Bloodthirsty Liberal

So cynical.

US Vice President Joe Biden declared Tuesday that the window had not yet closed on an Israeli military strike against Iran, but that the window for sanctions and diplomatic efforts to halt Tehran’s nuclear program would soon shut.

Biden also stressed Israel’s right to take the action it sees necessary and that Israel’s security is a “fundamental national interest” of the United States, criticizing some in the American Jewish community for questioning the Obama administration’s commitment to the Jewish state.

“The window has not closed in terms of the ability of the Israelis if they choose on their own to act militarily,” he said. “But diplomacy backed by serious, serious sanctions and pressure – on that score the window is closing in the near term.”

Speaking to the Rabbinical Assembly of the Conservative Movement during the group’s 2012 convention in Atlanta, Biden related a conversation he had had with Defense Minister Ehud Barak in which the vice president told him, “Were I an Israeli, were I a Jew, I would not contract out my security to anyone, even a loyal, loyal, loyal friend like the United States.”

The Conservative Movement of Jews is not a political movement; it is a group of Jews that are not Orthodox and not Reform. Politically, they tend to be democrats, but can be swayed sometimes to vote for a Republican. The Obama administration is probably worried about this group. They have the Reform Jews in the bag and they won’t be able to persuade the Orthodox Jews. The Conservative Jews are swing voters. In certain states, especially Florida, Obama needs their votes. They bought into Hope ‘n Change, despite Reverend Wright, in 2008. Will they buy it again? That’s my reading of this. If I am wrong, I’d love to hear alternative explanations.

- Aggie

I haven’t seen this many happy Jews since they put General Gau’s Chicken back on the menu at my grandpa’s favorite Chinese restaurant [hat tip reader Jeanette and Elder of Ziyon]:

Apartheid looks pretty good, doesn’t it, my Jew-hating lefty friends?

Brilliant.

A four-decade tidal wave of Mexican immigration to the United States has receded, causing a historic shift in migration patterns as more Mexicans appear to be leaving the United States for Mexico than the other way around, according to a report from the Pew Hispanic Center.

It looks to be the first reversal in the trend since the Depression, and experts say that a declining Mexican birthrate and other factors may make it permanent.

“I think the massive boom in Mexican immigration is over and I don’t think it will ever return to the numbers we saw in the 1990s and 2000s,” said Douglas Massey, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University and co-director of the Mexican Migration Project, which has been gathering data on the subject for 30 years.

Nearly 1.4 million Mexicans moved from the United States to Mexico between 2005 and 2010, double the number who did so a decade earlier. The number of Mexicans who moved to the United States during that period fell to less than half of the 3 million who came between 1995 and 2000.
…
According to the report, the Mexican-born population, which had been increasing since 1970, peaked at 12.6 million in 2007 and has dropped to 12 million since then.

The reversal appears to be a result of tightened border controls, a weak U.S. job and housing construction market, a rise in deportations and a decline in Mexican birthrates, said the study, which used U.S. and Mexican census figures and Mexican government surveys. Arrests of illegal immigrants trying to enter the United States have also dropped precipitously in recent years.

Heckuva job, Barry! And a question to our more skeptical readers: What percentage of the decline in illegal immigrants is due to the decline in the US economy?

- Aggie

I’m thinking my neighbor’s kids, the ones with degrees in gender issues, will be helping me navigate the hallways of the nursing home, holding the soup spoon when my shaky hands give out, and more. Is that the future they envisioned?

A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don’t fully use their skills and knowledge.

Young adults with bachelor’s degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that’s confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.

An analysis of government data conducted for The Associated Press lays bare the highly uneven prospects for holders of bachelor’s degrees.
..

While there’s strong demand in science, education and health fields, arts and humanities flounder. Median wages for those with bachelor’s degrees are down from 2000, hit by technological changes that are eliminating midlevel jobs such as bank tellers. Most future job openings are projected to be in lower-skilled positions such as home health aides, who can provide personalized attention as the U.S. population ages.

Taking underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor’s degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade.

“I don’t even know what I’m looking for,” says Michael Bledsoe, who described months of fruitless job searches as he served customers at a Seattle coffeehouse. The 23-year-old graduated in 2010 with a creative writing degree.

Initially hopeful that his college education would create opportunities, Bledsoe languished for three months before finally taking a job as a barista, a position he has held for the last two years. In the beginning he sent three or four resumes day. But, Bledsoe said, employers questioned his lack of experience or the practical worth of his major. Now he sends a resume once every two weeks or so.

Bledsoe, currently making just above minimum wage, says he got financial help from his parents to help pay off student loans. He is now mulling whether to go to graduate school, seeing few other options to advance his career. “There is not much out there, it seems,” he said.

His situation highlights a widening but little-discussed labor problem. Perhaps more than ever, the choices that young adults make earlier in life — level of schooling, academic field and training, where to attend college, how to pay for it — are having long-lasting financial impact.

“You can make more money on average if you go to college, but it’s not true for everybody,” says Harvard economist Richard Freeman, noting the growing risk of a debt bubble with total U.S. student loan debt surpassing $1 trillion. “If you’re not sure what you’re going to be doing, it probably bodes well to take some job, if you can get one, and get a sense first of what you want from college.”

Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University who analyzed the numbers, said many people with a bachelor’s degree face a double whammy of rising tuition and poor job outcomes. “Simply put, we’re failing kids coming out of college,” he said, emphasizing that when it comes to jobs, a college major can make all the difference. “We’re going to need a lot better job growth and connections to the labor market, otherwise college debt will grow.”

By region, the Mountain West was most likely to have young college graduates jobless or underemployed — roughly 3 in 5. It was followed by the more rural southeastern U.S., including Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee. The Pacific region, including Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington, also was high on the list.

On the other end of the scale, the southern U.S., anchored by Texas, was most likely to have young college graduates in higher-skill jobs. [Interesting. Texas. Where the conservatives have clustered. Where dumb people like George Bush and Rick Perry have both been governors. How is this possible?- Aggie]
…

Broken down by occupation, young college graduates were heavily represented in jobs that require a high school diploma or less.

In the last year, they were more likely to be employed as waiters, waitresses, bartenders and food-service helpers than as engineers, physicists, chemists and mathematicians combined (100,000 versus 90,000). There were more working in office-related jobs such as receptionist or payroll clerk than in all computer professional jobs (163,000 versus 100,000). More also were employed as cashiers, retail clerks and customer representatives than engineers (125,000 versus 80,000).

According to government projections released last month, only three of the 30 occupations with the largest projected number of job openings by 2020 will require a bachelor’s degree or higher to fill the position — teachers, college professors and accountants. Most job openings are in professions such as retail sales, fast food and truck driving, jobs which aren’t easily replaced by computers.

College graduates who majored in zoology, anthropology, philosophy, art history and humanities were among the least likely to find jobs appropriate to their education level; those with nursing, teaching, accounting or computer science degrees were among the most likely.

In Nevada, where unemployment is the highest in the nation, Class of 2012 college seniors recently expressed feelings ranging from anxiety and fear to cautious optimism about what lies ahead.

With the state’s economy languishing in an extended housing bust, a lot of young graduates have shown up at job placement centers in tears. Many have been squeezed out of jobs by more experienced workers, job counselors said, and are now having to explain to prospective employers the time gaps in their resumes.

This is to both those young grads and their parents. The administration’s policies have been a disaster. Are you still going to vote for Obama in November? Really?

- Aggie

He’s made us less safe. The world hates us.

Remember the talk about how Bush made the world hate us? Lefties, I know it is early and today the time changed, but wipe the sleep from your eyes and let’s do a time travel experiment. Once we put Obama into office, our prestige was going to shoot up in the world, and the Muslim world in particular would love us.

How’s it working out so far?

Fifteen Afghan civilians were shot by an American soldier in Kandahar province Sunday, with seven of them feared dead, the provincial government said.

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force confirmed that a soldier had gone off base and fired on civilians before turning himself in, but did not say how many victims there had been.

Capt. Justin Brockhoff of ISAF said there had been “multiple” casualties and that the injured Afghans were being treated in ISAF facilities.

“One of our soldiers is reported to have killed and injured a number of civilians in villages adjacent to his base,” ISAF’s deputy commander, Lt. Gen. Adrian Bradshaw, said in a statement that expressed “deep regrets and sorrow at this appalling incident.”

There has been confusion about the number of casualties since the shooting outside a military base in eastern Afghanistan.

A provincial council member, Ahsan Noorzai, said earlier that 18 people were killed, but did not say where his information came from.

The Taliban claimed that 50 people had been killed, but the Islamist militia regularly exaggerates casualty figures.

I want to deconstruct the last sentence first, the one I bolded. Am I the only one who finds it interesting that the media is aware of the fact that the Taliban exaggerates their casualties? I’m surprised, because Palestinian terror groups do this too, and we never hear a word about it from the MSM. Curious.

But I digress. What it sounds like, and remember, this is coming from the media, so we can’t be certain, but it sounds as if a soldier went nuts and committed atrocities. On Obama’s watch. On Panetta’s watch. Now, in a former lifetime, I would have given our leadership some slack. How can they be responsible for the mental health and good judgement of every single soldier?

That was then. Today I note that the standard has been established. Every time someone stubs their toe, it is Bush’s, sorry, Obama’s fault. And Panetta’s. Think about the lack of discipline, the weakness of the command, and the general racism that this implies. What lousy leadership. I guess they’re in real trouble now. There will be front page headlines demanding impeachment, no doubt.

- Aggie

Have you heard about the Joseph Kony movie? I am posting it here. And here’s the grumpy question? Why is it ok for Palestinian Arabs to teach children to strap on suicide vests?
Do you think it is because Kony isn’t Muslim? Because from what I understand, the militias in Khartoum do and have done the same things to the children of South Sudan. However, the South Sudanese are usually either Christian or practice traditional African religions. Help me out here. I am trying to understand why Kony is fair game but so many African militia leaders (and Middle Eastern terror leaders) are given a free pass.

- Aggie

Hey, did you guys hear about the solar fla— %^&%%^#W$%QERJGouifhapoirtnvo[i4hqbncpoiqweuhf[ovqierhgj asdhvi efhup

Just kidding.

He heard that in the Bush years all the time. The Left would say anything that they wanted to say, and if you questioned it, you were fascist, questioning their patriotism, and, in fact, they were the most patriotic of all because they hated Bush the most.

My what a sprucing up we’ve had since Obama because King of the Hill. Now, dissent is no longer patriotic at all. It is, at best, unhelpful, and at worst, it approaches treason.

Criticism of President Barack Obama’s apology for the burning of Qurans in Afghanistanis not helpful, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Sunday in a wide-ranging interview with CNN.

“I find it somewhat troubling that our politics would enflame such a dangerous situation in Afghanistan,” Clinton said of the complaints by Republican presidential candidates and some experts about Obama’s apology.

Really, Hillary? Were you troubled when your own party went after Bush policies in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Oh, and they’re itching to go to war in Syria… and the Secretary of State position is now just a political hack job:

We have a lot of contacts, as do other countries – a lot of sources within the Syrian government and the business community and minority communities – and our message is the same to all of them: ‘You cannot continue to support this illegitimate regime because it is going to fall,’” she said.

But she said the Syrian National Council was not yet the kind of united opposition movement that toppled Moammar Gadhafi with international help in Libya last year.

The Libyan opposition base in the city of Benghazi gave the international community “an address” to deal with.

“We don’t have that in Syria,” she said. “The Syrian National Council is doing the best it can but obviously it is not yet a united opposition.”

Clinton also defended telling an audience in Tunisia Saturday that Obama would be re-elected.

…

“I was asked whether the comments in the primary campaign, some of which have been quite inflammatory, represented America,” she said, adding that they did not necessarily. “I represent America.”

As America’s top diplomat, Clinton would not normally make political statements to a foreign audience.

“Probably my enthusiasm for the president got a little out of hand,” Clinton said with a laugh.

Ha Ha.

- Aggie

Does reality exist? How do you know, if you are looking at this screen, that you exist, and that the screen exists?

Aggie, stop talking like a 10th grader, please.

No. Seriously. Read the news, and try to come to grips with the fact that we are not living in the same universe that we were born into, and that what was formerly up is now down. Reality doesn’t exist. Exhibit A this morning:

The arrest of a 29-year-old Moroccan living illegally in the United States has focused attention again on the danger posed by “lone-wolf” terrorists.

Now, what is a “lone-wolf”? A lone wolf, is, first of all, a loner. Think Unabomber. Someone who has created their own worldview, alone, and carries out horrible actions – alone. They aren’t supported by anybody. The Moroccan, on the other hand, was attempting contact with al qaeda, and thought he had achieved it. So he was simply a failure.

He is alleged to have worked with others he believed to be al Qaeda operatives, who provided him with a suicide vest and conducted a demonstration of explosives in a quarry in West Virginia, according to a Department of Justice affidavit.

For more than a year, undercover agents were in contact with El Khalifi after his intentions became known during an ongoing criminal investigation, according to one source.

According to the affidavit, an FBI informant brought El Khalifi, who was arrested Friday, to the attention of law enforcement in January 2011 after he told others at an Arlington residence that “the group needed to be ready for war.”

In many ways, such cases are the worst nightmare of counterterrorism officials: individuals acting alone, untraceable through any contacts with other terror suspects, capable of teaching themselves how to launch a terror attack.

Do you see my point? He was in contact with others – not alone. Not an isolate.

So, what are the advantages of portraying him as a Lone Wolf? Let’s see if the story offers any clues:

In the past two and a half years, 11 of the 17 Islamist terrorist plots on U.S. soil involved individuals with no ties to terrorist organizations or other co-conspirators.

Responding to the arrest of El Khalifi, Sen. Susan Collins said she was alarmed by “the sharp escalation in the number of homegrown plots.”

She noted that data from the Congressional Research Service show that since May 2009, arrests have been made in connection with 36 ‘homegrown’ plots by American citizens or legal permanent residents of the United States.

El Khalifi had been in the United States illegally since 1999, according to the affidavit.

I say that they are bending reality here, in order to redefine Islamic terrorism. Let’s move away from the fun house mirror for just a sec, ok? Al qaeda and other terror organizations encourage Muslims living in the West to carry out terror events. They have been doing this for over 11 years now. Some Muslims take up the challenge. They attempt to join al qaeda, but the FBI tricks them. They devise a terror attack with the help of the FBI, based on the belief that they are part of al qaeda, or another terror group. Does this sound lone-wolfy to you?

The article recounts example after example of “lone-wolfs”, all radical Muslims. And they do it with a straight face. BTL, we should consider a new tag: Self Delusion

- Aggie

So says the NY Times

If this is accurate, it doesn’t bode well. Personally, I’m not conservative on this matter and I know many single women who are doing a fine job raising their kids. But it is definitely more difficult than raising children with a partner. Much, much harder, just physically and emotionally.

It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.

Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America. The fastest growth in the last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree, according to Child Trends, a Washington research group that analyzed government data.

Among mothers of all ages, a majority — 59 percent in 2009 — are married when they have children. But the surge of births outside marriage among younger women — nearly two-thirds of children in the United States are born to mothers under 30 — is both a symbol of the transforming family and a hint of coming generational change.

Wow. I just can’t imagine how difficult that will be. The women I know personally who have opted to have kids outside of marriage are older women who have either adopted or given birth, but have high paying jobs and a mature social network. And, like everyone, I know lots of divorced women who are going it alone. For them, it’s difficult and draining. If a younger women in a low-paying job does this with family support, I suppose it is similar. But I can imagine a scenario where increasing numbers of kids grow up in chaotic homes with limited resources.

One group still largely resists the trend: college graduates, who overwhelmingly marry before having children. That is turning family structure into a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of marriage increasingly reserved for people with the most education.

“Marriage has become a luxury good,” said Frank Furstenberg, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Isn’t that nonsense? There is absolutely nothing keeping people from marrying, whether they have a college education or not.

The shift is affecting children’s lives. Researchers have consistently found that children born outside marriage face elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional and behavioral problems.

Oh, dear. Let me issue a ‘Ya Think Award™ to the NY Times!! Congratulations, Boys!!! WhooHoo!!!!

Reviewing the academic literature, Susan L. Brown of Bowling Green State University recently found that children born to married couples, on average, “experience better education, social, cognitive and behavioral outcomes.”

Lisa Mercado, an unmarried mother in Lorain, would not be surprised by that. Between nursing classes and an all-night job at a gas station, she rarely sees her 6-year-old daughter, who is left with a rotating cast of relatives. The girl’s father has other children and rarely lends a hand.

“I want to do things with her, but I end up falling asleep,” Ms. Mercado said.

Sad.

- Aggie