Read it.

A newly uncovered email confirms accusations that the $305 million Cover Oregon Obamacare exchange was controlled by partisan political advisors working for then-Governor John Kitzhaber’s 2014 reelection effort.

Kitzhaber is, of course, a Democrat.

Public documents previously obtained and examined by Willamette Week suggested that decisions over the fate of the now-failed exchange were given to partisan political operatives – led by a trusted aid of the governor known as “the princess of darkness.” This new email all but confirms these accusations.

Cronyism is, of course, endemic to politicians of all parties.

While Kitzhaber did win reelection, he was forced to resign months later amid a public corruption scandal involving his fiancée’s misuse of public office.

Ah, yes, the traditional Democrat way to retire from office.

Read it.

Communications app Telegram Messenger is in the spotlight after the deadly terrorist attacks in Jakarta last week, with experts in Indonesia and Malaysia saying Islamic State radicals in Syria have used the platform to recruit members from Southeast Asia.

The revelations underscore both the apparent popularity of the Berlin-based app among members of the terror organization and the challenges it poses to authorities in tracking its private, encrypted chats.

Read it.

Of course. The city is run by Democrats, and Democrats don’t see why the quality of the product ought to be reflected in what they charge you for it.

“This s*** is criminal… [Michigan’s Governor Rick Snyder] deserves to go to prison for this,” local resident Kendrick Boyd was quoted as saying.

Of course. The city is run by Democrats, and Democrats always look for a Republican to blame when what they do goes wrong.

Read it.

Boyz n the Hood director John Singleton, the first African-American to be nominated for a directing award, has weighed in on the controversy surrounding this year’s Oscars nominations, saying that he doesn’t have a problem with the lack of diversity in them.

“There’s only so many slots, though,” Singleton told Variety, when asked why the Academy didn’t nominate any black leading actors or actresses. “There are a couple of movies that may have (warranted attention) but … It’s all subjective. It’s almost like the lottery.”

“It’s like every year people complain,” he continued. “People even complain even when we have a lot of nominations.”

Illustrating the eternal truth that the whining always comes loudest from losers who are convinced that they ought to be winners, without having to do any work to get there.

Read it.

Israel is demonized and singled out by the media and international bodies. Israel is accused of excessive use of force, despite its great efforts to minimize collateral damage, while the massacres by the Assad regime or the heavy collateral damage resulting from Saudi attacks in Yemen are hardly mentioned. The EU decided to mark the products of the Israeli settlements beyond the “Green Line,” taking no similar action for the products in northern Cyprus (occupied by Turkey), or in Tibet (occupied by China), or in Western Sahara (occupied by Morocco). Israel, a democratic state, is accused of human rights violations, while the UN ignores the human rights violations of many of its members.

The reasons for the dislike of the Jewish state are numerous and often reinforce each other.

Read it.

Paul Krugman asks, “Is vast inequality necessary?” His answer is that some inequality is “inevitable,” but “the rich don’t have to be as rich as they are.”

But maybe the problem isn’t the rich are too rich. Maybe the problem is the poor aren’t rich enough. Like Bernie Sanders, who accuses Trump of being a demagogue and then spends most of his speeches lambasting the wealthy, Krugman wants to blame the wealthy for being rich. But the wealthy aren’t the ones who put policies in place that keep the poor oppressed.

The Antiplanner recently met Alan Graham, who helps homeless people in Austin. He says the homeless have too many health problems to make good employees, but they are very entrepreneurial. But the only entrepreneurial activity they are legally allowed to engage in is begging, because the courts have ruled that begging is a First Amendment right. Anything else they would like to do, even just open a lemonade stand, requires fees they can’t afford and permits from a bureaucracy they can’t understand. These rules were made by middle-class bureaucrats and progressive elected officials, not the wealthy.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

Read it.

Political leaders in Central Europe continue to lead the way in the opposition to mass immigration, specifically Muslim immigration, matching Geert Wilders in their “Islamophobia”.

Miloš Zeman, the President of the Czech Republic, has now joined Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico in asserting that the integration of a Muslim community into Europe is not only undesirable, it is in fact impossible.

Read it.

“To regard it as one of life’s premiere moral injustices to have to eat dinner underneath a portrait of Woodrow Wilson is to lose perspective on what is happening in the world.” That was former Harvard University President Larry Summers’ take on the increasingly petty concerns of college students, which he shared during a revealing conversation with The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol.

‘Creeping’? Say rather ‘galloping’.

Read it.

All across Europe, the cover-up is unravelling. For ideological reasons, and to a lesser degree due to misguided economic theories, Western Europe’s elites have pretended that importing millions of Muslims from countries ranging from Morocco to Afghanistan raises no issues and creates no problems. That this is untrue has been obvious for a long time, starting with the Turkish “guest workers” who never leave. But recent events have ripped the lid off the pretense that has dominated European discourse about immigration for many years.

Read it.

For the last several months, social scientists have been debating the striking findings of a study by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton.* Between 1998 and 2013, Case and Deaton argue, white Americans across multiple age groups experienced large spikes in suicide and fatalities related to alcohol and drug abuse—spikes that were so large that, for whites aged 45 to 54, they overwhelmed the dependable modern trend of steadily improving life expectancy. While critics have challenged the magnitude and timing of the rise in middle-age deaths (particularly for men), they and the study’s authors alike seem to agree on some basic points: Problems of mental health and addiction have taken a terrible toll on whites in America—though seemingly not in other wealthy nations—and the least educated among them have fared the worst.

And everywhere they look the cry of ‘White Privelege!’ sounds from their newspapers and their TV sets, their college campuses and their shopping malls. I’m surprised they’re not doing worse than they are.

Read it.

The next time you read of doom-and-gloom about how there are all these poor starving people in the world, remember that people are complaining that we’re growing too much food.

Read it.

If Debbie Wasserman Schultz wanted to “maximize the opportunity for voters to see our candidates” she failed. But she probably didn’t; she probably helped schedule the debates on purpose on nights that TV audiences would be small so as not to give too much exposure to Hillary Clinton’s rivals. And she’s probably lying about it now.

Whoa. When you’ve lost Slate magazine, you are one dead Democrat.

Read it.

Finally, an incentive to watch the Oscars.

Perhaps they could create some new categories:

Best Token Fashionable Minority Affirmative Action Victim.

Best Supporting Token Fashionable Minority Affirmative Action Victim.

Best Celebrity Snit.

Best Excuse to Wildly Throw Around Accusations of Racism and Sexism.

Read it.

Read it.

That’s why they call it the Affordable Care Act — because they act as if it were affordable care, but it’s really just an act.

Obamacare – the gift that keeps on shivving.

Read it.

Members of the Ohio University activist group Black Lives Action Coalition (BLAC) want to see compulsory “cultural competency” courses established for the spring of 2017.

We could hold them out in the woods and call them Re-Education Camps.

And people could be expelled for racist/sexist/homophobe/whatever ThoughtCrime! Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Read it.

Ideological purity always does that to a cynical and corrupt ruling class. The nomenklatura in the Soviet Union had similar worries.

Much like any train wreck, of course, those not involved can appreciate the entertaining moments.

Pass the popcorn.

Mark Steyn ponders the irony.

Canadians are dead, and so is satire. Six Quebeckers get slaughtered by Islamic terrorists in Burkina Faso, and to honor their memory Prime Minister Justin Trudeau leads a moment of silence …at a mosque.

And probably didn’t think twice about it. It would have been hilarious if a jihadist had cut his head off, but you can’t have everything.

Speaking of prime ministers, having spent his entire premiership assuring us that whatever happens in the news headlines is nothing to do with Islam, David Cameron has suddenly discovered a few things that are to do with Islam. The opening paragraph from Mr Cameron’s column in the London Times:

Where in the world do you think the following things are happening? School governors’ meetings where male governors sit in the meeting room and the women have to sit out of sight in the corridor. Young women only allowed to leave their house in the company of a male relative. Religious councils that openly discriminate against women and prevent them from leaving abusive marriages.

The answer, I’m sorry to say, is Britain.

Ah, right. And who in Britain bears responsibility for letting a parallel self-segregating society incubate and grow these last 20 years?

Read it.

As a Democrat, she wants to buy your vote; and she realizes that you’re easy, but not cheap.

Read it.

The elites who live extravagantly along the coast have their own peasants – nannies, gardeners, maintenance workers and security guards. They account for one-sixth of the welfare recipients in America. The shrinking middle class, meanwhile, “drives on substandard roads to a job that does not quite pay for his once overpriced but now underwater house, or the most expensive and highly taxed gas in the nation.”

Read it.

And this is in the New York Times, so it must be true, right?

We liberals are sometimes glib about equating guns and danger. In fact, it’s complicated: The number of guns in America has increased by more than 50 percent since 1993, and in that same period the gun homicide rate in the United States has dropped by half.

‘Glib’? I wouldn’t say that. ‘Delusional’? That I would say.

Read it.

Fifteen years ago this month, on Jan. 20, 2001, his last day in office, Bill Clinton issued a pardon for international fugitive Marc Rich. It would become perhaps the most condemned official act of Clinton’s political career. A New York Times editorial called it “a shocking abuse of presidential power.” The usually Clinton-friendly New Republic noted it “is often mentioned as Exhibit A of Clintonian sliminess.”

…

What bothered so many was that Clinton’s clemency to Rich reeked of payoff. In the run-up to the presidential pardon, the financier’s ex-wife Denise had donated $450,000 to the fledgling Clinton Library and “over $1 million to Democratic campaigns in the Clinton era.”

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

Rich died in 2013. But his business partners, lawyers, advisers and friends have showered millions of dollars on the Clintons in the decade and a half following the scandal.

Clinton corruption .. the gift that keeps on giving.

“And I say unto you, make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, that when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.” — Luke 16:9.

Read it.

The Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) started off 2016 by removing the manatee from the Endangered Species Act (ESA) designation of “endangered” to the lesser designation of “threatened.” In a notice in the Federal Register published after the announcement, the FWS noted that manatee populations have seen gains such that there is a “very low percentage chance of this animal going extinct in the next 100 years.” However, the FWS noted one of the more pressing threats to the manatee resurgence would come from President Obama’s carbon regulations under the Clean Power Plan.

It’s no secret the President’s carbon regulations will force the premature retirement of coal-fired power plants across the U.S. In fact the President seems wholly indifferent to the thousands of jobs and livelihoods he’s destroying. However what the President and EPA did not count on is that some of the power plants that will be shuttered are integral to the survival of hundreds of Florida manatees.

The issue stems from the fact that the warm-water discharge from some Florida coal-fired power plants, such as Florida’s Big Bend Power Station, has become home to hundreds of West Indian manatees. The manatees are drawn to the warm-water discharge for a nearly six-month period in the winter.

The FWS’s notice on the manatee’s new ESA designation stated, “Within the Southeastern United States, the potential loss of warm water at power plants…used by wintering manatees is identified as a significant threat.” The FWS went on to point out that “addressing the pending loss of warm water habitat from power plant discharges remains a priority activity needed to achieve recovery.”

Read it.

I’m happy to see this sort of thing get out into the wider world.

Read it.

In 2008, Ed Boland, a well-off New Yorker who had spent 20 years as an executive at a nonprofit, had a midlife epiphany: He should leave his white-glove world, the galas at the Waldorf and drinks at the Yale Club, and go work with the city’s neediest children.

“The Battle for Room 314: My Year of Hope and Despair in a New York City High School” (Grand Central Publishing) is Boland’s memoir of his brief, harrowing tenure as a public-schoolteacher, and it’s riveting.

Only if you like the horror story that is life in the modern government school.

Government schools didn’t used to be this bad. Identify what has changed, and you’ll know why they’re this bad now. Bite the bullet and vote against the sort of people who are responsible for this degeneration.

Eric S Raymond gives the best explanation of Natural Right that I’ve ever seen.

In modern terms, we can think of “natural rights” as the political and social rules which are required to sustain “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, and derive them not from religion but from game-theoretic analysis of the behavior of competing agents in a political system.

The theorists of English Republicanism in the century and a half before the Declaration of Independence did not have the language of economics or game theory, but they developed a pretty firm grasp on the theory of natural rights by studying the historical failure modes of various political systems.

The English Republican defenses of (for example) the right to free speech were very simple: if these are not the rules of your polity, your polity will come to a bad end in tyranny and chaos and great suffering. In modern terms, they were seeking stable cooperative equilibria under the recognition that most possible sets of political rules do not yield it.

Read it.

Oregon has a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by forcing electric companies to stop burning coal and to get half their energy from renewable resources. It sounds like a great plan, but like so many government plans, it has a few flaws.

First, it won’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Second, it will increase energy prices, thus reducing the viability of Oregon’s economy.

At least, that’s the conclusion of Oregon’s Public Utility Commission, the three-member board that is supposed to regulate electric utilities. The only problem is that the commission was never consulted about the energy plan, suggesting that the state is listening only to groups who are already true believers.

“We have some deep concerns about these negotiations because we think they will not be effective in reducing carbon emissions,” wrote commission chair Susan Ackerman in an email to the governor’s staff, “but they will be expensive to consumers.”

That never stopped them before.

Read it.

A secret meeting (secret until afterwards) took place last week between Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of the ruling Law and Justice Party in Poland, and Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary. Poland and Hungary are two of the “Visegrad Four” countries, which together are looking to resist the refugee resettlement mandates that the quota czars in Brussels are attempting to enforce.

At the moment the European Union is unhappy with the conservative Polish government’s changes to the country’s courts and media, and is considering economic sanctions against the Poles for going against the diktats of the center in Brussels.

Baron Bodissey, at Gates of Vienna blog, recounts an adventure.

In medieval Arabic literature, maqama were collections of tales recounted in a mixture of poetry and prose. Each vignette described the accomplishments of a sly trickster who hoodwinked his adversaries using deceptive rhetoric.

In recent days here at Gates of Vienna we’ve had our own silver-tongued Arab dazzling us with his maqama in comments on various posts. Dubbing himself “Muslim”, he left a series of reasonable-sounding, carefully balanced comments whose style verged on the unctuous. When anyone responded to him, he offered additional soothing bromides with equal verbal virtuosity.

Read it. And watch the video.

The following report by Ezra Levant of TheRebel.media discusses the case of a culture-enriching young man named Walid Mustapha Chalhoub, who groomed underage girls in Quebec and turned them into his sex slaves. Mr. Chalhoub — who has now pleaded guilty to the charges against him — was a predator whose modus operandi was remarkably like that of the grooming gang in Rotherham, even though the scope of the operation in Quebec was more modest.

Adjustable Focus Reading Sunglasses.

Bay Area Regional Planner. Be the first on your block to be the Stalin of San Francisco.

Golden Skull Chair. For when you take over the world.

The Viking Coloring Book. Pillage first, then burn.

StinkBOSS.

Totem Recycling Bin.

Gorilla Grip Bath Pillow. I am not making this up.

Hypoallergenic Tongue Cleaner. Those of you who need this know who you are.

The Perfect Bag for a Heist.

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Read it.

Ever notice how feel-good government programs by The Great Nanny wind up encouraging people to lie, cheat, and steal?

Check it out.

I’d like to see these on the street.

Read it.

The Kennedy Political Union, the student organization that hosted the event, imposed a no-filming rule after explicitly inviting “student media” to cover Cullors’ speech and even reserving seats for reporters.

What are they trying to hide?

Organizers may have had reason to fear that a moment from Cullors’ talk would go viral. In her opening remarks, Cullors addressed a rumor that activists who disagree with her may be present among the crowd.

Oh, ya think? What are they trying to hide? Actionable slander, perhaps?

Is it time to coin the hashtag #BlackPrivilege?

Steven Hayward at PowerLine blog smells a rat, a big ugly one.

About this business of the navy patrol boats captured by Iran. As Scott and Investors Business Daily point out, there’s something off about the official story that a “navigation error” caused the boats to stray into Iranian waters. I don’t believe this story for a moment. (And the initial explanation that the boats “drifted” there after engine trouble has already been withdrawn. Why was that put out or not disavowed immediately?) One hopes that boat crews would navigate by means in addition to GPS since GPS could be taken out in a serious conflict, but unless our sailors have become incompetent or there was some extraordinary failure on these boats (unlikely I think), this “navigation error” sounds like either a deliberate mission that the Pentagon can’t acknowledge*, or the Iranians captured the boats in international waters, and we’re not willing to dispute their claim because of the Iran arms treaty agreement.

I don’t believe the government’s story for a minute, either. A number of former special forces types have explained at great length that this fable is, due to the planning and preparation for such a mission, exactly that — a fable.

This is just a fig leaf to excuse the government from having to respond to a blatant violation of international law by the Iranians, which one might call the Obama Benghazi Doctrine.

Read it.

It was a different kind of terrorist attack: a carefully orchestrated, coordinated mass rape and sexual assault on hundreds of women across Cologne, Germany amongst the firework celebrations of New Year’s Eve. Reports of the attacks describe women desperately fleeing as men pulled at them, groped between their legs, dragged them into alleyways, and witnesses who struggled to rescue them as men threw bottles and fireworks at the police.

Two weeks later, more than 500 women, along with other victims in Hamburg, Stuttgart, and Berlin, have filed complaints, and 22 suspects have been identified. Most of those suspects are asylum-seekers, new arrivals from war-torn Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan who, German officials now say, used the country’s open-armed offer of sanctuary to the victims of terrorism as a gateway to wage even more terrorism in the West.

It worked. Across Europe, women have voiced a new fear of being on the streets at night and concern that the attacks in Germany will spread. In fact, they have already. Other such rapes were reported in Finland, Sweden and Austria over New Year’s as well, though on a smaller scale.

Read it.

Recently arrived Arab migrants sexually assaulted large numbers of German women in front of the Cologne Cathedral on New Year’s Eve, in case you have been in a catatonic trance for a fortnight.

…

A Syrian woman friend of mine tells me that Syrian girls are routinely insulted, harassed, and groped by young Muslim men in Syria. It makes no difference whether the girls are Muslim or Christian, she says.

…

What was more extraordinary than what happened in Cologne was the fact that it was carefully covered up by the police, the city hall, and the Rhineland government. They all lied and lied and lied. News got out because of the social media and an invaluable news website called Breitbart.

Gavin McInnes turns over a rock.

If you just landed here from outer space, you’d assume cis white scum like DiPaolo are functionally retarded and Western society is run by white women, black men, and a smattering of gays. We’ve gone from providing women and minorities with inspiring role models to turning them all into infallible gods who are constantly held back by bumbling white men.

…

When my kids turn on cartoons all I see is girls in lab coats and blacks with glasses solving complex problems while some white boy stumbles in and blurts out, “DUH!”

…

Adult programming is the same. Is there a head of surgery on TV who isn’t black? Sir Lancelot is now black. The Ghostbusters are women. Thor is black. Mad Max is a woman. Spider-Man is black. Ocean’s 11 is all women. Meat Loaf is gay. The Honeymooners are black. James Bond is black or maybe he’ll be gay. At the beginning of the Annie reboot where we discover she’s now black, she performs for her classmates and tells them welfare-state pioneer FDR was the greatest president ever because he brought us the New Deal. Later in the movie, we discover Annie can’t read. Nice utopia, you Feel-Good Communists. That’s what’s so annoying about watching these people push us into the passenger seat. They can’t drive. The fake world they’re forcing down our throats is as boring to watch as it is totally implausible.

Mark Steyn points out some inconvenient truth.

There’s no point pretending the illegal seizure and release of America’s sailors is anything other a huge propaganda victory for Iran – and a humiliation for the United States. Insofar as there was a strategic calculation behind Obama’s outreach to the mullahs, it was that the nuclear deal and the lifting of sanctions would incentivize the Islamic Republic to start behaving like any other house-trained member of the community of nations. In other words, they’d stop pulling this stuff.

If I were in the military, I’d be planning to leave and do something else for a living.

I wonder what other videos Iran took. With the British hostages, I recall they mocked one of the lads because he reminded them of Mister Bean. I’m not sure that’s specifically mentioned in the Geneva Conventions, but I reiterate my point: The ayatollahs can’t – yet – beat our tanks and planes, so they pick battlefields where they can win, very easily. We should know that by now, and train our guys to act accordingly.

…

In fact, the Iranians are doing exactly what they’ve always done. They got their nuclear deal, and it’s business as usual. The only difference is that, a decade ago, they did it to America’s allies but they never quite dared to do it to America itself.

Now they do.

Read it.

How does it keep from getting run over?

Read it.

How did that happen?

The decision prompted outrage from liberal clergy with one prominent supporter of gay marriage saying he was “thoroughly ashamed to be Anglican” because of  the decision.

I suspect that the feeling is mutual.

“Recent developments in the Episcopal Church with respect to a change in their Canon on marriage represent a fundamental departure from the faith and teaching held  by the majority of our Provinces on the doctrine of marriage,” the document said. “The traditional doctrine of the Church in view of the teaching of Scripture, upholds marriage as between a man and a woman in faithful, lifelong union. The majority of those gathered reaffirm this teaching.”

Amazing. They may be Christians after all. Whoda thunkit?

Read it.

No good deed goes unpunished. Schrade Middle School in Garland, Texas, suspended a 12-year-old girl for several days—and has placed her in alternative schooling for the next month—because she lent her inhaler to a classmate who was having difficulty breathing.

No good deed goes unpunished — ain’t that the truth?

The school district is probably right that Rush shouldn’t have shared her inhaler, but who can blame her for wanting to help? That said, there’s an easy solution available to the school: just tell Rush not to do it again. That’s it. Not every mistake requires a punishment. Sometimes, it’s sufficient to correct inappropriate behavior without ruining a child’s entire school year.

Sorry, that’s too sensible for a modern school official.

Read it.

And they weren’t even very good fakes.

Or perhaps all of the unborn children who died on his watch. Your choice.

Read it.

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) is planning to introduce legislation that would require sports franchises who have received public financing for their stadiums and other projects to pay back those funds if they “prematurely” relocate to another city.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that McCaskill, channeling the rage felt by many of her constituents in the Show-Me State over the NFL’s decision to allow Rams owner Stan Kroenke to move his team from St. Louis to Los Angeles, wants to make sure the public is “treated fairly” if a team subsidized by taxpayer dollars decides to skip town before the bills are paid off, which is the case with the Rams.

Apparently the taxpayers of Missouri are still on the hook for $100 million for the stadium that the Rams are leaving behind. Just terrible, the way some people just won’t stay bought.

Read it.

Prediction: This won’t end well. For a hint, review China under the Cultural Revolution. Be sure to count the bodies.