John Bolton on Egypt

This is how adults who are realists talk about foreign policy.   Any comparison to the present POTUS is entirely intentional:

The Muslim Brotherhood has acted as if it is a power unto itself and Egypt. It is not a normal political party as we understand that term in the United States. It’s more like an armed militia and even though Mohammed Morsi the ousted President won narrowly an election last year, in office he acted in ways that would have entrenched the brotherhood in power and the saying is that as the wags have it one person one time,–one person, one vote, one time, so I don’t have any doubt here that the brotherhood wanted this confrontation. They were not going to acknowledge the interim government. And, although it’s bloody and it’s undoubtedly going to get worse, this reflects a fundamental divide in Egyptian society. You could paper it over with negotiations day after day but the divide wasn’t going to go away. It’s much to be regretted, but the idea that this is all one sides fault or the others is a bad way to look it at. So, what should the United States do? The United States should look to its fundamental national interests which are in this situation, I think two. Interest number one, we want an Egyptian government that will abide by its commitments under the Camp David Peace Accord with Israel. That is the foundation stone of American foreign policy in the region since 1979. It’s perfectly clear the Muslim brotherhood would abrogate that treaty as soon as it could. Let’s not forget, it was the Muslim Brotherhood that killed Anwar Sadat in 1981 for negotiating the treaty in the first place, so there’s no doubt that our interests seems to me lie with the forces that control the interim government here. And, number two, we have a clear interest in keeping the Suez Canal open and that requires a government that has the ability to restore order and to recognize its international obligations with respect to the Canal, and that doesn’t seem to me to be the Brotherhood either. Is this a happy choice? Of course not, but that’s what America ought to focus on. We’re not going to effect politics inside Egypt. They are obviously already out of the control even of the Egyptian people, but we can focus on our interests and that’s what we should do.

I would add a third interest.   We must side with the party that will protect Coptic Christians from becoming the victims of an Islamist pogrom.   That means siding with the military against the Muslim Brotherhood.  






















If Obama won't lay down a "red line" telling the Muslim Brotherhood that the killing of Christians and the burning of churches won't be tolerated, then what the hell good is he?  

"The Wheels Are Coming Off of Health Care Reform"

A pretty good summary by a fellow blogger of where we stand with Obamacare:

The Administration pushed hard for passage of health care reform, asserting that everyone who disagreed with any provision of the law was a liar for pointing out flaws. Now, nearly every critic has been proven right. Premiums are higher when the government mandates that insurance policies cannot limit their downside risk. Duh. Employers are less likely to offer coverage when they are required to pay higher costs for more coverage. Duh. Employers are likely to drop coverage when the government is offering a subsidy to individuals, but not employers, and when the penalty for dropping coverage is much lower than the cost of continuing it. Duh. Employers are going to cut employee hours to avoid triggering the threshold at which they are required to absorb tens of thousands of per-employee health care costs. Duh. 

The bottom line is that the wheels are coming off of health care reform.

I would add that all of these problems with Obamacare all stem from the same fundamental ideological flaw.   People (liberals in government) who have not run businesses and ideologically do not approve of the concept of business (profit maximization through rational control of inputs, including labor costs/employee benefits), do not understand that employers are rational actors, insurance companies are rational actors, employees are rational actors, individual people facing choices in the markeplace are rational actors (do I spend my marginal income on health insurance if I am a young healthy person or do I bet that I won't get sick and/or that, if I do get sick, under Obamacare they can't turn me down for coverage?), etc.   Anyone with rudimentary understanding of economics would have told you (a) premiums will go way up when insurance companies can't turn down people with pre-existing conditions; (b) businesses will cut employees and/or hours and/or not hire additional people if doing so means they will have to incur the costs in both cash outlays and bureaucratic transaction costs of providing health insurance benefits; (c) where penalties are relatively low for not having coverage (both IRS tax penalties and the penalty for not having coverage, which is now negligible since people with pre-existing conditions cannot be denied) and the costs of coverage are much higher, people will opt out rather than opt in.  

On the other hand, the cynic in me might think that the libs intended this train wreck from the outset, so that single-payer government health care would be the only thing left standing after the crash.

Girl of the Day - Laura Fraser (Lydia on Breaking Bad)

Walter White's scary weird contact for moving meth to the Czech Republic (the source of his newfound mega-wealth), Lydia, is played by the delightful Scottish actress Laura Fraser.   It's always amazing to me how actors and actresses are able to change their accents... in the show she sounds like any American actress would sound playing an uptight American businesswoman.   Here's how she looks in the show:

And here she is being interviewed, looking much different and sounding much cuter (Scottish accent, don't you know).  

Global Warming? Not in Milwaukee.

Today is just another low 70s beautiful day in August here in Milwaukee.   Maybe it's hot elsewhere, but this has been a remarkably mild summer for us.   So my conclusion is that there's no such thing as global warming.

Of course that's just anecdotal.   Sort of like whenever there's a hurricane or tornado or week of heat elsewhere the Left automatically says that phenomena X is the effect and global warming is the cause.   Because odd stretches of weather that occur fairly randomly aren't actually the norm for existence in the physical world.   Because you're anti-science if you disagree.   Because (probably) racism (somehow).

For the Left, whenever something happens it's caused by global warming and, ultimately, by evil corporations and evil Westerners using too much fossil fuel.   Because their worldview requires reducing every phenomena to a Manichaen agon of good and evil.   Environmentalism is a faith, replete with saints and sinners, angels and demons.  

For conservatives, we know that sometimes it's just the weather.  

L'Etat, C'est Moi!

Laws are for little people.   That's the mantra of the Obama Administration, especially regarding its supposedly grandest accomplishment, Obamacare.   Here's the story:

First, there was the delay of Obamacare’s Medicare cuts until after the election. Then there was the delay of the law’s employer mandate. Then there was the announcement, buried in the Federal Register, that the administration would delay enforcement of a number of key eligibility requirements for the law’s health insurance subsidies, relying on the “honor system” instead. Now comes word that another costly provision of the health law—its caps on out-of-pocket insurance costs—will be delayed for one more year. 

According to the Congressional Research Service, as of November 2011, the Obama administration had missed as many as one-third of the deadlines, specified by law, under the Affordable Care Act.

Now the key thing to remember here is not that Obamacare is a clusterf***.    We knew that already, basically a priori.   You can't take an enormous, complicated economy the size of France's or Canada's and remake it on paper in a bill drafted by Washington lawyer-lobbyists and have it be anything else.   See Von Mises.   See Hayek.    No one should be surprised.

No, the key thing is that we now have a dictator, if by dictator we mean someone who is above the law, who does not think that the laws written by Congress pertain to him.   Obamacare, for better and for worse, was enacted by Congress.   It had certain dates in it, deadlines by which times the Executive Branch had to do X or had to do Y.   Those dates were part of the law just like filing your income taxes by April 15th every year is part of the law.   But the Obama Administration thinks they can just ignore those parts of the law that are inconvenient... that would expose the "train wreck" of Obamacare in advance of the 2014 mid-term elections.

If I were writing thrillers, I'd write a political thriller where the people around the President are conspiring to win the mid-terms, retake the House, then crash the economy in 2015 with the implementation of Obamacare, and then cancel the 2016 election and have Obama keep power because of an "emergency."   I don't really think that's what's happening, but if I were writing a paranoid thriller, that's how the facts so far would fit.

A Return to Authority?

Psychologists call this "projection."   The rest of us call it wishful thinking.   Here's David Brooks of The New York Times predicting that consumers of news and punditry will return to the very mainstream media they've been leaving in droves over the past ten years or so:

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah, I think the audience has changed online. I think there's been a return to authority. You know, I used to read blogs, and you'd kind of be reading something interesting, and then the blogger would write, "Well, I've got to quit now. I'm going off to junior high." I realized I'd been reading a 12 year old.

But I think there has been a return away from some of that toward, whether it's online or in print, a return to quality. People who actually make the calls, who are not speculating, who are reporting. And I think there's been a return to that sort of stuff.

And so I'm a little more of the belief that the old media is going to continue. Look at e-books; they've hit a plateau. Look at online; it's hitting a plateau, I think. And so I think we're going to be stunned by how much of the old media, whether it's delivered online or not, is going to be around, as the audience returns to authority.

It's hard to even respond to something so muddleheaded.    Why, of course, people are "returning to authority" of papers like the Washington Post or the Boston Globe (just sold for less than 10 cents on the dollar of what they were worth 10 years go), or to CNN or network news (ratings plummeting), or to Newsweek (defunct) or Time (soon to be defunct) or The New Yorker (who cares anymore?).  

And the casual put down of bloggers... "I realized I'd been reading a 12 year old."   First of all... I don't believe that story.   I think it's a lie, made up so that Brooks can dine out on it at the toney cocktail parties in Manhattan he goes to.   Because he just happened on that 12 year-old blogger rather than looking at blogs like Powerline (all high-powered lawyers), Instapundit (a law professor), Legal Insurrection (a law professor), Hugh Hewitt (a law professor), or moi for that matter (Ph.D/lawyer).   Really.   This is the sort of statement that you could discredit on cross-examination in about thirty seconds, but it gets tossed off as a bon mot among the chi-chi crowd at the New York Times.

David Brooks' paean to "authority" is about as crystalline a version of why newspapers are dying as you could imagine.   Superior without actual accomplishment, pretentious without actual learning, ultimately it's just sophomoric.   Didn't Brooks ever take freshman comp, where they ought to have taught him that an argument from authority was a logical fallacy?

A Start, But Not Far Enough

Eric Holder, whom I do not like, has managed to do something that may turn out to be a good thing, or may just be more of the same.   He's saying that the Department of Justice will start pulling back on prosecution of non-violent drug crimes:

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced Monday that low-level, nonviolent drug offenders with no ties to gangs or large-scale drug organizations will no longer be charged with offenses that impose severe mandatory sentences. 

The new Justice Department policy is part of a comprehensive prison reform package that Holder unveiled in a speech to the American Bar Association in San Francisco. He also introduced a policy to reduce sentences for elderly, nonviolent inmates and find alternatives to prison for nonviolent criminals..... 

It is clear that “too many Americans go to too many prisons for far too long and for no truly good law enforcement reason,” Holder said. “We cannot simply prosecute or incarcerate our way to becoming a safer nation,” he added later in the speech. 

Holder is calling for a change in Justice Department policies to reserve the most severe penalties for drug offenses for serious, high-level or violent drug traffickers.

To me this doesn't go far enough.   The problem with criminalizing drugs is that it incentivizes "gangs or large-scale drug organizations" to enter the business and to protect their turf with violence.   Sure, it would be a good thing if a mere consumer of drugs isn't incarcerated, but is diverted into treatment or some other non-prison punishment.   But a lot of that is happening anyway.   What we need is to end the incentives for some of the best and the brightest and most motivated and aggressive young men in inner cities to enter the drug trade as a means of getting ahead economically, and to divert those guys -- precisely the guys who are with-it enough to organize "gangs or large-scale drug organizations" -- into the real economy.   The way to do that is to remove the thing that makes drug trafficking profitable, because it drives drug prices up so far, namely, the illegality of the enterprise and the risk involved.  

That's a really radical proposal, and I'm afraid it's one that the Eric Holders of the world wouldn't embrace.  

Caravaggio!

A miracle of parenthood that seems to be happening with great frequency in our house occurs when your son or daughter surpasses you in knowledge of particular areas, and then surprises you with what he or she has learned.   As Regular Guy readers, you may recall that the Regular Son is a painter.   Over the weekend he mentioned that his favorite painting of all time is Caravaggio's Deposition of Christ.   Here it is:








































If your 16 year-old son even has a favorite painting, you're doing pretty well.   If it's this one, I'd say your parenting has been a roaring success.   So far anyway, so good.

Meanwhile, Back In the Real World

While President Obama takes yet another golf vacation, it's worth revisiting where we stand now with the economy.   Remember the economy?   Remember how the stimulus was supposed to fix it?   That was back in 2009.  

So, how is Obama doing?

Not so good:


























Now, to be fair, is Obama responsible for all of the stagnation of the American economy over the past five years?   No... there is some very hard deleveraging going on in businesses and households, coupled with a painful weeding out of unproductive workers and industries.   Many jobs simply aren't coming back.  

But Obama's policies, as the apotheosis of a century of liberalism and the growth of the bureaucratic state, have certainly exacerbated the slowness of the recovery, and will limit the possibility for the kind of explosive growth the economy really needs.   Think of the effects of just the following policies on creating and growing small businesses, the engine of American employment growth:

• Increasing the minimum wage.
• Increasing the cost of energy by limiting the ability of American companies to explore and drill for petroleum, including the idiotic rejection of the Keystone pipeline, drilling in ANWR, offshore drilling, fracking, etc., all of which is exacerbated by the idiotic subsidies poured into "green energy" technologies that don't and won't work.
• Increasing taxes on the "wealthy," many of whom are small business owners whose companies are flow-through entities that pay the individual income tax rate.
• Larding more and more regulation on companies, particularly environmental regulations that hamstring American manufacturing and, for some industries have simply driven them south of the border or overseas to China.
• Obamacare and its mandates.

Couple all of this bad economic policy with a constant drumbeat of anti-business propaganda from the media, and it's no wonder that the best and the brightest of our young people seem to be gravitating more and more toward rent-seeking as professions (law, government, academia, non-profits, media) and less and less toward starting and owning businesses.

But, not to worry, everything's under control on Martha's Vineyard.

Girl of the Day - Karlie Kloss

She's a super-model, a Victoria's Secret model, she went to Webster Groves High, and she's a Cardinals fan.   I meanwhile am apparently a dirty old man, but the Cardinals fan thing put me over the top:

Human Nature Is What It Is

I have written here before about the great unmentionable fact of American society, the fact that no politicians want to face -- that 50% of Americans have an IQ that is 100 or below.   By definition.   Not something that throwing money at the problem will change.   That 16% or so have an IQ at or below 85.   Fact.   Can't be changed.   Conversely that roughly 16% have IQs above 115,  and only 2.5% or so have IQs above 130, and those people will generally (not always, but statistically) end up being the most productive citizens, the people who support the rest by of us providing jobs, goods, services, etc.  

How do we provide a dignified life for the people in the low-IQ categories?   How do we educate them?   How do we create a society where they can live safely (and where society can maintain order, i.e., where we can be safe from predations from low-IQ criminals).   How do we create a society where the high-IQ citizens are rewarded for the benefit they create for the rest of us while controlling the natural impulse of the strong to prey upon the weak?  

None of this is very pleasant to think about or write about or talk about, and it's likely that if a politican started talking about this sort of thing, even the most lawyer-vetted, careful, politically-correct speech would end up offending people.   Because racist.   Because anti-immigrant.   Because mean-spirited.

Anyway, I was reminded of these sad thoughts by reading this sad item from Instapundit from a teacher in apparently an urban public school.   It's hard not to despair:

A school in which I used to teach was failing. Is failing. Has always failed. Our staff was more than 50% non-traditional teachers. We had a strong core of Teach For America and Teaching Fellows – neither of which pull in your regular “he who can’t? Teaches” anecdotes. Most of us were “wanting to help where we can” folks. 

We couldn’t make a dent in that school. 

The only reason that the 60% of the kids who bothered to show up daily even came to school was for the 2 free meals and the climate control. We needed a force of 15 security people to keep the kids IN CLASS. They had no desire to learn. They did not CARE if they failed. I never, ever had kids who started at my school as 9th graders and had enough credits to be juniors by their third year. Most didn’t even have enough credits to be sophomores. And this was when summer school was free! 

Most of my 33 student classes had a regular showing of about 20-25, and it was never the same kids. 

Those that did come were usually passed up to their current grade based on age – after all, who wants a 16-year-old boy in classes with an 11-year-old girl? No one. And we can’t just stop them all in 9th grade! Why, it would be full! So, I had kids who read at 2nd grade level to 11th grade level, with math scores in the same range. All in the same classroom. About 60% of the time. 

Now, there were the other issues. I didn’t see them in my room, but we did have some mongo fights in the school. We had fires (never had to have drills because we had fires). Anything we didn’t have nailed down got stolen. But that’s all secondary. Mostly, I liked my kids a lot. I got along with them very well. I even taught some pretty good science when I had seniors – kids who had cared enough to slog through 4 years of prison-without-bars, as they called it. 

The primary issue is that these children (and their parents) have no vested interest in education. If they merely showed up to school, I was required to pass them. The D’s in my class were really F’s, but I gave them D’s because they showed up enough that I knew failing them would do them no good and would only get me in a world of trouble. 

They look at school as something that is done to them. Something that they are subjected to. Sure, all kids kind of view school like that. But when the family is not saying that it’s their job, when they simply don’t see that school gets them anything? There will be no successful school with these children.

The President as Celebrity

Does it bother you that President Obama went on Jay Leno this week to discuss foreign policy?   It bothers me.   We are closing 20 embassies around the world because of supposedly credible threats from al Qaeda.   An attack on an embassy is an act of war -- it is no different than if a foreign power attacked American soil.   So, with a supposedly credible threat of an act of war against America, the President chooses to spend time flying to Los Angeles to appear on a talk show with a comedian?

What's worse... apparently Leno was more insightful and probing in his questions than most of the White House Press corps has been.

Girl of the Day - The Regular Wife!

After twenty years of marriage I can say honestly that the Regular Wife has never been more beautiful.  





























And, of course, she's responsible for these people too!  

The Regular Son!

 

And the Regular Daughters!

Best wife and mother ever!   Happy Anniversary, sweetheart!  

Lawlessness

Obama apparently personally helped negotiate an exemption for Congress and its staffers from Obamacare.   

As Orwell said, all pigs are equal, but some pigs are more equal than others.

Filner, Clinton, Spitzer, Weiner... Does Anyone Notice a Pattern?

Here's a Bill Clinton commercial for Bob Filner, the Democrat mayor of San Diego, who has now been outed as a serial sexual harasser.






This is par for the course in the Democratic Party -- the same party where whoring (Spitzer), sexting (Weiner), and general sex-crazed hound-doggery (Clinton and Filner) seem to be a prerequisite for higher office.  

But, of course, what women really have to worry about is those crazy Christian Republicans who want to take away their right to KILL THEIR BABIES.

Drudge v. WaPo

Jeff Bezos of Amazon just bought the Washington Post for $250 million.

Meanwhile, a conservative estimate last year of the value of the website The Drudge Report had it worth up to $375 million.

Your essay question for today, class, is... compare and contrast!  

***

Oh, and by the way, no one thinks Bezos is getting a deal on the Post.   Nearly everyone who's looked at it thinks he made a vanity purchase and grossly overpaid for the newspaper as a going concern, because, as a going concern, newspapers are going, going, gone!

On the other hand, I don't think Matt Drudge would sell his website for $375 million.   He gets a billion page-views a month!  I think he's pretty confident that it will continue to grow and generate growing revenues.   With little to no overhead, no pension plans for employees, no threat of strikes, etc.!   As my dad would say... such a deal!

***

Now, for extra credit, compare and contrast, say, your average overpriced liberal arts college with the Kahn Academy online.  

Same principle, different industry.   The demise of the newspaper industry is only farther along in the process.   University education's demise is coming like a freight train.

Liberalism, Crystallized

From a press release by the FBI's Detroit office:

Sandra Campbell, 57 a former Detroit Public Schools contract accountant and school board candidate, and her daughter, Domonique Campbell, 38, a Detroit Public Schools teacher, were convicted today by a federal jury in Detroit on charges of program fraud conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy, and tax charges following a five-week jury trial, United States Attorney Barbara L. McQuade announced today. The jury returned its verdict after only one-and-a-half hours of deliberations.... 

The evidence presented at trial established that between 2004 and 2008, Sandra Campbell and Domonique Campbell obtained in excess of $530,000 from the Detroit Public Schools through a fraudulent scheme in which orders were placed with the Campbells’ sham company for books and educational materials never provided to the schools. Sandra Campbell and Domonique Campbell conspired to launder the fraud proceeds and to defraud the Internal Revenue Service and failed to report the money they fraudulently obtained from the Detroit Public Schools as income on their tax returns.

That's what happens to citizens' tax dollars when they get funneled into the maw of liberal big city public employees.

 

More VDH - Does This Guy Ever Sleep?

Man, can Victor Davis Hanson turn out the punditry!   More great stuff from a different article, this one from NRO, on the Obama scandals, and the comparison to Watergate:

I think it is a fair guess that had the public learned the truth about the Benghazi deaths — that a videomaker had no role in the violence and that the administration was paranoid about drawing attention to an ascendant al-Qaeda, U.S. missile-running, and lax diplomatic security — or about the IRS targeting or the NSA surveillance or the AP/Rosen monitoring, Barack Obama would have lost a close election. All these scandals had their geneses before the 2012 election, and all were adroitly hushed up until after Obama’s second inauguration. 

That too is in accord with the Watergate pattern. The Nixon administration covered up in Machiavellian fashion the June 1972 Watergate break-in, almost five months before the president’s landslide win. At least six weeks before the election, the nation knew that there were members of the Nixon administration or the Nixon reelection committee involved in Watergate-related misdeeds — but they found that in comparison to Vietnam, the Chinese initiatives, or the economy, the Watergate news was boring. Again, that the Obama scandals were successfully kept hushed up before the 2012 election is not unusual.

Hiroshima, 68 Years Ago Today

The must reading for today, and every year on the anniversary of the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb, is Paul Fussel's essay, "Thank God for the Atomic Bomb."   Fussel, stationed in the Pacific and part of the forces that would have invaded Japan, knew what he was talking about:

John Kenneth Galbraith is persuaded that the Japanese would have surrendered surely by November without an invasion. He thinks the A-bombs were unnecessary and unjustified because the war was ending anyway. The A-bombs meant, he says, "a difference, at most, of two or three weeks." But at the time, with no indication that surrender was on the way, the kamikazes were sinking American vessels, the Indianapolis was sunk (880 men killed), and Allied casualties were running to over 7,000 per week. "Two or three weeks," says Galbraith. Two weeks more means 14,000 more killed and wounded, three weeks more, 21,000. Those weeks mean the world if you're one of those thousands or related to one of them. During the time between the dropping of the Nagasaki bomb on August 9 and the actual surrender on the fifteenth, the war pursued its accustomed course: on the twelfth of August eight captured American fliers were executed (heads chopped off); the fifty-first United States submarine, Bonefish, was sunk (all aboard drowned); the destroyer Callaghan went down, the seventieth to be sunk, and the Destroyer Escort Underhill was lost. That's a bit of what happened in six days of the two or three weeks posited by Galbraith. What did he do in the war? He worked in the Office of Price Administration in Washington. I don't demand that he experience having his ass shot off. I merely note that he didn't.

Exactly so.

VDH and the Litany of Obama Failures

Victor Davis Hanson often writes longish columns over at PJ Media that compile the assorted sins of the Obama Administration.   Today's is a particularly insightful exercise in the genre.   Here are some of the nuggets, but read the whole thing:

• Aside from Obama himself, no one in the post-Benghazi, -AP, -NSA, and -IRS scandal era references the president any longer as the former “professor of constitutional law.” In Obama’s case even the inflated title has become an oxymoron.

 

• When Obama occasionally soars with the old “wind and solar” and “millions of new green jobs” tropes, most associate those references with “Solyndra.” How odd that those in the fracking business — reducing carbon emissions, lowering electricity prices, reducing dependence on foreign energy sources — have done Obama far more political good than his often inept and corrupt friends in the green subsidy racket.

• If a House representative in 2009 had suggested that those in the executive branch should not enforce the employer mandate of the newly passed Obamacare, he would have incurred charges of being disloyal to the Constitution. Now the author of the bill calls it a “train wreck,” and the president chooses not to faithfully execute elements of his own law, his “signature” legislative achievement.... The more vehemently a group in 2009 demanded Obamacare — unions, government employees, pro-Democratic businesses — the more likely they were by 2013 to wish exemption from it.

 

• If anyone were to repeat the Obama reform mantra of 2008 — a new transparency, an end to lobbyists, no more revolving doors — it would incur laughter.

 

• To be a good class warrior also requires the pretense of populism. Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich were at least not habitués of Martha’s Vineyard, did not make second homes out of tony golf courses, did not have the family jetting to Aspen and Costa del Sol to take time off with those who forgot when to quit their profiting. How can a president so rail at the 1% and yet so wish to play, vacation, and be among those who didn’t build their wealth?  The president’s signature achievement? He has established a precedent that the president can play all the golf he wishes without being caricatured as a distracted would-be aristocrat.

All great stuff.

On The A-Rod Suspension and a Flashback to TRG On PED Hypocrisy

I don't like A-Rod.   He has always struck me as an arrogant, entitled pretty boy, who never won until he played with a winner like Derek Jeter and an organization like the Yankees, and who always seemed to "choke" in the clutch.   Some of that is probably wrong, and of course I don't know him personally.   Those are just my impressions.   Some players on opposing teams are likeable -- guys like the Pirates' Andrew McCutcheon from today's game, men like Greg Maddux or Tom Glavine or John Smoltz from earlier rival teams.   Some aren't -- A-Rod, Ryan Braun, Alfonso Soriano, Bryan Harper.  

But, for the life of me, I don't quite understand how A-Rod has become such a capital-V Villain for baseball fans.   Has he used performance enhancing drugs?   Yes.   Has he lied about that use?   Yes.   But so have a lot of baseball players who aren't so vilified.   It probably has to do with the amount of money he's made playing baseball, and the degree that money has lifted him up from being just a baseball player to being a celebrity.   A-Rod seems always to have acted as if he was bigger than the game and somehow "above" the rest of us.   Lots of great players didn't act that way, and even some of today's stars who make tens of millions of dollars don't act that way -- Miguel Cabrera comes to mind.   But, even so... the guy hasn't murdered anyone.   (See Hernandez, Aaron.)  

And, of course, however much you think steroids or PEDs may have helped him in his career... they didn't help him hit .358 with 36 HRs and 123 RBIs as a twenty year-old shortstop in 1996.   They may have helped at the margins later in his career, so maybe instead of 647 HRs he might have 10% fewer (582) or even 20% fewer (517), but he would still then have more HRs and more Gold Gloves at shortstop (2) than Ernie freakin' Banks!

In other words, A-Rod, however big a jerk he is, is still one of the great great great baseball players of all time.   So why all the hate?   Or is it something about human nature that we need to have someone to be our villain, some focus for venting our anger and hatred?   Not a pretty thought.

Anyway, he's about to become the poster boy for MLB's continuing efforts to unring the bell of PEDs and its own original sin of tacitly permitting them for many years through the 1990s and early 2000s.   Today he'll be suspended, likely for a year and a half, which, at 38, could be the end of his career.   Sad story.   And it says a lot about our own hypocrisy as a society.   I wrote about this angle awhile back:

Why do we hate cheaters? Because they gain an unfair advantage over other players and distort the statistics by which we measure greatness in the game. 

OK, but weren't the statistics in the 1920s and 1930s and on through most of the 1940s distorted by the fact that African-Americans weren't allowed to play in the major leagues? Didn't those white players like, oh, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and Ty Cobb and Rogers Hornsby gain an unfair advantage because they didn't have to play against great Negro League pitchers in their prime like Satchel Paige? Didn't Walter Johnson or Christy Mathewson have an unfair advantage because they didn't have to pitch to Josh Gibson? 

And which is a worse sin, the tolerance of performance-enhancing drugs by baseball in the 1990s, or the tolerance of institutional racism in the 1920s and 1930s? 

And, while I'm on the subject of performance-enhancing drugs... should colleges ask prospective students whether they have taken performance-enhancing drugs to combat attention deficit disorder (since we drug our young at an alarming rate)? Aren't their grades "distorted" because of those performance enhancing drugs? 

And, of course, consider the irony that nearly every sports broadcast features advertisements for performance-enhancing drugs. "Sports Center, brought to you by Cialis!" How many of those fat, pasty-faced sportswriters finish their column lamenting performance-enhancing drugs in baseball and go home and take a Viagra tablet to enhance their own performance?

A drug-addled culture has a lot of nerve vilifying a baseball player while poisoning millions of boys with Adderal and Ritalin just so pharmaceutical companies can have a higher ROI.    But that's where we are in 2013.  

Girl of the Day - Yvonne Strahovsky

She's baaaaack!   As Hannah McKay on Dexter.

Or at least that's what I hear... since we couldn't watch it because Time Warner and Showtime are having a freakin' contract dispute!

Ah, well.

We Lost

We are coming up on the 12 year anniversary of 9/11.   During those dozen years we have spent thousands of young lives and hundreds of billions of our treasure on the War on Terror.   Have we been hit by a large-scale terrorist attack in our homeland?   Well, no, but that will be scant comfort to the families of victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, or families of victims of the Fort Hood shootings.   Are we more secure against large-scale attacks than we were?   Hard to say.   I guess we'll find out.  

But one thing is certain... after 12 years our standing in the world as a country that you mess with at your peril has never been lower.   Witness:

• We are snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq.
• We are conceding defeat in Afghanistan and withdrawing, leaving the Taliban inevitably back in power, whether de facto or de jure it doesn't matter.
• Libya and Egypt and Syria are all in chaos.
• Iran is ever closer to obtaining nuclear weapons.
• The longer we go without some retaliation for the murder of our ambassador in Benghazi, the more radical Islamists across the world see that America can be attacked without repercussion.   We are becoming the weak horse.

And now we must close 20 embassies around the world because of a threat of terrorist attack.  

Posts in Abu Dhabi, Amman, Cairo, Riyadh, Dhahran, Jeddah, Doha, Dubai, Kuwait, Manama, Muscat, Sanaa, Tripoli, Antananarivo, Bujumbura, Djibouti, Khartoum, Kigali, and Port Louis are instructed to close for normal operations Monday, August 5 through Saturday, August 10.

That's from the State Department's press release.  

Here's a more honest press release,  which would reflect the apparent reality:

"Dear Islamist terrorists, you win!   America has no stomach to fight you anymore, and we'll absorb whatever attacks you have in store for us until you get bored with it.   Don't expect us to retaliate... we'll just hide our heads.   And, oh, by the way, Israelis... don't wait for us to protect you from Iran's nuclear weapons... you're pretty much on your own.   Iraqis or Afghanis interested in democracy and scared by sharia... too bad, so sad.   America is taking its ball and going home."

But here's a statement that a real President would make:

"America has obtained credible intelligence regarding potential attacks on our embassies abroad in the Middle East and Africa by radical Islamist terrorists.   Our embassies will remain open for business despite these threats.   Any attack on our embassies is an attack against American soil and will be met with force.   Any murders of our embassy personnel will result in an overwhelming response against capital cities in Islamic countries across the Middle East, including Riyadh and Tehran.   So I encourage the leaders of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the two most powerful Islamic countries in the world, to use whatever influence they may have to stop terrorist attacks against American embassies, or else face the consequences.   Thank you."

That's not going to happen.   Again, a little Gibbon goes a long way:

"A people who still remembered that their ancestors had been the masters of the world would have applauded, with conscious pride, the representation of ancient freedom, if they had not long since been accustomed to prefer the solid assurance of bread to the unsubstantial visions of liberty and greatness."

 

We lost.  

Too Good Not To Steal

Via Ace:

Your Neighbors Are Stealing From You

Did you know that?   Your neighbors are, more and more, simply stealing from you.   Oh, they don't break into your house and steal your change jar and they don't take your kids' bikes out of the garage.   But they're stealing from you anyway... that is, if you have neighbors who are on Social Security disability.   I've harped on this before, but here's another report from Veronica de Rugy in NRO that makes the point again with this chart:

Oh, and she adds this nugget:

On a related point, the NPR story points out that in 2011 33.8 percent of people getting disability insurance suffer from back pains and other musculosketal problems. In 1961, only 8.3 percent did.

Why should this be?   In an economy with much less farming and manufacturing and mining, and much more "white collar" office work, why should four times as many people be having disabling back injuries?   It could be because of obesity, but I think Occam's Razor suggests an easier answer... a lot of people are scamming the system by claiming to have "pain" that really can't be cured or even confirmed by medical science.

Girl of the Day - Myrna Loy

One of the all-time greats.   She's perhaps most famous as Nora Charles, the long-suffering wife of William Powell's Thin Man, but I liked her best as the wife of Frederic March in The Best Years of Our Lives:

But Who Didn't Know About the Benghazi Cover-Up?

This report on CNN may get some play as "big news" on the Benghazi story:

CNN has learned the CIA is involved in what one source calls an unprecedented attempt to keep the spy agency's Benghazi secrets from ever leaking out. 

Since January, some CIA operatives involved in the agency's missions in Libya, have been subjected to frequent, even monthly polygraph examinations, according to a source with deep inside knowledge of the agency's workings. 

The goal of the questioning, according to sources, is to find out if anyone is talking to the media or Congress. 

It is being described as pure intimidation, with the threat that any unauthorized CIA employee who leaks information could face the end of his or her career. 

In exclusive communications obtained by CNN, one insider writes, "You don't jeopardize yourself, you jeopardize your family as well." 

Another says, "You have no idea the amount of pressure being brought to bear on anyone with knowledge of this operation."

But, after all, hasn't it long been obvious that the Obama administration was engaged in a massive coverup of whatever actually was going on in Benghazi?

• It happened two months before the election.
• The whereabouts of the President on the night of the attack are unknown.
• Why Chris Stevens, the ambassador, was in Benghazi rather than Tripoli is unknown.
• The Arab Spring has, since last fall, turned into a pretty obvious disaster.  (See, Egypt.)
• It seems pretty clear that the Obama administration has been trying to get arms to the rebels in Syria, and Libya, with Qaddafi's caches, was a likely "black" source.
• The Secretary of State at the time, lest we forget, is a certain female ex-First Lady who wants to run for President.

And, of course, four Americans died, including an ambassador, in an attack on an embassy, which is technically and legally American soil.   And the President did not react to try to save them.   And no one has been brought to "justice."    And no retaliation (at least no obvious retaliation) has occurred.   An incredible moment of weakness for a declining superpower.

In short, lots and lots of reasons to cover up what really happened.

More Gibbon

Gibbon, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, wrote:

“The five marks of the Roman decaying culture:

• Concern with displaying affluence instead of building wealth;
• Obsession with sex and perversions of sex;
• Art becomes freakish and sensationalistic instead of creative and original;
• Widening disparity between very rich and very poor;
• Increased demand to live off the state.” 

Does this sound familiar?

Defense Cuts

Because of our federal government's inability to control spending on entitlements, we are now faced with huge cuts to our defense budgets, cuts that will inevitably make us weaker, more vulnerable, less able to project force, and more likely to be targeted by terrorists.   This is a disaster, and it's entirely self-imposed:

The Strategic Choices and Management Review did not produce a detailed budget blueprint. That was not the purpose of this review. It generated a menu of options, not a set of decisions, built around three potential budget scenarios:

• The President’s FY 2014 budget, which incorporates a carefully calibrated and largely back-loaded $150 billion reduction in defense spending over the next ten years;  

• The Budget Control Act’s sequester-level caps, which would cut another $52 billion from defense in fiscal year 2014, with $500 billion in reductions for the DoD over the next ten years;  

• An “in-between” scenario that would reduce defense spending by about $250 billion over the next ten years, but would be largely back-loaded.

It is important to remember that all these cuts are in addition to the $487 billion reduction in defense spending over the next decade required by the initial caps in the Budget Control Act of 2011 which DoD has been implementing. If sequester-level cuts persist, DoD would experience nearly a trillion dollars in defense spending reductions over the next ten years.

Meanwhile, let's just keep focusing on Anthony Weiner.   Yeah, that's the ticket.   It's not like there aren't real, looming debacles on the horizon.   It's not like we don't live in a very very dangerous world.

Gibbon seems apropos about now:

“In the end, more than freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all – security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.”

Girl of the Day - Not Hillary Clinton!

Apparently, a miniseries about Hillary Clinton that will be suspiciously timed to air about the time she's launching her 2016 Presidential campaign -- can you say "in-kind contribution"?-- will star Diane Lane as Hillary Clinton.

Really?   This is not what they call type-casting.