“Contempt” in several senses of the word.
Please watch to the end [the tape should start around minute 3:00]:
Oh, and by the way—here’s the video of the March 26 hearing where Koskinen promised to provide ALL the emails:
What a vile weasel.
Sword, sorcery, and The Dykes
Richard Fernandez has written another great great article. Probably one of his best, and that’s saying something.
Someone in the comments section there made reference to this 1902 Kipling poem which I’d never even seen before. I was impressed enough by the theme and its appropriateness (“We were born to peace in the lee of the dykes, but the time of our peace is past”) that I’m reproducing it here:
THE DYKES
We have no heart for the fishing, we have no hand for the oar–
All that our fathers taught us of old pleases us now no more;
All that our own hearts bid us believe we doubt where we do not deny–
There is no proof in the bread we eat or rest in the toil we ply.Look you, our foreshore stretches far through sea-gate, dyke, and groin–
Made land all, that our fathers made, where the flats and the fairway join.
They forced the sea a sea-league back. They died, and their work stood fast.
We were born to peace in the lee of the dykes, but the time of our peace is past.Far off, the full tide clambers and slips, mouthing and testing all,
Nipping the flanks of the water-gates, baying along the wall;
Turning the shingle, returning the shingle, changing the set of the sand…
We are too far from the beach, men say, to know how the outworks stand.So we come down, uneasy, to look, uneasily pacing the beach.
These are the dykes our fathers made: we have never known a breach.
Time and again has the gale blown by and we were not afraid;
Now we come only to look at the dykes ”” at the dykes our fathers made.O’er the marsh where the homesteads cower apart the harried sunlight flies,
Shifts and considers, wanes and recovers, scatters and sickens and dies–
An evil ember bedded in ash ”” a spark blown west by the wind…
We are surrendered to night and the sea ”” the gale and the tide behind!At the bridge of the lower saltings the cattle gather and blare,
Roused by the feet of running men, dazed by the lantern glare.
Unbar and let them away for their lives””the levels drown as they stand,
Where the flood-wash forces the sluices aback and the ditches deliver inland.Ninefold deep to the top of the dykes the galloping breakers stride,
And their overcarried spray is a sea ”” a sea on the landward side.
Coming, like stallions they paw with their hooves, going they snatch with their teeth,
Till the bents and the furze and the sand are dragged out, and the old-time hurdles beneath.Bid men gather fuel for fire, the tar, the oil and the tow–
Flame we shall need, not smoke, in the dark if the riddled seabanks go.
Bid the ringers watch in the tower (who knows how the dawn shall prove?)
Each with his rope between his feet and the trembling bells above.Now we can only wait till the day, wait and apportion our shame.
These are the dykes our fathers left, but we would not look to the same.
Time and again were we warned of the dykes, time and again we delayed:
Now, it may fall, we have slain our sons, as our fathers we have betrayed.Walking along the wreck of the dykes, watching the work of the seas!
These were the dykes our fathers made to our great profit and ease.
But the peace is gone and the profit is gone, with the old sure days withdrawn…
That our own houses show as strange when we come back in the dawn!
Immigration crisis: if there were a will, there would be a way
My new article is up at PJ:
What do we owe the enormous numbers of children who have crossed our borders illegally in the last couple of months from various countries in Central America? We certainly owe it to them to not kill, starve, beat, or otherwise harm them while they’re here. But beyond that? Nothing but a speedy and safe trip back home…
Iraq quickly fracturing along ethnic and religious lines
Obama’s laissez faire attitude towards Iraq has led us from this good news to its opposite:
The insurgents came at midday, walking across a canal, advancing under cover of mortar fire toward the cluster of three Iraqi villages.
Within eight hours, Shiite residents who fled said the Sunni insurgents had expelled thousands of them from the majority-Sunni province, helped by local Sunnis in neighboring villages.
“They hit us with mortars and mortars, and the families fled, and they kept hitting us. It was completely sectarian. The Shiites, out,” he said.
Some will say “Let them kill each other; it was bound to happen.” I say this was not inevitable at all, and an ounce of prevention would have been worth a megaton of a cure that won’t be provided anyway. I am certain there are plenty of people in Iraq who would like to wash their hands of the whole struggle and live their lives in peace—although I have no idea what percentage of the population could be described that way—and they will suffer greatly because of this.
What’s more, ISIS has designs on us. Make no mistake about it. And this empowers them greatly in terms of money, support, arms, people, and territory.
And they’re showing what happens to those who ally with the west against them:
Judge Raouf Abdel-Rahman, the Iraqi judge who presided over former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s 2006 trial, has been captured and executed by the Islamic fundamentalist group ISIS, according to a report from the Egyptian newspaper Al-Mesyroon.
Abdel-Rahman’s execution was reportedly labeled as revenge for the death of Hussein. While his death has not yet been confirmed by the Iraqi government, Jordanian MP Khalil Attieh appeared to confirm the development on Monday.
“Iraqi revolutionaries arrested him and sentenced him to death in retaliation for the death of the martyr Saddam Hussein,” Attieh wrote on his Facebook page.
Remind me again why Obama couldn’t have let loose a few bombs on ISIS when it was amassing, about to attack, and vulnerable? He was warned.
Yes, it’s that time again
[BUMPED UP—for just a couple more days.]
Time passes so quickly when we’re enjoying ourselves, doesn’t it?
But it’s been a while since I asked you to donate to a semi-worthy cause: this blog. And so I’m going to ask you again to use the “donate” button on the right sidebar beside the photo of the hat, and give whatever you see fit.
Every single donation— large or small—adds up, and helps me a great deal in continuing the blog. If each and every reader gave even a few dollars, it would be a glorious thing. But whether you decide to donate or not, please keep visiting and keep commenting. I appreciate all of you. Comments and readers are a very big part of what makes this blog work.
I thank you all in advance. I’ll probably repeat this notice every now and then for the next week, the equivalent of jiggling that cup/hat.
Twin twins
ABC US News | ABC Celebrity News
Drugs aren’t ordinarily involved in the formation of identical twins. They can be involved for fraternal ones, though, because fertility drugs tend to make it more likely that the mother will release two (or more) eggs in a single ovulation cycle. If each were fertilized, the resulting twins (or triplets, or other multiple births) would be fraternal. In contrast, identical twins come from a single fertilized egg that splits in two very soon after fertilization.
In this case the mother didn’t take fertility drugs. But she must have released two eggs anyway, which were then fertilized by one sperm each. Then, instead of developing into a single set of fraternal twins as would ordinarily happen, each fertilized egg split to form the two sets of identical twins. No wonder it’s rare!
What if the Secretary of State had disapproved of Obama’s spin on Benghazi?
Edward Klein has written Blood Feud, a book that purports to give the inside info on the Clintons and the Obamas and the fact that there’s no love lost between the two couples.
Klein is a curious figure. A former editor of the New York Times Magazine and Newsweek, he would appear to have peerless liberal MSM credentials. But after leaving those publications he turned to writing expose-type biographies that have not been kind to their liberal subjects.
I initially thought Klein might be a political changer. But that’s not entirely correct:
Having watched Klein’s subsequent literary career, Frankel added, “None of those books are the kind that normally you’d expect a New York Times person to produce.”
His former colleagues wonder how he emerged as a combative conservative targeting powerful liberals. Klein acknowledges hawkish sentiments as far back as the Vietnam War, but while working at Newsweek and the Times he realized that “it was not my business to push my personal ideology through the pages.”
He believes he has suffered not only for turning his back on the mainstream media world but also for succeeding as an outsider in the exclusive realm of conservative commentary. The left reviles him, and the right has yet to embrace him.
In other words, nobody quite trusts him, although he swears that each fact he publishes is confirmed by two reliable sources. Who knows? Reading a few excerpts from his book, I am suspicious. Although some may be true, it has the ring of gossip, and much of it falls into the category of What You Imagine Could Be True, as well as featuring dialogue in the style of Grade B novels.
Take this tale about Hillary’s reaction the night of Benghazi. It is distinguished by being plausible, but that doesn’t mean it actually happened this way:
“Hillary was stunned when she heard the president talk about the Benghazi attack,” one of her top legal advisers said in an interview. “Obama wanted her to say that the attack had been a spontaneous demonstration triggered by an obscure video on the Internet that demeaned the Prophet Mohammed.”
This adviser continued: “Hillary told Obama, ”˜Mr. President, that story isn’t credible. Among other things, it ignores the fact that the attack occurred on 9/11.’ But the president was adamant. He said, ”˜Hillary, I need you to put out a State Department release as soon as possible.’”
It’s possible that it happened just that way, with Hillary reluctant to go along. It’s also possible it didn’t happen that way at all, and Hillary just wants you to think that, finally freed of Obama’s pernicious influence and elected president on her own, she would have handled it a lot differently and a lot better.
At any rate, the story continues with her calling Bill for advice. This is very believable, too:
Hillary’s legal adviser provided further detail: “During their phone call, Bill started playing with various doomsday scenarios, up to and including the idea that Hillary consider resigning as secretary of state over the issue. But both he and Hillary quickly agreed that resigning wasn’t a realistic option.
If her resignation hurt Obama’s chances of winning re-election, her fellow Democrats would never forgive her. Hillary was already thinking of running for president in 2016, and her political future, as well as Obama’s, hung in the balance.”
I find that part fascinating. I’d thought about the possibility before. Whether it’s what actually happened or not in the case of Hillary, if she or any other politician in her position had been in deep disagreement with the way Obama wanted to handle the Benghazi fallout (or Benghazi itself), the only recourse that person would have had would have been to resign.
Talk about profiles in courage! It would have taken extraordinary guts to have resigned—because, as Klein indicates, it would have been the equivalent of stabbing herself and Obama and her party in the back simultaneously, for the sake of principle. I wonder how many politicians today would have acquitted themselves well had they been faced with that decision? Very few, if any. Politics is a dirty game, and it either attracts those with no principles at all in the first place, or encourages people to jettison their principles as time goes by if they want to get ahead. Another reason to not appoint politicians to the post of Secretary of State.
I also wonder something else: if, faced with such a decision, Hillary (or fill in the blank with any politician of your choice in a similar situation) had resigned in protest, how would her subsequent political fortunes have gone? My guess is that she would have sunk like a stone. But some small part of me would like to think that such an act of patriotism and devotion to truth would cause a groundswell of popular support. People say they want public figures with integrity, but do they? And could they recognize them even if they saw them?
Or do we get the politicians we deserve?
[NOTE: According to Klein, here’s a quote from Bill Clinton:
I hate that man Obama more than any man I’ve ever met, more than any man who ever lived.
So, has Bill succumbed to that dread disease that’s only supposed to affect Republicans: Obama Derangement Syndrome? If so, I have to say he’s stepped up a notch in my estimation—although his reasons for succumbing are probably a lot different than most. For Bill it’s probably personal rather than political.]
Remember Biden’s prediction?
He was wrong about the time frame. He was wrong about the “brilliant” part; we could fill in with a lot of other adjectives, and “inexperienced” and would be among the kindest. Also, perhaps “generated”—with its implication of “manufactured rather than real”—wasn’t the best word, either.
But otherwise, Joe Biden had the right idea when he said in 2008:
“It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”
“I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate,” Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities.
How about both?
And yet in 2012 they mocked Romney for saying that Russia was our greatest geopolitical enemy, and for predicting that Obama’s complete abandonment of Iraq would have dire consequences.
And they said Romney lacked the common touch
But Hillary Clinton makes him look like a regular working stiff.
Every time Hillary opens her mouth lately something worse pops out of it. Did she suddenly get bad at politics, or was she already this bad in 2008? I can’t remember, but I think the depth of the problem is relatively new. Maybe in the ensuing almost-six years of high living and jet-setting since 2008, she’s lost whatever common touch she may have once had:
Clinton responded to criticism of her wealth in an interview with the Guardian newspaper published Saturday night by suggesting Americans won’t be concerned about the more than $100 million her family has reportedly earned in recent years because they’re not “truly well off.”
“They don’t see me as part of the problem,” Clinton said of Americans who are upset about income inequality, adding, “Because we pay ordinary income tax, unlike a lot of people who are truly well off, not to name names; and we’ve done it through dint of hard work.”
Clinton earned an $8 million advance for her 2003 book “Living History” and her publisher is rumored to have paid “significantly more” for “Hard Choices.” Additionally, Clinton reportedly earns $200,000 in speaking fees each time she makes a speech. Bill Clinton has reportedly made over $100 million in speaking fees since leaving office.
I guess that, in the circles in which the Clintons run these days, a person doesn’t have real money unless it’s in the billions.
And although these kinds of statements should hurt her—and especially her ability to be perceived as a person who can feel your pain—many of the liberals who want her to be the first female president and think she’s owed the job will support her no matter what she says.
[NOTE: To clarify, I happen to think that quote is incorrect in characterizing what Hillary said. She didn’t actually say that she and Bill aren’t “truly well off,” although she didn’t say they are, either. She left it somewhat ambiguous. But the idea that she somehow gets off the hook as a nefarious person of privilege because she pays taxes and others don’t (when in fact all the candidates—including the Clintons—have used perfectly legal tax strategies to reduce their taxes as much as possible) is absurd and off-putting, particularly after her “dead broke” faux pas in an earlier interview.
See also this.
As far as I’m concerned, Clinton can do with her money whatever she wants, as long as it’s legal. And if she wants to voluntarily redistribute it, that’s fine with me, too.]
Don’t get the tattoo in the first place…
…and you won’t have Melanie Griffith’s problem.
Or, don’t get the divorce.
I was at the beach the other day and I noticed that about half the people walking around seemed to be tattooed. Highly unattractive, IMHO.
In other beach observations, the going rate for a soft-serve kiddie-sized ice cream cone is now four dollars. And a kiddie-sized cone—the very smallest you can purchase—is now the equivalent of two scoops.
The White House on the children and families crossing the border illegally: see, we’re trying really really hard!
[Hat tip: Fausta]
White House Domestic Policy Council director Cecilia Munoz, in a call with the press:
…[blamed] misinformation that is being deliberately planted by criminal organizations, by smuggling networks, about what people can expect if they come to the United States” for the influx of Central Americans.
This may just be the truest thing the administration has said in years.
Of course, belief in the untrue assertions of those “criminal organizations” and “smuggling networks” was encouraged by Obama’s bypassing Congress in June of 2012, prior to the 2012 election, to announce his very own passage of the blocked DREAM act. But who needs Congress?—we don’t need no steenking Congress.
More from the administration yesterday [emphasis mine]:
Deputy DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the department is “surging resources to increase our capacity to detain individuals and adults with children, and to handle immigration court hearings.”
“This will allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement ”” or ICE ”” to return unlawful migrants from Central America who are ordered removed to their home countries more quickly,” Mayorkas said. “”¦With very few exceptions, all individuals apprehended, including adults with children, are placed in removal proceedings.”
“”¦But let me make one very important point, and that is that our detention and notice-to-appear decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, and of course, our detention decisions are predicated on an assessment of our prioritization, including at the very top our national security and public safety concerns.”
Sounds pretty tough, right? Of course, why was there virtually no response from the feds till now, after the whole thing was publicized on Fox?
And then there’s also this [emphasis mine]:
“The question before us is how can we make the process more efficient, given the surge in the number of individuals who are being apprehended, and how best can we address those individuals in terms of their humanitarian claims of relief, as well as the removal for those who are not claiming credible fear,” Mayorkas said.
Aye, there’s the rub. Who among them don’t have “humanitarian claims,” and who wouldn’t be claiming “credible fear”? Nobody.
You think I’m making up that “nobody”? Think again:
…[T]he children and adults respond with very deliberate and rehearsed answers when questioned by Border Patrol.
They immediately claim credible fear from gang violence or say, “I was scared I would be killed,” one of the Border Patrol agents working along the border told TheBlaze.
“It’s something they’re all saying and it’s obvious that it is well-rehearsed and it is a consistent story,” said Albert Spratte, a Border Patrol agent and union representative with the National Border Patrol Council’s Local 3307 in the Rio Grande Valley sector. “We can’t even get them to answer their name before they tell us the gangs were the reason they fled their country.”
And what of the administration’s policy of releasing the newcomers with a letter to appear in court in a bit? That usually goes about as you’d expect:
They all know that their family and friends before them received an “order to appear in court” document that allows them safe passage throughout the country.
The illegal immigrants rarely report to court within the 90 days ordered, and most disappear into the fabric of immigrant communities throughout the country without fear of deportation.
I don’t see either Munoz or Mayorkas announcing a change in that policy.
The whole thing seems to be a pretense to give the appearance of action when in fact all that might happen is a speeding-up of an already corrupt system. Why no National Guard to actually guard the borders? One can only conclude that it’s because the federal government has no intention of stopping this influx.
Scott Walker defends himself against media lies
Please pass this around.
Excerpt:
The truth on the widely covered “John Doe” is that two judges, one state and one federal, reviewed the accusations of partisans within a Democrat District Attorney’s Office and determined their theories have no merit or basis in law.
Each of these judges explicitly issued judicial orders that these partisan prosecutors must end their investigation immediately.
These are the truths that need to be stated over and over again to fight the slander directed at me and our campaign by my political opponents.
Still, many in the media proceed as though the opinion of the partisan prosecutors is new information and ignore the truths I have stated above. It is not. It is old news that has already been discounted by two judges. No charges. No case.
In reaction to the information that was released to the public and seized on by the media, the federal judge just this week sharply criticized the prosecutors. He said that they are now seeking “refuge in the Court of Public Opinion, having lost in this Court on the law.”
Watching the media frenzy it is clear that this is what happens when someone takes on the big government special interests. They push back. No wonder so many politicians are afraid to make tough decisions.
That last point is a very good one: this not only was intended to have an effect on Walker, but this and other baseless charges promulgated by the MSM have an effect on anyone who would run for office on the right.
Walker is one brave guy. I wrote in January of 2014 that he was my favorite so far for president in 2016. He still is.
As I wrote about a different attack on Walker back in February:
The whole thing also works on the low information voter, who (outside Wisconsin) doesn’t know much about Walker yet and might even like him if he/she learned something about him. Might even vote for him, for goodness’ sake. So the idea is to get in on the ground floor, to brand Walker as corrupt and get people to form a negative opinion of him before they know much else.
It works. The template, of course, is what happened to Sarah Palin at the hands of Democrats and the MSM during the campaign of 2008. I saw and heard it occur in real time, and it happened quickly and was incredibly effective.
They are starting earlier now, that’s all. And although Walker’s life doesn’t give them much ammunition, they will find what they can and make the most of it.
It wasn’t rocket science to make that prediction, which I had also made a bit earlier:
The Christie brouhaha and the Walker aide investigation not only have the goal of trying to bring these particular men down. They also serve as notice to anyone else even thinking of running on the Republican side, letting them know what’s ahead for them, no matter how uncorrupted they may appear to be or how uncorrupted they think they actually are.