Detroit Defaults

The result of decades of total Democrat control. 

A team led by a state-appointed emergency manager said Friday that Detroit is defaulting on about $2.5 billion in unsecured debt and is asking creditors to take about 10 cents on the dollar of what the city owes them.

Fun facts about Detroit:

• 20 percent of Detroit is on food stamps.
• It's violent crime rate is 5 times the national average and it’s rated as America’s Most Dangerous City.
• 40% of Detroit residents want to leave the city.
• Home prices have fallen 54 percent in the last 3 years.
• Detroit has the highest poverty rate in the nation.
• Detroit voted for  Obama by 98 percent, because when you’re already living in a hellhole, your prime motivation is to drag the rest of the country in with you.
• The 40 percent of Detroiters who want to leave have drawn no conclusions about the causes of all their problems.

Not enough fun facts?

• 50 years ago, Detroit's population was more than two million.
• 700,000 are left
• The number of people who left Detroit in the last decade is nearly twice those who left New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
• Detroit’s public schools are among the worst in the nation in spite of spending nearly $16,000 per pupil, 60 percent more than Georgia spends.
• Detroit school graduation rate is 32%.
• Test scores are so bad the superintendent of the city’s schools once said they were no better than if the students had simply guessed at the answers.
• Detroit’s per capita tax burden is several times the average for the Michigan cities.
• Kwame Kilpatrick, Detroit's last mayor was convicted of 24 federal crimes, including racketeering, extortion and bribery and is going to jail for up to 30 years.
• Detroit is so Democrat that it's mayoral elections have two Democrats running against each other.
• As an interesting sidelight, Kwame Kilpatrick was one of the Mayors Against Guns crowd started by Michael Bloomberg.

Finally, serious consideration is given to razing Detroit and turning it into farmland.

"It all started with a third-rate break-in into a reporter's computer..."

Ask yourself the question, who would break in to Sharyl Attkisson's computer?

This is obviously a politically-motivated crime, not a personally- or economically-motivated one. That doesn't mean the government had anything to do with it, but it certainly seems that someone favorably inclined towards the government did.

Attkinson was virtually the only MSM reporter interested in Fast & Furious and Benghazi.

Watergate started with a seemingly minor break-in too.

DOJ has already announced that “to our knowledge,” it has never accessed Ms. Attkisson’s computers

Surveillance never sounded so smooth!

Learning to hate America?

 

 

My previous post linked to a Peggy Noonan column.  The subhead: The surveillance state threatens Americans' love of country.

 

She's right.

 

Noonan is one of those who, along with David Brooks and Christopher Buckley (Bill's son), was smitten with Barack Obama in 2008.  They presented him as sharp, smart, moderate and just the right color to bring racial harmony to America.  Brooks is still smitten but Noonan is backing away.  (We never found out what happened to Bill's son.)

 

Her most recent essay has an interesting insight into something going on in America today.  Keep in mind that Obama represents the counterculture of the 1960s.  The part that hated the culture and the institutions of the country.  They are the ones who spit on Viet Nam vets as they came home, and chanted "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Min, the Viet Cong are going to win" as they rioted for a communist victory in Viet Nam.

 

They didn't like America.  And they went on a long march through the institutions they own today: academia, the media, the press, the "permanent" government. 

 

Pushing back, the rest of the country became more reflexively more pro-country.  But that is changing thanks to the Obama administration.  Now that the hard core cadres of the Left have captured the Presidency, the patriotism of the Country Class may be turning.

 

Noonan:

I feel that almost everyone who talks about America for a living—politicians and journalists and even historians—is missing a huge and essential story: that too many things are happening that are making a lot of Americans feel a new distance from, a frayed affiliation with, the country they have loved for half a century and more, the country they loved without every having to think about it, so natural was it. This isn't the kind of thing that can be quantified in polls—it's barely the kind of thing people admit to themselves. But talk to older Americans—they feel they barely know this country anymore. In governance its crucial to stay within parameters, it's important not to strain ties, push too far, be extreme. And if you think this does not carry implications for down the road, for our healthy continuance as a nation, you are mistaken. Love keeps great nations going.

But when love is reciprocated with hate, there is a reaction.

 

If this country is really Obama's America; if he and the people who elected him are the future of America, I'm glad I'm old enough to be closer to the end than the beginning.  My admiration for law enforcement, for the military, for teachers, for trust in the basic justice of the government is disappearing.  I may soon end up as part of the NEW American counterculture.  After all, if the country under Obama represent the dominant culture, then those of us who were once patriots will now become what they once were.

UPDATE:  Thanks Glenn, and welcome Instapundit readers.  You may also like Detroit Defaults

"... explicit and even harsh penalties for violations."

Peggy Noonan has a column in today’s Wall Street Journal that makes the point that domestic spying will eventually, if it has not already, lead to a paranoid nation where no one trusts anyone.

 

Noonan:

If—what Snowden says is substantially true, the surveillance state will in time encourage an air of subtle oppression, and encourage too a sense of paranoia that may in time—not next week, but in time, as the years unfold—loosen and disrupt the ties the people of America feel to our country. "They spy on you here and will abuse the information they get from spying on you here. I don't like 'here.'"

Following the IRS and NSA revelations, the Internet is filled with references to the Stasi, the notorious East German police that monitored the people in that wretched country.

If we are going to stop government agents from the IRS, the FBI, the EPA or any of the other government alphabet agencies from crossing the line from servant to master, we must find the will to make sure that those who transgress are dealt with harshly. Harsh as in jail time; not simply fired, allowed to resign or put on paid leave like Lois Lerner.

When we commit a crime, lie to government agents or fall afoul of the myriad laws that have been passed we find ourselves in the coils of the judicial system. Government employees appear to have no fear of this, hence Ms. Lerner’s obvious contempt for the members of congress that tried to ask her some questions. It is past time to bring back the concept that they work for us, not the other way around. It is past time to rein in the Ruling Class. The only way that is done is for punishment to be severe and public.

Rand Paul's Message To Evangelicals: "There is a war on Christianity"

I'm starting to warm to Rand Paul more and more.

Senator Rand Paul, who is seriously considering running for President of the United States, told a conservative Christian audience today that, "There is a war on Christianity" being waged by "liberal elites' and "worldwide as well.

Part of his speech (read the whole thing).

There is a war on Christianity, not just from liberal elites here at home, but worldwide.

And your government, or more correctly, you, the taxpayer, are funding it.

You are being taxed to send money to countries that are not only intolerant of Christians but openly hostile. Christians are imprisoned and threatened with death for their beliefs.

In Pakistan, Asia Bibi, a Christian, sits on death row. Her crime, according to her, is that she dared to drink from a glass that belonged to a Muslim co-worker.

According to her co-workers, she insulted the Prophet. In our country, we refer to such quibbling as gossip. In Pakistan, if you are a Christian, it can land you on death row.

Recently, in Pakistan, a 12-year-old with Downs syndrome was imprisoned and charged with a death penalty crime for burning the Koran.

After weeks she was released after a local Imam was accused of actually sprinkling pages from an Arabic book into a fire near the little girl.

Criticize Obama and Josh Marshall calls you are racist, even if you are the Washington Post

Wapo has story on the immense costs of taking black presidents on trips to Africa

A foreign war is always a good way for diverting attention from domestic problems.

 

Is Scandalpalooza getting a little too much for Barack Obama? Running around the country raising money and playing small-ball not changing the focus enough?  Obama has decided to use the ace-in-the-hole that he’s been holding back for just the right time.  The tried and true play of the ruler in trouble:  when things in the capital get too hot, get the involved in another foreign war. His spy agency has suddenly told him, at just this very minute, that Bashar al-Assad, the dictator of Syria has used chemical weapons. Or perhaps he found out about it by reading about it in the newspapers.  So to war we will go, and antediluvian dinosaurs like McCain will be egging him on.

It is not possible to be too cynical about this regime.   And it's not possible to exaggerate the stupidity of Republicans.

If Sarah Palin Had Become President

Remember the 2008 election? Democrats in and out of the media told us that McCain was old and it was possible that he could die in office, leaving Sarah Palin as president. The horror!
 

Well imagine that McCain had not self-destructed, become president and died, leaving Palin as president.

Beginning on day one: 

• Palin would not have dismissed the Black Panther intimidation lawsuit that the government had already won.
• Palin would not have seized two auto companies and give them to her cronies in and out of the UAW.
• Palin and her supporters would not be claiming that her opponents were racists for disagreeing with her policies.
• Palin would not have tried to block Boeing from building a factory in South Carolina as a gift to her union buddies in Washington state.
• Palin would not have toured the world apologizing for America.
• Palin's Homeland Security Department would not have classified patriots as security threats.
• Palin would have expanded oil and gas exploration on federal lands instead of reducing it, make the US even less dependent on foreign oil.
• Palin would not have allowed the Pigford suit to be settled that gives billions of dollars to “farmers” that never farmed.
• Palin would not have shipped thousands of guns to Mexican drug cartels so that they could be found next to the bodies of murdered Mexicans and American agents.
• Palin would not have encouraged the IRS to harass Tea Party groups.
• Palin would not have encouraged the IRS to illegally reveal the names of contributors to conservative groups to Liberal organizations so that contributors could be harassed.
• Palin’s IRS would not ask groups seeking 501(c)4 status about their prayer life.
• Palin would not have passed a national health care bill that is a 2000 page “train wreck” and that threatens to destroy America’s health care system.
• Palin would have focused on reducing unemployment as it skyrocketed instead of wasting a trillion dollars on green boondoggles..
• Palin would have known that in today’s regulatory state there is not such thing as a “shovel ready jobs” program.
• Palin would not have spent a trillion dollars to prop up state and local government employees when private sector employees were losing millions of jobs.
• Palin would not have handed out “Palin phones” to welfare recipients.
• Palin would not have attacked Libya, without congressional approval, turning it into a rogue state.
• Palin would not have allowed her ambassador to Libya to be slaughtered, along with three US service members, and told would-be rescuers to stand down.
• Palin would not have blamed a demonstration that did not occur caused by a video that no one saw for the attack by terrorist in Benghazi.
• Palin’s UN ambassador would not have gone on national TV to lie about the terrorist attacks in Benghazi because she would not have broken Libya in the first place.
• Palin would not have been stupid enough - or naive enough - to support the Islamist take-over of the Egyptian government.
• Palin would have given encouragement to demonstrators in Iran when they went to the streets to protest a fraudulent election.
• Palin would not be giving the Islamist regime in Egypt billions of dollars to keep it in power.
• Palin would not have told Putin to wait till after she was re-elected because then she would have more flexibility.
• Palin’s appointed officials would not be lying to congress and the American people when they are not invoking the Fifth Amendment against incrimination.
• Palin would not be sending Secret Service agent to her critics' homes demanding to do a search, go through his medical records, his computer, his cell phone and pretty much anything else, and then threaten to come back and confiscate his guns if he "stepped over the line."
• Finally, Palin would have taken responsibility for the things that happened while she was President instead of telling us that she only read about it in this morning’s newspaper.

St. Louis police commander survives ambush on special patrol

When the bad guys begin setting up ambushes for police officers, what makes St. Louis different from any city in the Middle East?  I think we have more than the usual criminal problem.  Crooks should be afraid of the police rather than the other way around.  This is not a crime problem, it's a culture problem.  Think "war zone."

Spiess, 52, was alone, in uniform, driving an unmarked Chevrolet Impala about 9:22 p.m. when he spotted a suspicious-looking black Pontiac Bonneville with temporary license tags on Evans Avenue, heading west near Vandeventer Avenue.

He said he made a U-turn to follow, and the Pontiac’s driver would not stop for his lights and siren. The circumstances did not qualify under rules limiting pursuits, so he gave up at Evans and Sarah Street.

As Spiess continued along Evans, a man jogged slowly toward him and stopped between parked cars about 12 feet away.

“He looks me dead in the eye, lifts his pistol and starts shooting at me,” Spiess said Wednesday. “The first round sounded like a shotgun went off in my car. Then I heard a high-pitched whine go through the (open) driver’s side window and out the passenger window.

“He looked at me square in the face, I’m in an Impala, wearing a police shirt, and he was looking me right in the eye. He knew who he was shooting at. He absolutely knew I was a policeman.”

Spiess said that as he sped off, he watched in the mirror as the gunman stepped to the middle of the street and continued firing.

Note that in the entire article the race of the individuals is not named.  In the MSM that's a dead give-away.

ANN COULTER: IF THE GOP IS THIS STUPID, IT DESERVES TO DIE

On amnesty for illegal immigrants.

Democrats terrify Hispanics into thinking they'll be lynched if they vote for Republicans, and then turn around and taunt Republicans for not winning a majority of the Hispanic vote.

This line of attack has real resonance with our stupidest Republicans. (Proposed Republican primary targets: Sens. Kelly Ayotte, Jeff Flake, Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio.) Which explains why Republicans are devoting all their energy to slightly increasing their share of the Hispanic vote while alienating everyone else in America.

It must be fun for liberals to manipulate Republicans into focusing on hopeless causes. Why don't Democrats waste their time trying to win the votes of gun owners?

As journalist Steve Sailer recently pointed out, the Hispanic vote terrifying Republicans isn't that big. It actually declined in 2012. The Census Bureau finally released the real voter turnout numbers from the last election, and the Hispanic vote came in at only 8.4 percent of the electorate -- not the 10 percent claimed by the pro-amnesty crowd.

The sleeping giant of the last election wasn't Hispanics; it was elderly black women, terrified of media claims that Republicans were trying to suppress the black vote and determined to keep the first African-American president in the White House.

READ THE WHOLE THING.

I often refer to John McCain “the old guy who ran with Sarah Palin” for good reason, he’s past his sell-by date. Honor McCain for his courage as a POW, put up a statue to his somewhere, but get him out of the political spotlight and into a retirement home because when he talks (and the media loves to get him talking) he makes my hair hurt.

He says that Republicans should support amnesty even if it doesn’t get the GOP one more vote because it gets them in the game and allows them to compete for the Hispanic vote. For one counterpoint read Ann Coulter. For another, let’s review the Republican experience with the Black vote. More Republicans voted for the Civil Rights bill than did Democrats. Yet every time this fact is raised nobody cares. Black voters are an electoral monolith, a reliable Democrat vote. Even when Republicans run a Black candidate against a white Democrat, the white Democrat gets the majority of the Black vote.

Facts don’t matter nearly as much as demagoguery. Democrats accuse the Republicans of wanting to put black people in chains, re-introduce slavery and kill their first-born and have more credibility with Black voters than some poor white schlub running on the Republican ticket proclaiming he’s for Civil Rights for all and voted for Civil Rights all his life. The answer from Black voters is to pull the lever next to the “D” on Election Day.

There is an answer to this issue, but it’s not the McCain answer. Please, Arizona voters, send McCain off to “spend more time with his family.”

Dorothy Rabinowitz goes off the rails.

Dorothy Rabinowitz on A Song of Victims

For the school of believers certain that an all-powerful American government regularly plots to invade their lives and subvert their freedom, these are heady days—or so they seemed. News of data mining looked to be irresistible proof of that faith—their darkest vision of an America at the mercy of a government secretly gathering all sorts of personal information and subverting the Constitution. And there was Edward Snowden, the latest addition to the pantheon of anti-government leakers, releasing a tonnage of classified data about the NSA surveillance programs.

.

For this he was, not unexpectedly, acclaimed as a hero both in the precincts of the Progressive Left and its anti-terror war warriors, and some quarters of the Libertarian Right—two groups, it has long been obvious, with much in common.

Trouble is, this latest face of self-sacrifice for a higher cause (Snowden has let it be known he considers his life as a free man pretty much over now) hasn't been greeted with anything remotely like admiration among Americans, other than sympathizers in the aforementioned groups. From all indications, he's an object of general contempt well deserving of prosecution—another in the line of socially deranged seekers who found the self-definition they long for in their obsessed vision of their government as the central source of evil in the world. It didn't help that Mr. Snowden's explanation for what he did came brimming odiously with virtue—he had, he said, decided to leak material because he thought Americans should be informed so that they could debate the questions he raised.

I’m sorry Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote this because it damages her valuable reputation. She uses the straw men that Obama regularly creates, creating a “school of believers” who believe that the American government “plots to invade their lives and subvert their freedom,” that view “…their government as the central source of evil in the world.” She may be spending too much time with the Progressives who told us that the Bush-Cheney cabal was doing exactly that. She may agree with Barack Obama that the constitution is fatally flawed because the Bill of Rights tells the government what it can’t do rather than telling the government what it must do .

 

Meanwhile in the rest of the country, we’re being hit with stories about the IRS targeting Tea Party and patriot groups for “special treatment.” For “accidentally” sending out lists of contributors to conservative and pro-family groups to Leftist organizations so that their contributors can be harassed. At the EPA, we have its head using a fake e-mail account and her underlings making conservatives pay a fortune for FOIAs to be granted while waiving fees for liberal groups. We have seen the government and the press (but I repeat myself) blame Benghazi on a demonstration that did not occur in reaction to a video that no one ever saw. We’re now treated to the interesting statistic that the lawyers in government supported Obama over Romney overwhelmingly, from 68% at the Department of Defense to 100% at the Department of Education. The Ruling Class is telling us to trust the government while the Country Class believes that they may not be paranoid enough.

 

But back to Dorothy, whose work I have previously admired. She indulges in ad hominem attacks on the leaker who may or may not be an honorable man, but whose revelations should be the cause of a national debate on just how much information we want the government to have on us. There is the little matter of the Fourth Amendment which states: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

 

We should have a sober discussion about whether creating a data base of all my phone calls and my internet comments violate this protection of my “person, houses, papers and effects.” And to dismiss this concern as foolish is beneath her. To suggest, as Dorothy does, that spying on Americans is the way to keep us from dying at the hands of terrorists is also beneath her.

The Real Threat to British Elites

Via Taki's Magazine

Recent incidents of Muslims behaving badly—such as the butchering of British soldier Lee Rigby by two Islamic-convert African immigrants, the riots in Stockholm, and the never-ending revelations about numerous Pakistani pimps “grooming” very young white English girls for being gang-banged by their relatives—has European elites terrified…of European commoners.

Please share this article by using the link below. When you cut and paste an article, Taki's Magazine misses out on traffic, and our writers don't get paid for their work. Email editors@takimag.com to buy additional rights.

Interesting article about Muslim male-chauvinist men in England grooming very young girls into having sex and then gang-banging them.

What makes the European eleites nervous?  Not the gang-rape of low class girls (after all, their children are protected).  It’s European men—with their talent for self-organization—who frighten Europe’s ruling class.

FOUR, Count Them, Four Separate EPA Scandals

1) The EPA gave an ethics award to fake employee, “Richard Windsor,” who was already just an unethically created e-mail alias for the agency’s former head, Lisa P. Jackson.

2) The EPA makes conservatives pay a fortune for FOIAs to be granted while waiving fees for liberal groups.

3) EPA contractors are basically Gym, Tan, Laundrying in new, swanky rec rooms thanks to your tax money.

4) The EPA leaked confidential information on farmers and cattle facilities to environmental groups. No bigs.

We can trust our phone and Internet records to this government.  Suuure we can.

EPA 'Mistakenly' Gives Names of Farmers to Radical Groups

According to the report, the information on livestock and produce farmers was sought through a Freedom of Information Act request by the groups Earth Justice, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Pew Charitable Trust. They were given information on roughly 80,000 farmers and ranchers, though the EPA later said it made a mistake by releasing the information.

So the EPA sent them the names, addresses, phone numbers and other private personal information so that they could be harassed more effectively.

‘Pro-Gun’ Ricin mailer turns out to be Hollywood anti-gunner

Shocker! 

The letters came in the mail, and they bore a chilling message:

You will have to kill me and my family before you get my guns. Anyone wants to come to my house will get shot in the face. The right to bear arms is my constitutional right and I will excersice [sic] that right til the day I die. whats in the letter is nothing compared to what ive got planned for you.

The first one was addressed to Michael Bloomberg, the most visible face of the anti-gun movement, but it was intercepted at a postal facility that screens mail for New York celebrities. (No one will ever poison one of them, just an expendable postal worker, the new Ruling Class equivalent of Cleopatra’s food taster). Within a few days an identical letter with an identical date and postmark came to Mark Glaze, the guy who does the day-to-day gruntwork of trying to disarm America for his boss, Michael Bloomberg, at his lobbying firm The Raben Group, 1640 Rhode Island Avenue NW, Washington DC. Glaze was not covered by postal special treatment at the time, but the envelope was opened, as all mail to Washington lobbyists is, by an expendable intern.

Those few individuals who seriously study criminal communications, like these letters, can often utter an opinion with some degree of confidence about whether the letter is written by an actual idiot, or by an intelligent and educated person impersonating an idiot. These letters do show deliberate misspellings and usage “errors” of the type used in such an impersonation.

A third letter with slightly variant text, and with a curious absence of spaces after most periods, but with the same Louisiana postmark was sent to the President. It read (bold text is added variation from the Bloomberg/Glaze letters, strikethrough is material deleted that was in those letters):

You will have to kill me and my family before you get my guns.Anyone wants to come to my house will get shot in the face.I served in the united states army and because your muslim ass will probly never be able to retire.I will have to work until my last breath.I deserve better and so do my wife and kiddos.I will take care of this myself and make sure you wont be runnin this country in the ground any further.The right to bear arms is my constitutional right and I will excersice [sic] that right til the day I die. What’s in the letter is nothing compared to what ive got plannedin store for you mr president.

All three letters tested positive for ricin, using a somewhat insensitive field test. No one was exposed to lethal levels of the toxin (lethal levels being extremely small), fortunately. But the publicity over the letters wasn’t what the putative sender might have expected. Glaze, Bloomberg, and Obama, and their partisans and the media (but we repeat ourselves!) received the news with something approximating delight. The letters were proof that gun owners were murderous, insurrectionist sickos, fully deserving the IRS audits and whatever other miseries federal authorities could bring down on them. Editorials and “news analyses” (i.e., the New York Times equivalent of the front-page editorial formerly favored by Pravda pre-1992) piled imprecations on the presumed facilitator and enabler of this act of terrorism: the NRA, naturally.

Meanwhile, the actual investigation took another turn.

Postal inspectors have access to some of the coolest new tools in the Patriot Act toolbox. Every piece of mail is imaged, databased, and stored forever (just like the source, destination, duration, and location of every phone call, apparently). The Bloomberg and Obama letters were quickly tracked through a Shreveport postal center, back to a bunch of mail that came in through New Boston and Texarkana, Texas.

She was sure she could outwit the FBI.

At this time, a providential break in the case occurred: a New Boston woman named Shannon Richardson walked in to the FBI in Shreveport, LA, and fingered her husband, Nathaniel, as the mailer. Nathaniel was dangerous. He had lots of guns. He didn’t like the President. He was a combat wounded veteran, and he was employed in the defense industrial base (these are all things the FBI has been directed to consider warning signs). The FBI swarmed him at work.

To their shock and surprise, Nathaniel Richardson was cooperative. He said his marriage was on the rocks, and said anything Shannon told them was probably bullshit. Apparently one of the many stressors in their failed marriage was their disparate attitude towards guns. He consented to a search of his vehicle.

The search found a dozen castor beans in the trunk of his silver Maxima. Castor beans are the essential source of ricin. Still, they didn’t take him into custody. They did tell him not to leave town.

Meanwhile, other agents conducted a limited consent search of the Richardson home, finding and taking with Shannon’s consent numerous electronic gadgets that let them establish that Nathaniel’s computer had indeed been used to order castor beans and items for preparing ricin (lye and syringes). Shannon’s cell phone, which she also permitted them to examine, had nothing suspicious on it.

At this point, the FBI had a pretty good suspicion that the ricin letters originated at the Richardson home, but they had no real proof either spouse was guilty — each fingered the other, and the physical and computer forensics didn’t close the suspicion gap on either one.

This was the pinnacle of Shannon’s acting career. She wasn’t acting.

They chose to reinterview Shannon, and they fluttered her. The polygraph examiner indicated that she was deceptive when denying knowledge of the castor beans or ricin. At this point she changed her story. Now she said she had known that Nathaniel sent the letters, so, wanting him to be apprehended, she took steps to make sure he was caught by spreading some of his castor beans around. (“Modified limited hangout” perhaps?)

Both Richardsons consented to a thorough search of their home, and this time the FBI hit pay dirt: while on their first visit, they’d taken only electronics, this time they found castor beans, syringes with suspicious fluid, and various samples that tested positive for ricin. (Interestingly, the documents released so far do not indicate that the agents found or seized firearms).

Meanwhile, the forensic examination of the Richardsons’ computers bore further fruit. Three files were generated on Shannon’s computer, but printed on Nathaniel’s. They were:

•obama.docx — three mailing labels: to Bloomberg, Obama and Glaze.

•Muslimbastard.docx — the letter to President Obama, quoted above.

•guns.docx — various other quasi-literate letters that served to incriminate Nathaniel.

The printing, the mailing, the ordering of the castor beans and the data searches were all timestamped in the systems of the computers. At each of these times, Nathaniel had the perfect alibi: he was clocked in at work at Red River Army Depot, where his co-workers confirmed that he had been there, and where he had no computer access whatsoever.

SCAR. Check. Swimsuit. Check. Bat Guano Crazy Chick. Double check!

Shannon Richardson, meanwhile, had emerged as an interesting character. She was pregnant with a child, presumably sired by Nathaniel, but had five other children and several other failed marriages behind her. She was an aging actress (she uses the name Shannon Guess for film work; IMDB says she’s 35 but she looks older) who has struggled to find work in the youth-obsessed industry. Her best-known recent turn was as a zombie in a TV show, not exactly a thespian career milestone. And — oh yeah. She was a bitter opponent of gun rights.

It was time for the FBI to talk to Shannon Richardson again, and on D-Day, June 6th, they interviewed her on neutral ground, in a Mt Pleasant, Texas, hotel. Shown some of the evidence, she made a further confession, if still only a partial one: yes, she’d received the ricin ingredients, yes, she’d printed the mailing labels, and yes, she’d mailed the letters.

And, oh yeah, she had known the letters had ricin in them.

But it was all Nathaniel’s fault! He’d forced her, you see. That was her third, and latest story, and it incriminated her even as she insisted she was an innocent victim all along.

That was enough for the FBI. The next morning, June 7th, SA James Spiropoulos was in front of US Magistrate Judge Caroline Craven, with an affidavit setting out most of the above, and asking for an arrest warrant. Judge Craven signed. The only charge in the arrest affidavit was 18 USC 876(c), a general prohibition on sending threats of kidnapping or injury through the mails. Expect further charges.

Frankly, we could have told the Richardsons long ago that they were not a match: Nathaniel is a MacBook Pro user, and Shannon is PC. Not that she’ll be online for a while.

Meanwhile, when you don’t see retractions or apologies from Bloomberg, Glaze, Obama and about two hundred editorial pages, don’t be shocked. Indeed, expect the media to keep referring to this crime as one committed by pro-gunners, and inspired by the NRA.

And remember that Bloomberg, Glaze, Obama and the media were all excited about the prospect of prison for a man who now appears to be innocent.

Hero or Anti-Hero

Central Standard Times also wonders about the NSA leaker.

The man who exposed the National Security Agency’s top-secret surveillance programs has mysteriously disappeared from the Hong Kong hotel room where he had recently taken refuge, and a massive world-wide manhunt is now underway. We’re not talking about the American law enforcement officials who hope to arrest him on various espionage charges, although they’re probably on the job as well, but rather about the army of Hollywood agents eager to secure the rights to his story.

The saga of Edward Snowden would make for an interesting movie, and we’d happily pay the price of admission if only for the suspense of finding out if he is portrayed as a hero or a villain.

Hollywood could have a problem with him because, after all, he leaked The Lightworker's secrets.

Marco Rubio: In immigration reform, legalization comes first

In a Spanish-language interview Sunday with the network Univision, Sen. Marco Rubio, the leading Republican on the Gang of Eight comprehensive immigration reform group, made his strongest statement yet that legalization of the nation’s estimated 11 million illegal immigrants must happen before any new border security or internal enforcement measures are in place, and will in no way be conditional on any security requirements.

“Let’s be clear,” Rubio said. “Nobody is talking about preventing the legalization. The legalization is going to happen. That means the following will happen: First comes the legalization. Then come the measures to secure the border. And then comes the process of permanent residence.”

It's good to know where he stands. He doesn't have to lie any more.  Good thing the House will kill this bill.

Democrats love surveillance, as long as it's Obama, not Bush...

Spying is OK as long as your guy is doing the spying.

Politicians Not Worthy of Trust

All ruling classes always maintain that what they are doing is for the common good.  They lie.  I recently posted a series of posts here, here and here to illustrate how rapidly our assumptions about the benevolence of government have crumbled. 

It really does matter who is in charge of the awesome power the government has, and the Obama administration has demonstrated what happens when bad people rule.  Washington has not just become the capital of Hunger Games, but the seat of corruption so vast that people are finally beginning to rebel.

Glenn Reynolds was one of the first to sound the alarm.  Obama's power grab

The NSA spying scandal goes deep, and the Obama administration's only upside is that the furor over its poking into Americans' private business on a wholesale basis will distract people from the furor over the use of the IRS and other federal agencies to target political enemies -- and even donors to Republican causes -- and the furor over the Benghazi screwup and subsequent lies (scapegoated filmmaker Nakoula is still in jail), the furor over the "Fast And Furious" gunrunning scandal that left literally scores of Mexicans dead, the scandal over the DOJ's poking into phone records of journalists (and their parents), HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius' shakedown of companies she regulates for "donations" to pay for ObamaCare implementation that Congress has refused to fund, the Pigford scandal where the Treasury Department's "Judgment Fund" appears to have been raided for political purposes -- well, it's getting to where you need a scorecard to keep up.

But, in fact, there's a common theme in all of these scandals: Abuse of power. And, what's more, that abuse-of-power theme is what makes the NSA snooping story bigger than it otherwise would be. It all comes down to trust.

The justification for giving the government a lot of snooping power hangs on two key arguments: That snooping will make us safer and that the snooping power won't be abused.

It didn't stop the Boston bombings, Major Nassan or Benghazi, although all of these event were preceded by the use of electronic communication.

Most Americans generally think that politicians are untrustworthy. So why trust them with so much power? The evidence to date strongly suggests that they aren't worthy of it.

I agree.

The Ruling Class vs. the Country Class

The gap between the rulers and the ruled widens precipitously.

As far as the American people are concerned, this domestic spying is a big deal. Yet revealingly, to the political class--that is, our leaders in Washington DC--it’s not such a big deal. And there we see the central cleft in our politics today: the widening gap between the government and the governed.

According to pollster Scott Rasmussen, the American people oppose the US government’s secret collection of phone records by a whopping 59:26 margin.

Listening to Special Report tonight was eye-opening. All three commentators expressed support for the NSA spying program. They defended it because we are supposed to believe that if it’s approved and rendered kosher by government officials, members of congress and judges, the American people should just accept that what the government is doing is fine. I’m frankly shocked by how out of touch these people are. Is there some kind of invisible shield around Washington DC and New York that keeps them from seeing that the “country class” no longer believes the soothing reassurance of government officials … including judges?   If the scandals of the last few weeks mean anything, it's that reassurance from people in government no longer has credibility.  I voted for Reagan, Bush, Palin (and the old guy she ran with) and Romney but right now I find the rush to defend the NSA by the ruling class of both parties frankly scary.  And demeaning.  The officials are telling us they have everything under control; "top men" are working on it.  Do the people who make these comments even realize they are using the punch line from an Indiana Jones movie?

“I work for you”.

The accumulation of just too many lies.

The government’s ultimate defense is to say “I work for you”. But that only works when people believe it. Unfortunately too many now believe the country works for Obama....
Snowden said what many were already prepared to believe — even Obama’s liberal supporters — that the administration is a lying, corrupt, power-mad collection of unscrupulous men. Like a jilted woman, people didn’t believe Snowden because they knew him; they believed in Snowden because they knew Obama. The sense of betrayal may have even been more acute on the Left. In Snowden’s words: “I believed in Obama’s promises”. And how many of those said to themselves, ‘so did I and chose poorly.’

Your IRS at work

“Keep Your Faith to Yourself”

Brainwashing the troops

The new, politically correct, military.

From Just One Minute:

Programming our troops overseas get as their choices when they listen to AM Radio broadcasts overseas:

AFN Powernet Schedule:

Here for instance is Tuesday thru Friday:

(Tuesday thru Friday)

0000 NPR Market Place

0030 NPR All Things Considered

0400 ESPN Game Night (Monday)

0400 ESPN Sports Center Tonight (Tuesday – Friday)

0600 AFN Morning NewsWatch

0900 NPR From the Top (Monday)

0900 NPR Talk of the Nation (Tuesday-Friday)

1000 NPR On the Media (Monday)

1000 NPR Fresh Air (Tuesday-Friday)

1000 AFN OpenLine (as scheduled covering NPR)

1100 NPR All Things Considered

1300 ESPN Mike & Mike in the Morning

1600 AFN Afternoon NewsWatch

1800 AP News

1802 AFN NewsWatch Update

1805 Yahoo Sports

1806 Rush Limbaugh (Conservative)

1900 AP News (2 Minutes)

1902 AFN NewsWatch Update

1905 Yahoo Sports

1906 Doug Stephan (Call-in interviews – Variety)

2000 Jim Rome (Sports Talk}

2100 AP News (2 Minutes)

2102 AFN NewsWatch Update

2105 Yahoo Sports

2106 Ed Schulz (Liberal)

2200 NPR All Things Considered

Stop calling Obama an Academic

OK, I’ll grant you that the image of academics today is piss poor; Marxist fanatics indoctrinating minds full of mush with gender-bending theories of history leading violent attacks on anyone to the Right of Pol Pot. But for God’s sake, Obama spent a forgettable couple of years as a teacher at a Chicago college. Nobody noticed and nobody cared. His books were written by Bill Ayers, his class notes were probably cribbed from Frank Marshall Davis’ old articles. The real Obama left no tracks, which is one of the reasons he managed to convince race obsessed Liberals that it was safe to elect him to take away their guilt.

Calling Obama an academic is the way that Liberals convince themselves that their stupidity was really a stroke of genius.  He's their Chaucey Gardiner and they are sticking with him.

60 percent of Richmond families are single parent

Well, it could be worse. 

And sure enough,

Within the African-American demographic, that number spikes up to 86 percent, a number that surpasses the national average.

Happy Father's Day.

Victor Davis Hansen" The Man Who Never Was"

Is there anything that Obama has won that his record shows he deserved? It seems as if he rose through the ranks without demonstrating any achievements.

The saga of Obama is marked by the uncanny ability to soar through the academic and government cursus honorum without ever being held too accountable for what followed. Obama’s selection as editor of the Harvard Law Review broke new ground. But to this day, no one cares much that his record was mediocre with no scholarly work to show for his tenure.

For that matter, ditto also his law career at the University of Chicago: an impressive appointment, but no scholarly book as promised, not even an article, and no distinguished record of teaching. Not much of anything. The point of the Nobel Prize was winning it — not doing anything that might have earned it. Just as there was no foreign policy achievement that preceded the prize, so there was naturally none following it. Why expect anything different now?

Getting a Nobel Prize on the come?  What does that say about Obama.  What does it say about the Nobel committee?

Obama brilliantly threaded the multicultural, Ivy-League, prep-school, affirmative action, just like us-sorta, yuppie needle. I’ll let you decide whether wealthy liberals practice such racialist paternalism because of feelings of guilt, because of their intrinsic dislike of the NASCAR/Sarah Palin working and middle classes, or as a sort of medieval exemption — the huge “Obama for President” sign on the lawn of the Palo Alto professor means never having to put your kids in schools where some are bused in from East Palo Alto. But what is absolutely non-controversial is that Obama’s prior record as a university undergraduate, a Harvard Law Review editor, a Chicago law lecturer, an Illinois legislator, and a U.S. senator was as undistinguished as his efforts to obtain those posts were absolutely dazzling.

And Hansen recognizes the Limbaugh Theorem, without mentioning it.

The result of the serial dishonesty is that Obama almost immediately reverted to his natural campaign mode, the soaring rhetoric and non-traditional persona that won him everything on the guarantee that there would be no audit, no assessment, no final appraisal. In other words, Obama never really became president of the United States. He simply kept running for the office against “them” even when he is now “them” holding the highest office. So Pavlovian was his campaign mode that he never quite stopped to wonder why he was running against himself — now damning the very abuses of power that he committed, upset only that someone might be disturbed about a record in a manner that they never were at Harvard, in the Senate, or during his first term.

Even Hitler could have used the Obama excuse.

"I don't blame people for being outraged. I'm outraged too. I learned about this holocaust from the news reports, just like the rest of you."

Ron Fournier struggles to wake, but he's still in a fog.

He really thought that Obama and "Good Government" could be used in the same sentence without sarcasm.

How Obama Scandals Threaten to Kill 'Good Government'

At least he is not calling the Tea Party racist any more.  That's a beginning.

Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations

The 29-year-old source behind the biggest intelligence leak in the NSA's history explains his motives, his uncertain future and why he never intended on hiding in the shadows

Go HERE for video.

The NSA Whistleblower

VIDEO: The 29-year-old source behind biggest intelligence leak in NSA history explains his motives...
'I do not expect to see home again'...
'I don't want to live in a society that does these sort of things'...
'I believed in Obama's promises'...
'Presidents openly lie to secure the office'...
'Government has granted itself power it is not entitled to'...
Suggests he's defecting -- to China?


<! MAIN HEADLINE>
HE COMES FORWARD!

Public Peace, Secret War: The Snooping Scandals and The President’s War Strategy

 

Via Meadia

President Obama’s core war strategy depends on massive intelligence capabilities that were undreamed of twenty years ago. It depends on the substitution of drones for troops. PRISM and similar programs aren’t a ghastly misstep or an avoidable accident. They are the essence of Obama’s grand strategy: public peace and secret war. To cool down the public face of the war, he must intensify the secret struggle.

Here’s the big problem: to the degree that the strategy works, and the public begins to feel safe and the war atmosphere fades, the intelligence work and the drone strikes that the strategy requires look less and less justifiable. After all, the President’s message is that the threat is under control and the terrorists are on the run. Why then is the NSA tapping every phone and reading every email in the country?

As the gap grows between the public peace and the secret war, leaks about the war become more likely and more damaging. Those who service the secret war begin to wonder if what they are doing is right; they wonder if somebody shouldn’t blow the whistle on what begins to look like a massive deception of the public. And the more the administration has been putting out the ‘peace in our time’ vibe to the media, the more explosive is the news that in secret it is ramping up some of the most controversial aspects of W’s war policy to levels Dick Cheney could only dream about.

Obama’s strategy can only work if the American people are as stupid as he thinks they are. He’s aided in this by the “guilty white Liberal” syndrome that infects and dominates the MSM, academia and the media. These people may not be that stupid but they are incapable of overcoming their prejudice and will either look the other way or seek to cover for him.

Conducting secret wars in faraway places with strange sounding names is hard enough, to do it at home by entering everyone’s home, everyone’s secrets, is impossible. The chickens are coming home to roost.

Illinois now has the lowest credit rating of any state in the country even without the S&P downgrade, and the worst rating in its history.

Don't worry, there are lots of ratings below A-, and Illinois will hit all of them on the way to D.

Via Meadia

The Illinois pension saga just keeps getting worse. In response to the state legislature’s failure to pass a pension reform bill before adjourning, Fitch downgraded Illinois’s bonds from A to A- earlier this week. On Thursday Moody’s joined the party, lowering the state’s rating from A2 to A3. S&P is now the only agency not to have downgraded the state, but it is issuing its own dire warnings. As Reuters notes, Illinois now has the lowest credit rating of any state in the country even without the S&P downgrade, and the worst rating in its history.

What it’s like to try and buy cigarettes in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s New York City

Chris Christie meet Barack Obama on eHarmony.com

Neil Cavuto Rips Guest for Obama Spy Scandal Defense

“I’m not going to get anywhere arguing this point,” Cavuto said. “You are saying nothing, and it’s offensive. It’s annoying how obnoxious you can be on the reality. I’m not going to play this game with you, Julian! You play the same damn game…”

Rand Paul Wants Class-Action Lawsuit on Government Snooping

Rand Paul says a lot of  things that make sense.

With the government looking at a billion telephone calls every day, Sen. Rand Paul wants Americans to join a class-action lawsuit to take the issue to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Appearing on Fox News Sunday, the Kentucky Republican said he wants all Internet providers and phone companies to ask their customers to join his suit.

President Barack Obama called the computer searches of metadata a necessary compromise of privacy to ensure security.

"That doesn't sound like a 'modest invasion of privacy,'" Paul said. "It sounds like an extraordinary invasion of privacy."

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says that a specific warrant can be asked for to obtain such record, Paul said, but the mining of metadata of all phone calls and Internet activity is a general warrant.

"This is what we objected to, and what our Founding Fathers partly fought the Revolution over," Paul said. The founders, he said, didn't want generalized warrants where soldiers could go house-to-house looking for things. Today, that is being done computer-to-computer, phone-to-phone without specifying who is being targeted, he said.

Paul said he has no issue with the government getting a warrant when they have probable cause to suspect terrorism.

"Get a warrant," he said. "Go after a terrorist or a murderer or a rapist. But don't troll through a billion phone records every day. That is unconstitutional; it invades our privacy."

The Limbaugh Theorem and White Guilt

D.C. McAllister at Ricochet

The Limbaugh Theorem is Rush’s explanation of why, according to the polls, most Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction but don’t hold President Obama accountable for it. Even in the midst of scandals, his job approval rating remains relatively high.

The theorem explains that people don’t associate Obama with the bad state of affairs because he’s always campaigning, fundraising, deflecting blame, feigning indignation, and talking about events in the Capitol as if he’s an outsider and not the man in charge. As a result, nothing sticks to him.

During his recent speech about terrorism at the National Defense University in Washington, Obama amazingly set himself in opposition to his own administration. He talked about a “perpetual war” that will prove to be “self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways,” as if he doesn’t have any control over the situation. He spoke about Guantanamo Bay, where “we are force-feeding detainees who are being held on a hunger strike.” But the “we” he mentioned doesn’t include himself. If he wanted to stop the force-feeding, he could do it with a simple phone call.

Rush is right. These factors certainly shed light on why people can approve of Obama’s job performance while at the same time believing the country is in decline. But not fully. Not everyone is a low-information voter, not everyone buys the campaign rhetoric, and many people will freely admit that Obama is deceptively positioning himself as if he’s above it all. Yet they still won’t hold him accountable.

There is an intransigent refusal on the part of most Americans to call Obama a failure, and the explanations given are not sufficient to explain this phenomenon. The Limbaugh Theorem is not complete. There’s another factor that needs to be added—a very powerful one, one more significant than Obama’s constant campaign strategy and the gullibility of the low-information voter.

It seems to me that the root cause of Americans not holding Obama responsible is the very same thing that got him elected: white guilt, something recognized not only by Rush after the 2008 election, but by writers and pundits from George Will to Ann Coulter.

If it is true that the primary causal factor in the Limbaugh Theorem is white guilt, then trying to pin anything on Obama by continually countering his campaign rhetoric or even trying to convince uninformed citizens that Obama, as the CEO and Commander-in-Chief, must be responsible for what goes on in Washington is useless. People, from low-information voters to high, just aren’t ready to abandon their guilt. They cling to it as a means of redemption, their perceptions informed by it, the truth shaded by it.

 

It’s time to accept the fact that when it comes to Obama, we won’t make a dent in America’s unwillingness or downright inability to accuse him of failure. Obama will never be held responsible because whites are lost in what Steele called “a void of vulnerability.”

Voters bound by white guilt have unwittingly forsaken any “moral authority” by which to judge Obama. He holds all the cards and carries all the power, not just because he is a clever man who avoids questions while on the campaign trail, or because people are ignorant, or even because he is a quintessential liberal adored by statists everywhere, but because he is, first and foremost, a “victim” of historical racism.

She quotes Shelby Steele:

The most striking irony of the age of white guilt is that racism suddenly became valuable to the people who had suffered it. Racism, in the age of racism, had only brought every variety of inhuman treatment, which is why the King generation felt that extinguishing it would bring equality. But in the age of white guilt, racism was also evidence of white wrongdoing and, therefore, evidence of white obligation to blacks.

For guilty whites, having the country suffer under Barack Obama is the just reward for racism.  We owe it to him to suffer. 

The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. ... Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” ...

But “this is more than just a data center,” ...It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. ... “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

.And while there is little indication that [the NSAs] actual effectiveness has improved—after all, despite numerous pieces of evidence and intelligence-gathering opportunities, it missed the near-disastrous attempted attacks by the underwear bomber on a flight to Detroit in 2009 and by the car bomber in Times Square in 2010—there is no doubt that it has transformed itself into the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created.

In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.

The scope of surveillance expands from there, Binney says. Once a name is entered into the Narus database, all phone calls and other communications to and from that person are automatically routed to the NSA’s recorders. “Anybody you want, route to a recorder,” Binney says. “If your number’s in there? Routed and gets recorded.” He adds, “The Narus device allows you to take it all.” And when Bluffdale is completed, whatever is collected will be routed there for storage and B

Orwell's Big Brother was a piker compared to Obama's NSA.

Government is the New Race

MSNBC is to news channels as Ringling Bros' Clown College is to Harvard University. There's a certain distant resemblance. Everyone sits behind desks and reads from teleprompters. And that's where the resemblance ends.

While you might think that it would be impossible to run an entire cable news network around accusing people of racism, MSNBC has taken your bet and now expects you to buy it coffee for a month. It would be impossible for reasonable people to constantly talk about racism. But unreasonable people racialize everything.

On Wednesday, Martin Bashir declared that IRS was the new N word; which would mean that IRS is now the unpronounceable I word. "Three letters that sound so innocent, but we know what you mean," Bashir said. I don't know anyone who associates those particular three letters with innocence, except Obama's media defenders for whom a giant ruthless government agency is the innocent victim of a Republican hate crime....

Racism has become the mask that liberalism wears. And liberalism has become the mask that big government wears. Underneath the mask of the social justice crusader is a government bureaucrat with a photo of Martin Luther King on the wall.

The abstraction of political racism from real racism and social justice from the actual interests of the black community has gone so far that an administration that has presided over record black unemployment is always defended in racial terms.

Liberalism has not only become identified with racial politics, it has swallowed racial politics so completely that they no longer exist on a national level. National racial politics is just liberalism misspelled and when an MSNBC anchor equates IRS with a racial slur, it becomes rather clear that there is no longer any race in racism. Racism in politics has become so abstract that it no longer has anything to do with black people.

The latest administration boondoggle, illegal alien amnesty is expected to economically devastate the black community. If there was ever a policy that deserved to be criticized on racial grounds, it's the proposal to bring in huge numbers of unskilled workers at a time when 1 in 7 African-Americans are unemployed. But it won't be, because racism no longer refers to policies that disadvantage black people, but policies that limit the power and scope of big government.

If there's anything that ought to be equated with the N Word, it's not the IRS; it’s Amnesty. Amnesty is the code for the economic and political disenfranchisement of African-Americans across the country. But it's also a code word that can't be spoken. The IRS can be decoded to reveal the abstract inner racism of its critics, but a bill that would put millions of black people out of work is being passed off as the greatest civil rights achievement in a generation.

Obama: “This war, like all wars, must end,”

Richard Fernandez

The problem of declaring victory against an enemy who refuses to concede defeat is not new. The World War 2 generation solved the problem by continuing until the foe threw in the towel. Although President Obama may believe that victory consists in convincing one’s countrymen that “we won”, historically it consisted of convincing the enemy that he lost. In World War II for example, both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were defeated as a military fact by early 1944. But they were not convinced of the fact. The remainder of the war was spent knocking the idea into their consciousness.

But the allies did not declare peace in 1944. They went on and by mid-1945, Curtis LeMay’s bombers were incinerating one Japanese city a night; US battleships were shelling coastal towns, harbors everywhere were being mined and submarines kept ships from leaving or entering ports. Victory as an objective fact was not debatable. But to the Axis accepting defeat subjectively was unthinkable. One of the supreme ironies of World War II was that the Japanese high command needed the A-bomb more than the Americans. They needed it not to change any military fact, they were as defeated before the Bomb as after it, but in order to change a mental perception. The bomb provided the pretext to accept defeat.

But in the bad old, unenlightened days you convinced the enemy they lost. Today we’re smarter. We convince ourselves the whole misunderstanding should never have happened in the first place.

What is the administration’s pretext to accept victory? As near as can be seen, it consists in convincing ourselves that we never had an enemy to begin with. We just misunderstood things. There is no such thing as a Clash of Civilizations, nor rogue states, nor even a militant version of Islam. That’s all a conservative invention. There are just only misunderstood people who, if we got to know better, we would not drive to workplace violence.

Maybe that’s why the White House erroneously refers to its authority to bug domestic communications as deriving from the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act. Not the “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act”, which actually exists, but by some slip of the fat finger, the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act, which are the words which occur in the White House transcript.

Read the whole thing.

If the war is over, why are we bugging everyone in the country and who are we killing with those drones?

Pelsi Lies: Doesn’t Remember Saying ObamaCare Would Lower Everyone’s Premiums

“I don’t remember saying that everybody in the country would have a lower premium.”


But she did say it.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

"A Washington official was the driving force behind the targeting of Tea Party organizations"

So says an IRS employee in Cincinnati. 

Elizabeth Hofacre, the Cincinnati staffer, said that she started receiving applications from Tea Party groups to sift through in April, 2010. Hofacre’s handling of those cases, she said, was highly influenced by Carter Hull, an IRS lawyer in Washington.

Hofacre said that she integrated questions from Hull into her follow-ups with Tea Party groups, and that Hull had to approve the letters seeking more information that she sent out to those organizations. That process, she said, was both unusual and “demeaning.”

“One of the criteria is to work independently and do research and make decisions based on your experience and education,” Hofacre said, according to transcripts reviewed by The Hill. “Whereas in this case, I had no autonomy at all through the process.”

“I thought it was over the top,” she added, in interviews held by investigators in both parties from the House Oversight and Ways and Means committees. “I am not sure where it came from, but it was a bit unusual.”

The only people who have not figured this out are dead.

Report: Homeschooling Growing Seven Times Faster than Public School Enrollment

Well sure, your child will not get suspended for biting into a Pop Tart to make it look like a gun.  Putting your child in public school should be cosidered child abuse.

The IRS scandal week 4

What the press doesn’t think we should know it conveniently omits.

Glenn Reynolds:

SO I JUST WATCHED AN NYC LOCAL NEWS STORY (PIX 11 NEWS) ON THE SANTA MONICA SHOOTING, and they never mentioned the shooter’s name, which is John Zawahri. Instead they spent a lot of time talking about guns.

UPDATE: A reader emails: “I don’t know how significant the ‘Middle Eastern’ness of the last name really is. Most Arabs in America are Christian. The first names of the brothers ‘John’ and ‘Chris’ are not very Islamic.”

Yeah, but the point is what the press doesn’t think we should know.

This Won’t Turn Out Well: The IRS prepares to enforce Obamacare’s contraception mandate.

On August 1, the one-year “safe harbor” for religious charities objecting to provisions of Obamacare will end. Starting then, these nonprofit employers will be forced to violate their religious beliefs or pay large fines. In charge of collecting the fines will be our recently newsworthy friends at the Internal Revenue Service.

Republicans Focus Fire on IRS Involvement in Obamacare

After the Supreme Court’s decision labeling Obamacare’s mandate a tax, the IRS has become the crucial centerpiece of President Obama’s health care rollout. But with the IRS’ targeting of conservative non-profits, Republicans are calling into question the agency’s involvement in the application of Obamacare.

On May 23, Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) specifically targeted IRS involvement in Obamacare as a rationale for fighting the program:

And here’s another thing we shouldn’t be doing: handing over the administration of Obamacare to these folks. I mean, think about it. A deeply unpopular law being administered by an agency that’s so betrayed the public trust. Even the IRS’ staunchest defenders in this scandal describe their actions as a case of ‘horrible customer service.’ That’s the best they can say: ‘Horrible customer service.’ And now they’re going to be put in charge of a new trillion-dollar program? One that will give them access to all sorts of sensitive, deeply personal information? Well, that’s just what the Administration and congressional Democrats are about to let happen.