"The Fall of the House of Moon /Sex rituals, foreign spies, Biden offspring, and the Unification Church's war-torn first family."

A long article by Mariah Blake in The New Republic. Excerpt:

Hunter Biden and his lawyer, Marc LoPresti, maintain that the deal was fair, given the state of the company. But people close to Park say he was emotionally fragile and felt indebted to the Bidens, which put him in a vulnerable position.

Finally, in 2008, the economy collapsed, after which it emerged that Allen Stanford, whose firm was soliciting investors for one of Paradigm’s funds, was running a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. While the fund itself was solid, investors were spooked. In 2010, Paradigm filed for voluntary liquidation. “It was a thicket,” Hunter Biden told me. “Every time you thought you saw a way out, there would be another road block.”

Should we bully Rand Paul about plagiarism for cutting and pasting 3 pages of Heritage Fund text into his book "Government Bullies"?

Buzzfeed uses the word "plagiarism," but there is an endnote to the Heritage Fund report and Heritage Fund itself is only saying "we like when people cite our work."

How bad is this? (Multiple answers allowed.)
	If only he'd blocked and indented it would have been nothing, but as it is, it's plagiarism.
	Makes him less of a distinctive character, more like a name to be slapped on a group project.
	Puts him in a category with other middling politicos, like Joe Biden.
	It's a mark of dishonesty, but a mild one, and politicians are always at least somewhat dishonest.
	As dishonesty, this is nothing compared to Obama's lies about Obamacare.
	I'll be honest. This was dishonest, and it should be held against him.
	More evidence that political books are unreadable trash.
	A writer worth reading, even if dishonest, would never leave someone else's sentences verbatim.
	What's truly unoriginal is a book where someone else's prose seems to blend right in.
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Joe Biden emails me with the subject line: "Ann."

Man, this gets my "Big Government sounds like a creepy stalker" tag:



He just emailed me yesterday. Back off, Government Man!

And don't make me the bogus subject of your communication. This is not about me, but you think I'm so doggedly self-interested that I get jazzed up by email purporting to be about me?

"If you've been watching what's been happening here in Washington over the past couple of weeks..."

Well, I haven't. I've been averting my eyes.

"... and you still think you need more reasons to support Democrats over Republicans, I'm not sure what to tell you."

Yesterday's email was about how Biden "can't understand" what Republicans are doing, and today's email is about how Biden doesn't know what to say to anyone who doesn't already agree with him.

I must be on the Democratic Party's special email list of Perpetually Puzzled People, and somehow it's been decided that the best name to slap on the "From" line in email to the PPP is Joe Biden.

Joe Biden is emailing me, "Do you understand this?"

He addresses me — "Ann" — and informs me that "One senator is running the show in the Republican Party right now."

He's not my senator. And he's not your senator.

I guess Joe checked before emailing that I'm not from Texas. Regular readers of this blog know that if life begins at conception, I am from Texas, but that wouldn't make Ted Cruz my Senator.

Joe continues:

But for some reason I can't understand, the Republican Party is letting Ted Cruz lead their charge against Obamacare....

They're letting him? Seems to me the Party tried to rein him in but couldn't. Why try to "understand" things that aren't true? Why is the moon made of green cheese?

... a law that they're still fighting tooth and nail despite the fact that every branch of the federal government has approved it, and despite the fact that we're seeing real signs that it's starting to work.

If the GOP really is trying to stop it, it could be that they believe it will work and that people will like it, and they don't want the people to find out the GOP was wrong. But it might be that the GOP thinks it won't work and people won't like it, and they want to ensure that the people know who's to blame and who tried to save them from this calamity.

But if the GOP really isn't trying too hard to stop it, and it's just Ted and a few others going rogue, then we've got something different to understand.

Now, Ted Cruz isn't a bad guy....

So I do understand that the project of demonizing Ted Cruz flopped.

1. "I mean, that's a storybook, man." 2. "This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen."

1. Senator Joe Biden, February 2007.

2. Bill Clinton, January 2008.

Just 2 old quotes we had occasion to bring up in conversation around Meadhouse this morning. Storybook/fairy tale... the positive/negative description of Obama the Candidate. The story continues. Obama the Candidate continues. What we were talking about was the idea that Obama is operating at a very high level of politics, not just high as in The President is at the top of our political structure, but high as in We are gazing upon the great political genius of our time.

It might be true in a way that Obama is the great political genius of our time, in that he was great enough to make us think that, but it's heartening to see that the greatest political genius really isn't able to be that great in America. Or is that itself a delusion, and allowing us to think that we're onto him is part of the way in which we are duped and part of the workings of the genius? If so, at least I got far enough to be able to ask that question.

It's been a bad first quarter of first year of the second term for President Obama.

1. It's been so bad that the media dropped their erstwhile foible of talking about everything that happens in terms of what it means for Obama. And here it is, the first lap of his new term, when there's more reason than usual to talk about how things are working out for the President.

2. Obama made gun control his big issue leading into the new term. He tried so hard to deploy his speaking skills to channel the nation's emotion after the Sandy Hook massacre, and in the end he couldn't even wrangle all of the Democrats in the Senate, and he was reduced yesterday to surrounding himself with human vessels of tragedy and "a scowling Vice President Biden" and pronounce it "all in all...  a pretty shameful day for Washington." The media offered weak support by describing him as passionately angry, but I watched the video and found it surprising dull. I couldn't motivate myself to go over to my computer to blog about it last night. Obama knew he was going to lose. The theater of sympathy and outrage had gone on far too long, the show was a flop, and the leading man was obliged to take his curtain call.

3. North Korea apparently has a nuclear weapon and the nerve to use it (or to pose as if it does), and the new Secretary of State, the exceedingly dreary John Kerry, is sojourning in the general area nattering about global warming —  "the Foreign Minister and I agreed to raise the initiative above the level that it is today" — and meanwhile, back in the United States, it's really cold.

4. Obama's efforts to get some lightweight good press over basketball failed. His bracket was busted, and a cutesy photo-op produced an embarrassing video in which he went 2 for 22. That he could play basketball was an element of his legend, and now it's that video that comes to mind when we think of Obama and basketball. Does he even have another sport? Golf? Golf, unlike basketball, never worked as an element of the Obama legend.

5. He shut off White House tours, presumably on the theory that it would spark outrage at the sequester (and those terrible Republicans), but that gesture clashed with his own fun in the White House. Ordinary kids had their field trips canceled, while Obama's daughters got Justin Timberlake to come to the White House and perform right in front of them. It was another of the many parties. Wasn't Beyonce just there? And then she and Jay-Z went to Cuba, and, when criticized, Jay-Z put out a pissy rap tune that (I think) insulted Obama.

6. George Bush is making a comeback, with some charming new elements: He's a granddad and he paints pictures of dogs. The big library is opening. And then there's the new disaster in Waco, just 45 miles from his Crawford ranch, giving Bush reason to do a low-profile but touching trip to comfort the injured and the bereaved. So now does that mean Obama has to go to Texas? He's already going to Boston for a memorial service. How can he not go to Texas? But Texas is not comfortable territory for Obama.

7. Margaret Thatcher up and died. What rotten luck! What a platform for the promoters of the ideology in opposition to his! And then idiots take to the streets with all that "Ding, Dong the Witch Is Dead" childishness and disrespect, damaging the left-wing brand. Should Obama attend the funeral? Ah, at least send the Vice President. At least send somebody! No. He sends nobody.

8. What's the legislative agenda? Immigration reform? WaPo headlines: "Obama isn’t leading on immigration, and that’s a good thing." The media's attempts to help are getting really embarrassing. He's not leading, but, see, that's a good thing. Let us explain why: "Presidential leadership is a polarizing force...." Blah blah blah. What really matters are the 2014 elections. Just hang back and wait. Nothing but weakness and failure might just be a devious strategy for winning 565 days from now.

9. What's happening with Obamacare? That was the achievement of Obama's first term. If there's one thing he ought to do with this second term, it's make sure that thing gets implemented in a way that works with some degree of smoothness, at least enough that — when people finally notice what's been in the works for so long —  we don't freak out entirely. But: "A senior Democratic senator who helped write President Barack Obama’s health care law stunned administration officials Wednesday, saying openly he thinks it’s headed for a 'train wreck' because of bumbling implementation.'"

10. The trial of Kermit Gosnell is fogging up the clarity achieved in 2012 victory in the War on Women.

"Biden’s office forces reporter to delete photos."

"They apologized after the fact. The reporter should also apologize — for complying, instead of saying 'fuck off, I’m a reporter.'"

"I have a soft spot for Joe Biden. I like him. But he’s dumb as an ashtray."

Said Roger Ailes. He also said: "I like Marco Rubio.... But I don’t know about as a vice-presidential candidate. He’s a nice guy, and that role requires kicking the crap out of your opponents.

"How many of you all believe that there is a movement to take away the Second Amendment?"

Democratic Senator Joe Manchin asked a group of his supporters back home in West Virginia.

About half the hands in the room went up.

Despite his best attempts to reassure them — “I see no movement, no talk, no bills, no nothing” — they remained skeptical. “We give up our rights one piece at a time,” a banker named Charlie Houck told the senator.

That's the anecdote that leads off the NYT article "Democrats in Senate Confront Doubts at Home on Gun Laws." The article ends:

During the lunch, Mr. Manchin shared a recent conversation he had with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Obama administration’s point person on gun control.

“I said, ‘Mr. Vice President, with all due respect, I don’t know how many people who truly believe that you would fight to protect their rights.’ ”

The senator added, “That’s what we’re dealing with.”

How are we to think about rights? It's good for politicians to hear the deeply engrained American attitude: We give up our rights one piece at a time. There's a long tradition — predating the Bill of Rights — of thinking like that. Here's James Madison in 1785:

[I]t is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of Citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The free men of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. We revere this lesson too much soon to forget it.

The issue there was not guns but the use of tax money to pay for teachers of religion. In the paragraph quoted above, Madison went on to say that citizens should object to the requirement of paying even "three pence" to support a religion because a government that extracts even that trifle may go on to coerce religious conformity. The small things are not small. The small things are where the people still have the capacity to fight authoritarian government.

Democrats know this. They are part of this American culture of deeply engrained belief in constitutional rights. What is different to the Democrats is that they don't believe that the right to keep and bear arms is a constitutional right. They think the Supreme Court misinterpreted the Second Amendment when it found a constitutional right. District of Columbia v. Heller was a 5 to 4 decision, and the 5 are the 5 Justices, still on the Court, whom the Democratic Senators would love to have a chance to replace.

The NYT portrays the folks back home in West Virginia as misinformed, troublesome, and hysterical. That’s what we’re dealing with.

Biden sez "I'm proud to be President of the United States."

Oops.

This gun control controversy is a real gift to Republicans.

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

Righties should be sending thank you notes to Joe Biden.

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

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

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

"The president is going to act... Executive order, executive action that can be taken; we haven't decided what that is yet."

"But we're compiling it all with the help of the attorney general and all the rest of the cabinet members as well as legislative action, we believe, is required."

Gun control, it's coming, we don't know exactly how we're going to do it, but we're going to do it without the assistance of Congress, says VP Joe Biden.

Robert Bork has died.

He was 85.

From the above-linked NYT obituary:

Judge Bork, a bear of a man with a scraggly red beard and untamed frizz on a balding pate who liked to eat, drink and smoke for much of his adult life, handled himself poorly in front of the [Senate Judiciary] committee and failed to give doubters confidence. As Tom Shales, the television critic for The Washington Post, wrote of his testimony: “He looked, and talked, like a man who would throw the book at you — maybe like a man who would throw the book at the whole country.”

See that's what I was just talking about: Liberals used to express abhorrence of law-and-order types.

The NYT obit refers to "the notion that the nominee was somehow unfeeling as a judge." Somehow... a notion... Where, oh, where could it come from?!

This [notion] was amplified when, asked by a sympathetic senator, Alan Simpson, Republican of Wyoming, why he wanted to serve on the Supreme Court, Judge Bork replied that it would be “an intellectual feast.”

And that was it, the worst answer ever given to any question in the history of the United States. Intellectual feast! The feast turned out to be a feeding frenzy for the liberal media. Why, they're still picking kinky reddish beard hairs out of their back molars! Burrrrp! Tasty! What a time! And no Supreme Court nominee has said one interesting thing since. Every single one has promised to be a good little judge who would never ever do anything but serve humbly and modestly deciding the cases according to the law.

You think it was interesting that John Roberts said he saw himself as an umpire, calling balls and strikes? That proves my point! I know, Clarence Thomas, "high-tech lynching," but that wasn't about doing the judicial work, so I'm excluding that from the point, which is that they all learned what not to do from Bork. Presidents learned to avoid even picking someone Borkish, so no one was allowed to look weird, speak quirkly, seem like an intellectual with ideas of his own, it would just be bland blandness served atop a steaming pile of blandness. That is: Not tasty! As a live-blogger of nomination hearings, I want to know: Where's my intellectual feast?

ADDED: When C-SPAN put its entire archive up on-line, the first thing I looked up to relive was the Bork hearings: