Exquisite evil

Weep for post-America.  Again I ask, how long ago would it have been that enough people would have considered this horrific that it would have never happened?

The abortion movement is going upscale: a new Maryland abortion clinic in Friendship Heights called Carafem attempts to make women who want an abortion feel like they're attending a spa, with tea, robes, and plush furniture.

Not only that, Carafem wants women wanting an abortion to feel just dandy about the procedure, guilt-free, with its ads scheduled for metro stations in the area proudly proclaiming, “Abortion. Yeah, we do that.”
Carafem President Christopher Purdy blustered to The Washington Post, “We don’t want to talk in hushed tones. We use the A-word.” Planned Parenthood spokesman Eric Ferrero said that his organization’s attempts to reach people on the fence about abortion should be augmented with another approach, echoing, “We also need to be unapologetic and bold.” In the last four years, the number of Planned Parenthood chapters on college campuses has skyrocketed from 70 to 250.
All Carafem will offer is the abortion pill, not vacuum aspiration or surgery, and clients must be pregnant for ten weeks or less. The lucky women will take a pill in an appointment that will last less than an hour, then given a second set of pills, which will trigger the abortion, likely within six hours. Not only will the lucky women save time, they will save money; Purdy will charge $400, while the average pharmaceutical abortion in 2011 cost about $500 in the United States.
Another perk for the abortion client: wood floors and wood tone on the walls. “It was important for us to try to present an upgraded, almost spa-like feel,” said Purdy, boasting, “It’s fresh, it’s modern, it’s clean, it’s caring. That’s the brand we’re trying to create.”

The logical conclusion of all-about-me-ism.

 

It sprang up fast and had no real roots reaching back into history

One aspect of the current firestorm over the Indiana religious-freedom law is the unprecedented pace at which the entire question of gays and society has evolved from where it stood circa 1970 to now.

It was refreshing to see that Ross Douthat at the New York Times has been thinking about this as well:

 . . . the definition of “common sense” and “compromise” on these issues has shifted so rapidly in such a short time: Positions taken by, say, the president of the United States and most Democratic politicians a few short years ago are now deemed the purest atavism, the definition of bigotry gets more and more elastic, and developments that social liberals would have described as right-wing scare stories in 2002 or so are now treated as just the most natural extensions of basic American principles. (Rod Dreher calls this the “law of merited impossibility,” in which various follow-on effects of same-sex marriage are dismissed as impossible until they happen, at which point it’s explained that of course they were absolutely necessary.) Of course all of this is happening because underlying attitudes have changed rapidly, and what’s politically and socially possible is changing with them; that’s all understandable. But the pace involved is unusual, and its rapidity makes it very easy to imagine that scenarios that aren’t officially on the table right now will become plausible very, very soon.

Let’s just take the issue at stake in the Indiana/religious liberty debate. Beneath all of the to-and-fro-ing over what the law actually says, whether it differs from other statutes like it, and so on, lies a basic reality that both sides can concede. The support for new state RFRAs from religious conservative has been occasioned by a handful of cases in which people in the wedding industry (photographers, florists, etc.) have been sued or fined or otherwise sanctioned for trying to decline to provide their services for a same-sex ceremony. The current conservative position (though one that the Republican Party’s business wing is eager to abjure) is 

is that a religious exemption of some sort is a reasonable compromise between gay rights and freedom of religion/freedom of association; the current liberal position (with a few exceptions) is that granting private businesses the right to decline involvement in same-sex nuptials is the moral and legal equivalent of allowing businesses to turn away African-Americans from lunch counters.

That liberal position, is, of course, preposterous, but there is one aspect of the attempted parallel that must enter into our considerations:

 . . . both Jim Crow and the means we used to destroy it are, well, legally and culturally extraordinary. So if our current situation with same-sex marriage and religious conservatives really is analogous, there is no obvious reason why we’ve reached any kind stopping point once the florists and bakers have been appropriately fined or closed down. 

Douthat then poses some questions we'll have to look at as things go forward, and it's worth your time to ponder them.

One last matter: On Bret Baier's FNC show last evening, Jonah Goldberg said that homosexual "marriage" is such a done deal in our society that the firestorm over the Indiana law really amounts to a case of "shooting the wounded."

I refuse to believe that.  You should, too.

For the sake of our civilization, we must reject that kind of resignation.

Patty-cake complications

Now Iran is reneging on the matter of shipping its already enriched uranium our of the country, and Russia's participant in the P5+1 side has left the table, saying to let him know when everybody is ready for at least a modicum of seriousness.

Still, we know Global-Test will still work feverishly to have something "historic" to present to the world by tomorrow.

Principle and real faith know no color

Contrary to what the Freedom-Haters would have us believe about the demographic groups that they want to anoint with victim status, those groups do not march in lockstep.  A formerly Christian organization that is now simply another sewer of Leftism experiences yet another thinning of its ranks, a process that has been going on for decades:

A coalition of 34,000 black churches has cut its ties with the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) in the wake of its recent vote to approve same-sex marriage.

In a statement at Charisma News, Rev. Anthony Evans, president of the National Black Church Initiative (NBCI), wrote that PCUSA’s “arbitrary change of Holy Scripture is a flagrantly pretentious and illegitimate maneuver by a body that has no authority whatsoever to alter holy text.”

After endorsing same-sex marriage last June, PCUSA voted earlier this month to revise its constitutional language defining marriage to include a “commitment between two people.” The church became the largest Protestant group to formally recognize same-sex marriage as a Christian institution and to permit same-sex weddings in its congregations. 

Good move, Reverend Evans.

The truth we must face

Take it from an Iranian journalist covering the Lausanne patty-cake.  He's now defected to the West and tells us this:

An Iranian journalist writing about the nuclear negotiations between the United States and Iran has defected. In an interview Amir Hossein Motaghi, has some harsh words for his native Iran. He also has a damning indictment of America's role in the nuclear negotiations.

“The U.S. negotiating team are mainly there to speak on Iran’s behalf with other members of the 5+1 countries and convince them of a deal," Motaghi told a TV station after just defecting from the Iranian delegation while abroad for the nuclear talks. The P 5 + 1 is made up of United States, United Kingdom, Russia, China, France, plus Germany.

There you have it.  Global-Test plays for the other team.

The utterly mad essence of contemporary leftism

Exhibit A: Renowned scientist Barbara Lee using her extensive research into every arcane aspect of the remote possibilities she's been thinking about to come to this conclusion:

Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee has introduced a resolution in the House that is based on the premise that “women will disproportionately face harmful impacts from climate change.” This is parody come to life: world about to end, women and minorities hit hardest! Among the horrors that climate change will give rise to, according to the resolution, is the likelihood that “food insecure women with limited socioeconomic resources may be vulnerable to situations such as sex work, transactional sex, and early marriage….”

Which gives one pause. The Earth is currently cooler than it has been around 93% of the time since the end of the last Ice Age, according to ice core data. Does this mean that the past was an orgy of “sex work”? Well, in some times and places it probably was.

But let’s take this prophecy of runaway prostitution as a typical example of the hysteria that surrounds global warming. Does such extremism make any sense whatsoever? Amid the hoopla, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that global warming theory argues that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 will cause an increase in the Earth’s average temperature of 1 degree C. Alarmists rely on hypothetical positive feedbacks (the most important of which, an alleged increase in water vapor, has already been disproved) to magnify that 1 degree into 3 degrees. Actually, the feedbacks are likely negative, but put that to the side for a moment. The range of change we are talking about–1 to 3 degrees Celsius–is small in relation to temperature variations that already exists.

This site lists the average annual temperature for each of the fifty states. The variation is remarkable. In my home state of Minnesota, the average temperature is 5.1 degrees C. In Alabama, it is 17.1. That is a 12 degree difference, 12 times as much as the theoretical change in temperature due to a doubling of CO2. Would it be a tragedy if Minnesota’s climate were 1/12 of the way closer to Alabama’s? One wouldn’t think so. The widest disparity is between Alaska (-3.0) and Florida (21.5). That is 24 times the change that theoretically would occur from a doubling of CO2.

With each day, we are expose to some new utterance from supposed representatives and executives (and judges, actually) that would have been considered the babblings of completely untethered lunatics not more than twenty years ago.

But we elected them.   Something got to us.  Something convinced us that there was something to such completely infantile memes as human-caused climate change, gender fluidity, an "international community," and a right to health care.  We have erected a post_America predicated on such insanity.

And we shall surely pay the price.

Israel stands alone

The land where Truth was revealed and which today is Truth's last best hope for being told and lived is isolated as never before.

The Virginia State Bar Association ought to be a concentration of morally driven clarity of thought. Instead it has given itself over to the Father of Lies:

The Virginia State Bar Association has canceled a trip for its members to learn in Jerusalem later this year after some members campaigned against it, accusing Israel of “unacceptable discriminatory policies and practices” in how it ensures its border security.

The episode, confirmed in an email from Bar President Kevin Martingayle that was obtained by The Washington Times, is the latest example of the impact of an anti-Israel fervor that has swept across some parts of America in recent months as President Obama has feuded with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Certain members of the Virginia State Bar and other individuals have expressed objections to the VSB’s plan to take the Midyear Legal Seminar trip in November to Jerusalem,” Mr. Martingayle wrote in the email. “It was stated that there are some unacceptable discriminatory policies and practices pertaining to border security that affect travelers to the nation. Upon review of U.S. State Department advisories and other research, and after consultation with our leaders, it has been determined that there is enough legitimate concern to warrant cancellation of the Israel trip and exploration of alternative locations.”

Lanny J. Davis, a prominent Democratic lawyer in Washington, said he strongly disagreed with the Bar’s decision, adding that it was similar to a statement made by the president’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, in seeming to conflate Israel’s right to defend itself as discrimination.

“The Virginia State Bar’s false equivalent of defending yourself against terrorists by maintaining strict security procedures at your borders and discrimination offends basic legal principles as well as principles of fairness,” Mr. Davis said in an interview. “You cannot equate what you need to do to secure your families from people who surround you and say they want to destroy you and try doing it with discrimination.”

Then there's the UN Human Rights Council, which is an absolute sewer of deception, right down to its name:

What country deserves more condemnation for violating human rights than any other nation on earth? According to the U.N.’s top human rights body, that would be Israel.

Last week, Israel was the U.N.’s number one women’s rights violator. This week it is the U.N.’s all-round human rights villain.

The U.N. Human Rights Council wrapped up its latest session in Geneva on Friday, March 27 by adopting four resolutions condemning Israel.  That’s four times more than any of the other 192 UN member states.

In a world such as ours, this body finds reason to single out this particular nation?

There were four resolutions on Israel. And one on North Korea -- a country that is home to government policies of torture, starvation, enslavement, rape, disappearances, and murder – to name just some of its crimes against humanity.
Four resolutions on Israel. And one on Syria. Where the death toll of four years of war is 100,000 civilians, ten million people are displaced, and barrel bombs containing chemical agents like chlorine gas are back in action.
Four resolutions on Israel. And one on Iran. Where there is no rule of law, no free elections, no freedom of speech, corruption is endemic, protestors are jailed and tortured, religious minorities are persecuted, and pedophilia is state-run.  At last count, in 2012 Iranian courts ordered more than 30,000 girls ages 14 and under to be “married.”
And what did that one resolution on Iran say? Co-sponsored by the United States, it was labelled a “short procedural text,” consisting of just three operative paragraphs that contained not a single condemnation of Iran.
The Israel resolutions, on the other hand, were full of “demands,” “condemns,” “expresses grave concern,” and “deplores” – along with orders to “cease immediately” a long list of alleged human rights violations.

Ninety percent of states – inhabited by 6.6 billion people – got no mention at all. Countries like China, Qatar, Russia, and Saudi Arabia.  For the UN, there was not one human rights violation worthy of mention by any of these human rights horror shows. 

Up is down, down is up.  Israel violates human rights. Human activity is causing the the global climate to heat up.  Gender identity is fluid.  Christians are haters.  Government redistribution is charity.  Iran's regime should be legitimized.

Never has the spiritually poisonous motivation of the Left's agenda been more nakedly obvious.

Let's get real about what the essence of this is

It just occurred to me as I was trimming asparagus for supper what the essence is of what those unleashing the Indiana-religious-freedom-law firestorm are predicating their sales pitch on:  the idea that  there had been a general itching among the bigoted populace to hang "No [fill in your favorite disenfranchised demographic] Allowed" signs in the nation's shop windows.

What utter hooey.  Disingenuous, just like the notion that you keeping your thermostat at 72 is going to submerge the Statue of Liberty, just like the notion that seriously enforcing our immigration laws is going to consign a generation of Latin American toddlers to a childhood and adolescence of Dickensian limbo.

This is all about grievance-mongering homosexuals and devout Christisans, and everybody knows it.  The case of florist Barnelle Stutzman makes this clear.  The gay couple had purchased previous services from her.  It was specifically the wedding floral-arrangement business that she declined.  And it wasn't even the couple that sued her.  It was the Washington state attorney general.

I maintain that the two aims of this hate frenzy are

• striking the most wounding blow possible against free-market economics, and 
• relegating Christianity to the status of a marginal, niche belief system that mainly appeals to kooks and bigots.

That's why "goose-stepping jackboots" is not an over-the-top way to describe contemporary leftists.

Reason number gazillion and seventeen why Jeb is a bad, wrong, horrible Pub prez candidate

Cleanup mode after a top advisor shoots off his mouth at an ill-advised appearance:

Jeb Bush is cleaning up a mess he helped create. It’s a distraction from what he’d rather be doing, which is building an “aura of inevitability” around his soon-to-be presidential campaign. He’s spent the past week distancing himself from the speech that one of his foreign policy advisers, former secretary of State James Baker, delivered to the annual meeting of J Street, the liberal fringe group that pushes tough policies against Israel.

Baker’s speech couldn’t have come at a worse time. The Obama administration is in the midst of a campaign to demonize Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, greeted Netanyahu’s election victory with abuse and threats to abandon Israel to the anti-Semites at the U.N., and is hurtling toward a flawed nuclear agreement with Iran. Having a former high-ranking Republican official tell moldy anecdotes and agree that Israel is responsible for the standstill in the peace process only legitimized J Street and suggested a division in GOP ranks when there isn’t any. The speech risked confirming the suspicions of conservatives and Republicans that Bush isn’t really one of them. Two advisers to national political figures appeared at the J Street conference: White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and James Baker. Surely this White House is company the Bush crew doesn’t want to keep.

Baker's foreign policy orientation has always been goofy and worthless.  Clearly, Jeb is not astute enough to conclude as much and seek guidance from more serious and less prejudiced sources.

More identity politics ugliness in Indiana

She really said this:

An Indiana Democratic state representative made a shocking claim during a floor speech earlier this week when she said a Republican colleague’s 18-month-old toddler was scared of her because she’s black.

Rep. Vanessa Summers was debating the Religious Freedom Restoration Act on Monday when she speculated that Republican Rep. Jud McMillin’s young son is a fledgling racist.

“I have told Representative McMillin I love his little son, but he’s scared of me because of my color,” Summers speculated. “And that’s horrible.”

“It’s true,” Summers said in response to groans from the legislative body.

“And that’s something we’re going to work on. We’ve talked about it. And we’re going to work on it.”

It's pretty nasty around here these days.

It's handcuffs time for Hillionaire, isn't it?

Given what Trey Gowdy is asserting, what other course forward is there?

Hillary Clinton wiped “clean” the private server housing emails from her tenure as secretary of state, the chairman of the House committee investigating the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi said Friday.

“While it is not clear precisely when Secretary Clinton decided to permanently delete all emails from her server, it appears she made the decision after October 28, 2014, when the Department of State for the first time asked the Secretary to return her public record to the Department,” Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chairman of the Select Committee on Benghazi, said in a statement.

She reminds one a great deal of the Iranians in these patty-cake sessions about its nuclear program.  Seek extensions, offer dog-ate-my-homework excuses.

Let's have it, Hillionaire.  

Memo to Kasich: Have your ducks in a row before you invoke scripture to defend redistribution

Otherwise you face the ridicule of policy wonks who have thought about this far more deeply than you:

Ohio Gov. John Kasich got a rocky reception from leading conservative economists and media representatives in a New York City gathering, with one questioning whether Kasich thinks opponents of Medicaid expansion “are going to hell.”

Kasich’s frequent use of the Bible to justify the expansion — made possible by Obamacare — didn’t sit well with many at the exclusive gathering in the tony Four Seasons restaurant on Wednesday night, especially Avik Roy, Manhattan Institute senior fellow and a Forbesopinion editor.

“He’s really calling into question the character and the motivation of those who disagree with him on the Medicaid expansion, pretty much literally saying that you’re going to rot in hell if you didn’t agree,” Roy told The Dispatch on Thursday when asked about his open challenge of Kasich the night before.

“I would say that it’s highly probable that many conservative Christians will be offended that they’re not good Christians if they don’t support a massive expansion of government health care. I would say that’s almost disqualifying in a Republican primary.”

Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols said the exchange “comes with the territory for any public official. You routinely get challenged on policies or issues or ideas, and you challenge them back.”< /p>

Kasich conceded that Roy had described his position on Obamacare and Medicaid correctly, but added, “I'm gonna send you the transcript so you can get it right,” according to Newsmax, a conservative media organization based in Florida.

It's true that Matthew 25 charges us to "care for the least of these," but utility-grade government services are probably the least effective way to even try to do that.  And the business about being asked at the gates of Heaven whether you balanced the budget is vulgar and boneheaded and indicates a lack of a rudder that does nothing to place the governor among the principled conservatives worthy of greater stops along their career paths.

Architects of apocalypse

Lindsey Graham exhibits squish tendencies at least as often as he even hints at having any rightie bona fides, but he has been among those in the US Senate concerned to the point of alarm over the Most Equal Comrade's Middle East "policy," and the facial expression and sentence with which he concluded his remarks at his presser with McCain and Ayotte yesterday articulated the sentiment of what's left of a sane America.

"God help us," he said.

Another expression of the same viewpoint is worthy of an airing as well:

“We’re in a goddamn free fall here,” said James Jeffrey, who served as Obama’s ambassador to Iraq and was a top national security aide in the George W. Bush White House.

As of this morning, we find ourselves at this juncture:

• Post-America has declassified details about Israel's nuclear program.
• The Iranian Foreign Ministry is crowing that the reason a deal is within reach is that "the other side has withdrawn from its positions compared with the past."
• Saudi Arabia has amassed 150,000 troops and assembled a coalition that includes Egypt and Jordan and possibly Pakistan to drive both Houthis and al-Qaeda out of Yemen.
• Iran is none too pleased about it.  Ian Bremmer says, "This is the worst tension we've seen between Iran and Saudi Arabia, period."
• Libya is a failed state and a nest of jihad.
• Boko Haram is now allied with ISIS.

There comes a point when someone supposedly in charge of a situation has blundered that responsibility so badly that regaining control is no longer possible.  This is what has happened in the case of the post-American overlords. The State Department and the White House have lost their grip on reality.

We are living in a world where the United States of America no longer matters.  The dark and ugly unfolding of events we're witnessing will shape world dynamics for years to come, and the record will show that post-America's role was as a feeble and delusional minor player at best.

Post-America is ruled by those who hate Western civilization

Consider the post below about post-America's declassification of the 1987 document detailing Israel's nuke program in the context of this development:

The United States is considering letting Tehran run hundreds of centrifuges at a once-secret, fortified underground bunker in exchange for limits on centrifuge work and research and development at other sites, officials have told The Associated Press.

The trade-off would allow Iran to run several hundred of the devices at its Fordo facility, although the Iranians would not be allowed to do work that could lead to an atomic bomb and the site would be subject to international inspections, according to Western officials familiar with details of negotiations now underway. In return, Iran would be required to scale back the number of centrifuges it runs at its Natanz facility and accept other restrictions on nuclear-related work.

Instead of uranium, which can be enriched to be the fissile core of a nuclear weapon, any centrifuges permitted at Fordo would be fed elements such as zinc, xenon or germanium for separating out isotopes used in medicine, industry or science, the officials said. The number of centrifuges would not be enough to produce the amount of uranium needed to produce a weapon within a year — the minimum time-frame that Washington and its negotiating partners demand.

The officials spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss details of the sensitive negotiations as the latest round of talks began between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif. The negotiators are racing to meet an end-of-March deadline to reach an outline of an agreement that would grant Iran relief from international sanctions in exchange for curbing its nuclear program. The deadline for a final agreement is June 30.

The other part of our message to Israel, along with "We no longer have your back," is "We are eager to legitimize the regime bent on your destruction."

Can there be any doubt that the Most Equal Comrade intended this as a signal re: the future of the relationship?

This is a pretty blatant act of spite:

In a development that has largely been missed by mainstream media, the Pentagon early last month quietly declassified a Department of Defense top-secret document detailing Israel's nuclear program, a highly covert topic that Israel has never formally announced to avoid a regional nuclear arms race, and which the US until now has respected by remaining silent.

But by publishing the declassified document from 1987, the US reportedly breached the silent agreement to keep quiet on Israel's nuclear powers for the first time ever, detailing the nuclear program in great depth.

The timing of the revelation is highly suspect, given that it came as tensions spiraled out of control between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and US President Barack Obama ahead of Netanyahu's March 3 address in Congress, in which he warned against the dangers of Iran's nuclear program and how the deal being formed on that program leaves the Islamic regime with nuclear breakout capabilities.

Another highly suspicious aspect of the document is that while the Pentagon saw fit to declassify sections on Israel's sensitive nuclear program, it kept sections on Italy, France, West Germany and other NATO countries classified, with those sections blocked out in the document.

The 386-page report entitled "Critical Technological Assessment in Israel and NATO Nations" gives a detailed description of how Israel advanced its military technology and developed its nuclear infrastructure and research in the 1970s and 1980s.

Israel is "developing the kind of codes which will enable them to make hydrogen bombs. That is, codes which detail fission and fusion processes on a microscopic and macroscopic level," reveals the report, stating that in the 1980s Israelis were reaching the ability to create bombs considered a thousand times more powerful than atom bombs.

The revelation marks a first in which the US published in a document a description of how Israel attained hydrogen bombs.

The message is clear, is it not?  "We no longer have your back."

Hey, Most Equal Comrade, how's that again about Yemen being a model for our counterterrorism efforts?

The Houthis have really cashed in on some useful information:

Secret files held by Yemeni security forces that contain details of American intelligence operations in the country have been looted by Iran-backed militia leaders, exposing names of confidential informants and plans for U.S.-backed counter-terrorism strikes, U.S. officials say.

U.S. intelligence officials believe additional files were handed directly to Iranian advisors by Yemeni officials who have sided with the Houthi militias that seized control of Sana, the capital, in September, which led the U.S.-backed president to flee to Aden.

For American intelligence networks in Yemen, the damage has been severe. Until recently, U.S. forces deployed in Yemen had worked closely with President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi’s government to track and kill Al Qaeda operatives, and President Obama had hailed Yemen last fall as a model for counter-terrorism operations elsewhere.

And Saudi Arabia is employing some formidable resources to address this Houthi-takeover business:

Saudi Arabia deployed 100 fighter jets, 150,000 soldiers and other navy units on Thursday, after it launched its operation against the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Al Arabiya News Channel reported.

The Saudi aerial deployment enabled the Royal Saudi Air Force to take control of Yemen’s airspace early Thursday.

And a number of other countries are stepping up to make it a coalition effort:

The Gulf nations said they decided to “repel Houthi aggression” in neighboring Yemen, following a request from the country’s President Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi.

In their joint statement Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait said they “decided to repel Houthi militias, al-Qaeda and ISIS [Islamic State of Iraq and Syria] in the country.”

The Gulf states warned that the Houthi coup in Yemen represented a “major threat” to the region’s stability.

The UAE contributed 30 fighter jets, Bahrain 15, Kuwaiti 15, Qatar 10 and Jordan 6 in the operation.

On Thursday, Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan and Sudan also expressed their readiness to participate on the ground in Yemen.

How does all this impact post-America?

In an interview, Senator Richard Burr, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told The Daily Beast that unfolding events in Yemen portended a dire future for U.S. policy across the region.

“We’re totally out. Forward looking, this is what the region is going to look like if we don’t take care of al Qaeda, we don’t take care of ISIL, we don’t take care of Iran’s involvement with the Houthis,” Burr said, using the government’s preferred acronym for the so-called Islamic State. “Yemen is going to be, in the president’s own words, a ‘model,’ [but] not of success, [instead] of absolute failure of our foreign policy.”

Burr was referring to prior public assurances from President Obama that despite an escalating crisis in Yemen and waning U.S. influence there following the upheaval of the Arab Spring, counterterrorism operations were still a model of success and would inform future missions. 

“It’s a big setback,” Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer with extensive experience in the Middle East, said of the rapidly deteriorating security situation in Yemen, which now more than ever seems in the grips of an outright civil war. “Without both a U.S. presence on the ground or a reliable ally, it will be much more difficult to target al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” Riedel told The Daily Beast, referring to the terror group’s Yemeni branch—the one that U.S. intelligence officials say is most capable of attacking in Europe and the United States. “Much of eastern Yemen will be a chaotic no-man’s-land where al Qaeda can operate.”

Vacuums don't take long to fill, do they?

Your utterly mad overlords - today's edition

When you think about Bergdahl's father speaking in Arabic at the Rose Garden announcement, when you think about Susan Rice's "served with honor and distinction" remark, when you think about the trade for five of the most vicious Taliban commanders for which we traded him, when you think about Hillary's "It-doesn't-matter-how-they-ended-up-in-a-prisoner-of-war-situation," how do you keep the vomit from hitting back of your teeth now that the military feels it has the evidence to proceed with this?

Bowe Bergdahl, a U.S. soldier who has long been suspected of abandoning his Afghanistan outpost in 2009, has been charged with desertion, Bergdahl’s attorney has told the media.

Eugene Fidell, Bergdahl’s lawyer, told the Washington Post that his client was handed the desertion charge sheet on Tuesday. The Army has announced that they will update the public on Bergdahl’s case at 3:30 p.m. eastern time.

Last year, in an unprecedented act, the Obama administration agreed to release five top Taliban commanders in exchange for the charged Army deserter. The government of Qatar–which has frequently been accused of aiding and abetting terrorist groups–served as an intermediary for the negotiations between the Taliban and the U.S. government.

The Taliban commanders are now reportedly living large in Doha. They will soon be allowed to leave the country, because the negotiated settlement only required that they stay in Qatar for one year. Soon, they will be free to re-engage in their jihad against the United States.

When Bergdahl reached the U.S., White House National Security Advisor Susan Rice said that he served with “honor and distinction,” a claim that she still defends.

Your post-American overlords don't give a flying f--- if you get murdered in your bed.

Battlefield Indiana

As I said the other day, the Indiana House passed the religious freedom bill.  It will quickly pass through the Senate and Governor Pence will sign it.

What the hard, pro-tyranny-and-decline-and-distorition-of-basic-concepts-and-word-meanings Left has unleashed in response is as grotesque and horrifying as anything this state has seen in at least a long time.

The religious freedom bill is designed to prevent situations such as that which befell Richland, Washington florist Baronelle Stutzman, who had served a particular couple in other ways prior to the request for a wedding floral arrangement, and was perfectly willing to refer them to other florists, but found herself the target of a lawsuit brought by the state’s Attorney General and now stands to lose not only her business, but her personal assets, or Lakewood,Colorado baker Jack Phillips, who was sentenced to sensitivity training for similarly declining such business.

And we know that the free market would elegantly solve any such situation that arose.  The Christian service provider declines to take the homosexual couple's business, the couple finds a service provider happy to take its business, and there are wins all around.  The Christian is free to stay true to his or her faith, the couple gets its cake / photographs / chapel, and the willing service provider gets a new customer.

But, no.  The Left demands that we create a new right - the right not to be offended - out of thin air.  In fact, in a case from upstate New York, a couple with a honeymoon ranch was sued by a lesbian couple for "emotional distress."

Social media posts by Hooisers today have been overwhelmingly pro-distortion-of-basic-concepts.  Christians and free-market proponents have been lying low.  Self-righteous preening from the Leftists about how they are "embarrassed and ashamed for their state" have been the order of the day.

Some 600 people attended a late-morning rally outside the courthouse in my city.  Signs were of the "Just let me eat" and "No to hate" variety.  Indianapolis TV news crews were on hand to cover it.

Cummins, the Fortune 200 engine maker with its world headquarters in our city, has chimed in, saying the bill runs counter to its corporate value of diversity.  Companies in its supply chain, as well as recipients of its foundation's largesse, know which side their bread is buttered on.  You'll not hear much institutional dispute of the mighty C's position, I daresay.

We all know what the real mission is here: To strike a wounding blow to free-market economics, and to render Christianity a marginal, niche belief system.  The message to Christians is clear:  shuffle off to the sidelines and zip it.

I would say that there is going to come a point at which Governor Pence will no longer be able to compartmentalize it all, to sign a bill like this on the one hand, and take measures to ensure that Indiana stays at the forefront of economically healthy states on the other.  We may have a relatively impressive unemployment rate and a budget surplus, but Indiana is still part of post-America, and hence, underneath the smiley-face surface, as ugly and grim as anywhere else in this rapidly darkening land.

If Freedom-Hater-care were a dandy law, you wouldn't get this kind of thing

Yet another request for yet another delay in implementation of yet another of its features:

A group of Democratic senators is urging the Obama administration to delay a key portion of Obamacare because the results could be “harmful and disruptive.”

In a letter exclusively obtained by The Daily Caller, Senate Democrats pleaded with Health and Human Services secretary Sylvia Matthews Burwell to delay an Obamacare rule change that puts companies with 51 to 100 employees in the costlier “small group” market instead of the “large group” market. The rule change, which will result in higher premiums for many companies, goes into effect in 2016.

The letter was signed by Democratic Sens. Claire McCaskill, Heidi Heitkamp, Chris Coons, Joe Manchin, Joe Donnelly and Jon Tester and independent Sen. Angus King, who caucuses with the Democrats.

“We are writing to share our concerns regarding scheduled changes to the definition of the small group market under the Affordable Care Act (ACA),” the senators wrote in the letter, dated March 12.

Still, the FHers say the calls for total repeal are wacko.

The evil of engaging in patty-cake with Iran

The Supreme Ayatollah continues to tweet about his regime's position on patty-cake.  The contrast between it and the position of the utterly mad post-American overlords could not be more stark:

Ayatollah Khamenei pledged, “#US should know that ppl of #Iran wouldn’t submit to bullying &negotiators follow the nation in disallowing anyone to bully them.” He added, “Talks with #US are only on the nuclear issue & nothing else. We don’t talk over regional issues as their goal is opposite to ours. #ISIS.”

In other words, Iran will keep expanding its regional power no matter the outcome of talks. This is exactly what Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu said two weeks ago before Congress, when he explained that the nuclear deal reached by the Obama administration would enrich and arm an aggressive Iranian regime.

This, of course, was not the message being delivered simultaneously by White House chief of staff Denis McDonough to an astroturfed, George Soros-funded anti-Israel front group called J Street. McDonough lied, “The only deal we’ll accept is one that assures us that Iran’s nuclear program is entirely peaceful. And, if we detect any failure to comply on Iran’s part, the extended breakout window would give us plenty of time to respond. In other words, we’d make it harder for Iran to reach breakout and rush for a nuclear bomb.”

Actually, McDonough’s own speech explains that daily inspections regimes thus far do not extend to the Arak plutonium reactor; reports state that Iran will be left with 6,000 centrifuges, ensuring a breakout period of no more than one year. That is certainly not enough time to reconstruct a powerful sanctions regime or stop Iran with anything other than military action—which, of course, will never happen under any president remotely on the same page as President Obama.

Meanwhile, Yemen's chaos may not make for analytical clarity about the dynamics on the ground there, but it's clear that, like so many other places (Syria and Libya come to mind), the only players of any significance are either Sunni jihadists broadly aligned with al-Qaeda and ISIS on the one hand, and Shiite jihadists eagerly enlisting the support of Iran.

And they're getting it:

On Monday, Yemeni foreign minister Riyadh Yaseen asked Persian Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia, to intervene militarily to stop flights from Houthi-controlled airports. The Saudis might be tempted: There are now 28 flights a week between San’a and Iran, up from zero before the Houthi takeover. The flights include those made by Mahan Air, an Iranian airline blacklisted by the U.S. for supporting terrorism.

If the (relatively) grownup states of the region - Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Israel - are going to combine resources to address this, they'd better get going.  And they shouldn't count on post-America being interested in participating.

The howls in Indiana just got louder

The House chamber of the state legislature passed the religious-freedom bill, and the America-destroyers wasted no time throwing every possible flimsy argument across the road to decency, dignity and liberty.

The so-called Religious Freedom Bill passed out of the Indiana House of Representatives with a vote of 63-31.

The Religious Freedom Restoration Act has not been without controversy. Supporters call it the Religious Freedom Bill. Opponents call it discrimination.

That's where the battle line is drawn and it drew out both sides in large numbers one week ago when the bill went to a House committee for a vote and passed.

Those in favor of the bill wore green and rallied before the vote saying the bill protects the religious freedoms of business owners who don't want to compromise their beliefs.

But, the other side, who wore red and rallied against the bill, said the bill would allow businesses to deny services particularly to gays and lesbians if they feel it violates their religious beliefs.

"We want to be able to practice our faith, even in our businesses, in our homes, in our churches without fear of being prosecuted," said Cindy Holmes, a supporter of the legislation. "We hear stories all over the country where bakers and florists are losing their businesses and homes just because they wanted to practice their own faith."

The howls consist of what you'd expect: attempts to draw parallels to race, attempts to paint Christians as hypocritical since all of them sin by their own standards.

On to the next level of the battle!

Ted knows what the correct policy toward Iran would be

The newly minted 2016 prez candidate has re-introduced an Iran sanctions bill in the Senate.   Andrew McCarthy likes it a great deal and tells us why: It addresses what really needs to be addressed.

 . . . the Cruz proposal emphasizes that the point of imposing sanctions on Iran was to force the complete dismantling of its nuclear program, not to entice Iran into negotiations that legitimize that program and haggle over its scope. Consequently, the sanctions must be ratcheted up in order to achieve the objective, not eased or eliminated to facilitate the program. The Cruz proposal thus not only restores sanctions Obama has waived and contemplates eliminating; it intensifies the sanctions to impose grave pain on the regime’s financial, energy, automotive, and defense sectors. Concurrently, the Cruz proposal requires the Iranian regime to renounce its sponsorship of terrorism and demonstrate that the renunciation is genuine. Congress would use its power of the purse to deny funding for negotiations with Iran in the absence of: the regime’s freeing of all political prisoners; its payment of compensation to American hostages it detained beginning in 1979; proof that the regime has dismantled its centrifuges and processing facilities; proof that it has relinquished its stockpiles of enriched uranium; proof that it has abandoned its ballistic-missiles program; and certification by the president that Iran is no longer a state sponsor of terrorism . . . 

Ted knows you don't even glance at the mullahs, much less sit at the table with them, without having squeezed them.  It's perfectly fine if they know you are really working for regime change.  You box them in, leave them with no alternative but to see things your way.

That's how you deal with a mortal enemy with obvious nuclear aspirations.

Alexis, where's that big-shot swagger now?

The new radical leftist prime minister of Greece, Alexis Tsipris, is meeting with Angela Merkel presently.  Gone is the badass talk of mere weeks ago.  Now, it's all leaks about a "positive spirit."

Look, pal, Angela and everybody in the EU and at the European Central Bank just want to know where your damn concrete plan for clawing your country's way out of its black hole is.

Rick Moran at The American Thinker distills the matter to its essence:

The man who suggested that Merkel is some kind of latter-day Nazi who has threatened to seize German assets in Greece to pay off World War II reparations is coming hat in hand to Germany begging for more cash – no strings attached.

He is not going to get it unless he surrenders completely – something he cannot do and survive politically.  It has been fascinating watching Tsipras as he's gone from being an arrogant, far-left rabble-rouser, demanding that the EU recognize his "mandate" and eliminate all the restrictions on the government's budget, to this pathetic leader coming to Germany for more cash after reality has hit him over the head.

Pretty sad.  One of the cradles of Western civilization reduced to collapse and irrelevancy.

These people aren't going to be fit for anything when they graduate

 . . . from a prestigious university that coddled their ridiculous regressive delusions.  A bunch of real-life Julias getting the vapors because they were in the presence of someone with a fact-based perspective on an issue.

Brown University allowed a debate on campus between shrill feminist Jessica Valenti (a loathsome misandrist known for wearing a T-shirt bragging that she “bathes in men’s tears.”) and Wendy McElroy, a libertarian on the subject of whether college campuses are really the dangerous rape zones feminists make them out to be. The campus feminists and administrators became hysterical, thinking about all the trauma that would be inflicted on college chicks when they heard a woman express skepticism toward feminist “Rape Culture” dogma. How could they comfort the poor dears?

This is what they came up with:

[S]tudent volunteers put up posters advertising that a “safe space” would be available for anyone who found the debate too upsetting.
The safe space, Ms. Byron explained, was intended to give people who might find comments “troubling” or “triggering,” a place to recuperate. The room was equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies, as well as students and staff members trained to deal with trauma. Emma Hall, a junior, rape survivor and “sexual assault peer educator” who helped set up the room and worked in it during the debate, estimates that a couple of dozen people used it. At one point she went to the lecture hall — it was packed — but after a while, she had to return to the safe space. “I was feeling bombarded by a lot of viewpoints that really go against my dearly and closely held beliefs,” Ms. Hall said.

Again, I ask, how many years ago would it have been that this kind of scenario would have been the object of derisive laughter?

Why?

It's clear that there is no Iranian fatwa against the production of nuclear weapons.

Scott Johnson at Power Line ponders the possible reasons why the Most Equal Comrade and Secretary Global-Test continue to talk about one:

 want to offer a set of possible answers that shade into each other, something like this: a) Obama and Kerry have been misinformed and don’t know any better, b) Obama and Kerry know better but are willing to say anything in a bad cause, c) to put it slightly differently, Obama and Kerry are doing advance work for the extraordinarily unpopular deal with Iran that they are about to deliver as a fait accompli, d) as Andy McCarthy postulates, Obama and Kerry cite the phantom fatwa as a rationale for making an unacceptable deal (“We needn’t worry about the inability to verify that the Iranians are not constructing nukes because the Islamic ruler has solemnly forbidden it”), and/or e) Obama and Kerry are willing tools of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The case of the phantom fatwa persists. Its nonexistence cannot reasonably be in doubt. Obama’s and Kerry’s continued citation of it suggests either that they are fools, or that they know better and think we are.

How much weight do you give each of these?  To what extent do you think they shade into each other?  Are there other reasons?

In any event, it doesn't bode well for a post-American foreign policy that ought to be in the hands of responsible grownups, but isn't.

Filling the vacuum in a post-American world

Post-Americans - diplomatic, military, and business-related - may have felt compelled to skedaddle Yemen, but post-America's mortal enemy feels that it's being welcomed with open arms:

An Iranian ship unloaded 185 tons of weapons and military equipment at a Houthi-controlled al-Saleef port in Yemen, al Arabiya reports.

The Houthi militias reportedly closed the port and denied entrance to employees there. Al-Saleef port is considered the second most vital in Yemen.

The news follows last week’s economic partnership agreements between Iran and the Houthis, including a deal that promises a year’s worth of oil supply from Iran.

Iran has also agreed to provide Yemen with a 200 megawatt power plant, according to Yemeni news agency Saba.

But mention of this kind of development is off-limits at the patty-cake session over the nuke program

What LITD means by three-pillared conservatism - a primer

In the course of a Facebook exchange with some rather overly ripe enthusiasts of "fairness" and the like, I was compelled to formulate afresh the basic tenets of my worldview.

Permit me to share them here:

1.) Free market economics: A good or a service is worth what buyer and seller agree that it is worth.  Period.  No other entity - certainly not government - has any business being involved in reaching that agreement.  Therefore, public-policy inquiries that concern themselves with macro-level phenomenon such as wealth inequality or “fair” wages are not only pointless but tyrannical by definition.

2.) The understanding that Western civilization is a unique blessing to the world: Both the Greco-Roman tradition from which the West has distilled the political structure of a representative democracy and the above-mentioned free-market economy, and the Judeo-Christian tradition from which it acquired an accurate understanding of the Creator’s nature and humankind’s proper relationship to the creator are the two most significant avenues of advancement our species has ever discovered.  (And much falls under this point that needs serious discussion at this time, such as the fact that there are only two genders, male and female, and that there is no fluidity between them, and that the family structure of a husband, wife and children thereof is the overwhelmingly normal one and the one most conducive to a happy and prosperous society.)

3.) A foreign policy based on what history tells us about human nature:  Evil is real and always with us.  A nation-state seeking a righteous world(such as the United States of America) should only form close alliances with other nations that have demonstrated a track record of common values.  Regimes that are clearly tyrannical and / or expansionist should never be appeased.  Indeed, foreign policy should be guided by thinking on how to at least eventually remove such regimes as problems on the world stage.

Still, the post-American overlords pursue patty-cake with this bunch

The Ayatollah Khameini is none too impressed with what the overlords are bringing to the table, per his Twitter feed:

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, tweeted his outrage Saturday over talks with the U.S. over his nation’s nuclear weapons research.

“We reject fraudulent offer of reaching w #Iran first than lifting sanctions,” Khamenei tweeted. “Lifting sanctions is a part of deal, not its outcome.”

 “#US sanctions are ineffective,” he continued. “Threatening to sanction or military action won’t scare #Iran-ians. God backs Iranian nation’s resistance.”

The Ayatollah’s remarks come amid a break in negotiations between Tehran and the West that began Friday. Secretary of State John Kerry noted “substantial progress” in bargaining Saturday but said a deal is not done yet.

Khamenei refuted Kerry’s comments Saturday. The Ayatollah said his people would not accept U.S “bullying” during the talks.

“#Iran prefers to stand on its own,” he tweeted. “US seeks regional instability & dismantlement of Islamic awakening by arming terrorist groups. #ISIS”

“They falsely claim to support ppl of #Iran while via economy they seek to deprive Iranian nation of security which is unique in West Asia,” he added.

And he and a crowd to which he expressed this stuff in person were clearly on the same page:

Khamenei told a crowd in Tehran that Iran would not capitulate to Western demands. When the crowd started shouting, “Death to America,” the ayatollah responded: “Of course yes, death to America, because America is the original source of this pressure.

Now, why would this regime bother sitting down with a nation the death of which it cheers for?  Isn't the obvious answer that it sees the patty-cake process as the means at hand for bringing about said death?

The Most Equal Comrade: The confluence of goose-stepping totalitarianism and perpetual adolescence

Has time to send out all kinds of strong hints that the alliance between Israel and post-America is going to further fray, but when it comes to addressing the latest level of Yemen's descent into chaos, he seems to have other priorities:

The foreign policy of President Barack Obama took a devastating blow on Saturday as news broke of the last U.S. troops fleeing Yemen as the terrorist group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula attacked the city of al-Houta near their base.

The BBC reported the troops were training the Yemen military to fight AQAP at al-Anad air base

While US troops were humiliated yet again under Obama, their commander-in-chief was goofing off.

Obama attended a NCAA women’s basketball tournament game at College Park, Maryland Saturday where his niece Leslie Robinson was serving as a benchwarmer for Princeton.

Before Obama headed out for the game, the news media broke reported on the evacuation of about 100 U.S. troops, including Special Forces, from Yemen.

Then the son of a bitch went to play golf.