Conversion Therapy With Amit Freidman!

Well, perhaps we've had enough coverage of the "intersex" youth radicals and the backdoor boogie brothers for the day. Here's some Amit Friedman for those looking to upgrade on that lifestyle action:

More Amit here: "Blogger Angry White Dude Announces That He Believes in the Sanctity of Marriage Between One Man and One Hot, Sexy Woman."

Here's That James Yeager 'I'm Going to Start Killing People' Video

Here's the abbreviated clip below, not including the "I'm going to start killing" people warning.

HuffPo has the rest of it, "Tactical Response CEO Threatens To 'Start Killing People' Over Possible Obama Gun Measure (VIDEO)." And check the response from the batshit crazy progressives at Memeorandum.

Mika Brzezinski Slams Joe Scarborough as 'Chauvinistic'

Well, maybe it's good for the ratings, but Mika's way out there on this one:

ICYMI: "Oops! Obama Cabinet May Not Meet Administration's Own Diversity Standards."

Five Facts About Guns, Schools, and Violence

From Nick Gillespie, at Reason.tv:

Oops! Obama Cabinet May Not Meet Administration's Own Diversity Standards

It's the left's war on women, unless folks have forgotten.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Obama Cabinet may not meet his own diversity standards":

Where's that binder full of women now?
— Melissa Joan Hart (@MelissaJoanHart) January 10, 2013

WASHINGTON — Wednesday's "photo of the day" on the White House website showed an unusual sight in Oval Office history — the president surrounded by top advisors, only half of whom are white men.

The picture seemed calculated to counter criticism that President Obama's new set of Cabinet appointees so far all are white and male.

Obama is expected to name his chief of staff, Jacob Lew, to lead the Treasury Department. Further compounding the diversity problem, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton plans to leave the administration soon, and Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis announced Wednesday that she was resigning.

Following Solis' decision, three Cabinet officials quickly spread the word that they planned to stay, at least for now: Eric H. Holder Jr., the first black attorney general; Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius; and Veterans Affairs chief Eric K. Shinseki, who is Japanese American.

But the concerns still hover over the president as he attempts to craft a team that lives up to the diversity standards of his first term. Aides say Obama raised the point himself after United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice took herself out of the running for secretary of State.

Obama places a high value on a team with a variety of experience and knowledge, aides say. More than 40% of the president's appointees have been women, according to administration officials, and the gender breakdown on the White House staff is 50-50.

"This president is committed to diversity," said Jay Carney, Obama's press secretary. "Look at the record. It is a vast improvement" from previous administrations.

Still, Obama's first round of appointments has been striking in its homogeneity. This week he nominated former Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel to serve as secretary of Defense and anti-terrorism advisor John Brennan to lead the CIA. Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) is slated to succeed Clinton at the State Department.

Lew is white, as are two leading candidates to fill his position: Washington lawyer Ron Klain, former chief of staff to the vice president; and Denis McDonough, a deputy national security advisor. The third is Nancy-Ann DeParle, a deputy chief of staff and a specialist on healthcare issues.

The New York Times noted the phenomenon in a story Wednesday accompanied by an image of Obama that was released recently in a collection of 2012 photographs. In it, Obama faces a semicircle of 11 advisors — 10 of them men, eight of whom are white. The only woman, senior advisor Valerie Jarrett, is almost completely obscured.

Aides complained that the photo wasn't representative. They prefer the day's whitehouse.gov photo, showing an Oval Office meeting involving Jarrett, DeParle and White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is a leading candidate to be attorney general one day.

And Rice, who as U.N. ambassador sits with the Cabinet, is a contender for national security advisor at some point in Obama's second term.

Carney urged critics not to judge the diversity of Obama's appointees too quickly.

Oh no, we wouldn't want to judge too quickly. That would horrible, just HORRIBLE!!

More at Twitchy, "Melissa Joan Hart: ‘Where’s that binder full of women now?’"

Yes, Homosexuality's a Lifestyle Choice

Well, since everybody's all fired up about homosexuals, "gay rights," and inclusion, let's just be clear about this, okay.

From Robert Oscar Lopez, at American Thinker, "Yes, gay is a choice. Get over it":

According to Peter Schmidt in the Chronicle of Higher Education, yet another individual working in higher education has been demolished for saying the wrong thing about homosexuality.  The basis on which to define people as "anti-gay" has, however, taken a turn to the absurd (and eerie).

Unlike Angela McCaskill, who was nearly fired from Gallaudet University for signing a petition on gay marriage, Crystal Dixon of the University of Toledo was fired for writing an editorial in a local newspaper.  She referred to Exodus and mentioned people who chose to leave the gay lifestyle.


For this column I will stick to the gay male angle, since I have but 1,200 words.  Even if we accepted, for argument's sake (which I do not accept), that McCaskill was "anti-gay" because she signed a petition, the case against Dixon is based purely on wild assumptions about sex.  To fire Dixon, one must accept that gay men cannot stop themselves from having anal sex or engaging in fellatio.  Without anal sex or fellatio, it would seem that a gay couple is tough to distinguish from roommates who like to kiss each other once in a while.

These assumptions bestialize and infantilize gay men.  While I have tired of penning editorials about gay controversies, the situation is dire.  I feel compelled to write a column once again emphasizing a basic reality: gay sex is a choice.  Nobody lacks the power to refrain from having gay sex.  Get.  Over.  It.

Dixon said that gays had the choice to leave the lifestyle (in other words, stop engaging in anal sex and fellatio).  According to her detractors, such was tantamount to being anti-gay.  Her detractors are following the lead of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which lists "conversion therapy" as a hate crime.

Scroll through the comments section of any article about these issues.  You will see a roll call of gays and pro-gay supporters, issuing confident testimonials that nobody has ever changed from gay to straight.  (It's fine to change from straight to gay, according to these tribunes, because that's simply coming out of the closet.)  They allude, at various times, to Simon LeVay's 1991 brain study or problematic decades-old research into identical twins, if not warped evolutionary logic from ideologues like David Barash or anecdotes about someone they know.  The research has spoken!  Anyone who says you can change your sexuality is a lying, right-wing bigot!  To which I say the following:

Does anybody who uses the term LGBT remember the "B" in that God-forsaken acronym?  Hello?  There are bisexuals.  I am one of them.  Why include us in these categories if you think we don't exist?

Dating and marriage don't magically happen, like going to the bathroom or breathing.  They take conscious choices -- where do you hang out?  What are you looking for?  What type of partner shares your goals?  Whether to hang out in gay clubs or straight clubs makes a huge difference; these are completely different cultures.  We choose the life we want to live (or leave, for that matter).

Even gay men still choose which sex acts they commit.  I hate to admit this, but I worked as a housekeeper in a gay sex club in Manhattan in the early 1990s, when I was desperate for work.  I witnessed, literally, thousands of men having sex in the open, with me having to go clean up after them.  Very rarely (thank the Lord) did they engage in anal sex.

I have known, personally, scores of gay male couples that barely have any sex at all after they have been together for a while.  (They start preferring Monday Night Football and hitting the sack early.)  A large portion of the sex club patrons came to watch and then went home.  If "Gs" can choose what kind of sex to have, they can also choose not to have sex at all.  It's a choice.

In the lurid job I held in a Manhattan sex club, I learned some other things as well.  Many men get involved in the gay scene for unexpected reasons.  Many of them want fast and inexpensive sex, sometimes because they have trouble with women.  They can go to a bathhouse or a cruising zone and pick up men without paying the fortune they'd have to spend on a prostitute.

Moreover, a lot of times I saw people who were addicted to drugs and addicted to anonymous sex; the two compulsions were linked somehow, and there was no way for such people to quit their addiction without quitting their homosexuality.  These folks often ended up on the AA circuit or joining a church and getting baptized.

Lastly, a lot of men came to the gay sex scene in order to engage in bondage and sadomasochism, because they were raped as boys.  The aftereffects of sexual assault, as we know from studying female rape victims, are complicated and often lead people to repeat or recreate the assault scene.  Many of these mentally scarred men did not even have sex in sex clubs, even though they sought male partners to enact their eroticized simulations.

There's still more at the link.

Yeah, it's a lifestyle ---- and you better get with the program or you will be destroyed!

PREVIOUSLY: "L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. — Sexual Minorities Gone Wild."

L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. — Sexual Minorities Gone Wild

At the New York Times, "Generation LGBTQIA":

@ampowerblog Good Lord! Guess kids nowadays have to try a lot harder to be considered a weirdo.
— Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) January 10, 2013

STEPHEN IRA, a junior at Sarah Lawrence College, uploaded a video last March on We Happy Trans, a site that shares “positive perspectives” on being transgender.

In the breakneck six-and-a-half-minute monologue — hair tousled, sitting in a wood-paneled dorm room — Stephen exuberantly declared himself “a queer, a nerd fighter, a writer, an artist and a guy who needs a haircut,” and held forth on everything from his style icons (Truman Capote and “any male-identified person who wears thigh-highs or garters”) to his toy zebra.

Because Stephen, who was born Kathlyn, is the 21-year-old child of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, the video went viral, garnering nearly half a million views. But that was not the only reason for its appeal. With its adrenalized, freewheeling eloquence, the video seemed like a battle cry for a new generation of post-gay gender activists, for whom Stephen represents a rare public face.

Armed with the millennial generation’s defining traits — Web savvy, boundless confidence and social networks that extend online and off — Stephen and his peers are forging a political identity all their own, often at odds with mainstream gay culture.

If the gay-rights movement today seems to revolve around same-sex marriage, this generation is seeking something more radical: an upending of gender roles beyond the binary of male/female. The core question isn’t whom they love, but who they are — that is, identity as distinct from sexual orientation.

But what to call this movement? Whereas “gay and lesbian” was once used to lump together various sexual minorities — and more recently “L.G.B.T.” to include bisexual and transgender — the new vanguard wants a broader, more inclusive abbreviation. “Youth today do not define themselves on the spectrum of L.G.B.T.,” said Shane Windmeyer, a founder of Campus Pride, a national student advocacy group based in Charlotte, N.C.

Part of the solution has been to add more letters, and in recent years the post-post-post-gay-rights banner has gotten significantly longer, some might say unwieldy. The emerging rubric is “L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.,” which stands for different things, depending on whom you ask.

Well, live and let live I guess.

Either that, or be destroyed by the homosexual left's Star Chamber.

Reforming U.S. Drone Strike Policies

An interesting piece from Micah Zenko, at Foreign Policy, "Target Window."

Zenko's an expert on these systems, apparently, but he still falls into the trap of fingering the Bush administration as the bad guy in the evolving regime of drone warfare. He corrects himself, implicitly, with this passage correctly putting the onus on the Obama administration for a public reconciliation of drone policy in line with both U.S. interests and values:

If the United States hopes to have normative influence on how others use drones -- and administration officials repeatedly claim that they do -- then U.S. leadership must provide a legal framework, a coherent and plausible explanation of the scope of legitimate targets, and a rationale for how targeted killings are coordinated with broader foreign policy objectives. The problem is that the administration's public articulation of its drone strike policies -- used only against specific senior al Qaeda officials who pose an imminent threat to the U.S. homeland -- are fundamentally at odds with how they are actually employed, such as the use of signature strikes against suspected militants predominantly engaged in domestic insurgencies.

To address these issues, the Obama administration should bring its drone strike practices in line with its stated policies by: exclusively limiting its targeted killings to the leadership of al Qaeda or those with a direct operational role in past or ongoing terrorist plots; immediately ending the practice of signature strikes, or publically explaining how they plausibly meet the principles of distinction and proportionality; and reviewing the current policy whereby the executive authority for drone strikes is split between the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command, which have different legal authorities, degrees of permissible transparency, and oversight.

RTWT.

The Homosexual Star Chamber Exacts Its Latest Penalty

I'm sure if they could they'd have had this guy executed for heresy.

At the New York Times, "Louie Giglio, Inaugural Pastor, Criticized for Antigay Sermon":

WASHINGTON — The pastor whom President Obama has chosen to deliver the benediction at his inauguration this month delivered a sermon in the 1990s in which he called on fellow Christians to fight the “aggressive agenda” of the gay rights movement and advocated “the healing power of Jesus” as “the only way out of a homosexual lifestyle.”

Think Progress, a liberal blog affiliated with the Center for American Progress Action Fund, reported Wednesday afternoon on the sermon delivered by the Rev. Louie Giglio, an Atlanta minister and founder of the Passion Conferences, a group dedicated to uniting college students in worship and prayer.

The speech, “In Search of a Standard — Christian Response to Homosexuality,” can be heard on Discipleship Library, a Christian training Web site.

In it, Mr. Giglio cites Scripture in saying that homosexuality “is sin in the eyes of God, and it is sin in the word of God.” He warned against gay rights. “That movement is not a benevolent movement,” he said. “It is a movement to seize by any means necessary the feeling and the mood of the day, to the point where the homosexual lifestyle becomes accepted as a norm in our society.”

Inaugural officials did not respond to a request for comment, and a spokeswoman for Mr. Giglio was not available.

Wayne Besen, founder of Truth Wins Out, which fights antigay sentiment, said: “It is imperative that Giglio clarify his remarks and explain whether he has evolved on gay rights, like so many other faith and political leaders. It would be a shame to select a preacher with backward views on L.G.B.T. people at a moment when the nation is rapidly moving forward on our issues.”

"Backward views." Get that? If you're not down with the extremist, morally bankrupt progressive homosexual agenda, you're "backward."

I dare say this country is going backward straight to hell. And not a single conservative is blogging this story at Memeorandum. You'd think that folks on the right had seen a ghost, and it's the phantom of their own social-conservative past.

My god this country is doomed.

Obama Administration Takes Action on Guns

An executive order. WTF?

That is exactly in the freakin' Obama administration's style.

At WSJ, "Biden Says White House May Bypass Congress Over Guns":

WASHINGTON—President Barack Obama is considering taking executive action to stem gun violence, Vice President Joe Biden said Wednesday, suggesting that some federal gun regulations will change even if support doesn't materialize in Congress.

"The president is going to act," Mr. Biden said, as he opened multiple days of meetings with interest groups as part of his assignment from Mr. Obama to draw up proposals for responding to the elementary-school shootings in Newtown, Conn. White House officials said no decisions had been made about what steps the administration would take.

Mr. Biden met Wednesday with gun-safety advocacy groups, as well as victims and survivors of shootings. He also made calls to governors, mayors and other local officials.

The vice president said in the private meeting he hoped to deliver recommendations to the president as soon as next week, a participant said. The meeting yielded consensus on calls for improved background checks and on bans on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines, according to the participant.

Mr. Biden is likely to face resistance to most of those ideas on Thursday, when he is due to meet with the National Rifle Association, the nation's most powerful gun lobby, and other gun-rights groups. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., WMT -0.03% the country's largest seller of guns, initially said it couldn't meet Thursday with the vice president but on Wednesday said it would send a representative.

There is little sign lawmakers and advocacy groups on either side of the debate are willing to alter their stances, though room for agreement may exist in some areas, such as requiring states to increase their submission of mental-health records to the background-check system used to screen people buying guns from federally licensed dealers.

Mike Hammond, legislative counsel for Gun Owners of America, which wasn't invited to meet with Mr. Biden, said he didn't expect Thursday's meeting with gun-rights groups to be constructive. "They are being summoned" and will be "lectured," he said.

The NRA declined to comment on what it expects will happen at the meeting. The organization, which last month called for a national campaign to place armed security in the nation's schools, sent a letter to members of Congress last week saying it planned to be a constructive voice in the debate while emphasizing that "gun bans do not work."

One person who has taken part in several of Mr. Biden's meetings said one issue has been what role the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives should have. A law-enforcement official involved in the talks said the administration has questioned whether the ATF should be given a new mission or moved into another agency.

Some states are trying to advance their own measures. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo proposed broad changes to the state's gun laws Wednesday, putting New York on track to be the first to revamp its gun laws following the Newtown shootings.

New York already has some of the nation's strictest gun laws, including an assault-weapons ban, but Mr. Cuomo directed his calls for change at so-called loopholes in the laws.

More at that top link. And also lots more at Memeorandum.

Plus, at Instapundit here and here, for starters.

And at The Blaze, "FOX’S ‘THE FIVE’ RETALIATES AGAINST GAWKER’S NYC GUN OWNER LIST BY AIRING FOUNDER’S PHONE NUMBER."

More at RealClearPolitics, "'Krauthammer: Gun Confiscation "Unconstitutional And Would Cause Insurrection In The Country'."

BONUS: At the Right Scoop, "Pat Caddell: ‘This country is on the verge of an explosion’."

I'll have more later...

Why Is GOP Defending Neoconservatism?

The headline at top is cribbed from RealClearPolitics' link to Paul Mulshine, at The New Jersey Star Ledger, "On Hagel, the Republicans protest a return to realism." And from the piece:

Did you hear what that liberal, left-wing commie Barack Obama is up to? Why, that pinko’s gone and picked a former Republican senator who’s a war hero as secretary of defense! Can you imagine anything more un-American than that?

Sorry if I sounded like a Fox News commentator for a second there. But that’s the tone the Fox News crowd has adopted in light of the nomination of Chuck Hagel for defense secretary. An online poll showed that Fox fans were spewing this nonsense back at the talking heads by a 10-1 margin.

If this sort of thing were confined to the cartoon show that is Fox News, that would be okay. But the leaders of the Republican Party are mouthing the same sort of stuff. All the usual suspects are denouncing Hagel for being insufficiently enthusiastic about continuing the mindless meddling in the Mideast that began with George W. Bush and continued through Obama’s first term.

With his nomination of Hagel, Obama seems determined to make a long-overdue break with that past and return to realism in foreign policy. Republicans used to boast of being realists. But the term became a dirty word in the years when Bush was employing the U.S. military as a sort of armed wing of the League of Women Voters in his haste to spread democracy.

Bush’s father saw things differently, as did Republican presidents before him. Richard Nixon embraced the realism of Henry Kissinger. Gerald Ford and Bush 41 both appointed as national security adviser a Kissinger disciple by the name of Brent Scowcroft.

In the run-up to the Iraq War in 2002, Scowcroft penned a piece for the Wall Street Journal headlined "Don’t attack Saddam." In it, he noted that an invasion "would have to be followed by a large-scale, long-term military occupation." For good measure, he added that an invasion "could well destabilize Arab regimes in the region" and "could even swell the ranks of the terrorists."

Hagel was saying the same sort of thing around the same time while a senator. "I think it would be unwise and dangerous if the United States would move unilaterally against Iraq," he said. "My fundamental question is, ‘What happens next? So if you take Saddam Hussein out, who governs? Do you let Iraq be fractured into many components?’ "

All of those dreadful results occurred right on schedule. Yet the realists get no respect from their fellow Republicans to this day. Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina called the Hagel pick "an in-your-face nomination" by Obama. And on a Sunday talk show, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wondered aloud whether Hagel would stand up to questioning concerning "the importance of having a robust military."

McConnell said that right after he blasted "the president and the Democratic majority in the Senate’s unwillingness to cut spending." But it’s the Republicans who oppose cutting the biggest discretionary outlay. That’s military spending, and reducing it would not be difficult once we returned to realism.

There's still more at the link, especially the part where Mulshine labels Hagel a "paleo-conservative" (a meaningless term with regard to Israel, as the so-called "paleos" by default just make common cause with the Israel-hating left).

Okay. Where to begin? For one thing, Mulshine might have mentioned the fact that Hagel voted for the Iraq deployment before he turned against it. I can't speak for other despised "neoconservatives," but more than anything else I hate rank opportunists like the craven former Senator Hagel. That (renounced) vote alone makes him no different from the avoid-force-at-all-costs Democrats who first voted for war then pushed to cut-and-run from Iraq from 2003 onward. This is the left's "great betrayal," a stab-in-the-back to America's troops that's unforgivable.

Second, today's realists aren't of the cold, calculating Nixon-Kissinger mold of the 1970s, or of the advisers to President Bush 41. In 1973 the Nixon administration went to DefCon III on the news of possible Soviet intervention on the side of the Arab states against Israel in the Yom Kippur War. That's the last thing that today's Democrat realists would do. Indeed, it's not the "GOP defending neoconservatism." It's the GOP defending Israel as an independent state after this administration has demonstrated its readiness to cast Jerusalem to the wolves.

I've written about today's "realists" many times, most tellingly Harvard political scientist Stephen Walt. Here's his post yesterday on the Hagel nomination, with all his classic odiousness regarding U.S. support for Israel, "What the Hagel fight does and doesn't mean":

...the real question with the fight over Hagel is whether it is the beginning of a thaw in foreign policy discourse inside the American establishment. Until the Hagel case, ambitious foreign policy wannabes understood that one either had to be completely silent about the "special relationship" with Israel or one had to be an open and vocal supporter. The merest hint that you had independent thoughts on this matter would make you slightly suspect at best or provoke overt accusations that you were an anti-semite, effectively derailing any political ambitions you might have had. The result was an absurdly truncated debate in Washington, where one couldn't even talk about the role of the Israel lobby without getting smeared. Indeed, one couldn't even ask if unconditional U.S. support for Israel was in Israel's best interest, let alone America's, despite the growing evidence that its settlement policy was threatening its long-term future.

By making such ludicrous charges about Hagel, however, neoconservatives and other extremists made it clear just how nasty, factually ignorant, and narrow-minded they are, and how much they believed that the commitment to Israel ought to trump other foreign policy priorities. And it wasn't just the absurd claim that Hagel was anti-semitic; it was the bizarre suggestion that a key job requirement for the U.S. Secretary of Defense was a deep and passionate attachment to a foreign country. The attacks on Hagel triggered a long-overdue reaction from a remarkably wide circle -- including many staunch defenders of Israel -- who were clearly disgusted by the smear tactics and aren't willing to quail before them anymore.

Furthemore, as Peter Beinart noted yesterday, Hagel's appointment might also dilute the perceived need for policy wonks to seem hawkish and bellicose even when skepticism about the use of force is called for. While no dove, Hagel has been intelligently critical of sending young men and women into harm's way without a clear strategy and compelling national interest. His appointment might open up foreign policy debate to a much wider range of views, instead of the narrow-minded bellicosity that has prevailed since 9/11 (if not before).

It's too soon to tell how far-reaching this shift might be. No doubt Hagel's opponents will try to make him express his undying fidelity to Israel during his hearings, in an effort to restore the previous political orthodoxy. But it's a losing cause, especially when Israel itself is about to elect the most right-wing government in its history and when Americans of many political stripes are beginning to understand that the "special relationship" may in fact have become a form of assisted suicide. For the record, I hope that's not the case. Avoiding it will require the United States to be able to speak more honestly on this entire subject, and I hope the Hagel affair opens the door to a far more open, fact-based, and smear-free debate on the entire subject of U.S. foreign and defense policy, including our perenially hamstrung approach to the greater Middle East.

If the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy apparatus internally disliked Jews and, as some have claimed, were indifferent to Soviet human rights abuses against the Jews back in the day, they were nevertheless fierce defenders of the Jewish state, and put American foreign policy on the line to protect Israel's national security interests as the key to stability in the region. That's no longer the case among the so-called "realists" of today, as anyone who knows Professor Walt's repulsive anti-Israel bigotry will recall (see Eliot Cohen for a refresher, just in case, "Yes, It's Anti-Semitic").

The Hagel nomination is the epic battle ground for the competing visions of U.S. foreign and national security policy for the next four years and beyond. These are bad people, Hagel and his co-nominees at State and the CIA. Not just incompetent, but bad actors all around. See: "'They are all stupid people. Some friends said I shouldn't write this because it is a subjective judgment and sounds mean-spirited. But honest, it's true...'."

Enjoying Ben Shapiro's 'Bullies'

Picked up a copy yesterday and I'm into Chapter 3 so far. It's good. And I'm getting retweeted by the man Ben Shapiro himself. Cool.

Get yours here: Bullies: How the Left's Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences Americans.

Angelica Huston's Double Chin

I'm thinking, "And that's not a Photoshop?"

At London's Daily Mail, "Worried that you're turning into the double-chinned likes of Anjelica Huston? Here's how to lose that flabby face in just EIGHT weeks."

And no double chin at my 2010 #Bama Rose Bowl photo, but I better be careful. I might start slacking like somebody we know around here, LOL!

The Progressive Plan to Remake America

I doubt there's anything new here, except the revelation that a bunch of left-wing groups got together after the election to consolidate the already on-the-books program of fundamentally transforming America. We're smack dab in the middle of it.

But Maggie's Notebook has this, "NEA, SWA, NAACP, GreenPeace Meet to End Voter ID, End Filibuster – and GET BIG MONEY OUT OF POLITICS."

And communist Steve Hynd has more, at The Agonist, "The Democracy Initiative – smart organizing at last?" (Via Memeorandum.) Note that Hynd is a.k.a "Cernig" from the old Newshoggers blog --- the folks who cheered al Qaeda in Iraq using down syndrome women as suicide bombers. Hynd writes at The Agonist:

Such a pity it is being done for a President and party that are de facto the 1980s center-right, wouldn’t it be great if these people were also trying to build an actual party of the left too? Ah well, maybe – just a maybe - the Democracy Initiative will exert some of their undoubted clout to hauling both Obama and the Dems back leftwards a bit.

We're already tracking pretty far leftward, but that's not enough, obviously, for out-and-out communists.

Nicole Neal Rule 5

She just tweeted this out right now.

And she's on the cover of the FHM October 2012 issue.

More at That Dog's Blog, "Nicole Neal topless in photos from Nuts."

BONUS: Pirate's Cove, "If All You See…is the flag of one of the world’s most evil carbon polluters, you might just be a Warmist."

'And You Can Wear Your Jolly Roger...'

I've watched this about three times now, it's so funny. At 4:40 at the clip Alex Jones says to Piers Morgan, "You think you're a tough guy? Have me back on with a boxing ring here and I'll have on my red, white and blue and you can wear your Jolly Roger..." Boy that's some hilarious bluster. And as wrong as Morgan is on the gun issue, I give him credit for his enormous patience with this blowhard. I don't listen to Jones' show and I don't seek out InfoWars on YouTube. 9/11 trutherism ain't my style, although I can understand the guy's mass appeal. Be ready with a boatload of statistics and never let your interlocutor get a word in edgewise.

Robert Stacy McCain has more, "If ‘Crazy’ Were a Political Philosophy, Its Spokesman Would Be Alex Jones."

PREVIOUSLY: "Petition to Deport Piers Morgan."

MORE: At Memeorandum.

'They are all stupid people. Some friends said I shouldn't write this because it is a subjective judgment and sounds mean-spirited. But honest, it's true...'

From Barry Rubin's brutally devastating comments on Obama's foreign policy nominations, "The Four Horsemen of the American Foreign Policy Apocalypse":

I did a lot of soul-searching before writing my latest article, “After the Fall: What Do You Do When You Conclude America is (Temporarily or Permanently) Kaput?” Of course, I believed every word of it and have done so for a while. But would it depress readers too much? Would it just be too grim?

Maybe U.S. policy will just muddle through the next four years and beyond without any disasters. Perhaps the world will be spared big crises. Possibly the fact that there isn't some single big superpower enemy seeking world domination will keep things contained.

Perhaps that is true. Yet within hours after its publication I concluded that I hadn't been too pessimistic. The cause of that reaction is the breaking story that not only will Senator John Kerry be the new secretary of state; that not only will the equally reprehensible former Senator Chuck Hagel be secretary of defense, but that John Brennan, the president’s counterterrorism advisor, will become CIA chief.

About two years ago I joked that if Kerry would become secretary of state it was time to think about heading for that fallout shelter in New Zealand. This trio in power—which along with Obama himself could be called the four horseman of the Apocalypse for U.S. foreign policy—might require an inter-stellar journey....

-- They are all stupid people. Some friends said I shouldn’t write this because it is a subjective judgment and sounds mean-spirited. But honest, it’s true. Nobody would ever say that their predecessors—Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, and David Petraeus—were not intelligent and accomplished. But these guys are simply not in that category. Smart people can make bad judgments; regular people with common sense often make bad judgments less often. But stupid, arrogant people with terrible ideas are a disaster.

How to Waste a Decade in Afghanistan

From Frederick and Kimberly Kagan, at the Wall Street Journal. According to the authors the White House is looking to keep as few as 3,000 to 4,000 troops in Afghanistan after the 2014 withdrawal:

Has the president decided to cut his losses or does he actually think that the U.S. will have succeeded in Afghanistan at the end of his second term? Does it even matter?

Success in Afghanistan has always meant driving al Qaeda out and preventing it from returning. The U.S. cleared al Qaeda from the country in 2001-02 quickly, and with few forces. American efforts have since aimed at creating conditions in which Afghanistan will be able to keep al Qaeda out with limited international assistance. This part of the task has always been the most difficult. Yet it remains as vital today as it was in 2001. Failing at it means letting al Qaeda regain its footing in the land from which it launched the most devastating terror attack against the U.S. in history.

It might be comforting to imagine that killing Osama bin Laden and other key leaders has neutralized al Qaeda, or that the terror group is no longer seeking to return to Afghanistan when other theaters of jihad are available. But Ayman al Zawahiri has solidly replaced bin Laden at the helm, and other lieutenants have filled vacancies in the organization. Despite the dramatic expansion of al Qaeda franchises in Yemen, Somalia, North Africa and Syria since President Obama took office, the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region remains the headquarters of the global al Qaeda movement. It is also home to the largest concentration of regional and global Islamist terrorist organizations in the world.

The reasons are simple. Pakistan does not effectively govern, police or control a large area on its side of the border—and Afghan and international forces have been fighting hard to gain control of a larger area on the Afghan side that is also historically difficult for Kabul to control. The very concentration of terrorist groups in this area is itself a reason for them to remain there, where they can communicate and support one another easily and directly. They share logistics facilities, training areas, weapons factories and many other critical pieces of terrorist infrastructure that would be hard and costly to replicate elsewhere.

The U.S. has long recognized that some ungoverned space will remain in Afghanistan—and in Pakistan. One aim of America's efforts in Afghanistan has been to reduce the size of this terrorist-friendly area while making it difficult for terrorists to operate in what remains. The U.S. has pursued that aim by building an Afghan National Security Force tied both to a minimally functional Afghan government and to international forces over the long term.

The strategy was not to build an ANSF that could function without any international assistance. Creating a fully independent ANSF, if possible at all, would take decades. Even our European allies—France and Britain included—require significant American logistical and air support to conduct major operations. No one has ever imagined that the Afghan army would do better than the French.

For all of these reasons the Obama administration will no doubt promise that the U.S. will continue to provide assistance to the Afghan military in addition to continuing counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan. But the military reality is that we cannot conduct either mission at the force level the president is considering....

If a much-reduced U.S. force level is announced, Afghans will say that the Americans have abandoned their country. They will be right. With a drastically reduced U.S. presence, the Afghan government and army will fracture, warlords will begin fighting each other and the insurgents and terrorists in ungoverned spaces. The conditions will be ideal for al Qaeda's return.

That's failure. And it will matter.

Well, it won't matter to Obama.

He lied about his commitment to Afghanistan for crass political reasons. See: "Abandoning Afghanistan."

And flashback at AoSHQ, "Liberal Blogger Admits: We Claimed to Support 'The Good War' in Afghanistan as Political Strategy to Prove Our "Macho" Credentials; We Never Meant It."

Exactly. It was never a good war. These people are f-king depraved liars and hypocrites.

New Fears on Syria's Chemical Weapons

At Independent UK, "Britain and US fear Syrian chemical weapons could fall into the hands of extreme Islamist groups":

The prospect of Syria’s chemical arsenal falling into the hands of extremist Islamists among the rebels fighting the country’s bloody civil war is a matter of mounting concern for the West.

General Sir David Richards, the head of the British military, has raised his worries in Whitehall in recent weeks and there has been a series of meetings over the issue between European and American officials and governments in the region.

The possibility that President Bashar al-Assad may unleash such weapons was one of the key reasons given for the deployment this week of Nato Patriot missiles to the Turkish border.

At the end of last year Barack Obama warned that the use of chemical weapons would mean the Assad regime had crossed a ‘red line’ and must bear the consequences. The regime appeared to have stopped on its tracks in preparing such attacks and defence secretary Leon Panetta stated subsequently that the threat has been reduced.

Although the US and UK governments still hold that a beleaguered regime on its last legs may use weapons of mass destruction (WMD) there is also the clear danger of jihadist fighter getting possession of stockpiles. The Obama administration has prescribed the Al-Nusra Brigade, one of the strongest of the rebel groups and one which declares itself affiliated to al-Qa’ida, as a terrorist organisation.

An SAS team is believed to have attended as observers an exercise carried out by US and Jordanian special forces in preparation for any operation which may have to be undertaken to secure the stockpiles. Defence sources in London stated there are no plans at present to deploy British personnel for such a mission. ( please keep in this paragraph).

There is bound to be public scepticism about claims of the Syrian regime and WMDs after the exposure of similar false reports about Saddam Hussein’s arsenal used by the Bush and Blair administrations to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Western officials insist, however, that there is ample evidence that the Damascus regime has the means to carry out chemical warfare and also evidence, of a more limited nature , that it has a biological warfare programme. One cause of apprehension is that the regime’s command and control for WMDs have been severely damaged by casualties and defections.

More at that top link.

And see "'Chemical weapons were used on Homs': Syria's military police defector tells of nerve gas attack."

Banks Now Favor Short Sales Over Foreclosures

Well, my wife and I did a short sale. We needed new financing if we were going to be able to stay in our home but the value had depreciated so much no bank was going to finance us. We were approached by a young realtor who was specializing in short sales and we signed up. It took about three months but it went through. The main bummer has been losing our mortgage interest deductions, and some other related tax issues, which drove up our tax bill last year when we filed. But overall it worked out well.

In any case, see the Los Angeles Times, "Short sales in California surpass sales of foreclosed homes."