Saturday, June 14, 2014

A Dog Ate 2 years of Lois Lerner’s Emails. Now What?

Posted By Roger Kimball On June 13, 2014 @ 3:37 pm In Uncategorized | 42 Comments

Former IRS official Lois Lerner
So the IRS suffered a catastrophic hard disk failure and — lo and behold! – two years of Lois Lerner’s emails have vanished [1]: poof! Just like that. Imagine. Evidence of those happy days targeting conservative groups, gone. So much for the memoir. Eliana Johnson reports [2] that Dave Camp, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, is really steamed. He has even asked the Justice Department to look into it.  “The fact that I am just learning about this, over a year into the investigation, is completely unacceptable and now calls into question the credibility of the IRS’s response to congressional inquiries,” he said in a statement. “There needs to be an immediate investigation and forensic audit by Department of Justice as well as the Inspector General.”

Still laughing? Yes, that would be Eric Holder’s Justice Department.  Don’t hold your breath, Mr. Camp.

Now, I actually might be able to help the IRS.  When we lost a hard disk at my office with lots of archival material, we were pretty glum.  But there are scads of data recovery companies whose entire business revolves around getting data off damaged hard disks. (“Recovering data from damaged hard disks” turned up 31,200,000 results in .36 seconds on the Google search I just performed.) I’m sure there are many such companies within a stone’s throw of the IRS.  And here’s an offer: I’ll gladly pay personally to have the data recovered. Really. It’s only $1000 bucks, $2000 tops, and I’d pay a lot more than that to know what was in those emails. Wouldn’t you?

But here’s the thing.  After we lost that hard disk, we wised up and started backing up.  We have redundant backups in our office and offsite back ups as well.  And we’re a tiny company with no IT department. The IRS commands the resources of the federal government and as much of your money as it chooses to glom on to. Is it credible that they have no backups of two years’ worth of emails of a senior staff person—a senior staff person who just happens to be at the center of a huge scandal?  What do you think?

I have a couple of other questions. 1. How will the New York Times, MSNBC, CNN, and the rest of the extended White House public relations team cover this story?  Will they cover it?  And 2. What will it take to rouse the public from its supine attitude of hapless acquiescence to this administration’s increasingly brazen lawlessness? I almost tire of reciting the litany, but here it is, part of it, once again, on the next page:

• Benghazi [3]

 • Obamacare (“If you like your healthcare plan you can keep your healthcare plan [3], period.”)

• IRS [4]

 • Immigration [5]

 • et very much cetera (think Fast & Furious [6], Yucca  Mountain nuclear waste repository, making recess appointments when Congress not in recess, Solyndra, etc. etc. Read Andy McCarthy’s Faithless Execution [7]).

What would Obama have to do to lose the confidence of the people? Rob a bank? His economic policies have robbed society of more than any bank has on deposit. Murder someone?  Ask the families of Chris Stevens and the other people slaughtered at Benghazi what they think about the president’s performance as commander-in-chief.

I wish I knew the answers to these questions.  It seems to me that the scandals emanating from this administration are coming faster and faster. Where is the Fourth Estate?  Where are the people?  I wish I knew.

More from Bryan Preston: Convenient [8]
Article printed from Roger’s Rules: http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball


URLs in this post:

[1] two years of Lois Lerner’s emails have vanished: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jun/13/irs-says-it-lost-key-lerner-emails/









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Don’t Blame Iraq on Obama Alone

Some Republicans are indulging in revisionist history. 

I’ve just written Faithless Execution, a book positing that there is such a solid legal case of high crimes and misdemeanors committed by the president that the time is ripe to build a political case for his impeachment. I have argued, moreover, that the president’s policy of appeasing and empowering Islamic supremacists has been a national-security catastrophe, catalyzing a jihadist resurgence across the Middle East.

It is pretty safe to say I am no fan of Barack Obama’s. But it is just as safe to say that for Beltway Republicans to blame Obama alone for the implosion of Iraq — which is now being overrun by the same Sunni jihadists those Republicans have championed in Syria and Libya — is shameful.

Look, I will stipulate that the president’s signature recklessness is abundantly evident in Iraq. He heedlessly withdrew U.S. forces, making no effort to preserve the security gains they achieved in routing al-Qaeda, even as it became obvious that the withdrawal had evaporated those gains and invited the terror network to return with a vengeance.

Still, it was not Obama who agreed to the withdrawal schedule. It was President Bush. And it was not Obama who turned Iraq into an Islamic-supremacist state seething with anti-American and anti-Semitic hatred. Long before Obama came to power, Iraq was an Islamist country, rife with Sunni and Shiite militants who agreed on little else besides their devotion to sharia and their abhorrence of the West.

In late 2008, several weeks before Obama entered the Oval Office, I wrote here about the status of forces agreement (SOFA) the Bush administration was then entering into with the ingrate Shiite government of Nouri al-Maliki. Even then, Iraq was pulling ever closer to the terrorist regime in Iran while American troops continued fighting to protect Maliki’s fledgling government from al-Qaeda jihadists — jihadists that the insidious mullahs were also supplying with money, training, and IEDs.

In the SOFA, the Bush administration agreed to strict withdrawal deadlines that invited al-Qaeda to catch its breath, wait out the United States, then resume the jihad as Americans were leaving — the better to make it look to the world like they were chasing us out. All American combat operations were to cease in mid 2009; and, at the end of 2011, all American forces would pull out of Iraq. The 2008 SOFA is the basis for the American withdrawal that Obama so anxiously consummated. It is what promised a resumption of Islam’s eternal, internecine bloodletting between Sunnis and Shiites that now has Iraq on the verge of collapse.
To listen to Republicans and those who foolishly repeat their revisionist history, you would think Obama inherited the Iraq so delusionally envisioned by Islamic-democracy-project devotees: a free, pluralistic democracy that would be a reliable counterterrorism ally and a thorn in totalitarian Iran’s side.

In reality, Iraq remains an incorrigible sharia society in which the persecution of religious minorities and homosexuals is routine. Far from democratizing the country in any cultural sense, Bush officials fortified these tendencies by encouraging Iraq’s adoption of a constitution that enshrined Islam as the state religion and sharia as a primary source of law. Under American occupation, Iraq continued to shun diplomatic relations with Israel and to cheer the “resistance” waged by Hamas and Hezbollah. It sought closer ties with Tehran, a desire the Bush administration indulged on the fantasy rationale that Iran had a strong interest in a stable Iraq — even as everyone knew Iran was fueling anti-American terrorism in Iraq by both Shiite and Sunni jihadist cells.

Why did President Bush agree to the SOFA on his way out of office (under the pressure of a December 31, 2008, expiration of the U.N. mandate approving U.S. military operations there)? Because it was the best deal he could get in an Islamist country that despises America.

Beginning in 2003, fatwas calling for violent jihad against American forces in Iraq were issued by influential sharia jurists, including Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi and Sheikh Abdulla bin Bayyah (who are now Obama administration consultants). Because our government eschews the study of Islamic-supremacist ideology, most Americans remain unaware that these fatwas represented a mainstream interpretation of sharia in the Muslim Middle East: If Western forces occupy Islamic territory, and especially if they are peddling concepts like Western democracy, they must be driven out — even if, in their own minds, they are do-gooders trying to make life better for Muslims.

The Iraqi mindset was obvious in public polling: In 2008, four in ten Iraqis continued to see Americans as legitimate terror targets — and the figure had recently hovered close to six in ten. Fully 80 percent of Iraqis said they wanted Americans to vacate their country. In the one vestige of Iraqi democracy about which the Bush administration could brag, the nation’s holding of popular elections, candidates competed with each other over who could most strenuously condemn the United States and demand that our troops leave yesterday.

It is certainly understandable that after thousands of lost lives and hundreds of billions of wasted dollars, veterans of the war in Iraq are incensed to see the triumphant march of an al-Qaeda offshoot — the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (greater Syria or “the Levant”) — through cities they once heroically wrested from terrorist control. After all the American sacrifice, it is infuriating to watch jihadists triumph while Obama idles.

But is it fair to blame these developments on our overmatched commander-in-chief?

Many of us on the right supported the toppling of Saddam Hussein. He was a terror supporter. In those post-9/11 days, there was reason to believe our government was serious about dealing with terror-supporting regimes as if they were terrorists. If Saddam was the next domino to fall after the Taliban, all to the good — it didn’t seem like he’d be the last.

But then the Bush doctrine morphed from a crackdown on the jihad into a reimagining of the Middle East. When democracy predictably didn’t take, the dreamers decided to define democracy down rather than admit failure. “Democracy” somehow became fully compatible with repressive sharia, and we fantasized that anti-Western Islamic supremacists were democratic allies and that Iran would play a constructive regional role.
It was absurd. Yet it was the unquestioned premise for concluding, in 2008, that a sharia state gravitating ever further into Iran’s orbit — an Iraqi state that was dependent on the loyalty of Shiite militias and was already in a simmering conflict with its restive Sunni minority — could be trusted in the imminent draw-down, then complete absence, of American troops to preserve the security gains hard won by American bravery and know-how.

Our troops did astonishing work given the severe limitations placed on them. It was not within their capabilities, though, to democratize Iraq — not unless we were willing to occupy that country for generations with a firm purpose to stamp out its sharia culture. And while our troops demolished al-Qaeda in Iraq, it was not within their capabilities to conclusively defeat a global enemy by demolishing it in one country.
In 2008, we announced we were leaving and provided a timeline for our departure under circumstances where a new American president, bitterly opposed to the war in Iraq, was about to assume power. From that point on, al-Qaeda’s return was inevitable.

Has President Obama been a disaster in Iraq — as in every other place? Sure he has. The security situation in Iraq steadily deteriorated as American forces departed. Maliki was sufficiently desperate that he’d surely have renegotiated the SOFA if Obama had been interested in preserving what our troops had fought for. Obama, however, is all about Obama: He wanted to run for reelection as the president who “ended” the war in Iraq, just as he is now legacy-chasing to be the president who “ended” the war in Afghanistan — even if “ending” really means al-Qaeda and its allies win.

Let’s not pretend, though, that America’s Middle East mess is strictly an Obama production. Today, a Sunni jihadist in Iraq might be killed by an American drone in support, incredibly, of the Iranian military intervention to prop up Iraq’s Shiite government. But if that same Sunni jihadist instead crosses the border into Syria, he will be given American-supplied weapons to fight against the Iranian military intervention that props up Syria’s Shiite government.

That kind of insanity does not happen overnight. It happens after more than 20 years of willful blindness to the ideology of our enemies, and more than 20 years without a strategic vision of the global jihadist challenge.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment, was released by Encounter Books on June 3.
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Friday, June 13, 2014

The New York Times Defends Al-Qaeda

June 11, 2014

Boko Haram's leader, Abubakar Shekau, proudly claims responsibility for the abduction and forced conversion of hundreds of Christian schoolgirls, in a recent video pictured here.

Why are some of the biggest Western mainstream media outlets — especially the New York Times [NYT] — often apologetic, not only for radical Islamists, but for al-Qaeda, an organization responsible for, among other atrocities, killing nearly 3000 Americans on September 11, 2001?

A recent NYT report, "Abduction of Girls an Act Not Even Al Qaeda Can Condone," tries to exonerate al-Qaeda of the horrific actions of a similar jihadi organization, Nigeria's Boko Haram — when both groups are remarkably similar in outlook and method, and often Boko Haram is affiliated with al-Qaeda and is frequently even worse. The report begins "As word spread like wildfire on Twitter and Facebook that Nigerian militants were preparing to auction off more than 200 kidnapped schoolgirls in the name of Islam, a very different Internet network started quietly buzzing too," one which, according to the NYT, reflects "the dismay of fellow jihadists at the innocent targets of Boko Haram's violence":
"Such news [the abduction of Nigerian schoolgirls] is spread to taint the image of the Mujahedeen," wrote one dubious poster on a web forum used by Islamic militants that displays a picture of Osama bin Laden. "I have brothers from Africa who are in this group," wrote another, insisting that they were like "the Quran walking the earth [i.e. righteous and just]." 
Boko Haram, the cultlike Nigerian group that carried out the kidnappings, was rejected long ago by mainstream Muslim scholars and Islamist parties around the world for its seemingly senseless cruelty and capricious violence against civilians. But this week its stunning abduction appeared too much even for fellow militants normally eager to condone terrorist acts against the West and its allies. 
"There is news that they attacked a girls' school!" another astonished poster wrote on the same jihadi forum ...
There is really nothing "stunning" about the recent abduction. What the NYT calls a "stunning abduction" pales in comparison to the many other atrocities Boko Haram has committed, and as documented in Gatestone Institute's Muslim Persecution of Christians series, where not a month goes by without countless atrocities committed by the Nigerian jihadis, including the bombing or burning of hundreds of churches, especially on Christmas Day and Easter Day, which have left hundreds of worshippers dead or dismembered in the last few years.

Back in 2012, in fact, Boko Haram warned that it would do what is now referred to as "stunning." It declared that it was preparing to "strike fear into the Christians of the power of Islam by kidnapping their women." Before and since, it has kidnapped, raped, and converted countless Christian girls.

Perhaps the only thing "stunning" is that this latest raid on schoolgirls, the majority of whom are Christian, was widely reported and managed to reach the Western mainstream media.

The NYT next quotes a supposed al-Qaeda expert saying, "The violence most of the African rebel groups practice makes Al Qaeda look like a bunch of schoolgirls."

Is the incineration of nearly three-thousand Americans on 9/11 the act of a "bunch of schoolgirls"? (For a long list of atrocities committed by al-Qaeda and the Taliban before September 11, 2001 — many which make the recent Nigerian abduction seem like kindergarten — click here.)

What is "too much even for fellow militants" is not the act of abduction itself, but rather that the world finally heard about it. Muslim clerics and the NYT therefore had to respond — the clerics with formal disavowals of Boko Haram, the NYT with articles whitewashing al-Qaeda.

The NYT is never the first to report on atrocities committed by jihadis against Christians and other minorities, but it is always first to try to whitewash and apologize for the jihadis' role whenever news of jihadi atrocities appears from other media outlets. The article, by Adam Nossiter and David Kirkpatrick, continues with information that is simply false:
Its [Boko Haram's] violence is broader and more casual than Al Qaeda or other jihadist groups. Indeed, its reputation for the mass murder of innocent civilians is strikingly inconsistent with a current push by Al Qaeda's leaders to avoid such deaths for fear of alienating potential supporters.
The NYT totally fails to mention that most African Islamic groups waging jihad to enforce Islamic law — from Nigeria's Boko Haram to Somalia's al-Shabaab — are affiliated with al-Qaeda as regional branches of the terrorist organization, both in their ends and their means.

For example, in 2012, after Somalia's al-Shabaab had decapitated countless Christian men and women accused of apostasy, among other atrocities, it was heartily welcomed into the al-Qaeda fold by Ayman Zawahiri.

Boko Haram also has deep connections to al-Qaeda. Boko Haram is affiliated with the core leadership of al-Qaeda as well as its nearby Maghrebi branch, according to the United Nations Al-Qaida Sanctions Committee.

The NYT then goes on to make yet another false assertion: that Boko Haram's extreme violence "was the subject of the dispute that led to Al Qaeda's recent break with its former affiliate, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria."

This invention seems meant to distance al-Qaeda from yet another brutal savage Islamic organization, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [ISIS], which has also been committing any number of atrocities—including crucifying people, bombing churches, and raping non-Muslims. In reality, "atrocities" are hardly the reason for the conflict between ISIS and al-Qaeda. ISIS was committing atrocities even when it was connected to al-Qaeda. The dispute was about power politics.

Why is the NYT trying so hard to make al-Qaeda and other Islamists look better by attempting to distance and excuse them from the widely exposed crimes of Boko Haram and ISIS?

If people started to connect the dots and understand that all Islamists (al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, ISIS, al-Shabaab, al-Nusra Front, etc.), when they commit atrocities against non-Muslims, do it simply out of religious hate, the narrative that Western governments and mainstream media so stubbornly uphold — that al-Qaeda's terrorism, including 9/11, is based on "grievances against the West and Israel," and not Islamic supremacism and religious hate — would quickly unravel.

The NYT article even manages to invoke the grievance paradigm when discussing Boko Haram's terror: it states that "Boko Haram tapped into growing anger among northern Nigerians at their poverty and lack of opportunity as well as the humiliating abuses of the government's security forces." Boko Haram may well have tapped into a poverty level — most people in "developing countries," including southern Nigeria, are poor. But the NYT totally disregards that many noted jihadis are doctors, engineers, well-educated and often affluent, including al-Qaeda leader Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mohammed Atta, and Major Nidal Hasan.

A recent Danish statistical study of immigrant families even finds that "Muslims [are] 218 percent more criminal in second generation than first," despite the fact that the second generation are more prosperous and educated than their first generation parents.

Yet the NYT insists on portraying terrorists as victims.

Al-Qaeda itself already put this question of grievances to rest. The late Osama bin Laden, in a private letter to Saudi Muslims, rhetorically asked:
Our talks with the infidel West and our conflict with them ultimately revolve around one issue... Does Islam, or does it not, force people by the power of the sword to submit to its authority corporeally if not spiritually? Yes. There are only three choices in Islam... Either submit, or live under the suzerainty of Islam, or die.
Related Topics:  Nigeria  |  Raymond Ibrahimreceive the latest by email: subscribe to the free gatestone institute mailing list
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Today's Tune: Ben Nichols - The Last Pale Light in The West

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Welcome to the Jihadi Spring

The Arab Spring is over, and tweeting slogans won’t change the chaos that has followed it. 
By 
http://www.nationalreview.com/
June 13, 2014
An image taken from a video uploaded on Sunday by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria claiming to show fighters in Tikrit, Iraq. (Credit ISIS, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images)
The Arab Spring is over. Welcome to the Jihadi Spring.

Across a huge swath of what, up until recently, had been known as Iraq and Syria, a transnational movement of Sunni Islamic extremists has taken control. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has conquered — without much effort — Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, along with most of the province of Nineveh. It’s also taken Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown. Along the way it has ransacked banks (to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars), pillaged weapon stockpiles (including the stuff we left behind for the Iraqi army), and recruited ever more fighters from Iraq, Syria, and abroad.

ISIS started out as an al-Qaeda franchise, but in 2011 it broke off to become an independent dealer of Islamist mayhem. If anything, it is more extreme than al-Qaeda — though that fine distinction probably means little to the Shiites and Christians it slaughters.

Sunday in Pakistan, Taliban militants attacked the airport in Karachi, the country’s busiest and most important travel hub. They followed up with an attack on an airport security-training facility, showing that there was no area of Pakistan it could not threaten. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif came into office seeking an accord with the Taliban. But the Taliban won’t abandon its key objective: a total Islamist state. After the attacks, most observers think Sharif will have little choice but to unleash the army on the insurgents.

Late last month, President Obama announced at West Point that we are definitely leaving Afghanistan, period. That period took the form of a prisoner swap in which we essentially gave back five top Taliban commanders. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda linked and inspired groups are on the rise in Nigeria, Yemen, the Philippines, Libya, and elsewhere.

The good news is that the administration has a policy to deal with the Jihadi Spring. The bad news is that it looks to be the same policy it had for the Arab Spring: nothing.
Nothing, that is, beyond casting lots of words and Twitter hashtags into the air like so many magic beans that will sprout into peace and security wherever they find purchase.
That’s the hitch. This administration’s words don’t have much traction around the world, or at least where it matters. (He’s still popular in Belgium!)

Often, when critics call attention to these and numerous other foreign-policy failures, the president and his defenders will argue that the critics want war. Indeed, in his West Point speech, Obama took a firm and forthright stand against an argument pretty much nobody is making: Military action “cannot be the only — or even primary — component of our leadership in every instance.”

Even the most rabid hawks (though technically, I don’t think birds can get rabies) would never dream of arguing that the military should be the only or primary component of leadership in “every instance.”

But this is a clever, albeit grotesquely cynical, ploy. If you give the American people a choice between, on the one hand, doing nothing beyond tweeting slogans and lecturing the “international community” and, on the other, sending American troops into harm’s way in the Middle East (or Ukraine or the South China Sea), Americans are going to choose option A, and understandably so.

A better option would be a time machine. That way today’s President Obama could go back and give first-term Obama the benefit of his experience. He could tell him that foreign policy should define his talking points, not the other way around. With that foresight, maybe he would have done more to help democracy in Iran when the streets were full of protestors. Perhaps he wouldn’t have wasted so much time harassing Israel as if it were the cause of a centuries-old Sunni–Shia civil war. Or maybe he would have kept U.S. troops in Iraq to deter the rise of ISIS. Or maybe he would have followed through on his “red line” threats to Syria. Today’s Obama could tell first-term Obama that Mitt Romney was right about Russia, and that “Bin Laden is dead” isn’t a foreign policy, it’s a bumper sticker.

Defenders of the president often ask critics, “Well, what do you want to do?” I’ll be honest. I don’t know. We have no good options left. I certainly think we should provide assistance to the (corrupt and pathetic) Iraqi government to repel ISIS. (Obama turned down their requests for air support last month.) But I certainly don’t want boots on the ground.

What I want is that time machine.

— Jonah Goldberg is the author of The Tyranny of Clichés, now on sale in paperback. You can write to him by e-mail at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
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Superb Spurs Primed To Bury The Past, Heat

By J.A. Adande
http://espn.go.com/nba/dailydime
June 13, 2014

MIAMI -- The only thing the San Antonio Spurs aren't doing better than the Miami Heatright now is talking about what the Spurs are doing better than the Heat.
No Spur has stepped to a microphone and summed up the past two games of these NBA Finals -- in which the Spurs outscored the Heat by 40 total points to take a 3-1 lead in the series -- as well as LeBron James did Thursday night.
"They're a high-oiled machine, and they move the ball extremely well," James said after a 107-86 loss in Game 4. "They put you in so many difficult positions. If you're not right on time, right on target, they're going to make you pay for it."
San Antonio Spurs
Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE/Getty ImagesAfter dominating the Heat on their home court, the Spurs eye a closing Game 5.
See, that's much better than what was said by Gregg Popovich, who previously made no attempt to explain the nearly inexplicable 76 percent-shooting first half the Spurs enjoyed in Game 3. He summed up their Game 4 success with relatively tame 57 percent shooting by saying, "Well, if you shoot [57] percent, you're in pretty good shape, as long as everything else is copacetic."
More postgame analysis from Popovich: "I thought we did a better job tonight than we did in Game 3 at the defensive end."
Then again, sometimes Popovich gives one-word answers for no other reason than they're the most efficient ways of communicating his message. Take the second (and final) question asked of him before Game 4.
From the official transcript:
Q: "Last Finals and this Finals has been a series of adjustments. Do you feel you have something to change from the way you guys played Game 3 to the way you guys are going to play Game 4? Something strong that you have to change?"
COACH GREGG POPOVICH: "No."
No further explanation necessary, because the Spurs don't change from night to night. They've certainly evolved over the years, but their style of play in their dismantling of the Heat in Game 4 wasn't all that different from the way they played in January.
Even now, with the Larry O'Brien trophy only a victory away from their grasp, this feels more like a culmination than a coronation.
"It's coming together," Spurs guard Danny Green said. "This is the result of us working on this all season long, to become one of the best teams or last teams standing."
The Spurs are about the ongoing quest for improvement, not the quick fix. Their answers to setbacks are better execution of their system, not desperate reaches into the bag to see what can be pulled out (such as Heat coach Erik Spoelstra's sending in Toney Douglas in the second quarter of the fourth Finals game).
Even swapping Boris Diaw for the Tiago Splitter in the starting lineup didn't qualify as a drastic shakeup. Diaw was already logging a starter's time, playing 65 minutes to Splitter's 42 minutes in the first two games. The only difference was hearing his name over the loudspeaker before tipoff.
It almost doesn't matter who plays when for the Spurs anymore. Patty Mills chipped in 14 points. That's one reason the Spurs won easily even though Manu Ginobili scored only seven points. Duncan had 10, but those double digits were important because, along with his 11 rebounds, it helped him establish a career record for playoff double-doubles (158). It was a rare moment that a Spurs' contribution meant more to an individual than the team.
The Spurs make it tough to single out an individual for praise. Who's the leading candidate for the Bill Russell award given to the Finals MVP? I'd go with Kawhi Leonard, even though he didn't make much of an impact in the first two games. He was the star of Game 3 with 29 points, and he followed that with 20 points and 14 rebounds in Game 4.
And his defense on James is so indicative of the difference between last year's series and this year's. The Spurs insist they haven't changed their schemes, which tried to bait James into taking midrange jumpers in 2013. The only modification is that this year Leonard is being more aggressive, meeting James sooner, preventing him from gaining momentum or rhythm.
The Spurs have methodically unwound the premise of the Heat. On any given night, the Heat were supposed to have the best player on the court. Some nights the two best players. When they really had it going, the three best players.
But Leonard outplayed James in Game 3. And even though James had 28 points in Game 4, both Tony Parker (19 points) and Mills (14 points) got the better of Dwyane Wade (10 points on 3-for-13 shooting). Diaw had eight points, nine rebounds and nine assists, besting Bosh in the latter two categories.
The Spurs are overwhelming the Heat with waves. Waves of players, waves of help defenders, waves of passes. They had 25 more assists in Game 4, almost twice as many as the Heat.
The Spurs' patience is the worst thing for a Heat team that's showing the effects of playing 86 playoff games in the past four years. It takes a physical and mental stamina to challenge the Spurs that the Heat just don't have right now.

More from ESPN.com

"They put you in positions that no other team in this league does," James said. "It's tough because you have to cover the ball first, but also those guys on the weak side can do multiple things. They can shoot the ball from outside, they can also penetrate. So our defense is geared toward running guys off the 3-point line, but at the same time, those guys are getting full steam ahead and getting to the rim, too."
Bosh added: "They're just one of those teams -- if you make mistakes, especially early, they're going to capitalize very quickly.
"They're doing a very good job of starting fast. Not only starting fast, but they're hitting their shots and getting to the basket, getting to the free throw line. They're pretty much getting everything they want."
What the Spurs want more than anything is to get this over with -- to stop talking about last year's disappointment and adjustments and what it will take to close out the Heat and actually do this thing.
They're one victory away from the franchise's fifth championship. It's close enough that they can practically see the yellow rope surrounding the court. All of the pieces of the stage will be in the hallway, ready to get rolled out for the championship celebration.
And the Spurs will, in all likelihood, treat it like just another game.
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Thursday, June 12, 2014

N. T. Wright on Gay Marriage

By Matthew Schmitz
June 11, 2014
N. T. Wright—hailed by Time as “one of the most formidable figures in Christian thought”—first captured my imagination with the early volumes of his series  Christian Origins and the Question of God. In them, he frames the Christian story precisely as a story, a grand narrative, the greatest epic, and all the greater for being true. As Wesley Hill noted in our most recent issue, there can be peril in such readings of Scripture, but also great promise. In a recent interview with J. John of the Philo Trust, Wright explains why he views the complementarity of the sexes as essential to that story, and to marriage itself. Below is an unedited transcript.
What do you think are the major challenges to the church and the Christian message in the light of the current legislation on the redefinition of marriage?
N. T. Wright: Obviously huge issues there, and there’s no way we can lay them all out tonight. I do want to say a word about a word. When anybody—pressure groups, governments, civilizations—suddenly change the meaning of key words, you really should watch out. If you go to a German dictionary and just open at random, you may well see several German words which have a little square bracket saying “N.S.,” meaning National Socialist or Nazi. The Nazis gave those words a certain meaning. In post-1917 Russia, there were whole categories of people who were called “former persons,” because by the Communist diktat they had ceased to be relevant for the state, and once you call them former persons it was extremely easy to ship them off somewhere and have them killed.
In the same way, there was a letter in the Times Literary Supplement just a few weeks ago saying that when we’re talking about assisted suicide, we shouldn’t actually use words like “suicide,” “killing,” and those sort of words because those imply that you shouldn’t do it. Whereas now our civilization is saying that maybe there are reasons for that. I find that sort of stuff chilling, the attempt to change an ideology within a culture by changing the language.
Now, the word “marriage,” for thousands of years and cross-culturally has meant man and woman. Sometimes it’s been one man and more than one woman. Occasionally it’s been one woman and more than one man. There is polyandry as well as polygamy in some societies in some parts of history, but it’s always been male plus female. Simply to say that you can have a woman-plus-woman marriage or a man-plus-man marriage is radically to change that because of the givenness of maleness and femaleness. I would say that without any particular Christian presuppositions at all, just cross-culturally, that’s so.
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The VA Sacrificed Vets for Solar Panels

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On June 12, 2014 @ 12:58 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 5 Comments


The Carl T. Hayden Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Phoenix, Arizona
The VA Scandal began at the Phoenix VA Health Care System where administrators earned promotions and bonuses by shunting patients who needed treatment into fake waiting lists.

As many as 40 veterans had died while waiting for care and 1,715 veterans in the Phoenix VA Health Care System had waited more than 90 days for an appointment. A retired Navy serviceman died of bladder cancer after being put on a 7-month waiting list after blood was found in his urine. He finally received an appointment a week after his death.

But each and every year, from 2009 to 2011, the Phoenix VA Health Care System put in solar panels. The solar panels at the Carl T. Hayden VA in Phoenix cost $20 million.

That $20 million could have saved the lives of dying veterans. Instead it went to Green Energy.

The situation at the Phoenix VA wasn’t unique. In 2009, Obama had signed a Green Energy executive order. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki announced that “in order to continue providing Veterans with the best health care and benefit services, VA must adapt to climate change.”

Not only did Global Warming have nothing to do with serving veterans, but it got in the way of the VA’s central mission. While Shinseki was focused on building solar panels so the sky wouldn’t fall, veterans were waiting months to see a doctor.

At some South Texas facilities vets had to wait 85 days for a primary care appointment and 55 days for a mental health appointment with “a worst-in-the-nation, 145-day average wait for new patients seeking specialist care.”

One of the vets waiting for a mental health appointment, who suffered from waiting list cheating, committed suicide.

Meanwhile the South Texas Veterans Health Care System installed a 1.7 MW solar PV system.
The Amarillo VA Health Care System had the third longest wait times for mental health appointments in the country. Its Thomas E. Creek office complained of a lack of resources.
Meanwhile $10 million was spent on solar panels for a facility that sees 25,000 patients a year.
Hawaii has the longest waiting list for veterans with an average of 145 days for an appointment at the Spark M. Matsunaga VA Medical Center.

Meanwhile it was spending between $1 and $2 million on a 119 KW Solar PV System.

Veterans at Kansas VAs had to wait more than 90 days. 977 never had appointments scheduled. There were 104 vets on the waiting list at the Robert J. Dole VA Medical Center in Wichita.

But while the Dole Center may not have had time for vets, it did have time to set up solar panels.
Three mental health administrators at the Malcom Randall VA Medical Center in Gainesville, Florida were suspended for keeping a waiting list for over 200 vets. Meanwhile the facility had blown between $5 and $10 million on a solar panel system.

The Raymond G. Murphy VA Medical Center put 3,000 vets on a phantom waiting list to see a doctor who doesn’t see patients.

Unfortunately its $20.3 million solar setup was all too real.

The average wait time for new patients at the Carl Vinson VA Medical Center was about 57 days to see a primary care doctor.  But that just gave vets more time to admire its new $1.1 million solar setup.

The Bay Pines VA Health Care System didn’t schedule appointments for 1,000 vets. But it did find the time and money to put in solar panels. The Cheyenne VA Medical Center, which was caught removing vets from the waiting list, had not one, but two, million-dollar solar setups.

The Sepulveda Ambulatory Care Center, which was one of three flagged facilities, was part of a $50 million VA solar panel contract.

In life the vets couldn’t get an appointment while resources were being squandered on Green Energy and when they died, they still couldn’t escape Green Energy.

Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki, who had ignored the abuse of veterans, turned his attention to something truly important. He began seeing to it that all the cemeteries had wind or solar power.

The Massachusetts National Cemetery got a 50 kW wind turbine so the dead veterans would have all the sustainable energy they needed.

A VA press release about the cemetery turbine boasted that “under the leadership of Secretary Eric K. Shinseki… VA is transitioning into a 21st century organization that better serves America’s Veterans.”

Shinseki arrived in person at the dedication ceremony to flip the switch on the cemetery wind turbine. Resting in their graves were men who had died because of his policies.

“Nationally, VA continues to expand its investment in renewable sources of energy to promote our Nation’s energy independence, save taxpayer dollars, and improve care for our Veterans and their families,” he said.

The cemetery turbine cost $533,000. Veterans were dying to save the VA a few hundred dollars. Shinseki had made his order of priorities clear. Green energy boondoggles came first. Improving veteran care came last.

Acting Under Secretary for Memorial Affairs Steve Muro told the audience, “With one of VA’s first wind turbine projects, the Massachusetts National Cemetery is leading the way in the use of renewable energy while providing the burial benefits that New England Veterans and their families have earned.”

With those words, Muro made the entire horrifying spectacle worthy of a Joseph Heller novel.
The wind turbine of the dead was only an aberration because the VA was more focused on installing solar panels at cemeteries to better serve dead veterans.

The Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery’s solar panels cost $787,308. According to the press release, the solar panels in the cemetery would “reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

$742,034 worth of solar panels was put in at the Calverton National Cemetery. The San Joaquin Valley National Cemetery got an $800,000 solar panel system. The Riverside National Cemetery got a $1.3 million solar setup.

“We are investing in clean energy and renewable energy projects at our national cemeteries to reduce our environmental footprint,” Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric K. Shinseki declared.
“The transition toward these renewable energy sources helps VA continue to be a leading example of going green in the federal government.”

Vets might be dying at VA facilities, but they would have solar panels and wind turbines over their graves so that Shineski could provide Obama with a leading example of “greenness.”

Meanwhile in Southeast Texas, the former associate chief of staff at the VA said that a cost-cutting policy had been implemented under which colonoscopies would only be approved if the patient tested positive in three successive screenings for bloody stools.

“By the time that you do the colonoscopies on these patients, you went from a stage 1 to a stage 4, which is basically inoperable,” Dr. Richard Krugman said.”That was done because of dollars and cents. For the VA, they have to be bleeding out of their rectum before they would authorize a colonoscopy.”

Everyone has their priorities. Benghazi and the VA scandal happened because the men who died were a low priority compared to solar panels and buying bad art for embassies. The State Department spent millions on art for embassies and mansion renovations, but begrudged the security that would have saved four American lives. Fortunes were spent on solar panels and wind turbines for VA facilities, but veterans died of cancer to save money on a colonoscopy.

The corrupt obsession with Green Energy doesn’t just waste money, it costs lives. The fanaticism of the Global Warmists in the White House led them to disregard the lives of vets because they thought that saving the world with solar panels and wind turbines was more important.

While they were putting in wind and solar at VA facilities and cemeteries, they forgot about the veterans who had served their country and deserved better than to be sacrificed for a solar panel.

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