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.