Vile Israel-Hating Professor Stephen Walt Cheers Netanyahu 'Blowing Up' the U.S.-Israel 'Special Relationship'

From the reviled co-author of the "Israel Lobby," at Foreign Policy, "Bibi Blows Up the Special Relationship":

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be the only person who was looking forward to his visit to the United States this week. House Speaker John Boehner, who cooked up the invitation for Netanyahu to address Congress with Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer, has now been exposed as a narrow-minded partisan who put his party’s fortunes ahead of broader diplomatic interests. The White House is supremely ticked off, with National Security Advisor Susan Rice terming the visit “destructive” to the U.S.-Israel relationship and Secretary of State John Kerry pointedly reminding people of how bad Netanyahu’s past advice has been. A chorus of reliably “pro-Israel” pundits — including some prominent members of Israel’s national security establishment — appear to share Rice’s view (if not her choice of words) and have denounced Netanyahu’s refusal to reschedule in no uncertain terms.

Even the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the “leviathan among lobbies,” seems to be unhappy about the whole business. Sure, it’s giving Netanyahu a prominent platform at its policy conference this week and is reportedly twisting arms on Capitol Hill to keep more Democrats from boycotting Netanyahu’s speech, but AIPAC appears to have been blindsided by the invitation itself, and partisan wrangling over Israel goes against its entire political playbook.

But in point of fact, AIPAC and other key organizations in the lobby have only themselves to blame. The contretemps taking place now is at least partly the result of the policies they have supported and the tactics they have employed over many years. It’s not the end of U.S. support for Israel, but it may well mark an important and ultimately positive shift in what has become a dysfunctional — even bizarre — relationship.It’s not the end of U.S. support for Israel, but it may well mark an important and ultimately positive shift in what has become a dysfunctional — even bizarre — relationship.

To be sure, a small part of the problem lies with Netanyahu himself. He seems to get on well with Vladimir Putin, but his bombastic and self-righteous moralism grates on most of the foreign leaders who have had to deal with him. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy called him a liar, and then-President Bill Clinton once responded to Bibi’s antics by exploding, “Who’s the fucking superpower here?” Netanyahu’s lack of chemistry with President Barack Obama is well known, of course, yet Netanyahu has done little to try to win the U.S. president over. Instead, he or his cabinet ministers have repeatedly treated Obama and other U.S. officials — including Vice President Joe Biden and Kerry — with a degree of disdain bordering on contempt.

But as Matt Duss notes in an important piece in Tablet, the real divide is about policy, not personality. The flap over Netanyahu’s speech is exposing what has long been obvious but is usually denied by politicians: U.S. and Israeli interests overlap on some issues but they are not identical. It might be in Israel’s interest for the United States to insist on zero Iranian enrichment and for the United States to go to war to secure that goal, but such an attack is definitely not in America’s interest. Instead, America’s strategic position would be enhanced if it could get a diplomatic deal that kept Iran from going nuclear and opened the door to a more constructive relationship.

Similarly, though Netanyahu and his government remain staunchly opposed to a genuine two-state solution with the Palestinians, that outcome would be very good for the United States. It is definitely not in America’s interest for its closest ally in the Middle East to deny millions of Palestinian Arabs either full equality in Israel proper or any semblance of political rights in the West Bank, and it hurts U.S. interests every time Israel launches another punishing attack on the captive population in Gaza, inevitably causing hundreds of civilian deaths. Such actions — conducted with U.S. weaponry and subsidized by the U.S. taxpayer — do enormous damage to America’s image in the Middle East and have long been a staple ingredient in the jihadi narrative.

Similarly, it might be in Israel’s interest to have its own nuclear deterrent, but having to turn a blind eye to Tel Aviv’s undeclared arsenal makes Washington look hypocritical and undermines its broader effort to limit the spread of weapons of mass destruction. The point is that no two states have the same interests, and that is as true of the United States and Israel as it is of America’s relations with many other democracies.

The controversy over Netanyahu’s visit has also exposed a core of resentment that the power of the lobby has long suppressed...

Still more.

Notice how it's all Israel's fault. The conflict in U.S.-Israel relations, the absence of peace in the Middle East and "human rights" for those angelic "Palestinians" --- and frankly, Iran's nuclear proliferation regime itself. And notice the "Israel First" canards Walt slathers throughout the piece, including the idea that it would be in "Israel’s interest for the United States to insist on zero Iranian enrichment and for the United States to go to war to secure that goal." The Jewish tail wagging the American dog. Got it. And that blood libel of the so-called "punishing" attacks on Gaza's "captive population," you know, the same population that Hamas throws up as human shields every chance it gets? Priceless.

Anything that destroys the power of "the lobby" is good. You know, if Jews run an influential interest group in Washington anything that weakens that cabal ought to be cheered. "Who's the fucking superpower here"? Conspiracy much?

Professor Stephen Walt is a puny stinking wretch of a man, a seriously vile and disgusting anti-Semite who's never found a Jew-hating slur he didn't like. Screw him and the far-left BDS camel he rode in on.

Nikki Lund

Some babetastic Rule 5 blogging.

At Egotastic!, "Nikki Lund Bikini Pictures Heat Up the Chilly Malibu Shoreline."

Be Prepared on #ObamaCare

From James Capretta and Yuval Levin, at the Weekly Standard, "Be Prepared: How to respond if the Court ends Obamacare ­subsidies":

Few people expect much to happen on health care in the 114th Congress, certainly not President Obama. He plans to continue bending and twisting his interpretation of Obamacare’s many complex provisions as necessary to keep it afloat and to avoid dealing at all with opposition to the law among the public or the Republicans who now run Congress.

But King v. Burwell could upend the president’s plans. That’s the case, now on the Supreme Court’s docket, contesting the legality of subsidy payments to people in states that chose not to build their own Obamacare insurance exchanges. A decision against the government’s provision of the subsidies would undermine the law in the 37 affected states and, in the process, disrupt insurance for millions of people who signed up for coverage on the assumption that the subsidies would be available to them.

The blame for the mess that would surely ensue should rightfully fall on the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress. Congressional Democrats wrote the statute on their own, and the administration has enforced it. If the Court rules that the statute was written carelessly and enforced lawlessly, Democrats will have no one to blame but themselves.

But don’t expect them to take responsibility. If the administration loses the case, Obama is sure to denounce the ruling as an ideological power grab by the Court and then to demand that Republicans in Congress fix it, with no strings attached. Further, the administration will almost certainly develop a workaround for the states, allowing them to designate and use the federal exchange as if it had been built by the states. This would give administration officials a justification to continue paying federal subsidies in the states agreeing to the workaround, even if it were legally questionable.

It will be tempting, under these circumstances, for Republicans in Congress to stand back and watch events unfold rather than step into the breach with a plan of action. After all, they had nothing to do with writing or implementing Obamacare, so why should they have to offer a solution? Moreover, many conservatives will see the loss of federal subsidies as the first step in the full unwinding of the law. Why on earth would the GOP want to step in?

What exactly would happen in the aftermath of a Court ruling in favor of the plaintiffs is certainly unpredictable. It is possible, perhaps, that the public would be so disgusted with the lawlessness of the administration that opinion would swing in the GOP’s favor, tempting the party to do nothing while the administration is forced to scramble to pick up the pieces. But it seems more likely that a combination of the president demanding a simple fix and public concern about the fate of the several million people with disrupted insurance arrangements in the affected states would put at least some of the pressure for a fix on Republicans.

And the pressure could be especially acute on Republican governors in the affected states. They are the ones who will be presiding over insurance markets that could unravel entirely. If the president offers them an easy route to building a “state” exchange, and there is no prospect of an alternative coming from Congress, then it seems probable that many Republican leaders in these states will succumb to the pressure coming from both the administration and the public to fix the mess by adopting state exchanges. Several Republican governors have stated that they would not accept such a “solution,” but as we have seen with the lure of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, the pressure to do so could ultimately be hard to resist.

If events were to unfold this way, it would, of course, be politically disastrous for the GOP. But it would also mean the party had missed a huge opportunity. Obamacare is being fully implemented nationwide. There will be some 10 or 11 million people getting insurance through the exchanges, and another several million more getting covered through Medicaid. The longer implementation proceeds, the harder it will be to undo. If the Court strikes a significant blow to the law, it will be perhaps the last opportunity for Republicans to begin moving health care policy in a very different direction in the Obama years. Despite the political risks, the GOP should recognize and take advantage of such an opportunity...

Keep reading.

Placentia Teacher Hangs Herself in Classroom

This is sad.

At the O.C. Register, "'Right away we knew something really horrible had happened': Photography teacher ID'd as woman found hanged at El Dorado High in Placentia."

The woman, Jillian Jacobson, a popular photography teacher, left no suicide note.

Also at ABC 7 Los Angeles, "STUDENTS FIND TEACHER HANGING IN PLACENTIA CLASSROOM."

Why Do Leftists Hate Asian-Americans?

Well, I posted on this last week or so, "Leftist Racial Bias Against Asian-Americans in College Admissions."

And now here comes Michael Walsh, at Pajamas, sounding the tocsin on the left's despicable racism. See, "Why Do Democrats Hate Asian-Americans? Because They’re Smart and Successful":

This piece appeared in the Los Angeles Times recently, and it deserves a lot more notice from conservatives than it’s received so far. It’s not that it doesn’t tell us things we didn’t already know — it’s that the Left is so blatant about its prejudices, and so determined to tear down any semblance of meritocracy regarding college admissions. And, mostly, it reminds us that Asian-Americans need to recognize who their enemies are...

Six Words Might Decide Fate of #ObamaCare

At WaPo, "Six words might decide the fate of Obamacare at the Supreme Court":

When the Supreme Court takes up the latest challenge to President Obama’s health-care law this week, how the justices interpret a six-word phrase in the bill could determine its fate.

The law, adopted in 2010, says the federal government can pay subsidies to help people afford insurance bought through “an Exchange established by the state.”

But two-thirds of the states have opted against setting up their own exchanges, and as a result, more Americans have been buying insurance through the federal insurance marketplace. Now, opponents of the law will make their case to the high court that Americans who are not using the state exchanges are ineligible for subsidies. And if they win, insurance premiums could skyrocket and many people might drop their coverage — possibly undermining the whole health-care program.

And as the justices weigh whether the health-care law in fact has a fatal glitch, one of the key questions is this: Why did the Obama administration rule-writing officials in the Internal Revenue Service and its parent agency, the Treasury Department, ultimately interpret the language the way they did?

It had never occurred to the Treasury Department official responsible for making the changes in the tax code required by the law that there was more than one way to read the phrase — until she happened across an article in a trade journal.

Emily McMahon, deputy assistant treasury secretary for tax policy, read an article in Bloomberg BNA’s Daily Tax Report in January 2011 raising questions about whether federal subsidies could be paid for millions of Americans buying insurance under the Affordable Care Act, according to Treasury Department officials. The issue was whether the law allowed these payments if the coverage was bought in states that did not set up their own insurance marketplaces.

So McMahon called a meeting with two of her top lawyers, one of them recalled, and asked whether there was “a glitch in the law we needed to worry about.”

In the end, the Treasury and IRS officials who wrote the rules adopted the more expansive reading of the law — allowing subsidies for all marketplaces — because they concluded this was required for the new health-care initiative to succeed, according to current and former agency officials and documents they provided to congressional investigators. And, the officials reasoned, Congress would not have passed a law that it wanted to fail.

“Nobody I talked to in government, including many people involved in the legislative process, thought this was a question,” recalled David Gamage, a tax law professor at the University of California at Berkeley hired to help the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Policy implement the law. “Nobody thought the argument [limiting the subsidies] was persuasive.’’

While it was clear to the rules’ authors at Treasury and the IRS that the issue was a practical matter and not a political one, they met regularly with White House officials, who were closely monitoring the drafting of the regulations, two former officials said.

And while the team of tax attorneys had no doubt that the subsidies should apply to all marketplaces, there was a significant debate inside Treasury and the IRS about how much of their reasoning should be spelled out in public. The agency was sensitive to the legal and political minefield it was navigating...

Still more.

Militant Longshoreman's Union Boasts Clout in Era of Globalization

From yesterday's front page, at the Los Angeles Times, "On docks, workers still have power."

And I guess this is a theme at the cheerleading L.A. Times, because the newspaper ran a virtually identical piece a couple of weeks ago, "Small but powerful union is at center of port dispute":

The dispute that has snarled West Coast shipping revolves around a rarity in American business — a small but mighty union.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union represents 20,000 dockworkers, a fraction of the organized ranks of teachers, truck drivers or healthcare workers. But the port workers — who still queue up at hiring halls daily for work and spend years earning full membership — stand guard over a crucial chokepoint in the global economy.

For decades these "lords of the docks" have been paid like blue-collar royalty. Their current contract pays $26 to $41 an hour, with free healthcare for members. Some earn six figures with overtime. Even as a growing chorus of business groups clamor for a resolution to their months-long contract talks with the Pacific Maritime Assn., which represents shipping companies, the union sees little need to back down.

"They have unique skills that aren't easily replaced," said Goetz Wolff, who teaches about labor and economics at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. "They're not going to roll over and play dead."

Leftists love militant unions, as they represent the spearhead of the revolutionary struggle against capital. And that's why the Times is pumping up these goons as if they were going out of business tomorrow.

President Obama's Leftist Media Enablers Push Back Against U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard

This is totally predictable.

It's like I said earlier, it's only a matter of time before Rep. Gabbard switches parties.

At BizPac Review, "Combat veteran Democrat crossed Obama in Hawaii; now she’s paying a price."

Erin Heatherton Body Paint

Following-up from the other day, "Uncovered Erin Heatherton."

The Murder of Boris Nemtsov

At WSJ, "Another Putin opponent is killed by unknown assailants":

In the gangster state that is Vladimir Putin ’s Russia, we may never learn who shot dead Boris Nemtsov in Moscow late Friday night, much less why. The longtime opposition leader had once been Russia’s deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin, and he might have steered Russia toward a decent future had he been given a chance. Instead, he was fated to become a courageous voice for democracy and human rights who risked his life to alert an indifferent West to the dangers of doing business with the man in the Kremlin.

Some of those warnings appeared in these pages. In March 2012, he and fellow opposition leader Garry Kasparov warned against President Obama’s “reset” with Russia, urging that the Administration replace the Cold War-era Jackson-Vanik amendment with the Magnitsky Act, which imposes sanctions on Russian officials guilty of human-rights violations.

Nemtsov was also not afraid of criticizing Mr. Putin by name, noting in that same op-ed that he “is not the legitimate leader of Russia” given the ballot stuffing that went into his 2012 election. For his honesty he was repeatedly arrested and jailed by the Russian government. He was also the rare Russian willing to speak up for Ukraine’s democracy movement. “By supporting Ukraine,” he said in December 2013, “we also support ourselves.”

With his murder, Nemtsov’s name now joins that of other opponents of Mr. Putin who have met violent deaths or otherwise been brutalized by his regime: journalist Anna Politkovskaya, human-rights researcher Natalya Estemirova, opposition leader Alexei Navalny. One day their names will be celebrated in Russia, long after Mr. Putin is gone.

Quartering Spyware Troops in a Digital Age: Why Your Home Should Be Your Castle

From Glenn Reynolds, at USA Today, "Quartering spyware troops in the digital age":

In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner published a famous paper on the closing of the American frontier. The last unsettled areas, he said, were being populated, and that meant the end of an era.

I think that something a bit like that is happening in my field of constitutional law. The last part of the Bill of Rights left almost untouched — the Third Amendment — is now becoming the subject of substantial academic commentary, with a symposium on the amendment, which I attended, this past weekend held by the Tennessee Law Review.

The Tennessee Law Review published the very first law review article on the Third Amendment back in 1949. But there weren't very many to follow: a handful, over many decades. Maybe that's because the Third Amendment just plain works. It provides: "No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law."

That doesn't happen much — The Onion ran a parody piece some years ago entitled "Third Amendment Rights Group Celebrates Another Successful Year" — and so it may just be that the Third Amendment is the only part of the Bill of Rights that really works. Except that it may not be working the way that we think.

The only Supreme Court case in which the Third Amendment did any heavy lifting is Griswold v. Connecticut, a case that's not about troop-quartering, but about birth control. The Supreme Court held that the Third Amendment's "penumbra" (a legal term that predates the Griswold case) extended to protecting the privacy of the home from government intrusions. "Would we," asked the court, "allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives?" The very idea, said the court, was "repulsive."

Likewise, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held in Engblom v. Carey that the Third Amendment protects a "fundamental right to privacy" in the home. Since then, courts haven't done much to flesh these holdings out, but I wonder if they should. In the 18th century, when the Third Amendment was drafted, "troop quartering" meant literally having troops move into your house to live at your expense and sleep in your beds. It destroyed any semblance of domestic privacy, opening up conversations, affection, even spats to the observation and participation of outsiders. It converted a home into an arena.

Today we don't have that, but we have numerous intrusions that didn't exist in James Madison's day: Government spying on phones, computers, and video — is spyware on your computer like having a tiny soldier quartered on your hard drive? — intrusive regulations on child-rearing and education, the threat of dangerous "no-knock" raids by soldierly SWAT teams that break down doors first and ask questions later.

The Third Amendment hasn't been invoked in these cases — well, actually, it has, in the case of a SWAT team in Henderson, Nev., that took over a family home so that it could position itself against a neighbor's house — but maybe it should be. At least, maybe we should go farther in recognizing a fundamental right of privacy in people's homes...

More.

LAPD Shoots and Kills Homeless Man in Downtown Los Angeles (VIDEO)

At LAT, "Police fatally shoot man in struggle over officer's gun, authorities say":

Authorities said Sunday night that Los Angeles police fatally shot a man on skid row during a struggle over an officer's weapons.

Police officials offered a detailed account of what they say prompted the Sunday morning shooting, which was captured on video by a bystander.

Cmdr. Andrew Smith said officers assigned to the LAPD's Central Division and Safer Cities Initiative — a task force focused on skid row — responded to the location about noon Sunday after receiving a 911 call reporting a possible robbery.

Smith said the officers approached the man and made contact with him, at which point he "began fighting and physically resisting the officers." The officers attempted to take him into custody and at one point, attempted to use a Taser that Smith said was "ineffective."

The man continued to resist police, Smith said, and the man and some of the officers fell to the ground.

"At some point in there, a struggle over one of the officer's weapons occurred," Smith said. "At that point an officer-involved shooting happened."

Two officers and a sergeant fired at the man, who was pronounced dead at the scene, Smith said. It was unclear how many times the officers fired, although at least five shots can be heard on the video recording that captured the shooting.

No other gun was recovered at the scene, Smith said. It was unclear if the man had any other weapons among his possessions — investigators were still combing the scene late Sunday night.

The man has been tentatively identified, but Smith said it was unclear if he was homeless.

Two officers were treated and released for injuries sustained in the struggle, Smith said. The extent of those injuries was unclear...

More.

Sunday Cartoons

At Flopping Aces, "Sunday Funnies."



Also at Lonely Con, "Saturday Funnies," and Theo Spark's, "Cartoon Roundup."

And at Reaganite Republican, "Reaganite's SUNDAY FUNNIES."

Cartoon Credit: Legal Insurrection, "Branco Cartoon – It Takes A Village."

Anti-Israel Protesters Dragged Out of AIPAC Conference (VIDEO)

These people are disgusting, murderous bastards.

One sign at the protest compared Israel to Islamic State, where "both have hijacked peaceful religions" for violence and murder.



More, "USA: Five arrested in pro-Israel conference protest."

PREVIOUSLY: "Barack Obama: Mainstreaming Jew-Hatred in America."

Hillary Clinton Seen Launching White House Bid in April

Well, the only surprise here is the timing. I mean, does anyone think Hillary wasn't mounting a run for the 2016 Democrat Party nomination?

At WSJ, "Hillary Clinton Seen Launching Presidential Bid in April":

Hillary Clinton and her close advisers are telling Democratic donors she will enter the presidential race sooner than expected, likely in April, a move that would allay uncertainties within her party and allow her to rev up fundraising.

Clinton aides have spoken of the earlier timetable in private meetings, according to people engaged in recent discussions about the presumed Democratic front-runner’s emerging 2016 campaign. Many within her camp have advocated her staying out of the fray until the summer.

Jumping in sooner would help the Democratic field take shape, reassuring party leaders and donors that the former first lady, senator and secretary of state is running. A super PAC loyal to Mrs. Clinton has faced hesitation from donors who don’t want to make big pledges until she is a candidate. Such concerns would evaporate after she announces.

But Mrs. Clinton would become an even larger target for Republicans when she enters the race. She also would be pressed to opine on a raft of thorny issues in the news, including how to combat the military advances of Islamic State militants in the Middle East.

One influential proponent of an earlier announcement is John Podesta, who is expected to play an important role in Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign, one person familiar with the matter said. Mr. Podesta, who in January resigned as senior adviser in the Obama White House, declined to comment, as did a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton.

Many Democratic activists say they would like to see the race begin in earnest—something that won’t happen until Mrs. Clinton jumps in.

Mrs. Clinton “should get in right now. If she’s going to run, get a campaign going,” said Jason Frerichs, a county Democratic chairman in Iowa, the state that holds the first contest of the 2016 campaign.

Mrs. Clinton, according to some close associates, doesn’t relish the campaign trail and is in no particular hurry to announce, especially given the scant competition for her party’s nomination. Most polls show Mrs. Clinton running far ahead of her nearest potential challenger, Vice President Joe Biden .

“She’s obviously biding her time before she gets out there,” said Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, a Democrat.

Mrs. Clinton, 67 years old, made known her feelings about grueling campaigns in a private meeting last month with London Mayor Boris Johnson. Mr. Johnson later said she had bemoaned the lengthy U.S. presidential campaigns.

During her 2008 bid, she teared up at a campaign event in New Hampshire when describing the rigors of campaign life: lack of sleep, an overreliance on pizza and limited ability to exercise.

“If I were taking this on, seeing what candidates went through last time around, I’d sure want to put it off as long as I could,” said Doug Goldman, a major fundraiser for President Barack Obama who lives in San Francisco. At this point in the 2008 cycle, Mrs. Clinton already was a candidate.

Mrs. Clinton’s team has considered first forming an exploratory committee, a common in-between step candidates use to signal they are running while avoiding the formal launch of a campaign. But her camp now appears likely to scrap that idea.

A later entrance into the race comes with certain perils. She hopes to raise more than $1 billion for the campaign, people familiar with her plans said, and some Democratic donors are concerned that if she waits until the summer, she would be hard-pressed to meet that goal...

More.

PREVIOUSLY: "Can a Democratic Win the Presidency After Two Terms of Obama?", and "Hillary Clinton Faces Uphill Fight for White, Rural Vote."

Ransom Paid as ISIS Releases at Least 19 Christian Captives

Yeah, I was wondering about the reports of Islamic State releasing Christians. Seems to me that they'd rather behead them.

But ransom was paid, according to the Times of Israel, "Islamic State frees 19 Christians as ransom paid: activists."

Thousands Attend March in Memory of Boris Nemtsov (VIDEO)

Via Telegraph UK:

Republicans Have 13-Point Edge Over Dems on Foreign Policy

Surprisingly, the treasonous Democrats have a more favorable view overall in public opinion, but on the issues that count --- and foreign policy's going to count hella lot in 2016 --- the GOP has the edge.

At Pew, "The GOP has a 13-point edge over Dems on making wise decisions about foreign policy'."

Obama's Legacy on Trial

At Time, "The fate of the president’s key initiatives rests with the Supreme Court":

When U.S. district Judge Andrew Hanen ruled against President Barack Obama’s sweeping immigration overhaul on Feb. 16, he did more than throw the future of 5 million immigrants facing deportation into doubt. In siding with Texas and 25 other states that had challenged Obama’s Executive Order, Hanen ensured that the fate of one of the President’s signature initiatives will be tied up in litigation that could go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

It would be in good company there. In the past six years, nearly all the building blocks of Obama’s domestic legacy–from health care and financial reforms to environmental regulations–have been challenged in court. Dodd-Frank, the massive banking-reform law enacted after the financial crisis, has been picked at in dozens of federal cases. Last June, the Supreme Court confirmed a lower court’s decision to overturn a handful of the Administration’s recess appointments. And by the end of the court’s current term this summer, the Justices will have ruled three separate times on Obamacare and twice on the Administration’s new EPA mandates that are meant to curb climate change.

These lawsuits are both a symptom and a cause of the partisan gridlock in Washington. On one hand, they are part of a continuing Republican effort to undo the Obama Administration’s early legislative victories. On the other, they represent a pushback against a White House that has used regulatory and executive action to end-run a divided Congress–a tactic that has exposed it to legal challenges. But if the battles are ending up at the Supreme Court, they are starting at the state level with increasingly large partisan groups of state attorneys general.

Since Obama took office, state attorneys general have joined to participate in hundreds of suits against the federal government. Sometimes they have directly sued federal agencies; other times they’ve filed influential friend-of-the-court briefs or collaborated with private entities on legal strategies. In 2010 alone, coalitions of attorneys general sued the Obama Administration a record 52 times, according to Paul Nolette, a political scientist at Marquette University and an expert on modern-day attorneys general.

It wasn’t always that way. In the 1980s and ’90s, state attorneys general acted largely independently of one another. If a states’-rights issue arose, state challenges were often nonpartisan and involved smaller groups of AGs. But that bipartisan collaboration withered as the nation become more polarized, and partisan AG associations, formed in the past 15 years, helped facilitate collaboration between members.

In the past decade, the practice of suing the federal government has become “institutionalized,” Nolette says. Under Obama, Republican attorneys general have been particularly active. “We’ve never seen anywhere close to this level of intense Republican activism and collaboration before,” he says. Michael Greve, a conservative scholar and professor of law at George Mason University, expects the trend to continue. “If the next President is a Republican, you’ll see the same crusade on the part of Democrats,” he says...

Politics in the age of polarization. This is just the way it is nowadays.

More at the Hill, "GOP fears grow over ObamaCare challenge" (via Memeorandum).

Congress Should Hear Out Netanyahu

Hey, a rare righteous editorial at the Los Angeles Times. Deserves a post:

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses Congress on Tuesday about the dangers posed by Iran's nuclear program, he will have to overcome the deafening political static created by the circumstances of his invitation. Not only did House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) invite the prime minister without consulting with the White House — leading to charges that Netanyahu was “meddling” in the making of American foreign policy — but he has given Netanyahu an enviable international platform two weeks before Israel's election.

Clearly irked, President Obama is declining to meet Netanyahu during his visit, and Obama's national security advisor Susan Rice has gone so far as to say that the injection of partisanship into the U.S.-Israeli relationship was “destructive.” Meanwhile, some [America- and Israel-hating] Democratic members of Congress plan to boycott the speech.

We understand their irritation, but Netanyahu deserves a respectful hearing even if the auspices of his appearance are exasperating. Like other nations in the region, Israel has understandable concerns about a nuclear-armed Iran. It is not only worried about a doomsday scenario in which Iran — whose anti-Zionist rhetoric is legendary — launches an attack on Tel Aviv; it also worries that an Iranian nuclear weapon would encourage countries such as Saudi Arabia to follow suit. (Unsurprisingly, Israel prefers the status quo, in which it has a monopoly on nuclear weapons in the region.)

But hearing out Netanyahu doesn't mean taking everything he says at face value or abdicating to Israel this country's decision about whether it's possible to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran without making a fateful decision to use military force...

More.

Also, from Yuli Edelstein, "Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to Congress comes at right time, right place."

PREVIOUSLY: "Netanyahu to Target Obama in Speech to Joint Session of Congress."

Natasha Vargas-Cooper Protects Her Twitter Account

I'll give her credit, though.

She did post a series of apologetic tweets yesterday, which I saw and thought about blogging, considering the hail of vituperation she brought down on herself with her smug dissing of critics.

At Twitchy, "Jezebel writer who smeared Scott Walker has protected her Twitter account."



More at the Other McCain, "Hey, @natashavc, Sorry Your Dishonest Scott Walker Smear Got Breitbarted."

Hanging On: Debbie Harry on Punk and Sex at 69

At Telegraph UK, "Debbie Harry on punk, refusing to retire and sex at 69":

Forty years after Blondie found fame on the New York scene, Debbie Harry is still waving the flag for women in the music business – of every age.

In 1980, during a tour with Blondie, Debbie Harry hosted a tea party at a London hotel, gathering together many of the women prominent in music at the time. Chrissie Hynde was there; Siouxsie Sioux; the Slits guitarist Viv Albertine; Pauline Black from The Selecter; and Poly Styrene from X-Ray Spex. Chris Stein, Harry’s boyfriend at the time as well as the other half of Blondie’s creative core, published pictures of it in his recent book Negative, a collection of his photographs from the early years of their fame.

It looks as though there was a lot of laughter. This was a different time for women in music. Two years earlier Kate Bush, who was invited to tea but didn’t make it, had become the first female solo performer to reach number one in the British charts with her own song (Wuthering Heights).

There was a widespread assumption that there was room for just one main female performer in each genre. If another appeared, they were expected to battle it out for the title of queen of pop/soul/disco/punk.

Harry was keen to cut through that. “I really wanted to get together with all the punk females for an afternoon of celebration,” she explains. “It’s a great memory.” If you did that today, I say, you would need more than a hotel room. “I would need a hall!” she says, laughing. “It has changed a lot. It’s really grown, hasn’t it?”

In part, the large number of women making music now is down to the influence of those pioneers. Poly Styrene died in 2011, but remarkably the others are all still creating: both Hynde and Albertine have made fine solo albums in the past three years; Sioux never really went away; Black still plays with her band, and last summer Bush returned to the live arena for the first time since she was 20 with a triumphant run of London shows, which sold out in minutes.

As for Harry, I am talking to her in Paris, backstage at a theatre where she is preparing to play that night, at a party to launch a new perfume. To mark the 10th anniversary of its Black XS fragrance, Paco Rabanne has launched two limited-edition scents called Black XS Be a Legend – one for men, one for women – with a tuxedo-clad Harry and Iggy Pop fronting the ad campaign.

“It was great to work with Iggy again,” Harry says. They met when she was a waitress at the legendary New York music venue Max’s Kansas City, and Blondie’s first real tour was as his support act, at a time when his band included David Bowie on the keyboard. “They treated us in a way that was very generous and smart. They said, 'We want the show to be great – for all of us. We want to put on a unified piece.’ And bands were awful to each other at that time.”

Though Blondie grew out of the New York punk scene in the mid-1970s, they had an unashamedly pop slant, with their genre-bending music taking in elements of everything that was popular in clubs at the time, from rap to reggae to disco. But they also had a strong subversive streak.

“It was very much about irony at that time. It was about a sophisticated sort of put-down, antisocial but witty. We were always trying for that play on words, for the double entendre.”

Harry has always identified herself as a feminist, and there is a quiet strength in the way she presents herself, a sense that here is a woman very much in control. Before she was famous, she was on her way home from a club one rainy night in New York.
“It was two or three in the morning and I couldn’t find a cab. A car kept coming round and offering me a ride, so I accepted. Once in the car I noticed there were no door handles on the inside, which made me wary. I don’t know how, but I managed to put my hand through the window and open the door from the outside.”

The driver swerved to try to stop her escaping, but that gave her the momentum to throw herself out of the moving car. She thought no more of it until years later, when she saw the driver on the news. It was Ted Bundy, the serial killer who eventually confessed to murdering at least 30 women. “I always say my instincts saved me.”

As a performer there was something defiantly self-contained about Harry. Although she constantly played with images of sexy blond bombshells, there was a sense that she was doing this not to excite her audience but to please herself: you can look, but you can’t touch.

Her impact was huge. Andy Warhol featured her in silk-screen portraits (she still has one, though she confesses she has recently been tempted to sell it), and every few years her look emerges yet again on the catwalks. She is flattered, but points out that her look was itself cobbled together from comic books and Hollywood films, mixed in with English punk influences and later the strong lines of the New York-based designer Stephen Sprouse. “It’s very flattering and it’s nice to be loved like that. It’s amazing to me that it made such an impression, but also it seems like a natural process, if you go back to the things that influenced me and the elements that I took from.”

If, in the late 1970s, Harry threw the ball in the air, it was Madonna who caught it and ran with it. In the mid-1980s Harry took a lengthy break from music while Stein battled with illness, and the Material Girl took a similar blend of pop and New York-street attitude, and became a global superstar.

“There was a switch in music,” Harry says. “And I think it may have been primarily with her. She really went to showbiz. She was a solo artist; she wasn’t in a band; she wasn’t representing anyone but herself. And she did very well.”...

More.

Netanyahu to Target Obama in Speech to Joint Session of Congress

At the Washington Post, "Netanyahu’s address to Congress will be most important speech of his life":

JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s upcoming address to a joint meeting of Congress will probably be the most important speech of his career — and one that has already jeopardized relations between Israel and the United States.

On Tuesday morning, Netanyahu will confront an American president and insist that the future of the State of Israel, and the world, is imperiled by a pending “bad deal” with Iran on its nuclear program.

Also hanging in the balance is Netanyahu’s own political future. Just two weeks after the speech, Netanyahu will either be reelected to a historic fourth term as prime minister or be out of a job.

Netanyahu has spent three terms as Israeli prime minister focused on the dangers posed by Iran. In his first address to Congress in 1996, he warned that an atomic Iran would “presage catastrophic consequences, not only for my country, and not only for the Middle East, but for all mankind.”

His supporters call him prescient; his detractors say Netanyahu has been warning for 20 years that “time is running out” on the Iran threat. His critics say Netanyahu is a broken record, a Cassandra obsessed, willing to deeply damage U.S.-Israeli relations in a futile confrontation with the United States that wins Israel nothing.

His opponents in Israel and the United States say the speech is mostly a cynical ploy to get reelected in a tight March 17 vote, by fear-mongering on Iran and by opposing an American president who is not very popular in Israel.

On Tuesday morning, as Secretary of State John F. Kerry meets with his counterparts in Switzerland to try to complete a framework accord with Iran by the end of March, Netanyahu will stand at the lectern in Congress to tell Americans, essentially, that President Obama is either foolhardy or weak and about to sign a deal with the devil.

Netanyahu will warn, as he has in the past, that the Americans are gambling on a radical Iranian regime run by Muslim clerics who deny the Holocaust, sponsor terrorist groups, support a murderous regime in Syria and pledge to destroy Israel.

As his chartered plane wings toward Washington on Sunday afternoon, Netanyahu’s advisers say the final author of the speech will be Netanyahu himself.

The prime minister’s press office released photographs of Netanyahu penning his speech in longhand.

Netanyahu will write the speech because he considers himself not only an authority on the minutiae of the Iran nuclear program — the number, type and productivity of the centrifuges and the estimates of low-enriched uranium to the kilogram — but also an expert on U.S. politics and the American people.

Netanyahu studied at MIT and served as Israeli ambassador to the United Nations in New York. He has been called the “most American” of Israeli prime ministers.

This is his moment. Netanyahu’s English is fluid, conversational, persuasive and often blunt. He has a flair for stagecraft. His guiding light, says his inner circle, is Britain’s wartime premier and great orator, Winston Churchill, who is the only other foreign leader to have addressed a joint meeting of Congress three times.

During Netanyahu’s second speech to Congress in May 2009, he received 29 standing ovations.

Netanyahu’s critics in Israel and in the Obama administration warn that the Israeli leader is really no Churchill and that he has seriously miscalculated this time.

Israeli relations with Democrats and the Obama administration are at a historic low.

More.

Also, at Arutz Sheva, "Report: Obama Threatened to Shoot Down IAF Iran Strike" (via Memeorandum).

Heh, and the idiot leftists are up in arms. So the vile William Saletan, at Slate, "Netanyahu's Speech in Congress is a Revolting and Dangerous Gamble." Lol. Tell us how you really feel about it!

Tori Kelly Might Just Be the Next Britney Spears/Katy Perry/Taylor Swift

At Elle:

Tori Kelly, a 22-year-old YouTube sensation that Simon Cowell called "almost annoying" on season nine of American Idol before kicking her out of the competition, has just one thing to say to the TV host: "Thank you for not putting me on your show. Everything happens for a reason and I probably wouldn't be who I am now if I had made it on that show."

Kelly's new single, "Nobody Love," debuting today, is primed to be the singer/songwriter's breakout hit that she's been waiting for, after releasing two "teaser" EPs that—thanks to their intimate and acoustic-driven style—garnered her a cult following on YouTube (she has one million subscribers), with 661,000 Facebook likes and 443,000 Twitter followers.

Kelly is backed by her music manager, Scooter Braun (who also looks after Justin Bieber), and Max Martin, the Swedish producer who has ruled the Billboard Hot 100 for over a decade with a string of hits for Britney Spears, Katy Perry, P!nk, and Taylor Swift. She has been praised for having a set of "emotionally expressive" and "powerful" vocal pipes that rival top pop stars before her, like Christina Aguilera and Mariah Carey...

More.

So BuzzFeed Got 41 Million Pageviews on 'What Colors Are This Dress?'

See, "What It’s Like to Work on BuzzFeed’s Tech Team During Record Traffic."

And from Ben Smith, "The Dress: I sent this email to the BuzzFeed editorial staff this afternoon."

More, at USA Today, "What colors are this dress?"

Strange, I must say. But that's the nature of things these days, with our cyber-culture of superficiality.

After Boris Nemtsov's Assassination, 'There Are No Longer Any Limits'

From Julia Ioffe, at the New York Times Magazine:

Here is #Nemtsov a few hours before his death at a Moscow radio station, encouraging people to Sunday's protest. pic.twitter.com/CEHweHUDQD

— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) February 28, 2015

On Friday evening, Boris Nemtsov, a Russian opposition leader and former first deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin, went on a prominent Moscow radio station to exhort his fellow citizens to come out to protest President Vladimir Putin’s policies. There would be a rally on Sunday, a spring march, to demonstrate against the deepening economic crisis and Russia’s involvement in Ukraine. The most prominent Russian opposition leader, Aleksei Navalny, had been put in jail for 15 days, which just happened to be long enough to keep him from attending the rally. Nemtsov, who was older and, by now, less influential, had handed out leaflets in the metro and encouraged people to come anyway.

After the radio show, on which Nemtsov warned that too much power in the hands of one man would “end in catastrophe,” he met Anna Duritskaya, his girlfriend of three years — and, as the police would later pointedly note, a citizen of Ukraine. They had dinner and then headed home, strolling across Red Square and past the swirling domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral, adjacent to the Kremlin. Just before midnight, as they crossed the bridge toward the historic Moscow neighborhood where Nemtsov lived, a white car pulled up, and, according to investigators, someone inside fired seven or eight shots. Four of them hit Nemtsov in the head, heart, liver and stomach, killing him on the spot.

Duritskaya was unharmed and immediately taken in for questioning. Nemtsov, a big, broad man, was left on the pavement in the rain, his shirt yanked up to his chin.

On Russian social media, liberal Moscow has struggled to wrap its head around something that seemed like it simply couldn’t happen, until it did. It had been years since Nemtsov, a rising star in Yeltsin-era politics, had been the standard-bearer of Western liberalism, and he could be a silly bon vivant. But he was deeply intelligent, witty, kind and ubiquitous. He seemed to genuinely be everyone’s friend; when I lived in Moscow as a journalist, he was always willing to jaw over endless glasses of cognac. And he was a powerful, vigorous critic of Vladimir Putin, assailing him in every possible medium, constantly publishing reports on topics like the president’s lavish lifestyle and the corruption behind the Sochi Olympics.

How could such a prominent politician — a founder of the opposition Solidarity Party, a sitting member of the Yaroslavl city parliament — be gunned down so brazenly, within steps of the Kremlin? “We didn’t kill members of government,” Gleb Pavlovsky, an independent political consultant who used to work for Putin, told me over the phone. “It’s an absolutely new situation.” Olga Romanova, a prominent opposition activist and a close friend of Nemtsov, said, “There are more cameras in that spot than there are grains in a packet of grain.” When I called her last night, she had just come from the scene of the crime, where her friend still lay on the ground, surrounded by laughing policemen. “It’s the first time I’ve seen a very close person murdered, lying on the pavement,” she said. “It’s terrifying.”

Putin promptly called Nemtsov’s mother to offer his condolences and threw what seemed like the entire Ministry of Internal Affairs on the case. Yet we can be sure that the investigation will lead precisely nowhere. At most, some sad sap, the supposed trigger-puller, will be hauled in front of a judge, the scapegoat for someone far more powerful. More likely, the case will founder for years amid promises that everyone is working hard, and no one will be brought to justice at all. This has been the pattern for other high-profile killings, like those of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the whistle-blower Sergei Magnitsky.

Already, the Kremlin is muddying the waters...

Keep reading.

Uncovered Erin Heatherton

Via Theo Spark.

The Death of Boris Nemtsov

From Miriam Elder, at BuzzFeed.

Karen Alloy

She's so beautiful.

On Instagram.

The Return of the German Question

From Giovanna Maria Dora Dore, at the American Interest (via Instapundit):

The geopolitical dilemmas that Europe struggled with for centuries have returned in geo-economic form, centered on the conflict between creditor and debtor countries locked in a single currency.

*****

The euro crisis has undermined the “Europe of Maastricht status quo” that was shaped to a significant extent by Germany, including the concept of the ECB, the culture of fiscal stability, and the politics of EU enlargement. Germany now faces the challenges of overcoming the status quo to which it adjusted more successfully than any other country in the EU (thanks to the economic power it gained over the past half a century), and the growing political and economic weakness of its EU partners. The UK’s obsession about sovereignty and its ambivalent attitude about the EU has made Britain irrelevant to Germany. The Franco-German axis at the heart of European integration has become lopsided, with power shifting sharply towards Berlin. This has paved the way for Chancellor Merkel to set in place intergovernmental mechanisms for crisis management, and thus move executive decision-making from the 27 countries of the EU and the European Commission to the 18 countries of the Eurozone. These new cooperation mechanisms outside EU treaties demonstrate the failure of the “Europe of Maastricht”, and especially the impossibility of a European Germany.

The institutions and policies that previously almost perfectly matched Germany’s expectations for the EU now need to be redesigned. Germany is being forced to take on a leading role in shaping a new system and new policies, while at the same time trying to convince the rest of the Eurozone that its insistence on a more competitive EU is neither an expression of economic dogma nor a quest for political dominance, but rather the result of a sober analysis of the challenges of globalization to the EU. With 7 percent of the world’s population, 25 percent of global economic output, and 50 percent of the world’s social expenditure, the EU needs to strengthen competitiveness if it is to ensure prosperity, address inequality, and maintain social cohesion.

There’s little doubt that the future of the EU hinges on Germany’s decision about its direction. Yet, it is not clear what Germany wants to do with Europe, and how other member states can use Germany’s economic and political weight to develop a global strategy for the EU. Germany remains reluctant to discard the Maastricht order completely, because it does not want to take on further responsibility for Europe. Nevertheless Germany faces a choice: it can either recommit to partnership with the rest of the EU and exercise benign economic hegemony within the Eurozone as the price for this commitment, or it can be a more normal EU member state that pursues its national interests in a narrower way, which will increasingly bring it into conflict with the EU’s other member states.

Germany has signaled that it will do whatever it takes to save the euro. Yet observers fear that Germany’s determination to save the euro could lead to a two-speed Europe. On the one hand, deepening the integration of economic policy among the 17 Eurozone countries could result in a split between them and the other ten member states, who could find access to the single currency much more difficult or even find themselves permanently excluded. On the other, German leadership could deepen the schism between the debtors and creditor countries, with a growing competitiveness gap between these two groups as a result of the “bail-in” and the continuing debt burden on the indebted countries.

Germany is too big to fail and the biggest country in Europe, but still not big enough to be the EU’s hegemon. At a time when Germans have lost their romantic attachment to the EU, the other 26 member states need to go through the same process of re-invention that Germany has embarked upon and design a new approach to Europe that can secure their national interests. Success in this task might give the EU the Germany it needs—and it might just give Germany the Europe it wants.

An interesting piece. RTWT.

Plus, on the original German question, see the outstanding William Keylor, The Twentieth-Century World and Beyond: An International History since 1900.

In Defense of the Notoriously Arrogant French Waiter

This will be a nice piece to enjoy with a cup of coffee, imagining you're in Paris.

At WSJ, "French Waiters: They’re infamous for being rude and condescending, but the garçon de café can be endlessly entertaining—and a great resource—if you know how to use them."

The Internet? Bah!

Heh.

Get a kick out of this.

Flashback, from Clifford Stoll, at Newsweek, February 1995, "Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana":

20 years ago today, Newsweek got the Internet horribly wrong. http://t.co/ap8vtRnpIZ #NewsweekRewind pic.twitter.com/05zHTIexhW

— Newsweek (@Newsweek) February 27, 2015

After two decades online, I'm perplexed. It's not that I haven't had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I've met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I'm uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Consider today's online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them—one's a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, "Too many connections, try again later."

Won't the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.

Point and click:

Then there are those pushing computers into schools...

Keep reading.

Brooklyn Terror Suspect Left Trail of Online Rants at Websites 'Sympathetic' to Islamic State

This story's actually kind of bizarre.

I mean, seriously, these guys are idiots and nutjobs. Just freakin' nutjobs.

At NYT, "In Brooklyn, Eager to Join ISIS, if Only His Mother Would Return His Passport."

Speculation Grows About Speaker John Boehner's Future

Hmm...

Interesting.

At Politico, "Congress passes one-week DHS fix: The last-minute move comes after House Republicans dealt a humiliating defeat to John Boehner":

The House voted late Friday to stave off a shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security for another week, narrowly averting a funding lapse for the agency that has become the battleground over President Barack Obama’s executive actions on immigration.

The vote was 357-60. The Senate approved the stopgap measure earlier Friday evening and it was signed by President Barack Obama minutes before the midnight deadline when the department’s funding was to expire.

The 11th-hour move came after dozens of House Republicans dealt a humiliating defeat to Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and other GOP leaders. Conservatives teamed up with Democrats to shoot down a Boehner-backed measure that would have funded DHS for three weeks.

Boehner’s allies are concerned after Friday’s setback that his critics inside the Republican Conference may try to oust him as speaker if — as expected — he puts a long-term DHS funding bill on the House floor next week. While Boehner shrugs off such speculation, close friends believe such a move is a real possibility.

“There is a lot of speculation about this,” said a GOP lawmaker who is close with Boehner. “People are watching for this very, very closely.”

Twenty-five Republicans voted against Boehner for speaker on the floor in early January, signaling his continued problems with his conservative hardliners. And Boehner’s allies believe that the earlier DHS debacle on Friday, when 52 Republicans voted against the three-week plan, was in part aimed at toppling the speaker.

One issue for Boehner’s GOP opponents — beyond his continued popularity with the vast majority of House Republicans — is who would succeed him. Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) would seem like a natural choice, but he is close to Boehner and would never seek to replace him. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has strong ties to many members, yet that may not necessarily translate for support for speaker.

After those two men, there’s a large drop-off to the next tier of potential choices. That helps Boehner’s cause.

The drama over Boehner’s future came after a day of unexpected twists in the homeland security saga...

More.

And lots more at Memeorandum.

Emily Miller Gets Her Concealed Carry Permit

She's a good lady.

At My FoxDC, "FOX 5's Emily Miller gets DC gun carry permit approved."



And buy Emily's book, Emily Gets Her Gun: …But Obama Wants to Take Yours.

Boris Nemtsov Murdered in Moscow

At the Los Angeles Times, "Boris Nemtsov, leading Russian opposition leader, gunned down in Moscow":

Leading Russian opposition politician Boris Y. Nemtsov, a former first deputy prime minister under President Boris Yeltsin, was shot dead on a Moscow street near the Kremlin early Saturday, Russian officials and news agencies reported.

A fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Nemtsov had been preparing to join an opposition rally Sunday against the Kremlin leader’s backing of separatists in eastern Ukraine, which has brought international sanctions against Russia and sent its economy into a tailspin.

"An unknown person shot and killed Boris Nemtsov on St. Basil’s slope by four shots from a handgun," the Tass news agency quoted an unnamed official as saying. "A team of operatives and investigators is working at spot of the crime."

The Russian Interior Ministry, which oversees police and security operations, later confirmed that Nemtsov had been gunned down in the shadow of St. Basil’s Cathedral on a sidewalk across the street from Red Square.

Television and YouTube video from the scene showed the lifeless body of the 55-year-old politician -- once considered a future Kremlin leader -- sprawled on a sidewalk along the busy thoroughfare in the heart of the Russian capital.

Putin expressed condolences to the family of the slain politician, his spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

“Putin noted that this was a cruel murder and bears all the signs of a contract killing which appears exclusively provocative,” Peskov told ITAR-TASS.

Nemtsov's close associate and opposition leader Ilya Yashin called the attack on his friend “a political murder.”

“Boris was the most outspoken critic of Putin and the most charismatic leader of the opposition, and his dead body found 100 yards from the Kremlin is a clear message to all the opposition activists and all people who do not support the Kremlin,” Yashin said in an interview with The Times. “This act of political terror is clearly aimed to stun and horrify the opposition to the Putin regime on the eve of the march we will now hold as a mourning march as originally planned on Sunday.”

President Obama condemned the slaying and offered condolences to Nemtsov’s family.

“Nemtsov was a tireless advocate for his country, seeking for his fellow Russian citizens the rights to which all people are entitled,” Obama said in a statement. “I admired Nemtsov’s courageous dedication to the struggle against corruption in Russia and appreciated his willingness to share his candid views with me when we met in Moscow in 2009.”

Nemtsov ran afoul of Putin's Kremlin administration years ago and had been active with the opposition coalition PARNAS.

A companion who witnessed Nemtsov’s killing was being questioned by police, the official Sputnik news agency reported.

Russia Today television, a pro-Kremlin mouthpiece, said on Twitter that the slaying “could be a provocation,” suggesting that the opposition was responsible for the killing to tarnish the Putin administration.

Pro-democracy allies and world leaders who knew the gregarious and energetic politician expressed horror over the killing that many were inclined to see as an assassination.

“Shock. Boris has been killed. It’s impossible to believe,” Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said via Twitter. “I’m certain the killers will be punished. Sooner or later.”

Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion and another outspoken opponent of Putin, linked Nemtsov’s killing with other violence attributed to the Kremlin and its enforcers.

“[Journalist Anya] Politkovskaya was gunned down. MH17 was shot out of the sky. Now Boris is dead. As always, Kremlin will blame opposition, or CIA, whatever,” Kasparov said via Twitter.

More.

And at BuzzFeed, "Killing Hope In Putin’s Russia." And Memeorandum.

Rick Perry

He's at CPAC.

His speech isn't posted to the ACU YouTube page yet, so I'll update.

Hey Leftists, Stop Lying About Everything!

From Kurt Schlichter, at Town Hall, "Liberals, Stop Lying About Everything":

The last few weeks have raised a critical question for all Americans: Is the liberal elite unbelievably dumb or unbelievably cynical? Do our over-credentialed, under-educated, would-be betters actually believe the bullstuff they are shoveling, or do they really think that we normal Americans are so stupid that they can lie to our faces and we will just take it?

I’m guessing Door Number Two. Liberals know they are full of it; they just think the rest of us are as foolish as the welfare-guzzling mouth-breathers who vote for them.

It’s time for the lies to stop.

Liberals, stop lying about the weather. There is no climate change crisis. Whatever changes our climate is undergoing are part and parcel of the natural processes that have been going on since the Earth was formed. All the massaged, manhandled, and manufactured data in the world won’t change the simple fact that this is a naked grab for money and power by a liberal elite so concerned about carbon they choose to dump gazillions of pounds of it into the air jetting off to party with their denier denying pals.

Forty years ago we were going into an ice age, and the solution was to give more power and money to liberal elites. Ten years ago, we were a decade away from the Arctic ice cap melting and the polar bears being parboiled, and the solution was to give more power and money to liberal elites. I don’t even want to guess what the next lie is going to be about the perpetual crisis around the corner, but I know to an absolute certainty that the solution is going to be giving more power and money to liberal elites.

Liberals, stop lying about our war with radical Muslims. This bloodshed isn’t “random.” This isn’t about “violent extremism.” Mass enslavement, mutilation and murder isn’t “workplace violence,” and these semi-human freaks aren’t going to stop if someone hands them a mop, bucket and paycheck.

We are at war – war – with radical Islam, and we need to end the lies, the equivocation and dissembling and speak the truth. Our enemies think they are Muslims, and they think the Koran commands their actions. This isn’t about theology – whether their version of Islam is a misunderstanding or misinterpretation is utterly irrelevant. They think they’re pious Muslims even if we, as well as most of the world’s Muslims, disagree...

More.

Senior Pentagon Official Warns that Washington Can't Take Technological Dominance for Granted

At Foreign Policy, "Top Intel Official: U.S. Facing ‘Unprecedented’ Array of Threats":

ST. PETE BEACH, Florida — U.S. special operations forces now face a widening array of “non-geopolitical threats” that challenge them in realms in which the United States once held undisputed sway, a senior Pentagon intelligence official said Wednesday.

As an example, Garry Reid, a top deputy to Michael Vickers, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, cited the widespread availability of commercial satellite imagery. “Where once you could assume that only you had the bird’s-eye view of the target area, now just about anybody can have [it],” he said during an address to a gathering of current and former special operations personnel here.

Reid said the proliferation of “quite challenging” commercial encryption capabilities also threatens U.S. dominance in signals intelligence, the difficult act of cracking into phone, Internet, and other forms of telecommunications networks around the world. “It’s not as easy as it once was to exploit adversary communications,” he said.

And without saying so in as many words, Reid suggested that technological advances are making it increasingly difficult for the United States to place intelligence operatives undercover. “Global biometrics, identity management, and the ability to track people [using] your electronic signature around the world becomes a challenge for us,” he said.

In his remarks, Reid led the audience on a global tour of what he described as an “unprecedented” plethora of challenges facing the United States, from the rise of the Islamic State and other violent Islamist extremist groups to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa and Russian aggression against Ukraine. The confluence of so many asymmetrical challenges will continue to place a high demand on U.S. intelligence and special operations forces well into the future, he said.The confluence of so many asymmetrical challenges will continue to place a high demand on U.S. intelligence and special operations forces well into the future, he said.

“We’re sitting on top of the most powerful military arsenal … ever assembled,” he said, but added that most “conventional forces and strategic forces are barely applicable to any of these problems. That is quite a vexing scenario.”

More.

And this is interesting. I've been wondering about the current status of U.S. dominance of some of these areas, especially in light of Barry Posens' 2002 piece, "Command of the Commons."

Quinnipiac University Poll: Scott Walker Holds Early Lead in Iowa Republican Caucuses

This is great.

Indeed, the race is wide open, Jeb Bush.

At Quinnipiac, "Walker Has Strong Early Lead In Iowa GOP Caucus, Quinnipiac University Poll Finds; Conservative Base With Large Dose of Tea Party."

More from Ed Morrissey, at Hot Air, "Video: Is Jeb Bush inevitable?"

ADDED: From Ronald Brownstein, at National Journal, "In Early Polling, Walker Stands Apart" (via Memeorandum).

Sorry, Jeb, the Race Is Wide Open

From Peggy Noonan, at WSJ, "Democrats may be ready for Hillary, but nothing is inevitable for the GOP":

Thoughts on the 2016 presidential primaries:

No one expects anything from the Democrats. They will back, accept or acquiesce in a coronation. This will not be called passive but disciplined. But when you think about it—one of our two major parties, in a time of considerable national peril, will settle its presidential nomination without vigorous debate—it is weird and disturbing.

Republicans are the action, and will draw all the lightning. A read on where the base—huge, broad and varied, including but not limited to attendees of this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference—is:

Republicans this year are not looking for Reagan. They’re looking for Churchill. They’re looking for the guy who knows the war is already here, not the guy who knows the war can be averted if we defeat the guys who would wage it. What is “the war”? Everything from scarily sluggish economic growth to long-term liabilities and deficits; from the melting away of the post-World-War-II order to the Mideast to domestic terrorism. Every four years there is frustration and argument; this year there is urgency.

What the Republican Party needs in a presidential candidate is not a centrist who can make the sale to conservatives in the primaries; it is a conservative who can win over centrists in the general election. That means the Republican nominee should be a man or woman who can redefine conservative thinking for current circumstances and produce policies that centrists and independents will find worthy of consideration.

Jeb Bush is said by some and treated by many as the front-runner, the one to beat. I don’t see it. In fact I think he’s making a poor impression.

It’s a commonplace to say nobody’s watching this early. But some people are, especially activists in the base and the mainstream media, which is picking up impressions that will harden into widespread clichés. What are they seeing?

Mr. Bush is spending much of his time in The Rooms—offices and conference rooms—with millionaires and billionaires. Money in politics is very important, and Mr. Bush makes a great impression on the denizens of The Rooms. He speaks their language. They like his experience, the fluency with which he speaks of domestic policy. Here his family name helps him; they know he is politically vetted, a successful former governor, is respectful of the imperatives of business, and is bottom-line sane.

It is going so well that Patrick O’Connor of the Journal reported this week the Bush team is asking fundraisers who want to join the campaign’s top tier to collect $500,000 by the end of March. But veteran bundlers expect it will cost more “to reach the inner circle . . . because deep-pocketed donors have been so eager to write big checks.”

All this reflects a deliberate allocating of the candidate’s time. The Bush campaign will vacuum up money now and be interesting and compelling later. They’re trying to force rivals out of the race by picking up their potential donors and leaving nothing but crumbs.

Mr. Bush’s operation is also, according to the New York Times, muscling party strategists and policy specialists to advise only him and no one else. Again a message is sent: Be with us now or we’ll remember later. It sounds tough and Clintonian. Actually it looks less like a sales pitch than a hostile takeover.

There’s something tentative and joyless in Mr. Bush’s public presentations. He isn’t mixing it up with voters or wading into the crowd. So far he is not good at the podium. His recent foreign-policy speech was both bland and jangly, and its one memorable statement—“I am my own man”—was the kind of thing a candidate shouldn’t have to say.

What is most missing so far is a fierce sense of engagement, a passionate desire to lead America out of the morass, a fiery—or Churchillian—certainty that he is the man for the moment. In its place we see a softer, wanner I’m smart, accomplished, know policy, and it’s my turn.

I am not sure Mr. Bush likes the base. If he doesn’t, it would explain some of his discomfort. I am wondering if he sees the base as a challenge, not a home, something he has to manage, not something he is of. He was perhaps referring to this in December when he said you have “to lose the primary to win the general.” Actually you have to win it, but to really succeed you have to show you share the base’s heart, that you understand its beginning points and align with it on essentials. When you disagree with it you address those issues among friends, and with confidence. You can’t cover up differences in a passive-aggressive way—at their feet when you really want to be at their throat.

A certain resistance to the idea of Mr. Bush is bubbling up among some journalists and intellectuals. In an arresting piece in the Atlantic, David Frum asked if he is the Republican Obama —essentially bicultural, interested in transforming a nation he finds lacking. “Both Jeb Bush and Barack Obama are men who have openly and publicly struggled with their ambivalence about their family inheritance. Both responded by leaving the place of their youth to create new identities for themselves: Barack Obama, as an organizer in the poor African-American neighborhoods of Chicago; Jeb Bush in Mexico, Venezuela, and at last in Cuban-influenced Miami. Both are men who have talked a great deal about the feeling of being ‘between two worlds,’ ” Mr. Obama in his books and Mr. Bush in his speeches. “Both chose wives who would more deeply connect them to their new chosen identity. Both derived from their new identity a sharp critique of their nation as it is. Both have built their campaign for president upon a deep commitment to fundamental transformation of their nation into what they believe it should be.”

Jim Geraghty of National Review writes of “considerable evidence that there’s a lot of Jeb-skepticism out there among conservatives.” Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard says Mr. Bush may be “cornering the market” on professional Republicans but asks: “What is the case for a Bush restoration, beyond the fact that it would make the professional GOP comfortable once again? Why should average Republican primary voters—the insurance salesmen and truck drivers, not pollsters and policy advisors—choose Jeb over Scott Walker, Chris Christie , Ted Cruz, or the dozen other potential nominees?”

These are respected voices read by many conservatives...

More.

Shop Amazon - St. Patrick's Day

For my Irish readers --- and those who love to celebrate St. Patrick's Day.

Shop Amazon - St. Patrick's Day - Books, Party Supplies, Costumes & More.

'You know who you are'

Heh.

I love this, at the Hill, "Boehner reminds members of dress code: 'You know who you are'":

Boehner said that adhering to the House chamber rules dignifies the environment.

"Following the basic standards of practice will foster an atmosphere of mutual and institutional respect and will ensure against personal confrontation amongst individual members, between members, and the presiding officer," Boehner said.

"It will enable accurate transcriptions of the proceedings and, in sum, will ensure the comity that elevates the spirited deliberations above mere arguments," Boehner concluded.

The Future of Charlie Hebdo in Doubt

I suppose this dénouement was inevitable.

At WSJ, "Rift Among Charlie Hebdo Staff on Future of Newspaper Enriched by Tragedy":

PARIS—Less than two weeks after the terror attack that devastated their newsroom, Charlie Hebdo’s surviving staff members gathered in a borrowed conference room to discuss an unexpected dilemma.

The satirical newspaper, once on the edge of bankruptcy, was selling millions of copies, and many on its staff were suddenly demanding that it become a cooperative to give everyone a say in how to use the resulting windfall.

“It’s completely out of the question,” responded Laurent Sourisseau, known as Riss, one of only two surviving shareholders in Charlie Hebdo and its new top editor. Moments later, according to people present, he stormed out of the meeting.

A rift has emerged inside Charlie Hebdo over how the leftist newspaper should handle its transformation from a financially troubled niche journal to a global brand enriched by tragedy.

After burying their colleagues and getting back to work, many on staff are pressing the publication’s owners to give up their shares and place the newspaper in the hands of all its employees. But those atop the newsroom—including Mr. Sourisseau, who received his 40% stake as a symbolic gesture when the shares were essentially worthless—have resisted, saying it is too early to make any changes.

“I don’t think a cooperative is the best way to run a newspaper,” said Gérard Biard, the No. 2 editor under Mr. Sourisseau, in an interview. “Money can make people crazy.”

A spokeswoman declined to make Mr. Sourisseau available, and he didn’t respond to requests for comment.

On Wednesday, after a pause to regroup, Charlie Hebdo will publish its second issue since brothers Chérif and Said Kouachi assaulted its offices on Jan. 7, killing eight staff members and four others in what the terrorists said was retaliation for the newspaper’s caricatures of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad.

The attack turned Charlie Hebdo into one of the world’s best-known symbols of free expression, with the “Je Suis Charlie” slogan resonating globally. But it also brought to light long-simmering tensions inside and outside the weekly, where the biggest commercial successes have often come when it has been at its most controversial, particularly in its treatment of Muslims and Islam.

In the weeks since the attacks and Charlie Hebdo’s decision to print another caricature of the Prophet Muhammad, the newspaper has sold nearly eight million copies, more than 200 times the normal level, which will generate about €12 million ($13.6 million) after printing and distribution expenses, the distributor said. It has also attracted 250,000 new subscribers who each spent roughly €100 for a year, and it received around €4 million in donations, a lawyer for the newspaper said.

At the same time, Charlie Hebdo has faced sometimes violent protests across the Muslim world. Online, a counter movement dubbed “Je ne suis pas Charlie” (I am not Charlie) has also gained momentum. A former Charlie Hebdo staffer, Delfeil de Ton, blamed murdered editor Stéphane Charbonnier for provoking the assault, asking in an article published last month in French magazine l’Obs: “Why did you drag the whole team along in your escalation?”

Inside the newspaper, there is debate over how—or whether—Charlie Hebdo should assume the mantle that has been thrust upon it. It has already, with the help of the French newspaper Le Monde, released a smartphone app, and it will continue to offer a digital version with English translations. A complete redesign is planned for the fall.

Some inside the newsroom say Charlie Hebdo must reject its new symbolic role. Others say they must embrace it. “We must become a global newspaper of freedom,” said Patrick Pelloux, a veteran Charlie Hebdo columnist. “It’s an enormous responsibility.”

Amid the debates, there appears to be broad internal agreement that Charlie Hebdo must not let its newfound wealth and readers change its editorial tone...

More.

Chicago Mayoral Runoff

Exquisite.

At the Chicago Sun-Times, "Analysis: Runoff election is 'still Rahm's to lose' — and still a huge embarrassment."

Ontario Sex Ed Curriculum

Video hat tip: The Other McCain, "You Had Me at ‘Pansexual’."

Plus, at the National Post, "Ontario’s new sex ed covers homosexuality, masturbation — and consent. Not everyone’s saying ‘yes’," and "Read Ontario’s new sex ed curriculum for yourself."

'Sex Trouble: Essays on Radical Feminism and the War Against Human Nature'

Here's Robert Stacy McCain's new book:

Radical feminism has declared war on human nature. Feminists assert that everything most people think of as normal and natural about sex -- including basic ideas about what it means to be male and female -- is oppressive to women. Award-winning journalist Robert Stacy McCain examines these theories and warns that feminism's radical ideas about "equality" could destroy our civilization.

This is cool. Buy the book.

3 Jihad Wannabes Arrested in Plot to Join Islamic State, Kill Obama

The FBI can't stop every one of these homegrown terror plots. One of these days the jihad wannabes are going to get lucky and pull off a major attack.

At iOTW Report, "3 NYC men arrested after plotting to join ISIS, kill Obama."

And at Blazing Cat Fur, "Two Uzbeks and a Kazakhistani walk into a bar."



More at the Los Angeles Times, "3 planned to kill in U.S. if unable to join Islamic State, FBI says."

And at CNN, "FBI: Three men attempted to join ISIS."

ADDED: From the Federal Bureau of Investigation, "Three Brooklyn Residents Charged with Attempt and Conspiracy to Provide Material Support to ISIL." (Via Memeorandum.)

The Science Is Settled: Yes, Leftists Are Less Patriotic

Heh.

From Rich Lowry, at National Review (with the headline above snagged from Instapundit), "Yes, Liberals Are Less Patriotic."

Jose Alejandro Sanchez-Ramirez, Suspect in Oxnard Metrolink Crash, Previously Convicted of DUI

At LAT, "Pickup driver in Metrolink crash was previously convicted of DUI, traffic violations."

Plus, "Story So Far: Metrolink derailment."