Americans Sign Petition to Support “Nazi-Style Orwellian Police State”

To keep everybody safe

By Paul Joseph Watson
After illustrating their enthusiasm for repealing the Bill of Rights, a video shows Americans happily signing a petition to support a “Nazi-style Orwellian police state,” in what easily represents the most shocking footage of its kind to date.

White House not being honest about ObamaCare problems, says Ezra Klein; Update: Obama blames Republicans, shutdown

....Talk about dishonest — did Obama actually blame the shutdown? Yes, he did:

“About three weeks ago, as the federal government shutdown, and the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance marketplaces opened up across the country,” said Obama. “Well, we’ve now gotten the government back open for the American people and today I want to talk about how were going to get the marketplaces running at full steam as well.”

Say what? The White House had three and a half years to get this ready, and it rolled out on the same day as the shutdown. The website issues existed long before the shutdown, and the Obama administration was well aware of them before the shutdown and decided to proceed anyway. Talk about spin.

$17,000,000,000,000

President Obama boasted last week that he had signed legislation to lift “the twin threats” to our economy of government shutdown and default. But what was done to fix the problem of growing debt that leads Washington to repeatedly raise the debt ceiling?
Nothing. In fact, by Friday, the U.S. debt had rocketed past $17 trillion.
What does this mean?

At $17 trillion, this number has passed total U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), the measure of all that is produced in the economy.
Since Obama took office, the national debt has increased from about $10.6 trillion to more than $17 trillion—a 60 percent increase.

...The real story about the debt is that by the end of Obama’s eight years, he will have matched the borrowing of all previous presidents combined. Yet incredibly, the present huge sum of $17 trillion in debt is serviced at the same cost that we paid over 15 years ago. Such free use of money without raging inflation is almost historically unprecedented — and it won’t last.
... If interest ever returned to 1997 levels, at say 6.6%, we’d be paying over a trillion dollars a year in debt service. In crude terms, the winners of this Ponzi scheme are the very wealthy connected to Wall Street, which is flooded with foreign and domestic capital. It need not do much of anything more than outperform a pathetic 1% return on savings accounts.
The poor benefit from the vast increase in federal spending and exemption from federal income taxes. In contrast, the middle class still pays high interest on its student loans, credit card, and, to a lesser extent, car debt, receives almost no interest on its meager savings accounts, and is not so ready, after 2008, to dabble in real estate and the stock market.

The Reality of America's Finances

By Jon Gabriel

...The analogy is imperfect, but imagine the green is your salary, the yellow is the amount you're spending over your salary, and the red is your Visa statement. Then imagine your spouse runs into the room and shouts, “great news honey, our fiscal crisis is over. We just got approved for a new MasterCard!” Your first call would be to a marriage counselor or a shrink.
The chart is brutally bipartisan. Debt increased under Republican presidents and Democrat presidents. It increased under Democrat congresses and Republican congresses. In war and in peace, in boom times and in busts, after tax hikes and tax cuts, the Potomac filled with red ink.
Washington likes to talk about sustainability. Forget sustainable — how is this sane?
Yet when a conservative hesitates before raising the debt ceiling, he's portrayed as a madman.

By Stephen Green
....And still the economy remains on trillion-dollar life support.
Why?
A few possibilities:
● Encouraging Dependency. The Department of Health and Human Services has a budget in 2013 of $941,000,000,000. If HHS were a country, it would be the 16th richest in the world, between South Korea and Indonesia. If HHS were a state, it would be bigger than any of them except for California, Texas, and New York. HHS is bigger than the economies of Vermont, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Alaska, Rhode Island, Maine, Idaho, New Hampshire, Delaware, West Virginia, Hawaii, New Mexico, Nebraska, and Mississippi combined. The District of Columbia is about the same size as HHS — and you can’t imagine that’s a coincidence.
● Debt Overhang. There’s that $17,000,000,000,000 we’ve racked up, plus millions of mortgages still left underwater from the Great Recession.
● ZIRP. The Fed’s Zero Interest Rate Policy is supposed to make borrowing cheaper, but instead it’s made saving more expensive. People — especially people on fixed incomes — have to sock away more and more money to make up for the lost interest on their deposits.
● Concentration of Wealth. D.C. and its environs are now some of the richest in the country. Many of the country’s best go there not to create wealth, but to redistribute it. We’re undergoing a disastrous intranational brain-drain.
● Anemic Productivity Growth. Productivity growth is the real secret to wealth creation, but Bill Clinton’s Community Reinvestment Act, combined with Alan Greenspan’s and Ben Bernanke’s easy money policies, diverted trillions of dollars into housing — and houses are not productive assets. Instead of figuring out inventive new ways to create wealth, our best finance guys were coming up with inventive new ways to create debt.
● Obamacare. We’ll never know how many full-time jobs were lost, how many will never be created, or which small businesses will be induced to stay that way instead of pursuing robust growth. But Obamacare is just getting started, and already it’s turning us into a part-time nation.
That’s not all, of course. There’s higher taxes, the regulatory explosion, the chaos on Capitol Hill, Dodd-Frank, and the administration’s war on cheap energy, to name five more.

The Way Members of Congress Subsidize Their Lifestyles With Political Contributions — And It’s All Legal

Many U.S. lawmakers are using political contributions to subsidize their lifestyles, a new “60 Minutes” report highlights.

...One of the ways lawmakers can get around the issue is to rely on “leadership PACs,” political action committees that don’t technically count as being attached to specific campaigns.

These PACs weren’t in existence when Congress passed rules in 1989 that made it illegal for lawmakers to use political contributions for personal use. As a result, members of Congress have gladly exploited this fact and are using these PACs to their advantage.

Congresswoman Funneled $294,245 in Campaign Cash to Herself

By Wynton Hall

Rep. Grace Napolitano (D-CA) has bagged at least $294,245 since 1998 by loaning her congressional campaign money at interest rates up to 18%--a scheme that effectively funneled campaign contributor donations directly into her personal bank account.
The self-loan ruse was exposed Sunday night during a joint investigation by 60 Minutes and Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President Peter Schweizer based on Schweizer’s forthcoming book, Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets.
...In 1998, Rep. Grace Napolitano (D-CA) loaned her congressional campaign $150,000 at a staggering 18% interest. Napolitano then let the loan linger unpaid for 20 years. In the first decade of the loan, Napolitano bagged $200,000 in interest payments. Then in 2006, Napolitano lowered the interest rate to 10% and kept drawing interest checks. In the 2008 and 2010 elections, the California Democrat pocketed another $94,245 in interest.
Presently, Schweizer, who appeared Monday morning on CBS Early Show, says the self-loan scheme is legal under congressional rules. The only stipulation is that lawmakers must charge a “commercially reasonable” interest rate on the loans they make to their campaigns—a term of art that is undefined and almost never enforced.

Four Things We Think We Know About Obamacare

By Megan McArdle
....The penalty for being uninsured next year is $95. Again, this is partly true. In fact, the penalty for being uninsured next year is $95 or 1 percent of your income, whichever is higher. So if you make $75,000 a year and you decide to go without insurance, the penalty will be $750. There are a number of things you can do to avoid having to pay it, from deliberately getting your utilities shut off to under-withholding taxes from your paycheck so that they don’t have a refund from which to take out the penalty. But that number is what will go on the books at the Internal Revenue Service, not the $95 you’ve probably heard.

Obamacare seeks to segregate patients, doctors by race

By Katie McHugh
If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor under Obamacare — if you both belong to the same race.
Obamacare’s spectacular flop of a rollout distracts from its crude calculus that encourages the allocation of healthcare resources along racial lines and a doctor-patient system splintered into ethnicities.
...Throughout the Obamacare process, administration officials have put a strange emphasis on racial and ethnic factors of dubious relation to health care outcomes. On the day the exchanges opened, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius boasted the national call center employed translators ready to interpret 150 different languages. Her comment was one of many that seemed aimed at separating Americans into units labeled by skin color, ethnicity and other areas that are unrelated to the goal of helping sick people get better.

ObamaCare a Planned Disaster for Political Reasons

By Karin McQuillan
...Politics has driven the ObamaCare launch failure from the beginning. Political consideration number one was the 2012 presidential election. The Democrats did not want voters to know there would be a huge jump in the price of insurance for most people not being subsidized. They didn't want us to know about the four- and eight-thousand dollar deductibles, and the limits on what hospitals you would have access to and what doctors you could see. They knew voters would flock to the Republican ticket to stop it.

In order to hide ObamaCare from voters, the administration didn't reveal the details of the law to the companies building the exchanges either, until safely after the election. As a result, the exchange designers weren't able to begin writing software until the spring. Less than six months to create a system this complex made failure inevitable. Obama would not have been re-elected otherwise, so the choice was easy.

...Federal agencies are sitting on a pile of major health, environmental, and financial regulations that lobbyists, congressional staffers, and former administration officials say are being held back to avoid providing ammunition to Mitt Romney and other Republican critics.
Despite looming legislative deadlines in the Affordable Care Act, court deadlines requiring environmental-protection rules, and a financial industry awaiting clarification on key reform details, the pace of regulatory release has slowed by almost half.

The explosion of federal regulations under the Democrat Big-Government Nanny was crushing our economy and disgusting citizens who care about freedom.  So before the election, Nanny did a slow-mo partial shutdown, if you will, throwing every ObamaCare deadline years behind schedule...
...Obama will go down in history as America's most unaccountable president.  He has skated over one calamity after another, with none of the blame attached to his party -- our economic stagnation, the suffering of our neediest citizens, the destabilization of the Middle East, a looming nuclear Iran, Benghazi, the IRS, the spying on ordinary citizens and the press.  None of these significant failures have mattered one whit to loyal Democrat voters.

Why would ObamaCare be different?  When you are never blamed for failure, failure is acceptable.  All that matters is political advantage.  The worse your performance, the more important politics becomes.  Obama's politics is all about defaming voters who disagree with him, so his own followers would be ashamed to listen to their valid criticism.

The Morgan Shakedown

A landmark that shows how much politicians now control U.S. finance.

The tentative $13 billion settlement that the Justice Department appears to be extracting from J.P. Morgan Chase needs to be understood as a watershed moment in American capitalism. Federal law enforcers are confiscating roughly half of a company's annual earnings for no other reason than because they can and because they want to appease their left-wing populist allies.
The settlement isn't final and many details weren't available on the weekend, but we know enough for Americans to be dismayed. The bulk of the settlement is related to mortgage-backed securities issued before the 2008 financial panic. But those securities weren't simply a Morgan product. They were largely issued by Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, both of which the federal government asked J.P. Morgan to take over to help ease the crisis.
So first the feds asked the bank to do the country a favor without giving it a chance for proper due diligence. The Treasury needed quick decisions, and Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon made them in good faith. But five years later the feds are punishing the bank for having done them the favor. As Richard Parsons notes nearby, this is not going to make another CEO eager to help the Treasury in the next crisis. But more pointedly, where is the justice in such ex post facto punishment?
Then there's the fact that $4 billion of the settlement is earmarked to settle charges against the bank by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We are supposed to believe that the bank misled the two mortgage giants about the quality of the mortgage securities they were issuing. But everyone knows that Fan and Fred had as their explicit policy the purchase of securities for liar loans and subprime mortgages to further their affordable-housing goals. Those goals went far to create the crisis, but now these wards of the state are portraying themselves as victims.
...To make the victims whole, the government would have to distribute the settlement proceeds to those buyers, who aren't mom and pop. If instead the feds pass out the money to consumers or their favorite advocacy groups, the fact that this is a political shakedown and wealth-redistribution scheme becomes even clearer. Perhaps the Administration will have the checks arrive in swing Congressional districts right before the 2014 election.
...The real lesson of the Morgan settlement isn't that justice has finally been done to the perpetrators of the crisis. That would require arresting Barney Frank and those in Congress who blocked the reform of Fannie and Freddie, plus the Federal Reserve governors who created so much easy credit.
The lesson is how government has used the crisis to exert political control over even the most powerful private financial companies. The real lords of American finance are Attorney General Eric Holder, Treasury chief Jack Lew and their boss in the White House.

Obama wins and young Americans lose

The future promises little but bankruptcy

By Charlie Kirk
...As the politicians and their supporters (who are the parents and grandparents of my generation) continue to kick the can down the road, my generation needs to speak up and declare, “Stop! It’s not fair that these cans are piling up in our front yard.”
Republicans don’t want to raise taxes, and Democrats don’t want to cut spending, so in order to pay the nation’s bills, the only option left is for Uncle Sam to print money, raise the debt limit and continue to borrow money abroad.
What’s another trillion to a generation that is already drowning in debt?
...In this political climate, where it’s all about “winners and losers,” the most important scoreboard to look at is the national debt clock. The debt clock shows exactly how much debt the United States is accumulating in real time as we now approach $17 trillion. Every time the clock ticks upward, how can any reasonable politician consider himself a victor? The nation has added more than $6 trillion in new debt during the past five years. With each dollar we borrow, we sacrifice a little bit more of the next generation’s liberty.
Democrats and Republicans like to point to elections, polls and public opinion to define victory. I only look at the debt clock. Until it stops ticking upward, we are all losers, especially the youth of this great nation. They are the ones left with multitrillion-dollar deficits that will be mathematically impossible to pay back. As we look to the future, we see only bankruptcy.

The Maligned Tea Party

The Left’s characterizations just aren’t true.

By Charles C W Cooke
....Broadly speaking, tea-party hysteria seems to be originated and peddled by three factions. The first, and most cynical, is made up of perfidious progressives who, because they oppose the Tea Party’s economic agenda and fear its electoral and political clout, have set out with malice aforethought to destroy the group’s reputation. Into this bloc we can reliably throw almost everybody at MSNBC, the Democratic National Committee, the Obama administration, and the parade of political operatives who work around the clock to make politics intolerable for everyone. Given that these people are more committed than they are creative, you will notice that their preferred epithets for the Tea Party are the ones that they throw at everybody. Hence “racist,” “greedy,” and “stupid.”
The second faction consists of the genuinely dangerous Americans who do not grasp the nature, legitimacy, and vital role of vehement political opposition in a free republic. These are the people who, willfully or not, orchestrated and cheered on the IRS’s disgusting singling out of tea-party groups. Evidently, a number of people in America have managed to convince themselves that citizens who rail against taxes and debt and wish to see a reduction in regulation are more likely than most to break the laws they disdain — even though there is precisely no evidence for this. To propose that members of the Tea Party should be more closely monitored by the IRS because they advance an anti-tax message is akin to proposing that the advocates of drug legalization should be singled out for visits by the DEA or that opponents of wiretapping should be targeted for NSA surveillance. In other words, it is to say that there should be tangible consequences for speaking up against the status quo.
The third group is perhaps the most interesting, for it is full of people who have become precisely what they fear. When the history of this period in American life comes to be written, historians will almost certainly come to see the hysteria prompted by the rise of the Tea Party as akin to the “Red Scare” of the 1950s — except, that is, that there were actual Communist traitors in America. The New York Times’s Ross Douthat has observed that the more genuinely vexed among the movement’s detractors believe the group to be “an expression of crypto-fascist, crypto-racist rage, part Timothy McVeigh and part Bull Connor, potentially carrying a wave of terrorist violence in its wings.” Douthat correctly explains that “the historical term for this kind of anxiety is ‘Brown Scare’ — an inordinate fear of a vast far-right conspiracy, which resembles the anti-Communist panics of our past.”

George Will Bails Out

By Sally Zelikovsky
Just when you thought the blowback from the defund-shutdown effort couldn't get worse, along comes conservative columnist George Will, claiming that the Tea Party and Obama "have something important in common -- disdain for the practice of politics within the Framers' institutional architecture."
To suggest that the Tea Party has common ground with the one person and administration that stands diametrically opposed to everything they hold dear -- limited government, fiscal responsibility, lower taxes, individual liberty, and free markets -- is a reductio ad absurdum. One wonders if the author is completely out of touch with the people who make up the Tea Party or is just filled with his own disdain for it? I hope the former.
Then, to describe this supposedly shared disdain with the qualification "within the Framer's institutional architecture" makes me further wonder where George Will has been for the last five years? The Tea Party reveres the Constitution, the Framers, and their infrastructure for constitutional governance. The Tea Party actually promotes the "practice of politics" as long as it takes place "within the Framer's institutional architecture." It's... what we live for! And, it's what we've been ridiculed for as well.

Will There Be Blood?

By Allan Erickson
...As we've seen in recent years, and especially in recent months, the actual endorsement of violence and killing frequents many discussions about the Tea Party or any conservative willing to disagree with the Obama regime. Dissent is being criminalized. Now we have Democrats and MoveOn.org actually calling for the arrest of Republican leaders, insisting they be prosecuted for having an opinion and for exercising their constitutional rights: American fascism on parade. Aside from Cher and some actor actually calling for violence and murder directed at Tea Party individuals and Sen. Ted Cruz, here you have one of the programmed robots on MSKGB comparing Cruz to cultist David Koresh. It has become something beyond bizarre.
Celebrities, media talking heads, politicians and others who participate in verbal violence are bad enough, but those same people who actually encourage physical violence and killing, they are the ones who should face criminal charges. They are the real haters. They are the real traitors.
If they persist, like the Grayson operatives in Orlando, there will be violence, but solely due to their escalation.
Our response must be pure self-defense, measured and adequate.

Blame the Tea Party? Use Your Memory

By Randall Hoven
The virus that causes people to go mad and vote Democrat has apparently spread to erstwhile conservatives. Take Ann Coulter, please. She writes:

For reasons of purity, we dumped an unbeatable Republican candidate and ran a conservative activist with no electoral victories to her in name for the U.S Senate from Delaware -- a state that hasn't voted for a Republican president in nearly two decades. For no good reason, we threw out another sure-winner incumbent Republican senator from Indiana. Driven by a "Privatize the Lighthouses" purity, we ended up with a narcissistic loon running for the U.S. Senate from Missouri.

Ann's not the only one, of course. Plenty of people who I used to think were on our side are blaming the "Tea Party," whatever that is. The usual suspects are Christine O'Donnell (the Delaware case that Coulter refers to), Sharron Angle (Nevada), Richard Mourdock (Indiana), and Todd Akin (Missouri). (Akin's problem had nothing to do with privatizing lighthouses, but everything to do with his theory of the reproductive process.)

Maybe you've heard the phrase, "use your words." I tell people to "use your memory." Let me refresh your memory with this chart. (It took 50 Republicans to ensure majority control of the Senate while Bush was president. After that, it would take 51.)

Source for numbers: US Senate.

On January 2, 2007, the U.S. Senate had 55 Republican senators. Just over two years later, it had only 41. Republicans lost majority control of the Senate in 2006, and then lost so many more senators in 2008 that the Democrats could finagle their way to filibuster-proof control. For our sins we were saddled with the $830-billion Stimulus in 2009 and ObamaCare in 2010, causing a permanent increase in federal spending and regulation from then to infinity. Those sins, by the way, were then baked into the cake. All Democrats needed to do after that was insist on continuing resolutions.

Look at those years again. The loss of the both houses of Congress, Obama's election, the Obama Stimulus, and ObamaCare all happened before the 2010 elections, meaning before the first nationwide election in which the Tea Party existed.

And what happened immediately after the Tea Party came into existence?

(1)   A record-setting gain of seats in state legislatures, gaining control of 14 more chambers in the states and achieving control of both chambers in 26 states.

(2)   A gain of 64 seats in the House of Representatives, enough to win back majority control after four years of Democrat control.

(3)   A gain of 6 seats in the Senate, wiping out 75% of the devastating losses from the 2008 election.

Republicans won just about everything that could be won in 2010, except the Senate. One reason for that? Only one third of the Senate is up for election in any election year.

Thirty-five Senate seats were up for election in 2010, and only 19 of them were held by Democrats. Do the math: to gain control of the Senate, Republicans would have had to hold all 16 of their seats and then win 10 of the 19 seats held by Democrats. The actual result: they held all 16 of their seats and won 6 seats from Democrats. Go ahead, blame the Tea Party.

But for Princess Ann, the pea under all those winning mattresses was Christine O'Donnell. Use your math, Ann. Let's hypothesize that both Tea Party ogres, O'Donnell and Angel, had won in 2010. That would have given Republicans 49 Senate seats, still two short of majority control. Those were not critical losses, even if you assume (and one can only assume) that the non-Tea Party Republicans would have won those seats.

And while we're assuming, let's assume that Richard Mourdock's and Todd Akin's primary opponents had won in 2012. Then, instead of 45 Republican senators, we'd have 47, still well short of majority control. Scott Brown lost in that same election, despite being the incumbent. Too Tea Party pure?

Just prior to the Tea Party's existence, Republicans had 178 seats in the House and 41 in the Senate. Today, two elections post-Tea Party, they have 234 seats in the House and 45 in the Senate. Go ahead, blame the Tea Party.

People whining about the Tea Party are the real "purists." They expect miracles from the Tea Party while accepting all the excuses in the world from non-Tea Partiers. Let's review how this all started, shall we?

It was in the elections of 2006 that Republicans lost control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. And it was in 2008 that Democrats won the presidency and gained even larger majorities in both houses of Congress.

Now, what had happened prior to that? The Tea Party didn't even exist, remember? What happened was that Republicans had everything at the national level -- House, Senate, and president -- for the first time since 1954. And they were not very Tea Party.

They forced Medicare Part D on us using the same kind of parliamentary shenanigans that the Democrats used with ObamaCare. That was the largest expansion of entitlements since LBJ. It would add almost $8 trillion to our unfunded liabilities.
They teamed up with Democrats like Ted Kennedy to give us Campaign Finance Reform and No Child Left Behind.
They increased federal spending from 18.2% of GDP in 2000 (the lowest level of spending since 1966) to 20.8% in 2008. That cannot all be blamed on war spending, either.
They mandated more ethanol in gasoline.
They expanded Clinton's Americorps.
President Bush signed onto legislation outlawing light bulbs.
And President Bush gave us the TARP bailout, which most Republicans in Congress voted for.
And this might be news to some of you: President Bush didn't deregulate anything. He increased the number of regulations, the number of people regulating, and the dollars being spent on regulating.

That is why we are in the mess we're in. The Tea Party is not demanding purity; it is demanding sanity.

We Tea Party types kept our mouths shut for 20 years and voted Republican as the Party nominated George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, and John McCain. We bit our tongues as our president waxed wise about "compassionate conservatism" and Karl Rove talked of a new Republican era. But they won two elections in 2000 and 2004, so we gave them the benefit of the doubt that they at least knew how to "win." We were hoping to get two steps forward for every step backward.

But what were our forward steps? What did we "win"? Republicans spent more. They regulated more. They expanded programs we Tea Partiers had hoped to eliminate. And they invented a whole new $8-trillion entitlement that none of us asked for. We weren't looking for purity at all, but simply one iota of a difference from Democrats.

"But you can't expect to elect a Jim DeMint in Vermont." No, but we did elect Jim Jeffords. How did that work for us? Arlen Specter? Charlie Crist? How many times do you expect us to kick Lucy's football?

So stop looking at the mote in the Tea Party's eye, and start looking at the beam in your own. (That's a reference to Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, for those of you who might have forgotten it, or never learned it.)

Obama's Teachable Moments: A Personal Tale

By Carol Brown
....These are but a few examples that provide frighteningly clear answers to the questions I pondered on election night in 2008. Obama has proven himself to be a traitor to all America stands for, for all America has been, and for all America now struggles to continue to be.

I wonder if we keep going the way we are, what the nation will look like. In one year. In five years. In ten years. And I wonder if life will ever be the same again.

Then I catch myself feeling morose. And overwhelmed. I'm just one person. I can't fix this. (But I hope someone will.)

I hope a great leader will emerge and make everything right again.

I hope there will be a massive protest.

I hope the ideas proposed by Mark Levin in The Liberty Amendments take off. How, or by whom, I do not know.

I believe we need to tackle things on all fronts, including local government. But am I willing to run for city council? Am I even willing to canvas for a good local candidate?

Can I accept this fight will be long and hard and that things may not improve in my lifetime? How much am I willing to give? How much fortitude can I muster?

Is there a way, and do I have the will, to shift the expectations I had for my life to accept that it's going to take more -- a whole lot more -- than I'd ever imagined to do my part? And, if so, what will my part be?

Heckuva job, Obama: President excuses long list of scandals and blunders

By Dave Boyer
The list of scandals and blunders in the Obama administration is long, but the roster of people who have been fired by President Obama

for screwing up is strikingly short.
From Benghazi to the Internal Revenue Service to the Fast and Furious gun-running furor in the Justice Department, the president

has been loathe to hold high-level aides accountable for major bungling.

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s Toxic Race Tour at Cornell University

By J Christian Adams

....This is what passes for credible on elite college campuses today — the idea that treating individuals without regard to race or color but rather as individuals with divine dignity is somehow racially discriminatory.
These are not just nutty notions, they are dangerous notions. They attempt to undo and unravel the meaning of words. They defy the truth. Treating people without regard to race is deconstructed to mean racism.

Beware: these nutty and dangerous notions aren’t confined to places like Cornell or Crenshaw’s classroom in Los Angeles. They are en vogue among growing numbers of lawyers and those who hold power. We saw it on display last week at the Supreme Court when Shanta Driver stood before the Supreme Court justices and proclaimed that the 14th Amendment doesn’t apply to whites. Driver wasn’t ashamed. She and thousands more share the same toxic belief. We see the belief manifest in the policies of the Justice Department.

Oh, That Present-Tense Culture

By Ed Driscoll

Discussing the vapidity of pop culture in 2007, Mark Steyn wrote:

“Popular culture” is more accurately a “present-tense culture”: You’re celebrating the millennium but you can barely conceive of anything before the mid-1960s. We’re at school longer than any society in human history, entering kindergarten at four or five and leaving college the best part of a quarter-century later—or thirty years later in Germany. Yet in all those decades we exist in the din of the present. A classical education considers society as a kind of iceberg, and teaches you the seven-eighths below the surface. Today, we live on the top eighth bobbing around in the flotsam and jetsam of the here and now. And, without the seven-eighths under the water, what’s left on the surface gets thinner and thinner.

Until there’s nothing there at all. Behold the America education system summed up in two sentences: