Monday round-up *UPDATED*

I don’t have deep thoughts, but others do (thank goodness).  Herewith some links:

This letter of amends from a Berkeley liberal deserves wide, wide distribution.  Incidentally, I already knew about the political-social thuggery the letter describes from my years at Berkeley in the late 1970s. The place had a cliquish me-tooism that already disturbed me back then, and left me feeling extremely isolated, although I was too ill-informed to recognize the root-cause that was its Leftism.

I wrote last week about the fact that Obama, in his pre-executive power days, when monitoring a dispute managed to make all sides believe he agreed with them and them alone.  Obama is now discovering that this doesn’t work when, as Bush would say, you’re the “decider.”  Obama’s latest betrayal is to needle exchange advocates.  Candidate Obama promised to lift a ban on providing federal funding for AIDS programs that include needle exchanges.  President Obama (rightly, I think) refuses to do so.  Members of yet another constituency now struggle with the fact that their idol has feet of clay.

You’ve got to love the New York Times‘ built-in sexism.  In an article about the rise of “woman on woman” bullying and sabotage in the workplace, you’ll find this lovely sentence (emphasis mine):  “It’s probably no surprise that most of these bullies are men, as a survey by the Workplace Bullying Institute, an advocacy group, makes clear.”  You know those mean old men, right?  Probably all of ’em white.  And I bet they’re Republicans.  Incidentally, women account for 40% of workplace bullies.  And here’s me being sexist:  I bet women account for more than 50% of the backstabbers in a workplace.

Sometimes it helps to see things in one place.  To that end, Fox has helpfully compiled a list of all the apologies President Obama made on your and my behalf.  Groveling is a painful job, and I guess we should be grateful that Obama has spared each and every one of us the necessity of having to do the groveling ourselves.

Daniel Henninger reminds us of what we all know:  Reagan is dead.  He’s not coming back.  And now Kemp’s dead too.  But, as Henninger goes on to say, the Reagan message is still a good one.  Reagan sowed a seed that should be able to bloom long after the farmer is gone, and we conservatives shouldn’t forget it.  Let go of the man by all means, but don’t abandon the ideas.  (By the way, Dick Morris and Eileen McGann agree.  So do I.)

Barack Obama:  too competent to touch comedically.  That in itself is a laugh line, isn’t it?

Twenty years ago, a Stanford professor let me in on a little secret:  In a Lake Woebegone-ish way, all the students at Stanford are above average.  Truly.  The faculty was not allowed to fail anyone, so much so that, if it looked as if a student was failing, up to and including the final exam, the student was just “dropped out” of the class.  “A” grades were handed out like candy.  After all, Stanford got some of the best students in America.  You couldn’t let them, or their paying parents, down by giving them bad grades.  The notion that it might be good for them to compete against others as smart as they were, so as to winnow out the best of the best, was anathema.  Walter Williams explains that this system remains unchanged, and that it continues to pervert both the education system and the “best and the brightest” themselves.

Blackmail?!  Is that the hold Castro has over those gushing Hollywood stars who flood (and pollute) our airways with their paeans to the man?  Frankly, it wouldn’t surprise me one little bit.  Next time someone you know references some A-List star praising the man, direct your friend to this article.

It wouldn’t be one of my posts if I didn’t mention Israel.  First, if you believe Israel has the right to a continued existence, Stand With Us has a list of immediate steps you can take to put pressure on an administration that seems determined to destroy Israel.  Second, you’ll be happy to know that Israel’s woes are all her fault.  I know because a New York Times reader told me so.  You see, just as in the school yard some kids are bully magnets because their conduct invites the bullying, so too is Israel a world bully magnet, because she has really bad PR.  When you’ve figured out the logic there, please get back to me and explain.

Lastly, Michael Barone demonstrates that, on the subjects of gun control and climate change, the masses are moving away from the elites.  This would normally be good news (’cause I agree with the masses), but I do fear that Obama is being very European in working actively to remove any real power from the masses.  In other words, the masses had better act quickly, or the time to act will forever be gone.

UPDATEAmerican Thinker points out that, lately, the New York Times has been making loving little “bows” to the more Jewish Jews (read:  Orthodox & Hasidic) in New York.  Considering its unending hostility to Israel, these bows reminded me of the Nazi approach to Prague:  they saved the synagogue and the cemetery as museum pieces to commemorate the Nazis’ successful eradication of the Jewish people.