How Real is 'Homeland'?

This is great, at the Daily Beast:

CIA Agents: How Real Is 'Homeland?' http://t.co/Wad5yMHYx5 pic.twitter.com/OJJTUH9eeX

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) December 15, 2014

I See Charles C. Johnson's Struck a Nerve

Seen on Twitter:

Fuck @ChuckCJohnson and everything he stands for. http://t.co/bWC3UoZRWL

— Michael Mirasol (@flipcritic) December 15, 2014

Politico also had a write up as well.

'There are no lone wolves in the jihad war...'

From Pamela Geller, at Atlas Shrugs, "DEFENDING THE WEST: The Islamic propaganda offensive; Exclusive: Pamela Geller declares, ‘There are no lone wolves in the jihad war’":

Islamic supremacists and their leftwing lapddpgs didn’t even wait for the bodies to be counted in the latest jihad slaughter in Sydney before the propaganda putsch began — “fear of reprisals” (which never happen), “islamophobia” and “backlash-o-phobia.”

I wrote this column this past weekend — before a Muslim terrorist in Sydney, Australia  stormed a popular Chocolate shop/cafe. It rings truer still now, in the wake of the Sydney jihad bloodshed.

RTWT.

Plus, "Photos: LOOK at the Faces of the Victims of #SydneySeige Jihad Terrorist."

Sydney Hostage Siege

Memeorandum has a huge roundup.

And at the link, from the New York Times, "Sydney Hostage Siege Ends With Gunman and 2 Captives Dead as Police Storm Cafe."

And see Andrew Bolt, at Sydney's Daily Telegraph, "Sydney hostages forced to hold Islamic flag," and "Hostage taker with Islamic flag gives Wendy Bacon a pleasant vision of a green future."

More, "Gunman and two hostages killed."



Plus, see James Taranto on the left's wet response down in Sydney, "‘He Must Have Loved Ones, Too’: Pathological altruism in Sydney."

Washington's Disfunction Is the New Normal

Hey, fine by me.

I'm looking for Republican control of the both the executive and the legislature in 2017. Then we can finally begin to reverse the collectivist damage suffered during the Obama interregnum.

From Dan Balz, at the Washington Post, "In Washington, political dysfunction and grim outlooks are the new normal":

The November elections brought significant changes to Washington and to many states. What they did not produce was any greater sense of optimism on the part of the public about the state of American politics. If anything, they produced the opposite.

A new report from the Pew Research Center lays out the evidence in clear and unrelenting detail. The survey of attitudes at the close of the year offers a reminder to political leaders, and especially prospective presidential candidates, that among their biggest challenges ahead will be finding ways to begin to restore faith and confidence in the political system.

Four in 5 Americans say the country is more politically divided than in the past. Although that is no worse than it was two years ago, it is far gloomier than it used to be. Scroll back to the early days of President Obama’s tenure in the White House, and the differences between then and now are particularly stark.

During George W. Bush’s second term as president, a period of rancor and division because of the Iraq war, almost 7 in 10 Americans said the country was more divided than it had been.

After Obama’s election in 2008, there was a brief thaw in attitudes. At that moment, as many people said the country was not more divided than in the past as said it was, hardly a consensus that the country was heading toward a period of greater unity, but at least a sign of optimism.

That disappeared quickly. Today, perceptions of political division are even more negative than during the worst days under Bush, and there is minimal confidence that things will change for the better anytime soon.

Just 1 in 5 surveyed by Pew say they think the country will be less divided in five years than it is today. More than a third say the country will be even more divided, and the rest say it will be no different.

Seven in 10 say the failure of Republicans and Democrats to work together over the next two years will hurt the country a lot; another 16 percent say it will hurt some. And more than 4 in 5 say it will hurt them personally...

More.

Johnny Football's Deflating Debut

Heh.

This is something else.

At WSJ, "Johnny Manziel’s Starting Debut for Cleveland Ends With a 30-0 Loss to Cincinnati."

Hawaiian Surfer Garrett MacNamara Returns to Nazaré for Giant Waves

At NBC News:

Death Wishes Pour In for Dick Cheney

From the ever so classy progs, via Twitchy:

'Curl up and die': Death wishes pour in for Dick Cheney after MTP appearance http://t.co/ysscGTtBsH

— TwitchyTeam (@TwitchyTeam) December 14, 2014

Mexico's Child Laborers

LAT's been running a very compelling series on Mexico's economy --- and its transnational economic interdependence with the U.S., which hasn't always been a force for good.

Here, "Children harvest crops and sacrifice dreams in Mexico's fields."

Beauty and Small-Town American Exceptionalism

From Salena Zito, at RCP, "Hardworking, Small-town American Exceptionalism":

BEDFORD, Pa. - Michael Corle's exhausting work ethic, coupled with devotion to family and heritage, unites the edgy energy of the young with the values and traditions of rural ancestors.

He's a throwback to our entrepreneurial past, with a vision that exists in the moment.

Corle is a designer, father, teacher and proprietor of Locality, a gallery with a distinctive mix of contemporary art and more primitive pieces that he intentionally does not refinish or repurpose. “I want to preserve their authenticity, so the drawer that is worn because of years of being open and shut by constant use, retains that part of its history,” he said, explaining his genuine passion to retain the remnants of a past life.

Corle loves flaws: “(The) telltale signs of use, the natural aging of things, that kind of providence and hand-of-time is really unique.”

A descendant of German and Scots-Irish farmers who settled here in the late 1750s, he is married to Jade, a Pittsburgh native of black, Italian and Polish background; partners in life, work and family, they met while attending the Art Institute of Pittsburgh in 1999.

In 2007 they left the city life they loved in Pittsburgh and moved into the century-old home where Corle's father was born — literally in the living room — to create a destination where emerging or established artists from Central and Western Pennsylvania could showcase their craft.

On a brilliant Sunday afternoon their storefront window is a mix of kitschy old-time Christmas decorations that look like they came straight from Ozzie and Harriet's attic, all draped over a stunning primitive cabinet.

Inside, their children — Matthias, 5; Halina, 4; Eden, 2 — are dressed in their Christmas best, sitting on the planked hardwood floor and drawing pictures as customers from Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh and the Bedford area barter over artworks.

They often hold workshops at the gallery and at local schools. “What we wanted to do was to bring in all that we loved about Pittsburgh, its feel and vibe. ... We look at the concept of the community of an urban village,” Corle said.

Bedford has a lazy buzz to it that is hard to describe and even harder to resist. You just sort of want to be here to see what happens next, except that it is moving at a snail's pace; it is as uniquely American as going to New York City, just with the opposite velocity.

Small locally owned stores line the main thoroughfare of the town of 2,000. An alpaca-wool shop, two homemade-candy shops, an antiques arcade converted from an old five-and-dime, a free-trade shop, several taverns and a theater crowd the streets where George Washington once headquartered to plot his next move against the Western Pennsylvania farmers rising against the federal government at the height of the Whiskey Rebellion.

There is even the required commemorative plaque announcing that Washington slept here...

Beautiful. All-American.

But shush. Don't spread the word too far. The socialist destroyers of the collectivist left will swarm on Bedford like a plague of locusts should they catch word of such beauty and hard work.

More.

Dick Cheney's Answer of the Year

Via William Kristol, "2014 Answer of the Year."

The Flight from Reason on Campus

From James Ceasar, at the Weekly Standard:

The university is often said to be the first place in our society to look for the truth. Unfortunately, it is now one of the last places to find it.

Events surrounding a recent Rolling Stone article that chronicles an account of a gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity make clear how little the critical spirit operates today on our nation’s campuses. The story, which Rolling Stone no longer supports, begged to be treated with skepticism. Appearing in a magazine that trades in sensationalism—last year it put a glamour photo of the Boston marathon bomber on its cover—the narrative is so pat and faithful to a formula that common sense dictated caution. And most readers, one suspects, did feel at least a tinge of suspicion. Yet opinion leaders and campus activists across the nation quickly embraced the story as gospel truth, with some looking to convert it into a national movement to stem sexual violence.

At the epicenter of this event is the University of Virginia, where I have taught for over three decades. Jefferson’s campus became the site of rallies, demonstrations, constant social network exchanges, and endless meetings at all levels. A discourse or rhetoric began to develop that alternated expressions of rage with pleas for compassion. Apologies were issued all the way from the university’s Board of Visitors down to informal groups gathered on the campus grounds.

To be in the midst of an occurrence of this kind is to appreciate just how powerful is the force of the crowd. What took place resembled nothing so much as the behavior of a gentle mob, postmodern style. Anyone who expressed reserve about the article or who dared to apply the adjective “alleged” to the acts described faced the charge of being indifferent to sexual violence and rape. The penalty was to be written out of the community. Best, one observer cautioned, not to poke the beast.

Like many such crowds, this one sought its own victims to punish. Strangely, retribution against the seven alleged perpetrators was treated as less important than one might have thought, for this result would have placed the onus in the affair on these individuals and their criminal acts. From the moment of the first mass rally, speakers from the faculty and student body left no doubt that they were in search of much bigger game. Moving in a reverse pyramid from the specific to the more abstract, they decried the fraternity system, privilege (the “money-fraternity complex”), and the rape culture of the South, including Thomas Jefferson for his relations with Sally Hemings. The charges went higher and higher up the ladder of generality until the sex crime committed at UVA became a confirmation of the basic theory of privileged Western male oppression that is so widely subscribed to in the disciplines of cultural studies. The theoretical or ideological dimension that began to take hold, which relies on class profiling, accorded with the subtext of the Rolling Stone article that is directed less against sexual violence per se—of which Charlottesville has tragically suffered more than enough in recent years—than against sexual violence perpetrated by males belonging to society’s “upper tier.”

The abandonment of a critical spirit on our campuses is as much a failure of moral courage as of intellectual blindness. Every adult, if not every student, knows what happened at Duke eight years ago, where, under pressure from the same kind of academic crowd behavior, members of the men’s lacrosse team were tainted and criminally prosecuted for rape, under charges that ultimately proved baseless. Every professor in media studies and public opinion is fully aware of the spectacular hoaxes of modern journalism, from the gripping accounts of urban poverty by Janet Cooke in the Washington Post to the multiple fabrications of Stephen Glass in the New Republic. And scholars of literature and history cannot be ignorant of the psychology of false accusation, from the biblical story of Potiphar’s wife down to the rape charges by Tawana Brawley, cynically perpetuated by Al Sharpton. Yet, in the climate of the moment, none of the perspective that these teachers could have offered, even if they had wished to do so, was ever brought to bear. A crowd does not listen, particularly when it is convinced it is on the side of the angels...

More.

Senate Passes $1.1 Trillion Spending Bill

At LAT, "Senate approves $1.1-trillion spending bill after deadline battle":

Capping a week of high drama that exposed divisions in both parties and raised the specter of another government shutdown, the U.S. Senate gave final approval late Saturday to a $1.1-trillion spending bill that funds most government operations through next fall.

After Democrats beat back an effort by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to strip funding for President Obama's new immigration actions, senators voted 56-40 to send the spending bill to Obama's desk.

A procedural battle that pit Ted Cruz against many of his GOP colleagues required a rare weekend Senate session to resolve, and gave Democrats an opening to try to confirm a package of controversial Obama nominations that might otherwise have languished.

Earlier in the week, it was House Democrats who sought to derail the appropriations deal in protest of provisions that would undo components of the Dodd-Frank financial law...

More.

Also at Memeorandum.

Another Major Stormfront Barrels Toward Southern California

I love it.

At LAT, "Rain forecast for Monday as third Alaskan storm takes aim at L.A."

Plus, more video from the last storm:

Elizabeth Warren’s Government Shutdown

It's hard to find a more revolting Democrat dirtbag than Elizabeth Warren, and they've got a deep bench, so that's saying something.

From Jonathan Tobin, at Commentary:

The specter of a potential government shutdown is haunting Washington today. But it isn’t Ted Cruz and what the liberal mainstream media considers his gang of Tea Party obstructionists who are the principle threat to the passage of the so-called Cromnibus bill that will avert the possibility of a repeat of the 2013 standoff. Instead it is the darling of the liberal media, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is seeking to derail the compromise forged by House Speaker John Boehner and Democrats. Warren is calling on liberals to vote against the deal because among its provisions are measures raising the limits on campaign contributions and scaling back some of the onerous regulations on banks and Wall Street firms in the Dodd-Frank bill that have caused such havoc. But don’t expect the same media that labeled Cruz an arsonist to speak ill of Warren’s efforts to thwart efforts to keep the government funded.

Cruz has been loudly and frequently criticized both by liberals and some conservatives for deciding that his efforts to thwart the implementation of ObamaCare took precedence over the need to keep the government funded. Even those who sympathized him on the substance of this issue thought he was unreasonable in his insistence that voting for a compromise-funding bill made Republicans complicit with measures they opposed. The notion that principle ought to trump political reality and the necessity to avoid a standoff that could lead to a government shutdown (for which President Obama and his supporters were just as responsible as anything Cruz and the Tea Partiers did) was viewed as a disruptive approach that interfered with the responsibility of both parties to govern rather than to merely expound their views.

But the question today is why are those who were so quick to tag Cruz as a scourge of good government for his opposition to often messy yet necessary compromises to bills that require bipartisan support not putting the same label on Warren.

The reasons for this are fairly obvious. Most of the press clearly sympathizes with Warren’s rabble rousing on behalf of ineffective campaign-finance laws as well as a regulatory regime that has caused as much trouble as the problems it was supposed to solve. Warren’s rhetoric denouncing the rich and Wall Street is catnip for a press corps that shares her political point of view. By contrast, few in the media sympathized with Cruz’s last stand against ObamaCare, something that most in the president’s press cheering section viewed as a reactionary position that deserved the opprobrium they hurled at it.

Yet Warren’s attacks on the spending bill are no less extreme than anything Cruz was saying in 2013 or even now as he has ineffectively sought to rally conservatives to oppose the Cromnibus. Her claim that the Dodd-Frank changes were slipped into the bill in the middle of the night are false since they were negotiated with Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Barbara Mikulski, who is every bit the liberal that Warren claims to be. So is the notion that they are the product of a right-wing conspiracy is flatly false since, as the Washington Post notes, Democrats like Minority Whip Steny Hoyer and Rep. Nita Lowey voted for them in a stand-in alone vote last year.

She's a lying "Fauxcahontas" scumbag. That's why the leftist press lover her.

Keep reading.

Also at Politico, "Lindsey Graham: Elizabeth Warren’s ‘the problem’."

Saturday Rule 5

Here's an encore photo and paean to our Second Amendment friends of the opposite sex, especially Dana Loesch and her new book, Hands Off My Gun: Defeating the Plot to Disarm America.

Worst Storm in Years Hit San Francisco Bay Area

They got hit much harder than Southern California.

Via CBS News San Francisco:

The Other America

From VDH, at the O.C. Register (via Blazing Cat Fur):

Germany’s first chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, supposedly once said that there was “a special providence for drunkards, fools and the United States of America.”

Apparently, late 19th century observers could not quite explain how the U.S. thrived when, by logic, it should not. That paradox has never been more true than today.

The U.S. government now owes more than $18 trillion in long-term debt. Even after recent income tax hikes for the very wealthy and huge cuts in the defense budget, the Obama administration will still run an annual budget deficit of nearly $500 billion.

No government official dares to trim Social Security or Medicare. Everyone knows that both programs are fiscally unsustainable.

More than 11 million undocumented immigrants are residing in the U.S. as federal immigration law is reduced to a bothersome irritant. A record 92 million American citizens ages 16 and older are not working.

Red-state and blue-state animosities reveal a nation more divided than at any time since the 1960s – or perhaps the pre-Civil War 1850s.

The permanent bureaucracy is awash in serial scandals. The IRS, VA, GSA, NSA, ICE and Secret Service have all deservedly lost the public trust.

Congress suffers from overwhelming public disapproval. President Obama’s approval rating hovers just above 40 percent.

Our new foreign policy could be characterized as managed decline. Three defense secretaries have retired or resigned under Obama. Two of them, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, wrote memoirs in which they blasted the administration. From Russia to the Pacific to the Middle East, the world seems to be descending into the law of the jungle as the U.S. withdraws from its role as a global overseer of the postwar order.

The Michael Brown shooting illustrates seeming racial divides not seen in 50 years. Al Sharpton once was seen as a social arsonist and tax delinquent. Now he appears to be the White House’s most influential adviser on racial matters.

Student-loan debt exceeds $1 trillion. Six years of college has become the new normal. More than a third of the students who enter college never graduate.

In such a depressing American landscape, why is the United States doing pretty well?

Put simply, millions of quiet, determined Americans get up every morning and tune out the incompetence of their government. Instead, these quiet Americans simply go to work, pursue their own talents, excel at what they do and seek to take care of their families.

The result of their singular expertise is that, even in America’s current illness, the nation soars above the global competition.
Only in America can you find the sort of innovation, talent, legal framework and can-do attitude needed to invent and refine hydraulic fracking and horizontal drilling. Just a few hundred thousand scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, oil riggers and skilled craftsman have revived the once-ossified oil industry for 320 million Americans.

The United States is not running out of fuels – as was predicted over the past 20 years. It instead has become the largest gas-and-oil producer in the world.

The epitaph for Silicon Valley is written each year. Its tech industry is copied the world over. Yet, seemingly each year a new American technical innovation sweeps the world.

Neither drought, nor cumbersome regulations, nor unfair trade practices have stalled American agriculture. U.S. farms – where less than 2 percent of the population resides – have never turned out so much safe, nutritious and cheap food that is feeding the world and earning America hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign exchange.

The U.S. military – in which fewer than 1 in 100 Americans serves – is facing record cuts. The Navy will have fewer ships than the American fleet of World War I. The Air Force and the Marine Corps are shrinking. Yet superb American forces continue to ensure that the United States and its allies remain safe. Neither Vladimir Putin’s Russia, nor the communist Chinese hierarchy, nor the Iranian theocrats are quite ready to take on the U.S. military.

America is not saved by our elected officials, bureaucrats, celebrities and partisan activists. Instead, just a few million hardworking Americans in key areas – a natural meritocracy of all races, classes and backgrounds – ignore the daily hype and chaos, remain innovative and productive, and dazzle the world.

Stocks Tumble After Weak Oil Forecast

At WSJ, "How Crude Oil’s Global Collapse Unfolded: Tracing the Plunge In Oil Prices Back to Texas":

Since the 1970s, Nigeria has sent a steady stream of high-quality crude oil to North American refineries. As recently as 2010, tankers delivered a million barrels a day.

Then came the U.S. energy boom. By July of this year, oil imports from Nigeria had fallen to zero.

Displaced by surging U.S. oil production, millions of barrels of Nigerian crude now head to India, Indonesia and China. But Middle Eastern nations are trying to entice the same buyers. This has set up a battle for market share that could reshape the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and fundamentally change the global market for oil.

On Friday, crude prices dropped to their lowest level in five years after the International Energy Agency cut its forecast for global oil demand for the fifth time in six months. That signaled to investors that the world economy would struggle in the coming year, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbling by 315.51 points, or 1.8%, to 17280.83. That’s the Dow’s biggest weekly percentage loss in three years.

Since June, the IEA has cut its demand forecast for 2015 by 800,000 barrels, while it says U.S. oil output will rise next year by 1.3 million barrels a day.

The drop in global oil prices from over $110 a barrel to under $62 on Friday has been portrayed as a showdown between Saudi Arabia and the U.S., two of the world’s biggest oil producers. But the reality is more complex, involving Libyan rebels and Indonesian cabdrivers as well as Texas roughnecks and Middle Eastern oil ministers. It reflects both the surging supply of crude and the crumbling demand for oil.

And the oil-price plunge may not end soon. Bank of America Merrill Lynch says U.S. oil prices could drop to $50 in 2015.

The roots of the price collapse go back to 2008 near Cotulla, Texas, a tiny town between San Antonio and the Mexican border. This was where the first well was drilled into the Eagle Ford Shale. At the time, the U.S. pumped about 4.7 million barrels a day of crude oil.

In 2009 and 2010, the global economy improved, demand for oil increased and crude prices rose, creating a large incentive to find new supplies. In Cotulla and elsewhere, U.S. drillers answered the call. “There was, for lack of a better term, an arms race for oil, and we found a ton of oil,” says Dean Hazelcorn, an oil trader at Coquest in Dallas.


Today, two hundred drilling rigs blanket South Texas, steering metal bits deep underground into the rock. Once drilled and hydraulically fractured, these wells yield large volumes of high-quality oil; at the moment, the U.S. is producing 8.9 million barrels a day, thanks to the Eagle Ford and other new oil fields.

Americans aren’t pumping more gasoline or otherwise using up all that new crude, and under U.S. laws dating back to the 1970s, it has been almost impossible to export.

As a result, American refineries snapped up inexpensive crude from Texas and North Dakota, using it to replace oil from Nigeria, Algeria, Angola and Brazil, and almost every other oil-producing nation except Canada.

OPEC sent the U.S. 180.6 million barrels in August 2008, a month before the first Eagle Ford well; in September 2014, it shipped about half that, 87 million barrels. That is about 100 fewer tankers of crude arriving in U.S. ports. They went elsewhere.

For a long time, it seemed like the world’s growing appetite for oil would soak up all the displaced crude. By 2011 prices began to hover between $90 and $100 a barrel and mostly stayed in that range.

But earlier this year, another trend began to come into focus, catching Wall Street energy analysts and other market watchers by surprise. In March, many analysts predicted global demand for crude oil would grow by 1.4 million barrels a day in 2014, to 92.7 million barrels a day.

That prediction proved wildly optimistic...

More.

Feminists Try to Save the 'Rape Culture' Narrative

Good luck with that.

At the Other McCain, "As UVA Rape Story Falls Apart; Feminists Try to Save ‘Rape Culture’ Narrative."