Obama Denies Role in Government

In other news, even liberals are starting to find President Obama's weak attempts at deflection laughable.  The following is from Andy Borowitz of the New Yorker in a post entitled "Obama Denies Role in Government":

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—President Obama used his weekly radio address on Saturday to reassure the American people that he has “played no role whatsoever” in the U.S. government over the past four years. 

“Right now, many of you are angry at the government, and no one is angrier than I am,” he said. “Quite frankly, I am glad that I have had no involvement in such an organization.”

The President’s outrage only increased, he said, when he “recently became aware of a part of that government called the Department of Justice.” 

“The more I learn about the activities of these individuals, the more certain I am that I would not want to be associated with them,” he said. “They sound like bad news.” 

Mr. Obama closed his address by indicating that beginning next week he would enforce what he called a “zero tolerance policy on governing.” 

“If I find that any members of my Administration have had any intimate knowledge of, or involvement in, the workings of the United States government, they will be dealt with accordingly,” he said.

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

More Lies

So you might have heard the latest spin by the Obama Administration and the media (but I repeat myself) that the IRS scandal is nothing more than machinations of a few rogue agents in the IRS office in Cincinnati.  What a surprise to find out that isn't true:

Officials in the Technical Unit of the IRS’s Rulings and Agreements office played an integral role in determining how the targeted applications were treated, provided general guidelines to Cincinnati case workers, briefed other agency employees on the status of the special cases, and reviewed all those intrusive requests demanding “more information” from tea-party groups. At times, the Technical Unit lawyers seemed to exercise tight control over these applications, creating both a backlog in application processing and frustration among Cincinnati agents waiting for direction. 

An IRS employee who asked not to be identified tells National Review Onlinethat all members of the agency’s Technical Unit are based in Washington, D.C. A current list of Technical Unit managers provided by another IRS employee shows that all such managers are based at the agency’s headquarters on Constitution Avenue in the District of Columbia, and the IRS confirmed, in a testy exchange with National Review Online, that the Technical Unit is “based in Washington.”

Shocker.

The Real Scandal

Bill Kristol gets it right with his thoughts on seeing the Obama Adminsitration's scandals in their proper context and what Republicans should be doing in the mean time:

Obama’s scandals are damaging to the country. Congress should do its duty in getting to the bottom of them, and if the scandals weaken Obama’s ability to push through bad legislation, conservatives have no obligation to look that gift horse in the mouth. But Obama’s liberal policies are more dangerous than his managerial scandals. 

That’s why making the substantive case against the Obama administration’s policies remains job one for an opposition that hopes to persuade the American people that it deserves to govern. So the key task is to demonstrate how Obama’s policies are failing, to explain why they’re destructive to the country, and to elucidate why conservative policies have worked in the past and how they can be updated to shape a better future. 

This isn’t that hard. But it’s easy to be distracted by the scandal of the day. The real scandal, though, is the Obama administration, whose purposes and policies exemplify a liberalism that degrades popular self-government and embraces American decline.

I think it's lazy for Republicans to sit back and talk of impeachment (at least as the evidence stands currently) or see how many times they can link Obama to Richard Nixon in a press conference.  This opening should not be wasted.

Sports Writers and Politics: A Second Take

It seems that it should be a universal rule that sports writers and commentators should never breach into other topics, especially something as high as politics.  Jay Nordlinger wrote a wonderful column for National Review on the subject, which came out at during a time (2005 to be exact) when sports writers, in the middle of describing a walk-off win in extra innings or a late touchdown catch to secure a win, felt the need to interject some riff about Dick Cheney or link some boneheaded play to the supposed incompetence of the Bush Administration.  A sample:

Perusing [Sports Illustrated's] website, you might suspect that anti-Cheney remarks are required from all SI writers. These remarks amount to a big, collective tic. Have a passage on a San Antonio Spur: “[He] remains as unpopular among non-Spurs as Dick Cheney is among Democrats, Independents, Americans with no political affiliation, a growing number of Republicans, the great majority of the world population as well as that poor guy he filled with buckshot.”

But in the growing scandals of the Obama Administration--in trying to erase the fact that the State Department did not heed the repeated warnings on the lack of security by then-Ambassador Chris Stevens prior to the attack on the consulate in Benghazi and the ensuing attempt to try to fool the American people and blame it on a video instead of Muslim terrorists; the IRS singling out groups of a certain political bent and then covering up who knew what and when, which included then-acting IRS head Steven Miller lying to Congress in early 2012; and the Justice Department under Eric Holder doing things that were only dreamed of in the heads of leftist columnists during the Bush Administration--, (stay with me here) sports writers, in a sense, have actually proved themselves even more capable talking about politics than the political writers and commentators themselves.  I base this all on on observation made by James Taranto late last week in the WSJ:

One thing we have learned from the IRS scandal is that sports journalists are morally superior to political journalists. Whereas the former understand that cheating is an assault on the basic integrity of the sport, the latter all too often treat it as if it were just part of the game.

It is a sad state of affairs in the world when that observation is true.

The IRS Scandal and the Future of Campaign Finance Reform

With the IRS scandal now seemingly growing by the hour, Steven Hayward takes a moment to reflect on where this may all be heading:

I’ve always said that the way to get rid of corruption in high places is to get rid of high places, and surely that’s the right answer here: let’s get rid of the byzantine campaign finance rules that stifle political expression or limit it to the insiders like Rove and Axelrod. But the opposite is likely to happen. The so-called “reform community” (Fred Wertheimer, chief nanny), which is very well organized and has media sympathy, is going to argue that the IRS scandal shows that we need more regulation of political speech, or at the very least, disclosure of donors, so that more people can receive the Koch brothers treatment by the left. (Of course, the so-called “reformers” always want to change the subject when you bring up the exemption from campaign contribution disclosure that the Socialist Workers Party still enjoys; most reporters don’t even know it exists.)

And we need to be afraid of this development:

Want to hear some really bad news? John McCain is on the case. Which means we’re doomed: 

A Senate investigative panel led by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan and Republican John McCain of Arizona has been reviewing the use of social welfare groups for political causes for the past year and now is examining the agency’s handling of the tax-exempt reviews.

Remember when McCain-Feingold campaign finance "reform" was passed back in 2002?  (And also remember when President thought it was unconstitutional but signed it into law anyway because for Bush, resolving issues of constitutionality is something only the courts can decide?)

Well, we may have not heard the last from McCain on that front.

And also, remember immigration reform?  I wonder what has been going on with that with all of the scandals taking the front pages (if you are the New York Times coverage begins on A16)...

The Bulworth Presidency

In an interesting piece for the New York Times (odd, I know), Peter Baker stumbles upon something important regarding how the president sees himself:

“Being in office for nearly four and a half years gives the president some perspective — it helps separate the signal from the noise,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a White House senior adviser. “When you have dealt with real life-and-death problems, the political ones seem much smaller and affect you less.” 

Yet Mr. Obama also expresses exasperation. In private, he has talked longingly of “going Bulworth,” a reference to a little-remembered 1998 Warren Beatty movie about a senator who risked it all to say what he really thought. While Mr. Beatty’s character had neither the power nor the platform of a president, the metaphor highlights Mr. Obama’s desire to be liberated from what he sees as the hindrances on him.' 

“Probably every president says that from time to time,” said David Axelrod, another longtime adviser who has heard Mr. Obama’s movie-inspired aspiration. “It’s probably cathartic just to say it. But the reality is that while you want to be truthful, you want to be straightforward, you also want to be practical about whatever you’re saying.”

But, like me, if you've never seen that forgotten Beatty masterpiece, here is a section of a review by John Podhoretz that is, shall I say, enlightening:

In Bulworth, which [Beatty] co-wrote and directed, Beatty plays a U.S. senator who suddenly becomes a Marxist while running for reelection -- and receives 71 percent of the vote before being assassinated by an insurance company. It would be tempting to describe Bulworth as the single most left-wing portrait of the United States ever attempted on film, but Bulworth is not actually set in the United States. It is set in Beattyworld, a fantasy land in which the suffering masses are just waiting for a politician who will wander around yelling "Socialism!" and "Ebonics? Great!"

Ha.

Courage, Obama Style

News broke yesterday that President Obama asked acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller to resign amid the scandal that, for once, is now causing the press to be somewhat interested in doing their jobs (I just heard this from Jonah Goldberg on Fox News).  But what's interesting in all of this is that Miller was scheduled to leave in June anyway.

Wow, the courage...

UPDATE:

If you have the time, please read this post on Ricochet, which gives an in depth account of the unlawful methods of the IRS.

Lastly, please read this take on the liberal argument that Tea Partiers, taking advantage of the evil ruling in Citizens United, more than doubled the creation of advocacy nonprofits soon after the ruling so that they would begin receiving tax exempt statues (I just heard this argument myself from Juan Williams):

Applications for tax exemption from advocacy nonprofits had not yet spiked when the Internal Revenue Service began using what it admits was inappropriate scrutiny of conservative groups in 2010. 

In fact, applications were declining, data show. 

Top IRS officials have been saying that a “significant increase” in applications from advocacy groups seeking tax-exempt status spurred its Cincinnati office in 2010 to filter those requests by using such politically loaded phrases as “Tea Party,” “patriots,” and “9/12.” 

Both Steven Miller, the agency’s acting commissioner until he stepped down Wednesday, and Lois Lerner, director of the agency’s exempt-organization division, have said over the past week that IRS officials started the scrutiny after observing a surge in applications for status as 501(c)(4) “social welfare” groups. Both officials cited an increase from about 1,500 applications in 2010 and to nearly 3,500 in 2012. President Obama ask Mr. Miller to resign on Wednesday. 

The scrutiny began, however, in March 2010, before an uptick could have been observed, according to data contained in the audit released Tuesday from the Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration.

The Real Danger

With the news on the scandal at the IRS growing by the day (it turns out that the higher ups knew way back in 2011), Ken Masugi sees the real danger to which this episode points:  the adminsitrative state.

Staying on the superficial level of comparing Obama with Nixon ignores the fundamental problem coming into sight here: the administrative state. In Woodrow Wilson’s conception, this scientific, a-political unity would inflict the will of an elite class on an electorate. In its modest way the IRS in this current scandal is playing out the logic of the great Progressive theorists of the administrative state—as well as its practitioners (see Woodrow Wilson, especially his classic essay on public administration). I have made this argument in some posts for this site, e.g., this one on Cass Sunstein and FDR, and several others, including John Marini and Joseph Postell, have made similar arguments.

This is about as clear a description of the battle lines as I have seen:

The assault on bureaucracy today pits the rights of the people against the wisdom of the ruling elite. Try reforming the CIA, the civil rights division of the Justice Department, or the IRS through political appointees, who reflect the results of elections. Those agencies have long been captured, not through some iron triangle of interests, but through the acceptance of their employees of a conception of justice that is at war with constitutional government. That is what the IRS scandal is bringing to light.

Is the administrative state--partially caused by the legislature freely ceding away their power to virtually unaccountable bureaucracies that have quasi-legislative, executive, and judicial powers--at all compatible in a regime built on the the laws of nature and of nature's God?  Is it compatible with the principle of government being built upon the (enlightened) consent of the governed?  I think not.

Justice Served?

Today "Dr." Kermit Gosnell was found guilty of three counts of murder.  He undoutedly could have been found guilty of many more, as Ramesh Ponnuru notes:

Kermit Gosnell is a serial killer. He was found guilty today of the first-degree murder of three infants and the third-degree murder of a patient at his abortion clinic. The grand jury believes that hundreds of infants met the same end as the ones whose murders were proved in court. Let no one call this justice. 

And, on Planned Parenthood's almost unspeakable attempt at blaming the pro-life side for the actions of Gosnell:

Among supporters of late-term abortion -- a small but vocal contingent -- a common reaction to the trial has been to say that restrictions on the practice drove women to Gosnell. The grand jury reached a different conclusion: There weren’t any restrictions, thanks to Pennsylvania state governments of both parties that supported legal abortion. Clinics stopped being monitored under the administration of Republican Governor Tom Ridge, who got himself a nice reputation as a moderate because of his stance on abortion.

Also not to be missed, Hadley Arkes, one of the foremost defenders of the right to life, shined a light on what was missed by commentators on both sides:

What is pathetic and laughable is the statement put out by Planned Parenthood — as though Gosnell’s acts were simply an assault on the pregnant women, and not the babies. But quite as implausible may be the comments of conservative commentators who feign to believe that there is something different and more objectionable in a late-term abortions. What is killed is precisely the same, distinct human being. There was nothing in this grisly killing that Planned Parenthood would have opposed five minutes, five hours, five days, five months before the same baby emerged from the womb.

Amen.

They Say Things Happen in Threes

I hope you've heard about the IRS admitting on Friday that they unfairly targeted Tea Party and other conservative-affiliated groups as early as 2011.  In case you haven't, here is a quick rundown from the AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senior Internal Revenue Service officials knew agents were targeting tea party groups as early as 2011, according to a draft of an inspector general's report obtained by The Associated Press that seemingly contradicts public statements by the IRS commissioner. 

The IRS apologized Friday for what it acknowledged was "inappropriate" targeting of conservative political groups during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status. The agency blamed low-level employees, saying no high-level officials were aware. 

But on June 29, 2011, Lois G. Lerner, who heads the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt organizations, learned at a meeting that groups were being targeted, according to the watchdog's report. At the meeting, she was told that groups with "Tea Party," ''Patriot" or "9/12 Project" in their names were being flagged for additional and often burdensome scrutiny, the report says.

The IRS maintains that this activity for which they now feel sorry for was the fault of lower level agents in their Cincinnati office.  According to the IRS, no higher level officials knew about this (if you believe this, I have a skyscraper to sell).

Of course, this news hits just as the Inspector General of the Treasury is getting ready this coming week to release a report on political abuse at the IRS that was a full year in the making.

Hmmm...I wonder if these two things are connected in any way...

Spirits in the Political World

The White House celebrates Mother's Day:

(h/t Mollie Hemingway)

A Return to Benghazi

It seems typical in politics that once time passes after a major event -- or in this case especially when the event in question would be detrimental to a liberal administration and a possible second term of a president -- we usually never seem to hear anything about the event in question ever again.  But thankfully things seem to be different with regard to the terrorist attacks in Benghazi in which four Americans were murdered.

Since it has been some time since my last post on Benghazi, it is useful to remind oneself of some of the major facts surrounding the attack and what occurred shortly afterwords.  To begin this series of posts, I will quote Scott Johnson, who has a good summary of the administration's equivocations on the reasons for the attack:

As the massacre of our fellow Americans in Benghazi returns to the news in a big way today, with the hearing scheduled in the House, it is well to remember the promotion of the Muhammad video by President Obama and Secretary Clinton in this context. It shows the politicization of the massacre by the Obama administration from the first moment on. The Obama administration’s attribution of responsibility for the massacre to a mob enraged by the Muhammad video was deeply deceitful from the outset. It was a complete and utter fraud. 

Upon reception of the caskets at Andrews Air Force Base, Clinton remarked: “This has been a difficult week for the State Department and for our country. We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful internet video that we had nothing do to with.” And, she might have added, that had nothing to do with the men whose bodies lay before her. Instead, she added this, reiterating the connection of the massacre to a mob enraged by the Muhammad video: “The people of Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Tunisia, did not trade the tyranny of a dictator for the tyranny of a mob.”
Two weeks after the massacre Obama was still yammering about the Muhammad video. Among other things, Obama declared that “there are no words that excuse the killing of innocent” and that there is “no video that justifies an attack on an embassy.” Obama decried the video as “an insult not only to Muslims, but to America as well.” I doubt the video was an insult to America. If so, Obama’s speech itself constituted a far greater insult to the United States, and to the truth as well. 

When Clinton appeared before the Senate panel to testify about these events this past January, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin made the perfectly appropriate comment that has been vindicated by subsequent investigation: “[W]e were misled that there were supposedly protests and that something sprang out of that — an assault sprang out of that — and that was easily ascertained that that was not the fact, and the American people could have known that within days and they didn’t know that.” To which Clinton responded:

With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they’d they go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator. Now, honestly, I will do my best to answer your questions about this, but the fact is that people were trying in real time to get to the best information. The IC has a process, I understand, going with the other committees to explain how these talking points came out. But you know, to be clear, it is, from my perspective, less important today looking backwards as to why these militants decided they did it than to find them and bring them to justice, and then maybe we’ll figure out what was going on in the meantime. 

It is hard to imagine a less fitting question to be asked, rhetorical or otherwise, than “What difference does it make?” It should be her epitaph, if not that of the Obama administration.

Tyranny? We Don't Need No Stinkin' Tyranny!!

President Obama yesterday was the commencement speaker at The Ohio State University's Commencement.  I had finally had time to skim some of the speech, which was revealing as usual.  But before I get into a closer examination of the speech I want to say something that always bugs me about a lot of conservative critiques of Obama and his speeches:  that he is in "campaign mode" or reads off the teleprompters too much.  Of course this true but it's merely window dressing for what is actually taking place.  I think probably the easiest approach is the one that is mostly passed over by many commentators:  actually taking him at his word. 

Let's take him at his word and see what we find.

Here is Obama a little ways into the address:

And I suspect that those of you who pursue more education, or climb the corporate ladder, or enter the arts or science or journalism, you will still choose a cause that you care about in your life and will fight like heck to realize your vision (emphasis added).

What if the "vision" a person realizing is not a good one -- one detrimental to to him and those around him?  What is "vision" anyway?  Is it something akin to fortune telling?

Obama goes on to say that

[citizenship is] at the heart of our founding -- that as Americans, we are blessed with God-given talents and inalienable rights, but with those rights come responsibilities -- to ourselves, and to one another, and to future generations.

So what do you call not dealing with entitlements and accumulating massive debts for future generations?

Anyway, let's move on.

Now, I don’t pretend to have all the answers. I’m not going to offer some grand theory on a beautiful day like this -- you guys all have celebrating to do. I’m not going to get partisan, either, because that’s not what citizenship is about.

Ok, great, not going to get partisan.  Looking forward to that for a change.  Obama tells us a few paragraphs later the following:

Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted. 

We have never been a people who place all of our faith in government to solve our problems; we shouldn’t want to. But we don’t think the government is the source of all our problems, either. Because we understand that this democracy is ours. And as citizens, we understand that it’s not about what America can do for us; it’s about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating but absolutely necessary work of self-government.

And:

[When we turn away from our duties as American citizens] a small minority of lawmakers get cover to defeat something the vast majority of their constituents want. That’s how our political system gets consumed by small things when we are a people called to do great things -- like rebuild a middle class, and reverse the rise of inequality, and repair the deteriorating climate that threatens everything we plan to leave for our kids and our grandkids.

What happened to the whole non-partisan pledge?  But that's not even the worst part of the foregoing paragraphs.  It is the screed in the first paragraph about the danger posed by those who "warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner."  

You know, those crackpots who are always blathering on and on about the dangers of tyranny, kind of like this crazy conspiracy theorist:

The valuable improvements made by the American constitutions on the popular models, both ancient and modern, cannot certainly be too much admired; but it would be an unwarrantable partiality to contend that they have as effectually obviated the danger on this side, as was wished and expected. Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority (emphasis added).

That of course was James Madison from Federalist 10.

All the usual strawmen aside (so conservative critics don't trust the people with self-rule?  You know, like the how liberals do with the administrative state and far away centralized planning...), unlike Obama, the Founders knew that human nature does not change and that republican government is always open to the possibility of either minority or majority tyranny.  Rejecting those truths is not progress but a diminishing of true philosophical and intellectual progress.

Like I said in the opening paragraph, it is important to understand Obama as he understands himself.

Terrorist Turned Terrorist

Former Weather Underground member and chief Obama backer Bill Ayers gave a speech yesterday at Kent State (it was the 43rd anniversary of the shootings) in which he said the following:

U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., committed daily war crimes in Vietnam “and I get asked about violence when what I did was some destruction of property to issue a scream and cry against an illegal war in which 6,000 people a week are being killed,” Ayers said. “Six thousand a week being killed and I destroyed some property. Show me the equivalence. You should ask John McCain that question … I’m against violence.”

Right, Bill Ayers is obviously against violence...that's why he helped bomb the Capital building, the Pentagon, and various other government buildings in the 60's and 70's (his former lover was killed when she was preparing a bomb that prematurely exploded that would have been planted at Fort Dix military base in New Jersey).  

Also included in this speech was this gem:

The United States is the most violent country that has ever been created, Ayers said.

I'm surprised there wasn't a rip in the space-time continuum with the irony of that line.

Is there some way we can kick this guy out of the country?

I Can Do Anything Better Than You

I just finished reading Charles Johnson's superb Why Coolidge Matters:  Leadership Lessons from America's Most Underrated President and a quote in the afterword caught my eye.  The quote comes from Thomas Gammack, a businessman, who in 1928 said the following about Herbert Hoover, who would soon take the presidential reigns from Coolidge:

Mr. Hoover is confident that he knows more about finance then financiers, more about industry than industrialists, and more about agriculture then agriculturalists. He is so sure of his judgement in these field that he wants to impress it on others. He is very seldom willing to take advice. Since he knows more than any advisers could, why should he?

I feel like I have heard something like this before:

I think I'm a better speech writer than my speech writers. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I'll tell you right now that I'm . . . a better political director than my political director.

Oh right, that was Barack Obama in 2008.  Looks like Obama is in some good company then.

Gun Facts

In light of a statement yesterday by President Obama while in Mexico that "we also recognize that most of the guns used to commit violence here in Mexico come from the United States," (this sems to be another version of blowback theory) Kevin Williamson at NRO has a great column dispelling some of the myths created by the Left in order to justify stricter gun laws in the United States.  

Here are a few samples, beginning with the much touted "gun death" data:

We hear a lot about “gun deaths” in the United States, but we hear less often the fact that the great majority of those deaths are suicides — more than two-thirds of them. Which is to say, the great majority of our “gun death” incidents are not conventional crimes but intentionally self-inflicted wounds: private despair, not blood in the streets.

And:

We hear a great deal about the bane of “assault rifles,” but all rifles combined — scary-looking ones and traditional-looking ones alike — account for very few homicides, only 358 in 2010. We hear a great deal about “weapons of war” turning our streets into high-firepower battle zones, but this is mostly untrue: As far as law-enforcement records document, legally owned fully automatic weapons have been used in exactly two homicides in the modern era, and one of those was a police-issue weapon used by a police officer to murder a troublesome police informant.

A fact that points to deeper issues concerning crime rates on the books in various countries:

There are some places with very strict gun laws and lots of crime, some places with very liberal gun laws and very little crime, some places with strict guns laws and little crime, and some places with liberal gun laws and lots of crime. Given the variation between countries, the variation within other countries, and the variation within the United States, the most reasonable conclusion is that the most important variable in violent crime is not the regulation of firearms. There are many reasons that Zurich does not much resemble Havana, and many reasons San Diego does not resemble Detroit.

On the idea that Republicans are being pulled on strings by the NRA:

On the political side, perhaps you have heard that the National Rifle Association is one of the most powerful and feared lobbies on Capitol Hill. What you probably have not heard is that it is nowhere near the top of the list of Washington money-movers. In terms of campaign contributions, the NRA is not in the top five or top ten or top 100: It is No. 228. In terms of lobbying outlays, it is No. 171. Unlike the National Beer Wholesalers Association or the American Federation of Teachers, it does not appear on the list of top-20 PACs. Unlike the National Auto Dealers Association, it does not appear on the list of top-20 PACs that favor Republicans. There is a lot of loose talk about the NRA buying loyalty on Capitol Hill, but the best political-science scholarship suggests that on issues such as gun rights and abortion, the donations follow the votes, not the other way around. That is not a secret: It is just something that people like Gabby Giffords would rather not admit.

And finally on the recent argument that Illinois's crime issues are because Indiana has liberal gun laws:

The argument that crime would be lower in Chicago if Indiana had Illinois’s laws fails to account for the fact that Muncie has a pretty low crime rate under Indiana’s laws, while Gary has a high rate under the same laws. The laws are a constant; the meaningful variable is, not to put too fine a point on it, proximity to Chicago. Statistical game-rigging is a way to suggest that Chicago would have less crime if Indiana adopted Illinois’s gun laws . . . except that one is left with the many other states in which Chicago’s criminals might acquire guns. The unspoken endgame is having the entire country adapt Illinois’s gun laws. But it is very likely that if the country did so, Chicago would still be Chicago, with all that goes along with that. Chicago has lots of non-gun murders, too.

Please take some time to read the whole thing, because it seems that this issue is especially rife with irrationality.

What Not to Do

While conservatives are doing well at trying to stop the implementation of Obamacare, some are tempted by the fruit of nullification--the theory that a single state under the 10th Amendment can nullify a federal act of Congress.  Case in point, the South Carolina legislature just passed what amounts a bill that attempts to nullify Obamacare inside the borders of South Carolina by making any citizen "who is forced to pay federal tax penalties due to a violation of the Obamacare healthcare mandate, which penalizes for non-compliance, ... [to] be allowed to deduct the full penalty amount from their SC state tax liability."

They unfortunately "lean heavily on the 10th amendment and claim it gives states the right to invalidate unconstitutional federal legislation."

This is nothing more than a restatement of the political philosophy of John C. Calhoun, who, during the Nullification Crisis of 1832, claimed the authority of the Founders for his pro-nullification arguments.  Unfortunately for his cause, James Madison, who was still alive, corrected Calhoun's history and political principles which at their heart was a rejection of the Founders' principles (this rejection can be seen most notably in Calhoun's theory of the concurrent majority).

We would do well to follow Madison and Founders and leave Calhoun in the dustbin of history.

My Sharia

The Economist today put out a daily chart that was put together by the Pew Research Center that is truly eye-opening:

It says something that 89% of Palestinians support Sharia Law while 85% also support "religious freedom."  And we wonder why even with elections that these people still elect terrorist groups like Hamas to political office.

The Party of Civil Rights

Kevin Williamson has a little history lesson for us today on the true party of civil rights:  the GOP.  Some little known history about that arch conservative Barry Goldwater:

[In Pheonix] Goldwater was a department-store proprietor and a member of the Phoenix city council. He was a very conservative Republican, something that was not at all at odds with his membership in the NAACP, which was, in the 1950s, an organization in which Republicans and conservatives still were very much welcome. The civil-rights community in Phoenix, such as it was, did not quite know what to make of Goldwater. It was already clear by then that he was to be a conservative’s conservative and a man skeptical of federal overreach; while he described himself as being unprejudiced on what was at the time referred to as “the race question,” the fact was that he did not talk much about it, at least in public. His family department stores were desegregated under his watch, though he was not known to hire blacks to work there. But when the Arizona legislature was considering making segregation voluntary in the public schools, Goldwater was lobbying for it behind the scenes.

Goldwater also worked behind the scenes, helping to fund a lawsuit that would eventually desegregate the schools in Arizona a full year before a unanimous decision was handed down in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education.  Though Goldwater is unfortunately most known as a critic of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which he was wrong about), he nonetheless helped end segregation, much to the dismay of Lyndon Johnson and a majority of the Democratic Party.

It's amazing how much revisionism has been done in American history because it seems as though most Americans would think today that it was in fact the GOP that was the party trying to halt racial progress.  I blame Republicans as well because I don't see the current leadership of the GOP feeling the need to correct any of this either.

Madman

I haven't really wanted to ever bring this guy up, but a piece on NRO today takes a look at the conspiracy theory bete noire Alex Jones.  Jones is a proud 9/11 truther, and a day after the Boston bombing called it a "false flag" operation (in other words, the government was behind it in order to further ratchet up the police state).  A sample:

Jones isn’t so much a professor of conspiracy theory as he is an evangelist for conspiracy theology. And that’s probably what makes his oeuvre so compelling to so many — it’s bad news compounded by worse news compounded by news that’s even worse, but there’s always at the end a germ of hope.

The theories Jones and his followers spew are problematic at best because they almost always tend to follow this line of logic:  Every theory is accepted until proven otherwise, and anyone who discounts the theories are either willing dupes or are a part of the conspiracy.  This is the logic of a madman.

Problems? What Problems?!?!?

I have been busy working on plans for the fall, which is the cause for my more intermittent posts recently.  

Some news:  Here is John Hinderaker on the Gang of Eight's immigration proposal, which, if what I've been reading is accurate, will do nothing to solve the problems of illegal immigration or assimilation:

As we noted here, Numbers USA has estimated that if the Gang of Eight’s immigration proposal becomes law, at least 33 million immigrants will enter the United States, or be legalized here, over the next ten years. The overwhelming majority will be Mexicans, and most will enter the country as a result of our irrational policy of chain immigration, which will be unlimited as to the relatives of those covered by the bill. 

[...]

Where, exactly are we going to find jobs for 33 million people? How many of the 33 million will go directly onto welfare, without even looking for work? For that matter, where are we going to put them? These are a few of the many questions to which the Gang has no answers.

And it looks like the Gang wants to sweep all the problems associated with their proposal under the rug.

Rearing His Ugly Head

Think you've heard the last of former Rep. Ron Paul?  Think again.

On April 17, Paul announced the creation of a new think tank, the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, which, according to its website, “continues and expands Dr. Paul’s lifetime of public advocacy for a peaceful foreign policy and the protection of civil liberties at home.”

And it wouldn't be Ron Paul without his usual gang of associates:

A prominent defender of the late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, [British writer John] Laughland penned a book on his Hague war-crimes trial titled Travesty (the “travesty” in question not being the Bosnian Serb genocide of Muslims, which Laughland deniesever took place, but the “kangaroo court” that brought Milosevic to justice and which Laughland blamed for his 2006 death). Laughland has also defended Ukraine’s Kremlin-backed president Viktor Yanukovych (whose attempt to steal the 2004 election sparked that country’s peaceful Orange Revolution) and lamented the fateof Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, Europe’s last dictator, victim of “humiliating treatment” at the hands of a “propaganda campaign waged against” him “by the West.”

And:

Next on the list of Paul Institute board members are the 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Most prominent among them is Judge Andrew Napolitano, a legal analyst for Fox News who has said that “It’s hard for me to believe that [7 World Trade Center] came down by itself” and that the 9/11 attacks “couldn’t possibly have been done the way the government told us.”

And:

[Judge Napolitano] is joined by Eric Margolis, who, despite an apparent lack of a Ph.D. or appointment at an institution of higher learning, is listed as a member of the organization’s “academic board.” Margolis says that “conclusive proof still lacks” connecting Osama bin Laden to the 9/11 attacks and has speculated that the events could have been “a plot by America’s far right or by Israel or a giant cover-up.”

Of course, it wouldn't be a Ron Paul Institute without Lincoln haters and Lost Causers:

For that, there’s Walter Block, an anarcho-capitalist professor of economics and fellow at the Mises Institute. Like many in Rockwell’s neo-Confederate circle, Block believes that the wrong side won the “war against Southern succession” and blames most of America’s current problems on “the monster Lincoln.”

The curious irony of those who hate the state and who whitewash the crimes of the old European tyrannies of the former Soviet block:

In the Ron Paul Institute, we see a group of people supposedly prioritizing limited government and personal freedom shilling on behalf of regimes which have actually implemented the very sort of surveillance state policies these civil liberties obsessives routinely cry are being imposed on unsuspecting Americans by Democratic and Republican politicians alike.

I'm glad Paul is gone but his influence is certainly not waning.  Be afraid.

Cum Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc

Saw this headline in my Facebook newsfeed earlier today:  "Study finds belief in free market economics predicts rejection of science."

A sample:

Those who rejected climate change appeared to be more accepting of conspiracy theories in general. Belief that the moon landing was actually staged on Earth, that the government allowed the 9/11 terrorist attacks occur so they could invade the Middle East, and other conspiracy theories predicted rejection of climate change.

Oh, I see.  So those with beliefs that mostly typify the extreme left believe in free market economics and are rejecting science... .

I also thought up a similar headline: "Baseball player hits home run,  causes rain to fall."

The Sound and the Fury

Care of John Hinderaker is this piece in The Atlantic titled "The Boston Bombers Were Muslim:  So?" by Megan Garber that typifies the modern liberal mindset.  Hinderaker had this to say about the title:

Before taking a close look at Ms. Garber’s article, let’s advise The Atlantic not to put away that headline. It could come in handy so often. “The Cole Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The Embassy Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The First World Trade Center Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The September 11 Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The Madrid Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The London Bombers Were Muslim: So?” “The Shoebomber Was Muslim: So?” The Underwear Bomber Was Muslim: So?” “The Fort Hood Shooter Was Muslim: So?” “The Beslan Child-Murderers Were Muslim: So?” “The Times Square Bomber Was Muslim: So?”

Here is a longer section that I will quote in full just to give a full flavor of the essay's overarching logic:

Here is what we know -- or what we think we know -- about Tamerlan Tsarnaev: He was a boxer and a "gifted athlete." He did not smoke or drink -- "God said no alcohol" -- and didn't take his shirt off in public "so girls don't get bad ideas." He was "very religious." He had a girlfriend who was half-Portuguese and half-Italian. In 2009, he was arrested after allegedly assaulting his girlfriend. He was "a nice guy." He was also a "cocky guy." He was also a "a normal guy." He loved the movie Borat. He wanted to become an engineer, but his first love was music: He studied it in school, playing the piano and the violin. He didn't have American friends, he said -- "I don't understand them" -- but he also professed to appreciate the U.S. ("America has a lot of jobs .... You have a chance to make money here if you are willing to work"). He was training, as a boxer, to represent the U.S. in the Olympics. 

We know, or we think we do, that Tamerlan's brother, Dzhokar, is "very quiet." Having graduated from the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School -- a public school known for its diverse student body -- he received a scholarship from the City of Cambridge. He went to his prom, with a date and in a tux. He had friends. He posed with them, smiling, at graduation. He tweeted pictures of cats. He skateboarded around his Cambridge neighborhood. His personal priorities, he has said, are "career and money." He is a second-year medical student at UMass Dartmouth. He is seemingly Chechan by birth and Muslim by religion, and has lived in the U.S. since 2002. He is "a true angel." He has uncles in Maryland. He called one of them yesterday and said, "Forgive me."

These are provisional facts. They are the products of the chaos of breaking news, and may well also be the products of people who stretch the truth -- or break it -- in order to play a role in the mayhem. They are very much subject to change. But they are also reminders of something it's so easy to forget right now, especially for the many, many members of the media -- professional and otherwise -- who currently find themselves under pressure of live air or deadline: Tamerlan and Dzhokar Tsarnaev are not simply "the Marathon bombers," or "murderers," or "Chechens," or "immigrants," or "Muslims." They might turn out to be all of those things. They might not. The one thing we know for sure is that they are not only those things. They had friends and families and lives. They had YouTube accounts and Twitter feeds. They went to class. They went to work. They came home, and they left it again (emphasis added).

Just as Shakespeare said:  "...a tale told by an Idiot, all the sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Not Born but Made

At NRO, John O'Sullivan makes an important point about what the Boston bombings mean in regards to how we deal with immigration in this country.  Is the current trend of multiculturalism the answer or is assimilation -- assuredly a dirty word in today's lexicon -- the correct path?  The Founders thought the latter.  And as O'Sullivan argues, the current trend of multiculturalism has been steadily undermining any attachment -- Lincoln called it the electric cord -- to the principles of the regime, which the Founders thought was what truly made someone a citizen.  

Here is O'Sullivan:

Ten days ago the Hudson Institute published an important paper, “America’s Patriotic Immigrations System is Broken,” by John Fonte and Althea Nagai, which drew on a massive new Harris Interactive survey of native-born Americans and immigrants (which Fonte discussed on the Corner). 

This study shows beyond any doubt that, as John Fonte puts it, the patriotic attachment of naturalized citizens is much weaker than that of the native-born. For example, by 30 percentage points (67.3 percent to 37 percent) native-born citizens are more likely to believe that the U.S. Constitution should be a higher legal authority than international law if there is a conflict between the two. But that is only one example — the strength of Fonte-Nagai paper is the cumulative evidence that a relatively weak love of country persists across a large range of issues. But read the study for yourself. 

Into this moral and patriotic vacuum seeps what Orwell called “transferred nationalism.” In his day this was usually some variety of Marxism; today it often often a variation on radical Islam. But it is adopted and sparks violent thoughts in the minds of young men whom official America has shielded from the old Americanization. 

Getting patriotic assimilation right is as vital — perhaps more vital — than getting border security right. It is an essential part of any comprehensive immigration reform worth the name. To propose opening the country to millions of new immigrants until we have solved this problem is simply to invite more violence from more young men whom we have disoriented and left victim to the worse impulses.

In all of this, it is always important to remember that Americans are not born but made.

Rush to Judgement

Stephen Knott, a professor at the U.S. War Naval College, has a good column in the Washington Post on the rush to judgement made by historians on the record of President George W. Bush.  This column is a snapshot of his full length treatment of the subject in his book Rush to Judgement:  George W. Bush, the War of Terror, and His Critics.  Much like smearing of Calvin Coolidge by the New Deal historians, historians today have similarly trashed Bush--even when he was still in office.  A sample:

In April 2006, Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz published an essay in Rolling Stone titled “The Worst President in History?” Wilentz argued that “George W. Bush’s presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace” in part because he had “demonized the Democrats,” hurting the nation’s ability to wage war. No other U.S. president “failed to embrace the opposing political party” in wartime, Wilentz claimed, despite numerous examples to the contrary, such as whenFranklin D. Roosevelt compared his Republican opponents to fascists in 1944.

And:

Not to be outdone, in December of that year Columbia history professor Eric Foner proclaimed Bush “the worst president in U.S. history” and argued that Bush sought to “strip people accused of crimes of rights that date as far back as the Magna Carta.” According to Foner, Warren Harding of Teapot Dome fame was something of a paragon of virtue next to Bush, whose administration was characterized by “even worse cronyism, corruption, and pro-business bias.”

Knott is not so much interested in giving the Bush presidency a sterling review, but he is instead calling out those historians who do not practice what they preach.

In their hasty, partisan-tinged assessments of Bush, far too many scholars breached their professional obligations, engaging in a form of scholarly malpractice, by failing to do what historians are trained to do before pronouncing judgment on a presidency: conduct tedious archival research, undertake oral history interviews, plow through memoirs, interview foreign leaders and wait for the release of classified information.

[...] 

George W. Bush’s low standing among academics reflects, in part, the rise of partisan scholarship: the use of history as ideology and as a political weapon, which means the corruption of history as history. Bush may not have been a great president; he may even be considered an average or below-average president, but he and — more important — the nation deserve better than this partisan rush to judgment.

Even more than the Marxists roots that most historians today share, they also tend to see history with a capital H--History that encapsulates men and their times in amber--much like dinosaur fossils.  Instead of right and wrong being always true no matter the time and place, historians tend to see right and wrong as bowing down to History (the phrase in politics of "being on the right side of history" comes to mind).  They reject the Lincolnian teaching that the principle that all men are created equal is a truth applicable to all men and all times.  Instead, we are marching towards something, but (with the influences of post-modernism) we are no longer sure of just what that place is.

Lessons from Boston

Reflecting before the capture of the second suspect in the Boston bombing, Victor Davis Hanson focuses his aim on how we as a country should go about dealing with domestic terrorism.  Since I am a big on using the right words in politics, I think this is some good advice:

I don’t think the therapeutic and euphemistic approach (the effort to change the language to win adherents by fantasies such as “workplace violence”/“overseas contingency operations”/ “man-caused disasters”) works. Avoidance of the word terrorism, especially in the context of Islam, or worry over the loss of the diversity in the military after the Hasan killing, is not the right way to drive home to would-be killers the image of a society collectively vigilant and unforgiving of terrorism. 

These Orwellian terms came from the easy caricaturing of the Bush-Cheney-era anti-terrorism protocols, an indulgence that became popular as Iraq heated up, 9/11 fears lessened, and politics returned with a vengeance. But those measures were in response to real threats about which we were initially both confused and unprepared, and soon had forgotten. The irony of the Patriot Act measures was that they largely worked and therefore gave some the luxury to insist that the measures were unnecessary all along.

The focus on diversity (in the sense that race, ethnicity, and gender somehow defines a person as a moral being) and the like really misses the forest for the trees and puts something on a pedestal that is only an accident of birth.

Some more advice on what should be done regarding immigration policy:

If we are intent on accepting persecuted “refugees” from religious-based conflict in the Islamic world — whether Chechens to Boston or Somalis to Minnesota — then it is probably not a wise idea to grant, without close scrutiny, those without citizenship periodic visas to return to their supposedly dangerous countries of origin. If their homeland was so perilous to begin with, why would a resident alien risk going back to a place whose danger was the primary reason for his original request for asylum in the U.S.? Assembling anti-personnel IEDs is not the sort of skill that one acquires without first-hand mentoring — it cannot not simply be learned by downloading plans from the Internet, at least not without a lot of personal risk.

And the ultimate irony of our immigration policies in light of what just transpired in Boston:

Finally, why is it so easy to enter the United States and so hard to be deported from it, especially after being arrested or violating its laws?

Shameful

Jacob Sullum at Reason calls out President Obama for his demagogic approach in his push for heightened gun control:

"This is about doing the right thing for all the families who are here that have been torn apart by gun violence," President Obama declared on Monday, promoting his "common-sense gun safety reforms" in a speech at the University of Hartford, where the audience included parents of children who were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in nearby Newtown last December. "This is not about politics."

Two days after the Sandy Hook attack, at a memorial service for the 20 children and six adults killed by Adam Lanza, Obama said people who don't support his gun control agenda are in effect saying "we're powerless in the face of such carnage" because "the politics are too hard." Since then he has repeatedly cited the Newtown massacre as a reason to enact the same gun controls he has always supported—including "universal background checks," a renewed "assault weapon" ban, and a 10-round limit on magazines—even though these policies could not possibly have prevented that horrific attack. He calls this "common sense." 

Unless you disagree with him. "There is only one thing that can stand in the way of change," Obama said, "and that's politics in Washington." Members of Congress have a simple choice to make, he explained: "What's more important to you—our children, or an A grade from the gun lobby?" This crass attempt at moral intimidation, contrasting Obama's benevolent motives with his opponents' child-endangering partisanship, is the essence of his case for new gun restrictions, which relies on emotional manipulation rather than logical argument. 

Obama cites the careless, confusing gun control bills hastily enacted in New York, Colorado, Connecticut, and Maryland as models for Congress to follow. "We can't stand by and keep letting these tragedies happen," he said on Monday, as if strong resolve is all that's needed to stop mass shootings. "If there is just one thing we can do to keep one father from having to bury his child, isn't that worth fighting for?" 

Contrary to Obama's implication, the question is not whether preventing the murder of children is desirable but whether the policies he supports would do that. Instead of explaining, for example, how background checks can thwart mass killers, who typically do not have disqualifying criminal or psychiatric records and who in any event can use guns purchased by someone else (as Lanza did), Obama simply assumes his plan will work and insinuates that anyone who opposes it does not care about children as much as he does.
Even as he claims to be troubled by a lack of empathy in the gun control debate, Obama refuses to entertain the possibility that his opponents, like him, are doing what they believe to be right. On Monday he described them as "powerful interests that are very good at confusing the subject, that are good at amplifying conflict and extremes, that are good at drowning out rational debate, good at ginning up irrational fears." 

This from a man who says mass shootings, which remain thankfully rare, are becoming "routine"; who falsely asserts that Lanza used a "fully automatic weapon" and habituallyconflates military-style semi-automatics with machine guns; and who claims background checks have "prevented more than 2 million dangerous people from getting their hands on a gun," when in fact we don't know how many of those people were actually dangerous or how many were actually prevented from obtaining firearms. Obama's idea of "rational debate" involves trotting out grieving parents and presenting their pain as if it were an argument. 

"There are good people on both sides of this thing," Obama said in Denver last week, "but we have to be able to put ourselves in the other person's shoes." He worried that "both sides of the debate sometimes don't listen to each other" and wondered, "How do you build trust?" Here's one way: Stop trying to claim the moral high ground by clambering onto the bloody corpses of children.

This was written prior to the failure of the gun control compromises to pass out of the Senate.  Yesterday, in response to this, Obama again stoked the fires, implictly accusing Republicans of not caring about stopping school shootings.  A sample:

There were no coherent arguments as to why we wouldn’t do this. It came down to politics—the worry that that vocal minority of gun owners would come after them in future elections….They caved to pressure, and they started looking for an excuse—any excuse—to vote no….This was a pretty shameful day for Washington.

Yes, it was a pretty shameful day in Washington.

Tax Truths

If any single thing can destroy the common liberal myth that raising taxes necessarily leads to more revenue it is this graph:

Liberal Hypocrisy and the Limits of the Right to Choose

Steve Hayward has some thoughts on the liberal hypocrisy in regards to the case of abrtionist Kermit Gosnell and how, ala Newt Gingrich, Republicans should turn the tables on questions from the MSM designed to carry water for the pro-choice side:

Liberals and the media are still dining out on Rep. Todd Akin’s famous face-plant about “legitimate rape” that, in conjunction with Richard Mourdoch’s similar mis-step in Indiana, didn’t just cost the GOP two winnable Senate seats, but might have cost them the Senate and the presidential election as well. The competent answer to that question in a political campaign, of course, would have been to go on the attack, with a line of reasoning that goes something like this: “I notice that you pro-abortion reporters so in the bag for the abortion industry that you have to default to the most extreme case in order to defend your friends, and never ask ‘pro-choice’ politicians about the extreme cases on their side. Please tell me how many times you or anyone else in the media has ever asked Barack Obama why he voted in favor of infanticide when he voted against Illinois’s ‘Infants Born Alive Protection Act,’ the same kind of statute that is at the root of the prosecution of Dr. Gosnell in Philadelphia that you’re also ignoring right now.”

You would think the media would be a little curious in knowing just when the other side thinks the right to choose ends and life begins.  The third trimester?  A few hours after birth?  In the car on the way home?  Or do they believe in infanticide like then-state senator Obama who, in 2003, said that once abortion was decided upon, that that constitutional right trumped all other considerations, even if the baby was born alive?

Does Obama at Play Keep the Government Away?

Saw this on The Weekly Standard blog:  "Obama Golfs--Third Weekend in a Row."

I used to indulge in the standard conservative critique that it was bad, unseemly even, that President Obama golfs so much, but because of the influence of Jay Nordlinger, my mind has been changed on the subject.  There is no mistaking that the president likes the game of golf and spends a lot of time on the links.  However, I seem to remember when President Bush golfed, the press made a big deal about it (Bush actually stopped golfing in 2003 because the Iraq War, etc.).  With Obama, naturally, this not a big deal to them.  I think President Bush showed prudence when he stopped playing.  With President Obama, it means that he is spending less time doing damage to the country (although, considering existence of the administrative state, this point may be moot).

Bait and Switch

Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute recounts the promises Obama and his administration made regarding Obamacare (remember when the use of that word by someone meant that person was racist?) and what will actually happen now that full implementation is looming.  Some of the major promises that will go unkept:

Rising health-care costs are already beginning to show up as higher premiums. California health insurers are proposing increases for some customers of 20% or more: 26% by Blue Cross, 22% by Aetna and 20% by Blue Shield. 

In New York, the Department of Financial Services has limited insurers to a 7.5% increase this year, better but still substantial. And, according to The Wall Street Journal, insurers are warning that premiums in the individual and small group markets could double in the next few years. While these are worst-case scenarios — and it would be unfair to attribute all the premium rise directly to ObamaCare — there is no doubt that the new health-care law will drive premiums up.

And:

In addition, ObamaCare requires all insurance plans to offer new and more expensive benefits. Remember President Obama’s promise that “If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period?” Well, a recent study of more than 11,000 plans on the individual market found that less than 2% of existing plans are fully in compliance with the law’s benefit requirements. While current plans are technically grandfathered in, allowing people to keep them for now, any change in the plans requires that their coverage be brought into compliance.

Finally:

The IRS recently estimated that in 2016, for a family of five, a policy available through the exchange would cost roughly $20,000. At the same time, the IRS has decided that subsidy eligibility will be based on whether one’s employer offers an “affordable” individual plan (meaning the premium is less than 9.5% of the worker’s income), whatever the cost of a family plan might be. As a result, the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that 3.9 million family dependents could be left unable to afford either employer-provided family coverage or insurance offered through an exchange.

Wow, what a shocker.

National Disgrace

Kristen Powers has a column in yesterday's U.S.A. Today that deserves to be screamed from the rooftops.  The column  is on the on-going trial of "Dr." Kermit Gosnell, who, over a period of 17 years at his clinic in Philadephia, murdered babies that were born.  Haven't heard of this?  Well, the media hasn't seen the need to report it because, for most of them, the issue is a local crime story.

Here is how Powers begins, with an opening that should shock the reader (warning:  the opening paragraphs are very graphic in nature):

Infant beheadings. Severed baby feet in jars. A childscreaming after it was delivered alive during an abortion procedure. Haven't heard about these sickening accusations?

[...] 

NBC-10 Philadelphia reported that, Stephen Massof, a former Gosnell worker, "described how he snipped the spinal cords of babies, calling it, 'literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body." One former worker, Adrienne Moton,testified that Gosnell taught her his "snipping" technique to use on infants born alive. 

Massof, who, like other witnesses, has himself pleaded guilty to serious crimes, testified "It would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place." Here is the headline the Associated Press put on a story about his testimony that he saw 100 babies born and then snipped: "Staffer describes chaos at PA abortion clinic."

And the sad truth of MSM malfeasance:

A Lexis-Nexis search shows none of the news shows on the three major national television networks has mentioned the Gosnell trial in the last three months. The exception is when Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan hijacked a segmenton Meet the Press meant to foment outrage over an anti-abortion rights law in some backward red state. 

The Washington Post has not published original reporting on this during the trial andThe New York Times saw fit to run one original story on A-17 on the trial's first day. They've been silent ever since, despite headline-worthy testimony.

This is so sad.  It makes you want to scream.

What Does Bowdoin Teach?

The National Association of Scholars has just issued a report on Bowdoin College (based in Brunswick, Maine) aptly entitled What Does Bowdoin Teach?  It is a must read as, like William F. Buckley's famous God and Man at Yale, it details--painfully in many instances--what really goes on at Bowdoin.  (The report should immediately signal to the reader that the things going on at Bowdoin are not merely limited to that college but are instead indicative of most modern liberal arts universities and ivy league schools.)

If you may not know the back story, this all began when the Chairman of the Claremont Institute, Thomas Klingenstein, golfed with Bowdoin President Barry Mills.  Mills attacked Klingenstein for being against the diversity agenda that is a main driving force behind most of the academic policies at Bowdoin.  Mills of course acted as though Klingenstein was a relic from the Stone Age and proceeded to walk off the course with "despair and deep concern."  Klingenstein published a corrective to Mills' interpretation of what had taken place and in the process, continued to make the case of the intellectual and moral lethargy of liberal arts college around the U.S., with a perfect example being what was going on at Bowdoin.   

Perez and the Prez

Ken Masugi has a post on what the approval of Thomas Perez as Secretary of Labor could mean:

As Secretary of Labor, Perez would have full discretion to regulate the hiring practices of virtually all employers who have federal contracts. This means companies as large as Lockheed Martin and as small as a Denver cheese maker—which are in every congressional district in the country. Note the prominent businesses among the top 200 contractors of well over 141,000, divvying up over $533 billion in federal contracts.[ii] The struggle over the Perez nomination is not only about how civil rights enforcement is to proceed but about our general attitude toward bureaucratic government. Should the laudable goal of civil rights be enforced by a despotic bureaucracy?

It is becoming distressingly clear that Perez would apply the Chicago-style politics of President Obama to not only the regulatory but the social agenda as well. Perez would achieve these radical aims through the obscure Office of Federal Contract Compliance and Programs (OFCCP), headed by a deputy assistant secretary-level Director who does not require Senate confirmation. [iii] The new Secretary of Labor will shape policy directly, as the OFCCP as of November 2009 now reports directly to his Office.

More on the OFCCP:

Unfortunately, we already know what a willful OFCCP can do. In a July 1996 article for theAmerican Spectator, “Here Comes the Goon Squad,” James Bovard provided an appalling picture of how a small federal agency abuses its powers in order to “intimidate and browbeat businesses.” The OFCCP, he declares, “is now symbolic of the corruption and deception at the heart of affirmative action.” Compliance officers’ vices range from incompetence and illiteracy to dishonesty and deception about what the laws require. Their agenda is a socialist or redistributionist of corporate money to pay people for work they never did.

This doesn't look good.

Moral Judgement at the Movies

Shocking that the following movie review of The Evil Dead, the remake the Sam Raimi 1981 gorefest, appeared in the Washington Times:

As director of "Oz the Great and Powerful" and the original "Spider-Man" trilogy, Sam Raimi would seem to be a modern-day heir to Steven Spielberg and Walt Disney. But he started his career more than 30 years ago by making one of the most notoriously gruesome horror films of all time. 

"The Evil Dead" (1981), Mr. Raimi's first full-length feature, was so mercilessly violent that it was unrated upon its U.S. release and eventually branded NC-17, banned for 20 years in Germany, sliced to pieces by editors in Finland and virtually created the need for the "video nasty" list of films deemed too violent to be distributed in England.
One might expect that with 30 more years of life experience, mainstream acceptance and a longtime marriage with five children, Mr. Raimi would look back on that movie as an early aberration. Instead, he is an executive producer and the driving force behind the big-budget remake "Evil Dead," which opens Friday. 

About 90 percent of the new film's running time consists of finding brutal and bloody ways to kill a person, including shotgun blasts, nail guns, broken mirror shards, strangulations, drowning, electrocution, burning and live burial. I haven't even mentioned the dungeon full of rotting cat corpses hanging from the ceiling, the dog that has its throat slashed, the moving tree branches that violate a woman (don't ask), and the numerous forced or accidental amputations along the way. 

The more blood spewed, the more the audience at a Tuesday night preview screening applauded and cheered. It leads me to wonder more than ever whether we're just a degree of separation away from being as callously dehumanized in our sense of what is entertainment as the ancient Romans were. 

What does it say about us as a people that such depictions of hatred and suffering are considered acceptable for an R rating — and, thus, wide theatrical release — by the Motion Picture Association of America, upon which many rely to give warning of objectionable content? And it's fair to ask Mr. Raimi why, as a father — and, by past media accounts, a patriotic American — he would want to pollute the culture with the kind of material that could drive the next James Holmes or Adam Lanza over the edge.
The movie has a $14 million budget, a whopping 400 times larger than the original's $350,000 shoestring. It is also about 40 times more bloody than any other film to come down the pike in ages. 

Like the original, the new movie's plot is simple: A group of 20-somethings heads to an old, run-down cabin in the woods. This time, they have assembled because one of the women is desperate to kick her heroin habit after overdosing and they hope that the woods will keep her away from drugs. Her friends and her brother make a pact behind her back to lock her down and hold her in the woods no matter how hard she begs to leave. The problem is that she really has a good reason to want out: One of the guys on the trip has found an ancient witchcraft book and unleashed a demon, leading to all manner of mayhem as the friends take turns being possessed and attempting to kill one another.
As in the original, Raimi-directed "Dead," the deaths are so over the top that they often are played for laughs. This film is a textbook example of the cliche "buckets of blood." Writer-director Fede Alvarez has people spew, vomit and drip blood all over one another and the scenery. 

The fact that the new version is going out in wide release with an R rating is an example of just how far our society has gone off the rails and come to accept bloodletting as entertainment. 

This unending assault on the senses is skillfully shot and decently acted by performers who seem to be playing it all for laughs about half the time, but Sam Raimi and his cohorts should be ashamed for laughing all the way to the bank.

Oh no, this seems to resemble something like what's now called a "value judgement."  This kind of thing has no place in a society such as ours....

But then I read comments to the review like this one and it brings everything back home:

it's so funny that people will complain about violent entertainment and harken back to the good old days, well, i hate to break it to you but the people raised on i love lucy, leave it to beaver and all those other shows are the ones who have created the most war, destruction and misery for other people and countries in this world.

Oh ok, so everyone in the 1950s were evil, sadistic butchers.  Enlightening.

Was TR a Conservative?

In the newest issue of the Claremont Review, in a review of Jean Yarborough's Theodore Roosevelt and the American Political Tradition, Ronald Pestritto offers a corrective to those conservatives who look to Teddy Roosevelt as a model for their politics:

Roosevelt is, at least superficially, a much more sympathetic figure than his progressive counterpart, Woodrow Wilson. When he was shot in the chest at the outset of a campaign speech in 1912, T.R. manfully insisted on sticking around to give the entire 90-minute speech before he would seek medical attention. No one would mistake Wilson for such a man, and it is unsurprising that Roosevelt's larger-than-life personality captivated the American mind in a way no other Progressive ever did. He was also known for unapologetically sticking up for American national interest abroad, for attacking what he thought was an out-of-control judiciary, and for a strong dose of moral seriousness—all things that conservatives admire. Yet these relatively superficial points pale in comparison to the fundamentals of Roosevelt's principles and politics: fundamentals that show a deep antipathy to limited government, individual liberty, property rights, the free market, and just about anything else at the heart of the American constitutional order.

Conservatives should instead look to this man.

 

Why Are We Funding Lies?

Veteran "journalist" Bill Moyers opened his March 29th show on PBS with a monologue about the Pledge of Allegiance, calling it "a lie, a whopper of a lie."  He went on:

We coax it from the mouths of babes for the same reason our politicians wear those flag pins in their lapels – it makes the hypocrisy go down easier, the way aspirin helps a headache go away.

And:

’Justice for all’ is a line item in the budget – sequestered now by the Paul Ryans of Congress and the Fix the Debt gang of plutocratic CEOs who, with a wink-wink from our president, claim, ‘Oh, we can’t afford that!’

Of course it must be remembered that the public dollars partially fund PBS.  The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the company created in 1967 by Congress for the purpose to oversee public broadcasting, receives substantial amounts of funding in the federal budget (CPB then distributes the money to PBS, NPR, and other public television stations).   In 2010 alone, the CPB received $510 million.

And this from PBS's own website on how influential it is across America:

Public television is America’s largest classroom, the nation’s largest stage for the arts and a trusted window to the world....