Saying a Premature Peace Would Be a Worse Disaster, Nobel Peace Prize Winner Preaches War

M. Henri Lafontaine, president of the International Peace and Arbitration Association, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize [two years ago] and is a member of the Belgian Senate, has just left France for the United States, where he intends to conduct a campaign against the propaganda of certain American pacifists in favor of stopping the war. In conversation with a correspondent of the Herald, M. Lafontaine said that he proposes to preach throughout the United States that nothing could be more disastrous to the cause of civilization and justice than the conclusion of a premature peace.

— The New York Herald, European Edition, July 3, 1915

An American Tax Nightmare

The bureaucratic burden of identifying, verifying and reporting has caused many banks to regard American clients, particularly those of moderate means, as more trouble than they are worth 

wrote Stu Haugen in May as the former head for Republicans Abroad in France called the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (Fatca) "a massive breach of the Fourth Amendment, which forbids unreasonable search and seizure."

Middle-class Americans living abroad are losing bank accounts and home mortgages and, in some cases, having their retirement savings exposed to debilitating taxes and penalties.

There is no recourse and no appeal process. Those impacted are left with the choice of uprooting their families (including foreign spouses and children), careers and businesses to re-establish a life in the United States; or to make the painful decision to renounce their citizenship.

Without significant and timely changes, that will only be the tip of the iceberg as foreign financial institutions continue their search for unprofitable American accounts. Remember, the vast majority of those renouncing citizenship are not wealthy tax evaders trading their passport for income tax savings; they are middle-class Americans, living overseas, fully compliant with their U.S. tax and reporting obligations.

A week later, the International Chairwoman of Democrats Abroad, Katie Solon, responded:

Stuart Haugen’s article on the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act is an accurate portrayal of Fatca’s failings but gives an incomplete account of nonpartisan efforts to limit its impact to the tax cheats who are the intended targets.

Democrats Abroad and several nonpartisan organizations of Americans overseas have been lobbying for four years for a “Same Country Safe Harbor” proposal to provide relief to law-abiding citizens and lessen the burden on financial institutions without giving cover to those hiding taxable assets in third-country accounts. The Same Country Safe Harbor plan would exempt from Fatca reporting the accounts of American citizens who are legal residents in the country in which the accounts are held.

The Democratic National Committee called for Fatca reform eight months ago. The Treasury Department could implement the exception without legislation, which Mr. Haugen and the sponsors of repeal admit is unlikely to happen in this Congress or the next.

If the Fatca Legal Action lawsuit is ever to succeed, it will take years. Right now, the Same Country Safe Harbor proposal is the best hope for urgent Fatca relief.

Last Leader of DDR: "It was clear to me that I was not really prime minister but administrator of a giant bankruptcy"

In a 25th anniversary article on the fall of the Berlin Wall, the New York Times' Alison Smale asked six Germans from different generations (roughly 25, 50 and 75 years old) to describe their views on the past, present, and future of Germany. Notably Lothar de Maizière, the first (and last) freely elected prime minister of East Germany, had things of interest to say.

Adapting to a New Life

Lothar de Maizière, 75:

The elections [in spring 1990] were not really elections — they were a plebiscite for the unity of Germany, a state ruled by law, a federal system with a social market economy and the Deutschmark. I knew very exactly studies on the state of East Germany economically, so it was clear to me that I was not really prime minister but administrator of a giant bankruptcy. Back then I had 160 clients a year as a lawyer, now I had 16 million clients, full of unbelievable expectations.

Lingering Differences

Mr. de Maizière, 75:

I visited a lawyer friend in Prague three years ago and asked why people there seemed more content than those in Berlin. Two things, he said: We are comparing with earlier, while you still compare with the West. And we are changing, while you were changed.

The Russian Connection

Mr. de Maizière, 75:

The first time [Mikhail S. Gorbachev and I] met in Moscow on April 29, 1990 ... I had brought a piece of the Berlin Wall … as gratitude for his words, “He who comes too late gets punished by life.” And then he said something that I will never forget: “Didn’t we all come too late?” Gorbachev is for me a hero from a Greek tragedy. He wanted to have a humanized form of socialism, and got a shabby capitalism, pretty much the shabbiest. He wanted a democratized Soviet Union, and got its collapse. And yet he remains one of the great saviors of the second half of the 20th century.

Regrets?

Mr. de Maizière, 75:

I always said there was a 10/10 generation — 10 years too long in East Germany to really make a fresh start, and 10 years too young to retire. And that is tragic, because they were the people who for 40 years effectively carried East Germany. And then they were told we don’t need you any more.

Plus Ça Change… A Sherlock Holmes Story from 1891 Proves Prescient

Ann Althouse links to a New York Post story about a bum boasting he makes $200 an hour panhandling (cheers to Instapundit).

Remember the Conan Doyle story about the anguished family who called Sherlock Holmes about the husband/father millionaire who had vanished for days?

In The Man with the Twisted Lip, what was worse was that the police had found a disfigured beggar who was wearing the millionaire's coat, and he refused to testify or explain why he was wearing the man's coat.

Dr Watson's story concludes as Holmes pulls on the beggar's beard, it comes off and it turns out to be the millionaire!

He explains that many years ago, he had lost his job and had had no choice but to turn to begging for a short term.

Here, however, he made a lot more money than he had at his regular, honest job, and so he had turned professional beggar, amassing his fortune over the years.

Stealth is the Left’s watchword: Oh, those stubborn conservatives, when will they ever learn the value of compromise?!

Supporters of Houston’s “Equal Rights” Ordinance (HERO) are predictably crying foul after voters resoundingly rejected their ballot measure last week

notes Benny Huang.

Apparently it lost only because bigots poisoned the debate with “misinformation.” Sore losers that they are, its proponents can’t accept that the voters understood what was at stake and voted accordingly.

 … Particularly galling to HERO supporters was the opposition’s succinct slogan: “No Men in Women’s Bathrooms.” Once voters understood the issue in those terms the ordinance was doomed. HERO’s supporters count the slogan as one of the most egregious “lies” told in a vicious smear campaign. The only problem is that it happens to be true.

 A little background on HERO would be appropriate here. The original HERO legislation debated in the Houston City Council in 2014 explicitly stated that any person would be allowed to use “public” restrooms consistent with his or her “gender identity.” In plain English that means that dudes would be allowed into ladies’ rooms—provided that those dudes believe in their heart of hearts that they were born with incorrect body parts…or simply claim to. Women changing into their sweats at a Curves gym might look up and see a guy standing there in all his naked glory; and as long as that guy proclaims himself to be a woman, the law would indulge his delusion.

 … Both sides know HERO is about bathrooms but only one side wants to talk about it. Stealth is the Left’s watchword.

Predictably, the Houston Chronicle also ran an article bemoaning the intransigent opposition. The subtitle of the article shouted: “Compromise suggested for city ordinance not enough for some GOP, faith leaders.” Oh, those stubborn conservatives, when will they ever learn the value of compromise?
 
Perhaps conservatives didn’t want to “compromise” with the homofascist mayor because she’d already admitted that the exclusion of bathroom language didn’t alter the law one iota. A compromise without concessions from both sides is no compromise at all. That’s just caving. And why should HERO opponents cave when they have the voters behind them?

It should come as no surprise that the Houston Chronicle endorsed HERO twice. … Jayme Fraser … knew that Mayor Parker’s compromise was bogus and yet she still wrote a ludicrous article implying that the anti-HERO camp was stubbornly refusing to meet HERO supporters halfway.

Liberals are generally pretty bad at compromise and the homofascist subset is absolutely incapable of it. This is the Civil Rights Movement all over again and you’re Bull Connor. Ergo, they get everything and you get nothing. They don’t always get their way because sometimes they just lose; but they never settle for half a loaf and they absolutely never give up.

On occasion, they’ll offer a faux compromise of the variety that Parker proposed. Other times they try the incrementalist approach—“settling” for a partial victory, only to return shortly thereafter wanting to renegotiate the deal. After three or four partial victories they find that they’ve achieved everything they wanted. But most of the time the LGBTQXYZ activists don’t even do that. They concoct phony hate crimes, they riot, they sue, they get people fired from their jobs, and occasionally they even murder people. When they finally taste sweet victory they run the rainbow banner up the flagpole and declare #Lovewins!

Be sure to read Benny's description of "the pickle that suburban Palatine, Illinois has found itself in trying to accommodate a delusional high school student who thinks he’s a girl."

Intolerable! Everyone must be forced to believe the Big Lie. This is a “civil rights issue” and nothing less than total capitulation will suffice. We wouldn’t meet Jim Crow supporters halfway, would we?

We lost the last war with the homofascists because we tried to accommodate them. We thought we could offer them civil unions—all the benefits of marriage without the word. They weren’t satisfied. We thought we could let them do their thing and it would never affect us, but soon they were forcing us to be unwilling participants in their sham weddings, demanding to use church-owned property for their ceremonies, and dismantling long-standing codes of conduct for teachers at religious schools. There is no “live and let live” with these people. It’s absolute servility or pitched battle, nothing in between.

Related by Benny Huang: • Every media outlet has chosen to share Lila Perry’s delusion that he’s a girl, which explains why noone can find the teen’s real name anywhere

• "No One Is!" Leftists and Their Calculated Lies Intended to Pacify the Bitter Clingers

• Ranger School: Everything in the Obama administration is make-believe and subordinated to the agenda—even truth

• That’s what nondiscrimination laws are—involuntary servitude laws

• Diversity compels society give up its traditions, its sacred rights, and even its basic decency

Free speech is dying a death of a thousand exceptions

"This is not a free speech issue!" Or so goes the slogan of the crusading censor.

Benny Huang is enthusiastic about the new book by the author of There is No Such Thing as a Free Press.

Mick Hume, free speech advocate and author of Trigger Warning (Is Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?) daftly disassembles the arguments of the shut-your-piehole crowd. Hume argues that the expression of controversial ideas is becoming nearly impossible in the West despite its professed adoration for free speech.

While Hume assures the reader that his book was not written in response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre which occurred just as he was wrapping up the project, he does discuss the hypocrisy of the European elites who suddenly became staunch defenders of Charlie's artistic expression—and acted as if they always had been. Western nations are full of censors, he argues, and many of them are in high places. Banning sentiments that might offend Muslims was fairly pedestrian before the Charlie killings and continued unabated after the fact.

While almost most people claim to support free speech in theory, plenty of people rationalize exceptions to the principle that essentially nullify the sacred liberty. Free speech, he argues, is dying a death of a thousand exceptions. He focuses primarily on his native Britain, where the situation is dire, but warns that even the United States, despite its expansive first amendment, is succumbing to this dangerous trend. Hume obliterates some of the common rationales for censorship, including "That's not free speech, it's hate speech" and Oliver Wendell Holmes's "You can't yell fire in a crowded theater!" His analysis is spot-on.    

Everyone knows that no fault divorce is required to liberate women from being trapped in commitment; Yet change the context to the cost of broken families, and suddenly everyone knows that men are running away from commitment

Everyone knows that traditional marriage is a cruel institution that “traps” women in commitment, depriving them of the romantic love their noble hearts desire

writes Dalrock, satire dripping from his jaws.

Everyone knows that no fault divorce is required to liberate women from being trapped in commitment.

Modern women’s enthusiasm for divorce is hardly a well kept secret. [Not all modern women view divorce as empowerment, but a large enough majority does feel this way, which is why divorce empowerment is ubiquitous in entertainment aimed at women.]  If you are looking at media aimed to women, divorce empowerment is a staple.  This is quite literally a shameless obsession.  As new commenter Anna mentioned recently:

It’s crazy that every time that I find an article about marriage, it’s either about the actual wedding or divorce. As a 26 year old woman that has been married for 6 years, I’m well aware of the pressure for divorcing. There’s always a “5 ways to know that your marriage is over”. This is how I found your website and it all makes so much sense, even though I’m not a christian. I have no idea why society is leaning towards destroying its foundations.

Yet change the context to the cost of broken families, and suddenly everyone knows that men are running away from commitment.  This is especially important when it comes to conservative backing for child support.  In 2005 Phyllis Schlafly laid out what should be the standard conservative position on a government program designed to destroy families in Federal Incentives Make Children Fatherless:

The federal incentives drive the system. The more divorces, and the higher the child-support guidelines are set and enforced (no matter how unreasonable), the more money the state bureaucracy collects from the feds.

Follow the money. The less time that non-custodial parents (usually fathers) are permitted to be with their children, the more child support they must pay into the state fund, and the higher the federal bonus to the states for collecting the money.

The states have powerful incentives to separate fathers from their children, to give near-total custody to mothers, to maintain the fathers’ high-level support obligations even if their income is drastically reduced, and to hang onto the father’s payments as long as possible before paying them out to the mothers…

We can no longer ignore how taxpayers’ money is incentivizing divorce and creating fatherless children. Nor can we ignore the government’s complicity in the predictable social costs that result from more than 17 million children growing up without their fathers.

Yet Schlafly is an extreme outlier among conservatives on this topic.  Conservatives are the strongest backers of the child support system, and this is due to a deeply held belief that broken families are caused by men who aren’t willing to stick around and raise their kids.  This belief is so strong that conservatives end up taking very unconservative positions on the family.  Instead of opposing a law that creates perverse incentives to break up families, they enthusiastically support it.  Instead of supporting marriage, they support the system designed to replace marriage.  Instead of supporting an incentive based structure for production, they are wedded to a crushing soviet style quota system that discourages hard work.

In Order To Solve Problems, It Is Imperative That You Have Problems to Solve

Jim Davis's Garfield does a good job of describing the modus operandi of white-knight politicians in-shining-armor who are eager to come to our rescue.

Ben Carson to the MSM: "The American People Are Waking Up to Your Games"

Ben Carson strikes back at the press:
"You see, what you're not going to find with me is somebody who just is going to sit back and let you be completely unfair, without letting the American people know what's going on."

Challenging Queries from the Mainstream Media

Amazingly enough, this Wizard of Id cartoon appeared in July, over three months before the first Democratic debate.

Hundreds of federal employees, including officials at the State and Justice departments, have been found to hold qualifications from a bogus diploma mill operation

Seen from the Internet, it is a vast education empire

writes Declan Walsh in a major New York Times report:

hundreds of universities and high schools, with elegant names and smiling professors at sun-dappled American campuses.

Yet on closer examination, this picture shimmers like a mirage. The news reports are fabricated. The professors are paid actors. The university campuses exist only as stock photos on computer servers. The degrees have no true accreditation.

In fact, very little in this virtual academic realm, appearing to span at least 370 websites, is real — except for the tens of millions of dollars in estimated revenue it gleans each year from many thousands of people around the world, all paid to a secretive Pakistani software company.

That company, Axact, operates from the port city of Karachi, where it employs over 2,000 people and calls itself Pakistan’s largest software exporter, with Silicon Valley-style employee perks like a swimming pool and yacht.

Axact does sell some software applications. But according to former insiders, company records and a detailed analysis of its websites, Axact’s main business has been to take the centuries-old scam of selling fake academic degrees and turn it into an Internet-era scheme on a global scale.

 … In academia, diploma mills have long been seen as a nuisance. But the proliferation of Internet-based degree schemes has raised concerns about their possible use in immigration fraud, and about dangers they may pose to public safety and legal systems. In 2007, for example, a British court jailed Gene Morrison, a fake police criminologist who claimed to have degree certificates from the Axact-owned Rochville University, among other places.

Little of this is known in Pakistan, where Axact has dodged questions about its diploma business and has portrayed itself as a roaring success and model corporate citizen. …/…

Real-Life Troubles

Many customers of degree operations, hoping to secure a promotion or pad their résumé, are clearly aware that they are buying the educational equivalent of a knockoff Rolex. Some have been caught.

In the United States, one federal prosecution in 2008 revealed that 350 federal employees, including officials at the departments of State and Justice, held qualifications from a non-Axact-related diploma mill operation based in Washington State.

The effects have sometimes been deeply disruptive. In Britain, the police had to re-examine 700 cases that Mr. Morrison, the falsely credentialed police criminologist and Rochville graduate, had worked on. “It looked easier than going to a real university,” Mr. Morrison said during his 2007 trial.

In the Middle East, Axact has sold aeronautical degrees to airline employees, and medical degrees to hospital workers. One nurse at a large hospital in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, admitted to spending $60,000 on an Axact-issued medical degree to secure a promotion.

But there is also evidence that many Axact customers are dupes, lured by the promise of a real online education.

Left's Journalism Hero Becomes France's Foremost Anti-Immigration Mayor

In a past life he was France’s leading advocate for journalists, fighting to spring them from dictators worldwide, a fearless defender of freedom of the press on four continents and a hero to free-speech advocates

writes Adam Nossiter in the New York Times.

That was then. Now, Robert Ménard, the man who founded Reporters Sans Frontières — Reporters Without Borders — has become a symbol of right-wing extremism in France.

No longer a journalists’ advocate but the mayor of the largest city under far-right control in France, he says there are too many immigrants in his town, too many veils, too many Muslim children and too much culture that is not French.

Mr. Ménard has ordered the laundry off the window ledges, the satellite dishes off the roofs and Syrian refugees out of public housing. He has counted the Muslim children in schools here — a strict no-no in secular France — and increased police patrols on horseback in this whitewashed old Mediterranean city of 70,000 people, high unemployment, high poverty, narrow stone streets and medieval churches.

“People feel like they are being replaced,” Mr. Ménard said an interview inside the 18th-century City Hall. “Immigration has become massive.”

For the far right in France, his tenure as mayor of Béziers has become a laboratory of sorts, watched with fascination by the country’s media, chagrin by liberal-minded opponents and glee by the National Front party of Marine Le Pen.

 … “We are the avant-garde of change in France,” Mr. Ménard, 62, declared in the interview.

  … to Mr. Ménard, it is all straightforward. He wants most if not all of the immigrants to go somewhere else.

“I don’t want this city to be majority-Muslim, at all,” he said. “There is a majority of the Muslim population that is incapable of living within the norms of this country.”

“I love this country,” he said, ticking off France’s prowess in literature, art and architecture, even its “way of looking at women. I am as attached to them as to my own eyes,” he said.

“The identity of this city is not a Muslim identity,” Mr. Ménard continued. “This is a problem of numbers. When you’ve got two-thirds of the kids in a school with Muslim names — that’s a disaster. Impossible. There’s no way you could want this.”

In September, he strode into public housing here, wearing his tricolor official sash — the French national colors — and accompanied by a retinue of aides, to accost a Syrian refugee wearing a Berkeley T-shirt.

In his carefully enunciated diction, Mr. Ménard told the bemused-looking refugee, “Sir, you are not welcome in this city.”

The episode was filmed and posted on YouTube by the City of Béziers.

 … Mr. Ménard founded Reporters Sans Frontières in 1985 with friends, and until he left it in 2008, was an uncompromising defender of free speech, becoming ever more so as the years went on, and even speaking up against the law silencing French Holocaust deniers like Robert Faurisson.

Mr. Ménard was born in French Algeria and was forced to leave with his family, along with millions of other Frenchmen, when the country gained independence in 1962 — a background critics say explains his hostility toward Muslim immigrants.

More on Robert Menard

Diversity compels society give up its traditions, its sacred rights, and even its basic decency

We can now add Halloween parties to the list of things we can’t do because we live in a diverse society

notes one Benny Huang, who knows a thing or two about racial diversity.

Advocates of diversity ought to familiarize themselves with a little thing called “truth in advertising.” Like all ideas, diversity is “sold,” in a manner of speaking. Great efforts are made to get the public to buy into the concept that the optimal model for society is a heterogeneous jumble of people who share nothing in common. The fewer commonalities we have, the better! That’s what diversity means—differentness. It’s enough to make you wonder what the benefits of diversity are; besides the race riots and lack of social cohesion, I mean. As many condescending liberals have explained to me, the benefits of living in a diverse society include a panoply of ethnic restaurants right in our own neighborhoods…and not much else. I guess that’s a good enough selling point for some people.

But is it too much to ask of diversity’s booster club that they at least disclose the price of diversity before we decide it’s something we want? They never do. Diversity is promoted as an unqualified good, something that only a crazy person wouldn’t like. It’s all roses, no thorns.

Until the bill comes due, that is, and then we find out that diversity isn’t free. With a myriad of cultures comes a limitless set of traditions, social norms, prickly sensibilities and hot button issues. Someone is always bound to take offense or to feel excluded, which requires us to reinvent our culture from the bottom up. Now that we live in a multi-racial, multi-religious, multi-lingual, and even multi-gendered (!) society, our old ways are no longer appropriate.

I could easily write a book filled with examples of stuff that the diversity enforcers won’t allow us to say, do, and think. I would call it “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things”

Read the whole thing™ for "a short list of 'nice things' that people living in diverse environments can’t have." Benny Huang adds that he

could go on and on with dozens of more examples. Far from being a bonus, diversity looms as a pagan god that demands the constant sacrifice of everything we hold dear. In exchange for a few benefits—exotic restaurants, I guess?—it compels society give up its traditions, its sacred rights, and even its basic decency. The terms of the Faustian bargain are never spoken aloud of course because no one would ever accept it if they were. Diversity’s salesmen will tell us that there is much to gain and nothing to lose though experience should tell us that they’re lying. It first demands that we give up the small stuff, things that seem insignificant when considered in isolation, such as silly high school musicals. What’s the big deal if we ditch West Side Story for the sake of racial harmony? But it doesn’t stop there because diversity’s hunger is never sated. A precedent has been set and will inevitably be followed from there on out.

When will regulators be held to the same standard as VW executives?

Martin Winterkorn lost his job as Volkswagen’s boss because the carmaker cheated emissions tests

writes Andrew Morriss, Dean of the Texas A&M School of Law, to The Economist (“Dirty secrets”, September 26th).

Yet the heads of the environment agencies in America and Europe are still at their desks. This is despite the fact that the only way they wouldn’t have known that engine software might be detecting test conditions and adjusting the engine was if they had spent the past two decades on another planet.

 … It is impossible for any competent regulator to have been unaware of what was going on with other diesel engines after 1998.

You called for criminal prosecutions of executives that engage in this sort of behaviour. When will you start to hold regulators to the same standard?

Glenn Kennedy adds that the

VW scandal raises questions about a 1970s-era regulatory regime that is based on a one-size-fits-all emissions standard set at a national level, when the reality is that air quality is largely an urban, regional and sometimes seasonal problem.

Indeed, preferring a reduction in NOx emissions at the expense of lower efficiency and therefore higher carbon emissions has a possibly negative environmental benefit for a car driving along a deserted interstate in Montana, compared with a stop-start commute through smog-choked and densely populated Los Angeles.

But if VW’s technically brilliant “defeat” software is able to discern the purpose of the car’s operation and adjust its pollution output accordingly, then surely with GPS technology it should be able to detect its location and make the same adjustments. Feed real-time atmospheric condition data to the vehicle and it might dynamically adjust this trade-off in urban environments, preferring efficiency on clear, windy days, and lower NOx emissions on still, smoggy ones.

Put to a nefarious purpose, VW’s algorithms could well lead to its demise. But combined with updated, technology-driven regulation, this same code could contain the seeds of a smarter, more efficient approach to reducing transportation emissions.

Finally, Hovione's Guy Villax points out that

in Europe our regulators are asleep at the wheel. Football and diesel cars are small in America and big in Europe, but it is the American authorities who have taken action in those two scandals. How much longer will Europe allow non-compliance to be a competitive advantage?

Why All the Tears?

Women Unharmed By Men Touching Their Posterior, Says Danish Expert

DON'T TELL THE FEMINISTS!  After a Danish student made a huge public stink about "sexism in night life" — due to the fact that she got "insanely furious" that a couple of men had patted her behind in a Copenhagen bar (the bartender refused to obey Renna Rose Agger's remark to him, "that's illegal, throw them out") — Dr. Karin Helweg-Larsen told BT's Berit Hartung that there is no harm in that type of incident; for either men or women.

The expert on violence in society added that, yes, there might be cause for concern if it happened on a dark forest lane, but that she would never feel attacked if anyone pinched her buttocks.

If a woman is incapable of signaling where her boundaries lie, she said, that woman should refrain from going out on the town.

The Healer Who Would Make America Respected Again Seems to Often Get the Cold Shoulder From the Leaders of the World He Is Supposed to Be Saving

 … the two bruising encounters [with President Xi Jinping of China and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia] in such a short span underscore a hard reality for [President Obama] delivered as he heads deeper into a second term that may come to be dominated by foreign policy.

Thus wrote Mark Landler and Peter Baker about the Apologizer-in-Chief in the New York Times a couple of years ago, before spelling out the harsh reality in question:

his main counterparts on the world stage are not his friends, and they make little attempt to cloak their disagreements in diplomatic niceties.

Even his friends are not always so friendly. On Wednesday, for example, the president is to meet in Berlin with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who has invited him to deliver a speech at the Brandenburg Gate. But Ms. Merkel is also expected to press Mr. Obama about the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs, which offend privacy-minded Germans. 

For all of his effort to cultivate personal ties with foreign counterparts over the last four and a half years — the informal “shirt-sleeves summit” with Mr. Xi was supposed to nurture a friendly rapport that White House aides acknowledge did not materialize — Mr. Obama has complicated relationships with some, and has bet on others who came to disappoint him.

 … Even with friends, however, there is tension. President François Hollande of France was initially thrilled with Mr. Obama because he saw him as an ally against Ms. Merkel on economic issues. 

But by the time they met at the Group of 8 summit meeting in Northern Ireland on Tuesday, the relationship had soured, according to French analysts, because France is frustrated that the United States did not do more to help with the war in Mali and resisted a more robust response to Syria. 

Mr. Obama differs from his most recent predecessors, who made personal relationships with leaders the cornerstone of their foreign policies. The first George Bush moved gracefully in foreign capitals, while Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush related to fellow leaders as politicians, trying to understand their pressures and constituencies.  

“That’s not President Obama’s style,” said James B. Steinberg, Mr. Clinton’s deputy national security adviser and Mr. Obama’s deputy secretary of state. …

Have U.S. Relations with Russia Reverted to The Same Type as Those During the Cold War That Obama Once Mocked Romney For?

… the concern is part of a growing wariness among senior American and allied military and intelligence officials over the accelerated activity by Russian armed forces around the globe … the internal debate in Washington illustrates how the United States is increasingly viewing every Russian move through a lens of deep distrust, reminiscent of relations during the Cold War

write David Sanger and Éric Schmitt in the New York Times.

    Am I the only one who thinks that the world seems to be a far more dangerous place in 2015 than a decade ago (Russian Ships Near Data Cables Are Too Close for U.S. Comfort, October 26)?

    I remember when Barack Obama mocked Mitt Romney during the 2012 election, telling him "the Cold War's been over for 20 years."  I also remember him furtively asking Vladimir Putin's protégé for "space" that year, whispering that after said election he would "have more flexibility" with regards to making the U.S. missile defense more palatable to the Kremlin.

    Finally, I remember the enthusiasm in 2008 for getting that dumb, war-mongering cowboy Bush out of the White House, and replaced by a visionary who would make the United States loved and respected again, bringing an unprecedented measure of peace to the world in the process.

    Besides Moscow annexing Crimea (with Russian fighters routinely violating EU airspace), we have Beijing saber-rattling in the China Sea and ISIS capturing one Middle East stronghold after another.  (Yes, I also remember Joe Biden calling the 2011 return of all U.S. combat troops from Baghdad "one of the great achievements of this administration", with Obama declaring "I ended the war in Iraq, as I promised.")

    One might be excused for speculating that far from appreciating the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate's overtures, his numerous apologies, and what Democrats call "smart diplomacy," all sorts of actors have become emboldened and, if anything, are itching for a fight with Uncle Sam.

    During the previous administration, we kept hearing—far from inappropriately—how the latest batch of troubles of the time was "on Bush's watch."  Will no media outlet point out the obvious, that the leftists' feel-good, smiley-face fairy tales about the world ("be nice and talk to everybody, we can all live together") might be at least partially responsible for the the current perilous state of events?

When Hillary attended the funeral of a former Navy SEAL who gave his life at Benghazi, she told the victim’s father she would seek retribution—not against the barbarians who killed his son, but against the video maker

The mainstream media is loath to admit it but Hillary Clinton had a very bad day testifying before the Benghazi committee

opines U.S. Army veteran Benny Huang at Brian Kolfage's Wounded American Warrior.

The emails concern the motive for the attack and its perpetrators. It was never about “The Innocence of Muslims,” a Youtube video that portrayed the historical Mohammad as a truly villainous character. Nearly everyone now admits that the video did not spark the great Benghazi conflagration that left four Americans dead and a consulate in ruins—and by “everyone,” I mean members of the Obama Administration. It was like pulling teeth to get them to concede the point but they apparently have. Their current position is that they made an honest mistake in the Clausewitzian “fog of war.” As difficult as it was to defend the “honest mistake” narrative before Clinton’s emails were uncovered, it is now impossible—or at least it’s impossible for people who care about facts.

Three emails discovered on Mrs. Clinton’s illegal private email server—the one she wiped to stymie investigators—reveal that the secretary never believed the Youtube yarn for a moment. The night of the attack she confided in her daughter Chelsea via email that the compound had been besieged by an “al-Qaeda like group.” She said something similar to the president of Libya, and to Egyptian Prime Minister Hesham Qandil she wrote: “We know the attack in Libya had nothing to with the film. It was a planned attack not a protest.” These words were written approximately twenty-four hours after the attack.
 
Being the skilled liar that she is, Clinton actually tried to deny that she had ever claimed otherwise. Clearly it was a terrorist attack, not a spontaneous protest gone awry, and she had said so all along!

Okay, not really. On the night of the attack, she addressed the nation, saying:

“Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the internet. The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation. But let me be clear: There is never any justification for violent acts of this kind.”

So there are two lies in that brief statement—that our government values religious tolerance (LOL!) and that the attack was spurred by a video. I’m sure her defenders, weasels that they are, will argue that Clinton never definitively blamed the video but only claimed that “some” sought to justify the attack on those grounds. Who those “some” are is unclear, especially when one considers that the rumor was spawned at the highest levels of the US government. In any case, it’s weak sauce. She was clearly blaming “The Innocence of Muslims,” just as the rest of the administration did. They had their talking points coordinated and they spoke with one voice—blame the video!

 … It would be prudent at this point for Mrs. Clinton and her former boss to apologize to the American public for misleading them. It’ll never happen, I know. But there’s another person, a non-American, who also deserves an apology. His name is Nakoula Bassely Nakoula and he produced the video under the pseudonym “Sam Bacile.” Mr. Nakoula was the administration’s sacrificial lamb led to the slaughter so that the administration could appease the mob, escape blame, and win reelection. Besides the four dead Americans and their families, of course, no one has suffered more than he.

When Mrs. Clinton attended the funeral of Tyrone Woods, a security contractor and former Navy SEAL who gave his life trying to hold back the angry hordes, she approached Charles Woods, the victim’s father, and told him that she would seek retribution—not against the barbarians who killed his son, of course, but against Nakoula Bassely Nakoula. According to Mr. Woods, Clinton said “We’re going to make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.” Yikes!

 … The Benghazi attack’s death toll ought to include the names of four dead Americans, of course, but also the first amendment, which died a little that day in September 2012.

About Ben Carson: "He really is as nice a man as he seems"

We got a message from N-Joe, the No Pasarán webmaster who wrote for years for the weblog. 

He was at an event of Ben Carson's and sent the above photo along with the following text:

He really is as nice a man as he seems

If, like me, you want Joe N to come back and return to regular blogging, tell him so in the comments b'low.