Liberal Politician Qualification! Clowns Already There!

A liberal decides he wants to run for public office but does not know what position so he goes to his local party's office.

The person who interviews him asks him has he been circumcised and he says yes but asks what does that have to do with his running for office?

The response given was that to be a liberal politician you have to be a complete prick!
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It is always great to get this type of comment: and particularly when from a good friend

"Dick, Your posts are always great, but this was an especially noteworthy one.  

If someone were to look back on this post in three years, I wonder what might be different?  

Great stuff - keep 'em coming! R.."

My friend was referring to the one entitled "Carter Cannot Tame His Lame Tongue" and I responded that I leave Friday for a conference in Washington and will be meeting with and hearing from a variety of guest speakers. I have also signed up for some interesting sessions. One in particular is about the Israeli Dome which they have proven works and will be relying upon should another rocket confrontation begin.

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 Send in the clowns? Hell, they are already there.  (See 1 below.)

Dumb them down first, then scare the hell out of them later. (See 1a below.)

Obama becomes his own sequester stuckee!  (See 1b below.)

Low information all round! (See 1c below.)
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Here is one high profile  black citizen who has the courage to tell it like he sees it!

"Google this guy, Harry Alford and view the following:

Black Chamber of Commerce CEO rips Obama [VIDEO] | The Daily ..."

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With Obama having led from the rear and thus, lost a great deal of influence in shaping matters in Syria  has our new Sec. of State been placed in a position where he has little leverage?  Time will tell. (See 2 below.)

Obama's misguided approach to foreign policy, borne out of even worse domestic mistakes, will create vacuums and they will be filled in ways detrimental to our nation, our allies and the world in general.  So much for our having elected a radical incompetent! (See 2a below.)

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Will Woodward find a cattle's head in is bed? (See 3 below.)

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If SCOTUS declares racism is over will it mean the experiment with affirmative action was also  reverse discrimination?  You decide. (See 4 below.)

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Dick

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1)The White House Court Jesters of Sequester

• 
 
• Michelle Malkin

Traffic alert: There's a massive clown car pileup in the Beltway. And with the White House court jesters of sequester behind the wheel, no one is safe. Fiscal sanity, of course, is the ultimate victim.

President Obama has been warning America that if Congress allows mandatory spending "cuts" of a piddly-widdly 2 percent to go into effect this week, the sky will fall. The manufactured crisis of "sequestration" was Obama's idea in the first place.

But that hasn't stopped the Chicken Little in Chief from surrounding himself with every last teacher, senior citizen and emergency responder who will be catastrophically victimized by hardhearted Republicans. Curses on those meanie Republicans! How dare they acquiesce to the very plan for "cuts" -- or rather, negligible reductions in the explosive rate of federal spending growth -- that Obama himself hatched?

How low will the kick-the-can Democrats go? Among the ridiculous claims the administration is making: The National Drug Intelligence Center will lose $2 million from its $20 million budget. That scary factoid appears in an ominous Office of Management and Budget report purporting to calculate the Sequester Disaster. So lock the doors and hide the children, right?

Wrong. As Reason magazine's Mike Riggs points out, the NDIC shut down in June 2012, and some of its responsibilities were absorbed by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Ready for more reckless, feckless farce? Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano played Henny Penny during a panicked speech at the Brookings Institution Tuesday. She warned that her agency's "core critical mission areas" would be undermined by the sequester. To cynically underscore the point, "waves" of illegal aliens were released this week from at least three detention centers in Texas, Florida and Louisiana, according to the Fort Worth Star Telegram.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed the release of some illegal immigrants Monday night, but would not say how many or from which detention centers.

The real punch line, as I've reported relentlessly, is that the catch and release of criminal illegal aliens has been bipartisan standard operating procedure for decades. The persistent deportation and removal abyss allows hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens -- many of them known repeat criminal offenders -- to pass through the immigration court system and then disappear into the ether because we have no determined will to track them down and kick them all out of the country.

While Napolitano shrieks about decimation of the DHS workforce, DHS workers tell me that the double-dipping of retired ICE brass -- who get back on the payroll as "rehired annuitants" -- is rampant.

While this open-borders White House phonily gnashes its teeth over the sequester's effect on national security, its top officials are lobbying for a massive nationwide amnesty that would foster a tsunami of increased illegal immigration for generations to come. The shamnesty beneficiaries will be welcomed with open arms, discounted college tuition, home loans and Obamacare. And as every outraged rank-and-file border agent will tell you, DHS top officials have instituted systemic non-enforcement and sabotage of detention, deportation and removal functions.

In another emetic performance, Obama parachuted into a Virginia naval shipyard this week to decry Pentagon cuts that would gut our military. But I repeat: The reductions in spending are CINO: Cuts In Name Only. If the sequester goes into effect, Pentagon spending will increase by $121 billion between 2014 and 2023. Fiscal watchdog GOP Sen. Tom Coburn adds that $70 billion is spent by the Defense Department on "nondefense" expenditures each year.

Send in the clowns. Wait. Don't bother. They're here.

1a)Obama and the Sequester Scare

Governing isn't about blaming someone else. It is about choosing.

By PHIL GRAMM

President Obama's message could not be clearer: Life as we know it in America will change dramatically on March 1, when automatic cuts are imposed to achieve $85 billion in government-spending reductions. Furloughed government employees, flight delays and criminals set free are among the dire consequences the president has predicted. If the Washington Monument weren't already closed for repairs, no doubt it too would be shut down.

Scare tactics such as these are similar to the ones that were made when I co-authored the first sequester legislation in 1985, the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act. The 1986 sequester was triggered anyway, but the predicted disaster never came. The nation survived then. It will now.

The president's response to the sequester demonstrates how out of touch he is with the real world of working families. Even after the sequester, the federal government will spend $15 billion more than it did last year, and 30% more than it spent in 2007. Government spending on nondefense discretionary programs will be 19.2% higher and spending on defense will be 13.8% higher than it was in 2007.

For a typical American family that earns less than it did in the year President Obama was elected, the anguished cries and dark predictions coming out of the White House should elicit not sympathy but revulsion.

When the 1985 sequester was created, the formula for cuts was closely examined, debated, amended and agreed to by a Democratic House and a Republican Senate and White House. Today's sequester is denounced because of the allegedly arbitrary nature of its across-the-board cuts. Yet the sequester formula that goes into effect on Friday preserves the spending priorities legislated by the Congress and the president, including exemptions and limitations they favored when the Budget Control Act of 2011 became law. The president himself first proposed the sequester. He may not like the way it works, but he has offered no real alternative.

Congress and the president might have worked together to avoid this outcome. Congress could have passed a budget resolution. The Republican House has repeatedly passed budgets, but the Democratic Senate hasn't passed one in four years. Past sequesters allowed for fast-track consideration of alternatives or modifications to the cuts—but the 2013 version doesn't allow for those.

Even if the sequester goes into effect, the magnitude of the automatic cuts won't be very different from those imposed in 1986. Nor is the job of finding alternative spending reductions any harder than it was when alternative cuts were enacted in 1987.

The first Gramm-Rudman sequester took effect on March 1, 1986. It cut nondefense spending by 4.3% and defense spending by 4.9%.

The most recent estimate by the Congressional Budget Office for this year's sequester is that nondefense spending will be cut by 4.6% and defense spending will be cut by 7.9%. While the sequester will reduce spending authority by $85 billion, the actual cuts that will occur in 2013 will be $44 billion. That is a mere 1.2% of total federal spending this year.

The first round of cuts under Gramm-Rudman weren't so devastating that Congress and the president rushed to repeal them. In July 1986, Congress had the opportunity simply to stop the sequester after the Supreme Court invalidated its triggering mechanism. Instead it voted overwhelmingly to reaffirm the across-the-board cuts. The vote in the Democratic House was 339 to 72, and the Republican Senate approved it by acclamation, not deeming it worthy of a roll-call vote.

In 1987, Congress fixed the triggering mechanism and restored the sequester in Gramm-Rudman II. That deal would have cut nondefense discretionary spending by 8.5% and defense spending by 10.5%, far greater cuts than will be triggered this year. Yet a Democratic Congress and a Republican White House came together to replace that sequester with spending cuts in fiscal years 1988 and 1989 that werelarger than those called for by Gramm-Rudman II.

While history shows that a divided government can enact significant spending cuts as an alternative to sequesters, that doesn't appear to be the path Mr. Obama intends to follow. Instead of protecting civilian defense workers, the president will continue to force the Pentagon to buy biofuels at $27 per gallon to promote his green agenda. Instead of protecting children from cuts in nutrition programs, the president will continue to allow $2.7 billion of fraud and mismanagement he has identified in the food-stamp program. Instead of protecting Medicare from a 2% cut, the president will ignore $62 billion in annual waste that his administration has identified in Medicare and Medicaid.

But governing is not about blaming someone else—it is about choosing.

While Mr. Obama may choose to make the cuts ordered by the sequester in the most painful way possible, the best alternative—which is practiced every year to some extent—is allowing federal agencies to transfer funds among individual programs with congressional approval or by rearranging priorities as part of the March 27 resolution to fund the government for the rest of the fiscal year.

That doesn't sound like a herculean task to Americans who make hard choices every day. Their choices have become harder and more frequent because the country's political leaders seem unwilling to do the same in Washington.

— Mr. Gramm, a former Republican senator from Texas, is a senior partner of US Policy Metrics.

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1b)

You Can't Community-Organize Your Way Out of a Sequester By Jim Geraghty You're familiar with the notion of the Hedgehog and the Fox, right? "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing"? Hardball producer Michael LaRossa marvels, "Only in America can a President propose a law, get it passed, and then actively campaign against implementing it." Yes, instead of spending time in Washington, with all of the members of Congress who could pass something to replace the sequester, Obama went to Newport News to hold a campaign-style event shouting about the need to pass something to replace the sequester. Permit me to spotlight a funny recent essay by RedState contributor Moe Lane, in which he examines the skills and philosophy of President Obama through the lens of role-playing video games: To begin with: a munchkin (or power gamer, or mini-maxer, or a bunch of terms that cannot be repeated here) is a type of gamer (roleplaying, computer, roleplaying-computer) who looks for loopholes in the rules — because games have rules, and there isn't a rule-set in the world that cannot be manipulated by somebody with enough motivation/obsession. And it turns out that the American Democratic primary system was full of such loopholes, which is why Barack Obama won the nomination in 2008 despite losing almost all the big Democratic primary states (and arguably the popular vote, depending on how you score Michigan). And it also turns out that the intersection of our electoral system with our rapidly-expanding online culture can produce what computer gamers call "exploits:" which is to say, a glitch in the system that gives someone an unintended benefit (if it just crashes the system, it's a bug). Strictly speaking, the system is not designed to elevate a state Senator to the Presidency in five years – for what turned out to be very good reasons – but it can be done. Mini-maxing is when a player designs a character that is fantastically good at one thing, at the expense of everything else. So you could end up with a character who is, say, obscenely good at hitting things with a sword — but can't convince a bunch of sailors to drink free beer. The mini-maxer doesn't mind; he'll just go around the game trying to resolve as many problems as he can by hitting them with a sword (tabletop gamers — err, "D&D players" — often call this The Gun is My Skill List, although obviously substitute a sword for a gun in the name). The problems that the mini-maxer can't resolve that way he'll either ignore until later, or else flail about on the screen while hitting the buttons quickly and/or at random ("button-mashing"), in the hopes that eventually the laws of probability will allow him to bull on through anyway. And that's where we are now. Barack Obama knows how to do one thing: elect Barack Obama to public office. And that's not ‘elect Democrats.' Or ‘elect liberals.' Or even ‘elect people that Barack Obama likes.' It's just him: his team is trying pretty hard right now to figure out how to use their over-specialized skill more generally, but they don't have much time to figure it out and the system is actually rigged against them in this case. Barack Obama certainly doesn't know how to govern effectively; take away a Congress that will rubber-stamp the Democratic agenda and he flails about. He's so bad at this, in fact, that when confronted with a situation where all he had to do was do nothing to fulfill a campaign promise (the tax cuts) we somehow ended up with a situation where Obama gave in on 98% of those tax cuts and voluntarily signed up to take the blame for the AMT fix. In short: Obama was woefully unprepared for the Presidency, and he hasn't really spent the last four years trying to catch up. Instead, he goes from situation to situation either trying to recast the problem in ways that he does have some skill in (permanent campaigning for office), or else… flail about on the scene while hitting people's buttons quickly and/or at random, in the hopes that eventually the laws of probability will allow him to bull on through anyway. How did Obama try to pass his stimulus? Campaign-style events. How did Obama try to pass Obamacare? Campaign-style events. How is Obama pushing for amnesty legislation? Campaign-style events. Gun control?Campaign-style events. Fiscal cliff? Campaign-style events. This is all besides his actual presidential campaign. But mind you, his campaign-style rallies didn't move the poll numbers on Obamacare, and Democrats to this day never use the word "stimulus" when discussing new spending. Obama is very good at getting people to like him and believe in him — more so than his agenda. We see this phenomenon when his overall job-approval rating is five to ten points higher than his handling of most major issues such as the economy. But this is what he knows, and after his reelection, he's convinced it works. So here we go. More cowbell. 1c)Low Information Voters? How about a Low Information President? By Bruce Johnson There is a real possibility, a strong likelihood, that President Obama knows nothing of the nuts and bolts, the details and realities of the positions he promotes.  He rides the Starship Air Force One, thrills adolescent crowds and frames himself with federal employees while orating vapid clichés dowsed in demagoguery. He drives the fancy car but needs help filling it with gas and couldn't point to the air filter if you popped the hood. Imagery sans leadership.  Celebrity is the accomplishment here, and adoration is the metric.  Polls demonstrate people approve more of him and less of his execution of the responsibilities of office. This Presidency is therefore wrapped in a managed personal imagery that supersedes the measure of ability. He speaks yet says nothing. He exists before the camera scripted to generalities and clichés. Once this is understood, we can sense there is no more. True leadership and real understanding of the issues just aren't there.  Recall a few instances. There was the Paul Ryan Obamacare summit in which Ryan began to peel back the skin on the Affordable Care Act.  Ryan began reading from the bill itself, and as he did Obama's eyes glazed over.  When Ryan was finished, Obama had nothing of substance to say.  Dismissive and aloof, he pushed out a short narrative of banalities and bromides. Did Obama know enough to defend his own program? There was also the Univision interview in which Obama declared that George W. Bush began Fast and Furious back in 2007.  This is inherently false.  There was a similar program, granted.  But, the program had ended and, by the way, the program attempted to capture gun runners. Two glaring differences.  But did Obama know these facts? At first one thinks there is a twisting of the truth by the President.  But, there is a strong possibility that indeed he believed what he said based on what he had been told. Dr. Benjamin Carson revealed his version of the world and the shortfalls of Obamacare standing a few feet from the President himself.  Obama's body language, as he was forced to bear witness, spoke volumes. This was the closest to an exchange between Obama and a critic of his beloved health insurance initiative to date.  But there was no exchange.  There was no defense. There was no telepromptered pre-authored clichéd speech to deliver. Regarding the Benghazi incident, Obama suggested that for him to dig in and learn the details and facts of that 9/11 day would be to somehow interfere with an FBI investigation, an investigation that to date has provided nil. Wouldn't, shouldn't a President's attitude be more in the vein of "I will find out what happened and I will report back to the nation."? He declares that he has cut over a trillion dollars, somewhere.  He has been told this and it seems he believes it. He will not engage a critic and nor defend his positions in detail.  He can not apparently even engage a questioning reporter nor engage his congressional opposition. In my opinion, he couldn't last 5 minutes in a fact-driven analysis of that which he promotes. The President doesn't meet with the political opposition to initiate compromise because he simply couldn't keep up his end of the argument. His game is to broadcast insipid generalities wrapped in demagoguery and reliant on an arrangement that disallows honest questioning.  Can we recall anytime that Mr. Obama had control and knowledge of the facts of an issue? I maintain that Obama really believes that George Bush started Fast and Furious. I maintain that Paul Ryan has read more of the Obama Care bill than the President. I think he actually believes he has trimmed over 1 Trillion dollars from the budget and that the sequestration is a "real" cut rather than merely a trimming of the rate of increase in federal spending. The president operates only on the information he is given. That is understandable.  But does he sense that perhaps his information is flawed?  Does he care? Not likely. Obama's non-engagement and aversion to compromise is actually seated in his complete lack of knowledge, and therefore inability to defend his agenda or even forge a compromise.  He is inactive in leadership and compromise because he simply lacks the ability and issue knowledge to lead and compromise. It is becoming apparent that the President is purposely kept in a bubble by his handlers, protected by the aegis of screened questioning. He is merely a one trick pony with the trick being nothing but media-enabled and unrebutted declarative demagoguery delivered to fawning audiences and broadcast to the clinically under informed. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --- 2)US joins Russia in drawing ceasefire lines for ending Syrian war Incoming US Secretary of State John Kerry, on his first foreign trip, set forth what sounded like a new Obama administration policy for Syria in his remarks in Paris Wednesday, Feb. 27. They were accompanied by reports that the US was stepping up its support for the Syrian opposition. It would cover training rebels at a base in the region and non-lethal assistances and equipment, such as vehicles, communications equipment and night vision gear. But Kerry’s remarks did not reflect a new policy but merely recycled old definitions which confirmed US disengagement from Syria, rather than “stepping up support” for the Syrian opposition “for the first time.” US supplies of nonlethal assistance to Syrian rebels date back to early last year. The US has moreover been training Syrian rebels in Jordanian bases near the Syrian border for more than a year to carry out three missions: 1. To seize control of Bashar Assad’s chemical weapons arsenal; 2. To create a pro-Western core command structure as a factor in post-Assad government; 3. To ward off the takeover of the revolt command by Islamist factions, including groups associated with al Qaeda. It turned out that none of these three missions was actually achieved. The chemical weapons remained firmly in the hands of Assad and his army - which never used them, contrary to rebel claims; factions close to Al Qaeda grew stronger; and their role in the rebel command expanded as they were seen to be the best-armed and trained of any Syrian rebel faction. The Obama administration finally came to the conclusion that the only way to contain Islamist forces and retain a modicum of American control over the rebels was to catch a ride on Russian President Vladimir Putin plans for Syria, even through they entailed preserving Bashar Assad in power through to 2014. Military and Russian sources reveal plans hinge primarily on establishing armistice lines dividing the country into separate sectors and determining in advance which will be controlled by rebel factions and which by Assad loyalilsts. This is the first practical basis to be put forward for an accord to end the two-year old civil war between Assad and the Syrian opposition and it is designed to go forward under joint Russian-American oversight. Sources add that the teamwork between Washington and Moscow in pursuit of this plan is close and detailed. They have agreed to get together on the types of weapons to be supplied to each of the rebel groups and are sharing costs. That is the real new American policy for Syria: It is based on Washington’s recognition of the new situation unfolding in Syria and the need to cooperate with Moscow, including acceptance of Assad’s rule, in order to salvage remnants of American influence within the Syrian rebel camp. French President Francois Hollande showed he was quick on the uptake. No sooner had the Secretary Kerry departed Paris for Rome Wednesday, than Hollande was on his way to Moscow to scout out a role for France. 2a)American recessional By Victor Davis Hanson Republicans and Democrats are blaming one another for impending cuts to the defense budget brought about by sequestration. But with serial annual deficits of $1 trillion-plus and an aggregate debt nearing $17 trillion, the United States -- like an insolventRome and exhausted Great Britain of the past -- was bound to re-examine its expensive overseas commitments and strategic profile. The president's nomination of Chuck Hagel for defense secretary was a sort of Zen-like way of having a Republican combat veteran orchestrate a reduced military. In fact, Barack Obama has nurtured a broad and diverse constituency for his neo-isolationist vision. Budget hawks concede that defense must suffer its fair share of cuts. Libertarians want back their republic and hate the big-government baggage that comes along with a big military's involvement overseas. Leftists agree, adding that the U.S. has neither the moral authority nor the wherewithal to arrange events overseas. For liberals, a scaled-back military presence abroad means more entitlements at home. For each F-22 Raptor not built, about another 20,000 families could receive food stamps for a year. The American public -- exhausted by Iraq and Afghanistan -- is receptive to all the above arguments. If our poorer grandparents thought 70 percent of the annual U.S. budget devoted to defense after the Korean War was about right, we, the more affluent, insist that even the present 20 percent is far too costly. The result is that we lead from behind in Libya; France leads from the front in Mali. Syria andIran shrug off Obama's periodic sermons to behave. Our reset with Russia was abruptly reset by Russia. American policy in the Middle East could be summed up as "Whatever" -- as we become only mildly miffed that distasteful authoritarian allies are replaced by more distasteful Islamist enemies. In his first major speech as secretary of state, John Kerry did not worry about radical Islam. Nor did he warn Americans of a rogue North Korea, a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran, or China -- bullying in the Pacific and cyber-hacking the U.S. -- but mostly of the need for collective efforts to address climate change. A shortage of solar panels and windmills, not impending cuts in U.S. ships and planes, is Kerry's idea of existential danger on the global horizon. To the extent that there is a coherent American foreign policy, it is perhaps symbolized by drone assassinations: Every couple of days or so, just kill a terrorist suspect or two -- and as cheaply, as remotely and as quietly as possible. What will the world look begin to look like as the global sheriff backs out of the world saloon with both guns holstered? Japan and Germany, the world's third- and fourth-largest nations in terms of their gross domestic product, have never translated their formidable postwar economic strength into their past, prewar levels of military power. Yet both in theory could quickly do so -- and make nukes in the same way they make fine cars -- once they sense that there is no longer an unshakeable U.S. commitment and ability to shelter them from regional threats. In fact, an array of allies -- South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines -- would all be frontline garrison states should the U.S. military vacate their bad neighborhoods. The world is full of hot spots apart from the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Shiite majorities in many of the Sunni-ruled and oil-rich Persian Gulf kingdoms believe that a terrorist-sponsoringIran is more a liberator than rogue nation, and that Gulf oil has not been fully utilized as a strategic weapon. The Aegean, Cyprus, the former Soviet Republics, the Falkland Islands, Central America and the Baltic are all deceptively quiet. Potentially aggressive actors in the region don't quite know how the U.S. military might react -- only that it easily could, and has in the past. We lament the terrible American losses in blood and treasure in tribal Afghanistan and Iraq. But privately, radical Islamists acknowledge that the U.S. military killed thousands of jihadists in both countries -- and hope never to see U.S. troops on the battlefield again. Of course, a country that can neither budget the necessary money nor maintain the will to oversee the international peace has no business continuing to try. But in our relief from the vast costs and burdens of maintaining the postwar global order, we might at least acknowledge the truth, past and present: Just as the world was a far better place after 1945 because of an engaged United States, so it will probably become a much worse place due to an increasingly absent America. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3)Woodward: White House Warned Me "You Will Regret Doing This" WOLF BLITZER, CNN: You're used to this kind of stuff, but share with our viewers what's going on between you and the White House. BOB WOODWARD: Well, they're not happy at all and some people kind of, you know, said, look, 'we don't see eye to eye on this.' They never really said, though, afterwards, they've said that this is factually wrong, and they -- and it was said to me in an e-mail by a top -- BLITZER: What was said? WOODWARD: It was said very clearly, you will regret doing this. BLITZER: Who sent that e-mail to you? WOODWARD: Well, I'm not going to say. BLITZER: Was it a senior person at the White House? WOODWARD: A very senior person. And just as a matter -- I mean, it makes me very uncomfortable to have the White House telling reporters, 'you're going to regret doing something that you believe in, and even though we don't look at it that way, you do look at it that way.' I think if Barack Obama knew that was part of the communication's strategy, let's hope it's not a strategy, that it's a tactic that somebody's employed, and said, 'Look, we don't go around trying to say to reporters, if you, in an honest way, present something we don't like, that, you know, you're going to regret this.' It's Mickey Mouse. (The Situation Room, February 27, 2013) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4)Supreme Court Poised to Declare Racism Over Conservative justices on the high court look set to scrap a key part of the Voting Rights Act. —By Adam Serwer | Pop champagne: Racism is over.  "There is an old disease, and that disease is cured," Bert Rein, the attorney leading the legal challenge to the Voting Rights Act—the landmark law intended to ensure all Americans can vote—told to the Supreme Court on Tuesday. "That problem is solved." Rein represents Shelby County, Alabama, one of the jurisdictions covered by a key section of the Voting Rights Act called Section 5. Under Section 5, parts of the country with histories of discriminatory election practices have to ask for permission—or "preclearance," in legal terms—from the Justice Department before making any changes to their voting rules. But the South, where most of the covered jurisdictions are, has changed, Rein said, and the law, although once justified, is now unfair and unconstitutional. The five conservative justices on the Supreme Court seemed to agree. "The Marshall Plan was very good too," argued Justice Anthony Kennedy, "but times change." That's not to say all discrimination is a thing of the past. In the eyes of the high court's conservatives, America has transcended its tragic history of disenfranchising minorities, but there's still one kind of discrimination that matters: Discrimination against the states covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Justice Antonin Scalia said that it was "sort of extraordinary to say" that "Congress can just pick out…these eight states," referring to the states covered by Section 5. Later, Scalia telegraphed his reasoning for what will almost certainly be a vote to strike down part of the law. Explaining overwhelming support for the Voting Rights Act reauthorization in Congress in 2006, Scalia called Section 5 the "perpetuation of a racial entitlement" that legislators would never have the courage to overturn. "In the House there are practically black districts by law now," Scalia complained. (In Mississippi, a state which Roberts would later cite as a paradise of racial enlightenment, state lawmakers in the early 1990s referred to these as "nigger districts.") Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a liberal appointed by President Barack Obama, held her tongue until Rein rose to rebut the government's arguments. She then lobbed Scalia's grenade back in his direction. "Do you think the right to vote is a racial entitlement in Section 5?" she asked. "No," Rein said, "the 15th Amendment protects the right of all to vote." It should, but sometimes it doesn't. That's why Congress passed Section 5. Scalia wasn't the only conservative justice despondent over how unfair Section 5 is to the South. Chief Justice John Roberts, arguing that voter registration and participation of black voters is higher in Mississippi than Massachusetts, asked Solicitor General Donald B Verrilli Jr., who was defending the law, "Is it the government's submission that the citizens of the South are more racist than the citizens of the North?"  Verrilli awkwardly cleared his throat and said no. Being from the South doesn't mean a person is racist, and being from the North doesn't mean a person isn't. The notion that the South is more racist than the North might seem intuitive, though, given the hundreds of years of an economy based on the forced labor of enslaved blacks, the instigation of a bloody civil war fought over the right to own black people as property, decades of near slavery and apartheid following emancipation, and the fact that a massive effort by the federal government and several constitutional amendments were just required to ensure black Americans' basic rights. But when Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act—and Section 5—in 2006, it wasn't measuring anything so abstract as racism. It was looking at whether or not the states covered by Section 5 still sought, in less explicit ways than in the days of poll taxes and grandfather clauses, to abridge the right to vote on the basis of race. "Of course [Section 5] was aimed at states," said Justice Stephen Breyer, a member of the liberal bloc. "What do you think the Civil War was about?" This crowd? States rights, probably. "It's an old disease; it's gotten better," Breyer said, "but it's still there." Almost ignored by the justices, however, was that the Voting Rights Act has a provision that allows states to "bail out" of Section 5 coverage if they go a long time without proposing discriminatory voting changes. Almost 200 jurisdictions have bailed out of Section 5 since 1982, at a cost of about $5,000 each. Shelby County, Alabama, can't do that, though, because in 2006 local officials redistricted the only black lawmaker in the city of Calera out of his seat. Scalia worried that Section 5, and its unjustifiable discrimination against states, would continue in "perpetuity." But with the bailout provision, it's a relatively simply matter to escape the Section 5. To quote Roberts in a case striking down a school integration program, "the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." Maybe instead of trying to gut the Voting Rights Act, Shelby County should try that. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

President Chaos! From Middle East to Asia!

Chaos ! Is that Obama's goal?  He grew up cutting his bicuspid on the philosophy you cannot let a
crisis go to waste.  (See 1, 1a and 1b below.)
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A dear friend of mine recently told me of a charter school in our town financed by Hillsdale College and the Walton Family Foundation that is going to return to teaching  the basics so the students who attend will graduate with an ability to reason. How novel.  I am hoping to be asked to join their advisory board. (See 2 below.)
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Life after liberalsim (See 3 below.)
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Iran has crossed the line?  What if anything will Hagel, Netanyahu do? (See 4 below.)
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The State Department has basically failed to reach its goals in The Middle East so is it about to move to Asia and continue  its path of failures in a new location?  (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1)A President Who Is Rooting for Chaos
By Bernard Goldberg


In my last column I said that President Obama was a "deeply cynical man."  I now have second thoughts in light of the White House warning that because of sequestration we should expect long flight delays and a general disruption in air travel. Unfortunately for Mr. Obama my second thoughts are exactly the same as my first thoughts.  He is a deeply cynical man.

Mr. Obama is not only out to scare everybody about a tiny cut in the growth of our out-of-control spending — $85 billion out of a $3 trillion-plus budget — I think he actually wants long lines at airports, and criminals being set free for lack of money to prosecute them, and massive layoffs and all the rest.  I think he wants the most hardship to the most people so he can secure the most political points.  I think he is rooting for chaos because he knows the American people won't blame him, not a majority of them anyway.  The Republicans will get the blame and in 2014 he may very well get the House – to go along with the Senate.

You know what that means?  It means Mr. Obama would then be able to do whatever he wants and it will be called democracy in action.  Higher taxes on success that might discourage investment that would create jobs, more money for green energy that won't produce much energy, more money for early education programs that don't work, a minimum wage that might cost young workers a job, increase in cap-and-trade programs for carbon emissions that might slow the economy and put people out of work, new housing incentives, new manufacturing incentives, new, new, new, more, more, more, money, money, money.

This can only work, as I pointed out in my last column, if there are enough clueless people out there who know nothing about the economy but are certain that they love Barack Obama and will support any idea he comes up with. And there are.  We live in the United States of Clueless.

All the president has to tell these low information voters, as Rush Limbaugh calls them to avoid using the word "stupid," is that he's for "compromise" and they swoon.  All he has to say is he wants to close "loopholes" for people who fly around in private jets and buy yachts, and they say "right on, Mr. President." Except closing those loopholes wouldn't keep the government going for an hour … and there's also that inconvenient fact that whenever big liberal government goes after private jets and yachts it's the blue collar workers who build them who get hurt a lot more than the "plutocrats" who get around in them.

I also think President Obama doesn't care one bit about deficits and debts.  I think he is a community organizer at heart.  He thinks the poor are getting the shaft and the rich have more than they need.  His entire philosophy can be summed up in four little words:  "Spread the wealth around."  That's why I'm also convinced that he has absolutely no interest in cutting spending in any serious way.

So will the slobbering love affair last if Barack Obama gets his way and keeps on taxing the successful and spending money we don't have?  Will the love affair last after it becomes obvious that he can tax the rich all he wants and it won't get us out of the debt and deficit whole that someday will sink the economy?

In the short run, the answer, I think, is yes.  Ignorance is a powerful force.

But if the sequester goes into effect and chaos doesn't reign — if the scare tactics are exposed as just that — Mr. Obama will look like the boy who cried wolf.  But he'll get away with that too.  For a while.

But if he continues to believe, as he reportedly told House Speaker John Boehner, that "we don't have a spending problem," if he continues to minimize our deficit and debt, then the house of cards will come crumbling down as sure as the sun rises in the east. And the people he says he cares about the most will be the ones who are hurt the most.

A president would care about these things.  A community organizer ... not so much.

1a)The Sequester Airport Shakedown

By Jonathan S. Tobin  

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHoodhas been under fire the past few daysfor his role as one of the leading front men for the president’s effort to scare Americans about the sequester. There are good reasons to fear the impact of these across-the-board spending cuts, especially to defense, as Max wrotelast week. But the manner in which the administration is attempting to claim that the country’s business will grind to a halt is prompting some skepticism about the sequester as well as the government’s credibility.

There’s no doubt the sequester will inflict real pain on the Department of Transportation and other government sectors. But Republicans are publicly wondering whether that pain will be disproportionately applied to services that will directly affect the public as opposed to other, far less vital expenditures that might well be eliminated without creating the sort of havoc that the White House has been warning us about. Who is right? We’ll find out soon enough, as at this point either side of this argument can say anything it wants without fear of being proven wrong. But once the sequester starts going into effect it will be possible to see whether the government is being straight with the public or not. That’s the danger for the White House.

Up until this week, the contest to see who will get the lion’s share of the blame for the sequester has been the main event in Washington. Part of that was involved in the White House’s effort to disavow the paternity of this awful idea. But now that Bob Woodward has blown that up, they are back to their main task of arguing that any suffering or inconvenience that stems from the measure will be due to the GOP refusing to accept the president’s demands and raise taxes. While talking about the long-term impact of layoffs or lower allocations for programs can certainly drive the argument about the sequester, Democrats also know that the way the cuts impact the daily life of Americans will be even more influential.

That’s why the focus this week has been on things like the possible travails that travelers will experience at airports when the sequester goes into effect. In theory that ought to create tremendous pressure on Republicans to give in to the president, evoking the spectacle of aggravated passengers as canceled flights and long security lines bring air travel to a grinding halt.

But if it comes out that these delays have been as much the result of manipulative decisions by the authorities that are geared toward maximizing inconvenience rather than just cutting expenditures, it could cause some real blow back for the administration. Figures such as LaHood need to be very careful in the way the sequester is administered. As much as the president is the beneficiary of a largely complacent press corps, any monkey business aimed at making things look even worse than they are could erase any temporary advantage the president might get from this dustup.

1b)Bob Woodward blasts President Obama ‘madness’

By KEVIN ROBILLARD 

The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward attacked President Barack Obama on Wednesday, saying the commander-in-chief’s decision not to deploy an aircraft carrier because of budget cuts is “a kind of madness.”

“Can you imagine Ronald Reagan sitting there and saying ‘Oh, by the way, I can’t do this because of some budget document?’” Woodward said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe."

“Or George W. Bush saying, ‘You know, I’m not going to invade Iraq because I can’t get the aircraft carriers I need’ or even Bill Clinton saying, ‘You know, I’m not going to attack Saddam Hussein’s intelligence headquarters,’ as he did when Clinton was president because of some budget document?” Woodward added. “Under the Constitution, the president is commander-in-chief and employs the force. And so we now have the president going out because of this piece of paper and this agreement, I can’t do what I need to do to protect the country. That’s a kind of madness that I haven’t seen in a long time.”

The Pentagon announced earlier this month the U.S.S. Harry Truman, which was supposed to leave for the Persian Gulf, will remain stateside due to budget concerns. The sequester, which will cut billions in defense spending, is scheduled to hit on Friday.

Woodward has become an unlikely conservative hero in recent days for calling out the administration over whether Obama had “moved the goalposts”’ in negotiations over the sequester.

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2)One Hundred Reasons to Abandon Public Education Now

By Daren Jonescu

In a recent article, I noted in passing that "there are a hundred compelling reasons for removing your children and grandchildren from the public schools, regardless of any practical or financial inconveniences this may cause you."  My choice of the round figure one hundred was purely a rhetorical flourish -- there are actually far more than a hundred reasons to abolish public education, one child at a time if necessary. 

By way of proving this point, I offer the following list for your consideration and dissemination:

(1) John Dewey.  "The father of modern education" -- including modern Soviet education.  Critic of Western rationalism, socialist, enemy of ethical individualism.

(2) Bill Ayers.  Weatherman communist, Deweyite -- and influential voice in early childhood education. 

(3) "Benevolent" would-be oligarchs explicitly conceived of modern compulsory schooling as a means of forcibly stunting intellectual growth in order to produce a submissive worker class.  (See below) 

(4) Standardized curricula and testing.  Coerced uniformity of goals and methods -- the "death panel" of education.

(5) Reduces family home to glorified bunkhouse for state-raised children.  (See below)

(6) Undermines family's historical role as nature's buffer between individual and state.

(7) Sex education.  Mechanistic reduction of sex spells the death of Eros -- life's central mystery -- and hence of sublimated passions, high art, and the pursuit of wisdom.

(8) Psychiatric branding and drugging of non-compliant children.

(9) "Gun-free zones."  Public school: "Hundreds of weak, undefended targets here."

(10) Benjamin Franklin.  Little formal schooling; a printer's apprentice at twelve.

(11) Jane Austen.  Little formal schooling; read books and wrote stories at home.

(12) Alexander Pope. Little formal schooling; major poet and literary critic at twenty-three.

(13) John Keats.  Medical apprentice (and orphaned) at fourteen, professional surgeon's assistant at twenty, licensed apothecary at twenty-one, greatest English poet of his era at twenty-three (dead at twenty-five). 

(14) Under compulsory schooling, only two entries in Keats' biography (item 13) would have been possible -- "orphaned" and "dead at twenty-five."  Think about that.

(15) School environment designed to make life easier for teachers, not better for children.

(16) Public school teacher certification requires "successful" indoctrination in government-approved pedagogy.  (See items 1 and 2)

(17) Public school teachers belong to powerful unions with radical leftist leadership and agendas.

(18) Rare talented, earnest teachers are completely hamstrung by government/union social and academic goals.

(19) "Barack Hussein Obama, mm, mm, mm."

(20) Obama Youth singing "Yes We Can."

(21) Bullying.  Anti-rational mass children's education fosters coercion, mob intimidation.

(22) Anti-bullying programs.  Government creates Lord of the Flies; proposes to correct it by creating Nineteen Eighty-Four.

(23) Government classroom encourages mindless obedience and uniformity ("Because I say so!") -- training children in subservience to irrational, generic authority.

(24) Emphasis on group activities and forced sharing discourages individual initiative and respect for others' property and achievement.  "You didn't build that."

(25) Socialization: a progressive catchword which means learning how to mold oneself to the shape of any presiding majority, i.e., conformity.

(26) Fear: the constant emotional undercurrent for "different," "quiet," or "unpopular" children thrust into the midst of hundreds of their "peers" and told to "get along."

(27) Power lust: one of the two common means of reducing the fear of being trapped among an irrational collective.  (See items 23-26.)

(28) Bootlicking, currying favor: the other common means of reducing fear. 

(29) Homeschooling.

(30) Thomas Jefferson.  Studying multiple languages and the natural world at nine years old under a Presbyterian minister.

(31) David Hume.  Entered University of Edinburgh at twelve.  Completed the most important philosophic treatise of the Scottish Enlightenment at twenty-six.

(32) "It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -- Albert Einstein

(33) "In the first place, God made idiots.  That was for practice.  Then he made school boards." -- Mark Twain

(34) "Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education.  It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery." -- Benjamin Disraeli

(35) "Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men's natural abilities as to restrain them." -- Baruch Spinoza

(36) "Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening.  The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role." -- William T. Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education, 1889  (See item 3)

(37) "Peer pressure."  The moral intimidation of a child whose character is not yet firmly established, by an ever-present group with the power to condemn with ostracism.

(38) 12,000 hours (counting only mandatory class time) of wasted opportunities for family guidance and conversation, practical skills development, remunerative employment, apprenticeships, reading, exploration of nature, and musical training.

(39) Unrelenting boredom.  Stifles natural curiosity -- "the devil's playground."

(40) "The children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone would be interdependent." -- Dewey

(41) Nationalized standards, e.g. America's new Common Core.  Imposing universal, increasingly idiosyncratic standards is intended to render alternative education practically impossible.

(42) History curriculum designed by post-Marxist revisionists.

(43) The entitlement mentality.

(44) Natural attachment to the "provider."  Abstract state replaces concrete parents as the object of future obligation and duty.

(45) "Gender role" and "alternative lifestyle" lessons.  (See item 7)

(46) Unceasing Marxist critique of Western civilization: sexism, systemic oppression, capitalism is racist, the rich get richer, etc.

(47) Public education requires lowest common denominator approach.  Stifles natural intelligence.

(48) Discouraging female modesty.

(49) Discouraging male admiration for female modesty.  (See item 7)

(50) Ayn Rand's essay on education, "The Comprachicos."  (I first read it while hiding out in my high school library, probably cutting class.  It is the one Rand essay I've recalled frequently as an adult.)

(51) The downward ratchet of expectations and achievement.  (See item 47)  Most teachers are products of the public system at earlier stages.  The results:

(52) English teachers who never cared for poetry beyond Bob Dylan.

(53) History teachers who teach Oliver Stone or Howard Zinn, but have never read Tacitus or Gibbon.

(54) Music teachers whose idea of broadening their students' horizons is the "Mission Impossible" theme or "Imagine."

(55) Teachers too ignorant and incompetent to discern or meet the interests or character of their students.  My 10th grade English class, which by chance was comprised of only boys, was forced to read the clammy pop-psychological novel Ordinary People.  One day, when we were being particularly ornery about it, our teacher finally stormed out on us, after screaming furiously, "This is one of the greatest novels of the 20th century!"  Even then, I could only wonder whether she knew any others.

(56) "All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education." -- Sir Walter Scott

(57) Man-made global warming indoctrination.  Anyone who works with government-educated children in any developed nation on Earth encounters this intractable faith.

(58) Typical age of entrance at Scottish universities during the 18th century (i.e., the Scottish Enlightenment): fourteen.  Hume, Francis Hutcheson, and Adam Smith all attended at fourteen or younger.  (Scotland's beloved national poet, Robert Burns, never attended university, and was mostly home-educated.)

(59) The U.S. federal Department of Education's budget for primary and secondary education alone was over $40 billion in 2012 -- more than the entire national budget of Singapore.  Results?  See the other ninety-nine items on this list.  Tax expenditure on education rises continuously; civilization nosedives continuously. 

(60) Thomas Edison.  Judged addle-minded by his teacher; withdrawn from school and educated by his mother; began a nomadic life of entrepreneurial endeavors and scientific experiments at twelve.  Today, he would be on Ritalin at six, urged to make friends by his mother, and likely bored out of his skull and a failing student throughout his teens.

(61) "Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality." -- Beatrix Potter

(62) How can coercion to surrender your child to a state-controlled school regimen until young adulthood be squared with a belief in individual liberty?

(63) "Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted." -- Vladimir Lenin

(64) John Taylor Gatto's Underground History of American Education.

(65) Imagine twelve years of being forcibly prevented from doing anything of any practical importance.

(65) Artificially prolongs childhood, stunting character development.  (See item 3)

(67) Thinking is by definition a private enterprise.  Great thinking is often likened to being alone on a mountaintop.  Public education seeks to prevent children from ever really being alone, or climbing. 

(68) "In our dreams...people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands." -- Occasional Letter Number One, General Education Board, 1906.  (See item 3)

(69) "From my cold, dead hands."  As I have said before, if you stand proudly against state confiscation of your firearms, how can you not feel at least as strongly about state confiscation of your children?

(70) Public schools are deliberately calibrated to limit spiritual achievement, by waiting out (i.e., wasting) the natural period of boundless energy and enthusiasm that drove men to self-development in the pre-public school era.

(71) Feminism.

(72) Political correctness.

(73) "Fairness."

(74) "Diversity."

(75) "Creativity."

(76) "Individuality."

(77) "Truth is relative."

(78) Banning Christmas.

(79) The moral ratchet: Yesterday's vice, today's "experiment," tomorrow's "basic right."

(80) Drugs.  America has its first proud drug-user president -- there is no turning back within the public system.

(81) Textbook publishing oligopoly.  Crony capitalism makes government curriculum decisions a racket, in addition to being a joke.

(82) "High quality, public education is a human right." -- NEA website.  "The child is entitled to receive education, which shall be free and compulsory." -- UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child, 1959.  (A compulsory "right"?)  Doesn't this make private or home schooling a rights violation?

(83) A monopolistic pyramid disperses corruption at the top throughout the affected community.  And monopoly breeds corruption.

(84) Parents are now increasingly relegated to the roles of funding machines and support workers for state child-rearing.

(85) The push for public pre-schools.  The trajectory: universal, compulsory government raising of children from the beginning of language use to the completion of character formation and thought process habituation. 

(86) "The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother's care, shall be in state institutions at state expense." -- Karl Marx

(87) Answer to "learning social skills" argument: family, church, neighbors, hobby or study groups.

(88) Answer to "learning about real life" argument: public school is the antithesis of real life. 

(89) If "real life" looks increasingly like public school, that's because universal public education has formed a society in its image: infantile, amoral, collectivist, driven by fear, power lust, and pandering.

(90) Education requires a desire for knowledge; desire requires a sense of need; concrete circumstances give rise to need.  Compulsory schooling withdraws a child from such concrete circumstances; everything is abstract and impractical.  No need; no desire; no education. 

(91) "The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality." -- H.L. Mencken

(92) Genuine education breeds self-reliance; public school breeds dependency.

(93) "Every educated person is a future enemy." -- Martin Bormann, Hitler's personal secretary

(94) Compulsory government schooling is the exception, historically speaking.  It has not always existed.  It need not exist.

(95) Public education did not make modern prosperity possible -- exactly the opposite, in fact.  As Tocqueville warned, modern prosperity weakened men's resistance to the siren song of "soft despotism."

(96) Private schools, religious and secular, exist.

(97) "I can undo the school's damage at home."  If the government mandated that your child be force-fed rotting "state food" for each meal, would you say, "No problem -- I can feed him healthy food on weekends"?  Then how do you justify allowing the state to force-feed its spiritual rot to your child's mind?

(98) "I can undo the school's damage at home."  All of it?  Are you completely certain?  Children indoctrinated under totalitarian regimes go home after class, too.  Their parents probably tell themselves the same thing -- but they, unlike you, have no choice.

(99) A better car or your child?  A bigger home or your child?  Early retirement or your child?  Freedom to do as you please or the child you freely chose to bring into the world?

(100) Every child who attends a public school will be less than he might have been, and the deficit -- in reasoning, knowledge, character, sensibility, motivation -- can never be fully overcome.  (And yes, I include myself among the victims.)  This monumental waste of valuable time and invaluable emotional energy is irreversible.  Can you live with that?

There is my list.  Please add your own ideas.  Who knows?  Perhaps every hundred reasons will persuade one family to withdraw a child from a government school.  One soul rescued from irreparable harm -- that seems worth the effort.

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3)Liberals Should Have Known

By Christopher Chantrill

One of the favorite parlor games of our liberal friends is "The Germans Should Have Known" -- about the Final Solution, about the war crimes, about the slave labor.  Part Two of the game is to blame everyone from Nietzsche to Hegel to Herder to Heidegger for setting the stage for Nazism.  Some people are even able to parlay the parlor game into a bestseller, as with Daniel Goldhagen and his Hitler's Willing Executioners.

So, while the president tries out for the new Hollywood blockbuster The Boy Who Cried 'Wolf,' featuring fiscal cliffs and sequesters and climate change, let us imagine the world after liberalism.  It might be a time when media talking heads and ambitious young writers will be figuring out paths to fame and fortune playing the "Liberals Should Have Known" game.

Really, I don't think we will be playing "Pin the Tail on the Liberal," because what's the point?  In the glorious dawn of entitlement reform, vigorous economic growth, a price-driven health-care system, and educational choice; with abortion safe, legal, and shameful; and with a robust African-American middle class with the highest marriage rate in the nation, who will care about blaming liberals?  Except, perhaps, former liberals eager to curry favor with the new ruling class.

Having lived through the liberal Götterdämmerung, any decent person will then figure that the liberals have suffered enough with the destruction of all their delusions, what with Siegfried Obama dead, Brünnhilde Clinton finally done singing, and the Ring of big government returned to those captivating MSNBC Rhinemaidens.

Another thing.  All the liberals that I know are good, decent people.  They just believe what they read in The New York Times and hear on National Public Radio.

Of course our educated liberal friends should be reading Sowell's Basic Economics.  Of course they should be parsing Hayek.  But they don't; they won't.  Instead they take comfort in Nobel economist Paul Krugman's call for more Keynesianism.  They worry about right-wing militias.  They sneer at fracking.   And they equate gay marriage with the civil rights struggle.  They are, you might say, Human, All Too Human.  They stay with their faith.

After all, what would have happened to the Israelites if they hadn't followed Moses on his crazy wanderings in the desert?  What would have happened if Henry J. Heinz had given up after going broke in cucumbers?  What would have happened if the Revolutionary Army had melted away in the winter at Valley Forge?

Liberals naturally think that with one more Big Push, they will get the political breakthrough they need to fundamentally transform America.

But liberals should have known.  They should have known that their vote-winning entitlements were a fraud that discouraged generations of Americans from saving for their old age and creating jobs for their children.  They should have known that a time would come when people would react in outrage to the idea of killing little babies in the womb, for what are we here on this Earth if not for babies?  They should have known that their welfare politics would lead to a cultural implosion, with lower-income women abandoning marriage and lower-income men abandoning work, and both abandoning their children to inner-city chaos.  They should have known that the global warming conspiracy was a con from the beginning, and that its exposure as a cesspool of crony capitalism would touch just about every Democrat in high politics.  They should have known that a century of compulsory government education would lead inevitably to a generation of whining whipped puppies.

The reason the Germans created their big state was to play catch-up with Britain and France in the nation-state game.  They succeeded only too well, and then they didn't know how to stop.  It didn't help having a foolish kaiser as head of state at the turn of the 20^th century. 

The reason the liberals created their big state was to solve the "social question" posed by early capitalism.  They succeeded only too well, and then they didn't know how to stop.  It didn't help having a foolish president a little after the turn of the 21^st century who got his politics from drinking a lethal ideological cocktail of radical suits and big-city corruptocrats.

A liberal friend recently told me that the civil-rights revolution was inevitable.  I beg to differ.  It required a lot of things to come together, including a united ruling class determined to do the right thing against the bitter-enders, who at the time, you might recall, held a lot of committee chairmanships in Congress.

The tragedy of the Obama era is that there is no consensus in the ruling class to do the right thing and reform our government finances.  And the Democratic Party is a coalition of bitter-enders, dogs-in-a-manger snapping at anyone who dares to threaten their rotting pensions and sinecures.

It is all such a shame.

Christopher Chantrill (mailto:chrischantrill@gmail.com) is a frequent contributor to American Thinker.  See his usgovernmentspending.com and also usgovernmentdebt.us.  At americanmanifesto.org he is blogging and writing An American Manifesto: Life After Liberalism.

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4)What will Chuck Hagel do about Iran's plutonium production at Arak?

Chuck Hagel was swept into office Tuesday, Feb. 26 by a Senate majority as Barack Obama’s new defense secretary atop a cloud of disinformation which aimed to confirm that Iran’s nuclear program has gone too far to stop - like Iran’s grip on Syria and Lebanon. This message was accentuated by what the London Telegraph called Iran’s Plan B, signified by “…a cloud of steam that indicates heavy-water production for… a nuclear reactor that can produce plutonium, which could then be used to make a bomb.”

The “cloud of steam” is no proof of an active plant; it could be just a trial run, but the timing of the British paper’s publication on the day of Hagel’s Senate endorsement and the Six-Power meeting with Iran in Kazkahstan to discuss its nuclear program, underscored the view of British Prime Minister David Cameron. He has said in private conversations that US President Obama, French President Francois Hollande and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu are pursuing an unrealistic policy on Iran and should accept the reality that Iran has achieved a nuclear bomb capacity. Sanctions are therefore pointless and futile and should be lifted.

The point contributed by the Telegraph – for the benefit of the incoming US defense secretary - was that Iran has achieved a dual track to an atomic bomb, which only goes to strengthen Cameron’s argument.

Just as unrealistically, the Kazakhstan talks focused on curtailing Iran’s uranium enrichment up to weapons grade, while Tehran was creeping up on the six powers (US, UK, France, Russia, China and Germany) with its Plan B for producing a plutonium bomb.

It must also be said that the Arak plant and Iran’s plan for a plutonium weapon have been around for some time and were only brought into play now to support these arguments..

As for the rumors of Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah coming down with cancer and being flown to a hospital in Tehran – broadcast Tuesday, Feb. 26 – even assuming they were confirmed – prove nothing. Hizballah in fact strenuously denied the rumor Tuesday night.

If Nasrallah were to disappear tomorrow, Hizballah’s military, political, intelligence and terrorist arms,which are managed totally by Tehran, would simply carry on as before in Lebanon and Syria. And whatever fate may overtake even Syrian President Bashar Assad, Iran is too deeply entrenched in both countries to be dislodged.

The rumors of Nasrallah’s terminal illness come one month after the assassination of Gen. Hassan Shateri aka Hossam Khosh-Nevis, who was Iran’s overlord for Syria and Lebanon. They look very much like an attempt to undermine morale in Damascus and Beirut ahead of the March 5 negotiations opening in Moscow between the Assad regime and the Syrian opposition.

It is hardly likely that the Moscow-Tehran initiative for ending the Syrian war will be affected any more than images of a head of steam over Arak will halt Iran’s nuclear program.

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5) US 'pivot to Asia': Is John Kerry retooling it?

By Howard LaFranchi

A focus of American resources away from the Middle East and toward Asia was a major priority when Hillary Rodham Clinton was secretary of State. But it is unclear if John Kerry will follow her approach exactly, many regional analysts say

When John Kerry spoke at his confirmation hearing to become secretary of State, Asia experts took notice when he seemed to back away from a key aspect of President Obama's vaunted "pivot" to Asia.

"I'm not convinced that increased military ramp-up [in the Asia-Pacific] is critical yet," Mr. Kerry said at the January hearing. "That's something I'd want to look at very carefully."

The "rebalancing" of America's focus and resources — away from the Middle East and toward a rising Asia — was considered part of the legacy of Kerry's predecessor, Hillary Rodham Clinton. China had been put on notice that the United States was reasserting itself as an Asia-Pacific power. But was Kerry suggesting, as some surmised, that the US would now focus more on engagement with a rising China? Was he signaling that the "pivot to Asia" is no longer a guiding priority?

Or, as a senior State Department official suggests, was Kerry simply saying that the US, which has played a key role in Asia's security and prosperity for decades, will be cautious not to do anything that might jostle the region? "Anything that could upset [what we've helped accomplish in Asia] has to be looked at very carefully" — including a potentially unsettling military buildup, says the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Whether the Asia pivot is "real or rhetoric" will be answered in the coming months, regional analysts say — as the US addresses the simmering territorial disputes in the seas of Southeast Asia, as it signals the diplomatic attention it intends to give the region, and as it moves ahead, or not, on an ambitious regional trade pact called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

For US officials, the pivot never meant turning toward something new, since the US has been a Pacific power for more than a century. Rather, they describe it as "refocusing" on the world's most economically dynamic region. And they say the US is taking concrete steps to make the pivot a reality.

In November 2011, Mr. Obama announced plans for up to 2,500 US Marines to be stationed in Australia — a first for the US. And by 2020, 60 percent of the US naval fleet will be deployed to the Asia-Pacific, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced last June.

On the diplomatic front, Mrs. Clinton pressed ahead with building up "institutional architecture" for US-China relations, establishing regular high-level meetings.

She also ramped up US involvement elsewhere in the region, particularly with Southeast Asia — a strategic focus for both the US and China. Clinton made a point of attending forums of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) every year of her tenure — a first for a secretary of State.

In addition, Obama had the US join a new grouping — the East Asia Summit (EAS) — and he attended the summit two years in a row. Obama also hosted the first US-ASEAN Summit, held in Singapore in 2009, and then attended annual ASEAN summits, as well as Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summits.

This bump-up of attention to the region by the US president does not go unnoticed by leaders, says Michael Green, a senior Asia adviser in the George W. Bush administration who is now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

"The president's commitment to the EAS may be the most lasting dimension of the pivot," he says.

For some US diplomats, a crucial factor in making the pivot more than rhetoric is the number of largely unseen working groups and other contacts being established on issues that range from trade and investment to e-trade security. Their goal is to boost the region's prosperity while making the US an integral part of it.

So far, the "ramp-up" in economic contacts has largely been accomplished by "juggling" existing resources, but requests in the 2014 budget are based in part on adding new "slots" in both Washington and the region, the senior State Department official says.

"We are taking advantage of revenues that will be somewhat freed up" by the "rebalancing" of resources from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the official says.

Yet despite this evidence of a redirection, it remains unclear if what began in Obama's first term will carry over full force into his second, many regional analysts say. "Clearly the meaning of the pivot a year and a half ago is different from its meaning today," says Dean Cheng, a research fellow at The Heritage Foundation's Asian Studies Center in Washington.

"Secretary Kerry seemed to be saying in his confirmation statement [that] we don't need a pivot," he adds. "We'll see in the months ahead if the political and military and economic attention we give the Asia-Pacific region confirms that that's what he meant."

One significant question, Mr. Green says, is the defense budget — whether cuts can be made while keeping the envisioned redeployment of forces to the Asia-Pacific.

Another important indication of where the pivot is headed will come when Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe travels to the White House Feb. 22.

Mr. Abe — who has made no secret since his election in December of the priority he places on revitalizing relations with the US — visits as a territorial dispute between Japan and China over a collection of uninhabited islets (the Senkaku, or Diaoyu) heats up.

How far Obama goes in supporting Japan, with whom the US has a security treaty, will say a lot about how the US wants China to interpret its role in the region, some say.

But other signals out of the White House will be just as important, regional analysts say — such as who makes up the administration's Asia team. Asia analysts want to see who replaces Kurt Campbell, the recently departed assistant secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, who worked closely with Clinton to move the Asia pivot beyond rhetoric.

The region will be watching, too. "In the Chinese view, the pivot was identified with Mrs. Clinton," says Mr. Cheng of Heritage. "Her departure and that of Kurt Campbell will be seen as a weakening, a diluting of the pivot."

Another indicator will be what happens this year with the TPP, a new trade group being negotiated by 11 Pacific Rim countries, including the US. Negotiators have set a deadline of September for reaching an accord, which many say could serve as a template for extending trade agreements across the region.

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