White House throwing star-studded concert despite sequester
The White House announced Tuesday that the 10th concert in its "In Performance at the White House" series would go on April 16. Set to perform are Al Green, Ben Harper, Queen Latifah, Cyndi Lauper and Justin Timberlake, among many others.
Though the White House last month decided to suspend official tours of the "people's house" citing the sequester, the budget cuts apparently have not impeded the concert schedule.
Since their inception in 2009, the White House concerts have featured Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder and other stars.
The concerts are not for the Obamas' ears only. The events are streamed live on www.whitehouse.gov/live
,
and the April 16 concert will be broadcast on PBS stations across the
country. It will also be broadcast to U.S. forces overseas at a later
date. Virtually every social event held by the first family, though, has come under scrutiny, given the impact of the sequester. Republican lawmakers ripped the administration for its decision to cancel White House tours, which affected school groups and others who had made spring plans to visit.
The administration claimed that it made the call in order to save the Secret Service money, and in turn reduce the need to furlough agents.
President Obama has since indicated he's open to allowing some exceptions for school groups.
Meanwhile, the White House did host the annual Eager Egg Roll on Monday, which is open to the public.
And the April 16 concert will feature a special event for school children.
First lady Michelle Obama plans to welcome 120 school students for a workshop that afternoon on "The History of Memphis Soul." Featured performers are expected to speak to the students and answer questions during that event.
Obama Pushes For Housing Bubble 2.0
Got bad credit? Want to buy a home? You're in luck! President Obama is ramping up the country for housing bubble 2.0 as he urges banks to loan to people with poor credit so they can purchase a home. What could go wrong? Oh just about everything. And don't worry, the government is going to promise banks everything will be just fine.The Obama administration is engaged in a broad push to make more home loans available to people with weaker credit, an effort that officials say will help power the economic recovery but that skeptics say could open the door to the risky lending that caused the housing crash in the first place.
President Obama’s economic advisers and outside experts say the nation’s much-celebrated housing rebound is leaving too many people behind, including young people looking to buy their first homes and individuals with credit records weakened by the recession.
In response, administration officials say they are working to get banks to lend to a wider range of borrowers by taking advantage of taxpayer-backed programs — including those offered by the Federal Housing Administration — that insure home loans against default.
Housing officials are urging the Justice Department to provide assurances to banks, which have become increasingly cautious, that they will not face legal or financial recriminations if they make loans to riskier borrowers who meet government standards but later default.Shorter version: President Obama's crappy economy has caused people's credit to decline and even though the economy isn't much better (and neither is their credit) he wants them to buy a home with money and credit they don't have. Fantastic. As a reminder, the housing market crashed after the government forced banks to lend to people who 1) shouldn't have been applying for a housing loan in the first place 2) had no way to pay a housing loan back 3) never intended to pay back the housing loan in the first place.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2013/04/03/obama-pushes-for-housing-bubble-20-n1556894
Dem Congresswoman Mocks Concerned Pro-Gun Senior Citizen: ‘You’d Probably Be Dead Anyway’
During a public forum on national gun
control legislation hosted by the Denver Post editorial board on
Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Dianne DeGette (D-Colo.) mocked a concerned pro-gun
senior citizen when he expressed his fears regarding how gun control
will affect his ability to defend himself.
Among the scheduled panelists at the
forum were DeGette, Ed Perlmutter (D-Colo.), Republican state Sen. Kevin
Lundberg, and Larimer County Sheriff Justin Smith, according to the Denver Post.
“My question is: What about me?” the
Denver citizen asked Rep. DeGette, arguing against limiting magazine
capacity. “There may not be one bad guy that comes into my house… I have
to change magazines? I am a serious disadvantage.”
“What about me?” he repeated.
After arrogantly smirking at his
question, DeGette replied: “The good news for you, you live in Denver.
The [Denver Police Department] would be there within minutes.”
“You’d probably be dead anyway if they had that kind of firepower,” she added.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/04/03/dem-congresswoman-mocks-concerned-pro-gun-senior-citizen-youd-probably-be-dead-anyway/
Rep. Jason Chaffetz Visits the Unsecure Border
Last week we were given a photo op about the "security" of the border from Senators John McCain and Chuck Schumer as they stood in front of the border fence near Nogales, Arizona and watched as a woman entered the country illegally right in front of them. As Allahpundit said at the time, McCain was in "pretend border-hawk mode to lay the groundwork for the big immigration debate in the Senate next month. This bill’s not going to pass if Republican voters become convinced that the GOP caucus is selling them out on border improvements in the name of moving legalization along."Luckily, Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz is more concerned about the border actually being secure rather than photo ops of false bipartisanship. He visited parts of the border in Arizona yesterday near Yuma and tweeted photos of what he found: an area where there are stairs and handrails to help people cross the border and a not so sufficient fence.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2013/04/03/rep-jason-chaffetz-visits-the-unsecure-border-n1556585
The Open-Borders Reporters Who Banned "Illegal Immigrant"
By Michelle MalkinFile this in the overflowing cabinet labeled: No Wonder the Mainstream Media Is Dying. On Tuesday, the Associated Press announced that it is banishing the phrase "illegal immigrant" from its famous stylebook. The world's largest newsgathering outlet now advises reporters that "illegal" will "only refer to an action, not a person."
AP directs writers not to use the terms "illegal alien, an illegal, illegals or undocumented" anymore, except "in direct quotations." It won't be long before illegal border crossers, illegal visa overstayers, illegal deportation evaders, document fraudsters and illegal alien traffickers are all referred to as "our fellow Americans." Without the quotations. Mark my words.
AP explains that it wants to stop labeling people. Hah. This is the same organization that employs journalists who have repeatedly shown naked bias against tea party members, gun owners and pro-life activists. AP's most famous White House correspondent, Jennifer Loven, was such a shameless water-carrier for the Democratic Party that she earned the permanent nickname "Democratic operative Jennifer Loven" on the Internet. In 2010, she left AP to join an official Democratic-run lobbying and communications firm in D.C. Same difference.
I propose that we banish the term "journalist" when referring to members of mainstream news organizations who pose as neutral news-gathers while carrying out a blatantly ideological agenda. From now on, AP's staffers shall be described in my columns as "alleged practitioners of journalism" or "journalists" only when using direct quotations.
But I digress.
Just a few years ago, the AP resisted open-borders demands and the pressure of political correctness in favor of pithiness and precision. In 2010, a member of the "Diversity Committee" of the Society of Professional Journalists launched a campaign "illegal immigrant" and "illegal alien." The crusading "journalist" argued that foreign law-breakers should instead be labeled "undocumented workers" or "undocumented immigrants."
As I told Daily Caller reporter Matthew Boyle at the time, the idea that "undocumented workers" and "undocumented immigrants" are more objective labels than "illegal immigrants" is complete and utter nonsense. The euphemisms that mainstream "journalists" favor are far more politically loaded than the ones they're trying to replace.
It's a farce to call someone an "undocumented immigrant" whose pockets are overflowing with fake, fraudulent documents -- and that is usually the case with many of the suspected illegal immigrants featured in AP stories. (Moreover, it is inaccurate to call someone whose employment history, criminal record and welfare status are unknown an undocumented "worker.")
At the time, the AP agreed. AP's deputy standards editor David Minthorn told Boyle three short years ago: "The AP Stylebook created its entry on 'illegal immigrant' in 2004, in response to renewed debate over border security and the enforcement of immigration laws after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Together, the terms describe a person who resides in a country unlawfully by residency or citizenship requirements. Illegal immigrant ... is accurate and neutral for news stories."
So what changed? "Journalist" Kathleen Carroll, AP's executive editor, attributes the move to the "evolving" English language. I attribute it to the "evolving" transformation of once-neutral news organizations into brazenly transparent satellite lobbying outfits for the left. It's not media bias that's the problem, of course. It's the sanctimonious pretense of objectivity to which these alleged practitioners of journalism cling.
Just look at the ABC News coverage of the AP's decision. "Journalist" Cristina Costantini praised the move and patted her own colleagues on the back for their progressivism. "Fusion, the ABC-Univision joint venture, does not use 'illegal immigrant' because we believe it dehumanizes those it describes and we find it to be linguistically inaccurate." On her Twitter account, "journalist" Costantini gushed that AP's capitulation came "thanks to the hard work of great people like @joseiswriting."
"@joseiswriting" is Jose Antonio Vargas, the former Washington Post reporter who spearheaded the whitewashing of our language and our laws on behalf of illegal aliens. In 2011, with great fanfare and elite media sympathy, Vargas publicly declared himself an "undocumented immigrant." Except, as he himself confessed, Vargas had documents coming out of his ears -- including a fake passport with a fake name, a fake green card and a Social Security card his grandfather doctored for him at a Kinko's.
As I previously noted when Vargas shed his "journalist" costume in favor of full-fledged activist, he had committed perjury repeatedly on federal I-9 employment eligibility forms. An immigration lawyer advised him to take responsibility for breaking the law and return to his native Philippines. Following the rules would have meant a 10-year bar to reentry into America. Making false claims of citizenship is a felony offense.
Document fraud is a felony offense. Instead of accepting responsibility, Vargas used a friend's address to obtain an Oregon driver's license under false pretenses and duped his employers until the golden moment to confess -- without any fear of punishment under the illegal alien-friendly Obama administration -- arrived.
The persistent use of open-borders euphemisms championed by Vargas and Company once again serves as the perfect illumination of the agenda-driven, dominant progressive media. They're as activist inside their newsrooms as Vargas is out in the open. Vargas won't rest until the legal definition of American citizenship is obliterated. And neither will his "journalist" colleagues cheering him on, whitewash brushes in hand.
http://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2013/04/03/the-openborders-reporters-who-banned-illegal-immigrant-n1556235/page/full/
Associated Press says 'adios' to 'illegal immigrant' and regard for rule of law
George Carlin once observed, “by and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth.” He may be giving us that wry head cock right now after the Associated Press has decided to recommend that newsrooms refrain from using the term “illegal immigrant.” Their use of the more precise term “illegal alien” vanished some time ago.Ensuring that moral judgment does not bleed into news reporting is a worthy goal for all free press, but shaping words to fit politically correct molds is simply another form of bias. Scrapping the term “illegal alien” or “illegal immigrant” in order to placate powerful lobbies surrenders the language to drive an agenda and interjects opinion into the news.
Journalistic guidelines dictate that disclosing a subject’s personal information -- including immigration status -- is not always integral to the story. But when it is, readers deserve clarity, not obfuscation.
Readers deserve clarity, not obfuscation.
Can’t have it both ways folks.
The addition of the word “undocumented” suggests that those who have violated U.S. immigration laws are simply inconvenienced by not having the proper papers. But many illegal aliens do have documentation – it just doesn’t happen to rightfully belong to them. Finally, the term “workers” implies that all are gainfully employed, which many are not. But for the record, the seven million illegal aliens who do work are employed illegally and occupying jobs that rightfully belong to Americans.
The alternative use of “undocumented immigrants” is just as empty. These aren’t immigrants and this isn’t immigration. America is suffering from a policy of chaos and a flood of 12 million lawbreakers. Swapping the term “alien” for “immigrant” when referring to those who have broken the law is offensive to many legal immigrants. The distinction between legal and illegal is important. Coming to the United States the right way is a badge of honor for most immigrants.
There is no getting around it. The term “illegal alien” is the most legally precise, descriptive term in the lexicon. It delineates between one of only two possible categories; one either has legal status to be on U.S. soil or one is residing here illegally. “Illegal” means prohibited by law. Yes, entry without inspection into the U.S. is prohibited. And “alien” is a term that refers to a person who is not a citizen of the country. The term is well defined in 8 U.S.C. Section 1101. It is used by legal professionals across the board including the United States Supreme Court. It’s ok to say “illegal alien.”
Use it, but use it correctly. Don’t say someone is an illegal alien without the facts. That’s unacceptable and you’ll wind up in court. If based on due diligence, you have reason to believe the subject of a story is an illegal alien because credible sources have indicated he/she may be, use “alleged” illegal alien. But when the facts prove it and the circumstances are obvious, don’t be coy.
For example, when referring to 500 people at a rally holding “Illegal and Proud of It” signs, your readers will appreciate you reporting it accurately as a crowd largely composed of illegal aliens. Don’t water down stories about amnesty legislation for illegal aliens with references to “undocumented workers.”
Why?
Because amnesty legislation isn’t about giving needed documents, it’s about changing the law to erase the laws that were broken.
Why go through the fuss of changing the term “illegal alien” anyways? Altered to even the most preposterous euphemism we all know what it means – a person is here when he/she is not supposed to be. Leave well enough alone and avoid the hollow substitutes because ultimately, it takes more effort to conceal the truth than to reveal it.
Jay Leno: Not Using Illegal Immigrant? How Bout' "Undocumented Democrat?"
Facing the Hardest Truth on Public Education
There are several major obstacles to overcome if there is to be any hope of saving civilization from the grip of the authoritarian pre-education camps we call "public schools." The most stubborn obstacle of all, however, is perhaps the one embedded in our own hearts, namely the all too human instinct to comfort ourselves with the thought that the soul-deforming corruptions of public education began in earnest only after our own school days, and hence that we ourselves escaped the harm we so easily recognize in others.This instinct forms the rationale for the many objections I get to my calls for the complete abolition of public schooling, from people who claim that if the schools just got back to the methods of the good old days, all would be well. In other words, these people are unwilling to see the problem as anything deeper than the superimposition of some bad textbooks or teaching methods on an essentially noble system, because to admit that the problem is more fundamental than this is to admit that one's own education was harmful, which is to concede that one was indeed harmed -- that you are less than you might have been.
***
Were public schools better twenty, forty, or sixty years ago? Of course they were. But it no more follows from this that public education is not such a bad idea than it follows from the fact that the welfare state of sixty years ago had not yet incorporated socialized medicine that socialism is not such a bad idea. Today's extensions of progressive control over an ever-increasing range of our lives did not arise from nowhere; they were made possible by earlier, gradual insinuations of the concepts and moral perspectives of tyranny into the modern West's soul.
Likewise with education. John Dewey did not get the progressive, individualism-crushing system he wanted all at once. But the slow encroachment of his theories into the educational establishments of the world, beginning more than a century ago, has allowed his intellectual heirs to achieve a level of socialist indoctrination and anti-West moral degradation that, in many ways, have surpassed Dewey's most depraved hopes. So while it may have been easier in the distant past for people to come out of public school with some of their reasoning and moral character intact, it is invalid to conclude that this relative superiority indicates anything other than that an old cancer has worsened.
Public schools from the supposed good old days were the precondition for public schools of today. Once the premise was established that modern society's interest in a broadly educated population could best be satisfied by direct government provision and oversight of schooling, it was a very short step to the conclusion that such schooling ought to be compulsory. And from here, it was an even shorter step to the argument that everyone ought to be provided the same education, in the same way, in the name of universality and fairness. Thus, increasing centralization and standardization are natural (even if unintended) developments of the initial impulse to use the coercive power of government to provide something called "education" for all children. Such a metastasizing government beneficence is all too susceptible to internal corruption by "big thinkers," central planners, and bureaucratic mother hens. The result, all but inevitable given the initial premises, is what you see: an entire civilization undone, intellectually, spiritually and morally, in the name of "making sure every child gets a good education," or "preparing our children for today's economy."
Some, comparing their own pasts to mankind's present impasse, are tempted to object here that public schools in the old style were, after all, responsible for the most prosperous and powerful society in history. On the contrary: Public schools in the old style were responsible for the gradual undermining and destruction of the most prosperous and powerful society in history.
The perceptual inversion made by apologists for the good old days results from imagining the relationship between public education and modernity as a still photograph, rather than observing the historical trajectory of the relationship in motion. The mechanisms of liberty, free markets, individualism and self-reliance were set in motion centuries before public education was generally available, let alone universal and compulsory.
The generations that produced the ideas and art which gave modern liberty its mind and character, as well as the generations that produced the statesmen and warriors who brought modernity's promise to practical realization, were generations without public education. The accumulated spiritual and economic momentum of liberty was able to withstand the first frictions of progressive authoritarianism, allowing civilization and its economies to grow even while the tyrannical urge was beginning its ugly lurch into modern life. But nowhere was this progressive infection more destructive, and more brilliantly conceived, than in government schools, which can nip in the bud the natural impulse to learn and excel, and which were explicitly intended from early on to produce competent but submissive workers for the benefit of the ruling class. The subsequent broadening of the progressive schools' agenda to include the deliberate undermining of the family, the short-circuiting of Eros in favor of permanent puberty, and socialist revisionism regarding the Western intellectual and historical heritage, was not a radical shift in education policy, but a "natural" devolution made possible by the success of earlier stages of corruption. (This descent also defines the devolution of the teaching profession itself.)
The Jesuits said "give me the child for seven years, and I will give you the man." Lenin boasted that he needed only the first four years to mould a child to the unshakable form that communism required. It is no accident that John Dewey was primarily focused on early childhood education as early as the 1880s. Or that Bill Ayers is today. Yes, public education continues to deteriorate. But that is the point: the deterioration is a continuation of something begun generations ago. None of us who have been through any version of public schooling should fool ourselves about what this means, including and especially for our own souls. This is no time for foolish pride; it is time for righteous anger, and the will to put a stop to more than a century of forced intellectual and moral decline.
Universal public education is modernity's monster, the fatal mistake of a prosperous civilization imagining that it can take over where freed human nature left off, and even outdo freedom and nature, by mass producing, through government micromanagement, the kind of men who make liberty and civil society possible. This description of public education's foundations is the generous version, which I offer only as a concession to those who object to my arguments against this monster by noting that even some good men have favored state control of childhood education.
It is true: some good men have favored this. It is also true that the best and most nobly motivated of these men -- from Aristotle to James Madison -- were not publicly educated themselves, and never lived in a community in which state-controlled education was the norm. We cannot know, but may guess, how their views on the subject might be different were they among us today, witnessing the practical reality of a civilization in ruins, thanks in large measure to the multi-generational effects of compulsory government-regulated schooling on a society's practical intelligence, moral character, and the habits of mind that make liberal education in the proper sense possible.
The blind spot of these men of exalted spirit, such as Aristotle and Madison, is their noble-minded presumption that in a good and just society, good and just motives will prevail. From less hopeful, but equally great, men, such as Plato and Tocqueville, we learn three harsh truths that in combination are all the answer we need offer to the virtuous hopes of Aristotle, Madison, or today's wishful thinkers regarding state-regulated schooling: (1) no society is so pure or so just as to be immune to the corruptive effects of human weakness or malice; (2) societal success and prosperity actually pave the way for corruption by weakening the resolve and vigilance of a populace grown over-confident in its strength and security; and, (3) the levers of monopolistic state authority are a natural magnet to those whose desire for power and wealth outstrips their desire for virtue and the common good.
In sum, state control of education -- as of most things -- is an invitation to ignoble men to insinuate themselves and their immoral motives into the system, seeking their own perceived advantage at the expense of fellow men who fall under the jurisdiction of their legislative influence. And since, in this case, it is the soul of the future -- the children -- into which evil may be insinuated, it would seem that education, far from being an exception to the rule of limited government, ought to be an especially emphatic marker of the proper limits of legitimate government involvement in men's affairs.
The risk is too great. The proof of this is in the poison pudding of today's public schools, not merely in one or two nations, but worldwide. Indeed, the universality of compulsory government schooling, considered a radical outrage when Marx proposed it just a century and a half ago, is itself evidence of the way corruption breeds further corruption.
Leave your ego to one side, for the sake of mankind's future. If you were publicly educated, your soul's growth was stunted to a significant degree, at the very least through the emotional bruising engendered by your spiritual resistance.
Be not proud. Be angry. And resolve to end this authoritarian abomination, before it ends us.
We live in a mythic age — but mythic in the sense of made-up.
The Coastal Aristocrat
In the last thirty years, I have probably spoken 200 times at a coastal university of some sort, most of which were on the Eastern seaboard. I spent eight years at UC Santa Cruz and Stanford. I go to Palo Alto every week to work, and often lecture or teach in southern California.
So I know the Bay Area and Los Angeles almost as well as I know the San Joaquin Valley and the culture of the Eastern seaboard. I talk sometimes with the media, academics, foundation heads, a few in entertainment, and some politicians. All are coastal-based. Here is what I’ve learned over the last three decades about the mythologies of our national oligarchy.
There is a liberal coastal aristocrat, but he is really not very liberal, at least in the sense of his regressive life not matching his progressive rhetoric. His views are mostly conditioned on his education, salary, and material circumstances. Put the coastal aristocrat in charge of a 7-Eleven in Stockton, and his therapeutic view would turn tragic quite quickly. And that fear is why he rarely goes to either a 7-Eleven or Stockton.
Let me give a few examples.
Fracking is seen as mostly bad, not because of any firsthand knowledge, any in-depth reading of the literature, any quid pro quo, or any cost/benefit analysis of the effect of more oil and gas production on the lives of the poor, but largely because the coastal aristocrat senses that he 1) has quite enough money and job security to ignore the price of gas [1], 2) does not drive all that much in comparison to the red-state interior Neanderthal, and 3) receives enormous psychological comfort and social acceptance from the fact that he is opposed to carbon emissions. Why, he wonders, do the poor on the way to work drive those gas-guzzling used Yukons, when a second-hand Prius would work just as well?
Illegal immigration? The Palo Alto aristocrat’s position is predicated on two realities: his hardworking nanny, yardman, and cook are often rather recent arrivals from Mexico, and he most certainly does not wish his children to attend school anywhere near Redwood City. Thus he is for “comprehensive immigration reform,” with the understanding that the benefits are his, and for others the downside.
Taxes? They are the cost of a utopian worldview, a mordida necessary to live in Cambridge or Santa Monica. For the aristocrat making over $500,000 a year, a few extra thousand dollars a year is a price worth paying, at least for the psychological guarantee that the distant food-stamp recipients, who mostly go to Safeway rather than Ralphs or Whole Foods, are content to live their happy lives as they do. Pay up the penance and be done with the guilt is the creed.
Guns? For the coastal elite, who do not hunt, who do not live in a dangerous neighborhood, and who believe the Bill of Rights are sacrosanct to the degree they support progressive change and fluid when they do not, guns more or less should just go away. Of course, the celebrity, the CEO, and the politician may need “security,” [2] but no one much asks what hides inside the coats of the husky men at their sides.
Education? Public unions are saintly. Charter schools and vouchers are satanic. But the aristocrat, who knows best what is good for the masses [3], prefers and can afford the private school, and feels no guilt in his choice because his version is liberal while the more low-brow alternative is often crappy and not that much better than the public offering. (E.g., if you wish to duck out of the public school system, at least have the class to do it with style rather than on the cheap: a Castilleja or Andover rather than First Christian Academy.)
In lieu of the traditional aristocrat estate, peerage, or title, the outward manifestation of aristocracy is an Ivy League brand or a West Coast Stanford version. The proper campus is one’s lifelong entrée. The right quad is where your kids meet the right mate and receive a bumper sticker that opens the right doors. Such university snobbery is inconsistent with classical liberalism, but not with liberal aristocratic values, which are based on exclusionary criteria. For the NBC anchor, or the Massachusetts senator, or the Google executive, the key is to get your kid into the right prep school, as requisite for the even more correct Ivy League, where the perfect spouse and Facebook founders-like coterie are found. It is not just that junior will emerge with correct ideas [4] about gay marriage, abortion, green power, the U.S. role abroad, and the poor, but that he will be seen, by virtue of his degree, as having the right ideas.
Apartheid is the unifying theme of coastal aristocracy. Without it, reality would disabuse the grandee of his worldview. Take any tenured Berkeley professor of environmental studies and make his existence hinge on squeezing a daily profit out of a Selma Stop-N-Go, and this gentle brontosaurus would turn into a Tyrannosaurus rex in a nanosecond. Therefore exclusion of all sorts from the underbelly of America is an essential.
One associates with mostly fellow one percenters. One picks and chooses friends on the basis of where they work and where they were educated and the views they hold. A Chevron field job, a University of Idaho degree in sports journalism, a strong aversion to abortion — all this is impermissible. In some Frankenstein-like laboratory, an evil genius cooked up Sarah Palin, whose looks, accent, background, views, and style were designed to enrage the coastal aristocracy [5].
I used to think that the coastal aristocracy was just hypocritical in matters of race, but as I age I fear I have become more cynical: it is not white guilt that explains why the coastal elite seek gestures of progressive caring (how else would an anti-Semitic, race-baiting provocateur like Al Sharpton [6] be given his own show? Or an unaccomplished Touré rate over the accomplished Dr. Carson [7]?), but a real aversion to mixing with unlike kind. On matters of race, the liberal worldview of affirmative action, busing, amnesty, and vast entitlements is a psychological mechanism for conniving to get your own into Princeton, for ensuring they are not schooled in fourth grade with a bused-in student body, and ensuring that you are not in the evening line at Save Mart as the only English speaker or privately racially profiling the two scary people who just lined up behind you at the convenience store checkout stand. An alien from Mars who studied the liberal aristocrat would conclude that he is a segregationist of the first order [8].
Obamism
Our greatest legend is Barack Obama. Liberals believe that he is still the fierce anti-Cheney civil libertarian of 2008, as he institutionalized the idea that drones could target U.S. citizens (as they did in Yemen) and expanded or embraced renditions, preventative detention, tribunals, wiretaps, and intercepts. In our secular bible, Obama still shuns money from Wall Street sorts like Goldman Sachs [15], follows campaign-financing reform laws, vacations as a man of the people, and has squeezed out of the exploiting classes millions of new jobs for minorities.
There were not 50 consecutive months of 7.8% unemployment (until last month, no one month of the Obama administration saw unemployment lower than in any one month of the Bush administration). What about sluggish GDP, record debt, chronic deficits, unheard of zero interest, vast numbers on food stamps and unemployment and disability insurance? Bush did it.
We all know how this Paul Bunyan legend will end up. The next president, be it Hillary or Marco Rubio or Joe Biden or Rand Paul, will not embrace Obamism. They cannot and have the nation still survive. The federal saddlebags are empty [16]. We will not follow the Obama trajectory to 70 million on food stamps or $30 trillion in debt. Even a President Hillary Clinton would not lecture us that we didn’t build that. We cannot keep printing a trillion dollars through quantitative easing. Interest rates will climb. I don’t think Rand Paul will tell the Tea Party “to punish our enemies” or Hillary Clinton “to get in their faces.”
You see, Obamism is an emotional flight from reality, completely unsustainable to the degree it is a paradigm for anything. It is mythical, this notion of borrowing vast amounts of money to grow government and subsidize a new cadre on government support, or demonizing millions as suspect for their success, or assuming that foreign nations react best to apologies, contextualization, and sermons, or wish to join in the cultural adulation of an American president. Putin could care less. Ditto the North Koreans.
In short, in this mythical age, we all know that Barack Obama won the Nobel Prize, but none of us quite know what for.
Such is what passes for reality in our age of myth [17].
http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/america-in-the-age-of-myth/?singlepage=true
PK'S NOTE: Bet you $10 it was US. This administration didn't stop with Fast and Furious and moving guns was probably a factor in Benghazi.
How Did Syria's Rebels Get This Gun?
The British-made AS-50, accurate from a distance of 20 football fields, is made for British Special Forces and Navy SEALs. Video
showing Syrian rebels, who are aligned with Al Qaeda, firing the guns and shouting “Alahu akbar,” has also raised questions about who is supplying such devastating hardware.“The video, showing jihadist rebels of the 'Descendents of the Prophet Brigade' firing one of the world's most effective sniper rifles, should be cause for alarm," said David Reaboi, of the Washington-based Center for Security Policy. "We don't know who has been supplying this group (or the myriad others) with these weapons but, given the jihadist ideology of these groups, it's only a matter of time until they're turned on Americans or our allies and interests.”
The gun set a world record when a member of the British Household Cavalry in Afghanistan’s Helmand province killed two members of the Taliban with successive bullets over a recorded distance of more than 1.5 miles.
The Free Syrian Army has been receiving weapons from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey - all close allies of the U.S. But the U.S. has repeatedly stated that it has sent no weapons to the opposition forces.
"... given the jihadist ideology of these groups, it's only a matter of time until they're turned on Americans or our allies and interests.”- David Reaboi, Center for Security Policy
Experts said it could prove impossible to determine where the rebels got AS-50s and how many they have.
The sniper rifle, manufactured by Accuracy International – which sells arms to the Turkish and Saudi Arabian militaries - has a fearsome reputation. It has been used in various theaters of war in recent years by many elite forces, including both the SEALs and British Special Forces.
“I know from first-hand experience how revered the AI product is, even in the States, where traditionally US producers are favored,” a British Army sniping instructor told Wired in 2011.
The Free Syrian Army has recently made significant territorial gains against government forces in the two-year-old bloody civil war that in March saw its worst ever body count, with independent monitors determining at least 6,000 people were killed.
The gun costs about $10,000, according to Reaboi, and each one could be around long after the war in Syria ends.
"We're unsure of how many they have," Reaboi said. "Equally troubling, of course, is the training ground of the Syrian civil war itself; like the conflict in the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan, we will be facing tested veteran jihadist fighters who don't just leave the war when the one battle is over. I'm afraid we or our allies will have to face them shortly, and with exceedingly lethal weapons."
Especially concerned is Israel, which shares an increasingly uneasy border with Syria in the Golan Heights.
With the Free Syrian Army increasingly dominated by more radical Jihadist elements such as the Al Qaeda-associated Al Nusra Front (Jabhat al-Nusra), concern is growing that it won’t be too long before battle-hardened Islamist fighters as well as mercenaries from around the globe who have joined the fight against Assad, turn their attentions towards Israel. In their experienced hands even a far from easy-to-use weapon such as the AS-50 would be indeed be lethal.
Israel Defense Forces spokesman Capt. Eytan Buchman told FoxNews.com that the IDF is keeping a close eye on all forms of weaponry being used in the neighboring conflict.
“The Israeli security forces are very closely tracking developments inside of Syria in order to isolate and identify any potential threat to Israeli security” Buchman said.
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