[guest post by Dana]

Once again, Joe Biden behaved in an overly-familiar way with a woman who was not Dr. Jill Biden. This time, the wife of newly appointed Defense Secretary Ash Carter had the unfortunate luck of drawing the short straw:

As Carter began speaking, Biden beckoned Stephanie Carter from across the room, then put both hands on her shoulders. They lingered there for roughly 20 seconds until Biden leaned in and whispered in her ear.

Video:

This is not Biden’s first time getting too close to a woman other than his wife. As he possessively put both hands on Mrs. Carter’s shoulders while standing very close to her backside, one wonders just what was so urgent that he had to lean in like that and whisper in her ear? I’ll tell you what: nothing. Absolutely nothing. And when one considers the Democrat’s caterwauling about the raging war on women, you’d think his boss would personally put the kibosh on the questionable behavior by his Vice-President toward binders full of women, lest anyone perceive these actions an abuse of power.

–Dana

[guest post by Dana]

State Dept. spokesperson Marie Harf, in discussing the ISIS situation with Chris Matthews, said this:

We cannot kill our way out of this war. We need in the medium to longer term to go after the root causes that leads people to join these groups, whether it’s a lack of opportunity for jobs.

We’re not going to be able to stop that in our lifetime or 50 lifetimes,” Matthews interrupted. “There’s always going to be poor people. There’s always going to be poor Muslims, and as long as there are poor Muslims, the trumpet’s blowing and they’ll join. We can’t stop that, can we?”

In return, Harf suggested a soft power-like approach: “We can work with countries around the world to help improve their governance,” she said. “We can help them build their economies so they can have job opportunities for these people.

After a facing a barrage of criticism, Harf got on her high horse, ostensibly to clarify her comments, but instead ended up insulting the intelligence of the American people:

“I’m not the first person to say something like this,” Harf said. “Military commanders that we’ve had throughout many years here fighting this war on terrorism have said the exact same thing, that in the short term when there’s a threat like ISIL. We’ll take direct military action against these terrorists. We have done that. We are doing that in Iraq and Syria. But longer term, we have to look at how we combat the conditions that can lead people to turn to extremism.”

“So you suggested that maybe if you find these young men jobs, they might not become terrorists?” Blitzer asked, echoing her critics, prompting Harf to call his statement a “gross oversimplification.”

“We cannot kill every terrorist around the world, nor should we try,” Harf said later. “How do you get at the root causes of this? It might be too nuanced an argument for some, like I’ve seen over the last 24 hours some of the commentary out there, but it’s really the smart way that Democrats, Republicans, our partners in the Arab world think we need to combat it.”

This administration continues to embolden the enemy through this incredibly naive and clueless outlook. If we don’t say the “I” word, if we don’t provoke them in any way, if we “feel their pain” and respect them and if we understand they’ve been humiliated and damaged in life, then all will be well and they will not see us as their enemy. How else to explain this inability to recognize nonredeemable evil and call it by its name – even as we witness the despicable, barbaric and heinous acts of evil being committed against humanity on a daily basis?

I don’t know what the administration’s mission plan is to combat ISIS. I don’t know that they even have one yet. But what I am compelled to believe, right here and right now, is that this president is on a mission – a holy mission and that is to be the savior to the Lost Boys of ISIS.

–Dana

Patrick Brennan at National Review Online last night:

A federal judge for the Southern District of Texas granted an injunction tonight blocking the implementation of President Obama’s sweeping executive action on immigration from November, which offered a form of temporary legal status and work authorization to millions of illegel immigrants. The judge, Andrew Hanen, is considering a case brought by the attorney generals of 26 states, which alleges that the executive action is improper and unconstitutional, and will harm the states by forcing them to pay for some benefits granted to newly legal immigrants, such as drivers’ licenses, and for higher law-enforcement costs.

The federal government is expected to immediately ask for a stay of the injunction. That would allow the feds to resume the process of preparing to grant quasi-legal status to millions of illegal immigrants — applications for one category of the president amnesty were to open this week. For now, that can’t happen; the decision from a higher court will probably take a few weeks.

Whatever the final decision is, this ruling should a bit of ammunition for Republicans who are currently trying to force some Democrats into agreeing to a government-funding bill in Congress that blocks the implementation of the order, which many Democrats once opposed.

Such an injunction isn’t granted unless the judge feels the plaintiffs have “a substantial likelihood of success on the merits.” Hanen’s ruling offers analysis of whether the states have standing to sue (on a number of grounds, he says they do), and whether they have a good chance at success.

The ruling does not reach Obama’s violation of executive powers, unfortunately. According to Brennan, it merely has to do with legal arcana concerning rulemaking without jumping through the necessary hoops.

You’ll find no original analysis in this here post. Call me lazy, but I don’t feel inclined right now to go read 100 pages of legal yapping that doesn’t even address the central problem with Obama’s action.

But I’ll take what I can get, for as long as it lasts. We’ll see how long that is, I guess.

FLASHBACK: Regular readers might remember Judge Hanen from this post of mine in June 2014. In that post, I quoted a Washington Times piece by Ernest Istook, which quoted Judge Hanen’s criticism of the Obama administration’s actions regarding immigration:

“The Department of Homeland Security, instead of enforcing our border security laws, actually assisted the criminal conspiracy [of child-smuggling] in achieving its illegal goals,” writes a federal judge in a court order.

U.S. District Judge Andrew S. Hanen in Brownsville, Texas, issued the order in December. It explains and condemns how today’s crisis was created by President Barack Obama’s laxity and refusal to enforce our immigration laws. . . [A] s Judge Hanen’s order states: “Time and again this court has been told by representatives of the government and the defense that cartels control the entire smuggling process … the government is not only allowing [those paying the child-smugglers] to fund the illegal and evil activities of these cartels, but is also inspiring them to do so.”

“The DHS policy is as logical as taking illegal drugs or weapons that it has seized from smugglers and delivering them to the criminals who initially solicited their illegal importation. Legally, this situation is no different,” he wrote.

. . . .

Judge Hanen described that the pattern is the same in other cases: “In each case, the DHS completed the criminal conspiracy, instead of enforcing the laws of the United States, by delivering the minors to the custody of the parent illegally living in the United States.”

The lefties (by which I mean Big Media) are going to treat this judge like a partisan hack. Mark my words.