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FEBRUARY 1,  2014

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 7:26 P.M. ET:

IDIOTS – From Fox:  "Environmentalists and other opponents of the Keystone XL Pipeline are ramping up their opposition to the project following the release Friday of a largely favorable State Department report -- vowing to hold vigils, jump into the November elections and even perform acts of civil disobedience."  The nuts don't surprise me.  They're basically totalitarians.  If they don't get a ruling they don't like, they just go into physical blocking mode.  Sadly, though, Obama is already making noises about further delays.  That is completely crazy.

GROVEL, BARACK, GROVEL – From The Hill:  "President Obama is planning a trip to Saudi Arabia to repair badly frayed ties with one of America's key allies in the Middle East, The Wall Street Journal reports.  Obama will visit the kingdom in March for a meeting with King Abdullah, the Journal reports, citing Arab officials. The White House declined to comment."  I have no love for the Saudis, and especially for their past and possibly current support for terrorism.  But the need for a presidential visit simply demonstrates how incompetent our foreign policy has been.  I mean, if you've lost the oil guys...

AND ANOTHER CLOWN HEARD FROM – "Sen. Tom Harkin, the Democratic chair of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, returned from a weeklong tour of Cuba with a somewhat shocking assessment: The poverty-stricken nation does much better in protecting children from dying than America.  '[Cuba‘s] a poor country, but they have a lower child mortality rate than ours' he told reporters Wednesday, the National Journal reported. 'Their life expectancy is now greater than ours. It’s interesting — their public health system is quite remarkable.'"  Yeah, right.  Comrade Fidel has done it again.  Harkin, who is retiring, has always been a little weird.  Things like child mortality and life expectancy are affected by many factors, including social custom and responsibility...and the propensity of some sub-groups within the Democratic coalition to murder each other.  When well-to-do Canadians seek better health care, they slip right across the border to the U.S.  They don't fly to the worker's paradise.  If Cuba were free, the health system would be much better.

February 1, 2014       Permalink

ANOTHER LOON SPEAKS – AT 10:58 A.M. ET:   I am sickened when I see American officeholders turn their backs on national defense.  The left wing of the Democratic Party is the prime example, although, I'm sorry to say, there is a growing return to isolationism among some Republicans.

The latest example comes from that great pillar of national security, Senator Patrick Leahy of the People's Republic of Vermont.  From The Hill:

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) got his wish on a new potential East Coast missile defense site: If it’s built, it won’t be in Vermont.

The Pentagon announced Friday that bases in four states — Ohio, Michigan, New York and Maine —would receive environmental reviews for possible construction of a third U.S. missile site on the East Coast.

The Pentagon selected the final four sites for an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) out of an initial list of five in September, eliminating only Camp Ethan Allen Training Site in Vermont.
The four sites that were selected will undergo an environmental analysis that will take two years, a step that was mandated by Congress in the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

After the Pentagon released the list of five possible locations in September 2013, Leahy issued a statement saying he didn’t want the interceptors housed in Vermont.

“I’ve always felt that the multiple billions spent on missile defense are a monumental waste of money, on technologically challenged systems, and I am emphatically against putting one of these sites in Vermont,” Leahy wrote in a letter to the Missile Defense Agency.

COMMENT:  We note that Vermont is the only state that has a self-described socialist, Bernie Sanders, in the U.S. Senate. 

Leahy has always been a bit lofty and above us all.  His comments are not entirely shocking.  They remind me of the disgraceful episode that took place in New York City in the 1980s.  The U.S. Navy offered to designate New York as a home port, meaning new facilities would be built and a certain number of ships would make New York their permanent base.  The leftist New York City Council turned down the offer.  As usual with the left, a deceptive reason was given – that some of the ships might be carrying nuclear weapons.  Of course, ships that carried nuclear weapons visited New York all the time.  The real reason was the anti-military tone of the City Council.  (It is even more leftist today.)  The rejection so revolted the legendary Mayor Ed Koch that he asked out loud whether New Yorkers still considered their city part of the United States.  I don't think he got an answer.

Many years later, San Francisco turned down an offer to have the battleship USS Iowa permanently docked in the city as a museum.  Too militaristic said the city fathers and mothers.  Iowa has found a home elsewhere. and San Francisco is the poorer.

February 1, 2014       Permalink

AND AT HOME – AT 10:21 A.M. ET:  Lots of athletics coming up in the next few weeks.  The Super Bowl and the Olympics.  We've seen that sports have their glory, and their dark side.  Consider this, from the College Fix:

A study conducted by a reading specialist at the University of North Carolina reveals that ten percent of the school’s football and basketball players read only at a 3rd grade level.

According to ESPN, Mary Willingham–a literacy specialist formerly employed by the university–worked with 183 football and basketball players at UNC from 2004 to 2012. Sixty percent read at an 8th grade level or below. Ten percent were below the 3rd grade level.

Willingham said she worked with on men’s basketball player who couldn’t read or write at all, ESPN reports.

After Willingham revealed her claims in a CNN story last week, the University of North Carolina promptly issued a statement saying it did not believe Willingham.

However, UNC is already under a cloud of suspicion with regard to the academic integrity of its scholar athletes–stemming from the recent revelation of long-term corruption in it’s African-American Studies department, which operated hundreds of phony classes, classes that were particularly popular among athletes.

The classes were either barely taught or, in the worst cases, the professor didn’t even bother to show up for the class.

More than five hundred unauthorized grade changes were also revealed during the university’s investigation.

The scandal led to the unceremonious departure of former chairman of the African-American Studies department, Julius Nyang’oro, who faces criminal charges for taking money for a class he never taught.

In view of the longstanding corruption of the African-American Studies program at UNC, and the high level of enrollment among student athletes in the aforementioned phony classes, UNC’s blanket denial that there is any literacy problem among its athletes is hardly reassuring.

COMMENT:  We have simply not held our colleges and universities to account in any area, although there are many sane voices pointing out the woeful deficiencies of the campus.  I would hope that Congress starts launching major investigations into the use of federal aid by these august institutions.  Maybe the threat of the checkbook will stun some of them into wising up, maturing, and delivering an honest product.

If you want the best information on this, check out William Jacobson's superb College Insurrection website, as well as the College Fix

February 1, 2014     Permalink

THE FIELD MARSHAL SPEAKS – AT 10:09 A.M. ET:  President Obama, renowned for his deep understanding of national security and defense concepts, has declared the Sochi Olympics safe.   We have his wisdom, from London's left-wing Guardian:

President Barack Obama has thrown his support behind Russian security preparations for the Sochi Winter Olympics, disagreeing with several US congressmen who have cautioned families against attending.

Revealing that the US had examined Russia's plans to prevent terrorists disrupting the Games, which start next week, the president was asked whether he would advise friends of his daughters to go.
“I'd tell them that I believe that Sochi is safe and that there are always some risks in these large international gatherings,” he told CNN. “I'm always going to feel even better if inside the United States, because then we have full control over what happens. But the Russian authorities understand the stakes here.”

The State Department has advised athletes to avoid wearing anything that clearly identifies them as American while traveling outside the Olympic Village, and concern about Sochi's proximity to unstable regions in Russia has dominated US media coverage of the games in recent days.

However, Obama, who is not attending the Games after a year of strained political relations with the Kremlin, signalled that he nonetheless felt US security fears were overplayed in comments that amount to the most forthright endorsement yet of Russian preparations by the White House.
“We are co-ordinating with them. We've looked at their plans,” he said. “I think we have a good sense of the security that they're putting in place to protect not only the athletes themselves, but also visitors there.

COMMENT:  You'd think Obama would have learned something in his five disastrous years as president, but his ego, and his leftist approach to Russia and Islamism, overpowers all.  We are getting warnings from every knowledgeable source, including Obama's own State Department. 

We hope nothing happens.  We hope any plot is snuffed out, and we hope potential terrorists are deterred by all the security.  But Obama's almost lighthearted comments belie a lack of seriousness that matches his lack of seriousness about foreign threats generally.

February 1,  2014     Permalink

JANUARY 31,  2014

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 8:48 P.M. ET:

AUTHORIZED? – A startling statement from a State Department spokeswoman.  From the Jerusalem Post: 
"WASHINGTON- State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf said on Friday that a resolution to the longstanding nuclear crisis with Iran, should current diplomatic efforts fail, 'is likely to involve military action.' 'I’m not predicting that we would take military action right away,' Harf said. 'It’s more of a broad statement that, look, if we can’t get this done diplomatically in six months or a year or at any time, we will– we are committed to resolving it. And that involves less durable and, quite frankly, riskier actions.'"  I wonder if she was authorized to go that far.  Her ultimate boss, Field Marshal General Obama, chokes on the term "military action," and didn't use it in his State of the Union message when noting what might happen if negotiations with Iran fail.

GOLDEN STATE? – From the L.A. Times:  "Nearly half of California households are in chronic financial stress and have little to no savings for emergencies, according to a report Thursday.  The study by the Corporation for Enterprise Development paints a generally dreary picture of the financial situation of low- and middle-income people -- and even many above-average wage earners -- throughout the state.  Based on various measures of overall financial well-being, California ranks 34th among the 50 states, according to the study. Unemployment, credit-card debt and personal bankruptcies all are far above the national average, the study found."  These problems built up over decades.  They are duplicated in many other states.  Should we hit another serious recession, this country could go into economic convulsions.

MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH – From CNN:  "Washington (CNN) -- A long-awaited State Department environmental report on the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline indicates what the oil industry and its backers have been saying -- it won't have a big impact on carbon emissions that cause climate change.  The report released Friday appears to give the Obama administration the cover it needs to approve the politically charged project, but not until May at the earliest, after a 90-day review and comment period."  It should have been approved long ago.  The delay is a concession to the environuts who prop up the Obama administration.  But it has been terribly insulting to Canada, not that Obama cares about America's allies.

THE SILLY SIDE OF MIKE – Mike Bloomberg was a competent, sane mayor of New York City.  But Mike has always had a silly side, and it's coming out again.  From the New York Post:  "UNITED NATIONS — Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg was appointed Friday to be the U.N. special envoy for cities and climate change, a position that will give the billionaire businessman and philanthropist an international stage to press for action to combat global warming.  Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon chose Bloomberg, who made combating climate change a major focus of his 12 years as mayor and was very outspoken on how cities should be run to cope with ever increasing populations without harming the environment."  Mike, the UN is a joke.  Just retire.  Or help shovel snow.  Don't get started with that crowd.

January 31, 2014       Permalink

QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 9:58 A.M. ET:  Peggy Noonan has written a particularly fine piece for The Wall Street Journal about the increasing despair that Americans feel about Washington:

The State of the Union was a spectacle of delusion and self-congratulation in which a Congress nobody likes rose to cheer a president nobody really likes. It marked the continued degeneration of a great and useful tradition. Viewership was down, to the lowest level since 2000. This year's innovation was the Parade of Hacks. It used to be the networks only showed the president walking down the aisle after his presence was dramatically announced. Now every cabinet-level officeholder marches in, shaking hands and high-fiving with breathless congressmen. And why not? No matter how bland and banal they may look, they do have the power to destroy your life—to declare the house you just built as in violation of EPA wetland regulations, to pull your kid's school placement, to define your medical coverage out of existence. So by all means attention must be paid and faces seen.

Noonan goes on to cite this administration's overreach, and attitude.  She lists the abuses, the strutting, the lies.

This is the great political failure of progressivism: They always go too far. They always try to rub your face in it.

And she concludes:

All these things—the pushing around of nuns, the limiting of freedoms that were helping kids get a start in life, the targeting of conservative groups—all these things have the effect of breaking bonds of trust between government and the people. They make citizens see Washington as an alien and hostile power.

Washington sees the disaffection. They read the polls, they know.

They call it rage. But it feels more like grief. Like the loss of something you never thought you'd lose, your sense of your country and your place in it, your rights in it.

COMMENT:  Read the whole thing.  It makes so much sense.  I find that I sometimes say to myself, "I thought I was an American."  Are we still Americans?  I'm not sure any longer.

January 31, 2014       Permalink

FAT CHANCE WE'LL LIFT A FINGER – AT 9:31 A.M. ET:  Russia has apparently violated an important arms-control treaty.  Ho hum.  Can that possibly be as important as Obama's "reset" with Russia?  Of course not.  From The Hill:

Republicans said Thursday the Obama administration should take action over an apparent Russian violation of the treaty banning testing of medium-range missiles.

Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee issued a statement slamming the administration for ignoring the Russian treaty violation and not acting.

“If the Administration wishfully waves away blatant infractions on current agreements, how are we supposed to trust future pacts?” Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) and three GOP subcommittee chairs asked in a statement.

“Since 2012, Congress has pushed the Administration to take Russian cheating on nuclear treaties seriously,” the committee members said. “We have been ignored, as has Russia’s material breach of the central arms control treaty of the nuclear era. Treaties are meaningless unless both sides sign in good faith.”

The New York Times reported Thursday the United States informed its NATO allies this month that Russia had tested a new ground-launched cruise missile, in violation of the 1987 treaty signed by President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

Obama administration officials have pressed the Russians on the tests, according to the report. But the Russians said they investigated and considered the case closed, and the U.S. was not ready to formally declare the missile tests had violated the treaty.

COMMENT:  Hardly a day goes by without another expression of American weakness.  But, of course, Obama doesn't see it that way.  He is a leftist, nurtured by the left from the day he was born.  He sees our weakness as a gain for the world.  The sad fact is, there are too many people of influence in the United States who agree with him.

January 31, 2014       Permalink

MADNESS HAS ITS CONSEQUENCES – AT 8:06 A.M. ET:   The American people are delivering their verdicts on news organizations.  Oh joy.  From Powerline:

MSNBC has once again apologized abjectly and, this time, fired an employee for a bigoted tweet that the network’s president described as “offensive and wrong.” I wrote about the episode last night.

MSNBC’s string of debacles has taken a toll. Public Policy Polling finds that MSNBC is now America’s least trusted news source, tied with its parent NBC and–wait for it!–Comedy Central. PPP asked respondents which network they trust the most. The results:

Fox News: 35%
PBS: 14%
ABC News: 11%
CNN: 9%
CBS News: 6%
NBC News: 3%
Comedy Central: 3%
MSNBC: 3%

That’s a runaway for Fox, actually.

COMMENT:  The topping on this cake is that PPP is a liberal polling organization.  The findings must pain them.

I am simply amazed at how little attention some news outlets pay to their own credibility.  Is it arrogance?  Ignorance?  Or don't they realize how much credibility they've lost?  I think the last possibility is particularly important.  Many modern, "educated" journalists live in a very narrow universe in which their views are mainstream, and those to the right are considered "fringe" or even fascistic.  This is a function of their education and culture.  It is also a function of where major news organizations have their headquarters. 

We learned this week that Obama has an 81% approval rating in the District of Columbia.  It's a bubble, and many "journalists" live there.  Happily.

January 31, 2014       Permalink

I'M GLAD WE'VE NOTICED – AT 8:55 A.M. ET:  The agreement with Syria calling for it to give up its chemical weapons has started to collapse (shock!), and even our State Department is forced to notice.  From the Jerusalem Post: 

WASHINGTON – The US strongly condemned Syria for its failure to prepare and package the bulk of its chemical weapons arsenal for removal from the country, six days before a UN deadline requires its government to have shipped its entire stockpile to the port at Latakia.

In September, Syria agreed to forfeit its massive chemical weapons stockpile to be destroyed at sea under strict time constraints, under threat of military force from Washington.

But with a major deadline approaching, only 4 percent of those weapons have been delivered to Latakia, and only two cargo shipments have left the port, each carrying away roughly 15 tons of material. According to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, tasked with facilitating the removal of Syria’s arms, the Syrian regime has stockpiled at least 1,300 tons of chemicals.

“We all know that the Syrian regime has the capability to move these weapons, since they have been moved multiple times in the conflict,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said on Thursday, adding that the US was “deeply concerned” about the delay. “This isn’t rocket science here. They’re dragging their feet.”

Psaki said US President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry never removed the prospect of military action from the table after threatening Syria’s Bashar Assad with assault in August. But they are focused on enforcing the deal that resulted from that standoff, she said.

COMMENT:  This is what happens when you flash weakness.  In fact, the United States has effectively removed the prospect of military action.  It is in Obama's body language, the way he approaches every issue.  Appeasement, and more appeasement, and the weakening of American defense.

If you were the Syrian regime, would you be especially afraid of Barack Hussein Obama Jr.  I really don't think so, especially as you see your strongest ally, Iran, strengthened by the same Obama. 

This is what losing looks like.

January 31,  2014     Permalink