Another Obamacare extension

The New Neo Posted on by

Another day, another Obamacare extension, decided by the president himself—thus further justifying the fact that the law is called by his name.

The thing that bothers me most about this extension of the deadline to April 15 is, once again, the procedural overreach by Obama and the unconstitutionality of his declaration. The actual content of the change makes more sense than the March 31 deadline ever did, because pre-Obamacare, individual health insurance could ordinarily be purchased by the fifteenth of the month effective the first day of the next month.

The new Obamacare extension only applies to people who’ve had trouble signing up on the federal website, so I assume that people in states with functioning state websites still supposedly have to sign up by March 31. I suspect such a distinction would be unconstitutional, but isn’t most of what Obama’s been doing with Obamacare rule changes unconsitutional (not to mention Obamacare itself, whatever SCOTUS says)? The deadline change is also on the honor system, which would make it almost humorous if this weren’t a very serious business indeed.

I’m with Boehner here:

“What the hell is this, a joke?” Boehner said at his weekly press conference.

…The Speaker called the move “another deadline made meaningless,” adding it to a litany of unilateral changes that the administration has made to the law.

“This is part of a long-term pattern of this administration manipulating the law for its own convenience,” Boehner said. “It’s not hard to understand why the American people question this administration’s commitment to the rule of law.”

The Speaker mocked the use of the “honor system” to determine who was eligible for an extension after the administration said it would make no effort to ensure that people had actually begun the process of signing up by March 31.

“Why don’t they just say, ”˜We’ve moved the date to April 15’? Because that’s in effect what they’ve done,” Boehner said.

Boehner said, “It’s not hard to understand why the American people question this administration’s commitment to the rule of law.” However, I would amend that to read: “It’s not hard to understand why Republicans question this administration’s commitment to the rule of law, and why conservatives and Jonathan Turley (strange bedfellows) realize that he has none.”

[ADDENDUM: A history of Obamacare extensions.]

Debris field spotted

The New Neo Posted on by

We won’t know its identity until some ship manages to snatch some of it up for analysis, but this sounds like the most promising find so far:

New satellite images show a debris field of 122 objects floating in the Indian Ocean potentially connected to doomed Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, officials said at a news conference today.

Obama: pay no attention to that Russia behind the curtain

The New Neo Posted on by

A nugget of Obama wisdom today on Russia [emphasis mine]:

Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not out of strength but out of weakness,” Obama asserted, as though he was talking about the psychological insecurities that plague the average playground bully.

“The fact that Russia felt compelled to go in militarily and lay bare these violations of international law indicates less influence, not more,” Obama insisted.

The mind boggles.

And Obama’s motivations? Take your pick, or you can answer “all of the following”: purposely enabling Russia in its power grabs, maintaining the consistency of Obama’s own worldview (asserting he’s right and Romney was wrong), his belief in the power of “dialogue” and international law, stupidity, ignorance, and/or evil.

One thing is certain: this sort of attitude on Obama’s part was foreshadowed way back in 2008:

Barack Obama gave an interesting description of Iran and the threat it poses to the United States and our national interests at an appearance in Oregon last night. “They don’t pose a serious threat to us in the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us,” Obama told a cheering audience, explaining why he doesn’t think we need to worry about “tiny” countries like Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, and Iran. Obama also displays a weird sense of history when he suggests that the Berlin Wall fell because we engaged Mikhail Gorbachev…

The Soviet Union collapsed economically; they did not just decide to capitulate. The Berlin Wall did not fall as a result of negotiations, but because the regime propping it up ceased to exist. Why did the Soviet Union collapse? Because Ronald Reagan won an economic war with Moscow, forcing it to spend more and more and falling further and further behind. The Strategic Defense Initiative provided the coup de grace to the Soviets, who knew they could never match us in missile defense, and tried negotiating an end to the economic war instead, with disastrous results.

That would be the same SDI that Democrats staunchly opposed, sneeringly called “Star Wars” and proclaiming it a threat to peaceful coexistence. They wanted a decades-long series of summits instead of the end of communism, which sounds strikingly familiar in Obama’s speech. Reagan had to fight the Democrats to beat the Soviets, not through presidential-level diplomacy but through economic isolation and military strength.

Obama is consistent.

Reporter James Risen…

The New Neo Posted on by

…calls the Obama administration “the greatest enemy of press freedom that we have encountered in at least a generation.” The impetus for his statement was this situation:

…[Risen] is fighting an order that he testify in the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer accused of leaking information to him, The administration wants to “narrow the field of national security reporting,” Risen said, to “create a path for accepted reporting.” Anyone journalist who exceeds those parameters, Risen said, “will be punished.”

The administration’s aggressive prosecutions have created “a de facto Official Secrets Act,” Risen said, and the media has been “too timid” in responding.

I submit that the Obama administration is not the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation. It is the press that is its own greatest enemy, not in a generation but in a century or more. The press has enabled and promoted nearly everything that Obama has done no matter how bad the violation, the lie, or the error. He is their creature and their creation, and they have reaped what they have sown. Unfortunately, the rest of us have reaped it too.

[NOTE: Perhaps the Obama administration is confusing James Risen with James Rosen?]

Keeping the younger generation dumb and happy—it’s working!

The New Neo Posted on by

Sex, drugs, and rock and roll. It’s a winning combination, along with ignorance, and it may keep the liberals and left in power through thick and thin, despite a few temporary setbacks (2014, anyone?).

It used to be that ignorant young people didn’t much care about voting, so that acted as a sort of natural bar to them exerting too great an influence on elections. But Obama was able to muster a campaign of getting out the vote that was wildly successful in getting enough of them to the polls in 2008 and 2012 to tip the balance in his favor.

In 2008, this was done mostly through projecting himself as an inspirational and transformational persona. In 2012 the mechanism was more fear of the Other, the dread Republican/conservative bent on taking away the sex, drugs, and rock and roll, as well as the financial governmental largesse (as opposed to prosperity) that might accrue from the left remaining in power.

The success of all of these efforts relies in large part on keeping the young voters dumb as well as happy with their pleasures. The “dumb” part apparently isn’t all that hard to do if you take over the educational and entertainment systems, weaken the family and other institutions that used to teach values, and control the press.

Here’s some strong evidence that the efforts to do this have been hugely successful. Read it and weep:

Last week, MRCTV’s Dan Joseph went to American University to give the student body a little general knowledge quiz.

When asked if they could name a SINGLE U.S. senator, the students blanked. Also, very few knew that each state has two senators. The guesses were all over the map, with some crediting each state with twelve, thirteen, and five senators.

The students passed the pop culture part of the exam with flying colors, as one might expect. This wasn’t a scientific survey, of course, and there were a few who knew the answers, but how many senators each state has is the sort of thing that not a single college student should be missing. However, as one of the interviewees said, “I’m not big into the ‘America’ thing.”

The question about how many senators is so elementary that students should be learning it—and much more about our government—in grade school. If college students at a relatively reputable university (called, ironically, “American”) don’t know the answer, they certainly can be assumed to be ignorant as well of most of the Founders’ brilliant designs for our government and its checks and balances on tyranny.

One of the foundations of liberty is an informed electorate, and if that is lacking, tyranny will almost undoubtedly emerge. No accident, either.

[ADDENDUM: Jeff Goldstein seems to be a half-full guy, because he sees this student ignorance as opportunity “for a[n] engaged and motivated liberty movement to take root where right now sits only bindweed and the loosest of intellect mulch.”]

The Greeks never heard of Greek yogurt

The New Neo Posted on by

But they have heard of strained yogurt, which is pretty much the same thing. In fact, it’s very popular there.

I’ve been making it for years for use in Greek and other Middle Eastern recipes. I even have a cute little cone-shaped gizmo for that very purpose, one I’ve owned for decades to strain the yogurt and make it nice and thick. Before that I tried cheesecloth, which is what older recipes called for, but that somehow never really worked well.

A favorite recipe of mine adds the strained yogurt to a soup made of browned ground lamb, broth, sauteed onions, barley, and mint. You don’t boil the yogurt, but just stir it in after you’ve cooked the rest.

The war on smokers reaches a new level

The New Neo Posted on by

First we had the hazards of smoking itself. They are real and well-documented, but affect only the smoker, who can sometimes be persuaded to quit after learning about the dangers but sometimes chooses to continue the habit.

Then there were the dangers to the non-smoking public of smoking, the so-called second-hand smoke problem. I wrote about it here, and my position is that although I can’t stand being around cigarette smoke and am in favor of banning it in enclosed public places, I remain unconvinced of the long-term negative health effects for anyone other than people with asthma or other lung diseases.

Now we have third-hand smoke, which is the residue that clings to clothing and curtains and carpets and cars and other surroundings of the smoker. I hate it with a passion—my hair is very porous, and when I’m around smokers I can smell it in my hair until I wash it, and on my clothes likewise. It’s a sour, stale, and generally disgusting odor that clings to apartments, motel rooms, and homes long after the smoker has left the premises. But the evidence for long-term problems due to third-hand smoke is even weaker than that for second-hand smoke (which is already weak enough). In addition, it seems to me that the campaign against third-hand smoke is potentially far more pernicious than the one against second-hand smoke, because the aim of the one against third-hand smoke must be to ban smoking altogether, and/or make the practice legally actionable, and/or scare people half to death about it, even if it’s practiced in the privacy of one’s home or out in the open air.

To wit:

…[A] mother who doesn’t smoke in front of her kids, smokes outside, then comes inside and holds the baby is exposing that child to thirdhand smoke. The new compounds are difficult to clean up, have a long life of their own, and many may be carcinogenic.

…”Thirdhand smoke is harmful to our genetic material,” Bo Hang, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, said at a news conference this week…”And the contamination becomes more toxic with time.”…

“In homes where we know no smoker has lived for 20 years, we’ve still found evidence of these compounds in dust, in wallboard,” says Neal Benowitz, chief of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco. Benowitz leads the California Consortium on Thirdhand Smoke, started in 2010…

Those who move into houses or apartments formerly owned by smokers might be exposed as well. And thirdhand smoke is difficult to eliminate. “So far, we have not found an exposed environment where you cannot measure it any more,” says Georg Matt, chair of the Department of Psychology at San Diego State University in California. “It’s virtually impossible to remove this stuff unless you remove the flooring and drywall.”

Buried in the article, however, is this:

Science hasn’t yet quantified the amount of exposure that poses a health risk, and hasn’t determined with certainty what those health risks might be.

In other words: we know almost nothing.

We’ve come along way, baby, haven’t we? From a time when the very real and very negative health effects of cigarettes on smokers themselves were covered up, to a time when the smallest undocumented/imagined effects on everyone else are hyped to the skies. Once smokers were trying to kill only themselves; in the future we’re supposed to think they’re out to kill us all.

Malaysian PM announces Flight 370 went down in Indian Ocean

The New Neo Posted on by

According to “a new analysis of satellite data by a British satellite company and accident investigators,” that is. Although he doesn’t specify exactly what that data or analysis might be, I’m hearing on the news that it has to do with a re-analysis of the satellite pings that points to the southern rather than northern arc as the final “ping” point of the airplane, and the fact that the entire area is extremely remote from a safe landing place.

Given the multiple errors that have been made so far, one wonders. But IMHO, signs have been pointing in this direction for quite some time.

I use the words “signs” rather than “evidence,” because we have so little substantiated evidence. But as the days have gone by and there has been no demand from hijackers and no sign of the airplane in a new terrorist act, the idea of a kidnapping of the plane (with or without the death of the passengers) has slowly seemed less plausible, although it’s not been eliminated. And with the sighting of not just one, but several pieces of debris in the general area of the south Indian Ocean more or less at the site of one of the last possible pings from the plane, the likelihood of it having crashed in that area has slowly gone up.

So I’m inclined to tentatively believe this announcement is probably the truth. Although I’m sad for the families, I’ve been sad for them for them from the start. At least this would offer the chance of that cliched and elusive and perhaps impossible concept, closure, and the possibility of the plane’s black box being found someday when it is still operative enough to piece together the all-important story of why Flight 370 went down.

[NOTE: Also see this.]

Illusion of a tiny waist?

The New Neo Posted on by

Who wouldn’t want a “waist-whittling illusion dress”? Me, for one, because I think these look like lampshades. Only a certain small (and I mean small) subgroup of women would look good in this style, and they are women who would probably look good in anything.

And although yes, their waists do look even smaller because of the wider tops, it’s not really an illusion that they have tiny waists. They really do have tiny waists.

Picky, picky, picky, I know.

But anyway, here are the weird silhouettes:

ittybittywaist

It’s actually the larger tops and bottoms that are the illusions. I predict this look will not catch on.

Unlike the trapeze:

trapeze

The chemise (on the left here):

chemise

And the balloon:

balloon

I remember each of those styles in its heyday. And I also remember this song, which may be obscure enough that you’ve never heard it before, unless you’re of a certain age:

If only Obama only had the right partners, his brilliance and wisdom would be known

The New Neo Posted on by

Obama is nothing if not a self-confident man. There’s nothing that needs to be revised, nothing he would do differently, and nothing he should learn. Back in late January, this is how he evaluated the foreign policy situation:

Obama told me [David Remnick of The New Yorker] that what he needs isn’t any new grand strategy””“I don’t really even need George Kennan right now”””but, rather, the right strategic partners.

This brings us up against that old, old question: Obama, fool or knave? Is he purposely sabotaging our foreign policy, or is he just that naive and puffed up with narcissism? I vote the former, and have for quite some time, but I consider that the latter is a possibility.

In a sense, though, it doesn’t matter, because whether he can’t change his approach or won’t change his approach, it’s the effect of his policies that matter most rather than his intent. Richard Fernandez of Belmont Club comments on the real world consequences of Obama’s foreign policy:

Obama was chosen by unserious people to face very serious thugs like Vladimir Putin. People for whom everything to this point has been a cocktail party and games. And American allies ”” those who are on the front line ”” know it.

Stripped of its euphemisms America’s position in the Middle East, Europe and Asia has collapsed and the world is arming up nukes. And the troops in Afghanistan ”” aren’t they dependent on the route through Russia for logistics? Isn’t that the size of it? Does the situation have the attention of people in the New York Times yet?

Nope not yet.

The intellectual elite who endorsed Obama are a population who’ve never been hungry or felt paralyzing danger. They grew to manhood and old age in the bosom of a Pax Americana and were vain enough to throw away because they felt guilty for the security it provided. They don’t realize they’ve opened the door and the tigers are staring out at them. They’re still thinking in terms of “tests” with the ruffians of the world and instead of realizing that they are playing in a casino for real money.

The sad thing is that this was easily foreseen, and yet it didn’t seem to matter. Way back in April of 2008 Obama foreshadowed what was going to happen due to his attitude:

…[F]oreign policy is the area where I am probably most confident that I know more and understand the world better than Senator Clinton or Senator McCain.

It’s ironic because this is supposedly the place where experience is most needed to be Commander-in-Chief. Experience in Washington is not knowledge of the world. This I know. When Senator Clinton brags ”˜I’ve met leaders from eighty countries’”“I know what those trips are like! I’ve been on them. You go from the airport to the embassy. There’s a group of children who do native dance. You meet with the CIA station chief and the embassy and they give you a briefing. You go take a tour of a plant that [with] the assistance of USAID has started something. And then – you go.”

“You do that in eighty countries – you don’t know those eighty countries. So when I speak about having lived in Indonesia for four years, having family that is impoverished in small villages in Africa – knowing the leaders is not important – what I know is the people. . . .”

“I traveled to Pakistan when I was in college – I knew what Sunni and Shia was [sic] before I joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

It was ominous even then to contemplate having a president with that much arrogance and that much naivete. It’s disturbing to realize he was elected despite that, and re-elected despite many bad consequences in the real world already having resulted from such arrogance and naivete in a president.

This is what I wrote at the time:

If there’s a better example of the arrogance of youth, I can’t think of it offhand. The glorification of “self-confidence” as an improvement on knowledge and experience. The description of the trips to foreign countries as meaningless, including those tedious briefings (sort of like a visit to a boring relative””can’t we go out and play now?) The idea that hazy memories of a few years spent in a country””in this case, Indonesia””about forty years ago as a child of six to ten years old would have any relevance to understanding what’s going on in terms of power or politics or economics in that country or any other part of the world today.

Likewise the college trip to Pakistan. Give me a break.

If Obama really were in his teens or early twenties, these sorts of statements might be understandable. And his “foreign policy” experience of living for a while in these countries would at least have the advantage of being relatively recent.

But Obama is now forty-six years old, and will be forty-seven at the time of the election. Not such a child after all. And although youthful exuberance and innocence can be charming even in an adult, youthful arrogance and ignorance never is.

But the real problem is an electorate that didn’t see this all as a grave warning sign that electing Obama would be a very, very bad idea—and an MSM that not only failed to make it clear to them, but that actively promoted the opposite notion.

This is what we’re up against: the WaPo and truth

The New Neo Posted on by

Last Thursday the WaPo published the usual takedown of the nefarious Koch brothers, purporting to show that “biggest lease holder in the northern Alberta oil sands” is a Koch brothers holding, and that they would be a big beneficiary of the Keystone Pipeline. John Hinderaker took them on, then the WaPo replied, and now Hinderaker has replied to their reply.

It’s not just a reply by Hinderaker, it’s an evisceration of the WaPo article, its authors, and the WaPo editors. You have to read the whole thing to get the details, but here’s an excerpt:

So in the Post’s view, it is acceptable to publish articles that are both literally false (Koch is the largest tar sands leaseholder) and massively misleading (the Keystone Pipeline is all about Koch Industries), if by doing so the paper can “stir and inflame public debate in this election year?”…

Let me offer an alternative explanation of why the Washington Post published their Keystone/Koch smear: 1) The Washington Post in general, and Mufson and Eilperin in particular, are agents of the Left, the environmental movement and the Democratic Party. 2) The Keystone Pipeline is a problem for the Democratic Party because 60% of voters want the pipeline built, while the party’s left-wing base insists that it not be approved. 3) The Keystone Pipeline is popular because it would broadly benefit the American people by creating large numbers of jobs, making gasoline more plentiful and bringing down the cost of energy. 4) Therefore, the Democratic Party tries to distract from the real issues surrounding the pipeline by claiming, falsely, that its proponents are merely tools of the billionaire Koch brothers”“who, in fact, have nothing to do with Keystone one way or the other. 5) The Post published its article to assist the Democratic Party with its anti-Keystone talking points.

There’s more, much more, about the relationships of one of the article’s authors to various leftwing “green” causes with an interest in sinking the pipeline. It’s a very convincing indictment of the WaPo and the writer.

Hinderaker is a formidable foe in terms of his knowledge and his ability to write. As a blogger, he has a wide audience—on the right. But there’s little question in my mind that the WaPo knows that its desired message “Koch Brothers evil, Keystone Pipeline benefits them, Keystone Pipeline evil,” will be received (and quoted) by far more people than will ever hear Hinderaker’s on-target reply.

The WaPo appears to have factored in all of this, and has decided that—in the words of Churchill—“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” I can almost guarantee that the “Kochs own the Keystone Pipeline” meme is already widely established, and that Hinderaker’s excellent refutation will hardly make a dent in it.

That’s the power of the press and the power of propaganda. The esteem in which papers like the WaPo are held has dropped in recent years, but not nearly enough to cow it into telling the truth or to end its influence.