When even the WaPo sees the need to address it in a house editorial

There is yet another interestingly right-headed editorial from the Bezos-era Washington Post.  Probably too early to make a connection or predict a long-range turnabout in orientation, but the editors clearly don't think too highly of Terry McAuliffe's play-like car "company" and its cavalier attitude toward its financial losses.

A quintessential MEC move

The Most Equal Comrade's redistribution brain trust came up with a doozy that immediately appealed to him:  Have the federal government go into the nation's school's, local control be damned, and upfit them with the fastest wireless technology available, so as to have greater access to the kiddies' brains.  Leave Congress out of the picture.  Pay for it with a cell phone fee hike, which does two things - takes more of people's money, always a Freedom-Hater objective - and enable the regime to run the whole scheme through the FCC.

Classic.

Egypt in chaos

The clearing out of the pro-Morsi protest encampments has led to several deaths.  The army is employing some major hardware. The Islamists, not having the resources to take on the military, decided to focus their ire on Coptic Christians, whom they have fingered as culprits in their man's demise.  Several churches torched as a result.  It's so out of control that the Ministry of Antiquities has closed the Giza pyramids area, as well as the museum in central Cairo that houses the country's most important artifacts.

Syria redux?

A carrier of the most virulent strain of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome

That would be Ana Navarro, who relishes opportunities to brashly diss Rep. Steve King, Sens. Lee, Paul and Cruz, and Heritage Action in the Lamestream Media, and whose employment record includes McCain and Jeb Bush.  For which she's gushed over by FHers, of course.

It's not like we need further proof that FHer-care is a complete failure, but here is some

After the waivers, the delay in Medicare cuts, the delay in the employer mandate and the reliance on the honor system for determining subsidy eligibility, now comes a delay until 2015 on capping out-ofpocket insurance expenses such as deductibles and co-pays.  Somebody in the leviathan had to face the fact that it was going to drive up premiums.

You see, the money has to come from somewhere.

Our freedom-hating overlords will not leave us alone

The USDA - which has no justifiable reason to exist - is instituting two new public-outreach programs, MyPlate for Kids, aimed at the elementary-school set, and MyPlate on Campus.  Once again, the aim is "promoting healthier eating.

MyPlate for Kids, because the attempt to put rabbit food into the nation's public-school cafeterias has been such a roaring success.

MyPlate on campus, because nineteen-year-olds are so receptive to exhortations from finger-wagging peers about eating food with no appeal instead of what they want.

It is on such seemingly inconsequential battlegrounds that the war for Western civilization is either lost or won.

All except one

An interesting list at Salon.com of the 15 Most Hated Bands of the Last 30 Years.  It was refreshing indeed to see this asserted by someone who is probably far savvier about pop culture in the those last three decades that I am.  (I am academically credentialed as a cultural historian, but my claim to expertise stops about where this list begins.)

Most of the musical acts on this list are exactly why I tuned out pop culture, and I'm glad to see that the passage of some time has imparted that perspective to some observers acknowledged to be seasoned.

One exception: Phish.  Yes, the whole follow-them-on-tour / trade-recordings-and-playlists-of-shows business was indicative that the core of their fan base needed to get a life, but I have a soft spot for freewheeling hippie music going back to the Bay Area scene of the late 1960s.

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

Of course, everyone reading this has always known that the endgame for FHer-care was to make it impossible for private insurance companies to make a profit in these exchanges, so that they'd pull out of the health-coverage biz and the American people would be driven to the sole remaining provider of coverage: government.  Single payer.  Socialism.

But if anybody ever needs plain substantiation in a situation where someone has doubts about that, Harry Reid has provided it.

The orchestrated decline of post-America

Russia's foreign minister tells the US to "start behaving like grownups."

It's all jihad

Well, okay, so the U.S. "has ruled out a connection between the threat against its consulate in Lahore, Pakistan, and the current stream of troubling information that prompted closures of American diplomatic facilities this week through the Middle East and Africa."  Perhaps that's true at the tactical level, but there is an overarching connection at the level of ideology.

Jihadists smell weakness like they haven't in years.  They see the Benghazi scandal, the closing of 19 embassies, the utter indifference of the MEC as manifested by his choice of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno as his first forum to discuss the heightened threat level, his vacation on Martha's Vineyard, the sputtering of yet another attempt at Israeli-Palestinian "peace,"  the completely ineffectual US policy toward Iran, the al-Qaeda-driven deterioration of public order and safety in Iraq (from which we withdrew with no plan for preventing this eventuality), and the classifying of Nidal Hasan's act of jihad as "workplace violence," and they conclude that this is an ideal time to pounce.

Is there the tiniest shred of evidence that they're mistaken?

This is delicious

You may have heard about The Nation magazine urging its readers to sign an open letter to Walmart demanding that it pay its employees a minimum wage of $12 an hour.  Well, a company executive had a little fun with that.

But it looks like someone in Bentonville finally snapped: Steven Restivo, a Walmart senior director of communications, sent out a email yesterday with the subject line: “people who live in glass houses…”

The Nation—“America’s leading progressive print and online magazine”—recently encouraged its readers to sign an open letter demanding that Walmart increase wages to $12/hour and this article called our company one of the “biggest abusers of low-wage labor.”

In an ironic twist, ProPublica recently reported that starting this fall, “interns at the Nation Institute will be paid minimum wage for the first time in the history of the 30-year-old program.” As ProPublica noted, The Nation has been paying its full-time interns a weekly stipend of $150 per week—less than the current federal minimum wage rate of $7.25 per hour.

This is great.  I know people who try to make something ideological out of the fact of Walmart's existence.  I'm glad such folks are coming in for some spot-on tweaking.

It's on purpose - today's edition

The Most Equal Comrade wants to revisit the policies that led to the mortgage bubble and its subsequent bursting.

This socialist is going to pursue his mad vision of what's fair even if it brings down our civilization.

When bureaucracy becomes the enemy of plain old hoss sense as well as the defense of freedom

Wrap your brain around this.  The U.S. Army has contractual relationships in Afghanistan with al-Qaeda-tied companies - at least 43 of them - and will not break those off, per the urging of a Special Inspector General.

The Army suspension and debarment official has taken the position that suspension or debarment of such individuals and entities would be a violation of their due process rights if based on classified information or if based on findings by the Department of Commerce which placed them on the Entities List.

SIGAR has referred 43 such cases to the Army, and all have been rejected, despite detailed supporting information demonstrating that these individuals and entities are providing material support to the insurgency in Afghanistan. In other words, they may be enemies of the United States, but that is not enough to keep them from getting government contracts.

This story had better have legs.

Why Robert Reich gets paid the big bucks

Wanna hear his proposal for rescuing Detroit?  Expanding its city limits to include the suburbs.

A hair-raising harbinger

 . . . especially for a guy like me who writes for a media company that owns several newspapers.

There's been some feedback from longtime associates of the WaPo.  Bob Woodward says it's sad, but Sally Quinn kind of shrugs and says it's just part of the change that is one of life's central features.

Bryan Preston at PJ Media offers an observation that could be the start of an interesting parlor game: 10 things that cost more than the Washington Post.

Even for the hard cases, we must press on in the search for a pro-freedom solution

Interesting hashing-out of what conservative health-care policy should look like going on over at NRO.    Henry Olsen and Brad Wassink of the American Enterprise Institute have penned a piece announcing a new AEI proposal that, if you carefully parse its gist, still involves gummint subsidies.

Now, I love AEI.  It's been home to some of my favorite thinkers over the years.  But it does employ some folks who get into some too-clever-by-half wonkery.

What I dug was a scrolldown through the comments:

A proposal that finances health coverage for the poor - not the destitute like Medicaid, but the 15-50k poor, and provides some subsidies to middle class, will never pass the Rep House

This is essentially the "public option" - and if the Reps wanted it, they could have had it in a heartbeat

[snip]

Instead of eliminating the employer tax exemption and providing subsidies, why not allow individuals who buy their own policies to take a tax deduction as well?

[snip]

No. No government involvement at all. Especially no government promoted or subsidized insurance. Anything the government provides or subsidized goes up in cost and becomes entangled in red tape.
Health care is a service like any other service. In a free market this service would be available at many different price points and the overall cost would be lower.
Health insurance is only marginally related to health care. It is a means by which a prudent person can plan for emergencies. It has absolutely no business having anything whatsoever to do with routine health care.
Providing health care for the poor who are truly unable to pay for a doctor's services -- as opposed to those who would rather pay for cable TV or a smartphone or drugs or alcohol or ... -- is not a job for the government but, rather, a job for private charity. If any government health care of any kind is to exist at all it should be provided at the local level of the city or the county.

I am hoping that the mini-thread underneath this person's comment will garner further exchange.  It presents us with one of those what-to-do-about-the-hard-cases scenarios, and the discussion must look squarely at them to be worthwhile:

As an acute leukemia and bone-marrow transplant survivor, I received well over one million dollars in treatment. If I were "truly" poor, what charity would have helped me? My local 200 plus member church? The little town in which I live? Should I have just died?

Still, my instincts tell me that any proposal that involves gummint subsidy reveals at least the mild symptoms of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome.