THE PRICE of 'college affordability'.

WHY I FLY THE FLAG.

JEFF JACOBY on the Chicago teachers' strike:

Only in government work would employees claim that so lousy a record entitles them to still more hefty raises, or to a level of job security virtually unheard-of in the private economy. Such an outrageous sense of entitlement is among the poisoned fruit of public-sector collective bargaining, which empowers union officials with influence they have no right to -- influence they preserve by exploiting other people's pain.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel should have pulled a Ronald Reagan, fired them all, and dissolved the union.

TWEET OF THE DAY: “Just once, I’d like to see an administration official on TV who doesn’t make me wonder how the f*** they got that job.”

AMBASSADOR JOHN BOLTON: The Obama administration's theory of Middle East appears to have 'broken down completely'. Among other things, Romney was right in his criticism.

FASHION FREAKS: Is it male or female?


Or does it matter?

CHUTZPAH: “Mitt Romney kept us from reporting on security failures.“

MARK STEYN: Disgrace in Benghazi.

GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOODS: Why does California insist on finding a problem where nobody else does? Better question: Why does California want to kill its residents?

WHITE HOUSE details potential effects if automatic budget cuts go through.

Here's the sequestration report -- all 394 pages. What's fascinating about the report is not the data (Appendices A and B), but the sheer number of budget categories (a typical budget category typically has hundreds of line items -- departments, agencies, etc.).

THE WEEKLY REPUBLICAN ADDRESS by Rep. Allen West (R-FL):



From Speaker of the House John Boehner's weekly email.

MORE PUNISHMENT OF THE INNOCENT: Colorado School Bans Student's Rosary Beads.

KEEPING UP with Obama’s welfare waivers.

RANDOM THOUGHTS from the retirement lane. Running errands yesterday, I heard on the radio that experts from some think tank believe bombing Iran will lead to general Mideast war. I say bring it on; the infectious variant of Islamism we're seeing today is going to make a wider war inevitable. The wise course might be to get it over now.

For you Democrats out there, think of it as a partial-birth abortion.

FOR YOUR CAREER: Best and worst college majors.

'PACK' ANIMALS about to return to military patrol.

LIBYA


Time to crank up the Enola Gay....

MORE ON 'SHOOTING BACK':

I’ve just seen a headline about how al-Qaeda has urged its people to kill more U.S. diplomats. And I was thinking, this is an old, old story . . .

Our ambassador to Sudan, Cleo Noel, was killed in 1973. He was killed on direct orders from Yasser Arafat. Vernon Walters told me that he personally listened to the intercepts. (Walters was at the CIA at the time.)

In 2004, just for the hell of it, I asked Efraim Halevy, the former head of the Mossad, “Why doesn’t my country hold it against Arafat that he had Noel murdered?” Halevy said, “I don’t know.”

When I related this to Bill Buckley, he said, “‘I don’t know’ can be a powerful answer,” which it was.

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter were very close to Arafat. After the Gulf War, the Saudis were unhappy with Arafat, because he had sided with Saddam Hussein. They cut off funding to him. Arafat asked Carter to fly to Riyadh to smooth things over for him. He did.

Carter also ghostwrote speeches for Arafat. A sample? “Our people, who face Israeli bullets, have no weapons: only a few stones remaining when our homes are destroyed by Israeli bulldozers.” (If you’re interested, you’ll find this stuff in my book on the Nobel Peace Prize. Arafat and Carter were fellow laureates, of course.)

In the eight years of Bill Clinton, who was the single most frequent foreign visitor to the White House? Arafat.

When I interviewed Condoleezza Rice, while she was serving as national-security adviser, she answered every question I put to her, except one — about Cleo Noel (and Arafat’s responsibility for his murder). Interesting.

Another name came across my mind in the last couple of days: Malcolm Kerr. When I was a Near Eastern Studies student, he was a big deal, an important scholar. I had some writings of his assigned to me. He was president of the American University of Beirut. When I was in college — reading him — he was killed.

There are many, many more names, of course. I think of Col. William R. Higgins, who was with the peacekeeping force in Lebanon. I’m talking about blue helmets, U.N. troops. Hezbollah got a hold of him — they tortured him and hanged him. They then circulated a film of what they had done. This is regarded as the first of a new genre: the jihadist snuff film.

I could go on, and I’m sorry about the extreme melancholy of this post. But there is more than melancholy: an extreme indignation, and an eagerness to see these SOBs stood up to (emphasis mine).

The link is here.

MY FAVORITE time of the year is when I can open up the windows and listen to the stars twinkle.

TECHNOLOGY: Oldies But Goodies.