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The Western defensive alliance NATO was a product of the Cold War. While it may have been a useful tool back then, the organization has so far proven utterly incapable of dealing with the tidal wave of Islamic aggression and Third World invasion through mass immigration that is engulfing the Western world. It is likely that there will soon be a concerted push by Morocco to retake the Spanish-ruled enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. How will NATO react to such a blatant attack on one of its member states? Will it respond in any meaningful way at all?

It is becoming increasingly evident to intelligent observers that the experiment with secularism in Turkey is failing and that the country is reemerging as a hostile Islamic power, the way it has been for most of the past 1,000 years. There are clear parallels between how the USA currently acts toward the Turkish neo-Ottomans and how Western European powers acted vis-à-vis the original Ottomans in the late 1800s. For example, there is the unholy practice of using smaller nations as bargaining chips to appease Muslims. The difference is that the USA treats all of Europe the way the British and French used to treat the Balkan Christians, by consistently pushing for Turkish membership in the European Union. NATO has actively supported the Islamization of Europe through its military actions in Serbia and Kosovo.

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Feldman, like other modern liberal writers who yearn for the Progressive days of yore, whitewashes Progressivism, so that it consisted solely of public-spirited regulation of corporations and the labor market. Meese and Oman note that the regulations in question weren’t always so public-spirited, but I’d add that Progressive regulation also included alcohol prohibition, coercive eugenics, housing segregation laws, bans on public schools, and other measures that people today across the political spectrum would agree were gross violations of individual rights. Resistance to these measures came primarily from the libertarian constitutionalists Feldman decries, not from his Progressive heroes. With that context, and in stark contrast to the way Feldman portrays things, the idea that property rights and limited government were a bulwark of individual liberty doesn’t seem quite so bizarre.

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

With the Clintons, it’s All About Them.

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There are obvious actions to speed things up, but the government oddly resists taking them.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

As the oil spill continues and the cleanup lags, we must begin to ask difficult and uncomfortable questions. There does not seem to be much that anyone can do to stop the spill except dig a relief well, not due until August. But the cleanup is a different story. The press and Internet are full of straightforward suggestions for easy ways of improving the cleanup, but the federal government is resisting these remedies.

It’s not hard to fathom. The federal government is  composed of agencies that, come hell or high wather (often literally) defend their turf whether or not it makes sense to Ordinary People.

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We have paid public officials with tax money to paint out an American flag mural just before the Fourth of July, because it was on state property without a permit. Caltrans officials quickly pointed out that this wasn’t intentional disrespect, it’s just that murals aren’t allowed on state property without a permit, and this was just discovered, and of course once it was discovered they had to act. Aren’t you glad we’re getting the government we are paying for? Do you think that in these economic times we might do with fewer public officials whose job it is to enforce this regulation?

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Color on color. Fail.

On the other hand, if they’re trying to express the rot that’s creeping into the UK — it just might work.

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The number of people who appear to be gaming the state’s health insurance system by purchasing coverage only when they are sick quadrupled from 2006 to 2008, according to a long-awaited report released yesterday from the Massachusetts Division of Insurance.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Steve Sailer is never afraid to look Political Correctness in the eye.

The background is that the winners of WWII, America and Britain, kept their old-fashioned elitist colleges like Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and Cambridge old-fashioned and elitist. The losers, like Germany, France, and Italy, after the war trashed their great universities on the altar of egalitarianism by going to open admissions. (In the U.S., CCNY was the only famous college to take the Spirit of ’68 seriously enough to dump selective admissions.) Today, that’s why ambitious Korean and Chinese students want to go to American or British universities, not to Continental ones: We won The War.

Whereas imposing a quota will suddenly produce creative risk-takers. Right. That’s why Google was founded by Michelle Obama.

To an American, it’s amusing to hear the French come up with the exact same cliches and fallacies as Americans have been telling each other for 40 years. Indeed, there are problems caused by reliance on entrance exams in terms of selecting for creativity and the like. But quotas do zip to fix those real problems. It’s not like the American quota kids all flock to Silicon Valley and start-up their own firms. A quota won’t give France its own Silicon Valley.

“With the objective of a great social opening,” the U.S. has been trying to invent “a better measure of young people’s intelligence” for 45 years, but we keep finding out that the old tests we had before the Great Society worked fine. It’s the test-takers who turned out to be the problem, not the test. But why should the French government learn from the U.S. experience? The U.S. government never learns from the U.S. experience.

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In every state, people are free to feed others in their filthy, unregulated homes, it’s only when money changes hands that home cooks transform into a public health hazard.

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The world is crazy for soccer, but most Americans don’t give a hoot about the sport. Why? Many years ago, my former White House colleague Bill McGurn pointed out to me the real reason soccer hasn’t caught on in the good old U.S.A. It’s simple, really: Soccer is a socialist sport.

Think about it. Soccer is the only sport in the world where you cannot use the one tool that distinguishes man from beast: opposable thumbs. “No hands” is a rule only a European statist could love. (In fact, with the web of high taxes and regulations that tie the hands of European entrepreneurs, “no hands” kind of describes their economic theories as well.)

Soccer is also the only sport in the world that has “hooligans”—proletarian mobs that trash private property whenever their team loses.

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Examples of why you don’t want the government running anything except perhaps a war.

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Telling doctors not to perform a particular test or procedure likely won’t be too effective if they think they’ll later be sued for not offering that very test or procedure.

Oh, ya think?

What’s the cost of all this defensive medicine? Hard to say. Study authors cite an estimate of as much as $60 billion. As we wrote last year, direct spending on medical malpractice litigation is pegged at about $30 billion annually, but money spent on tests that wouldn’t have been ordered were it not for the fear of a lawsuit is a more amorphous figure to capture.

We’re from the government, and we’re here to help.

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When President Obama named the members of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, he left little to chance.

Although the Executive Order which created the Commission allowed that its membership

… shall be drawn from among distinguished individuals, and may include those with experience in or representing the scientific, engineering, and environmental communities, the oil and gas industry, or any other area determined by the President to be of value to the Commission in carrying out its duties.

… there are two scientists, no engineers, and no real representatives of the oil and gas industry. The panel is primarily made up of lawyers, environmentalists and career politicians.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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A black councillor who called an Asian colleague a “coconut” during a council debate has been found guilty of racially aggravated harassment.

Shirley Brown, 48, a Liberal Democrat, used the term to describe a Conservative opponent, Jay Jethwa, who backed spending cuts for ethnic minority projects at a Bristol City Council meeting last year.

Mrs Brown, who denied racially aggravated harassment, used the term after Mrs Jethwa proposed to cut funding to the city’s Legacy Commission, which was set up in 2007 to educate people on the abolition of the slave trade two centuries ago.

The biter bit.

Some informative charts.

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Are there no honest black politicians in the Democrat party?

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is anyone documenting how many jobs have been “destroyed or averted” as a result of Obama administration policies and decisions?

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In the case of the phone’s shape, Apple has for the first time in the history of its phones clearly chosen form over function.

Apple made the unprecedented decision to put glass on the back of the iPhone 4, just like the front. No, there’s no screen or touch-pad on the back — and no reason at all to put glass there.

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You hear this soft, inflected tone everywhere that young people below, roughly, 35 congregate. As flat as the bottles of spring water they carry and affectless as algae, it tends to always trend towards a slight rising question at the end of even simple declarative sentences. It has no timbre to it and no edge of assertion in it.

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I am seriously of two minds about this….

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It came as something of a shock, the first time I got pregnant, to realise that the contents of my bump were suddenly very much other people’s business. From the first antenatal appointment, the expectant mother is deluged with advice: take folic acid, drink plenty of water and very little wine, say no to Stilton, sushi and swordfish. She is no longer a merrily autonomous individual, but a laboratory on legs.

Unfortunately, Britain has lost the mind-your-own-business tradition that is still fighting for life in the U.S., so they’re farther on the way to an Orwell-world than we are — although not as far as Europe, which is always falling into that pit and crawling out of it again.

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Americans lament the partisan venom of today’s politics, but for sheer verbal savagery, the country’s founders were in a league of their own. Ron Chernow on the Revolutionary origins of divisive discourse.

Yeah, well, they didn’t have to deal with no-loads like Barack Obama.

David Brooks lifts the curtain on Washington.

The most interesting part of my job is that I get to observe powerful people at close quarters. Most people in government, I find, are there because they sincerely want to do good. But they’re also exhausted and frustrated much of the time. And at these moments they can’t help letting you know that things would be much better if only there weren’t so many morons all around.

And all of them are right. And you’re paying their salaries. Aren’t you proud?

Seth Godin gets scammed by the USPS.

I needed to send a package today and figured I’d try them out. Visited the site on my Mac, got all the way through registration, entered my card to pay for stamps and then (and only then) did I find out their software doesn’t work on a Mac. Of course, they knew I was on a Mac but didn’t bother to alert me early on.

Now they have my card, but hey, it’s the USPS, so I trust them. Just for kicks, I call in to ask about the Mac compatibility issue. It turns out that by entering my card to pay for stamps, I’ve agreed to pay them $15.95 a month. Forever. And ever. Or until I notice.

I go online to cancel my account and discover that you can’t cancel your account online. You have to call them. Oh. (The people on the phone are friendly, for what it’s worth…)

(My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.)

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In 2000, in a book called Losing the Race, I argued that much of the reason for the gap between the grades and test scores of black students and white students was that black teens often equated doing well in school with “acting white.” I knew that a book which did not focus on racism’s role in this problem would attract bitter criticism. I was hardly surprised to be called a “sell-out” and “not really black” because I grew up middle class and thus had no understanding of black culture. But one of the few criticisms that I had not anticipated was that the “acting white” slam did not even exist.

Stuart Buck at last brings together all of the relevant evidence and puts paid to two myths. The first is that the “acting white” charge is a fiction or just pointless marginal static. The other slain myth, equally important, is that black kids reject school as alien out of some sort of ingrained stupidity; the fear of this conclusion lies at the root of the studious dismissal of the issue by so many black thinkers concerned about black children. Buck conclusively argues that the phenomenon is a recent and understandable outgrowth of a particular facet of black people’s unusual social history in America—and that facet is neither slavery nor Jim Crow.

Read it, if you can stay awake.

But I can save you some trouble:

“It’s a great moment. I’m proud to have been here,” said a teary-eyed Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), who as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee led the effort in the Senate. “No one will know until this is actually in place how it works. But we believe we’ve done something that has been needed for a long time. It took a crisis to bring us to the point where we could actually get this job done.”

(Emphasis added) That’s all you really need to know.

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There are no Secret Service agents posted next to the barista and no presidential seal on the ceiling, but the Caribou Coffee across the street from the White House has become a favorite meeting spot to conduct Obama administration business.

But because the discussions are not taking place at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they are not subject to disclosure on the visitors’ log that the White House releases as part of its pledge to be the “most transparent presidential administration in history.”

Politics, Chicago style.

How’s that hope and change thing working out for you? I guess the ‘hope’ is that they don’t get caught, and the ‘change’ is from the more honest way that previous Administrations have operated.

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As I argued in the Wall Street Journal  in 2008, the income tax code is inadequately indexed for the growth of incomes. The income tax brackets—the dollar amounts that designate the tax rates that apply to an individual’s income—are indexed only for inflation, while incomes tend to rise about 1 percent faster than inflation each year. The result is that a greater and greater share of individuals’ incomes will fall into higher tax brackets, increasing taxes even if the formal tax rates remain the same.

The effects of this are larger than you’d think. According to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) data, individual income tax receipts averaged 8.15 percent of Gross Domestic Product from 1953 through 2008. Due to the recession, this year they’re projected to equal around 8 percent of GDP.

But by 2020, income tax receipts are projected to rise to 9.5 percent of GDP, even if all of President Bush’s tax cuts are made permanent. By 2030, income tax receipts will rise to 10 percent of GDP, 22 percent higher than the historical level.

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Democrats want to raise carried-interest taxes from the current 15% rate to the top income tax rate, scheduled to hit 39.6% on January 1. The sales pitch is that this will only whack hedge fund managers and other unsympathetic types. Yet Democrats wrote the law so broadly that it may sweep up millions of Americans in family partnerships.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Every wonder why, with all the shit that tobacco companies take from the government, tobacco products aren’t just banned outright? Follow the money:

This week the New York legislature approved a $1.60-per-pack hike in the state’s cigarette tax. As of July 1, the state tax will be $3.10, the highest in the country. That’s in addition to a federal tax of $1.01. In New York City, which imposes its own levy of $1.50 a pack, the total tax will be $5.61, not counting a sales tax of 8.5 percent. The upshot is that premium brands will cost more than $11 a pack, with taxes accounting for most of the price. In New York City, the government will be making about 20 times as much on each pack of cigarettes as the tobacco companies do. (Nationwide, by R.J. Reynolds’ reckoning, the government’s average profit on each pack of cigarettes was $3.17 in 2009, compared to the company’s profit of 30 cents or so, which makes Philip Morris et al. look like minor shareholders in the business.)

And, of course, whenever government screws around with prices, what happens? Black markets!

Terrorists win when smokers/grocers buy bootleg, untaxed cigarettes. Bootleggers will have an enormous incentive to smuggle untaxed cigarettes into New York. A convicted bootlegger funded the Lackawanna Six. Phony tax stamps were found in apartments used by the 1993 WTC bombers and a group of Bronx Muslims arrested last month. Interpol and the ATF have identified cigarette smuggling as a revenue source for international terrorism….Yesterday’s budget action has set plans in motion for those who wish the USA and Israel harm.

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Not a single person has died of hunger in Gaza. They die in the other parts of the world, like Kirghizia, but nobody cares. The rights of Palestinians are above the rights of, say, the Uzbek people as well as Sudanese Christians, Iraqi Kurds, Boers in Southern Africa, “Ahmadyya” in Pakistan and the Baha’i in Iran. Palestinians are the high caste of mankind because (fortunately for them) they are up against Israel, and the international community has its own rights and interests in this conflict.

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Even more about McChrystal: now it can be told. The story about him voting for Obama is not contrived. He is a political liberal. He is a social liberal. He banned Fox News from the television sets in his headquarters. Yes, really. This puts to rest another false rumor: that McChrystal deliberately precipitated his firing because he wants to run for President.

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Senators Bernie Sanders, Tom Harkin, and Sheldon Whitehouse will introduce what they are calling (George Orwell, call your office) the Responsible Estate Tax, with a rate of 55% on estates above $50 million, and a 10% surtax on top of that on the value of an estate above $500 million ($1 billion for couples), Paul Caron’s TaxProf blog reports. At least Mr. Sanders is intellectually honest enough openly to call himself a socialist, which is more than can be said for Messrs. Harkin and Whitehouse.

Most civilized countries don’t tax estates but rather tax the inheritances as if they were income, which makes far too much sense for the American tax code. (Of course, the reason they tax the estate rather than the heirs is because they get to take their bite off the top, where the rates are higher.)

It’s also funny how the word “greed” is so often applied to the billionaires, but not to the politicians who want to take 65% of the money the billionaires have accumulated even after a lifetime of paying annual income taxes.

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The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is threatening to sue McDonald’s if the burger giant doesn’t stop selling Happy Meals, one of 1979’s greatest contributions to all mankind. In typical nanny-statist hype, the CSPI likens McD’s to a child molester….

Sounds like some people could use some Valium, much less a Happy Meal.

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In 1998 the pharmaceutical company Pfizer announced plans to build a giant new research and development center in New London, Connecticut. As part of the deal, city officials agreed to clear out neighboring property owners via eminent domain, giving a private developer space to build a fancy new hotel, apartment buildings, and office towers to complement the corporate facility. Five years ago today, in Kelo v. City of New London, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld this seizure of private property because it was part of a “comprehensive redevelopment plan” that would provide “appreciable benefits to the community.”

Half a decade has now passed and we know exactly how well Kelo worked out. The project that was used to entice Pfizer was never built, and last year the company announced that it was closing down its facility and pulling out of New London entirely. The only upshot of this atrocious decision is the nationwide backlash it sparked against eminent domain abuse, including several successful legal challenges and the passage of eminent domain reform in 43 states.

When the government is permitted to pick winners & losers, eventually the losers include everybody.

George Will takes the Obamateur to the woodshed.

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And they undoubtedly think that Obama is bright and will bring us hope and change.

Weep for the Republic … while we’ve still got one.

Michael Barone overturns a rock.

Thuggery is unattractive. Ineffective thuggery even more so. Which may be one reason so many Americans have been reacting negatively to the response of Barack Obama and his administration to BP’s gulf oil spill.

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Doctors weary of the low reimbursement rates and uncertainty surrounding Medicare are deserting the program in record numbers, USA Today reports. A host of medical associations report non-participation rates of as much as 31% (for primary-care doctors responding to an American Medical Association survey). Physicians say the reimbursement rates, which were 78% of private insurers’ average payments to doctors in 2008, make participation financially unfeasible. CMS reports a 97% overall participation rate but an agency official tells the paper that CMS is concerned about program members’ access to primary-care doctors.

Moe Lane puts the boot in.

Politically speaking, of course, it would look very, very bad for the White House if it got out that the man who designed the Democrats’ 2006/2008 Congressional strategy was planning to announce his resignation just after that Congressional strategy crashes, burns, ignites, explodes, and seeps toxic polysyllabic chemicals into the groundwater this November.  Not that a strategy of blustering denial will do anything except kick the can down the road for another four months, but they’ll worry about that later.

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The French are all about interesting food.

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Slow news day. Obama doesn’t have any more dick left to step on, so pickings will be sparse.

Kathleen Parker actually looks at the evidence. (What a shock.)

Granted, many children still have in-house fathers, but millions don’t. Some fathers have become alienated through divorce. “Baby daddies” never were invited to the commitment party. Still others are anonymous in the truest sense — mere DNA donors who made a deposit and picked up a check.

The latter are the subject of a new study — “My Daddy’s Name Is Donor” — about the offspring of sperm donors. Published by the Center for Marriage and Families, the report is the first of its kind since artificial insemination and single motherhood came into vogue. Finally, we have enough grown children from such arrangements to ask a few questions and draw some perhaps unwelcome conclusions.

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That’s certainly true for people who own cats.

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Aren’t they sweet.