Friday various & sundry

- Jim Geraghty: In His Remarks, Obama Kept His ‘I’ on the Middle East

No wonder the Twitter hashtag for Obama’s remarks is “#mespeech.”

Of course, if I had to summarize the speech in just one of its sentences, it would be “We must proceed with a sense of humility.”

- Steyn says:

Well, at a certain level, it was filled with the usual narcissism. He said that America had failed to speak to the broader aspirations of people in the Middle East, and that’s why two years ago in Cairo, “I began to broaden our engagement.” I was interested to see the result of that. In 2008, which you’ll recall was the last year of the Bush, Texas cowboy terror, 83% of Arabs had a very or somewhat negative view of the United States. By 2010, which was the second year of the Obama broaden engagement approach, 85% had a very or somewhat negative view. So much for the outreach. The fact is that this narcissistic buffoon gave this speech that placed himself front and center of developments in the Middle East. And in fact, the United States, for the first time in 70 years, is utterly irrelevant to what’s going on in the Middle East.

Read the rest.

- Remember Libya? Tom Maguire:

Six Republican Senators query the Obama Administration on just what style of steaming dung the Administration propose to serve in order to feign compliance with the sixty-day limit on action in Libya seemingly required by the War Powers Act:

RTR. The media would handle this story a bit differently if it were playing out under a Republican administration, no? But since it's Obama's baby, we hear very little about it.

- Sen. Jim DeMint on the NLRB vs. Boeing: This "should not happen in America": 

DeMint remains infuriated with the National Labor Relations Board for bullying Boeing. “This situation borders on tyranny,” he says. “If an unelected, unaccountable, unconfirmed bureaucrat can threaten thousands of jobs and a billion-dollar investment, after the facility is virtually complete, it smacks of a Third World–type dictatorship.”

The NLRB, a federal agency, has attempted to block the aircraft manufacturer from building a production facility near Charleston. The NLRB claims that Boeing moved away from its Puget Sound base in order to retaliate against aerospace-industry unions.

“I have seen a lot of absurd things come out of this administration,” DeMint sighs. “But the absurdity here is pretty amazing. This involves the right of a company to decide where to locate its business. I cannot believe that the president has not spoken out about it. This kind of thing should not happen in America.”

“This is not about South Carolina,” DeMint notes. “This is about every American company and every state, and not just right-to-work states. This will also hurt the forced-union states. Why would a company, like BMW for example, locate in a union state if they know that they could not move or expand?”

- Hmmm: 

A smoking gun document about an error-ridden GAO report puts the murder weapon in a top Democratic senator’s hands.

GAO issued a slew of corrections in November to an undercover investigation into for-profit colleges requested by Sen. Tom Harkin, Iowa Democrat, who had unveiled the report at a hearing highly critical of the schools Aug. 4.

A internal GAO email obtained by The Daily Caller, a self-evaluation on what went wrong from a member of the team that wrote the report, suggests GAO was under the gun.

The email says GAO was put under “extreme short time frames” by Harkin to issue the report and “congressional staffers” demanded the inclusion of numerous details as it was being finalized.

“It certainly discredits the report, doesn’t it?” said Rep. Rob Andrews, New Jersey Democrat and long-time advocate for the for-profit schools, “The fact that they felt pressure to finish this on time is disquieting.”

Read the rest. Someone doesn't like for-profit colleges and is willing to distort the data to discredit them. Meanwhile, American students and parents continue to pour money into the coffers of conventional colleges and universities, often getting back
very little of value. The NYT notes that "the outlook is rather bleak" for recent, debt-laden, grads.

- William Murchison on the clumsy tyranny of "non-sexist language":

Dammit, it's not "Everybody has their book"!

It's "Everybody has his book." His! His! His! Got that?

Not many do, I confess: for which outcome the blame attaches in no small degree to Kate Swift -- may her recently departed soul rest in peace -- and her disagreeably influential books on, ahem, non-sexist writing. Swift made the dismantling of English fashionable for purposes of consciousness-raising. May the Lord show her better things at this momentous passage in her career.

I'm afraid that ship has sailed; we're now trained to timidly tiptoe around those masculine pronouns, using them only when we're sure they won't "offend." But it's good to review the history of the feminist assault on English, so read the rest.


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