With the return of the Heckler's veto right thugs and left thugs combine to attack First Amendment

When you can't say something because someone else will be upset and break the law your speech has been vetoed by  violence. Fewer and fewer people respect our basic rights anymore.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/barry-a-fisher-free-speechs-shrinking-circle-of-friends-1419899071

Ben Trovato is such a bastard

Robert Tracinski summarizes all the "fake but true" stories from last year. Or as he puts it: the Ben Trovatos. So many too good to check lies, so little time.

At the link.

http://thefederalist.com/2014/12/30/my-person-of-the-year-ben-trovato/

But how does Obama know that in “day-to-day transactions” the nation is less racially divided? From all that appears, the only day-to-day transactions Obama has with ordinary Americans are with his golf caddies.

Indeed. At the link.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/12/the-legacy-obama-dreads.php

A racist under every bed

McCarthy famously acted as if there was a Red under every bed. The modern Democrat behaves as if that Red  has morphed into a Racist but otherwise is still there. PowerLine has a video at the link with 39 different claims of racism by the Party of Fear and Division in pursuit of their racial Balkanism. Next up: their "Gender Terror" edition.

I guess revolutions need enemies. At the link.

When the FISA court rejects a surveillance request the FBI ignores them and issues a National Security Letter instead

Our Federal government is an increasingly lawless joint venture of the thuggish and authoritarian left and the authoritarian and thuggish right.

The only thing to do about the badged crime wave is to break it up. Break it all up.

Little John's Libelous, Lying Lizards or the day the Skink turned

I encountered this little lad of a lizard wandering half frozen in the street.  I picked him up, saving him from certain splat. Not that he appreciated it.  No this stinkin' Spink just bitched at me as if it was my fault the tiny oaf was lost. Thus it was not surprising when I found out that this grumbling gecko wannabe was in fact the nephew of Little John Spink.  You remember Little John - he was the Spink I saved from certain smoosh on the bikepath last fall.  He too was ungrateful, telling me to get the hell off of his patch of path or else.

So for the record I would like to point out that I have been belittled by two little lying lizard lads laying languidly on bike and car paths. Languid laddish laying lizards that are lousy with lies linking me to lizard smashing.  Unlike these lazy lying little lampooning lizard lads I had the decency to save them despite their lampoons, laziness and libelous lies about my links to lizard deaths. They call it the Luck 'o the Lazy, Lying, Laying Lizard Lads who Lampoon and Libel those Lizard saviors they are Linked to.

To L with them all!

Jihad is exploding in Europe because political correctness has robbed society of the social condemnation that serves as the first line immune response to anti social behavior

It is instructive that the same thing is underway in US cities that are almost all run by the left.

In England, an "Operation Trojan Horse" outlined plans to Islamize schools in Muslim neighborhoods. According to the Guardian, a government investigation of the program last summer found a "'sustained, coordinated agenda to impose segregationist attitudes and practices of a hardline, politicised strain of Sunni Islam' on children in a number of Birmingham schools." Among those responsible for the "Operation" were the Association of Muslim Schools – UK and the Muslim Council of Britain – the same organization that, in 2011, declaredthat women who do not veil their faces "could be guilty of rejecting Islam."

Ironically, it seems to have been England's own culture that allowed the rise of Islamist teachings in its schools to begin with. Even Britain's education secretary Nicky Morganadmitted to the New York Times that much of the operation's success could be attributed to public "fear of being accused of racism and anti-Islamic views." Not for nothing did former Obama advisor Lawrence Krauss declare the British "too polite" and "scared of offending 'vocal and aggressive Muslims.'"

The government's discovery of "Operation Trojan Horse" and immediate efforts to dismantle it are commendable, but it is difficult to assess the damage already done to Muslim children in the British schools. By some accounts, as many as 2,000 Britons have joined the (Sunni-led) jihad in Syria and Iraq. That includes the man known as "Jihadi John," who beheaded U.S. journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff. And, experts warn, the number of so-called "junior jihadis" – children under 10 who have become radicalized – is on the rise.

Not that such warnings are likely to do much good: The UK has, until recently, spent tremendous resources on programs aimed at preventing Muslim youth from joining militant groups, which have for the most part failed. "Having undertaken the 'most significant domestic program by any Western country to foster a moderate version of Islam and prevent radicalization, the UK has effectively given up trying to stop jihadists from being created," James Brandon, the former research director at one such program, told Reuters.

More at the link.

Silicon Valley: On Immigration, Engineers Simply Don’t Trust VCs.

Remember: most of these people are "liberal" Democrats. Rich liberal Democrats. Meanwhile over the past ten years employment and compensation in the oil and gas industry has soared. But of course liberals believe everything is rigged by the politically powerful and behave accordingly. Oilies aren't liberals.

What is missing from the immigration debate in Silicon Valley is trust, and it certainly isn’t the engineers that have abused it. We know that tech companies have worked really hard to keep wages from rising the past decade. Google, Apple, and a multitude of other large tech companies systematically worked together to stop workers from negotiating higher salaries by restricting recruitment practices and preventing workers from enjoying free movement of their labor.

Such tactics have made engineers far more cynical about the motives of tech companies, which is intensified by the incessant talk of talent shortages in the industry.

If mothers love their sons more than they love feminism then how is the gendered eschaton to be immanentized?

I suppose for feminism to triumph women need to be taught to hate their born male offspring as much as they hate their unborn female ones.

These moms clearly haven't gotten the Femo (feminist memo)

Stupid and lazy is no way to go through life Gary Trudeau

Doonesbury retails discredited UVA gang rape hoax weeks after it was exposed. Must be "truthiness".

Medicaid is beginning to smoke, make metal on metal noises and give off a nasty smell

Medicaid expansion didn't expand the state budgets available or the supply of health care providers.  The result according to the erstwhile inert but now groggily waking from it's Obama torpor New York Times is scarcity magnified by falling reimbursement.  This is what happens when you don't give a damn about the supply side.  Because our cartelized health care system with quasi monopolists in every market and a hard cap on the number of new physicians that hasn't risen since the 80s means that instead of getting 'health care' the poor will get a 'health card' and the weakest and least among them will get elbowed aside by the newly eligible who are more affluent and capable.

It's all so very progressive.

Something real to worry about climate-wise

Our long term problem with climate is not warming but catastrophic cooling. The temperature record from the Vostok Ice cores demonstrates that climate conditions conducive to our civilization are vanishingly rare.  The little red box is the time in which our civilization has arisen.  John Holdren, the White House Science adviser has hypothesized that any global warming man creates might serve to moderate the cooling catastrophe that is already ever so slowly beginning. So yay CO2?

What do you do when the criminals have badges?

The drug war has made it easy to wreck anyone.  Here's an example of a vendetta that was pursued by a district attorney using the DEA.  It destroyed this woman's life.  It's a horrible story but there's another one every day.  And ten for each of those that no one hears.  Our "law" enforcement is increasingly lawless.

Won't someone wake up? Doesn't anyone care?

How government funded hysteria on saturated fats unleashed uncontrolled experiments on all of us. Experiments that are still underway in your children's lunch today.

Read this review. It tells the sordid story of how saturated fats became evil, triggering a series of global uncontrolled experiments on us that continue to this day. It reads just like the AGW story: politicized science, Queen of Hearts (answer first, research later) logic, demonization and defunding of the skeptics, massive industry investment in the "right" answer and obscene sneering moralism by bien pensants.

The only conclusion one can draw is that government funded science is  shit science.

I give the civil service credit for honesty when it comes to Sexual Assault

I am not a big fan of the Federal Government or its lifetime tenure bureaucrats.  That being said, I acknowledge that the Bureau of Justice Statistics' latest report - six years in the making - on the inidence of sexual assault is a model of disinterested honesty.  It finds that rather than the one in five women on campus assaulted during their college careers claimed by the Democrats, the actual rate is more like one in fifty six. Less than two percent is still a problem but it's not the catastrophe presented to justify the obscene 'war on women' rhetoric that the left uses to stampede women into its corner.

And for a government department filled with Democrats to directly and embarrassingly contradict the core narrative of the Democrats has to be hard.  Of course one could point out that they waited until after the election to publish the results and that is true.  This is similar to what happened with the massive longitudinal study of Head Start - far and away the best and largest study of preschool education found that the most expensive, highest quality preschool education does not change the ultimate educational outcomes of its participants.  The study was stifled for a year after completion by the Obami but eventually it came out.

And the fate of the Head Start study is also a cautionary tale.  This year the Obama administration is taking money via executive action to jump start about 300 so called 'high quality' preschool initiatives.  Among the many, many regulations that must be complied with to get the money is one requiring all workers have a college degree. Which has nothing to do with ability to teach and care for preschool children.  But it will increase demand for Barack Obama's strongest supporters:  colleges. So a discredited administration continues to pursue a discredited social policy in the face of its own high quality finding that the policy does not do what it claims and in doing so promotes its own favorite industry.  This is likely how the Obami will treat the sexual assault research.  As an example, here's a quote from Obama doormat Claire McCaskill:

“Frankly, it is irritating that anybody would be distracted by which statistics are accurate.”  

Or in other words:  are you going to pay attention to the truth or what is useful for our political power?  God help us every one.

One man revolutions seldom outlive the man

Victor Davis Hanson says that the President is making a one man revolution. But the only successful one man revolutionary in history was Jesus Christ. And he was the Son of God. And even then he had to be tortured to death and raised from the dead. Something tells me that our new low handicap Jesus isn't interested in playing the Golgotha Open.

Anyone who bases their actions on the promises of a man who will be gone in two years.

But this is also true:

In the next two years, we will see presidential overreach that we have not witnessed in modern memory.

More at the link.

Once upon a time Democrats and unions were fight for the little guy

Now they screw the little guy to line their pockets. It turns out that many of the new 15 dollar minimum wages being passed by 'progressive' cities come with exemptions for unionized employers who are allowed to pay far less if they force their employees to join Democrat unions. It extorts union dues from low wage employees and lowers their wages while claiming they have done a wonderful thing for the 'poor'. 

Read the whole obscene thing.

5 ways that today's war on rape parallels the KKK's campaign of yore

Maybe the feminists can bring lynching back. They have that genteel KKK personality.

We are in the midst of a war on rape. From American campuses to British courthouses, from newspaper op-ed pages to the weird world of online petitions, ‘zero tolerance’ of rape has been declared. And who could possibly be against it? No one is ‘pro-rape’. So surely everyone will cheer a war on rape. Not so fast. Wars on rape have been declared before, and often for deeply reactionary reasons, having the effect of harming society rather than helping women. Consider the ‘war on rape’ declared in America’s Deep South in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the KKK and other racists likewise declared zero tolerance of rape – rape committed by black men, that is – and signalled their determination to wipe out this ‘ultimate transgression’. There was little positive in that crusade. And here are five ways in which today’s non-racist feministic ‘war on rape’ echoes the lynch-mob logic of yesteryear’s racist ‘war on rape’.

Democrats in New York favor Potterville

It's a Wonderful Life...not in the Empire State. Nor the Golden state. Nor most blue states. The details...

In 21st century New York, George Bailey and his buddy the wealthy manufacturer Wainwright would be seen as environmental terrorists trying to build a manufacturing plant that could pollute the Bedford Falls water supply. By contrast, Henry Potter’s gambling dens and dance halls would be hailed as providing green jobs and sparking an economic revival.

Think my analysis is a bit far fetched? Last week Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a ban on fracking and approved the building of several large casinos in Upstate New York. Cuomo professed to believe that fracking never creates many jobs and is hazardous to the environment. More likely, he was blowing off Republican-leaning constituencies Upstate New York while kowtowing to the Orwellian-named Working Families party.

And they forgot the other blue state "Pottervilia": Housing. Mr. Potter was outraged that the Bailey Building and Loan was helping working families escape his tenements and into suburban tract homes which is of course anathema to Smart Growthers. Because tenements are hip. And don't even talk to me about the Bailey's large, environmentally offensive  family.

Is it just me or do the Blue State Dems seem like they are doing everything possible to be the anti-family party? 

Over half the Federal Inspector Generals agree: the Federal Government lacks oversight

47 IGs many of them Obama appointees sent a letter to the House Oversight Committee saying that their agency's are obstructing their investigations in contravention of Federal law.  IRS, DOJ, EPA, even the Peace Corps. Obstructing Justice. Didn't hear about this during the GWB administration did you?

You only use Omerta to protect your crime family. It turns out electing a Chicago politician elects his cronies. And that a heavily Democrat Federal bureaucracy is happy to be turned into a Democrat machine.

The only solution to widespread state impunity is to break it up, break it all up.

http://m.nationalreview.com/article/395337/irs-just-one-dozens-uncooperative-agencies-kevin-d-williamson

Mead: As liberal cocooning intensifies, liberal influence wanes

The poor dears are so obsessed by the righteousness of their cause and policing elite dissent from orthodoxy that they fail to notice that fewer and fewer people give a damn what they think.

So much so that the end state of this cocoon is more likely to be "squish" than "butterfly".

The frequency of Fuck in major motion pictures

There's just something about the word that draws people in. Sort of like moths to a streetlamp.

Odd. That.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_that_most_frequently_use_the_word_%22fuck%22

It has been my experience that the more privileged a black American the more sensitive to perceived racial slights they are....

...and Barack and Michelle Obama are certainly no exception to this rule. In the rest if the world the rich and powerful try to exhibit some tolerance for others foibles and avoid standing on "their" rights. The French call it "noblesse oblige" and both the Obamas and Clintons lack it. The Bushes are drowning in it.

http://www.twincities.com/soucheray/ci_27171675/joe-soucheray-obamas-are-keeping-divide-alive

The academic community is the left's worst liability

Oh yes indeedy do it is says Noemie Emery

This has happened before. In the late 1960s, the last time students and faculty were this full of themselves, they succeeded in electing a lot of Republicans. They gave their own bete noir, Richard M. Nixon, his long deferred and soon squandered wish to be president. As Michael Barone writes in his book Our Country, "Some cheered the springtime rebels as demonstrations broke out in April and May 1969 at Harvard, the City College of New York, and San Francisco State College. Others cheered San Francisco State’s president, the beret-capped semanticist S.I. Hayakawa, as he climbed on the top of a student sound truck and pulled the plugs."

Steven F. Hayward quotes Diana Trilling expressing dismay at the boost the riots gave then-Gov. Ronald Reagan, whose approval ratings in 1969 would nearly reach 80 percent. "Every time he shakes his finger at one of those mobs," a supporter told Newsweek, "it gets him 10,000 votes." The next year, voters would re-elect him by a nice, healthy margin — and would elect Republicans as president for 20 of the next 24 years.

http://m.washingtonexaminer.com/the-more-things-change-.../article/2557734

Die Law schools Die!

Instapundit notices a trend:

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: There are 186 first-year students per law school this year, down from 262 in 2010. You have to go all the way back to 1968 to find a number that low.

More at the link.

http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/12/the-last-time-so-few-people-were-starting-law-school.html

Universities are the vanguard for the type of society we will have if Liberals get their way.

And as Michael Barone points out it is an ugly, intolerant, racist culture.

Kangaroo courts, speech codes, racial discrimination: I suspect some older readers cannot believe such practices have become standard operating procedure at American colleges and universities — indeed, the major focus of many administrators, who now outnumber teachers on the nation’s campuses.

Historically, universities and colleges saw themselves as havens of free speech and fair play, insulated from the larger society to protect those things from interference. Now they insulate themselves in order to violate due process, suppress speech and discriminate by race.

There’s still some good scholarship and teaching on campus. But it exists, uneasily, amid a culture of lying and intellectual corruption

http://m.washingtonexaminer.com/free-speech-political-correctness-struggle-to-coexist-on-campus/article/2557630?custom_click=rss&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter?custom_click=rss&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

The amazing resilience of the United States

Bret Stephens marvels at how US innovation continues to dominate and drive change around the globe in spite of our lousy governance.  He ends with a nice phrase :

We are larger than our leaders.
We are better than our politics.
We are wiser than our culture.
We are smarter than our ideas.
Enjoy the holiday.

Will Bill DiBlasio be forced to resign as mayor of NYC?

Because he has so totally alienated the cops that he cannot govern. God I hope not. New Yorkers need to see the consequences of their foolish electoral choices. Consequences that will be a catastrophe for the city and state of New York. But fun to watch for the rest of us.

Another criminal police conspiracy: Red light cameras reduce safety but increase revenue

They are a lie wrapped in a fraud foisted on an unsuspecting public. In other words par for government in the 21st century. Or to paraphrase Barack Obama: Government is just the things we do to be cruel and exploitative to each other". Details about the new study at the link.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/12/major-chicago-study-finds-red-light-cameras-not-safer-cause-more-rear-end-injuries/

If a cop tells you that you are "threatening his safety" when you are 30 feet away videotaping his actions that means he thinks he can legally kill you

Our police are bewildered as to why people hate and fear them. It's just that we've seen the many and rapidly multiplying videos of their arrogance, brutality and murder. Or have experienced the same ourselves. Too many laws and too much arrogance breed brutality. Fear the cops and prosecutors and judges for that matter. They're not on your side they're on their side.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141212/13042129420/nothing-changes-cops-still-threatening-citizens-breaking-laws-to-shut-down-recordings.shtml

To know you

To want you
need you
you

To feel you tremble 

and hear you breathe
To see your tears

and make them leave.

To know your joy

and laughter too, 

To smile myself and 

laugh with you.

To know you
feel you
You

And when our time is done
in death, despair or ruin.
I am more for knowing you 

and you for knowing me.

And in the end when life  

has no more time to run,

You are more for knowing me 

and I for knowing you.

To know you,

understand you
Love you

To live so that at the end of time 

when all this world is done.
All of time cannot deny

that I knew you. 

And was found,
known and
changed
by you.

You.

Thomas Sowell explained income disparities between men and women in the 70s

Yet Barack Obama and the Democrats are making the same ridiculous claims about women being oppressed 40 years later. There is no better example of the Democrat's war on reality.

And the cops wonder why people hate them: outrageous abuse in suburban Houston

Also: Great example of why you should never call  the cops for almost anything. They aren't on your side. At the link.

http://boingboing.net/2014/12/20/tx-swat-team-beats-deafens-nu.html

The real reason you gasoline is cheaper: Barack Obana's feckless foreign policy

The Saudis are trying to curb Iranian and Russian adventurism and nukes in their neighborhood by bankrupting them. Who says that Obama never (accidentally) did anything good?

But oil speculators operating on their own accounts do not cause the Kremlin to put Holy Mother Russia on the rack of multi-point daily interest rate increases, causing large protests and some public disorder. This is a Saudi move that has ramified very seriously in Russia, far beyond its impact on new oil extraction techniques in the U.S.

If a $50 price is reached and maintained, it would negatively alter but not destroy the economics of heavy oil and probably reduce somewhat shale activity, where reserves are more quickly exploited and harder to estimate than traditional subterranean oil fields, even those that are off-shore. But a Saudi move on this scale, with the resulting self-inflicted reduction in their income, makes no sense for the marginal impact it will have on American future production and imports; it is a geopolitical move targeted much closer to home.

Al-Badri’s flimflam, for which there is much precedent in the history of OPEC (essentially, the cartel is a perpetual quarrel among thieves pretending to be price-fixing), naturally seeks to disguise the fact that Saudi Arabia is trying to discourage the use of Iranian and Russian oil revenues to prop up the blood-stained and beleaguered Assad regime in Damascus, to finance Iran’s nuclear military program, and to incite the continuing outrages of Hezbollah and Hamas in Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories against Israel. The exotic community of interest that has suddenly arisen between the historically Jew-baiting Saudis and the Jewish state is because the countries in the area fear, with good reason as far as can be discerned, that the UN Security Council members, plus Germany, may be on the verge of acquiescing in Iran’s arrival as a threshold nuclear military power. The oil-price weapon, in the face of the terminal enfeeblement of the Obama administration, is the last recourse before the Saudis and Turks, whatever their autocues of racist rhetoric, invite Israel to smash the Iranian nuclear program from the air.

It is perfectly indicative of the scramble that ensues when a mighty power like the United States withdraws, fatigued but undefeated, from much of the world, that Saudi Arabia, a joint venture between the nomadic and medieval House of Saud and the Wahhabi establishment that propagates jihadism with Saudi oil revenues, makes common cause with Israel in a way that inadvertently relieves much of the Russian pressure on Ukraine, which was not an objective in Saudi calculations at all. From the Western standpoint, this is a lucky bounce of the political football. But it is Saudi judgment of its self-interest opposite the contending factions in Syria and the hideous prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran that is discommoding the Saudi leaders, not the ineluctable exploitation by the United States of its own oil resources. It need hardly be added that any conventional definition of “speculation” has nothing to do with it; nor that the Western panic at the bonanza of a $500-billion reduction in the West’s energy costs or the obdurate failure of most Western commentators to understand the implications of the oil price reduction, are an unflattering reflection on the financial and political acuity of the pundits of our society

http://ww2.nationalpost.com/m/wp/blog.html?b=fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/12/20/conrad-black-the-saudis-believe-the-the-west-is-about-to-give-in-to-iranian-demands-crashing-the-price-of-oil-is-how-it-fights-back

My favorite part about the Obama era is all the racial healing.

Follow up tweet: Either that or lowering the sea levels...

https://mobile.twitter.com/exjon/status/537007913353883649

The stunning insult at the center of Grubergate.

Jonathan Gruber famously claimed that the ACA was structured in a complex, opaque way to fool "stupid" voters into supporting it. And who is Mr. Gruber calling stupid? Why the people who supported the law: the heart and soul of the Democratic coalition. The press, academe, unions, government workers, single moms, minorities, liberals and the poor. Gruber says that these people are stupid and easily deceived and manipulated.

But he is also implicitly saying that some other people aren't so stupid. Specifically: tea partiers, white evangelicals and devout Christians, conservatives, business owners, private sector workers, Republicans.

Amazing isn't it? The technocracy is so arrogant, so sure of itself that is will blithely refer to and treat its supporters as stupid dupes. But give Gruber credit where it's due: While he gets zero for one hundred for style he gets full marks for accuracy.

But leftists love to be victims and on that the Obami are quite obliging...more at the link.

ACA forcing the consolidation of physicians into mega cartels which drives down productivity and drives up costs.

Depending upon the study, self employed physicians are ten to thirty percent more productive than employed ones. So at a time when "reform" is rapidly expanding the demand for physicians (at what the best evidence tells us will have zero impact on overall morbidity or mortality) "reform" is also herding independent physicians into employment.

Why would the Obami do something so obviously perverse? Particularly when the President has already asserted the "right" to unilaterally rewrite the ACA. Why didn't he get rid of this stupidity?

He's a corporatist. He does not like people to be independent because they're hard to control. He wants to sit around the table with the power players and do deals. And if access to physicians by the poor has to decline for him to reach glory? Well the losers at the bottom will vote for him regardless. As Obama's key consultant said over and over: Obama's voters and press enablers are stupid. 

Microagression is all the microintelligent, microbrave can handle

Anyone who understands how true achievement happens knows that it requires courage and a thick skin. Yet our elite universities are creating a generation of bright cowards who cannot bear contradiction or adversity.

It's this hot house fragility of the young left that gives me hope for the future. For these men without chests - to steal CS Lewis' formulation - lack the fortitude to see their revolution through.

"Give me some men who are stouthearted men who will fight for the right they adore!
Give me ten men who are stouthearted men and I'll soon find you ten thousand more!"

Not on an Ivy campus you won't. Instead: "whiners to the left of me quitters to the far left. Here I am stuck in a proggo nightmare again."

We are at peak left, thank God

Walter Russell Mead observes that 2008 was the left's dream scenario with failed wars and a crash pinned on Republicans and now politics are shifting back to the middle. But the left doesn't understand this and they are enraged.

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/12/19/next-up-in-america-the-liberal-retreat/

Stupidity and progress in St. Louis' predatory policing

St Louis County police forces are more predator than protector: using fines as a substitute for a tax base. Ferguson is far from the worst offender in this regard yet after predatory harassment for fines led to catastrophe we find Ferguson's finest doubling down on stupid. Apparently the "most unpopular police force evah" plans to close a million dollar budget shortfall caused by stupid, exploitative policing by turning to more stupid exploitative policing, namely increasing fine revenue by a million dollars. Sigh. 

On the  the bright side (if you can call anything MO Democrats do "bright") the state AG is prosecuting 13 (Democrat) St. Louis county municipalities for levying excessive fines - essentially farming the citizenry. But not Ferguson which is odd. Alex Tabarrock has more here.

In other news I find it rich that Democrat police killing and exploiting Democrat blacks in a Democrat owned municipality in a Democrat dominated county, supported by a black Democrat County Executive, protected by a Democrat County Prosecutor, a Democrat state Attorney General and a Democrat Governor is an example of right wing Republican racism.

Of course this sort of intellectual pornography is how my father's family:  life long Republicans who lived in Oklahoma and opposed Jim Crow and all the corruption it entailed can be called 'racist' by the very descendants of Jim crow that they fought. To be a libertarian conservative is to be slandered over and over and over by statist thugs.  Who of course are as racist and sexist towards whites and men today as they were towards blacks and women yesterday.  They will endorse any bigotry that leads to power.

Vermont gives up on single payer system, citing ballooning costs

I'm not surprised because the ambition was always nuts.  I am sad though, because it would have been fun to watch one of the least dynamic, poorest, most left wing (but I repeat myself) places in America try to impale itself over and over while yanking hard on it's own petard and screeching "righteousness".  The train wreck would have been epic and educational.  Sigh.

In Northern Europe, the 2000 year trend is cooling

New research just published takes the long view.  From this dataset's perspective it doesn't look like the Anthropogenic signal is strong enough to overcome that climate trend thus far. Note the variation at the very end of the period is small relative to prior fluctuations.

Does political diversity need to be protected by law?

In light of the venom of faculty members and mob violence against conservatives at Michigan Glenn Reynolds asks:

If I were a Republican — or even Republican-curious — student at the University of Michigan, I’d feel unwelcome there. If I were a Republican governor or legislator in Michigan, and I think they have some of those, I’d be finding ways to encourage Michigan to be more inclusive and diverse. Especially given that — perhaps because of incitement caused by faculty views such as those above — the University of Michigan has already seen mob violence against conservatives. Perhaps Michigan lawmakers need to add political discrimination to their state’s civil rights code — at least as relates to institutions of education — especially in light of Cass Sunstein’s recent argument that political hatred is a serious problem in our society.

Michigan department chair: "It is scientific to hate Republicans"

An English professor opining on the "science" of acceptable hatreds in a national magazine. A great example of the  academy choking on its own bile.

We assumed that Presidents would always be pro American

Silly us. 

It is clear that a lot of our immigration and national security laws were written with certain assumptions about the Chief Executive in mind, assumptions that no longer hold. -Glenn Reynolds

Cali's new rape law turns women into hookers

Until now only prostitutes negotiated their sexual services up front. Now all women are expected to.

ASHE SCHOW: Defining nearly all sex as rape. “California’s ‘yes means yes’ law turns the idea of sexual consent upside down. Suddenly, nearly all sex is rape, unless no person involved reports it as such.

Hat tip Instapundit

Wisconsin won’t admit it, but its new egalitarian policy leads to grading quotas

Boy I gotta hire me some of those Wisconsin poindexters. Their education is so...so....so racially balanced.

Academe: another venal, corrupt left wing institution collapsing before our eyes. More at the link.

School research confirms a key evolutionary prediction

Evolutionary theory asserts that as environmental variables equalize the remaining differences between populations will tend to be derived from parenting and heredity which from an evolutionary standpoint are almost the same thing. Thus it is found that in poor countries with very unequal access to nutrition and schooling, investing in schools narrows achievement gaps because more funding pays for school meals and more instruction. In rich countries nutrition and access to instruction are much more equal but parental inheritance isn't. Hence the finding that more inputs don't help in richer countries.

It's instructive that this was known and downplayed in 1966 by the Federal Coleman Commission tasked with assessing education equality. And Americans have been blowing greater and greater wads of money ever since in a vain attempt to equalize that which is already largely equal to remediate that which money can't fix.

Of course the bureaucrats and their union and Democrat party friends have turned these lies into gold. Which us why they're still being told. Details at the link.

Yes Hollywood is filled with cowards

Hackers have caused Sony to wet their pants and cancel the Interview - a well timed mockery of the homicidal midget that runs the Nork asylum. Typical Norks. Typical Hollywood.

Here.

Obama is right: normalizing relations with Cuba us the right thing to do

The more Cubans are exposed to us, the sooner the Castros will be swinging from a lamppost. Faster please.

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/199818/

Michelle "Oh": racism, it's all racism these days sib

Poor 5'11" dear was "undercover" and was asked by a short honkey to help get something heavy off a top shelf.  Clearly racism.  She and Oprah will have soooo much to talk about. I lived in the Obama's Hyde Park neighborhood and the racism of the Chicago's black elite in the time of Harold Washington surprised me. The affluent matrons were the worst.

A different explanation is that somebody mistook Michelle for someone who was tall, athletic, and gave a shit. And hey, two out of three ain't bad.

Beware the Labelers of Destiny

A response to a friend who admired my father's exquisitely organized garage:

Oh my friend you are toying with powers beyond your ken. You do not engage my father to organize, you submit to the cleansing power of His Truth Which Organizes and Can Find All. You are then integrated into his ReBorg. My brother and I have escaped the ReBorg only by living totally disorganized and random lives. We have spent the last three decades tracking down the Three Labelers of Destiny: One to find them, One to Index them and One to Label them all. The first was discovered next to the dead body of the last Director of the Library of Congress who had labelled all 37 million items alphabetically...by the third letter in each of their names and was in the process of doing the same using the fourth when he died of apoplexy. The second was found on a Yakatori stand owner in the Ginza,Tokyo, Japan. He not only had labeled everything he owned and every piece of food he sold, he also labeled every bit of every ingredient in each piece of food which is why we found him starved to death. My father is the Labelmaker and he holds the third labeler. This winter's solstice my brother and I will take the three Labelers of Destiny to a special field where we will chant special chants and will waggle our asses in special waggles - well Todd will, he has a big waggly ass, mine's to damn small and pert. But if he does and we succeed we will do nothing less than save Entropy from destruction. For if the Labelmaker wins, everything will stop decaying, things will stop going to hell in a handbasket and all the crap that you or I ever made that we're glad is gone won't be. As I was told by my LabelBorg Fighting Mentor as he gestured towards the New York skyline: "If we fail then this all goes on forever and I don't think I could take that". And neither could we. So pray for us and for the restoration of every Man's God Given Right to a disordered, slovenly, half assed life.

The Democratic left: Racist, sexist, hysterical liars who don't care about anything but power

Why else would they repeat lie after lie after lie after lie about campus sexual assault? Why would they bandy about a fraudulent survey done by activists at two colleges claiming one in five women is assaulted when the government's own brand new data from the Justice Department says one in fifty six?  Why would they tell us that we are not to worry our little heads about what is true and what is not?  Why are human beings made pawns in their political machinations?  Why do they hate men so much? And why would the President of these United States endorse, nay promote their vile calumnies?

Why? Why? Why?

I don't know.  But it's ugly and contemptible.

Diane Feinstein rich partisan jerk who produces shoddy biased reports that crap on her country

But Democrats love to dump on their country. It turns out that like the Rolling Stone DIFI and company didn't interview anyone it accused of torture. It took the  allegations as read and crafted them into a partisan "America you suck" repirt. A report that a press that doesn't have enough balance to ride a Big Wheel dutifully shilled into the airwaves to be gleefully taken up by our enemies who really have no scruples.

DIFI: I know the country just kicked your ass but you deserved it. The country did not deserve to be smeared by a self righteous rich jerk like you. Go play with all your money.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marc-thiessen-sen-feinstein-lives-up-to-rolling-stones-standards/2014/12/15/1eca0ddc-8459-11e4-a702-fa31ff4ae98e_story.html

America's industrial boom blows the rest of the developed world away

Industrial production (including mining and power generation) is up 75 percent since 85 vs. - 1.5 in Japan and +30 in Germany. Yet employment is way down.

Scott Sumner explains: it's the productivity stupid.

http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=28175

Hemingway does IKEA

Priceless:

"This is what happens, I thought. You might make sport of their meatballs, but in the end the Swedes get the better of you."

Read the whole thing.

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-farewell-to-hemnes-ernest-hemingway-assembles-an-ikea-daybed-frame-with-three-drawers

Exploding energy costs in New England are the Demo plan

It should be fun to watch the accelerating exodus of all unsubsidized employment. Pretty soon it will just be colleges, banks , governments and Green Energy crooks trying to screw each other. With MA vetoing any new distribution capacity for the region.

And they think they're the smartest people in America.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/12/coming-soon-to-a-utility-bill-near-you.php

From Obama down the left lies about rape and racism and conservatives without consequence.

It's impossible to make a republic with people that have no regard for truth or the rules.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/12/14/campus-rape-uva-crisis-rolling-stone-politics-column/20397277/

Once again a Euro point of pride turns out to be faked

This time it is auto mileage standards that are fudged. If you don't honestly measure yourself then you can claim all sorts of things with a straight face.

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21636063-efficiency-european-cars-much-about-trickery-technology-fuels-paradise

Turns out Blow job Nina Burleigh has been servicing the patriarchy for quite some time.

LoOKING AT AN EARLIER QUESTIONABLE CAMPUS RAPE PIECE IN ROLLING STONE BY NINA BURLEIGH, Tom Maguire notices a pattern.

http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2014/12/i-sense-a-pattern-at-the-rolling-stone.html

The Iowa prosecutor who brought this charge should be raped.

Accusing a 78 year old husband of rape for having sex with his alzheimers impaired wife. Sexual hysteria in this country is reaching witch hunt levels.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/12/11/78-year-old-iowa-legislator-is-prosecuted-for-having-sex-with-his-wife-who-was-suffering-from-alzheimers/

Tin condos and Fannie's coming. Bubble's going to pop again. I can see the headlines screaming: 3 percent down in O-hi-o

A nationalized but utterly out of control (hey we're the government!) Fannie Mae is ramping up its easy money honey pot to destroy gullible lower income renters by conning them into buying a house they can't afford. It seems the Dems don't have enough pathetic dependents, lawyers bureaucrats and "educators" to ice elections anymore. So let in a bunch of poor illiterate Latinos and wipe out a few millions of the working class' hopes and dreams and "Happy days are here again!", baby.

Government is just something that screws us together.

How many more? How many more?

Exploiting street walkers for fun and profit: the odious A&E's odious new "reality" show

A so called man of God hunts down  hot hookers, cons them into a hotel room and then humiliates  them on national TV. Bet he stiffs them their fee as well.

Christianity always carries a strain of pious brutality. From Salem to the drug wars to mass felonization and the American Gulag the Church ladies cede nothing to the authoritarian left in terms of self righteous, manipulative cruelty.

Bitches.

The most interesting thing about this article is that it describes Dick Cheney getting dicked by Fox News while dickering with Brett Baier

And here I thought Fox was part of the "vast right wing conspiracy". Hmmmm.

True love and car keys

This post is about an act of love so profound that I could not let it pass unremarked.  Men: you all remember that moment when you showed your beloved just how much you loved her? No I'm not talking about the time you blew 50 bucks on flowers only to realize "Hey! these are just dead plant tips". Or when you agreed to the blowout wedding, diamond ring and Parisian honeymoon when it would have made far more sense to skip all of that and use the proceeds to buy a double wide at the lake thereby getting a home,honeymoon and all the fish you can eat for free. No, I'm speaking of something far more profound. An act so selfless, so irrational that it simply screams love, love, love! I am of course referring to the first time you let her drive your car.  Remember the gut stewing horror?  The clammy hands?  The hyperventilation barely controlled by surreptitious paper bag blowing? I shudder to recall that dark day standing on the edge of madness.   The photo below represents a sacrifice even more profound.  Yes, we let her drive our car because we loved her but it also was a social norm.  One that if we didn't adhere to would result in our ending up like that fat Norm who sat at the end of the bar next to the pathetic mail man in that TV show Cheers. No, this act represents a far greater sacrifice than ours because this man is letting his beloved (I have to assume she was his beloved because she wasn't holding a gun on him or anything) drive his CRANE.    I can say with certainty that there is no norm or rule.  No law or constitution. No commandment or scripture that requires a man to let his woman drive his industrial grade man toys.  Nowhere, nada, nothing. Yet there he is in plain daylight letting her play with his Pride and Joy in front of. everyone  

And all I can say is poor Sod: he's toast.  Burnt, buttered and eaten toast.  Such is the folly of man.

Feminists are the true heirs to the KKK and young men are their Scottsboro Millions

Jonah Goldberg points out the irony that fake rape charges was one of the key ways that racists kept black men down. In part because it is so easy to get middle class white women to panic.  Just like all the middle class white feminists are doing today.  They are so full of their own false righteousness that they can't even see the irony of their bigotry.  Eventually Murder Will Out, though.

Scottsboro is a landmark case in the history of the civil-rights movement and the American justice system. Sadly, it was hardly an outlier. There’s a long, tragic history of African-American men being wrongly accused and convicted of rape. The most notorious recent example is the 1989 case of the Central Park Five, in which four African-American teens and one Latino were wrongly accused and convicted of brutally raping a white woman in New York.

When the many establishment media frauds lie about you hit them back as hard as you can

So hard that they lose millions and their President is forced to resign.  Look at all the people gawking at Gawker laid out flat on the ground by video gamers.  Let's hit 'em again and see if we can make them cry....hat tip Instapundit.

ATTACKING YOUR CUSTOMERS IS EXPENSIVE: Anti-GamerGate Campaign Cost Gawker Over A Million Dollars. “The cost to Gawker Media of its ridicule and viciousness toward video gamers was ‘seven figures’ in lost advertising revenue, according to the company’s head of advertising, Andrew Gorenstein. In addition, founder Nick Denton has stepped down as president and editorial director Joel Johnson has been removed from his post and will probably leave the company, reports Capital New York. . . . Gawker, together with Vox Media, represent the ‘worst offenders’ in the media, according to GamerGate forums: they have both, through properties such as Kotaku and Polygon, respectively, repeatedly mocked video gamers and uncritically reported claims of threats and harassment from feminist campaigners which are falling apart under closer scrutiny.”

More Barack mACAca: surveyed employers estimate labor costs to soar 3x inflation.

And the vast majority will take the increased costs out of their employees' paychecks.

I guess our Lord and Savior still believes that he is bestowing manna from heaven rather than screwing people. Perhaps that's where the smug face comes from.

Conservatives: it is not conservative to immediately do whatever an armed representative of the state tells you. Or to approve of the punishment of anyone who does not.

It is not Conservative to lick government jack boots. It is not American to instinctively take the side of state violence and coercion. Prussian? Japanese? Yes. But Traditional American conservative? No. Quit kissing armed bureaucrat assess or kiss our Republic goodbye.  Liberals are the people that want to maximize the power of the state and to do that they needs lots of policing.  "Law and Order" conservatism is "Appeasing and Facilitating Liberal Goals" conservatism.  You're not getting "tough", you're getting "had".

Illinois is attempting to resurrect what the state’s politicians pretend is a privacy-protecting anti-surveillance law; in reality, it is the nearly identical reincarnation of the state’s earlier anti-recording law, the main purpose of which was to charge people who record police encounters with a felony, an obvious and heavy-handed means of discouraging such recording. Illinois’s state supreme court threw the law out on the grounds that police do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy when carrying out their duties, though police and politicians argued the contrary — apparently, some part of the meaning of the phrase “public servants” eludes them. The new/old law is, by design, maddeningly vague, and will leave Illinois residents unsure of which encounters may be legally recorded and which may not.

Here is the solution: Pass a law explicitly recognizing the right of citizens to record police officers. It is important to note that such a law would recognize a right rather than create one: Government has no legitimate power to forbid free people from using cameras, audio-recording devices, or telephones in public to document the business of government employees. The statute would only clarify that Americans — even in Illinois — already are entitled to that right.

This is not a theoretical concern: A woman in the great progressive bastion of Massachusetts is very possibly prison-bound for the crime of turning on the audio recording feature of her mobile phone when being arrested.

Obama DOJ "up to its neck" in IRS targeting scanal

We're becoming a less exceptional country every day. Who knew that electing a President with third world socialist mores would lead to third world thuggery?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2014/12/10/obama-justice-department-was-involved-in-irs-targeting-lerner-emails-reveal/

An adult, statistically literate discussion of sexual assault

Which points out that the "activjsts" behavior and thought process is profoundly illiberal and destructive of their professed goals. It's as if their rage at men in general overwhelms any rational course if action - they just want to make men pay and they don't particularly care which men. 

Vegan McCardle points out that with each illiberal shriek they are wrecking their case more. Anti rape hysteria is McCarthyism for feminists. See the link.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-12-09/you-cant-just-accuse-people-of-rape

Are Libertarians More Rational Than Others? No, Just More Aware of the *Limits* to Reason

Both liberals and conservatives have an overblown opinion of their ability to rationally manage humanity in the spheres they choose to exercise power. The brutal fact is that human beings are far to complex and sophisticated to be ruled in detail by other human beings without immense waste, cruelty  and degradation. But both sides can only see the other side's sin.

We libertarians tend to see the whole sordid Hyronemous Bosch  Tableau of self serving manipulation. And it horrifies us.

http://reason.com/blog/2014/12/09/are-libertarians-more-rational-than-othe

Media moral vacuity in full flood

So the Dems dumped a 'report' on interrogation practices by the CIA and others that (surprise, surprise) dumps on the people defending us for being immoral meanies and lays all the blame on the Republicans because no one had ever done a rough interrogation before Bushhitler came a long and that Bill Clinton cat never did any Renditions besides JFK was known for his milquetoast personality when it came to the nation's enemies.  But the fact that the Dems are pissing on their country is old news.  The Dems entire playbook is "America Sucks.  Elect us so we can make it suck even more".

But I'm fascinated by the insane lack of perspective on pain and suffering exhibited by our bien pensant lords.  Let's review the options available to the garden variety Jihadi caught in our crosshairs.

1. Gets caught and held in cages for years, perhaps for the rest of his life.  Horrible life, we get the bill and no intel.

2. Gets killed in an Afghan cave or Iraqi Spider Hole by Marines.  No fun, we save on the vittles but still no intel.

3.  Dies at home surrounded by his family and friends who also die because the house pancakes and they all are slowly crushed to death.  Less than no fun. No housing costs, horrible PR on account of all the screaming children being slowly crushed to death.  No intel.

4.  Getting dunked until you're gasping for breath a few dozen times until you tell them something which may or may not be true.  Absolute Nazi Badism.  As bad as the Holocaust, evil, totally evil.  Horrible. But we might get information that could lead to stopping terrorist acts or rounding up the kingpins.

Clearly we want to do a whole hell of a lot of one through three and under no circumstance should we ever, ever do four because it's so inhumane.

I would be astounded at our liberal elite's inability to think clearly had I not seen it  time and time again. Now it's just engenders a dull horror. .

Lincoln University President fired for telling female students the truth about rape: that they have a responsibility not to put themselves in compromising positions

The modern University is less tolerant and more superstitious than Salem was at the height of it's witch hysteria.  What an intellectual and moral catastrophe they've become.  I propose a big dose of real world reality for our academic fantasists.

I am continually astounded by how certain elements of the left are completely detached from reality: Feminists for example

It is tragic when someone's ideological fantasy life leads them to wholly misperceive reality.  These women have taken leave of their senses. the only other people who are this batshit crazy are the environmentalists.  And the Marxists, of course.  Leftism is a cult of unreason. Hat tip Instapundit.com

JUDITH LEVINE: Feminism Can Handle The Truth.

“Rape denialism”: The charge is hurled at anyone who questions the veracity of a story, statistic (one in five women students sexually assaulted), or policy (yes means yes). And if men are slapped down when they question these orthodoxies, special punishment attends female critics.

One alleged serial offender is Slate’s Emily Yoffe—a.k.a. Prudence of “Dear Prudence”—a consistently responsible, intelligent commentator on women’s issues. Last year, Yoffe wrote a typically well researched, and empathetic, piece about the link between binge drinking and campus rape. In it, she gave some common-sense advice: Rapists target drunk women. To reduce the risk of assault, don’t get plastered to unconsciousness.

The response was fierce. Feministing pronounced the column a “rape denialist manifesto.” On Jezebel, Erin Gloria Ryan accused Yoffe of “admonishing women for not doing enough to stop their own rapes.” Many more piled on.

Feministing had been indicting Yoffe for “denialism” for years. In 2007, a woman wrote to Prudence, fearing she’d have to divorce her “kind, supportive, funny, generous, smart, and loving” husband for the crime of twice initiating sex while both were intoxicated—sex, by the way, that the woman enjoyed. Yofee called it as she saw it: ideology gone mad. The man was not a rapist, she averred. Indeed, “Your prim, punctilious, punitive style has me admiring your put-upon husband’s ability to even get it up,” Yoffe wrote, and encouraged the woman to enjoy the spontaneous lovemaking that alcohol sometimes sparks.

For the mitzvah of saving a marriage, Lindsay Beyerstein, in In These Times, administered Yoffe 40 lashes for cruelly trivializing the trauma of a “survivor.”

Evidently Colombia law students can't handle adversity.

Apparently they need time off to recover from all the rioting and looting they did after Brown and Garner.  They're weaklings. Don't hire them.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/12/not-a-parody.php

I guess it's appropriate that modern Malthusianism is a left religious movement. After all Malthus was an Anglican Divine.

Paul Krugman's religious raving about "peak oil" after fracking had already negated the concept for at least a century illustrates this. Krugman had only to ask someone in the oil industry to have his faith in scarcity contradicted. But it was more important to demonstrate faith than be "right". Ravings at the link.

The right is getting savvier about hitting back

SABO is a street artist in LA, he responded to the UVA Rolling Stone Lena Dunham hoaxes with the following poster:



Rape fantasies indeed.

I'm not sure the 'values' Venn diagrams intersect any more

It has been a conviction of mine that despite all of the conflict the values of left and right America were fundamentally the same. We all valued fair dealing, truthfulness, honesty, all wanted to help the poor and the sick, all wanted to avoid war and minimize violence and cruelty.  Where we differed was in the means to these ends.  But I'm not so sure anymore.  For three reasons:

1. Campus Sexual Assault - there have been a number of high profile hoaxes recently but rather than condemn the hoaxers parts of the left have said the truth doesn't matter.

The President of UVA overreacted, believed the worst about her own students and shut down the Greek community of thousands.  Now that the rape has been exposed as all or mostly made up, she refuses to apologize saying:   “Over the past two weeks, our community has been more focused than ever on one of the most difficult and critical issues facing higher education today: sexual violence on college campuses. Today’s news must not alter this focus.” I would say no, sexual violence isn't the most difficult issue:  the bias, lack of honesty and abuse of power by those that run UVA that is the biggest issue.

But it's much worse:  many, many prominent women have said things like this:  As the fact-checking comes in, Jessica Valenti’s response is to declare, “I trust women,” and then go on to blame Rolling Stone for “throwing this young woman under the bus.” Amanda Marcotte blames the collapse of the story on “rape apologists” who “think that if they can ‘discredit’ one rape story, that means no other rape stories can be true, either”—a position held, so far as anyone can tell, by no one. But feminist blogger Melissa McEwan gets the top prize for this M.C. Escher drawing of a thought: “I can’t state this more emphatically: If Jackie’s story is partially or wholly untrue, it doesn’t validate the reasons for disbelieving her.”  Or this one:  Assertions of injustice by young men are infuriating to some. Caroline Heldman, an associate professor of politics at Occidental College and co-founder of End Rape on Campus, said of the men who are turning to the courts, “These lawsuits are an incredible display of entitlement, the same entitlement that drove them to rape.

A few feminists have issued a prompt and unreserved apology. The rest are going down with this ship.

2. Immigration amnesty.  The President, contradicting over 20 public statements he has made over the years is asserting the right to give an 'amnesty' to 5 million illegals based upon his 'enforcement' authority.  This is a fundamental restructuring of our Constitutional understanding of Executive Power and a massive usurpation of Congress.  

3. The relentless and very common assertion among elites that conservatives and Republicans are racist, homophobic and warring on women. It's incomprehensible to me that one could prejudge a hundred million men and women and define them as essentially evil for disagreeing with you. Now I realize that there are Conservatives who do the same thing but the "War on Women" was the Democrat's main campaign theme in the last two elections.  A campaign that essentially argued that Republicans and conservatives were sexists who hate women.  Even the 45% of them who are women.  There is nothing comparable coming from the right.  Nothing.

Meanwhile Ayan Hirsi Ali who is fighting a real 'war against women' in the Islamic world is not welcome on most college campuses who are so obsessed with the "war on women".  Why?  She's not of the tribe.

The bottom line is this:  If we can't agree that the truth is essential, that following the rules of the game is important and that all of us across the ideological spectrum are generally people of goodwill trying to work out the right path as best we can then we might as well hang this Republic up.  Because without those three things all you have left is  raw power.  And eventually violence.

The Democrat's desired dependency achievement in one chart

Dependent people are compliant people.

The Solid South is Dead! Long live the Solid South!

The flip is complete with only Va and FL having any Dem senators in the entire Old South plus Oklahoma (which was defended by slave owning Indians in what is today a hidden affront to multiculturalism).  And VA and FL are ruled from DC and NYC's southern branch respectively.

Mary Landrieu hasn’t just lost her runoff race against Bill Cassidy, she has been “crushed” (asPolitico puts it). With about 40 percent of precincts reporting, Cassidy leads by 17 points. That’s Mark Pryor territory and approaches the domain of Blanche Lincoln, who lost by 21 points in 2010.

Crushed.  Smooshed.  Squished. Guacamoled.

I say chain 'em together and make them do a perp walk too.

HELL NO — PUT THE CHAIRS EXTRA-CLOSE TOGETHER: HHS asks GOP: Keep us away from Gruber.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is asking lawmakers not to seat ObamaCare consultant Jonathan Gruber next to Medicare’s top official when the two testify on Capitol Hill next week. HHS Assistant Secretary for Legislation Jim Esquea wrote to the House Oversight Committee with the request, stating that government witnesses are “almost always afforded an opportunity” to sit alone or with other federal officials.

“The accommodation of separate panels for government witnesses reflects important comity in congressional-executive relations,” Esquea wrote. “The relatively few exceptions to this practice reinforce the seriousness of this accommodation.” The Oversight panel, led by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), is preparing to grill Gruber over his comments that the “stupidity of the American voter” and a “lack of transparency” helped ObamaCare pass in 2010. “The request is currently before Chairman Issa but at past hearings, government officials have testified alongside other non-administration witnesses,” said Becca Watkins, a spokeswoman for the committee.
While he has apologized, Gruber’s remarks have become their own flashpoint in debates over ObamaCare. Republicans say the comments confirm their view that the law was not passed in an open process.
Democrats have sought to distance themselves from Gruber. The Esquea letter is the clearest example related to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Marilyn Tavenner, who will serve as a witness at the same hearing.

Having the two seated together — with all the resulting photos — would be a public relations nightmare for the administration. Which it should be, and the GOP would be crazy not to make it happen.

Hat tip Instapundit.con

"Write tickets, do searches, make money. They’ll have a quota they have to fill."

Policing as shakedown racket in NYC. When everything's against the law, everyone's a criminal. Note the commentary about how the "legal" cig sellers who have to buy a license an pay 9 bucks in tax per pack went to the people they're paying off to "eliminate" the competition that hadn't paid for protection. 

All I know is New York City. Nowadays, since Kelly’s Operation Impact, rookies are taught one thing: Write tickets, do searches, make money. They’ll have a quota they have to fill. They’re not supposed to, but they do. They come up not knowing their asses from their elbows. These rookies don’t understand how to let the small stuff go. They’ll be on your back for a bag of grass. So then when things happen, they overreact.

It's still racketeering by a criminal enterprise. Even if it's legal. But usually the Gambinos don't murder the guy. And they sure as hell don't have the Staten Island Grand Jury bought the way the popo do.

Everybody loves 'broken windows policing'  but Broken windows only works when there are a limited number of things to police.  When everything is against the law Broken Windows becomes a license for municipalities to shake down and harass unpopular people. New York is once again an extreme example of a trend taken too far. 

Self righteous and controlling is no way to run a city.

Golly the left has achieved so much with their Obama investment

Eliminated more babies than abortion, wiped out the moderate wing of the Democrat party and massively inflamed black vs everyone else tensions

Attaboy Barry we couldn't have done it without you.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/12/05/us/us-sees-decline-in-births-for-sixth-year.html?referrer=

The media Gang raped a UVA frat this weekend but ended up screwing themselves

To their credit some media raised red flags but true to their agitprop heritage the NYT and MSNBC sullied their already sleazy reputations further.

Now on to the Lena Dunham rape lies!

DC has banned conscience

Religious schools and other institutions can no longer define their own long established standards for sexuality. I point out that DC is where Democratic Washington lives.

Fascist and intolerant is no way to run a city

http://m.nationalreview.com/corner/394106/dc-council-religious-schools-must-adopt-its-views-sexual-morality-william-c-duncan

Me at 53

Have you ever known a man so lost he can't even go?
Have you ever seen a truck on axles at the side of the road?

That's me you see and know and find,
that's me that's lost, afraid and dyin'
It's me at fifty three.

Have you ever found a man so down that he cries?
Have you ever been in the desert without a drop or a hide?

That's me you see and know and find,
that's me that's lost, afraid and dyin'
It's me at fifty three.

There's a lot of them out there in the world
No longer living but not yet dying
There's a lot of us lost out there too
No longer hoping but still lying
to ourselves that we'll get it straight
But we know in this world we're way too late.

That's me you see and know and find
that's me that's lost, afraid and dyin'
It's me at fifty three
It's me at fifty three
Only me
Look away
Please look away
Please

Feminist Fascists really need to up their game - the UVA rape story fell apart

It was obvious bullshit to anyone not drunk on 'sex assault' Koolaid.  Rolling Stone is a bunch of pathetic old coots way past their prime.  Jan Wenner needs to be put out to pasture.  Moo.

And:

Will U.Va. President Teresa Sullivan apologize for her evidence-free collective punishment of the entire Greek system? Actually, she should resign.

No, she won't because she's one of the Feminist Fascists.  She should be fired for her transparently political thuggery.

Barack's lastest incandescently stupid statement about Muslims - Jonah Goldberg

Truly this President is detached from the reality based community.  After all he's an academic but this is just astounding:  Jonah Explains this whale of a stupidity:

What’s That Now?

One last item I don’t want to fall down the memory hole. I was going to write a whole column on this, but Mona Charen beat me to the punch. Still, my jaw dropped when I heard Obama’s reaction to the beheading of Peter Kassig.

“ISIL’s actions represent no faith,” Obama said, “least of all the Muslim faith which Abdul-Rahman adopted as his own.”

Abdul-Rahman was Kassig’s Muslim name, which he adopted only while being held captive by Islamists. Perhaps the conversion was sincere, though I suspect Kassig did it to stay alive and certainly under duress and I can begrudge him it. Either way, there’s something disgusting about using Kassig’s Muslim name in order to score a propaganda point.

It’s even worse when that propaganda point is so incandescently stupid.

As Mona notes (and as I argued here), no one except Barack Obama thinks it’s a revelation that the Islamic State kills Muslims. No Kurd, no Shia, no moderate Sunni stays in his home when the Islamic State is at the gates, and says “Hey, we’re Muslim and Muslims don’t kill Muslims. We’ve got nothing to worry about.”

But it’s the phrase “least of all the Muslim faith” that is truly infuriating. Least of all? Really? So other faiths are more implicated in this atrocity than Islam? Which ones? Does he really mean to be suggesting that while the Islamic State’s actions “represent no faith,” if we have to assign blame, Islam is the least culpable? Could a team of rhetoricians, theologians and logicians working around the clock in some Andromeda Strain bunker beneath the Nevada desert come up with an argument that puts even a scintilla more blame at the feet of, say, the Lutherans or Quakers? On the one hand we have a bunch of dudes who shout “Allāhu Akbar!”, memorize the Koran, and rape and murder in the name of the Islamic State. On the other hand, we have a grab bag of Buddhists, Jews, Seventh Day Adventists, and Southern Baptists. And the one faith least implicated here is Islam? Really. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

Complexity is a subsidy, and the people making society more complex are the direct beneficiaries of that subsidy.

Brilliant insight from the sometimes brilliant but always entertaining Jonah Goldberg.  Here he says it in the pixels on Cavuto.

Screw Washington. States should strip the Feds of their misused power. Both parties.

Mark Levin:

The building national movement for a constitutional convention of states to block President Obama’s executive orders got a huge boost Thursday when leading advocate Mark Levin urged state lawmakers to throttle all of Washington, including Republicans.

“Take your power back,” he demanded of the hundreds of lawmakers attending the American Legislative Exchange Council convention on Capitol Hill. “You are the last line of defense of liberty.

There is no doubt that the states as a whole are far better run than the Federal farce. The deep blues? Not so much but that's OK because their demise will be educational. Faster please.

http://m.washingtonexaminer.com/mark-levin-urges-states-to-take-back-your-power-from-runaway-obama/article/2556952

What else us new? Once again the IRS refuses to hand over evidence despite court orders to do so.

Obstruction of justice is punishable during Republican administrations.

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/199244/

Chuck Todd: Obama care was written by the insurance companies?

Really? Really? Boy they're a lot more incompetent than what I thought. Sorry Chuck. Try as you might to present yourself as independent, the fact that slip almost immediately back into the Democratic blame game litany outs you. You think left which makes you useless as an independent analyst because you're just like the rest of them. Sad.

http://pjmedia.com/blog/chuck-todd-on-obamacare-this-bill-is-a-mess/

Garner was killed by too many laws arbitrarily enforced.

And those who live closest to the edge and come in most contact with the police get the arbitrary more of the time. Hence Eric Garner being strangled to death because NYC has driven the cigarette market for all but the rich underground. Statism is increasingly nihilistic and objectively evil in its impact on society.

Read the whole thing by Stephen Carter  here:

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-12-04/law-puts-us-all-in-same-danger-as-eric-garner

From the My God are they Really Going to Nominate Her department.

Country video music extolling her virtues as nostalgia. Neuralgia more like. My God is this what we've become? They've become I mean.

If Hook Hoo wins President it will be two entitled affirmative action left wing resumes sans accomplishments in a row. Two inept politicians is all I takes to destroy the dem coalition for good.

If she does run or even win I'll be a little like that boy in Animal House looking at the Playboy only to have a real Playboy bunny inexplicably land on his lap "thank you God". Although I suppose Hillary would only dress up that way for Bill.

But it's a naughty dream because
the country can't take it. The video or the woman.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/12/stand-with-hillary-and-then-laugh-your-a-off.php

Are the Dems really going to nominate a talentless wife/hack like la Clinton?

I suppose the only reason Hillary put up with the sleaze bag all these years is her lust for power and glory (and the thrill of manipulating and making others suffer, don't forget that outraged cruelty is always part of her and feminism's M.O.). But Dems: you've just impaled yourselves one aff-act hack do you really want more of this? Really?

Broken windows policing only works in a common culture where everyone agrees on what should be against the law.

If a behavior ceases to be overwhelmingly disapproved its policing becomes oppression rather than enforcement. There was a time when adults exposing their bare legs would have been considered disorder. No longer. In a city where the price of a pack of cigs has been jacked to 10 dollars selling loose smokes is a public service, not a crime. To be strangled to death for it as Eric Garner was is an obscenity and murder no matter what the corrupt Grand Jury system concluded.

The problem is the brutal punishment of disapproved commercial activity that large minorities or even majorities do not consider felonious such as street vending, marjuana crimes and so forth. It is Immoral for an elite to establish felonies for things that are not overwhelmingly considered to be felonious. To do increases by the act of enforcement the feeling of disorder that "broken windows" policing seeks to lower. It's just that the new crimes are committed at the behest and by employees of an out of control state.

And curiously this majoritarian  approach works for non commercial crimes like homosexuality, the level of acceptable display of public nudity and other behaviors. But when it comes to commerce the state gets greedy and cruel. Probably a legacy of our leftward party's contempt for commerce.

Yet in our oh so trendy burgs like San Francisco they are banning circumcision. Does trendy equal ignorance?

For the left the science of circumcision is only settled if it agrees with their politics. Hat tip instapundit.

Circumcision Guidelines Target Teenagers. “Doctors should start telling sexually active teenage boys who aren’t circumcised that if they have the surgery, they can reduce their risk of contracting H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted infections from their female partners, federal health officials propose. Similar counseling is urged for adult heterosexual men who remain uncircumcised and for expectant parents who will be making a decision about newborn circumcision if they have a boy, according to the new recommendations, proposed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Selling untaxed cigarettes is apparently a capital offense in the "great" state of New York

"Official Immunity" combined with the omni competent state makes a mockery of liberty. Because if you dissent from state orthodoxy its minions have the right to coerce your conformity up to and including killing you.

They get out of the traditional prohibition against state killing by saying "oops". Apparently New York Grand Juries are mere tools of state sponsored criminality just like the Feds.

Why, it’s almost as if the grand jury system is just a convenient means for prosecutors to get the outcome they want wrapped in a veneer of due process. Want to indict a ham sandwich? Consider it indicted. Texas Gov. Rick Perry was indicted for vetoing a spending bill, but a New York prosecutor can’t indict an officer who killed another man in an incident that was completely captured on video? Come on.

John Edwards was right: there are Two Americas. There’s an America where people who kill for no legitimate reason are held to account, and there’s an America where homicide isn’t really a big deal as long as you play for the right team.

Unfortunately Eric Garner was a victim in the second America, where some homicides are apparently less equal than others.

UPDATE: If you’d like additional evidence of my contention that a prosecutor can generally get a grand jury to return whichever outcome the prosecutor wants, check this out:

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Despite his contention of a frame-up, Ramsey Orta’s testimony didn’t sway a grand jury, which indicted him on weapon charges, stemming from an Aug. 2 arrest, it was revealed in court Friday.

Orta, 22, who filmed an NYPD officer’s fatal chokehold of Eric Garner last month, pleaded not guilty at his arraignment in state Supreme Court, St. George.

That’s right. Less than a month after Garner was killed, the same DA’s office tasked with handling his homicide case just happened to get a grand jury indictment against the man who filmed Garner’s homicide.

What a fucked up country we live in.

The empirical case for American Hegemony

Benign and prosperity enhancing, the Era of the Pax Americana has been the most peaceful and prosperous time in world history. And we do it with half the world's defense spending but only 4 percent of our output  (!).

Of course the key is thoughtful circumspection - only engage where necessary and useful - and consistent application. Of basic policy principles regardless of the party in power.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-good-country/

America is great because of our astounding fundamentals.

And Richard Fernandez argues it is our inefficient often ineffective government that gives us space for fundamentals to flourish.

America at the end of 2014 is in the strange position of having strengths that no one had even counted on. Its oil industry has produced a cornucopia of energy in despite of administration obstruction. It’s space industry and science are poised to lay the foundation for the commercial exploitation of space. It is, despite everything, in better shape than Europe and in far better condition than Japan.
A new American century may be in the works just when the intellectuals had written it off. The US may is led by unimaginative elites who have no idea what to do with these strengths except tax them. Yet that may be fortunate, almost as if God had blessed America with leaders who are too dumb to know they are.
Maybe the Founders were right: politicians are ultimately necessary evils best held down to as low a level of activity as possible. Ultimately a nation lives or dies on its character and culture. If that is sound then America simply can’t be held down, or maybe that will be China.
Such a result would suggest it wasn’t just Chuck Hagel who didn’t matter; the whole Hope and Change strategy may simply have been the modern equivalent of the Five Year Plan,  a MacGuffin everyone thinks is important but has no significance beyond a plot device. The administration’s vain attempt to imitate the ‘decisive leadership’ of the EU, China and other authoritarianisms succeeded because it failed.

http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2014/12/01/mining-engineers-led-by-communications-studies-majors/

Even the Salvation Army hates young men

A family was welcome at the Salvation Army Shelter except for their 15 year old son.  SA has a policy of not sheltering teenage males because of "sexual abuse" fears.  The insane sexual abuse and assault hysteria sweeping the nation is a classic activist and politician moral panic. And it is aimed directly at the highest risk demographic in our society: young men.

I knew church ladies and feminists hated young men but the Salvation Army? My God, my God why have you forsaken us? Details at the link.

http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/199131/

San Francisco stops prosecuting drug crimes and crime goes down

Just like libertarians have been saying all along.

http://reason.com/reasontv/2014/12/02/when-san-francisco-stopped-prosecuting-d

Obama care continues to be a program based upon fantasy

This is a quote from a Gallup poll which illustrates the fundamental confusion of the obami on this topic.

The theory behind ObamaCare and its insurance mandate was that forcing people into private insurance would allow them to keep from putting off care and treatment. That would mean better diagnoses and more effective treatments, which would then lower costs over the long run.

So called prevention and early detection drive Healthcare spending upwards. Always have always will.

http://hotair.com/archives/2014/12/01/gallup-obamacare-not-shielding-consumers-from-economic-choices/

Mary Landrieu: Toasted southern democrat

http://hotair.com/archives/2014/12/01/doom-early-vote-trends-are-gruesome-for-mary-landrieu/

Modern conundrums: Global Warming: Where's the Mitigation and Adaptation?

Increasing human activity is generating an inexorable rise in the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and oceans.  As a result the UN committee deputized to study this problem has issued a report (well many) that says  it is absolutely essential that the nations of the world act immediately and in concert to stabilize carbon dioxide levels by mid century at or near 450 ppm.

I assume that there are very good, rigorously tested scientific reasons that support the selection of 450PPM as the goal. Reasons that represent consequences so devastating that any reasonable man would agree as to the absolute necessity of submitting to a highly restrictive and coercive regime, spending tens of trillions of dollars in diverted investments and foregone economic growth and denying the poorer nations of the world access to much of modern civilization.  Because if it's just a convenient line in the sand and the really dangerous upper boundary for atmospheric CO2 concentrations is higher then the demand that the world submit to the global warming regime immediately is both fraudulent and immoral.  After all, the higher the true 'danger' zone the more time we have to solve the problem later when we are richer and more technologically sophisticated. So I assume 450PPM is a serious boundary produced by serious people.

Which is tragic because all the evidence says that we are going to blow past the 450 ppm benchmark. Recently President Obama returned from China having gotten the Chinese to commit to lowering greenhouse gas emissions.  But not now.  First they are going to double their current green house gas emissions and then if everything goes right in sixteen years they will begin working on reducing them. Honest, they swear. And without the Chinese, the Indians, Indonesians and Brazilians and all the other poor countries agreeing to immediately begin stunting their own economic growth in the name of global CO2 reductions there is no way on God's increasingly green earth that CO2 emissions are going to stabilize at 450 PPM and everyone who is anyone knows it.  After all, the Chinese just told us so.


Here's a list of the ten most populous countries in the world today.  Only the United States has made any progress towards green house gas reductions and eight of the remaining nine are poor and like China have no intention of sacrificing their economic growth to hit a carbon dioxide concentration number.  Even worse many of the rich 'AGW believer' nations seem to have lost their enthusiasm for the cause. Germany and Japan are busily scrapping their rather massive nuclear power infrastructures and replacing them with...coal and natural gas.  Australia has formally abandoned its goals, Canada is producing 'dirty' tar sands oil by the millions of barrelfuls while Germany and Spain have cancelled their renewable subsidy programs. The UK has tried so hard to go green that it is facing widespread power shortages in the dead of winter.

So if you believe that going much beyond 450PPM has catastrophic implications amounting to many tens of trillions of dollars and if you know that nothing we can do to will prevent that CO2 concentration from occurring then wouldn't the logical next step be to focus on adaptation and mitigation strategies?  An administration that truly believed the concentrations much beyond the 450 PPM target would lead to disaster would be doing everything it can to develop mitigation and adaptation capabilities.  They would not be wasting very much time fine tuning predictive climate models or doing more tree ring analysis.  Because if 450 is "it" then the time for science is over and the time for engineering needs to begin.

And yet no one who is prominent in the AGW cause nor any official body is advocating that the nations of the world pivot from CO2 reduction to AGW mitigation/adaptation.  Indeed the AGW leadership is by and large opposed to such measures.  In this respect the IPCC and company are behaving more skeptically about the dangers of AGW than skeptics like me. They are behaving very strangely for a group convinced that such a catastrophic outcome for the earth is looming that it requires that the world give them enormous power and spend tens of trillions of dollars at their direction while lavishly funding their research priorities.

Oops, never mind.