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Author: New Neo

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New Neo

Neo is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at the new neo.

Posted by New Neo on February 21, 2015 9 Comments
Obama spokespeople Marie Harf and Jen Psaki have come in for a certain amount of ridicule lately, as well as Josh Earnest and Jay Carney before him. But I admit to a sneaking sort of awe of what they do, although it's not a good sort of awe. People are fond of saying that Harf or Psaki are airheads, for example. I beg to differ. What they are---and what all on that list are---is loyal party apparatchiks with a fair amount of facility (some more than others) at keeping their stories and talking points straight, firing off a flurry of glib words to get those points across, and sticking relentlessly to message in the face of some difficult questions and no small amount of mockery and potential embarrassment. They are buoyed and driven not only by personal ambition, but also by their dedication to whatever they think their party and their boss stand for, so much so that they believe that manufacturing spin and telling some lies in the service of that spin are noble callings. This accounts for their triumph over any lingering shame they might feel. As with Winston Smith's interlocutor O'Brien, they not only say that 2 + 2 = 5, but they come to actually believe that on a certain level it's true as soon as they decide to say it.

Posted by New Neo on February 16, 2015 11 Comments
So now we know the identity of Copenhagen shooter Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein, whose crime has mirrored the recent terrorist attacks in Paris but with a smaller death total and a single perpetrator. More details will no doubt emerge, but already it seems fairly clear what's going on here: a continuation of the assault on the West's freedom of speech, perpetrated by a fundamentalist Muslim terrorist (or one in sympathy with fundamentalist Muslim terrorists). The idea is to silence what they see as blasphemy against Islam, as well as to exert a chilling effect on anyone who would sympathize with or support such freedom of speech. In addition, it is an attack on Jews and those who would protect them. The goal? Non-Muslims should not be free to criticize Islam in ways that the group deems blasphemous; Jews would not be free to practice Judaism; and the penalty for both crimes would be death. The moment when the West should have become aware of the growing seriousness of the threat to Western free speech was the 1989 fatwa against author Salman Rushdie. Perhaps some people were able to minimize it at the time by reminding themselves that Rushdie had been born a Muslim in India, which made him an apostate when he renounced the religion. But he was definitely a Westerner, having lived in Britain since the age of fourteen, and his books were written in English and aimed at a Western audience. To refresh your memory:
Many Muslims accused Rushdie of blasphemy or unbelief [for his novel The Satanic Verses] and in 1989 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie. Numerous killings, attempted killings, and bombings resulted from Muslim anger over the novel. The Iranian government backed the fatwa against Rushdie until 1998, when the succeeding government of Iranian President Mohammad Khatami said it no longer supported the killing of Rushdie. However, the fatwa remains in place.

Posted by New Neo on February 15, 2015 12 Comments
Is there anyone on Earth who is surprised at this news?
President Obama’s temporary deportation amnesty will make it easier for illegal immigrants to improperly register and vote in elections, state elections officials testified to Congress on Thursday, saying that the driver’s licenses and Social Security numbers they will be granted create a major voting loophole. While stressing that it remains illegal for noncitizens to vote, secretaries of state from Ohio and Kansas said they won’t have the tools to sniff out illegal immigrants who register anyway, ignoring stiff penalties to fill out the registration forms that are easily available at shopping malls, motor vehicle bureaus and in curbside registration drives.
The article contains quotes from various Democrats with the usual disclaimers, such as the idea that no one will actually do this so there's nothing to worry about. But it seems odd to assume that those who've already lived here illegally for years would all be so very loathe to risk breaking another law, especially if someone with an interest in their doing so were to offer them some cash for their troubles. Not to mention the fact that there are probably some amnesty recipients who might misunderstand the law and think that their new status confers on them the bona fide right to vote. Is the chance to register to vote really an unintended "loophole" through which the purpose of the amnesty order can be evaded? It is certainly possible it's a feature rather than a bug as far as Obama and the Democrats are concerned. In any event, there was and will be no effort by the Democratic Party or Obama to make it impossible for illegals with amnesty to vote, although this could have been done. The fact that the secretaries of state "don't have the tools to sniff out illegal immigrants who register" is no accident; they've been kept from having them.

Posted by New Neo on February 09, 2015 12 Comments
Obama is getting ready to shoot down the Keystone pipeline bill in the first of what promises to be a blizzard of vetoes of legislation the current Congress is planning to pass. Never mind that the Keystone bill passed with bipartisan support in the Senate 62-36 (nine Democrats joined) and in the House 266-153 (28 Democrats joined; although there will have to be another vote in the House within the next few days to align the two bills, it is expected to go similarly). From The Hill:
Still, if Obama vetoes too many bills, especially ones with Democratic support, Republicans could have success portraying him as partisan and unwilling to negotiate. “One veto doesn’t make him obstructionist,” said James Thurber, a professor of government at American University. “Now maybe after 3, 4, 5 vetoes, then they could start painting him that way.”
Portraying him. Painting him. Not, of course, that he is that way. Here's a statistic: since January, Obama has issued eight veto threats. That's "the most ever for the start of a new Congress." Obama thinks this projects strength, and to his supporters it most definitely does. When the Republicans---even when in the majority in the House, and even with Democratic support---tried to block something Obama was attempting, their actions were painted as unreasonable and stubborn obstructionism. Now, when Obama plans to block what a Republican-majority Congress has done, even when those Republicans have a significant amount of support from moderate Democrats, it's a show of strength and resolve.

Posted by New Neo on February 04, 2015 11 Comments
Ever wonder whether Obama's policy towards Iran represents something coherent, or just naive incompetence? Here's an excellent article by Michael Doran in Mosaic that fleshes out the details of a theory about Obama's approach to Iran. It doesn't take the most extreme stance of all---which would be the "Obama is a secret Iranian sympathizer" theory---but the piece's premise is credible, and it is well worth taking the time to read in its entirety. It's a bit difficult to summarize, but the article makes several points. The first two are that much of Obama's approach focuses on his deep contempt for Bush and his powerful desire to differentiate himself, as well as Obama's general penchant for secrecy. But there's much more:
During the Bush years, an elaborate myth had developed according to which the mullahs in Tehran had themselves reached out in friendship to Washington, offering a “grand bargain”: a deal on everything from regional security to nuclear weapons. The swaggering Bush, however, had slapped away the outstretched Iranian hand, squandering the opportunity of a lifetime... Obama based his policy of outreach to Tehran on two key assumptions of the grand-bargain myth: that Tehran and Washington were natural allies, and that Washington itself was the primary cause of the enmity between the two. If only the United States were to adopt a less belligerent posture, so the thinking went, Iran would reciprocate. In his very first television interview from the White House, Obama announced his desire to talk to the Iranians, to see “where there are potential avenues for progress.” Echoing his inaugural address, he said, “[I]f countries like Iran are willing to unclench their fist, they will find an extended hand from us.” Unfortunately, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, ignored the president’s invitation...
Because, of course, the entire thing was a myth.

Posted by New Neo on January 30, 2015 30 Comments
Now that Romney has released a statement to his supporters announcing that he won't be running in 2016, the next question is, to whom will he throw his support and his proven ability to raise money? Many conservatives have long excoriated Romney for not being conservative enough---or not being conservative at all. But I've long thought that his instincts were actually more conservative than he allowed himself to be while the governor of the deep blue state of Massachusetts (although I agree that he's certainly not as conservative as someone like Ted Cruz.) But those wondering about Romney's present intentions might want to pay particular attention to this part of his message:
I believe that one of our next generation of Republican leaders, one who may not be as well known as I am today, one who has not yet taken their message across the country, one who is just getting started, may well emerge as being better able to defeat the Democrat nominee. In fact, I expect and hope that to be the case. I feel that it is critical that America elect a conservative leader to become our next president. You know that I have wanted to be that president. But I do not want to make it more difficult for someone else to emerge who may have a better chance of becoming that president. You can’t imagine how hard it is for Ann and me to step aside, especially knowing of your support and the support of so many people across the country. But we believe it is for the best of the Party and the nation... I believe a Republican winning back the White House is essential for our country, and I will do whatever I can to make that happen...

Posted by New Neo on January 27, 2015 48 Comments
It is ironic that the success of modern vaccination programs against ancient scourges such as measles has been part of the reason parents today are so ignorant about what these diseases can do. A recent outbreak in California has demonstrated the effects of this lack of knowledge:
Researchers have found that past outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases are more likely in places where there are clusters of parents who refuse to have their children vaccinated... In California, vaccine exemptions have increased from 1.5 percent in 2007 to 3.1 percent in 2013, according to an analysis by the Los Angeles Times.
That's a surprisingly large number---but hey, this is California:
Researchers have found that those who refuse vaccines tend to share similarities. "In general, they’re upper-middle to upper class, well-educated — often graduate school-educated — and in jobs in which they exercise some level of control," Offit said. "They believe that they can google the word vaccine and know as much, if not more, as anyone who’s giving them advice."
An enormous amount of damage was also done by fraudulent science in the guise of an influential 1998 article in Lancet claiming a link between vaccines and autism, that has since been proven to be a fraud and retracted. But the study's author, Andrew Wakefield, couldn't have done it alone:

Posted by New Neo on January 23, 2015 4 Comments
It's long been apparent that the West faces a special dilemma, which is expressed very well in the following passage by Roger Kimball (and "liberal" and "liberalism" in the following doesn't just mean "liberals" as in "progressives," but also "liberals" as in "classical liberals"):
Liberal regimes have always suffered from this paralyzing antinomy: Liberalism implies openness to other points of view, even those points of view whose success would destroy liberalism. Tolerance to those points of view is a prescription for suicide. Intolerance betrays the fundamental premise of liberalism, i.e. openness. Of course (may I say “of course”?), there is a sense in which the antinomy is illusory, since any robust liberalism, i.e., a liberalism buttressed by a core of conservative backbone, understands that tolerance, if it is to flourish, cannot be synonymous with capitulation to ideas that would exploit tolerance only to destroy it. The “openness” that liberal society rightly cherishes is not a vacuous openness to all points of view: it is not “value neutral.” It need not, indeed it cannot, say Yes to all comers.
And yet that basic instinct for practical self-preservation, that paradoxical prohibition necessary for the general openness, is often ignored today. "Democracy is not a suicide pact"---at least, it shouldn't be. The origin of that last phrase lies in several statements by historic Americans, but the most specific one was by Supreme Court Justice Associate Justice Robert Jackson in 1949, in a dissent to the decision in the freedom of speech case known as Terminiello:

Posted by New Neo on January 22, 2015 10 Comments
Remember all those articles about Boehner planning to take revenge on Republicans who had opposed his Speakership? Remember how he was going to take away their committee positions as punishment? And remember how angry a great many people on the right got about it? I wrote this post about it at the time. But the next day I wondered:
...[T]here’s no real evidence that the retribution [by Boehner against his conservative enemies] is occurring... Now, I’m not saying it won’t happen. As I’ve written before, politics ain’t beanbag and people with power tend to reward those who support them and punish those who don’t. But it’s interesting that nothing much has really happened yet and yet we get all these reports that it’s happened or will happen. Who is making the reports? The MSM. Since their goal is to heighten the discord on the right, they have every motivation to spread rumors that will do just that. I’ll wait for something clearer before I will believe it’s happening. Again, I won’t be surprised if it happens. But it may not.
Now comes this article in National Journal entitled: "Boehner Foes Get Gavels, Not Punishment," and subtitled "The speaker's allies are annoyed that GOP rebels are getting top subcommittee slots." Here's an excerpt:

Posted by New Neo on January 16, 2015 17 Comments
In his latest editorial, Leslie Gelb seems both frightened and clueless about Obama. Gelb is a liberal whose foreign policy credentials are impressive if you like this sort of thing. At the age of 77, his resume includes "former correspondent for The New York Times and ...currently President Emeritus and Board Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations," assistant to Jacob Javits, Carter's Assistant Secretary of State, and plenty more that would warm the cockles of most Democrats' hearts. But Gelb writes as though he were Rip Van Winkle just waking up from a long and very deep sleep, one that lasted from January of 2009 till now and encompassed Obama's entire presidency thusfar. How else can you explain this sort of thing?
The failure of Obama or Biden to show up in Paris made clear that most of the president’s team can’t be trusted to conduct U.S national security policy and must be replaced—at once.
Republicans have been thinking that for a long long time---welcome to our world, Gelb. But we're not delusional enough to think it could ever happen. The people Obama has placed there are exactly the people he wants. They do his bidding, and he has no sense that he's failed. More from Gelb:

Posted by New Neo on January 14, 2015 9 Comments
This seems to be a disturbing development in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings:
France ordered prosecutors around the country to crack down on hate speech, anti-Semitism and those glorifying terrorism... Authorities said 54 people had been arrested for hate speech and defending terrorism since terror attacks killed 20 people in Paris last week, including three gunmen... Like many European countries, France has strong laws against hate speech, especially anti-Semitism in the wake of the Holocaust. The Justice Ministry sent a letter to all French prosecutors and judges urging more aggressive tactics against racist or anti-Semitic speech or acts.
"Speech or acts"---there's a big, big difference between the two. It is easier to justify criminalizing acts rather than speech---although of course it depends on what the speech is. To be legally actionable, the speech had better be the rough equivalent of yelling "fire" in a crowded auditorium.

Posted by New Neo on January 11, 2015 12 Comments
Here's what's planned on immigration by Republicans in the new Congress:
The House plans to vote next week on legislation that would defund President Obama's executive action on immigration. Republicans also plan to include language rolling back a 2012 order from the Obama administration that gave legal status to illegal immigrants brought to the United States as children. The two measures would be considered as part of a bill funding the Department of Homeland Security through September. An earlier government-funding measure approved last month only funded that agency through February... Mulvaney said Republicans debated in their closed-door meeting whether to focus solely on Obama's move to shield illegal immigrants from deportation, or whether to attack the president's policies on multiple fronts. Some more moderate, swing-district Republicans "wanted the rifle shot, ... maybe didn't want to muddy the waters," Mulvaney said. "But there were other voices in the room who said they wanted a chance to get at DACA, to get at the Morton memos" that relaxed some immigration laws in 2011.
Apparently the latter group won---for now. However, there's always the Senate:

Posted by New Neo on January 07, 2015 7 Comments
Promises, shmomises:
An air of secrecy surrounds the fate of 53 political prisoners whom Cuba agreed to free in its historic deal with the United States last month, as Washington and Havana’s refusal to publicly identify the dissidents is fueling suspicion over Cuba’s intentions... ...[O]fficials said a prisoner release was not a precondition for renewing diplomatic ties. White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday that not everyone on the list has been set free yet, but it was always understood that they would be released “in stages.”... The lack of transparency is contributing to a growing sense of concern that Havana will not follow through on its promises.
If there's "a growing sense of concern," it's certainly not on the part of Obama administration officials, for whom this quid pro quo was almost certainly for show. As in many of its "negotiations" with countries hostile to the US, the appearance of getting something in exchange for what we were giving up was only a thin veneer, because the administration was determined to capitulate.

Posted by New Neo on January 01, 2015 2 Comments
The last year I remember noticing as a huge transition was 2000. We had entered science fiction territory, and 2001 was similar because of the Stanley Kubrick film. But after that it's all been a blur. How did it pass so quickly? That's a cliche, but there's no question that as you get older time seems to fly by more rapidly. One reason is that each segment of time is now a much smaller percentage of the total amount you've been alive. A year? Almost a blink. These days when I try to figure out how much time has passed since an event my gut reaction is to use 2000 as the index year. So, for example, if something happened in 1976 my first response would be to say that that was 24 years ago. Way off, obviously; to get the right answer I have to take that figure and add the current year of the 21st century to it. It's a laborious process, but since for me the changing year number seems to have stopped at 2000 there's no way around it. The title of this post was inspired by a memory from my extreme youth. I was enchanted by a TV car ad campaign from the year 1957 that used the catch-phrase, "Suddenly, it's 1960!" to indicate how futuristic its car design was. All I had been aware of in my very short life up to that point were the 1950s, and the idea of a decade of 1960s was magical.

Posted by New Neo on December 30, 2014 15 Comments
Ordinarily one wouldn't think that news of wreckage and multiple bodies being pulled from the sea could be classified as "good." But given what we already very strongly suspected---which was that AirAsia Flight QZ8501 had crashed, and that the likelihood of survivors was very poor---and given the continued unknown whereabouts of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the news that the wreckage of QZ8501 has been found and that 40 bodies have been recovered so far can be considered "good" in the relative sense, despite its horrific nature. There was always more hope of finding this plane than of locating Flight 370. We didn't know much about QZ8591, but at least we knew that it had encountered bad weather, and that it had probably gone down suddenly in waters that were less than 150 feet deep. Had it not been for the mystery of Flight 370, it would have assumed that QZ8501 would have been found in due time. That is what has happened, and there is every reason to suppose that the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder will be recovered and we will learn the most likely cause of the disaster. The plane was found about six miles from where it lost radio contact with the ground, and there are reports that a plane-shaped "shadow" can be seen under the water. In addition:
The aircraft's last request - to climb higher to avoid a storm - was turned down... Geoffrey Thomas, editor of AirlineRatings.com, told Sky News: "We have a radar plot which shows the plane actually climbing through 36,300ft - it wasn't given permission to do that. "It also shows that its speed had decayed by 134mph and dropped dramatically to a level where it couldn't sustain flight."

Posted by New Neo on December 22, 2014 18 Comments
When I read the news of the murder of NYPD Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu by shooter Ismaaiyl Brinsley as they sat in their police car, it had an air of sickening familiarity. If you're as old as I am, and especially if you're from New York, you remember. You remember that in the early 70s a war against police began, a war in which police were gunned down by cold-blooded killers with a racial/political agenda and a convict past. The assailants were members of various black militant groups, mostly offshoots of the Black Panthers, such as the Black Liberation Army (BLA), which specialized in racially-motivated cop killings. It was almost inevitable that the furor against police officers that's been whipped up over the Brown and Garner deaths would end in some person or persons deciding that killing a cop would be just the thing. Whether Brinsley was crazy or not---and he may have been---and a lone wolf or not, even crazy people can be sparked to violence by an atmosphere of orchestrated hatred. There is also some evidence that Brinsley was not a lone wolf, however, but instead may have been a member of a group known as the Black Guerrilla Family. The Family shares similar antecedents with the BLA, including a prison genesis and a stated leftist/socialist/Marxist philosophy. Probably the most famous police officer ambush case was that of partners and Vietnam vets Gregory Foster and Rocco Laurie, which occurred in January of 1972. Witnesses and an investigation indicated that they were shot in the back by BLA members as the officers walked down the street on their beat, and then shot again multiple times with their own service revolvers as they lay dying. The murders of Foster and Laurie caused a furor because they were part of a war on police, but also because both were well-liked, young, handsome, and because they were good friends and an interracial team (Foster was black and Laurie white). There was a 1974 book and a 1975 movie about the heinous crime, and although there were suspects (some of whom have died or been killed in the ensuing years), no one has ever been tried for their murders.

Posted by New Neo on December 21, 2014 21 Comments
Vermont appears to have given up on single-payer health insurance, having run out of other people's money before the program even began. If leftist Vermont can't make it work, does that mean the drive for single-payer has been abandoned? One might think so, but not so fast. Perhaps the time just isn't right:
“It is not the right time for Vermont” to pass a single-payer system, [Vermont Governor] Shumlin acknowledged in a public statement ending his signature initiative. He concluded the 11.5 percent payroll assessments on businesses and sliding premiums up to 9.5 percent of individuals’ income “might hurt our economy.”
Will there ever be a "right time"?:
“If cobalt blue Vermont couldn’t find a way to make single-payer happen, then it’s very unlikely that any other state will,” said Jack Mozloom, spokesman for the National Federation of Independent Business. “There will never be a good time for a massive tax increase on employers and consumers in Vermont, so they should abandon that silly idea now and get serious,” Mozloom added.
Mozloom aside, the left will never stop trying. Never:

Posted by New Neo on December 19, 2014 30 Comments
Marco Rubio, among others, believes that Obama is a bad negotiator, the worst since Carter:
I don't know what [Obama's] intentions are. His foreign policy is at a minimum naive, and perhaps even truly counterproductive to the future of democracy in the region. Just last week we imposed sanctions on human rights violators in Venezuela, but the people who are supporting the Venezuelans in conducting those violations -- literally the Cubans have taken over the Venezuela government, we're actually lifting sanctions on them. How absurd is that? And it's just par for the course, all of these tyrants around the world know the United States can be had. At a minimum I will say this, the president is the worst negotiator we've had as president since at least Jimmy Carter and perhaps in the modern era.
But Rubio is wrong; Obama is not a bad negotiator at all. He is a faux negotiator. And perhaps Rubio even knows this (the hint being "at a minimum") but feels he can't say it or he will be labeled a kook. But I can say it: Obama's intentions here were almost certainly to prop up the Castro government and concede to them, and the negotiations were an excuse to do that. There were no reluctant concessions on the part of Obama, there were eager concessions. As Rich Lowry writes, it's not so much about whether it was time to loosen economic sanctions or not (reasonable people differ on this), it's about how it was done:
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