Q: What do Democrats call illegal aliens who have beaten women and children? A: Evidently future Democratic voters, since they refuse to amend the Gang of 8 illegal alien amnesty bill to exclude them.
Democratic Rep. John Larson (D–Con) whines that it’s so very, very unfair that ObamaCare applies to congress. Hold on, Rep. Larson. When I can get some time on a scanning-tunneling microscope, I’ll see if I can find an appropriately sized violin.
Maureen Dowd slams Obama some more: “When the man who polled where to take his summer vacation and whether to tell the truth about his affair with Monica Lewinsky tells you you’re a captive of polls, you’d better listen up.” Bonus: Description of the NSA program as “No Call Left Behind.”
A new crime control initiative in Houston: arm the law-abiding. More on the Armed Citizen Project here.
Animal Rights activists get Obama Administration to end testing on chimps. So much for liberals being part of the “science-based community.”
SooperMexican makes brutal fun of the SNAP Challenge. (If you’ve never heard of the SNAP challenge, it’s another variant on the “Any time conservatives cut a dime of government funding, 10 million children starve!” argument.)
Scientists invent a robotic cat. Evidently it has the “massive indifference to your presence” and “not coming when you call it” parts of a cat’s personality down pat…
It’s hard to find time to do an ordinary LinkSwarm with so much Obama scandal news breaking. It’s like ScandalPalooza. And there are some scandal tidbits here as well.
Obama’s arguments for vast NSA powers amounts to “Terrorism is on the run. That’s why we have to tap all your phones and read all your email.”
You know what the great weasel word in common for tech giant non-denial denials on the NSA PRISM scandal? “Direct access.” Or “we give them boatloads of indirect access.”
The IRS scandal is like Enron: criminality by underlings empowered by a toxic culture at the top by people who think the rules don’t apply to them because they’re smarter than everyone else. “Any good CEO will tell you that ethical meltdowns like the IRS political-targeting scandal are rarely the work of a few rogue employees. Such messes are the result of a toxic culture that has been allowed to fester.”
Some people have wondered why Egypt’s high court, doing the military leadership’s bidding, just invalidated the Egyptian parliament, even though the Muslim Brotherhood’s popularity, though strong, seemed to be on the wan. I think the simplest explanation is not that they were afraid of losing their grip on Egyptian society (though that’s probably part of the equation), but that the Egypt’s military leadership prefers not be be killed. I don’t mean this in a metaphorical sense, I mean that there was real (and probably justified) fear that a government lead by Muslim Brotherhood would lead, in very short order, to the liquidation of the military leadership. I think they were facing not one but two existential threats.
First, as shown in Turkey, when a nation’s existing military leadership also acts as an independent power base, islamists are only willing to tolerate potential threats to their own rule as long as they have to. Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s islamist AKP has moved to put vast swathes of Turkey’s previously independent military leadership on trail for blocking Islamist aims in the past. Egypt’s military is just as strong a power center (albeit one considerably less scrupulous than Turkey’s); how long do you think it would take the Muslim Brotherhood to move against the military leadership after they had consolidated power? My guess is not long at all, and the military knew it too.
Second, if we take the Muslim Brotherhood at their word, it’s obvious they’re itching for another war against Israel. And why not? They regard the “Zionist Entity” as a literal affront against God, one that must be wiped off the face of the earth. Moreover, what better way to tighten control over the levers of governmental powers than with a war against a hated enemy? There are are all sorts of ways to use “emergency wartime decrees” to eliminate opposition figures and seize direct control of businesses and ministries when everyone’s focused on the military action.
And who would bear the brunt of any war against Israel? The hated military. Win, and members of the Muslim Brotherhood government are heroes to Muslims all over the world. Lose, and it could only be attributable to traitorous disloyalty by the military leadership, which would be immediately purged.
The Egyptian military knows it would lose any war against Israel for the foreseeable future (even discounting Israel’s likely nuclear weapons arsenal), and it knows the best way to prevent one is to prevent the Muslim Brotherhood from coming to power. Strangely enough, in this instance the Egyptian military leadership is actually acting in the best interests of the nation, even if the end result also happens to be saving their own hide.
All sorts of stories bubbling away in various states of completion. In the meantime, here’s a nice Saturday LinkSwarm that includes some (but not all) of the links I’ve put up on my twitter feed:
We’ve gotten use to Democratic office holders in Texas switching to the Republican Party, but I don’t think we’ve ever seen all the Democratic officeholders in a county switch at the same time, which is what just happened in Throckmorton County, including the sheriff, county judge, clerk, treasurer, justice of the peace and three commissioners.
Texas Democrats give up on Texas Democrats. “Of the $21 million Texas Democrats have given to candidates running for federal office, Super PACs and party political committees in the 2012 election, only $4.8 million has gone to candidates from Texas.”
Today’s Texas Democrat under federal investigation for corruptions comes to you from Cameron County DA Armando Villalobos, who’s also running for U.S. congress in the newly created 34th congressional district.
That’s the rather bracing judgment from this Stratfor overview of Greece’s problem. Moreover, they’re saying that about its existence as a nation-state, even absent the European debt crises. Also: “Greece has to be kicked out of the Eurozone if the Eurozone is to survive.” Problem? They don’t have enough “firebreak” funds to do it. “Until the Europeans have 2 trillion Euro in funding stashed away, they can’t kick Greece out of the system.”
I’m not sure I share the pessimism about Greece in the long run. After all, nation-states can exist for an awful long time, despite crappy conditions (see, for example, Haiti). Of course, that assumes that a newly Islamic Turkey doesn’t decide to settle old scores by conquering them outright. (Assuming, of course, that Turkey is still predominately Turkish rather than Kurdish. Claire Berlinski is a little more sanguine about that prospect.)
Honestly, of the two, I think Greece will outlast the Eurozone by a good measure. The question isn’t the whether Eurocrats can prevent the Eurozone from breaking up, but rather how long they can delay the inevitable, how much sovereign debt can they put taxpayers on the hook for, and how much harder will the inevitable market correction be when it comes? It seems to be a race between how much European taxpayer money can be wasted propping up Europe’s bankrupt welfare states vs. how much of American taxpayer money can the Obama administration waste channeling payouts to well-connected Democratic cronies. The Eurocrats may be winning the race to insolvency, if only due to the lack of a European Tea Party.
But don’t take that as any kind of victory for the Euro. Quite the opposite. “The furious debate over the erosion of German fiscal sovereignty and democracy – as well as the escalating costs of the EU rescue machinery – has made it absolutely clear that the Bundestag will not prop up the ruins of monetary union for much longer. Horst Seehofer, the leader of Bavaria’s Social Christians, said his party would go ‘this far, and no further’.”
Greece passes the tax increase the Eurocrats say is necessary to stave off default.
The German finance minister says that a leveraged Euro-TARP is dead. I would say why U.S. regulators were pushing such a scheme was puzzling, except of course it isn’t. The goal is to put off the Euro-collapse until after the 2012 elections.
Meanwhile, liberal moneybags mastermind George Soros says that the Euro crises is dragging us toward another depression. His solution? I know you’re going to be shocked, shocked to learn that it’s bigger, more central government. “The governments of the eurozone must agree in principle on a new treaty creating a common treasury for the eurozone. In the meantime, the major banks must be put under the direction of the European Central Bank.” To be followed shortly thereafter by the formation of the First European Airborne Swine Squadron.
Is there any other place desperate Eurocrats can get money to prop up their falling welfare states? Are they perhaps hoping that Obama will bail them out? After all, what’s a few more trillions in unsupported debt between friends?
After an unusually active week, here’s a LinkSwarm for a lazy Friday, including a few things I meant to link to earlier and didn’t have the time.
Christopher Hitchens, a fine writer and a formidable intellect, weighs in on the London riots. In the process Hitchens provide a nod to his brother Peter Hitchens’ analysis of the riots (and link to this fascinating debate between the two on the nature of religion, of which I was previously unaware). I’m not entirely convinced by Hitchens argument that there were “bad” areas no one went into long before the riots. I’m sure there were, but did they consist of people who had never held a job in their lives, and would those denizens in past eras have felt a complete lack of compunction over setting other people’s small businesses on fire?
Finally, some good news from the Bastrop fire. Couple with horse farm had to flee with horses, but without tackle. The good news is the tackle (including some very expensive saddles) survived the fire. The bad news is it was promptly stolen. The good news is it took all of nine hours to track down the thieves trying to sell the stuff on eBay. Score one for the good guys.
The last six days of blogging have been pretty packed, so here’s a LinikSwarm for a lazy (and very hot) Friday:
Christopher Hitchens on Turkey. He glosses over the fact (maybe he only had so many words) that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk could be quite a murderous bastard himself when it suited his interests…
Amazon isn’t the problem in California. “How perverse is it when wanting to keep money that you’ve earned is considered being greedy?”
Here’s a movie about an an Islamic punk band with female and gay members who drink beer and smoke pot. Sadly, and predictably, it’s completely fictional.
You may remember my previous mention of the new definition of “flash mobs,” i.e. large groups of black youths that gather together to commit crimes and then disperse. Evidently they’re a big enough problem in Cleveland that they passed an ordinance to crack down on the phenomena, which was vetoed. Alas, from the description, the Ohio ACLU is probably correct in calling it “both ineffective and unconstitutional.”
I stopped doing This Week in Jihad because it was eating up too much of my time. But this week there were enough big Jihad-related stories to justify putting one up:
Michael Totten has an interesting interview with Claire Berlinski on the situation in Turkey. If Turkey put up a status update, it would read “Mood: Delusional.” Also, is it just me, or does Berlinski look an awful lot like Dr. Lisa Cuddy on House?
You know that “unarmed peace flotilla”? Yeah, not so much.
Female Kuwaiti “activist” calls for the return of sexual slavery to keep rich Muslim men from committing adultery. Sisters are doing it to themselves. And somewhere, Dominique Strauss-Kahn is kicking himself.
Strafor analyzes the latest al Qaeda video and sees a message of defeat. “The very call to leaderless resistance is an admission of defeat and an indication that the jihadists might not be receiving the divine blessing they claim.” The also show how al Qaeda ignorance of American gun control laws (no, you can’t buy automatic weapons at a gun show, since you need to fill out a form, undergo a background check that can take up to 90 days, and have a local law enforcement “chief” authorize your form (among other requirements), and that assumes you live in a state they haven’t been outlawed in) has lead to the arrests of several Jihadests looking to purchase them.
Alabama latest state to have law introduced banning Sharia.
Death penalty suggested for Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan. Given that the shooting happened all the way back in 2009, isn’t this a little slow even for the usual wheels of American justice? Maybe if we’re lucky, the actual trial will occur in the home stretch of the 2012 election…
And speaking of Michael Totten, he has an interview with Giulio Meotti, the author of A New Shoah: The Untold Story of Israel’s Victims of Terrorism. Lots of bracing, disheartening information in that interview. “Europe is an anti-Semitic continent.” “The current European anti-Semitism is a powerful mix of Islamist pressure on Europe by large Muslim communities in its midst and a leftist-progressive ideology.”