Cruising the Web

Awwww. One congressional Democrat thinks that it just isn't fair that congressional aides as well as the Congressmen to have to be subjected to Obamacare. The rest of America is weeping for them.

Sharyl Attkisson is giving out some more information on the suspicious intrusion into both her CBS work computer and her personal computer at home. It all sounds very intriguing.

“Whoever was in my work computer, the only thing I was working on were work-related things with CBS were big stories I guess during the time period in questions were I guess Benghazi and ‘Fast and Furious.’ The intruders did have access to personal information including passwords to my financial accounts and so on, but didn’t tamper with those, so they weren’t interested in stealing my identity or doing things to my finances. So people can decide on their own what they might have been trying to do in there.”

It does raise eyebrows, doesn't it? She says that CBS is continuing to investigate.

This exemplifies true chutzpah. Harry Reid is complaining that the House isn't proceeding to conference to on the budget. I guess he figures that no one will remember the four years that the Senate went without passing a budget.

Are you ready for Gingrich 2016? Please. No.

Democrats make real fools of themselves as they tweet their attempt to feed themselves on the average benefits from food stamps.

John Hawkins interviews Helen Smith on her book, Men on Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream – and Why It Matters. Very interesting.

Cruising the Web

Shouldn't we be spying on the Russian president? I don't get how this is a surprise or even a bad thing. Another new leak from Snowden is that British spies were spying on allies such as South Africa and Turkey during the 2009 G20 summit meeting. So now Snowden is out to embarrass Britain for spying on other leaders. What does that have to do with his purported concerns about NSA violating people's privacy? In revealing this information, Edward Snowden is not blowing any whistle; he's simply revealing information in order to damage American intelligence gathering. He has no freedom of speech or privacy arguments to make. With each new leak, he's making the argument for everyone that he's a traitor rather than a hero.

Seth Lipsky explains the difficulty under our Constitution of trying someone for treason; however Snowden could be tried for "adhering" to the enemy in times of war. I'd prefer to try him for laws he has clearly broken about revealing top secret information. Of course, any such argument is moot until he might be in American custody and that may never happen.

Mickey Kaus and Byron York point out that the Gang of 8 immigration bill is very loose on its restrictions for letting in immigrants with misdemeanor records. In fact the bill would not stop an illegal immigrant who had been convicted of domestic violence or child abuse. He recommends we ask Joe Biden, the proud author of the Violence Against Women Act, why we wouldn't want to block the legalization of an immigrant convicted of such violence.

Yet another scandal for the State Department as a whistleblower complains that she was forced to resign after she revealed that the US Consul General in Naples, Italy was meeting with hookers and having affairs with subordinates, including one woman to get an abortion and have her tubes tied.

Conn Carroll has a great gotcha story about Senator Whitehouse of Rhode Island who thought he had caught a Heritage Foundation scholar, Dr. Salim Furth, in an outright deception of Congress by testifying that European countries had not really tried austerity, but instead had been using tax increases. Sen. Whitehouse flourished a chart showing that European countries had indeed cut more than they'd raised taxes. Liberal minions in the media, including Paul Krugman and the Washington Post, then wrote about the moment accusing Heritage of lying. But it turned out that the data for the Senator's chart came from projections of what countries said they were going to do in the future with their budgets and not what they had actually done. Such are the arguments that the Democrats will use in order to pretend that their sorts of policies are working.

Jim Geraghty details how the IRS meets any allegations of improper conduct by issuing a stock statement that they take the allegation "very seriously."

The Obama administration has a history of pressuring or firing Inspector Generals when they are making findings that displease the Obamanians. Or, when they're not forcing IGs to quit, they're just not filling vacancies for the IG positions at quite a few important agencies.

According the EEOC, it is now racist for an employer to do a criminal background check before it employs someone.

We would have thought that criminal checks discriminate against criminals, regardless of race, creed, gender or anything else. Such criminal checks are legal and have long been part of the hiring process at many companies. You can argue that criminals deserve a second chance in life, or even a third or fourth, but business owners and managers ought to be able to decide if they want to take the risk of hiring felons.

The EEOC suit is part of the Administration's larger effort to redefine racism in America by using statistics, rather than individual intent or evidence. The Justice and Housing Departments have rewritten their rules and punished banks and counties like Westchester, N.Y., based on disparate statistical measures of lending and zoning. The EEOC signaled its plans in April last year when it rewrote its enforcement strategy, declaring that "an employer's evidence of a racially balanced workforce will not be enough to disprove disparate impact."

Mull that one over. Even if a company has a racially diverse workforce, it can still be sued if its applicant pool doesn't meet the EEOC's statistical tests. So a retailer that decides it would rather not have proven thieves manning its cash registers could be guilty of racism if the convicted thieves in its applicant pool are disproportionately minority.

Mark Steyn notes that, while our reach for surveillance increases, we are still being reined in by political correctness.

Don't believe all the blather about how the newly elected president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, is a moderate.

In reality, Rouhani is a regime loyalist who has been on Iran’s Supreme National Security Council since 1989 and who served as the nation’s chief nuclear negotiator from 2003 to 2005. In a recent television interview, he boasted that Iran’s strategy during this time was to use the diplomatic process to buy time for the development of the nation’s nuclear program by exploiting a wedge between the U.S. and Europe, thus preventing the United Nations Security Council from taking action. “(America) wanted what we had in nuclear technology not to be completed, and that we surrender what we had already,” he said. “What we aimed to do was to create a space so that this technology is completed.”

For those who oppose Iran becoming a nuclear power, one silver lining of Ahmedinejad’s Holocaust denial and constant bluster toward Israel and America was that such rhetoric helped clarify the true nature of the regime. It made it much easier to argue for the isolation of Iran and to build support for measures to thwart its nuclear ambitions. Now, Rouhani’s election (and the flood of naive stories in the Western press about his moderation) will prompt calls for more engagement with Iran. Meanwhile, the regime will get exactly what it wants – the breathing room it needs to acquire nuclear capability. In this sense Rouhani is much more dangerous than Ahmedinejad.

Cruising the Web

Kevin Arnovitz has a long story at ESPN about why people across the nation don't just love or hate the San Antonio Spurs as much as the public usually feels about a winning team. They're not flash and their players don't seek the limelight. They just get the job done. One more reason to pull for them to win two more games. They're like the good guy who finally wins the girl in the end after she takes a ride with the flashy, but lesser guy. They're the Jimmy Stewart of basketball, but I hope that this time he gets the girl.

Somehow the media got a lot of the story about PRISM all wrong.

The botched reporting by the Guardian and the Post means that millions of readers directed their anger at a handful of big companies that were unfairly accused of selling out their customers to the national security apparatus. The reality is that if NSA surveillance is indeed overstepping its bounds, those companies are victims, not willing participants.

It turns out that Obama's show-boating on sexual misconduct in the military has ensured that, if two defendants are found guilty in military sexual assault cases currently going to trial, they cannot be punitively discharged because his comments as commander in chief would have unduly influenced potential sentencing. That is what happens when our supposedly constitutional lawyer president can't stop from inserting himself into an ongoing story.

Harry Enten, the Guardian's expert on polling and politics, argues that the surveillance stories about the NSA might give the GOP an opening with younger voters. Of course, that would necessitate the GOP taking a more libertarian stand on such security issues and there seems to be a split down the middle on this issue within the party. And if the Democrats lost the White House, they would probably revert to their previous position on such a program since they would no longer have to reflexively support Obama.

What a surprise, insurers aren't as interested in joining up to Obamacare's small-business exchanges as the bill's backers were counting on.

As Detroit inches ever closer to what will be the biggest municipal bankruptcy in history, ponder the city government model that put this sort of fiscal lunacy in place.

More than 42 percent of Detroit's 2013 revenues went to required bond, pension, health care and other payments. If the city continues operating the way it had before Orr arrived, those costs would take up nearly 65 percent of city spending by 2017, Orr's team said.

James Taranto discusses "pathological altruism," a concept argued by Barbara Oakley, an engineering professor writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Basically, she is summarizing the liberal approach to public policy.

Oakley defines pathological altruism as "altruism in which attempts to promote the welfare of others instead result in unanticipated harm." A crucial qualification is that while the altruistic actor fails to anticipate the harm, "an external observer would conclude [that it] was reasonably foreseeable." Thus, she explains, if you offer to help a friend move, then accidentally break an expensive item, your altruism probably isn't pathological; whereas if your brother is addicted to painkillers and you help him obtain them, it is.

As Taranto writes,

Pathological altruism is at the root of the liberal left's crisis of authority, which we discussed in our May 20 column. The left derives its sense of moral authority from the supposition that its intentions are altruistic and its opponents' are selfish. That sense of moral superiority makes it easy to justify immoral behavior, like slandering critics of President Obama as racist--or using the power of the Internal Revenue Service to suppress them. It seems entirely plausible that the Internal Revenue Service officials who targeted and harassed conservative groups thought they were doing their patriotic duty. If so, what a perfect example of pathological altruism.

It's a fascinating approach to both social and political interactions.

The idea that the IRS scandal was cooked up by a few low-level employees in Cincinnati is just as false a narrative as the idea that the attack on Benghazi was the result of outrage of some youtube video.

Charles Krauthammer requests that the President decide if we are still in a war on terror that necessitates secret data collection by the NSA or if, as he has announced publicly, that threat is dying out.

Nor does it help that just three weeks ago the president issued a major foreign-policy manifesto whose essential theme was that the War on Terror is drawing to a close and that its very legal underpinning, the September 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, should be not just reformed but repealed to prevent “keeping America on a perpetual wartime footing.”

Now it turns out that Obama’s government was simultaneously running a massive, secret, anti-terror intelligence operation. But if the tide of war is receding, why this vast, ever-expanding NSA dragnet whose only justification is an outside threat — that you assure us is ever receding?

Which is it, Mr. President? Tell it straight. We are a nation of grown-ups. We can make choices. Even one it took you four years to admit is not “false.”

As Orrin Hatch argues, if you're upset by what we're finding out about how the IRS conducted its business, just wait until they're handling Obamacare.

The bottom line here is that the IRS can barely manage what it already has to do (and that's a generous characterization given its unlawful targeting of conservative groups). The prospect of the IRS taking a central role in the administration of ObamaCare can only be described as scary.

Indeed.

Ace links to the ludicrous idea by a couple of academics that children's books with human-like animals as the heroes are sending a dangerous, racist message to children.

Most animals portrayed in children’s books, songs and on clothing send a bad message, according to academics Nora Timmerman and Julia Ostertag: That animals only exist for human use, that humans are better than animals, that animals don’t have their own stories to tell, that it’s fine to “demean” them by cooing over their cuteness. Perhaps worst of all, they say, animals are anthropomorphized to reinforce “socially dominant norms” like nuclear families and gender stereotypes.

Most animals portrayed in children’s books, songs and on clothing send a bad message, according to academics Nora Timmerman and Julia Ostertag: That animals only exist for human use, that humans are better than animals, that animals don’t have their own stories to tell, that it’s fine to “demean” them by cooing over their cuteness. Perhaps worst of all, they say, animals are anthropomorphized to reinforce “socially dominant norms” like nuclear families and gender stereotypes.

One of the authors of the story, Timmerman, prefers that little children are exposed to the real animals and the lessons that we could learn from them.

Authors are often trying to convey good social values in children’s books with animal characters, whether it be acceptance or generosity or inclusivity. But Ms. Timmerman wishes these authors would acknowledge that “animals themselves may have lessons to teach us.” For example, bees buzzing around a hive or ants in an ant farm can teach the importance of community and teamwork without having to be anthropomorphized, she said.

Ah, I guess we should be exposing the toddlers to lots of those lessons about animals killing and devouring other animals. That's just the sort of realism that such fuzzy-headed thinking seems to forget about. Just because a creature isn't human, doesn't mean that it's all sweet and good. Rather like the lesson that just because a culture is non-Western doesn't mean it's all hunky dory in how it treats women or those weaker than the culture's leaders.

Cruising the Web

CBS announces that it turns out that Sharyl Attkisson's computer was indeed accessed by unknown and unauthorized parties. Makes you go hmmmm, doesn't it?

Ed Morrissey reminds us what Attkisson had been reporting at the time of the intrusion into her computer.

Jonah Goldberg demolishes the liberal argument that libertarianism is a failed idea simply because there is no country organized on libertarian principles.

Pick a date in the past, and you can imagine someone asking similar questions. “Why should women have equal rights?” some court intellectual surely asked. “Show me anywhere in the world where that has been tried.” Before that, “Give the peasants the right to vote? Unheard of!”

In other words, there’s a first time for everything.

It’s a little bizarre how the Left has always conflated statism with modernity and progress. The idea that rulers — be they chieftains, kings, priests, politburos, or wonkish bureaucrats — are enlightened or smart enough to tell others how to live is older than the written word. And the idea that someone stronger, with better weapons, has the right to take what is yours predates man’s discovery of fire by millennia. And yet, we’re always told that the latest rationalization for increased state power is the “wave of the future.”

Matthew Sheffied refutes the myth that Republicans today are more conservative than those of a few decades ago. Such assertions are just selective history.

Oops. Senator Landrieu may be on the Homeland Security Committee but she still flunks basic American geography.

David Feith has some very good questions for Samantha Power. For example:

You wrote in 2003 that "Instituting a doctrine of the mea culpa would enhance [U.S.] credibility by showing that American decision-makers do not endorse the sins of their predecessors." Which sins? In what three ways could a U.S. ambassador to the U.N. carry out this "mea culpa" doctrine you envision?

You wrote in 2003 that "much anti-Americanism derives from the role U.S. political, economic, and military power has played in denying such freedoms [of religion, of speech, etc.] to others." To which specific historical cases were you referring?

Is al Qaeda a response to past American "sins"? Is Iran's state sponsorship of terrorism, or its drive for nuclear weapons? What changes in past American foreign policy could have mitigated the threats posed today by al Qaeda and Iran?

Does it surprise anyone that over a thousand IRS workers misused government charge cards?

Oh the delicious irony. A labor organizer with the Clark County Education Association in Nevada is claiming that she was fired when she tried to organize her co-workers into a union to represent the staff of the union.

I've rarely been in a mass conference that was beneficial. How about cutting the spending that all our federal employees seem to love spending on conferences. Now we find out that HHS has been spending more than $36 million in the past four years on employee conferences. Have them circulate information by email and save some money.

According to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, government pre-school is better than leaving a child with grandma.