Max Boot reviews “The Endgame: The Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq, From George W. Bush to Barack Obama.”

Obama’s shameful, indifferent neglect of Iraq gets very little notice in the media.

Bush had a weekly teleconference with Maliki. Guess how often Obama called.

…Like all victories, the surge had many fathers. Messrs. Gordon and Trainor amply chronicle the valor of the frontline troops, but they also single out some unsung heroes who operated behind the scenes. Col. Derek Harvey, for example, an intelligence officer who was warning as early as 2004 that the situation was much worse than the official assessments claimed and arguing that it was imperative to reach out to the Sunni tribes. Or another intelligence officer, Lt. Col. Nicholas “Nycki” Brooks, who in 2006 was telling superiors of the need to clear insurgents from the “belts” surrounding Baghdad, a key part of the strategy that was eventually adopted. Yet another hero is former Sen. Chuck Robb, who, virtually alone among members of the 2006 Iraq Study Group led by Lee Hamilton and James Baker, championed the idea of sending additional troops to Iraq.

Messrs. Gordon and Trainor are less kind to the Obama administration, which came into office at a time when violence was falling as a result of the surge. On the campaign trail, Mr. Obama had opposed the surge, and the authors give the new administration credit for “backtracking on its unrealistic campaign promise to remove combat forces within sixteen months.” But they are highly critical of a range of other decisions, starting with the appointment of Christopher Hill, a diplomat with no experience in the Arab world, as the ambassador in Baghdad. (The job was first offered to, and accepted by, retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, but then, for reasons the authors cannot explain, the offer was rescinded.)

Mr. Hill was a disastrous choice. He clashed both with Iraqi officials and with Gen. Raymond Odierno, the senior U.S. military commander, with whom he developed a “toxic and dysfunctional” relationship. While his successful predecessor, Ryan Crocker, saw his job as working closely with the military to push Iraqi politics in a constructive direction, Mr. Hill adopted a hands-off attitude, trying to treat Iraq like a “normal” country even as it was mired in a lengthy stalemate over the formation of a new government following the inconclusive election of 2010. Mr. Hill sneered at Gen. Odierno’s attempts, Messrs. Trainor and Gordon write, “to neutralize, or at least attenuate, the ‘drivers of instability,’ those factors that had the potential to unhinge Iraq.”

When Mr. Hill and his superiors in the Obama administration finally got involved in trying to create a new government, they wound up pushing for Nouri al-Maliki’s retention as prime minister—ironically, the result that Iran was also pursuing. As one Iraqi politician joked, “the Axis of Evil and the Great Satan appeared to be backing the same candidate.” Mr. Obama tried to find a senior job for Ayad Allawi, the secular Shiite whose party had won the most seats in the election, but his clumsy intervention accomplished nothing. “Compared to Bush’s weekly videoconferences with Maliki,” the authors note, “Obama’s direct role with Iraq’s leaders was minimal.” Vice President Joe Biden, the administration’s point man on Iraq, had more direct contact, but his understanding was so limited that he told aides in 2010: “I’ll bet you my vice presidency Maliki will extend the SOFA [Status of Forces Agreement].”

Today, the SOFA has expired, and Mr. Maliki is more firmly entrenched than ever. The prime minister’s compliant courts recently passed down a death sentence on the Sunni vice president, Tariq Hashemi, based on evidence allegedly gathered by torturing his bodyguards. Mr. Hashemi has fled to Turkey, but his fellow Sunnis aren’t standing by idly while a militant Shiite with close links to Iran accumulates all the power in Baghdad. Al Qaeda in Iraq, which had been all but defeated by 2008, has risen from the grave to perpetuate fresh atrocities. On Sept. 9, the very day that Mr. Hashemi’s sentence was handed down, at least 100 people died across Iraq in a series of terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, Iran is using Iraqi airspace to send airplanes full of weapons to the Assad regime in Syria.

This dismaying outcome might have been averted if U.S. troops were still present in Iraq. Messrs. Gordon and Trainor show, however, how little interest Mr. Obama had in extending any troop presence past 2011. While military commanders judged that they would need at least 16,000 troops to advise and assist Iraqi forces, Obama was willing to send fewer than 5,000; and when Iraqi officials raised predictable objections to Washington’s demands for complete immunity from prosecution for U.S. troops, Mr. Obama didn’t try to finesse the issue. Instead he pulled the plug on the negotiations and embraced a total pullout. By failing to consolidate the gains won by our troops, the president appears well on his way to seizing defeat from the jaws of a hard-won victory.

Now that we’ve seen what bad officiating looks like, let’s take a moment to appreciate this Adonis in stripes.

Some links from open tabs:

How an FCC Free Phone Program
 Went Rogue — yes, there are free cell phones

Western Lifestyle Disturbing Key Bacterial Balance? — more on the science of our guts. I see more on this subject all the time.

Welcome to the Modern-Day Depression — Publisher and onetime Obama supporter Mort Zuckerman spells out the disaster of the past four years.

How the Elites Built America’s Economic Wall — from Bloomberg news.

Testing Obama’s Promise of Transparency — also from Bloomberg. Hint: he flunked.

Jonah Goldberg

…the story of modernity is the story of how we moved away from traditional, non-voluntary forms of tribalism based on familial, ethnic, or even nationalistic lines and toward voluntary forms of tribalism.

The American founding was revolutionary in its embrace of the universality of human rights (even as it fell so short of its own ideals with the institution of slavery). Since then, the West has fought several civil wars to break away from various tribal ideologies, including not just monarchism and imperialism but also Nazism (racial tribalism), Communism (economic tribalism), and fascism (national tribalism).

In fits and starts, we’ve moved toward ever greater voluntarism, which is a fancy way of saying we’ve moved toward greater individual liberty. According to the American creed, no one, and no thing, is the boss of me unless I agree to it. To a certain extent, that’s even true — at least in theory — about the government, which is a representative institution created solely by and for the people, who are sovereign.

But the instinctive attraction of tribalism endures. The same drives that once pushed tribes to kill the villagers downriver still reside in us. We’ve just learned to channel and check them better. Bowling leagues, football franchises, high-school rivalries, motorcycle clubs, Goth clubs: You name it, these free associations — what Edmund Burke called the “little platoons” — satisfy our innate desire to belong to “something larger than ourselves,” as so many politicians like to say.

Now, in the context of American politics, I would (and often do) argue that the Left has grown confused about all this. It has tried to turn government itself into a tribal enterprise of some kind. Democratic politicians tell us that “Government is just the word we use for those things we do together.” “We’re all in this together!” has become at once a rationalization and a battle cry for larger government and higher taxes.

At their recent convention, the Democrats rolled out a video proclaiming that government is “the one thing we all belong to.” This, to me, is pernicious nonsense. The government belongs to us, not the other way around.

But that is an argument for another time.

What got me thinking about all of this is the effort by various Muslim leaders at the United Nations to lecture us about free expression. Leaders who abuse and torture their own citizens for expressing their ideas or faith seem to think they have standing to lecture us about the limits of freedom.

Well, the tribe of barbarism doesn’t get to lecture the tribe of liberty about what freedom means. A few years ago, Dinesh D’Souza wrote a book, The Enemy at Home, in which he argued that American conservatives and (more…)

Per Hugh Hewitt’s post below.

Hugh Hewitt

…There are plenty of data points to encourage Republicans, and these are genuine data points as opposed to the junk food offered up by Quinnipiac and Marist, which derived their predictions from samples that included enormous Democratic voter margins in key states, pro-Democratic turnout margins that were even greater than those achieved in Obama’s blowout year of 2008..

Two data points that warm GOP hearts and undermine the junk polls: (1) Absentee requests in Ohio by Democrats are trailing their 2008 totals –often by a lot in key Democratic counties like Cuyahoga County; and (2) overall voter registeration for Democrats in the Buckeye State is down dramatically from 2008.

These two bits of info undermine the credibility of the Obama booster polls, as did the interviews I conducted with key leadership from both polls and with other informed observers.

The data on absentees and registration point to a fall off in enthusiasm for the president from the highs of 2008, a result both of his epic failures as president and of the fact that the second time around isn’t nearly as exciting as casting a vote for the first ever African-American president.

The conversations with the experts are the most revealing, however, and the Manhattan-Beltway media elite has really failed to do even minimal homework here, choosing instead to go with the conclusions of the people they have paid to give them data, thus outsourcing their work.

In this respect big media resembles nothing so much as investors in Bernie Madoff’s funds. Madoff never got asked tough questions by his investors or the SEC, and thus he rampaged through his clients’ cash.

Big news organizations that turn off their skepticism and write checks to polling firms are doing the same thing and for the same reason: They lack the skills to do their own analyses, and they don’t want to be thought stupid for asking obvious questions.

I don’t mind admitting I don’t know why a sample should include 10% more Democrats than Republicans, so I ask –and ask and ask. This is what journalists do. Unless, apparently, they have paid for the product or want badly to believe it is true.

But don’t believe me. Read the interviews.

Those interviews are full of insights.

Will the left go after Matt Damon for being in the pocket of Arab oil interests while propagandizing against domestic energy production?

Rhetorical question.

A new film starring Matt Damon presents American oil and natural gas producers as money-grubbing villains purportedly poisoning rural American towns. It is therefore of particular note that it is financed in part by the royal family of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates.

The creators of Promised Land have gone to absurd lengths to vilify oil and gas companies, as Scribe’s Michael Sandoval noted Wednesday. Since recent events have demonstrated the relative environmental soundness of hydraulic fracturing – a technique for extracting oil and gas from shale formations – Promised Land’s script has been altered to make doom-saying environmentalists the tools of oil companies attempting to discredit legitimate “fracking” concerns.

While left-leaning Hollywood often targets supposed environmental evildoers, Promised Land was also produced “in association with” Image Media Abu Dhabi, a subsidiary of Abu Dhabi Media, according to the preview’s list of credits. A spokesperson with DDA Public Relations, which runs PR for Participant Media, the company that developed the film fund backing Promised Land, confirmed that AD Media is a financier. The company is wholly owned by the government of the UAE.

Evan Bayh, former Democratic senator from Indiana, writes about the destructive nature of ObamaCare’s tax on medical devices.

The Supreme Court decision in June upholding the Affordable Care Act leaves in place a tax on medical devices that threatens thousands of American jobs and our global competitiveness. It will also stifle critical medical innovation in the industry that gave us defibrillators, pacemakers, artificial joints, stents, chemotherapy delivery systems and almost every device we depend on to save lives.

The 2.3% tax will be charged to manufacturers on each sale and takes effect in January. Many U.S. device companies, in response, have already announced layoffs, canceled plans for domestic expansion and slashed research-and-development budgets. This month, Welch Allyn—a maker of stethoscopes and blood-pressure cuffs—announced that it will lay off 10% of its global workforce over the next three years, but all of the jobs being cut are in the U.S.

Given the fragile state of the U.S. economy, Congress must move quickly to redress the harm from this tax before it becomes irreversible.

The medical-device industry has been a great American success story. More than 400,000 U.S. workers are employed in this sector directly, and another two million, including those involved in supply and distribution, benefit indirectly. At a time when the economy struggles to produce good jobs, medical-device positions pay well. Average compensation is $58,188 annually compared with a national average of $41,673 annually for all employment, a 2010 Pew Foundation report found.

While the U.S. overall imports far more products than it exports, America is a global leader in medical-device production and sales. Last year the U.S. device industry earned $5.4 billion more in exports than we spent on imports of such devices.

Even more important to the average American is the industry’s role in saving and sustaining life. Medical devices have contributed to remarkable advances in numerous areas: artificial hips and knees, and devices used in the treatment of cancer, and for angioplasty, vascular surgery and in-vitro fertilization, to name a few. Many of these devices have not only improved (more…)

by Burt Prelutsky

The way that people carried on in 2008, you would have thought we had elected a messiah and not merely a president. Some people who felt that way can be excused because that’s the way Obama was sold to us. After all, he vowed to lower the oceans, heal the planet and unite all Americans, whatever their class, race, gender or nation of origin.

That’s pretty big talk for someone whose singular accomplishment as a member of the Illinois legislature was to vote in favor of partial-birth abortions, and whose most noteworthy achievement during his two years in Washington was to be named the most liberal member of the Senate, beating out the unholy likes of Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid.

Okay, call me a skeptic. However, whenever anyone on TV makes huge, unrealistic promises, my immediate reaction is to withdraw into my shell of cynicism. And I’m merely referring to the sort of slicksters who claim that if I invest $5,000 in gold, I’ll be able to buy and sell Warren Buffet by the end of the month. When a mere politician guarantees that he’s going to lower the oceans my response is to demand he tell me exactly how and why he’s going to get rid of all that water.

I now believe that there was divine intervention in the 2008 election, but not by the candidate from the political sewers of Chicago, but by God, Himself. Somehow, He sensed that too many Americans had forgotten that elections have consequences. The president doesn’t just get to decide if the Thanksgiving Turkey lives or dies, but whether the American economy lives or dies and, even more to the point, whether American citizens live or die.

By allowing Barack Hussein Obama to be elected president and commander-in-chief, He was reminding us poor deluded mortals that when we choose someone because he looks and sounds like someone born to be the D.J. at a hip-hop club, we’re just asking for trouble.

Now, as if all the things Obama’s done and hasn’t done during his time in the White House aren’t bad enough, he announces that the one thing he has learned is that you — or, rather, he — can’t change Washington from the inside. Having said that, I think it’s only fair that we give him every chance to try changing it from the outside. From way outside, be it Chicago, or back in Hawaii, where word has it the Obamas are planning to erect a multi-million dollar home for their retirement. If the rumor is true, those would be the very first shovel-ready jobs for which he could actually claim credit.

Even though the title of my newest book is “Barack Obama, You’re Fired! (And Don’t Bother Asking for a Letter of Recommendation),” he is merely the worst of the left-wing offenders ruining our lives in Washington. As I make clear in Chapter Two, “Naming Names (Obama’s Cronies, Stooges, Enablers and Fall Guys),” the nation’s capital is fairly bursting at the seams with scoundrels who should be serving sentences, not terms.

A while ago, I wrote to one of them, Senator Dianne Feinstein, complaining about the foot-dragging I perceived taking place when it came to tracking down those who had leaked a slew of national security documents to the New York Times.

After several weeks, I forgot that I had even written to her. Then, one afternoon, I turned on my computer and there was an email from her. To be fair, I will reprint it in its entirety.

“Dear Mr. Prelutsky: Thank you for your letter about my remarks on the recent leaks of sensitive national security information. I appreciate hearing from you, and I welcome the opportunity to respond.

“Let me be clear. I do not believe that President Obama has leaked classified information, and I do not know the source of the leaks. On July 23, 2012, I was asked whether the White House might be responsible for recent national security leaks. I stated that I did not believe the president leaked classified information. I should not have speculated beyond that.

“I’m on record as being disturbed by these leaks and I know for a fact the president is extremely troubled by these leaks.

“In fact, President Obama’s Administration has moved aggressively to investigate the leaks. Attorney General Eric Holder has appointed U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Ronald C. Machen, Jr., and U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland Rod J. Rosenstein, to head criminal investigations into the leaks. The investigations are under way, and it is moving forward quickly. I hope and expect that they will follow the facts wherever they lead.

“Again, thank you for your letter. Please know that I appreciate your taking the time to write. If you have any additional questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact my Washington, D.C. office at (202) 224-3841. Sincerely yours, Dianne Feinstein, United States Senator.”

I wrote back: “Thank you for your response, Senator Feinstein. Frankly, it’s been so long since I wrote, I forgot that I had even brought the matter to your attention. That being said, the investigation is not going ahead quickly. There were only a few people in the room who could have possibly leaked the classified information. You hook those folks up to a lie detector machine and you go from there. Once you find the guilty party, you try him for treason.

“As for your contention that the person in question wasn’t Obama, I don’t believe anyone in that room would have risked providing the NY Times with national security data without Obama’s approval. Insisting that he didn’t do it is just plain silly and is, moreover, an insult to my intelligence; the Mafia don doesn’t do his own killing and the president doesn’t pick up the phone and call a Times reporter. In each case, they have it done.

“Clearly, this is a case of Party coming before Principle, Party coming before Country.

“Again, thanks for finally getting back to me. I know how busy you must be, not getting to the bottom of this scandal. Sincerely, Burt Prelutsky”

It’s one to thing to be biased, quite another to doctor video.

Thomas Sowell

Many voters will be comparing Mitt Romney with Barack Obama between now and election day. But what might be even more revealing would be comparing Obama with Obama. There is a big contrast between Obama based on his rhetoric (“Obama 1″) and Obama based on his record (“Obama 2″).

For example, during the 2008 election campaign, Obama 1 spoke of “opening up and creating more transparency in government,” so that government spending plans would be posted on the Internet for days before they passed into legislation. After he was elected president, Obama said, “My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government.”

This Obama 1 sounds like a very good fellow. No wonder so many people voted for him.

But then there is Obama 2. He passed a mammoth ObamaCare bill so fast that even members of Congress didn’t have time to read it, much less the general public. It was by no means posted on the Internet for days before the vote, as promised.

The Constitution of the United States requires transparency as well. When people are nominated by a President to become Cabinet members, the Constitution requires that they be confirmed by the Senate before they can take office, so that facts about them can become known before they are given the powers of their offices.

Although President Obama complied with this requirement when he appointed Cabinet members, he also made other appointments to powerful positions created by Executive Orders — people aptly called “czars” for the vast, unchecked powers they wielded, in some cases greater than the powers exercised by Cabinet members.

These “czars” never had to be confirmed by the Senate, and so had no public vetting before acquiring their powers. We had unknown and unaccountable rulers placed over us.

Another aspect of transparency was the Constitution’s requirement that Congress pass a budget every year. The Democratically controlled Senate during the Obama administration has not passed a budget for three consecutive years.

Passing a budget makes the administration tell the public what it will pay for, what it will have to cut to reduce the deficit — and how big the deficit will be if they don’t cut anything. By not even passing a budget, Obama 2 and his party are in effect saying to the public, “It is none of your business.” Transparency?

In his oath of office, Barack Obama swore to see that the laws are faithfully executed, as all Presidents do. But that was Obama 1. Once in the White House, Obama 2 proceeded to explicitly waive the enforcement of laws he didn’t agree with.

The immigration laws are a classic example. Failing to get Congress to pass some version of amnesty, Obama 2 simply issued an Executive Order exempting certain classes of illegal immigrants from the immigration laws on the books.

Too many people have gotten sucked into a discussion of whether it is a good or a bad thing for people brought into the country as children to be exempted. But the whole reason for Constitutional government is to have all three branches of government agree on what the laws of the land shall be.

Obama 2 has decided instead that if Congress doesn’t do what he wants, he will do it by himself through Executive Orders….

Government can’t create jobs, but it can stifle those who do.

Joel Gehrke

Fifty-five percent of small business owners and manufacturers would not have started their businesses in today’s economy, according to a new poll that also reports 69 percent say President Obama’s regulatory policies have hurt their businesses.

“There is far too much uncertainty, too many burdensome regulations and too few policymakers willing to put aside their egos and fulfill their responsibilities to the American people,” said Jay Timmons, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, which commissioned the poll along with the National Federation of Independent Businesses. “To fix this problem, we need immediate action on pro-growth tax and regulatory policies that put manufacturers in the United States in a position to compete and succeed in an ever-more competitive global economy.”

The poll reports another ominous statistic for job creation: “67 percent say there is too much uncertainty in the market today to expand, grow or hire new workers.” Why? Because “President Obama’s Executive Branch and regulatory policies have hurt American small businesses and manufacturers,” according to 69 percent of the business owners surveyed.

Here are the key findings in the poll, as highlighted by NAM:

• 67 percent say there is too much uncertainty in the market today to expand, grow or hire new workers.
• 69 percent of small business owners and manufacturers say President Obama’s Executive Branch and regulatory policies have hurt American small businesses and manufacturers.
• 55 percent say they would not start a business today given what they know now and in the current environment.
• 54 percent say other countries like China and India are more supportive of their small businesses and manufacturers than the United States.

“Instead of smoothing the way, our government continues to erect more barriers to growth through burdensome regulations that increase costs for small businesses and all Americans,” NFIB president Dan Danner said.

Those statistics suggest that even Democratic and independent small business owners criticized Obama, because only 46 percent of poll participants identified as Republicans, per Roll Call.

“It’s clear that small business owners and manufacturers are becoming increasingly more frustrated by the federal government’s inability to solve America’s economic problems,” Bill McInturff, whose Public Opinion Strategies conducted the poll. “Manufacturers place most of the blame squarely on policies coming out of Washington.”

Thomas Sowell

The recently discovered tape on which Barack Obama said back in 1998 that he believes in redistribution is not really news. He said the same thing to Joe the Plumber four years ago. But the surfacing of this tape may serve a useful purpose if it gets people to thinking about what the consequences of redistribution are.

Those who talk glibly about redistribution often act as if people are just inert objects that can be placed here and there, like pieces on a chess board, to carry out some grand design. But if human beings have their own responses to government policies, then we cannot blithely assume that government policies will have the effect intended.

The history of the 20th century is full of examples of countries that set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty. The communist nations were a classic example, but by no means the only example.

In theory, confiscating the wealth of the more successful people ought to make the rest of the society more prosperous. But when the Soviet Union confiscated the wealth of successful farmers, food became scarce. As many people died of starvation under Stalin in the 1930s as died in Hitler’s Holocaust in the 1940s.

How can that be? It is not complicated. You can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth — and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated. Farmers in the Soviet Union cut back on how much time and effort they invested in growing their crops, when they realized that the government was going to take a big part of the harvest. They slaughtered and ate young farm animals that they would normally keep tending and feeding while raising them to maturity.

People in industry are not inert objects either. Moreover, unlike farmers, industrialists are not tied to the land in a particular country.

Russian aviation pioneer Igor Sikorsky could take his expertise to America and produce his planes and helicopters thousands of miles away from his native land. Financiers are (more…)

Gimme gimme gimme.

Not people, apparently. Raccoons:

The bandit lay curled up in a metal cage, its drowsy expression turning to wariness, then narrow-eyed aggression as Trautmann-Winter approached.

“They look very smart, but I think they are very dangerous,” she said, as the captive hissed and bared its teeth. “And they are a problem for us.”

A big one, it turns out. A species first imported from the United States in the 1930s, Germany’s raccoon population is exploding and encroaching on the human environment more than ever before. That has many residents here up in arms — literally, in the case of hunters strapping on their rifles and heading into the woods to help stem the tide of hungry ring-tailed pests.

But they’re fighting a losing battle. Their furry, fertile and firmly established enemy fills an unoccupied niche in the local ecology, unmolested by natural predators, and has successfully colonized this country in less than a century since arriving from its faraway native habitat.

…

“We’re getting 50 calls a day…. I know of at least 500 raccoon families in the city,” Ehlert said. “They are the most intelligent mammals in Europe. They’re very quick.”

Unlike, say, the French.

Jim Geraghty:

Muslim Leaders to Obama: No, We Still Refuse to Accept Freedom of Expression, Blasphemy

This isn’t surprising, just worth keeping an eye on:

Insults to the Islamic prophet Muhammad are part of an organized assault on Muslim religious and cultural values and cannot be brushed aside, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi said Wednesday, rejecting the case for free speech made by President Obama just a day earlier.

“The obscenities that I have referred to that were recently released as part of an organized campaign against Islamic sanctities are unacceptable,” Morsi said, referring to a crude Internet video that mocks Islam called “Innocence of Muslims.”

“We reject this. We cannot accept it,” Morsi said, his voice thin with anger. “We will not allow anyone to do this by word or deed.”

In an address before the U.N. General Assembly that marked his debut as an international statesman, Egypt’s first democratically elected president presented an unapologetically Islamic view of world events and Egypt’s role in them. He said outrage over insults to Islam does not justify violence but said nothing directly about the attack two weeks ago on the U.S. Embassy in Cairo.

Four years ago, Obama came into the Oval Office convinced that a respectful tone and an outstretched hand, coupled with his unique experience of living as a child in a Muslim country and past personal and familial connections to the Muslim world, would generate breakthroughs in the U.S. relationship with the Muslim world.

Obviously, those breakthroughs haven’t happened and from the continuous violence targeted at our diplomatic staff, it’s easy to conclude things are worse. Obama seems to think that if we just do “X,” it will lower the temperature in the pervasive anti-American rage in the region. But the issue is never “X”; the goalposts always move. Osama bin Laden first complained about the insult of U.S. troops on Saudi soil; those troops left, and OBL didn’t change his tune one bit. Then we were told that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was a provocation. Those troops left, and the Islamists are still raging. Now we’re told it’s some YouTube video. It’s always going to be something — some cartoon, some rumor of a burned Koran, some U.S. presence somewhere that offends and enrages them.

The fact that Obama was wrong then is bad enough; the fact that he’s still trying the same approach, four years later, suggests desperation, lack of inspiration, or denial. Then again, with Obama, “there is no Plan B” is a phrase we hear again and again.

Regulators are not entitled to create their own laws or expand their own turf. But that doesn’t stop the liberal fascists from marching on.

Matt Cover

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski defended his agency’s role in regulating broadband Internet, saying that the FCC needed to act like a “cop on the beat.”

“We need to protect and promote competition,” Genachowski said at a speech to media firm Vox Communications in Washington on Tuesday. “We know from decades of experience that when it comes to competition in the communications sector, the FCC needs to be a cop on the beat.”

Genachowski said that part of this “cop on the beat” approach meant putting rules in place that “prevent anti-competitive practices.”

“Protecting competition sometimes means putting rules in place to prevent anti-competitive practices – rules we adopted last year by majority vote to ensure broadband data roaming is one example,” he said.

Genachowski also cited controversial net neutrality rules as one way the FCC prevents anti-competitive behavior.

“Sometimes government has to act to preserve platforms for innovation – that’s what the open internet/net neutrality debate was all about – doing it in a smart, market-oriented way that recognizes the realities of the marketplace, the fact that we really want an open platform for innovators and we also really want robust, fast networks that require capital investment.

We have it, and we have it because the government was not involved.

by Burt Prelutsky

When I hear liberals in the media and Congress repeating Obama’s lies while doing their best to make Romney appear to be a tax chiseler, a killer of cancer victims, a job destroyer and a candidate doomed to lose, I am reminded that whereas bees give up their lives to protect their queen, liberals are only willing to risk their reputations on behalf of their own.

Another lie that everyone on the Left seems dedicated to promoting is that the majority of the world’s Muslims are decent and peace-loving. What absolute hogwash! I would first remind everyone that even in the heyday of Hitler and Stalin, not every German or Russian was a Nazi or a Communist. In every society, there are those who lead and those who follow. But once war breaks out, everyone falls into line.

The truth is that it’s always a minority of activists who bring about change, be it for good, as with the American Revolution, or for evil, as with the French and Russian revolutions or the Arab Spring upheavals.

How much longer are we going to have to listen to the tripe our national leaders feed us about the small handful of Islamists who are causing all the trouble?

For the past 14 centuries, Islam has been the scourge of humanity. For the longest time, they tried to kill or convert everyone who was an infidel. When they found they couldn’t defeat Christianity, they hibernated. But all it took was Jimmy Carter pulling the Persian rug out from under the Shah of Iran to incite renewed insanity in the Muslim world.

Over the past 30-odd years, we have seen these creatures in all their glory, whether it was blowing up embassies and skyscrapers or pizza parlors and school buses. We have seen them hang and burn people from bridges and behead others on television. And even here in America, we have seen any number of so-called honor killings brought about when fathers murdered their daughters because they dared to date non-Muslims, refused to marry a Muslim or, for all I know, neglected to make their beds.

These days, whenever the Muslims act up, the mealy-mouthed crowd in Washington blames it on some silly trigger. Sometimes it’s a video or a cartoon or even a teddy bear, other times the blood-letting is blamed on Gitmo or an alleged trashing of a Koran.

Barack Obama, a man who hasn’t yet seen fit to pay a visit to Israel, one of our few actual allies, wasted no time rushing off to Cairo in 2009 and announcing that “Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance.”

Hell, Islam doesn’t even have a proud tradition of tolerating Islam. If there’s one thing they enjoy more than killing a Christian or a Jew, it’s Shiites slaughtering Sunnis, and Sunnis getting a kick out of murdering Shiites.

Bibles are burned all over the Middle East, and Christians are crucified, and our president bows and scrapes, and members of Congress curry their favor with billions of our tax dollars.

In Afghanistan, we teach their soldiers and cops how to use weapons and, as a final exam, they prove how well they’ve learned their lessons by shooting our soldiers in the back.

If Muslims were from outer space, we would all band together to battle them, recognizing how deeply ingrained were their evil intentions. But because so far as we can tell, they’re earthlings, we permit someone like Major Hassan to serve and be promoted in our military; we allow their clerics to enter our prisons and convert dangerous felons; we pretend that Pakistan, the country that shielded the mastermind behind 9/11 for a decade, is our ally in the war on terrorism; we permit Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to come to America and insult us at the U.N. Finally, for good measure, we remain in the U.N. where the Arab and Muslim countries out-number the western democracies and out-vote us time and again.

The terminally naïve were those who saw the upheavals in the Middle East led by the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda and imagined that something good was going to come of it. These people have been the dregs of the world for well over a thousand years, and were it not for the accident of oil lurking beneath the desert sand, they would still be riding around on camels and living in tents.

Although they are a backward and blood-thirsty lot, I still hold them in higher regard than I do our leaders who continue to curtsy to the followers of Islam, displaying what everyone knows is merely fear and disgust, but that they hope will be mistaken for tolerance and respect.

Andy Williams was my parents’ music, playing on the Hi-Fi years before WiFi.

I used my iMac — the one I use only for photo and video editing — to put music on my mother’s iPad. So the music collection is Williams, Sinatra, Mel Torme and so on.

For some reason, from time to time, it will launch iTunes spontaneously and start playing this tune. Andy Williams, dead at 84, a very fine voice indeed.

The video is a bit hokey, but had the best audio quality.

Victor Davis Hanson on the decline of California.

If the coast of California is “postmodern,” as its residents like to say, we in the state’s interior are now premodern. Out here in the San Joaquin Valley, civilization has zoomed into reverse, a process that I witness regularly on my farm in Selma, near Fresno. Last summer, for example, intruders ripped the copper conduits out of two of my agriculture pumps. Later, thieves looted the shed. I know no farmer in a five-mile radius who has escaped such thefts; for many residents of central California, confronting gang members casing their farms for scrap metal is a weekly occurrence. I chased out two last August. One neighbor painted his pump with the Oakland Raiders’ gray and black, hoping to win exemption from thieving gangs. No luck. My mailbox looks armored because it is: after starting to lose my mail once or twice each month, I picked a model advertised to resist an AK-47 barrage.

I bicycle twice a week on a 20-mile route through the countryside, where I see trash—everything from refrigerators to dead kittens—dumped along the sides of less traveled roads. The culprits are careless; their names, on utility-bill stubs and junk mail, are easy to spot. This summer, I also saw a portable canteen unplug its drainage outlet and speed off down the road, with a stream of cooking waste leaking out onto the pavement. After all, it is far cheaper to park a canteen along a country road, put up an awning over a few plastic chairs and tables, and set up an unregulated, tax-free roadside eatery than to battle the array of state regulations required to establish an in-town restaurant. Six such movable canteens line the road a mile from my farm. For that matter, I can buy a new, tax-free lawnmower, mattress, or shovel at the ad hoc emporia at dozens of rural crossroads. Who knows where their inventory comes from?

Few residence-zoning laws are enforced in the rural interior of highly regulated California. (more…)

Mike Rowe’s celebration of hard work. 20 minutes long, but worth the watch.

…When Dirty Jobs premiered back in 2003, critics called the show “a calamity of exploding toilets and misadventures in animal husbandry.” They weren’t exactly wrong. But mostly, Dirty Jobs was an unscripted celebration of hard work and skilled labor. It still is. Every week, we highlight regular people who do the kind of jobs most people go out of their way to avoid. My role on the show is that of a “perpetual apprentice.” In that capacity I have completed over three hundred different jobs, visited all fifty states, and worked in every major industry.

Though schizophrenic and void of any actual qualifications, my resume looks pretty impressive, and when our economy officially tanked in 2008, I was perfectly positioned to weigh in on a variety of serious topics. A reporter from The Wall Street Journal called to ask what I thought about the “counter-intuitive correlation between rising unemployment and the growing shortage of skilled labor.” CNBC wanted my take on outsourcing. Fox News wanted my opinions on manufacturing and infrastructure. And CNN wanted to chat about currency valuations, free trade, and just about every other work-related problem under the sun.

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In each case, I shared my theory that most of these “problems” were in fact symptoms of something more fundamental – a change in the way Americans viewed hard work and skilled labor. That’s the essence of what I’ve heard from the hundreds of men and women I’ve worked with on Dirty Jobs. Pig farmers, electricians, plumbers, bridge painters, jam makers, blacksmiths, brewers, coal miners, carpenters, crab fisherman, oil drillers…they all tell me the same thing over and over, again and again – our country has become emotionally disconnected from an essential part of our workforce. We are no longer impressed with cheap electricity, paved roads, and indoor plumbing. We take our infrastructure for granted, and the people who build it.

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Today, we can see the consequences of this disconnect in any number of areas, but none is more obvious than the growing skills gap. Even as unemployment remains sky high, a whole category of vital occupations has fallen out of favor, and companies struggle to find workers with the necessary skills. The causes seem clear. We have embraced a ridiculously narrow view of education. Any kind of training or study that does not come with a four-year degree is now deemed “alternative.” Many viable careers once aspired to are now seen as “vocational consolation prizes,” and many of the jobs this current administration has tried to “create” over the last four years are the same jobs that parents and teachers actively discourage kids from pursuing. (I always thought there was something ill-fated about the promise of three million “shovel ready jobs” made to a society that no longer encourages people to pick up a shovel.)

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Which brings me to my purpose in writing. On Labor Day of 2008, the fans of Dirty Jobs helped me launch this website. mikeroweWORKS.com began as a Trade Resource Center designed to connect kids with careers in the skilled trades. It has since evolved into a non-profit foundation – a kind of PR Campaign for hard work and skilled labor.

Thanks to a number of strategic partnerships, I have been able to promote a dialogue around these issues with a bit more credibility than my previous resume allowed. I’ve spoken to Congress (twice) about the need to confront the underlying stigmas and stereotypes that surround these kinds of jobs. Alabama and Georgia have both used mikeroweWORKS to launch their own statewide technical recruitment campaigns, and I’m proud to be the spokesman for both initiatives. I also work closely with Caterpillar, Ford, Kimberly-Clark, and Master Lock, as well as The Boy Scouts of America and The Future Farmers of America. To date, the mikeroweWORKS Foundation has raised over a million dollars for trade scholarships. It’s modest by many standards, but I think we’re making a difference.

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Certainly, we need more jobs, and you were clear about that in Tampa. But the Skills Gap proves that we need something else too. We need people who see opportunity where opportunity exists. We need enthusiasm for careers that have been overlooked and underappreciated by society at large. We need to have a really big national conversation about what we value in the workforce, and if I can be of help to you in that regard, I am at your service – assuming of course, you find yourself in a new address early next year.

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To be clear, mikeroweWORKS has no political agenda. I am not an apologist for Organized Labor or for Management. mikeroweWORKS is concerned only with encouraging a larger appreciation for skilled labor, and supporting those kids who are willing to learn a skill.

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Good luck in November. And thanks for your time.

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Sincerely,

Mike Rowe

Madonna offered a profanity-laced endorsement of President Obama at her concert Monday night, which involved the singer stripping down to her underwear to reveal the president’s name written on her body.

“You all better vote for f—ing Obama okay,” she told the crowd at Washington’s Verizon center.

Later in the show, Madonna took off her shirt and pulled down her pants to show she had “OBAMA” written in all capital letters across her lower back.

“When Obama is in the White House for a second term I’ll take it all off,” she said to cheers and whistles from the audience.

She then began singing a slow, seductive version of “Like a Virgin” while rolling around on a piano top.

The French are going off the deep end. But what about all those feminine and masculine words?

France is set to ban the words “mother” and “father” from all official documents under controversial plans to legalise gay marriage.

The move, which has outraged Catholics, means only the word “parents” would be used in identical marriage ceremonies for all heterosexual and same-sex couples.

The law would also give equal adoption rights to homosexual and heterosexual couples.

The draft law states that “marriage is a union of two people, of different or the same gender”.

It says all references to “mothers and fathers” in the civil code – which enshrines French law – will be swapped for simply “parents”.

Maybe they should all switch to English which has no gender. Sacrebleu!

The WSJ sticks a few footnotes down you-know-who’s throat.

The 10% President

A question raised by President Obama’s immortal line on CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday—”I think that, you know, as President, I bear responsibility for everything, to some degree”—is what that degree really is. Maybe 70% or 80% of the buck stops with him? Or is it halfsies?

Nope. Now we know: It turns out the figure is 10%. The other 90% is somebody else’s fault.

This revelation came when Steve Kroft mentioned that the national debt has climbed 60% on the President’s watch. “Well, first of all, Steve, I think it’s important to understand the context here,” Mr. Obama replied. Fair enough, so here’s his context in full, with our own annotation and translation below:

Assistant editorial page editor James Freeman on President Obama blaming George W. Bush for deficit he exploded and how the policies he endorsed while in the Senate contributed to the financial crisis. Photo: Associated Press

“When I came into office, I inherited the biggest deficit in our history.1 And over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but 90% of that is as a consequence of two wars that weren’t paid for,2 as a consequence of tax cuts that weren’t paid for,3 a prescription drug plan that was not paid for,4 and then the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.5

“Now we took some emergency actions, but that accounts for about 10% of this increase in the deficit,6 and we have actually seen the federal government grow at a slower pace than at any time since Dwight Eisenhower, in fact, substantially lower than the federal government grew under either Ronald Reagan or George Bush.7”

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Footnote No. 1: Either Mr. Obama inherited the largest deficit in American history or he won the 1944 election, but both can’t be true. The biggest annual deficit the modern government has ever run was in 1943, equal to 30.3% of the economy, to mobilize for World War II. The next biggest years were the following two, at 22.7% and 21.5%, to win it.

The deficit in fiscal 2008 was a mere 3.2% of GDP. The deficit in fiscal 2009, which began on October 1, 2008 and ran through September 2009, soared to 10.1%, the highest since 1945.

Mr. Obama wants to blame all of that on his predecessor, and no doubt the recession that began in December 2007 reduced revenues and increased automatic spending “stabilizers” like jobless insurance. But Mr. Obama conveniently forgets a little event in February 2009 known as the “stimulus” that increased spending by a mere $830 billion above the normal baseline.

The recession ended in June 2009, but spending has still kept rising. The President has (more…)

Apparently CNN was touting a “big story” that a “Cancer Cure is within Reach.”

As always, we refer to Health News Review for the facts.

This CNN report is inherently misleading in multiple ways.

The story leads viewers to believe something truly novel is happening, but the claim that cancer cases and deaths can be dramatically reduced by applying existing knowledge is a statement that is almost a cliché in the cancer world. Here’s one example I reported more than five years ago: Dr. Brian Druker, the researcher behind Gleevec, made a similar statement as he stepped into the top job at what’s now called the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute. “It’s already estimated that we could lower mortality rates from cancer by about a third if we implemented what we know. Implementing what we know encompasses a lot of things. It encompasses both screening and prevention, as well as optimizing therapy,” he told me for a profile story I wrote in 2007.

I’m not claiming I scooped Sanjay Gupta by five years. Indeed, he has reported this claim before. For example, the transcript of a CNN report from 2007 includes this quote from Dr. Harold Freeman, medical director of the Ralph Lauren Center for Cancer Care and Prevention in New York, “[W]e’re not applying to what we know to all American people. If we close that gap, that would be the biggest thing we could do to improve the results for cancer.” In that same transcript, Lance Armstrong states that applying existing knowledge about cancer could prevent 200,000 cancer deaths a year in the United States, about a third of the annual total at the time.

The story about MD Anderson Cancer Center does not make clear what makes this time any different.

And I’ll wager that any survey of viewers would find that most believe that Gupta’s report said that a big part of a decline in cancer deaths would come from new discoveries about cancer. The report did not make that claim. Several times it reported that most of the hoped-for improvements would come from applying existing knowledge about preventing cancer, but then the specific examples highlighted, and the video used, implied a different story of promise from new approaches.

After saying  that the biggest advances against cancer would come from applying existing knowledge, MD Anderson Cancer Center President, Dr. Ronald DePinho, told Gupta that screening smokers with lung CT scans would have “an impact on 170,000 deaths per year.” Gupta says proper screening could have “a huge impact.” I would forgive viewers for thinking that the report is claiming that lung cancer screening could save hundreds of thousands of lives a year. It didn’t actually make that claim, but the presentation was confusing. Actually, the biggest study of CT scans indicates you would have to test more than 300 heavy smokers to prevent just a single lung cancer death. And I will spare you a detailed explanation of how the story bungled references to the potential benefits of early detection, while failing to explain that if a disease takes 10 years to kill you, finding it in year 5, instead of year 9, can give the appearance of longer survival without necessarily changing the date of death…

But I bet they know Beyonce’s favorite flavor of yogurt.