What was that again about gay marriage and religious freedom?

The New Neo Posted on by

Ah, yes:

The Giffords, who own the bucolic Liberty Ridge Farm in upstate New York, were ordered to pay a total of $13,000 ”” a $10,000 fine to the state and another $1,500 to each member of a lesbian couple to compensate them for “mental anguish.’’ All because the Giffords, devout Christians, refused to hold a same-sex wedding ceremony on the property on which they live, work and have raised a daughter, 17, and a son, 21.

“This is scary,’’ Cynthia Gifford said. “It’s scary for all Americans.” Fifteen years ago, Cynthia, 54, and Robert Gifford, 55, opened to the public their farm in upstate Schaghticoke, near Albany, where they’ve lived for 25 years. They host an annual, family-friendly fall festival, which ends Tuesday, offering such countrified fare as a corn maze and pig-racing shows.

In summer, wedding ceremonies and receptions also are held on the farm. But once already-booked nuptials take place, the Giffords will no longer schedule new ceremonies. Only receptions ”” including same-sex ones ”” will go on.

Oh, and by the way, the lesbian couple who sued the Giffords may have known what was going to happen, because they recorded their initial conversation with the Giffords. During the call:

Gifford said she told [caller Melisa Erwin], politely, that she would not book a same-sex wedding ceremony at the farm.

She didn’t know it at the time, but the woman’s then-fianceé, Jennifer McCarthy, recorded the conversation. The pair then filed a formal complaint with the state Division of Human Rights. And this past August, an administrative law judge from The Bronx, Migdalia Pares, decreed that the farm was a “public accommodation’’ and ordered the penalties, after ruling that the Giffords had violated state law by discriminating against the two women…

They were devastated when they heard that Liberty Ridge Farm would not take their business because of who they are,’’ the ladies’ lawyer, Mariko Hirose of the New York Civil Liberties Union, told me.

No doubt they were surprised, as well, right? They just happened to choose the Giffords, and they just happened to record the call.

First Amendment rights seem to stop at the door of the right of gay couples to marry, as most critics of the latter recognized early on would happen. Now it’s playing out as expected.

[NOTE: By the way, New York is a “one-party consent” wiretapping state, which makes the plaintiffs’ action lawful in recording the conversation without the Giffords’ knowledge (I’m assuming the Giffords were unaware, although the article doesn’t address that issue).]

Ebola treatment: this is so inside the box it’s outside the box

The New Neo Posted on by

Could an older technique yield an effective ebola treatment?

And will researchers take the suggestion and try to develop it, instead of a more conventional vaccine?:

The proposal builds on the use of “convalescent serum,” or survivors’ blood, which has been given to at least four U.S. Ebola patients who then recovered from the virus. It is based on an approach called passive immunization, which has been used since the 19th century to treat diseases such as diphtheria but has been largely surpassed by vaccination.

The scientists propose using new genetic and other technologies to find hundreds or thousands of different Ebola antibodies, determine their genetic recipe, grow them in commercial quantities and combine them into a single treatment analogous to the multi-drug cocktails that treat HIV-AIDS.

That contrasts with current drug development, which focuses on finding one molecule, or a small number, to defeat the Ebola virus that has killed nearly 5,000 people in West Africa and infected thousands more since March.

[NOTE: Among the three Nobel laureates joining in the call for passive immunization to treat ebola is James Watson, he of double-helix fame. I was stunned to learn that he is still around, and to discover that he’s only eighty-six, at that. I knew he’d been young when he and Crick had won the Prize for their discovery of the structure of DNA, but actually he was thirty-four, which isn’t so terribly young in science. Seems like so much time has passed that he should be about a hundred, though.

By the way, Watson and Crick had actually presented the structure in a paper published in 1953, when Watson would have been twenty-five. Young, but still not so terribly young in science, and his associates Crick and Wilkins were older, twelve years and twelve years respectively (associate Rosalind Franklin was eight years older, but she died before the Prize was awarded, so she was never considered for the honor).]

Sharyl Attkisson reveals CBS complicity in Obama Benghazi 2012 debate coverup—but of course, we already knew that

The New Neo Posted on by

Sheryl Atkisson claims that, after the second 2012 presidential debate between Obama and Romney, where moderator Candy Crowley backed up Obama’s false assertion that he had called the Benghazi attack “terrorism” early on, CBS intentionally withheld an interview clip that would have contradicted Obama’s point. (Go here to watch Atkisson describe what happened; I would embed the video on the blog but I can’t seem to turn off the autoplay, and I hate autoplay.)

Of course, anyone who has followed Obama’s career knows that this sort of thing was and still is standard operating procedure, not just for CBS but for the entire MSM covering him. In addition, regarding the second debate itself, we really don’t need Sharyl Attkisson to know that the networks covered up for Obama in the aftermath of his “terrorism” assertion. The evidence was plain.

First of all, there was Crowley’s intervention itself and press reaction to it. Crowley was the debate moderator, and she was obviously way out of line in intervening as she did to become a judge, whether she had been right or wrong in her facts. But what network strongly condemned her behavior in the way it deserved? I may be missing something, but I certainly didn’t read that sort of thing afterwards in the MSM. Take a look, for example, at CBS’s reaction at the time, which was to cast the story as that of a journalist (Crowley) under fire from partisans on the right. CBS characterized the evidence of whether Obama had called the Benghazi attack terrorism in his Rose Garden speech as “unclear,” and called Crowley’s intervention largely insignificant, a “misstep” that had little influence on the debate and was merely part of “an increasing move in the news media to challenge erroneous claims.”

As to whether Obama’s Rose Garden statement was actually “unclear,” the word “unclear” is a coverup in itself. It was quite clear, as I demonstrated by actually looking at Obama’s entire Rose Garden speech and analyzing it in the light of Obama’s assertion during that debate and Crowley’s defense of it:

You can see that in his speech Obama characterizes the Benghazi violence and/or its perpetrators ten separate times, in an address that is only about 800 words long in its entirety. Each time, he might have chosen to have said “terrorist attacks” or “terrorists” or “terrorism,” but each time he chose not to do so. Instead, he used the words “attack” or “attackers” seven times, the word “act” twice, and the word “violence” once. He’s not shy about employing adjectives to modify those words, either: he calls them “senseless,” “brutal,” “terrible,”outrageous,” and “shocking.”

Note, however, that the word “terrorist” is never used as an adjective to modify Obama’s descriptions of what happened in Benghazi, nor is it used as a noun to describe the perpetrators. There is no question that the omission was intentional on Obama’s part, because if Obama had wanted to call it a terrorist attack it would have been natural to actually, like, you know, do so.

The only mention of terrorist acts by Obama comes, as I wrote yesterday, in his generic statement of resolve after mentioning both the 9/11 attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (9/11 being an unequivocal act of terrorism, and both wars being part of what used to be called the “War on Terror”).

All the networks should have pointed this out. None of them did. All that was needed was the speech itself, which was in the public domain.

What’s more, even what Attkisson is now asserting—that CBS held back the clip—is actually old news. For example, I wrote a post about it on November 5, 2012, the day before the election, based on a story on Fox by Bret Baier.

From Baier at the time:

Why did CBS release a clip that appeared to back up Obama’s claim in the second debate on Oct. 19, a few days before the foreign policy debate, and not release the rest of that interview at the beginning?

Why on the Sunday before the election, almost six weeks after the attack, at 6 p.m. does an obscure online timeline posted on CBS.com contain the additional “60 Minutes” interview material from Sept. 12?

Why wasn’t it news after the president said what he said in the second debate, knowing what they had in that “60 Minutes” tape ”” why didn’t they use it then? And why is it taking Fox News to spur other media organizations to take the Benghazi story seriously?

Attkisson adds valuable background to the story by giving some of the behind-the-scenes-at-CBS details, and I applaud her bravery about this and other matters she describes. But the basic story she is telling on this has been known for two years, and we have heard very little about it except briefly, from Fox. I contend that that fact is actually the bigger story, but don’t expect the MSM to cover it.

[NOTE: What’s more—although the answer to this question really is “unclear”—there is an argument to be made that Crowley colluded with Obama in setting up the whole thing for the debate.]

Report: ISIS leader may be badly wounded or dead—or maybe not either

The New Neo Posted on by

This sort of report reminds me of the days when we’d get bulletins that Bin Laden had been wounded or killed.

They were never true—until one day they were.

So there is no way to tell about this:

The leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was “critically wounded” when a U.S.-led air strike targeted the western Iraqi border town of al-Qaim, tribal sources told Al Arabiya News Channel on Saturday.

U.S. Central Command confirmed in a statement that U.S.-led air strikes targeted ISIS leaders near their northern Iraqi hub of Mosul late Friday, without confirming whether Baghdadi was killed, AFP reported.

I suspect they have not confirmed it officially because they actually have not confirmed it at all. There are some US “advisors” in Iraq, and there must be some intelligence from Iraqi sources, but how good it is on a subject like this is anyone’s guess. Of course, the strike location would have been based on intelligence in the first place.

It seems a bit more certain that a key aide to al Baghdadi was killed in the strike. But rest assured that none of this will stop ISIS:

The news came as Britain’s chief of the defence staff, General Sir Nick Houghton, said on Sunday that the Isis leadership would regenerate itself even if Baghdadi had been killed. In a sign that the UK believed there was a strong chance Baghdadi died in the air strikes, Houghton spoke of “potential death” as he said it would take some days for the US to confirm whether the Isis leader was alive or not…

But Houghton said Isis would fight back if its leader had been killed: “What I wouldn’t want to do is rush to the sense that the potential death of one of their totemic leaders is going to create some strategic reverse within Isis. They will regenerate leadership ”¦ because of the current potential attractiveness of this warped ideology.

What a way to go

The New Neo Posted on by

This is certainly different:

Now, the ashes of a loved one can be made into a beautiful diamond, thanks to a Swiss company called Algordanza…Using a combination of machines and complex scientific process, the staff at Algordanza separate the carbon from the deceased’s ashes, then convert the carbon into graphite, and use specific temperatures and pressure to create a diamond “seed.”

The color of the diamond varies depending on how much boron is present in the deceased’s ashes. The more boron, the bluer the diamond.

The finished product:

diamonds

It gives new meaning to the song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.”

But what it really reminds me of is one of my favorite verses from Shakespeare (it’s actually part of Ariel’s song in “The Tempest”), the mysteriously evocative “Full Fathom Five“:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them ”” Ding-dong, bell.

The lovefest negotiation: Obama and Congressional leaders

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an article that attempts to give the inside scoop on yesterday’s meeting between Obama and leaders of Congress. It as not a happy time:

The Republicans’ approach, three days after they resoundingly won control of the Senate in midterm elections, “seemed to fall on deaf ears,” Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said in a telephone interview. “The president instead of being contrite or saying in effect to America, ‘I hear you,’ as a result of the referendum on his policies that drove this last election, he seems unmoved and even defiant.”

“I don’t know why he would want to sabotage his last two years as president by doing something this provocative,” said Cornyn. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell earlier this week said the president’s stance was “like waving a red flag in front of a bull.”

Note the grim faces in the photo. Including Harry Reid’s.

Megan McArdle asks an interesting and related question: does Obama even know how to negotiate?

Most notably, of course, he said he would take executive action on immigration by year’s end unless Republicans passed a bill. It’s certainly a bold negotiating tactic: You can do what I want, or I’ll go ahead and do what I want anyway. This is how you “negotiate” with a seven-year old, not a Senate Majority Leader.

Actually, it’s how you negotiate as a seven-year-old, as well.

That is, if you’re even trying to negotiate. What if you’re trying to coerce, threaten, bully, while maintaining a facade of give-and-take negotiations—a facade that is so gossamer that it ends up fooling no one except those who want to be fooled?

As I wrote in my Noonan post, it’s as though the idea of Obama as a reasonable man, interested in the welfare of the country, willing to sit down and iron things out, dies very very hard, despite years and years of evidence to the contrary.

But although I think McArdle misses the fact that Obama has no intention of actually negotiating or compromising, at least not until his back is pushed right to the wall and perhaps not even then, she does go on to give a very interesting answer to her question about Obama and negotiations with the Republicans. Let’s assume for a moment he really would like to engage them in that way; does he know how? Her answer is “probably not,” and I think this may indeed be true, although it would be really informative if someone could tell us whether during his brief stint as a practicing attorney he ever negotiated a settlement, for example. I actually suspect that in situations where Obama didn’t think he had the power, and where it wasn’t really his agenda he was trying to implement but rather his clients’ interests, he could actually negotiate quite well.

McArdle:

I wonder if Obama even knows how to negotiate with Republicans. It’s not as if he has a long, distinguished record of passing legislation in a mixed environment. His later years in the Illinois State Senate enjoyed a solid Democratic majority, and he jumped into the U.S. Senate at a propitious time. Soon after he arrived came the wave of 2006, when Democrats controlled both houses of congress by comfortable margins, and Senator Obama was far too junior to be negotiating with the White House. Then came the financial crisis, and another wave, and Obama spent the first two years of his presidency in a happy situation where he could get things done without needing the support of the opposition. He didn’t even negotiate with his own party; the Senate negotiated his health care bill, and Nancy Pelosi whipped it through the House.

Post 2010, of course, he also hasn’t had much practice negotiating…

But at this point he doesn’t hold all the cards, does he? The legislative branch is about to be controlled by Republicans; after all, that’s the only reason he had that meeting with them yesterday in the first place. The thing is, I think that Obama thinks he’s got all the wild cards in the deck, and he’s willing to play them. If he’s willing to go outside the rules, he may think he’s the one holding the winning hand.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

Lots of interesting stories today:

Great New Yorker cover.

Holder’s replacement may be relatively non-controversial. That would be a switch. I guess Holder has already accomplished most of what Obama needed.

SCOTUS will be hearing those cases on whether the Obamacare federal subsidies are constitutional. Hmm, do elections have consequences?

Now he tells us: 1,500 more US troops to Iraq.

To Peggy Noonan: this is what a character disorder looks like

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s Peggy Noonan, being eminently reasonable, as is her wont:

Common sense says a chastened president would acknowledge the obvious””some things aren’t working, he has made some mistakes””and, in Mr. Obama’s case, hit the reset button with Congress. Reach out, be humble. Humility has power. It shows people that you have some give””you get the message, you are capable of self-correcting.

That is not what he’s doing. The president is instead doubling down on hostility, antagonism and distance.

What a mistake. What a huge, historic mistake, not only for him but also for his party.

It’s not a mistake.

Let me explain. First of all, although you’ve come a long way towards understanding Obama compared to 2008, Peggy, you’ve still got a long way to go. You see, Obama doesn’t want to self-correct, because in his mind he’s not done a thing wrong. He’s not just saying it’s not his fault, he really believes it’s not his fault.

In fact, nothing bad is his fault. And everything good is to his credit.

We all are familiar with the word “narcissism.” It is a trait. But it also can be much more than that—a character disorder, a personality disorder. That doesn’t just mean there’s something wrong with a person’s character or personality, either. It means there is something more basic that’s out of whack. It means there’s a leitmotif that runs through the entire personality, something that is usually either unchangeable or very very difficult to change.

For Obama this theme is narcissism, which appears to permeate everything he does.

The mystery is that it would be a mystery to anyone at this point. And yet it appears to be. Hope dies hard, and the idea that Obama can change dies hard as well.

[NOTE: The narcissism problem was so severe with Obama that many people noticed it almost from the start. I was one of them; this post of mine, written in the summer of 2008, was already remarking on it. But I was hardly alone.]

The post-2014-election world according to David Axelrod, annotated

The New Neo Posted on by

Annotated by yours truly, that is.

Here’s Axelrod’s statement (my translations of Axelrod’s words and speculative interpretations of his more candid thoughts are in brackets):

DAVID AXELROD: Well, some of us were concerned about this election [we were all sweating bullets, believe me] because of the turf on which these races were being fought and the historic pattern that wasn’t in favor of the president [don’t blame us; it’s not our fault!!]. Some of the events leading into the election weren’t helpful as well [don’t blame us; it’s not our fault!!]. Absolutely the president should respond [do something, you fool!]. You have to look forward. The important thing is you see Senator McConnell and I assume Speaker Boehner will do the same [if they don’t, I’ll excoriate them, even though under the same circumstances all we would ever say to Republicans would be “F____U! We won!]], suggesting that they want to work together, and I think the president has to test that proposition and has to be forward leaning in doing so [at least, he has to fool the public into thinking that he’s leaning that way].

Perhaps he could [hmmm, is that too many qualifiers—“perhaps” and then “could”?—but Barry, you definitely should] have been more forward leaning yesterday. Politics is all about when your interest align. It may have been in the interest of the Republican Party in the last six years to try and block the president at every turn [their fault; blame them!!), but their brand is degraded by what they’ve done [please keep hating them]. Their numbers are far worse than his and heading into the 2016 election, they have a lot of rehabilitation to do not just to win the presidency if that’s their goal but also to elect a lot of senators who are in blue states, Republican senators, their map is worse from that standpoint than the Democratic map was in 2014 [nah nah nah boo boo Republicans, the worm will turn]. They need to show they can work with this president [why I really can’t say, but it sounds good]. He ought to take advantage of that and see where they can…

I know he wants to keep faith with all of those Americans who want him to act and all those who are suffering with this broken immigration system [we haven’t forgotten you, base, even though you didn’t come through for us on Tuesday].

But the fact is a strong bipartisan bill was passed by the United States Senate [those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end, when Reid controlled the Senate]. If I were the president [do you hear me, Barack? This next thing I’m going to say is your best bet right now, in your reduced circumstances], i would go to John Boehner and say i’m willing to withdraw my plan for executive action if you’re willing to put this bill on the floor for a vote. I’ll live with the results of that vote. There’s a very good reason to believe that a majority of members of the House support this bipartisan [Americans love that “bipartisan” BS] Senate bill and while the Republicans are warning about taking what they consider extraordinary action on the part of the president, it’s also extraordinary to keep the House of Representatives from voting on a bill that a majority want to pass [at least, it’s extraordinary when Republicans do it] and so the Speaker if he wants to demonstrate that this is a new era [compared to the when we were in charge], he can do that by putting that bill on the floor. That would obviate the need for any executive action [because we all know that whenever legislatures controlled by the opposite party won’t do what a president says, that president is empowered to do it himself. I think that’s in the Constitution, isn’t it? It’s been awhile since I read it. But then again, I’m not a constitutional scholar like Barack.]

Obama: killing a whole flock of birds with one stone

The New Neo Posted on by

President Obama has a penpal:

President Obama reportedly penned a secret letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last month discussing their shared interest in fighting the Islamic State — a development one congressional source told Fox News “f***s up everything.”

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that, according to people briefed on the letter, Obama wrote to Khamenei in the middle of last month and stressed that any cooperation on dealing with the Islamic State, or ISIS, was tied to Iran striking a deal over its nuclear program. The U.S., Iran and other negotiators are facing a Nov. 24 deadline for such a deal.

I think John Bolton would be best at explaining why this was a bad, bad idea:

Again, one can entertain the old knave/fool question. At best, these people are rank amateurs with the special distinction of thinking they are geniuses and therefore ignoring and/or not even seeking the advice of people who might know what they’re doing. At worst—well, you can fill in the blanks yourself.

The importance of Tim Scott and Mia Love

The New Neo Posted on by

I am especially happy about the victories of Tim Scott, South Carolina’s Senator, and Mia Love, new Representative from Utah’s 4th District.

There’s no way to deny that their race becomes important, if only because Democrats have emphasized race so very much. Sadly, these usually-baseless accusations of Republican racism have become more frequent, not less, since the administration of Barack Obama. Scott and Love are living, breathing refutations of that rhetorical approach, and proof that Republicans only object to black candidates when they are liberals. Conservative black candidates can win even in a place like Utah, which is one of the whitest areas in the US.

I’ve not seen much of Love yet, but I have of Scott, and he’s one smart cookie. Here’s an example of his approach:

The Democratic Party must be shaking in its shoes worrying that black people might actually start listening to someone like Scott.

I have another reason to have special respect for black Republicans such as Scott and Love. By definition, they must be courageous and hyper-adept at defending and explaining themselves. If they are political changers (and quite a few are), they would also tend to be people who have thought long and hard about political principles and made independent and tough decisions. But even if they are not political changers, they are quite obviously people who are not afraid to be different, and who have the courage of their convictions. They have been forged into steel in the crucible of the calumny that’s been heaped on them, not by Republicans but by liberals and the left.

I congratulate both on their well-earned victories.