We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
My good friend Larry Bailey retired from the Navy in 1990 after a 27-year career as a SEAL, rising to Captain. Captain Bailey's most significant military assignment was as Commanding Officer of the Naval Special Warfare Center, where all Navy SEALS undergo basic and advanced training.
Bailey and others from across the spectrum of US special forces have banded together to form Special Operations Speaks. I'll let them speak for themselves:
Honorably discharged veterans of the Special Operations communities of all the Armed Services have organized an effort to elect Mitt Romney President of the United States. This group, “Special Operations Speaks,” or “SOS,” will be structured along quasi-military lines, with an umbrella organization coordinating the efforts of several subordinate Service-unique specialties. The Army will be represented by “Rangers Speak Out” and “Green Berets Speak Out;” the Navy by “SEALs Speak Out;” the Air Force by “Air Commandos Speak Out;” and the Marine Corps by “MARSOC Speaks out.”
SOS is configured as a “Super Political Action Committee” (Super PAC) that will enable it to exert maximum influence as an advocate for the election of Mitt Romney as President of the United States. Subsequent to the 2012 campaign, SOS will continue to exert pressure on behalf of the Special Operations community.
Of particular interest to SOS is the urgency of maintaining the level of secrecy that has heretofore been a hallmark of Special Operations. The recent leaking of highly classified information from the offices of the Commander-in-Chief himself clearly indicates the need to protect sensitive information from the public (and enemy’s) eye. SOS will educate the public and its representatives in the US Congress about this issue.
Until November 6, 2012, SOS will organize and execute operations designed to help elect Mitt Romney and to defeat Barack Hussein Obama.
There's a petition at the site for an investigation by the House Homeland Security Committee into who leaked the secret information about the SEAL raid that got bin Laden. Please sign up.
Also, rest assured that just as they defended us during their active duty, our special operations forces are still doing the job.
P.S.: Here's a 2007 interview by me with Larry Bailey, when he organized 40,000 in D.C. for a No Cut, No Run rally.
As in so many other cases, international media usually seeks out and features negative news about Israel or exaggerates it or treats it in a biased manner. So, too, on this issue.There is a natural, and commendable, empathy for peoples in dire straits or whose experience, by large stretches of analogy, may be compared to other groups, like Hispanics or Blacks in the US, but that alone does not merit the one-sided coverage of this issue and the lack of facts and context.That lack of context and partial facts has been the case with most of the reporting about African illegal immigrants in Israel.
As in the US, it is difficult to count the number of illegal immigrants, so hard numbers of illegal African immigrants in Israel are estimates.According to Wikipedia, there were about 26-thousand in July 2010 and 55-thousand in January 2012. Estimates of new arrivals are about 1-thousand a month, which would bring the June 2012 number to over 60-thousand.Two-thirds are estimated to be in south Tel Aviv and another 20% in the resort city of Eilat. Some other estimates of illegal African immigrants in Israel are higher. This is a lower percentage of illegal immigrants than in the US, but Israel should not wait until it is as large a problem as here. There are also about 150,000 Black Ethiopian Jews in Israel. Black Ethiopian Jews were brought in by Israel.
As in the US, there is certainly racism against Blacks within Israel.There is also acceptance and substantial aid within Israel, as in the US for its illegal immigrants.
“Imagine a world in which hunger is vanquished by crops that don’t depend on the soil, water or fertilizer, or pesticides to thrive; they’re just around the corner.”
The obesity epidemic is a convoluted way of saying that the problem with government health care is the people. But that's not the problem. Obesity may not be healthy, but if we ban sodas and force everyone to exercise in the yard before work, the numbers still won't balance. Because the real problem with government health care is government.
When offering a product or service, the most elementary thing to do is calculate the cost of making the product and the price that people are willing to pay for that product. If you can't bring the two together, then you don't have a product. You have a disaster waiting to happen.
Obama promises the progressive agenda — more executive aggrandizement, more marginalization of Congress, more latitude for unaccountable experts to supervise our lives, more regulatory suffocation of society. Romney promises the reverse.
...consider ... that we were born into the freest, strongest, and wealthiest nation that mankind has ever known—and elected as our president a man who promised to “fundamentally transform” it.
Yes, I think that may have been where we made our mistake. We wished to have an orange for a head.
To the extent that these unions shape the Democratic agenda, Democrats aren’t just the party of government; they are the party of inefficient, expensive, unresponsive, bureaucratic government. They are the party of government workers first and foremost, and if there is a clash between the interests of the providers of government services and their consumers (between, for example, unqualified, unmotivated life-tenured public school teachers and kids), the unions come at these issues from the standpoint of protecting workers first, others second.
In terms of the blue social model, they are the party of the bitter clingers: the power of public sector unions among Democrats is a power that inhibits Democrats from putting forward innovative, future-facing ideas (about schools, health care, and so on) and keeps them focused firmly on the defense of the past.
The left’s analysis of its loss in Wisconsin resorts to some classic tropes: it is despair masked as defiance in order to avoid deep introspection...
A rational Liberal, is Prof. Mead. Slick writer too.
The truth is that union ranks are collapsing as former members are now choosing to opt out. The AFT chapter in Wisconsin lost 6000 members, and AFSCME, the key union of state workers, saw its membership rolls drop from a high of 62,818 to 28,745. If those workers really saw a benefit in union membership and they believed in its principles, they would have stayed members even if dues collection was now voluntary. But these former union members chose to desert the ranks, preferring to keep the extra thousand dollars or so they would have given to the union and to put it in their own pockets.
Since the death of Mao, the People’s Republic of China has almost never hesitated to sign and ratify pacts, conventions, and treaties—and at the same time violate them.
The point remains: Sovereignty belongs to nations, and the European Union is not a nation. The solution to Europe’s economic crisis will belong to nations, not to the union of nations. The euro is not a national currency. As such, it is bound to be challenged. Greece is likely to present the first challenge. Others will follow. The nation states of Europe were never going to sacrifice themselves for the euro or the EU. What we see in Europe today is an old truth playing out. Power most effectively resides in the nation-state, not in the bloodless creation internationalist dreamers.
Look around you. The late-20th-century Western lifestyle isn’t going to be around much longer. In a few years’ time, our children will look at old TV commercials showing retirees dancing, golfing, cruising away their sixties and seventies, and wonder what alternative universe that came from. In turn, their children will be amazed to discover that in the early 21st century the Western world thought it entirely normal that vast swathes of the citizenry should while away their youth enjoying what, a mere hundred years earlier, would have been the leisurely varsity of the younger son of a Mitteleuropean Grand Duke.
If converted to cash, means-tested welfare spending is more than sufficient to bring the income of every lower-income American to 200 percent of the federal poverty level, roughly $44,000 per year for a family of four. (This calculation combines potential welfare aid with non-welfare income currently received by the poor.)
He said, ‘Look, what do you care who does the work?’” Liebau recalled Obama saying in reference to her management of the law review. “’It is the same amount of work for you to hand out the work no matter who it goes to, so why fight it? Do what’s easiest for you. Give the work to the people who will do the work, and just don’t worry about the people who don’t want to pull their weight.’”
Liebau wasn’t impressed.
“I guess I was young and naïve: I was like, ‘Ah but that wouldn’t be fair,’” she said.
“And what surprised me is apparently that didn’t bother Barack at all. It was just kind of like — take the easy way out. Why bother yourself with all these silly notions about justice and fairness? Do what works. Revealing? I don’t know. Good advice? I didn’t particularly think so.”
A steering committee led by Joyce Moy, director of CUNY’s Asian Research Institute, ran faculty focus groups based on “identity.” The groups included “African-American/black, Asian, White/Jewish, Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender, Hispanic/Latino, Individuals with disabilities, and Italian-American.”
CUNY targets Italian-Americans for affirmative action in response to lawsuits alleging bias….
“White,” said a Jewish professor at Kingsborough Community College, “is in every way a detriment to be categorized because of the push to hire minorities.”
Good grief. And still, it seems exclusionary to me to omit "White Native Americans" from the special treatment list.
The conflict today between Democrats and Republicans increasingly pits public sector unions, government employees and contractors, and beneficiaries of government programs against middle-class taxpayers and business interests large and small. . . This impasse between the two parties signals the end game for the system of politics that originated in the 1930s and 1940s. As the “regime party,” the Democrats are in the more vulnerable position because they have built their coalition around public spending, public debt, and publicly guaranteed credit, all sources of funds that appear to be reaching their limits. The end game for the New Deal system, and for the Democrats as our “regime party,” will arrive when those limits are reached or passed.
Dunkin' Donuts, the well-established donut-and-coffee chain on the East Coast and in the Midwest — with 6700 store locations in the U.S. and 30 other countries — didn’t have a California location until earlier this month.
Located inside Camp Pendleton’s new MCX store (a one-stop shop for active duty military and their families), Dunkin' Donuts opened with little fanfare on May 3.
Upon hearing of the store's opening, I tried on numerous occasions to get a comment from the Dunkin' Donuts corporation based in Massachusetts. It took several weeks for a spokesperson to respond to emails.
On May 22, PR manager McCall Gosslin responded that they understand the demand for Dunkin' Donuts in California, pointing out that the state is number one in sales for their prepackaged coffee. But, he added, it will be a long time before other California locations are added. He said Camp Pendleton officials reached out to Dunkin' Donuts because of their popularity at other military installations.
Speculation as to why a multinational company won't have an additional presence in California can be drawn from an announcement last year that Carl’s Jr. will no longer seek to open additional California locations due to a regulatory process that takes two to three years.
On May 23, Dunkin' Donuts manager Daisy said they were extremely busy and that the Marines are aware of the fact that theirs is the first shop in California.
Let no crisis go to waste. It's always a "crisis" when government wants power and control, and it is in the nature of governments to desire those things.
Nock’s essay on the Right Thing is a reminder that the advocates of the paternalistic state, whether “left” or “right,” have it backward: good conduct isn’t a precondition of freedom; it is a consequence of freedom. He contrasts the “region of conduct” regulated by force, that is, by government, with the region regulated by the individual’s sense of doing the Right Thing.
In the fall of 1971, in grad school, I did a 60-page analysis of the Nixon/Kissinger détente policy. I concluded it was largely a holding action meant to slow down what otherwise was believed by its primaries as the inevitable declining power of the West in the face of rising Soviet and Chinese power. I termed it “existential defeatism”. Although pragmatic coping in many ways, defeatism or its better cousin called nuance, has not been terribly beneficial to US interests since.
There isn’t a linear relationship from 1971 to now, but rather a trend. This trend is toward restraint in asserting our interests, with the confused interruption of our Iraq experience. It is increasingly coupled with deference to the alternate or contrary interests of other countries, called internationalism.
These policies can take little credit for the fall of the Soviet Union, under the weight of its own internal contradictions, in 1989. On the other hand, China kept ascending, US fecklessness in Indochina is touted by Islamist radicals as encouragement for their causes, and Russia is following its old path contrary to Western interests. Meanwhile, many of today’s foreign policy gurus tout international law and international organizations, usually most often in play to hinder or attack Western interests.
Restraint in foreign engagements, particularly military, is certainly to be prized unless clear US national interests, mechanisms, and follow-through plans are pretty clearly present, and articulated by our national political leaders so necessary to domestic support. However, instead, what we’ve increasingly seen is muddling and disparagement of the very concept of US national interests, substituting outright negativity, conceptual distractions, and refusal to actively engage unless elusive or impossible international consensus is reached, to include Russia and China who aren’t shy about exerting themselves actively in opposition to US or Western interests. In effect, as well, the US and Western Europe have too often abandoned its moral core, as well, to the favor of those who don’t share it or deride or hate it.
All that said, this critique must face the serious real-world problems we face immediately in the Middle East and coastal Asia, and the influence of financial problems.
Understandably nervous and hesitant to confront crazies in the Middle East, we have defaulted influence to Iran and to Russia.
Not wanting to indiscriminately support or arm possible future foes, as we did in Afghanistan to chase out the Soviet Union, there is little effort to discriminate and strengthen those not antagonistic to the West. Syria has been a cat’s paw of Iran to ferment conflict. Our non-action furthers this, rather than decrease it, aside from the humanitarian toll on Syrians with Iranians on the ground adding to the murders and Russian arms arriving in torrents. The US is rightly seen in the region and elsewhere as ineffectual, hardly worth allying with. Meanwhile, enough said, Iran continues its steady march to nuclear weapons, stirring others in the region to possibly also do so, further destabilizing international order and security.
One would hope that the US is doing more behind the scenes than is apparent, but no observers have seen such which is telling in the usually open sieve of reporting and NGOs. The US should be doing more in Syria, and more openly and assertively, including arms to those less problematic. The US should announce a date certain in 2012, after which all informed analysts recognize it will be too late, by which the US will devastatingly bomb—as only the US could -- Iran’s nuclear installations if there is not a convincing abandonment of Iran’s nuclear war-making capacities. Neither in Syria nor Iran are US military forces necessary on the ground. But short of that we have done far too little to influence the outcomes, leaving the threats to grow and to undermine confidence in the West, and influencing Middle East countries and citizens to accommodate or ally themselves with Iran.
The primary rationale for the US Senate to ratify its decades-pending Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) may be to strengthen the hand in an international forum of the states in coastal Asia against the expansiveness of China. However, all, including China, have long since joined LOST, and that hasn’t slowed China’s claim of virtually the entire South China Sea as its own. China’s navy is expanding, often acting aggressively toward other states, and its oil and gas exploration is reaching into deep waters near other countries. See this map, the red lines far away from China being ocean borders that China wildly claims.
...what Obama wasn't able to make stick to Romney with Bain, Romney intends to make stick to Obama with Solyndra -- define him as a reckless job killer who squanders our money for his own personal and political gain. And from where I stand, this is working , mainly because everything Romney is saying is 100% true. Which brings me back to the media.
The reason the use of the media is so crucial in this ad is because the Romney campaign obviously learned much from 2008 and therefore understands that in order to protect Obama, the media has devised any number of ways to kill narratives damaging to Their Precious One. Phony fact-checkers like Politifact come to mind.
Clinton, unlike Cory Booker, is not spankable by the O team. In fact, Team Clinton, still the de-facto heads of the Dem party, has carefully announced that it's OK not to pin your future on Obama. That is politically devastating, I think.
Romney is a JFK-era Democrat. Or, you could argue, a JFK-era Repub. They weren't all that far apart, back then. Back then, the federal government did not play such a large role in daily life, and did not aspire to it so it did not matter too much.
Does Obama have any friends at all? I mean, besides the notably unappealing David Axelrod who is a guy who makes you want to take a shower after listening to him, and government union thugs who will expect to be paid off, Chicago-style?
It’s certainly hard to argue that the Romneys’ horse-riding habits today are worse than the Maraniss revelations, which have gotten little mainstream coverage.
And the horse-riding story came a few weeks after a second story that made Republicans see red – another front-pager, this time in the Washington Post, that hit Mitt Romney for bullying a kid who might have been gay, in high school nearly a half-century ago. The clear implication to readers: Romney was a mean, insensitive jerk.
Maraniss works for the Post and his pot-smoking scoop, which included details of Obama’s college-era dope-smoking club and waste-no-weed rules for inhaling it, never made the front of his own paper.
The story landed on page A6, and Maraniss’s reporting included colorful details of Obama’s pot-smoking prowess: “As a member of the Choom Gang, Barry Obama was known for starting a few pot-smoking trends. The first was called ‘TA,’ short for ‘total absorption.’ To place this in the physical and political context of another young man who would grow up to be president, TA was the antithesis of Bill Clinton’s claim that as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford he smoked dope but never inhaled,” Maraniss writes in his book.
Obama does have one thing right. If you’re a Democrat who wants to make a ridiculous claim, put it out there and watch the mainstream media carry your water like Gunga Din. While they’re at it, they’ll suggest that your long-time relationships with extremists such as Rev. Jeremiah Wright and William Ayers are irrelevant while your opponent’s one-time appearance at an event with one of the most famous men in America, Donald Trump, is a sign of moral turpitude.
Robert Mugabe, and his Zambian sidekick, Michael Sata, have been appointed United Nations international tourism ambassadors in recognition of the promotion and development of tourism.
To sum up my simple message: Empirical data are important; scientific discoveries are important; the disclosure of malpractices in the IPCC and other “bastions” of the global-warming debate are important; but we have to take part in the undergoing ideological battle. The subtitle of my five-year-old book is What is Endangered: Climate or Freedom? There is no doubt that it is all about freedom.
Many on the left have lost any insight into their own bias; nothing Obama says is over the top, and nothing he has done lacks significance or inspiration. Likewise, nothing Romney says or has done amounts to much. By forcing a halo upon Obama, suggesting dark hearts among any who don't see it and follow, and ignoring the virtues of a decent man like Romney, does not serve the president well. It stirs resentment among voters who chafe at being told to love him or else.
Krauthammer on the White House kill list. "The hypocrisy is staggering.":
In New York Magazine: Hope: The Sequel - For Obama & Co., this time around it’s all about fear:
...2008’s candidate of hope stands poised to become 2012’s candidate of fear. For many Democrats, this is just fine and dandy, for they believe that in the Romney-Republican agenda there is plenty to be scared of. For others in the party in both politics and business, however, the new Obama posture is cause for concern. From the gay-marriage decision to the onslaught on Bain, they see the president and his team as coming across as too divisive, too conventional, and too nakedly political, putting at risk Obama’s greatest asset his likability with the voters in the middle of the electorate who will ultimately decide his fate.
Whichever side is right, one thing is undeniable. For anyone still starry-eyed about Obama, the months ahead will provide a bracing revelation about what he truly is: not a savior, not a saint, not a man above the fray, but a brass-knuckled, pipe-hitting, red-in-tooth-and-claw brawler determined to do what is necessary to stay in power, in other words, a politician.
We all want nothing more than to have that perfect career that makes us feel like life is the equivalent of skipping through a summer field, with flowers in bloom all around and the golden sunshine on your face (this is a fictional world where there are no bugs in that summer field). Most of us instead end up with a career like that miserable camping trip where it rained the whole time, you were freezing and tired and hungry non-stop, and, oh yes, there were lots and lots of nasty, crawling, dirty bugs.
Reportedly, over half of American workers hate their jobs.
"Legal plunder can be committed in an infinite number of ways. Thus we have an infinite number of plans for organizing it: tariffs, protection, benefits, subsidies, encouragements, progressive taxation, public schools, guaranteed jobs, guaranteed profits, minimum wages, a right to relief, a right to the tools of labor, free credit, and so on, and so on. All these plans as a whole—with their common aim of legal plunder—constitute socialism.
But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime."
...imagine if a presidential candidate in 2012 announced that his anti-poverty program entailed teaching the poor old-fashioned morality, a passion for work, self-reliance, restraining one's consumption, and saving for future purchases versus credit-card debt. That is, traditional (pre-1960s) middle-class values. He would be vilified, accused of imposing "white" values, and clobbered by a rival who instead promised instant cheap college loans as the instant pathway to the American Dream (see here).
It gets worse. Conflating outward appearance with underlying traits is typical of poorly educated Third World nations and, sad to say, America is increasingly drifting in that direction. In these societies, possessing a fancy paper saying "diploma" becomes irrefutable proof of being "educated." "Education" may also be acquired by dressing as an educated person--glasses, a three-piece suit, a briefcase, a fountain pen and similar theatrical props. Translated into current American society, one becomes "middle class" by owning a college diploma even if the acquired learning is less than what was once gained in high school and acquiring the degree required a small army of helpers.
Via Insty, 
Some 
Why Anchoress 
Let no crisis go to waste. It's always a "crisis" when government wants power and control, and it is in the nature of governments to desire those things.
Deconstructed Fluffernutter sandwich via Laughing Squid. Some blame the fluffy Lefty brains of Massachusetts residents on being raised on this stuff.
Memorial Day and ordinary men
"Four years ago this Memorial Day I was home on leave from my Iraq deployment. I was still recovering from my jet lag but