forgetfoo

it's friday morning, so let's see what victor hanson has to say in his weekly op/ed...

Obama's Second-Term Embarrassments

"Hope and change" is looking more like the 1973 Nixon White House.

In Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, he ran to the left of Hillary Clinton as a moral reformer. Obama promised to transcend the old politics and bring a new era of hope-and-change transparency to Washington. Five years later, those vows are in shambles.

True, the murder of four Americans in Benghazi has become a mess of partisan bickering. But the disturbing facts now transcend politics. The Obama administration – the president himself, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. ambassador Susan Rice, White House press secretary Jay Carney – all at various times blamed an obscure video maker for the "spontaneous violence" that killed Americans last September.

The problem is not just that such scapegoating was untrue, but that our officials knew it was untrue when they said it – given both prior CIA talking-point briefings and phone calls from those on the ground during the attacks.

One theme ties all the bizarre aspects of the Benghazi scandal – the doctored talking points, the inexplicable failure to beef up diplomatic security before the attacks and to send in help during the fighting, the jailing of a petty con artist on the false charge that his amateur video had led to attacks on our consulate, and the shabby treatment of nonpartisan State Department whistleblowers – together.

There was an overarching preelection desire last year to downplay any notion that al-Qaeda remained a serious danger after the much ballyhooed killing of Osama bin Laden. Likewise, Libya was not supposed to be a radical Islamic mess after the successful "lead from behind" removal of Moammar Qaddafi. Facts then had to change to fit a campaign narrative.

As the congressional hearings on Benghazi were taking place last week, we also learned that the IRS, administered by the Department of the Treasury, has been going after conservative groups in a politicized manner that we have not seen since Richard Nixon's White House. There was no evidence that any of these conservative associations had taken thousands of dollars in improper tax deductions – in the manner of former Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, the one-time overseer of the IRS.

Instead, groups with suspiciously American names like "Patriot" or "Tea Party" prompted IRS partisans to scrutinize their tax information in a way that they would not have for the tax-exempt MoveOn.org or the Obama-affiliated Organizing for Action.

On top of that, the Justice Department just announced that it had secretly seized the records of calls from at least 20 work and private phone lines belonging to editors and reporters at the Associated Press in efforts to stop suspected leaks. At about the same time as the Benghazi and IRS disclosures, it was learned that there was a strange relationship between the Obama White House and the very center of the American media – odd in a way that might explain the unusually favorable media coverage accorded this administration.

good stuff as always.

p.s. White House Wordplay

Hope for Change in Syria

Remember when President Obama used to warn Syria's Bashar al-Assad to stop his mass killing and step down?

Moammar Qaddafi's dictatorship had just collapsed under Western bombing. The murders of Americans in Benghazi and the subsequent postwar tribal mess in Libya were still in the future. In those heady days of 2011, the rage was "lead from behind," as the Arab Spring was blooming and social-media types were calling for democracy in the streets of Cairo.

The Muslim Brotherhood was proclaimed to be largely "secular." Echoing the pseudo-disavowals of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini years earlier, the American-educated Mohamed Morsi insisted that his Islamist movement was not interested in running Egypt.

Now comes a depressing Arab Winter of chaos and growing Islamic authoritarianism. Egypt is a mess, with a wrecked economy and wide-scale persecution of Coptic minorities. No one yet knows exactly what happened in Benghazi. More than ever, the stubborn Assad clings to power. He calculates that killing 70,000 of his own is far better than sharing the fate of deposed Arab dictators such as Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and Hosni Mubarak.

The result is that Obama's threats about Syrian use of weapons of mass destruction are now contextualized and internationalized. We sorta, kinda want the United Nations, our allies, or maybe the Arab League first to certify Assad guilty of using weapons of mass destruction. Then we can eventually, at some time in the future, organize a coalition to address the problem.

The president finds himself in a terrible dilemma with Syria – partly of his own making, partly due to the lose-lose nature of the Middle East. Obama rightly understands that to remove repugnant Arab dictators tottering amid insurrection is not difficult, given overwhelming American airpower. But he also realizes that the freewheeling tribal and sectarian mess that usually follows can be almost as odious as the authoritarian police state that has crumbled.

i kinda figured that with the "whistleblower" testimony the other day, that victor would write an op/ed piece about benghazi and all the colossal fuckups that seem to point all the way to the white house... but i guess not, which is cool since i can never really tell what he's going to write about from week to week.

TGIF, mang.

a little later than usual, but i had a really long day... but it is friday, and i do try to keep with tradition when i can, so here's the latest from victor – An Irrelevant Middle East

Since antiquity, the Middle East has been the trading nexus of three continents – Asia, Europe, and Africa – and the vibrant birthplace of three of the world's great religions.

Middle Eastern influence rose again in the 19th century when the Suez Canal turned the once-dead-end eastern Mediterranean Sea into a sea highway from Europe to Asia.

With the 20th-century development of large gas and oil supplies in the Persian Gulf and North Africa, an Arab-led OPEC more or less dictated the foreign policy of thirsty oil importers like the United States and Europe. No wonder U.S. Central Command has remained America's military-command hot spot.

Yet the Middle East is becoming irrelevant. The discovery of enormous new oil and gas reserves along with the use of new oil-recovery technology in North America and China is steadily curbing the demand for Middle Eastern oil. Soon, countries such as Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Iran are going to have less income and geostrategic clout. In both Iran and the Gulf, domestic demand is rising, while there is neither the technical know-how nor the water to master the new art of fracking to sustain exports.

The recent Boston bombing reminded the West that nearly twelve years after 9/11, most terrorism still follows the same old, same old script, acted out by angry young men with Muslim pedigrees claiming to act on radical Islamist impulses, without much popular rebuke from the Muslim world.

There is not much left to the stale Middle East complaint from the 1960s that Western colonialism and imperialism sidetracked the region's own natural trajectory to democracy. After the derailed Arab Spring, the world accepted that the mess in the Middle East is not imported but rather the result of homegrown tribalism, sexual apartheid, religious intolerance, anti-Semitism, illiteracy, statism, and authoritarianism.

Revolutionary theocrats always seem to follow the ouster of fossilized thugs. â¬SReformersâ¬? who were â¬Selectedâ¬? after the fall of the Shah of Iran and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt on spec conjured up the same old bogeymen as did their predecessors, subverted the rule of law in the same old fashion, and wrecked the economy in the same old manner. [...]

Visiting Persepolis, the Egyptian pyramids, Leptis Magna, or the Roman and Christian sites in the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria is not worth the madness that is now the price of Middle East tourism. The European Union and the United States are tired of Middle East terrorism – after 50 years of Yasser Arafat's secular brand and Osama bin Laden's Islamic bookend.

i know i'm pretty fucking tired of middle east terrorism.

ahhh, gotta luv friday mornings... especially ones as near-perfect as this one... but it's time for that friday morning ritual i got into the habit of a few years back, so here's the lastest from victor – Near-Suicidal Immigration Policies

Deportation has become a near-taboo word. Yet the Boston bombings inevitably rekindle old questions about the way the U.S. admits, and at times deports, foreign nationals.

Despite the Obama administration's politically driven and cyclical claims of deporting either a lot more or a lot fewer non-citizens, no one knows how many are really being sent home – for a variety of reasons.

There are not any accurate statistics on how many people are living in the United States illegally. And how does one define deportation? If someone from Latin America is detained by authorities an hour after illegally crossing the border and sent back, does he count as "apprehended" or "deported"?

Deportation is now politically incorrect, sort of like the T-word – terrorism – which the administration also seeks to avoid. The current government emphasis is on increasing legal immigration and granting amnesties; by no means is Washington as interested in clarifying deportation.

Why were the Tsarnaevs granted asylum in the United States – and why were some of them not later deported? Officially, they came here as refugees. As ethnic Chechens and former residents of Kyrgyzstan, they sought "asylum" here from anti-Muslim persecution – given that Russia had waged a brutal war in Chechnya against Islamic militants.

Yes, the environment of Islamic Russia was and still can be deadly. But if the Tsarnaevs were supposedly in danger there, why did the father, Anzor, after a few years choose to return to Dagestan, Russia, where he now apparently lives in relative safety? Why did one of the alleged Boston bombers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, return to Russia for six months last year – given that escape from such an unsafe place was the very reason that the United States granted his family asylum in the first place?

as more and more information comes out about these two Tsarnaevs brothers, it just seems like once again there were a few fuckups on the part of the FBI (and administration), which makes one wonder if it might not have been avoided had they been properly following up on info/intel prior to those two terrorist asshats going nuts in boston last week.

i mean, the russians were keeping their eyes open and notified us not just once, but at least twice about these guys... ummm, yeah... doesn't exactly instill a lot of confidence.

p.s. their chechan mother is effin nuts.

it's friday morning, and i usually lookup victor hanson's latest op/ed and post it, but this week he's talking about postmodern prudes and i thought it was a bit odd especially with all the stuff going on in the news this week... so instead, i'll go with lastest from krauthammer – Boston and Obama's Language Problem

Terrorism is speech – speech that gathers its audience by killing innocents as theatrically as possible. The 19th-century anarchist Paul Brousse called it "propaganda by deed." Accordingly, the Boston marathon attack, the first successful terror bombing in the U.S. since 9/11, was designed for maximum effect. At the finish line there would be not only news cameras but also hundreds of personal videos to amplify the message.

But what message? There was no claim of responsibility, no explanatory propaganda. Indeed, was it terrorism at all?

There was much ado about President Obama's non-use of the word "terrorism" in his first statement to the nation after the bombing. Indeed, the very next morning, he took to the White House briefing room for no other reason than to pronounce the event an "act of terrorism." He justified the update as a response to "what we now know." But there had been no new information overnight. Nothing changed, except a certain trepidation about the original omission.

There was no need to be so sensitive, however. The president said that terrorism is any bombing aimed at civilians. Not quite. Terrorism is any attack on civilians for a political purpose. Until you know the purpose, you can't know if it is terrorism.

Obama really does have this aversion to using the word "terror"... still kinda bugs me that the Fort Hood terrorist attack by that crazy fucker is labeled as "workplace voilence".

either way, looks like they should have this other terrorist brother that's on the run shortly... and then maybe we can start to find out the motive and reasoning behind it all – they've been here for the last 10 years afterall... going to school, working, girlfrieds... so what the hell?

what better way to start a friday morning than with some victor hanson, right? let's see what he's talking about this week in his latest op/ed piece – Iran's North Korean Future

The idea of a nuclear Iran – and of preventing a nuclear Iran – terrifies security analysts.

Those who argue for a preemptive strike against Iran cannot explain exactly how American planes and missiles would take out all the subterranean nuclear facilities without missing a stashed nuke or two – or whether they might as well expand their target lists to Iranian military assets in general. None can predict the fallout on world oil prices, global terrorism, and the politically fragile Persian Gulf, other than that it would be uniformly bad.

In contrast, those who favor containment of a nuclear Iran do not quite know how the theocracy could be deterred – or how either Israel or the regional Sunni Arab regimes will react to such a powerful and unpredictable neighbor.

The present crisis with North Korea offers us a glimpse of what, and what not, to expect should Iran get the bomb. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would gain the attention currently being paid to Kim Jong Un – attention not otherwise earned by his nation’s economy or cultural influence.

NK's been in the news quite a bit this last week, and while everybody thinks they're kinda crazy, that's exactly why you still have to go through the motions and treat it like it's serious – they do have nukes, afterall.

it's just weird, and sort of ironic, that people don't take NK seriously but mobilize and start shifting things around when they cause a stir... but pretty much ignore Iran, which is the bigger threat.

i don't really get it.

time to lean back, enjoy a morning cup of coffee, and see what victor has to say this week – After Obama

We can imagine what lies ahead in 2017 – no matter the result of either the 2014 midterm elections or the 2016 presidential contest.

There will be no more $1 trillion deficits. About $10 trillion will have been added to the national debt during the Obama administration, on top of the more than $4 trillion from the eight-year George W. Bush administration. That staggering sum will force the next president to be a deficit hawk, both fiscally and politically.

In addition, there will be no huge new federal spending programs – no third or fourth stimulus, no vast new entitlements. The debt is so large and voters are so tired of massive borrowing that the next president will talk not of "investments" but of balancing the budget. In 2017, President Hillary Clinton or President Marco Rubio will tell us that cutting spending and living within our means is the new cool.

If eight years of borrowing, printing, spending, and lending vast sums of money at zero interest did not lead to economic recovery, then the antithesis of all that will be the explicit platform of Republicans and the implicit one of Democrats.

continue →

it's probably because i don't particularly like or agree with many of Obama's policies, or leftist leaning chicago politics, but i really have no trouble at all imagining america without him at the helm.

being more conservative, as far as politics go, is kinda like being a Cubs fan – you get used to the disappointment, even if you don't like it, but still remain a fan.

we've made it through yet another week, and hopefully it'll start to actually feel like spring around here shortly... but it's friday morning, and you know what that means, so here it is – A Weird Economy

After the government borrowed more than $6 trillion over the last five years, the economy still only grew in the last quarter at a rate of 0.4 percent. When we look for new measures that might boost economic growth – new energy production, deregulation, tax cuts, or increased business confidence – we see instead negative inducements: Keystone tabled, vast quantities of gas and oil put off limits on federal lands, the huge Monterey Shale Formation in California in suspended animation, a near panic at all the insidious new costs of a looming Obamacare, promises to revisit cap-and-trade, tax hikes on job creators, coupled with new state-income-tax raises like those in California (that hiked its sales, income, and gas taxes), the end of the payroll-tax holiday, unpredictability in the financial sector – from Cyprus-like worries to de facto zero interest paid on passbook accounts to quantitative easing.

And the result is a private sector sitting on vast amounts of cash, reluctant to buy new inventory and equipment, hire new employees, or take risks – an economic fact far more important than all the hundreds of billions of dollars borrowed and spent on various stimuli, high-speed rail, Solyndra-like boondoggles, etc.

One can mock the old wisdom about the negative effects of new taxes, regulations, deficits, debt, and government growth in unemployment and disability insurance and food stamps, and one can insist that the endless, boilerplate rhetoric of the last five years (e.g., spread the wealth, no time to profit, at some point you've made enough money, millionaires and billionaires, pay your fair share, you didn't build that, fat cats, corporate-jet owners, etc.) had no effect on thick-skinned, greedy capitalists eager to make a buck, but since 2009 we have taken a natural recovery and turned it into a near permanent European-like slowdown.

If all the textbook progressive stimulatory cures for a sick economy (borrowing vast amounts of money, swelling the size of government and its payroll, expanding the money supply, and reducing interest rates to near zero) have had either no, or negative, effects, then in our fifth year of this experiment perhaps it might be time to try to restore growth by encouraging far more U.S. gas and oil exploration, cutting government, stopping tax hikes, curbing regulations, and suspending Obamacare.

it's hard for me to truly understand why Obama, and other liberal/progressives, seem to honestly believe that spending huge amounts of cash and growing the size of government is the pathway to prosperity – the only thing that makes sense is that they don't overly care about the economy, not really, and their own philosophy trumps economic reality... but that's just my opinion.

that's right, ladies and germs, it's time for that early friday morning tradition that you eagerly wait for all week – c'mon, i know you do – so without adiue, here's the latest from victor: America's Big Fat Advantage

For all the Obama-era talk of decline, there is at least one reason why America probably won't, at least not quite yet.

"Peak oil" and our "oil addiction" were supposed to have ensured that we ran out of either gas or the money to buy it. Now, suddenly, we have more gas and oil than ever before. But the key question is: Why do we?

The oil-and-gas renaissance was brought on by horizontal drilling and fracking that opened up vast new reserves that were previously either unknown or considered unrecoverable. Both technological breakthroughs were American discoveries, largely brought on by entrepreneurial mavericks and engineers exploring on mostly private lands. Couldn't the Saudi, Venezuelan, or Nigerian oil industry have discovered these new methods of resource recovery, given their nations' reliance on petroleum exportation?

The world now wakes up to iPhone communication, Amazon online buying, social networking on Facebook, Google Internet searches, and writing and computing with Microsoft software. Why weren't these innovations first developed in Japan, China, or Germany – all wealthy industrial countries with large, well-educated, and hard-working populations? Because in such nations, young oddballs like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs more likely would have needed the proper parentage, age, family connections, or government-insider sanction to be given a fair shake.

Even in its third century, America is still the most meritocratic nation in the world. Unlike under the caste system of India; the class considerations of Europe; the racial homogeneity of China, Japan, or Korea; the tribalism of Africa; or the religious orthodoxy of the Middle East, in America one can offer a new idea, invention, or protocol and have it be judged on its merits, rather than on the background, accent, race, age, gender, or religion of the person who offers it.

despite the inept bickering childish dipshit politicians and Obama, i still can't help but have hope for the future... the full story hasn't been written, and there's still plenty to come.

almost hard to believe it's already friday, damn this week flew by fast... anywho, gotta keep up with tradition around here, so here's the lastest from victor hanson – The New Affirmative Action

Sometime in the first years of the new millennium, "global warming" evolved into "climate change." Amid growing controversies over the planet's past temperatures, Al Gore and other activists understood that human-induced "climate change" could explain almost any weather extremity – droughts or floods, temperatures too hot or too cold, hurricanes and tornadoes – better than "global warming" could.

Similar verbal gymnastics have gradually turned "affirmative action" into "diversity" – a word ambiguous enough to avoid the innate contradictions of a liberal society affirming the illiberal granting of racial preferences. [...]

How do we fairly allocate compensation for collective sins against a bygone generation? Slavery, Jim Crow, internment of Japanese-Americans, racially exclusionary immigration laws, the denial of U.S. admission to Jews fleeing the Holocaust: All were reprehensible, but it is difficult to know the degree to which these injustices still distort the career paths of individual Americans, or who still alive is to blame.

In 2009, the University of California system changed its admissions policy allegedly to curtail the number of Asian-Americans on its campuses. Such anti-affirmative action arose not because UC was a racist institution, but because, as an applicant group, Asian-Americans were outperforming most other ethnic groups, in numbers disproportionate to the general population.

In other words, just as the Ivy League turned away qualified Jews in the 1920s and '30s, so some UC administrators apparently thought that engineering a campus "to look like America" was more important than simply admitting those with the strongest academic achievement.

Affirmative action – fossilized for a half-century – also made few allowances for class. Asian-Americans, for example, have higher per capita incomes than Americans as a whole. Were affluent minority individuals eligible for affirmative action?

Will the children of multimillionaire Tiger Woods – or of Jay-Z and Beyoncé – qualify for special consideration on the theory that their racial pedigrees or statistical underrepresentation in some fields will make their lives more challenging than the lives of poor white children in rural Pennsylvania or second-generation Arab-Americans in Dearborn, Mich.?

another good one to munch on, as usual... never really been a big fan of affirmative action, and generally believe that things should be fair and equal across the board, but that's just me... how about you?

it's friday and that means time for our favorite guy, so let's see what victor has to say this week – The California Mordida

California now works on the principle of the mordida, or "bite". Its government assumes that it can take something extra from residents for the privilege of living in their special state.

In November, California approved a measure to raise its sales tax and its income-tax rates on the wealthy. According to the California Taxpayers Association, the state now has the highest sales tax and the highest top income-tax rate in the nation. The state also just upped its gasoline taxes by nearly 10 percent to make them the costliest in the United States – about 70 cents a gallon in combined federal, state, and local taxes. The state already has among the most expensive refinery regulations in America. That means California pump prices, at well over $4 per gallon, are second only to Hawaii's.

Yet, unlike Hawaii, California has wells that still produce more than 500,000 barrels of crude oil each day – behind only Texas and Alaska. Its newly discovered Monterey Shale Formation may hold some 30 billion barrels of oil and gas. Perhaps no state has so much recoverable petroleum and yet such high fuel taxes and pump prices.

California's record taxes are not reflections of the costs incurred ensuring superior public education. In fact, its public schools, in some surveys of national performance tests in math and English, rank near the nation's very bottom.

Nor do record gas taxes equate to wonderful freeways. The federal government concluded that only half of California's roads rate as acceptable. Private rankings put California's roads near dead last.

another good one describing and contrasting the nanny-state of california against texas... really kinda sucks, because california really is a beautiful state with so many natural resources.

it's early morning and i'm still at the office hack'n away... start'n to wind down now, and even the coffee isn't enough to me going much longer... anywho, it's friday morning so you know what that means! nope, i figure i'd go with krauthammer's latest – Hail Armageddon – since victor's talking about john kerry this week.

'The worst-case scenario for us," a leading anti-budget-cuts lobbyist told the Washington Post, "is the sequester hits and nothing bad really happens."

Think about that. Worst case? That a government drowning in debt should cut back by 2.2 percent — and the country survives. That a government now borrowing 35 cents of every dollar it spends reduces that borrowing by 2 cents "and nothing bad really happens." Oh, the humanity!

A normal citizen might think this a good thing. For reactionary liberalism, however, whatever sum our ever-inflating government happens to spend today (now double what Bill Clinton spent in his last year) is the Platonic ideal — the reduction of which, however minuscule, is a national calamity.

Or damn well should be. Otherwise, people might get the idea that we can shrink government, and live on.

Hence the president's message. If the "sequestration" – automatic spending cuts – goes into effect, the skies will fall. Plane travel jeopardized, carrier groups beached, teachers furloughed.

The administration has every incentive to make the sky fall, lest we suffer that terrible calamity – cuts the nation survives. Are they threatening to pare back consultants, conferences, travel, and other nonessential fluff? Hardly. It shall be air-traffic control. Meat inspection. Weather forecasting.

A 2011 GAO report gave a sampling of the vastness of what could be cut, consolidated, and rationalized in Washington: 44 overlapping job-training programs, 18 for nutrition assistance, 82 (!) on teacher quality, 56 dealing with financial literacy, more than 20 for homelessness, etc. Total annual cost: $100 billion to $200 billion, about two to five times the entire domestic sequester.

Are these on the chopping block? No sir. It's firemen first. That's the phrase coined in 1976 by legendary Washington Monthly editor Charlie Peters to describe the way government functionaries beat back budget cuts. Dare suggest a nick in the city budget and the mayor immediately shuts down the firehouse. The DMV back office stacked with nepotistic incompetents remains intact. Shrink it and no one would notice. Sell the firetruck – the people scream and the city council falls silent about any future cuts.

After all, the sequester is just one-half of 1 percent of GDP. It amounts to 1.4 cents on the dollar of nondefense spending, 2 cents overall.

nope, can't say i really disagree with him on anything... if anything, it just makes me pretty damn depressed thinking about it.

i'll probabaly feel better after i get some sleep and a blowjob.