Sucking at the Teat of the Progressive Welfare State

Well, I thought this was pretty good, at Maggie's Farm, "Normalizing and universalizing welfare: You pitiful masses still have unmet needs."

Welfare includes crony capitalism, tax breaks for businesses, mortgage deductions, bailouts, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid right down to disability and the now ubiquitous EBT cards.

Naturally, we Conservatives think it best to eliminate all forms of welfare and charity from government control except for the most desperate or hopeless of individual cases. Remove welfare from the middle classes and provide a safety net for the desperate: Restoring a True Safety Net.

The Left, on the other hand, aspires to normalize and universalize welfare programs. Hayek's serfdom under a benevolent, altruistic, and all-powerful state. With Obomacare on track to fail resulting in a total government take-over, Liberals are beginning to comtemplate their next project: The Great Society's Next Frontier - Now that Obamacare—the largest expansion of the social-safety net in the last 60 years—is safe, what's next for the liberal economic project?

It's true, you know?

Here's just one example, at the Democrat-socialist Daily Kos, "Let's Defend Social Security and Other Entitlements With the Second Bill of Rights."

How Much Would You Pay for One Hour With Sandra Fluke?

Hmm, an interesting question, although it's not exactly what you might imagine. From Nathan Harden, at The College Fix.

Now, if this was what you imagined, how much would you pay for an hour with her?

Butler University Liberal Arts Indoctrination

Quite the story, "STUDENTS TOLD TO DISAVOW 'AMERICAN-NESS, MALENESS, WHITENESS, HETEROSEXUALITY'."

Young People Getting Even More Screwed Under ObamaCare

This is freakin' mind-boggling. The news on the ObamaCare monstrosity gets worse by the day.

At Forbes, "Young People under Obamacare: Cash Cow for Older Workers":

It’s official: the health care law will unduly stick it to young Americans by making them pay far higher premiums starting January 1, 2014. New rules announced this month are even worse than expected when it comes to shoveling an unfair burden onto our nation’s youth. Moreover, they also perversely increase the incentives of young people to remain uninsured.

The newly announced rules limit insurers to charge their oldest customers no more than three times as much as younger ones. As shown in the following chart based on estimates by international management consulting firm Oliver Wyman, the rule will force insurers to hike rates for 18- to 24-year-olds by 45 percent even as rates for those 60 and older drop by 13 percent in most states. That means a 22-year-old waitress paying $2,068 for her health insurance will have to fork over $3,000 when Obamacare takes effect.[3] And these figures even underestimate the actual impact....

The real-world consequence of this regulatory misjudgment is that young people will have an even greater economic incentive to simply pay the $695 annual penalty for not having coverage and wait until they are sick before they purchase it. [4] In short, it is now even more likely that Obamacare will amplify the perverse incentives for “free-riding” that it was intended to counter.

Clearly, until we observe actual behavior next January, we won’t know precisely how large an adverse selection problem has been unnecessarily created by these new rules. But what we can say for certain is that for young adults who elect to have health coverage, it will be way more expensive next year than it is today.

Is this fair? Ask the typical 20-24 year-old—whose median weekly earnings are $461—whether it’s fair to be asked to pay 50 percent higher premiums so that workers age 55-64—whose median weekly earnings are $887—can pay lower premiums. Think about that. The median earnings for older workers are $420 a week more than those of younger workers, or roughly $20,000 more a year. How is mandating a price break on health insurance for this far higher income group at the expense of the lower income group possibly fair?

It's not fair.

Seriously. "Fair" isn't even the word for this. Shoot, is it legal? Young Americans are practically being raped by ObamaCare. The effective violations of liberty with this law are so freakin' astounding, people should be screaming violently in rage. And the thing is, young people don't even know what's about to hit them. I know this for a fact. I've been discussing the consequences of the election for the preservation liberty in my classes. Students were literally shocked when I told them they were going to be taxed under the individual mandate if they were uninsured beginning in 2014. Students will be even more glum when we open debate on current events for the remainder of the week.

Ignorance is very costly, and it's sad too since so many young people practically worship this president.

Jamie Lee Curtis Shows Off Her Lovely Figure at the Premiere of 'Hitchcock' in Los Angeles

She's having fun.

At London's Daily Mail, "Foxy in her 50s! Jamie Lee Curtis honours her mother Janet Leigh as she attends the Hitchcock premiere in off-the-shoulder white dress."

Senator Kelly Ayotte 'More Troubled Today' After Meeting With Ambassador Susan Rice

I'm not surprised by this at all, although I'm pleased the Senator Ayotte's not rolling over the Obama's corrupt "spontaneous protest" shill Susan Rice.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Senator Vows to Block Any Clinton Successor: After Meeting With Potential Secretary of State Nominee, Republicans Demand More Answers on Fatal Attack in Libya":

WASHINGTON—Ambassador Susan Rice’s attempt to repair her standing with Senate Republicans fell short Tuesday, as a trio of GOP senators emerged from a meeting with her even more harshly critical of the comments she made following the U.S. consulate attack in Libya.

One of the senators, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, said she would try to block the confirmation of Ms. Rice or another nominee to succeed departing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “My view is we should hold on this until we get sufficient information,” she said.

Ms. Ayotte and Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said the meeting on Capitol Hill left them more concerned than ever about the public statements Ms. Rice made in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, where U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed. “All I can say is that the concerns I have are greater today than they were before,” Mr. Graham said after the meeting. “We’re not even close to getting the basic answers.”

Ms. Rice, the ambassador to the United Nations, is seen as a front-runner to succeed Mrs. Clinton. In a statement issued after the meeting, Ms. Rice conceded that part of her comments about the attack in television interviews days afterward were incorrect, but said they were based on evolving intelligence.

In the interviews, Ms. Rice said the attack grew out of protests over an anti-Islamic video; officials later said there was no protest in Benghazi that day.
“The talking points provided by the intelligence community, and the initial assessment upon which they were based, were incorrect in a key respect: There was no protest or demonstration in Benghazi,” she said in her statement. Ms. Rice added that she didn’t intend to mislead and said “the administration updated Congress and the American people as our assessments evolved.”

Ms. Ayotte said there was clear evidence early on that people with ties to al Qaeda had carried out the Libya attack.

Criticism of Ms. Rice by the Republican senators had appeared to be abating, but the Tuesday meeting rekindled hostilities. That may complicate her chances for the secretary of state slot. Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, a Democrat, is another possibility for the job. President Barack Obama may announce his choice as soon as this week.

More at The Hill, "McCain: ‘I would be hard-pressed’ to support Rice for secretary of State." (At Memeorandum.)

Democrats Used to Love the Filibuster

Behold yet more epic hypocrisy from the Douchebag Party.

At Washington Examiner, "‘Those who would attack and destroy the institution of the filibuster…’."

More at Memeorandum, especially the idiots at Talking Points Memo, "Dems Defend Filibuster Reform Effort: ‘McConnell Has Broken The Social Contract’."

Anything to justify power for these people, the scummy disgusting Democrat douchebags.

The Debate About Tax Rates

I've been reading the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs, and Grover Norquist's got an essay therein, which is timely, considering how much he's in the news. See, "Are Taxes Too Damn High?":

Andrea Campbell tips her hand partway through her essay “America the Undertaxed” (September/October 2012) when she writes that “the central debate in U.S. politics is whether to keep taxes, particularly federal taxes, at their current levels in the long term or emulate other advanced nations and raise them.”

So the choice facing Americans is between maintaining the size of the government under President Barack Obama and expanding it further? Who knew? In framing things this way, Campbell posits a Brezhnev Doctrine for U.S. government spending and taxation: what the government takes and spends today is forever ceded by Americans to the state, and that portion of their income not yet taken by the government is negotiable. Such ideological blinders limit the author’s ability to understand or explain how the United States arrived at its present level of historically high spending and taxation -- and what the American people would like its government to do and how much it would like it to cost in the future.

The U.S. government was created to maximize liberty. Unlike the European nations Campbell offers as models for how much Americans should be taxed, the United States was not organized around defending or promoting historical land claims or one religion, tribe, or ethnicity. Americans are a people of the book: the Constitution. According to the founders, government should play a limited role in the lives of Americans, by providing for a common defense, the rule of law, property rights, and a justice system that protects them.

Despite these strict limits, the U.S. federal government has grown enormously in size, cost, and power over the last two centuries, mostly as a result of the country’s engagement in successive wars. With each conflict, Washington increased its spending and powers of taxation under the false flag of temporary necessity and appeals to patriotism. After each war, the government refused to return to its previous size and level of power.

This growth can be seen in the numbers. The federal government consumed less than four percent of GDP in 1930, 9.8 percent in 1940, and 16.2 percent in 1948. By 1965, the number had climbed to 25 percent of GDP, and it hit 30 percent in 2000 (compared with the average among members of the Organization for Cooperation and Development of 37 percent). Today, Campbell claims, raising taxes still higher, “perhaps by a few percentage points of GDP,” would “provide the government with much-needed revenue. And it might not have a detrimental impact on the U.S. economy, perhaps even spurring it.” But the economic crisis in Europe, where taxes and spending are already higher, makes that argument a little difficult to swallow.

The United States’ major political parties are now diametrically opposed on the question of the size of government. Gone are the days when Nixon Republicans and Kennedy Democrats argued about whether the government should get bigger or much bigger, and how quickly. No Republican House member voted for the 2009 stimulus package, and only one Republican member of Congress voted for Obamacare’s 20 tax hikes and massive spending increases (and he is no longer in Congress). Meanwhile, the modern Democratic Party has shifted from one that cast 56 Senate votes for the 1964 Kennedy-Johnson tax cut and 33 Senate votes for the 1986 Reagan tax reform into a high-tax ideological party that cast no votes for the 2001 income tax cut, under President George W. Bush, and only one vote for the capital gains and dividends tax cut of 2003 (and that voter is set to retire this year).

The budget that Obama released in February 2012 shows annual federal spending increasing by $1.5 trillion over the next ten years, producing $11 trillion in additional federal debt. Paying for all that spending will require dramatic hikes in taxes. Obama promised in the 2008 presidential campaign that under his plan, “no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase.” On August 8, 2012, however, Obama changed his pledge, saying, “If your family makes under $250,000 . . . , you will not see your income taxes increase by a single dime next year.” The promise to oppose all tax increases on incomes less than $250,000 was replaced by a promise to prevent only income tax hikes -- and only for 12 months. Obama’s new language opened the door to a value-added tax (VAT) at any time and to income tax hikes starting in January 1, 2014.
Obama’s shift is important, for as Campbell points out, the difference between U.S. and European levels of taxation is mainly due to the prevalence of VATs in Europe. The United Kingdom has a VAT of 20 percent, France one of 19.6 percent, and Sweden one of 25 percent.

Advocates of higher taxes in the United States know that only a VAT or steep taxes on energy can cover the higher levels of spending in Obama’s budget projections. Higher income tax rates do not raise useful amounts of money. The “Buffett rule,” which would raise rates on earnings of more than $1 million a year would, according to the Congressional Budget Office, take in only $47 billion over a decade, less than one-half of one percent of the $11 trillion in debt that Obama’s planned spending would produce.

Continue reading.

The Campbell essay is here: "America the Undertaxed."

And for the debate on Norquist and congressional Republicans, see Robert Stacy McCain, "Retire #Taxby Chambliss."

BONUS: At NewsBusters, "Grover Norquist: 'Warren Buffett Should Write a Check and Shut Up'." And also, "Greg Mankiw, "A Master of Tax Avoidance."

How 'Life of Julia' Prevailed

From William McGurn, at the Wall Street Journal, "How Obama's 'Life of Julia' Prevailed":

The name of the program now escapes me. Several months ago, while flipping channels with the remote, I stopped on an MTV show about a working mom whose whole life was upended when her partner announced that he was splitting. It caught my attention because this mother lived in a nice apartment that looked like one in my suburban New Jersey town, and she was applying for food stamps.

This wasn't your caricature "taker"—the woman had a real job. With her partner leaving, however, she could no longer afford the rent, and she would have trouble providing for her two young boys alone. As she walked up to an office to sign up for food stamps, she said something like, "I can't believe I am applying for public assistance."

Her situation provoked two questions. First, how could her boyfriend just abandon his sons without having to pay child support? Second, what is the conservative response to a woman who finds herself in this situation?

The show comes back to me in wake of the thumping Mitt Romney took in the presidential election among the demographic this mom represents: unmarried women. During the 2012 campaign, we conservatives had great sport at the expense of the Obama administration's "Life of Julia"—a cartoon explaining the cradle-to-grave government programs that provided for Julia's happy and successful life.

The president, alas, had the last laugh. For the voting blocs that went so disproportionately for the president's re-election—notably, Latinos and single women—the Julia view of government clearly resonates. To put it another way, maybe Americans who have reason to feel insecure about their futures don't find a government that promises to be there for them when they need it all that menacing.

The dominant media conclusion from this is that the Republican Party is cooked unless it surrenders its principles. I'm not so sure. To the contrary, it strikes me that now is a pretty good time to get back to principles—and to do more to show people who gave President Obama his victory why their dreams and families would be better served by a philosophy of free markets and limited government.

RTWT.

Well, I couldn't agree more, but it's going to be a long tutorial with the lunkhead progressives. These people are diehard Democrat dependency freaks. I think the trick is actually to get people before they start going Democrat, since weaning people from progressive entitlements will be even harder than encouraging a natural scavenger to hunt for itself.

PREVIOUSLY: "Meet Julia: The Big-Government Dependency Robot and Dream Woman of Leftist Ideology."

RELATED: Recall this piece, "Health-Care Law Spurs a Shift to Part-Time Workers"? (Excerpted here.) I mentioned it in one of my American government classes. Boy were there some glum faces when students realized that the negative externalities of the law might make their lives more difficult and less prosperous. So yes, explaining how ever-increasing government reduces opportunity and increases dependency can have an impact. The lessons may stick, even though the hurdles remain extremely high in the current environment.

"When people criticizing Republicans need to start their argument by announcing that they are 'reality-based,' you know an epistemic closure argument cannot be far behind...'

I'm going to start this by linking to William Jacobson's entry, "The Epistemic Closure of the Epistemic Closure Pundits." And here's the quote I've used for the title:

The dead give-away was the title of his article, “Revenge of the Reality-Based Community.” When people criticizing Republicans need to start their argument by announcing that they are “reality-based,” you know an epistemic closure argument cannot be far behind...

When I read Bartlett yesterday I was practically rolling on the floor. Anyone who has to publish virtually their entire professional resume going back to their college thesis must be really expecting some pushback. Yeah, Bartlett's got credentials. Unfortunately all the paperwork still doesn't inoculate the dude from making himself look like a damned laughingstock. You have to read it to believe it: "My life on the Republican right—and how I saw it all go wrong."

What a poor, pathetic little man (with little signifying stature rather than physical heft, of which Bartlett is hardly "little"). Seriously. For a second I thought that was a unicorn at the accompanying graphic, the dweeb. #Fail.

Republicans and the Tax Pledge

At the Wall Street Journal, "Grover Norquist is not the problem in Washington":

One of the more amazing post-election spectacles is the media celebration of Republicans who say they're willing to repudiate their pledge against raising taxes. So the same folks who like to denounce politicians because they can't be trusted are now praising politicians who openly admit they can't be trusted.

The spectacle is part of what is becoming a tripartisan—Democrats, media, some Republicans—attempt to stigmatize Grover Norquist as the source of all Beltway fiscal woes and gridlock. Mr. Norquist, who runs an outfit called Americans for Tax Reform, is the fellow who came up with the no-new-taxes pledge some 20 years ago. He tries to get politicians to sign it, and hundreds of Republicans have done so. He does not hold a gun to their heads.

Grover's—everyone calls him Grover—apparent crime against Washington is that he now actually wants to hold politicians to what they willingly signed. If enough Republicans will disavow their tax pledge, then the capital crowd can go about agreeing to a grand fiscal bargain that raises taxes, pretends to cut spending and avoids the January 1 fiscal crack-up that the politicians have set us up for. Voters are supposed to believe that only Grover stands in the way of this happy ever-after.

Thus we have the sight of powerful Senators like Saxby Chambliss and Lindsey Graham and New York Congressman Peter King patting themselves on the back for having the courage to stand up to a guy who has never held public office. On Monday no less than billionaire Warren Buffett, who can get the President on the phone at will, attacked Mr. Norquist. Who knew one unelected fellow had so much power?

RTWT.

I've got more on Norquist scheduled for today, but don't miss R.S. McCain's essay on this, which I think is rock solid.

Texas vs. California

An excellent talking points memo, from O'Reilly, "We're living in a very strange time and socialism is close":

Lesbian Republicans

Hey, maybe it's a trend.

At the New York Times, "Republican and Lesbian, and Fighting for Acceptance of Both Identities."

Path Clearing for Susan Rice Nomination as Secretary of State

I do think a Rice nomination will prove how arrogant this president is, but some reports indicate the way is clearing for Rice's promotion to Foggy Bottom. At USA Today, "Prospects brighten for Rice to succeed Clinton":

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama's top U.N. diplomat appears to have a clearer path to succeeding retiring Secretary of State Hilary Rodham Clinton after two top Republican critics moderated their accusations that Ambassador Susan Rice was part of a government cover-up of what happened in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya.

Rice has emerged as a clear front-runner to replace Clinton during Obama's second four-year term. If she is nominated for the position, it may signal greater U.S. willingness to intervene in world crises during Obama's second term.

The political furor over the Benghazi assault that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans exploded before the Nov. 6 presidential election and continued for weeks afterward, with Rice becoming the focus of Republican attacks.

Now, while refusing to back away from charges of a cover-up, Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham have toned down their complaints, suggesting Republicans may not block Rice's appointment if Obama chooses to nominate her.

We'll see. I'm not pleased that McCain and Co. is caving to the administration's deceit, although we still have the prospect of prolonged investigations in the House. More at Memeorandum.

'Unrestricted drones for me but not for thee?'

Ed Morrissey offers his comments on President Obama's "expected" release of legal rules for U.S. drone warfare --- you know, since Americans wouldn't be able to trust a President Romney with such unprecedented authoritarian powers, or something.

At Hot Air:

One of the tertiary issues that never got much attention during the presidential campaign was the use of drones to conduct the war against al-Qaeda and its affiliates in places like Pakistan, Yemen, and other loci of Islamist terrorist networks. It didn’t get much attention because Mitt Romney’s position on the use of drones didn’t provide much contrast from Barack Obama, and it seemed clear that the US would have continuity in this one area of policy regardless of who won the election.

That frustrated human-rights activists on the Left, who want the US to seriously curtail these attacks or stop them altogether, but have gained no traction with the Obama administration during his first term in office. Obama has remained determined thus far to keep the drone attack as a tactic open to him as he sees fit, acting as Commander in Chief. That probably wouldn’t get a lot of opposition from Republicans and hawks in both parties.

However, it seems as though Obama does have an objection to anyone else but him having that discretion. The New York Times reported yesterday on a ghastly hypocrisy within the White House, which tried to impose limits on the use of drones, limits that would activate if Obama lost the election...

Yes, "ghastly hypocrisy" fits the bill perfectly, with both this clusterf-k administration and his morally bankrupt supporters in the scum-infested progressive fever swamps.

But continue reading Morrissey's post, which comes to an interesting conclusion toward an argument to restrict the deployment of unmanned aerial kill machines (something that King Barack is certainly not likely to do).

PREVIOUSLY: "Obama Pushes to Codify Rules for Drone Warfare," and "FDL's Kevin Gosztola Wanted Bush-Cheney War Crimes Prosecutions But Gives Obama a Pass on Unprecedented Violations of International Law."

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula Has No Regrets

You might think what happened to this guy would only be possible in a fascist state.

Well think again. Times have changed. It can happen here.

At the New York Times, "From Man Who Insulted Muhammad, No Regret":

LOS ANGELES — Fuming for two months in a jail cell here, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula has had plenty of time to reconsider the wisdom of making “Innocence of Muslims,” his crude YouTube movie trailer depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a bloodthirsty, philandering thug.

Does Mr. Nakoula now regret the footage? After all, it fueled deadly protests across the Islamic world and led the unlikely filmmaker to his own arrest for violating his supervised release on a fraud conviction.

Not at all. In his first public comments since his incarceration soon after the video gained international attention in September, Mr. Nakoula told The New York Times that he would go to great lengths to convey what he called “the actual truth” about Muhammad. “I thought, before I wrote this script,” he said, “that I should burn myself in a public square to let the American people and the people of the world know this message that I believe in.”

In explaining his reasons for the film, Mr. Nakoula, 55, a Coptic Christian born in Egypt, cited the 2009 massacre at Fort Hood, Tex., as a prime example of the violence committed “under the sign of Allah.” His anger seemed so intense over the years that even from a federal prison in 2010, he followed the protests against the building of an Islamic center and mosque near ground zero in New York as he continued to work on his movie script.

Until now, only the barest details were known about the making of the film that inspired international outrage. Initial reports made it seem as if the film had been thrown together in about a year.

But a longer, more intricate and somewhat surreal story emerges from interviews with Mr. Nakoula, church and law enforcement officials and more than a dozen people who worked on the movie — those who knew its real subject and those who were tricked into believing it was to be a sword-and-sandal epic called “Desert Warriors.” Together, they paint a picture of a financially desperate man with a penchant for fiction who was looking to give meaning and means to a life in shambles.

A troubled man. Now a prison scapegoat for this administration's national security clusterf-k.

Continue reading.

RELATED: At the Wall Street Journal, "First Amendment Affront":

In his address to the United Nations earlier this week, President Obama condemned "the crude and disgusting video [that] sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world." Some 48 hours later, police in California arrested the man behind the film "Innocence of Muslims," and a federal judge on Thursday night ordered Nakoula Basseley Nakoula held in jail without bond.

Mr. Nakoula allegedly used the alias Sam Bacile to produce and post an amateurish clip of the film, which may not exist in full, on YouTube. The government has charged him with eight counts of violating parole. In 2010, he was convicted of bank fraud and served a year of a 21-month sentence. His use of the Internet is restricted.

We're not privy to the specific parole terms to be able to pass judgment on the technical merits of the government's case. A judge will sort it out. But the decision to pursue him in the first place was a discretionary call by the government.

We doubt that every Web surfer on similar probation gets hauled back to prison. Or gets denied bail by a judge who called Mr. Nakoula "a flight risk," though it's hard to imagine he'd want to return to his native Egypt, the scene of the first violent protests on September 11, or go anywhere else. A minister in the Pakistani government has put a $100,000 bounty on his head....

In that same speech on Tuesday, President Obama rightly noted that, "Americans have fought and died around the globe to protect the right of all people to express their views—even views that we disagree with."

The government's actions send a different message. The Obama Administration asked YouTube to yank the video off the site. (YouTube didn't.) And now the filmmaker sits behind bars—whether on legally justifiable grounds is besides the point. The First Amendment also protects speech that causes the White House headaches abroad.

Progressives value freedom of speech, but only speech that furthers their agenda of socialist statism and the destruction of Judeo-Christian cultural hegemony.

PREVIOUSLY: "The End of Freedom of Expression in the West."

East Germany's Living Hell

An outstanding photo-essay, at Reaganite Republican, "The LIVING Hell of Socialism":

East Germany (DDR = Deutsche Demokratische Republik)
blamed capitalists for everything,
nationalized industry,
suppressed dissent,
glorified a (paranoid) leader,
spied on their own citizens,
hated Israel, supported Palestinian radicals,
and did it all the name of the 'common man'
-sound familiar, Obammunist tools?

Don't miss it, at the link.

The Repeated Claim That Benghazi Was Spontaneous Was a Monstrous Lie, Vile and Done for the Basest of Reasons

An especially powerful commentary from Michael Goodwin, at the New York Post, "David Petraeus Testimony Pins Mistruths to White House":

Until Friday, there were two possible explanations for why the White House failed to immediately call the Benghazi attack an act of terrorism. One was incompetence, the other was worse.

Now there is only one, and it is the worse one. Based on the persuasive testimony of ex-CIA boss David Petraeus, it is clear the Obama administration made a deliberate decision to mislead Congress and the American people.

The repeated claim that the attack was spontaneous and grew out of a demonstration against an anti-Islam video — a claim made by the president and secretary of State as they stood next to the bodies of four dead Americans — was a monstrous lie. It was vile and done for the basest of reasons.

Because we now know the truth of what happened — CIA reports were edited to remove the names of al Qaeda groups involved in the attack, Petraeus said under oath — we also know the motive. It was political self-preservation, meaning the president and his team put politics first.

The timing helps tell the tale. Just days removed from his Charlotte convention, where he danced on the grave of Osama bin Laden and boasted that al Qaeda was decimated, Obama couldn’t bear to admit that affiliated groups were thriving in North Africa. And he certainly couldn’t admit they had carried out a murderous attack on our consulate on the 11th anniversary of the most awful day in American history.

To do so would be to acknowledge the failure of his decision to ignore hard-line Islamists and that his team had erred egregiously in rejecting pleas for more security from Libya Ambassador Chris Stevens.

So the president lied, including in a speech to the United Nations, where he cited the video as the reason for the attack. He sent out reams of flunkies to do the same, including his snide press secretary, Jay Carney.

Most notably, UN Ambassador Susan Rice went on five Sunday television shows to spin the nonsense about the hijacking of a demonstration — a demonstration that never existed. Rice made a fool of herself, and now, she, too is damaged goods.

Oddly, Petraeus, brought down by the reckless affair with his biographer, nonetheless looks like the only honest man in the drama.

A briefing he gave soon after the attack is now more suspect because it adhered to the party line, despite his belief that it was always a terrorist attack.

But Friday in his testimony behind closed doors, Petraeus told the truth as he knew it, even though the administration announced the day before that it was investigating his conduct at the CIA.

If that was meant to pressure him to protect the president, it failed spectacularly. Whatever his personal failings, Petraeus reinforced his reputation for professional integrity.

The next move is up to Congress. While Democrats are predictably and shamefully trying to deny the significance of Petraeus’ revelation, Republicans say they are determined to get the full truth, wherever the hunt takes them.

Kirsten Powers: Obama Nominating Susan Rice Would Show His 'Arrogance'

A great video at RealClearPolitics:

Kirsten Powers on if President Obama named Susan Rice as his next Secretary of State: "I don't know. I think if he does though it could be, that kind of arrogance, which I think it would be, would be his undoing. Because if she is put under oath and is forced to go through and answer all of these questions about Benghazi, it's going to put the administration into a really bad position. And I don't think she was the frontrunner. I don't understand where this came out of... It's now become almost a sense of pride... His defense of her was fine but then it kind of went into an area that didn't make sense."

I hope he goes ahead with that nomination. This ought to be very interesting.

Ke$ha Gets Rockin' With 'Warrior'

At the New York Times, "Dancing Up a Storm but Dying to Rock: Kesha Tilts Closer to a Rock Sound With ‘Warrior’":

At the Third Encore rehearsal studio in North Hollywood there’s a wall decorated with photographs of clients who’ve prepared there for tours, legends like Robert Plant and Slash. In a room behind that wall, waiting while her band and dancers rehearse for a live appearance at the American Music Awards, sat Kesha, 25, a young woman who’d really like to join that swaggering pantheon. A hugely popular, if deeply polarizing, singer who ruled the radio in 2010 with No. 1 smashes like “Tik Tok“ and now returns with “Warrior” (RCA), the follow-up to the smash album “Animal” and its EP supplement, “Cannibal,” Kesha would be filed under dance pop by most people. So it’s surprising to discover just how much reverence she has for the rock 1970s, an era that ended seven years before she was born.

For instance Kesha’s look today was inspired by Marc Bolan of the glam-rock band T. Rex. “I was watching a documentary on Bolan, and he’s wearing all these funny suits, and I was like, ‘I want to wear a funny suit,’ “ she said. She was sporting a black wide-brimmed hat with a pink rose nestled in it, a black jacket with a garish floral pattern and a pimplike extravagance of rings. Strangely, though, there’s no glitter, one of Kesha’s trademarks and an affinity she shares with that long-dead rocker. And like Bolan, Kesha practices her own androgyny. The persona she developed on “Animal” parties hard, trash-talks and treats conquests like sex toys, just as male rock stars have done for decades. But precisely because Kesha challenged double standards by seizing male rock’s license to misbehave, she became a lightning rod for contempt.

“Oh God, I have so many people who hate me, it’s unbelievable,” Kesha said, her laughter tinged with discomfort. “It’s the main reason I don’t go online.” She added, “There’s people who want me to die.” The Web abuse includes hate blogs and a patronizing video skit made by a Princeton humor magazine in which the poet Paul Muldoon analyzes “Tik Tok.”

Attributing her use of rapping and AutoTune to an inability to sing, detractors assumed that Kesha was a manufactured puppet. Actually she jointly writes her songs, supplying the lyrics and most of the vocal melodies. The rap element, influenced by the Beastie Boys, and the gimmicky use of AutoTune effects, inspired by Daft Punk, were deliberate choices. As with other female stars with over-the-top cartoon images, like Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj, the persona is her own creation. “Kesha” is an amped-up caricature of Kesha Sebert’s real self and the feral lifestyle she was leading here at the time “Animal” was recorded. And whether you find her trashy antics annoying or refreshing in a pop era of anodyne glamour, there’s no denying that Kesha’s music caught the mood of embattled hedonism in post-crash America. Her live-for-now stance, in songs like the current hit single “Die Young,” made her pop’s YOLO queen two years before that acronym, which stands for “You only live once,” became a rallying cry for let’s-get-wrecked recklessness.

Discussing her potty-mouthed, Jack Daniels-swigging image, she said: “You must realize by this point that I’m in on the joke. I know I sound like a jackass half the time. I do it on purpose.” Actually Kesha seemed not very jackasslike that evening, but reflective and earnest. Flashes of the flirty playfulness of her videos were offset by hints of vulnerability.

Robin James, a professsor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who writes about female personas in 21st century pop culture, argued that messy hedonism is treated differently when the perpetrator is female. “If you look at, say, Judd Apatow movies, the women have to be responsible and stable and pursue careers, while the men get to behave badly,” she said. “But when women are irresponsible, they get punished for it.”

Continue reading.

Ohio Republicans Seek to Revive Heartbeat Bill

And boy does Ohio Democrat State Senator Nina Turner get all batshit crazy about it, Via Jill Stanek.

I swear, this lady sounds like a freakin' gang-banger:

Scientists Show That Unborn Babies Yawn Repeatedly in the Womb

At LifeNews, "Amazing 4-D Ultrasound Captures Baby Yawning in the Womb."

'This notion that the Senate is dysfunctional is not because of the rules. It's because of behavior...'

That's Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell shooting down the Democrats' bullshit meme that the parliamentary rules have gridlocked the Senate. At the New York Times, "The New Senate's First Task Will Likely Be Trying to Fix Itself" (at Memeorandum).

Professor John Pitney has some great perspective on this, "Switching Sides on the Filibuster." And one with a much, much lesser intellect says dammit, stand aside and let the Democrats have their way!

The End of Freedom of Expression in the West

"Silent Conquest," via Blazing Cat Fur:

Cyber Monday Sales

If you're doing any shopping online you can help this blog with no extra cost to yourself.

The Amazon widgets are here at the post and at the sidebar. I'll be updating periodically with reminders throughout the season. Thanks for your readership and support!

Freedom to Blog Update November 25, 2012

I haven't abandoned my "Freedom to Blog" series. We've had a political campaign and so forth, although there remains considerable activity growing out of the left's summer assault on conservatives online.

For now folks should read Robert Stacy McCain, "The Dishonesty of Bill Schmalfeldt," and "Pray for Ten Thousand Angels."

And here's one more, "@Karoli: Weiner Truther? And Other Questions of Remaining Interest."

Never cave to these fuckers, because it empowers them.

RELATED: "The Lies of Scott Eric Kaufman — Leftist Hate-Blogger Sought to Silence Criticism With Libelous Campaign of Workplace Harassment," and "Progressives Are the Biggest Threat to Freedom of Speech in America."

Iran Shipping Rockets to Gaza

At the Times of Israel, "Fresh shipment of Iranian-made rockets reportedly already en route to Gaza":

Less than a week after the conclusion of Operation Pillar of Defense, and with Hamas boasting of an imminent increase in military aid from Iran, Israeli satellites have spotted a ship at the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas being loaded with rockets and other military supplies ostensibly bound for Gaza, the British Sunday Times reported.

The report cites Israeli intelligence sources who surmised that the cargo, loaded a week ago, would be shipped to Sudan and from there smuggled over land to Gaza.

According to the report, the cargo may include Fajr-5 rockets of the likes already fired by Hamas during the recent conflict, and whose stocks were reportedly depleted by Israeli bombings. Also possibly included: components of Shahab-3 ballistic missiles, which could be stationed in Sudan and used as a direct threat to Israel.

“With a lot of effort, Iran has skillfully built a strategic arm pointing at Israel from the south,” an Israeli source was quoted as saying.

FDL's Kevin Gosztola Wanted Bush-Cheney War Crimes Prosecutions But Gives Obama a Pass on Unprecedented Violations of International Law

Following up on my earlier commentary on Obama's push to codify his illegal killing regime, it turns out Kevin Gosztola of Firedoglake used that New York Times report to attack Mitt Romney as some kind of a neocon warmonger-in-waiting. See, "Obama Administration Was Not Willing to Trust Romney With a Secret Kill List."

Having posted on the topic, I called out Gosztola on Twitter. Typical leftist hypocrite couldn't defend his own writing and instead resorted to childishly calling me a "whackjob."

Whackjob RT @ampowerblog Why give Obama a pass? is.gd/KNTBE6 Beef of that story is buried in your piece and you know it
— Kevin Gosztola (@kgosztola) November 25, 2012

I also pointed out that progressives called for Bush-Cheney war crimes prosecutions under the incoming Obama administration:

@kgosztola Remember how Bush/Cheney were war criminals and all that? If you believe, Obama's 100 times worse. is.gd/KNTBE6 #Drones
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) November 25, 2012

And no surprise, but it was Gosztola himself who was leading the charge to put Dick Cheney on trial. See this one of many entries at Firedoglake, "Torture Decriminalized: How the State Department Provides Space for the Culpables’ Book Tours":

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who should be investigated and tried for war crimes that include but are not limited to torture and abuse of detainees, has mounted a tour to publicize his memoir In My Time. Waterboarding has historically been considered torture and a war crime yet he is able to go on Dateline on NBC News and tell Jamie Gangel that he would strongly support using it again. He is also able to go on and express support for wiretapping and secret prisons, which seem to be mechanisms an authoritarian and not a democratic society would use.

That post then goes on to attack the Obama administration for not mounting prosecutions against the Bush-Cheney cabal. This was a common refrain on the radical left at the time of election in 2008, that a new administration should not close the book on the past. Leftists argued that the Bush administration should be brought before the bar of history, with progressives attacking President-elect Obama's pledge "to look forward as opposed to looking backwards." Here's more from Gosztola's post:

In July 2008, the New York Times published an editorial on the “disturbing victory” the Bush administration had won when a federal appeals court ruled the administration could “continue to detain Ali Al-Marri,” who had “been held for more than five years as an enemy combatant.” They noted the “sweeping power” could deprive citizens as well as noncitizens of freedom. Al-Marri, a Qatar citizen, was legally residing in the US. He was arrested in Peoria, Illinois, on “ordinary criminal charges” and seized and imprisoned by the military. The evidence in support of his secret detention was based on “thin hearsay evidence” and also based on the fact that he had been in an army and carried arms on a battlefield, which makes it even more difficult to celebrate al-Marri as a case that is an example of the Obama administration’s efforts to renew respect for the rule of law.

What the letter plainly shows is the contempt the State Department and Obama administration has for addressing the lawlessness of the Bush administration. With Cheney’s book tour to defend torture underway, the letter takes on even more significance. He is someone, who is culpable for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Yet, it is next to impossible to mount a prosecution when the Obama administration has decriminalized the Bush administration torture regime by arguing steps have been taken to leave behind that unsavory past.

It's hypocrisy all the way down with these idiots.

As I pointed out earlier, the fact is, from the left's human rights perspective, the Obama administration's national security policies are exponentially more grievous than any U.S. administration in history. But all the anti-Bush agitation was never about human rights or humanitarian international law. It was about raw power and revenge against political enemies. If progressives truly cared about human rights abuses we should be seeing antiwar protests across the globe, on the scale of the protests on the eve of the Iraq war in 2003. President Obama himself campaigned in 2008 as the most far-left candidate since George McGovern, but since taking office has eliminated virtually nothing from the Bush administration's national security program. Indeed, Fox News confirmed that the CIA was holding prisoners at the Obama administration's black site in Benghazi. What's worse is that Obama's secret prisons are in violation of his own administration's executive order abolishing extraordinary rendition and secret overseas prisons.

People like Kevin Gosztola know all of this, but in the service of progressive power are not only giving the president a pass on the massive illegality of the kill list regime, but have in fact aided and abetted a cover-up of the Benghazi murders to perpetuate Democrat power in Washington. That's the real crime here. The historical fucking moral bankruptcy of the left, people who will stop and nothing to keep political power, and thus expand the vicious leftist power grab in government even if innocent people are killed.

Sunday Cartoons

At Flopping Aces, "Sunday Funnies."

More at Reaganite Republican, "Reaganite's Sunday Funnies," and Theo Spark, "Cartoon Round Up..."

Obama Pushes to Codify Rules for Drone Warfare

At the New York Times, "U.S. Election Speeded Move to Codify Policy on Drones":

WASHINGTON — Facing the possibility that President Obama might not win a second term, his administration accelerated work in the weeks before the election to develop explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned drones, so that a new president would inherit clear standards and procedures, according to two administration officials.

The matter may have lost some urgency after Nov. 6. But with more than 300 drone strikes and some 2,500 people killed by the Central Intelligence Agency and the military since Mr. Obama first took office, the administration is still pushing to make the rules formal and resolve internal uncertainty and disagreement about exactly when lethal action is justified.

Mr. Obama and his advisers are still debating whether remote-control killing should be a measure of last resort against imminent threats to the United States, or a more flexible tool, available to help allied governments attack their enemies or to prevent militants from controlling territory.

Though publicly the administration presents a united front on the use of drones, behind the scenes there is longstanding tension. The Defense Department and the C.I.A. continue to press for greater latitude to carry out strikes; Justice Department and State Department officials, and the president’s counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, have argued for restraint, officials involved in the discussions say.

More broadly, the administration’s legal reasoning has not persuaded many other countries that the strikes are acceptable under international law. For years before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the United States routinely condemned targeted killings of suspected terrorists by Israel, and most countries still object to such measures.

But since the first targeted killing by the United States in 2002, two administrations have taken the position that the United States is at war with Al Qaeda and its allies and can legally defend itself by striking its enemies wherever they are found.

Partly because United Nations officials know that the United States is setting a legal and ethical precedent for other countries developing armed drones, the U.N. plans to open a unit in Geneva early next year to investigate American drone strikes.

The attempt to write a formal rule book for targeted killing began last summer after news reports on the drone program, started under President George W. Bush and expanded by Mr. Obama, revealed some details of the president’s role in the shifting procedures for compiling “kill lists” and approving strikes. Though national security officials insist that the process is meticulous and lawful, the president and top aides believe it should be institutionalized, a course of action that seemed particularly urgent when it appeared that Mitt Romney might win the presidency.

“There was concern that the levers might no longer be in our hands,” said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity. With a continuing debate about the proper limits of drone strikes, Mr. Obama did not want to leave an “amorphous” program to his successor, the official said. The effort, which would have been rushed to completion by January had Mr. Romney won, will now be finished at a more leisurely pace, the official said.

Mr. Obama himself, in little-noticed remarks, has acknowledged that the legal governance of drone strikes is still a work in progress.

“One of the things we’ve got to do is put a legal architecture in place, and we need Congressional help in order to do that, to make sure that not only am I reined in but any president’s reined in terms of some of the decisions that we’re making,” Mr. Obama told Jon Stewart in an appearance on “The Daily Show” on Oct. 18.

In other words, it's illegal, and for outward appearances it might be good if the United States wasn't completely fucking oblivious to international norms, much less international legal regimes, such as the Geneva Conventions, which make illegal the fatalities of civilian non-combatants. Obama campaigned in 2008 on a massive antiwar humanitarian agenda. He attacked the Bush administration on all fronts, from Guantanamo to the Iraq war. His antiwar image was one of the biggest attractions of his candidacy. He was going to heal America's reputation as a warmongering imperialist power. All that was talk, of course. Big rhetorical bullshit in the furtherance of power. One of the biggest scandals of his administration --- and there are many --- is the ease with which he's been able to kill both American citizens and foreign civilians with no checks and balances whatsoever, to say nothing of political consequences. The only person writing about Obama's historical authoritarianism is Glenn Greenwald. Otherwise, progressives down the line give this president a pass where previously they had sought war crimes indictments for such policies under his predecessor. That's the rankest kind of hypocrisy that makes its way all the way to the current Oval Office, for I don't for a second believe that President Obama embraces his unprecedented shift in war powers in terms of national security. No, this president sees targeted killings as gruesome fodder for earned reporting from the Obama media's press retinue, all in service of the maintenance and expansion of power. In contrast, President George W. Bush genuinely believed that his policies would make the nation more secure, and they have.

In any case, Greenwald considers Obama the worst civil liberties president in American history. I don't like Greenwald, although I have recommended his consistency on such matters. See, "Who is the worst civil liberties president in US history?":

Abraham Lincoln illegally suspended the core liberty of habeas corpus without Congressional approval. Wilson's attacks on basic free speech in the name of national security were indeed legion and probably unparalleled. Franklin Roosevelt oversaw the due-process-free internment of more than 100,000 law-abiding Japanese-Americans into concentration camps.

And then there are the two War on Terror presidents. George Bush seized on the 9/11 attack to usher in radical new surveillance and detention powers in the PATRIOT ACT, spied for years on the communications of US citizens without the warrants required by law, and claimed the power to indefinitely imprison even US citizens without charges in military brigs.

His successor, Barack Obama, went further by claiming the power not merely to detain citizens without judicial review but to assassinate them (about which the New York Times said: "It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing"). He has waged an unprecedented war on whistleblowers, dusting off Wilson's Espionage Act of 1917 to prosecute more then double the number of whistleblowers than all prior presidents combined. And he has draped his actions with at least as much secrecy, if not more so, than any president in US history...

Lincoln's Language and its Legacy

A lengthy review article from Adam Gopnik, at the New Yorker, "ANNALS OF BIOGRAPHY: ANGELS AND AGES":

The tendency to obsess over single words and phrases reflects, in part, the semi-divine status of Lincoln in American history. But it also reflects a desire to show that rhetoric and writing were as essential to his career as acts and orders and elections. In the past twenty-five years, and particularly since the publication of Garry Wills’s “Lincoln at Gettysburg” (1992), language and its uses has become a central Lincoln subject. Two prominent strains of rhetoric run through the period—the Biblical and the classical—and political ideas tend to get tinted by whichever of them the speaker uses. Reading Edward Everett’s Gettysburg address, the two-hour set speech that preceded Lincoln’s and was meant to be the real event of the Gettysburg commemoration, one is startled to see how relentlessly classical it is in tone and analogy: Everett goes on and on about Marathon and the Greeks and the Persian invasions, in order to “elevate” Gettysburg and the Union soldiers. Lincoln’s rhetoric is, instead, deliberately Biblical. (It is difficult to find a single obviously classical reference in all of his speeches.) Lincoln had mastered the sound of the King James Bible so completely that he could recast abstract issues of constitutional law in Biblical terms, making the proposition that Texas and New Hampshire should be forever bound by a single post office sound like something right out of Genesis.

What strikes a newcomer to Lincoln’s speeches, however, is how rare those famous cadences are; their simple, resonant language—“with malice towards none, with charity for all”; the concluding and opening lines of the Gettysburg Address—is memorable in part because there isn’t much of it. The majority of Lincoln’s public utterances are narrowly, sometimes brilliantly, lawyerly—even, on occasion, crafted to give an appearance of inevitability to oratorical conclusions that are not well supported by the chain of reasoning that precedes them. The undramatic, small-print language in which Lincoln offered the Emancipation Proclamation is the most famous instance of his mastery of anti-heroic rhetoric. (Karl Marx said that it reminded him of “ordinary summonses sent by one lawyer to another.”)

But Lincoln believed in legalism. One of his first public speeches, the Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum, in Springfield in 1837, declared a radical insistence on “reason” to be the only acceptable form of public discourse; the cure for the prevalence and epidemic of violence in American life would be “hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason”: “Passion has helped us, but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason—cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason—must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.” Lincoln tempered but never really abandoned that conviction. His rhetorical genius lay in making closely reasoned argument ring with the sound of religious necessity...

Grab a cup of coffe and read it all. It's well done.

Brisk Sales Point to Breakout Holiday Shopping Season

At LAT, "Shopping season off to strong start":

Opening their doors earlier than ever for Black Friday paid off for retailers as shoppers mobbed malls thick with sales across the Southland, snapping up electronics, toys and other deals.

Hundreds of bargain hunters surged toward the Glendale Galleria before midnight, some banging on one entrance and shouting to be let in. At the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, shoppers rushing into Urban Outfitters shattered a glass door. Mall traffic was a nightmare throughout Southern California.

Despite the chaos, early signs point to a blockbuster shopping day for merchants — with stores raking in even more than the record $11.4 billion for Black Friday they reported last year. More comprehensive numbers are expected Sunday.

"Overall it was a smash hit," said Britt Beemer, a retail expert at America's Research Group who has been tracking holiday sales nationally for more than three decades. "In all the years I have been out, I have never seen such crowds in my life."

Target, Sears and the Disney Store reported a surge in customers. Wal-Mart said it was the retail behemoth's best Black Friday sale ever. Mall operators saw long lines, and shoppers scooped up even some full-price items as well as bargains in stores and online.

The shopping frenzy cheered merchants and Wall Street, which enjoyed a big boost Friday.

There was no violence reported in Southern California, where last year at least 10 people were injured when a shopper used pepper spray to ward off rivals at a Porter Ranch Wal-Mart.

But protests erupted over working conditions at dozens of Wal-Marts nationwide, including one that led to the arrest of nine people blocking a street in Paramount. And two people were shot in what police said was a scuffle over a parking spot at a Wal-Mart in Tallahassee, Fla.

LAist has more on that, "Local Walmart Workers Stage Black Friday Walkout [VIDEO]."

Egypt's Islamist Coup

At WSJ:

The Egyptian revolution took another bad turn Thursday, as President Mohamed Morsi gave himself dictatorial powers over the legislature and courts. The world has feared that the Muslim Brotherhood would favor one-man, one-vote, once, and the Morsi coup is an ominous sign.

"The people wanted me to be the guardian of these steps in this phase," Reuters quoted Mr. Morsi as saying on Friday. "I don't like and don't want—and there is no need—to use exceptional measures. But those who are trying to gnaw the bones of the nation" must be "held accountable."

Mr. Morsi says his diktat will merely last as long as it takes the country to adopt a new constitution, which is what authoritarians always say. They claim to be a necessary step on the way to democracy, but democracy never arrives. Mr. Morsi's rationalization is that he must have this power to "protect the revolution," as if the demonstrators who deposed Hosni Mubarak in 2011 merely wanted another Mubarak with a beard and prayer rug. Mr. Morsi is claiming more power than Mr. Mubarak ever had.

Egyptians took to the street on Friday in protest, sometimes violently, and nearly every other major political leader denounced the putsch. That includes Abdel Monheim Aboul Fotouh, a former Muslim Brotherhood leader and presidential candidate. The violence is regrettable, but the protests may be the only way Egyptians can prevent the Muslim Brotherhood from becoming their new dictators.

The Brotherhood doesn't control the military or Ministry of Interior, yet neither one is going to rush to defend a more liberal Egyptian state. The military's main goal is to protect its role in government and its economic interests, and the Brotherhood's draft constitution puts the military outside of civilian control.

As long as Mr. Morsi doesn't challenge those interests, the military and police may let him control the courts, the media and the legislature. This is a recipe for rule a la Pakistan, with an increasingly Islamist state but the military and intelligence services as an independent power. The immediate losers will be Egypt's liberals and the Western journalists who inhaled the vapors of Tahrir Square. But whatever Mr. Morsi intends, the Pakistan model is not a recipe for a more stable Egypt.

Mr. Morsi's coup is also awkward for the Obama Administration, which had been praising the Egyptian in media backgrounders for his role in brokering the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. Mr. Morsi was hailed as a moderate statesman. Yet Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had barely left Cairo before Mr. Morsi made his move. He may have figured that all the praise made it easier for him to grab more power.

It's awkward alright.

The administration basically installed the Muslim Brotherhood and now Morsi's making a bid for the region's pan-Islamist leader to rival even Iran's influence. You get what you bargain for, I guess. And boy, did Obama ever bargain for his Muslim Brothers!

RELATED: From David Goldman, "Obama Legitimizes Morsi’s Protection Racket."

Gratuitous Kate Upton Rule 5 Video

She's lovely and so far you can't get enough of her.

And speaking of Rule 5, congratulations to Bob Belvedere for his blogging milestone: "2,000,000 Hits – Thanks to You All."

And a little more from Bob, "Rule 5 News Special Report: The Mammary Murder Plot."

That'll get you another two million in no time!

'Gangnam Style' Video is Most-Viewed on YouTube

Well, it's pretty gay, so no surprise.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Psy's "Gangnam Style" video is the most-viewed video on YouTube."

Bethany's Black Friday Shopping

Well, this is much more relaxed than Walmart in Georgia:

Professor Paul Frampton Convicted in Denise Milani 'Honey Trap' Case

Well, clearly those big breasts proved too hard to resist.

At ABC News, "Paul Frampton: Court in Argentina Convicts UNC Professor of Drug Smuggling":

A court in Argentina has convicted an Oxford educated University of North Carolina professor of attempting to smuggle four pounds of cocaine into the United States.

Paul Frampton, a 68-year-old esteemed professor of physics and astronomy, says he thought he was flying to South America to meet with a bikini model but ended up getting caught in what they call a "honey trap."

Frampton flew to Bolivia from North Carolina earlier this year after communicating with someone who claimed to be Denise Milani, winner of Miss Bikini World 2007. She never showed up.

Instead, Frampton says he was met by a man who gave him a suitcase, identifying himself as an intermediary for Milani, and instructing him to take it to her in Argentina.

Once there, he says he could not find her and decided to board a plane home, with that suitcase in hand. Police opened it up at the airport and found more than four pounds of cocaine inside.

"He has a high IQ, is well-known and very distinguished in the field of physics and other scientific areas, but when it comes to common sense he scored a zero," said former DC homicide investigator Rod Wheeler.

The Argentinean court sentenced Frampton to serve four years and eight months in custody after prosecutors there presented evidence of text messages they say Frampton sent to the person he thought was the model, saying, "I'm worried about the sniffer dogs," and "I'm looking after your special little suitcase."

The University of North Carolina has cut off Frampton's salary in a move that prompted dozens of his colleagues at the university to sign a letter of protest to administrators.

"As more information about his case becomes available ... it becomes more and more obvious that Paul was the innocent, although very gullible, victim of a scam," the joint letter said.

Many wrote separate letters of reference on a website they created to support the embattled professor, who is hoping to serve his time under house arrest in Argentina at a friend's apartment.

From prison Frampton has said, "It does seem unfair that an innocent scam victim is treated as a professional drug smuggler."

Well, it's hard out there for swinging academics.

There's an ABC News video here: "Professor Paul Frampton Convicted of Drug Smuggling."

And see the Independent UK, "The Denise Milani conspiracy: 'Honey trap' professor gets five years in Argentina jail," and "The case of Denise Milani and the British scientist proves – set a honeytrap and men fall in every time."

BONUS: At Hollywood Tuna, "Denise Milani Picture Moment."

Arlington's One More Page Bookstore Caters to Royalty, Closes to Public During Obama's Presidential Visit

Well, you wouldn't want to inconvenience the presidential family by having the riff-raff nearby.

At London's Daily Mail, "Must be nice being President! Obama avoids Black Friday crowds as bookstore closes for his visit as he shops for Christmas presents with his girls."

Pictures at the link. And I don't see any red carpets. These people are slacking!

Here's the store's website: One More Page Books, located in Arlington, Virginia.

ADDED: Here's video, "Raw: Obama, Daughters Go Christmas Shopping."

Ideological Discrimination at University of Iowa Law School

At The TaxProf, "Jurors Agree: University of Iowa Law School Discriminated Against Faculty Applicant Due to Her Conservative Views" (via Memeorandum):

Following up on my previous posts (links below) about Teresa Wagner's federal lawsuit: Des Monies Register, Jurors Say They Saw Hiring Bias at University of Iowa; But University, Not Former Law Dean, Wronged Conservative Job Applicant:

A federal jury believed the University of Iowa’s law school illegally denied a promotion to a conservative Republican because of her politics, former jurors told The Des Moines Register.

However, jurors said they felt conflicted about holding a former dean personally responsible for the bias. They wanted to hold the school itself accountable, but federal law does not recognize political discrimination by institutions. “I will say that everyone in that jury room believed that she had been discriminated against,” said Davenport resident Carol Tracy, the jury forewoman.

Meanwhile, attorneys for Teresa Wagner on Tuesday filed a motion for a new trial in the case that scholars agree could have national implications in what some argue is the liberally slanted world of academia.

Des Moines Register editorial: U of I Needs to Respect Diversity of Thought, Too: The Claim of Political Bias in Hiring at the Law School Should Not End with the Deadlocked Jury...

Continue reading.

Hey, when you go after bias at the universities, you're hammering away at the enemy's beachhead of Marxist cultural power and ideological indoctrination.

More at Volokh, "Jurors in Bias Case Believe University of Iowa Engaged in Ideological Discrimination."

Peter Suderman's Twitter Tutorial Shows How Walmart Helps Nation's Poor

It's really very straightforward. Walmart's low prices make more goods available to more people, especially people at the lower income quintile. I used to talk a lot about Walmart during my class discussions on the economy. One thing Suderman doesn't mention is that Walmart's economies of scale create dramatic ripple effects throughout the entire economy. There's a tremendous benefit from lower prices for families across the board, as the company's market-setting impact improves the well-being of individuals and families at all income levels. Basically, Walmart helps keep prices low economy-wide. Suppliers, wholesalers, shippers and other interdependent businesses must keep costs down to stay competitive, or Walmart shifts its purchasing and contracting relations to more efficient concerns. Inflation is reduced nationally. And national well-being increases. Left-wing attacks on Walmart are not designed to help workers, who will end up losing their higher wages to big labor bosses in any case, when they pony up their mandatory union dues. It's power the big bosses want, not social improvements for society's poor.

See Twitchy, "Reason magazine’s Peter Suderman destroys the Left’s irrational Walmart criticism."

9. Raise prices to pay for increased wages and you cut into the store’s huge low-price benefits for the poor. It’s regressive.
— Peter Suderman (@petersuderman) November 24, 2012

And at The Blaze, "Reason Senior Editor Dismantles the Left's Chief Anti-Walmart Talking Points."

Walmart Black Friday Shopping

At JWF, "Bloody Friday: Deranged Shoppers Battle Over Cell Phones at WalMart."

(Also on YouTube, "Walmart Black Friday Fighting Over Phones During 2012.")

Republicans and the Hispanic Vote

Two articles getting some attention: Kim Strassel, at the Wall Street Journal, "The GOP Turnout Myth," and Byron York, at the Washington Examiner, "Hispanics favor Dems but didn't decide election."

I don't think Hispanics are naturally conservative (as Charles Krauthammer argued recently, erroneously), although I do think that Republicans can pick up enough Hispanics to reduce the Democrat electoral advantage in key swing states. Strassel's essay points that out:

In Florida, 238,000 more Hispanics voted than in 2008, and Mr. Obama got 60% of Hispanic voters. His total margin of victory in Florida was 78,000 votes, so that demographic alone won it for him. Or consider Ohio, where Mr. Romney won independents by 10 points. The lead mattered little, though, given that black turnout increased by 178,000 votes, and the president won 96% of the black vote. Mr. Obama's margin of victory there was 103,000.

This is the demographic argument that is getting so much attention, and properly so. The Republican Party can hope that a future Democratic candidate won't equal Mr. Obama's magnetism for minority voters. But the GOP would do far better by fighting aggressively for a piece of the minority electorate.

And that, for the record, was the GOP's real 2012 turnout disaster. Elections are about the candidate and the message, yes, but also about the ground game. Republicans right now are fretting about Mr. Romney's failures and the party's immigration platform—that's fair enough. But equally important has been the party's mind-boggling failure to institute a competitive Hispanic ground game. The GOP doesn't campaign in those communities, doesn't register voters there, doesn't knock on doors. So while pre-election polling showed that Hispanics were worried about Obama policies, in the end the only campaign that these voters heard from—by email, at their door, on the phone—was the president's.

Often missed in talk of the GOP's "demographics problem" is that it would take relatively modest minority-voter shifts toward Republicans to return the party to a dominating force. The GOP might see that as the enormous opportunity it is, rather than a problem. The key to winning turnout is having more people to turn out in the first place.

Texas Secession Fever

At the New York Times, "With Stickers, a Petition and Even a Middle Name, Secession Fever Hits Texas":

HOUSTON — In the weeks since President Obama’s re-election, Republicans around the country have been wondering how to proceed. Some conservatives in Texas have been asking a far more pointed question: how to secede.

Secession fever has struck parts of Texas, which Mitt Romney won by nearly 1.3 million votes.

Sales of bumper stickers reading “Secede” — one for $2, or three for $5 — have increased at TexasSecede.com. In East Texas, a Republican official sent out an e-mail newsletter saying it was time for Texas and Vermont to each “go her own way in peace” and sign a free-trade agreement among the states.

A petition calling for secession that was filed by a Texas man on a White House Web site has received tens of thousands of signatures, and the Obama administration must now issue a response. And Larry Scott Kilgore, a perennial Republican candidate from Arlington, a Dallas suburb, announced that he was running for governor in 2014 and would legally change his name to Larry Secede Kilgore, with Secede in capital letters. As his Web page, secedekilgore.com, puts it: “Secession! All other issues can be dealt with later.”

In Texas, talk of secession in recent years has steadily shifted to the center from the fringe right. It has emerged as an echo of the state Republican leadership’s anti-Washington, pro-Texas-sovereignty mantra on a variety of issues, including health care and environmental regulations. For some Texans, the renewed interest in the subject serves simply as comic relief after a crushing election defeat.

But for other proponents of secession and its sister ideology, Texas nationalism — a focus of the Texas Nationalist Movement and other groups that want the state to become an independent nation, as it was in the 1830s and 1840s — it is a far more serious matter.

It's interesting, if not something of a sideshow.

RELATED: From Saberpoint, "Vox Popoli Hates Californians -- Even Conservatives."

Tea Party Looks to Oust Republicans Seen as Not Conservative Enough

This isn't anything new, although there's obviously greater urgency amid the left's information coup and the second term of the Obama disaster. Basically, double down hoping to gain some traction before we're all shot to hell.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Tea Party Seeks to Regroup: Movement Sets Sights on Ousting Republicans Seen as Not Conservative Enough":

The tea-party movement is trying to regroup after taking some licks in this month's elections. Several groups already are setting their sights on 2014 congressional races, in which they plan to promote their preferred candidates and hope to weed out Republicans they consider insufficiently conservative.

Many tea-party activists say they remain dumbfounded by the Nov. 6 defeat of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and favored GOP candidates for the Senate, and opinions are swirling over how the movement should push forward.

In Virginia, organizations that canvassed aggressively for Mr. Romney are now girding for next year's election for governor. Many are moving to support Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli in his GOP primary contest against Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling.

Conservative groups also are considering potential challenges to GOP Sens. Lindsey Graham in South Carolina, Lamar Alexander in Tennessee and Saxby Chambliss in Georgia, whom some activists view as not conservative enough.

After scoring a wave of successes in the 2010 midterm elections, tea-party groups found the environment much less hospitable this year in states where President Barack Obama's campaign made gains with the electorate.

One of the movement's most outspoken advocates, Rep. Allen West of Florida, lost his first bid for re-election, while Rep. Michele Bachmann, a founder of the congressional Tea Party Caucus, barely scraped by to keep her Minnesota seat. Still, many House freshmen backed by the tea party in 2010 survived this year, and Republicans retained their House majority.

"This was a very difficult year, with the strength of the Obama ground game and the fact that Romney just didn't inspire much enthusiasm," said Jamie Radtke, an unsuccessful 2012 Senate candidate and founder of the Virginia Federation of Tea Party Patriots, a statewide umbrella group that continues to expand and now has over 60 member organizations. "But in many ways, we are stronger than ever," she said.

The federation, Ms. Radtke said, plans to play a big role in 2013 Virginia races, including those for the governor's and lieutenant governor's offices.

Across the country, tea-party activists are drawing different lessons from the year's setbacks.

One of the movement's big losses was in the Indiana Senate race, where Richard Mourdock, a favorite of tea-party activists, toppled six-term Republican Sen. Richard Lugar in the Republican primary, only to lose this month to conservative Democrat Joe Donnelly. Mr. Mourdock's campaign took a hit after he said that "even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something God intended to happen."

Tea-party activist Greg Fettig, a founder of Hoosiers for a Conservative Senate and a backer of Mr. Mourdock, said the main lesson from the loss is that activists need to be sure the campaigns they support are well-run.

In South Carolina, tea-party activists are looking to mount a primary challenge against Mr. Graham, whom they oppose in part because he voted to confirm Mr. Obama's Supreme Court nominees, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

"I think he will face a strong primary challenge," said Joe Dugan, South Carolina coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots. "The extent of that challenge and the money that can be raised will depend on his actions from this time forward."

Mr. Graham didn't respond to requests for comment.

Andrea Alarcon to Take Leave of Absence

At LAT, "Mayor's top appointee on Board of Public Works will take leave."

She's also "seeking help." See: "Public works commissioner says she’s seeking 'professional help'."

Democrats need professional help, so there you go. And this lady's actions are criminal. She should being doing time for her kind of progressive child abandonment and endangerment.

PREVIOUSLY: "Andrea Alarcon, President of Los Angeles Board of Public Works, Under Investigation for Child Endangerment."

Protesters Storm Muslim Brotherhood Headquarters in Alexandria

The opposition to the Morsi coup is pretty widespread.

See, "Protests rock Egypt after Morsi seizes new powers."

More: "Morsy reassures Egyptians as protests grow."

Obama Copies California, While State's Residents Flee to Texas

An absolutely amazing development, but no surprise givien the long-standing stagnation of this once "Golden State." At IBD, "Obama Policies Copy Moribund California, Not Texas":

Anyone who thinks that President Obama's economic policies will spur strong growth should consider U-Haul rates between California and Texas.

Renting a 20-foot truck one-way from San Francisco to San Antonio, for example, will cost $1,693. But the U-Haul tab to go in the opposite direction is just $983.

To University of Michigan economist Mark Perry, who has tracked this "U-Haul Index," the difference in these rental rates is the result of straightforward supply and demand.

Put simply, far more people want to leave California for Texas than vice versa. Why? Because California's economy is moribund while Texas' is thriving.

"The American people and businesses are voting with their feet and their one-way truck rentals to escape California and its forced unionism, high taxes, and high unemployment rate for a better life in low-tax, business-friendly, right-to-work states like Texas," noted Perry, who is also a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

California Nation

The problem is that Obama's economic policies are pushing the country to be more like the California people are leaving and less like the Texas they're flocking to.

"Every dream program that the administration embraces — cap and trade, massive taxes on the rich, high-speed rail — is either in place or on the drawing boards" in California, notes Joel Kotkin, executive editor of NewGeography.

Like President Obama, California's Gov. Jerry Brown pushed for a substantial new tax on the "rich" that raises the top rate to 13.3%, a hike voters approved in November. Even before these taxes kick in, California was the fourth most heavily taxed state, according to a ranking by the Tax Foundation.

Also like Obama, the state is regulation happy. The Mercatus Center at George Mason University ranks California as one of the four worst states in terms of regulations. The state also imposes one of the heaviest tax burdens on businesses.

As a result, California consistently ranks at or near the bottom for business friendliness.

And like Obama — who has pushed federal spending up to historic highs for the past four years — per-capita spending in California has climbed 42% from 2000 to 2010, even after adjusting for inflation. The state is now one of the biggest spenders in the country.

The contrast in economic policies between California and Texas — which otherwise share many things in common, since both are big-population border states with lots of immigrants — could not be more striking.

Continue reading.

Erin Andrews Models Brooklyn Decker Boots

Via Twittter.

And indeed, those are Brooklyn Decker boots: "Boots on a motha effin' plane."