Hillary admitted to hospital over 'blood clot' issues - do I owe her an apology? Possibly, but I doubt it - my cynicism regarding this administration has risen to such dizzy heights that I take absolutely nothing they say or do at face value. Nothing. It is possible that the concussion story was floated in order to hide some other more worrisome ailment related to 'blood clots' that might pose a threat to her future political aspirations - I'll allow for that possibility - but I still doubt it if only because of the extremely convenient timing - but aside from the timing this blood clot story is just as full of seeming holes as the concussion story - she was diagnosed without having gone to a hospital? Not likely, not at all - a blood clot is only discoverable through tests that need to be administered in a hospital - and then I'm supposed to believe she was diagnosed with a clot two weeks ago and only now is being treated for it? Ah... sorry, not buying it. Suppose this makes me sound like a horribly insensitive person, but, regardless, none of this stuff rings true in any way whatsoever to my ear.

Now, understand, whatever little game Hillary is up to here is certainly a story in and of itself - but it's the corruption it is a manifestation of that is the big story - sure, it'd be nice if she'd testify and maybe the curtain then gets peeled back a bit on the whole Benghazi mess and maybe a lurid light then falls on the awful, misguided jumble of misdirection that is Obama's foreign policy - but real point of all this is that only happens if the press and media report on such in an honest, objective and thoroughly investigative way and they've made it clear that's not gonna happen - which makes that the big story here and, needless to say, a story that will also not be covered for obvious reasons.

As we see with the bogus fiscal cliff negotiations, that charade that has turned into a faux debate on taxing the rich as if taxes on the putative, arbitrarily assigned rich had anything to do with our problems - I believe everything Obama does is predicated on his firm faith that the opinion makers in the country will do what he wants them to do, will more or less fall in line behind the message he wants put out there - sure, there may be some minor push back on the margins of this dynamic - but Obama wanted this debate to be about taxing the rich because as always his main if not sole interest here is a political win driven by ideology and accordingly that's the narrative that gets played - I suppose you can fault republicans for not having a sound strategy in response - but that's why I advised them not to engage in negotiations at all with the man in the first place - if the media is not gonna behave like an objective arbiter of opinion and the result of that is a 'rigged game' that strongly favors the president, it's hard to beat that, not impossible but certainly difficult, and especially difficult if one lacks the attributes required to make the media work for you - and needless to say current GOP congressional leadership lacks those skills.

In short, what we see in the age of Obama, is that media bias has almost entirely hollowed out the whole notion of open and substantive public debate and I have trouble seeing how a democracy survives something like that, or at the very least manages to avoid a serious breakdown at some point because of it. There's a reason the first amendment is about freedom of speech - you don't get a viable democracy without it - and when opinion makers have chosen to chain themselves to a specific ideological agenda regardless of objective, countervailing 'facts', haven't they in a significant sense stepped away from the whole point of free speech?

[but what if my whole fixation on this Hillary story was based on the assumption that there's absolutely no way she'd receive such incompetent medical supervision re how to respond to a possible concussion and yet in fact that is indeed what happened? Well... I guess I'd have to change my storyline... but, no, that just is not possible, no way she suffered a concussion and the orders were not get ye to a hospital for tests - just not possible - and yet news reports are suggesting that is indeed what happened - but I'm sorry, I just can't believe it, there's no way that would happen - no way - I mean a mediocre intern who scraped through medical school knows you suffer a head injury you should probably have tests done to make sure there's no swelling or bleeding in the brain, especially if you're a 65 year old woman who may be the next president of the US - I mean, c'mon - this story is just so, I dunno, odd - although, even if it turns out she really did suffer a concussion it doesn't really change my point here, that being what the hell does the American press think it's doing when it comes to Obama? - I mean, questions should have been asked, obvious questions like, for starters, what's standard medical procedure when an older person suffers a significant head injury - but the questions weren't asked and the only reason for that that I can think of is the press like me thought the timing of the 'illness' looked way too convenient andfelt it incumbent upon them to therefore run cover for Obama, which apparently means running cover for Hillary too - that in no way is a good thing and you're delusional out of your fucking mind crazy if you can't see that]

[addendum: to put this annoying thing to bed, it does indeed appear that H has a blood clot or something along those lines; it is not at all clear that she ever had a concussion or if the clot may be sourced to such a trauma; the blood clot was discovered during a checkup related to assumed concussion, which would have to happen in hospital, which no one heard about, which means she indeed could have had a secret visit to the hospital in the first place, which means the whole reason I thought the story an obvious lie may have been completely off base - but who knows since other than the blood clot the whole episode is shrouded in shadows - it's not impossible that there was no fall, no concussion, and the blood clot was a pre-existing condition that by mere coincidence became symptomatic right now - or it could be they are related, there was a fall, a concussion, there were hospital visits that were kept secret - whatever, I'm moving on since my whole point all along was simply that a VIP suffering a head trauma would almost certainly have to be hospitalized for testing purposes - that didn't seem to happen - which made the 'illness' look highly suspicious given she was supposed to testify on Benghazi and now will never testify on Benghazi - the press was not asking the obvious questions about hospitalization because they thought the illness was bogus too - that was my whole point, and it's still a valid point - that I may have calumniated H unfairly is unfortunate - but I made it clear all along that my main focus here was the behavior of the press - certainly if Condi Rice had 'taken ill' under similar circumstances there would have been no end to speculation on what was really going on in the pages of the Times et al]

Well, this is welcome news - or more accurately the study on the pestilential effects of the Community Reinvestment Act it refers to is welcome news if one has the technical chops to read that - whatever, the gist of the gist here is all the average person needs to know and it'd sure be nice if each was made aware of it somehow - which of course will never happen cause the media will continue to act as if the financial crisis was all the fault of greedy Wall Street types and the evil republicans who serve their greedy little interests - and since the socialist was re-elected by tying evil white rich guy Romney to the evil white rich guys of Wall Street we certainly can't have any inconvenient counter-narrative truths being spoken, no. Stop ruining the story by insisting on being right you awful most horrible haters, you anti hope and changers, you racists!

Stupid left wing thinking that led to ruinously misguided government policies caused the financial crisis - well, that mess was the ugly child of many parents not least seminal of which was prodigiously improvident business people of course - I'm not in denial concerning the culpability of Wall Street etc etc - but business interests did what they always do, take risks, sometimes foolish risks, sometimes extremely foolish risks to maximize profits, that's why the market goes up and the market goes down - the real root of the problem in this instance, the difference maker, the true seed of rottenness was idiotic left wing thinking being unleashed into that combustible marketplace through wretchedly ill advised government policy anxious to impose an illusory egalitarianism - it was the distortions created by this government activism that pushed the system towards the maelstrom over which we currently dangle - and now we have four more years of a president who could be a poster child for this kind of misbegotten shite.

Very hard these days to find something one can honestly feel good about. There was that YouTube video of the toddler gleefully jumping in a puddle while his dog loyally loitered by his side. That was nice. Doesn't quite make up for the ruination of the American empire - but nice all the same.

I have no choice but to reiterate: if the media, if the press has been corrupted, has chosen a side in a democracy then that democracy is as a consequence perforce under threat - eventually a significant proportion of the electorate will come to not simply lose faith in the government that the media has anointed [we're already there basically] but more importantly will stop viewing the government as legitimate - and then you're in trouble - then you've put in motion a dangerous dynamic where the refusal of the press to act as an objective critical voice and hold the government's feet to the fire will lead to mistakes, will encourage bad behavior and eventually drive the embittered 'losers' not favored by the press to act out in ways that are not predictable - as I've said before the likelihood rises that the 'losers' will increasingly accept as true the sense that the country has fallen to a left wing coup enabled by a corrupt media - again it's about legitimacy - a democracy cannot survive if the losing side has decided the process is no longer legitimate - if you think about it, a democracy is defined in a sense more by the losers than by the winners since the system cannot work unless the losers accept the results as reflecting a legitimate process.

Anyway, anyway - it's this Hillary nonsense that drives me again into Cassandra's arms - she's obviously lying - the story they've put out is that she was ill, became extremely dehydrated and fainted, suffering a concussion - this is quite obviously bull shit - the highly paid, highly skilled doctors who treat and look after our royal court would never allow such a prized member of that court to become severely dehydrated - a physical state that can be quite dangerous, even lethal - but even if somehow such a malpractice did indeed happen there is absolutely no way that this miscarriage would then be made infinitely worse by not taking the concussed person to a hospital for a full array of tests to make sure there was no bleeding or swelling in that valuable brain since such things are often initially symptomless and if left untreated very definitely can lead to all kinds of bad stuff not the least of which is death.

So this story is obviously a lie - of course pretty hard to prove it a lie, but only a naive fool or a partisan hack would think otherwise. Now, don't get me wrong here, that the Obama administration would engage in such dishonest behavior does not surprise me at all - in fact it's what I expect from them - and, let's face it, like or not this is what politicians do - sure, it's a bit more galling coming from the Obama since this unseemly reality is at large so thoroughly ignored and thus it grates harshly against the grotesque hyperbole of the man's public persona - but, whatever, being shameless liars hardly makes he and his court unique.

What's disturbing here is that they're lying without repercussions, and apparently without any fear of there being repercussions - in other words such an obvious lie being ignored seems to strongly suggest that Obama et al are right to not bother themselves with a fear that the press is going to hold them accountable for their words or actions in any substantial way whatsoever - the press ignored Benghazi in order to get Obama elected, and now they're ignoring it in order to protect the credibility of the likely 2016 democratic nominee. This is corruption of the fourth estate, pure and simple - and hell, it's not like they can claim a plausible deniability here - the Obama clan wants Benghazi buried and the media is going, sure, why not. This is the kind of hand puppetry Mursi expects from the Egyptian press and Erdogan from the Turkish press and the the Magi of the Middle Kingdom from the Peoples Daily - this is not what we Westerners expect from a real democracy.

[and although I do not want to get into the sad story of Newtown, we can see the same pathology playing out there as well - liberal elites and their media cohorts want to implant in the gullible minds of the public the idea, the sense that those kids are dead because conservatives like guns - especially 'machine guns' - how else do you explain the deliberate attempt by liberal talking heads to confuse the difference between an automatic and semi-automatic rifle? I doubt very much it's because they're so stupid they don't understand the difference themselves - it's obviously a deliberate ploy and it amounts to propaganda in service of a specific political agenda - gun control is like ideological catnip for these people - nothing confirms more clearly for them their assumed superiority over conservatives than their contempt for guns - well, unless the gun is being waved about in a Scorcese film or being carried by some amped up Kansas farm boy in Seal Team 6 who probably grew up with guns and has just wasted Osama with one - that they manage somehow to celebrate without troubling their pretty little vacant heads over the hypocrisy of it all]

"... in a democracy the reasonable are constantly under threat from the caprices of the foolish and increasingly each election feels like a roll of the dice where you're just praying the right numbers come up... the West is in the midst of an economic correction and it's painful and worrisome and no one really knows how it's gonna end... but it's the political correction still to come that possibly worries me even more since I'm thinking it's like to leave us longing for these difficult days as if they were nothing but sunshine and good cheer..."

Secretary of State's dog eats her homework - Hillary can't testify on Benghazi because she fell and suffered a concussion? Seriously? As I've said many times, these people are utterly shameless - there's absolutely no line of bullshit they will not cross - and now that Obama has shed tears on TV over the horrible murders in Connecticut, let's face it, he's untouchable, wouldn't be shocked to see his job approval numbers jump by 10, 15 points - might as well just give him more or less what he wants, let the next four years happen and if we somehow manage to survive [I'm not in love with our odds] just try and pick up the pieces then and attempt a moving on.

She can't testify because of a concussion - my god, that's too ridiculous to even laugh at, a simple guffaw indicating contempt and scorn is beyond me here - it's just sad, pathetic.

This reminds one of the de Tocqueville musing that suggested the American democratic experiment would be undone when elected representatives figured out they could use the public's money to buy the public's favor.

I dunno - am I crazy to believe that we should have shot down the North Korean missile? How else do we stop them from perfecting this technology? Shouldn't that be our goal? Cause this tech is just gonna end up in Iran - hell, they no doubt funded this thing - so we just allowed Iran to add another component to its emerging nuclear threat. And China's motives here are murky to say the least - they say they oppose the launch, but then they do nothing when N Korea ignores them - sounds to me like they're ok with it for reasons which are not entirely clear, although one assumes they see the implied threat as being useful to them - whatever, I gotta think China is encouraging it, either directly or through acts of omission, because I have a hard time believing they'd be tolerating this slight otherwise.

The point is, by not shooting it down we're enabling a lot of disturbing dynamics to percolate and god knows what's gonna come of that. Now I'm sure some game theory tree can explain why my contention is not 'optimal' - but I can't play game theory - I know the consequences of shooting it down could prove quite bad but that doesn't then imply that the consequences of not shooting it down will perforce be better.

I mean, what if the 'caution' exhibited here is perceived as weakness, a reluctance to engage, a signal of an American retreat, relatively speaking, from the region at some not too distant date - what does that lead to? How do the intentions, motivations, perceptions of the various players change under the influence of such? China just buzzed Japanese airspace the other day over the disputed island chain with a 'government' [not military] plane and Japan in response scrambled eight, eight F-15s - how long before the PLA ups the ante by using a military plane to push the envelope? Japan shoots down a Chinese plane and all hell will break loose. If Japan perceives America as no longer being a reliable partner in the region, don't they change their whole military posture which right now is constitutionally quite restricted?

Now of course I'm not saying you can draw a straight line from a failure to bring down N Korea's missile to an outbreak of hostilities between Japan and China - never mind what it portends viz Iran - what I am saying is that it seems absolutely foolish to act as if a line of some sort, possibly quite convoluted, can't exist simply because we might prefer to believe in the primacy of more amenable scenarios that only in a putative or highly conditional sense seem more reasonable.

"... simplistic posturing and pontification upon race and racism by left wing elites has become the new opiate of that elite and their indentured masses under the ironically post racial rule of Mr Obama... it's a little like victim porn for the dimly enlightened who long for the sentimental proxy of a shared but safe pain... tease some cliched narrative, express a bit of shallow outrage, then everybody goes to sleep... ah, populism, cheap date of the delusional and simple minded..."

Yes, this is very good. It has always struck me as confounding, galling even, that Obama is referred to as a 'realist' when it comes to foreign policy, a pragmatist - and especially galling when his foreign policy successes are characterized accordingly. Jesus, what successes? None that I can see. As referenced article points out, it's all incoherent chaos that sycophantic confederates choose to spin as realism as a means of either continuing to prop up Obama by forever pushing down on Bush - or simply as a ruse to avoid the loathed 'idealist' label - but to me that's exactly what Obama is, a confused, incoherent idealist. His whole approach to Israel succinctly makes the case - it was/is pure idealist fantasy, right out of the uber liberal play book on how to 'fix' the Mideast.

Think about it - the media [and the president for that matter, which may be a redundancy] presents it as an equivalency, republicans give on taxing the rich [very broadly defined so as to include those who really aren't rich at all] and democrats give on modest [no doubt very modest] entitlement cuts - but there's no legitimate economist or budget savant out there who thinks the rich paying more in taxes comes anywhere even remotely close to dealing with our prodigious problems compared to significant curbs on spending - in other words, as opposed to serious spending cuts, punitive taxes on the rich are constructive only from the view point of ideological pandering - as a practical matter viz benefitting economic performance and addressing fiscal realities they're virtually useless and indeed almost certainly counterproductive - and yet the media treats a possible 'compromise' of this sort as a fair trade. And apparently a majority of the the electorate is either dumb enough or lost enough in a socialist fog to think that makes sense.

And I'm supposed to sit here and pretend we aren't utterly fucked? Can't see it.

I too agree with this sentiment - in many ways when you look at the modern West this is the decay one sees - the productive dynamic of sacrifice for a future good is gone - everything's about the degenerative now - we're all sad charlatans sitting about dining on our tails, convincing ourselves of how wonderfully enjoyable and oh so special it all is and then drunkenly posting a picture of the self immolation on Facebook as if that amounted to a meaningful affirmation of something worth a damn.

Should the GOP walk away from ‘fiscal cliff’ negotiations - more and more seem to be considering this seemingly crazy notion.

The logic behind it would arise from recognition of a reality about Obama that I think even at this late date some people just can’t seem to fully accept - ie, that he’s a completely viscous player when it comes to his own political fortunes - there’s no lie he won’t tell, no line he won’t cross, no manipulative gesture he won’t essay - and whether that Machiavellian glee is just the expression of a prodigious ego or a prodigous hatred for traditional [don't you dare say white ruling class!] American values - or whether it’s simply him identifying entirely a victory by him personally as equalling in toto a victory for the movement in general doesn’t really matter - fact remains he plays to win at any cost, including romps over fiscal cliffs.

So, given that, the logic here would be that Obama’s only intention viz negotiations is to weaken the GOP so he can wipe them out in 2014 leaving him with two years where he’s free to turn America into whatever socialist abomination the left has in mind - to that end, either get them to capitulate and agree roughly to his desires on revenues and cuts which will split the GOP and cause uproar in Tea Party - or draw them out in bogus talks that in the end will be crafted to make it look like he tried oh so sincerely for an honest deal but alas evil, unreasonable [don’t forget racist] republicans, serving the 1% at the expense of the 99%, refused to play nice - and then off the cliff we go - but remember he’ll have the press more or less on his side, he’ll have the oval office, he can go out and give class warfare speeches across the country etc etc - and so even though the economy will likely tip back into recession with a cliff jump he’ll figure he can blame it all on the GOP and, again, they’ll be toast in 2014. After all, exit polls showed a majority were quite willing to blame Bush rather than Obama for current economic malaise - why on earth would one think he can’t mouth the same incantations over the next two years to conjure forth the same delusional magic?

If you believe the above scenario is true [and I think it probably is] the reason you’d walk away now becomes obvious: any negotiations you engage in are just a trap. Obama has put a ludicrously insufficient, one might say shamelessly disingenuous offer on the table - walking away extracts you from the trap and forces Obama to defend it.

But of course you can’t simply just walk away, refusing to sign anything - Obama probably wins that gambit just as surely as if you’d walked into his trap to begin with. No - acknowledging the lurking danger of the fiscal cliff you’d have to name what exactly you would be willing to sign in order to avoid it even while still refusing to engage in bogus negotiations with the Obama - and to do that you’re gonna have to convincingly explain to the people the rationale behind walking away which will necessarily mean saying some very nasty things about the president’s true intentions - no walk in the park that - which, again, is why you’d have to name exactly what it is you would sign - and there are only two choices here the way I see it: without any negotiations, agree to the offer Obama has put on the table, thereby making the democrats entirely responsible for the economic consequences that follow; or right now agree to sit down and sign the only bipartisan settlement out there and the only truly bipartisan agreement that will probably ever see the light of day given current dynamics - Simpson/Bowles. Now, SB is hardly a 'great deal' if you're a conservative, but then that's the point because probably even more so it's not a great deal if you're Obama but he can't simply dismiss it if the GOP is willing to swallow hard and take it - so that's a win, or at least not a glaring loss.

One can see how this risky move might appeal to disenchanted, cynical types like me who see Obama for the ruthless schemer, shameless political manipulator he is, don't think you can beat him by dancing around the edges [especially with the press running cover for him, which is really the secret behind everything Obama does] and believe that if you’re backed into a corner only a bold and cunning move is gonna save your ass and the only cleverly cunning bold move I can think of is the studied walk away - can't look merely petulant - regardless, I hold out very little hope for the success of such a venture, if only for one simple reason: for the game to work you’d need a very, very compelling spokesperson out front selling the whys and wherefores of it - and who would that be? Ryan? I dunno - possibly - and then the entire house GOP would have to be onboard with it - and so again if one wants to engage in the probable fantasy of this gambit the thing you absolutely without question are gonna need to produce is a smooth talker who can make the sale - cause without that, it's most likely a suicide run.

You’d think with the way things are going in Egypt and with the Arab pseudo spring in general that Israeli scepticism regarding the intentions of Islam viz Israel specifically and the West in general and the realistic capacity for Palestinians and their sclerotic, disingenuous leadership to accept anything even remotely approximating legitimate conditions for a peace agreement, you'd think this sceptical acuity would be given more credit, be treated with a more honest objectivity by progressives, those naive fools who unlike the Israeli realists they scorn got the putative Arab spring entirely wrong.

But nope, not gonna happen, as the Palestinian proto state UN vote makes clear - and then when Israel responds to this provocation by announcing the building of a few more condos in Jerusalem the progressives are very quick to label them extreme as if the Palestinian maneuver was entirely reasonable and sincere - Obama, who can’t bring himself to criticise what’s going on in Egypt, has absolutely no problem acting as if once again Israel has subverted a real opening for peace through unreasonable aggression. Obama et al got the Arab Spring wrong, Israel got it right, and yet still liberals in the West act as if Israel is the misguided party here.

You’ve almost got to admire these progressives, the plucky way they blindly carry on as if they know exactly where they’re going when they quite clearly don't have a clue. Well, admiration’s wrong, can’t admire something like this - envy - maybe I envy them, ignorance being bliss and all.