Trey Gowdy is so good

If you want to corner a Freedom-Hater and leave him no way to conceal his foulness, sic Trey on him!

James Delingpole's delicious takedown of Hank Paulson

At Breitbart, he provides a point-by-point refutation of the former Treasury Secretary's NYT op-ed on "climate change."

Here are a few highlights:

"The solution can be a fundamentally conservative one that will empower the marketplace to find the most efficient response. We can do this by putting a price on emissions of carbon dioxide — a carbon tax. Few in the United States now pay to emit this potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere we all share. Putting a price on emissions will create incentives to develop new, cleaner energy technologies."

This position you outline: it is not a conservative one. Conservatives do not believe in higher taxes; conservatives do not believe that governments can pick winners or, as you weasellishly put it, "empower the marketplace". Maybe it's time you and you had a serious chat about this with David L Brooks in the New York Times canteen. If you both joined the Democrats together, they might give you a two for the price of one deal.

"It’s true that the United States can’t solve this problem alone."

Indeed. The word you're looking for is "China." And guess what? They're building a new coal-fired power plant every five days. That's how much they care about your plans to stop global warming.

"Looking back at the dark days of the financial crisis in 2008, it is easy to see the similarities between the financial crisis and the climate challenge we now face."

Yes,they're both classic examples of Enron economics: a gigantic Ponzi scheme in which rent-seeking corporations, faux experts, and low-down shysters exploit government regulation and incompetence to fleece everyone else.

"Our experts (financial experts then, climate scientists now) try to understand what they see and to model possible futures."

So let me get this right: you're using the example of all those useless "experts" who failed to predict the 2008 crash as a justification for trusting the widely discredited models of "climate scientists"? Good luck with that.

Really liked this one:

"I'm a businessman, not a climatologist"

No shit, Sherlock!

Many more, so read it all.

Keep the VA scandal on your radar screen

Senator Tom Coburn's report, released today, makes clear just how ugly things are at that agency:

• Female patients received unnecessary pelvic and breast exams from a sex offender.

• Delays are endemic. In addition to care waiting lists, the VA is behind on processing disability claims and constructing facilities.

• Some VA health care providers have lost their medical licenses, but the VA hides that information from patients.

• The federal government has paid out $845 million for VA medical malpractice settlements since 2001.

Mr. Coburn included a photo from one VA facility in North Carolina that couldn’t find proper storage for 37,000 benefit claim folders. They were piled on top of filing cabinets, apparently in random order, making it not only poor case management, but also a fire hazard, Mr. Coburn said.

In the stunning case of the police chief, Richard Meltz, head of security at the Bedford VA Medical Center, pleaded guilty in January to involvement in what the FBI called “two sadistic kidnapping, rape and murder conspiracies.” Meltz advised two others on how to avoid being tracked, such as not using toll roads, and where to dump bodies, according to the FBI.

Throwing more money at the problem is no solution.  Give vets vouchers.  And, of course, repeal Freedom-Hater-care.

Why any of the Clintons is admired stumps anybody who's not a lobotomized cow

When Hard Choices first came out, one of my Facebook nemeses, a 75-year-old artist lady with whom I actually share a strange mutual respect, having met her when I did a magazine article on her, quite some time before we found out each other's ideological orientation, crowed about what a great prez candidate and president the H-Word Creature was going to make.  Later in our exchange about the matter, I was able to provide some good skunk-at-the-garden-party fare, such as book sales dropping off precipitously, and some of the unfortunate interview moments during launch week. But my first volley in the HRC exchange was a simple question:  Can you please name a major accomplishment from her stints as an attorney, Senator or Secretary of State?  The artist lady came back with some mush about "She's had lots of accomplishments."  I repeated my question.  Someone else chimed in, a  rather accomplished folk singer and actor (several CD and tours, some TV and movie roles) who, again, is someone I see around town and in musical situations, and with whom I have cordial relations.  He could do no better at naming a HRC accomplishment.

Well, actually, in 1975, she represented an accused rapist and got him a plea-down and laughed on a tape about the ineffectiveness of polygraphs, and according to the rape victim, tried to smear her as emotionally unstable.

But anything that would qualify as bold, visionary, historic?  Just ain't there.

She does step in it with a fair amount of frequency, however.  On the heels of the "we-were-flat-broke" remark, the backlash from which would presumably make a public figure rethink any talk about her financial situation at any point, she has now let loose with this:

In an interview with Britain's Guardian published over the weekend, Clinton reignited the debate over her wealth by comparing herself to other wealthy people who Clinton said were "truly well off."

Asked by the paper whether she would represent the populist strain of her party, Clinton said, "They don't see me as part of the problem because we pay ordinary income tax, unlike a lot of people who are truly well off, not to name names; and we've done it through dint of hard work."

It's almost enough to make want one to tell her, out of pity, for the sake of a reputation above buffoon level, to put a sock in it.

Then there's Chelsea, who had brief gigs as a hedge-fund consultant and an NBC special correspondent at a salary of $600K.  Now she's at her parents' foundation.

You see, she's learned that she just doesn't care much about money.

“I was curious if I could care about (money) on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t,” she told UK’s The Telegraph, explaining why she gave up lucrative gigs to join her family’s philanthropic foundation.

So she appears ready to settle into the life of an elite symbol of do-gooderism.

Her mom may have to likewise settle.


At least Billy Jeff the Zipper has always come across as a gregarious, engaging personality.  The H-Word creature is the polar opposite:

Hillary, by contrast, never seems anything but vain and testy.  That comes across on television.  No presidential candidate in the last half-century appears so unpleasant.  Moreover, that image is pretty well fixed in the public mind, and every effort Hillary makes to counter that image has the additional problem of looking phony.

Hillary also is physically unappealing.  She was never pretty, but now she is old and tired.  While many of us may pine for the days before looks counted so much to our countrymen, it is undeniable that visual response is now the primary source of information for most American voters.  When is the last time that someone ugly won a presidential election?

Carl Cannon may believe that identity politics will trump all in 2016, but his view is the outlier.  It's June 2014, and the H-Word Creature shows nearly daily that she's not invincible, much less inevitable.

Far more likely that the three empty suits from Little Rock will spend the remainder of their days floating around the world being icons of vague feel-good-ism, and occasionally making trouble with comments that do Western civilization a grave disservice in one fashion or another, as all Freedom-Haters are wont to do.

Meriam's out of jail

But the Sudanese Christian physician who had her second child while incarceration and had been sentenced to be flogged 100 times and then hanged is still in some kind of safe house in Sudan.  It's important to get her, her husband and the kids America-bound pronto.  There are lots of threats to her safety, including a half-brother who threatens to kill her if he gets the chance.

I was pretty sure Rand Paul wasn't in my top 20 prez candidate possibilities, but this clinches it

On Meet the Press, he tells David Gregory he blames W for the current juncture at which Iraq finds itself.

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line is more blunt than I'd be, but let's hear from him:

Rand Paul is a fool. Chaos exists in much of the Middle East and North Africa. Did the Iraq invasion cause the chaos in Libya? Did it cause the chaos in Syria?

Of course not. The chaos we see in these countries and elsewhere is the result of uprisings against dictatorial regimes following the Arab Spring. The uprisings would have occurred in or around 2011 regardless of whether the U.S. had invaded Iraq in 2003.

Indeed, it’s extremely unlikely that an Iraq still controlled in the spring of 2011 by Saddam Hussein would have been immune from such an uprising. Iraq, with its multiple sectarian fault lines, was as vulnerable as any nation in the region to the type of civil wars we’ve witnessed since that time. Why would he have fared better than Assad?

As for Iran, its increase in influence is also largely independent of the Iraq invasion. Working through Hezbollah, Iran has become a key player in Lebanon and in Syria, where it played a huge role in saving the Assad regime. Iran has also increased its influence by moving ever closer to developing nuclear weapons.

None of this has anything to do with the Iraq invasion (if one believes the CIA, the invasion actually caused Iran to suspend its nuclear program for several years). As for Iranian influence in Iraq itself, again it’s difficult to imagine that, absent the 2003 invasion, Iran wouldn’t have stirred up and abetted a rebellious Shiite majority population in the aftermath of the Arab Spring.

But even if one believes (1) that the continuation of Saddam Hussein’s regime would have been, on balance, desirable and (2) that his regime would have skated past the Arab Spring, it’s still ridiculous for Rand Paul to let Obama off the hook. Obama must be judged independently of Bush. Even if he made merely a bad situation worse, Obama is to blame for that.

[snip]

Bush isn’t to blame for the fact that Obama pulled our military entirely out of Iraq. Bush isn’t to blame for the fact that, thereafter, al Qaeda reemerged. Bush isn’t to blame for the fact that, in the face of intelligence that al Qaeda was “becoming more and more dangerous,” Obama did nothing.

I'd been concerned about insufficient daylight between Rand's foreign policy views and those of his father.  His ability to see what the Most Equal Comrade has wrought in the middle east is too clouded to trust his judgement on any world-affairs issue from this point forward.

 

Solidifying the caliphate

Now it's the Iraq-Jordan border that has been rendered null and void.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry met Iraq's prime minister in Baghdad on Monday to push for a more inclusive government, even as Baghdad's forces abandoned the border with Jordan, leaving the entire Western frontier outside government control.

Sunni tribes took the Turaibil border crossing, the only legal crossing point between Iraq and Jordan, after Iraqi security forces fled, Iraqi and Jordanian security sources said.

The tribes were negotiating to hand the post over to insurgents from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant who took control of two main crossings with Syria over the weekend.

Kurdish forces control a third border post with Syria in the north, leaving central government troops with no presence along the entire Western frontier which includes some of the most important east-west trade routes in the Middle East.

For the insurgents, capturing the frontier is a dramatic step towards the goal of erasing the modern border altogether and building a caliphate across swathes of Syria and Iraq.

Of course, there's been a lot of debate about whether our 300 special forces in an advisory capacity can be effective in any meaningful sense, or whether that's 300 too many.  From this blogger's perspective in the middle of North America, it looks like what we'd better do is prepare to address the new reality of an entirely new jihadist entity spanning what had been three "countries," as well as an Iran that has the same orientation it has had since 1979.  In short, we will see two entities, each of which has an intention to destroy the West, vie for dominance.  I know the temptation is to indulge the hope that they will so thoroughly decimate each other with their well-known tools of catastrophic terror that neither will be in a position to cause trouble in places beyond their own neighborhood.  But that is to forget how central obliterating the West is to the mission of each.  That accomplishment would go far to seal the dominance of the party so obliterating.  Each side is already plotting such attacks, after all.

I do think it's a little late to preoccupy ourselves with shoring up an al-Maliki-led coalition.

The fruits of planned decline - today's edition

Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski says his country's relationship with post-America "isn't worth anything."

Infantilizing established norms of grammar in order to coddle confused narcissists

When English-speaking societies decided that there was something fundamentally inequitable about using "he" and "his" for singular pronouns, a couple of solutions surfaced.  In some quarters, basic grammatical rules were bent a bit and "they" and "theirs" became acceptable usage.  Others went in for the slash ("him / her").  "One" often worked quite adequately.

But, no, the Vancouver school board now wants to impose the stupid and awkward "xe," "xim" and "xyr" on all the tabula rasas in its charge.

How much more in your face can our overlords be?

The IRS scandal gets more ultra-sinister by the day:

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) cancelled its longtime relationship with an email-storage contractor just weeks after ex-IRS official Lois Lerner’s computer crashed and shortly before other IRS officials’ computers allegedly crashed.

The IRS signed a contract with Sonasoft, an email-archiving company based in San Jose, California, each year from 2005 to 2010. The company, which partners with Microsoft and counts The New York Times among its clients, claims in its company slogans that it provides “Email Archiving Done Right” and “Point-Click Recovery.” Sonasoft in 2009 tweeted, “If the IRS uses Sonasoft products to backup their servers why wouldn’t you choose them to protect your servers?”

Sonasoft was providing “automatic data processing” services for the IRS throughout the January 2009 to April 2011 period in which Lerner sent her missing emails.

But Sonasoft’s six-year business relationship with the IRS came to an abrupt end at the close of fiscal year 2011, as congressional investigators began looking into the IRS conservative targeting scandal and IRS employees’ computers started crashing left and right.

Sonasoft’s fiscal year 2011 contract with the IRS ended on August 31, 2011. Eight days later, the IRS officially closed out its relationship with Sonasoft in accordance with the federal government’s contract close-out guidelines, which require agencies to fully audit their contracts and to get back any money that wasn’t used by the contractor. Curiously, the IRS de-allocated 36 cents when it closed out its contract with Sonasoft on September 8, 2011.

Lois Lerner’s computer allegedly crashed in June 2011, just ten days after House Ways and Means Committee chairman Rep. Dave Camp first wrote a letter asking if the IRS was engaging in targeting of nonprofit groups.

Yet this tyranny-imposing agency will continue to exist by this time next week.  That is wrong.

Why the divest-from-Israel movement is nothing short of evil

Because it's all about picking on the lone outpost of righteousness and human advancement in a region that is otherwise given over to an exaltation of chaos and brutality:

What is it they want Americans to divest from? A rare, functioning Middle East democracy that operates under the rule of law and treats all its citizens — men, women, Arab, Jew — with justice and respect.

A nation enduring an average of nearly one rocket attack a day launched by Palestinian militants and their supporters; many of those rockets are targeted at schools and residential neighborhoods.

A nation forced by an international community that purports not to negotiate with terrorists to sit across the bargaining table with those who have slaughtered their children in vicious terrorist strikes.

A nation surrounded by neighbors who are pledged to its extermination, and yet is blamed for all of the instability and unrest in its region.

And still under today’s bizarre hierarchy of victimhood, it’s the Palestinians who wear the mantle of the oppressed.

Israel is blamed for the stagnant peace process, even though the Palestinians have repeatedly broken the conditions established for resuming talks, most recently by forming a unity government with Hamas, the terrorist group that controls Gaza — the primary launching pad for those rockets.

You could use any number of issues - human sexuality, atmospheric science, national sovereignty, gun policy - to illustrate the utter abandonment of morality among our mainline Protestant denominations, our universities, our "news outlets" and even far too many of our corporations, but none make it so crystal-clear as where a person or organization stands on the Israeli-Palestinian matter.

The prospect of amnesty is what keeps 'em coming

So says the president of Honduras:

The president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, recently said that the tidal wave of illegal immigrants crossing into the U.S. from Central America can be attributed to the fact that many believe they will get amnesty. The Obama Administration's rhetoric and actions surrounding the immigration surge have led many in Central America to think they will not be deported if they come into the U.S. illegally--and indeed, most of the thousands of children that continue to cross the border will likely get to stay in the country. 

Why is the message to these people not unmistakably clear that there will be no amnesty?  What is the real reason? 

Perhaps we should ask Valerie Jarrett and Rupert Murdoch.

The denomination of my upbringing is now a hate group

The Presbyterian Church USA votes to divest from Israel.

George Will remains George Will even after losing his main gig

The sensitivity-enforcement mob recently claimed a high-profile scalp:  Columnist George Will.  Got him canned from the Washington Post and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

He's responding with courage and principle:

Conservative columnist George Will wouldn’t give an inch over his apparently offensive column on college sexual assaults, telling CSPAN host Brian Lamb it’s his “job” is to discount “dubious statistics” and blasting “jerry-built, improvised campus processes” to deal with sexual assault.

Will appeared Thursday on CSPAN’s “Q&A” program, which airs Sunday on the nonprofit news channel but was published on YouTube Friday.

Lamb asked Will about one of his recent columns lambasting misinformation and hyperbole over rape on college campuses. Tens of thousands contacted The Washington Post urging them to drop Will’s column for excusing, if not encouraging, “rape culture” at American universities.

And on Thursday, his column was removed from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, with the paper calling the column “offensive and inaccurate.” (RELATED: George Will Dispatched By Dispatch For Sexual Assault Column)

“What is the impact of the column that has people raging about you at this moment?” Lamb asked, pointing out the St. Louis paper’s decision to sever their ties with him.

“Yes, they have,” Will noted. “They know how to propitiate the rabble. But this is my job, is when dubious statistics become the basis of dubious and dangerous abandonment of due process, to step in and say, ‘Take a deep breath everybody.’”

The columnist explained how the White House and other advocacy groups are — based on their own numbers — demonstrably inflating campus rape statistics.

Will repeated his claim that he “takes sexual assault more seriously than I think they do . . . when someone is accused of rape, it should be reported to the criminal justice system that knows how to deal with this, not jerry-built, improvised campus processes.”

The Freedom-Haters are raising the stakes for being an agent of common sense and real justice.  This situation is a guide on a moral level on how to deal with it.

What's really going on in the Scott Walker pseudo-situation

Gabriel Malor at The Federalist looks at what has really gone down in the campaign-contributions situation that the MEC regime's propaganda arm has tried to turn into a smear of one of the nation's best governors:

 in 2012, Democratic district attorneys in Wisconsin launched a secret probe known as a John Doe investigation with the goal of proving that conservative groups illegally coordinated activities during Gov. Scott Walker’s recall election. They issued more than 100 subpoenas, demanded the private information of conservatives and conservative groups, and actually conducted secret raids. And under state law, individuals who were targeted or witness to the investigation were forbidden from making knowledge of it public.

Fortunately, judges saw right through this partisan abuse of power. Early this year, a state judge, ruling in a secret proceeding, quashed the subpoenas and all but ended the investigation. According to the judge, “the subpoenas do not show probable cause that the moving parties committed any violations of the campaign finance laws.” This started the unraveling of the John Doe investigation that had many conservatives fearing they would be targeted for subpoenas and raids next.

After a short trip to a federal appeals court, the federal judge reissued his order that the John Doe probe cease. Most recently, that appeals court has ordered some of the previously secret probe documents disclosed to the public, including an unsuccessful defense that the John Doe investigators made to one of their secret subpoenas. In their attempt to get a subpoena, which was rejected by a judge for lacking probable cause, the partisan investigators claimed that Walker was involved in the so-called conservative conspiracy.

And that is where the litigation stands as of today. Having launched a secret probe that has now been shut down by both the state and federal courts, the Democratic district attorneys find themselves the subject of an ongoing civil rights lawsuit for infringing the First Amendment rights of conservatives. But that is not how the media have reported the case.

Upon the unsealing of some of the probe documents by the federal appeals court, the media worked itself into a frenzy claiming that Walker was part of a criminal conspiracy. The media claim was based entirely on the subpoena document that was denied by the state judge as failing utterly to demonstrate probable cause to believe a crime occurred.

Knowing what you now know, it becomes easier to fully see the agenda of the truth-hating propaganda machine:

the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel kicked off this infuriating libel with a piece that claimed, “John Doe prosecutors allege Scott Walker at center of ‘criminal scheme.’” The more accurate word, of course, would have been “alleged,” past-tense with the addition of the words “in denied subpoena request” or perhaps “in failed partisan investigation” or even “in politically-motivated secret investigation rejected by the state and federal courts.”

The New York Times, trumpeting the story on today’s front page, also uses the present tense to give the wrong impression. The piece begins “Prosecutors in Wisconsin assert that Gov. Scott Walker was part of an elaborate effort to illegally coordinate fund-raising and spending.” Again, the true story is that this took place last year and was ended by the courts. You’d have to read all the way down to the tenth paragraph to learn that the subpoenas weren’t granted because there was no probable cause to believe that a crime had occurred. Oddly, the Times piece muses on the electoral consequences for Walker in the third paragraph. 

Shameful, yes, but now you're fully armed to quash any trumpetings of the truth-hater version of events.

Freedom-Hater-care is only a good deal for those who qualify for gummint gravy (also known as your tax dollars)

Byron York at the Washington Examiner looks beyond the crowing of the regime's propaganda arm regarding how "success" has finally come to characterize FHer-care.  It boils down to folks without much wherewithal getting coverage and the rest of the folks getting a bill of goods:

Of the eight million, about 85 percent, or 6.8 million, actually paid for coverage. Of those, about 87 percent, or 5.9 million, receive taxpayer-paid subsidies to help them pay.

In other words, nearly everyone who has bought insurance through the Obamacare exchanges has done so with money from the government. And the subsidies are significant — an average of $264 a month, according to HHS. The average monthly premium is $346, according to the report, so minus the $264 subsidy, the average subsidy recipient is paying a net cost of $82 a month for coverage. The government pays the rest.

"It would appear from this data that it is the lowest income people who are most often signing up for coverage," writes insurance industry analyst Bob Laszewski. "That explains why the average consumer subsidy is so high and the average net cost is so low."

The problem is, for those who are not eligible for subsidies, or for those eligible only for smaller subsidies, Obamacare still presents higher premiums, higher deductibles, and narrow networks of doctors and hospitals. "The Obamacare plans are unattractive to all but the poorest who get the biggest subsidies and the lowest deductibles," writes Laszewski. "The working class and middle class are not getting access to attractive benefits."

So they have not purchased coverage. The Democrats who created Obamacare planned to pressure them into doing so by imposing an individual mandate -- a penalty euphemistically called a "shared responsibility fee" -- on those who go uninsured. The idea was, the mandate would not only increase the coverage rate but also raise revenue for the federal government.

But now comes word that very few will pay the penalty. In a study released this week, theCongressional Budget Office said that of the 30 million people estimated to be uninsured in 2016, only about four million will be required to pay. The rest -- 26 million people -- will be exempt from the mandate under various regulations issued by the Obama administration.

So this is one vision of Obamacare's future: Lower-income Americans purchase insurance because they receive the biggest subsidies. Others with somewhat higher incomes are priced out of the Obamacare market. The individual mandate is meaningless. The net result is tens of millions remain without coverage.

And you will have noticed if you've ever challenged some Freedom-Hater who boasts about how great the program is finally turning out on how it gets paid for, their "counter-argument," such as it is, amounts to trying to shame you for not being willing to part with your money to address the particular needs of fellow citizens you don't even know.