Dare to compare

Well, now.  Which of these seems like a more thorough take on the root causes of Baltimore's current ills?

E.J. Dionne at WaPo asserts that it's a matter of "the costs of globalization and technological change [being] borne almost entirely by the least advantaged people in our society."

Baltimore and its inner suburbs were once home to the vast manufacturing facilities operated by Bethlehem Steel, General Motors and Martin Marietta, notes Thomas J. Vicino, author of "Transforming Race and Class in Suburbia: Decline in Metropolitan Baltimore." In 1970, about a third of the labor force in Baltimore and its first-tier suburbs was employed in manufacturing. By 2000, only 7 percent of city residents had manufacturing jobs, and the losses have continued since. An awareness of this, Vicino says, should shape our understanding of what's happening in the city now.

He goes on to say that, while blue-collar whites have been affected by this de-industrialization, blue-collar blacks had the additional challenge of less opportunity for mobility due to housing discrimination.  Excuse me, E.J., but housing discrimination was dealt with a half-century ago.

He also cites a brainy Harvard prof who makes the self-evident point that, without the a anchoring effect of a steady job in one's daily life, the other stabilizing aspects of that life, such as family, lose coherence.

Got it.

But why did Baltimore de-industrialize and lose its economic vitality?

Let us consult Ian Tuttle at NRO:

The city and its partners somehow failed to take into account that Baltimore’s population was not growing, but shrinking — and, in fact, had been shrinking, sometimes rapidly, since 1950. Between 1970 and 1980, a staggering 13 percent of the city’s population moved away. Frustrated by an increasingly hostile business climate, employers left. And, exhausted by rising crime, so did residents. By 1999, 10 percent of the city’s population was drug-addicted, and there had been almost a murder a day through much of the 1990s. In the 2000s, the trend continued.

 It didn't help that the city's you-know-which-party overlords looked to Alinsky-ism for a remedy:

Throughout the early 1990s, Sandtown was Ground Zero of one of the largest, most closely watched urban-reinvestment projects in the country. Having done much to help revamp Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, mayor Kurt Schmoke, elected in 1987, turned his attention to Sandtown. The neighborhood was the preoccupation of one of his campaign’s key organizational supporters, Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD), a West Baltimore–based community-action group under the umbrella of Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation. Schmoke raised almost $30 million in federal and state grants and private funds to construct 210 new housing units and overhaul 17 others. For a nonprofit partner, Schmoke hit on the Enterprise Foundation (now Enterprise Community Partners), founded by real-estate magnate and Marylander James Rouse, who created Baltimore’s Harborplace and had turned his attention to low-income housing needs. With the help of significant subsidies, those 200-plus houses, which each cost $83,000 to build, were sold at $37,000 apiece. Three hundred more units were planned for a federally funded “Homeownership Zone” nearby. In 1997, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) awarded the city $5.2 million for that purpose.

HUD and the overlords of Baltimore had a cozy relationship, but the result was a bit like those huge empty cities you read about dotting the land mass of Red China:

By 1998, Schmoke had channeled approximately $60 million into revitalizing Sandtown, but almost all of it was devoted to housing construction and rehabilitation. And, as Barry Yeoman wrote in a 1998 article for City Limits, “Left Behind in Sandtown,” there was a problem with that strategy: “Nobody . . . was looking at demographic trends to see if they could fill 600 additional units of housing.” The city and its partners somehow failed to take into account that Baltimore’s population was not growing, but shrinking — and, in fact, had been shrinking, sometimes rapidly, since 1950. Between 1970 and 1980, a staggering 13 percent of the city’s population moved away. Frustrated by an increasingly hostile business climate, employers left. And, exhausted by rising crime, so did residents. By 1999, 10 percent of the city’s population was drug-addicted, and there had been almost a murder a day through much of the 1990s. In the 2000s, the trend continued.

All dressed up with no place to go, it would seem.

Sure can't go to see the Orioles at Camden Yards.

What a pathetic symbol of the state of post-America.  America's game being played to no one, because of . . . well, decades of morally rotten rule by America-hating overlords.

Same old narrative, new year

Here's another case of my not knowing how to adequately excerpt from a column without winding up reprinting the whole thing.

So read the whole thing.

Author John Merline's focus is the spin that went with pretty much every piece of reportage yesterday about the dismal report on the first quarter's economic performance.  I'll bet you picked up on that as well.  It was spin along the lines of that poor performance being due to unique mitigating circumstances: the weather and a ports dispute.  The spin continues, asserting that the scenario for the rest of the year looks much rosier.

He then invites us to take a stroll back through the last several Aprils:

April 2010: "The U.S. economy grew at a slightly slower-than-expected pace in the first quarter, held back by inventories and exports, but resurgent consumer spending offered evidence of a sustainable recovery, a government report showed on Friday."

As it turns out, that resurgence never materialized. Overall growth for 2010 come in at just 2.5%.

April 2011 : "Economists surveyed by CNNMoney are expecting the slowdown to be temporary — they still project full-year growth of 3.1% for 2011. 'It's a weak number, but behind the scenes, it's showing some strength,' said John Canally, senior economist with LPL Financial. 'The economy is just not that weak. The data shows this is a one-time thing and we'll get a rebound this quarter.'"

As a matter of fact, the economy was just that weak. GDP growth for 2011 was a mere 1.6%.

April 2012: "Don't panic yet. The government reported Friday that the economy got off to a tepid start this year, but that doesn't foreshadow a repeat of the near-standstill that happened in 2011. 'The economy is firmly on a growth trajectory,' said Sung Won Sohn, an economics professor at California State University's Smith School of Business. 'The first-quarter slowdown will be temporary.'"

That "firm growth trajectory" produced a whopping 1.6% growth in Q2, followed by 2.5% in Q3 and 0.1% in Q4. For the year, GDP eked out a paltry 2.2% gain.

April 2014: "The U.S. economy barely grew in the first quarter as the severe winter hampered exports and led businesses to curtail investment spending, but activity already appears to be bouncing back."

The economy actually shrank 2.1% in the first three months of last year, as subsequent revisions would show. Growth did accelerate over the next two quarters, but then it "unexpectedly" petered out again in the last three months of the year.

The one exception to this "growth-is-just-around-the-corner" mantra was in April 2013, when GDP numbers once again disappointed. Economists were especially downbeat that year about growth prospects. Why? Because they thought budget cuts imposed by the GOP would undermine the recovery.

As it turns out, the last two quarters of 2013 proved economists wrong in other direction. Despite the alleged self-inflicted wounds of "deep cuts," GDP climbed 4.5% and 3.5% in the third and fourth quarters.

Carry water for the architects of planned decline much?

The poison of the leftist worldview

Check out the tweets in response to Whole Foods providing chow to the National Guard in Baltimore.

The main theme that emerges is that WF is reprehensible because Baltimore school kids are going hungry (what? their damn parents aren't feeding them, as is to be expected in a normally functioning city?) while the "oppressors" are getting nourishment.

Leftists are one sick bunch.

Freedom-Hater-care's ongoing damage to post-America

I can lend a personal testimony to this set of developments.

I had a policy with Assurant Health for several years.  Yes, the premium was stiff, but that's because it was a catastrophic-care policy only, which, in a truly free market, would be the only kind of health insurance most people would need (and the premium would be lower).  In fact, the premium came down a bit when FHer-care was enacted, because Assurant was no longer able to ding me for my high blood pressure.  How the company was expected to cover that cost is not apparent.

And that only lasted for about a year.  Then the premium shot up again as more features of FHer-care were implemented.

So I swallowed hard and went looking on the damn government exchange for something else and indeed found a policy with much lower premiums due to the fact that it was subsidized.  That's right, I have a cushy health-insurance situation because the government is seizing my fellow citizens' money at gunpoint to make that possible.  And if I make more money this year - something I, along with most post-Americans, aspire to -  that will change next year.

But how fares my old provider?  Here's how:

The parent company of Assurant Health said Tuesday that it will sell or shut down the Milwaukee health insurer — which employs 1,200 people in the area — by the end of next year.

Assurant Health has struggled to adjust to changes in the health insurance market imposed by the Affordable Care Act and is expected to report an operating loss of $80 million to $90 million in its first quarter. That comes after it lost $64 million last year.

The company, whose headquarters is in downtown Milwaukee, specializes in health insurance for small employers and individuals, the two market segments that have faced the most changes from the Affordable Care Act.

"They are a casualty of the ACA," said Steven Schwartz, an analyst with Raymond James & Associates.

Assurant Inc., the parent company based in New York, said it is exploring a sale. Absent that, it will not sell health insurance policies in 2016 and will shut down the business.

The announcement leaves the fate of Assurant Health's 1,700 employees companywide, most of them in the Milwaukee region, in doubt.

Assurant also said it is exploring the sale of its employee benefits business, which sells dental, short-term and long-term disability, and life insurance.

"While it is a difficult decision, we believe they would be strong assets for new owners that are focused more exclusively on health care and employee benefits," Alan Colberg, the parent company's president and chief executive officer, said in a statement.

Assurant instead plans to focus on its niche insurance products, including extended-service contracts, mobile-housing insurance, vehicle-service contracts and prepaid funeral plans.

Assurant Health's ties to Milwaukee go back to 1900, when the La Crosse Mutual Aid Association moved to the city and changed its name to Time Insurance Co.

Analysts began speculating as far back as late 2011 that Assurant might exit the health insurance business.

The Affordable Care Act barred health insurers from turning away customers because of pre-existing health conditions. That new regulation negated one of Assurant Health's strengths: underwriting, or determining which potential customers were the best risks.

"That went away," said Schwartz of Raymond James.

The law also required health plans to cover a package of basic benefits and required health insurers to spend at least 80 cents of every premium dollar on medical care or quality initiatives.

The changes forced Assurant Health to move quickly to cut costs and eliminate jobs.

And the subsidy thing I'm enjoying with my new provider may not be the sweet deal it looks like at the moment.  That's certainly the case for people who went with a gummint-propped plan the first go-round:

Providing still more evidence of how ObamaCare is "working," most enrollees learned this year that they had to pay back a huge chunk of their insurance subsidies. So much for "affordability."

Back in January, H&R Block figured that about half of the 6.8 million people who were getting ObamaCare subsidies would owe some of the money back. Another expert reckoned the average payback at $208.

That was enough to set off alarms about the "unpleasant tax surprise" these millions would face. The tax experts were too optimistic, however. H&R Block now figures that two-thirds of ObamaCare enrollees who got subsidies had to pay at least some of it back. And the average payback was $729.

So roughly 5.5 million ObamaCare enrollees had to return, on average, almost a quarter of their premium subsidies. Given that these subsidies are available only to families with modest incomes, that's got to hurt.

(H&R Block also found that a quarter of ObamaCare enrollees got an average of $425 in additional tax credits for last year.)

Why all the subsidy mistakes? Because ObamaCare uses a Rube Goldberg subsidy scheme that requires enrollees to predict next year's income. If they guess too low, their insurance subsidies will be too high. Overestimate their income and the subsidies will be too low.

H&R Block also found that the average penalty paid by the uninsured last year was $178. That no doubt was also a surprise to many who thought it would be just $95.

Here's a novel idea: Get government completely out of health care.

Freedom is always elegantly simple compared to bureaucratic schemes.  And it's less likely to present people with rude shocks, since, with freedom, they are in charge of their own destinies.

An unserious, once-great nation burns while its overlords preen

And so the Most Equal Comrade weights in on Baltimore.

The gist of what he had to say when it came time for the obligatory addressing-of-social-ills portion of his remarks was the classic MEC combination of self-referential preening, partisan divisiveness, and pointy-headed bureaucratic remedies:

“There’s a bunch of my agenda that would make difference right now in that,” he said, calling for more funding for early education, criminal justice reform and job training.

Obama criticized members of Congress for blocking his agenda items, but encouraged Americans to do some “soul searching” during his joint press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe this afternoon.

“I’m under no illusion that under this Congress we’re going to get massive investments in urban communities,” he said, adding that it was important to work to improve communities anyway.

He explained Americans should not “just pay attention to these communities when a CVS burns,” but rather work together to tackle poverty around the nation.

“[W]hat I’ve tried to do is promote those ideas that would make a difference, but I think we all understand that politics is tough because it’s easy to ignore those problems or to treat them as a law and order issue as opposed to a broader social issue,” he said.

That quintessential Freedom-Hater value - feeling good about your intentions regardless of the results of your policies - is on full display here.

Haven't we already made "massive investments in urban communities"?  Indeed we have.  And the results have been predictably underwhelming:

In 2009, Obama and the Democrats rammed the $840 billion federal stimulus package through Capitol Hill under the guise of immediate job creation and economic recovery. An estimated $64 billion went to public school districts; another nearly $50 billion went for other education spending. This included $13 billion for low-income public school kids; $4.1 billion for Head Start and childcare services; $650 million for educational technology; $200 million for working college students; and $70 million for homeless children.

How's that all working out? Last week, economists from the St. Louis Federal Reserve surveyed more than 6,700 education stimulus recipients and concluded that for every $1 million of stimulus grants to a district, a measly 1.5 jobs were created. "Moreover, all of this increase came in the form of nonteaching staff," the report found, and the "jobs effect was also not statistically different from zero." 

More than three-quarters of the jobs "created or saved" in the first year of the stimulus were government jobs, while roughly 1 million private sector jobs were forestalled or destroyed, according to Ohio State University. President Obama later admitted "there was no such thing" as "shovel-ready projects." But there were plenty of pork-ready recipients, from green energy billionaires to union bosses to Democratic campaign finance bundlers. About $230 billion in porkulus funds was set aside for infrastructure projects, yet less than a year later, Obama was back asking for another $50 billion to pour down the infrastructure black hole.

In 2010, President Obama signed the so-called Edujobs bill into law -- a $26 billion political wealth redistribution scheme paying back Big Labor for funding Democratic congressional campaigns. A year later, several were spending on the money to plug budget shortfalls instead of hiring teachers. Other recipients received billions despite having full educational payrolls and not knowing what to do with the big bucks. 

It goes on and on.  

In July 2014, with bipartisan support, Obama signed the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act to "help job seekers access employment, education, training, and support services to succeed in the labor market and to match employers with the skilled workers they need to compete in the global economy." (Never mind that a GAO review of the feds' existing 47 job-training programs run by nine different agencies "generally found the effects of participation were not consistent across programs, with only some demonstrating positive impacts that tended to be small, inconclusive or restricted to short-term impacts.")

In December 2014, the White House unveiled nearly $1 billion in new "investments" to "expand access to high-quality early childhood education to every child in America" from "birth and continuing to age 5."

That's all on top of the $6 billion government-funded national service and education initiative known as the SERVE America Act, which was enacted less than a month after the nearly $1 trillion stimulus with the help of a majority of Big Government Senate Republicans. The SERVE America Act included $1.1 billion to increase the investment in national service opportunities; $97 million for Learn and Serve America Youth Engagement Zones; and nearly $400 million for the Social Innovation Fund and Volunteer Generation Fund.

The "social innovation" slush fund was intended to "create new knowledge about how to solve social challenges in the areas of economic opportunity, youth development and school support, and healthy futures, and to improve our nation's problem-solving infrastructure in low-income communities." The biggest beneficiaries? Obama's progressive cronies.

The basic social order in post-America breaks down, and all the overlords have to offer is redistribution to make it possible for a bunch of pointy-headed administrative-class nerds to sit in offices and give the appearance of productive activity. Said nerds then have a vested interest in keeping the gravy flowing. Occasionally they can be roused to put on a conference at which they give PowerPoint presentations that are rich stews of eye-glazing acronyms and flow charts and empty platitudes about bright tomorrows.

In the meantime, rival gangs form alliances to wage war on police, babies are mass produced by feral young men with no intention of raising them, and businesses quite correctly determine that the MEC's "urban communities" are no place to invest capital.

And the larger array of clear signs that night has fallen on post-America, from transgendered bathrooms to white-privilege conferences to fines for adhering to Christian doctrine to a foreign policy that takes a fiction such as "climate change" seriously while refusing to see immediate threats from actual enemies, looms as the context in which night falls on Baltimore.

How much longer do we have until the dystopian denouement?

Sunday morning roundup

Today's roundup has a decidedly identity-politics flavor to it.

Two gay hotel-industry executives held a meet-and-greet for Ted Cruz at a Central Park South penthouse.  They are very pro-Israel and in sync with the Senator on a number of other issues.  Didn't take any time for the jackboots to call for a boycott of the hoteliers' business.  Broadway Cares, an AIDS charity, has already cancelled an event to be held at one of their properties.

GoFundMe.com has taken down the crowdfunding page of the campaign to raise money for the Oregon bakery Sweet Cakes by Melissa, which has been fined by the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries (Soviet ring to name much?) for refusing to do business in violation of the owners' Christian faith.  Policy against hate, doncha know.

The Student Government Association at Johns Hopkins approved a resolution demanding that the administration swear it will never allow a Chick Fil-A franchise on campus.  "Microaggession," doncha  know.

A "community organizer" guest on Melissa Harris-Perry's MSNBC show says that the Baltimore situation, in which a young black male died after several days in the custody of the predominately black police department (predominantly up to and including a black chief), still has white-supremacy overtones because "American policing . . . is founded on anti-blackness, on slave patrols . . . "

Got your mind right yet?

Me neither.

"Reform conservatism" is bad and pointless

Important Steven Hayward post at Power Line on "Reformicons."  I won't do much, if any, excerpting,  because it's one of those you ought to read in its entirety, and because confusion could be sowed since Hayward does a lot of excerpting himself.

Two of the leading lights of this "reform conservative" business are Pete Wehner, who holds forth at Commentary, and Ramesh Ponnuru, who is a senior editor at National Review.

Hayward launches his observation by looking at what William Vogeli has to say in a piece about it all at the Claremont Review of Books.

I'll cut to the chase and say that I am solidly with Vogeli and think Wehner and Ponnuru are all wet.  Especially Wehner, who makes my teeth grind with most of what he has to say on anything.  He has a bad case of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome, as far as I'm concerned.

Vogeli says that a conservatism based on the selling point that "our five-point proposals for dealing with this or that social need and concern are bounded, decentralized, and nimble, while liberals’ eight-point proposals are bloated, intrusive, and ineffective" is no actual conservatism at all."

Both Wehner and Ponnuru respond, as Hayward reports.  

Ponnuru merely stresses a need he perceives for conservatism to sell itself based on pragmatic solutions to contemporary societal problems.  I gather that he thinks that thereby, people will detect the outlines of the body of principles conservatives champion.

But it's Wehner's response to Vogeli that is downright hurl-worthy.

Okay, I'm going to offer the same Wehner excerpt that Hayward does, because it is so poisonously off-base:

If Voegeli believes that the New Deal and the Great Society are inherently illegitimate and conservatives ought to wage a full-scale, fundamental assault on them—that conservatives should proudly promise to uproot every last vestige of them—then he will destroy conservatism as a viable political movement. The eminent political scientist James Q. Wilson summarized this political reality when he said, “Telling people who want clean air, a safe environment, fewer drug dealers, a decent retirement, and protection against catastrophic medical bills that the government ought not to do these things is wishful or suicidal politics.” There is plenty of evidence that Americans are unhappy with the performance of modern government; there is little evidence to suggest that they are unhappy with the aims of modern government. It is not as though the New Deal was snuck through by a crafty Franklin Roosevelt and has been resented by the American people ever since. Whether conservatives like it or not, the pillars of the New Deal and most of the Great Society have been strongly and consistently reaffirmed in election after election, both congressional and presidential. Since the New Deal, in fact, no national politician has been elected promising to undo it, including the conservative icon Ronald Reagan.

Damn it, principles are immutable or they're not principles, Pete.

If the central questions are the relationship between the state and the individual and the need for free individuals to choose timeless virtues, then we have no truck with anything - anything - that presumes any proper degree of dependence on government for that which free, robust, viruous individuals ought to be providing for themselves.

This line of "reasoning" sounds a great deal like a point I've heard George Will make a few times.  I paraphrase a bit, but he says that Americans since the early 20th century have broadly decided that government ought to address two basic aspects of the human condition: sickness and old age.

Tell it to the Framers, George.

Listen up, Pete:  These New Deal programs you take as givens were cooked up by rabid statists such as Rex Tugwell and Frances Perkins.  Their intent was to shift the publics entire set of assumptions to the point at which they saw these programs as permanent and the benefits accruing thereunto as "rights."

 No. Just no.

If real conservatism is a difficult sell, then the task before us is to come up with an effective way to sell it.

Voegli is right, and you, Pete, deserve contempt.

And thanks to Hayward for putting the two sides of this crucial debate before us.

The exact ten squishes you thought they'd be

Here's the list of those afflicted with Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome to the degree that they'd vote to confirm as Attorney General someone who is on record as supporting such an unconstitutional measure as executive-order amnesty for illegal aliens:

Mitch McConnell (Ky.) Orrin Hatch (Utah) Lindsey Graham (S.C.) Jeff Flake (Ariz.) Thad Cochran (Miss.) Susan Collins (Maine) Mark Kirk (Ill.) Kelly Ayotte (N.H.) Ron Johnson (Wis.) Rob Portman (Ohio)

Somewhat bummed to see Ayotte and Johnson on the list.  They'd showed a bit of promise early on.  I saw Johnson speak at the AFP Defending the American Dream Summit in Orlando in 2013 and he was impressive.

Putting this in context makes it even more depressing.  Matthew Boyle at Breitbart has an exhaustive examination of the voting record of the current makeup of the Senate, including confirmation of judges and various types of bills, and it screams squish.  It's no different from how things would have gone if Freedom-Haters were still officially in control of that chamber.

Narrative, 0, Truth, 1

Directors may be a lot tending left, but think about the nature of their craft.  They deal in authenticity.  They have to come across as believable.  Actors really ought to have to find that level of honesty as well.

 Alas, that is far from what commonly takes place, and so the director of a Los Angeles play about last summer's Ferguson, Missouri embarrassment is going to need to put together a new cast:

According to the Los Angeles Times, the cast members quit the production after learning the true circumstances surrounding Brown’s death. Playwright and producer Phelim McAleer told Breitbart News that the script is based strictly on grand jury testimony, with “nothing added. No dialogue, no characters.”

“He claims that he wrote this to try to get to the truth of it, but everybody’s truth is totally subjective,” former cast member Veralyn Jones told the Times. “When you come to the matter of what really happened, nobody really knows for sure, because everybody has a different take on it. … It just didn’t feel right to me.”

A self-described “very liberal, left-wing-leaning” cast member, Philip Casnoff, told the Times that when he learned about McAleer’s conservative background, he thought, “Whoa, this is not the place for me to be.”

“It felt like the purpose of the piece was to show, ‘Of course he was not indicted – here’s why,'” Casnoff added.

McAleer has repeatedly stated that his play is based on a genre of drama called “verbatim theater,” in which events depicted on stage are a recreation of exact witness testimony and interviews.

“The truth is the truth. If it doesn’t fit in with their beliefs, they need to change their beliefs,” McAleer told the Times. “All the people who testified that he had his hands up, it was pretty much demolished in grand jury testimony.”

McAleer reportedly rejected cast members’ suggestions to “balance out” the play with information sympathetic to Brown, leading to their decision to quit. However one actress, Donzaleigh Abernathy, said she would wait to meet McAleer Thursday night before making a decision on whether to continue with the production.

“I want to hear what he has to say face to face,” Abernathy told the Times. “I actually want to know, on a moral level, how can you do something like this that you know will divide America? Does it make you feel good?

It's pointless  to tell the Freedom-Haters to just knock it off.  The prospect of total power hinges on the perpetuation of these complete falsehoods.

Leftists are evil.  There's nothing hyperbolic, self, indulgent, snarky or juvenile about that statement.

It's the obvious truth.

I got a kick of that actress's question as to whether the director want to "divide America."  That's a done deal, toots.  That ship has done sailed.  And you be like on the opposite side from those of us who cherish freedom, truth, human dignity, common sense and Western civilization.

You decided to join the enemy in this war for America's soul.

Beyond repair?

I guess it would be piling on for LITD to be the umpteenth outlet to list the current troubles besetting Hillionaire and Billy Jeff the Zipper. After all, you don't have to go farther than Drudge to avail yourself of such nuggets of woe as the NYT article on the connection Canadian uranium execs selling their mines to the big Russian atomic energy-agency Rosatom and also donating big bucks to the Clinton Foundation - both transactions occurring while Hillionaire was Secretary of State, or the NY Post article on the Quinnipiac poll showing 54 percent of post-Americans think Hillionaire is untrustworthy, or the New York Magazine opinion piece by Jonathan Chait, a pundit with impeccable lefty bona fides entitled "The Disastrous Clinton Post-Presidency."

And that's just today's roundup.  Yes, the propaganda arm of the Freedom-Hater party has made an art form out of getting post-America to "move on" from previous thorns is the Clintons' sides, such as foundation donations from questionable Middle Eastern regimes, the plane rides and Dominican Republic private-resort stays with the Menendez donor with a penchant for underage girls, the wiping clean of the private e-mail server, the fact that Hillionaire wasn't even supposed to have a private e-mail server for State Department communications, the rumblings from former Secret Service detail about her violent temper, potty mouth and arrogance, the Benghazi debacle . . .

 . . . the cattle futures, the Rosewater Law Firm billing records showing up on a White House night stand years after investigators started looking for them, the covering for Billy Jeff's misadventures . . .

 . . . but these never went fully away, and now are of a piece with a recent cascade that is still gaining in momentum.

And a lot of the sources for the current barrage are by no means right-of-center.

Do you really think it tapers off soon and that's that?

Me neither.

So it's reasonable to conclude that Hillionaire's plans - plans she began formulating decades ago, and I don't mean just back to the 1990s - to become president and amass more power than any president in history are in real trouble.

But even that isn't the biggest big-picture conclusion to be drawn here.

Think about what a shoo-in she was assumed to be.  Both the FHer nomination and the election were proclaimed to be coronations.

What kind of party has no one on deck for the brass ring of all American political striving but someone this foul?

It would be the same kind of party that similarly deified a current president who is equally foul.

The kind of party that counts among its lions a current Secretary of State who, as a young leader in Vietnam Veterans Against the War told outrageous lies about U.S. behavior in testimony to a Congressional hearing, who, in one of his first acts as a Senator, went to Nicaragua to meet with Daniel Ortega and actively work to undermine U.S. foreign policy toward Central America, and who, at present, is proclaiming loudly that an utter fiction, human-caused global warming, is at least as much of a world threat as ISIS, Iran or North Korea.

The kind of party that put forth a Senate Majority Leader who said of the 2012 Republican presidential candidate that he hadn't paid taxes in years, and when confronted with this proven lie recently responded, "He didn't win, did he?"

The kind of party that put forth a former Speaker of the House who is publicly fine with the extermination of fetal Americans and still expects to receive Catholic communion, and who said of Freedom-Hater-care when it was being rammed through her chamber, "We have to pass it to find out what's in it."

What we have an opportunity to see here with unprecedented clarity is the moral rottenness of one of post-America's two major political parties.

Democrats have nothing but contempt for you.

They have no conception of nobility or greatness.  They certainly have no love, not one molecule, for America.

Even if Hillionaire falls, the aftermath will not be tidy.  For one thing, the FHers will have to put up somebody to run in 2016, and the support for that candidate will be as shrill and silly as it has been for Hillionaire, the Most Equal Comrade and every other monster they've put up for high office in the last 40 years.

Plus, let us remember - we are conservatives, with a fundamentally tragic worldview, after all - that all human beings are fallible, and that even any Republicans who prove worthy of lionization will fall short of His glory, and therefore must not be mistaken for a messiah.

Still, this has the possibility of being one of the most instructive moments in American political history.

Let's not get fooled again.

And here's how it is in post-America

It's a land where acting on conservative views can get you awakened at dawn to police with battering rams who will insist on entering your home, entering your children's bedrooms, and rifling through your most private belongings.

It's a land of campus shit-ins the purpose of which is to push for transgender bathrooms and the notion that gender is a fluid, abstract construct.

It's a land ruled by a junta determined to impose regulations on electricity providers even if it leads to blackouts.

It's a land in which a serious contender for the position of president speaks of "toppling" the wealthies 1 percent of citizens.

Can such a place - which until recently was the hope of all freedom-cherishing humanity - be saved?

It's not a certainty.

Well, the interception is a good idea, but why the hell do we continue with the patty-cake?

Secretary Global-Test's obsequious and increasingly desperate gestures notwithstanding, we're more likely to be headed into a state of hot conflict with Iran than rapprochement.

The 'proxy' war is escalating very rapidly. As AP reports, Navy officials confirm that the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt is headed to Yemeni waters to intercept an Iranian weapons shipments. Just as we warned 10 days ago, the probability of a major escalation over the latest proxy Middle Eastern civil war escalated substantially when Iran parked two warships off the Yemeni coast.

I am increasingly inclined to believe that it's merely a question of whether it's the Sunni or Shiite Islamic enemies among our overall array of enemies that gets to us first.

Spawning jihadists among the wheat fields and lakes

We're growing our own enemies:

FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force has reportedly been investigating at least 15 young residents of the Minneapolis-St. Paul area over the past year, according to a spokesman with U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger reported Minneapolis Public Radio News (MPR).

A Monday morning press conference emphasized that the group is not one of confused young men, but dedicated individuals “intent on joining terror organization by any means possible.” Some members of the group have succeeded in leaving the country to join terrorists overseas while others’ plans have been thwarted. One of the men who was successful is now actively recruiting for ISIL/ISIS from overseas.

Two men from the group had driven to San Diego with plans to obtain false travel documents, cross into Mexico and fly to Syria, Special Agent in Charge Rick Thornton said, according to Fox 5.

Family members in Minnesota were claiming no knowledge of why the men were taken into custody after the Sunday arrests.

A woman telling MPR that she was the mother of two of the men arrested said that the FBI came around noon to the family’s house and arrested one son. The other, she told MPR, was arrested in San Diego.

“The community is in a state of confusion,” said Somali activist Omar Jamal on Sunday night reports MPR. “They don’t know what is going on….This is a very serious issue. We as a community are concerned about losing our kids to [ISIL].”

Arising from an unserious culture with a burning intent to impose a grimly serious one thereupon.

Oh, fer cryin' out loud

Feminism has reached a strange juncture indeed.  Its current crop of adherents seem to want to assume the stances of fierce, goose-stepping jackboots and shrinking violets with the vapors simultaneously.

Consider their reaction to a recent Georgetown University lecture by American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers:

“Current College Republicans leadership has not been willing to do simple things like add a trigger/ content warning, or clarify why they felt it was appropriate to bring this speaker into our community,” Sarah complained.

“If you’re available and up for it, I’d strongly encourage you to attend,” the feminist continued. “Students that are educated on the real facts of sexual assault and able to provide information on resources should be in the room.”

Sarah’s email was addressed to “SAPE,” which appears to be a Georgetown campus group called Sexual Assault Peer Educators.

Perhaps a dozen of the lecture attendees turned out to be protesters. They held up signs as Sommers spoke. Messages on the signs included “Feminists Against RAPE Apology!” and “Trigger Warning: anti-feminism.” At the bottom of the “trigger warning” sign was a scrawled message about “safe space.”

The demonstrators also posted signs outside the room where Sommers spoke notifying students of “safe spaces” in another campus building.

“All are welcome to come if they feel triggered or upset by today’s events,” the signs urged, according to Luce Lecture director Laurel Conrad.

Sommers, who looks to be about 5’5″ and weighs perhaps 130 pounds after getting caught in a rainstorm, spoke to a standing-room only crowd of over 100 students in total.

The big question is whether there is still a critical mass of the post-American populace that classifies this sort of antic as silly, or whether we're now at a point where a significant swath of us sees this as the expression of mature, self-respecting human beings.

But will it play Council Bluffs?

Iowa, of course, is considered a political bellwether because its caucuses occur early in each primary season.

It's also known for cornfields and a pace of life better described as rural than urban.  However, it's far from predictably conservative.  It's home to some of the most out-there-lefty colleges and universities anywhere.   And consider Tom Harkin.

But what will Iowans make of NYC mayor Bill De Blasio's visit?  He was there to try to steer the state's conversations with presidential hopefuls toward a radical framework.

And he  hit on at least three of the major tenets of that framework:

De Blasio couldn’t very well start off his Iowa speech bashing small businesses, but he’s no friend to them, as his mayoralty is showing back in New York. When the uber-progressive New York City Council held hearings on a law to expand mandatory sick leave, for instance, the council chambers overflowed as de Blasio administration representatives testified in favor of the idea. After they finished, the de Blasio team as well as most city council members walked out—before small-business groups, including several minority business associations, could share their thoughts on the matter. So a nearly empty chamber didn’t hear the head of a 200-member Hispanic supermarket association testify that the legislation—which not only required mandatory sick leave but also necessitated a significant increase in paperwork for businesses—“could create havoc with small independent supermarkets,” especially as “this burden falls on supermarkets just as they face other burdens, like the Affordable Care Act.”

While in the Hawkeye State, de Blasio also felt compelled to explain how he would spend the proceeds from all the new tax money he covets. One of his big agenda items is universal pre-K across America—a prime example of how New York’s mayor is a “spend first, worry about results later” politician. Pre-K is not a new idea—it’s been around for decades and academics have studied it extensively. The singular result of these studies is that pre-K demonstrates little lasting educational value for most kids, with the sole exception being some small, well-run programs for poor children, who seem to benefit from a head start on schooling. But even that small advantage almost always vanishes by third grade. Universal pre-K’s real appeal is as a tool for teachers’ unions to boost membership, one reason why the issue has such passionate advocates.

The mayor’s other big-spending idea is to pour more money into infrastructure. But the rest of the nation might pause before taking advice from a New Yorker on the subject. As City Journal’s Aaron Renn noted recently, the city wastes billions of dollars on poorly conceived and poorly executed infrastructure projects, thanks to conscious decisions to overspend by ignoring union featherbedding, mandating “buy American” programs for materials, and requiring protracted environmental reviews. 

We midwesterners tend to get saddled with Freedom-Hater politicians all too often because they aren't as recognizable as the coastal variety, which tends to be more out-front about it.  Flyover radicals tend to come clothed in more pragmatic trappings and only become recognizable after they are in positions to craft and implement policy.  In this sense, a speech from a flagrant coastal FHer like De Blasio is useful.  Fellow breadbasket citizens, peruse stories about your city-council, state-legislature, mayoral and gubernatorial candidates for little hints that they go in for the likes of the above.  It's a pretty clear indication that their just-folks drop-ins at the local coffee shop aren't demonstrations of admirable sincerity about their entire agendas.

Sunday morning round-up

How does this cacophonous ball of dirt and water fare at the onset of yet another week of occupation by the biped species with the movable thumbs?

It seems that climate science is becoming the ghetto of the physical-sciences world, much as gender studies is where social-science bottom-feeders are found.

A veteran Chinese journalist - and veteran of China's jails - is off to the hoosegow again, for having exposed the details of Document Number 9.  It is the government's plan for addressing "subversive" elements in Chinese media - such as the BBC's presence there.

Yesterday was Army Day in Iran.  It gave Iranians a chance to check out some fancy new hardware, and a truck sporting a huge banner reading "Death to Israel."

Oh, and a senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander puts the kibosh on any possibility of inspections of military sites that might be part of any agreement resulting from all the patty-cake of the last few years.

College and university presidents are trying to outdo each other in the moral preening department by pledging their campuses to be ever-more excruciatingly "sustainable."

Mason High School in Ohio cancels Hijab Day.

George Will explains why the gummint is making a couple in the raisin-farming business hand over 47 percent of their crop.

It's just plain wacky out there, I tell ya.

Plain truths are simple, but require a grownup's mindset to be embraced

There's a lot of buzz lately - for good reason - about the book Popular Economics by Forbes and Real Clear Markets editor John Tamny.  His basic thesis is that economics is not nearly so complex as most economists try to make it.

Basic principles are basic principles.  No amount of obfuscation can render them non-existent.

I've long said - I didn't get this from Tamny; I've been asserting it for years - that probably the most basic principle of all is this: The money has to come from somewhere.  You can earn it, you can borrow it, you can receive it as a gift, or you can steal it.  Those are the four ways you get it.

Speaking of borrowing, a corollary principle would be this: If you borrow money, your lender will expect to get it back.

True among individuals.  True between individuals and banks.  True between nations and international financial institutions.

So Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis's whinings in Washington this week ring a bit hollow:

"The fact is that Greece is out of the markets and it has been redeeming its debts for the last few months using its own scarce liquidity. It can't go on," he said.

Waaahhhh.

Look, pal, if you weren't all ate up with the ideology of your radical-leftist Syriza party, you'd see that the only way out of this for Greece is for government to extricate itself from the country's economic life - knock it off with the pension funds and state-supported industries - and for the Greek people to actually produce stuff of value.  Sure, you have tourism and olive oil, but it's clearly not enough.

To reiterate another of life's basic truths, culture is upstream from politics and policy.  Greek society must make the course correction from dependency and entitlement to inventiveness and enterprise.

A post-American is saying this because, pal, your refusal to face the basic truth has implications for us all:

George Osborne has warned that Greece's battle with Europe's creditor powers is nearing a "crunch" point and threatens to detonate a fresh global crisis if mishandled over the next days and weeks. 

The Chancellor said the escalating crisis in Greece is now the biggest threat to the world economy and has become a haunting theme for finance ministers and central bankers meeting at the International Monetary Fund in Washington this week. 

"The mood is notably more gloomy than at the last international gathering, and it is now clear to me that a misstep or a miscalculation by either side could easily return European economies to the kind of perilous situation we saw three or four years ago," he said.

And when the digestive byproduct hits the fan, we don't want to hear a lot of gobbled-gook.  The plain fact is that you, Greece - the Greece that elected Syriza - owe this money to European creditors and you have no actual plan to pay it back.

Speaking of the IMF meeting in Washington, there are also rumblings of concern about post-America:

As world leaders converge here for their semiannual trek to the capital of what is still the world’s most powerful economy, concern is rising in many quarters that the United States is retreating from global economic leadership just when it is needed most.
The spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank have filled Washington with motorcades and traffic jams and loaded the schedules of President Obama and Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew. But they have also highlighted what some in Washington and around the world see as a United States government so bitterly divided that it is on the verge of ceding the global economic stage it built at the end of World War II and has largely directed ever since.
“It’s almost handing over legitimacy to the rising powers,” Arvind Subramanian, the chief economic adviser to the government of India, said of the United States in an interview on Friday. “People can’t be too public about these things, but I would argue this is the single most important issue of these spring meetings.”

Notice how Jonathan Weisman of the NYT chalks it up to "dysfunction" and how Jack Lew of the Most Equal Comrade's nomenklatura attributes it to "bitter division."

Again, this is a smokescreen.  The plain fact is that post-America is saddled with its own version of Syriza, and its agenda is planned decline. This fading of leadership is on purpose.

And so the peak of civilization recedes into the ever-more-hazy past, and we spin tales to comfort us about how culpability is just a relative thing, and besides, decline is actually rather pleasant.

Until the Huns appear on the scene.  Which, by the way, they have.

Friday morning round-up

Digest the following and you'll have a pretty clear snapshot of where we are in post-America:

Girls Scouts of America thinks the way to shore up dismal-and-getting-more-so membership numbers is to court kids who want their crotches carved up because of unease about the kinds of crotches they were born with.

Thomas B. Edsall at the New York Times is deeply concerned that Freedom-Hater-care's decidedly under-baked performance so far is souring the post-American public on redistribution, and causing it to reconsider the notion that health care is a right.

The social-justice jackboots would now have you believe that a white guy consulting a dictionary for the final say on a word's definition or proper grammatical usage is de facto guilty of bigotry.

Writers among the jackboots now have it in for straight white male publishers.   They couldn't be more clear: "Sit down and let us abolish you." "Don't assume that you are at the center."  "You've doomed yourselves."

Assumption of responsibility is anathema to Freedom-Haters.  The elementary school teacher who had her 8-and-9-year-old students write get-well cards to Mumia Abu-Jamal (who was known as Wesley Cook at the time he shot the cop in 1981) says it was their idea.

Morale in post-America's military is at a record low.

And that's the way it is!

Freedom-Haters insist on narrative over fact to the bitter end

Is there any other term for what Sarah Silverman did to her "friend" other than despicable?

Comedian Sarah Silverman admitted that a story she told about wage discrimination (in which she even went so far as to call out a specific employer by name) was a lie — and then said people who might consider her lie a reason to question the movement she was supporting were “maniacs.” In an April 6 wage-discrimination-activism video for Levo League, Silverman accused New York Comedy Club owner Al Martin of having paid her less than a male comic for doing the same work: “I was out with my friend Todd Barry and we were doing sets around town together, and I was pretty well-known already, and we both did back-to-back 15-minute sets at this club, the New York Comedy Club, and he paid me 10 bucks . . . and we were outside talking and Todd somehow brought up that he, you know, mentioned that he got 60 bucks,” she said. “So I went back inside and I asked the owner Al Martin and I said, ‘Al, why did you pay me $10 and you paid Todd Barry $60?’ And he, it was so perfect,” Silverman continued, laughing. “He goes, ‘Oh, did you want a $60 spot?’ It was symbolic, I didn’t need $60, but, you know it was pretty s****y.”

Wow! “Pretty s****y” indeed! Just one problem: That didn’t actually happen.

As Martin explained to PJ Media on Tuesday, Barry’s set was a booked job, while Silverman’s was just a last-minute guest spot (read: expected to be unpaid regardless of gender) that he let her have as a favor — and the $10 was cab fare he gave her just to be extra nice. In other words: He definitely didn’t pay her less for the same job, because the set she did that night wasn’t even a job at all. In a statement to Salon, Silverman admitted that she had made the whole thing up and apologized to Martin: “My regret is that I mentioned Al by name — it should have been a nameless, faceless anecdote and he has always been lovely to me,” she said.

Says the story "just popped into [her] head."

Hands up, don't shoot.

Brutal gang rape at UVA.

Rising global temperatures.

Religious freedom equals rank discrimination.

Satan is referred to in Scripture as the father of lies.  There is no disputing the fact that he is prowling this realm without restraint.

Leftism is so evil and foul that it eats its own if a lie that increases its overall power can be perpetuated.

MIPS or ACO - them's your choices, Doc

I'm glad we have the likes of James C. Capretta to be willing to employ his brainpower in the service of parsing the arcane weeds of gummint health-care machinations.

He says we should look for the Senate to pass the Medicare-physician-payment legislation recently passed by the House.  The main reason will be that it removes the perennial thorn in their sides known as doc fixes.

But what it creates in the process is yet another layer of acronym-saddled pointy-headedness designed to make the average doctor's and average patient's eyes glaze over, so that they throw up their hands and say to the agents of Leviathan, "Just put me in whatever is simplest!"

The heart of the bill is a new, two-tiered indexing system for physician fees. Physicians who agree to participate in Medicare Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) — or in similar structures established by the Medicare bureaucracy — will receive a permanent 0.75 percent increase in their fees each year. Physicians that don’t join an ACO will be placed into a new Merit-Based Incentive Payment System, or MIPS. Under MIPS, the Medicare bureaucracy will assess the “quality” of a physician’s services to patients and reward or penalize them accordingly. On average, physicians in MIPS will receive a payment increase of 0.25 percent every year — far below the annual payment increase for physicians in ACOs. The actuaries who assess Medicare finances for the administration have looked at these provisions and come to the perfectly rational conclusion that physicians will have little choice but to join an ACO to get an extra 0.5-percentage-point bump in their payments every year. By 2019, the actuaries assume that 60 percent of all physicians taking care of Medicare beneficiaries will be part of an ACO, up from 25 percent today. By 2038, they assume that 100 percent of physicians participating in Medicare will be a part of an ACO or a similar structure invented by the Medicare bureaucracy.

These ACOs are supposed to offer super-streamlined, breathtakingly efficient service to the cattle-masses - who won't even know that they've been corralled into them.

In effect, Medicare beneficiaries are being shoved into managed care–like structures without their explicit consent.

The bottom line?

It forces physicians into a new structure — ACOs — that gives the Medicare bureaucracy immense regulatory power over how doctors and hospitals organize themselves and take care of patients. And it forces Medicare beneficiaries to get their care through these organizations regardless of their personal preferences. Once established, ACOs will provide a direct route for the federal government to exert full control over the practice of medicine.

The free-market solution to this would be elegantly simple, and would probably come up with what this bill claims to come up with: a genuinely efficient managed-care model.  it would just be done as a result of the competition of ideas.

But simplicity is of no benefit to the Freedom-Haters.  Our overlords have a vested interest in bureaucratic mazes.  Your job, Comrade Cow, is to line up at this chute and get ready for the pen.

Jihad is breathing down post-America's neck

Talk about proximity:

ISIS is operating a camp just a few miles from El Paso, Texas, according to Judicial Watch sources that include a Mexican Army field grade officer and a Mexican Federal Police Inspector.

The exact location where the terrorist group has established its base is around eight miles from the U.S. border in an area known as “Anapra” situated just west of Ciudad Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Another ISIS cell to the west of Ciudad Juárez, in Puerto Palomas, targets the New Mexico towns of Columbus and Deming for easy access to the United States, the same knowledgeable sources confirm.

During the course of a joint operation last week, Mexican Army and federal law enforcement officials discovered documents in Arabic and Urdu, as well as “plans” of Fort Bliss – the sprawling military installation that houses the US Army’s 1st Armored Division. Muslim prayer rugs were recovered with the documents during the operation.

Law enforcement and intelligence sources report the area around Anapra is dominated by the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes Cartel (“Juárez Cartel”), La Línea (the enforcement arm of the cartel) and the Barrio Azteca (a gang originally formed in the jails of El Paso). Cartel control of the Anapra area make it an extremely dangerous and hostile operating environment for Mexican Army and Federal Police operations.

According to these same sources, “coyotes” engaged in human smuggling – and working for Juárez Cartel – help move ISIS terrorists through the desert and across the border between Santa Teresa and Sunland Park, New Mexico. To the east of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, cartel-backed “coyotes” are also smuggling ISIS terrorists through the porous border between Acala and Fort Hancock, Texas. These specific areas were targeted for exploitation by ISIS because of their understaffed municipal and county police forces, and the relative safe-havens the areas provide for the unchecked large-scale drug smuggling that was already ongoing.

They're eyeing the railway system and university campuses in the area, among other tasty morsels.

Which of our Islamic enemies - the Sunni variety or the Shiite variety - will conquer us first?

Castro recognizes a brother

The Cuban dictator, invited to the Summit of the Americas for the first time, beats up on America from a historical standpoint, but says to the Most Equal Comrade, "Now you, kid, you're all right":

He referred to the United States' "wars, conquests and interventions" in the region, saying through an interpreter that the country has been a "hegemonic force that plundered territories throughout the Americas."

Castro recalled that the U.S. Congress authorized military intervention in Cuba in the late 19th century and that led to the establishment of a military base in Guantanamo that still "occupies our territory."

In the 20th century, the United States carried out a series of "interventions to overthrow democratic governments" in Latin America, where "dictators were installed in 20 countries, 12 of them simultaneously."

"In South America alone, hundreds of thousands of people were killed," Castro said, adding that the most "brutal" episode was the 1973 U.S.-backed coup that toppled Chilean President Salvador Allende's democratically elected socialist government.

But after finishing his review of Latin American history, Castro issued an apology to his U.S. counterpart.

"The passion comes out of my pores when the revolution is involved, but I want to apologize to President Obama because he doesn't have anything to do with all of that," Castro said, eliciting another round of applause.

Hell, the post-American overlords can't get anything close to that level of comity out of the other enemy we're trying to legitimize (Iran).  Khameini continues - as recently as last week - to say that the MEC has "devilish intentions."  Maybe it's some kind of difference between Communism and radical Islam.

But one thing's for sure:  Everybody else is taking notice.

An identity politics narrative can fill an empty suit rather impressively

Her only achievements of note are massive goof-ups.

So why is she so poised to possibly take the helm of Western civilization's downward spiral?

The whole phenomenon of the Clintons’ celebrity is something of a mystery to me. Part of the reason it is so difficult to analyze is that it is not all of a piece.  The engine  of the enterprise is Bill Clinton. I don’t think anyone would dispute that. He provides the pheromones for the enterprise, and absent that, what do we have?

t’s hard to say.  On her own, Hillary Clinton has to be one of the least likeable people in politics. I’m talking about her personality, her “people skills.” Does anyone, anyone, believe she competes in that arena? Barack Obama is a chilly narcissist, but next to Hillary he seems like Roy Rogers. It should be, but somehow isn’t, an embarrassment to the feminist sisterhood chanting for Hillary, Hillary, Hillary, that right from the beginning hers was a “coattail career.” Back in 1977, when she became the first female partner at the Rose Law Firm, that was—surprise, surprise—just after Bill Clinton was sworn in as the state’s attorney general.  Think there was a connection?

And so it’s been ever after. Although she, not Bill, is the couple’s chief ideologue and Minister of Propaganda, she has always existed in the echo chamber of his accomplishment.

We are so deadened to the standard of actually having accomplished something, of actually having gone on record with a core set of principles, that charlatans like the Clintons stand to finish implementing the Freedom-Hater vision and consign our descendants to lifetimes of tragic darkness.

Are you cool with that?

The advanced state of the rot

There is nothing gimmicky about my use of the moniker "post-America" to identify the nation we live in.  Our coins and dollars still say "United States of America," as do our tax forms and the pledge we still sometimes say before gatherings official and otherwise.  

Look for this formality to fray.

Post-America is a place of stinking rot.  Post-America exists to give the middle finger to God.

Dennis Prager has put it plainly:  The decay that has been underway for decades is accelerating.  He enumerates six particular areas basic to the life of a healthy country and shows that they have moved past peril and are now moribund.  There's the death of the family, as evidenced by current rates of illegitimacy and fatherlessness, the decline of education to the point that it is a cesspool of identity politics, the end of male and female, the end of right and wrong, the end of religion, characterized by the absence of absolutes and their replacement with feelings, and the death of beauty.

This last one particularly resonates with me, given my lifelong love of art, particularly music:

There is no good or bad art or literature. You like Beethoven; I like rap. You like Shakespeare; I like Batman. "Street art" (aka graffiti) is worthy of museum exhibition; paint thrown by an "artist" from atop a ladder onto a canvas is considered high art and fetches over $100 million; and a giant sculpture of a dog with lifted leg urinating adorns the front of the Orange County Museum of Art in California.

The rot is so insidious that it has worked its way into conservatism.  We are now told by those who do indeed share our principles regarding economic liberty and foreign policy that we need to rethink God's intentions in creating the universe as he did. Jen Kuznicki has written a piece about a National Journal article by a former Log Cabin Republicans official that demonstrates this line of persuasion:

. . . the last line of the National Journal article shows how the operatives politicize God, which is the real stealth assault on Western Civilization.

“I certainly don't think Steve King is going to wake up one night and say, 'Well I gotta love the gays because I read a poll,' " Berle says. "But I think a lot of people understand what the primary issue is to Americans—concerns about the economy, foreign policy issues—and nobody is really getting kept up at night that the gay couple down street are wearing wedding bands."

Christian Berle is the former deputy executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans. His cavalier snark against Representative Steve King (R-IA) shows you just how he and his like-minded operatives expect to talk to the “folks.” Identifying King as someone who hates gays is mean-spirited and ignorant of the issues that real, rational adults think about when it comes to gay marriage. Notice in his turn of phrase, that if you are against gay marriage, you hate gays. Conservatives who are Christian, and rightly have the ability (or at least did in the past) to be able to vote on how they’d like their state to manage issues like this, are all suddenly gay haters. That’s not hyperbolic Christians saying things like this, it is the invective we have been assaulted with these past few years by leftist radical gay activists as well as through our own state republican parties. Not only is the gay advocacy condoning tearing down state constitutional amendments, they view people who cling to their religion as idiots and zealots, much like Barack Obama did during his original presidential campaign.

And the tortured what-if scenarios regarding the assertion of religions freedom get more outrageous by the day.  Dr. Susan Berry at Breitbart  shows the degree to which the ACLU has refined this to exquisitely levels of grotesqueness:

As reported at Nola.com, ACLU attorney Marjorie Esman said regarding husbands, “He could say ‘It is my moral conviction that my spouse can submit to discipline from me.’ … It basically dismantles the Louisiana legal system. The whole criminal code goes out the window.”

Leftwing opponents of religious freedom legislation are continuing a trail of fear mongering that led Indiana lawmakers and Gov. Mike Pence (R) to cave to demands to change that state’s law last week.

Michael Reed, Communications Director for Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) said in a statement sent to Breitbart News that Esman’s comment is “an example of the absurdity of the Left and the length they will go to spread lies about laws to protect individual religious rights from adverse action by government.”

“This comment is shockingly reprehensible – but fortunately quite absurd and misinformed,” Reed added.

House Bill 707, introduced by Louisiana state Rep. Mike Johnson (R), would create the “Marriage and Conscience Act,” and “create a cause of action for the protection of the right of conscience as relates to marriage.”

“House Bill 707 doesn’t change any law to allow people or businesses to do anything that is currently against the law, be it spousal abuse, or breaking and entering, or jaywalking,” continued Reed. “The bill that has been filed simply ensures the state cannot deny a license, certification, accreditation, contract, etc. to an individual or business on the basis of a sincerely held religious belief about marriage.”

In a written statement to Nola.com, Johnson said the ACLU and those supporting the militant LGBT agenda “are intentionally engaging in a campaign of fear, intimidation and misinformation about this bill.”

Do we have any weapons of such effectiveness?

While Peter Wehner more often than not demonstrates a tendency toward Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome, and indeed does so toward the end of this piece at Commentary on Hillary and culture war, he makes some chilling points we ought to ponder:

The distortions, mob mentality, and smear campaign that characterized the reaction of the left to the Indiana version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (the federal version of which Bill Clinton signed into law) will be amplified by a factor of a hundred. If Hillary Clinton could talk about contraception, abortion, evolution, same sex marriage, and equal pay for equal work every day between now and November 2016, she would.

The 2010s is not the 1970s or 1980s, when focusing on cultural issues and symbols helped the GOP. As National Journal’s Ron Brownstein has written

While Republicans took the offense on most cultural arguments through the late 20th century, now Democrats from Obama on down are mostly pressing these issues, confident that they represent an expanding majority of public opinion.

Veteran pollster Stanley B. Greenberg captures this almost unprecedented Democratic assurance when he declares flatly: “Republicans are on the losing side of all of these trends.”

Jonathan V. Last at the Weekly Standard illustrates the advanced degree of our rot with the story of a certain teenaged heart-transplant recipient:

 You probably don't remember Anthony Stokes, but back in 2013, he was briefly famous. Stokes was a 15-year-old Georgia kid with a bad heart: Born with an enlarged heart, doctors gave him roughly six months to live if he didn't get a transplant. The problem for Stokes-besides his terrible medical condition-was that the medical authorities wouldn't put him on the transplant list because they deemed him to be a high risk for non-compliance. You see, Stokes had not just a history of bad grades but a criminal record, too. "We follow very specific criteria in determining eligibility for a transplant of any kind," a flack from Children's Healthcare of Atlanta said at the time. "They said they don't have any evidence that he would take his medicine or that he would go to his follow-ups," said Stokes' mother. 

But this is America, so you can already guess how this story went. Stokes' family went to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They cried racism. Then social media and "#BlackTwitter" (their term, not mine) kicked in. And the doctors at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta freaked out because there are few things as unsettling as being called a racist by hordes of people on the internet. So the doctors reversed course and put Stokes on the transplant list. And, by the grace of God, Stokes got a heart. (Which means that someone else, by necessity, did not.)
And then the left-from the Huffington Post to Think Progress to Gawker to Ebony-did a victory lap. To their mind, they had won another victory in the culture war, exposing racism, shaming the power structure, and making the world a more perfect place.
Last Tuesday, a little less than two years after Stokes was gifted a heart, he-allegedy-broke into an 81-year-old woman's home and, upon being discovered, fired gunshots at her. He-allegedly-fled the scene in a car that police later determined had been stolen. Police pursued Stokes in a high-speed chase. After a few miles Stokes-allegedly!-hit a pedestrian, whereupon he crashed the stolen car and died. (We don't have to cover ourselves on this last bit; he is indisputably dead.)
There's a great parable wrapped up in this story. And yet in the public consciousness, the death of Anthony Stokes barely registers. He's not even a footnote. But he should be. Because he got a heart that could have gone to someone else if not for the online mob and charges of racism. He got a heart-and someone else did not-because of the culture war. And he wasted it.

And I think it's appropriate to give the final word on this entire subject to Last as well:

Whatever happens in Iran, the culture war in America has gone nuclear. And I suspect that there's no going back.

And that, folks, is where we are.