Eric Holder's fiefdom hates fair elections

The DOJ intends to sue Texas over its voter ID law. 

Is anybody going to do anything about it?

The chemical weapons attack in Syria, that is.  Claudia Rossett says we shouldn't hold our breath.  The post-American MEC regime?  Not likely.  The UN?  Less so.

And, she says, it's even less likely that anyone will fully explore the Syria - North Korea link.

It's on purpose - today's edition

How's this for an eye-popper?

`Outside of the federal government's Bureau of Labor statistics, the Gallup polling organization also tracks the nation's unemployment rate. While the BLS and Gallup findings might not always perfectly align, the trends almost always do and the small statistical differences just haven't been worthy of note. But now Gallup is showing a sizable 30 day jump in the unemployment rate, from 7.7% on July 21 to 8.9% today.

This is an 18-month high.

Wowee zowee!

The MEC regime is right on track with its aim to bring the masses to their knees, begging the leviathan state for a bit of daily gruel.

Looks like LITD has to post about race again

Looks like one of the Oklahoma killers of the Australian athlete / student had posted an expression of general hatred toward white people on Facebook just hours before the foul deed.

Some refreshing departures from FHer orthodoxy on the part of some of Hollywood's most well-respected

There was Ashton Kutcher's speech about opportunity looking a lot like work.

Now comes James Woods's tweets about the Benghazi scandal and what the H-word Creature has to answer for.

Kudos to these guys for the courage to speak the plain truth.

The toxic fruits of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome

American Action Network is an outfit run by former Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman.  It thinks amnesty for illegal aliens is a good thing.  Well, okay, but what's up with its use of FHer data to try to substantiate its claim that amnesty would create jobs?

According to the information about the data that the group has disclosed, what is known about AAN’s work is that it used economic data that President Barack Obama’s White House has touted after the Institutional Left funded the production of the research. The Ford Foundation and the Unbound Philanthropy, two different liberal foundations that are connected with and support the George Soros-funded National Immigration Forum (NIF), and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, another bastion of the Institutional Left, funded research and a report by Regional Economic Models, Inc. (REMI), according to a disclosure at the bottom of the first page of the report. That REMI report, published on July 17, 2013, argued would create hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the first few years after an amnesty.

President Obama’s White House then took that report and on August 1, used it to arguethat “[c]ommonsense immigration reform will strengthen the U.S. economy and create jobs.”

“Independent studies affirm that commonsense immigration reform will increase economic growth by adding more high-demand workers to the labor force, increasing capital investment and overall productivity, and leading to greater numbers of entrepreneurs starting companies in the U.S.,” the White House wrote on its official website, before again endorsing the Senate “Gang of Eight” bill as one that it argued would economically boost the country and individual states.

Pro-rule-of-law folks in Congress are hip to what's going on:

In response to these revelations, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) told Breitbart News on Tuesday that the group needs to either release the relevant information or pull it down from its website. “The American Action Network should either release their methodology or remove the claims from their website,” Sessions said in a statement provided to Breitbart News.
Sessions also told Breitbart News that the Senate Gang of Eight bill’s failure to stem the tide of future illegal immigration—according to the same CBO report that AAN says it cited here, the Senate bill will only at best reduce illegal immigration 30 to 50 percent from current levels—and President Obama’s demonstrated willingness to not enforce laws like E-Verify, many illegal immigrants would continue taking jobs away from American citizens and legal immigrants.
Sessions’ communications director Stephen Miller told Breitbart News, too, that even if one were to believe these jobs numbers from AAN, that purported increase in the amount of jobs would still not be enough to match the number of new people the Senate bill or a plan like it would bring into the country via legalization or via new unprecedentedly massive increases in legal immigration to ensure American citizens and legal immigrants get jobs first.
"Based on conservative CBO projections, the senate bill would add approximately 46 million immigrants by 2033,” Miller said in an email. “Even using AAN's inflated claim of 6 million jobs - for which they provide no supporting data - that's not nearly enough to keep up with the expansion of guest workers and low-skill immigration contained in the proposal.  That's why CBO reports that joblessness will grow, wages will fall, and per-capita GNP will shrink for the next 25 years.”
Rep. Steve King (R-IA) told Breitbart News that “whatever the logical basis for” AAN’s claim that passing an amnesty would “create” 13,298 “jobs” in his district, Iowa’s fourth, “I’d like to see it.”

You don't blur lines.  You act according to your principles.  Somebody needs to tell Norm Coleman, Douglas Holtz-Eakin and their ilk that that's an indispensible part of the definition of a conservative.

 

Gradually getting the masses accustomed to the muddying of the distinctions between the three branches of government

Very important Charles C. W. Cooke piece at NRO today on the recent trend toward crafting legislation that is open-ended and leaves much - way too much - to the discretion of cabinet-level department secretaries, executive-branch agencies, and regulation-happy bureaucrats.  Cooke cites FHer-care, Dodd-Frank and the current approach to immigration as glaring examples.

Obamacare, which makes the Senate’s immigration bill look like an exercise in legislative restraint, contains over 2,500 references to the secretary’s discretion, 700 cases in which the secretary “shall,” 200 instances in which the secretary “may,” and 139 cases in which the secretary “determines.” Its twin, Dodd-Frank, which effectively allows an unelected Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to police the personal-finance sector, is little different, aggregating the power of the three branches into one, stripping Congress of its traditional capacity to set an agency’s budget and severely limiting the courts’ opportunity to review the CFPB’s legal interpretations. This is law, Jim — but not as we know it.

Have we become so inured to this blurring of boundaries that we think nothing of this kind of statement?

“If you look at the polling” on Obamacare, David Axelrod explained on MSNBC’s Morning Joe last week, “the majority of the people say let’s move forward and fix it along the way — and that’s exactly what the president will do.” This, to say the least, is a rather novel theory of the American political system. Whether the “majority of the people say let’s move forward” on a particular project or not is rarely the salient question. The United States is a republic. It is not a monarchy, it is not a majoritarian democracy, and it is certainly not a direct democracy. Its highest value, in fact, is “nomocratic” — that is to say, that the rule of law and the overarching constitutional system trumps pretty much everything else.

As Cooke points out, the way the regime sells this stuff is by portraying every issue as being so pressing and so urgently requiring governmental action, that we're perfectly justified in dispensing with Constitutional niceties.

It has to stop.

 

Squeezing the masses so they'll have to turn to government

UPS is dropping 15,000 employee spouses' health-insurance benefits, specifically citing FHer-care.

Because we're so ecumenical, doncha know

The timing of al-Jazeera's launch of its US network is rather exquisite, is it not?  It comes just as the Arab world turns against the pro-Muslim Brotherhood country that owns al-Jazeera, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia says it is taking note of who is supporting Egypt's military and who is supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.

Talk about a tinder box.

Meanwhile, we tacitly endorse the position of the one country in the middle east that the rest of the region is none too pleased with.   As if we need to be the object of any more raw feelings.

An actual policy to foster actual stability

It's pretty obvious to nearly everyone that the "Arab spring" was no such thing, and that Jeffersonian democracy is not in the cards for Egypt for the foreseeable future.  That is why the US ought to be supporting Egypt's military.

Two cogent arguments for such a course appear today: one from Bret Stephens at the WSJ, and one from Thomas Sowell at Townhall.

Preening and posturing ain't gonna cut it.  We have a certain array of options in this situation, and it doesn't include any that we'd rather have.

The meticulous editing of reality by the social-justice crowd

The activist arm of the Quaker denomination, the American Friends Service Committee, has a long history of fellow-traveling and taking up causes that don't exactly further the pacifism it claims to be motivated by.

Is it aware of this, and therefore really about some other agenda?  Perhaps so motivated by this other agenda that it is willing to spoil real peaceful cooperation, as well as the fostering of prosperity, between groups with a history of tense relations?  A current project of the group would indicate so.  Along with Jewish Voices for Peace, it held a Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions camp this summer.  But the aim was not to target Israel as a nation, doncha know:

There’s a very telling remark at the end of Philadelphia Jewish Exponent’s Philly-Based Quaker Group Criticized For BDS Camp:

Alexis Moore, an AFSC spokeswoman, said her group rejects “the idea that BDS is anti-Semitic. We are not targeting a country.” Instead, it is targeting specific companies like Israeli-owned Sodastream, that has its home fountain soda maker factory on the West Bank. “We see nothing anti-Semitic in the use of these non-violent tactics. Our work is rooted in human rights and equal justice for everyone.”

By mentioning SodaStream she gives away her game.

You see, SodaStream is a prime example of coexistence. Palestinian workers there make good salaries and have room for advancement. If there was a place in the Middle East that demonstrated “equal justice,” SodaStream would be an excellent example of that.

Willing to foul up economic opportunity for the group it claims to champion, all in the name of an abstract ideological principle.  That's the Freedom-Hater way!

 

Vintage MEC

His weekly radio address yesterday was a classic exercise in vulgar caricature and fear-mongering as only the Most Equal Comrade can dish out.  The subject was FHer-care, and his method of persuasion was one that is quickly becoming the technique of choice for FHers on any subject: Those who oppose statism want anyone besides themselves to be marginalized.

Not that my first inclination today is to post about race, but circumstances necessitate it

There's the rodeo clown embarrassment.  There's the still-fresh Zimmerman acquittal, kept so by the four different "we-are-Trayvon" covers of the current issue of Ebony. There's the O'Reilly-Sharpton feud.

And now comes this new movie, The Butler.

Get ready to be subjected to a barrage of gushing about its powerful honesty and unflinching look at America's flaws and testimony to the steadfastness of the human heart from the usual sources.

Look, the script was inspired by a 2008 Washington Post profile of an actual White House butler named Eugene Allen, who worked there from 1952 to 1986.  Director Lee Daniels and screenwriter Danny Strong (of Palin-bashing Game Changer fame) have used that actual person as the launching point for creating the fictional protagonist Cecil Gaines, and the departure from the inspiration becomes immediately complete.

But The Butler is not really about Eugene Allen; that much is clear from the opening seconds, in which the camera drifts over a Georgia plantation while Forest Whitaker intones with quiet majesty, “The only thing I ever knew was cotton.” Never mind that Allen was actually born in Virginia.

Never mind, either, that Allen’s mother and father were notrespectively raped and murdered by a cartoonishly brutal white landowner — or that such depredations would not have been casually dismissed in the early 1920s, even if carried out against black sharecroppers.

Sounds like it's going to be unabashedly cheesy and vulgar, too:

Strong’s script offers not so much a plot as a row of clichés, arranged with such appalling neatness that the mind aches for something, anything, original. It is almost refreshing when the narrative occasionally swerves from bromidic NPR progressivism into something a bit nastier — as when Martin Luther King Jr. explains that he opposes the Vietnam War because “the Viet Cong don’t call us niggers,” or when Cecil equates American slavery with genocide: “America’s always turned a blind eye toward what we’ve done to our own. We’ve heard about the concentration camps; but these camps went on for 200 years right here in America.”

Even the score is hackneyed: Classical piano concertos by Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Schumann fill the White House, while the Gaines family and the other black characters in the film groove to the strains of James Brown, Shorty Long, and the O’Jays. With due reverence to the Godfather of Soul, might not the real Allen family have put on a Schumann record too, once in a while?

And, of course, the fact that Gaines' tenure extends into the mid-1980s provides Daniels and Strong with the perfect opportunity to latch onto a contortion of fact to make Ronald Reagan look like, at best, indifferent and, at worst, a bigot:

Though Dwight Eisenhower (played by Robin Williams) is favorably portrayed in The Butler, fellow Republicans Richard Nixon (John Cusack) and Ronald Reagan (Alan Rickman) are thrown under the bus because the modern Left is obsessed with the fiction that Republicans are enemies to black people.

Reagan, in fact, is denounced as having damaged or dismantled all Civil Rights policies in the country — an absurd claim that the movie doesn’t even attempt to justify.

The only Reagan-related racial issue that The Butler can muster is his veto of sanctions against apartheid-era South Africa, which wasn’t even a U.S. Civil Rights issue and which Reagan believed would worsen conditions for blacks in that country. The movie portrays this entirely understandable decision (which was overridden by Congress) as simple heartlessness toward black people. 

Mike Flynn at Breitbart makes plain the chasm between fact and fantasy regarding the relationship between the historical Allen and the historical Reagan:

This is pure fiction. A Washington Post profile in 2008 noted that Allen and his wife kept framed photos of Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy in their living room. Pictures of the other presidents Allen served were hung in the basement. Why would the real-life Allen keep pictures of Reagan in the most prominent place in his home if he had quit his job over policy disagreements with the Administration? 

The closeness between Allen and the Reagans is evidenced by another anecdote in the profile. Allen was the first butler to attend a state dinner as a guest. The Reagans invited Allen and his wife to attend a state dinner for West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.  

I'm glad I had ample warning before I had any occasion to subject myself to this garbage.  About a year ago, my wife and I, searching iTunes for something to watch on the iPad one evening, rented The Help, and that was enough Hollywood racial-guilt-mongering to last me for a good long while.

One of our times' principle frustrations is the futility of pointing up the disconnect between real-life post America and the fantasy world the Freedom-Haters strive so mightily - and, often, all too effectively - to convince us that we inhabit.  The Most Equal Comrade is richly deserving of all the derision that is ever heaped on him - by rodeo clowns, talk show hosts, me, or anyone else.  He is the worst president in US history.   He has not a patriotic bone in his body.  He is deliberately dismantling America's leadership role on the world stage, and dismantling economic freedom and its resultant prosperity at home.  The FHers' only hope of preventing a critical mass of this nation's citizenry from seeing that is to immediately infect all conversation about it with the accusation of bigotry.

Is it vulgar and childish?  Of course, and that says much about how far we have fallen from our peak as a civilization.  You don't just "get away with" such a position; it's quite easy to depict it as the norm, departure from which is, in this portrayal, indication of an irredeemable character flaw.

There's only one thing to do.  Keep reporting what is actually going on.  Keep reminding all who still have free minds just how late in the day it really is.

You don't cross the H-word Creature, especially in matters of covering up her corruption

We all know it doesn't take much to bring out her shrill side, but an instance from last September shows that that's especially so when someone tries to insert the truth into a conversation:

'Two days after this attack,' said Rep. Adam Kinzinger, 'we were in a briefing with Hillary Clinton and she screamed at a member of Congress who’d dare suggest that this was a terrorist attack.'

[snip]

The congressman appeared on the Fox News Channel on Friday, recalling Clinton 'basically, in a very loud, angry voice, [saying] "It's irresponsible to even suggest this is a terror attack. This is a YouTube video. We know that there are protests all over, and we need to be very careful how we're saying this" -- and basically chided this member of Congress.'

This throws a wrench in those coronation plans, does it not?

Defending conservative principles on Facebook

Just had an interesting exchange - in fact, I doubt if it's done yet - on Facebook.  A "friend" who is of the pretty darn hard left variety (Unitarian, feminist, climate change Kool Aid swallower, zealot for caricaturing the Tea Party as a bunch of inbred illiterates) thought it would be clever to taunt me with a "news item" about a Tennessee Tea Party activist named Hal Rounds and his group's efforts to get the state's history textbooks to place the Founding Fathers' vision and courage front and center, rather than the fact that some of them were slave owners.

In these situations, the first step  is to do some digging.  I Googled Hal Rounds.  I swear, I'm convinced that someone at Google manipulates the ranking for links in searches to put the lefty ones first.  I had to scroll to halfway through the second page to find one non-lefty link about him.  It was from black conservative Kira Davis, and it was just what I needed to fire a return salvo.

But the kind of sense Davis makes is buried among a plethora of accusatory, nuance-lacking diatribes.

Here is what the Tennessee Tea Party wants to see as the criterion for dealing with the fact that some Founders owned slaves:

“No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.”

No assertion that textbooks shouldn't mention the slavery issue.  Just that it shouldn't be so front-and-center as to obscure the main point about the Founders:

 Where is the demand for the Tea Party seeking to remove the teaching of slavery from textbooks?  It becomes obvious that the TP is leveling the charge that public schools are purposely playing down or omitting the Founding Father’s great contributions to American history.  Such great contributions include the importance of the principles of the Declaration of Independence.  Never in the history of mankind has a country founded its government on the premise that the right to life and liberty derive from our Creator and that these rights are unalienable.  Additionally, it has never been truly established that government’s primary function is to merely protect those rights as the Constitution is like no other founding document in the world.  Countries such as Rome, Sweden, France, Germany etc. have had several forms of government (i.e. monarchy, oligarchy, democracy, etc.) – not America though.  The United States, on the other hand, is the only nation in the world that has had a Constitutional Republic that has lasted for over 220 years.

The liberties and opportunities of the United States have attracted many immigrants to come here.  Even illegal aliens recognize that America is like no other country in the world as many risk their lives to come here for job opportunities.  I have never heard of an American floating on an inner tube while fighting off sharks of the ocean to escape America; but I have certainly heard of a Cuban doing such a thing to flee the socialist whelms of Fidel Castro in search of freedom.
Then there’s also the charge from the Tea Party affiliate that information is being purposely omitted; which adds negative light to some our great revolutionaries.  For example, modern textbooks hardly ever acknowledge the fact that some founders never owned slaves.  John Adams, Signer of the Declaration of Independence, immediately comes to mind as he stated, “My opinion about it has always been known…never in my life did I own a slave.” (Letter to George Churchman and Jacob Lindley on January 24, 1801)
Some simply changed their position and later denounced slavery.

Stay tuned.  I doubt if my "friend" will let this be the end of it.  If it gets juicier, I'll fill you in here.

UPDATE:  My "friend" wants to expand the argument to include the Texas textbook dust-up.  This time I had to wade through six and a half pages of Google search to find Rick Moran's American Thinker piece, the first really substantive refutation of claims such as, for instance, that Texas conservatives wanted to impart a stature equal to Lincoln's to Jefferson Davis.

Here's my latest comment in our thread:

Anyway, on to the Texas component. Lefty accounts of what went down try to make it sound as if the point was to establish some kind of moral equivalency between Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. What actually was implemented was the inclusion of Davis's inaugural address, so that students might have the opportunity to compare and contrast it to Lincoln's. Davis did, after all, se himself as president of a sovereign nation. I might have a criticism that this is not the highest priority element of the Civil War years for eighth graders to focus on, but it hardly rises to an advocacy of a view of black inferiority.

Caudillo talk

If it's been a while since you've seen an exhaustive list of the MEC's instances of circumventing the Constitution, Charles Krauthammer presents one that's maddeningly comprehensive.  Read it and get angry all over again.