"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Hillary Clinton's University Speeches and Money Laundering to Avoid Campaign Finance Laws



























Regarding the exorbitant fees Hillary Clinton has received for speaking engagements on college campuses, I had this same thought, but John Hinderaker beat me to it:

What does Hillary do? No sane person would pay to sit through one of her speeches. The universities that pay her hundreds of thousands of dollars are always quick to say that it wasn’t their money–it doesn’t account for their spiraling tuition!–but rather, it was contributed by donors. This is called money laundering. No one could contribute $250,000 to Hillary’s campaign–legally–but anyone can give the money to a university to underwrite her fee for a forgettable speech.

Why doesn't some enterprising reporter at the Washington Post or New York Times ask Hillary and these universities to disclose who exactly the donors were who contributed the funds necessary to pay Hillary Clinton $250k for an hour of droning?   Consider if the Koch brothers had donated, say, $250k to each of 20-30 universities for the express purpose of paying for a Ted Cruz speech, then Ted Cruz used the resulting $5-7.5 million in "personal" wealth to fund the early stages of his Presidential campaign.   Would they be interested in the topic then? 

See, if it were Republicans, someone in the Justice Department might notice that university administrations, wealthy donors, and the Hillary Clinton permanent campaign, are engaged in something called a CONSPIRACY TO COMMIT CAMPAIGN FINANCE FRAUD, which I strongly suspect is a federal crime punishable by prison terms.  

Monday, July 14, 2014

Wisdom from Victor Davis Hanson

VDH this morning:  "Modern liberalism has descended into the art of rich people blaming the lower middle class for not being generous enough with money they don’t have."

Friday, July 11, 2014

Nicholas Brothers

Ace of Spades had this last night, but I thought I'd share.   This is literally the most wonderful thing I've ever seen:


Thursday, July 10, 2014

Pranking the Religious




Ann Althouse today notes that liberal pranksters have recently been doing things like this at Hobby Lobby stores:



hobby lobby pro-choice prank



















Althouse makes this essential point:

The pranksters are taunting those who have taken a strong stand based on religion. Are we really going to taunt people about religion? If you're inclined to say yes, do you really mean it, across the board for all religions, or is this a special willingness to taunt Christians? If it's special for Christians, why is that? Is it because you think it's okay to taunt what you think is the dominant group? If Christians like the ones your protesting against really were dominant, we shouldn't, in a democracy, end up with laws forcing them to do things against their conscience, so I'd say, the existence of the birth control mandate is evidence that they are not the dominant group, in which case, you're harassing a minority. Why would you do that? Is it that you feel safe picking on Christians?

As becomes more and more clear, American liberalism, which used to be about combatting prejudice, now increasingly is a form of prejudice -- against white Americans, men, Christians, etc.   

***

On, and by the way, this behavior breaks the first rule of the Regular Guy, which as my children will tell you is:

DON'T MAKE WORK FOR OTHER PEOPLE!

Here's a self-identifying hip liberal who thinks it's OK to create a mess in a business and force one of its employees to take time to clean it up.   Just look at the self-congratulatory smugness on her face!   Hey, look at me, look how much smarter I am than these little people!   Won't I have a good laugh watching them straighten up after my vandalism!

If I were Hobby Lobby, I'd figure out a way to find out who this person is who is so blithely self-advertising her disorderly conduct, and call the local gendarmes.   Wonder if she'd be laughing then?

Obama Fiddling While Jerusalem Burns

Here's a story from Powerline that, fair to say, most Americans won't know, because most Americans are too busy thinking about where LeBron James will end up:

Writing from The Israel Project this morning, Omri Ceren draws our attention to a notable development (reported here) in Hamas’s war against Israel: “Yesterday Hamas launched – and then bragged about launching – three long-range M75 rockets targeting Israel’s nuclear reactor in the city Dimona. Iron Dome had to knock one of the rockets out of the sky; the other two landed in open areas.”
Omri comments: “A terrorist attack against a nuclear reactor is straightforwardly defined as nuclear terrorism by the UN’s 2005 International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism. This isn’t a close, debatable interpretation. It’s part of the black-letter definition at the very top of the convention[.]”
Hamas is likely to try again; if they succeed, writes Omri, they will have pulled off against an Israeli city what the UN considers to be an act of nuclear terrorism: “The Israeli reaction to an unconventional terror attack is impossible to completely foresee, but it’s safe to say that Israel’s missile defense system prevented a catastrophe yesterday.”

If Hamas were to succeed in hitting one of Israel's nuclear reactors the resulting fallout could cause a Chernobyl-like disaster.   Is it any wonder that Israel is acting aggressively against Hamas?   They were literally moments away from a potentially country-destroying catastrophe.    (Chernobyl, lest we forget, resulted in the creation of a 30 km radius "exclusion zone" in the Ukraine.   That's slightly more than 1,000 sq. miles.   The entire nation of Israel is only 8,000 sq. miles.   Is the Dimona reactor larger or smaller than Chernobyl?   Would its destruction by missile cause a larger or smaller release than Chernobyl?   Do you know?   Does anyone?)

Oh, by the way, could all of the liberal Democrats who ridiculed Ronald Reagan for his proposal in the 1980s to build an anti-missile shield please forward their apologies to the Reagan family?   They called it "Star Wars" and called Reagan a dunce for fantasizing about it.   The Israels call it the "Iron Dome" and it may have just saved their country.

Meanwhile, here's what our current President is spending his time doing:

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Shameful

Peggy Noonan had a great piece last weekend about how Obama has basically decided that he no longer needs to do his job.   Here's the gist:

I'm not sure people are noticing the sheer strangeness of how the president is responding to the lack of success around him. He once seemed a serious man. He wrote books, lectured on the Constitution. Now he seems unserious, frivolous, shallow. He hangs with celebrities, plays golf. His references to Congress are merely sarcastic: "So sue me." "They don't do anything except block me. And call me names. It can't be that much fun."
In a truly stunning piece in early June, Politico's Carrie Budoff Brown and Jennifer Epstein interviewed many around the president and reported a general feeling that events have left him—well, changed. He is "taking fuller advantage of the perquisites of office," such as hosting "star-studded dinners that sometimes go on well past midnight." He travels, leaving the White House more in the first half of 2014 than any other time of his presidency except his re-election year. He enjoys talking to athletes and celebrities, not grubby politicians, even members of his own party. He is above it all.  
On his state trip to Italy in the spring, he asked to spend time with "interesting Italians." They were wealthy, famous. The dinner went for four hours. The next morning his staff were briefing him for a "60 Minutes" interview about Ukraine and health care. "One aide paraphrased Obama's response: 'Just last night I was talking about life and art, big interesting things, and now we're back to the minuscule things on politics.' '' 
Minuscule? Politics is his job.


Now there's this:




If you've lost a Hispanic Democratic Congressman, you've probably reached the bottom.


Media Ignorance

A terrific article by Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist blog highlights the growing problem of media ignorance... how the liberal punditocracy which claims to know best about how to run the world actually knows very little about the world they want to run.   Here's a minor taste, but read it all:

During my time at GetReligion, a site that daily analyzes how well the mainstream media handles religion news, we never lacked for content. There was the time a New York Times‘ reporter referred to the crozier, the ornate silver shepherd’s crook, carried by Pope John Paul II as a “crow’s ear.” Which of course brings to mind First Things editor Richard John Neuhaus’ stories of being interviewed:
An eager young thing with a national paper was interviewing me about yet another instance of political corruption.   
"Is this something new?" she asked.  
"No," I said, "it's been around ever since that unfortunate afternoon in the garden."  
There was a long pause and then she asked, "What garden was that?" It was touching.

What prompts me to mention this today is that I'm just off the phone with a reporter from the same national paper.  
He's doing a story on Pope Benedict's new encyclical. In the course of discussing the pontificate,  
I referred to the pope as the bishop of Rome. 
 "That raises an interesting point," he said. "Is it unusual that this pope is also the bishop of Rome?"  
He obviously thought he was on to a new angle.

It would be funny if it weren't so sad.

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

The Difference

When extremist Islamists flew planes into our buildings on 9/11, Palestinians in the streets of East Jerusalem cheered.   But when extremist Israelis murdered a Palestinian teenager in revenge for earlier murders (by Palestinians) of three Israeli teenagers, here is how Israel reacted:

Israel reckoned with rising homegrown extremism Sunday as it arrested six Jewish suspects who are believed to have burned to death an Arab teenager in revenge for the killing of three Israeli teens.
The arrests shocked those on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide — Palestinians because many had assumed Israel would never act against its own, and Israelis because there had been widespread doubt that Jews could have carried out such a heinous crime. 
Sunday’s action could help defuse what has been seen as a dangerous swelling of Palestinian anger, with violent protests in East Jerusalem and Arab towns in northern Israel feeding fears of a budding intifada.

That's the difference between the two cultures.   And that's why the culture of Israel -- the culture of the West -- must prevail.  

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Girl of the Day - Elisabeth Moss and Hobby Lobby

I'm pretty sure this woman could figure out a way to get her own contraception without her employer's help or subsidy:

































So, since when did it become the Left's position that women are infants who can't possibly take care of their own "health care needs" without either Big Daddy Government or  Big Daddy Corporation providing for them?



I'm just askin'.

Elizabeth Warren, U.S. Senator and Full-Time Moron, on the Hobby Lobby Decision

Here is Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren's astonishingly obtuse and offensive Twitter response to yesterday's Hobby Lobby decision:




















At a glance, there are at least three glaring factual errors in this:

1. Hobby Lobby, while employing some 17,000 Americans in 600 or so stores, is not really a "big corporation."   It is not publicly-traded, and is owned by a single family, the Greens, of Oklahoma City.

2. Hobby Lobby is not denying women "access to basic care."   The company is giving its employees health insurance; is willing to provide 16 of 20 birth control options under its plan; and only objects to the four "birth control" options that, in their view, constitute abortifacients that end what their religion tells them are human lives.   Women employees remain free to go purchase those abortifacients at the local pharmacy using their own money.   Is the English language really so degraded in our current political culture that the sentence "X refuses to pay for Y to get Z where Y can easily pay for Z herself" now means "X denies Y access to Z"?    (All of this begging the question... why is birth control considered part of "basic care" to begin with?   Sex and pregnancy are not diseases.)

3. "Vague moral objections"?   Is Warren unaware that the largest Christian denominations in the world (and Islam for that matter) believe that conscious action to abort a human child is a grave sin?   Calling a fundamental tenet of both Catholicism and Evangelical Christianity a "vague moral objection" strikes me as walking right up to the edge of religious bigotry.  

I don't know what's sadder:  that this person is a U.S. Senator; that this person may be a candidate for the 2016 Democratic nomination for President; or that this supposed "intellectual" was once a full professor at Harvard Law School.