Saturday, July 27, 2013

Supposed Crimes of the Mind

Supposed Crimes of the Mind With hate speech, it’s the perceived ideology of the perpetrator that matters most.

By Victor Davis Hanson

When do insensitive words destroy reputations?

It all depends.
Celebrity chef Paula Deen was dropped by her TV network, her publisher, and many of her corporate partners after she testified in a legal deposition that she used the N-word some 30 years ago. The deposition was made in a lawsuit against Deen and her brother over allegations of sexual and racial harassment.

Actor Alec Baldwin recently let loose with a barrage of homophobic crudities. Unlike Deen, Baldwin spewed his epithets in the present. He tweeted them publicly, along with threats of physical violence. So far he has avoided Paula Deen’s ignominious fate.
Does race determine whether a perceived slur is an actual slur?
It depends.
Some blacks use the N-word in ways supposedly different from those of ill-intentioned white racists. Testimony revealed that the late Trayvon Martin had used the N-word in reference to George Zimmerman and had also referred to Zimmerman as a “creepy-ass cracker” who was following him.
Some members of the media have suggested that we should ignore such inflammatory words and instead focus on whether Zimmerman, who has been described as a “white Hispanic,” used coded racist language during his 911 call.
Actor Jamie Foxx offers nonstop racialist speech of the sort that a white counterpart would not dare. At the recent NAACP Image Awards (of all places), Foxx gushed: “Black people are the most talented people in the world.” Earlier, on Saturday Night Live, Foxx had joked of his recent role in a Quentin Tarantino movie: “I kill all the white people in the movie. How great is that?”
Foxx has not suffered the fate of Paula Deen. He certainly has not incurred the odium accorded comedian Michael Richards, who crudely used the N-word in 2006 toward two African-American hecklers of his stand-up routine.
Yet whites at times seem exempt from any fallout over the slurring of blacks. Democratic Minnesota state representative Ryan Winkler recently tweeted of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s vote to update the Voting Rights Act: “VRA majority is four accomplices to race discrimination and one Uncle Thomas.” Winkler’s implication was that four of the jurists were veritable racists, while Thomas was a sellout. After a meek apology, nothing much happened to Winkler.
Winkler’s “Uncle Thomas” racial slur was mild in comparison to the smear of Justice Thomas by MSNBC talking head and African-American professor Michael Eric Dyson, who made incendiary on-air comments invoking Hitler and the Holocaust.
Does profanity against women destroy celebrity careers? Apparently not.
TV talk-show host Bill Maher used two vulgar slang terms with reference to Sarah Palin, without any major consequences.
Those Palin slurs were mild in comparison to late-night television icon David Letterman’s crude riff that Palin’s then-14-year-old daughter had been impregnated by baseball star Alex Rodriguez.
In contrast, when talk-show host Rush Limbaugh demeaned activist Sandra Fluke as a “slut,” outrage followed. Sponsors were pressured to drop Limbaugh. Some did. Unlike the targeted Palin, Fluke became a national icon of popular feminist resistance.
So how do we sort out all these slurs and the contradictory consequences that follow them?
Apparently, racist, sexist, or homophobic words themselves do not necessarily earn any rebuke. Nor is the race or gender of the speaker always a clue to the degree of outrage that follows.
Instead, the perceived ideology of the perpetrator is what matters most. Maher and Letterman, being good liberals, could hardly be crude sexists. But when the conservative Limbaugh uses similar terms, it must be a window into his dark heart

It’s apparently OK for whites or blacks to slur the conservative Clarence Thomas in racist terms. Saying anything similar of the late liberal justice Thurgood Marshall would have been blasphemous.

In short, we are dealing not with actual word crimes, but with supposed thought crimes.

The liberal media and popular culture have become our self-appointed thought police. Politics determines whether hate speech is a reflection of real hate or just an inadvertent slip, a risqué joke, or an anguished reaction to years of oppression. Poor Paula Deen. She may protest accusations of racism by noting that she supported Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns. But the media instead fixate on her Southern accent and demeanor, which supposedly prove her speech was racist in a way that utterances by the left-wing and cool Jamie Foxx could never be.
We cannot forgive the conservative Mel Gibson for his despicable, drunken anti-Semitic rant. But it appears we can pardon the liberal Alec Baldwin for his vicious, homophobic outburst. The former smears are judged by the thought police to be typical, but the latter slurs are surely aberrant.
The crime is not hate speech, but hate thought — a state of mind that apparently only self-appointed liberal referees can detect.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is The Savior Generals, published this spring by Bloomsbury Books.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/353130/supposed-crimes-mind-victor-davis-hanson?splash=

Race Relations In America Improving Every Year, And The Media Hates It

by Noah Rothman

Many readers of this post clicked through only because they were appalled at the implication in that headline – that racism in America is on the decline. This empirical, undeniable reality provokes predictable expressions of disbelief, rage, and frustration from those who wish to believe it is not true. They are the predictable reactions one would expect to follow any expression of heresy which contradicts canonical “truths.”
Those who insist that race relations in America are on the decline are provided with ample, anecdotal evidence on a daily basis from the news media which supports this article of faith. But the overwhelming preponderance of evidence contradicts this assertion. Even merely asserting that there has been undeniable progress in relations between blacks and whites in the U.S. over the course of a single generation is greeted with horror from the establishment media. Much like the prosecutors in the trial of George Zimmerman argued that the jurors needed to decide the case with their hearts rather than their heads, the media asks its audience to emote and disregard the facts when discussing racial politics in America. This is a tragedy.
In a post last week, I noted that political commentators – on the left and right – predicting civil unrest in the event that Zimmerman was found not guilty were displaying an offensive lack of faith in or knowledge of the black community. That verdict came and, with some small-scale exceptions, that event was not characterized by a violent response from African-Americans. Unsurprisingly, though opinions about the correctness of the verdict varied, the vast majority of all Americans internalized the jury’s decision rationally.
This prediction was not a difficult one to make. Any historical reading of the progress of race relations in this country suggests that they are far better today than they were in 1992 – the last time a shocking trial verdict resulted in widespread rioting.
Gallup polling over the course of the last 50 years measures the trajectory of how blacks and whites view one another. Since Gallup started recording data on race relations in 1963, the trend has been an undeniably positive one.
In June of that year, respondents were asked “do you think that blacks have as good a chance as white people in your community to get any kind of job for which they are qualified?” Only 39 percent said that they were, while 48 percent said that they were not. The next time they asked that question, in June of 1978, that result had flipped with 67 percent of respondents saying that African-Americans were qualified for and had access to whatever opportunities they chose to seek while just 24 percent disagreed. Though the number has fluctuated throughout history, today between 71 and 79 percent of Americans think blacks have “as good a chance” as white people to have access to the career of their choice.
Another dramatic shift can be observed in how Americans think “civil rights for blacks have changed in this country.” In 1995, in the wake of the verdict in the trial of O.J. Simpson, only 32 percent of Americans said that civil rights for blacks had “greatly improved” while 51 percent said civil rights had only improved “somewhat.” In August, 2011, 50 percent said that civil rights for blacks had “greatly improved” with 39 percent qualifying that improvement with “somewhat.”
In 2011, a full 76 percent of Americans believe that “new civil rights laws” are “not needed” to advance racial equality. Just 21 percent said that they were – down dramatically from August, 1993, when 38 percent agreed that new laws relating to civil rights are necessary.
Following the O.J. verdict, 68 percent of Americans said that race relations in America will “always be a problem.” Only 29 percent said they believed that racial animus will “eventually” disappear. In 2011, 52 percent believed that race relations between blacks and whites will “eventually [be] worked out.” 46 percent insist that problems will persist, up from 30 percent in 2008 following the election of the first black President of the United States.
In Gallup’s most recent survey of the state of race relations in America in January, 2013, a majority of Americans said that they were “somewhat” or “very” satisfied with racial progress in America. While all of the above data points have fluctuated – and racial progress comes in fits and starts, occasionally receding at times – the trajectory of race relations in America are following a historically positive trend.
It is not merely a fact of American life measured in survey responses. Gaps indicative of racial disparity in this country continue to dissipate. “According to the most recent census data, blacks have virtually closed the gap with whites not only in the percentage graduating from high school but also in the percentage graduating from junior college,” wrote Orlando Patterson in the New York Times… in 1997. Today, in an underreported but critical development showing how race relations have improved, the 2010 census showed that, while blacks were slightly less likely than other groups to receive a college degree, “Blacks were also more likely to have completed some college than any other group.”
Unfortunately halted by the onset of the Great Recession, the income and wage gap between blacks and whites was gradually, though not fast enough, approaching parity in 2005. Persistently higher unemployment among blacks in the wake of the financial downturn has exacerbated the perennial problem of a wealth disparity between the races. But the statistical trends are hard to ignore.
None of these statistics are cited as an effort to show race relations are perfect, or that racial disparity does not exist. Inequality and racism do exist in America – in varying degrees, they probably always will. But these statistics do empirically advance the notion that the equality of opportunity for blacks and whites, as well as non-white Hispanics and Asians, is progressing every year.
Many, particularly those in the elite media, react bitterly to this news. The outcome of the Zimmerman trial has highlighted how many media professionals cling to the belief that racial disparity in America is fixed feature of its existence and will never appreciably dissipate.
“Do you think the American justice system is innately racist?” CNN anchor Candy Crowley asked Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn on Sunday morning.
“This is, for many Americans, another piece of evidence of the incontrovertible contempt that this nation often shows and displays for black men,” argued radio and television host Tavis Smalley on ABC’s This Week on Sunday.
The Nation‘s Mychal Denzel Smith parodied left-wing overreaction by saying that Zimmerman’s defense “literally invoked the same justification for the killing of Trayvon Martin that you would during lynching.”
“George Zimmerman was protecting, not just himself, but white womanhood from this vicious, black thug,” Smith added breathlessly.
These are the same media voices likely to call for a “frank, national conversation on race” after making these comments which can only be characterized as conversation-stifling. It has never become clearer that the media rewards commentators who reject measured conversation and the fostering of a dialogue for irresponsible baiting and instigation.
At the very least, responsible news anchors and commentators should be arming their viewers with the facts prior to rending garments over the state of race relations in America. Even if these statistics do not support the narrative of persistent racial hatred which they have committed their careers to addressing.

Friday, July 26, 2013

Hispanic Immigrants: Weak Party ID, But Strong Liberal Views

Hispanic Immigrants: Weak Party ID, But Strong Liberal Views

By Mark Krikorian

I argue on the home page that passing an immigration bill that amnesties illegals and increases immigration would be politically disastrous for the Republican party long before any of the legalized aliens or new legal immigrants step into a voting booth for the first time. While I specifically don’t address voting behavior, a reader (or Tweader?) offered as rebuttal a new Latino Decisions report that shows weak party identification among immigrants from Latin America who have not yet become naturalized Americans. The political purpose of the report (Latino Decisions is a strongly pro-amnesty, high-immigration research group) is to persuade Republicans to back the Senate amnesty bill by showing that the legalized illegal aliens might well vote Republican: “The GOP has a real opportunity to win the partisan hearts and minds of Latino immigrants.”

Except that the report shows nothing of the kind. All it shows is that most Hispanic immigrants don’t have strong partisan leanings — not how they’d vote. For instance, among illegal aliens from Latin America, only 28 percent identified with either of the two major parties (that’s U.S. political parties). But the partisan split among those who did have such an identification was 25-3 in favor of the Democrats (89 percent Democrat). Among Hispanic legal permanent residents (green-card holders), 29 percent reported a partisan identification, 23–6 in favor of the Democrats (79 percent Democrat). Among naturalized citizens originally from Spanish-speaking Latin America the split was 44–15 (75 percent D).
This overwhelming preference for Democrats is consistent with polling on the policy preferences of Hispanic voters. They support Obamacare, favor tax hikes over benefits cuts, support gun control, want government action to prevent climate change, oppose fracking, and support gay marriage. And that’s just from Latino Decisions’ own research — the same group that’s lying about how “the GOP has a real opportunity to win the partisan hearts and minds of Latino immigrants.” A more accurate assessment comes from another Latino Decisions paper, which is headlined: “It’s True: Latinos are Liberals.”
Republicans need to do better outreach to all segments of the American people, and getting the support of a somewhat larger share of voters with roots south of the border is a real possibility. But the party’s pooh-bahs need to understand the limits of such efforts, and the importance of not digging an even deeper hole by continuing to back continued (or even increased) mass immigration.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/353191/hispanic-immigrants-weak-party-id-strong-liberal-views-mark-krikorian

HHS Admits: You Might Not Be Able to Keep Your Doctor Under Obamacare

Flashback: "If you've got a doctor that you like, you will be able to keep your doctor," Obama said.

Jeryl Bier

As Obamacare was being pushed through Congress in 2010, the Obama administration and its allies were unequivocal in two claims: If you like your doctor and you like your current health care plan, you can keep them both. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius and then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi backed the president fully in this regard. The White House even went so far as to post a "Health Insurance Reform Reality Check" on its website, where "Linda Douglass of the White House Office of Health Reform debunks the myth that reform will force you out of your current insurance plan or force you to change doctors." President Obama upped the ante, putting the promise in the form of a "guarantee":

THE PRESIDENT: Here is a guarantee that I've made. If you have insurance that you like, then you will be able to keep that insurance. If you've got a doctor that you like, you will be able to keep your doctor. Nobody is trying to change what works in the system. We are trying to change what doesn't work in the system.

While there has been sniping back and forth between the administration and its detractors about the real-world application and implementation of Obamacare, the new Healthcare.gov website has taken some of the mystery out of the controversy. And President Obama and his administration do not fare well in this latest "reality check." Among the questions that HHS recently added to the website: "Can I keep my own doctor?":

"Depending on the plan you choose in the Marketplace, you may be able to keep your current doctor." The bottom line is that Obamacare guarantees neither. Doctors may be only available through certain networks, just as in the current system. And only plans that existed in their current form on March 23, 2010, are even eligible to be "kept." The vast majority of plans will be new, subject to a raft of new regulations, requirements, and restrictions.
Now that Health and Human Services has confirmed that the suspicions of Obamacare opponents were justified, the Obama administration will have some explaining to do to friends and foes of the law alike. Because now everyone is finding out "what's in it."

http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/blogs/hhs-admits-you-might-not-be-able-keep-your-doctor-under-obamacare_740093.html

Obamacare has doctors planning exit (DP: Obama said what? about keeping the doctor you like?)

Obamacare has doctors planning exit

60% say many physicians will retire from medicine early within next 3 years

Bob Unruh

In a survey by a top research firm, six in 10 physicians said it is likely many doctors will retire earlier than planned in the next one to three years.
The same percentage say the practice of medicine is in jeopardy as medical experts lose control of their clinics and compensation with the implementation of the Affordable Health Care for America Act, or Obamacare.
A spokeswoman for the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, Dr. Jane Orient, was not surprised.
She told WND that doctors already have started leaving the profession through early retirement. Among those who remain, some will seek alternatives to what they see coming in the federal government’s takeover of health care.
“I think it’s a disaster for patients,” she said. “They may lose the doctor they relied on all their lives.”
The survey by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions found that the “future of the medical profession may be in jeopardy as it loses clinical autonomy and compensation.”
Further, it found the health insurance exchanges required by Obamacare this year probably won’t be reality. Many doctors are starting to limit their participation in Medicaid and Medicare because of low reimbursement rates.
Some doctors even close off their practices to such patients, the survey found.
The study said: “Physicians recognize ‘the new normal’ will necessitate major changes in the profession that require them to practice in different settings as part of a larger organization that uses technologies and team-based models for consumer care.”
Orient affirmed that many doctors are unable to continue a private practice and will end up working for a corporation hospital where the profits are distributed to shareholders.
She warned that such scenarios often end up giving the feeling of an assembly line, where a patient sees a doctor briefly, is given a diagnosis and shown the door.
Doctors in that system, she said, will be punished if they spend too much time on a patient, or possibly if they provide too much treatment.
She said the frustration that comes from such scenarios actually is creating the incentive for a countertrend in which doctors cut ties to the behemoth insurance companies and simply charge a fee to patients.
The survey found physicians are pessimistic about the future of medicine.
“The majority worry about the profession’s erosion of clinical autonomy and income, and its inability to achieve medical liability reform.”
While many doctors are satisfied with practicing medicine, most gain that from their interaction with patients. But nearly one in four said that even now they are not allowed to spend enough time with each patient. And one in five was distressed by the developing government regulations.
The survey said the perception that there will be a drain opened among the pool of physicians over the coming requirements and regulations is uniform among all doctors.
The report said: “Nearly three-quarters of physicians (higher among surgical specialists at 81 percent) think the best and brightest may not consider a career in medicine (slight increase from those who felt similarly in 2011 at 69 percent), while more than half believe that physicians will retire (62 percent) or scale back practice hours (55 percent) based on how the future of medicine is changing.
“Eight in 10 physicians agree that the face of the future in medicine over the next decade involves interdisciplinary teams and care coordinators,” the report continued.
And while the report said four in 10 physicians had reductions in their take-home pay from 2011 to 2012, “among those physicians whose take home pay decreased by any amount in 2012, four in 10 believe that it was a result of the ACA.”
Fully half expect their incomes to “fall dramatically in the next one to three years.”
Overall, they are critical of the U.S. health care system, blaming problems on a defensive mode that influences treatment and results, the survey said.
Among other results: Only two in 10 doctors believe the government exchanges will be ready to go, 25 percent say they’ll limit their work on Medicare patients if the government funding program continues at it is and most believe unhealthy lifestyles influence the health care system costs.
Orient told WND the problems all generally relate to more government demands and intervention.
“It amounts to busy work,” he said.
A blogger who commented on the study, the Lonely Conservative, said: “Any time you hear talk of a ‘new normal’ you know what they really mean is ‘ongoing misery,’ and it’s always thanks to progressive policies. Heck, government officials aren’t even sounding all that confident that our health care system won’t become like the third world.”

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/07/obamacare-has-doctors-planning-exit/#xqYg452hoUjcxfVb.99

Black America's Real Problem Isn't White Racism

by Pat Buchanan

In the aftermath of the acquittal of George Zimmerman, Eric Holder, Al Sharpton and Ben Jealous of the NAACP are calling on the black community to rise up in national protest.
Yet they know — and Barack Obama, whose silence speaks volumes, knows — nothing is going to happen.
"Stand-Your-Ground" laws in Florida and other states are not going to be repealed. George Zimmerman is not going to be prosecuted for a federal "hate crime" in the death of Trayvon Martin.
The result of all this ginned-up rage that has produced vandalism and violence is simply going to be an ever-deepening racial divide.
Consider the matter of crime and fear of crime.
From listening to cable channels and hearing Holder, Sharpton, Jealous and others, one would think the great threat to black children today emanates from white vigilantes and white cops.
Hence, every black father must have a "conversation" with his son, warning him not to resist or run if pulled over or hassled by a cop.
Make the wrong move, son, and you may be dead is the implication.
But is this the reality in Black America?
When Holder delivered his 2009 "nation-of-cowards" speech blaming racism for racial separation, Manhattan Institute's Heather Mac Donald suggested that our attorney general study his crime statistics.
In New York from January to June 2008, 83 percent of all gun assailants were black, according to witnesses and victims, though blacks were only 24 percent of the population. Blacks and Hispanics together accounted for 98 percent of all gun assailants. Forty-nine of every 50 muggings and murders in the Big Apple were the work of black or Hispanic criminals.
New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly confirms Mac Donald's facts. Blacks and Hispanics commit 96 percent of all crimes in the city, he says, but only 85 percent of the stop-and-frisks are of blacks and Hispanics.
And these may involve the kind of pat-downs all of us have had at the airport.
Is stop-and-frisk the work of racist cops in New York, where the crime rate has been driven down to levels unseen in decades?
According to Kelly, a majority of his police force, which he has been able to cut from 41,000 officers to 35,000, is now made up of minorities.
But blacks are also, per capita, the principal victims of crime. Would black fathers prefer their sons to grow up in Chicago, rather than low-crime New York City, with its stop-and-frisk policy?
Fernando Mateo, head of the New York taxicab union, urges his drivers to profile blacks and Hispanics for their own safety: "The God's honest truth is that 99 percent of the people that are robbing, stealing, killing these drivers are blacks and Hispanics."
Mateo is what The New York Times would describe as "a black Hispanic" Yet he may be closer to the 'hood than Holder, who says he was stopped by police when running to a movie — in Georgetown.
Which raises a relevant question. Georgetown is an elitist enclave of a national capital that has been ruled by black mayors for half a century. It's never had a white mayor.
Is Holder saying we've got racist cops in the district where Obama carried 86 percent of the white vote and 97 percent of the black vote? And his son should fear the white cops in Washington, D.C.?
What about interracial crime, white-on-black attacks and the reverse?
After researching the FBI numbers for "Suicide of a Superpower," this writer concluded: "An analysis of 'single offender victimization figures' from the FBI for 2007 finds blacks committed 433,934 crimes against whites, eight times the 55,685 whites committed against blacks. Interracial rape is almost exclusively black on white — with 14,000 assaults on white women by African Americans in 2007. Not one case of a white sexual assault on a black female was found in the FBI study."
Though blacks are outnumbered 5-to-1 in the population by whites, they commit eight times as many crimes against whites as the reverse. By those 2007 numbers, a black male was 40 times as likely to assault a white person as the reverse.
If interracial crime is the ugliest manifestation of racism, what does this tell us about where racism really resides — in America?
And if the FBI stats for 2007 represent an average year since the Tawana Brawley rape-hoax of 1987, over one-third of a million white women have been sexually assaulted by black males since 1987 — with no visible protest from the civil rights leadership.
Today, 73 percent of all black kids are born out of wedlock. Growing up, these kids drop out, use drugs, are unemployed, commit crimes and are incarcerated at many times the rate of Asians and whites — or Hispanics, who are taking the jobs that used to go to young black Americans.
Are white vigilantes or white cops really Black America's problem?
Obama seems not to think so. The Rev. Sharpton notwithstanding, he is touting Ray Kelly as a possible chief of homeland security.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of "Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?" To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

http://news.yahoo.com/black-americas-real-problem-isnt-white-racism-070000529.html

Thursday, July 25, 2013

ObamaCare's failures are not the only sign of a great public crack-up.

Henninger: Big Government Implodes

ObamaCare's failures are not the only sign of a great public crack-up.

DANIEL HENNINGER

Mark July 3, 2013, as the day Big Government finally imploded.
July 3 was the quiet afternoon that a deputy assistant Treasury secretary for tax policy announced in a blog post that the Affordable Care Act's employer mandate would be delayed one year. Something about the "complexity of the requirements." The Fourth's fireworks couldn't hold a candle to the sound of the U.S. government finally hitting the wall.
Since at least 1789, America's conservatives and liberals have argued about the proper role of government. Home library shelves across the land splinter and creak beneath the weight of books arguing the case for individual liberty or for government-led social justice. World Wrestling smackdowns are nothing compared with Hayek vs. Rawls.
Maybe we have been listening to the wrong experts. Philosophers and pundits aren't going to tell us anything new about government. The one-year rollover of ObamaCare because of its "complexity" suggests it's time to call in the physicists, the people who study black holes and death stars. That's what the federal government looks like after expanding ever outward for the past 224 years.

Enlarge Image

Douglas Jones

Even if you are a liberal and support the goals of the Affordable Care Act, there has to be an emerging sense that maybe the law's theorists missed a signal from life outside the castle walls. While they troweled brick after brick into a 2,000-page law, the rest of the world was reshaping itself into smaller, more nimble units whose defining metaphor is the 140-character Twitter message.
Laughably, Barack Obama tried this week to align himself with the new age in a speech calling yet again for "smarter" government. It requires whatever lies on the far side of chutzpah to say this after passing a 1930s-style law that is both incomprehensible and simply won't work. ObamaCare is turning into pure gravity. Nothing moves.
On July 5, the administration announced into the holiday void that because of "operational barriers" to IRS oversight, individuals would be allowed to self-report their income to qualify for the law's subsidies.
If the ObamaCare meltdown were a one-off, the system could dismiss it as a legislative misfire and move on, as always. But ObamaCare's problems are not unique. Important parts of the federal government are breaking down almost simultaneously.
The National Security Agency has conservative philosophers upset that its surveillance program is ushering in Big Brother. What's more concretely frightening is that a dweeb like Edward Snowden could download the content of the NSA's computers onto a thumb drive and walk out of the world's "most secretive" agency. Here's the short answer: The NSA has 40,000 employees. (Some say it's as high as 55,000, but it's a secret.)
Echoing that, when the IRS's audits of conservative groups emerged, the agency managers' defense was that the IRS is too big for anyone to know what its agents are doing. Thus both the NSA and IRS are too big to avoid endangering the public.
It is hard to imagine a more apolitical federal function than the nation's weather satellites. The ones we have—to predict hurricanes and such—are about to wear out and need to be replaced. Can't do it. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and the Pentagon have been trying to replace the old weather satellites, since 1994. The Government Accountability Office says "we are looking at potentially a 17-month gap" in this crucial weather data. NOAA has good scientists whose bad luck is they work for a collapsing constellation of bureaucracies.
The State Department missed signs of the Arab Spring's insurrections in late 2010 despite warnings from outside groups. Egypt is in flames, in part, because State for years has been mainly a massive, drifting bureaucracy. Little wonder Hillary Clinton spent four years in flight from the place.
Even some conservatives have given up and boarded the death star. The Senate immigration bill throws $46 billion at the Department of Homeland Security to implement a "border surge" strategy that has no chance of achieving its goals. Securing the border is the conservatives' Solyndra.
To call the U.S. federal government a black hole is a disservice to black holes, which have a neutral majesty. Excepting the military's fighting units, the federal government has become a giant slug, like Jabba the Hutt, inert but dangerous. Like Jabba, the government increasingly survives by issuing authoritarian decrees from this or that agency. Barack Obama, essentially a publicist for Jabba's world of federal fat, euphemized this mess Monday as the American people's "democracy."
Thomas Jefferson, who must be rolling in his grave, said the way to ensure good government was to divide it among the many. Some states and cities are indeed reworking their functions in efficient, innovative ways. But Washington is oblivious to life beyond the Beltway.
Those indispensable but dying weather satellites are a metaphor for the U.S. now. Whether ObamaCare or the border fence, Washington is winding down into a black hole of its own making. The debate's over. Liberalism will be swept into this vortex, too.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323368704578596140112431854.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

TO AVOID LOOKING LIKE A CRIMINAL, DON’T COMMIT A CRIME

Black liberals keep bemoaning the danger to their own teenage sons after the "not guilty" verdict in George Zimmerman's murder trial. To avoid what happened to Trayvon Martin, their boys need only follow this advice: Don't walk up to a stranger and punch him, ground-and-pound him, MMA-style, and repeatedly smash his head against the pavement.

The Justice-for-Trayvon crowd keeps pretending there hasn't been a trial where the evidence overwhelmingly showed that Trayvon committed the first (and only) crime that night by assaulting Zimmerman. Instead, the race agitators are sticking with the original story peddled by the media, back when we had zero facts. To wit, that Zimmerman had stalked a young black child and shot him dead just for being black and wearing a hoodie.

Dozens of these hair-on-fire racism stories are retold in my book, Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama. In the golden age of racial demagoguery, they came at a pace of about one a year. Al Sharpton was usually involved.

A normal person would hear some of the more outlandish allegations and think, "I can't believe it!" not meaning, "Wow! What a blockbuster story!" but rather, "I would like to hear the facts because I literally don't believe it." (That was much of America's reaction to the media's claim last year that a neighborhood-watch captain in Florida had hunted down a black teenager and shot him dead just for wearing a hoodie.)

Whenever a much-celebrated claim of racism turned out to be false -- which was almost always -- you'd just stop hearing about it. There would never be a clippable story admitting that the media's harrumphing had been in error: Attention, readers! That story we've been howling about for several months turned out to be a complete fraud.

A little time would pass, and then we'd get an all-new, excited "America is still racist" media campaign. Journalists are incapable of learning that they should get all the facts before launching moral crusades.

As a result, the official record shows: A few hate crimes and some unverified hate crimes with no clear resolution one way or another. As long as the fraudulent hate crimes didn't get counted as strikeouts, liberals always looked like Ted Williams.

Since they didn't keep an accurate batting average, I did it for them in Mugged.

The case most like George Zimmerman's is the Edmund Perry case. In 1985, Perry, a black teenager from Harlem who had just graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, mugged a guy who turned out to be an undercover cop. He got shot and a few hours later was dead.

Instead of waiting for the facts, the media rushed out with a story about Officer Lee Van Houten being a trigger-happy, racist cop. When that turned out to be false, The New York Times looked at its shoes. It was the kind of story the elites wanted to be true. It should be true. We had such high hopes for that one. Damn!

The initial news accounts stressed not only that Perry was a graduate of Exeter on his way to Stanford, but that he was unarmed. (In all white-on-black shootings, the media expect the white to have RoboCop-like superpowers to detect any weapons on the perp as well as his resume.)

A few weeks after the shooting, The New York Times called Perry "a prized symbol of hope." In a telling bit of obtuseness, The Times said that "all New Yorkers have extraordinary reasons to wish for the innocence of the young man who was killed." I doubt very much that the cop being accused of being a murderous racist hoped for that.

An article in The Village Voice explained: "[L]ike so many other victims in this city," Perry was "just too black for his own good."

Luckily for the policeman, Perry had mugged him in a well-lit hospital parking lot. Twenty-three witnesses backed the officer's story in testimony to the grand jury. (Unlike Zimmerman, Van Houten's case was at least presented to a grand jury.)

As I wrote in "Mugged": "God help Officer Van Houten if he had been mugged someplace other than a hospital parking lot with plenty of witnesses." Such as, for example, a dark pathway in The Retreat at Twin Lakes. There weren't 23 witnesses backing Zimmerman's story, only about a half-dozen. But, as with Van Houten, the evidence overwhelmingly corroborated Zimmerman's story.

In Van Houten's case, even after it was blindingly clear that Perry had mugged him, the truth was only revealed amid great sorrow. When the facts were unknown, the cop was a racist. When it turned out Perry had mugged the cop, it was no one's fault, but a problem of "violence," "confusion" and "two worlds" colliding.

Perhaps, someday, blacks will win the right to be treated like volitional human beings. But not yet.

As with Zimmerman's case this week, some journalists pretended to have missed the court proceedings that supported the self-defense story. Even after the grand jury's refusal to indict Van Houten, Dorothy J. Gaiter of the Miami Herald wrote about Perry in an article titled "To Be Black and Male Is Dangerous in U.S." She asked: "How do you teach a boy to be a man in a society where others may view him as a threat just because he is black?"

Van Houten said he was jumped, knocked to the ground, punched and kicked by Edmund Perry. Grand jury witnesses backed his story. Isn't it possible that Van Houten saw Perry as a threat for reasons other than "just because he is black"?

(And please stop talking about Martin's "hoodie"! Zimmerman wasn't worried about the hoodie; he was worried about being beaten to death.)

Instead of turning every story about a black person killed by a white person into an occasion to announce, "The simple fact is, America is a racist society," liberals might, one time, ask the question: Why do you suppose there would be a generalized fear of young black males? What might that be based on?

Throw us a bone. It's because a disproportionate number of criminals are young black males. It just happens that when Lee Van Houten and George Zimmerman were mugged by two of them, they survived the encounter.

http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2013-07-17.html

The Conversation Holder Doesn't Really Want

Eric Holder dismissed America as a "nation of cowards" because we wouldn't, he argued, have a "national conversation" about race. It's a slander wrapped in a farce. We talk of race unremittingly. That's the farce. The slander is hydra-headed.

No honest conversation about race is possible when accusations of racism replace reasoned arguments. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, who mentioned high rates of crime among black males, was rewarded with the racist label within minutes by some of those (The Atlantic, Slate) who presumably agree with Holder that we are too timid when discussing race.

Many American liberals are achingly nostalgic for old-fashioned racism. It offered them a helium high of moral superiority. It was deserved ... in 1967. But by perpetuating the fiction that modern America has not changed, they've become more than ridiculous, more even than grossly unjust, they've become dangerous. Look around you. The violence and bitterness that have followed the Zimmerman verdict were virtually ordered up by convicted slanderer Al Sharpton and his many imitators.
The Zimmerman case was complicated. Any fair-minded person could see that it was difficult to conclude that Zimmerman was not acting in self-defense (however unwise his initial actions may have been). But the racial-grievance industrial complex doesn't permit complexity. Racial enmity is their living. Stirring feelings of victimization and injustice among blacks and, to a lesser extent, among other designated minorities is their delight.
When you consider the steady agitprop churned out by the racial-grievance industrial complex, it's amazing that race relations aren't worse. The RGI has circulated falsehoods about black voter "disenfranchisement" in the 2000 presidential election, about a spate of "racially motivated" arsons at black churches, about George W. Bush's "indifference" to the lynching of a black man in Texas, about voter ID laws being a conspiracy to suppress the black vote, about Republicans opposing the civil rights act of 1964 (MSNBC recently ran a picture of George Wallace that ID'd him as a Republican), about "racial profiling" by New Jersey state troopers and about "racist" killings of black immigrants by New York cops. Each of these is an outright falsehood. There was zero voter disenfranchisement in 2000, George W. Bush signed the death warrant of the killer in Texas, Republicans were more in favor of the Voting Rights Act than Democrats, the tragic shootings of two black men in New York were mistakes, and on and on.
This is not to suggest that racism has been expunged from the heart of every American. But while the RGI bravely fights the battles of 1954, African-Americans (and not only they) face new challenges that require serious attention, free of the cant and destructive incitement that characterize the grievance mongers.
The RGI propounds the myth that the criminal justice system is indelibly racist. Young black males, we are told, are far more likely than whites to be arrested and to serve time in prison. When it is observed that a disproportionate share of offenders are black; that significant numbers of most city police forces are black; and that most victims are also black, we are invited to consider the ultimate proof — the glaring disparity in the penalties for powder and crack cocaine.
The federal criminal penalties for crack, passed in the 1980s, were a response to the devastation crack was causing in black neighborhoods. The huge spike in crime during the 1980s — and the vast victimization of inner city blacks — was primarily attributable to crack addiction. If it was racist to impose these penalties, why were members of the Congressional Black Caucus the first to champion the legislation? Heather MacDonald noted in City Journal that the laws on crystal meth have a similarly "disparate impact" on whites. "In 2006, the 5,391 sentenced federal meth defendants (nearly as many as the crack defendants) were 54 percent white, 39 percent Hispanic, and 2 percent black."
From 1976 to 2004, 65 percent of executions involved whites, but whites committed only 47 percent of murders. Evidence of anti-white bias in the system? You could make such a case, and it would have as much validity as the manufactured panic about anti-black bias in America.
America continues to muddle along. Black/white unions comprised 11 percent of marriages in 2008. Black married couple families had an average income of $63,566 in 2010. Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012 — which is evidence of poor judgment, but clearly not of the kind of racist cauldron the grievance industry eternally conjures.
To find out more about Mona Charen and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

http://news.yahoo.com/conversation-holder-doesnt-really-want-070000833.html

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Facing Facts about Race

Facing Facts about Race

Young black males are at greater risk from their peers than from the police or white civilians.

By Victor Davis Hanson

Last week President Obama weighed in again on the Trayvon Martin episode. Sadly, most of what he said was wrong, both literally and ethically.
Pace the president, the Zimmerman case was not about Stand Your Ground laws. It was not a white-on-black episode. The shooting involved a Latino of mixed heritage in a violent altercation with a black youth.
Is it ethical for the president to weigh in on a civil-rights case apparently being examined by his own Justice Department? The president knows that if it is true that African-American males are viewed suspiciously, it is probably because statistically they commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime. If that were not true, they might well be given no more attention as supposed suspects than is accorded to white, Asian, or Latino youths. Had George Zimmerman been black, he would have been, statistically at least, more likely to have shot Trayvon Martin — and statistically likewise less likely to have been tried.
Barack Obama knows that if non-African-Americans were to cease all inordinate scrutiny of young African-American males, the latters’ inordinate crime rates would probably not be affected — given other causation for disproportionate incidences of criminality. Yet should their statistical crime profiles suddenly resemble those of other racial and ethnic groups, the so-called profiling would likely cease.
The president, I think, spoke out for three reasons: 1) He is an unbound, lame-duck president, with a ruined agenda, facing mounting ethical scandals; from now on, he will say things more consonant with being a community organizer than with being a nation’s president; 2) he knows the federal civil-rights case has little merit and cannot be pursued, and thus wanted to shore up his bona fides with an aggrieved black community; and 3) as with the ginned-up “assault-weapons ban” and the claim that Republicans are waging a “war on women,” Obama knows, as a community activist, that tension can mask culpability — in his case, the utter failure to address soaring unemployment in the inner city, epidemic black murder rates, the bankruptcy of Detroit, and the ways his failed economic policies disproportionately affect inner-city youth.

Attorney General Eric Holder earlier gave an address to the NAACP on the Zimmerman trial. His oration was likewise not aimed at binding wounds. Apparently he wanted to remind his anguished audience that because of the acquittal of Zimmerman, there still is not racial justice in America.Holder noted in lamentation that he had to repeat to his own son the lecture that his father long ago gave him. The sermon was about the dangers of police stereotyping of young black males. Apparently, Holder believes that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Yet I fear that for every lecture of the sort that Holder is forced to give his son, millions of non-African-Americans are offering their own versions of ensuring safety to their progeny.
In my case, the sermon — aside from constant reminders to judge a man on his merits, not on his class or race — was very precise.
First, let me say that my father was a lifelong Democrat. He had helped to establish a local junior college aimed at providing vocational education for at-risk minorities, and as a hands-on administrator he found himself on some occasions in a physical altercation with a disaffected student. In middle age, he and my mother once were parking their car on a visit to San Francisco when they were suddenly surrounded by several African-American teens. When confronted with their demands, he offered to give the thieves all his cash if they would leave him and my mother alone. Thankfully they took his cash and left.
I think that experience — and others — is why he once advised me, “When you go to San Francisco, be careful if a group of black youths approaches you.” Note what he did not say to me. He did not employ language like “typical black person.” He did not advise extra caution about black women, the elderly, or the very young — or about young Asian Punjabi, or Native American males. In other words, the advice was not about race per se, but instead about the tendency of males of one particular age and race to commit an inordinate amount of violent crime.
It was after some first-hand episodes with young African-American males that I offered a similar lecture to my own son. The advice was born out of experience rather than subjective stereotyping. When I was a graduate student living in East Palo Alto, two adult black males once tried to break through the door of my apartment — while I was in it. On a second occasion, four black males attempted to steal my bicycle — while I was on it. I could cite three more examples that more or less conform to the same apprehensions once expressed by a younger Jesse Jackson. Regrettably, I expect that my son already has his own warnings prepared to pass on to his own future children.
Holder, of course, knows that there are two narratives about race in America, and increasingly they have nothing to do with each other. In one, African-Americans understandably cite racism and its baleful legacy to explain vast present-day disparities in income, education, and rates of criminality. Others often counter by instead emphasizing the wages of an inner-city culture of single-parent families and government dependence, and the glorification of violence in the popular media.

In the old days of the Great Society, we once dreamed of splitting the difference — the government would invest more in the inner city, while black leadership in turn would emphasize more self-help and self-critique.Not now. Both sides have almost given up on persuading the other. Eric Holder’s speech to the NAACP might as well have been given on Mars. It will convince zero Americans that stereotyping of young African-American males and Stand Your Ground laws are the two key racial problems facing America.
Again, Holder may offer his 15-year-old son the same warning that his father gave him about the dangers of racist, stereotyping police. Yet I suspect — and statistics would again support such supposition — that Holder privately is more worried that his son is in greater danger of being attacked by other black youths than by either the police or a nation of white-Hispanic George Zimmermans on the loose.
Besides, two developments over recent decades have made Holder’s reactionary argument about black/white relations mostly irrelevant. First, America is now a multiracial nation. The divide is not white versus black. And as the Zimmerman trial reminds us, it is no longer a nation where most of the authority figures are white males. We saw a female judge, a female jury, and an Hispanic in confrontation with an African-American; today those of various racial pedigrees and different genders interact in ways that transcend the supposed culpability of white males.
Second, the attitude of the so-called white community toward racial challenges is not so much political as class driven. White liberals have largely won the argument that massive government expenditure must be infused into the black community. Yet they have probably lost the argument that such vast government investments have done much to alleviate the plight of urban black youth.
Stranger still, there is no evidence in our increasingly self-segregated society that white liberals stand out as integrationists. The latter increasingly have the capital to school their children far from the inner city, to live largely apart from inner-city blacks, and in general to avoid the black underclass in the concrete as much as they profess liberal nostrums for it in the abstract.
No one seems to care that the children of our liberal elite, black and white, go to places like Sidwell Friends rather than to Washington public schools, where the consequences of 50 years of liberal social policy are all too real. If Chris Matthews wishes to apologize collectively for whites, then he should have long ago moved to an integrated neighborhood, put his children in integrated schools, and walked to work through a black neighborhood to get to know local residents. Anything else, and his apology remains what it is: cheap psychological recompense for his own elite apartheid.
Just as Eric Holder preferred anecdote to statistics, so too I end with an unscientific vignette of my own. Last week I was driving in northern California with the attorney general’s speech playing on the car radio. North of San Francisco I stopped to buy coffee and two local newspapers.
In one, there was a gruesome story of a young African-American male charged with ransacking a San Francisco jewelry store and murdering two employees, Khin Min, 35, of San Francisco, and Lina Lim, 51, of Daly City. The owner of the shop, Vic Hung, fought back and survived, despite receiving gunshot and stab wounds in the attack.
The suspected attacker had a prior record of violent assault. The victims were all of Asian ancestry. I don’t think their families would agree with Eric Holder that self-defense laws were the cause of such interracial violence. Nor would the six policemen who were fired upon by the suspect agree that stereotyping prompted this sort of mayhem.
Barack Obama will never suggest that the suspected killer physically resembles himself some three decades ago — and there would be no point in doing so. Nor will he admit that if Barack Obama owned an urban jewelry store and needed its profits to send his daughters to Sidwell Friends, he too might have become apprehensive when a young black male entered his store.
In the other paper, there was a strangely similar tale. Not far away, in Santa Rosa, at about the same time, two African-American youths in hoodies attacked another jewelry store, also had a shoot-out with the owner, and also failed to evade the police — though in this case none of the employees or customers was injured.

In such cases, too many Americans find there is a sort of tired sameness. The victims were white or Asian. The murder and robbery suspects were young African-American males. The violence was aimed not at acquiring food or clothing, but at stealing luxury goods. The armed small-business owners tried to defend themselves by firing back at their attackers. Had they been unarmed, both would have probably perished. In one case, the police were fired upon. The suspects had prior arrests.And on and on and on across America each day, this same tragedy is played out of a small percentage of Americans committing violent crimes at rates far exceeding their proportion of the general population.
The world will long remember Trayvon Martin, but few people — and certainly not Barack Obama or Eric Holder, who have a bad habit, in an increasingly multiracial country, of claiming solidarity on the basis of race — will care that Khin Min and Lina Lim were torn to pieces by bullets and a knife. Few will care that they died in a vicious assault that had nothing to do with stereotyping, Stand Your Ground self-defense, weak gun laws, insufficient federal civil-rights legislation, or any of the other causes of interracial violence falsely advanced by the attorney general — but quite a lot to do with an urban culture that for unspoken reasons has spawned an epidemic of disproportionate violent crime on the part of young African-American males.
I offer one final surreal footnote to this strange juxtaposition of reading the real news while listening to the mytho-history that a Eric Holder constructed from the death of Trayvon Martin to indict both the police and the public.
What were the names of two of the men suspected of being the ones who last week shot it out with the Santa Rosa jeweler as Eric Holder demagogued the Trayvon Martin shooting?
Traveon Banks-Austin and Alexander Tyvon Brandon.
And so the tragedy continues.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is The Savior Generals, published this spring by Bloomsbury Books.

http://m.nationalreview.com/node/354122/print

Race Relations In America Improving Every Year, And The Media Hates It

by Noah Rothman

President Obama's Mandated Insurance Rebates Will Reduce Your Choice of Health Plans

Yesterday, President Obama invoked the rebates that consumers will get from their health plans this year as proof that his signature health legislation is benefiting Americans. But this aspect may be one of Obamacare’s most ruinous provisions.

Under the Affordable Care Act, insurers have to spend at least 80 percent of the premiums they receive on providing direct care to patients. This 80 percent is referred to as the health plan’s medical loss ratio. It’s a measure of the total claims paid out by the company (its loss) divided by total revenue for the company.
An 80 percent MLR means a health plan has 20 percent of its revenue left over for covering administrative costs and profits. Under Obamacare, health plans that don’t spend at least 80 percent of premium revenue on patient care have to refund the extra money to beneficiaries. This limits how much the health plans can earn in profits and caps how much they can spend on their administration and overhead.
An estimated 8.5 million Americans will receive rebates as a result of the provision, a fact that President Obama yesterday touted as part of a renewed push by the White House to sell the health law to Americans. “Last year, millions of Americans opened letters from their insurance companies. But instead of the usual dread that comes from getting a bill, they were pleasantly surprised with a check,” the President said. “Another 8.5 million rebates are being sent out this summer, averaging around a hundred bucks each,” he said.
But the reality isn’t quite as rosy as the pitch.
Only about a third of Americans will actually get the money. These are people who purchased insurance on their own, directly from a health plan. For Americans who get their coverage at work, the rebate will instead flow directly to their employer.
Worse still, the entire scheme will help the largest insurers like Aetna [NYSE:AET] and United Healthcare [NYSE:UNH] lock in market share – often at the expense of consumers. The caps on medical loss ratios give the largest health insurers an incentive to push up their rates. It also makes it hard for new health plans to enter the market. As a result, the rebate scheme will restrict price competition and cost consumers money.
First, the provision gives health insurers an economic incentive to inflate their premiums. If the plans overshoot, and end up pushing their prices too high (collecting more premium money than the government lets them keep) then they will rebate the difference to consumers. Most consumers will be happy to get the check. But if instead, health plans undershoot and collect less premium revenue than they were entitled to keep, the government doesn’t share in the loss. Health plans would rather rebate excess profits than have to eat an avoidable loss.
Second, the forced rebates will impede the entry of brand new health plans into the marketplace. The rebates will also drive existing health plans to consolidate. Both of these consequences favor the largest health insurers. The provisions will help the big players further extend their already dominant market positions.
This is because loss ratios (the money health plans spend on direct patient care) typically rise over time, as plans age. New health plans usually launch with lower medical loss ratios. The extra premium money that they pocket is typically spent on start up costs. Over time, as their overhead costs diminish, and their healthcare costs rise, the medical loss ratios trend toward a mean of around 80 percent.
For these reasons, the requirement that even newly launched health plans have to spend at least 80 percent of their premium money on the costs of providing healthcare makes it difficult for brand new plans to enter the market. It also drives smaller plans to consolidate. Since the amount of money that health plans can spend on overhead costs is capped by the government, health plans will have a strong incentive to consolidate into larger entities to gain economies of scale.
Finally the MLR caps will also limit innovation. Right now, expenses that are on a pre-approved, government list of “activities that improve health care quality” are not included in the cost of administration and so don’t count against the 20 percent cap on what plans get to spend on overhead. If a health plan comes up with a new business approach that it believes improves quality and outcomes, it will be forced to count the costs against its allowable profits. It can’t incorporate the cost into the total money it spends on healthcare if the new scheme isn’t on the government list.
This makes plans reluctant to invest in their businesses unless the realized costs can be fully and immediately offset by a reduction in other expenses.
The White House is aware of these consequences, and some in the Administration celebrate these marketplace changes. There’s a view in the Obama Administration that promoting the formation of a small number of very large, national insurers will create efficiency and make the industry easier to regulate. But it will also limit competition on price and products and will ultimately disadvantage consumers.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottgottlieb/2013/07/19/president-obamas-mandated-insurance-rebates-will-cost-consumers-money-and-limit-health-plan-competition/?partner=yahootix

A Jobless Recovery Is a Phony Recovery (DP: I read top to bottom and you should too. Some solutions toward the end)

Mort Zuckerman: A Jobless Recovery Is a Phony Recovery

More people have left the workforce than got a new job during the recovery—by a factor of nearly three.

by MORTIMER ZUCKERMAN

In recent months, Americans have heard reports out of Washington and in the media that the economy is looking up—that recovery from the Great Recession is gathering steam. If only it were true. The longest and worst recession since the end of World War II has been marked by the weakest recovery from any U.S. recession in that same period.
The jobless nature of the recovery is particularly unsettling. In June, the government's Household Survey reported that since the start of the year, the number of people with jobs increased by 753,000—but there are jobs and then there are "jobs." No fewer than 557,000 of these positions were only part-time. The survey also reported that in June full-time jobs declined by 240,000, while part-time jobs soared by 360,000 and have now reached an all-time high of 28,059,000—three million more part-time positions than when the recession began at the end of 2007.
That's just for starters. The survey includes part-time workers who want full-time work but can't get it, as well as those who want to work but have stopped looking. That puts the real unemployment rate for June at 14.3%, up from 13.8% in May.
The 7.6% unemployment figure so common in headlines these days is utterly misleading. An estimated 22 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed; they are virtually invisible and mostly excluded from unemployment calculations that garner headlines.
At this stage of an expansion you would expect the number of part-time jobs to be declining, as companies would be doing more full-time hiring. Not this time. In the long misery of this post-recession period, we have an extraordinary situation: Americans by the millions are in part-time work because there are no other employment opportunities as businesses increase their reliance on independent contractors and part-time, temporary and seasonal employees.
Even the federal government payroll is turning to part-timers: In June 2012, 58,000 federal workers were part-timers. This year it's 148,000, and we still don't know how the budget sequester will play out, for many agencies have resorted to furloughs rather than layoffs.
The latest unemployment report was as underwhelming as the Household Survey. The biggest gains in June came from leisure and hospitality industries, including hotels and fast-food restaurants. Of the 195,000 new payroll jobs, 75,000 were in restaurants and bars, where the average weekly paycheck is about $351, less than half the average for all other private industries. Not to mention that these positions offer fewer hours, especially in the restaurant world, which has averaged 26.1 hours per week versus 34.5 hours for all private employers.

Getty Images

What's going on? The fundamentals surely reflect the feebleness of the macroeconomic recovery that began roughly four years ago, as seen in an average gross domestic product growth rate annualized over the past 15 quarters at a miserable 2%. That's the weakest GDP growth since World War II. Over a similar period in previous recessions, growth averaged 4.1%. During the fourth quarter of 2012 and the first quarter of 2013, the GDP growth rate dropped below 2%. This anemic growth is all we have to show for the greatest fiscal and monetary stimuli in 75 years, with fiscal deficits of over 10% of GDP for four consecutive years. The misery is not going to end soon.
ObamaCare is partially to blame. The health-insurance law requires employers with more than 50 workers to provide health insurance or pay a $2,000 penalty per worker. Under the law, a full-time job is defined as 30 hours a week, so businesses, especially smaller ones, have an incentive to bring on more part-time workers.
Little wonder that earlier this month the Obama administration announced it is postponing the employer mandate until 2015, undoubtedly to see if the delay will encourage more full-time hiring. But thousands of small businesses have been capping employment at 30 hours and not hiring more than 50 full-timers, and the businesses are unlikely to suddenly change that approach just because they received a 12-month reprieve.
These businesses' hesitation to hire is part of a larger caution among employers unsure about the direction of government policy—and which has helped contribute to chronic long-term unemployment that shows no sign of easing. Unlike those who lose a job and then find another one in a matter of weeks or months, fully a third of the currently unemployed have been out of work for more than six months. As they remain out of the workforce, their skills deteriorating, the likelihood rises that they will be seen as permanently unemployable. With each passing month of bleak job news, the possibility increases of a structural unemployment problem in the U.S. such as Europe experienced in the 1980s.
That brings us to a stunning fact about the jobless recovery: The measure of those adults who can work and have jobs, known as the civilian workforce-participation rate, is currently 63.5%—a drop of 2.2% since the recession ended. Such a decline amid a supposedly expanding economy has never happened after previous recessions. Another statistic that underscores why this is such a dysfunctional labor market is that the number of people leaving the workforce during this economic recovery has actually outpaced the number of people finding a new job by a factor of nearly three.
What the country clearly needs are policies that will encourage the modernization of America's capital stock, where investment in modern production has plunged to the lowest levels in decades. Policies should also be targeted to nourish high-tech industries, which will in turn inspire the design and manufacture of products in the U.S. where they would be closer to the American market, spurring more hiring. This means preparing a skilled workforce, especially engineers suitable to work in manufacturing, and increasing the number of visas available to foreign graduate students in the hard sciences—who are now forced to leave America and who then work for foreign competitors.
Similarly, patent-application processing must be streamlined: The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office should be a channel for innovation, but instead has for too long been and an impediment to the swift introduction of new ideas. Finally, the country should engage in a major infrastructure program to improve airports as America once did for railroads and highways. Air cargo and air travel are linchpins of the economy, yet air-traffic-control technology is stuck in the last century.
It is imperative that the U.S. focus on innovative and creative policies. Otherwise, the five-year crisis in employment will continue even when the economy seems to be recovering. Without such a focus, millions of American families whose breadwinners are unemployed or underemployed will remain dispiriting and apprehensive about the future, especially the young who are entering the workforce. The country needs a real recovery, not a phony one.
Mr. Zuckerman is chairman and editor in chief of U.S. News & World Report.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323740804578601472261953366.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop