Red lines impulsively drawn are no substitute for principle-based policy

Great Stanley Kurtz post at NRO's The Corner today.  He says that the MEC, guided  by a Samantha Powers-ian to mideast policy, shooting off his mouth about chemical weapons, isolated from any larger context other than the mixed signals sent by previous cozyings-up to Assad, put us in the position where "if we go light, we'll seem like paper tigers," but if we strive in earnest to depose Assad we kick over a geostrategic hornet's nest.

Don’t draw red lines ahead of time based on non-strategic considerations. Insofar as Power’s commitments diverge from our strategic interests, America will be harmed by following through on them. If, on the other hand, we protect our interests, undercutting Power’s message in the process, the cycle of failed deterrence will start again.
This is the dangerous mess Obama’s utopianism has landed us in.

And as if you'd thought Libya was not still a middle eastern hot spot

"Armed groups" have seized a very major oilfield in the western part of the country.

Why meetings of the kind I attended last night are so important

They give firepower to rank-and-file conservative House members to stand up to John Boehner:

The House GOP’s conference call last week turned “ugly,” in the words of one Republican on the call, after Speaker John Boehner announced his intention to pursue a short-term continuing resolution to fund the government, hinting it would not use the bill to pick a fight over the implementation of Obamacare.

Representative Lynn Westmoreland of Georgia, one of about a dozen voices who said they were feeling the heat back home, told Boehner to “go back to the drawing board.”

“We hear it in our town halls, we hear it our one-on-one meetings with constituents. We hear it when we’re at county fairs or events we’ve attended during the August recess, of which there are many. And the message all over the country, at least as relayed by members on that phone call, is that this is the overriding issue that is being discussed. Way more than immigration, way more than the debt,” says Representative Cynthia Lummis, who spoke up on the call herself.

They listen to us.

 

No, he wasn't, Senator

Jeffrey Lord at The American Spectator does a superb job of debunking Scott Brown's approving claim that Dutch had Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome.

Because the MEC regime didn't bother with earning our adversaries' and enemies' respect early on

Senior officials in Syria and Iran say Israel gets it if we let loose with the missiles.  Israelis are taking it seriously.  They're stocking up on gas masks.

Russia and now China warn of "catastrophic" consequences of the West acting without consulting the UN Security Council.

And Saudi senior intelligence official Prince Bandar has offered Russia an odd but disturbing half-extortion-half-bribe scenario if it drops its alliance with Syra.  He says he can make Russia an irreversibly major player on the world oil market, but then adds this:

 [H]e also hinted at Chechen terrorist attacks on Russia’s Winter Olympics in Sochi if there is no accord. “I can give you a guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics next year. The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the games are controlled by us,” he allegedly said.

Prince Bandar went on to say that Chechens operating in Syria were a pressure tool that could be switched on an off. “These groups do not scare us. We use them in the face of the Syrian regime but they will have no role in Syria’s political future.”

When you don't do the right thing early on, doing the right thing late in the day can have unsavory consequences.

All it takes is courage and principle

Heritage Action's Defund Now tour rolled into Indy this evening.  Here's Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint offering strategy ideas for grassroots involvement.  Raphael Cruz (Senator Ted's dad) was there to open things with a prayer and close the occasion with a rousing speech.  The main thing I got from the evening was that it is really going to take everyday folks getting vocal, getting involved, in order to pull the plug on FHer-care.

The toxic confluence of patty-cake and reset

So the Russian foreign minister is warning Secretary Global Test against a US military action against the Assad regime.

Once again, as in Egypt and Libya, we find ourselves in a situation in which we're now waxing indignant against a middle eastern dictator, perhaps getting ready to lob cruise missiles at his strongholds, - but only after we've passed the kind of global test from whence the Secretary of State gets his moniker - after having regarded him as a key strategic asset in regional affairs.

In fact, when Global Test was a Senator, he was downright cozy with the Alawite Baathist in Damascus.

In February 2009, Kerry led a delegation there to engage Syria. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad told visiting US members of Congress on Saturday that the United States should ‘move away from a policy based on dictating decisions.’ Assad's guests on Saturday included US Senator John Kerry, who headed the third delegation this week to call on the Syrian president's door as Washington reviews its policies toward countries the previous administration regarded as hostile. Assad told his visitors that future relations should be based on a ‘proper understanding’ by Washington of regional issues and on common interests, SANA news agency reported,” AFP reported at the time.

AFP followed up with this report after the visit stating that Kerry believes "Syria is an essential player in bringing peace and stability to the region":

“President Barack Obama's administration considers Syria a key player in Washington's efforts to revive the stalled Middle East peace process, US Senator John Kerry said in Damascus on Thursday. ‘Syria is an essential player in bringing peace and stability to the region,’ Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a speech after meeting President Bashar al-Assad. ‘Both the United States and Syria have a very deep interest... in having a very frank exchange on any differences (and) agreements that we have about the possibilities of peace in this region,’ he said in the statement.”

[snip]

Kerry praised Assad later in 2011 as being a "very generous" man. "Well, I personally believe that -- I mean, this is my belief, okay? But President Assad has been very generous with me in terms of the discussions we have had. And when I last went to -- the last several trips to Syria -- I asked President Assad to do certain things to build the relationship with the United States and sort of show the good faith that would help us to move the process forward," said Kerry at a think tank.

The linked Weekly Standard  has a photo of the Assads and Senator and Mrs. Global Test having an intimate dinner.

And, of course, through all of our half-cocked attempts at consistent, grown-up policy, Russia has been Assad's staunch ally.  It's also been over this period of time that Putin and the Most Equal Comrade have established a relationship wherein the MEC is Putin's bitch.

Because this regime so utterly disdains America's leadership role on the world stage, it never occurred to any of our declinist overlords to pursue a policy of sternness toward Assad - pressuring him to not be a threat to Israel, and to back out of his alliance with Iran - and have actually frank discussions with Russia on these matters.

And so here we are.  Another scenario in which all good options are gone.

 

Because FHer fantasies of a "fair" world are more important than actual lives of individuals in supposedly disadvantaged demographic groups

Along the lines of yesterday's post about school vouchers, Heather MacDonald, writing at NRO has a really heart-wrenching story about a high school senior from South Central Los Angeles who was admitted to UC Berkeley under affirmative action circumstances and quickly went from belwilderment about the whole notion of college-level standards to a self-esteem in utter shreds.

A counselor in the campus psychologist’s office urged him to scale back his academic ambitions. “Maybe he didn’t have to be the straight-A kid he’d been in high school anymore,” the counselor advised him. This “be content with mediocrity” message is hardly a recipe for future success, but it sums up the attitude that many a struggling affirmative-action “beneficiary” has adopted to get through college.

The black-themed dorm and student center also operated exactly as one would expect, confirming their members’ belief in their own racial oppression:

“Sometimes we feel like we’re not wanted on campus,” Kashawn said, surrounded at a dinner table by several of his dorm mates, all of them nodding in agreement. “It’s usually subtle things, glances or not being invited to study groups. Little, constant aggressions.”

Of course, the only reason that Kashawn and many of his fellow dorm mates are at Berkeley is because the administration “wants” them so much, regardless of their chances of success. It is unlikely, however, that African American Studies 5A discussed the academic-achievement gap in Berkeley’s admissions between black, white, and Asian students. That gap, not racism, explains why Kashawn is not a sought-after addition to study groups. (Kashawn came to Berkeley through one of the University of California’s many desperate efforts to evade California’s ban on governmental racial preferences: an admissions guarantee for students in the top decile of their high school classes, regardless of their test scores or the caliber of their school.)

MacDonald tells it like it is:

Racial preferences are not just ill advised, they are positively sadistic. Only the preening self-regard of University of California administrators and faculty is served by such an admissions travesty. Preference practitioners are willing to set their “beneficiaries” up to fail and to subject them to possible emotional distress, simply so that the preference dispensers can look out upon their “diverse” realm and know that they are morally superior to the rest of society. 

New Mexico's Supreme Court is at war with the First Amendment right to freedom of religion

You've probably heard by now about the NM Supreme Court deciding that a wedding photographer had to take the business of a lesbian couple.  Tom Trinko at American Thinker looks into the deeply flawed "reasoning" behind the ruling:

The first glaring error is the Court's assumption that the New Mexico state legislature can make laws unconstrained by the constitutional rights of the citizens of New Mexico.

Liberals in general agree with that idea to the extent that it is useful for their agenda -- which is why, when asked, so many liberals in government can't explain how their legislation is within the powers given to them by the Constitution but can quickly explain why the Constitution requires that pornography be legal.

But given that Americans have repudiated neither the rule of law nor the Constitution, it is unclear how any rational judge can conclude that forcing people to do things they believe to be immoral is consistent with those individuals' First Amendment rights. 

The second glaring error is that this decision is content-based.  We all know that if a liberal photographer had refused to photograph a neo-Nazi skinhead wedding, the New Mexico Supreme Court would have ruled differently, assuming the case had even come to trial.  Even more importantly, note that given the New Mexico Supreme Court's ruling, if a gay photographer refused to photograph a Christian wedding, he'd be protected by law because Christians, unlike gays, do not enjoy special status under New Mexico law.  No reasonable person can believe that the Constitution supports fundamental rights only for specially protected groups, but not for citizens in general.

The third glaring error is the assumption that one group of citizens must surrender its rights so that another group can have special rights.  It's critical to note that the gay couple in question were easily able to find another wedding photographer, so they did not suffer in any real way.  Second, note that the issue in question was not the photographer's attacking the gays in any way, nor was the photographer trying to prevent the gays from being "married."  Rather, the couple apparently has the right to compel the photographer to violate her deeply held religious beliefs.

Trinko doesn't take on the public-accomodation aspect of the court's argument, but that doesn't hold water, either.  The restaurants and lunch counters of the 1950s deep South denied service to blacks, not on the basis of objecting to being a party to sin, but rather on the basis of - well, racism, the belief that blacks were not fit biologically to take sustenance in the same environment as whites.

This is a prime example of why I cede not an inch in calling these people freedom-haters.

Martin Luther King III opts for vulgarity over greatness

He had to go there. At yesterday's 50th anniversary commemoration of his father's speech, he played the Trayvon card.

Bookworm examines the levels of the wrongness of this:

Here are a few facts to challenge MLK III’s infantile remonstrance against “racism” in America:

1. Content of character: The undisputed facts show that Trayvon Martin was a hulking thug who used drugs, played with guns, got into fights, skipped school, and talked trash. The same undisputed facts show that George Zimmerman was a neighborhood favorite who went the extra mile for everyone, regardless of the color of their skin – so much so that he spent enormous time trying to help a young black man he believed the police had unjustly targeted.

2. Stand Your Ground laws: Neither the prosecution nor the defense breathed a word about Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law (also known as the Castle doctrine). Instead, this was an out-and-out case of old-fashioned self-defense. The evidence showed that Trayvon was sitting on top of Zimmerman trying to bash his brains out on the pavement. Zimmerman didn’t have the choice of standing his ground or trying to flee when he was shot. The situation had devolved in “it’s either him or me.”

3. There was no profiling. Police profile. Zimmerman is not a police officer. He is an ordinary citizen. Ordinary citizens observe, make decisions, and react as they see fit. You cannot enact federal laws imposing on all ordinary citizens some bizarre standard by which they’re not allowed to defend themselves against black aggressors, because to do so is “profiling.”

The only thing the MLK III got right is that racism lives today. But the racism in the Zimmerman case wasn’t Zimmerman’s racism against Trayvon. Every bit of evidence introduced at trial or revealed by fact-finders showed that George Zimmerman was a mixed-race man who treated all races with respect.

The real racism in this case was that shown by the race hustler’s in the Democrat party and the media (but I repeat myself), who made the decision to lynch George Zimmerman during that brief window of time when they thought he was white. Even when they were corrected, and learned that Zimmerman self-identifies as Hispanic, they created a bizarre new racial classification called “white-Hispanic” so that they could play out their revolting racist fantasies against him.

And so the memory of another moment of national greatness gets profaned.

What ought to be the most impartial cabinet-level department, but is in fact Eric Holder's fiefdom, thinks racial balance is more important than kids getting the best possible education

DoJ is going after Louisiana's school voucher program, on - are you ready for this? - the grounds that if those vouchers are used in any district that is still under a federal desegregation order.  Because that would create "racial imbalance," doncha know.  And fairness by the FHers' standards is more important, doncha know than actual people of the black race getting the best education possible.

The overlords actually think this way.

These people outdo themselves on a daily basis now

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius says amnesty for illegal aliens is necessary for FHer-care to work properly.  Comes right out and says that, in addition to amnesty's power to make Freedom-Haters feel good about themselves for being compassionate, it swells the ranks of those shopping on the exchanges.

Oh, and, for good measure, she is sending government agents into the dark corners of American society where illegal aliens understandably go to keep a low profile and reach out to them, doncha know:

According to CNS News, Sebelius recommended that, until illegal immigrants can access ObamaCare, they continue to obtain medical care at community health centers where they will find federally funded, “culturally competent” health care providers “who actually speak the language and can reach out to a neighborhood.

”Sebelius also announced that the Obama administration has doubled the size of the Public Health Service Corps, “which, to me, is one of the great, well-kept secrets in America. It’s like the Peace Corps for health workers,” she said.

“If you agree to serve in an underserved area, the federal government helps pay off the student loans and debt that a lot of health professionals carry,” Sebelius explained. “And what we find is that when people actually take up service in the National Health Service Corps, they stay in the communities that they are serving long beyond their assignments. So there will be continued access for undocumented.”

And, as always, this crud is being paid for with money seized from you at gunpoint.

The MEC's modus operandi on full display

With all that is on our national plate, the Most Equal Comrade has decided that this is the time to unveil a new approach to making higher education affordable.  No, really, this is a new approach, newer than the one from his first term, because the failure of that one to solve anything has to be obscured with a new, new plan:

"We've got a crisis in terms of college affordability and student debt," said Mr. Obama, without a trace of irony at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The same man who three years ago forced through a plan to add $1 trillion in student loans to the federal balance sheet over a decade said on Thursday, "Our economy can't afford the trillion dollars in outstanding student loan debt, much of which may not get repaid because students don't have the capacity to pay it."

True to form, his need to deflect blame from himself requires a willingness to throw some of his loyal fellow Freedom-Haters under the bus:

Mr. Obama specifically blamed colleges and universities for charging too much. "Not enough colleges have been working to figure out how do we control costs, how do we cut back on costs," he said. His solution is for the federal government to rate colleges on their effectiveness and efficiency, and then to allocate federal subsidies to the schools that Washington believes are providing the best education at the lowest cost.

Particularly jarring for Mr. Obama's fans in the faculty lounge, he talked about them on Thursday in the same disrespectful manner that he normally reserves for entrepreneurs. "And I've got to tell you ahead of time, these reforms won't be popular with everybody, especially those who are making out just fine under the current system. But my main concern is not with those institutions; my main concern is the students those institutions are there to serve," said the President.

Conservative readers may be tempted to chuckle here. And we concede that this latest Obama regulatory onslaught couldn't happen to a nicer bunch than the university elite who did so much to elect him. But while shifting control of universities from lefty professors to the U.S. Department of Education may seem like a transition between six and a half-dozen, it is not.

As maddening as it can be to see how liberal academics spend the wealth created by hard-working citizens, Americans should think long and hard before allowing the federal government to dominate a system of higher education that is still by all accounts the envy of the world. If the feds are deciding what a quality education is in order to dole out billions in annual aid—in an era when most students can't afford to matriculate without some form of aid—Washington will certainly dominate. Tying aid to whatever the bureaucrats decide is the right tuition is a back-door form of price controls. Even more disturbing is the idea that a federal political authority will decide which curricula at which institutions represent a good educational value. 

 

And on top of that, he proposes capping the paying-back of student loans at 10 percent of the incomes of those bearing the obligation.

These people will try anything, no matter how convoluted and lacking in hoss sense, to avoid the normal-people free-market solutions to society's dilemmas.  And the reason why is pretty plain to see:  There's no role for them if people make their own economic choices.

 

Why control of the culture is so important

The cultural arbiters of Freedom-Hating Post-America have really outdone themselves this time.  NBC_TV's Law and Order SVU series is filming an episode in which Cybil Shephard plays a beloved Southern chef who guns down a hoodie-wearing black kid.

Their vulgarity and willingness to foment the unraveling of civil society knows no bounds.

Meanwhile, here's what's going on in Reality-Land: this and this.

Notice that the story from Washington state doesn't mention the suspects' race until the second-to-last paragraph.  The story from Oklahoma doesn't mention it at all.

Along with entertainment, education is, of course, a huge component of our culture.  Chuck Ross at The Daily Caller looks into just who the hate-crime-hoax perpetrators at Oberlin College were:

One of the two students removed from Oberlin College earlier this year for allegedly circulating virulently racist, anti-Jewish and anti-gay messages around campus  is an ardent leftist and committed supporter of President Barack Obama, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.

Dylan Bleier, one of the two students, organized a voter registration drive on behalf of Obama before the 2008 election. That voter drive is still listed on the website for Organizing for Action, the non-profit group whose mission is to advance Obama’s agenda.

[snip]

On his now-defunct LinkedIn page, Bleier noted that he was the founder and president of the Ithaca High School for Obama club. He also identified himself as a member of the Oberlin College Democrats.
Bleier also listed his participation in a group called Ithaca White Allies Against Structural Racism. He joined the group in May of this year, he reported. He said the group’s goal is to “eradicate structural racism in Tompkins County [NY], via forums discussing racism.”
On his Twitter account, which he protected after TheDCNF reached him on Tuesday, Bleier hailed Obama’s comments on George Zimmerman, tweeting: “Zimmerman is just the tip of the iceberg, a single highly visible symptom of the racist system that is ‘succeeding’ in the US.”
Bleier also describes himself on Twitter as an “atheist/pacifist/environmentalist/libertarian socialist/consequentialist.”

[snip]

[A recent Obelin grad who knew both perpetrators] thinks that Bleier and Alden were likely behind all of the hateful graffiti that marred that campus during the string of incidents in February. He also said that Alden and Bleier had been suspended and removed from campus before the March 4 report of someone wearing KKK attire.

What would it take to bring the societal temperature back down?   That's not a rhetorical question.  I don't have the answer.

Really get your brain around this; I implore you

A Department of Homeland Security employee in charge of buying ammo for the government runs a hate-whitey website.

Ayo Kimathi, who calls himself the “Irritated Genie,” told his supervisors that the website was set up to sell concert and lecture videos.

But the report showed the site's content strayed far beyond concert promotion, warning about a coming race war. His website, “War on the Horizon,” declares, “in order for Black people to survive the 21st century, we are going to have to kill a lot of whites – more than our Christian hearts can possibly count,” the Alabama-based SPLC said in its report. 

One of Kimathi’s former supervisors at DHS told SPLC’s Hatewatch that, “Everybody is the office is afraid of him,” and that his co-workers are “afraid he will come in with a gun and someday go postal.”

The supervisor, who was not named, continued, “I am astounded he’s employed by the federal government, let alone Homeland Security.”

Kimathi, who works for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is a division of DHS, reportedly got the go-ahead from the government to create and maintain his website. 

That’s because as a law enforcement agency employee, he is required to get permission in writing if he engages in outside activities which includes everything from working a second job to volunteering.

The SPLC says Kimathi obtained official permission but did it by misrepresenting the true nature of his site.

I had real reservations back in 2001 about creating yet another cabinet-level bureaucracy.  This is the kind of fallout you get.   DHS hasn't panned out to be worth it, it seems to me.  We already have a Defense Department and a slew of intelligence agencies.  Those organizations seem less conducive, I think, to situations in which a clear wacko is in charge of procuring massive amounts of ammo.

The regime's most exquisite tactic for fomenting fundamental transformation: trivialization

Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Libya are in flames.  Hizbollah is firing rockets into Israel from southern Lebanon.  Our relationship with Russia is in tatters.  Unemployment is going back up dramatically.  Major American cities are going bankrupt.  One in six Americans is on food stamps.

The White House thinks this is an appropriate time to host a roundtable on issues affecting bisexuals.

“Participants and administration officials will discuss a range of topics including health, HIV/AIDS, domestic and intimate partner violence, mental health, and bullying,” White House LGBT liaison Gautam Raghavan said.

The stinking MEC White House actually has one of those.  And we pay the mother------'s salary with money seized at gunpoint from us.