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A settlement forced by the Obama Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency on a Wisconsin power company has forced an employer to prepare to cut jobs and spend millions paying for the Obama Administration’s green energy agenda. The EPA has entered into a consent decree with the Wisconsin Public Service Corporation (WPS) after federal regulators alleged that two of the company’s coal-fired power plants were in violation | Read More »

“… slipping into a bondage mask and handcuffs inside a church rectory in Springfield, Illinois…. this time he put the handcuffs on with the keyhole up instead of down….” Although I find this bloggable, I don’t want to listen to the recording. Hm…

The Washington Free Beacon reports: Armenian-American leaders and human rights advocates have expressed deep reservations about the nomination of Chuck Hagel to lead the defense department.

The Buckeye Firearms Association (BFA) announced in a January 9 release that over 1,000 educators have applied for its partner foundation’s Armed Teacher Training Program first publicized December 20, 2012. Applications are still being accepted via online survey. “The original intent was to simply offer free firearm training to 24 teachers in order to show that teachers could be an effective deterrent to mass murder in | Read More »

Louie Giglio is a Christian pastor in Atlanta. For the past two decades he has spent his time getting Christians to focus on a topic dear to me — human trafficking. That has been his calling and focus. It is a worthy cause. More than 17,000 people are smuggled into the United States each year to serve as slaves, often in the sex trade. American | Read More »

Mark Sanford, the former governor of South Carolina, will run for the House of Representatives, sources close to Sanford confirm. He will try to win election to the seat formerly held by Tim Scott. 

Sanford, a Republican who held the House seat himself from 1995 to 2001, will announce his intention to run early next week, ahead of the January 18 filing deadline. The special election to succeed Scott, who was appointed to the Senate by Governor Nikki Haley last month, will take place on May 7, with a GOP primary being held on March 19.

“An evangelical pastor from Atlanta [Rev. Louie Giglio] announced Thursday that he would not give the benediction at President Obama’s swearing-in ceremony after a sermon he gave on homosexuality in the mid-1990s resurfaced earlier this week.”

Suspicion: Giglio was chosen with full knowledge of that sermon and the intention that it would “resurface” and that he would then conspicuously withdraw. This would promote Obama’s pro-gay stance and take the heat off Chuck Hagel, who’s got an anti-gay remark in his record which the Obama people would like to submerge. It was all planned: the desire for Hagel to become Secretary of Defense, the known problem of his anti-gay remark, the desire to perform a conspicuous expiation, the identification of Giglio as a plausible benediction-giver with an anti-gay remark in his history, choosing Giglio, revealing the old Giglio sermon, Giglio bowing out in a tribute to Obama’s rejection of homophobia, Hagel saved by the scapegoat.

I’m not saying I believe this is what happened, and I certainly have no inside knowledge. I’m just noticing the correlations and putting together a hypothesis. Please discuss.

You can pull me back from this suspicion if you make a great case for why else Giglio would have been chosen for this honor. He’s a white male, by the way.

West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller says that he will not run for reelection in 2014. Rockefeller would have been very hard-pressed to win in his increasingly conservative state, particularly against the popular Shelley Moore Capito. As I noted, in November, when Capito announced her candidacy, she leads Rockefeller in the polls. And during her congressional career, she has represented roughly 40 percent of the state’s voting population.

As things stand now, Republicans need to pick up a net of six seats to take control of the Senate in 2014. It is not overly optimistic think that West Virginia will contribute to that cause. Rockefeller himself acknowledged that Democrats will have a hard time holding onto his West Virginia Senate seat.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey mentions a possible downside to Rockefeller’s decision:

[T]his means that Rockefeller doesn’t have to spend the next two years looking over his shoulder and shifting to the right to protect his seat. For the next two years, Rockefeller can vote without any accountability to the more conservative voters in West Virginia.

But the aristocratic Rockefeller doesn’t strike me as the bending, “accountable” type. With the possible exception of a few hot West Virginia issues, I wouldn’t have expected him to shift to the right even if he had decided to run in 2014.

It got them out of the morose election postmortem. Now, they’re in their zone. Guns! — such invigorating shift from having to talk about Mitt Romney.

Righties should be sending thank you notes to Joe Biden.

ADDED: Biden actually said: “There is nothing that has pricked the consciousness of the American people (and) there is nothing that has gone to the heart of the matter more than the image people have of little 6-year-old kids riddled – not shot, but riddled, riddled – with bullet holes in their classroom.”

Like it’s all a matter of the capacity to visualize gore.

If we picture a bloody mincemeat of fetuses, then do we get to take away abortion rights?

Tweeting photos from space.

“If there’s something that I can do to be proactive, it might hurt my body, it might hurt my physical beauty, but I’m going to be alive.” After the Miss America pageant, contestant Allyn Rose will have a pre-emptive double mastectomy: Rose said it was…

On January 22, two days after President Obama’s second inauguaration, Israel effectively will reelect Obama’s nemesis Benjamin Netanyahu. Unlike in Obama’s case, the Netanyahu electoral victory will be overwhelming. And it will reflect a much more significant mandate than raising taxes on the “the wealthy.”

David Horovitz, editor of the Times of Israel, accurately describes the impending Israeli mandate as the rejection of a Palestinian state, a rejection “prompted by a combination of the Palestinians’ intransigence, doubletalk, hostility, and terrorism, and of Israeli Jews’ security fears, historic connection, and sense of religious obligation.” Ironically, rejectionism was not Netanyahu’s policy; he announced his support for a “two state solution.” As Horovitz says, Netayahu is “a discordant relative moderate” within his coalition.

Horovitz calls this outcome a “dramatic imminent shift,” and he attributes it not to the Israeli electorate moving right, but to the popularity of a right that has become “far-right.” However, Rick Richman offers a persuasive refutation:

The Israeli left has also moved right, and its own shift has been even more dramatic. In “We Gave Peace a Chance,” Daniel Gordis notes that what destroyed the Israeli left was four years of the “Palestinian Terror War (mistakenly called the second intifada),” which disabused Israelis of the idea that the Palestinian leadership wanted a deal, and the fact that Arabs have become ever more candid about their ultimate goal, with Mahmoud Abbas telling Egyptian TV “he would never, in a thousand years, recognize a Jewish state.” Gordis writes that “Israelis across the spectrum are acknowledging what they used to only whisper: the old paradigm is dying”

Accordingly, says Richman, the “dramatic imminent shift” is not a shift, but a realization; not imminent, but rather what happened over many years; and not dramatic, but rather the slow accumulation of many events:

(1) the barbaric terror war against Israeli civilians, commenced after the first Israeli offer of a state; (2) the Palestinian rejection of the Clinton Parameters, after Israel formally accepted them; (3) the Palestinian failure to carry out even Phase I of the three-phase Roadmap; (4) the transformation of Gaza into Hamastan after Israel withdrew every settler and soldier; (5) the election of Hamas in 2006 and the Hamas coup in 2007; (6) two rocket wars from Judenrein Gaza, and the continuing prospect of more; (7) the year-long negotiation in the Annapolis Process that produced still another offer of a state, from which Abbas walked away; (8) Abbas’s announcement in 2009 that he would do nothing without a construction freeze, followed by his doing nothing after he got one; (9) the continual “reconciliation” attempts by Abbas with the terrorist group he promised to dismantle; (10) his failure to give a Bir Zeit speech to match Netanyahu’s Bar-Ilan one; (11) the inability of the Palestinians to hold an election, much less build the institutions of a peaceful democratic state; (12) the violation of their express Oslo commitments with repeated end-runs at the UN; (13) a Palestinian society, media and educational system steeped in anti-Semitism. . . .

Given all of this, Richman credits the Israeli democracy for reacting not with a “dramatic imminent shift” but with repeated efforts, over more than a decade, to give the Palestinians a state if they would recognize a Jewish one with defensible borders. He notes that “four prime ministers from three different parties (representing the left, center, and right) tried, and each met the same response.”

Now, Israel will opt for realism and finally take “no” for an answer from the Palestinians.

When asked if they have a higher opinion of either Congress or a series of unpleasant or disliked things, voters said they had a higher opinion of root canals (32 for Congress and 56 for the dental procedure), NFL replacement refs (29-56), head lice (19-67), the rock band Nickelback (32-39), colonoscopies (31-58), Washington DC political pundits (34- 37), carnies (31-39), traffic jams (34-56), cockroaches (43-45), Donald Trump (42-44), France (37-46), Genghis Khan (37-41), used-car salesmen (32-57), and Brussels sprouts (23-69) than Congress.

(Via Meadia)

So here’s a political and philosophical quandary to chew on. Do most Americans secretly yearn for Democracy? My answer is pretty much unfashionable and unsexy. Most Americans, if given a social unconstrained choice and the opportunity to control what happens if they don’t choose deliberative process, would tell you take Democracy and shove it from whence the waste emerges. So given this economic preference, who in their ever-loving gourd would actually like Congress? Certainly not that vocal and growing Ghengis Khan Fan Club™.

President Barack Obama will deliver this year’s State of the Union Address on February 12, which is the same day as Abraham Lincoln’s birthday.

… getting a flu shot — done! — and a mammogram — later. The mammogram is something I’d been putting off, but deciding to go in for the flu shot gave me the push I needed to schedule the mammogram. Dialogue with the nurse:

NURSE: Do you have breast implants?

ME [with slight disgust and amusement]: Nooo! [Changing my tone:] Oh, I mean, I didn’t mean any disrespect to the women who have breast implants.

This is the instinctive all-inclusive political correctness I carry about in my daily doings here in Madison, Wisconsin. Not that the nurse would have expressed disapproval if I’d said anything wrong. And I’m not even sure if my self-protective instinctive political correctness is a comic routine. It is something I see myself doing. Sorry if that’s TMI on the breasts, but I’m just saying: Come on, everybody, get your flu shots and (if needed) mammograms.

The AP reports:

The (U.K.) Daily Telegraph published a front-page article yesterday on the growing trend of sex-selection abortions taking place in the country aimed at exterminating unwanted girls. The apparent rise in gendercide coincides with increased immigration rates from India and China, where the murderous practice is common:

The Government was on Thursday night urged to open an inquiry after officials found signs that birth rates for girls and boys vary noticeably according to where their mothers were born.

A health minister said that these differences in rates of male and female births among mothers of certain nationalities may “fall outside the range considered possible without intervention”.

It forms the first official statistical evidence potentially backing up concerns that sex-selection abortions are being carried out in Britain.

Andrew Lansley, the former health secretary, last year criticised the “illegal and morally wrong” practice following a Daily Telegraph investigation into the issue.
After this newspaper received information that the procedures were becoming increasingly common for cultural and social reasons, undercover reporters filmed doctors offering women terminations based on gender.

Former MP Lord Alton has been a leading whistleblower:

Last night, Lord Alton said the presence of sex-selective abortion in the UK could be a product of terminations becoming too “routine”.

“Abortion has become so routine in Britain with 600 taking place every day that people have accepted the mantra that it’s just a matter of choice but that’s not what the law says,” he said. “There is a fundamental debate to take place here.”

He said the practice may have been imported from areas of the world where it is more common, including India and China “where sex-selective abortions have taken place on an industrial scale”.

This is the real war on women — and it’s the grisly consequence of “planned parenthood” taken to evil extremes.

If you’ve been paying attention, you know it’s here in America, too. In June, investigative tour-de-force Lila Grace Rose and Live Action once again exposed the gendercide-endorsing zealots of Planned Parenthood. Watch or re-watch the counselor in Hawaii condone abortion of an unwanted girl:

The group had earlier exposed gendercide-embracing abortion officials in Texas and New York City.

The bloody ghost of eugenicist Planned Parenthood Margaret Sanger is cackling.

On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss the nomination of Jack Lew to be the next Treasury Secretary, dire projections about the length of time until we reach the magic 6.5% un…

Via the AP: U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, who came to West Virginia as a young man from one of the world’s richest families to work on antipoverty programs and remained in the state to build a political legacy, announced Friday he will not seek a sixth term. Jay Rockefeller was not on my list of particularly vulnerable Senators for 2014 – I figured that incumbency | Read More »