The magnificent Ted Cruz

Great seven-plus-minutes video of Ted conversing with an Iowa farmer about ethanol and subsidies generally. The guy starts out with a hot-head demeanor but is calmed down and has accepted Ted's invitation to consider the broader scope by the end of their exchange.

My only problem with the whole conversation is that, due to the nature of contemporary politics, Ted feels compelled to start his answer to the guy's in-your-face demands with the stock line about "Let me assure you, no one will fight harder for the American farmer" and spend a couple more minutes of their time together setting the table for his core argument about how the government should not be picking winners and losers in the energy marketplace.

In a world of citizens adequately intellectually prepared for such a discussion, Ted could have leapt right in with the essential truth: subsidies distort the market value of anything, so it's a wash or pretty close to it that subsidies help this farmer since they are paid for by taxes which he pays along with his fellow citizens.

And followed up with a ringing reminder that government imposing such market distortions is tyranny - no different than when it is done in North Korea or Cuba.

Anyway, Ted got that point, in a gentler, less direct way, across, and the farmer seems convinced or nearly so, by the end of their conversation, so it was ultimately constructive.

But speaking of demeanor, compare Ted's calmness, commitment to a sound structuring of his argument, and the articulate manner (combined with the personable touch, as evidenced by his invitation to the farmer to go across the room and also have a conversation with a prominent Iowa ethanol businessman) with which he gets his points across, to the way Squirrel-Hair would have dealt one-on-one with the concerned voter. But, of course, S-H is on board with ethanol subsidies, at least this week.

Squirrel-Hair gets a little confused about liturgy

This recent practice of making a show of going to church needs a little help in the credibility department.

today, Trump dragged his third trophy wife off to church to try to convince Evangelicals that he was actually one of them.

Trump attended services at the First Christian Orchard Campus, a nondenominational church in Council Bluffs.

He, his wife, Melania, and two staffers took communion when it was passed. But Trump, momentarily confused, mistook the silver plates circulated around the auditorium and dug several bills out of his pocket.

“I thought it was for offering,” he said with a laugh to his staff.

In a lot of ways this smug arrogance and condescension is a metaphor for Trump. 

Trump was raised as some variety of Presbyterian. This is not a Presbyterian church. He couldn’t be bothered to have a staffer research the liturgy of that church beforehand. He couldn’t be bothered to see what anyone else was doing, because, after all, what do they really know? They aren’t rich. And it is all about money. He probably thought some dumb f*** had dropped food on the plate as their offering or that the church was doing what any organization does when Trump visits: begging for money.

“My little cracker” 1. Donald Trump 0.

Pay attention to what the bulletin says is coming up next, knucklehead.

Jihad never sleeps - today's edition

The Devil is prowling Nigeria:

In one of their most heinous massacres to date, militants from the radical Islamist Boko Haram group slaughtered over a hundred victims in a village in northeast Nigeria Saturday night, including a number of children whom they burned alive.

The latest atrocity from the jihadi group allied to the Islamic State took place in the village of Dalori, some three miles from Maiduguri, Nigeria. Vice Chairman of a civilian joint task force in Dalori, Modu Kaka, said that at least 100 dead bodies were taken away but that hundreds are still missing.

Witnesses spoke of “scores of bodies” burned and riddled with bullets lying in the streets after the attack Saturday night. One man, who managed to escape by hiding in a tree, said that he could hear the wails of children screaming in the flames.

Residents of the community said the militants stormed into town around 6:20 pm and began their killing spree, which lasted for several hours. During the assault, the jihadis demolished houses and burned livestock once they had pillaged and carried away foodstuffs. Several of the villagers were burnt beyond recognition.

Witnesses reported that the fighters ravaged the settlement for four hours, and that three female suicide bombers blew themselves up among people who were fleeing.

Students at nearby University of Maiduguri heard explosions and gunfire, and many fled the area as the conflict raged.

One political science student named Hauwa Ba’na said: “We are crying in our hostel because the explosions are loud and everyone is panicking.”

A Dalori resident, Mallam Buka, decried the lack of protection from the Nigerian military. “We were helpless. Could you believe that there was no military presence in Dalori? The government didn’t provide security to protect us. I lost 11 people, and 5 of our children are nowhere to be found,” she said.

Remember that Boko Haram is now an official ISIS affiliate.

Cans she really make it to November?

Hillionaire has the gall to say she wants the job the first duty of which is to keep the nation secure.

Really? After this?

The intelligence community has deemed some of Hillary Clinton’s emails “too damaging" to national security to release under any circumstances, according to a U.S. government official close to the ongoing review. A second source, who was not authorized to speak on the record, backed up the finding.  

The determination was first reported by Fox News, hours

before the State Department formally announced Friday that seven email chains, found in 22 documents, will be withheld “in full” because they, in fact, contain “Top Secret” information.

The State Department, when first contacted by Fox News about withholding such emails Friday morning, did not dispute the reporting – but did not comment in detail. After a version of this report was first published, the Obama administration confirmed to the Associated Press that the seven email chains would be withheld. The department has since confirmed those details publicly.

The decision to withhold the documents in full, and not provide even a partial release with redactions, further undercuts claims by the State Department and the Clinton campaign that none of the intelligence in the emails was classified when it hit Clinton's personal server.

Fox News is told the emails include intelligence from "special access programs," or SAP, which is considered beyond “Top Secret.” 

Must. Not. Be. Anywhere. Near. The. Oval. Office.

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

There is no need to get wonky about this. Yes, one could trot out the reasons why there actually is no pay gap between the genders, or the costs to businesses of complying with regulations.

But the basic principle ought to be front and center. Where does government get off telling private organizations how to conduct their affairs (i.e., pay people)?

The Obama administration will move on Friday to require companies to report to the federal government what they pay employees by race, gender and ethnicity, part of a push by President Obama to crack down on firms that pay women less for doing the same work as men.
The new rules, Mr. Obama’s latest bid to use his executive power to address a priority of his that Congress has resisted acting on, would mandate that companies with 100 employees or more include salary information on a form they already submit annually that reports employees’ sex, age and job groups.
“Too often, pay discrimination goes undetected because of a lack of accurate information about what people are paid,” said Jenny Yang, the chairwoman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which will publish the proposed regulation jointly with the Department of Labor. “We will be using the information that we’re collecting as one piece of information that can inform our investigations.”

Memo to Ms. Yang: This information is none of your damn business.

Exactly

Read the latest post at Political Hat. Won't try to excerpt from it, as it's full of links and excerpts itself. But it's one of those big-picture pieces that compels one to think anew about how very late in the day it is.

Our civilization is dying. Are we going to do anything about it?

The divide on our side, and which view merits aligning with

The impact of Squirrel-Hair manifests itself in the could-not-be-more-divergent conclusions of two columns that have been published today, one by Tucker Carlson at Politico and one by David Limbaugh at Townhall. (It was refreshing beyond description to see at least one Limbaugh brother be unequivocal in his conclusion about the current political juncture.)

For starters, consider the title of each. Carlson: "Donald Trump is Shocking, Vulgar and Right." Limbaugh: "Vote Cruz in Iowa As If The Republic Depends On It."

Carlson starts his piece with a vignette from his personal experience with S-H that amply demonstrates the shocking-and-vulgar part of his argument. He then goes on to outline the four big reasons he sees as arguments for S-H's superior effectiveness: He Exists BecauseYou [the GOP and, indeed, the conservative movement] Failed, Truth Is Not Only A Defense, It's Thrilling, Washington Really Is Corrupt, and He Could Win.

Read it. For one thing, it's great, cogent writing, and he makes points that are discomforting to concede, but that must be conceded. Also, he fleshes out his assertions with vivid examples of what he's talking about. With regard to righties failing, he asks a bracing question:

Consider the conservative nonprofit establishment, which seems to employ most right-of-center adults in Washington. Over the past 40 years, how much donated money have all those think tanks and foundations consumed? Billions, certainly. (Someone better at math and less prone to melancholy should probably figure out the precise number.) Has America become more conservative over that same period? Come on. Most of that cash went to self-perpetuation: Salaries, bonuses, retirement funds, medical, dental, lunches, car services, leases on high-end office space, retreats in Mexico, more fundraising. Unless you were the direct beneficiary of any of that, you’d have to consider it wasted.

Pretty embarrassing. And yet they’re not embarrassed. Many of those same overpaid, underperforming tax-exempt sinecure-holders are now demanding that Trump be stopped. Why? Because, as his critics have noted in a rising chorus of hysteria, Trump represents “an existential threat to conservatism.”

He is less convincing when he employs the it's-time-for-s-to-embrace-some-cynicism tone that he uses to justify S-H's upfront acknowledgement that he has routinely bought people off:

Everyone beats up on Washington, but most of the people I know who live here love it. Of course they do. It’s beautiful, the people are friendly, we’ve got good restaurants, not to mention full employment and construction cranes on virtually every corner. If you work on Capitol Hill or downtown, it’s hard to walk back from lunch without seeing someone you know. It’s a warm bath. Nobody wants to leave.
But let’s pretend for a second this isn’t Washington. Let’s imagine it’s the capital of an African country, say Burkina Faso, and we are doing a study on corruption. Probably the first question we’d ask: How many government officials have close relatives who make a living by influencing government spending? A huge percentage of them? OK. Case closed. Ouagadougou is obviously a very corrupt city.
That’s how the rest of the country views D.C. Washington is probably the richest city in America because the people who live there have the closest proximity to power. That seems obvious to most voters. It’s less obvious to us, because everyone here is so cheerful and familiar, and we’re too close to it. Chairman so-and-so’s son-in-law lobbies the committee? That doesn’t seem corrupt. He’s such a good guy.
All of which explains why almost nobody in Washington caught the significance of Trump’s finest moment in the first debate. One of the moderators asked, in effect: if you’re so opposed to Hillary Clinton, why did she come to your last wedding? It seemed like a revealing, even devastating question.
Trump’s response, delivered without pause or embarrassment: Because I paid her to be there. As if she was the wedding singer, or in charge of the catering.
Even then, I’ll confess, I didn’t get it. (Why would you pay someone to come to your wedding?) But the audience did. Trump is the ideal candidate to fight Washington corruption not simply because he opposes it, but because he has personally participated in it. He’s not just a reformer; like most effective populists, he’s a whistleblower, a traitor to his class. Before he became the most ferocious enemy American business had ever known, Teddy Roosevelt was a rich guy. His privilege wasn't incidental; it was key to his appeal. Anyone can peer through the window in envy. It takes a real man to throw furniture through it from the inside.

The we-need-to-be-cynical-because-this-is-a-hard-rough-world tone gets awful thick in the paragraphs under the "He Could Win" heading.

Now, contrast that to what David Limbaugh has to say about ted Cruz:

There is nothing extreme about Ted Cruz except for his commitment to the American idea, to free enterprise, to ordered liberty, to limited government, to national solvency, to America's national security and sovereignty and to policies designed to unleash robust economic growth to benefit all sectors of society.
There is nothing extreme about Ted Cruz, because there is nothing extreme about Reagan conservatism other than a sincere commitment to reignite America's uniqueness and greatness.
As we've watched this GOP contest unfold, we've seen in Cruz a man under fire from all quarters who has maintained his cool, his dignity, his resolve, his faith, his integrity, his presidential demeanor and his unwavering dedication to restoring America -- the America that we know and love, the shining city on a hill that has been the most benevolent, decent and prosperous nation in history.

Finally, it's important for me to emphasize that I don't idolize Ted Cruz or support him as part of a cult of personality. I support him because I believe he is the best hope for America for the many reasons I've underscored and more. 

Whooee. I wish David's brother could be that forthright.

But the whole tone is different from the preceding argument. It's about championing what is good and true and right.

Sorry, Tucker, but your hard-bitten "realism" is gruel too thin to be settling for.

They smell weakness - today's edition

Russia's harassment of post-America continues:

A Russian Su-27 jet fighter came within 20 feet of a U.S. RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft over the Black Sea on Monday in Moscow’s latest military provocation involving dangerous aerial encounters.

“On Jan. 25 an RC-135 aircraft flying a routine route in international airspace over the Black Sea was intercepted by a Russian Su-27 in an unsafe and unprofessional manner,” Navy Capt. Daniel Hernandez, chief spokesman for the U.S. European Command, told the Washington Free Beacon. “We are looking into the issue.”

Defense officials said the Su-27 flew alongside the RC-135, an electronic intelligence-gathering aircraft, and then performed what they said was an aggressive banking turn away from the intelligence jet.

The thrust from the Su-27 “disturbed the controllability” of the RC-135, said one official familiar with details of the incident.

A second official said the reconnaissance aircraft was flying 30 miles from the coast—well within international airspace and far away from any Russian territory—at the time of the encounter.

The Pentagon announced Thursday that it has concluded a flight safety memorandum with Russia after holding a video conference with Russian Defense Ministry officials.

The areas of discussion included air safety over the skies in Syria as well as “the means to avoid accidents and unintended confrontation between coalition and Russian forces whenever the two sides operate in close proximity,” Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said in a statement.

The statement made no mention of Monday’s dangerous aerial encounter.

The Black Sea encounter was the latest in a series of aggressive Russian military activities aimed coercing or harassing U.S. military aircraft and ships in both Europe and Asia.

The provocations are not limited to U.S. forces. On Tuesday, Japan’s Defense Ministry revealed that Japanese interceptor jets were scrambled to chase two Russian Tu-95 Bear bombers that approached the northern end of Japan and flew just outside that country’s airspace in maneuvers described by analysts as unusually close.

Other incidents included a similar near-collision between a Russian fighter and RC-135, a militarized Boeing 707, over the Black Sea on May 30. Around the same time, a Russian Su-24 jet buzzed the destroyer USS Ross in the Black Sea near occupied Crimea.

Earlier, on April 7, another Su-27 flew within 20 feet of an RC-135, this time over the Baltic Sea.

Of a piece with  Iran's arrest of the Navy-boat crew and milking it for maximum humiliation value, and North Korea's latest nuclear test, and Chinese hacking of the OPM database.

And don't bother briefing the Most Equal Comrade on this kind of thing. It bores him to death.

The looney bin formerly known as Western civilization

A parlor game I play with myself from time to time is which ten cabinet-level departments I'd immediately dismantle if given the power to do so. (Ted Cruz has played this one, too - one of the reason's he's LITD's guy in this race.)

It seems to me the Labor Department would be ripe for obliteration:

The Department of Labor has proposed a rule that would remove the words “he” and “she” from an anti-discrimination regulation in order to “avoid the gender binary” — which is obviously something that must be avoided at all costs. The rule replaces “‘he or she’ with ‘the individual,’ ‘person,’ or other appropriate identifier,” according to the document’s text.

It also updates the list of things that count as banned discrimination under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act to include “sex stereotyping, transgender status, and gender identity.” As the Washington Free Beacon notes, the change would require job centers to spend $4 million updating their posters and equal opportunity notices alone — something the department referred to as an “important benefit to society.” “Our nation’s workforce system should reflect our commitment to diversity,” U.S. Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez said according to the announcement of the rules. That same announcement referred to the changes as being “necessary.” 

How many years ago would 99 percent of post-Americans have laughed at this as the product of the wildest imaginations? It can't be over five.

We all know that culture is upstream from politics. What matters more than who we elect as the next president or the composition of the next Congress is finding a way to thwart the Great Leveling Project and take the concepts of normalcy and human nature out of mothballs.

Another Freedom-Hater-care selling point wilts before our eyes

So much for the claim that enrollment numbers would get more robust:

ObamaCare will enroll significantly fewer people than expected in 2016, ending the year with about 13 million customers, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) said Monday.

The figure, which was included in an expansive budget report, is a decline of about 40 percent from last year’s enrollment prediction of about 20 million people.

The latest projections confirm the Obama administration’s previous assessment that fewer people are signing up as the marketplace closes in on its third enrollment season — the final one under President Obama.

Now, can we please try a normal-people, free-market model?

Is Squirrel-Hair powerful enough to corrupt certain righties?

Leon Wolf has a piece worth your pondering at Red State today, entitled "Who in the Conservative Movement Has Trump Successfully Bought?"

He starts out by correcting the record on the matter of Iowa evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats and the six-figure sum paid for Squirrel-Hair to speak at an event. (S-H did the extorting.)

Wolf then begins wondering about some recent curious developments, such as S-H endorsements from Phyllis Schlafly and Jerry Falwell, Jr.

In the comment thread under the piece, one commenter merely says, "*cough* Breitbart *cough*".

I do believe there are some who just plain drank the Kool-Aid. Laura Ingraham, for instance, has over the past year or so - since before S-H announced - spoken considerably more about populism than about conservatism.

But what is up with the litany of FNC personalities I quoted the other day? Why the overt shilling? (In the case of Pirro, it seems there may be some substantiation for Wolf's speculation:

Before I go on, since the Judge didn’t mention it allow me to point out her financial ties to Trump. New York Magazine once described her ex-husband Al Pirro as “Westchester’s most influential real-estate lawyer, a man Donald Trump keeps on retainer”

Variety said, in 2007 “Sir Pirro, a wily and wildly successful real estate attorney, has a somewhat checkered past that has played itself out quite publicly in the New York media. Indeed he has long standing professional relationships with such high profile individuals as The Donald (Trump),”

In other words, before her divorce Mr. Trump was an important part of Judge Pirro’s household income. And when she ran for New York State Attorney General, Donald Trump donated $20,000 to her campaign. 

 And she has in fact characterized S-H as a personal friend on her show.)

But this business about S-H abruptly bowing out of tomorrow night's debate, and saying he'll only deal with Murdoch and not Ailes, is there a palpable leverage involved? Can S-H play hell with Megyn Kelly's career? He doesn't seem fazed by the response - that he had to anticipate, from principled conservatives - that he's acting like a big baby and like he can't deal with a petite, vivacious former-attorney television personality.

And what's with Rush Limbaugh's excruciatingly abstract dance of late, this whole business about how "this thing is so big and unprecedented, all I can do - all anybody can do - is try to objectively analyze it"? Today, he spent a half-hour setting up today's abstract canvas by talking about how hard it is for him to discuss it at all, given that he is friends or at least acquaintances with most of the players - Kelly, Ailes, Squirrel-Hair, Cruz, etc.

For crying out loud, he's in the opining business. In 28 years, he has never hesitated to draw distinctions of the "this-is-good-this-is-bad / this-is-silly-this-is-substantive / this-is-tyrannical-this-is-freedom-enhancing" variety. Why the waffling now?

All this substantiates the assertion that National Review showed great courage with its latest issue, as has Red State, Power Line, Dana Loesch, Caroline Glick, and others who forthrightly declare that S-H is utterly unsuited to be president.

Maybe there is one positive lesson for us in all this: fealty to principles is always advisable if you really want to sleep well at night.

Isn't this tantamount to characterizing himself as a phony?

Squirrel-Hair says, "When I'm president, I'm a different person. I can be the most politically correct person you've ever seen."

For the sake of winnowing out distractions, let's not dwell on the tense problems with the construction of the first sentence. (Has he been president before? Is this a post he holds with some frequency?)

What he's doing is admitting that he turns different tones and types of rhetoric on and off at will.

. He’s aggressive and anti-PC on the trail, in a knife fight with 15 other candidates, because that’s what it takes to win, but if winning at the job of the presidency requires a different tone, then that’s the tone he’ll take. This must be the first time in American history where it’s impossible to predict not only what a major-party frontrunner would do as president — given Trump’s volatile political history, all we can count on is that there’ll be “deals” — but how he would sound. 

Pray hard that something stops his campaign dead in its tracks.

It's on purpose - today's edition

The Coward-Piven disciples with their grip on post-America's throat are no doubt very proud of themselves. By their own standards, they should be:

The federal government will be flirting with $30 trillion in debt within a decade, the Congressional Budget Office reported Monday, blaming an aging population, new spending and tax cuts approved on Capitol Hill, and the growing burden from Obamacare for erasing the progress Washington had made over the past few years.

Analysts said Obamacare will chase more workers out of the labor force over the next five years, adding pressure to an economy still struggling to spring to life more than seven years into the Obama recovery.

The grim news comes with less than a year left for President Obama to put the law on firmer footing as he seeks to head off what is likely to be a last effort at repealing the act after November’s elections.

The economic front is somewhat brighter for Mr. Obama, who seven years into the recovery will finally see significant sustained growth of 2.5 percent this year and 2.6 percent next year, the CBO said.

That will be followed by a cooling off, with growth dropping below 2 percent in 2019 and 2020. The economic gains will continue to go disproportionately to the wealthy, helping boost income tax revenue but limiting payroll taxes, which will put even more pressure on the entitlement programs that are driving up deficits.

The biggest fiscal dent, however, was made late last year when Mr. Obama and the Republican-run Congress struck a deal. The president won significant spending hikes, and Republicans insisted on a new round of special tax breaks that, combined, reversed years of progress and added nearly $750 billion to projected deficits over the next decade.

“After six consecutive years in which the deficit has declined relative to the size of the economy, this year’s deficit — at 2.9 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) — is anticipated to increase for the first time since it peaked at 9.8 percent in 2009,” the CBOsaid.

Deficits will continue to rise over the next 10 years, topping $1 trillion again in 2022 and reaching $1.4 trillion in 2026, the analysts said.

The accumulation of those deficits will deepen the gross public debt from $18.1 trillion at the end of 2015 to $29.3 trillion in 2026. By contrast, the debt stood at $10.6 trillion when Mr. Obama took office in 2009.

Looking decades into the future, the picture only gets worse, the CBO said.

Now, of course we can expect enthusiasts of the leviathan state seizing ever more of individuals' money at gunpoint to point to the "tax cuts" as a culprit. A couple of things: in the same paragraph, the Most Equal Comrade's spending increase is also mentioned as a factor, and with the magnitude of debt and deficits being projected, there is no kind of tax increase that could ameliorate the situation. The post-American cattle-masses - rich, middle-class or poor - just don't have that kind of money.

Hillionaire's astounding recklessness

It gets worse by the day:

As if keeping the highest level of sensitive human source information, which FBI investigators had to obtain special clearances to handle, on a private server wasn't bad enough, a new report in the New York Post shows Clinton's top aides may have deliberately 'copied and pasted' highly sensitive, classified information from secure government systems onto Clinton's private, unsecure server. (Bolding is mine). 

 The FBI is investigating whether members of Hillary Clinton’s inner circle “cut and pasted” material from the government’s classified network so that it could be sent to her private e-mail address, former State Department security officials say.

Clinton and her top aides had access to a Pentagon-run classified network that goes up to the Secret level, as well as a separate system used for Top Secret communications.

The two systems — the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet) and Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS) — are not connected to the unclassified system, known as the Non-Classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet). You cannot e-mail from one system to the other, though you can use NIPRNet to send ­e-mails outside the government.

Somehow, highly classified information from SIPRNet, as well as even the super-secure JWICS, jumped from those closed systems to the open system and turned up in at least 1,340 of Clinton’s home e-mails — including several the CIA earlier this month flagged as containing ultra-secret Sensitive Compartmented Information and Special Access Programs, a subset of SCI.

 Of course, this is all going to come down to whether Loretta Lynch has the tiniest shred of integrity. FBI director James Comey - and, according to Joe DiGenova, the vast majority of the agency's staff - is amassing more than enough evidence to send Hillionaire and maybe some of her sycophants to the hoosegow for extended stays. It will become obvious that the right thing for Lynch to do is assemble a grand jury and get legal proceedings going.

Squirrel-Hair, you may want to think again about messing with Michelle Malkin

The two are engaged in a pretty intense Twitter fight.

MM doesn't hold back when she's on a tear. S-H may have made one enemy he's gonna regret making.

Power Line vs. Fox News

Yesterday, in my post entitled "The National Review Dustup, A Couple of Days In," I included Andrea Tantaros among those putting forth pro-Squirrel-Hair arguments utterly devoid of substance.

Paul Mirengoff does likewise in his latest post at Power Line. He also includes Jeanine Pirro, Peter Johnson, Harris Faulkner, Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity. It's quite an indictment of the rampant sloppy thinking going on at FNC.

And to think that FNC is still miles above the caliber of intellectual rigor one finds on any other cable-news outlet.

Europe's suicide - today's edition

The continent's postmoderns tell the Muslim invaders, "Please give us some more degrading behavior and hooliganism":

An Austrian swimming bath that banned ‘refugees’ from bathing without being accompanied by their social workers last week have caved into leftist demands after just three days of criticism.

The new rules of admission at the city baths in Mödling, Austria were reported on by the local Lower Austria news service of the state broadcaster ORF on Friday, with a copy of the notice posted to the front of the swimming pool. The bath announced “due to repeated complaints both by bathers and our own staff” individuals of “immigration background” were only to be admitted if they were accompanied by appropriate escorts and with their identification paperwork.

Prompting the ban was bad behaviour at the pool including invasions of the women’s changing rooms, abusing staff, swimming in the baths while wearing outdoor clothes, and attempting to steal money from voluntary boxes. The troublemakers are reported to be part of a 180 strong migrant housing project nearby, and are thought to have been Afghan ‘refugees’.

However the ambiguously worded sign was immediately leapt upon by hard-left pro-mass migration campaigners who took to the internet to ask “Am I Aryan enough for the city bath?”. Twitter was alive with criticism of the policy, an outpouring of hatred towards the swimming pool management which Heute has described as a “shitstorm”. Attempting to draw allusions to the third Reich, some twitter users asked how many generations of Austrian citizenship were required to be eligible to swim.

Hammering home the point, the leader of the state’s Socialist Youth party Julia Jakob said of the notice: “To refuse people because of race, religion or colour is reminiscent of one of the darkest periods in our history”.

Taking their opposition from the on-line sphere to the real world, a small group of native Austrians even took part in a swimming protest on the bath on Sunday evening, shortly before the town mayor removed the sign, remarking it had been misinterpreted and had only meant to exclude a small group of troublemakers rather than all foreigners.

Diversity, indeed.

The Olympic Committee sticks a shiv in an already mortally wounded Western civilization

The Great Leveling Project grows ever more monstrous:

The Olympic Committee has a new policy, and in short, it allows men to compete as woman (and vice versa). Here’s the relevant portion of the reasoning:

To require surgical anatomical changes as a pre-condition to participation is not necessary to preserve fair competition and may be inconsistent with developing legislation and notions of human rights.

It means what you think it means: THE TOTAL RUINATION OF BEACH VOLLEYBALL.

This is being heralded, of course, as some huge leap forward for mankind, because the only thing that really matters to the American left is feeling like they’re heroes to some class of citizen, even at the expense of another. In this case, the transgender community at the expense of female athletes.

From Outsports:

Joanna Harper, chief medical physicist, radiation oncology, Providence Portland Medical Center, was one of the people at that meeting. She also happens to be trans, and she said her voice in the room was important in determining these guidelines.

“The new IOC transgender guidelines fix almost all of the deficiencies with the old rules,” Harper said via email late Thursday night. “Hopefully, organizations such as the ITA will quickly adapt to the new IOC guidelines and all of the outdated trans policies will get replaced soon.”

The Olympic committee states among their reasons that there is a growing imperative around the world and, therefore, in sports, for “autonomy of gender identity.” But do not think this means that nobody is aware of the differences in gender. Here is how the policy actually works out:

1. Those who transition from female to male are eligible to compete in the male category without restriction.

2. Those who transition from male to female are eligible to compete in the female category under the following conditions:

2.1. The athlete has declared that her gender identity is female. The declaration cannot be changed, for sporting purposes, for a minimum of four years.

2.2. The athlete must demonstrate that her total testosterone level in serum has been below 10 nmol/L for at least 12 months prior to her first competition (with the requirement for any longer period to be based on a confidential case-by-case evaluation, considering whether or not 12 months is a sufficient length of time to minimize any advantage in women’s competition).

Notice that there are STILL DIFFERENT RULES FOR MEN AND WOMEN. Why, I wonder why that would be? 

Women can compete in men’s sports without restriction. That’s because in most of those sports they are inherently, biologically disadvantaged. This is simply a medical, biological, physical fact. 

But for men to compete as women, they have to super duper promise and cross their hearts that they won’t change their mind a week later and compete as male for four years. They don’t have to live as a woman, they just have to promise not to compete in sports as a man for four years. Pinky swears.

The other requirement for men is that they reduce their testosterone before the Olympics will use the preferred pronoun. So he does’t count as a she until he meets a hormone level requirement. To compete as a woman, he has to take a drug that alters his physical state in a way that impacts his performance. It may not be “enhancing” but it is most definitely performance-affecting. 

But let’s be honest, if that is even a thing society does anymore. Dropping testosterone levels does not eliminate the male advantage. Bigger. Faster. More upper body strength. Taller. More lower body strength. Greater ability to build muscle mass. The list goes on. This is not intolerant. It is not biased. It is just so. 

Does it, at this late date, mean anything to speak of the "human being"?

Exactly

Credit must be given to PJ Media. In the post below, I excerpt from Roger L. Simon's piece in which he has a lot of positive things to say about Squirrel-Hair's man-of-action "pragmatism." Variety of viewpoint is to be found on the site, however.

In fact, Paula Bolyard speaks for me precisely in her latest piece:

Matt Walsh wrote at the Blaze this week:

I watch it unfold feeling like a guy whose best friend just started dating the town floozy. I try to tell him that she’s sleeping around, she’s betraying him, she’ll break his heart, but he’s too smitten to hear me. 

That's exactly what it feels like when you try to have a conversation with Trump's ardent followers. They are card-carrying members of Trump's cult of personality now, and I fear they're not coming back. You can't reason people out of something they haven't been reasoned into. Many of these people are caught up in the emotion of this moment and it doesn't bother them one bit that a man who could quite possibly become president of the United States in a few months is openly bragging that his sycophants will blindly follow him, no matter what he does. But don't worry. It's all a show! He's just entertaining the crowds and schlepping for votes. He doesn't really mean any of this crazy stuff. Except for the stuff we like, and then we're sure that he really, truly (pinky promise!) means all of that. Because he fights!

I've never in my life been so frightened for my country.

That's where LITD is.

Never more frightened? Not even in 2008 and 2012, when this country elected the most poisonous, destructive, freedom-hating figure in its history?

Nope.

Because even then there was no charlatan hijacking the one worldview that has the formula for true human advancement and happiness.

And that charlatan has indeed hijacked it. Big-time.

The National Review dust-up, a couple of days in

In a Politico piece today, NR editor Rich Lowry sums up the emerging set of themes of the blowback, and addresses each one:

Who are you to tell us what to think? Well, we’re an opinion magazine. People are free to agree or disagree, admire us or detest us. If people find that uncongenial, there are all sorts of place they can move in the world where they won't be disturbed by robust argument about politics.

Won't your criticism just help Trump? It's possible. But we aren't a super PAC or a political campaign. Our role is to call it as we see it, and let the chips fall where they may. It has happened before that candidates we opposed won the Republican nomination (see Bob Dole in 1996 or John McCain in 2008), and it may well happen again this year.

You are the dastardly establishment. If Brent Bozell, Dana Loesch, Katie Pavlich and Erick Erickson are the establishment, the world really has been turned upside down. In reality, elements of the Republican establishment are currently negotiating the terms of their surrender to Trump before a vote has been cast, in an astonishing display of fecklessness.

How dare you criticize someone so dominant in the polls? I really don't get this one. If Trump were running second everywhere, it would be less important to criticize him. Even Trump understands this: As he explained in the last debate, he only began attacking Ted Cruz when he started rising in the polls. This line of argument is a form of fatalism: Trump is at about 35 percent in the national polls, therefore the race is over. Nicolle Wallace actually said on MSNBC on Friday, "The voters have now spoken." Before any caucus or primary! There is no doubt that Trump is in a strong position, but that obviously shouldn't exempt him from criticism, especially when he himself is a one-man political wrecking ball.

You just don't get Trump's appeal. Actually, we have written extensively about Trump's appeal—from his emphasis on immigration to his resistance to political correctness—and believe his candidacy holds important lessons for the GOP. You can learn from him without nominating him.

I gave some thought to whether to put Lowry's list first, rather than use it as a refutation of the various types of charges I've been seeing in the - I guess - right-of-center punditsphere, but I'm inclined to think that having his solid defense in each case in mind is good preparation for considering the nature of the salvos being lobbed from various quarters.

John Nolte at Breitbart thinks he adds to an accurate view of the matter by painting a scene of wood paneling, brandy and cigars - in a rather abrupt turn from the metaphor he employs in the first few paragraphs, that of a nuclear-tipped missile thudding to the ground immediately upon launch:

The entire execution behind the delivery of this dud immediately brought this to my mind:

INT. PRIVATE CLUB – K STREET – VICTORIAN ERA

Long hallway. Oak paneled walls. Ends at two closed, imposing doors.

The only sound is horse-drawn carriages passing by outside and the echo of IMPORTANT MEN discussing IMPORTANT MATTERS from behind those doors.

From somewhere a bell tinkles. Immediately a BOY in a heavily-starched uniform appears. The doors swing open. A toxic cloud of cigar smoke swallows the boy. As the smoke dissipates, we see that the room inside is filled with WELL-DRESSED IMPORTANT MEN pleased with themselves. They sit in leather chairs and drink brandy.

The BOY is handed a piece of paper – A PROCLAMATION.

Like it is as sacred as the Magna Carta, the BOY runs to make his delivery as the WELL-DRESSED IMPORTANT MEN confidently celebrate how their proclamation will change the world.

Other than the usual-usual Fox News appearances, that is exactly what National Review did last night.

I’m sorry but even if it ever did, the world does not work this way anymore. Even if you believe 100% in every word National Review wrote against Trump, if there ever really was an era where one could change the world by stuffing a bunch of opinions in-between magazine covers, this sure as hell isn’t it.

This is 2016. Opinions are not changed with the drop of a magazine filled with Very Important Thinkers espousing Very Big Thinks about How We Should All Think. This approach only backfires because it looks self-important, stuffy and conceited from good people who are none of those things.

If I may paraphrase the Coen Brothers: Nobody likes the high hat.

Drudge doesn’t issue proclamations.

BuzzFeed doesn’t issue proclamations.

The Mainstream Media doesn’t issue proclamations.

Roger L Simon at PJ Media couches the matter in man-of-action-versus-the-theorists terms:

Many of their arguments revolve around whether Trump is a "true conservative."  Instead of wading into the definitional weeds on that one -- as they say on the Internet, YMMV -- allow me to address the macro question of what the purpose of ideology actually is. For me, it is to provide a theoretical basis on which to act, a set of principles.  But that's all it is.  It's not a religion, although it can be mistaken for one (communism).

Ideology should function as a guide, not a faith, because in the real world you may have to violate it, when the rubber meets the road, as they say.  For those of us in the punditocracy, the rubber rarely if ever meets the road.  All we have is our theories. They are the road for us.  If we're lucky, we're paid for them.  In that case, we hardly ever vary them. It would be bad for business.

Trump's perspective was the reverse.  The rubber was constantly meeting the road.  In fact, it rarely did anything else.  He always had to change and adjust.  Ideological principles were just background noise, barely audible sounds above the jack hammers.
When National Review takes up arms against Trump, it is men and women of theory against a man of action.  The public, if we are to believe the polls, prefers the action.  It's not hard to see why.  The theory has failed and become increasingly disconnected from the people.  It doesn't go anywhere and hasn't for years. I'm guilty of it too. (Our current president is 150% a man of theory.) Too many people -- left and right -- are drunk on ideology.
That is why, more than any other potential matchup, I would like to see Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders go head-to-head in the coming presidential election. And, although far from a sure thing, this is becoming increasingly likely.
It would be an American epic -- the quintessential business pragmatist against the most extreme ideologue to have run for national office in years ... in a nutshell, capitalism versus socialism.  Capitalism is ragged and wild and wooly, like Donald Trump. It changes its mind on a dime. Ideology is secondary.  Socialism is a rigid utopian theory that leads to bankruptcy (at best) or mass-murdering Maoist totalitarianism.  Ideology is primary.

This is frankly disturbing. If anyone is supposed to believe that principles are immutable, it is a conservative. Then again, Simon is something of a latecomer to conservatism, and maybe it never really found its way beyond his brain into his heart.

Andrea Tantaros tries to paint NR's against-Trump issue as an establishment Hail Mary. Has she seen Lowry's Politico piece, and does she have anything to say about point number three?

Publications like National Review, run by elite "conservatives" have given us George W. Bush and his wars, "No Child Left Behind," Medicare Part D, huge deficits caused by Republican consultants spending to woo select voters, Mitt "Romneycare" Romney, John McCain...the list goes on and on.

William F. Buckley, who founded National Review, used the magazine to publish a stellar series of essays by conservative intellectuals who helped foster the Reagan Revolution. 

Since then, "movement conservatism" has not been a powerful enough force to make things better for the working classes in the country.

This vacuum, created by the "conservative" elites who have backed RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) and candidates who are antithetical to conservatism, is what created the opportunity for Donald Trump to rise. 

In fact, publications like National Review have such a blind spot, they never even saw devout, pro-America nationalists like Trump taking off. 

They aren't credible in their criticism of Trump because they never saw it coming. 

Beyond that, and most importantly, they told us we -- the conservatives who are sick and tired of elistist, establishment blunders -- were wrong.

And they still don't get it.

Trump's appeal stretches far beyond disgruntled, outside the country club conservatives. His potential for crossover support, especially with blue collar and working class voters, is huge. Most establishment Republicans have never met a blue collar worker (unless they were fixing their Jacuzzi).

I can see Trump winning coal miners, unionized construction workers, auto workers, steel workers, Teamsters, etc. 

Trump may even score a larger share of black votes with his immigration stand. His appeal to working class voters is a very under reported story, but it's evident because even President Barack Obama himself mentioned Trump by name during an interview with NPR in which he said that Trump is tapping into the "anger of the blue collar white male."

This showcases just how scared the left is when it comes to Trump's potential to tear into demographics that Democrats have largely considered theirs. 

The bed wetters at the RNC are dreaming of a GOP that grows because it attracts Latinos, pro-abortion millennial women and other hopelessly Democratic voters. Trump's coalition of adding working class voters (who actually work) makes more sense. 

I have respect for National Review as an institution, but the cover and series of articles designed to hurt Trump only hurts the elitest, Beltway crowd they represent because it exposes why he is the seemingly solid and unstoppable frontrunner: it's because of them.

They have failed us, not Trump. Donald Trump is merely capitalizing on a moment in a pursuit to make America Great Again, in spite of the failures of the conservative movement.

The conservative movement hasn't failed, Andrea. The Republican party, yes, but they are entirely different animals. You know this. Why are you writing this kind of stuff?


This is a taste of the spectrum of arguments against what NR has done.

They are all to be found in ostensibly right-of-center venues, but not a one of them is conservative.

And, as we conservatives have been saying since at least the mid-1950s, if our "ideology" were ever tried in a robust, undiluted form, it would make America actually great again.

Rekindling the will to wage the war for America's soul

The name of this blog continues to be apt.

In addition to the threat posed for the last century by a Left that hates the one essential condition for human well-being (freedom), we now have a second threat to this unique blessing to our species (the United States of America): an unfocused rage, rooted in a fear it shares with principled conservatism, but that manifests itself in scattershot attacks, often delivered in all caps, on targets that represent no discernible pattern, and is susceptible to adulation of a certain personality type based on a penchant for sheer outrageousness.

In a sense, this third force (the other two being the Left and Right) has its roots in the Left. The coarsening of our culture - art, education, news, and basic discourse - has been a major project of the Freedom-Haters for decades. See my recent post on the impact of rock and roll over the last sixty-plus years for an analysis of how celebration of that which is patently ugly rose to legitimacy and even prevalence.

And now we have one Republican presidential candidate, and one only, who feels free to use the word "shit" in his campaign speeches. And he's way ahead in every national poll.

It's tough to maintain the will to preserve and defend that which is true, good, right, decent and lovely. Don't be too hard on yourself if your resolve wavers.

If you've been so afflicted, the antidote of the moment is the latest issue of National Review. The theme of the entire magazine is "Against Trump." An editorial kicks it off, with unsparing candor:

Donald Trump is a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot in behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as the Donald himself.

The editors are to be applauded for enlisting an impressive cross-section of conservative figures to chime in with essays. They range from Dana Loesch to Cal Thomas to Thomas Sowell to Erick Ericsson to Glenn Beck.

The inevitable backlash is underway. A self-described Trump supporter / conservative  from California has posted a video of the "who-are-you-to-tell-me-whether-I-pass-muster-as-a-conservative-or-not" variety on the web, and it's gone viral. (By the way, she used the word "piss" twice by the one-minute mark.)

I just heard Laura Ingraham try to restrain herself and project composure as she questioned whether NR wasn't engaging in a perilously divisive exercise.

At this moment of chaos and peril, let us remember two of our highest values as conservatives: clarity and absolutes. Let us resolve to call the backlashers wrong.

There's a personal-refinement aspect to what is required of us, along with the courage to go into the public arena and fight with every fiber of our beings. When, from time to time, as we must, just as a soldier on the most raging battlefield must still occasionally rest, we pause, let us use that time to pray, think, read and reflect on what we really treasure. In so doing, we will carry back out into battle the level of keen discernment, articulation of our principles, and unshakable faith that sets us apart from both the Freedom-Haters and the tragically misguided enthusiasts of the bombastic narcissist who appears to own the moment.

Fight hard. Pray hard. It is very late in the day.

Your overlords' contempt for America on full display

In case you needed to get smacked right between the eyes to conclude that Common Core was bad for post-America, brace yourself:

Project Veritas has released its third undercover video of another Common Core executive revealing the political ideology behind the national educational standards. And this time the anti-American agenda is made clear.

The featured Common Core salesperson in this video is Kim Koerber of National Geographic Education (funded by the Gates Foundation, by the way) and a former Pearson Education publishing executive. Her expressions of hatred for America's founding documents coupled with her undying love for Common Core brings the problem to an entirely new level. Plus, she brings a new meaning to the word disgust when talking about those pesky Texas conservatives:

Common Core is really important because it needs to have some cohesion between the states, and Texas keeps screwing it up over and over again.

Texas got upset about it and they wanted to have their founders, they wanted to pound the founders in it. And it's like come on!

The dead white guys did not create this country. It was a whole bunch of different kinds of people. And yes there were women, and yes there were people of color, and yes… you need to talk about them, too. But they want to talk about those dead white guys.

People who say that they want to teach the Constitution, only want to teach the part of the Constitution that they like. 

When told that Texans are upset that the Constitution isn't being covered, Koerber pushed back hard saying, " It is being covered, but not the way they -- cause they’re idiots and they don’t know what’s in it."

"You should know a little bit about it, you shouldn’t have to memorize the thing," she added.

When a Project Veritas undercover journalist spoke about the Second Amendment, Koerber interjected:

That damn Second Amendment. I don’t think personal handguns need to be on anyone except the government, the police. What is the purpose of having a gun?

But Koerber wasn't done insulting conservatives, or Christians -- what she kept referring to as "those" people in Texas who keep resisting Common Core:

They don't agree with Islam, so they don't want their kids to know about it. They don't agree with birth control, so they don't want their kids to talk about it. They don't agree with math because they don't understand it. It's not the same math that they did in high school, so they don't want their kids to know about it. 

Here is a little back and forth with a PV journalist and Kroeber, continuing this line of thought (via Breitbart):

PV: I am really glad I’m here in California, whatever religious affiliation you want to take is fine, but in Texas they want to push the Christianity.

KOERBER: Because they think it’s the only one.

PV: They do, and I see that.

KOERBER: That’s why it’s so offensive to have these prayers in the school board.

PV: Christianity is totally out of the common core?

KOERBER: Yes it is. Totally. It’s not a core concept at all.

PV: But then there is a mention of other religions like Islam.

KOERBER: Yeah well you have to because …

PV: So how did Islam get worked in?

KOERBER: Islam…they said you have to talk about Islam, you have to talk about Judaism and you have to talk about Christianity and they wanted to make it big about Christianity; no it’s like, everybody needs to know about everything else.

Relativism, contempt for the great men who understood that America was to be unique because it was founded on the idea that liberty is essential,  the hatred of the fact that Americans can arm themselves - it's all there.

Keep your kids away from government schools.

Secretary Global-Test to the world: That's right, post-America is a foolish nation ripe for obliteration

Some candor from Davos, from a guy who usually speaks in the flimsiest of platitudes:

Iran has been making out like a bandit since the nuclear deal was announced last year. Among the many fears about the deal was that the sanctions relief money that would accompany it would find its way into some rather unsavory hands quickly and easily. Today, John Kerry did nothing to assuage those concerns. While in Davos, Switzerland, he spoke with CNBC about what could happen:

When asked about whether some the $150 billion in sanctions relief to Iran would go to terrorist groups, Kerry reiterated that, after settling debts, Iran would receive closer to $55 billion. He conceded some of that could go to groups considered terrorists, saying there was nothing the U.S. could do to prevent that.“I think that some of it will end up in the hands of the IRGC or other entities, some of which are labeled terrorists,” he said in the interview in Davos, referring to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. “You know, to some degree, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that every component of that can be prevented.”

In other words, the likelihood that it will find its way into the hands of one terrorist group or another is so high that our Secretary of State is not even bothering to lie about it or cover it up. It’s probably going to happen, he says, and there’s really just nothing we can do about it.
If you need any indicator of how serious Barack Obama and his administration is about opposing the Iranians and fighting terrorism in the Middle East, especially in the last year of his Presidency, this should be more than enough. There are many reasons for ISIS’ success, but one of them, if you will recall, is that they ended up being armed along with the so-called “moderate” Syrian rebels (or, rather, many of those rebels ended up becoming ISIS). Now, we have tacit admission that this is all but certainly going to happen on the Iranian side as well.

Clearly, this is a case of the emperor wearing no clothes, but in the fable, the empire wasn't in immediate danger of obliteration.

 

John Kasich is completely worthless as a Republican - today's edition

The latest information on the cost of the main reason he's completely worthless:

Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s Obamacare expansion passed another exciting milestone last month: $6 billion in new federal spending!

Can you believe how generous Kasich is with your money? He’s a regular Prince of Light and Hope.

Medicaid benefits for Ohio’s 650,000 Obamacare expansion enrollees cost $406 million in December. For context, that was more than the state’s higher education and criminal justice spending combined.

If you’re a fan of Obamacare, this represents a rip-roaring success. If you’re not,  I should clarify that we are, in fact, talking about the John Kasich who is running for president as a Republican.

Since January 2014, Kasich’s expansion of Medicaid to working-age adults with no kids and no disabilities has added 5% of Ohio’s population to the welfare rolls and has cost federal taxpayers $6.4 billion.

In 2013, before Kasich vetoed the Ohio General Assembly’s ban on Obamacare expansion and expanded Medicaid unilaterally, critics said costs and enrollment would be higher than expected.

Who was right?

Kasich projected enrollment would reach 447,000 in 2020. He underestimated costs for the first 18 months by $1.5 billion.

In a speech this week to the New Hampshire House of Representatives, Kasich boasted about saving lives by spending $14 billion to put more Ohioans on Medicaid… and then, seconds later, he bragged about slowing Ohio Medicaid spending growth.

Kasich’s $14 billion figure — the amount of “Ohio money” he says he’s “bringing back” — is an old estimate of Obamacare expansion costs through 2020. Based on actual spending, Kasich is understating costs by at least $10 billion.

Of course, there is no vault of “Ohio money” for Kasich to “bring back” to the state, just like there’s no vault of New Jersey money paying for Chris Christie’s Obamacare expansion. It’s all new federal spending.

Assuming Obamacare isn’t repealed under a Republican president, Ohio will be on the hook for 5% of the expansion’s benefit costs next year and 10% in 2020. Where’s that state match of $40 million+ per month going to come from?

Does he still want to use that business about whether he cared more for shrinking government or helping the poor when he arrives at heaven's gate as a campaign plus?