"HENDRIK HERTZBERG of the New Yorker is untroubled" ... and that's a problem.

W.W. In The Economist is troubled by the fact that Hendrik Hertzberg is untroubled.

HENDRIK HERTZBERG of the New Yorker is untroubled by the NSA's promiscuous data-gathering operations. In response to a left-leaning friend's despairing note about the complacency of a press corps faced with the spectre of "the encroaching police state", Mr Hertzberg shrugs:

“I still don’t know of a single instance where the N.S.A. data program has encroached on or repressed any particular person’s or group’s freedom of expression or association in a tangible way. Nor have I come across a clear explanation of exactly how the program could be put to such a purpose.

But even if the program could be misused in that way, for it to happen you would have to have a malevolent government—or, at least, a government with a malevolent, out-of-control component or powerful official or officials.”

W.W. faults Hertzberg for failing to understand that the NSA surveillance program seriously threatens Americans’ constitutional rights. He’s concerned about what a powerful government may do with all the data that it is Hoovering from its citizens. He’s concerned what that government has already begun to do.

But Hertzberg is untroubled. And the reason for his lack of concern has nothing to do with principle and everything to do with the fact that he trusts THIS government. And that’s what partisan ideology does. He’s a true believer, and true believers hold on to their faith despite evidence to the contrary.

For the rest of this essay I’m here to say: To Hell with “Godwin’s Law.”

I’m going to remind people about the Nazis. I’m going to remind people that Hitler ran a popular police state. That's really not so rare, in fact it's quite common.  Popular doesn’t mean that he was universally loved. Popular means that he had a huge following and millions adored him, especially the women. He was popular because he addressed a lot of the issues that troubled Germany in the 1930s. I’m confident that if a poll had been held after he took over a large number of the German people would have told the pollster that Adolf Hitler was the kind of person who “cares about people like me.” As an example, when Hitler came to power cars in Germany were for the wealthy.  The average German rode a bicycle or motor scooter.  He decided that the average German should have a car that they could afford, just like Americans.  So he had the Nazi trade unions create the "People's Car:" "Volkswagen" in German. Unlike Solydra, Volkswagen is still a going concern.

The average German did not become Nazi party members, but they loved him. They loved his speeches, his stagecraft, his policies and even his wars because in the beginning he brought them victory. The problem was that he didn’t know when to stop. He was a narcissist and believed his own bullshit.   In that respect he was  not that different from other leaders. 

Do you know what’s terribly misleading about the movies of Hitler’s speeches?  First, most people don’t speak German so we see edited versions of a man ranting; that’s a mistake, he wasn't ranting in an unintelligible language, he was connecting with his audience. Hitler’s speeches were carefully crafted to appeal to his people. The second thing that’s misleading is that the camera usually dwells on the stage. What people should be looking at is the audience; an audience composed of thousands of little Hendrik Herzbergs. On that stage they don’t see a fanatic standing in front of banners and symbols of party power. They don’t a see a (to use Herzberg's phrase) “malevolent government—or, at least, a government with a malevolent, out-of-control component or powerful official or officials.” They see someone who cares about them and who has a vision for a Germany that rejects its past mistakes and is re-born; led by the ones they have been waiting for.

 Conservatives view this country as unique among nations in its founding as a constitutional representative republic dedicated individual freedom. It is that ideal, an ideal (that this country has fallen short of like all ideals) that makes America a “Shining city on a hill.”  When they are not rejecting the very idea of American Exceptionalism, they are believers in a certain kind of American Exceptionalism.  I believe that there resides in the innermost belief system of many Liberals the belief that America can never fall into the despotism that has been the fate of all other countries. Deep down inside they believe that the American people really are a race apart; somehow better than those benighted English or Germans or Italians or Japanese or Russians or Zulus all of whom entertained despotic rulers.   It's reflected in their wish to do away with the Second Amendment because to them it's absurd that Americans should ever have to actually use guns to physically confront the government.  Why they think that is a puzzle since America is largely made up of people from nations that are or were despotic. But when logic and ideology collide, ideology always triumphs. 

That’s why Hendrik Herzberg is dangerous; he is a perfect, rapt, enthusiastic member of the dictator’s audience, as long as it's HIS dictator.

Tampons, bottles urine and feces removed from protesters as Texas senate gathers to vote on measure to toughen up abortion laws

Keeping it classy.

The Texas Senate has given its initial approval for sweeping abortion restrictions late on Friday, sending them to Republican Governor Rick Perry to sign into law after weeks of protests and rallies that drew thousands of people to the Capitol and made the state the focus of the national abortion debate.

Republicans used their large majority in the Texas Legislature to pass the Bill nearly three weeks after a filibuster by Democratic Senator Wendy Davis and an outburst by abortion-rights activists in the Senate gallery disrupted a deadline vote on June 25.

As protesters came to the Capitol building in Austin on Friday, bottles of urine and feces, and even tampons were confiscated by state troopers as they tried to prevent anything from disrupting the debate.

Question for the US media: why do we have to go to a British paper to read about the kind of human debris the protesters are?

LAYERS OF EDITORS AND FACT-CHECKERS: At KTVU. And, apparently, the NTSB. . . .

Via Glenn Reynolds

How's that "smart diplomacy" working out for you?

Snowden revelations stir anti-US feeling...
Governments worldwide viewing America as arrogant superpower...
Headaches, distractions for White House...

This is not your father’s NAACP.

Tristan Breaux, age 25, is finding it hard to escape the plantation. According to the Virginian Pilot, the youngest president of the Norfolk, Virginia chapter of the NAACP posted this on his Facebook page.

"I wonder why is it that we are always willing to say someone who clearly had a shaky past, was the victim. Are we blinded about why Trayvon was at his dad's house in the first place, and why he wasn't at home at the time he was shot? Please think logically and not racially."

Here’s the rest of the story:

Several local NAACP members asked Breaux to take the post down, and he initially refused, said Jeffrey Logan, a former member of the local chapter's executive committee.

The post went up last week. Breaux's Facebook page is no longer visible.

"With a sensitive issue like this, for an NAACP president to post that - it's not a good thing," said former Norfolk NAACP President Bob Rawls.

Logan and Rawls said Breaux should resign his position.

Members of the branch's executive committee said they have no plans to seek his removal.

Breaux, the youngest president in the branch's history, did not return phone calls seeking comment. He became president in January.

Call me an optimist, and I realize that it’s not much, but I can be persuaded – if more evidence is presented – that a new generation, one that could be Barack Obama’s son if he had one, could be the one that eventually gets us over the racial divide.
 

Of course the people who benefit from the race hustle are furious.

There's this huge gap between the picture of Trayvon as 14 (the MSM's go-to picture) and his death at 17. One commenter fills the gap.

After assaulting a bus driver with a "sucker punch" to the face, Saint Treysgon [sic} was busted at his Miami high school with burglar tools/stolen women's jewelry pot residue which got him suspended for the third time and sent to meet a Twin Lakes Watch Captain in Sanford who he also assaulted.

‘Don’t be that girl’ posters in Edmonton spark debate

The Mens Rights Edmonton association is taking responsibility for the campaign. One of its members, who did not want to identify himself, says this poster campaign was intended to counter the “Don’t be that guy” campaign that he says made “rape into a gendered issue.”

“We don’t blame victims for anything, we’re simply looking for an accurate discourse on the subject.”

Go to the link for a video of a news report. Note the phrase "... some are calling ... disturbing."

That "Men's rights" name is like a red flag to a bull. Men don't have rights. They are just guilty.

Women Defect: Obama Ratings Down

Want to know why this disaster is president?

 

Today, she's marginally less sure.

Cobb County man slaughtered in random hate crime mob attack

On July 1st a group of black gang members brutally attacked and beat a random white pedestrian in Cobb County, Georgia. He was then knocked onto the road where he was hit by oncoming traffic.

This story received minor coverage in the local news. If the races had been reversed this would be the biggest news story in the United States. It would have knocked the Zimmerman trial out of the news.

Glenn Reynolds asks: WHERE’S THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT

Why is Juan Williams less informed that I am about the Zimmerman Trial

 

 

Juan Williams is listed as a journalist.  As such me should not be ignorant about the facts of the events that led to the shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman.  He does a workmanlike job describing the racial aspects of the trial, but he seems to be clueless about the events of that night even though these have been available for months if not years.

He's writing as if this is some kind of Greek tragedy. It wasn't.

 

"These are all caricatures of two real people caught in a tragedy."

Williams: Zimmerman should have listened to the 911 emergency dispatch operator who told him to stop following Martin.

Me: Zimmerman was not told to stop following Martin. The dispatcher said "you don't need to do that" after he asked Zimmerman if he was following Martin. Zimmerman replies: OK.

Williams: Why did he have a gun if he was simply part of a neighborhood watch program?

Me: A lot of people have guns and carry them. If I were part of a neighborhood watch program I would definitely carry a gun for protection. If I were trying to spot burglars or other bad guys at night I would want to have an advantage if they decided that I looked like a likely victim.

Williams: He had no basis to suspect Martin of any crime. So why does he describe Martin as “suspicious” to police?

Me: Were you there, Juan?  He was a neighborhood watchman for heavens sake.  He's supposed to be on the lookout for people who act "suspicious."  The homes in the neighborhood had been burglarized. It was raining and a person who's walking around looking around in the dark is suspicious. He may not be casing the area, but a neighborhood watchman is supposed to be on the lookout for people, especially young people, who are ".., just walking around, looking about" in the rain. Zimmerman called the cops and was waiting for them to arrive.

Williams: Why does he apparently lump Martin with people he describes as “these a--holes, they always get away.”

Me: Zimmerman figured that the suspicious kid he called the cops on may well well have been a burglar. And, take it from the voice of experience, burglars usually get away.

Williams: Why didn’t Martin just walk away from Zimmerman?

Me: Good question.  My guess: it may have something to do with culture that makes black folk call white folk "creepy-ass crackers." Could it have something to do with the game in some cultures to see if you can knock somebody out with a single sucker punch, like this one on the street in Baltimore?  Think what a great story it would have been if Martin had been able to do what he wanted with that out-of-shape "white Hispanic" leaving him bleeding, perhaps dying on the pavement.  Lot's of street cred with that.

ObamaCare put up for adoption

 

It happened in the dark of night. The Democrat president and the Democrat congress had consensual relations. And out of that coupling, a law was conceived. The proud parents decided to call it the Affordable Care Act but it goes by the nickname: ObamaCare. When the advent was announced the Greek chorus in the media burst into glad hosannas. Their savior had brought medical heaven on earth. This miraculous offspring was perfect.

 

The infant baby ObamaCare would provide insurance for everyone, healthy or sick, lame or blind, young and old and it would make everyone’s insurance bill fall by $2500 per year.

 

If for some reason you were happy with your rotten old doctor and your rotten old insurance you could keep it; you Neanderthal.

 

It would take care of the deficit (remember that promise?) 

 

It would lower the oceans and heal the planet. No, I made that up. The oceans began to recede and the planet to heal when Obama was elected. That was even before ObamaCare was a gleam in Obama’s eye.

 

And those evil, dastardly, racist, bigoted, homophobic Republicans wanted to abort this beautiful baby.

 

But they did not get their way and ObamaCare was born.

 

Strangely enough, (or as Glenn Reynolds likes to say “unexpectedly”) the baby did not live up to its promises. In fact he did not live up to any of its promises. Surprise: no universal coverage, premiums are up, health care plans were dropped and changed right and left, doctors (those not retiring) are changing their practice to eliminate insurance payments, and the deficit and the debt continue to rise. It turns out that costs are so high that only really stupid young healthy people would sign up for ObamaCare.

 

This is one ugly baby.

 

So the proud parents and their Greek chorus want to put their baby up for adoption. How do I know? The press, in the person of my local paper, the Virginian Pilot (a charter member of the Obama Greek chorus) has suddenly announced that “Congress Must Fix Healthcare.” After taking the obligatory shots at conservatives, they make the astounding concession that their toddler may be “fundamentally unworkable,” even “wildly overcomplicated.” They profess to see “major surprises” as implementation moves forward. They are gob smacked that taking control of one-sixth of the US economy is not going to be smooth and simple because the ones in charge are the “ones we have been waiting for.”

 

So they now want “congress” to fix it. But “congress” did not conceive it; Democrats did. The act was not consummated as a ménage a trois. Republicans were not invited to participate as this wedding was consummated. There is no question about this baby’s parents.  No DNA tests are needed.

 

What the press means by “congress” is really: “Republicans.” They want Republicans to adopt this infant Frankenstein and help it grow. But repeal it and start over? No way. This is their baby, the one they wanted, their precious snowflake. They just want to pretend that the way it came out isn’t their fault. They want somebody else to take the responsibility for keeping it alive and raising it.

 

And if Republicans fall for this they will once again prove that they are the stupid party.

Is the Virginian Pilot going to demand Crony Capitalist and Tax Cheat Terry McAuliffe come clean?

Don't bet on it. He's their candidate and they will do everything they can to make any questions about his past, present and future go away. The Virginian Pilot and its billionaire owners embody the core beliefs of the Move-On group that told us that the Whitewater, Cattlegate and Lewinski scandals were irrelevant. OTOH, Romney's wealth was a scandal.

In short, based on the available evidence, Terry McAuliffe appears to have used Leaf Clean Energy as precisely the kind of perfectly legal tax shelter that he and his fellow Democrats routinely rail against as immoral and irresponsible. Until he releases his full tax returns, there is no way of knowing for sure.

McAuliffe is always promising the moon and delivering nada, nothing, zip. One example close to home is the Franklin pellet-manufacturing project in the abandoned International Paper factory. McAuliffe is using cut-outs on this project so that his name will not be associated with a project that's never gotten off the ground.

That project has engendered its own controversy in Isle of Wight County, as the pellet plant has failed to materialize more than three years after McAuliffe announced his bid for the site. I spoke this afternoon with Lisa Perry, director of the county’s Department of Economic Development, who assured me that the project is still active and answered “Yes” when asked whether McAuliffe was still personally involved (notwithstanding CMI’s removal of McAuliffe from its website). Perry also said, “This is a real project. We have approached it from the beginning as a real project. . . . I have complete confidence that it will continue.” Citing nondisclosure agreements, Perry could not furnish details about the current state of the undertaking; but she explained that “Being engaged with International Paper on this type of economic development project is overwhelmingly difficult,” and cited “just the fact that International Paper is engaged with this company at all” as evidence of seriousness on the part of McAuliffe and his consortium.

Oh, and the place where tax cheat McAuliffe has his headquarters?  Ugland House.  This is what McAuliffe's sponsor said about it.  Is McAuliffe a tax cheat?  You don't have to take my word for it; here's Barack Obama:

On the campaign, I used to talk about the outrage of a building in the Cayman Islands that had over 12,000 business — businesses claim this building as their headquarters. And I’ve said before, either this is the largest building in the world or the largest tax scam in the world. 

One more reason to make Ken Cuccinelli the next governor of Virginia.

"There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat" could be the credo of the Obama Democrats.

James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal recounts the story of a city in China with suspiciously high test scores.

The relatively small city of Zhongxiang in Hubei province has always performed suspiciously well in China's notoriously tough "gaokao" exams, each year winning a disproportionate number of places at the country's elite universities.

Last year, the city received a slap on the wrist from the province's Education department after it discovered 99 identical papers in one subject. Forty five examiners were "harshly criticised" for allowing cheats to prosper.

So this year, a new pilot scheme was introduced to strictly enforce the rules.

When students at the No. 3 high school in Zhongxiang arrived to sit their exams earlier this month, they were dismayed to find they would be supervised not by their own teachers, but by 54 external invigilators [supervisors] randomly drafted in from different schools across the county. . . .

As soon as the exams finished, a mob swarmed into the school in protest. . . .

By late afternoon, the invigilators were trapped in a set of school offices, as groups of students pelted the windows with rocks. Outside, an angry mob of more than 2,000 people had gathered to vent its rage, smashing cars and chanting: "We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat."

He concludes that "... if it was necessary for Obama to steal the 2012 election, the abuse of the IRS and other agencies were sufficient to achieve that goal."

Those 100%+ turnouts in certain districts in certain cities with no votes for Romney may also have something to do with it.

How about encouraging Africans to do something more productive than trying to leave Africa?

Robert Stacy McCain talking about the Pope and the African migration to Europe.  The Pope tweeted:

We pray for a heart which will embrace immigrants. God will judge us upon how we have treated the most needy.

From a news report:

 

Pope Francis has visited Lampedusa to pay tribute to the thousands of refugees who have lost their lives trying to reach the European Union. The pope also criticized what he called the “globalization of indifference.”

McCain responds

The “globalization of indifference”? Hey, dig this, Pope: How about encouraging the localization of responsibility?

If everybody is responsible, nobody is responsible. If it’s Europe’s job to take care of Africans, what is Africa’s job other than building boats so they can try to get to Europe? How about encouraging Africans to do something more productive than trying to leave Africa?

Also, speaking of “how we have treated the most needy,” Pope, I checked my records and you’ve never hit my tip jar. Just sayin’ . .

I have a great deal of respect for the Catholic church, in fact I am a Christian (of the Protestant variety), but it seems to me that many religious leaders make noises that are designed to place them morally above the rest of humanity.  Now, in many cases they are, and taking care of the poor is a moral imperative.  But taking care of the problems in Africa by encouraging them to move to Europe is not a moral solution to a problem.  It's preening; a characteristic of Liberals in and out of religion.

The Tolerant Left

Our Crippling Fear Of The Truth

About the nutcase Left. Giving Fascists a free ride.

It’s time to train officers not to shoot dogs

Apparently, police shooting dogs is a policy.

A cop shot a dog the other day. Again.

Maybe you’ve seen the video — it was all over the Internet, complete with the dog’s grisly death spasms. Hawthorne, Calif., resident Leon Rosby was using his cellphone to record a standoff between police officers and armed robbers. At the end of the standoff, officers headed Rosby’s way. He put his dog, a Rottweiler named Max, in his car, then placed his arms behind his back to be cuffed. (He’d had run-ins with the law before.)

As the officers began taking Rosby into custody, Max jumped out the car window and approached. At first he sniffed the ground and paced, agitated but not threatening. When an officer made a move toward Max, he jumped and snapped.

So the officer killed him.

Read the whole thing.

Hawkmoths emit sonic pulses from their genitals to jam bats’ echolocation capability

Malaysia has the highest diversity of hawkmoths in the entire world.

That explains a lot.

ObamaCare Killed Immigration Reform

Remember when Obama said that:

·         If you liked your doctor or insurance plan youcould keep it?

·         ObamaCare would reduce insurance costs by $2500per year?

·         Everyone would be covered?

·         ObamaCare would reduce the national debt?

This is what Barack Obama told us would happen if Congress passed ObamaCare.  That is what the MSM told us would happen if ObamaCare passed. 

Were they lying, or were they stupid? 

If you were a member of the media, which one were you?

If you voted for Obama. which one were you?

It is now becoming apparent that one of the main reasons that even jellyfish Republicans will not pass an immigration bill is that after the latest debacle in ObamaCare no-one believes the President.  No one.

Even Suck-ups like Chuck Todd knows this.

 

Something did change in the immigration debate last week. But it wasn’t the realization that there is no “trigger” to force the House to act. That has been true since the beginning of the debate. What changed this week is that Republicans lost all trust in President Obama’s ability to faithfully execute the laws of the United States.

On Tuesday of last week, news broke that the Treasury Department was about to announce it’s intention to delay implementation of Obamacare’s employer mandate for a year. Nothing in the law gives the Obama administration authority to delay the mandate, but he did it anyway.

As bad as that blow to the rule of law was, the Department of Health and Human Services followed it up with 600 pages of regulations Friday, one of which also delayed a requirement that states verify the eligibility information submitted by applicants. Not only is this also not authorized in the statute, but, as National Review’s Yuval Levin notes, it is also an open invitation for those wanting health care subsidies to defraud taxpayers.

“They have shown no respect for traditional Constitutional separation of powers,” Rep. Phil Roe, R-Tenn., told National Review‘s John Fund about the impact of the Obamacare delays on the immigration debate, “and that makes it difficult to pass laws where the fear is that they will simply ignore the parts they don’t like.”

"I wouldn’t trust Durbin (or most of his Senate colleagues) to baby-sit my kid."

Glenn Reynolds reflects the contempt in which creatures like Durbin, a corrupt Illinois pol, are rightly held.   This creep wants to decide who's a journalist? 

Tar and feathers are too good for this goon and the entire class of deviants he associates with..

And the "bloodbath" in Chicago continues; 10 killed, 55 wounded.

The Chicago Sun-Times has counted 38 separate shooting incidents since 6 p.m. Wednesday. Ten men were killed and 55 other people, including two young boys, were wounded.

Wake me when the "bloodbath" in Cairo reaches the level of the "bloodbath" in Chicago.

Welcome Instapundit readers.  Please look around.  Here's one that you may like, or this.

The bar for "bloodbath" has been set awfully low

Footage broadcast by state TV showed Mursi supporters throwing rocks at soldiers in riot gear on one of the main roads leading to Cairo airport.

Young men, some carrying sticks, crouched behind a building, emerging to throw petrol bombs before retreating again.

State-run television showed soldiers carrying a wounded comrade along a rock-strewn road, and news footage zoomed in on a handful of protesters firing crude handguns during clashes.

What is a "crude handgun?"

To cut STD rate, Calif considers condoms in prison

It seems that California prisons don't control their prisoners.

Congress Is on Pace to Do Less Than Record-Breaking Low

They report that as if it's a bad thing.

Why Zimmerman’s Motion for Acquittal Should Have Been Granted

Reasons why the show trial of George Zimmerman should have ended. Good read of the law.

What's the Difference between a Radical Muslim and a Moderate Muslim?

The difference between a moderate Muslim and a radical Muslim is that the radical Muslim wants to kill us, the moderate Muslim wants the radical Muslim to kill us.

(Stolen from a comment at Roger's Rules)

Egypt violence: Gang throws rivals to their deaths from top of a building

Egypt needs good government, not democracy.

Walter Russell Meade on Obama: Still Wrong About Egypt—and Wrong About the World Commenting on Obama's vaporing about Egypt's transition to Democracy:

It is not at all clear that Egypt is in the midst of a transition to democracy. It is in the midst of a crisis of authority and has been wallowing for some time in a damaging crisis of governance, but is Egypt really in a transition to democracy? And is democracy really what “ordinary” Egyptians want?

Right now one suspects that most Egyptians fear that the country could be in a transition to anarchy, and that what ordinary Egyptians (who are extremely poor by US standards and earn their bread by the sweat of their brow with very little cushion against illness or a bad day at the market) want most of all right now is security. They aren’t fretting so much about when they will have a government more like Norway’s as they are terrified that their country is sliding in the direction of Libya, Syria or Iraq.

As is often the case, Washington policymakers seem to be paying too much attention to the glibbest of political scientists and the vaporings of the Davoisie. Egypt has none of the signs that would lead historians to think democracy is just around the corner. Mubarak was not Franco, and Egypt is not Spain. What’s happening in Egypt isn’t the robust flowering of a civil society so dynamic and so democratic that it can no longer be held back by dictatorial power.

Want America to look stupid and be hated?

If American policy toward Egypt is based on the assumption that Egypt is having a “messy transition” to democracy and that we must shepherd the poor dears to the broad sunny uplands, encouraging when they do well, chiding when they misstep, Washington will keep looking foolish and our influence will continue to fade. If that is the approach our foolishness compels us to take, look for more cases in which American good intentions just make us more hated—not because we are wicked, but because we are clueless.

Makes you nostalgic for the realism of George Bush.

Anti-Americanism Flares in Egypt.

Good thing we got rid of that dumb cowboy Bush. People in the Mideast didn’t like him.

This is what "Crony Capitalism" looks like: How Terry McAuliffe got rich

Example of information you will not find in the Virginian Pilot. 

Ten years ago, McAuliffe turned a $100K stock buy into $18M thanks to his relationship with the CEO of Internet firm Global Crossing. Shortly thereafter the company went bankrupt, the stock price collapsed and 10,000 employees lost their jobs.

This was not the only questionable deal he was associated with. But it was part of a pattern in his business life of using insider connections that made him very wealthy.

This was written in 2009, the first time McAuliffe had his eye on the State House.  Since then he has battened his bank account using his political connections at the top of the Democrat party money-raising pyramid.   

The Coke cage

Via Maggie's Farm and Vanderleun at American Digest.

This is a remarkably forthright and dismaying report from a teacher in an 80% black school: Before-It’s-Deleted Of The Day.

... the chain-link fence that many majority-black schools use to protect vending machines. The cage surrounds the machine and even covers its top. Delivery employees have to unlock a gate on the front of the cage to service the machines. Companies would prefer not to build cages around vending machines. They are expensive, ugly, and a bother, but black students smashed the machines so many times it was cheaper to build a cage than repair the damage.

Read the whole thing. It's scary because part of our culture is defective.  It also explains the Rasmussen Report on racism cited by James Taranto.

This ad was rejected for being too controversial.

That's it, just a picture of a baby.

No graphic photos of aborted babies, or what abortion mills like Planned Parenthood call “products of conception” or “POCs.” Instead, it just shows a child at roughly 20 weeks gestation resting in the hand of an adult, which gives readers some badly-needed context about late-term abortions.

This is what the radical feminists in Texas are fighting to kill. They want women who have this little baby in their body to be able to call up a doctor, go to a clinic and have it sucked out … in pieces. The legal right to kill this little baby is the defining right for feminists.

The Spit-Roasting of Paula Deen

The story became yet another tedious and barf-inducing racial scandal last week. It led to the Food Channel, where the cheesecake-fryin’, nut-droppin’ Georgia porker had ruled the pigsty for over a decade, announcing on Friday that they would not renew Deen’s contract because, well, c’mon, she said the word [word than cannot be said by creepy-ass crackers] and that’s the modern equivalent of the unpardonable sin.

Amid all the public shirt-rending, the wagging of fingers and shaking of heads, the tut-tutting and tsk-tsking, the eyeball-pluckingly pious denunciations about shamefulness, evil, heinousness, and raw pure unabashed hateful unforgivable Southern wickedness, it mostly escaped notice that Deen (an Obama supporter) said she’d used the word in a discussion with her husband after a black man held a gun to her head while robbing her at the bank where she worked.

“To baser creatures, apologies are usually interpreted as weakness, and we all know how wolfpacks treat weakness.”

We live in a topsy-turvy world where people are far more offended if someone says “nigger” than if they act like one. Thus, last week’s sentencing of three black Marines who murdered a fellow white Marine and his black wife received almost zero notice in the national press.

Read the whole thing.

Fast & Furious: "I don’t think it was a “failed gun-tracking operation” at all."

Glenn Reynolds and I are on the same page.  Fast & Furious was not a failed gun-tracking operation because the guns were not tracked.  The only logical use of this program was to provide proof that guns bought in America were found at Mexican crime scenes.  It was specifically designed to "prove" that US guns were responsible for Mexican crimes.  If the truth was otherwise, Fast & Furious was designed to change the facts.

THERE IS NO OTHER LOGICAL REASON FOR THE WAY THIS ACTIVITY WAS IMPLEMENTED.

I don't mean to shout, but the media's references to this as a "failed gun tracking operation" is nuts.


So now we can add a dead Mexican police chief to the toll of Team Obama's drive for gun control.

“A high-powered rifle lost in the ATF’s Fast and Furious controversy was used to kill a Mexican police chief in the state of Jalisco earlier this year.

Sexual politics in a Modern Liberal Women world

There is a discussion at Althouse about men’s responsibility for children when they have sexual relations with women.  I’m of the old school and believe that men and women should take sexual relations very seriously rather than sport.  At one time it was assumed that men conspired to have sex with women.  Since visiting web sites that cater to women, I have been disabused of that notion and am told in no uncertain terms that women want to have sex at least as much as men.  Indeed, the single woman who does not have a number of notches on her bedpost is an outcast. 

But that makes me a fossil, especially when viewed from the perspective of Modern Liberal Women (MLW).  Heck, I’m so old that when I was a lad the Constitution not only had nothing to say about abortion; it even lacked penumbras and emanations. 

There are two views that MLW share: (1) abortion is an absolute right and (2) what women do with their bodies is their business.  From this two things should logically follow:

·         Women who have a child are the only ones responsible for that child being born.  They have total autonomy of the issue of abortion and can terminate the pregnancy at any time.   We have to give credit to the Romans who allowed the father to kill his children up to a certain age.  The only thing that’s changed is the gender of the person with the right to kill.

·         Since the man (sperm donor) has no rights regarding the birth of a child, he should logically have no responsibility.

If he accepts responsibility, that may be an indication of an emotional attachment either to the woman or to the offspring, or both.  Acceding to an emotional attachment is not illogical since it brings pleasure to the individuals involved. 

 

However, if there is no emotional attachment on the part of the sperm donor  to either the woman or the child, it is the law, not logic that forces the man to pay for the upkeep of the child.  Althouse makes emotional arguments to shame the man into child support, fallback to pre-Roe times when aborting a child was more difficult than having your teeth cleaned.  She states that “The child is real and needs support.”  Well, that’s true if the child lives which is a decision that’s entirely a decision on the part of the woman.  If the woman decides that she wants the child to live, why is it the responsibility of the sperm donor to provide the “support?”

Ann Althouse demands not just autonomy for the woman; she demands that the sperm donor pay for her decisions.  That may be illogical, but she is not known for logic.  There are several indications of this: first, she teaches law and the law and logic do not necessarily intersect.  Second, she voted for Obama the first time and actually considered doing it a second time.  Third she is a woman and her kind has skin in this game.

Part time America

The latest jobs report is explained by James Pethokoukis and David Burge.

 First Burge

Unemployment report in a nutshell: the Taco Bell that had 30 40 hour workers now has 40 30 hour workers.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) July 5, 2013

 

Now Pethokoukis:

As folks on Main Street surely know:

1. The economy lost 240,000 full-time workers last month, according to the more volatile household survey, while gaining 360,000 part-time workers. In other words, the entire increase in the household measure of employment was accounted for by persons working part-time for economic reasons. The underemployment rate surged to 14.3% from 13.8%.

2. Does Obamacare explain the poor jobs mix? From the econ team at First Trust:

Given the volatility in these data series, we would not put too much emphasis on one month’s worth of data. However, it’s consistent with the large payroll gains for retail as well as restaurants & bars and probably shows some firms who would be hiring full-timers are hiring part-timers to avoid Obamacare.

3. Part-time America: There are 28 million part-time workers in US vs. 25 million before the Great Recession. There are 116 million full-time workers in US vs. 122 million before the Great Recession. In other words, 19% of the (smaller) US workforce is part time vs. 17% before the Great Recession

4. Some context: Even at 195,000 jobs a month, the US would not, according to Brookings, return to pre-Great Recession employment levels until 2021. The “jobs gap” remains huge.

5. If the labor force participation rate were back to prerecession levels, the unemployment rate would be 11.1%. And even accounting for America’s aging, the U-3 rate would be roughly 9.1%, according to Goldman Sachs.

Of course, this kind of analysis is not to be found in the MSM.  They take the headline number and tell us about The Great Obama (forgive me, I just finished reading The Great Gatsby and found this "classic" really lousy).

If we're going to have abortion, let's look to Europe for rules on abortion

Sweden (Socialist Paradise)

Between 12 and 18 weeks of gestation, the women must discuss the procedure with a social worker. After 18 weeks, permission must be obtained from the National Board of Health and Welfare.

Abortions must be performed by a licensed medical practitioner and, except in cases of emergency, in a general hospital or other approved healthcare establishment.

Aren't US Liberals always citing Europe as the goal to which they aspire?  The most common limit on elective abortion in Europe in those countries it's permitted is 12 weeks.

H/T Glenn Reynolds

Equal reproductive freedom

Glenn Reynolds comments about vasectomies. 

Interestingly, though, doctors often ask married men for their wife’s permission before they’ll perform a vasectomy. When people talk about “reproductive freedom,” they generally mean women’s reproductive freedom.

Obamacare called ‘The fiasco for the ages’

Nancy Pelosi told us there would be days like this. The only way to find out what was in Obamacare was to pass it and see what happens. Congress passed it, the messiah signed it, and we’re beginning to see what happens.

Barack Obama and the gang that can’t shoot straight aren’t having much fun, but if they think they aren’t having fun now, just wait. The “best” is yet to come.

The best the Democrats can say about Obamacare is that it’s an approaching train wreck, in the memorable description of Sen. Max Baucus of Montana. Mr. Baucus was one of the authors of the legislation and now he’s hurrying home to Montana for good, anxious to avert his eyes from all the hair, teeth and eyeballs soon to be scattered along the railroad right-of-way.

Pundits and professors are rifling through the thesaurus, looking for the right word to describe what the Wall Street Journal calls “a fiasco for the ages.” The Journal editorialists reminded everyone that they “fought the Affordable Care Act from start to passage, and we’d like to apologize to our readers. It turns out we weren’t nearly critical enough.”

The editors of The New York Times, Mr. Obama’s most reliable sycophants, are deep in mourning, but working furiously to apply more rouge to the corpse before it turns the parlor too fragrant for a wake. It’s summer, and they’re running out of ice.

The “downside” to the delay in implementing the employer mandate is that it gives Republican critics the facts and figures, the “ammunition to portray the health care reforms as a failure,” The Times says. But not to worry, the year’s delay decreed by the president will allow the Internal Revenue Service time to figure out “how this mandate will work … it is more important to do this right than to do it quickly.”

It’s ever so reassuring to know the IRS is on the case.

Read the whole thing.

White liberals' psychological need to feel morally superior to other whites

James Taranto has an excellent essay on a recent poll that asks participants who is more racist.  Head the whole essay here, but here is the delicious part.

It's not surprising that whites would be more apt to impute racism to blacks than to whites. Thus the partisan and ideological breakdowns are about what one would expect, given that most conservatives, and especially most Republicans, are white.

But the results for blacks are a big surprise. Blacks are more likely (by 7 percentage points) to think most blacks are racist than to think most whites are. Moreover, they are 11 points likelier than liberals (regardless of race) to think most blacks are racist, and 9 points likelier than Democrats. And blacks are 3 points less likely than liberals to think most whites are racist.

All of which suggests that the people likeliest to believe most whites are racist and most blacks are not are those who are both liberal and white. Which reinforces a point we've made often in this column: that a lot of what drives the futile debate over race in America is white liberals' psychological need to feel morally superior to other whites.

You can see it in the MSM, on college campuses and on the Internet. To take the latter as an example, the Volokh conspiracy is a blog owned by impeccably white and mostly Libertarian law professors. For reasons that are not totally clear (perhaps it's the composition of the legal profession) the site draws a large number of commenters who are somewhere to the Left of Karl Marx (exaggeration for effect). Here is a great example from degsme who denies that America was founded as - and has been - a liberal democracy:

As has been pointed out below, the USA's democracy has hardly been "liberal" in its values, be it 100+ years of slavery followed by another 100 years of oppression of minority rights or the suppression of women's bodily integrity, or the genocide of native tribes, or the wholesale "manifest destiny" oppression of hispanics in the SW. this makes it a touch hypocritical to look at someone like Morsi and argue that he is "illiberal" by comparison. What he asks for of women is nothing much more than what the USA demanded a mere 50-60 years ago, and he's hardly proposing slavery, and the response to the "Ground Zero Mosque" is hardly an example of majority religious tolerance.

Governor McDonnell is getting the Issa treatment in the Virginian Pilot.

While mostly ignoring the Obama administration’s Fast & Furious, Benghazi, IRS, NSA, and reporter-spying scandals, the Virginian Pilot has been full of Bob McDonnell “scandals.” One of the latest was the “scandal” involving a friend who lent his limo to drive McDonnell’s daughter and her new husband after her wedding. We’re not kidding you: that’s one of the breathless revelations that the Virginian Pilot hopes will so smear McDonnell that he won’t be able to go out in public, or at least will never run for office again.

The assault on McDonnell is simply the tried-and-true way the Obama team wins elections. They destroy the opposition by smearing them personally. That’s how Obama won most of his elections in Chicago, and he likes the way it works.  It's the Chicago Way and it's landed in Virginia. 

After winning the Presidency in 2008 with a worshipful press the smear has become the favorite tactic of Team Obama. The reason it works is that there are enough willing accomplices in the media who will broadcast and amplify the smear.  Paid political ads are discounted by the public, but if you can get a newspaper to print a smear, and then editorialize about it, the low information voter buys it hook, line and sinker.  The key is finding a reporter willing to spread a lie, and at the Virginian Pilot they are lined up with knee pads at the ready.  Nowhere is the appellation: "Democrat operatives with bylines" more true that at the Virginian Pilot.

In the election of 2012, Mitt Romney, probably the most straight-laced candidate for President in my lifetime, was vilified as a murderer and a felonious tax cheat by the press so far in the tank for Obama that they rarely came up for air.

 

In the summer of 2010, with Republicans poised to take over the House and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) in line to lead the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the White House started urging reporters to write negative stories about the congressman’s past, a new book says.

Now it’s McDonnell’s turn and the Democrats have a willing accomplice in the Virginian Pilot who are trying to destroy both McDonnell and Ken Cuccinelli who’s running for Governor against Obama crony and political fixer-plutocrat Terry McAuliffe.

Obama, the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt and Starvation.

Spengler:

Starvation is the unstated subject of this week’s military coup. For the past several months, the bottom half of Egypt’s population has had little to eat besides government-subsidized bread, and now the bread supply is threatened by a shortage of imported wheat. Despite $8 billion of aid from Qatar and smidgens from Libya, Turkey, and others, Egypt is struggling to meet a financing gap of perhaps $20 billion a year, made worse by the collapse of its major cash earner — the tourist industry. Malnutrition is epidemic in the form of extreme protein deficiency in a country where 40% of the adult population is already “stunted” by poor diet, according to the World Food Program. It is not that hard to get 14 million people into the streets if there is nothing to eat at home. [snip]

With the Muslim Brotherhood out of the way in Egypt, the Saudis have uncontested influence with the military. Presumably the military will suppress the Brotherhood unless it chooses to dissolve spontaneously. No one should mourn the Brotherhood, a totalitarian organization with a Nazi past and an extreme anti-Semitic ideology.

The notion that this band of Jew-hating jihadi thugs might become the vehicle for a transition to a functioning Muslim democracy was perhaps the stupidest notion to circulate in Washington in living memory.[snip]

Egypt probably can be kept on life support for about $10 billion a year in foreign subsidies, especially if the military regime can restore calm and bring the tourists back (although that is a big “if” — one of President Morsi’s last acts was to appoint as governor of Luxor province an associate of the Islamist terrorists who massacred 62 tourists in Luxor in 1997).

Clear insight is much better than faith that mankind is changing. The Middle East is not hospitable to Democracy.

In the Beltway, to be sure, the same folk on left and right who thought the “Arab Spring” would usher in a golden era of Muslim democracy are wringing their hands over the tragic fate of Egypt’s first democratically elected government. These include Republicans as well as Democrats, whom I qualified as “Dumb and Dumber” in a May 20 essay for Tablet. The sequel — call it “Dumb and Dumberer” — is still playing on CNN and Fox News. No matter: the important matters are now in the competent hands of Prince Bandar, whose judgment I prefer to that of John Kerry or Susan Rice or John McCain any day of the week. The best-case scenario would be for the grown-ups in the region to ignore the blandishments of the Obama administration as well as the advice of the Republican establishment, and to do what they have to do regardless.

Americans who want to conduct a great experiment in democracy will have to take their laboratory somewhere else.

The most hopeful aftermath to the Arab Spring so far

DRUDGE:



Egypt prepares for backlash as Morsi allies reject new regime...

Army warns against 'endless circle of revenge'...

Brotherhood leader arrested...

Widening Sweep...

Air of defeat hangs over Islamists...

'Friday of Rejection'...

'No more beards!'

Rival gangs gearing up for battle...

Immigrants account for all job gains since 2000: native-born workers’ employment has fallen

Doing Taking the jobs Americans won't do lost.

Immigrants — both legal and illegal — have accounted for all of the job gains in the U.S. labor market since 2000, according to a report that highlights the stiff competition for jobs in a tight economy as Congress debates adding more workers to the mix.

The Center for Immigration Studies report, which is being released Wednesday, says 22.4 million immigrants of working age held jobs at the beginning of this year, up 5.3 million over the total in 2000. But native-born workers with jobs dropped 1.3 million over that same period, from 114.8 million to 113.5 million.

Egypt prepares for backlash as Morsi allies reject new regime

OBAMA URGENT MEETING AFTER BRO OVERTHROW

What is DRUDGE trying to say here?

Abortion Supporters Chant ‘Hail Satan!’ While Pro-Life Activists Sing ‘Amazing Grace’ Outside Texas Capitol

Watch the video. 

Also this sign ...

"If I wanted the government in my womb I would f*** a senator."

This mommy must be very proud.

Independence Day

Perjury By Permission: Clapper Apologizes For False Testimony And The Congress Remains Silent

Even Jonathan Turley sees a problem.

I previously wrote a column how our country seems to have developed separate rules for the ruling elite and the rest of us. There is no better example than the lack of response of the Senate to the admitted perjury of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper before Congress. While the Justice Department has prosecuted people for the smallest departure from the truth, including testimony before Congress, no one in the Senate is calling for an investigation, let alone a prosecution, of Clapper. For his part, Attorney General Eric Holder is continuing his political approach to enforcing the law and declining to even acknowledge the admitted perjury of Clapper. Now, in a truly bizarre moment, Clapper has written a letter of apology like an errant schoolboy to excuse his commission of a felony crime . . . and it appears to have been accepted. What is curious is that we do not have letters from senators like Dianne Feinstein apologizing to doing nothing when they were all aware that Clapper was lying in his public testimony. Welcome to America’s Animal Farm.

And why does the ruling elite get away with it? Silly question. Another very important part of the ruling elite makes it all possible.

For its part, the media is cooperating. Few are addressing the obvious perjury or past cases prosecuted on far less. After all, Clapper is one of the ruling elite and not the great unwashed public. The result is perjury by permission, a new exception to criminal acts for the governing elite.

Who has higher standards: Abortion supporters or Satanists?

For me it's Satanists because I believe Satan is real. But his followers don't want to be linked to abortionists.

Real Satanists Want Nothing To Do With Abortion Supporters.

Rasmussen poll: More Americans View Blacks As Racist Than Whites, Hispanics

Americans consider blacks more likely to be racist than whites and Hispanics in this country.

Well, DUH! All you creepy-ass crackers out there, listen up. 

Wait, wasn't Obama's election going to fix the race problem?

Team Obama mainstreamed black racism.  White Liberals approved.

How's that smart diplomacy working out?

At least the Egyptian people are not taking their anger out on America.

The smartest revolution I ever saw.

“I hope your daughter’s raped”

State senator Donna Campbell, who issued the third point of order against Davis’s filibuster (which ended it), has also been the target of extensive verbal abuse from pro-choice protesters, according to her spokesman Jon Oliver. They’ve received Facebook messages and e-mails saying, “I hope you’re raped” and “I hope your daughter’s raped,”

Hey, they're Liberals. if the NY Times writes about it, I'm sure they'll Bowdlerize these comments too.

14,000 Abandoned Wind Turbines in the USA

H/T Instapundit

Frankly, I had no idea that there were 14,000 wind turbines in the US, much less that there were 14,000 abandoned ones.

The US has had wind farms since 1981, what the left and the green movement don't want to talk about regarding windmills is (as usual) the truth. The truth is: windmills, like solar panels, break down. And like solar panels, windmills produce less energy before they break down than the energy it took to make them. That's the part liberals forget: making windmills and solar panels takes energy, energy from coal, oil, and diesel, energy that extracts and refines raw materials, energy that transports those materials to where they will be re-shaped into finished goods, energy to manufacture those goods. More energy than those finished windmills and solar panels will ever produce.

There are many hidden truths about the world of wind turbines from the pollution and environmental damage caused in China by manufacturing bird choppers, the blight on people's lives of noise and the flicker factor and the countless numbers of birds that are killed each year by these blots on the landscape. The symbol of Green renewable energy, our saviour from the non existent problem of Global Warming, abandoned wind farms are starting to litter the planet as globally governments cut the subsidies taxes that consumers pay for the privilege of having a very expensive power source that does not work every day for various reasons like it's too cold or the wind speed is too high.

The US experience with wind farms has left over 14,000 wind turbines abandoned and slowly decaying, in most instances the turbines are just left as symbols of a dying Climate Religion, nowhere have the Green Environmentalists appeared to clear up their mess or even complain about the abandoned wind farms.

Thousands of these abandoned monsters pollute California "big three" locations--Altamont Pass, Tehachapin, and San Gorgonio. They do but nothing kill birds as they gradually decay. The so-called "environmentalists" turn their backs on their creations. Each year the body count grows. 75 to 110 Golden Eagles, 380 Burrowing Owls, 300 Red-tailed Hawks, and 333 American Kestrels (falcons) are killed by Altamont turbines annually.

 

 

This is what the numbskulls who write for the Virginian Pilot want for the view from the beaches of Virginia: bird killing monuments to stupidity.

New York Times Bowdlerizes Zimmerman Trial Testimony

If you went to public school you may not know what the Bowdlerize means. The term was named after an English doctor and philanthropist Thomas Bowdler who edited Shakespeare’s plays, taking out the “racy “parts.

In today’s NY Times on the Zimmerman trial they Bowdlerize the actual testimony to shield the lead prosecution witness – and Trayvon Martin - from being exposed as racist bigots. Here’s the Times version of what Trayvon Martin told Rachel Jeantel, his girlfriend, in the phone the night of the shooting: “he was being followed by a “creepy” man …” What she really said was that Trayvon Martin called George Zimmerman a "creepy-ass cracker.”    The Times wins today's Thomas Bowdler prize for sending racist language that black people use down the Memory Hole.

Even in In TimesLand, calling someone is “creepy-ass cracker” is probably something to be covered up, although other Liberal commentators has defended the racist comments.

Obama pining for the peace, quiet, and friendly press of Washington, D.C.

A great way of ending Bud Norman's review of rhe Obama family's $100 million African vacation.
Hooray for Barack Obama the African explorer.
Excerpt:

By one of those hilarious twists of fate that seem to bedevil the president at every turn, Obama happened to be in Senegal on the day that the Supreme Court delivered a ruling striking down key portions of the Defense of Marriage Act and handing what was considered a huge victory to homosexual rights advocates. When asked about the ruling during an obligatory press conference with his Senegalese counterpart, the recently pro-same-sex-marriage Obama couldn’t help exulting. President Macky Sall was then asked for his views on the matter, and replied that he didn’t believe Senegal should go so far as make homosexuality legal. Although Obama takes a back seat to no one in his heightened sensitivity to third world cultures and their venerable traditions, homosexuality trumps multi-culturalism in the contemporary hierarchy of liberal values and he was thus compelled to have a rather public spat with the president of Senegal. The debate was widely reported in the African press, with the African public seeming to come down squarely on the side of Sall, and it seems incident has not strengthened American ties with the region. The Chinese government’s assiduous courtship of the region, so far as we know, have not included any talk of homosexuality.

Read the whole thing.

“Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.”

Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal: Will Mohammed Morsi join the pharaohs, caliphs, pashas and strongmen that came before him?

I’m reminded of the famous line from Star Wars where the evil Emperor Palpatine says “Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.” What I found incomprehensible a few years ago is how much hope was fixed on the so-called Arab Spring. There are literally thousands of years of history in the Middle East of pharaohs followed by emperors, kings and dictators. Thinking that a largely illiterate population immersed in Islam should create a democracy is magical thinking. What struck me at the time was how many people in the “mainstream” were caught up in this fantasy. In a way, it explains the election of Barack Obama.

If you call me a "creepy-ass cracker," are you profiling or offending me?

Not if you are a Liberal. 

Joan Walsh:

author of a book whose actual title is "What's the Matter With White People?," denounced "white grievance-mongers" who do not care for the word "cracker":

Apparently my skin color prevents me from being offended.

Alexander Abad-Santos of TheAtlanticWire.com

opined that "saying 'creepy-ass cracker' . . . is just a way of saying things,"

OK then.

Rachel Samara says that I'm just one one more creepy ass white cracker who

"Don't Understand About Rachel Jeantel."

You can always tell Liberals, if you know what I mean.

The Sprawling, Dimming Age of Obama

Via the Daily Beast

The Age of Obama, writes Lloyd Green, is mandated healthcare, crony capitalism, and First Family TV spots as modern iteration of bread and circuses.

In Barack Obama, America elected a chief executive whose Department of Justice has repeatedly targeted the press, whose Internal Revenue Service has gone gunning for conservatives, and whose government has elevated secrecy into a cardinal virtue. The Obama administration’s data grab is not just about national security, or Edward Snowden. It is also an epilogue befitting a candidate who delivered his 2008 convention acceptance speech in front of a temple façade dedicated to himself, and whose faith in government and the state is at the center of his presidency.

Forget Obama’s paeans to civil liberties. The Age of Obama is a celebration of ever-growing and ever-more intrusive government, with mandated healthcare, crony capitalism, and First Family daytime and late-night television appearances as the modern iterations of bread and circuses.

And what does Obama get in return for his push for big government? A government that loves him back. Unlike the financial, insurance and real-estate industries that have been fickle about him — showering him with hosannas and cash in 2008, while offering a relative trickle of support in 2012—Obama remains the living end for government workers.

IRS employees donated to Obama over Romney by a 4-to-1 margin, IRS attorneys favored Obama by 20-to-1, and government lawyers at the National Labor Relations Board and the Department of Education shut out the Romney campaign completely. The federal bureaucracy had effectively lined up against nearly half the country.

Meanwhile, the White House press secretary dissembles daily; the intelligence community appears incapable of delivering a complete and truthful answer to Congress, and IRS employees apparently enjoyed a giant tax payer funded party catered by Wolfgang Puck.

Given this totality, public distrust of Washington should come as no surprise.

For the record, spending $2.4 million on an Olympics-themed confab, complete with an open bar while America’s housing market was crashing, is not prudent. Using credit cards to buy bottles of wine and $140 dinners is not what we want from the IRS’s green-eyeshade brigade. Trust, what’s that?

Guess the country he's referring to

Inexperienced 18 years olds who have grown up in corrupt, poorly governed societies, and been educated in trashy schools by incompetent hacks know very well that the status quo is unacceptable. Young people who know they are being ripped off and abused are typically not very patient. Throw in healthy doses of sexual frustration and contempt for an establishment that has lost confidence in its own capacity to lead, and you have a cocktail much more explosive than anything Molotov knew.

The description is of education in Egypt, but there is an eery echo of modern American education where millions of teens graduate from high school and get brainwashed into taking classes by tenured radicals whose main function is to replicate themselves via indoctrination while living the good life in academia. Our children are being ripped off by intellectual mobsters, leaving the university with worthless diplomas unprepared for the job market.

The system is overloading and breaking down. But perhaps that's the plan.