Sanity on the Hill

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel recently sent out a letter to the large banks (Bank of America and TD Bank Group) within the city limits and called for them to stop lending to firearms manufactures.  Sen. Ted Cruz from Texas also sent a letter and invited the banks and gun manufacturers to consider relocating to Texas:


And page 2 (sorry for the format):

Also, check out Sen. Cruz's very impressive performance during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the new gun control proposals that have been floating around:

Had Enough?

Though GDP was up 3.1% in the third quarter of last year, the economy came crashing down in the fourth quarter when GDP fell 0.1%.  In other words, the economy actually shrunk.

And I ask again:  Where is this recovery we've been hearing so much about?

A New Patriotism for a New Age

Charles Kesler has a brilliant piece on NRO on President Obama's Second Inaugural.  Here is the big take away:

To put it briefly: Obama began by saluting “the enduring strength of our Constitution” (not its wisdom or justice) and affirming “the promise of our democracy,” meaning the country as it will be, the America of our imagination, which to a modern liberal is the only thoroughly justifiable object of patriotic sentiments. Then he quoted the great sentence from the Declaration that begins “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights . . . ” One sentence later — one sentence! — and the Declaration was in the rearview mirror and we were off on “a never-ending journey” to “bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time.” 

At least those foundational “words” seemed to have a meaning, or to have once had one. Because a short half-page later, Obama explains that “our purpose” is “what the moment requires” and that it is doing what the moment requires that “will give real meaning to our creed.” 

So now the meaning of the Declaration’s solemn propositions seems to come entirely, or almost entirely, from our own needs, preferences, and choices. Only urgent and imperative actions such as fighting climate change and protecting entitlements “will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.” The fathers’ Declaration, though perhaps meaningful to them in their age, is empty and meaningless in ours until we fill it up with our own values. The “timeless spirit” of the Founding obligates us to follow the changing spirit of our times — always as interpreted by liberals, of course. 

Thus “equality,” which for Lincoln meant the recognition of our equal humanity and therefore equal freedom, means for Obama the compulsory redistribution of wealth. “Liberty,” in turn, transforms into the right to live out the lifestyle of our choice, free from others’ offensive remarks, and with federal subsidies as necessary or demanded.
Even as the Declaration’s original meaning fades, so does the Constitution’s. Toward the end of the speech, Obama mentioned that the oath of office he had taken that day “was an oath to God and country,” not so different from the oath a new citizen or a soldier takes. Actually, though all these oaths are sworn before God, they are properly speaking oaths to support the Constitution. The presidential oath is emphatic, and distinctive, in that regard. He alone (unlike new citizens or soldiers) swears to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Obama overlooked the main element of his own oath, which is not so surprising given his allegiance to the living constitution, which is rather different from the written one.

I think this is just a little better than the usual bullet point analysis on Bill O'Reilly's Talking Points, don't you think?

Short-sighted

In the newest issue of The Weekly Standard, Mackubin Thomas Owens has a must-read article on the wrong-headed move to make available to women the option to fight alongside their male counterparts in combat units.  

One of the most glaring reasons why this would result in disaster:

The trouble is that the desire for equal opportunity is, in practice, usually translated into a demand for equal results. Consequently, there has been a watering down of standards to accommodate the generally lower physical capabilities of women. This has had two consequences.

First, standards have been reduced so much that, in many cases, service members no longer are being prepared for the strenuous challenges they will face in the fleet or field. Second—and even more destructive of morale and trust—is the fact that when the requirement can’t be changed and the test cannot be eliminated, scores are “gender normed” to conceal the differences between men and women. All the services have lower physical standards for women than for men. Two decades ago, the U.S. Military Academy identified 120 physical differences between men and women, not to mention psychological ones, that resulted in a less rigorous overall program of physical training at West Point in order to accommodate female cadets.

For those who see this move as the next step in the continuing evolution towards a fully egalitarian society, crashing through the next barrier erected by the sexism of the past seems logical.  But those who think this forget that the principle of equality is itself grounded in the things that make men and women different by nature.  Trying to overcome these differences is a fools errand and leads to a rejection of true political equality, one based on the consent of the governed.  Whether or not those voicing the above opinion are actually trying to achieve the kind of equality on which our country is based is a different question altogether.

Sitting on the Sidelines

Michael Drysch, who hit an unbelievable half court shot during halftime of a Miami Heat game, will have to pay upwards of $22,000 on taxes from his winnings (he won $75,000 by making the basket).  Here is the shot:

And we wonder why there is still so much money sitting on the sidelines in this country.

Assaulting Reason

John Hinderaker at Power Line has been one of the best commentators on the inanity of the "assault weapons" ban that was recently introduced by Sen. Diane Feinstein.  Her bill, which supposedly would curb mass shootings, instead would do nothing of the sort.  Much like the assault weapons ban that was in place from 1994 to 2004, the focus is placed on the aesthetics of the weapon and not on the lethality of the weapon.  Hinderaker eleborates on this point:

Here is the list of features that make a semiautomatic rifle an “assault weapon” under Feinstein’s proposal:

All semiautomatic rifles that can accept a detachable magazine and have at least one military feature: pistol grip; forward grip; folding, telescoping, or detachable stock; grenade launcher or rocket launcher; barrel shroud; or threaded barrel. 

Most of these features have nothing to do with making a rifle more lethal; in fact, the only exceptions are the grenade launcher and rocket launcher, which I have never seen on a rifle. Maybe they exist somewhere. But does a pistol grip or a forward grip, or a folding stock, make a rifle more lethal? Of course not. A barrel shroud adds nothing to the lethality of a gun, it simply prevents your fingers from getting hot if they touch the barrel. And barrels are threaded so they can accept silencers, which make guns quieter, not more lethal. So Feinstein’s bill doesn’t make any more sense than the 1994 act did.

And as Hinderaker notes, the implicit focus on bans such as this surely indicates that mass shooting are on the rise, right?  Wrong.  The number of fatalities caused by mass shooting in the past three years are 45, 17, and 8 respectively.  In fact, more people die every year by lightning strikes (and getting struck by subways, Mayor Bloomberg).

This isn't too minimize the affects of mass shooting.  Surely even one is too many.  The problem is the knee-jerk reaction by those who feel that they have to do something.  They don't even care about the affects of the legislation they pass, only that the legislation was passed through Congress and signed by the president.  And to point out the obvious, I am sure these same people clamoring for gun control now just came to this position as a result of Sandy Hook, it's not like they could have had these ideas beforehand....

That Pesky Constitution

The U.S. Court of Appeals has finally recognized what we all knew over a year ago:  President Obama's three appointments to the National Labor Relations Board are unconstitutional.  From The Washington Times:

In a case freighted with major constitutional implications, a federal appeals court on Friday overturned President Obama’s controversial recess appointments from last year, ruling he abused his powers and acted when the Senate was not actually in a recess. 

The three-judge panel’s ruling is a major blow to Mr. Obama. The judges ruled that the appointments he made to the National Labor Relations Board are illegal, and hence the five-person board did not have a quorum to operate.

If my reading of this is correct, then all the decisions the board has made since that time will be null and void.

Also now in question is Obama's appointment of former Ohio Attorney General, Richard Cordray, to head the newly-created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

A Second Take

Here are some more thoughts from people much smarter than me on the meaning and significance of Obama's Second Inaugural.  The first from Scott Johnson at Power Line:

I think it would be a serious mistake to ignore or fail to attend closely to President Obama’s second inaugural address. It speaks to his ambition, his assault on the founding principles, and his attempt to realign the electorate on a misreading or misinterpretation or misrepresentation of the meaning of the founding principles. Attention must be paid. See, e.g., Yuval Levin’s “Obama’s second inaugural.” 

As R.J. Pestritto has demonstrated, the intellectual roots of modern American liberalism lie in Woodrow Wilson’s assault on the ideas of natural rights and limited government. They eventuate in an administrative state and rule by supposed experts. Obamacare represents something like the full flowering of modern liberalism. 

Wilson’s expressions of disapproval are the precursor to Barack Obama’s disdain for the Constitution and the Warren Court. Obama perfectly reflected Wilson’s views in his 2001 comments on the civil rights movement and the Supreme Court. In the course of the famous radio interview Obama gave to WBEZ in Chicago, Obama observed that the Warren Court had not broken “free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties.” To achieve “redistributive change,” the limitations of the Constitution would have to be overcome by the Court or by Congress. 

Franklin Roosevelt touted welfare state liberalism in the “second Bill of Rights” that he set forth to Congress in his 1944 State of the Union Address. “Necessitous men are not free men,” Roosevelt asserted, and enumerated a new set of rights, among which were the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation, the right of every family to a decent home, and the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health. 

Implicitly arguing that the teaching of the Declaration had become obsolete, Roosevelt asserted: “In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.” 

Now comes Obama to give us progressivism and welfare state liberalism falsely staked on the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Elsewhere Obama has frankly rejected the concept of “absolute truth” as inconsistent with democracy. In his second inaugural address, however, Obama places the Declaration’s “self-evident truths” up front and seems to place his stamp of approval on them, so long as one is not paying too much attention. 

In Obama’s telling, “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” have dropped out. Before you know it, devotion to the founding principles serves up the welfare state, the campaign against global warming (evolved into “climate change”), gay marriage, open borders and something to ameliorate long lines to vote. We shall overcome. 

While Woodrow Wilson gave us “the living Constitution” — the Constitution unmoored from its ascertainable meaning and constraints — Barack Obama gives us a living Declaration of Independence. Those self-evident truths are an evolving thing.

Obama has cleverly left many believing in his strict adherence to the Declaration when he has actually undermined the very grounding of those principles.  For Obama, the Founders principles are fulfilled through unabated action by the government.  As Scott has pointed out, the Laws of Nature and Nature's God do not show up Obama's Declaration.  Instead, the grounding of these rights (which Obama never calls natural) are implied to be created from the will of the citizens themselves.

Another view from Ken Masugi at the Liberty Law Blog:

Lincoln’s own ambition led him to restore the Constitution and the glory of George Washington—perpetuating the nation became his expression of “towering genius,” his source of fame. 

Obama’s ambition is of a different sort, somewhat easier to execute than Lincoln’s. The object of his second term, and likely of his political career, is to do what eluded Franklin Roosevelt—to destroy the Republican Party and, more important, to delegitimize the conservative and libertarian beliefs and policies that it advanced. Obama’s address attacks the wellsprings of liberty and limited government in the political philosophy of the American founding. 

Obama puts a personal twist on a patriotic tenet: “We recall that what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names. What makes us exceptional—what makes us American—is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago….” He then quotes the Declaration: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Obama projects himself, with his mixture of races and faiths and his atypical name, as the model of the American creed. (By contrast, Lincoln had noted the Germans and French in his audience who would be included in his reading of the Declaration.) To attack his view of the Declaration is to attack him personally—not a winning strategy. Obama is interested in perpetuation—how do we “continue a never-ending journey to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time.” Throughout the address he relates the word with the deeds, as in the beginning of the Gospel of John, though he does not go as far as Roosevelt in his First Inaugural, comparing himself with Jesus driving out the moneychangers.

[...] 

Proceeding to attack, Obama draws from the classics of Democratic Party rhetoric, including Woodrow Wilson’s 1912 campaign address “What is Progress?” (an attack on the founding) and Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign and inaugural speeches. (I do not deny he has other leftist sources for his learning, but these suffice.) He is also well aware that the most effective partisan speeches are those that appear nonpartisan, as we see in Thomas Jefferson’s First Inaugural—of course we agree on the first principles of our government!  Of course we may continue to disagree on some things. Though he declines to equate conservative Republicans with fascists (as FDR did in his 1944 State of the Union Address), he will use the bulk of his speech to imply they are to be as disdained as the traitorous “Tories” FDR ridiculed in 1932. Otherwise, we cannot continually make “ourselves anew.” 

Three-fourths of the speech of about 2100 words is given to a series of false choices—in paragraphs beginning with “Together, we” or “We, the people.” Obama even revived his most notorious campaign bluntness of “you didn’t build that:” “No single person can … build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation and one people.” 

The purpose of these assertions is not to make arguments but to read dissidents out of the country, out of the company of respectable people—much as the Tories fled, the Federalists crumbled, the slaveholding regime was destroyed, and the moneychangers driven from the temple. Each time the victors revived the Declaration of Independence, or a compelling interpretation of it, to justify a new political arrangement. Obama sternly declares the enemies of the people to be out of touch if not downright unpatriotic—an elite party, discriminating in favor of a tiny portion of wealthy, favoring superstition over science, obsessed with guns, opposing women’s rights and health, and of course racist, bigoted, and behind the times. The rights the founders gave us imposed a duty to fight these latter-day traitors.

With Malice Towards Them

President Obama today gave his Second Inaugural address on the West steps of the Capitol.  On the surface, most of the speech seemed unobjectionable and could be given by any number of Republican presidents.  But on a closer reading, and pairing that reading with what Obama has said in other places, we can more closely follow what he was trying to do in the speech.  From the opening:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” 

Today we continue a never-ending journey, to bridge the meaning of those words with the realities of our time. For history tells us that while these truths may be self-evident, they have never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth. The patriots of 1776 did not fight to replace the tyranny of a king with the privileges of a few or the rule of a mob. They gave to us a Republic, a government of, and by, and for the people, entrusting each generation to keep safe our founding creed.

Almost completely unobjectionable (history tells us?); but this came from the same man who said the following in his book, The Audacity of Hope:

Implicit in [the Constitution's] structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth, the infalibility or any idea or ideology or theology or "ism," any tyrannical consistency that might look future generations into a single, unalterable course.

Seems a little contradictory with what he said today, to say the least.  Anyway, let's move on.

Through it all, we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all society’s ills can be cured through government alone. Our celebration of initiative and enterprise; our insistence on hard work and personal responsibility, these are constants in our character. 

But we have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action. For the American people can no more meet the demands of today’s world by acting alone than American soldiers could have met the forces of fascism or communism with muskets and militias. No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores. Now, more than ever, we must do these things together, as one nation, and one people.

Jonah Goldberg basically nails the first problem with this whole formulation:

In other words, the old platitudes I just paid lip service to — and which continue to poll well — can now only be realized by embracing their philosophical opposite. In this case, individual freedom through collective action!

The second problem is the basic illogic of it, especially the second paragraph.  The entire very confused part about American soldiers, muskets and militias (an obvious rhetorical bow to the current gun control debate) and the defeat of communism and fascism is meaningless.  So is the part just beneath it regarding some mythical "single person" who wants to train all of the U.S.'s future math and science teachers.  I honestly couldn't assign any rational meaning to any of it.

This generation of Americans has been tested by crises that steeled our resolve and proved our resilience. A decade of war is now ending. An economic recovery has begun. America’s possibilities are limitless, for we possess all the qualities that this world without boundaries demands: youth and drive; diversity and openness; an endless capacity for risk and a gift for reinvention. My fellow Americans, we are made for this moment, and we will seize it – so long as we seize it together.

Though most of the troops have returned from Afghanistan and Iraq, the war has certainly not ended.  And when did the economy begin to recover?  I must have missed that part.  The old liberal standbys diversity and openness show up here, along with the idea of reinvention, which does not seem at all consistent with what he voiced before about the self-evident truths of our Founding.

We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity. We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit. But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future.

Who are the group of people (who it seems are large enough in number to address in a second inaugural) who believe that we "must choose" between the old and the young?  Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan went out of their way in the months running up to the election to let the people know that their plan in no way affected those 55 and over.

It is now our generation’s task to carry on what those pioneers began. For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers, and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts.

If that were an actual problem, I guess this would be a big deal.

Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.

I am not aware that gays and lesbians face the same kind of animus and threats of violence against them that blacks did in this country for far too long.  Although I am not going to go further down this road, marriage is more than just about "love."  If we really followed President Obama's logic in this regard, I think we may recoil to where it might lead us.

For now decisions are upon us, and we cannot afford delay. We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate.  (Emphasis added.)

The bolded section is wonderful coming from the man who was behind a recently finished campaign that implied that his opponents' policies would result in (at least figuratively) throwing old people off cliffs, cancer, and death.

Though President Obama hearkened back to the Founding and its principles in this speech, he did so in the spirit of FDR:  cloaking the new and radical in the old and traditional.  Hopefully in the coming four years, an increasing number of the American People will awaken to the true transformational nature of the presidency of Barack Obama.

In Celebration of MLK

In honor of the celebration of the life and message of the Rev. Martin Luther King, I quote some of his most famous teachings.  From Letter from a Birmingham Jail:

How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.

From his I Have a Dream:

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

And another section from Letter (which was pointed out by Jeffrey Anderson at The Weekly Standard), in which King stated that,

time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God....

King's teaching cuts across many of the lessons taught today by those in government and academia -- that there aren't any permanent truths; that human nature is changeable; and that the Founders set our nation on principles that should be rejected and redefined to suit us in our own day.

Let us once again live up to the principles that the Rev. King held most dear.

UPDATE:

Take a look at this piece up on CNN.com regarding the idea (strange for the writer I'm sure) that MLK is a hero for conservatives.  Check out this excerpt from an eminent historian:

"He was against all policies based on race," says Peter Schramm, a conservative historian. "The basis of his attack on segregation was 'judge us by the content of our character, not by the color of our skin.' That's a profound moral argument."

Dereliction of Duty

This morning on Meet the Press, Sen. Chuck Schumer said the following about the plan of the House Republicans to pass a short-term debt ceiling deal if Senate Democrats would pass a budget:

"We're going to do a budget this year and it's going to have revenues in it. And our Republican colleagues better get used to that fact," Schumer added hours before President Barack Obama began his second term, which officially began at noon Sunday and will be heralded with celebrations around the capital city a day later.

Good, I am glad that the Senate will finally do their constitutional duty and actually deign to pass a budget, which is something they haven't done since 2009.  I look forward to "get[tting] used to" the Senate Democrats doing what they were supposed to be doing all along.

Sick

This is shocking:

“I don’t know what to do,” sighed Gene Rosen. “I’m getting hang-up calls, I’m getting some calls, I’m getting emails with, not direct threats, but accusations that I’m lying, that I’m a crisis actor, ‘how much am I being paid?’” Someone posted a photo of his house online. There have been phony Google+ and YouTube accounts created in his name, messages on white supremacist message boards ridiculing the “emotional Jewish guy,” and dozens of blog posts and videos “exposing” him as a fraud. One email purporting to be a business inquiry taunted: “How are all those little students doing? You know, the ones that showed up at your house after the ‘shooting’. What is the going rate for getting involved in a gov’t sponsored hoax anyway?” 

“The quantity of the material is overwhelming,” he said. So much so that a friend shields him from most of it by doing daily sweeps of the Web so Rosen doesn’t have to. His wife is worried for their safety. He’s logged every email and every call, and consulted with a retired state police officer, who took the complaint seriously but said police probably can’t do anything at the moment; he plans to do the same with the FBI. 

What did Rosen do to deserve this? One month ago, he found six little children and a bus driver at the end of the driveway of his home in Newtown, Conn. “We can’t go back to school,” one little boy told Rosen. “Our teacher is dead.” He brought them inside and gave them food and juice and toys. He called their parents. He sat with them and listened to their shocked accounts of what had happened just down the street inside Sandy Hook Elementary, close enough that Rosen heard the gunshots. 

In the hours and days that followed, Rosen did a lot of media interviews. “I wanted to speak about the bravery of the children, and it kind of helped me work through this,” he told Salon in an interview. “I guess I kind of opened myself up to this.”

The “this” in question is becoming a prime target of the burgeoning Sandy Hook truther movement, which — like its precursor that denied the veracity of the 9/11 terror attacks — alleges that the entire shooting was a hoax of some kind. There were conspiracy theories surrounding the shooting from Day One, but the movement has exploded into public view the past two weeks, and a Google Trends search suggests it’s just now picking up steam. It’s also beginning to earn the backing of presumably credible sources like a professor and a reporter.

(h/t Jonah Goldberg)

For the Children, of Course

Last week when President Obama unveiled his new executive orders on gun control, he was surrounded by little kids at the podium.  The message being sent of course is that if you disagree in any way with the president, you must be also be against little kids as well, wanting to open them up to more opportunities to be attacked at school.  When substantive argument is not enough, these are the places you go.

Here is the picture if you don't believe me:

To be sure, certainly not all uses of children by politicians is a bad thing--quite to the contrary.  But in everything this president seems to do, it's all towards continuing to build up the straw men that he wants to portray as his adversaries' real positions.

The other half of this problem is exhibited by this story I found on Yahoo! News, which coincidentally blasts conservatives such as me who are blasting the president in this regard:

But children deserve a voice in this debate: Grownups have argued fiercely about gun control, "but as usual, kids say it better," says Joyce Slaton at BabyCenter. Taejah Goode, 10, said he grieved for the Newtown victims and asked Obama to "STOP gun violence." Julia Stokes, 11, urged Obama in her letter to make it "very hard for people to buy guns." Obama was right to share these letters. These voices must be heard. Kids have "a simple, heartfelt way of cutting through the nonsense."

But saying that we have to "STOP gun violence" does not say at all exactly how to stop it.  I think everyone but the most contemptible madman would disagree with that statement.  The problem is that the president is focusing on policies that either will have no impact (in other words, criminals by definition don't follow the law) or will actually do the reverse of the intention of the those policies (gun store sales right now are through the roof).  Unless we are going to be writing up policies in crayon, that's about how far I think children will help in fixing the supposed problems the president is trying to correct.

And, to come full circle on this story, gun violence has actually fallen dramatically in the last ten years.  Also, to leave you with something not highly reported on in the war against "assault rifles," those committing gun violence use handguns by a massive margin.  People use their bare hands five times more than people who actually use rifles of any kind for the purposes of murder.

The End of the Line

NRO's Kathryn Jean Lopez recently interviewed Charles Kesler, and among the topics of discussion were the future of liberalism (which Kesler thinks will eventually collapse on itself in both theory and in practice), Barack Obama, and the meaning of conservatism.  Kesler does about a good of a job as can be done in explaining the major differences between conservatism and liberalism in the following section:

For [conservatives], to put it simply, principles are rooted in what our fathers called the laws of nature and of nature’s God. These are timeless, that is, they call to us in every age. Some ages live up to the minimal demands of moral decency and the maximum demands of political excellence better than others; no age lives up to them perfectly. That’s why conservatives are inherently moderate in their demands and expectations of politics, recognizing that neither political defeat nor victory affects the inherent authority and goodness of first principles. Our losses in 2012 are therefore not cause for despair. Like everything in politics they are temporary. We shouldn’t run around like liberals, afraid that the times are against us and that we need to exchange old principles for new ones that allegedly fit the times better. Our calling is, so far as possible, to keep the times in tune with our principles, not to adjust our principles to match the times. As Churchill put it, it isn’t possible to guarantee success in politics or war; it’s possible only to deserve it. By contrast, progressives believe in happy endings, in the inevitability of progress. They cannot separate might from right, success from legitimacy, and so don’t have the consolation of believing in principles in the conservative sense. They insist that the good guys must always or at least eventually win, a standard which elides easily into the deeply immoral belief that, in the end, whoever wins must be right.

As they say, please read the whole thing.

Clintonmax

This story has the punchlines already included:

Bill Clinton is a multimillionaire, but you’re paying for the Cinemax in his office. 

That’s just one eyebrow-raising expense a former occupant of the White House has been allowed to put on the taxpayer tab every year, even though every living ex-president is quite wealthy.

And of course:

Late at night, the premium channel earns its “Skinemax” nickname with a turn toward adult programming, offering shows titles like “Busty Coeds Vs. Lusty Cheerleaders,” “Sex Games Cancun 01: Last Temptation of Hank” and “Hotel Erotica Feature 05: Bedroom Fantasies 2.”

Good grief.  Again, this is not from The Onion or some monologue of a late night comedian (although I'm sure Leno and Letterman will be having a field day with this tonight).

Politics at its Best

Peter Schramm, the Executive Director of the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University, has a review of the movie Lincoln up at the Center's website.  This is the best part of the review and the best part about the movie itself:

The movie wonderfully shows what politics is at its best–constitutional statesmanship navigating between liberty as its good end and the low politics that are a necessary means toward it. Even when the give and take seems rough and base, the low is always in the service of the high. In the basement of the White House–over the image of a compass always pointing north–Lincoln lectures the abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens on why the means of getting to that just end must always be varied. The radical Stevens wants to simplify it. He thinks only the principle matters; Lincoln knows better, he has a better understanding of politics. He understands that choosing what is truly the right thing is good only insofar as it can be realized. Principle needs intelligence, it needs prudence, practical wisdom, and this is politics at its best.

Those in politics need to think about both the ends and the means.  This is not simply leadership; it is statesmanship.

The Times They Are A-Changin'

Today at his press conference President Obama stated that the debt ceiling will be raised without any corresponding spending cuts.  He then said the following about the Republican plan to finally do something about the mounting U.S. debt (it now stands at approximately 16.4 trillion dollars) in the form of another debt ceiling deal:

In the final news conference of his first term, Obama said Republicans were threatening to hold “a gun at the head of the American people” and that he would not trade spending cuts, as Republicans demand, for an agreement to raise the federal debt ceiling.

What happened to the lessons learned from the time when Sarah Palin supposedly caused the shootings in Arizona that killed six people and injured now former-Rep. Gabby Giffords?  Wasn't rhetoric and images like this the cause of much of the violence throughout the United States?

It's interesting to note how quickly those lessons are forgotten by the exact same people who voiced such odious claims only last summer.

Moving on.

In 2006, then-Senator Obama voted against raising the debt ceiling and stated the following reasons why in a speech on the floor of the Senate:

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here. Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.

Wait, so now with the debt astronomically higher than it was in 2006, Obama now says that voting for the debt ceiling without spending cuts of any kind is the right thing to do.  Funny how times change.

Lessons Not Learned

In the wake of the deal that averted the"fiscal cliff," it seems that Republican voters are increasingly disgusted with thier party.  This news as reported by pollster Scott Rasmussen should not make them feel any better

So, according to Politico, the Washington team is gearing up a new effort to protect incumbents and limit the ability of Republican voters to successfully challenge establishment candidates. 

That makes sense to those whose sole goal is winning a majority in Congress rather than changing the course of government policy. Seen from the outside, though, it sounds like the professional politicians are saying that the only way to win is to pick more candidates like the insiders. Hearing that message, the reaction of many Republican and conservative voters is, "Why bother?"

What a more responsible party would do:

Mature party leaders would spend a lot more time listening to Republican voters rather than further insulating themselves from those voters. They would try to understand why just 37 percent of Republicans nationwide believe the economy is fair. They would give serious thought to why just half of GOP voters have a favorable opinion of House Speaker John Boehner, the highest-ranking elected Republican in the nation. They would acknowledge that government spending in America has gone up in every year since 1954 regardless of whether Republicans or Democrats are in charge. 

Then mature party leaders would chart a realistic course to address these concerns and share those plans with the voters. To succeed, this course would have to include some painful medicine for the establishment, such as giving up corporate welfare programs that benefit their friends and allies. It also would require helping Republican voters identify primary candidates who challenge the establishment but could be effective on the campaign trail. 

This is a much tougher course to follow; one that would benefit the party and the nation. Unfortunately, by seeking to protect the insiders from the voters, all indications are that most establishment Republicans would rather blame the voters and keep their perks.

I know this whole listen-to-your-constituency-thing is insane, but it might be just crazy enough to work...

Instead of changing the rules to further insulate themselves against those they perceive to be stupid country bumpkins, Republicans should listen and ponder what Abraham Lincoln had to say about the role of public opinion in a republic such as ours:

With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who moulds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.

In an essay in the Fall issue of the Claremont Review of Books that is truly a must-read, William Voegli expands on Lincoln's exhortation:

Abraham Lincoln's carefully chosen word "molds" suggests that this paramount duty of democratic statesmanship is quite different from disdaining public sentiment and working to render it governmentally inconsequential, the ambition of the incipient tyrant. It is also the road not taken by the self-marginalizing activist content merely to denounce public sentiment when he believes it's mistaken, preferring the satisfactions of moral purity to the messier, murkier work of making a difference. Molding public sentiment is, finally, different from simple acquiescence, letting it take whatever shape it will. This firm but shrewd defiance is especially important when the public is prepared to embrace a wicked or destructive course. Americans in the 1850s, it appeared to Lincoln, were moving toward accepting the indefinite expansion and permanent existence of slavery, a prospect he believed would be a practical and moral catastrophe.

This is statesmanship:  the combination of principle and practice, or the use of prudence to forward the first principles of the regime in changing circumstances.  Since the the discovery of philosophy, and thereby political philosophy, politics in the highest sense has been about the use of persuasion by those who share in the faculty of reason to debate in the public arena the best means to achieve the ends which are set by nature.

Rather than taking this path, Republicans insiders have chosen a different path -- one that indicates they have learned nothing about why they lost in 2012.  This does not inspire confidence going forward.

Onion-Worthy

Here is another Onion-worthy story -- this time, it's VP Joe Biden's turn:

Vice President Joe Biden said on Friday he was “shooting for Tuesday” to get President Barack Obama his recommendations on how to battle an epidemic of gun violence and warned “there’s no silver bullet” to stop the killing. 

Biden was meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House with executives from video game companies whose products have often been blamed for making players insensitive to real-world violence. 

This is hilarious:

"I come to this meeting with no judgment. You all know the judgment other people have made," Biden said.

Why, Biden just the other day met with the NRA and other groups at the White House.  The NRA came away unconvinced of the VP's neutrality on the issue:

The gun rights group said: 'We were disappointed with how little this meeting had to do with keeping our children safe and how much it had to do with an agenda to attack the Second Amendment. 

'While claiming that no policy proposals would be "prejudged", this Task Force spent most of its time on proposed restrictions on lawful firearms owners -- honest, taxpaying, hardworking Americans. 

'It is unfortunate that this administration continues to insist on pushing failed solutions to our nation's most pressing problems. We will not allow law-abiding gun owners to be blamed for the acts of criminals and madmen.'

The Tables Are Turned

Since it was released, the photo below, which even got the notice of the New York Times, has been the cause of much controversy.

The Times' account:

WASHINGTON — In an Oval Office meeting on Dec. 29, 11 of President Obama’s top advisers stood before him discussing the heated fiscal negotiations. The 10 visible in aWhite House photo are men. 

In the days since, Mr. Obama has put together a national security team dominated by men, with Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts nominated to succeed Hillary Rodham Clinton as the secretary of state, Chuck Hagel chosen to be the defense secretary and John O. Brennan nominated as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Given the leading contenders for other top jobs, including chief of staff and Treasury secretary, Mr. Obama’s inner circle will continue to be dominated by men well into his second term.

And of course since that time, Obama has nominated only men to fill cabinet level positions.  To combat charges of being anti-woman (in other words, a Republican), the White House released the following picture:

I assure you, this story did not come from The Onion.  This is not satire.  The picture above was not doctored.

It's interesting when the tenants of modern liberalism (e.g., egalitarianism run amok a la Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron) come back to bite them.  And from reports I've seen, it looks as though Democrats do have something against women after all.

Educating Boehner

This WSJ piece by Stephen Moore is very insightful into President Obama's lack of seriousness in tackling the debt problem (which is really a spending problem) in this country.  In it, Moore interviews Speaker John Boehner and some truly appaling details emerge from the so-called "fiscal cliff" back room dealings:

What stunned House Speaker John Boehner more than anything else during his prolonged closed-door budget negotiations with Barack Obama was this revelation: "At one point several weeks ago," Mr. Boehner says, "the president said to me, 'We don't have a spending problem.' "

And:

The president's insistence that Washington doesn't have a spending problem, Mr. Boehner says, is predicated on the belief that massive federal deficits stem from what Mr. Obama called "a health-care problem." Mr. Boehner says that after he recovered from his astonishment—"They blame all of the fiscal woes on our health-care system"—he replied: "Clearly we have a health-care problem, which is about to get worse with ObamaCare. But, Mr. President, we have a very serious spending problem." He repeated this message so often, he says, that toward the end of the negotiations, the president became irritated and said: "I'm getting tired of hearing you say that." 

Obama, the "great compromiser":

Mr. Boehner confirms that at one critical juncture he asked Mr. Obama, after conceding on $800 billion in new taxes, "What am I getting?" and the president replied: "You don't get anything for it. I'm taking that anyway."

Boehner's tone throughout the piece is somewhat naive, e.g., this section:

...Mr. Boehner says he won't engage in any more closed-door budget negotiations with the White House, which are "futile." He adds: "Sure, I will meet with the president if he wants to," but House Republicans will from now on proceed with establishing a budget for the year following what is known as "regular order," and they will insist that Harry Reid and Senate Democrats pass a budget—something they haven't done in nearly four years—before proceeding.

I'm glad he finally figured this out (this is after all a Republic, right?).

This piece shows me that Boehner needs to understand Obama more as Obama understands himself.  He really needs to read Charles Kesler's I Am the Change:  Barack Obama and the Crisis of Modern Liberalism before the next time he negotiates with President Obama.

The Next Fight

Alana Goodman over at Commentary has some great advice on how Republicans should go about cutting government spending (and yes, that includes defense cuts) in the future:

Fiscal conservatives argue that defense spending shouldn’t be immune from cuts, and they’re right. There is waste and mismanagement within the Pentagon, just like any other government bureaucracy, and there is undoubtedly room for reduction. What’s unacceptable is arbitrary, across-the-board cuts that would force the military to set priorities based on budget reductions, rather than the other way around. Defense should not be dealt with the same way as health care and entitlements; it’s the most important responsibility of the federal government. If there are specific areas where reductions can be made, that should be determined. But choosing a random number and asking the military to cut that much is not the way to do it.

Cuts in defense spending should be based on the circumstances, not simply based on some arbitrary number that means nothing in the real world.

But this whole discussion takes for granted the main problem:  When are these spending cuts ever going to materialize?

Natural Rights and Religion

I hadn't gotten around to reading Hadley Arkes essay entitled "Is Religious Freedom a 'Natural Right'?" until this weekend.  It truly is a must read.  Arkes main point is that much of how we think about religion and conscience today is a rejection of the natural law based foundations on which the U.S. Constitution was built.  

We often tend to talk about religion in terms of "faith" and "belief," which are merely subjective terms that indicate nothing said in that realm can be proven true or false.  What has been lost is something which George Washington, James Madison, and the Founders understood:  That religion is also based on the claims of reason, or the canons of natural law.  If this is not the case, how then would civil society be able to pass laws banning the practice of suttee, in which an aggrieved widow throws herself on the funeral pyres of her deceased husband?  After all, she is just practicing her religion, right?  Think again:

In contrast, there is the understanding made explicit by John Paul II, that the Church has always moved with two wings, faith and reason. Anyone engaged in the serious study of theology knows how demanding is the discipline of reason that is bound up with the efforts to explore the depths of theology. But beyond that it seems to be one of the best kept secrets in the country—a secret apparently not revealed to many Democratic politicians—that the teaching of the Catholic church on moral questions such as abortion does not depend critically on appeals to faith. The Catholic position on abortion is a weave composed mainly of embryology, the facts of science, and principled reasoning. The Catholic position has been argued in the style of natural law, with reasons that are accessible even to people who are not Catholic. One doesn't have to be Catholic in order to understand the Church's position on abortion, euthanasia, stem cell research, or marriage—and that has been precisely the teaching of the Church: that one doesn't have to be Catholic in order to understand these arguments woven of moral reasoning.

Though Arkes is a Catholic, this reasoning is not simply true just for Catholics.  Case in point, Arkes on what is really going on in the arguments against the provisions in Obamacare that mandate that Catholic hospitals among other religious entities offer contraception coverage in their employees' health plans:

Bishop William Lori pointed out that the Church was not seeking an exemption from the policies on contraception in the way that "conscientious objectors" sought exemptions from service in the military. The Bishop was appealing to "conscience" in the sense once explained with exquisite care by John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor : conscience as an understanding ordered to a body of objective moral truths. John Paul II remarked on that facile tendency to accord to the "individual conscience the status of a supreme tribunal of moral judgment which hands down categorical and infallible decisions about good and evil":

But in this way the inescapable claims of truth disappear, yielding their place to a criterion of sincerity, authenticity and ‘being at peace with oneself', so much so that some have come to adopt a radically subjectivistic conception of moral judgment.  

What is lost then is the recognition that conscience is not directed inward to the self and one's feelings, but outward to the natural law: The "natural law discloses the objective and universal demands of the moral good," and the function of conscience is "the application of the law to a particular case." That seemed to be the understanding at work with Bishop Lori and his colleagues for they were not, as I say, seeking an exemption from the mandate on contraception. They were pronouncing the mandates to constitute an "unjust law, no law at all," and therefore rightly binding on no one. (Italics in original.)

What this means for our understanding of "religion" and how far removed it is (or is not) from what the Founders had in mind:

But just before the drafting of the Constitution, in the "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments," James Madison had drawn from the Virginia Declaration of Rights as he set forth with a crisp clarity what he and many of the Founders understood by religion: "the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it." Years later, that understanding would be restated by the redoubtable Justice Stephen J. Field in Davis v. Beason (1890), one of the cases dealing with the Mormons. That is probably still the understanding held by most people in this country about the meaning of religion. It is the religion marked by the presence of the God of the Declaration, the God of the logos, of reason, who was understood to have brought forth, as the peak of His creation, those creatures with the capacity to give and understand reasons over matters of right and wrong. There is no understanding of religion more bound up with the deep principles of the American regime and the very ground of the laws. That is not to say that we would be retreating to some notion of "the god of the place," the God associated with thistribe of Americans. The God of the Declaration was not a local god. Serious Protestants, Catholics and Jews understood the God of the Creation as a God with a universal jurisdiction, the Author of moral commands universal in their reach.

But, as Arkes points out, the understanding now dominant in our Courts is one of nihilism, relativism, and atheism.  In an odd irony, judges have deemed that the principle of the rule of law now entails the rejection of the grounding of that principle:  that we no longer have access to the moral principles which used to be thought were available to all.

Please ponder over this essay because the implications drawn from it will be very helpful in continuing the defense of natural rights and natural law against the full implementation of the provisions of Obamacare in the coming years.

Elections Have Consequences and Consequences and Consequences and...

In case you missed this WSJ piece about the crony capitalism taking place behind the scenes -- and months in advance -- of the "fiscal cliff" deal (why isn't when the entitlement programs eventually put the country on ice called the "fiscal cliff" instead?)  read on:

In praising Congress's huge new tax increase, President Obama said Tuesday that "millionaires and billionaires" will finally "pay their fair share." That is, unless you are a Nascar track owner, a wind-energy company or the owners of StarKist Tuna, among many others who managed to get their taxes reduced in Congress's New Year celebration. 

There's plenty to lament about the capital and income tax hikes, but the bill's seedier underside is the $40 billion or so in tax payoffs to every crony capitalist and special pleader with a lobbyist worth his million-dollar salary. Congress and the White House want everyone to ignore this corporate-welfare blowout, so allow us to shine a light on the merriment.

A couple of examples:

Thus Michigan Democrat Debbie Stabenow was able to retain an accelerated tax write-off for owners of Nascar tracks (cost: $78 million) to benefit the paupers who control the Michigan International Speedway. New Mexico's Jeff Bingaman saved a tax credit for companies operating in American Samoa ($62 million), including a StarKist factory. 

Distillers are able to drink to a $222 million rum tax rebate. Perhaps this will help to finance more of those fabulous Bacardi TV ads with all those beautiful rich people. Businesses located on Indian reservations will receive $222 million in accelerated depreciation. And there are breaks for railroads, "New York Liberty Zone" bonds and so much more.

And what these kinds of deals mean:

The costs of all this are far greater than the estimates conjured by the Joint Tax Committee. They include slower economic growth from misallocated capital, lower revenues for the Treasury and thus more pressure to raise rates on everyone, and greater public cynicism that government mainly serves the powerful.

Also, to leave you with something the media did not report:  taxes weren't just raised on the richest Americans.  Social Security payroll taxes were raised by 2%.  But you won't find this out just by browsing the headlines.

Looks like a great deal to me.

Jumping Over the Cliff

In lieu of taking time to talk about all the different aspects of the deal that was reached last night to avert the dreaded "fiscal cliff," I will put up a single chart by Yuval Levin that sums it all up.

This is all you need to know about the seriousness of the deal that was just struck between Democrats and Republicans.

Revolting

On Saturday I saw Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained and, to be honest, I am still not really sure what to think about it.  The movie revolves around a slave named Django (played by Jamie Foxx) and his quest, with the help of the German bounty Hunter Dr. King Schultz, to rescue his wife from the grips of the evil plantation owner Calvin Candie.  The movie is, as usual for Tarantino, ultra violent (this is probably his most gory movie, which is saying something), but it does have some very entertaining moments.

Samuel L. Jackson, a veteran of Tarantino's movies, plays probably one of the worst characters I've ever seen portrayed in a movie.  His character, Stephen, who is the head slave at Candie's mansion, happily proceeds to help Candie in any endeavor, be it even against the other slaves themselves.  I bring up Jackon's character because of a review of the movie I read in The Boston Globe.  Here is the relevant (and revolting) portion:

[Tarantino] knows what the stakes are and keeps finding clever ways to raise them. They don’t get much higher — or lower, perhaps — than Stephen, the head servant at the Candie mansion. He gets a load of Django, turns defensive, then smells a rat. Samuel L. Jackson plays crusty, waxen Stephen as a vision of depraved loyalty and bombastic jive that cuts right past the obvious association with Uncle Tom. The movie is too modern for what Jackson is doing to be limited to 1853. He’s conjuring the house Negro, yes, but playing him as though he were Clarence Thomas or Alan Keyes or Herman Cain or Michael Steele, men whom some black people find embarrassing.

And I'm sure the reviewer includes himself as part of the group who find those men embarrassing.  It's truly amazing the kind of racial determinism and animus that still exists in parts of this country.  (Nevermind the fact that the people voicing these opinions without irony call themselves "progressive.")