Hump Day!

Former Gitmo detainee was implicated in the Benghazi attack. Oh, and contra NYTimes, he was connected to Al Qaeda.

Some good stuff on Rachel Maddow over at PowerLine.

What's next for the UI extension bill in the Senate?

The NLRB's burdensome "poster rule" is dead, after the Obama Admin failed to timely petition the Supreme Court for review of its loss before the 4th Circuit.

I want one of these.

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Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:49 AM | Comments (316)
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The Agonies of the Feminist Left

And what made Collette so very, very rageful? Apparently the existence of this:

Which is a classic example of my theory of Conservation of Misery which posits that most people have a more or less fixed amount of angst/anxiety/anger hardwired into them.

Now in the past this emotional energy was expended on such real and worthwhile concerns as wolves, starvation, murder, sorcery, and barbarians. But today in a world of vastly more health, wealth and safety we still have this free-floating mass of concern inside us which demands catharsis. So we end up focusing it on ever more trivial and rare (or even non-existent) targets such as global warming, food preservatives, rampant child abduction, people wrong on the internet, and the existence of male-targeted potato chips. Oh THE OUTRAGE!!

Former GOP Senator Dick Lugar Donates to Democratic Candidate in GA

Well I guess he can finally stop pretending to be conservative and we can stop pretending he was really a Republican. (Thanks to Slu for the link)

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:44 PM | Comments (762)
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As reviewed by Bob Woodward, so this is as insidery as it gets.

In a new memoir, former defense secretary Robert Gates unleashes harsh judgments about President Obama’s leadership and his commitment to the Afghanistan war, writing that by early 2010 he had concluded the president “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”

Which is what is so galling. Men are being killed at three times the rate as they died under Bush's leadership, and Obama is not even trying to win.

Those men remain there out of political cowardice. Men are dying for Obama's political cowardice.

If he does not wish to fight the war-- then he should save those men's lives and bring them home.

It is one thing to sacrifice men's lives for an important objective. The only objective sought by Obama is avoiding the "Weak on Terrorism" attack that would be lodged by the Right. And the attack that Obama claimed, in knocking the Iraq War constantly, that he would be tough as the Devil on Afghanistan.

So men are dying, to save Obama some short-term minor political pain.

Leveling one of the more serious charges that a defense secretary could make against a commander in chief sending forces into combat, Gates asserts that Obama had more than doubts about the course he had charted in Afghanistan. The president was “skeptical if not outright convinced it would fail,” Gates writes in “Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War.”

...

Gates offers a catalogue of various meetings, based in part on notes that he and his aides made at the time, including an exchange between Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that he calls “remarkable.”

He writes: “Hillary told the president that her opposition to the [2007] surge in Iraq had been political because she was facing him in the Iowa primary. . . . The president conceded vaguely that opposition to the Iraq surge had been political. To hear the two of them making these admissions, and in front of me, was as surprising as it was dismaying.”

...

Gates acknowledges forthrightly in “Duty” that he did not reveal his dismay. “I never confronted Obama directly over what I (as well as [Hillary] Clinton, [then-CIA Director Leon] Panetta, and others) saw as the president’s determination that the White House tightly control every aspect of national security policy and even operations. His White House was by far the most centralized and controlling in national security of any I had seen since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger ruled the roost.”

...

It got so bad during internal debates over whether to intervene in Libya in 2011 that Gates says he felt compelled to deliver a “rant” because the White House staff was “talking about military options with the president without Defense being involved.”

This is interesting. You already read, above, how Gates did not express his objections to Obama. He also withheld his concerns from Congress.

If you've ever thought "Military leaders are not free to offer their real opinions to Congress or the American people," you're right.

But Gates says he did not speak his mind when the committee chairman listed the problems he would face as secretary. “I remember sitting at the witness table listening to this litany of woe and thinking, “What the hell am I doing here? I have walked right into the middle of a category-five shitstorm. It was the first of many, many times I would sit at the witness table thinking something very different from what I was saying.”

It's really a Read the Whole Thing thing. I didn't quote Gates' opinion on National Security Advisor Tom Donillon being a "disaster," for example.

Thanks to SteveG.

Posted by: Ace at 01:54 PM | Comments (327)
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This is something I keep talking about of late. An organization with an agenda (usually leftist) demands a firing -- in this case, the American Studies Association demanded a firing of Israel. The firing would take the form of an academic boycott of the beleaguered nation, which would mean that universities joining the boycott would sever programatic ties with Israel and Israeli universities.

Over 100 universities and academic organizations have rejected the ban.

And five universities have taken even firmer action against the "American" Studies Association's drive to limit free speech and free exchange of ideas -- they've severed institutional ties with the ASA completely.

The University of Texas honors itself by becoming the sixth to do so.

I am hopeful for more backlash against this odious, unamerican practice. It has become the standard move to give in to a bully when the bully issues a list of demands. It is easier for a university -- or a corporation, as we've seen lately -- to just give in to the bully.

Squeaky wheels get grease, after all.

But what if Squeaky Wheels stopped getting so much grease? What if they instead got a swift kick to the axel and were told they'd better stop squeaking so shrilly or they'd be rubbished?

It's about time we all started standing up this sort of faux-intellectual brigandry. It's time to tell the baying mobs, ever out for blood, to STFU, keep a civil tongue, and make us all a nice sandwich in apology for their past sins.

Posted by: Ace at 12:03 PM | Comments (236)
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Charles C. W. Cooke has a good column on the left confessing its lies about Obamacare... now that it's too late for the public to make an informed decision, prospectively, on the law.

It is easier, they say, and "they" are always right, to beg forgiveness afterwards than to secure permission beforehand.

Accusing its opponents of lying has been the Left’s modus operandi since the first shots of the health-care debate were fired. Insofar as there was any at all, the ostensible theory was that, unable to muster any serious criticisms, almost certainly motivated by money and by racism, and tainted forever for having supposedly endorsed the scheme in the 1990s, conservatives were reduced to fabrications and to hyperbole — in other words, into scaring the public by telling them things that weren’t true. In the meantime, the law’s architects tripped over themselves to bend the truth — but that was fine because they were spreading “noble lies,” as the perpetually melting-down Brian Beutler now terms these tales.

Among the alleged falsehoods on which conservative opposition relied were that the scheme was effectively a “takeover” that would leave the president with capricious control over the nation’s health-care system; that insurance premiums would inevitably increase for some; that the president’s oft-repeated promise that all Americans could keep their health care if they liked it was obviously untrue; and that government was almost certainly unsuited to run a project of this magnitude and importance. Also claimed to be mendacious was the Right’s characterization of the measure as a severe departure from the status quo. Thus were we treated to a standard by which Joe Biden was able to call passage a “big f***ing deal” and the president was allowed to boast about his newest place in history with nary a squeak, but Republicans doing the same thing were accused of blowing a “moderate” and “modest” proposal out of all proportion.

I've noticed this in a different context, recently-- these "noble lies" the left tells.

The Left believes in many things that the majority of society does not. They believe, for example, that Socialism is an ideal to be aspired to. But rather than admit this, and make a case forthrightly for Socialism, they (and here I include their zealous advocates of the media) simply deny that any move towards Socialism is Socialism at all.

In the case of Obamacare, the Right was correct, and true: Obamacare was a massive cost-shifting, wealth-redistributing scheme. And also effectively a "government takeover" of health care.

The Left believes these things are good. They do not think it's fair that a healthy person purchasing insurance before he gets sick should pay less than an unhealthy person who delays its purchase until after he has been stricken. And they do not like how the free market operates in the health insurance market -- or, actually, how it operates in any market at all. They are foursquare in favor of government takeovers of not just the health insurance industry but practically any industry.

Oh, they would not call it this. They would call it a "Government-Business Partnership," or some such rot.

But the point stands: They are in favor of these things, but rather than honestly state their beliefs and press for the rightness of them, they instead lie at practically every turn and simply say "We do not believe that" and "We do not wish that" or "That is not what you claim it is."

This is why no genuine discussion can be had with them. They lie at virtually every turn. One can hardly argue with a man that what he believes is false if he automatically gainsays believing in it at all.

Obama did not go to church this Christmas. I do not believe that is a moral flaw -- I did not go to church this Christmas either, and neither did a majority (or near-majority) of my family and friends.

Even the New York Times bothered to notice:

President Obama celebrated a low-key Christmas in Hawaii this year. He sang carols, opened presents with his family, and visited a nearby military base to wish the troops “Mele Kalikimaka” — the Hawaiian phrase meaning “Merry Christmas.”

But the one thing the president and his family did not do — something they have rarely done since he entered the White House — was attend Christmas church services.

“He has not gone to church hardly at all, as president,” said Gary Scott Smith, the author of “Faith and the Presidency: From George Washington to George W. Bush,” adding that it is “very unusual for a president not to attend” Christmas services.

Historically, watching the nation’s first family head to church dressed in their Sunday best, especially around the holiday season, was something of a ritual. Yet Mr. Obama’s faith is a more complicated, more private, and perhaps — religious and presidential historians say — a more inclusive affair.

By "more inclusive," the New York Times intends to mean that he doesn't upset any religious minority by observing any religion at all. Atheism is essentially re-cast as an ecumenical faith.

The left reacted to this reportage with its typical outrage -- "How dare you suggest that Obama is anything less that utterly pious!"

Obama is not pious. Neither are most of the left. The left is broadly in favor of atheism and broadly hostile to faith (particularly the Christian faith). But again, rather than making an honest argument in favor of atheism, or "free-thinking," as it was earlier called, they instead simply deny that they are atheist at all.

Or, I should say, various unimportant members of the left will state their own atheism while denying that Obama shares their lack of faith.

Because he's the one who's important. He's the one they have to lie about.

But is it really beyond the pale, at this point, to note that Obama is not Christian and not religious? He is Christian in the sense that I am Christian-- that's the religion of my birth.

But I do not practice it and do not believe in it.

Exactly like Barack Obama doesn't practice it and seems not to believe in it. And yet I wouldn't get huffy! if someone dared to suggest I'm not really a Christian. Spoiler alert: I'm really not.

It's only the Right that's called out for suggesting that Obama is anything other than what he half-heartedly poses as being. For example, when Expert on All Things Atheist Richard Dawkins proclaims, proudly and in a complimentary fashion, that he is "sure" Obama is an atheist, the left doesn't react with anger and shouting.

Neither does the left squawk when Bill Maher predicts that Obama will announce himself as an atheist. (For the 2012 elections -- Um, no. But he may do so as he's preparing to leave office.)

They don't scream about these statements for three reasons:

1, because they know they're probably true,

and 2, because they're said in a "nice way," just as it's okay for Obama to champion Obamacare as a historic, paradigm-shifting law, but if the Right decries it as transformative, they mean that in a "bad way," and so they're dirty liars,

and 3, because Dawkins and Maher are largely speaking among their friends on the Left. Just as Yasser Arafat could say things in Arabic that he wouldn't say in English, so too can the left freely discuss (and praise!) Obama's Enlightened Atheism among themselves. It's only when the idea threatens to get out to the Great Unwashed Religious Hinterlands that the screams of "Liar!" begin.

The left is fundamentally dishonorable. An honorable man tells you what he believes and is prepared to defend those beliefs fairly and candidly.

The Left never does. They speak in "Noble Lies," and have done so forever. Obama is not interested in spreading the wealth around despite telling Joe the Plumber he intends to "spread the wealth around." Obama is not a Socialist, despite having been a member of the Socialist New Party, and despite having a Socialist agenda (at least a soft socialism, which is the most the Overton window currently permits).

And Obama is a believing Christian, despite routinely failing to offer an Easter message or attend church on Christmas.

It would be better for America if the Left stopped speaking forever in "Noble Lies" and occasionally ventured a Noble Truth or two.

Posted by: Ace at 10:45 AM | Comments (331)
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THC change. I'm repeating that. I want to make sure you pot-addled stoner burnouts see what I did there.

THC change. Sea Change. Get it? Eh, you'll get it in about five minutes.

Gallup's survey asks, "Do you think the use of marijuana should be made legal, or not?" That leaves open the question of whether commercial production and distribution should be legal as well (as in Colorado and Washington). But other national polls that go beyond marijuana consumption also have found majority support for legalization. In a Reason-Rupe survey last January, for example, 53 percent of respondents said "the government should treat marijuana the same as alcohol." And last month a Public Policy Polling survey in Texas found that 58 percent of respondents either "somewhat" or "strongly" supported "changing Texas law to regulate and tax marijuana similarly to alcohol, where stores would be licensed to sell marijuana to adults 21 and older." The latter finding was especially striking given the state's conservative reputation.

Mary Katherine Ham, who's been a zealous advocate for decriminalization for a while now, got into it with O'Reilly last night.

Video here.

You have to watch this to see how demagogic it is.

O'Reilly played the "You've got a baby. Do you that baby to be smoking pot?" card. Mary Katharine stated that no, she didn't want her kid to smoke pot, but she would exercise parental responsibility to prevent or ameliorate that. He kept telling her she wasn't answering the question, even though she was.

In between O'Reilly's hectoring -- insisting that she didn't mind if her infant smoked pot, and that she wasn't answering his questions (though, you know, she was) -- Mary Katharine managed to state the following:

Freedom is much less likely to be damaging than paternalism in a nanny state.

O'Reilly then promptly informed her she was "babbling."

Let's just note this: The following statement,

Freedom is much less likely to be damaging than paternalism in a nanny state.

...is officially deemed to be "babbling" -- nonsensical, incoherent, and likely due to someone Taking the Pot -- by Bill O'Reilly.

However, she's decided that downside of criminalization greatly outweighs its upside.

For Bill O'Reilly, however, the matter is quite simple: If you are not in favor of a harsh, zero-tolerance War on Drugs to eliminate The Pot (and how's that working, by the way?), then it you must be okay with babies toking on bongs.

Only maximalist hostility to pot, expressed through support of a criminalization regime, counts as being anti-pot. Anything else is Tolerating Evil.

Maybe we should all Tolerate some things we don't actually approve of, in the hopes that our own disapproved-of habits might be tolerated as well.

Now you don't have to agree with Mary Katharine, but you have to concede that O'Reilly's repeated question, essentially "Will you be Smoking the Reefers with your Baby?," is unfair and itself "babbling."

Dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb. O'Reilly is frequently unfair and dumb, including with people on the left we don't mind seeing getting the unfair and dumb treatment, because, let's be honest, that's their own stock in trade.

But one does notice the unfairness and dumbness when it's one of our own.

Thanks to @rdbrewer4 in the sidebar for this.

Posted by: Ace at 12:46 PM | Comments (1018)
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@AOSHQDOOM linked this last night. If you've gotten the sense that America has lost its way and doesn't even seem to want to find its way back, Frank Luntz has the data to back that up. And he's depressed about it.

America's best-known public-opinion guru hasn't suddenly gone vegan. Luntz—the tubby, rumpled guy who runs the focus groups on Fox News after presidential debates, the political consultant and TV fixture whose word has been law in Republican circles since he helped write the 1994 Contract With America—has always been a hard man to please. But something is different now, he tells me. Something is wrong. Something in his psyche has broken, and he does not know if he can recover.

Frank Luntz is having some kind of crisis. I just can't quite get my head around it.
"I've had a headache for six days now, and it doesn't go away," he tells me as we take our seats at a table downstairs. "I don't sleep for more than two or three hours at a time. I'm probably less healthy now than I have ever been in my life." He's not sure what to do. He's still going through the motions—giving speeches, going on television, conducting focus groups, and advising companies and politicians on how best to convey their message.

...

The crisis began, he says, after last year's presidential election, when Luntz became profoundly depressed. For more than a month, he tried to stay occupied, but nothing could keep his attention. Finally, six weeks after the election, during a meeting of his consulting company in Las Vegas, he fell apart. Leaving his employees behind, he flew back to his mansion in Los Angeles, where he stayed for three weeks, barely going outside or talking to anyone.

...

"I spend more time with voters than anybody else," Luntz says. "I do more focus groups than anybody else. I do more dial sessions than anybody else. I don't know shit about anything, with the exception of what the American people think."

It was what Luntz heard from the American people that scared him. They were contentious and argumentative. They didn't listen to each other as they once had. They weren't interested in hearing other points of view. They were divided one against the other, black vs. white, men vs. women, young vs. old, rich vs. poor. "They want to impose their opinions rather than express them," is the way he describes what he saw. "And they're picking up their leads from here in Washington." Haven't political disagreements always been contentious, I ask? "Not like this," he says. "Not like this."

....

In reelecting Obama, the people had spoken. And the people, he believed, were wrong. Having spent his career telling politicians what the people wanted to hear, Luntz now believed the people had been corrupted and were beyond saving. Obama had ruined the electorate, set them at each other's throats, and there was no way to turn back.

...

[W]hat if the Real People are wrong? That is the possibility Luntz now grapples with. What if the things people want to hear from their leaders are ideas that would lead the country down a dangerous road?

"You should not expect a handout," he tells me. "You should not even expect a safety net. When my house burns down, I should not go to the government to rebuild it. I should have the savings, and if I don't, my neighbors should pitch in for me, because I would do that for them." The entitlement he now hears from the focus groups he convenes amounts, in his view, to a permanent poisoning of the electorate—one that cannot be undone. "We have now created a sense of dependency and a sense of entitlement that is so great that you had, on the day that he was elected, women thinking that Obama was going to pay their mortgage payment, and that's why they voted for him," he says. "And that, to me, is the end of what made this country so great."

Neo-Neocon discusses Luntz's dour assessment of the American psyche.

This is why the Democrats have picked themselves up from the debacle that Obamacare has been and are counting on their campaign against “economic inequality” to appeal in this way. But the message is hardly new, and of course it hardly began with Obama, although he has delivered it repeatedly. The soil was carefully fertilized first before he could plant those seeds and have them take root so well. This is a strain in politics and in culture—both in America and abroad—that has been building for literally hundreds of years. And it rests on a foundation that is inherent in human nature, although that aspect is not always dominant and is ever at war with another desire, one towards liberty and independence.

Obama could not have been elected (remember what he said to Joe the Plumber?) without the ground having been prepared by nearly a century of ever-increasing entitlements, and most especially a “progressive” takeover of the major institutions that shape both the growing mind and the adult one (education, the MSM, and entertainment), as well as the slow and steady undermining of the traditional family.

There is no mystery here, and there should have been no surprise. If Luntz and many others were surprised, they werenÂ’t paying attention.

....

Despair about this is not an option, although it is sometimes a temptation. Obamacare is a little window of opportunity that needs to be opened. But the stupid party (you know who you are) had better get a lot smarter very soon. ItÂ’s late, and getting later.

Read the whole things, both.

Hot Air's Quotes of the Day were mostly about this. Well, this, and an Internet Vaporware Meme that "The Right Craves a New King, because they don't believe democracy will produce good results any longer." But the silly "king" meme is just an expression of frustration with the voters' choice to begin hooking up with Socialism, and maybe even let Socialism get to Fourth Base.

Posted by: Ace at 09:54 AM | Comments (404)
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Happy Tuesday.

Sen. Johnson's Obamacare lawsuit accusing the administration of giving congressmen and their staff special treatment has been filed and Paul Clement is arguing it. Lawgeeks, you can look at the complaint here.

The Chief Justice declined to grant the plaintiffs in one of the Origination Clause lawsuits a stay of Obamacare pending completion of their litigation. The subsidies lawsuits, the contraception mandate lawsuits, the accommodation lawsuits, and Sen. Johnson's lawsuit all have a better chance of success on the merits than the Origination Clause lawsuits, seeing as how the Origination Clause lawsuits lack entirely a basis in law or precedent.

Satanists have unveiled their proposed monument for the Oklahoma state Capitol. They argue that the Capitol is obligated to accept their monument, since it just accepted the donation of a Ten Commandments monument which has since been erected on Capitol grounds. Litigation is pending.

The 5th Circuit panel reviewing the appeal of the Texas HB2 decision -- that is, the abortion limitations bill passed last year over, among other things, the objection of fad Democratic candidate Wendy Davis -- was pretty harsh. For example, Judge Jones asked one lawyer if she would inform the court when more doctors get admitting privileges, adding cryptically, “or have you notified the New York Times?” Lawgeeks, audio of the argument is available here.

Some folks are arguing that Liz Cheney's failed campaign is evidence of the decline of GOP hawks. I think it more likely it's just evidence that people from Virginia should run for Senate in Virginia. In Wyoming, even more than a lot of other places, all politics is local. Cheney just never got traction after the carpetbagger accusations. The folks that think Cheney's campaign is emblematic of a shift against GOP hawks are oddly not drawing the opposite conclusion about Tom Cotton's strong campaign to unseat Arkansas Sen. Pryor. Cotton is a notable war hawk and it looks like he's going to win.

The RNC is putting its first paid media of 2014 in the field. Radio ads hitting Dems on Obamacare will play in 12 states.

Finally, don't miss the bonus podcast with DaveinTexas and Justified's Nick Searcy. And then the regular weekly podcast is linked below. Oh, don't forget to send your "Ask the Blog" questions and comments via the link.

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Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:50 AM | Comments (270)
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• The House Seats Most Likely To Flip
  
• De Blasio's Choice For NYC Council Speaker Is An Admitted Tax Cheat
  
• The 'Trickle-Down' Lie
  
• Gun Sales Hit New Record
  
• WH Credits Obamacare For Decrease In Healthcare Spending Since 2010
  
• Awesome Snow Shark
  
• Rachel Maddow Is Crazy, Too
  
• China Tightens Grip On Shadow Banking
  
• FBI Drops Law Enforcement As Its Primary Mission
  
• Scott Walker's Message To Tea Partiers
  
• Ron Johnson Suing Over Obamacare Exemptions
  
• Is It 1914 All Over Again?
  
• Liz Cheney Drops Out Of Senate Race
  
• Family Finds Missing Son After Spotting Him In An AP Photo
  
• Support For Legal Marijuana Getting Higher
  
• Workers Seize Bosses At French Goodyear Site
  
• Alan Grayson's Wife Filed For Divorce
  
• Blowing Bubbles In Freezing Cold Weather
  
• This Is A Disgusting Mental Image
  

In case you weren't informed, I'm on twitter and you can follow me.

Posted by: Open Blogger at 05:12 AM | Comments (364)
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Because I'm tired and lazy that's why.

So Who Would Play You in a Movie?

According to the quiz this is the movie version of me. It could have been much worse. So conflicted but still satisfied is how I'm feeling.

I can live with that.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 06:49 PM | Comments (689)
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