The United States has refused to join the United Nations Human Rights Council since it was birthed in 2006 following the dissolving of its failed predecessor, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. The Obama Administration changed course in March 2009 and now, for the first time, has submitted a report on the status of human rights in the U.S. to the Council, setting up the country to be judged by governments like those of Cuba, China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Qatar, Pakistan and Egypt.

It almost sounds like the set up to a “guy walks into a bar” joke—or maybe a knock-knock joke—but the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank made an assessment of his own political ideology that can’t help but draw a laugh.

On Fox News Channel’s top-rated Fox and Friends, host Gretchen Carlson would not allow the White House press secretary to do what his ilk to do best: revise history.

Now that Barack Obama has decided to be for the Ground Zero mosque before being implicitly against it (perhaps), discussion about his faith has once again reached a fever pitch. To many, his stance proves he’s a Muslim, with a recent poll showing that almost 20 percent of Americans hold that opinion; to others, it just reflects a desire to be faithful to the Constitution (now, that would be change). The truth, however, is a bit more nuanced. Obama is not religiously Muslim. Culturally, though...well, that’s a different matter altogether.

After the heming and hawing by the Obama administration over whether we should bring terror suspects to trial before military commissions, Obama’s DOJ and DOD finally decided that they could. But once again we see the half-way actions of the Obama administration shining through by the fact that, even as Obama seems to agree with the Bush administration policy of military tribunals for terrorists, the president hasn’t made a single plan on what to do with any of those terrorists ‘after’ they are convicted.

Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy, D-Ohio, was listed as a member of a U.S.-based socialist organization, it has emerged. 

Is the U.S. Department of the Treasury undertaking a new role? Taking its newest press release(1) as an example, one could be excused to imagine that our Treasury Department has decided that it is now our ‘next’ Department of Muslim Outreach.

Politico’s Kenneth Vogel has an interesting piece(1) on a book that Tea Party activists are starting to glom onto as an administrative guidebook of sorts. The book, “The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations,"(2) is a book that explains how leaderless organizations work and can be effective. Of late tea partiers have accepted the tome as a way to explain the success of their movement as well as a way to legitimize their hold on a certain amount of power into the future.

Controversy over job ‘offers’ for election favors boils over again - The controversy over allegations White House officials at least as high as Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel offered two congressional candidates jobs in return for campaign favors, which apparently would violate the law, is reheating – with a claim that one of the candidates colluded with the White House on what story to tell.

In the past, if anyone asked whether the folks in charge in the nation’s capital were certifiable lunatics, or whether policy decisions were being made by superannuated college kids with no experience out in the real world, who apparently stayed up too late last night, smoking too much dope and listening to too much heavy metal, those questions could be safely dismissed as exaggerations for rhetorical effect.

In the mid-1990s, when I was engaged in the research that would eventually be published early in 1997 in an article titled “Regime Uncertainty” (a modestly revised version of which appears as chapter 1 of my Depression, War, and Cold War), I had not read Raymond Moley’s book After Seven Years, published in 1939. Mea culpa. I should have read it much earlier. I am embarrassed to admit that although I purchased a copy in a used-book store many years ago, it sat on my shelf unread until recently.

WASHINGTON – Our “post-racial” president is actually our “most-racist” president, says the author of a blistering new book on race politics, “Negrophilia: From Slave Block to Pedestal – America’s Racial Obsession.”

Ron Brynaert has a story over at his The Raw Story blog(1) that reveals yet another denizen of the Old Media that is trying to be both a “journalist” and an official operative of Barack Obama’s White House. She is Patricia McGinnis, an unpaid advisor at the White House and also one of the contributors to the Post’s “On Leadership” blog. 

...Back in the 1960s, leftists confronted with the argument that socialism necessarily subjects a society to totalitarian government control would point to Sweden as the example of “social democracy,” i.e., a democratic country that followed the socialist path. Now we hear the news that “the Kingdom of Sweden took a dramatic turn toward totalitarianism with the adoption of a sweeping new education ‘reform’ package that essentially prohibits homeschooling and forces all schools to teach the same government curriculum.” It also places restriction on religious education, so that religious schools “can’t make any children to pray or confess to the God, but they will still be allowed [to exist]. ...”

Good day to all and a very happy 4th of July. Before I plan to BBQ and launch fireworks in celebration of America’s 234 birthday, I will opine on the topics below. Read them, pass them on to others and fight to change everything for the better before it gets any worse.