Archive for 2013

A NICE PLUG FOR MEN ON STRIKE at Chris Muir’s Day By Day cartoon — complete with cartoon boobies. Thanks, Chris!

JAMES TARANTO: The Education of Barack Obama: The president contradicts one of his airy inaugural pronouncements.

“As for our common defense,” Barack Obama declared in his First Inaugural Address, “we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. . . . Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.”

Last Friday the president said this: “I think it’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100% security and also then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience. We’re going to have to make some choices as a society.”

Read the whole thing.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Why Whistleblowers Are Weird. “We may well end up grateful to Edward Snowden, and also find that we don’t like him very much. Of course, Edward Snowden probably doesn’t care. After all, if he cared about people liking him as much as the rest of us do, he probably wouldn’t have been able to do with he did.”

ROGER KIMBALL: A Little Wisdom From Benjamin Franklin. “The NSA part of the current entertainment, I am reminded of a friend’s note to me about how it fits in with the administration’s gradual transformation of itself into an unaccountable nomenklatura with more or less unlimited powers. The concomitant transformation, it does not quite go without saying, is the transformation of us citizens — formerly the employers of all those ‘public servants’ (it sounds funny now, doesn’t it: ‘public servants’ forsooth!) swanning about in Washington on our money — the transformation, I say, of us citizens into serfs, i.e., slaves working for a feudal master.”

YA THINK? Obama’s Scandals Help the Tea Party, Hurt His Friends.

President Obama had big plans for this second term, but they’ve been pulverized by a slew of controversies that have erupted all at once.

The White House’s defensive crouch only tightened after revelations last week about Top Secret government programs to track Americans’ phone and Internet activities.

In addition to justifying those programs, it must also resolve the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups, satisfy inquiries into the death last year of four U.S. officials in the Benghazi, Libya terrorist attack, and balance its claims of transparency with the Justice Department seizing the records of reporters at the Associated Press and Fox News who cover classified security issues. The president tried instead on Friday to sell Obamacare’s rollout as a success, yet he had to devote a fair share of his appearance in San Jose, CA to a reporter’s question about the government accessing phone and Internet records. . . .

Taken as a whole, these controversies have re-ignited the Tea Party movement, while also offending liberal supporters who believed that Obama would dismantle the national security state he inherited from George W. Bush.

Hey, rube!

SOME LEFTY TROLLS ARE SHOWING UP in the review section of the Insta-Wife’s book. So if you’ve read it, how about dropping by and posting your own thoughts?

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Eliana Johnson: Stop Blaming the ‘Rogue Agents:’ The myth is debunked, and key IRS officials in D.C. are quietly retiring just in time. “The heart of the effort to target tea-party and other conservative groups, we are learning, occurred in Washington, and that is likely why five D.C.-based IRS officials who are connected to the targeting have retired, resigned, been replaced, or been put on administrative leave, since news of the scandal broke in mid May. They include Holly Paz, who last week, according to an IRS source, was replaced as director of Rulings and Agreements, the division that oversaw the targeting of conservative groups; Washington lawyer Carter Hull, who is accused of micromanaging the processing of tea-party cases, and who, according to IRS sources, requested his retirement package on March 12; the commissioner of the agency’s Tax Exempt and Government Entities division, Joseph Grant, who retired on June 3; former IRS commissioner Steven Miller, who resigned days after news of the scandal broke; and the director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations division, Lois Lerner, who was placed on administrative leave only after refusing to tender her resignation, according to Iowa’s Chuck Grassley. All five are or were based in the IRS’s headquarters on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C.”

THIS PROBABLY WORRIES OTHER DEMS: Suffolk Poll: Obama Scandals Are Hurting Markey. Markey should be a shoo-in in Massachusetts. If he’s facing even a little trouble, dems in less-blue areas are in a lot more danger.