Soccer's appeal is mainly to the pro-decline crowd

Bernard Goldberg writing at NRO examines a recent discussion between Peter Beinart and Fareed Zakaria about the World Cup and soccer generally:

Mr. Beinart was with Fareed Zakaria on CNN the other day and had a lot to say about how soccer just might save America — from its narrow-minded, insular self.

Soccer fans in America, he said, show us that “we have a less nativist sports culture and we’re more open — at least some groups in the United States — young people, immigrants, political liberals — are more open to liking the same kinds of things that people in other countries do. Things don’t have to be ours and ours alone.”

Part of the attraction of soccer, Mr. Zakaria says, is that we’re sharing the sport with the rest of the world; we’re following something the rest of the world is following. Yes, Professor Beinart says, but it’s much more than that. Younger Americans, who like soccer more than older Americans, “are far less likely than older Americans to say that American culture is superior or to say that America is the greatest country in the world.”

In case you were wondering, this is a good thing to Mr. Beinart, and I suspect many other liberals. Because “it reflects a more cosmopolitan temperament, more of a recognition that America has things to learn from the rest of the world, and that in fact maybe we have to learn from the rest of the world if we’re going to remain a successful country.”

After taking that in, Mr. Zakaria observes that soccer fans in the United States look a lot like the Obama coalition. To which Beinart replied: “That’s exactly right, and if you look at the states where soccer is most popular, they’re overwhelmingly blue states and the states where soccer is least popular are red states.”

This gets me to thinking about some findings in a recent Pew study discussed in Byron York's Townhall column today:

According to Pew, solid liberals make up about 17 percent of registered voters. Most (69 percent) are white. They are "highly educated and affluent," according to the survey. They are the most loyal Democrats of all groups and "unflagging supporters of Barack Obama."

Solid liberals are more urban than other groups, more likely to use public transportation, more likely to recycle. They're the most likely to say they want to live close to museums and theaters, and the least likely to hunt or fish.

And they think America needs to be taken down a peg on the world stage - to make room for jihadists and practitioners of genital mutilation, I suppose.

You knew it would be the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals

 . . . that would presume to make Arizona grant driver's licenses to illegal aliens.

Freedom-Haters eat their own at the first sign of mutiny

One of Mrs. MEC's biggest supporters in her attempt to bring totalitarianism to the nation's government-school cafeterias is turning on her:

the School Nutrition Association – which initially championed the new federal lunch standards on fruits, vegetables, salt, fat, sugar and virtually every other aspect of school lunches when they were implemented in 2012 – is now lobbying Congress to dial back the “overly prescriptive” and expensive changes, the New York Times News Service reports.

“Congress is listening, and it is considering legislation to delay the nutrition regulations for a year, some of which have already gone into effect. But some of the association’s onetime allies in the school-meal campaign are mystified, if not suspicious, concerning the group’s motivations,” the news service reports.

Unsurprisingly, the move has raised the ire of the unwavering food jackboots:

Regardless, proponents of the new lunch standards are lobbing wild accusations at SNA leaders for the group’s decision to side with its members, claiming the association is simply pandering to food companies that help sponsor its work.

“They sold their souls to the devil,” said Stanley Garnett, who resigned from the SNA in protest of the group’s change of heart.

Evil corporations are stirring this up, doncha know.

It's come to this in post-America

Who does the regime think are the bad guys in Murietta, California?

Jeremy Oliver, a resident of Temecula, California--a town that neighbors Murrieta--told Breitbart Texas that local police officers warned the protesters that "it's going to get ugly."

Oliver said, "The feds are pissed that they haven't been able to use this facility. Officers out there warned people that federal agents will be in Murrieta on Monday--they are going to get the next bus through no matter what. Riot gear and shields will be used to push the crowd back."

John Henry, a Murrieta resident since 1991, was told the same thing by local officers. 

"We're being told that federal Marshals or ICE will be here in the next few days and that they are bringing riot gear," Henry said. "They're apparently going to be blocking off the street with concrete blockades so that no vehicles can get through. The River County Sheriff's Department showed up last night and brought a huge watch tower that shoots up into the air 35 feet."

On Friday, six protesters were arrested in Murrieta. One was apprehended for crossing "the yellow tape that blocked protesters from the Border Patrol station entrance," according to USA Today. 

Henry expressed frustration at the fact that the illegal immigrants are being "rewarded" for breaking the law--after illegally crossing the border, they receive a slew of taxpayer subsidized benefits like housing, food, education, vocational training, and legal counsel. Most are then released onto U.S. soil. 

When U.S. citizens break the law, on the other hand, they pay the price. "If any one of us were to roll through a stop sign, we'd be pulled over and ticketed," Henry noted. 

Leviathan wants to use their town to accommodate criminals, and it looks like protests against that will result in busted heads.

Not an effective way for Freedom-Haters to state their case

Boycotting businesses with which they have an axe to grind, that is.

Didn't work with Chick-Fil-A, didn't work with Whole Foods, won't work with Hobby Lobby.

Megan McArdle explains:

Most boycotts fail because most people just don’t have the intensity to keep them up. In 2003, folks were promising to boycott French products such as Dannon yogurt over the country's stance on Iraq, but Dannon is still on the shelves and seems to be selling well. (Losing market share to the Greek invasion, to be sure, but as far as I know that has no political content other than the love of a creamier, richer taste in your fermented dairy products.) A few years later, liberals were going to boycott Whole Foods because … well, I don’t remember what the CEO had done, but I’m sure it was something. Whole Foods is also suffering -- from increased competition in its core business. The boycott seems to have had little to no effect.

It’s just hard to maintain that sort of intensity when you’re busy and vacation is coming up, and Mom needs help with her computer, and yes, honey, I’ll stop on the way home and pick up more yogurt. For all but the most bitterly partisan of partisans, motivation eventually gives way to more pressing concerns such as convenience.

Culture warriors face two additional problems:

1. They tend to want to boycott places they never shopped at in the first place.
2. The company’s actual core demographic takes umbrage about the boycott and stages a much more effective counterboycott.

But it makes them feel like caring persons, and that is a huge motivator among FHers.

About that ethnic Palestinian kid from the US in the police-beating video . . .

There's a backstory.

Seems he, and some other Palestinian youths, were setting upon the police with knives.

Gluten phobia and the disturbing gullibility of the post-American cattle-masses

Great Bruce Bialosky column at Townhall today.  In the course of getting a diagnosis about his digestive tract, he does some research and makes some interesting findings:

Personally, I was a naysayer on the subject of gluten as the California crazies hopped on the bandwagon of the mania. That was until my endocrinologist told me that avoiding gluten would help me control my blood sugar level while I was losing weight which aided my avoiding diabetes. Mr. Kimmel sent me to the internet to research the subject to avoid the pratfalls of other health-crazed Californians.

What I found was that gluten is a protein found in grains – particularly wheat, rye and barley. Gluten causes dough to rise and gives it a chewy texture. It is true that some people have intolerance to gluten, but it is not an allergy – it is just an intolerance. That is estimated to be one person out of every 133. Here is where the fun starts – there has never (yes, never) been a study that has shown that avoiding gluten for the other 132 people without an intolerance has any beneficial effect. But don’t try to convince the crazed people who have sworn off gluten as if it were a deadly poison.

Then I found out that corn, rice, and potatoes have no gluten. Being the cynical person I am, it occurs to me who might be behind this entire fad. Certainly there is no science behind it, but there sure is plenty of push to avoid gluten. Could it be corn, rice, and potato growers have banded together to convince the American public to eat their product and avoid those other foods? No that would never happen – would it? We never been told something was good for us and then later experienced an Emily Litella (Gilda Radner) moment – Never Mind.

He then discusses how Australian researcher Peter Gibson had to reverse himself on the position he took in a paper based on some subsequent experimentation.

Gibson did not have the “settled science” lobby breathing down his neck and redid his testing. He discovered that the reactions found in the first tests were not actually related to gluten. As stated in the article in Real Clear Science, “The rise in non-celiac gluten sensitivity seems predominantly driven by consumers and commercial interests, not quality scientific research.”

Bialosky goes on to look at new perspectives on animal fat and heart disease as well.

The point is that, just as with climate hooey, we have become a society willing to swallow the most preposterous, urgently-delivered warnings to drastically alter our entire way of life, and it's gotten to the point where ridicule and ostracism result when one doesn't get in line.

The same mindset by which we elected a radical socialist without a patriotic bone in his body.

 

The 2014 Independence Day post

I went into the archives to July 2013 to see what I wrote for Independence Day last year.  All I really did was insert a picture of the original Declaration.  Maybe I couldn't face what this holiday has come to signify in this grim age.

The sad thing is that when I use the term post-America, I'm not kidding.  This is something other than the United States of America.

This year, it's time to admit something terrible:  We are living under a tyranny.  Views vary as to whether we can work our way out of it via American political institutions, such as elections and parties driven by principle.  Myself, I feel it's important to stress the primacy of culture in our current predicament. We may find ourselves with solid Republican majorities in the House and the Senate, and a strengthened Republican presence on the state level, already an encouraging realm of political activity.  But consider how loud and ridiculous the howling from the Left has been this week in response to the SCOTUS Hobby Lobby ruling.

That's what must be turned around.  We live in a society in which sound reasoning and that which is obviously sensible gets not just short shrift but invites ridicule of the most vitriolic and abusive kind.  Consider the aspects of everyday life that have been politicized to the point of catalyzing bitter division in any form of discourse: the weather, national sovereignty, restrooms, children's food.

We should have seen this coming - well, a hundred years ago, in the age of Herbert Croly, John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, when the idea of a policy-setting executive branch, equipped with autonomous agencies staffed by wonky bureaucrats, first took hold.  We should have seen it coming during the New Deal, which, despite setbacks such as the Supreme Court ruling against the Roosevelt regime in cases such as Shechter Poultry, set in place the entrenchment of statism, as seen by the machinations of Frances Perkins, the architect of Social Security and the minimum wage.    We should have seen it coming during the Great Society era, when Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps joined Social Security as programs that we came to consider set in stone, never to be revisited even if they proved to be forces of societal deterioration.

We should have seen it in the 1970s, when, except for a few holdout fugitives such as Ayres and Dorhrn, the radicals came back into the fold and began their long march through the institutions, going to law school, journalism school and divinity school, taking over the record industry and the movie industry, beginning their forays into politics.

If we had seen, with sufficient clarity and in sufficient numbers, where it would lead, we might have been able to avoid the ugly and embarrassing juncture at which we find ourselves now, a juncture at which unelected EPA bureaucrats impose punitive policy on exploration efforts that, unimpeded, would bless us with cheap and abundant fossil-fuel energy for years to come, in which the post-American State Department preoccupies itself with increasing the "transgendered" among its ranks, in which our government, media and educational apparatus use a silly made-up term like "transgendered" with a straight face, in which our taxpayer dollars are used to fly disease-carrying illegal alien children all over the country in commercial airplanes, in which the post-American Justice Department tries to make the simple requirement of presenting a photo ID when voting into some kind of racially-charged hot potato, in which pretty much the entire executive branch goes out of its way to alienate our best - and only Western - middle east ally, while pursuing patty-cake with a mad Islamic regime bent on amassing a nuclear arsenal, in which another type of utterly mad Islamic ideology spreads like wildfire while the despot atop the regime ruling post-America tries to assuages us with blatant falsehoods about the the threat having been vanquished.

So, even if the more optimistic pundits among us are right, and this can be turned around with sufficient application of strenuous effort, the process is going to involve some cataclysmic moments.  The big question will be, if this can go according to some kind of best-case scenario, what the rabid Freedom-Haters will do as they are thwarted.

Yes, I got up and read the Declaration to my wife, as I have for twenty-four years.  Yes, I then filled the house with the United States Marine Band's renditions of The Star-Spangled Banner and Stars and Stripes Forever, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir's version of Battle Hymn of the Republic, and Ray Charles's version of America the Beautiful. We then went for a 17-mile bike ride, and are now headed to the beach.

But it's different this year.  It's more of a remembrance of a blessing we once had than a celebration of the country in which we live today.

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

This is seriously happening in post-America.  The EEOC is suing Wisconsin Plastics, Inc. for firing workers for their inability to speak English.

Your ammo for making sure clear thinking prevails in any argument about the Hobby Lobby case

From Ed Morrissey's column in the Fiscal Times.  Regarding the argument - make that shrieking - make that utter nonsense - you're encountering about how businesses can now "reach into a woman's body":

The problems inherent in the HHS contraception mandate and the balancing of power and liberty stem from its core: Obamacare. The law, officially known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, sets up the first peacetime federal command economy in American history. It forces Americans to buy health insurance not as a consequence of a voluntary use of public resources (such as an auto insurance requirement for using public roads), but simply for living in the US. HHS and the IRS determine what satisfies that mandate, and force businesses with 50 or more employees to provide insurance coverage or pay stiff fines. HHS also gets to determine, based on an unconscionably wide grant of authority from Congress, what health insurance plans must cover.

It’s this forced participation in Obamacare that creates the imbalance between the religious liberties of individuals, business owners, and religious organizations on one hand and the power of the government on the other. Critics of this decision have mainly focused on the legal consideration of corporations as persons for the sake of considering their inherent rights, but there is nothing at all novel about that legal doctrine.

Got that, shriekers?  Even in this era of Freedom-Hater-care, an employer is still perfectly free to not offer any insurance at all.  Granted, that now comes with a stiff penalty for doing so, but, in tattered form, the notion that a business is free to decide to compensate those it employees still stands.  Hobby Lobby would be within its rights to say, "Nuts to this. Our people will have to go to the exchanges or figure out health coverage on their own."

Regarding the false notion that this somehow opens the door wide to employers claiming anything, no matter how far-fetched, as a religious exemption from its FHer-care obligations:

Of course, one cannot expect to get off the hook by simply claiming that a federal regulation impedes on one’s religious belief. Congress specifically addressed this balancing act between religious liberty and the need for regulatory authority in 1993 with the Restoration of Religious Freedom Act (RFRA), on which the Hobby Lobby case largely hinged.
Congress passed it unanimously in the House and 97-3 in the Senate after the Supreme Court’s Employment Division v Smith decision refused unemployment benefits to two Native Americans fired for having used peyote in their rituals.  Religious expression should only be “substantially burdened,” Congress responded in nearly one voice, “in furtherance of a compelling governmental interest,” and then only by “the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling governmental interest.”
That applies to health decisions as well. As Justice Samuel Alito noted in his Hobby Lobby decision , other mandates for coverage meet this test, explicitly noting items such as vaccinations and blood transfusions. Blood transfusions are necessary for survival in some cases, while vaccinations are not just critical for individual health but also communal health, as thousands of studies confirm.

Regarding the notion that women are hereby "denied access to contraception":

As noted above, the CDC’s 26-year study of unplanned pregnancies (1982-2008) shows that 99 percent of all sexually active women seeking to avoid pregnancy accessed contraception. Access to contraception is such a non-issue that the word “access” only appears once in the entire report, and that in a footnote about access to health insurance. So despite all of the shouts of doom, nothing in this decision impacts the already-universal access to contraception Americans have had for the last four decades. 

The whole piece is worth your time.

David Harsanyi eats Max Fisher for lunch

 . . . in two recent posts at The Federalist.  The snot-nosed Fisher has been touting his warped worldview at The Atlantic and the WaPo for some time, and recently joined Ezra Klein's "explain-the-news" venture Vox, where he has confirmed himself as an Israel-hater.

Here's from Harsanyi's June 18 piece:

It’s worth noting that Fisher is no stranger to chewing over well-worn anti-Israel tropes in the guise of inquisitive journalism. “Why,” Fisher wondered while at the Washington Post “is the U.S. okay with Israel having nuclear weapons but not Iran?” (I dunno? An openly hostile, theocratic, destabilizing force is less trustworthy than a liberal democratic ally?) Or, “Here’s a List of Countries With a Higher GDP Per Capita Than Israel,” in which Fisher pondered if Mitt Romney’s assertion that Israel’s embrace of Western values allowed them to create a more prosperous society than their neighbors was true or not. (Answer: Maybe if Israel wasn’t poking its nose in everyone’s business, Gaza City would be just like Tel Aviv.)

“The end of ‘both sides’: Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is indefensible,” is the title of Fisher’s piece. It begins by offering dispatches on some of the hardships Palestinians have been subjected to after the recent kidnapping of three teenage yeshiva students in the West Bank — one an American citizen (a fact Fisher is not moved to mention). Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused Palestinian terrorist/unity government participants Hamas of being behind these abductions, which does not exactly sound farfetched. But we’ll see.

And while Fisher offers a few superficial declarations about spreading the blame (“no one is pure” — and isn’t that the truth?) overall the Jews are aggressors, paranoid and unreasonable.  And it is they who should cease the occupation, the root cause of all problems.  What that might mean to Israel’s security or the lives of thousands of Jews elsewhere is immaterial. Vox says it’s mean.

In Harsanyi's July 2 piece, he examines this twisted notion of Fisher's that Israel somehow thinks the kidnap-and-response cycle is some kind of gotcha game, a matter of putting points on the board.  How do people that cynical make it through their daily lives without cracking up?

Fisher writes that after the murder of three teenage students by Hamas, it was “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies on Israel’s political right” who “appear to have extracted what they wanted from the crisis.” Or, you may be surprised to learn, the murders make “it far more likely that full-on conflict will resume between Israel and Hamas, a dynamic that Netanyahu seems to prefer.”

Yes, the elected leaders of Israel, the nation’s “right” – because the major swath of the nation’s left-wing doesn’t support putting an end to Hamas, according to Fisher, who fails to offer any polling to back this odd assertion – were happy to use student hitchhikers as bait, hoping they would be kidnapped, executed and dropped in a shallow grave in an empty lot in Hebron. This outcome finally gives Israel the pretext it needed to extract revenge on a bunch of innocent Palestinians.

In Fisher’s view, Israel is pining to kill, longing to occupy, aching to inconvenience. Israel wants to waste millions of dollars tracking down Hamas terrorists; it craves the international backlash that will inevitably follow, and it just never feels quite whole until hundreds of its own citizens, and thousands of Palestinians, are put at risk. There’s nothing quite like persecuting the elderly Arab shopkeeper. Mission accomplished!

Does that sound ridiculous? That’s what the case against Israel sounds like when you refuse to offer any genuine context. And it gets worse. Fisher is also concerned that the Israeli response is “driving a wedge between Hamas and the more moderate, West Bank-based Fatah.” If the groups splinter, Fisher explains, it “will also have the effect of making peace talks far more difficult."

Fisher is emblematic of one of the most poisonous outlooks pervading our society today.  You see it, certainly, among those focused on Middle East issues, but also in other realms of foreign policy, as well as domestic policy and American politics.  People like that really think that Western nation-states, or principled political groupings, are willing to sacrifice their citizens for the symbolic value of staving off accommodation with also known as rivals, adversaries and enemies.  Of course, to someone like Fisher, there are no rivals, adversaries or enemies, except those he deems naive enough to believe in immutable principles worth fighting for.  They see a human landscape characterized by nothing more noble than naked self-preservation.

As I say, how does someone embrace such a cynical worldview without it finally driving them bonkers?

Once in a while, you still find a principled judge in post-America

 . . . such as US District Court Judge Reggie Walton:

Responding to a motion filed Monday by True the Vote, a Houston-based conservative nonprofit at the center of IRS targeting during the 2010 and 2012 campaigns, Walton issued an order Tuesday to hear arguments next week.

The IRS recently told Congress that a mysterious crash of the hard drives last year irretrievably destroyed nearly two years of emails to and from Lerner and the others to and from people in other federal agencies, including the White House.

But True the Vote wants a digital forensics expert from outside the IRS to assess the evidence.

“Even if the ill-timed hard drive ‘crash’ was truly an accident, and even if the IRS genuinely believes that the emails are ‘unrecoverable,’ the circumstances of the spoliation at issue cry out for a second opinion,” True the Vote's attorneys told Walton in the motion filed late Monday.

“It may well prove to be the case that a computer forensics expert could recover evidence that the IRS has been unable to retrieve.

"At the very least, such an expert could preserve whatever evidence has not already been wiped clean from the IRS’s computers along with whatever is stored on the Individual Defendants’ home computers, cell phones, and other PDAs.”

IRS attorneys will be in the federal District Court on July 10 to explain why the government failed to tell Judicial Watch about the lost emails for months despite their being evidence in the nonprofit's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Judicial Watch, a government watchdog nonprofit, filed its lawsuit last October after IRS officials failed to respond adequately to a May 2013 FOIA request for the Lerner emails.

The government asked Walton on Monday night to dismiss the motion for an outside digital forensics expert. But True the Vote argued that merely asking for the dismissal “does not give them carte blanche to destroy or permit the destruction of documents and discoverable information that are relevant to the IRS Targeting Scheme in general and the application of True the Vote for exempt status.

Makes sense to moi.  Since nobody's swallowing the line that the e-mails went poof and are gone forever, the IRS certainly ought to have to be subject to the assessment of an independent expert that its preposterous claim is indeed true.

Stomping out the truth everywhere it dares to appear

It is imperative to Freedom-Haters that truth not gain a foothold in post-American society.  The cattle-masses must not be allowed to avail themselves of facts such as NOAA reinstating July 1936 as the hottest month on record, or that Hobby Lobby has been covering sixteen of the twenty contraceptives that HHS bureaucrats deemed on their own, well after Congress rammed through Freedom-Hater-care, to be "preventive health" products  , and, of course, Lois Lerner's communications with the DoJ and various members of Congress.

The FHer regime must keep the truth from you even if it puts your health at risk:

“There were several of us who wanted to talk about the camps, but the agents made it clear we would be arrested,” a psychiatric counselor told me. “We were under orders not to say anything.”

The sources said workers were guarded by a security force from the Baptist Family & Children’s Services, which the Department of Health and Human Services hired to run the Lackland Camp.

The sources say security forces called themselves the “Brown Shirts.”

“It was a very submissive atmosphere,” the counselor said. “Once you stepped onto the grounds, you abided by their laws – the Brown Shirt laws.”

She said the workers were stripped of their cellphones and other communication devices. Anyone caught with a phone was immediately fired.

“Everyone was paranoid,” she said. “The children had more rights than the workers.”

She said children in the camp had measles, scabies, chicken pox and strep throat as well as mental and emotional issues.

“It was not a good atmosphere in terms of health,” she said. “I would be talking to children and lice would just be climbing down their hair.”

A former nurse at the camp told me she was horrified by what she saw.

“We have so many kids coming in that there was no way to control all of the sickness – all this stuff coming into the country,” she said. “We were very concerned at one point about strep going around the base.”

If you think the regime actually cares about these kids, check this out:

Face

Twitterlivefyre 

“I made a recommendation that a child needed to be sent to a psychiatric unit,” the counselor told me. “He was reaching psychosis. He was suicidal. Instead of treating him, they sent him off to a family in the United States.”

She said she filed a Child Protective Services report and quit her job.

“I didn’t want to lose my license if this kid committed suicide,” she told me. “I was done.”

The counselor kept a detailed journal about what happened during her tenure at the facility.

“When people read that journal they are going to be astonished,” she said. ‘I don’t think they will believe what is going on in America.”

So it was not a great surprise, she said, when she received a call from federal agents demanding that she return to the military base and hand over her journal.

She said she declined to do so.

“I didn’t go back to Lackland,” she said.

Both workers told me while they have no regrets, they want to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals.

“They’re going to crush the system,” the nurse told me. “We can’t sustain this. They are overwhelming the system and I think it’s a travesty.”

"Overwhelming the system."  Where have we heard that before?

NYT once sang a different tune regarding religious freedom

Once again, the Grey Lady serves as the emblem of how the Left is subject to the whims and momentary passions that victim politics never fails to whip up, immutable principles be damned:

In a 1993 editorial cheering the House’s passage of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the Times wrote that RFRA “reasserts a broadly accepted American concept of giving wide latitude to religious practices that many might regard as odd or unconventional” and asserted confidently that “the bill deserves passage.”

“Three years ago the Supreme Court threw away decades of precedent and watered down the religious liberty of all Americans,” it said, referring to 1990′s Employment Division v. Smith. “In a case involving the religious use of peyote by American Indians, the Court declared that states could criminalize all consumption of the substance without considering their laws’ impact on the free exercise of religion.”

Incensed about the court getting between a man and his mescaline, the Times explained that “before 1990, when law and religion collided, the Court had required government to show a compelling interest and to use the least intrusive method of enforcement. … Then suddenly, and unnecessarily, the Court declared in the peyote case that states could enforce generally applicable laws, even if they trampled on serious religious claims, so long as the laws weren’t deliberately aimed at religion.”

Luckily Chuck Schumer and Chris Cox came to the rescue, sponsoring the bill–which mandates that any law that might interfere with religious practice must meet strict scrutiny–in the House, where it passed by a voice vote without objection.

“With the Restoration Act, Congress asserts its own interest in protecting religious liberty. It’s a welcome antidote to the official insensitivity to religion the Court spawned in 1990,” the piece concludes.

Monday’s Times editorial called the Hobby Lobby ruling “deeply dismaying” and said that the case “swept aside accepted principles of corporate law and religious liberty to grant owners of closely held, for-profit companies an unprecedented right to impose their religious views on employees.” The decision was apparently “a radical departure from the court’s history of resisting claims for religious exemptions from neutral laws of general applicability when the exemptions would hurt other people.”

If the religion is hip or edgy, hey, let's give it total freedom.  If it's the Truth, let's chloroform it.  That's the Freedom-Hater version of intellectual consistency.

Another Freedom-Hater-care court decision that has the ground rumbling

When the DC Circuit Court rules on Halbig v. Burwell, it could be curtains for the MEC's signature act of planned decline:

The Halbig case challenges the massive federal subsidies in the form of tax credits made available to people with financial need who enroll in the program. In crafting the act, Congress created incentives for states to set up health insurance exchanges and disincentives for them to opt out. The law, for example, made the subsidies available only to those enrolled in insurance plans through exchanges "established by the state."

But despite that carrot — and to the great surprise of the administration — some 34 states opted not to establish their own exchanges, leaving it to the federal government to do so. This left the White House with a dilemma: If only those enrollees in states that created exchanges were eligible for subsidies, a huge pool of people would be unable to afford coverage, and the entire program would be in danger of collapse.

Indeed, the Halbig plaintiffs — individuals and small businesses in six states that didn't establish state exchanges — objected that, without the tax credits, they could have claimed exemption from the individual mandate penalty because they would be deemed unable to pay for the coverage. If the courts agree with them, the costs would go up in all 34 states that didn't establish state exchanges, and the resulting exemptions could lead to a mass exodus from Obamacare.

The administration attempted to solve the problem by simply declaring that even residents of states without their own exchanges were eligible for subsidies, even though the law seemed to specifically say they were not. The administration argues that although the statute's language does limit subsidies to residents of places with exchanges "established by the state," that wording actually referred to any exchange, including those established by the federal government. In January, a district court judge upheld that interpretation, allowing the subsidies to continue.

But the D.C. Circuit Court may see things quite differently, especially in light of recent Supreme Court opinions holding that the Obama administration has exceeded its authority and violated separation of powers.

Hopefully, the court will insist that words in pieces of legislation have specific meanings and that you can't go back after the fact and be loosey-goosey about those meanings.

That's the Most Equal Comrade for you: The West gets directly attacked, and he calls for diffidence

Well, those three Israeli teenage boys have been found - dead and discarded in an open field.  Killed by Hamas.

The MEC, in true MEC form, is urging Israel, which is reeling in grief and outrage and has, quite rightly, begun airstrikes against Hamas, "not to destabilize the situation."  And in true MEC form, he finds a way to make his statement self-referential:

“As a father, I cannot imagine the indescribable pain that the parents of these teenage boys are experiencing,” Obama said in a prepared statement. “From the outset, I have offered our full support to Israel and the Palestinian Authority to find the perpetrators of this crime and bring them to justice, and I encourage Israel and the Palestinian Authority to continue working together in that effort. I also urge all parties to refrain from steps that could further destabilize the situation. As the Israeli people deal with this tragedy, they have the full support and friendship of the United States.”

Tell me, Mr. MEC, is this "working with the Palestinian Authority" going to include demanding that it get completely out of its new unity pact with Hamas?  Re-name those town squares named after terrorists?  Put Israel's borders back on its maps?

Dog vomit where his soul should be.