Gun-Grabbing Democrats Exploit Tragedy to Push Radical Agenda

A great segment from Hannity's last night:

Stay with that video until the 6:00 minute mark or so, with the brutal discussion of Sam Donaldson and the progressive elite.

Also at Power Line, "Democrats Seek the Holy Grail of Gun Control." (Via Memeorandum.)

Fiscal Cliff Talks Down to the Wire

At the clip, Charles Krauthammer praises Obama for his "ruthless" partisanship.

And at the Wall Street Journal, "Both Sides to Meet at White House; Any Deal Likely to Be Limited":

Congress and the White House took small steps toward breaking the budget impasse Thursday, but Democrats and Republicans grew increasingly fearful they won't be able to avert the tax increases and spending cuts known as the fiscal cliff, a prospect that is unnerving consumers and investors.

President Barack Obama invited congressional leaders to the White House on Friday afternoon for a last-ditch effort to broker a deal, as the Senate returned to Washington on Thursday. House GOP leaders said in a Thursday conference call with Republicans, who are growing nervous about their party being blamed for the deadlock, that the House will reconvene Sunday evening.

It is still possible the two sides can reach a deal, especially with the leaders meeting Friday. Any resolution would be a scaled-back version of the package Mr. Obama and congressional leaders had anticipated passing after the November election. The White House is pressing for the Senate to extend current tax rates for income up to $250,000, extend unemployment benefits, keep the alternative minimum tax from hitting millions of additional taxpayers and delay spending cuts set to take effect in January.

The 11th-hour strategy carries enormous risk because it leaves no margin for error in Congress's balky legislative machinery. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) said the prospects for passage of a bill before the last day of the year are fading rapidly. "I have to be very honest," he said. "I don't know time-wise how it can happen now."

Anxiety about Washington's ability to resolve its budget battles is roiling the economy. Conference Board figures showed that consumer confidence fell in December to its lowest level since August, driven by a pessimistic outlook for economic activity next year.

Stocks have swung on the latest news from Washington. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell sharply on Mr. Reid's pessimistic comments before recouping most of a 151-point drop on news the House would reconvene this weekend.

At best, leaders are looking at a narrow bill that could be passed at the last minute. At the meeting Friday, Mr. Obama will outline the elements he thinks should be in a deal and could get majority support in both chambers of Congress, according to a person familiar with the matter. He won't put forward a specific bill or legislative language, the person added.

Continue reading.

And at Telegraph UK, "Barack Obama will meet congressional leaders today at the White House for last-minute talks on a "fiscal cliff" deal to avoid automatic tax increases and broad spending cuts that threaten the US economy's recovery."

PREVIOUSLY: "America's Crisis of Big Government Cronyism and Corruption."

The Year the Dreams Died

From Victor Davis Hanson, at National Review (via BCF and Memeorandum):

Barack Obama in 2008 won an election on an upbeat message of change amid hopes that the first black president would mark a redemptive moment in American history. Four years later, the fantasies are gone. In continuing dismal economic times, Obama ran for reelection neither on his first-term achievements — Obamacare, bailouts, financial stimuli, and Keynesian mega-deficits — nor on more utopian promises.

Instead, Obama’s campaign systematically reduced his rival, Wall Street financier Mitt Romney, to a conniving, felonious financial pirate who did dastardly things, from letting the uninsured die to putting his pet dog Seamus in a cage on top of the family car.

Obama once had mused that he wished to be the mirror image of Ronald Reagan — successfully coaxing America to the left as the folksy Reagan had to the right. Instead, 2012 taught us that a calculating Obama is more a canny Richard Nixon, who likewise used any means necessary to be reelected on the premise that his rival would be even worse. But we know what eventually happened to the triumphant, pre-Watergate Nixon after November 1972; what will be the second-term wages of Obama’s winning ugly?

Well, it won't be impeachment, that's for sure. The Democrat-Media Complex has got Barack's back.

Continue reading.

Reason's New Los Angeles Headquarters

This is interesting.

I'd like to go to one of those Reason parties. See: "Check out Reason's New LA Headquarters!"

And a sample from the magazine, featuring Jacob Sullum, "The Rioter’s Veto: Can violence in the Middle East justify censorship in the United States?"

That's also the left's veto. So far the only person arrested or jailed following the Benghazi scandal is Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the director of "Innocence of Muslims."

'Into You Like a Train'

This is fascinating.

At the clip, the band's opening their concert with this song, just like they opened in 1982 when I saw them at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.

PREVIOUSLY: "If You Believe That Anyone Like Me Within a Song..."

They were scheduled to play the House of Blues in Anaheim on New Year's Eve, but their tour's been cancelled temporarily due to an injury (singer Richard Butler is recovering from spinal surgery).

Progressives Viciously Attack Deceased Ret. General Norman Schwarzkopf on Twitter

At The Blaze, "Twitter Users Viciously Attack Deceased War Hero Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf: 'Eat Sh*t in Hell for Eternity'."

And then compare the deranged, malevolent leftists to the thoughtful conservatives at Twitchy, "Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf dies in Tampa, Fla., at 78; Remembered as American patriot."

And see the obituary at the New York Times, "Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, US Commander in Gulf War, Dies at 78." (Via Memeorandum.)

Death come in threes sometimes, although knock on wood considering former President George H.W. Bush, who sent Schwarzkopf into battle. At the Los Angeles Times, "Officials mute on George H.W. Bush's condition, cite family privacy."

Holiday Rule 5

Via Theo Spark, "Bedtime Totty..."

Also, "Bonus Totty..."

Also at El Opinador Compusivo, "You Gotta Look Sharp," and "Topless Christmas."

More at Dustbury, "Paloma Herrera."

And from Daley Gator, "Gena Lee Nolin."

Now at Randy's Roundtable, "Thursday Nite Tart: Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders."

Also at Knuckledragging, "a.k.a. Skull Cracker."

And the Last Tradition, "Rule 5 Sunday – Belinda Lee, Voluptuous Temptress of British and Italian Films of 1950s."

And Soylent Green, "Adrienne Overnight."

More at the Pirate's Cove, "If All You See ... is wine which could become extinct because someone (else) charged their iPhone, you might just be a Warmist." And "If All You See ... is evil CO2 infused beer, you might just be a Warmist."

Also from Reaganite, "Highlights from Miss Universe 2012."

And at Linkiest, "Maxim: Girls of the UFC."

BONUS: At TrogloPundit, "Why does the Pentagon average 666 rolls of toilet paper a day?"

That's it for now. If you've been left off just add your links in the comments and I'll update. This is an art more than a science. Cheers.

Looking Great! Jessica Simpson Posts Revealing Photo on Twitter Days After Confirming She's Expecting Second Child

I don't know.

Perhaps she's looking to generate a little media buzz after all the latest news on the extension of her Weight Watchers' gig. Either way, who's complaining?

At US Weekly, "Jessica Simpson Flashes Major Cleavage, Toned Legs in Revealing Twitter Picture" (via WeSmirch).

She's a big, curvy woman. Very happy as well.

More on Twitter.

PREVIOUSLY: "Weight Watchers Extends Endorsement Deal With Jessica Simpson."

Women Pose With Assault Rifles They Got For Christmas

At Instapundit, "A HEARTWARMING PHOTO GALLERY."

America's Crisis of Big Government Cronyism and Corruption

The January/February issue of Foreign Affairs is now available online. I just finished reading Fareed Zakaria's marquee essay, "Can America Be Fixed? The New Crisis of Democracy." While I disagree little on the problems we face, I differ substantially on the remedies he identifies. (And my respect for the man has plummeted over the years amid his increasingly predictable progressive sensibilities, but especially of late because of the allegations against him this year of plagiarism, for which he acknowledged and apologized for publicly, with permanent damage to his reputation.)

The article is gated but a quick summary and block quotes are sufficient for the purposes here. Zakaria sees the fiscal cliff stalemate as a signal of our political immobility. The gridlock we're facing means that the political establishment once again is delaying needed reforms on some of the biggest problems facing the country, most notably for Zakaria infrastructure and entitlements. The fatal flaw of the piece is that Zakaria's a hopeless advocate for expanding the size and scope of government. He actually offers an excellent discussion of the entitlement problem, but he refuses to see any role for markets and for the possibility of scaling back government commitments. His biggest problem is on infrastructure. Again, while he puts his finger on the problem quite deftly, he ignores some facts that make his case problematic --- one of the biggest being the fact that the U.S. spent nearly $1 trillion in "infrastructure" and "investment" in the Obama administration's 2009 stimulus legislation, and the country has virtually nothing to show for it in terms of long-term economic growth. Indeed, the administration's stimulus was a crony capitalist boondoggle that will likely be repeated again and again if the so-called investments Zakaria proposes are to indeed become public policy. In any case, some key block quotes. Here's a bit on the problems identified in the paper:

As the United States continues its slow but steady recovery from the depths of the financial crisis, nobody actually wants a massive austerity package to shock the economy back into recession, and so the odds have always been high that the game of budgetary chicken will stop short of disaster. Looming past the cliff, however, is a deep chasm that poses a much greater challenge -- the retooling of the country's economy, society, and government necessary for the United States to perform effectively in the twenty-first century. The focus in Washington now is on taxing and cutting; it should be on reforming and investing. The United States needs serious change in its fiscal, entitlement, infrastructure, immigration, and education policies, among others. And yet a polarized and often paralyzed Washington has pushed dealing with these problems off into the future, which will only make them more difficult and expensive to solve....

Is there a new crisis of democracy? Certainly, the American public seems to think so. Anger with politicians and institutions of government is much greater than it was in 1975. According to American National Election Studies polls, in 1964, 76 percent of Americans agreed with the statement "You can trust the government in Washington to do what is right just about always or most of the time." By the late 1970s, that number had dropped to the high 40s. In 2008, it was 30 percent. In January 2010, it had fallen to 19 percent.

Commentators are prone to seeing the challenges of the moment in unnecessarily apocalyptic terms. It is possible that these problems, too, will pass, that the West will muddle through somehow until it faces yet another set of challenges a generation down the road, which will again be described in an overly dramatic fashion. But it is also possible that the public is onto something. The crisis of democracy, from this perspective, never really went away; it was just papered over with temporary solutions and obscured by a series of lucky breaks. Today, the problems have mounted, and yet American democracy is more dysfunctional and commands less authority than ever -- and it has fewer levers to pull in a globalized economy. This time, the pessimists might be right.

And here's the key bit on "infrastructure investment":

If the case for reform is important, the case for investment is more urgent. In its annual study of competitiveness, the World Economic Forum consistently gives the United States poor marks for its tax and regulatory policies, ranking it 76th in 2012, for example, on the "burden of government regulations." But for all its complications, the American economy remains one of the world's most competitive, ranking seventh overall -- only a modest slippage from five years ago. In contrast, the United States has dropped dramatically in its investments in human and physical capital. The WEF ranked American infrastructure fifth in the world a decade ago but now ranks it 25th and falling. The country used to lead the world in percentage of college graduates; it is now ranked 14th. U.S. federal funding for research and development as a percentage of GDP has fallen to half the level it was in 1960 -- while it is rising in countries such as China, Singapore, and South Korea. The public university system in the United States -- once the crown jewel of American public education -- is being gutted by budget cuts.

The modern history of the United States suggests a correlation between investment and growth. In the 1950s and 1960s, the federal government spent over five percent of GDP annually on investment, and the economy boomed. Over the last 30 years, the government has been cutting back; federal spending on investment is now around three percent of GDP annually, and growth has been tepid. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Michael Spence has noted, the United States escaped from the Great Depression not only by spending massively on World War II but also by slashing consumption and ramping up investment. Americans reduced their spending, increased their savings, and purchased war bonds. That boost in public and private investment led to a generation of postwar growth. Another generation of growth will require comparable investments.

The problems of reform and investment come together in the case of infrastructure. In 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the country's infrastructure a grade of D and calculated that repairing and renovating it would cost $2 trillion. The specific number might be an exaggeration (engineers have a vested interest in the subject), but every study shows what any traveler can plainly see: the United States is falling badly behind. This is partly a matter of crumbling bridges and highways, but it goes well beyond that. The U.S. air traffic control system is outdated and in need of a $25 billion upgrade. The U.S. energy grid is antique, and it malfunctions often enough that many households are acquiring that classic symbol of status in the developing world: a private electrical generator. The country's drinking water is carried through a network of old and leaky pipes, and its cellular and broadband systems are slow compared with those of many other advanced countries. All this translates into slower growth. And if it takes longer to fix, it will cost more, as deferred maintenance usually does.

Spending on infrastructure is hardly a panacea, however, because without careful planning and oversight, it can be inefficient and ineffective. Congress allocates money to infrastructure projects based on politics, not need or bang for the buck. The elegant solution to the problem would be to have a national infrastructure bank that is funded by a combination of government money and private capital. Such a bank would minimize waste and redundancy by having projects chosen by technocrats on merit rather than by politicians for pork. Naturally, this very idea is languishing in Congress, despite some support from prominent figures on both sides of the aisle.

The same is the case with financial reforms: the problem is not a lack of good ideas or technical feasibility but politics. The politicians who sit on the committees overseeing the current alphabet soup of ineffective agencies are happy primarily because they can raise money for their campaigns from the financial industry. The current system works better as a mechanism for campaign fundraising than it does as an instrument for financial oversight.

In 1979, the social scientist Ezra Vogel published a book titled Japan as Number One, predicting a rosy future for the then-rising Asian power. When The Washington Post asked him recently why his prediction had been so far off the mark, he pointed out that the Japanese economy was highly sophisticated and advanced, but, he confessed, he had never anticipated that its political system would seize up the way it did and allow the country to spiral downward.

Vogel was right to note that the problem was politics rather than economics. All the advanced industrial economies have weaknesses, but they also all have considerable strengths, particularly the United States. They have reached a stage of development, however, at which outmoded policies, structures, and practices have to be changed or abandoned. The problem, as the economist Mancur Olson pointed out, is that the existing policies benefit interest groups that zealously protect the status quo. Reform requires governments to assert the national interest over such parochial interests, something that is increasingly difficult to do in a democracy.

Every now and then we see a new story on some collapsed bridge tragedy or massive urban flooding from busted water mains or broken levees, and on cue progressives start wagging their fingers about how we've got to start spending on infrastructure. I don't research this area but my regular reading on the politics of the stimulus isn't very reassuring. The administration's push for "investments" was mostly about the Democrat politics of job creation, and that didn't turn out so well. Conn Carroll has a good example, "$787 Billion in Stimulus, Zero Jobs “Created or Saved”." And while Zakaria's obsessed with government spending as "investmnent," there's little in the record of the last couple years that recommends doubling-down on it. See Romina Boccia, "New Stimulus Plan Same as the Old: Spend, Spend, Spend." And notice while Zakaria minimizes the corruption inherent in "infrastructure" spending as possibly "inefficient and ineffective," the facts of the past few years are devastating to his case. See Veronique de Rugy, "Stimulus Cronyism." And Michelle Malkin, "Obama's $50 Billion Union Infrastructure Boondoggle."

The United States is not some developing country that's going to be eviscerated by "draconian" spending cuts or devastated by some horrible "austerity package" that leaves the poor to fend for themselves. That's Krugmanite scare-mongering. We need to unleash the natural dynamism of the American economy. To put it as plainly as possible: We need robust and sustained economic growth, in the 4 or 5 percent range. We need to increase incentives for private investment. We need to reduce regulations and taxes on business job creators. And we need to rely on the system of federalism to shift real infrastructure investment from the federal to state governments. This isn't rocket science. The solutions to America's economic problems are self-evident. And the political crisis is largely one of a dramatically changed American electoral and political demographic. As the population base of the Democrat Party comes to increasingly favor policies of dependency, the productive, working sectors of the economy are required to bear a heavier load to keep everything afloat. Tea party Republicans, bless them, are resisting higher taxes because they know that'll be more of the same. As noted here yesterday, President Obama's not interested in fixing our politics or avoiding a recession should we go over the fiscal cliff. He's obsessed with punishing the most productive members of society in furtherance of his class warfare agenda of reducing inequality and promoting social justice. As long as we have one party that is objectively uninterested in growing the economy to create a rising tide that lifts all boats we will continue to have a crisis of political immobility. The electorate can fix the problem by choosing a government not fatally infected with cronyism and corruption. Both parties are implicated, although getting the Democrats out of power is the first order of business. We need to restore our faith in liberty and markets and unleash the innate innovation and dynamism of the individual. Our crisis is one of big government. Obama hasn't even been sworn in for a second term and its already clear that the public was duped in November. We must keep on with the hard work of real reform, which is what the tea party has represented, smaller government and fiscal responsibility. Without that we'll continue to stagnate and ultimately perish like the beached whale on the sand at Barbra Streisand's oceanfront estate.

BONUS: Zakaria dismisses the late Samuel Huntington's work in this report from the '70s-era Trilateral Commission: "The Crisis of Democracy." But our prospects for reform would be immeasurably greater if had more voices like Huntington's a less of those like Zakaria's.

ADDED: Linked at Blazing Cat Fur and Lonely Conservative. Thanks!

Zero Dark Feinstein

At the Wall Street Journal, "When a Hollywood script is more accurate than Senate Intelligence":

'Zero Dark Thirty," the film from director Kathryn Bigelow that opened this month, is garnering rave reviews for its unblinking portrayal of what it took the United States to track and kill Osama bin Laden. But a trio of Beltway critics are all thumbs down.

They would be Democratic Senators Dianne Feinstein of California and Carl Levin of Michigan and Republican Senator John McCain of John McCain. "We write to express our deep disappointment with the movie Zero Dark Thirty," the three wrote in a recent letter to Sony Pictures. "We believe the film is grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information that led to the location of Usama bin Laden."

You know it's a bad day in America when Hollywood seems to have a better grip on intelligence issues than the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the top two Members at Armed Services. The film depicts the "enhanced interrogation techniques," or EITs, used on the detainees held at the CIA's so-called black sites, and hints that the interrogations provided at least some of the information that led to bin Laden's killing.

What Ms. Bigelow intended by depicting the EITs is not for us to explain: This is an action flick, not a Ken Burns documentary. Yet the mere suggestion that such techniques paid crucial intelligence dividends—as attested by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and former CIA Director Michael Hayden, among many others—has sent Mrs. Feinstein and her colleagues into paroxysms of indignation. They even have a 5,000-plus-page study that purports to prove her case.

We say "purports" because, so far, hardly anyone outside the Senate Intelligence Committee has laid eyes on this white whale. The report began four years ago as a largely bipartisan effort to examine the CIA's post-9/11 detention and interrogation programs....

As for the report's methods, we got a taste of them in April when Sens. Feinstein and Levin issued a statement denouncing claims by former senior officer Jose Rodriguez that coercive interrogation techniques were in fact effective.

"CIA did not first learn about the existence of the UBL courier [Ahmed al-Kuwaiti] from detainees subjected to coercive interrogation techniques," they write in one characteristically slippery passage. Yet there's no small difference between knowing some piece of information and knowing why that piece may be significant.

"In the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, waterboarding produced misinformation," journalist Mark Bowden noted in an interview with the Daily Caller about the hunt for al-Kuwaiti, whose discovery ultimately led the CIA to bin Laden's Abbottabad hideaway. But Mr. Bowden also notes that "in this case the lie, contrasting so sharply with other detainee statements, actually proved helpful."

Mr. Bowden, by the way, is an opponent of coercive interrogations and a sympathetic observer of the Obama Administration who nonetheless can distinguish a moral objection from a practical one....

One day, perhaps, some of our liberal friends will acknowledge that the real world is stuffed with the kinds of hard moral choices that "Zero Dark Thirty" so effectively depicts. Until then, they can bask in the easy certitudes of a report that, whatever it contains, deserves never to be read.

Right. And compare that to the excitable Andrew Sullivan, "The Zero Dark Debate, Ctd."

A Weaker Tea Party?

Here's the headline from yesterday's New York Times front page: "Sidestepping Fiscal Showdown, Weaker Tea Party Narrows Focus."

The main thrust of the piece is to brush off the tea party as an irrelevant "fringe" movement following Obama's reelection and internal divisions among prominent organizations. There are indeed problems, but by no means is the tea party finished as a movement. The congressional elections saw some significant tea party victories and the tea partiers will no doubt have a strong voice in 2013, as their bread-and-butter issues of limited government and fiscal restraint prove more relevant than ever.

Note too that the tea party isn't so much a protest movement any more as it is a political tendency seeking to place activists into positions of power at all levels of government. I love the protests, but that energy has been increasingly channeled into electoral activities and organization. Leslie Eastman comments on that, at Legal Insurrection, "Tea Party tidal surge, not tsunami." And a local example is conservative activist Mike Munzing, who I first met at tea party rallies in 2009. He was elected to the Aliso Viejo City Council in November. A number of other local tea partiers either ran or were elected to the Orange County GOP Central Committee in recent years. Basically, the movement helped generate a mass of activists moving into formal political organizations.

Having said all that, the latest high profile conflicts at FreedomWorks are like catnip to the liberty-haters on the left. The Other McCain has the story with lots of links, "The Bloody Mess at FreedomWorks."

Either way, it's best not fall for the Democrat Media Complex's operation demoralize narrative. Taking back the country will require lots more activists to redouble their efforts at all the forms of grassroots participation. There's going to be ups and downs. Ignore these stupid memes about a "weaker tea party."

China's National People's Congress May Boast More Millionaires and Billionaires Than Any Other Legislative Body on Earth

An amazing piece, at the Wall Street Journal, "Defying Mao, Rich Chinese Crash the Communist Party":

When the Communist Party elite gathered last month to anoint China's new leaders, seven of the nation's richest people occupied coveted seats in Beijing's Great Hall of the People.

Wang Jianlin of Dalian Wanda Group, worth an estimated $10.3 billion and the recent buyer of U.S. cinema chain AMC Entertainment Holdings, took one of the chairs. So did Liang Wengen, with an estimated fortune of $7.3 billion, whose construction-equipment maker Sany Heavy Industry Co. competes with Caterpillar Inc. Zhou Haijiang, a clothing mogul with an estimated $1.3 billion family fortune, also had a seat. As members of the Communist Party Congress, all three had helped endorse the new leadership.

For years the Communist Party in China filled key political and state bodies with loyal servants: proletarian workers, pliant scholars and military officers. Now the door is wide open to another group: millionaires and billionaires.

An analysis by The Wall Street Journal, using data from Shanghai research firm Hurun Report, identified 160 of China's 1,024 richest people, with a collective family net worth of $221 billion, who were seated in the Communist Party Congress, the legislature and a prominent advisory group called the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

For years the Communist Party in China filled key political and state bodies with loyal servants: proletarian workers, pliant scholars and military officers. Now the door is wide open to another group: millionaires and billionaires.

An analysis by The Wall Street Journal, using data from Shanghai research firm Hurun Report, identified 160 of China's 1,024 richest people, with a collective family net worth of $221 billion, who were seated in the Communist Party Congress, the legislature and a prominent advisory group called the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

China has been grappling of late with political and social tension over its murky policy-making process and its growing income disparity. The party has been especially sensitive this year during the leadership change about revelations about fortunes amassed by the offspring of political leaders, known as "princelings," by leaders of state businesses and by other politically connected people. Many ordinary Chinese blame high prices, poor quality food and pollution on guanshang guojie—meaning, roughly, officials in bed with businessmen.

As political families move into business, private tycoons are entering the political sphere—although precisely what is driving that isn't clear. Other Chinese business leaders have cultivated relationships with party chiefs without entering politics themselves. But the Journal's analysis showed that people appearing on Hurun's rich list who also served in the legislature increased their wealth more quickly than the average member of the list.

Seventy-five people who appeared on the rich list from 2007 to 2012 served in China's legislature during that period. Their fortunes grew by 81%, on average, during that period, according to Hurun. The 324 list members with no national political positions over that period saw their wealth grow by 47%, on average, according to an analysis the firm ran for the Journal.

The contradictions of communism. The Chinese political system is one of the world's biggest ideological frauds going. It's all about keeping the elite in power and suppressing the slightest bit of opposition to the regime.

'If Charles Dickens were writing A Christmas Carol today, surely he would have replaced Ebenezer Scrooge with the figure of the joyless, rage-fuelled Dawkins spitting out ‘Bah, humbug!’ at families sitting down to the Christmas turkey...'

I wish I'd posted this on Christmas Eve, but definitely better late than never.

From Melanie Phillips, "Raising a child as Christian worse than sex abuse? Oh, do put a sock in it, you atheist Scrooge":

It is not just [Richard] Dawkins and his followers, however, who are dancing prematurely on Christianity’s grave.

In the eyes of just about the entire governing class, cultural milieu and intelligentsia, belief in Christianity is viewed at best as an embarrassment, and at worst as proof positive of imbecility.

Indeed, Christianity has long been the target of sneering comedians, blasphemous artists and the entire human rights industry — all determined to turn it into a despised activity to be pursued only by consenting adults in private.

As it happens, I myself am not a Christian; I am a Jew. And Jews have suffered terribly under Christianity in the past.

Yet I passionately believe that if Britain and the West are to continue to be civilised places, it is imperative that the decline in Christianity be reversed.

For it is the Judeo-Christian ethic which gave us belief in the innate equality of all human beings, the need to put others’ welfare before your own and the understanding of absolute truth. Without this particular religious underpinning, our society will lose the moral bonds that instil respect and care for other human beings. Without a belief in absolute truth, it will succumb to the dominance of lies.

Melanie Phillips is freakin' awesome.

'Breathe'

A woman to make your heart flutter. Just breathe.

Song background at Wikipedia. I'd forgotten how big it was.

Real World Intrudes Into Gamers' Universe

At the New York Times, "Game Theory: A Year When Real-World Violence Crept Into Play":

It’s hard to talk about video games and 2012 without addressing the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and the inevitable debate over violent games that emerged from the entirely predictable discovery that Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old gunman, played Call of Duty games. (Perhaps he also ate Big Macs; he’s in that core demographic too.) There’s no evidence that video games cause — or even correlate with — violence, and that can’t be stated often enough. And one of the most pleasurable aspects of playing in 2012 was how many tremendous games had nothing to do with shooting people in the face.

Progressives Lose the Gun Control Narrative

From Kurt Schlichter, at Townhall, "Liberals Panic As They Lose the Gun Narrative":

When you argue for a living, you can tell how an argument is going for you. The evidence and my gut both tell me that the liberals have lost control of the gun control narrative.

Not for lack of trying – it was almost as if they were poised to leap into action across the political, media and cultural spectrum the second the next semi-human creep shot up another “gun free zone.” This was their big opening to shift the debate and now it’s closing. They’ve lost, and they are going nuts.

The evidence is all around that this is not going to be the moment where America begins a slide into disarmed submission through an endless series of ever-harsher “reasonable restrictions” on our fundamental rights. You just have to look past the shrieking media harpies to see what’s really happening.

Let’s start with the most obvious omen that this tsunami has peaked...

Continue reading.

Democrats might get something on semi-automatic weapons and large capacity clips. Beyond that, bupkes.

Still, take a look at this piece at The Economist for an idea of how dramatic the impact of Newtown has been on the gun control narrative, "Newtown’s horror."

An Uneasy Separation in Afghanistan

It seems weird that we're approaching the full withdrawal date for the Afghanistan war, and I personally don't think it's going to go well when we're gone. But Barack Hussein will get all kinds of kudos for bringing another war to an end, and because he's all about scoring political capital in national security policy (compared to actually making Americans safer), it's all to be expected.

More on this throughout the next year. Meanwhile, at the Los Angeles Times, "Hard feelings on both sides as U.S. winds down its Afghan role":

SUROBI, Afghanistan — Col. Babagul Aamal is a proud veteran of 28 years in the Afghan National Army. Short and fit, with a thick black beard, he's a leader who blurts out exactly what he's thinking.

"I don't talk politics — I talk facts," Aamal said, wearing a sweater beneath his uniform in his unheated command office on a dusty base 40 miles east of Kabul.

It shames him, Aamal said, that he is not allowed to wear his pistol when he enters the fortified gate of the new American military base next door. Though he's a brigade commander, he's required to stand before an airport-type scanner with his arms raised, almost in surrender.

Yet when Americans visit Aamal's base, they are not searched. They are offered chai tea. And they bring half a dozen soldiers armed with M-16s, so-called Guardian Angels on the lookout for "insider attacks" by Afghan soldiers.

"Afghan generals get searched by low-ranking foreign soldiers," Aamal said. "Our soldiers see this, and they feel insulted."

As American troops shift from combat to advising, the ominous specter of insider attacks has strained the relationship between the two armies.

Sixty-two Western coalition troops have been killed this year in 46 such attacks, leaving many American soldiers deeply suspicious of their erstwhile allies.

At the same time, some Afghan officers and soldiers say they feel abandoned and patronized. After 11 years, they say, certain Americans still don't respect Afghan customs.

Moreover, they complain that the United States is pulling out without providing the weapons and equipment needed to hold off the Taliban.

"The Americans have the weapons, so they go wherever they want. It's like this is their country," the brigade's public affairs officer, Maj. Ghulam Ali, said with a weary shrug.

RTWT.

RELATED: At the New York Times, "Motive Unclear in Killing by Woman in Afghan Force."

'Where Is the Harmony? Sweet Harmony...'

And so I'm listening to Elvis Costello at the clip and about halfway through I realized that's the Peterson sisters and Susanna Hoffs (the Bangles) up there on the stage dancing. Love the song. Hate Costello's politics, but what can you do?

Ellis Cooper

From Zoo Today:

More at Egotastic, "Ellis Cooper Screencaps for Zoo Magazine November 2012."