The Obama administration lived up to its legal obligations today by withholding the first payment of U.S. funds to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) since it voted to recognize “Palestine” as a member state.  The State Department said a scheduled $60 million payment would not be in the mail to the world body and warned that the same treatment would be given to any other UN agency that pulls the same trick.

But Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland also said the U.S. would maintain its membership in the organization and continue to participate despite the group’s decision to flout America’s demand that it not attempt to circumvent the peace process by admitting the Palestinians. How exactly that will work is not clear especially since Washington will lose its vote after two years of nonpayment of dues. There is also the possibility that the international community will interpret the decision to stay at the organization as a mixed message that will dilute the impact of the financial cutoff. Considering that the administration’s arguments against the vote to admit the Palestinians were often couched more in terms of the embarrassment they felt about the aid cutoff than the damage the group was doing to the peace process, it would be difficult to blame other countries from assuming that Obama will find a way to make good on the funding by eventually finding a way to circumvent the law.

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“Contentions” is not a website usually devoted to sports, but from time to time it does take note of feats of excellence. And so a word is in order about the World Series that ended late Friday night between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Texas Rangers. As Tom Boswell of the Washington Post points out, it was the capstone to perhaps the best month in baseball history.

It all began with what is generally regarded as the most riveting day (September 28) in the history of the regular season, in which both the Cardinals and Tampa Bay Rays came back from record deficits at the beginning of September to win, in thrilling fashion, on the final day (the Cardinals were 10 1/2 games behind Atlanta for the wild card slot just a month before the regular season ended).

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My impression was that he was just trying to joke around with the audience, but there’s some media speculation that Rick Perry was under the influence of something during this New Hampshire speech on Friday. His demeanor in the video is definitely a far cry from his halting and uncomfortable style during the debates, though, as you’ll see, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a great improvement:

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I had a recent conversation with my colleague Yuval Levin about gratitude, and in the course of our conversation he said that he considers it to be among the foremost conservative virtues. I agree, and would add that it’s one of the more neglected ones.

The link between gratitude and conservatism is based on the precept that human nature is, as the founders believed, decidedly mixed. The line between good and evil runs through every human heart. This life is for all of us, at one point or another, a place of sorrow. And because a decent civilization is hard to build and difficult to sustain, conservatives should be pleased when human institutions and relationships work reasonably well. Perfection and utopia are not (as is the case with some strains within progressivism) the standards for contentment.

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Herman Cain maintains that he wasn’t aware of any financial settlements that the National Restaurant Association reportedly reached with two women who accused him of sexual harassment in the 1990s. But how likely is it that the head of the association at the time would be left in the dark on the issue? To get a clearer idea, I spoke with Liane Fisher, an employment attorney based in New York who specializes in sexual harassment and discrimination cases.

Fisher told me that it wasn’t “impossible” that Cain was oblivious about the settlement, but it seemed highly unlikely from her experience.

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The Palestinian Authority scored a major victory today in its campaign to secure international recognition as the government of an independent “Palestine” when UNESCO voted to admit it as a member state. But the actual Palestinian state — the one in Gaza where the Hamas terrorist group exercises virtually untrammeled sovereignty — gave the world another reminder of what such statehood actually means this weekend when it showered southern Israel with a barrage of missiles. One Israeli, 56-year-old Moshe Ami of Ashkelon was murdered in one of the attacks.

Ami’s death and the ongoing missile fire from Hamas and allied Islamist groups such as Islamic Jihad is being treated as just another one of those boring “cycle of violence” stories in most of the mainstream media in which the lead is as often as not about Israeli retaliation strikes aimed at silencing the missile fire. The focus of international diplomacy is, as always, the restoration of a meaningless cease-fire between Hamas and Israel that will last until the next time the rulers of Gaza feel like sending a message to Jerusalem. But the real message here is one that few are heeding. Palestinian independence in Gaza has only meant one thing: the right of terrorists to shoot at Jews with impunity.

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In this morning’s New York Times, Bill Keller, the former managing editor, has a column on an Indian reformer who has been on a hunger strike against government corruption, a huge problem on the subcontinent. He writes:

Like Occupy Wall Street, Hazare embodies a national frustration with broken democratic institutions. Indeed, India’s government makes our paralyzed Congress look nimble. Like Occupy, Hazare’s grand grievance is the wholesale diversion of wealth from the middle class and poor to the unworthy few — in India’s case through payoffs, patronage and thievery, in America’s through tax and regulatory policies that have expanded the gap between the richest few and everyone else.

I’ll leave India to the Indians, but Keller’s idea that wealth has been diverted from the American middle class to the mega-rich few via tax and regulatory policies is somewhere beyond ludicrous. The gap between the richest few and the rest of us has indeed increased in recent decades, but that is not because the rest of us have gotten poorer. It’s because the richest few have gotten enormously richer. In 1982 it took $82 million to get a slot on the Forbes 400 list. Today, just 29 years later, it takes a billion, more than ten times as much even allowing for inflation.
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Occupy Wall Street has managed to raise a tidy sum – half a million dollars - to fund blankets, pillows, sleeping bags, food, and the like. But precisely how it has managed to raise so much money is only now emerging. After all, OWS is not an official non-profit organisation. Or is it?

It seems OWS has partnered with the DC-based Alliance for Global Justice (AfGJ), an organisation dedicated to achieving ‘social change and economic justice by helping to build a stronger more unified grassroots movement.’ By collecting on behalf of OWS, donations to the latter become tax-deductible. In return, AfGJ retains a satisfying seven percent of all donations. Legally, this ties the two organizations’ finances.

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Conservatives need to avoid the temptation to dismiss Politico’s allegations against Herman Cain as evidence of a media double standard, or liberal hypocrisy on sexual harassment, and leave it at that. Jeffrey Lord of the American Spectator appears to minimize the allegations, as does Roger L. Simon of PJ Media, by repeating Clarence Thomas’s famous phrase: “high-tech lynching.”

But conservatives were infuriated by the allegations against Thomas because they were false. And though Curt Levey of Red State concludes that there is “no there there” in the Cain story — his colleague Erick Erickson characterizes the “five-figure” settlements with the women who complained about Cain as “ ‘go-away’ money” — conservatives should not be so quick to make light of the allegations.

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While the Obama administration’s hostility to transparency is well known, its latest scheme would break new ground in government secrecy. The administration’s proposed changes to the Freedom of Information Act guidelines would allow the Department of Justice to deny the existence of documents and prevent judicial oversight.

The ACLU says the rule changes would “dramatically undermine government integrity,” and the Sunlight Foundation, in a post that lays out fifteen ways the new rules would undermine transparency, notes that while most coverage has “focused on the DOJ’s desire to lie about the existence of records… DOJ’s efforts to undermine FOIA go well beyond dishonest requests.” Today’s Washington Examiner editorial explains what is so harmful about the changes:

First, by not citing a specific exemption allowed under the FOIA as grounds for denying a request, the proposal would cut off a requestor from appealing to the courts. By thus creating an area of federal activity that is completely exempt from judicial review, the proposal undercuts due process and other constitutional protections. Second, by creating a justification for government lying to FOIA requestors in one area, a legal precedent is created that sooner or later will be asserted by the government in other areas as well.

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Unfortunately this seems like the type of denial that may raise more questions than answers. Cain just told Fox News unequivocally that he has “never sexually harassed anyone,” but acknowledged that he was once accused of it. He also said that he was unaware of any financial settlement the National Restaurant Association might have reached with his accusers, but said it might have taken place without his knowledge.

Cain’s story would certainly explain why his campaign has been caught completely flat-footed by the bombshell. But there are also indications that he was fully aware the case was being handled by the association’s general counsel – which seems like it would imply a settlement – in the Politico story:

Cain spokesman J.D. Gordon told POLITICO the candidate indicated to campaign officials that he was “vaguely familiar” with the charges and that the restaurant association’s general counsel had resolved the matter.

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As expected, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — UNESCO — voted to admit “Palestine” as a full member-nation today, a move that will trigger an automatic cutoff of American funds and participation in the organization mandated by U.S. law. But the immediate response of the American delegation that had fought to either delay or defeat the move was far from defiant.

According to the New York Times:

David T. Killion, the American ambassador, said that the United States, “remains deeply committed” to UNESCO. But he said that Monday’s decision, which he repeatedly called premature, “will complicate our ability to support UNESCO.” The United States will seek other means to support the agency, Mr. Killion said, although he did not offer specifics about any avenues under consideration.

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Last week, I accused the filmmaker Michael Moore of being a hypocrite and a liar for emphatically denying to CNN’s Piers Morgan, on multiple occasions, that he was part of the “one percent.”

Moore has now confirmed my charge.

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Talk about the triumph of hope over experience: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seems to expect the Pakistani government will pressure its proxies in the Haqqani network and other terrorist groups into “reconciliation” talks. It was only last month that Admiral Mike Mullen blew the whistle on the Pakistanis and their nefarious connections with some of the world’s worst terrorist groups. Yet according to this Times account, President Obama is furious with Mullen–not the Pakistanis–because Mullen’s “remarks further enflamed the Pakistanis.” Onnly a few weeks after Mullen spoke, Clinton led a fresh delegation to Islamabad seeking the Pakistani army’s help to bring the Haqqanis to the negotiating table.

How the Pakistanis must have laughed. The only time they provided much help for us was in the early days after 9/11 when they were afraid of the consequences of not doing so. Since then,they have learned they can ignore our demands with impunity–or, more accurately, selectively grant a few demands while stiffing us on the rest. Thus, they allow us to keep flying drones to target al-Qaeda while they provided funding and direction to the Haqqanis as they carry out horrific strikes such as the suicide bombing in Kabul on Saturday that killed 13 NATO soldiers and contractors.

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Jonathan is right that the sexual harassment settlement allegations against Herman Cain may end up winning him sympathy from conservatives, at least initially. But if the Politico story holds up, it could be more than enough to knock him out of his top position. So who would benefit most from a potential Cain downfall?

So far, the momentum has moved from one not-Romney candidate to another: first Bachmann, then Perry, then Cain. This trend could continue, with Cain’s support siphoning away to Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum. Or his supporters could end up running back to Bachmann or Perry.

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Herman Cain’s presidential campaign has been cruising along without being derailed by either the candidate’s gaffes on foreign policy or abortion, but a bombshell story released by Politico on Sunday may profoundly impact the course of the Republican race. According to the website, Cain was accused by two separate women of inappropriate behavior during his time as CEO of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s. According to sources cited in the article, the accusations amounted to sexual harassment. The story leads readers to believe the cases were dealt with by the organization, and both women received settlements in exchange for their silence. If true, this is nothing less than political dynamite that could blow up Cain’s presidential hopes at a time when he continues to compete with Mitt Romney for the GOP lead in national polls.

For many observers, this will seem vaguely similar to the incendiary charges leveled by Anita Hill at Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearings. The question now is not just whether the story is true but if Republican voters think Cain is being given a “high-tech lynching” (to repeat the words Thomas used to describe what happened to him).

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