I wanted to post this yesterday but I figured too much of a good thing is a bad thing.

At NRO, Alec Torres lists the eight most naïve Administration statements about Russia.

Here's four of them, and we don't even get to Kerry yet:

1. President Obama, March 2012: “This is my last election. After my election I will have more flexibility.”

2. Hillary Clinton March, 2009: “We want to reset our relationship, so we will do it together.”

3. Joe Biden, July 2009: “They have a shrinking population base, they have a withering economy, they have a banking sector and structure that is not likely to be able to withstand the next 15 years, they’re in a situation where the world is changing before them, and they‘re clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable.”

4. Obama, October 2012: (Responding to Mitt Romney’s description of Russia as our greatest “geo-political foe”) “You said Russia. Not al-Qaeda. . . . The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because . . . the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

Biden's statement strikes me as curious. You could replace every "they" in his statement with "we, under Obama." Our population is declining (or soon will); our economy is withered and not recovering; our banking system is more of a mess than it was when Obama came into office. And of course Obama and Biden are clinging to a fantasy, the Blue Social Model, which is unsustainable.

Nice Sentence: Instapundit blind-links a quote from the Anchoress.

On Obama's foreign policy, she says: "The man's sense of himself has been over-indulged to a reckless point."

She writes:

The Obama White House is learning the hard way that presidential power requires something more substantial than an eternal marketing campaign and an endless spin-cycle, because no matter what a utopian president thinks the world should be like, the reality is this: in human life, peace is a transient thing, and in geopolitics, it is more often than not an illusion that quickly reveals itself as one. If Europe has been “at peace” these last 60 years, it’s a profound aberration in the scheme of history.
Obama (and his Secretary of State) seem to believe that humanity has — by virtue of nothing at all, except perhaps his say-so — transcended itself and entered into a we-are-stardust-we-are-golden happy place, where (in Europe, at least) nobody wants war, because everyone is loving peace.

That is a rather terrifying demonstration of naivete. Even a so-so student of human history and behavior (like me) knows that someone always wants war. Someone always wants more power. Someone is always looking for a way to avenge what they believe are past insults.

Posted by: Ace at 07:59 AM | Comments (230)
Post contains 492 words, total size 4 kb.

Some Partisan Theater for your morning enjoyment. Video at the link (Mediaite), or below.

Issa asked Cummings if he had any questions for the Fifth-pleading witness, Lois Lerner. Instead of asking a question, Cummings offered another rant. Issa asked him to yield, and Cummings refused, so Issa turned off his microphone and called for an adjournment. Cummings continued to rant (turning off his microphone had little effect given that he was yelling).

Buzzfeed's takeaway will be Issa's "cut him off' gesture, drawing his hand across the neck.

I'm pretty sure that's racist.

While making a statement before the committee, Issa stood up and asked Cummings to yield.

“If you will sit down and allow me to ask a question,” Cummings insisted. “I am a member of a Congress of the United States of America.”

“I am tired of this,” he continued. “You cannot just have a one-sided investigation. There is absolutely something wrong with that, and it is absolutely un-American.”

USA Today adds this:

In response to a series of pointed questions from Issa, Lerner repeatedly said, "On the advice of my counsel, I respectfully exercise my Fifth Amendment right and decline to answer that question."

After less than 15 minutes, Issa adjourned the hearing. "I can see no point in going further," he said.

When the ranking Democrat on the panel, Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, tried to ask a question, Issa told Republicans on the committee they could leave and the hearing was over.

"Shame, shame," Democrats called out.

Hot Air adds this explanation from Issa:

“He was actually slandering me at the moment that the mics did go off by claiming that this had not been a real investigation.”

Video stolen from Hot Air below.

(I hope @drewmtips pardons the light stompening, but I figure people want to discuss this.) more...

Posted by: Ace at 06:54 AM | Comments (309)
Post contains 347 words, total size 3 kb.

Senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas is trailing his GOP opponent Congressman Tom Cotton and seems to think the key to a comeback is saying Cotton feels "entitled" to a Senate seat because he served in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Pryor made the comment in a profile on MSNBC. If you watch, he doesn't really bring Cotton's service up, the reporter does. It's a perfectly normal DC conversation...real success is passing bills, while military service is something we say nice things about but isn't really of any practical value. This is the danger red-state Democrats run into. Back home they need to pretend to be gun lovin', liberal hating, regular folk. But when they are in DC, they are very much part of the Pelosi-Reid, DC liberal establishment.

It's a good plan (and one conservatives need to find a way to work in reverse) right up until you forget which part you're supposed to be playing.

Laughing at someone's military service is a This Town thing Mark, it's unlikely to play well back home.

Pryor's worlds collided on MSNBC and he's going to spend a lot of time fruitlessly trying to put them back together.

Congratulations to soon to be Senator Tom Cotton.

Posted by: DrewM at 06:13 AM | Comments (168)
Post contains 233 words, total size 2 kb.

Could they make a better argument for home schooling?

A ten-year-old Ohio boy was suspended from school after a teacher caught him brandishing a “level 2 lookalike firearm.” What lookalike firearm was this, you ask? Well, Nathan Entingh got in trouble after he pretended to use his finger as a gun. Yep, his finger.

I was tempted to go see how many levels of lookalike firearm there are in Ohio, but I fear that'd be too much of a stupid overload to start the day with.

Could they make a better argument for ending the Academy Awards?

12 Years A Slave is one of those “important subject” films that people will call a “difficult watch” while praising it, implying that you should sit through it to better yourself even if you don’t enjoy the experience. Not surprisingly, a few members of the Academy privately admitted to the LA Times that they wanted to reward the eventual Best Picture winner for its importance (and congratulate themselves for doing so), while foregoing the possible trauma of actually watching it.

Want to win an Oscar? Just make a Very Important Film about an Approved Topic and watch the accolades roll in.

Posted by: andy at 02:36 AM | Comments (319)
Post contains 206 words, total size 2 kb.

• Read This, It's Funny
  
• The Temptation Of Vladimir Putin
  
• What Happens If Russia Refuses To Fly US Astronauts
  
• Zero Tolerance Is Ruining The Joy Of Childhood
  
• A Remarkable Court Opinion In Chevron Case
  
• Niagra Falls Freezes Over
  
• Cornyn Defeats Challenger
  
• Code Pink Hag Locked Up At Cairo Airport
  
• Ralph Peters Not A Big Fan Of Obama
  
• Obama's Pseudo-Scientism
  
• MSM Go Full Goodwin On Gay Rights
  
• Ten Foreign Policy Principles for The Next Republican Administration
  
• DC Council Votes To Decriminalize Marijuana
  
• Radioshack To Close 1,100 Stores
  
• Alan Grayson, Wife Beater

Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:15 AM | Comments (225)
Post contains 97 words, total size 2 kb.

The Great State Shakedown

As the Blue State model begins to fail state politicians are getting desperate for additional revenue and looking for the perfect victims: out of state individuals and business who they can tax but who are unable to vote them out of office. Make no mistake - taxation without representation is a key part of the new blue revenue model.

New York and New Jersey are particularly egregious offenders with New York demanding full income tax from anyone who works for a NY-based company no matter where they live and New Jersey holding companies' trucks ransom for passing through the state.

Now this would seem to be a violation of the Commerce Clause but the Supreme Court has repeatedly deferred to Congress to hash out the details. And Congress has declined to do anything about this and so interstate commerce is slowly being squeezed by the grasping hands of failing states.

At least with the Articles of Confederation you knew exactly which state had dominion over you and your purse.

Stretching the limits of the U.S. Constitution's Commerce Clause to the breaking point, local revenue agents have seized out-of-state trucks simply passing through their jurisdiction, refusing to release them until the firms that dispatched them fork over corporate income taxes. Finance departments have slapped out-of-state businesses with bills for thousands of dollars in corporate back taxes, based on little more than a single worker visiting the state sometime during the year. And tax agents have targeted employees who work remotely for in-state firms, claiming that they owe personal income taxes, even when they've never stepped foot in the taxing state.

Telecommuting can now be a tax trap for employees, too. New York State now considers those working remotely for New York-based businesses to owe income taxes on all their work, whether they visit the state or not. New York employs a "convenience of the employer" rule to apply these taxes. It holds that telecommuters for New York firms are effectively physically present in the state, wherever they happen to be. A Hawaiian telecommuter to New York, in other words, might wind up paying income taxes in two states-his home and that of his employer.

According to congressional testimony by owners of trucking companies and the American Trucking Associations, beginning around 2000, revenue agents from New Jersey's department of taxation began descending on truck stops, weigh stations, and loading docks and waylaying trucks, demanding that the owners pay at least Jersey's $1,100 minimum corporate-franchise tax before letting the drivers proceed. Many of the vehicles-about 40,000 have been stopped-worked for companies with zero connection to New Jersey, other than making a pickup or delivery there. New Jersey was, in essence, charging a $1,100 entry fee into the state.

California's Chicken Law and the Commerce Clause

California is essentially imposing a tariff on all out-of-state eggs by demanding the hatcheries they come from meet California chicken coop standards despite the fact that the FDA has stated there is no legitimate reason for discriminating against non-CA eggs.

Californian voters approved a ballot measure in 2008 requiring California egg producers to provide additional room in chicken coops for egg-laying hens. The ballot initiative, according to research done by the University of California at Davis, will increase the costs of egg production in the state by 20 percent, putting out-of-state egg producers at a large competitive advantage

...Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing in the Lopez decision, added that regulations that treat in-state and out-of-state businesses the same are still unconstitutional if they overly burden interstate commerce: "One element of our dormant Commerce Clause jurisprudence has been the principle that the States may not impose regulations that place an undue burden on interstate commerce, even where those regulations do not discriminate between in-state and out-of-state businesses." According to Missouri's attorney general, the law passed in California outlawing the eggs produced under the practices generally used in the rest of the United States clearly offends the Constitution.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:33 PM | Comments (597)
Post contains 1367 words, total size 12 kb.

This has been going on for years.

Chevron, which some years back was presented with a multi-billion-dollar judgment related to pollution claims in Ecuador, has been engaged in a years-long battle against a coalition of lawyers, environmental groups, and activists, and its defense has been an interesting one: Not only has Chevron rejected the specific claims against it, it has maintained that the case is the result of a criminal conspiracy involving those same lawyers and environmentalists, corrupt judges, bribery, and more. The company’s general counsel, Hewitt Pate, said today: “The case against Chevron was the result of fraud, bribery, and other crimes, and its aim was extortion.”

The story might have struck many as too implausible even for a B movie, but a U.S. district court today issued a remarkable opinion confirming that the judgment against Chevron is indeed the result of fraud.

The ruling is long -- over 500 pages long. However, you can get the general sense of it from the first five pages (the first five numbered pages, after the very lengthy table of contents).

Upon consideration of all of the evidence, including the credibility of the witnesses– though several of the most important declined to testify – the Court finds that Donziger began his involvement in this controversy with a desire to improve conditions in the area in which his Ecuadorian clients live. To be sure, he sought also to do well for himself while doing good for others, but there was nothing wrong with that. In the end, however, he and the Ecuadorian lawyers he led corrupted the Lago Agrio case. They submitted fraudulent evidence. They coerced one judge, first to use a court appointed, supposedly impartial, “global expert” to make an overall damages assessment and, then, to appoint to that important role a man whom Donziger hand picked and paid to “totally play ball” with the LAPs. They then paid a Colorado consulting firm secretly to write all or most of the global expert’s report, falsely presented the report as the work of the court-appointed and supposedly impartial expert, and told half-truths or worse to U.S. courts in attempts to prevent exposure of that and other wrongdoing. Ultimately, the LAP team wrote the Lago Agrio court’s Judgment themselves and promised $500,000 to the Ecuadorian judge to rule in their favor and sign their judgment. If ever there were a case warranting equitable relief with
respect to a judgment procured by fraud, this is it.

...

[O]ne Ecuadorian legal team member, in a moment of panicky candor, admitted that if documents exposing just part of what they had done were to come to light, “apart from destroying the proceeding, all of us, your attorneys, might go to jail.”
It is time to face the facts.

Apparently it was a seriously-offered legal argument that bribery of judges for favorable rulings is just the way it's done in Ecuador, so, you know, we ought to respect their rules and enforce their judgment here in America.

Posted by: Ace at 01:55 PM | Comments (138)
Post contains 539 words, total size 4 kb.

Well, at least that's what I got from this. Read on, but we are not responsible for any damages or staining that may result from your reaction to his blunt analysis.

more...

Posted by: CAC at 02:49 PM | Comments (208)
Post contains 805 words, total size 5 kb.

Sure, why not.

Is this America?

Just over two weeks ago, an election was held at the Volkswagen plant in my hometown of Chattanooga to determine whether the United Auto Workers would represent the workers there. UAW operatives spent two years inside the plant working to organize it. Initially, the UAW tried to take away the workers' right to vote and force its way in through "card check," an attempt to entrench the union without a democratic election. Fortunately, the company insisted on a secret ballot for its employees. They voted on Feb. 14 not to organize, although in the week leading up to the vote, only the UAW was allowed inside the plant, where the union was given an audience with the workers on company time....

On Feb. 14, the workers made their voices heard, with 53% voting against allowing the UAW to represent them. I believe that the workers understood that they were nothing more than dollar signs for the UAW. Obviously, I could not have been happier for the Volkswagen employees, for the community and for Tennessee.

Unfortunately, the UAW has chosen to ignore the employees' decision and has filed objections with the National Labor Relations Board, charging that elected officials like me should not be allowed to make public comments expressing our opinion and sharing information with our constituents. It is telling that the UAW complaint does not mention President Obama's public statement urging the employees to vote for the union.

If the National Labor Relations Board upholds these objections, it would be an unprecedented assault on free speech.

The science is settled. The debate is over. And Eric, I won.

Posted by: Ace at 12:55 PM | Comments (302)
Post contains 309 words, total size 2 kb.

This is all very strange.

I don't get this. Do you? If you get this, let me know.

The baby-faced Farrow, whose parentage has been the subject of much speculation, sometimes seems to be more fame and prestige than flesh and bone. From a young age, heÂ’s had no problem attracting the sort of people who prize those qualities. They pop up throughout the many public accounts of his brief life.

There was Holbrooke, a loyal friend of Mia Farrow’s who hired Ronan as a speechwriter when he was 15. There is Holbrooke’s formidable widow, the journalist and socialite Kati Marton, the ex-wife of Peter Jennings. There is Diane Sawyer, Holbrooke’s ex-girlfriend, who is now advising Farrow. “I’ve told him, ‘If there is anything you want to do that I have a cautionary tale about, I’ll be there.’” Sawyer told the New York Times.

And there is Hillary Clinton, who, upon Holbrooke’s death, “took Ronan under her wing.”

Farrow has these people to thank for most of the jobs and awards that adorn his résumé. Marton last year presented him with the Richard C. Holbrooke Award for Social Justice. The New York Times’ profile featured Farrow receiving an award from a foundation that aids Holocaust survivors. Last week, after just three days on the air, Farrow picked up the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Exploration and Journalism at an event at the Princeton Club in midtown Manhattan.

...

Holbrooke, who had employed him at 15 and was, according to Marton, so loyal to Mia Farrow that he forbade Marton from watching Woody Allen movies, created a position for him in Hillary ClintonÂ’s State Department.

Farrow's job paid in the six figures. It was some kind of bullshit coordination/liaison type thing with NGOs. It was obviously bullshit, because this high-paid post was eliminated after Farrow left State. It was made just for Farrow, and when he left, they got rid of the contrivance.

Now, having done very little in his life except to look almost as much like Frank Sinatra as he does not look like Woody Allen, he's signed by MSNBC for a salary in the "low millions."

What I've left back at the link is his poor ratings (he's striking out with younger viewers, but doing well, for some reason, with people over 50 who really liked Frank Sinatra), and his bizarre backdrop, which contains (as @JohnEkdahl noted on the last podcast) bits of Ronan Farrow's resume in big letters.

Posted by: Ace at 11:54 AM | Comments (389)
Post contains 425 words, total size 3 kb.