Monthly Archives: February 2015
February 23, 2015 — John Hinderaker
A federal court has ruled that the Obama administration’s plan to issue work permits to illegal immigrants is–this is not exactly a surprise–illegal. But the Democrats are undeterred. Today, for the fourth time, they filibustered funding for the Department of Homeland Security, insisting that if Obama’s illegal program isn’t funded, the entire DHS must be shut down. In the meantime, it has come to light that the Obama administration has
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February 23, 2015 — Steven Hayward
Kudos to Brendan O’Neill of The Spectator of London for producing a comprehensive guide to self-checking privilege. Wish I had thought of this. You owe it to yourself not only to read the whole thing, but to bookmark it for frequent reference and to look forward to annual revisions (because who knows what terms will become off limits in coming months and years). Here’s a couple of my favorites from the
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February 23, 2015 — Scott Johnson
Our surrender to Iran’s nuclear program were implicit in the so-called Joint Plan of Action agreed to by the Obama administration; only the details needed to be worked out. The AP reports the details in process in “Phased US-Iran nuclear deal taking shape.” The details are about what you would expect, only worse. The Times of Israel’s David Horovitz comments in “Now we know who to believe on Iran.” We
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February 23, 2015 — Steven Hayward
I had to do a double shot to make sure that this headline really came from CBS News: The Gender Pay Gap Is a Complete Myth Not a half-truth, a semi-myth, a sort of small lie. A “complete myth.” Just take in the lede: According to all the media headlines about a new White House report, there’s still a big pay gap between men and women in America. The report
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February 23, 2015 — Scott Johnson
There is at best one degree of separation between the Palestinian Authority or the PLO and the terrorist attacks carried out in Israel by Palestinian Arabs. A federal jury in Manhattan returned a verdict against the PA/PLO in favor of American plaintiffs injured as a result of terrorist attacks carried out in Israel between between 2002 and 2004. The New York Times reports: The Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation
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February 23, 2015 — Steven Hayward
Everyone waiting to binge-watch the next installment of House of Cards next week ought to satisfy himself in the meantime with this four-minute Sesame Street parody. (I didn’t know Sesame Street was still on, and for the record, in my opinion the original British House of Cards from 25 years ago was better, and when is someone going to make the American version of Yes, Prime Minister? What’s that you
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February 23, 2015 — Steven Hayward
Yeah, I know, a headline about liberal hypocrisy is not exactly a man-bites-dog story, but I understand some starlet at the Oscars last night (I didn’t watch, for about the 30th year in a row) bleated about inequality in wages between men and women. I wonder if she’s had a look at womens’ wages in Obama’s White House, or in Hillary Clinton’s Senate office. Mark Perry has done the work
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February 23, 2015 — Scott Johnson
Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro is pushing his countrymen into a Castroite abyss of tyranny and impoverishment. Give up your freedom and Maduro will throw in immiseration too. It’s a left-wing package deal. Simnon Romero and Girish Gupta don’t put it quite that way in their New York Times story this morning. The intelligent reader, however, may be able to draw his own conclusions: Let’s take it from the top: For
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February 23, 2015 — Scott Johnson
I want to take the liberty of drawing your attention to a few of the most interesting and/or important pieces of analysis and commentary published in the past few weeks. Some of these we have linked to in posts; others have rotated through our Picks. I will only say that these warrant your time. Michael Doran”s Mosaic essay on what Obama is up to with Iran sheds light on dark
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February 22, 2015 — Steven Hayward
Thanks to Doug Giles of ClashDaily, we have seen some of the early job applications for Marie Harf’s jobs-for-jihadis program run through the Obama State Department. Maybe, as one application helpfully suggests, they will call this “Be-Head Start.” At least for the youth brigades. No word yet on whether these jobs will pay higher than minimum wage, which I hears is 72 of some currency. Also no word yet how
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February 22, 2015 — Steven Hayward
Rudy Giuliani’s skepticism regarding Barack Obama’s true sentiments about America seems to have struck a raw nerve among liberals. Which means he’s surely on to something. At the very least, shouldn’t some reporter ask Obama or his crew about Michelle’s famous remark from 2008 that “for the first time” she was proud of her country? Just what was her attitude, or the causes of her relatively lower lack of pride
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February 22, 2015 — John Hinderaker
Al-Shabab, the Somalian terrorist group loosely affiliated with al Qaeda, carried out an attack on a shopping mall in Kenya in 2013. Al-Shabab has now released a video that urges its followers in North America and the United Kingdom to execute similar terrorist attacks, including a specific call for an attack on the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota: “Be particularly careful” if you intend to visit the Mall of
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February 22, 2015 — Paul Mirengoff
I’m headed for a week in the Caribbean. By the time I return, Scott Walker probably will have been asked to opine on half a dozen more irrelevant issues, the White House will have selected half a dozen left-wing programs through which to persuade potential jihadists to forebear, and Team Clinton will have picked a symbol for the “rebranded” Hillary. In short, it’s a great time to take a week
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February 22, 2015 — Steven Hayward
If you break into admission statistics to elite colleges and universities you discover a pattern of “disparate impact” (as the civil rights term of art goes) against Asians. It appears Asians are being actively discriminated against just as Jews were for decades. The New York Times reported in November: To get into the top schools, they need SAT scores that are about 140 points higher than those of their white
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February 22, 2015 — Scott Johnson
Today is the anniversary of the birth of George Washington. Of all the great men of the revolutionary era to whom we owe our freedom, Washington’s greatness was the rarest and the most needed. At this remove in time, it is also the hardest to comprehend. Take, for example, Washington’s contribution to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Washington’s mere presence lent the undertaking and its handiwork the legitimacy that resulted
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February 22, 2015 — Scott Johnson
I have for the longest time employed two simple criteria to screen out movies for viewing. First, I want to know whether a film is aimed at an intelligent adult audience. I can’t believe how many films are aimed at teenage boys and teenage girls. Second, I want to know if the resolution of a film’s plot employs some gratuitous attack on the United States or a politically correct variant
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February 22, 2015 — Scott Johnson
Jeryl Bier has kindly forwarded the video compiled a while back by the Weekly Standard’s Jim Swift. The video depicts Psaki in the act of deploying her favorite locution: “As you know, [name]…” What “frankly” is to the career politician, what “let’s be clear about [fill in the blank]” and “as I have stated previously” are to President Obama, “as you know” is to Ms. Psaki: a warning that what
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