Recently in International Affairs Category

The Economist has long article explaining that the climate may be much less sensitive to carbon emissions than previously thought.

OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth's surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, "the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade."

Temperatures fluctuate over short periods, but this lack of new warming is a surprise. Ed Hawkins, of the University of Reading, in Britain, points out that surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range of projections derived from 20 climate models (see chart 1). If they remain flat, they will fall outside the models' range within a few years.

This is great news. Civilization has spent trillons of dollars on carbon emission reduction and climate mitigation, and this expense has been a huge drain on the global economy. If climate change isn't as big a worry as previously thought then we can eliminate a lot of these policies and expenses.

This news isn't a surprise to any software engineers who took the time to look at the climate modeling code that was leaked back in 2009. The software models were garbage, so of course they started to diverge from reality.

(HT: Power Line.)

Everyone in the world with a bank account broke into a cold sweat when they learned about the EU and the Cypriot government raiding private bank accounts to bailout the banks. That could never happen here, right? Well, what's happening in the United States is much more subtle and also much more sinister. Thomas Sowell describes how inflation is worse than stealing bank deposits.

Does that mean that Americans' money is safe in banks? Yes and no. The U.S. government is very unlikely to just seize money wholesale from people's bank accounts, as is being done in Cyprus. But does that mean that your life savings are safe? No. There are more sophisticated ways for governments to take what you have put aside for yourself and use it for whatever politicians feel like using it for. If they do it slowly but steadily, they can take a big chunk of what you have sacrificed for years to save before you are even aware, much less alarmed.

That is in fact already happening. When officials of the Federal Reserve System speak in vague and lofty terms about "quantitative easing," what they are talking about is creating more money out of thin air, as the Federal Reserve is authorized to do -- and has been doing in recent years, to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a month.

When the federal government spends far beyond the tax revenues it has, it gets the extra money by selling bonds. The Federal Reserve has become the biggest buyer of these bonds, since it costs them nothing to create more money.

This new money buys just as much as the money you sacrificed to save for years. More money in circulation, without a corresponding increase in output, means rising prices. Although the numbers in your bank book may remain the same, part of the purchasing power of your money is transferred to the government. Is that really different from what Cyprus has done?

The Fed has been printing money at a breakneck pace for five years now and we haven't seen a lot of inflation, right? Well, except for food and energy, which are conveniently excluded from "core inflation". Health care, ammunition and guns have gone up a lot, too. What's more, prices for goods that should be declining due to information technology improvements may instead be staying level, but that's a net level of inflation that's hard to measure.

Inflation has numerous advantages over stealing bank deposits:

1. Inflation lets the government tax everyone in the world who uses dollars. All dollars everywhere are devalued, which basically let's us "tax" all the countries and organizations who hold trillions of dollars in their foreign reserves. The Chinese can't just divest themselves of all those dollars, but they do complain a lot.

2. Inflation reduces the value of our national debt and deficit. This is the reason that I'm convinced that inflation is a goal for our government. There's simply no other way to pay off the debt we're accumulating. This is a good reason to be a borrower right now, as long as you can borrow at a fixed interest rate.

3. Equities and capital assets can float with (moderate) levels of inflation.

4. A weaker dollar enables greater US exports of all kinds.

5. Inflation helps moderate sticky economic factors, like wages and house prices. Unemployed people are very hesitant to accept jobs with a lower salary than their previous job. Homeowners are very reluctant to sell their house for less than they paid. Inflation allows salary and house price numbers to go up even though the value is going down.

So what's my advice?

1. Borrow at low fixed interest rates. Pay off your loans as slowly as possible, because future dollars will be worth much less than current dollars.

2. Don't sit on a lot of cash. Be fully invested in equities and hope they float with inflation.

3. Don't lose your job.

Glenn Reynolds outlines the legalities of asteroid mining.

Asteroids are certainly available, and they're valuable. More than 750,000 asteroids measure at least 1 kilometer across, and millions of smaller objects are scattered throughout the solar system, mostly in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Even a comparatively small asteroid is potentially quite valuable, both on Earth and in space.

A 79-foot-wide M-type (metallic) asteroid could hold 33,000 tons of extractable metals, including $50 million in platinum alone. A 23-foot-diameter C-type (carbonaceous) asteroid can hold 24,000 gallons of water, useful for generating fuel and oxygen. Even 1 gallon of water, at 8.33 pounds per, can cost tens of thousands of dollars to launch into Earth orbit. Prices will probably come down now that SpaceX and other private launch companies are in the game. But the numbers would need to improve a lot for water launched from Earth to compete with water that's already floating in space.

Larger asteroids could be worth as much as the GDP of a superpower. Asteroid 1986 DA is a metallic asteroid made up of iron, nickel, gold, and platinum. Estimates of its value range between $6 and $7 trillion. Something that size won't be retrieved anytime soon, but the figure gives some idea of just how much wealth is out there.

Ok, so that's just a quote about how valuable asteroids are. If you're interested in the existing legal issues go read the article, but the bottom line is that anything you can move is up for grabs.

After quickly checking to make sure that my bank is wholly owned in the United States I literally laughed at Europe's new bailout template.

The euro fell on global markets after Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch chairman of the eurozone, announced that the heavy losses inflicted on depositors in Cyprus would be the template for future banking crises across Europe.

"If there is a risk in a bank, our first question should be 'Okay, what are you in the bank going to do about that? What can you do to recapitalise yourself?'," he said.

"If the bank can't do it, then we'll talk to the shareholders and the bondholders, we'll ask them to contribute in recapitalising the bank, and if necessary the uninsured deposit holders."

As Willie Sutton explained with regards to his bank robberies: "because that's where the money is".

Dijsselbloem's assessment of the economic incentives is basically correct:

"If we want to have a healthy, sound financial sector, the only way is to say, 'Look, there where you take on the risks, you must deal with them, and if you can't deal with them, then you shouldn't have taken them on,'" he said.

So now depositors have to share risk with shareholders, bondholders, and taxpayers. Most depositors aren't interested in that kind of arrangement, and they'll start withdrawing their money. Reserve ratios will drop. Interest rates will increase. Eurozone deficit spending will get even more expensive. The end of the euro.

An awesome choose-your-own-adventure where you play the sucker from the Secret One World Government who gets flown into fix the Cypriot banking crisis.

So Hugo Chavez looted $1 billion or more from Venezuela? Big deal! Moammar Kadafi stole $200 billion from the Libyan people during his 42-year reign.

I suspect there's at least one many who has outdone Kadafi, but we won't know for sure till he's dead.

Bill Kristol and Peter Wehner indict President Obama for his inattention and passivity on September 11, 2012, the night that our embassy was attacked in Benghazi, Libya.

Thanks to the congressional testimony of outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey late last week, we know they met with President Obama on Sept. 11 at 5 p.m. in a pre-scheduled meeting, when they informed the president about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. The meeting lasted about a half-hour. Mr. Panetta said they spent roughly 20 minutes of the session briefing the president on the chaos at the American Embassy in Cairo and the attack in Benghazi, which eventually cost the lives of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, security personnel Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, and information officer Sean Smith.

Secretary Panetta said the president left operational details, including determination of what resources were available to help the Americans under siege, "up to us." We also learned that President Obama did not communicate in any way with Mr. Panetta or Gen. Dempsey the rest of that evening or that night. Indeed, Mr. Panetta and Gen. Dempsey testified they had no further contact at all with anyone in the White House that evening--or, for that matter, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

That's not all we discovered. We now know that despite Gen. Dempsey having been informed of Ambassador Stevens's repeated warnings about the rise of terrorist elements in Benghazi, no forces were put in place or made ready nearby to respond to possible trouble. It also seems that during the actual attacks in Benghazi, which the administration followed in real time and which lasted for some eight hours, not a single major military asset was deployed to help rescue Americans under assault.

So what happened? Ann Althouse speculates about the timeline and it's easy to imagine that she's right.

I think he is ashamed. Here's what I've been assuming happened: It looked like our people were overwhelmed and doomed, so there was shock, sadness, and acceptance. But then the fight went on for 7 or 8 hours. The White House folk decided there was nothing to do but accept the inevitable, and then they witnessed a valiant fight which they had done nothing to support. It was always too late to help. It was too late after one hour, then too late after 2 hours, then too late after 3 hours.... When were these people going to die already? After that was all over, how do you explain what you did?

President Obama should be ashamed. I'd be pleased if he resigned, for this and for a host of other reasons. The national media should also be ashamed for letting this story slide through the election -- this is much more significant than Watergate, folks. (And should we bring up Fast and Furious some more?) I think that President Obama is trying to do his best. The media, on the other hand, is more intent on covering for the President's failures than on performing its duty to the American public.

Key job for the media: interview some of the other Americans who were in Benghazi that night. Not everyone was killed. There were numerous other Americans at the embassy and the CIA safehouse who were rescued. Find them. Interview them.

In the modern world the concept of "slavery" is generally used in one of two ways: to reference slavery in the past, or as a metaphor for bad treatment in the present. However, literal slavery still exists in the world even if it hides under different names.

In which case, assuming even the rough accuracy of 27 million, there are likely more slaves in the world today than there have been at any other time in human history. For some quick perspective on that point: Over the entire 350 years of the transatlantic slave trade, 13.5 million people were taken out of Africa, meaning there are twice as many enslaved right now as there had been in that whole 350-year span.

It's a sobering read. Slavery isn't just a thing of the past or a euphemism for exploitative conditions. Literal slavery still exists.

I have never visited a developing country but this account of Haitian bureaucracy blew my mind.

It has proven hard for me to appreciate exactly how confused the Haitians are about some things. Gail, our program director, explained that she has a lot of trouble with her Haitian office staff because they don't understand the concept of sorting numerically. Not just "they don't want to do it" or "it never occurred to them", but after months and months of attempted explanation they don't understand that sorting alphabetically or numerically is even a thing. Not only has this messed up her office work, but it makes dealing with the Haitian bureaucracy - harrowing at the best of times - positively unbearable.

Gail told the story of the time she asked a city office for some paperwork regarding Doctors Without Borders. The local official took out a drawer full of paperwork and looked through every single paper individually to see if it was the one she wanted. Then he started looking for the next drawer. After five hours, the official finally said that the paper wasn't in his office.

Without concepts like "sorting" I don't see how you can build functioning institutions. Can this problem even be solved by aid, or is it deeper?

President Obama traveled to Phnom Penh to invite Asian countries (excluding China) to join a new Trans-Pacific Parternship. The only problem? No one joined.

It is symptomatic of the national condition of the United States that the worst humiliation ever suffered by it as a nation, and by a US president personally, passed almost without comment last week. I refer to the November 20 announcement at a summit meeting in Phnom Penh that 15 Asian nations, comprising half the world's population, would form a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership excluding the United States.

President Barack Obama attended the summit to sell a US-based Trans-Pacific Partnership excluding China. He didn't. The American led-partnership became a party to which no-one came.

Instead, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, plus China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand, will form a club and leave out the United States.

President Obama is a national embarrassment. The reason he's so popular internationally is that most of the world is pleased to see America humiliated and weak.

Everyone knows that China exports zillions of gadgets and trinkets every year and benefits from this huge trade surplus, but China isn't self-sufficient. China imports vast quantities of oil and natural gas over the ocean and also suffers a staggering food deficit.

Structurally, China is at a huge disadvantage as it accounts for 20% of the world's population, but only 7% of arable land. Compare that with Brazil which has the reverse of those ratios. What that does for a country like China is to incentivise the adoption of technification. Let's look at their porcine market, which represents 50% of global production and consumption. In China, to slaughter roughly 600 mn pigs per year, which is about six times the demand in the US, they have a breeding herd of about 50 mn animals. In the US, the comparable number is only about 6 mn so there is a huge productivity lag. Owing to its structural disadvantages, China is much more focused on increasing efficiency. For that, it needs to accelerate technification. So, we're seeing a whole series of government incentives at a national level, a provincial level and a local level, focusing on the need to move toward integrated pork production because that's a key way to optimise total economics, both in terms of pig production, slaughtering, processing and also actually taking the pork out into the marketplace.

Using Wikipedia for a source here's a table I made of the ten most populous countries and their arable land to population ratio (both as a percentage of the world's total).

The bimodal distribution is surprising to me... it's as if food self-sufficiency plays no role in limiting population. I wonder if this is a modern phenomena or has held true throughout history?

Also interesting is that Russia has a huge reserve of arable land to go along with its huge reserve of energy resources. Given their proximity to China, I wonder if Russia be able to hold on to their territory as their population shrinks? Russia's land isn't all of high quality, but there's a lot of it.

(HT: Via Meadia.)

David Horovitz describes how Iron Dome has protected Israel from rockets while simultaneously creating political complications.

Successive days of rocket attacks on Tel Aviv and efforts to reach Jerusalem? Well, that's worrying for sure. Those alarms are terrifying, no question. Plenty of Israelis from the center will now join the traumatized ranks of the Kassam-worn south. But injuries and death on the scale so gleefully contemplated by Hamas? Sorry. No, actually. We brought protection. We've got Iron Dome.

This being the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, even in Israel's defensive victory, even in its staggering success in keeping its people physically safe, lies the danger of defeat.

When Israel's short-sighted critics insistently refuse to look beyond the numerical asymmetry, the very effectiveness of Iron Dome becomes the latest weapon with which to attack Israel for its purported aggression. All those Gazans are suffering terribly, dozens have been killed, yet hardly any Israelis are dying? That can't be right. How can the Israelis claim to be the victims of unprovoked and indiscriminate aggression? They're still alive.

Here's the problem: it's easy for the media to report on suffering, because very few people deserve to suffer. The audience instinctively knows how to line up its sympathies and the journalists don't have to work very hard to explain anything. It would be a lot more work for journalists to explain why the audience should side against the people who are most immediately, most visibly suffering.

The success of Iron Dome can be explained in one story. Each Hamas rocket that doesn't land and kill anyone doesn't get its own treatment because the potential victims are vague and faceless. When an actual Palestinian is killed the victim is specific and has a face, and the tragedy of the suffering wrenches the heart and draws viewers.

Our world is perverse in that we glorify people who suffer without looking into the cause of their suffering. A person who suffers for doing wrong deserves our pity, but should also stand as a warning to others and not simply be excused out of sympathy. In reality the suffering of the Palestinians is caused not by Israel, but by Hamas.

And Palestinians in Gaza are dying in growing numbers because they are either directly involved in trying to kill us or -- to our genuine sorrow and Hamas's cynical delight -- they had the misfortune to be sleeping, walking, talking, studying or praying very close to a key Hamas terror chief, missile launch site, ammunition store or other element of the sprawling Hamas kill-the-Jews infrastructure.

To put it succinctly, Hamas is doing its best to kill any and all of us in Israel, while cynically seeking to protect itself from attack by emplacing its offensive capacity among Gaza's often unwitting civilians. And Israel is doing its best to prevent its citizens being killed, while trying to thwart the attacks without harming Gaza's civilians. There's the relevant asymmetry.

I'll have to admit that I've long been puzzled by the hatred most of the Western world has for Israel, but now Walter Russell Mead has enlightened me by delving into "Just War" theory.

But more moderate critics of Israel (including many Israelis) focus on jus in bello, and in particular they look at the question of proportionality. When the Palestinians flick a handful of fairly crude rockets at random across Israel, these critics say, Israel has a right to a kind of pinprick response: tit for tat. But it isn't entitled to bring the full power of its industrial grade air force and its mighty ground forces into an operation designed to crush Hamas at the cost of hundreds of civilian casualties. You can't fight slingshots with tanks.

For many people around the world, this seems patently obvious: Israel has a right to respond to attacks from Hamas but it doesn't have an unlimited right to respond to limited attacks with unlimited force. Israeli blindness to this obvious moral principle strikes many observers as evidence of hardheartedness and national moral decline, and colors their perceptions of many other Israeli policies.

The whole jus in bello argument sails right over the heads of most Americans. The proportionality concept never went over that big here. Many Americans are instinctive Clausewitzians; Clausewitz argued that efforts to make war less cruel end up making it worse, and a lot of Americans agree. [UPDATED NOTE: Many Americans consider the classic concept of proportionality -- that the violence used must be proportional to the end sought -- as meaningless when responding to attacks on the lives of citizens because the protection of citizens from armed and planned attacks is of enough importance to justify any steps taken to ensure that the attacks end.]

Just War theory really makes the most sense to me in the context of disagreements between individuals. Historically that's what wars have been: one aristocrat fighting against another for personal reasons. Among modern democracies though that paradigm doesn't hold. "You killed five of my peasants so I'm going to kill five of yours" is fine if peasants only have value as pieces of property, but once you start to see those peasants as citizens with inherent value of their own then proportionality goes out the window. Every citizen is immeasurably valuable on his own merit and deserves to be protected, not because of his value to his lord but because of his value to himself.

I'll have to admit that I've long been puzzled by the hatred most of the Western world has for Israel, but now Walter Russell Mead has enlightened me by delving into "Just War" theory.

But more moderate critics of Israel (including many Israelis) focus on jus in bello, and in particular they look at the question of proportionality. When the Palestinians flick a handful of fairly crude rockets at random across Israel, these critics say, Israel has a right to a kind of pinprick response: tit for tat. But it isn't entitled to bring the full power of its industrial grade air force and its mighty ground forces into an operation designed to crush Hamas at the cost of hundreds of civilian casualties. You can't fight slingshots with tanks.

For many people around the world, this seems patently obvious: Israel has a right to respond to attacks from Hamas but it doesn't have an unlimited right to respond to limited attacks with unlimited force. Israeli blindness to this obvious moral principle strikes many observers as evidence of hardheartedness and national moral decline, and colors their perceptions of many other Israeli policies.

The whole jus in bello argument sails right over the heads of most Americans. The proportionality concept never went over that big here. Many Americans are instinctive Clausewitzians; Clausewitz argued that efforts to make war less cruel end up making it worse, and a lot of Americans agree. [UPDATED NOTE: Many Americans consider the classic concept of proportionality -- that the violence used must be proportional to the end sought -- as meaningless when responding to attacks on the lives of citizens because the protection of citizens from armed and planned attacks is of enough importance to justify any steps taken to ensure that the attacks end.]

Just War theory really makes the most sense to me in the context of disagreements between individuals. Historically that's what wars have been: one aristocrat fighting against another for personal reasons. Among modern democracies though that paradigm doesn't hold. "You killed five of my peasants so I'm going to kill five of yours" is fine if peasants only have value as pieces of property, but once you start to see those peasants as citizens with inherent value of their own then proportionality goes out the window. Every citizen is immeasurably valuable on his own merit and deserves to be protected, not because of his value to his lord but because of his value to himself.

Newly released emails prove that Obama knew about the true nature of the Benghazi attack while it was in progress and then lied about it to America for weeks.

Three separate e-mails were sent to the White House on Sept. 11:

The first email, timed at 4:05 p.m. Washington time -- or 10:05 p.m. Benghazi time, 20-30 minutes after the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission allegedly began -- carried the subject line "U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi Under Attack" and the notation "SBU", meaning "Sensitive But Unclassified."

The text said the State Department's regional security office had reported that the diplomatic mission in Benghazi was "under attack. Embassy in Tripoli reports approximately 20 armed people fired shots; explosions have been heard as well."

The message continued: "Ambassador Stevens, who is currently in Benghazi, and four ... personnel are in the compound safe haven. The 17th of February militia is providing security support."

A second email, headed "Update 1: U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi" and timed 4:54 p.m. Washington time, said that the Embassy in Tripoli had reported that "the firing at the U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi had stopped and the compound had been cleared." It said a "response team" was at the site attempting to locate missing personnel.

A third email, also marked SBU and sent at 6:07 p.m. Washington time, carried the subject line: "Update 2: Ansar al-Sharia Claims Responsibility for Benghazi Attack."

The message reported: "Embassy Tripoli reports the group claimed responsibility on Facebook and Twitter and has called for an attack on Embassy Tripoli."

Yet the president and his advisers repeatedly told us the attack was spontaneous reaction to the anti-Muslim video and that it lacked information suggesting it was a terrorist assault.

Obama should resign. This is so far beyond Watergate... it's a national disgrace.

Kevin DuJan explains why you never cross the Clintons.

I fully expect Hillary Clinton to do something to retaliate against both Jay Carney personally and also Joe Biden in the next few weeks. She'll do it before the election...but won't touch Obama until after he's defeated, in which case I'm sure a lot of things will miraculously be made available to the incoming Romney administration (and its Justice Department) that were supposed to be shredded or buried in vaults somewhere. Ooops! Remember: Hillary Clinton can never do anything that harms Obama because she needs black people for her 2016 campaign...and the only thing that can keep her from being the nominee in 2016 is if she doesn't have the support of blacks. Being Secretary of State for the last four years was to show blacks that there was no hard feelings between Hillary and Obama and that all the racial rhetoric Obama churned up against the Clintons in the primaries should be forgotten. Hillary can't be the next nominee without blacks firmly behind her, and she knows it.

I'm so excited!

Added bonus: when will CIA Director General Petraeus weigh in? It's his agency that the Obama and Biden are blaming for the wrong information, and there are few people with more stature and gravitas. Would you be eager to pick a fight with the Clintons and the most popular and successful living general?

Obama's lies about the attacks in Libya are bad enough, but why hasn't America yet responded?

It took less than four weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, for the Bush administration to gather intelligence, plan the full-scale invasion of Afghanistan and begin executing Operation Enduring Freedom. By October 7, 2001, multinational forces from the United States, Britain and Australia were on the ground, linking up with friendly Afghan forces, overthrowing the Taliban and driving al-Qaeda from the haven from which they had attacked our country. ...

This is not to suggest an invasion of Libya. But certainly by now we could have identified the groups responsible for the attack, targeted their compounds and retaliated in some fashion. Heck, the Libyan people have done more to retaliate than Obama has. The Associated Press reports that a few days after the attack, "Hundreds of protesters seized control of several militia headquarters ... including the compound of one of Libya's strongest armed Islamic extremist groups, evicting militiamen and setting fire to buildings as the attack that killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans sparked a backlash against armed groups."

What kind of signal does it send when a Libyan mob does more to avenge the killing of an American ambassador than the president of the United States?

Our enemies need to learn that they cannot attack us and kill us with impunity. We need to respond to violence with violence. We must kill our enemies, because they're eager to kill us.

Setting forest fires is one of several terrorism tactics that many people have hesitated to mention because no one wants to give al-Qaeda any ideas.

"One should note that setting fires to forests in the countries of the European Union is a new tendency in al-Qaeda's strategy of a 'thousand cuts'," Alexander Bortnikov said, according to state news agency RIA Novosti, at a meeting of heads of security agencies.

"This method allows (al-Qaeda) to inflict significant economic and moral damage without serious preliminary preparations, technical equipment or significant expenses."

It's hard to prove arson, and it's hard to catch the arsonists when the fires themselves aren't discovered for a long time after they're started. There's no reason this tactic wouldn't work in America, if it hasn't already and we just don't know it.

Will these bloody handprints be the images that define President Obama's foreign policy legacy?

Caption: There will be blood: A Libyan man explains that the bloodstains on the column are from one the American staff members who grabbed the edge of the column while he was evacuated, after an attack that killed four Americans on September 11th

President Obama bears ultimate responsibility for our poor preparation for these attacks. America should respond to these attacks with force.

(HT: Gateway Pundit.)

So is foreign policy supposed to be off limits for presidential candidates?

There is no end to the chutzpah of the Obama administration and its enablers in the press. In the wake of violent attacks on the U.S. embassy in Cairo and consulate in Benghazi that resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including the first U.S. ambassador to be killed in the line of duty in 33 years, Barack Obama tries to pretend that the real story is Mitt Romney's criticism of the statement that the State Department released after the Cairo attack. And, incredibly, the press shows little interest in the September 11 anniversary attacks by al Qaeda members or sympathizers, and instead follow's the administration's line: it's all about Mitt! ...

Nevertheless, when Romney held a press conference to talk about these events, what happened? Reporters collaborated to make sure that appropriately hostile questions were asked, "no matter who he calls on." The Right Scoop picked up reporters planning their attack on Romney on an open microphone. (What is it with liberals and open microphones?) You really should watch the video; I would put it up here, but it doesn't appear to be embeddable.

This is quite remarkable: when Democrats alleged foreign policy failures during the Bush administration, do you remember hostile questions from reporters along the lines of, how dare you question the administration's foreign policies? Don't you know politics stops at the water's edge? No, I don't remember it that way, either.

Well, isn't it obvious? An American embassy looted and an American ambassador murdered. This is a huge embarrassment for President Obama. Embassies are sovereign territory, so when one is ransacked it is literally an invasion of American territory. The media simply can't allow Romney to draw attention to Obama's failure.