Girl Gets Swats in Texas by Male Vice Principal

The parents signed a release, but I guess they never expected a male administrator to administer the spanking.

At London's Daily Mail, "Taylor Santos Spanking: Mother's fury as Texas schoolgirl left 'bruised and blistered' after male vice principal SPANKED her for cheating."

Everything's so damned politically correct.

Boy, that would be something if we had corporal punishment at my school. We don't do that in college, of course, but I got swats when I was in 7th grade. It's not something you forget very quickly, and I'd say it's an effective form of discipline. Society's all wimped out nowadays. It's ridiculous.

Deadly Attack in Libya Was Major Blow to C.I.A. Efforts

A front-page report at today's New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans has dealt the Central Intelligence Agency a major setback in its intelligence-gathering efforts at a time of increasing instability in the North African nation.

Among the more than two dozen American personnel evacuated from the city after the assault on the American mission and a nearby annex were about a dozen C.I.A. operatives and contractors, who played a crucial role in conducting surveillance and collecting information on an array of armed militant groups in and around the city.

“It’s a catastrophic intelligence loss,” said one American official who has served in Libya and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the F.B.I. is still investigating the attack. “We got our eyes poked out.”

Continue reading.

On the Red Carpet at the Emmys

Hey, London's Daily Mail's got your epic photo roundup from last night's show.

Smokin' hotties.

See: "Emmys 2012: Blue belles! Sofia Vergara, Heidi Klum and Nicole Kidman lead the glamour parade at Emmy Awards."

Obama Blows Off Israel Concerns Over Iranian Nukes as Just Some 'Noise That's Out There'

More from O's f-ked up interview last night on "60 Minutes."

Jennifer Rubin reports, "Obama’s ‘60 Minutes’ wipeout." And from Ed Morrissey, "Obama: Israel’s concerns on Iran “noise” I’m going to block out." (At Memeorandum.)

First Lady Michelle Obama Speaks to Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Dinner

I would have puked all over the guests.

At Twitchy, "Disgraceful: Michelle Obama trots out race card, says ‘Voting rights is movement of our era’."

And listen at the clip. Talk about "back in chains." You'd think blacks were never unshackled in the first place. Something else. Scroll forward to about 15:00 minutes for the "movement of our era" comments. For the first time in my adult life...

Damian Lewis Shocks Emmy Awards With Dramatic Win for Showtime Drama 'Homeland'

At the Los Angeles Times, "Big winners: 'Game Change,' 'Homeland,' 'Modern Family'."

Lots of coverage over there, so surf around a bit for additional reporting.

Obama Dismisses His Administration's Historic Middle East Meltdown as Just 'Bumps in the Road'

Is this hubris? Or he's just completely aloof?

I never cease to be amazed at this president. We're in the midst of one of the greatest foreign policy disasters in recent decades and it's just a "bump in the road" to this man. Unbelievable. Or not. The nonchalance in the face of such an enormous clusterf-k is completely par for the course. What an epic presidential asshole.

See Daniel Halper at the Weekly Standard, "Obama on Recent Middle East Violence: 'Bumps in the Road'" (via Memeorandum).

"Bumps in the road." Boy, callousness comes easy to "The One."

Ann Coulter on ABC's 'This Week': 'Democrats Dropping Blacks and Moving On to Hispanics'

See: "Ann Coulter: Democrats ‘Dropping the Blacks and Moving on to the Hispanics’."

Here's the Dior 'J'Adore' Clip From Last Night's Emmy Awards, Featuring Charlize Theron

This is the full 90-second film.

I didn't see much of the awards but still caught the ad running two times during the broadcast. A striking clip.

Obama's Failed Exit From Iraq

From Michael Gordon, at the New York Times, "In U.S. Exit From Iraq, Failed Efforts and Challenges" (at Memeorandum):

The request was an unusual one, and President Obama himself made the confidential phone call to Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president.

Marshaling his best skills at persuasion, Mr. Obama asked Mr. Talabani, a consummate political survivor, to give up his post. It was Nov. 4, 2010, and the plan was for Ayad Allawi to take Mr. Talabani’s place.

With Mr. Allawi, a secular Shiite and the leader of a bloc with broad Sunni support, the Obama administration calculated, Iraq would have a more inclusive government and would check the worrisome drift toward authoritarianism under Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

But Mr. Obama did not make the sale.

“They were afraid what would happen if the different groups of Iraq did not reach an agreement,” recalled Mr. Talabani, who turned down the request.

Mr. Obama has pointed to the American troop withdrawal last year as proof that he has fulfilled his promise to end the Iraq war. Winding down a conflict, however, entails far more than extracting troops.

In the case of Iraq, the American goal has been to leave a stable and representative government, avoid a power vacuum that neighboring states and terrorists could exploit and maintain sufficient influence so that Iraq would be a partner or, at a minimum, not an opponent in the Middle East.

But the Obama administration has fallen frustratingly short of some of those objectives.

The attempt by Mr. Obama and his senior aides to fashion an extraordinary power-sharing arrangement between Mr. Maliki and Mr. Allawi never materialized. Neither did an agreement that would have kept a small American force in Iraq to train the Iraqi military and patrol the country’s skies. A plan to use American civilians to train the Iraqi police has been severely cut back. The result is an Iraq that is less stable domestically and less reliable internationally than the United States had envisioned.

The story of these efforts has received little attention in a nation weary of the conflict in Iraq, and administration officials have rarely talked about them. This account is based on interviews with many of the principals, in Washington and Baghdad.

Continue reading.

And check JustOneMinute as well.

Yet another foreign policy disaster from President Clusterf-k. Will Americans even care? Probably not, if expert opinion on voter preferences is any clue. But as I argued previously, this year foreign policy is taking on an outsized importance, and history will judge this administration's failures.

I'll have more later...

Outrage After CNN Uses Journal of Ambassador Christopher Stevens as News Source

Anderson Cooper's initial mention of Ambassador Stevens' worries about al Qaeda can be seen at the link.

Some of the source material for that reporting came from the ambassador's personal journal, and there's a backlash, at the Wall Street Journal, "Family Protests CNN's Use of Slain Envoy's Journal." (Via Lonely Conservative and Memeorandum.)

But see Robert Stacy McCain, "Classic: State Department Attacks CNN for Reporting Inconvenient Facts on Libya." Read it all at the link. Robert defends CNN's reporting, as the information in the journal held "worldwide significance."

Check all the reporting at Memeorandum.

Bill Clinton: Romney's Money Advantage Could Swing Election

Maybe old Bill's trying to dampen O's momentum. You know, helping Romney helps Hillary, who might run in 2016.

Putting that aside, perhaps a Romney advertising blitz in the battleground states could tilt the scales come November. If we give credence to the conservative attacks on the polls as biased towards the Dems, then then a GOP money advantage could be decisive.

In any case, FWIW, at the Los Angeles Times, "Clinton: GOP money advantage could still swing the election":

Notice the added point about how the GOP could win if its so-called "voter suppression" efforts are successful. This later point is a big meme on the left. Elizabeth Drew draws out the full conspiracy theory at the New York Review, "Voting Wrongs" (via Memeorandum). And be sure to scroll down to the comments for a real hoot: "IT'S THE END OF DEMOCRACY, GAWD!!!"

Fox News' Chris Wallace Hammers Obama Advisor Robert Gibbs on Administration's Libya Lies (VIDEO)

If we get some media coverage with backbone over the next week or so, the administration's Libya debacle could have an impact on the presidential horse race. The White House lied on Libya. The more information that comes out the worse the administration's cover up appears.

Watch it. These people are stooges.

Newt Gingrich: Romney's Gotta Be Aggressive

Bryan Jacoutot flags this Newt Gingrich interview on CNN, "Newt offers Romney some good advice."

Mitt Romney Can Win

It seems weird for folks to have to say it, but Mitt can still win this.

Mort Zuckerman weighs in, at U.S. News, "Romney Can Still Overcome Obama's Dishonest, Divisive Campaign" (via Memeorandum):

The problem for Mitt Romney right now is that he has put his entire candidacy at risk to the point where he may not even qualify for the dismissive equation of Barack Obama that Marco Rubio formulated for the Republican faithful: "Our problem is not that he's a bad person. Our problem is that he's a bad president." Is Romney also "not a bad person, just a bad candidate"? With his "47 percent" remarks at a Republican fundraiser in May, he has given his opponent evidence to initiate a new line of attack.

Voters can forgive a candidate who stumbles in the heat of an election, trapped by "gotcha" questions from journalists, being quoted out of context in cunning TV attack commercials, and in the Twitter age, failing to appreciate that nothing that is said is secret anymore. We all know the game, and Romney has demonstrated that he is not perfect at this game.

The same can be said of President Obama. As a candidate, he ran a brilliantly smooth and targeted campaign four years ago, but even he misspoke, as they say, in what he thought was a private meeting of San Francisco liberals. When the polls suggested he wasn't appealing to rural voters, his response was to blame them for not seeing how different he was from the likes of Bill Clinton and George Bush, who had let them down. "You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," he said. "It's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustration."

This week, Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, dismissed the condescension as something from the mythic past, not to be compared to the furor over Romney's "47 percent" remark. Yet even now, fully armored and protected by four years of 24/7 press scrutiny and an army of verbal bodyguards, the president stumbles. "You didn't build that" still rankles the millions of taxpayers who have concluded that in making their way they've not had much help from the government and a lot of hindrance.

The trouble with Romney—and for Romney—is that he has etched an unappealing sketch of himself. For independent voters, he made too many flip-flops in policy to appease the right. Indeed, he had an uncanny knack for offering an easy target for his opposition: "I like being able to fire people," "I'm also unemployed," "I'm not concerned about the very poor," and "Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs." He seems to be living in another world, referring to middle income as being in the range of "$200,000 to $250,000," when the median income is more like $50,000. By the way, after four years of Obama's economic stewardship, that figure represents a dramatic decline of 10 percent and, in fact, is a strong point to Romney's case against the administration.

Such careless remarks have made it easy for the Obama campaign to get away with a program that pits "the millionaires and billionaires" against the people. It is a dishonest, divisive campaign. It's discouraging of enterprise. It does the opposite of uniting the country to deal with the current economic crisis.

Read it all at the link.

Romney still has a chance. It's going to take some focus and adjustments, but he still has a chance.

The Left vs. the Liberals

From Sean Wilentz, at the New York Review:

Michael Kazin’s new book about American leftists and their impact on the nation over the last two centuries presupposes, as its subtitle suggests, that this impact has been enormous. But Kazin is a judicious scholar without bluster, a professor of history at Georgetown, and coeditor of Dissent, and his assessments are carefully measured. Kazin concedes that radical leftists have often been out of touch with prevailing values, including those of the people they wish to liberate. He concludes that American radicals have done more to change what he calls the nation’s “moral culture” than to change its politics.

And yet, even as Kazin tries to avoid romanticizing the left, his book leaves unchallenged some conventional leftist conceptions about American politics and how change happens. These conventions begin with a presumption about who controls American political life, what C. Wright Mills called the “power elite,” an interlocking directorate of wealth and bureaucracy at the top. Kazin refers to this directorate interchangeably as the “establishment” or the “governing elite.” Unless challenged by radicals, this elite, in his view, is slow to right social wrongs; but without the support of the elite’s more enlightened elements, the radicals remain in the political wilderness.

Occasionally—as with the abolition of slavery, the rise of the New Deal, and the victories of the civil rights movement—momentous changes supported by radicals have indeed come to pass. Yet Kazin argues that the liberal components of the governing elite have supported major reforms strictly in order to advance purposes of their own. Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans, he writes, embraced emancipation only halfway through the Civil War, when it became clear that doing so “could speed victory for the North” and save the Union, their true goal. Franklin D. Roosevelt endorsed labor’s rights only when he needed to court labor’s votes.

Even when they are successful, Kazin writes, the radicals—“decidedly junior partners in a coalition driven by establishment reformers”—end up shoved aside as the liberals enact their more limited programs and take all of the credit. Prophets without honor, the leftists return to the margins where they and later radicals dream new and bigger dreams until another social movement jars the establishment.

Some radical historians—most famously the late Howard Zinn—have described this pattern as a chronicle of thoroughgoing oppression. In their view, the reforms initiated by radicals have practically always turned into swindles, orchestrated by clever rulers to preserve and even reinforce their power. Kazin, who also despairs about the current state of the left, has a more positive view of liberal reformers and their reforms: the Emancipation Proclamation and the Voting Rights Act, he insists, were important political advances and not establishment ruses. But a basic pattern still holds for Kazin as it does for Zinn: radicals challenge the privileged; liberals co-opt them, claiming the glory. In effect liberals are the enemies of fundamental political change.

Most of American Dreamers consists of crisp and useful summaries of nearly four decades’ worth of historical research about American radicals and radical movements, including Kazin’s own work on the amorphous populist strain in American politics. For Kazin, the left consists of anyone who has sought to achieve, in his words, “a radically egalitarian transformation of society.” The definition embraces an enormous array of spokesmen and causes, and Kazin’s account runs from the abolitionists and workingmen radicals of the Jacksonian era through a succession of socialists, women’s suffragists, Greenwich Village bohemians, and civil rights protesters, down to today’s left-wing professoriat.

There's a lot more at the link.

If the left consists of folks looking for "a radical egalitarian transformation of society," one might think Barack Obama would fit the bill. But as the essay points out, Kazin treats Obama as a mainstream centrist Democrat.

That will be an interesting question in the years and decades ahead, the degree of Obama's left-wing radicalism. But read the whole thing. According to Wilentz's thesis, traditional anti-Communist social democrats have contributed much more toward that radical transformation that Kazin hopes to achieve than he's able to recognize. And for historians the key will be to sort out exactly what kind of Democrat this president is. He's not a neo-liberal in the Bill Clinton mold, and indeed, in ideological pedigree Obama's way more radical than President Lyndon Johnson ever was, even if he fails in achieving as lasting change as the great Texas Democrat did. But we could have four more years of this president, and as a lame duck he could tear off the mask and govern from the full-throated ideological radicalism that his upbringing and pedigree indicate. He promised a radical transformation, and he's off to a damn good start, to the detriment of liberty and traditional decency of the American political system.

President Obama Won't Explain Why Libya Consulate Wasn't Better Protected

President Clusterf-k, via Buzzfeed:

The Left is All About Hate

From Ron Radosh, "Why There Cannot Be a Decent Left: An Answer to Richard Landes":

Last week, I wrote a column challenging Professor Richard Landes of Boston University to respond to the critique I wrote of his own arguments against Judith Butler. In that article, I argued that well-meaning men of the Left like Prof. Landes should give up trying to tell people like Butler that the reasons for their hostility to Israel contradict the humanist values of the Left. I argued that it is a fool’s errand trying to save the Left from itself; that in today’s world, what defines being on the Left are precisely the kind of positions Landes and others disdain....

I discussed Landes’ argument with my friend David Horowitz, and he e-mailed me a thoughtful response with which I mainly concur. Horowitz writes:

The distinction he makes between a demotic Left and a revolutionary Left is fairy dust. Yes there have been and still are a handful of decent but impotent people on the Left whose political weight is non-existent. Whatever happened to the Euston Manifesto? What are the leftwing publications, organizations, recognized spokesmen who are defending Jews and Christians and even gays and women against the Islamo-Nazis? Were the same even calling them Nazis, which is what they are (and yes, the Nazis themselves were leftists)?

There is a fundamental snobbery and arrogance evident in the postures of the so-called demotic mini-Left. The leftists actually have a monopoly on all the values that we associate with human decency, equality, liberty, etc. But these values were actually instituted and made into a global force by conservatives — American conservatives who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and created a political system to make those values real. Judith Butler doesn’t act out of good intentions. She acts out of the same emotion that motivates the Left generally, which is hate. Henry James described them all in describing the feminist heroine of his novel The Bostonians: “It was the usual things of life that filled her with silent rage, which was natural enough, inasmuch as to her vision almost everything that was usual was iniquitous. … The most secret, the most sacred hope of her nature was that she might some day … be a martyr and die for something.” Or as Marx — who is the inspiration for all leftists — put it: “Everything that exists deserves to perish.” That is the true voice of leftism. What the demotic mini-Left is about is sentimentality.andes and others disdain.

Continue reading.

Pat Condell: We Don't Give a Damn About Your Islamic Outrage

Via Linkmaster Smith:

PREVIOUSLY: "Egypt's Mohamed Morsi Dictates U.S. Foreign Policy to the Obama White House."

Egypt's Mohamed Morsi Dictates U.S. Foreign Policy to the Obama White House

They say that voters don't vote foreign policy. In presidential elections pocketbook issues dominate, and especially in a year like this. And so far, it's not clear that the Republicans have won over the electorate on the jobs crisis (so we might be stuck with another four years of this Obama-Democrat calamity). But there's a lot more on our collective plate this year, and that's the standing of the United States as the continued leader of the free world. The evidence on the Libya attack is so overwhelming now that the White House can no longer cover it up. And we know that the Obama administration's foreign policy toward the Arab world has failed, our relations with and standing in the Muslim world has literally exploded in great balls of fire before our eyes. And the kick in the teeth is still to come when Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi meeets with President Obama to lay down the law on how the United States is to deal with the Middle East. I hope Obama's been practicing his bow, because he's going to be bending low before the Muslim Brotherhood chief, deeper than any head of state to which he's kowtowed thus far. Americans need to take a good hard look at what's going down and then ask themselves if 2012 isn't one of those elections in which history shall be the final judge. Obama promised a fundamental transformation in 2008. He's kept his word and continues to deliver the goods, bringing down Uncle Sam every step of the way.

At the New York Times, "Egypt’s New Leader Spells Out Terms for U.S.-Arab Ties":

CAIRO — On the eve of his first trip to the United States as Egypt’s new Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi said the United States needed to fundamentally change its approach to the Arab world, showing greater respect for its values and helping build a Palestinian state, if it hoped to overcome decades of pent-up anger.

A former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mr. Morsi sought in a 90-minute interview with The New York Times to introduce himself to the American public and to revise the terms of relations between his country and the United States after the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, an autocratic but reliable ally.

He said it was up to Washington to repair relations with the Arab world and to revitalize the alliance with Egypt, long a cornerstone of regional stability.

If Washington is asking Egypt to honor its treaty with Israel, he said, Washington should also live up to its own Camp David commitment to Palestinian self-rule. He said the United States must respect the Arab world’s history and culture, even when that conflicts with Western values.

And he dismissed criticism from the White House that he did not move fast enough to condemn protesters who recently climbed over the United States Embassy wall and burned the American flag in anger over a video that mocked the Prophet Muhammad.

“We took our time” in responding to avoid an explosive backlash, he said, but then dealt “decisively” with the small, violent element among the demonstrators.

“We can never condone this kind of violence, but we need to deal with the situation wisely,” he said, noting that the embassy employees were never in danger.

Mr. Morsi, who will travel to New York on Sunday for a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, arrives at a delicate moment. He faces political pressure at home to prove his independence, but demands from the West for reassurance that Egypt under Islamist rule will remain a stable partner.

Mr. Morsi, 61, whose office was still adorned with nautical paintings that Mr. Mubarak left behind, said the United States should not expect Egypt to live by its rules.

“If you want to judge the performance of the Egyptian people by the standards of German or Chinese or American culture, then there is no room for judgment,” he said. “When the Egyptians decide something, probably it is not appropriate for the U.S. When the Americans decide something, this, of course, is not appropriate for Egypt.”

He suggested that Egypt would not be hostile to the West, but would not be as compliant as Mr. Mubarak either.

“Successive American administrations essentially purchased with American taxpayer money the dislike, if not the hatred, of the peoples of the region,” he said, by backing dictatorial governments over popular opposition and supporting Israel over the Palestinians.

He initially sought to meet with President Obama at the White House during his visit this week, but he received a cool reception, aides to both presidents said. Mindful of the complicated election-year politics of a visit with Egypt’s Islamist leader, Mr. Morsi dropped his request.

Well, yeah. Bowing, in the White House, before the leader of the Arab terrorist world might not have gone over too well with the American public. That's something that even the Obama-enabling media wouldn't be able to conceal.

Things are not right in the world. There has never been as much groveling in our foreign policy, and now a two-bit terrorist lackey is dictating America's foreign policy on the Middle East. It's a disgrace of epic proportions, the mother of all clusterf-ks. May Americans take notice, for the survival of the republic is in their hands.

More at Big Government, "Obama to Condemn Christian Filmmaker Before United Nations" (via Memeorandum).

PREVIOUSLY: "David Horowitz on Libya Attack: 'One of the Most Disgraceful Moments in the History of the American Presidency...'"

RELATED: From the Western Center for Journalism, "Egypt’s New President Keeps Useful Idiot Obama On Short Muslim Brotherhood Leash."

IMAGE CREDIT: The Looking Spoon.