The jihadi menace reaches a high water mark

by Paul Mirengoff in Iraq, Middle East, Obama Foreign Policy
“From the ruins of the Obama Administration’s Middle East strategy, the most powerful and dangerous group of religious fanatics in modern history has emerged in the heart of the Middle East.” So says Walter Russell Mead, the distinguished historian of American foreign policy (who reportedly has said he voted for Barack Obama in 2008).
The fanatical group in question is, of course, ISIS. According to Mead, who cites analysts at the Brookings Institution and the Washington Institute, ISIS is more radical, better organized, and better financed than al-Qaeda. It commands the loyalty of thousands of dedicated fanatics, including many with Western and even U.S. passports. And it now controls some of the most strategic territory at the heart of the Middle East.
Given these advantages, Mead concludes that ISIS is “much better positioned to launch attacks in the U.S. and Europe than any of its predecessors.” And though it is preoccupied for the moment in Syria and Iraq, when the dust settles ISIS’s desire to attack the U.S. and Europe will likely be at least as great as that of its predecessors who did attack us.
How did ISIS attain its current status? It flourishes in Iraq because President Obama pulled our troops out. Without our influence and presence in Iraq, the military rotted and ISIS filled the vacuum. ISIS flourishes in Syria in part because Obama dithered (to use Mead’s word) over aiding its rivals in the Syrian opposition.
What can be done now? It’s not clear that anything much can be done in Iraq. Obama likes to talk about “exit strategy.” But the issue now is reentrance strategy. Obama does not seem to have left us with a viable one in Iraq. I assume this was deliberate. In any case, there may be no exit from our exit strategy.
What happens next? Mead says we should watch two developments. First, will ISIS’s momentum carry forward when it reaches the Shia districts of Iraq? It may. According to Mead, the “militias and parade groups currently marching around Baghdad and thumping their chests may not be very effective in the field, and it is not yet clear whether the Iraqi Army will fight any better on Shia home turf than it did in the north and the west.” After all, “the Sunni crushed the Shia in Iraq for decades and there is no law of nature that says they can’t do it again.”
But even if ISIS halts or is halted before it reaches the Shia districts of Iraq, it will still control a large swath of territory in Iraq and Syria. Barring a major rollback, the threat to the U.S. will remain significant.
This brings us to the second key development to watch, namely the political balance that emerges within ISIS held territory. Mead observes:

Tribal leaders, Baathist activists, other religious groups and their allies outnumber the true ISIS cadres by an immense factor. It is far from clear whether the rebel region in Syria and Iraq will be under one increasingly powerful and effective government or whether it falls apart into factionalism and internal power struggles.
For ISIS to impose real order and authority on the population under its military control, and to build up its forces from a guerrilla army to a force capable of imposing dictatorial religious rule on a large civilian population, would be a victory as difficult and in some ways more astonishing than the triumph of its forces on the ground.

Accordingly, Mead suggests that “the U.S. might do better to try to strengthen the non-ISIS components of the Sunni movements in Syria and Iraq than to look to Tehran and the Kremlin for help.”
Right now, though, it’s difficult to imagine that the U.S. has any credibility left with the Sunni movements in Syria and Iraq. We did, but Obama squandered it. Any fissure between ISIS and the Sunnis will have to increase significantly before the U.S. — presumably under a new president — is again taken seriously by Sunnis in Iraq and Syria.
As Mead says:

Rarely has an administration so trumpeted its superior wisdom and strategic smarts; rarely has any American administration experienced so much ignominious failure, or had its ignorance and miscalculation so brutally exposed. . . .
Six years into what the President and his supporters thought would be an era of liberal Democrats seizing the national security high ground from enfeebled, discredited Republicans, the outlook is much grimmer than the President’s team could have dreamed.

 http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/06/the-jihadi-menace-reaches-a-high-water-mark.php#!

Political ignorance and the Founding Fathers

Political ignorance and the Founding Fathers

BY ILYA SOMIN 
In a thoughtful recent review of my book Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter, political scientist James Rogers argues that my position that political ignorance is a serious problem for democracy that justifies limiting and decentralizing government power is in some respects at odds with the views of the Founding Fathers:

Contrary to Somin’s repeated claim that current average levels of political knowledge “fall well short of requirements of normative theories of political participation,” the framers had a robust commitment to representative democracy while holding the assumption of widespread political ignorance.

The difference, I think, lies in a couple of areas. First, the framers frankly assumed that policy-makers would have to learn on the job: They assumed that policy expertise was largely unattainable by the general public and even by most elites not in government service. But they engineered the structure of the national government to respond to this challenge. The structure of different branches of Congress, for example, would combine to produce outcomes superior to either chamber acting independently….

The argument of The Federalist suggests that the authors did not believe that sustained, high levels of public attention to policy were necessary to generate good policy outcomes, or for republicanism more generally. But this does not mean that the framers were anti-democratic (as is often surmised). Voter attentiveness to politics is, in the jargon of political science, “endogenous.” Much like potential competition in a market with only a single firm in it can make that one firm that looks like a monopolist nonetheless behave as though it has competition to deter the entry of other firms, the possibility that an action will make voters attentive to what’s going on in the state or national capital can be sufficient support for the “auxiliary precautions” that outcomes are generally in line with broad voter sentiment. Additionally, different branches and level of government, as well as organs of civil society, can act as the proverbial “canary in the mineshaft” to notify voters when to turn from inattentiveness to attentiveness.

It is indeed true that Framers sought to “engineer” the Constitution around the problem of political ignorance, thereby diminishing its harmful effects. But they did so in part by trying to do the very thing I advocate in the book: placing tight limits on the power of government, especially the federal government. James Madison famously emphasized in Federalist 45 that the powers of the central government are to be “few and defined.” In a passage from Federalist 62 that I quote in the book, he emphasized that “[i[t will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read." I doubt that Madison meant that adequately informed voters literally need to read every provision of every law. But he did clearly imply a tradeoff between the quantity and complexity of law and the ability of voters to understand it. He clearly was not confident that what Rogers called "canary in the mineshaft" democracy would work well in a situation where the role of government in society is massive and complex. The greater the size and scope of government, the less likely it is that rationally ignorant voters will pay attention to more than a tiny fraction of the many canaries competing for their attention.

Moreover, Madison ultimately concluded that increasing political knowledge was an important objective for making representative democracy work effectively. As he explained in an 1822 letter advocating the use of publicly financed education to increase political knowledge (I quote the letter at the start of my book): "A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance. And a people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the Power that knowledge gives." Thomas Jefferson and some of the other Founders expressed similar views. Unfortunately, as I also document in the book, public education has been much less successful in increasing political knowledge than Jefferson and others hoped.

Rogers also quotes Madison on "that honorable determination which animates every votary of freedom, to rest all of our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government," which he argues is a sharp contrast to my own view of freedom. It is true that Madison believed that representative government was an important element of freedom. On the other hand, he also emphasized that limits on government power were essential to the preservation of freedom. As he put it in his 1792 essay on "Property." "[t]hat is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where arbitrary restrictions, exemptions, and monopolies deny to part of its citizens that free use of their faculties, and free choice of their occupations.” He also argued there that “[i]f the United States mean to obtain or deserve the full praise due to wise and just governments, they will equally respect the rights of property, and the property in rights.”


I do not mean to imply that my analysis of political ignorance fully tracks that of Madison and the other Founders. Far from it. Among other important differences, they don’t seem to have recognized the central point rational ignorance is less of a problem when people “vote with their feet” than when they make choices at the ballot box. In addition, I argue in the book that such Founders as Jefferson and Madison were overly optimistic about the ability of public education to increase political knowledge. But at least some of them, especially Madison, were more worried about political ignorance than Rogers suggests. In an era where government has grown far larger and more complex than the Founders ever expected, we have even more reason for concern than they did.

UPDATE: For readers who may be interested, I explored the question of the relationship between foot voting and political freedom in much greater detail than in my book, in this forthcoming article.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/06/09/political-ignorance-and-the-founding-fathers/

DAILY BEAST: Obama Is The New Dubya: With each passing year

DAILY BEAST: Obama Is The New Dubya: With each passing year, Obama’s foreign policy gets more and more like Dubya’s—which creates bigger political problems for the Democrats.

Worse yet, he provides occasion to remind people of what the Democrats, including Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton, were saying on Iraq before the invasion:

UPDATE: Despite the Bush-blaming, here’s Joe Biden in 2010 on what a great achievement the stable, democratic Iraq has become.

by Glenn Reynolds

The Left Doesn’t Really Believe in Climate Change

The Left Doesn’t Really Believe in Climate Change

Jon Gabriel, Ed.·

The sky is always falling. If the new ice age doesn’t do us in, the ozone hole will. The instant DDT is banned, aerosols must follow. Global warming is replaced by climate change is replaced by “global weirding.”
And what is the solution to these often-contradictory scenarios? We anachronists who retain a bias toward the hard sciences would employ very different measures to prevent a freezing ocean and a boiling one. To an engineer, soldier or plumber, this is obvious.
But how do leaders of the environmental left address these opposing doomsdays? By raising taxes, increasing government, impeding capitalism and reducing national sovereignty. Coincidentally, the same policies they would promote if their supposed environmental catastrophe was utter fiction. It is little wonder that voters are suspicious.
When natural gas production was a too-expensive alternative to oil, the environmental lobby promoted it as a surefire way to reduce carbon emissions. Close the coal- and oil-fired plants; convert cars to run on CNG. Yes, it will devastate industries, cost jobs and burn billions of dollars, but think of the children!
Since even malevolent industrialists love their kids, energy barons took the greens’ advice and found cheaper, more efficient ways to extract and transport natural gas. What a victory for the movement! But instead of celebrating, envirolobbyists rent their garments over their once-miraculous fuel. The instant green energy translated into Big Oil profits, progressives placed the CNG and fracking on their naughty list.
When carbon emissions were labeled agents of the apocalypse, engineers noted that the only atmospheric emission from nuclear plants is water vapor. If greenhouse gases were as dangerous as claimed, Gaia’s savior, at least for a time, was the humble atom.
Again the environmentalists turned on a dime, alleging that CO2 is bad, but tiny amounts of nuclear waste buried under mountain ranges was, well, icky. Sure, there are now vastly safer waste-reducing solutions, but did you hard-science-types forget the cool bumper stickers on our VW microbus? The China Syndrome won Oscars, you know.
Every time a real-world solution is provided to a promised calamity, leftist leaders move the goalposts. To be sure, many well-meaning parishioners have bought the con and piously observe the demanding rituals of earth worship. But the high priests still jet around the globe, chasing checks from energy tycoons to build monstrous mansions along doomed coastlines.
That’s because the Left doesn’t really believe in climate change. Their true religion is raising taxes, increasing government, impeding capitalism and reducing national sovereignty. Climate change is just a temporary excuse to achieve those ends.

http://ricochet.com/left-doesnt-really-believe-climate-change/

Lessons of the VA Scandal

Lessons of the VA Scandal
Lengthy wait times, bureaucratic abuse, rationed care: par for the course in government-run health care.

ByJohn Fund

If our government has any obligation to fulfill its many promises on health care, it should be first and foremost to the men and women who served in our armed forces. But the scandal over hidden waiting lists at a growing number of veterans’ hospitals (seven so far) — wherein dozens of veterans died while waiting months for vital treatment, and the VA covered up the lengthy wait times — should make everyone wonder whether we can place our trust in a government-managed health-care system. The Dayton Daily News reported on Sunday that its investigation of a database of claims paid by the Department of Veterans Affairs shows that the words “delay in treatment” were used 167 times. The VA paid out a total of $36.4 million to settle the claims. There could well be many more cases of “death by delay” at the VA that never came to light.
Are there lessons in the VA scandal for the rest of us if Obamacare survives and even expands?

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You betcha. The first lesson is that as government expands taxpayer subsidies for health care, the demand will always outstrip supply. Here is President Obama in a speech to disabled veterans in August 2013:

The last time I was with you, I pledged to cut the backlog, slash those wait times, deliver your benefits sooner. And I’m going to be honest with you; it has not moved as fast as I wanted. Part of it is all these new veterans in the system who came in — Agent Orange, PTSD. It means a lot more claims, and despite additional resources, it’s resulted in longer waits. And that’s been unacceptable — unacceptable to me, unacceptable to [Department of Veterans Affairs] Secretary [Eric] Shinseki.

A few weeks later, President Obama had to admit that he found the fiasco of the HealthCare.gov website also “unacceptable.” Last week, his aides told reporters he was “madder than hell” over the veteran waiting-list scandal.
There’s a lot to be mad about at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute notes that more than 344,000 claims for veterans’ care are backed up and waiting to be processed. It takes an average of 160 days for a veteran to be approved for health benefits, and the VA itself estimates that is has an error rate of at least 9 percent in processing claims. According to VA figures for 2012, as reported by the Washington Post, “a veteran who takes an appeal through all available administrative steps faces an average wait of 1,598 days.” That’s more than four years of waiting.
Obamacare will dramatically expand access to the health-care system at the same time that many surveys show doctors are likely to retire or cut back their hours. It is almost inevitable that we’ll see more waiting-list scandals as the need to ration care grows.
This is the record of many single-payer health-care systems, and both Obama and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, have said that establishing a single-payer system is their long-term goal. In 2003, Obama, then an Illinois state senator, told an AFL-CIO conference: “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health-care program. . . . But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately.” Similarly, Majority Leader Reid told a PBS interview show in Nevada, in October 2013: “What we’ve done with Obamacare is have a step in the right direction, but we’re far from having something that’s going to work forever.” When he was asked by a panelist whether he meant that ultimately the country would need a health-care system that abandoned insurance as the means of accessing it, Reid said: “Yes, yes. Absolutely yes.”
But, if the experience of other countries is any guide, a single-payer health-care plan or even government-managed care brings all kinds of waiting lists with it. In 2012, it was discovered that more than 7,000 patients in just a few Scottish hospitals had been wrongly removed from waiting lists for surgery in order to pretend to meet government targets for treatment. One trick was offering to perform surgery on a date when hospital officials knew a patient would be away on holiday, then dropping the patient from the wait list for “refusing” the date.
Sarah Boyack, a member of the Scottish Parliament, called the figure of 7,000 “astonishing,” given that “an extra five million pounds [$8 million] has been pumped into the NHS [National Health Service] to help cut the waiting list” in the affected hospitals.
Not that NHS patients in hospitals without waiting-list scandals are that much better off. In all of the United Kingdom, NHS patients wait an average of about eight weeks for treatments that require admission to a hospital, four weeks for out-patient treatments, and two weeks for diagnostic tests. While NHS patients have a choice of hospitals, they cannot always choose their specialist.
The situation in Canada, a nation whose government-run health-care system has long been touted by liberal supporters of government in health care, is also dire. Last year, the respected Fraser Institute published a study on Canadian wait times for surgery. Among its finding are these:

In 2013, those requiring orthopaedic surgery were forced to endure waits of more than nine months (39.6 weeks) to receive treatment, while others had to wait for slightly more than four months (17.4 weeks) just to receive an appointment with a neurosurgeon. On the other hand, cancer patients in line for radiation therapy faced the shortest expected wait times for treatment after referral by a general practitioner (3.5 weeks).
Currently, one in 34 Canadians may be in pain, off work, or suffering from depression as they wait their turn for treatment.
The 2013 median waiting time of 18.2 weeks is about three days longer than 2012, and substantially longer than 1993 when it was just 9.3 weeks.

Bacchus Barua, the Fraser Institute’s senior health-policy analyst and the report’s lead author, writes: “Simply putting someone on a list is not the same as providing necessary medical attention in a timely manner.”
The veterans’ hospital scandals now in the news in the United States show just how bad things can get when the pressure of patient demand and waiting lists affects bureaucratic behavior. As many as 40 veterans reportedly died at a Phoenix veterans’ facility because they couldn’t get the care they needed. VA administrators there and at other hospitals apparently covered it up by establishing secret waiting lists and falsifying reports.
No one is suggesting that such scandals are widespread in the general health-care system. But they should serve as a warning sign of what could happen as the pressure to ration, inherent in all government-managed health care, is applied to the general population.
— John Fund is national-affairs columnist at National Review Online.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/378233/lessons-va-scandal-john-fund#!

CIS Study: All Growth In Employment Since 2000 Has Gone to Immigrants

by John HinderakerJune 27, 2014

The Center for Immigration Studies released a bombshell report today. You can read the whole thing at the link, but here are a few highlights:

Government data show that since 2000 all of the net gain in the number of working-age (16 to 65) people holding a job has gone to immigrants (legal and illegal). This is remarkable given that native-born Americans accounted for two-thirds of the growth in the total working-age population.

Currently, an astonishing 58 million working-age native Americans are not working.

Because the native-born population grew significantly, but the number working actually fell, there were 17 million more working-age natives not working in the first quarter of 2014 than in 2000.

The authors point out that the decline in employment for natives across all ages and education levels means that “there is no general labor shortage, which is the primary justification for the large increases in immigration (skilled and unskilled) in the Schumer-Rubio bill and similar House proposals.

The number of Americans who are not working, including legal and illegal immigrants, is stunning:

There were a total of 69 million working-age immigrants and natives not working in the first quarter of 2014. There were an additional 7.3 million forced to work part-time despite wanting full-time work.
The supply of potential workers is enormous: 8.7 million native college graduates are not working, as are 17 million with some college, and 25.3 million with no more than a high school education.

Why anyone would advocate massive increases in immigration in view of these numbers is baffling. The influx of immigrants (legal and illegal) over the last fifteen years has hurt young Americans worst of all:

[O]ne of the key things that happened to natives is that young people, particularly the less educated, have not found jobs over the last 14 years. The population of natives 16 to 29 grew 16.2 percent from 2000 to 2014, but the number working actually declined by 2.6 percent. These new entrants to the labor market are not finding jobs and so the number and share not working has exploded. … [P]roportionately it is younger native workers who have fared much worse over the last 14 years.

Why aren’t these young Americans “dreamers?” Why should they be condemned to lives of unemployment and underemployment?

One more point: the authors debunk the “jobs Americans won’t do” myth:

As we have seen in Table 2, immigrants made gains across the labor market. Looking at broad occupations as shown in that table makes clear that there are tens of millions of natives employed in the occupational cat- egories where immigrants have found jobs in the last 14 years. Thus, part of the reason immigration is likely to adversely impact the employment of some natives is that, contrary to the assertion of some, immigrants often do the same jobs. In an earlier report we examined all 472 civilian detailed occupations as defined by the Department of Commerce. We found only six were majority immigrant (legal and illegal). These six occupations account for 1 percent of the total U.S. workforce. Many jobs often thought to be overwhelmingly immigrant are in fact majority native-born. For example, 51 percent of maids and housekeepers are U.S.-born, as are 63 percent of butchers and meat processors. It is also the case that 64 percent of grounds maintenance workers are U.S.-born, as are 66 percent of construction laborers and 73 percent of janitors.23 It is simply not the case that there are jobs that Americans do not do.

Thankfully, immigration “reform” seems dead for the time being, especially with Eric Cantor’s defeat.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/06/cis-study-all-growth-in-employment-since-2000-has-gone-to-immigrants.php

D’Souza’s America

D’Souza’s America 

Dinesh D’Souza takes on Obama, Hillary, Saul Alinsky, and Howard Zinn in a single bold film. 

By John Fund

General Washington in America: Imagine a World Without Her

 

John Fnd 

The Fourth of July weekend is coming up, and this year you can do something other than fireworks and a barbecue to celebrate our nation’s freedom.

Dinesh D’Souza, the controversial social commentator who shook up Hollywood with the $33 million earned by the theatrical release of his Obama 2016, is back with a more polished and more powerful message.

At one level, his message in America: Imagine a World Without Her is deeply pessimistic: “The American dream is shrinking because some of our leaders want it to shrink. Decline, in other words, has become a policy objective. And if this decline continues at the current pace, America as we know it will cease to exist. In effect, we will have committed national suicide.”

But most people will leave the theater with a more optimistic conclusion: Much of the criticism of America taught in the nation’s schools is easily refuted, America is worth saving, and we have the tools to do so in our DNA, just waiting to be harnessed.

In an interview at a preview ofAmerica, D’Souza acknowledged that critics will try to discredit his message by attacking the messenger. A few months ago, he pleaded guilty to campaign-finance violations that could conceivably land him in prison when he is sentenced in September. D’Souza includes in the film a brief section on his legal troubles; in this, he clearly conveys his view that he was selectively prosecuted. But viewers should take the film on its own merits, he says, regardless of what they think of him.

“I intend to turn the progressive critique on its head,” he says in the film’s accompanying book, of the same name. “[Progressives] are not on the side of the ordinary citizen, because their policies lead to stagnation, impoverishment, indebtedness, and decline — all in evidence today. It is progressives who rely on government seizure and bureaucratic conquest to achieve their goals and increase their power. . . . I intend to blow the whistle on these people, starting with Obama and continuing with Hillary Clinton and the whole progressive menagerie.”

The current bitter partisanship we now see is a result of America’s division into two groups, D’Souza says: one that is a product of the 1960s cultural revolution, and another that never quite embraced the values of the 1960s. He notes that economist Joseph Schumpeter warned that capitalism produces “creative destruction” that topples traditional institutions and traditional mores. The material abundance created by capitalism erodes the qualities of hard work, self-discipline, and deferred gratification that produced that abundance in the first place.

Just how much those old values have been undermined is at the heart of the most controversial part of America. D’Souza points out that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were acolytes of the great left-wing “community organizer” Saul Alinsky. D’Souza is the first filmmaker to mine the rich material showing the radicalism of Alinksy, who was personally tutored by Al Capone’s deputies in the tactics of the mob and who even dedicated his most famous book, Rules for Radicals, to a master Machiavellian: the Devil himself.

In America, an actress portrays a young Hillary Rodham as she’s led from her roots as a “Goldwater Girl” into campus radicalism through meetings with Alinsky. Later, she would use her senior thesis at Wellesley to paint an admiring portrait of Alinsky. “If Hillary Clinton is elected in 2016, the baton will have passed from one America to another,” D’Souza warns.

For young people, and young adults who were taught spongy “social studies” rather than true American history, the most valuable parts of the movie might be those in which D’Souza tackles America’s greatest sins: its treatment of Native Americans, slavery, the transfer of half of Mexico to the U.S. after the Mexican War of 1848, and its supposed colonialist behavior. Consider his treatment of those subjects as his direct rebuttal to the works of radical historian Howard Zinn, whose textbooks treating America’s history as one of ceaseless oppression dominate many American high schools and colleges.

“The Indians have gotten a bad deal,” he notes in his book. “At the same time, we should be clear about what the alternatives are. . . . You say, ‘Give us back the Black Hills,’ You point out that there is uranium and other minerals in those hills, and now that land is worth a fortune. Once again, no Indian tribe knew how to mine uranium and no Indian tribe knew what to do with uranium if they had it. Other Americans have added value to the Black Hills by figuring out how to tap its resources, and now the Indians want the land back so they can take advantage of what others have figured out how to do.”

He takes a similarly hard line with the demands of some Latinos to return land that once belonged to Mexico: “After the war, the United States immediately recognized as valid the property rights of Mexicans who were now part of U.S. territory. The change was not in any individual’s land ownership but in the fact that people who were once Mexicans now became Americans. . . . While progressives deplore American aggression . . . what we do know is that the vast majority of Mexicans who ended up on the American side of the border, following the Mexican War, never attempted to return to Mexico. And neither have their descendants.”

“Did America owe something to the slaves whose labor had been stolen?” he asks in the book. Yes, he says, but “that debt . . . is best discharged through memory, because the slaves are dead and their descendants are better off as a consequence of their ancestors being hauled from Africa to America.” He notes that when the great boxer Muhammad Ali won one of his most famous fights (the “rumble in the jungle” against George Foreman in Zaire in the 1970s), he was asked by a reporter, “Champ, what did you think of Africa?” Ali replied, “Thank God my grandaddy got on that boat!” Ali recognized, D’Souza boldly claims, “that for all the horror of slavery, it was the transmission belt that brought Africans into the orbit of Western freedom.” He quotes the black writer Zora Neale Hurston: “I have no personal memory of those times, and no responsibility for them. Neither has the grandson of the man who held my folks. . . . I have no intention of wasting my time beating on old graves. . . . Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and that is worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it.” D’Souza also notes that slavery has been a worldwide phenomenon throughout most of human history, and that whites were often enslaved — it’s hardly a sin unique to America, which fought a civil war to free its slaves.

As you can divine, D’Souza’s film and his accompanying book are a no-holds-barred assault on the contemporary doctrine of political correctness. While he has an advantage on some of the topics he tackles — he is a dark-skinned immigrant from India — one must give him credit for wielding his sword at so many PC dragons in one sitting.

At its heart, America is a celebration of its title subject, and nothing so exemplifies this than the closing credits over which a band moored on a barge near the Statue of Liberty belts out the most unusual and yet stirring rendition of our national anthem you are likely ever to have heard. Like its subject, America isn’t perfect and its arguments sometimes aren’t sophisticated. But it’s the perfect film to take the family to on a Fourth of July. I wager that when it opens on 1,000 screens on July 2, it will double or triple the box-office take of D’Souza’s first film. Here’s hoping it begins a long-overdue national conversation about the true meaning of America.

— John Fund is national-affairs correspondent for NRO.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/381509/dsouzas-america-john-fund

Hobby Lobby: The Left Is Weeping Hot, Bitter Tears, and It Should

Hobby Lobby: The Left Is Weeping Hot, Bitter Tears, and It Should

By David French

Andrew’s and Molly’s post reflecting the hysterical reaction on the Left to theHobby Lobby decision makes for both entertaining and instructive reading. It’s entertaining because — regarding the issue they claim to care most about, access to contraceptives — the decision blocks exactly no one from obtaining the drugs they choose to purchase. There’s just slightly less free stuff on the market. This is hardlyHandmaid’s Tale territory.

It’s instructive because it demonstrates the extent to which the Left is emotionally and ideologically committed to the power of the regulatory state. For some time, the Left has been selling the public and the courts on the notion that somehow the act of forming a corporation and opening for business operates as an effective waiver of your most basic liberties, including free speech, free exercise of religion, and virtually the entire panoply of property rights. In effect, your business is not “your” business at all, but instead all aspects of its operations exist at the whim of the state, and if the state wants to draft you into its child-killing abortion crusade — or wants to muzzle you during political campaigns – then you best salute and fall in line.

By holding that RFRA protects closely-held businesses, the Supreme Court upheld not just the plain meaning of federal statutes but also common sense. In fact, the Obama administration admits that nonprofit corporations can exercise religious-liberty rights, so is the problem the corporate form, or the intent of the corporation? Justice Alito, writing for the Court, notes the irony:

We see nothing in RFRA that suggests a congressional intent to depart from the Dictionary Act definition, and HHS makes little effort to argue otherwise. We have entertained RFRA and free-exercise claims brought by nonprofit corporations, see Gonzales v. O Centro Espírita Beneficiente União do Vegetal, 546 U.S. 418 (2006) (RFRA); Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC, 565 U. S. ___ (2012) (Free Exercise); Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. Hialeah, 508 U. S. 520 (1993) (Free Exercise), and HHS concedes that a nonprofit corporation can be a “person” within the meaning of RFRA. This concession effectively dispatches any argument that the term “person” as used in RFRA does not reach the closely held corporations involved in these cases. No known understanding of the term “person” includes some but not all corporations. The term “person” sometimes encompasses artificial persons (as the Dictionary Act instructs), and it sometimes is limited to natural persons. But no conceivable definition of the term includes natural persons and nonprofit corporations, but not for-profit corporations.

The desire to make money does not act as a waiver of constitutional or statutory rights, nor is it morally suspect, but it certainly is indispensable to a system of free enterprise that all too many on the Left view as the enemy of “social justice.” As one of my colleagues at the ACLJ stated (full disclosure: We filed seven lawsuits against the mandate, filed an amicus brief in the Hobby Lobby case, have two mandate cases before the Supreme Court now, and have filed more than a dozenamicus briefs against the mandate nationwide), “If anything rivals the Left’s passion on the abortion issue, it’s their commitment to the regulatory state.”

When a case combines elements of both issues, for the Left a loss is cataclysmic. And if much of your public “argument” depends on creating a sense of cultural inevitability, then a dramatic halt to the latest leap forward of the allegedly unstoppable sexual revolution and regulatory state is a cause for leftist weeping indeed.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/381583/hobby-lobby-left-weeping-hot-bitter-tears-and-it-should-david-french

Gosnell Nation

Gosnell Nation

By The Editors

Democrats hold one thing — and one thing only — sacred, and that is abortion. Our diplomats may be murdered abroad, the rule of law may be grossly violated at home, the First Amendment may be written off as just another roadblock on the freeway to utopia, but abortion will always have for them a uniquely holy status — even if that means employing unholy methods to facilitate it. Thus Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut has introduced a bill, cosponsored by a majority of Senate Democrats, that would purport to strip states of their ability to impose even the most basic of health and safety regulations on the grisly procedure, a bill that David French has rightly suggested should be titled the Kermit Gosnell Enabling Act of 2014.

Readers will recall, though they will not enjoy it, the details of Dr. Gosnell’s case, the transcript of which reads like the screenplay for a Rob Zombie horror flick: the illegal abortions; the newborns who survived botched abortion attempts only to have their spinal cords severed with scissors; the obscenely unhygienic conditions, with free-ranging cats using the clinic as an open-air litter box; the dead patient and subsequent manslaughter conviction; and, finally, the murder convictions. The Gosnell gore-fest was a direct consequence of the elevation of abortion to divine office: Neither the local authorities in Democrat-dominated Philadelphia nor the Democrat-dominated statewide bureaucracies in Pennsylvania were much inclined to exercise basic oversight of abortion clinics. Even after a woman died under Dr. Gosnell’s knife, there was little interest in investigating his practice: It took allegations of illegal prescription-drug use and the piqued interest of the DEA to put Gosnell on the radar.

Senator Blumenthal proposes to apply the Philadelphia model to the nation at large. Under his bill, states would have effectively no power even to ensure that abortions are performed by licensed physicians — surely the most minimal standard of medical responsibility that there is. Laws covering grisly late-term abortions would be forcibly overturned and fetal viability would be redefined according to the subjective whim of the abortionist. While the Democrats are bemoaning a fictitious war on women, their bill would provide federal protection to sex-selective abortions — the barbaric practice under which generations of girls have been decimated in such backward jurisdictions as China and Azerbaijan, a practice The Economistdescribes as “gendercide.” Laws restricting taxpayer funding of abortion would be overturned. Laws protecting the consciences of physicians who choose not to perform abortions would be overturned.

Not that the Democrats are much interested in such niceties, but there is little or nothing in the law or the Constitution that could be construed to empower the federal government to set aside, wholesale, state regulation of physicians and their work. The states license physicians and hospitals, and they have broad power over their standards and conduct. Even if one accepts the 1973 abortion decisions as fixed and eternal law handed down from on high, there is nothing in Roe v. Wade or its companion cases that establishes a constitutional preemption of state health and safety laws.

Senator Blumenthal’s bill requires that abortion not be subject to any restriction that is not also applicable to “comparable” medical procedures, but there is in fact no such thing as a comparable procedure, something recognized by the Supreme Court, which describes the act as “unique” and “inherently different” from other surgeries. And, of course, it is: Abortion is in almost no instance a therapeutic procedure — its usual motive is simply the termination of an inconvenient human life.

Morally literate people, including those who generally support abortion rights, understand that abortion is fundamentally unlike anything else doctors are commonly called upon to do, and that it is morally significant in a way a tonsillectomy is not. People of good will may disagree to some extent about the moral significance of what is maturing in a woman’s womb — but it is not an ingrown toenail, and all the Senate proclamations in the world will not change that fact.

By their fruits you shall know them: Senate Democrats have just recently blocked efforts to get to the bottom of the IRS political-persecution scandal and to hold VA officials accountable for the horrific treatment of American veterans — ho-hum issues for Senator Blumenthal and his colleagues. But if Texas decides that abortions performed within its borders must be carried out by a licensed physician in a proper surgical facility, then Democrats are on the march. Abortion is, to say the least, ugly. Democrats’ ghoulish enthusiasm for it is almost as ugly.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/382914/gosnell-nation-editors

What Hobby Lobby Shows about Obama’s Fundamental Abuse of Executive Power

What Hobby Lobby Shows about Obama’s Fundamental Abuse of Executive Power

By John Yoo

This should have been an easy case, as Justice Alito’s straightforward analysis demonstrates. The logic is simple: 1. corporations are persons because Congress said so in the Dictionary Act; 2. Hobby Lobby’s right to religious freedom is violated, under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, because the contraceptives requirement for mandatory insurance supplied by employers contravenes the owner’s sincere beliefs; 3. the government did not explore any less burdensome alternatives to the mandate. This is a straightforward vindication of Hobby Lobby’s rights under the laws of Congress, not the Constitution.

But more important, this case shows the extreme ideological ends pursued by the Obama administration through its legal powers, and so is of a piece with the Noel Canning recess appointments clause case of last Thursday. In both cases, the president pursued extreme arguments in court to advance an ideological agenda — today, it was to sweep religious minorities into Obamacare; on Thursday, to create a union-friendly NLRB.

In both cases, the policy preference of Democrats was broadly at work. Most employers who supply insurance under Obamacare will not have religious-freedom rights at stake. The NLRB and labor law already gives unions broad rights to organize. But in order to push its ideology to extremes, the administration had to pursue even the small number of religious-oriented small businesses to force them into the contraceptives mandate. To guarantee unions a 100 percent win rate, rather than say 75 percent win rate in the NLRB, Obama had to illegally appoint its officials.

To me, that is Obama’s fundamental abuse of presidential power. He is not broadly interpreting his powers to respond to emergencies or national-security challenges. He is relying on extreme interpretations of his powers to play small-ball politics and win for ideological supporters. It is not only a misuse of power, but it damages the institution of the presidency for times when it will really matter.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/381570/what-hobby-lobby-shows-about-obamas-fundamental-abuse-executive-power-john-yoo

The Language of Despotism

by Bruce Thornton

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Long before 1984 gave us the adjective “Orwellian” to describe the political corruption of language and thought, Thucydides observed how factional struggles for power make words their first victims. Describing the horrors of civil war on the island of Corcyra during the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides wrote, “Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them.” Orwell explains the reason for such degradation of language in his essay “Politics and the English Language”: “Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.”

Tyrannical power and its abuses comprise the “indefensible” that must be verbally disguised. The gulags, engineered famines, show trials, and mass murder of the Soviet Union required that it be a “regime of lies,” as the disillusioned admirer of Soviet communism Pierre Pascal put it in 1927.

Image credit: 

Barbara Kelley

Our own political and social discourse must torture language in order to disguise the failures and abuses of policies designed to advance the power and interests of the “soft despotism,” as Tocqueville called it, of the modern Leviathan state and its political caretakers. Meanwhile, in foreign policy the transformation of meaning serves misguided policies that endanger our security and interests.

One example from domestic policy recently cropped up in Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor’s dissent in the Schuette decision, which upheld the Michigan referendum banning racial preferences. In her dissent, Sotomayor called for replacing the term  “affirmative action” with “race-sensitive admissions.” But “affirmative action” was itself a euphemism for the racial quotas in use in college admissions until they were struck down in the 1978 Bakke decision. To salvage racial discrimination, which any process that gives race an advantage necessarily requires, Bakke legitimized yet another euphemism, “diversity,” as a compelling state interest that justified taking race into account in university admissions.

Thus the most important form of “diversity” for the university became the easily quantifiable one of race. Not even socio-economic status can trump it, as the counsel for the University of Texas admitted during oral arguments in Fisher vs. University of Texas last year, when he implied that a minority applicant from a privileged background would add more diversity to the university than a less privileged white applicant. All these verbal evasions are necessary for camouflaging the fact that any process that discriminates on the basis of race violates the Civil Rights Act ban on such discrimination. Promoting an identity politics predicated on historical victimization and the equality of result is more important than the principle of equality before the law, and this illiberal ideology must be hidden behind distortions of language and vague phrases like “race-sensitive” and “diversity.” 

Another example can be found in the recently released report from the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault. The report is the basis for the government’s numerous policy and procedural suggestions to universities and colleges in order to help them “live up to their obligation to protect students from sexual violence.” Genuine sexual violence, of course, needs to be investigated, adjudicated, and punished to the full extent of the law by the police and the judicial system. But the “sexual assault” and “sexual violence” the Obama administration is talking about is something different. 

At the heart of the White House report is the oft-repeated 2007 statistic that 20 percent of female college students have been victims of “sexual assault,” which most people will understand to mean rape or sexual battery. Yet as many critics of the study have pointed out, that preposterous number––crime-ridden Detroit’s rape rate is 0.05 percent––was achieved by redefining “sexual assault” to include even consensual sexual contact when the woman was drunk, and behaviors like “forced kissing” and “rubbing up against [the woman] in a sexual way, even if it is over [her] clothes.”

The vagueness and subjectivity of such a definition is an invitation to women to abandon personal responsibility and agency by redefining clumsy or boorish behavior as “sexual assault,” a phrase suggesting physical violence against the unwilling. As one analyst of the flawed study has reported, “three-quarters of the female students who were classified as victims of sexual assault by incapacitation did not believe they had been raped; even when only incidents involving penetration were counted, nearly two-thirds did not call it rape.” As many have pointed out, if genuine sexual assault were happening, colleges would be calling in the police, not trying the accused in campus tribunals made up of legal amateurs and lacking constitutional protections such as the right to confront and cross-examine one’s accuser. 

What matters more than protecting college women against a phantom epidemic of rape, then, is the need to expand government power into the social lives of college students, empowering the federal bureaucrats, university administrators, and ideological programs like women’s studies that all stand to benefit by this sort of coercive intrusion. This enshrining of racial and sexual ideology into law through the abuse of language has had damaging consequences, whether for the minority college students mismatched with the universities to which they are admitted, thus often ensuring their failure and disillusion; or for the young women encouraged to abandon their autonomy and surrender it to government and education bureaucrats who know better than they how to make sense of their experiences and decisions.

In foreign policy, however, the abuse of language is positively dangerous. Since 9/11, our failure to identity the true nature of the Islamist threat and its grounding in traditional Islamic theology has led to misguided aims and tactics. Under both the Bush and Obama administrations, for example, the traditional Islamic doctrine of jihad––which means to fight against the enemies of Islam, which predominantly means infidels––has been redefined to serve the dubious tactic of flattering Islam in order to prevent Muslim terrorism.

Thus in 2008 the National Terrorism Center instructed its employees, “Never use the term jihadist or mujahideen in conversation to describe terrorists,” since “In Arabic, jihad means ‘striving in the path of God’ and is used in many contexts beyond warfare.” Similarly, CIA chief John Brennan has asserted that jihad “is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community,” despite the fourteen centuries of evidence from the Koran, hadiths, and bloody history that jihad is in fact predominantly an obligatory armed struggle against the enemies of Islam. The reluctance to put Muslim violence in its religious context reflects not historical truth, but a public relations tactic serving the delusional strategy of appeasing Muslims into liking us.

That’s why, to this day, the 2009 murders of 13 military personnel at Fort Hood by Muslim Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan are still classified as “workplace violence” rather than an act of terror. This despite the fact that Hasan––whose business cards had the initials “SoA,” “Soldier of Allah,” on them––shouted the traditional Islamic battle cry “Allahu Akbar” during his rampage. Or that in a presentation at Walter Reed Hospital, Hasan had put up a slide with the great commission to practice jihad that Mohammed delivered in his farewell address: “I was ordered to fight all men until they say ‘There is no god but Allah.’” This command to wage jihad was echoed in 1979 by the Ayatollah Khomeini, revered as a “Grand Sign of God” for his theological acumen, and by Osama bin Laden in 2001. Those ignoring this venerable jihadist tradition must use verbal evasions like “workplace violence” and “striving in the path of God” to hide the indefensible––and failed––tactic of appeasement that prevents us from accurately understanding the religious motives of Muslim terrorists, and the extent of the Muslim world’s support for them.

No foreign policy crisis, however, is more illustrative of the “regime of lies” and abuse of language to serve “indefensible” aims than the conflict between Israel and the Arabs. The Arabs’ aim, of course, is to destroy Israel as a nation, a policy they have consistently pursued since 1948. Since military attacks have failed ignominiously, an international public relations campaign coupled to terrorist violence has been employed to weaken Israel’s morale and separate Israel from her Western allies. An Orwellian assault on language has been key to this tactic.

Examples are legion, but one is particularly insidious, here seen in a New York Times headline from 2011: “Obama Sees ’67 Borders as Starting Point for Peace Deal.” The common reference to “borders” in regard to what is in fact the armistice line from the 1948 Arab war against Israel is ubiquitous. Yet there has never been recognized in international law a formal “border” between Israel and what the world, in another Orwellian phrase, calls the “West Bank,” because that territory has never been part of a modern nation. Its only international legal status was as part of the British Mandate for Palestine, which was confirmed by the League of Nations in 1922, and which was intended as the national homeland for the Jewish people. The Arabs’ rejection of the U.N. partition plan and their invasion of Israel in 1948 put the territory’s status in limbo once Jordan annexed Judea and Samaria, which the international community with a few exceptions refused to recognize. In 1967 Israel took it back in another defensive war against Arab aggression. Since then, its final disposition has awaited a peace treaty that will determine the international border.

This may sound like quibbling over careless language, but the dishonest use of “border” reinforces and encodes in peoples’ minds the big lie of the conflict––that a Palestinian “nation” is being deprived of its “homeland” by Israel, a canard that didn’t become current among Arabs and the rest of the world until after the 1967 Six Day War. And this lie in turns validates the common use of “occupation”––which implies an illegal invasion into and control of another nation, as the Germans did to France in 1940––to describe Israel’s defensive possession of territories that have long served as launch pads for aggression against Israel. Until a peace treaty, the territory known as the “West Bank”––more accurately Judea and Samaria, the heartland of historical Israel for centuries––is disputed, not “occupied.”

To paraphrase Thucydides, words like “borders” and “occupation” have had their ordinary meanings changed, and been forced to take meanings that serve tyranny and aggression. And we who accept those new meanings are complicit in the resulting injustice that follows.

http://www.hoover.org/research/language-despotism

Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   7/01/2014

The eternal lessons of the Declaration of Independence

My reverence for our most basic of founding documents, The Declaration of Independence, is most acute for the simple and absolute proclamation in the second paragraph that begins “We hold these Truths to be self-evident …” What follows is thereby placed beyond debate and dispute, subject to no one’s interpretation or approval, let alone contingent upon the permission of mortals, by way of the laws of men.

This is what those who reject, even deride, the notion of a Supreme Being, cannot escape: If “unalienable Rights … Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” are not granted by “Nature and Nature’s God,” then they are in some way granted by other humans, other humans who can, if only by sheer force of numbers, deprive someone of those same rights. It bears great significance that the “Pursuit of Happiness” was originally “Property,” which was thought too restrictive a concept for Divine endowment.  It could easily be limited to what one can lay hands upon in commerce, or owned, measured and held against other claimants.

The “Pursuit of Happiness” is a most open-ended, impossible-to-limit concept meant to encompass anything that emanates from one’s own productive creativity—be it music, machinery, theories, poetry, designs, animals, production, clothing, meals, wages, interest income and on and on. You have, as far as the Founders were concerned, no obligation to part with any of it under the color of authority or power. Hence, we have the beauty and blessing of private charity and magnanimity towards those less fortunate; hence, the inherent dishonesty and unfairness of theft at the behest of government for the seemingly laudable purpose of “redistributing” to those deemed to qualify for “benefits.”

As Walter E. Williams is wont to explain, if someone walked in your door and helped themselves to your food, stuff or cash, you’d throw them out and call the police. And yet, we are obligated under threat of fines, imprisonment or other violence to pay from our abundance into a common store, called government, that has no restrictions on how much of your earnings can be “shared” with, not necessarily the less fortunate, but those who qualify under the loose standards of those in charge.

You may remember Nobel economist Milton Friedman’s explanation of the sliding scale of oversight, thrift and concern in spending money: 1) You spend your own money on you, exercising great care for the quality and value of your purchase; 2) You spend your money for someone else and have similar care but not quite so much due to someone else benefiting and living with your choice; 3) Someone else spends money on you and you really have little say about the cost, quality and appropriateness (they use #2); 4) And finally, when someone else spends your money on yet another unrelated person or party, they exercise the lowest levels of care, concern and attention to value for the price. Government benefit programs, at best, rise no higher then #4; i.e. complete lack of economic thrift or value.

In “The Last Founder Standing” (7/03/2013), FirstThings.com blogger James Ceaser wrote of the relation of Thomas Jefferson to July 4^th. Jefferson included, among a short list on his gravestone, “Author of the Declaration of American Independence.” While a five-person committee was charged by Congress to write the Declaration, “Jefferson was given the task of preparing the initial draft,” to which changes and modifications were made in committee and by Congress.

“The Fourth today commonly celebrates the Founding, understood as the Declaration Of Independence (and the Revolutionary War) and the Constitution. Most Americans today … treat the Founding—and thus the Declaration and Constitution—as whole. In this Americans follow Abraham Lincoln, who likened the Declaration to ‘an apple of gold’ and the Constitution to the ‘frame of silver’ around it. The view that the Founding is a whole was denied by the Abolitionists, by the Confederates, and by many Progressives, each of whom, for different reasons, saw the two documents as being at odds with each other.”

It may surprise you to find out that, to Jefferson, the Constitution was the more malleable, changeable and even replaceable document, suggesting in correspondence that each generation write its own Constitution. “One document, however, does not lose its luster with the passing of time. Nor can it ever be improved by amendment; its truth is eternal. By the testimony of one man, then, there would appear to be only one Founder left standing: the author of the Declaration of Independence. Praise to Jefferson, then, though perhaps less than he, in his subtle audacity, demanded.”

It is more-than-useful to recall Calvin Coolidge’s speech on the sesquicentennial of the Declaration in 1926, explaining why the Declaration remains authoritative in American political life:

“About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter.” (Continued next week)