Kerry on Syria: "Transparently Futile ... Profoundly Wrong"

The WaPo editorial board rips into the hapless, hopeless Secretary of State.  The guys at the American Interest add a piquant comment of their own:

Future Presidents and Secretaries of State should take note: This is what happens when your foreign policy dies and goes to hell. Later, historians will rake your bones over the coals.

Quote of the Day: Seymour Hersh on Modern Journalism

The old Pulitzer Prize winner is none too pleased with the current state of things.  Here's a piece of it:

"... the New York Times still has investigative journalists but they do much more of carrying water for the president than I ever thought they would … it's like you don't dare be an outsider any more."

Ask Not For Whom the IRS Trolls. It Trolls For Thee.

While everybody in a justified uproar about the IRS scandal (and the hearings this week only made its wretched "leadership" look worse), there's a new response/"defense" making the rounds on social media, and I just have to shake my head.  Some lefty people are actually defending the IRS.  They do this despite the fact that the IRS confessed to purposefully going after particular organizations based specifically on their political (and now apparently even religious) convictions.  And you don't think this sort of behavior is wrong?  Really?  Really?

Apparently these folks are fine with the capricious abuse of power as long as it's their team doing the abusing.  The overarching principle that "abuse of power is bad" seems to go right past them.  Partisan ideology makes people blind, blind, blind.  Guys, the government beast that today bites the neighbor whom you hate can tomorrow just as easily bite you.

I've give you this as the quote of the day:

The IRS targeting citizens for political reasons is not simply another Washington scandal. At issue is something that strikes at the very heart of who we are as a people, what we believe as Americans and what this country has always stood for. 

The First Amendment was written to protect many different types of expression. But the Founding Fathers' primary concern -- and a first principle for every generation of Americans that followed -- was the protection of political speech. Apparently, the IRS was even targeting people who criticized how the country was being run. 

Protecting citizens' right to speak out against their government has always been an integral part of what separates us from tyrannical regimes. What the IRS did is how the KGB used to target dissidents. It is how they deal with troublemakers in China. 

It is not how we treat American citizens. Our Constitution guarantees it. 

... This is not about Republican vs. Democrat or conservative vs. liberal. It is about arrogant and unrestrained government vs. the rule of law. 

Preach!

Geek News: Revolutionizing Digital Privacy

There's an app for that!  Read the whole thing. There is a related thought. I also couldn't resist making this:

Here's a nice little Quote of the Day from Silent Circle CEO (and former Navy SEAL, by the way) Mike Janke: 

"We feel that every citizen has a right to communicate, the right to send data without the fear of it being grabbed out of the air and used by criminals, stored by governments, and aggregated by companies that sell it."

PREACH.  Surveillance society snooping pushing you?  Push back.  The fact that I have nothing to hide doesn't mean that you get to look at my stuff just because you can and feel like it.  The app launches on February 8.

Nerd News: The Cost of Administrative Bloat

It's worse than ever. Here's a bit of it:

Administrative costs on college campuses are soaring, crowding out instruction at a time of skyrocketing tuition and $1 trillion in outstanding student loans. At Purdue and other U.S. college campuses, bureaucratic growth is pitting professors against administrators and sparking complaints that tight budgets could be spent more efficiently. 

“We’re a public university,” Robinson [J. Paul Robinson, chairman of Purdue University’s faculty senate and a 59-year-old professor of biomedical engineering] said. “We’re here to deliver a high-quality education at as low a price as possible. Why is it that we can’t find any money for more faculty, but there seems to be an almost unlimited budget for administrators?”

Libertarian or Bust

I know I keep harping on this, but hey, this is my blog, and I'll harp if I want to.  Anyway, Nick Gillespie's latest take on why Romney lost is worth reading.  Never mind that I'm linking to it because it's pretty much what I personally think, but whatevs, right?  Blurb:

... the GOP, despite its endlessly repeated mantra of limited government, is wildly out of touch with the majority of Americans who consistently say they want the government to do less, spend less, and not enforce a single set of values.

Well, DUH!  Maybe the GOP establishment will finally stop looking at libertarians as though we were insane, shiftless loose cannons with no morals at all.  (Or NOT, probably not, but a girl can dream ... and, believe it or not, I actually dream of limited government and individual rights more than I dream of Ryan Gosling and Jensen Ackles.  I'll swear on a stack of Bibles!)

More blurbage after the fold so you can skip it if you're tired of my cheerleading for libertarians, sweetie pie.

Follow-Up: New York's Stuy Entrance Exam Controversy

I had noted the controversy here.  Here's a follow-up in the form of gentle reader and Stuy alum Eric's comment on the NAACP "othering" Asians in the Stuy entrance exam kerfuffle. Here's a blurb:

The NAACP isn’t contesting the neutrality of the exam. ... their claim is based on the result. The problem is the NAACP’s solution calls for race-based disparate treatment, which is a worse civil rights violation than disparate impact. 

I’m not angling towards separation. I’m calling out the NAACP for separating Asians. I agree that we should be able to trust the NAACP to guard the interests of Asian children – not ‘other’ and sacrifice Asians in order to favor other minority groups.  

You know what’s insulting? Read the NAACP complaint and see how it marginalizes Asians with the rhetorical trick of grouping together “either whites or Asian Americans”.

Quote of the Day: Ayaan Hirsi Ali Comments

She knows a thing or two about free speech issues and Islamist threats, and she remarks:

How often have I endured bizarre conversations with government officials who cling to the illusion that the threat is temporary or that it can be negotiated. And then there are the even more delusional positions staked out by some prominent intellectuals who blame the writer, the politician, the filmmaker, or the cartoonist for provoking the threat. In the days after van Gogh was murdered, too many prominent Dutch individuals expressed precisely this position, declaring smugly, “Yes, of course killing is wrong, but Theo was a provocateur ...” Will they never cease looking for ever more ingenious ways of apologizing for free speech?

No, they won't.  Heck, right now even the feckless US government is busy apologizing. That's why the rest of us have to keep on vociferously defending it.  Ali adds:

It was Voltaire who once said: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” As Salman Rushdie discovered, as we are reminded again as the Arab street burns, that sentiment is seldom heard in our time. Once I was ready to burn The Satanic Verses. Now I know that his right to publish it was a more sacred thing than any religion.

Amen, sister.

Awesome: Mike Rowe's Letter to Romney On Skilled Labor

Mike Rowe is even more awesome than previously thought.  (Marry me, Mike.)  Oh, be sure to read his open letter to the very end.  Zing!  Oh, and what this country needs is fewer bureaucrats and more Mike Rowes.  Here's more about the Dirty Jobs show and even more common-sensical, hard-working, pure awesomeness from Rowe's 2008 TED talk:

UPDATE:  Check this out!