John Kerry had made a controversial statement, warning of Israel's Apartheid future if the beleaguered nation did not agree to Obama's notion of a peace plan:

If there’s no two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict soon, Israel risks becoming “an apartheid state,” Secretary of State John Kerry told a room of influential world leaders in a closed-door meeting Friday.

Seeking to defuse the controversy, Jen Psaki tweeted that the Daily Kos was reporting that prior left-leaning Israeli PM's had made the "apartheid" prediction first, so it's no big deal.

Just another example of the Obama Administration's disregard for real-world foreign relations, contrasted with their laser-like focus on winning the Twitter Hashtag wars.

Churchill's "Fight Them on the Beaches" speech, adapted for the Age of Obama:

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of rising Russia and all the odious apparatus of the KGB state, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight on FaceBook, we shall fight on Instagram and Pinterest, we shall fight and, with growing follower lists and growing Likes, we shall defend our #hashtag, whatever the cost may be.
We shall fight on Twitter, we shall fight on Vine, we shall fight on the Washington Post's op-ed pages and in the New York Times' comment areas, we shall fight in Buzzfeed's gifs; we shall never surrender.

And if, which I do not for a moment believe, this #hashtag or a large part of it were hijacked by trolls, then our social media reach, armed and guarded by the writers at Media Matters and the Daily Beast, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, some miracle should descend upon us in rescue us so we can return, as we much desire, to the #WarOnWomen.

Romney wants to #BanTampons, please retweet.

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There's very little enjoyable in politics these days so there's not telling how long this tasty morsel of schadenfreude will have to last. Enjoy it while you can.

MMFA rejected their Card Check bid, so the union petitioned the National Labor Relations Board On April 10 to force the nonprofit to hold a workplace election. Meanwhile, MMFA hired Perkins Coie, a law firm that specializes in specializes in representing management in union disputes.

"For an organization that says they are not opposing employees' efforts to unionize, it's a little suspicious that they hired such a fancy legal team," Honey said. MMFA does not appear to be open to any solution that doesn't involve dragging in the NLRB, he added.

...

Media Matters has posted numerous articles supporting workers' rights and labor organizing. It has argued that "economists point to declining union participation as one cause of the growing economic rift in America" and claimed it was a fact that "unions increase productivity [and] do not reduce business competitiveness."

According to the union a majority of Media Matter interns/scholars/hacks have already indicated their support for unionization.

Media Matters For America: Onerous union work rules for thee but not for me!

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Cathy McMorris Rogers (R-WA) is the fourth ranking member of the House GOP leadership team and was selected to give the GOP response to the State Of the Union earlier this year. She's not a back-bencher, so when she says they aren't repealing ObamaCare, they aren't repealing ObamaCare.

"We need to look at reforming the exchanges,” the Eastern Washington Republican said Thursday.

...

McMorris Rodgers continued those criticisms Thursday, but said the framework established by the law likely will persist and reforms should take place within its structure.

“It is a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach to health care,” she said. Consumers should have more choice for their coverage, and Democrats should abandon the idea that everyone will enroll because of the mandate, McMorris Rodgers added.

Ah yes, "reform the exchanges". Now the only purpose the exchanges serve is to deliver subsidies to people who buy policies. If you think the exchanges, which are a disaster in most states, should be kept just to offer a one-stop shopping site for consumers you don't need to "reform" ObamaCare, you need to become an investor in eHealthInsurance.com (a site that did that before ObamaCare).

So now a GOP leader is committing to making the exchanges run better and maybe offer some more types of policies or something. Who knows. But the general shape of ObamaCare? That's staying it seems.

I was wondering why House conservatives were demanding Boehner and Cantor release their ObamaCare replacement plan when politically it's such a lousy move. Maybe they are pushing for it to be made public because they are getting the sense that the leadership's "replacement" is actually just a little tinkering and not really an alternative.

Personally I find it interesting McMorris Rodgers opened her reelection camapaign with the message of "reform" don't repeal ObamaCare. I mean, that's what the Democrats are running on.

But don't worry, McMorris Rodgers has a consolation prize for you...amnesty.

McMorris Rodgers said she still thinks a deal could be struck before the election.

“I believe there is a path that we get a bill on the floor by August,” she said.

A bipartisan plan was passed in the Senate last spring but made no headway in the Republican-controlled House. McMorris Rodgers echoed the concern brought up by many in the chamber, saying she wants to see stronger border security. But she said sheÂ’d support a bill that grants legal status to those undocumented immigrants working toward citizenship, allowing them to remain in the country to work and go to school while they wait their turn in the current system.

“We’re going to have to push that this is a legal status, not amnesty,” she said.

"Push that" however you want, it's still amnesty.

It's pretty clear the GOP has decided they have the mid-terms in the bag and that no matter what they do their voters will still show up and vote for whatever they serve up.

The sad part is...they are likely right.

Reminder....That the GOP would go wobbly on repeal was evident 10 days (TEN DAYS) after it passed.

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• The NRA's Next Challenge: Its Success
  
• CNN Rips Obama For Responding To Straw-Men Critics
  
• The UK In The Balance
  
• Capitalism Fells Communism In Marx/Engels Copyright Flap
  
• The Left's War Against the Culture Of Gun Owners
  
• Oklahoma House Seeks To Impeach Half Of Their State Supreme Court
  
• The Counter-Revolution Gets You Every Time
  
• Why Sci-Fi Keeps Imagining The Enslavement Of White People
  
• America Eats Itself
  
• Woman Beating Obama Donor Gets Fired
  
• Obamacare Deals Blow To One Doctor Medicine
  
• Get Rich Or Die Trying
  
• What A Bunch Of Pussies
  
• State Department Tweeting Out Links To Far Left Websites
  
• Woman Dies Happy
  

It was a real pleasure to meet Andy, JohnE, Jason "Inside Job" Howerton, Cameron Gray, LilMissRightie, Fingers Malloy, Andrew Branca, Bob Owens, Cam Edwards, and the soon to be married Charles C.W. Cooke at the NRA convention this weekend.

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Happy Monday.

Sec. Kerry told world leaders on Friday that Israel would become an "apartheid state" if it didn't make peace with the people lobbing rockets at it. Then State Department spokesjoke Jen Psaki defended her boss' inflammatory claim by citing to reputable foreign policy outlets DailyKos and Think Progress.

Toyota is moving its sales and marketing headquarters from California to Texas. "A company can easily see where it would benefit by relocating someplace else," said the Torrance, California mayor.

The Supreme Court will hear argument on Tuesday about cell phone searches incident to arrest.

Oh, you recall District Court Judge Leon's decision finding the NSA's phone metadata program unlawful? At the time, I criticized the decision on several grounds, noting in an aside that "it's been a while since I've seen a court decision with that many exclamation marks." Well, the latest document release from the FISA Court includes a decision taking Judge Leon's decision apart, and it includes an aside directed at his hyperbolic use of exclamation points and italics.

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Holocaust Remembrance Day

Long ago, Tacitus said "Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris. (It is a principle of human nature to hate those whom you have injured.)" Or as people have more recently noted, the Europeans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.

How Amsterdam Treated Holocaust Survivors Released from the Camps

They gave them no quarter on taxes or penalties. (H/T Betsy's Page)

Charlotte van den Berg was a 20-year-old college student working part-time in Amsterdam's city archives when she and other interns came across a shocking find: letters from Jewish Holocaust survivors complaining that the city was forcing them to pay back taxes and late payment fines on property seized after they were deported to Nazi death camps.

How, the survivors asked, could they be on the hook for taxes due while Hitler's regime was trying to exterminate them? A typical response was: "The base fees and the fines for late payment must be satisfied, regardless of whether a third party, legally empowered or not, has for some time held the title to the building."

...Amsterdam's official ruling of Sept. 12, 1947, a public document viewed by the AP, was that "the city has the right to full payment of fees and fines" and that most excuses - including that property had been seized by the Nazis - were invalid.

Jan Karski and Remembering Those Who Acted

Jan Karski was a professor at Georgetown University for 40 years (and had many famous students including Bill Clinton) but he's best known for his actions with the Polish Underground on behalf of the Jews during WWII.

Born Jan Kozielewski, he used Karski as his nom de guerre when after his escape from Soviet imprisonment (an army officer, he was captured when the Soviet Union invaded Poland as part of the Hitler-Stalin pact) and joined the Polish Home Army. During the course of his activities in the underground, Karski, a Polish Catholic, was smuggled in and out of the Warsaw Ghetto and a transit point for the Belzec death camp. In 1942 he brought proof of the reality of the Holocaust to first Britain and then the following year to the United States when, under the sponsorship of the free Polish government in exile, he spread the news of the extermination of the Jews to American leaders including Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, and William Donovan, the chief of the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. As he later told the story, in his own writings, Roosevelt was silent when Karski discussed the fate of the Jews, asking questions only about the conditions of horses in Poland. Frankfurter, a Jew, said that while he didn't question Karski's honesty, he nevertheless "could not believe him." Karski was shocked at the Allied leaders' refusal to act on his knowledge even to bomb the railroad tracks to the death camps when that became possible.

Jan KarskiÂ’s example, as well as the failure of those who chose not to listen to him, stands as a reminder that all the tears wept today about the Holocaust are meaningless if they are not accompanied by action to ensure that contemporary atrocities are not halted or prevented

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Waking-up-from-a-30-year-coma-to-a-horrifying-world edition.
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[We Politely Request That All Off-Topic or Political Comments Be Directed to the Open Thread down page, Which Will Serve Officially as the Current "Active Conversation" Thread for All Discussions Not Related To This Topic. Enjoy!]

After taking a week off for Easter, the astronomy thread is back with an extra long edition: the best of twitter and youtube from the night of the lunar eclipse, exciting news about a new moon forming around Saturn, the critical privately-funded B612 mission to protect us from SMOD, a deeper exploration of the most familiar constellation in the Northern sky, and finally, a $100 telescope that delivers. So come with me on our weekly journey overhead. more...

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John E., Ben K. & I have been at the NRA Annual Meeting in Indianapolis over the weekend, and I'll try to distill the full 2.5 days into the post below. But before getting to the gun-related stuff proper, I'd say the best thing about the meeting was spending time with lots of people we've known on-line for ages but hadn't met in person. The list of great folks we've met is staggeringly long and I won't bore you with it, but for all the folks we've spent time with in the last couple of days, you were the highlight of the weekend.

And on that note, John and I were coming back to the convention hall this morning, and we were chatting with the shuttle driver from the hotel. She told us that her impression of the NRA had totally changed over the weekend. Last week, she had the view of the NRA and its members that the media promotes ... bloodthirsty gun worshippers who cheer at school shootings or whatever. But after a few days of driving a bunch of happy people (her words) who are, as a rule, polite and just enjoying being in each other's company, her perception changed.

Changing hearts and minds one at a time. This is how we win.

NRA: One Issue And One Issue Only

I was fortunate to be exposed to a side of the NRA that you won't see in any of the other reporting on the NRAAM. I have a cousin who's on the NRA Board, and he invited me to attend the NRA Civil Rights Defense Fund committee meeting.

The fund assists people charged with gun-related crimes, and listening to the committee go through the various cases up for consideration all across the country was fascinating. Also, in the room and speaking were the folks who argued and won the 9th circuit Peruta case, the Delaware public housing case, and others. This is where the rubber meets the road on defending our second amendment rights.

Andrew Branca, FTW

We spent plenty of time with our friend Andrew Branca over the last few days, and we attended the SYG presentation he gave on Friday. He got lots of mileage out of a debate he did at UC Berkley where the lefty CNN host on the other side lost a bet and then refused to pay.

I know the Downfall parody is pretty played out as a general rule, but the one below the fold was used in Branca's presentation and had the crowd of a few hundred firearms law-types rolling in the aisles.

Also, I understand from Branca that Adam Baldwin deserves a tip of the hat for providing a key insight that allowed him to win the debate in the first 5 minutes.

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