Operation Choke Point a harbinger of big-government activism to come?

by Ed Morrissey

What happens when a government accrues so much power that it can force legal enterprises out of business through specific, intentional, and targeted regulatory abuse? It’s a fair bet that such a government will eventually abuse its power in this fashion, but will set the precedent with an unpopular-yet-legal industry. That seems to be the point behind Operation Choke Point, a Department of Justice attempt to kill off funding of the porn industry — and gun shops.

Tom Blumer wrote about this effort at the beginning of the month, with a focus on the payday lending industry:

DOJ is essentially employing a variant of the tactics former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer used against mutual fund companies last decade: threatening to smear them in the business community and otherwise make their lives miserable unless they settle.
Even despite the tactics, some readers may be reacting to all of this as a good idea. After all, payday lenders don’t have the cleanest of hands, and some — but far from all — may be operating illegally. There are two problems with this position.
The first is that DOJ doesn’t have the constitutional authority to go after businesses whose illegality has not been established by threatening their bank and financial services providers with legal sanctions and regulatory harassment if they don’t participate in the persecution. There are these things called laws which must be passed to declare certain financial practices and contracts illegal. That hasn’t happened. Short of that, there at least need to be court rulings having the same effect. There is apparently no evidence that DOJ has involved the courts at all.
The second is that although the bankers’ montage concentrated on payday lenders, many more business endeavors besides payday lending are involved. At least some of them, as odious as nanny-state officials and other might believe they are, operate legally.

TechDirt reported that Operation Choke Point also targeted porn stars:

After we just talked about Chase Bank appearing to close the personal bank accounts of a bunch of employees in the adult performing business, a few of you pointed us to reports that this may just be Chase Bank dancing to a federal piper. That report has expanded upon Teagan Presley, a former porn star, and her comments upon finding out she was suddenly no longer a Chase customer. …
So, the obvious question to ask next is what makes her “high risk”? After all, Chase Bank really likes money, even when it is generated by doing some pretty crappy things, so what’s the deal? Well, the latest is that this may be a part of the US Department of Justice’s “Operation Choke Point” program, in which the government has apparently decided that some extremely legal businesses don’t get to exist anymore, but since they can’t just disappear companies and industries in good standing, they’ve decided to route around the whole “freedom” thing and get the financial industry to act as contract hitmen.

This is the key point to remember. While many people think the porn industry and payday lending exploit people, the proper expression of that kind of cultural consensus would be to pass laws barring their operation. That hasn’t happened in these two cases, or the 30 other industries noted by Blumer in his post. This exercise in power is completely illegitimate, an intervention into private transactions of legal operations simply because those in power don’t happen to like their operations. It’s the rule of whim writ large — and getting larger.
Glenn Reynolds warns that this precedent could very well be used against other industries more favored by the current elite:

Justice Department targetsinclude industries as diverse as ammunition sales, coin dealers, payday loans, “racist materials,” etc. And, again, these are all legal businesses that haven’t been charged with breaking any laws — the Justice Department just doesn’t like them.
So what we have under “Operation Choke Point” is the government deciding it wants to put the squeeze on certain lines of (legal) business, for no other reason than that the Department of Justice doesn’t favor them. It seems almost like some sort of conspiracy to deprive people of their civil rights. …
Personally, I don’t think that regulators should be able to abuse their discretion — and this certainly looks abusive to me — in order to pressure banks to shut down the accounts of legal businesses. (As Sen. David Vitter, R-La., noted in March, the Justice Department has no statutory authority to do this). And while abortion clinics and environmental groups are probably safe under the Obama administration, if this sort of thing stands, they will be vulnerable to the same tactics if a different administration adopts this same thuggish approach toward the businesses that it dislikes. And why wouldn’t it, if the Justice Department gets away with this?
Congress, and the courts, and the press, need to bring the Justice Department to heel. And, in fact, I think that the officials involved should be named, shamed, and disciplined. Because what’s going on here doesn’t look much like justice at all.

No, it smells like autocracy at the least, if not outright tyranny. Congress needs to rope in the DoJ, but we need to recognize that this is a symptom of a far greater problem. The impulse to regulate everything at the federal level, and the lack of distinct limits on regulatory power granted to the executive branch, inevitably leads to this kind of politicization of law enforcement. Just because we don’t think highly of the first targets of such abuse of power doesn’t mean we should wait until it starts getting applied to us. Martin Niemöller had a thing or two to say about that.

http://hotair.com/archives/2014/05/27/operation-choke-point-a-harbinger-of-big-government-activism-to-come/

Al Qaeda is back in Iraq because President Obama and Hillary Clinton chose not to block them

By Hugh Hewitt                             

Topics: Barack Obama Hillary Clinton John Kerry Iraq al Qaeda

Opinion,Hugh Hewitt,Columnists,Barack Obama,Hillary Clinton,John Kerry,Iraq,al Qaeda

Iraqi Shiite Turkmen gunmen gather as they prepare to patrol around the village of Taza Khormato...

As al-Qaedastan takes shape, carved from parts of two countries and with ambitions far greater than the parts of Iraq and Syria it already owns, many Americans are wondering how President Obama and his pair of foreign policy gurus Hillary Clinton and John Kerry could have allowed this to happen.
How could an al Qaeda so devastated by drone attacks and the death of its titular head be thriving, especially in western Iraq, where the "Anbar Awakening" had combined with George W. Bush's famed "surge" to stabilize the region and allow for traditional tribal rulers to return to influence and re-establish order?
The answer of course is that America cut and ran. It refused to negotiate a status of forces agreement that would have provided for a residual force of 10,000 to 20,000 American troops - an agreement along the lines of one that George W. Bush had negotiated through 2011. Instead of negotiating, Obama and Clinton simply withdrew, leaving a vacuum into which the transnational terrorists that fly the al Qaeda black flag flooded.
Both Obama and Clinton found ways to tell everyone this past week that the lack of a SOFA was Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's fault. The president used a press conference and Clinton a CNN "townhall" to lay down their markers as to why there was no SOFA and thus no residual force of American troops to provide the glue the Iraqi army so obviously lacked this past week.
"We didn't get that done," Clinton told the country, and went on to blame Maliki. The president followed suit later in the week, each of them eager to lay out a defense against the charge of deadly malpractice if the forces of al Qaeda use these new conquests as a staging ground for attacks on America.
The Washington Post's Scott Wilson noticed the president's about-face, writing that throughout the campaign of 2012 the president trumpeted "the fact he had withdrawn all U.S. forces from the country was a problem solved and [that this was ] a political chip to be cashed in come November."
Wilson was one of the few to recall that in the presidential debates of two years ago GOP nominee Mitt Romney had blasted the president for failing to obtain a SOFA:

"With regards to Iraq, you and I agreed, I believe, that there should be a status of forces agreement," Romney told Obama as the two convened on the Lynn University campus in Boca Raton, Fla., that October evening. "That’s not true," Obama interjected. "Oh, you didn't want a status of forces agreement?" Romney asked as an argument ensued. "No," Obama said. "What I would not have done is left 10,000 troops in Iraq that would tie us down. That certainly would not help us in the Middle East."

Thank you, Mr. Wilson. Case closed.
Experts familiar with the failed SOFA negotiations know and have said on the record it was ours for the having, but Obama-Clinton wouldn't take it. They didn't want it. They wanted out and that is what they got.
They also got al-Qaedastan. They set up its set-up.
"Let me be clear," the president is fond of saying, and on this subject clarity is essential.
Obama and Clinton inherited a peaceful, stable, democratic Iraq from Bush. They tossed aside that legacy for political reasons. As the whirlwind is reaped there, and perhaps here as well, that fact should be known and repeated in every story.
The return of al Qaeda to Iraq could have been prevented. Obama and Clinton chose not to do so.
Hugh Hewitt is a nationally syndicated talk radio host, law professor at Chapman University's Fowler School of Law, and author, most recently of The Happiest Life. He posts daily at HughHewitt.com and is on Twitter @hughhewitt.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/al-qaeda-is-back-in-iraq-because-president-obama-and-hillary-clinton-chose-not-to-block-them/article/2550045

The Redskins Brouhaha Has Nothing To Do With Native Americans

by David Limbaugh 

 

Do you think leftists are the slightest bit troubled by the public's overwhelming opposition to their crusade to force the Washington Redskins to change their name? That was rhetorical; I give you more credit.

Despite leftists' ongoing effort to convince Native Americans and the rest of us that Native Americans must be offended by the long-standing name, the polls don't seem to be moving in their direction. But that hardly deters them. They are the final arbiters of who may be (and who is being) offended.
In the end, this liberal crusade has little to do with protecting the sensitivities of Native Americans and everything to do with liberals setting themselves up as their guardians. Their practice of patronizing groups cannot yield to the facts. Their cause transcends reality. For the cause is not defending the oppressed or the downtrodden but about making themselves look wonderful with their latest piety.
Please do not think I am exaggerating. Isn't that the way liberals operate today? They imply, for example, that African-Americans are not self-sufficient or savvy enough to procure voter identification and so to require all people to produce such documentation is racist. Is their presupposition not a form of subtle bigotry?
Moreover, isn't it destructive to race relations for liberals to suggest that Republicans insisting on people having to prove they are who they say they are as a condition to voting -- as a measure to ensure the integrity of the voting process -- want to disenfranchise blacks? If liberals hadn't made such an issue of this, I honestly wouldn't have known that blacks are less likely to have identification than whites, assuming that's true. Where do these people get such dark ideas that they are so eager to project onto their political opponents?
While the nation is beset with myriad administration scandals, a woeful economy, the Middle East on fire, an imploding health care system, an upside-down budget, etc., many liberals, especially the Washington bigwigs, are focusing instead on coercing a football team to change its innocuous name. Harry Reid actually said this issue is the nation's top priority. But do you think it's just an accident that Harry Reid et al. are harassing the Washington team instead of, say, the Cleveland Indians? Fear not, however; if their bullying campaign succeeds here, they'll seek to expand its reach.
In this era of Obama, in which lawlessness is in vogue, it's hardly surprising that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has officiously intermeddled into this nonissue, which is none of its business. This small cabal of bureaucrats has pulled the team's trademark because of the team's "disparaging" name.
Who do these mini-tyrants think they are? What makes them feel empowered to divest an entity of its legally valid trademark simply because they deem, way after the fact and in their own unsolicited and unauthorized discretion, that the protected name is offensive? Even those who insist on being offended by the name should be alarmed by this abuse of power. But they won't be, because the mentality that leads them to impose their will on Native Americans in the first place is the same mentality that leads to such abuses.
You should understand that it's not just the people at large who are not exercised about this issue; polls consistently indicate that Native Americans themselves reject the phony narrative that "Redskins" is offensive. My nonconfidential sources tell me that there has never been a poll indicating that the majority of Native Americans support a name change.
Even though the board's ruling will have little immediate practical effect because it doesn't affect the team's ownership of and right to use the Redskins name and logo, don't underestimate the left's persistence in such matters. Leftists will march on until they get their way; their ideological zeal and political energy are greater than millions of Energizer Bunnies. Their concern for the people's collective will is nonexistent. They'll either intimidate people into supporting their position -- or pretending to support it -- or ignore them. For them, "compromise" is merely an Orwellian term used to bludgeon their opponents into submission.
So many of today's liberals are not content with a healthy political and cultural debate and letting democracy run its course. More and more, they seek to censor opposing views, as when they fined, suspended and sent to sensitivity training Miami Dolphins player Don Jones for posting tweets registering disapproval of Michael Sam, the first openly gay person to be drafted to the NFL. It's one thing to say you disagree with Jones, but to punish him for expressing his views? In America?
The current brouhaha has nothing to do with Native Americans. They are merely props the left is exploiting in its latest self-serving exercise. It's about the growing intolerance and tyranny of today's left and what that means for the future of liberty -- thought, speech, religion and beyond. We'd better wake up and fight back.

http://townhall.com/columnists/davidlimbaugh/2014/06/20/the-redskins-brouhaha-has-nothing-to-do-with-native-americans-n1853616/page/full

Obama’s IRS Sent the FBI 1.1 Million Pages of Taxpayer Documents: An Update

by John Hinderaker in IRS, Obama Administration Scandals
 As I wrote here, one of the Obama administration’s most appalling scandals has gone largely unremarked. In the Fall of 2010, as part of its effort to stem the conservative uprising that was occurring at that time, the Internal Revenue Service, under the direction of Lois Lerner and Sarah Ingram, sent the FBI 21 disks containing 1.1 million pages of taxpayer filings. The IRS’s purpose was to give the FBI ammunition with which to investigate and prosecute conservatives.
The IRS covered up this transaction. Over more than a year, despite three subpoenas from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the IRS never disclosed its transmission of documents to the FBI. The episode came to light because the Department of Justice belatedly, in response to subpoenas from the House committee, acknowledged that the documents had been transmitted and gave the committee copies of the 21 disks as well as some emails that related to the transaction.
This was on June 2, 2014. At that time, the DOJ assured the House committee that there was nothing on the disks other than publicly-available filings of Section 501(c) non-profit organizations. But that wasn’t true. Two days later, on June 4, DOJ told the committee that its prior assurance was inoperative: the disks actually include confidential taxpayer information that was given to the FBI in violation of federal law. This is a serious matter; violation of the applicable statute carries a penalty of five years in prison.
The obvious inference is that the IRS didn’t just send the FBI a bunch of publicly available Form 990s filed by non-profits. Rather, the IRS included Schedule B to those forms–the documents that name the organization’s donors, and provide their addresses and the amounts they contributed. Donor information contained in Schedule B is confidential. Illegally communicated, it would give the FBI a checklist of individuals who could be investigated and potentially criminally prosecuted, much as Dinesh D’Souza was prosecuted for a chickenfeed election offense a few years later.
Is that what happened? And if so, how much confidential taxpayer information was illegally compromised? What conservative donors were disclosed? What action, if any, did the FBI take against some of those donors? (Sadly, we know one thing the FBI did NOT do: it did not blow the whistle on the IRS’s illegal transmission of confidential taxpayer data. An easy criminal prosecution, against Lois Lerner and others at the IRS, was at hand, but the FBI did not act.)
These are questions to which many conservatives (although no one in the news media, apparently) would like to have answers. But DOJ’s notification to the House committee that the 21 disks contain confidential taxpayer information operates as a Catch-22. Given that notice, no one on the committee, or on the committee’s staff–or anyone else–can access the disks without violating the same federal law that the IRS and the FBI broke in 2010. So the disks sit idle, and we do not know, and might never know, the scope of the Obama administration’s illegal conduct. Thus do the corrupt run rings around the law-abiding.
UPDATE: More here.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/06/obamas-irs-sent-the-fbi-1-1-million-pages-of-taxpayer-documents-an-update.php

Is America Over?

Is America Over?

We’re getting used to the idea of national decline.

By Myra Adams

Recently, my 91-year-old father-in-law and I were talking about the dire state of our nation, and he said, “I am sure glad I will not be around to see the end.”
My father-in-law is a great American patriot, who, as an Albanian immigrant, was processed through Ellis Island at the age of six. He often says the greatest gifts of his life were his family, his Catholic faith, and the opportunity to be American. In World War II, he was an engineer stationed at the Washington Navy Yard, where he worked on electronic circuitry for mines and torpedoes. After the war, he was recruited by the CIA. During several tumultuous decades he was a field operative fighting the Cold War in Europe, and then Vietnam and Laos. At his 90th-birthday party, he expressed utter astonishment that he had reached that milestone, given how many times he had cheated death during his career.
Considering his life experience, I was shaken to the core by his gratitude at the prospect of “not seeing the end” of America — not because I was surprised he said it, but because I totally agree that “the end” is coming and that my husband and I probably will be around to see it.
We are dismayed at the increasing secularization of a nation founded on Judeo-Christian principles, coupled with political, social, cultural, economic, moral, spiritual, and infrastructure decline everywhere we turn. During the 2012 presidential election, there was much discussion among Republicans to the effect that if Obama won reelection it would signal “the end of our nation as we know it.” The theory was that our nation would not be able to withstand another four years of President Obama’s “transforming” policies. The biggest fear of all was that, since his name would never again be on the ballot, Obama would be empowered to do whatever the heck he wanted.
So when Obama was reelected, there was a collective political depression of a kind I had never before witnessed. For weeks, people who voted against Obama, myself included, were just shaking their heads in disbelief: National decline was now inevitable, because Obama’s victory signaled the lack of will among Americans to repair the ship of state.
Thereafter, national decline became a normal, everyday discussion topic among my Baby Boomer friends. These friends are not right-wing nuts but educated, hardworking, successful people, many of whom own small businesses. Invariably, casual talk of decline leads to the following questions: Do you own a gun? Are you stockpiling supplies? These questions always leave me and my husband asking, “Should we be more prepared?” But prepared for what? A total collapse of our society and economic system? A government takeover of our property and assets? A natural disaster of epic proportions? A terrorist attack even worse than 9/11? All of the above?
Given that I was born in 1955 and my husband in 1951, through the decades we have seen and experienced much national and international upheaval. Sure, when I came of age the government had a “credibility gap,” and the horror of Vietnam unfolded nightly on our black-and-white TV. There were riots, assassinations, social upheaval, and Watergate. But since we knew that our nation was built on a strong foundation, we all believed, without a scintilla of doubt, that our future was bright and our nation would flourish. Amazingly, I don’t remember ever discussing any of these optimistic concepts; it was just built-in and assumed. Even much later in life, after the 9/11 attacks, I do not recall any talk about irreversible national decline. Instead, there was great optimism that our nation would emerge victorious against our enemies.
This great wave of negativity that has settled in during the last few years is therefore something new: a sense that “the end” is a matter not of “if” but of “when.” There is a feeling that our leaders can, at best, manage the decline, but are powerless to turn it around.
Do national poll data reflect the feelings of my father-in-law, my friends, my husband, and me, or are we just a bunch of pessimists?
It turns out our thinking is quite mainstream. The latest “right direction — wrong track” poll numbers indicate that only 28.3 percent of Americans believe our nation is heading in the right direction, while 63.5 percent say we are on the wrong track. An April 2014 Rasmussen poll revealed that 48 percent of Americans believe America’s best days are behind us, while 33 percent think our best days are still to come.
Compare those results with a Gallup poll released on January 2, 2013, in which 50 percent said they believed our country’s best days were behind, while 47 percent believed they were ahead. That poll showed an interesting partisan breakdown: A whopping 74 percent of Republicans said our best days were over, and only 24 percent disagreed. Among independent voters, 55 percent believed that our best days were behind us. But among Democrats, 69 percent believed our best days were ahead. Clearly, your view of the future depends on whether your party is leading the country.
On the question of whether America is stronger or weaker, a Fox News poll from this past March revealed that 52 percent of registered voters believed that our nation has become weaker in the past six years, 29 percent said there has been no change, and 17 percent thought we have become stronger.
And now, as Iraq descends into chaos, a strong possibility exists that our 104-acre U.S. Embassy compound in Baghdad could be attacked in the next few days. This unstable situation has the potential to set off a chain reaction, in which our nation could be tested in other global hot spots by our enemies, who will be carefully watching how President Obama plays his hand in this crisis.
Will this new round of Middle East turmoil usher in more opportunities for our nation to be attacked? Most experts I hear say “yes.” Adding to the downward spiral, we have a commander-in-chief who is perceived as weak globally, but at home acts like an imperial president, ignoring Congress and the laws when convenient and politically expedient.
Are there strong signals that our ship of state is heading into a perfect storm?
Maybe my father-in-law was wrong; perhaps he will be around to see the end.
— Myra Adams is a media producer and political writer. She was on the 2004 Bush campaign’s creative team and the 2008 McCain campaign’s Ad Council. Her writing credits include PJ Media, the Daily Beast, RedState, and the Daily Caller.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/380718/america-over-myra-adams/page/0/1

Numbers Don’t Lie

Numbers Don’t Lie

The global energy story of today is coal, which dwarfs the output of solar and wind.

By Robert Bryce

Rasheed Wallace gained notoriety during his 16-season NBA career for being a hot-headed power forward. If called for a foul (or, as was often the case with him, a technical foul) that he thought was undeserved, and the opposing team missed the ensuing free-throw attempts, Wallace would often holler, “ball don’t lie,” as if the basketball itself was pronouncing judgment on the ref’s call.
The “ball don’t lie” expression has gained fame and is even the title of a popular basketball blog.
I’d be inclined to adopt a variation on Wallace’s catchphrase for whenever energy use or energy policy is being discussed: Numbers don’t lie.
Indeed, on Monday, BP released the latest edition of its BP Statistical Review of World Energy, and that document shows that once again, the global energy story of today isn’t wind, solar, or “clean energy,” it is coal. The numbers put the lie to the ongoing story being pushed by the Obama administration, the Sierra Club, and their many allies on the green Left.
Earlier this month, the EPA released its new Clean Power Plan, a 645-page set of regulations that aims to cut carbon dioxide emissions from the domestic electricity-generation sector by 30 percent by 2030 when compared with 2005 levels. The EPA claims that the new rules are needed because greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide threaten “the American public by leading to potentially rapid, damaging and long-lasting changes in our climate that can have a range of severe negative effects on human health and the environment.”
Let’s look at the numbers. As I wrote in these pages on June 3, the EPA’s proposal aims to cut U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by about 720 million tons over the next 16 years. But that reduction will amount to a drop in the global carbon dioxide bucket. According to the new BP numbers, in 2013 alone, global CO² emission rose by 630 million tons. In other words, in one year, global CO² emissions rose by nearly 90 percent of the reductions being proposed by the EPA.
Why are emissions rising so quickly? We can find the answer largely in the coal numbers. Last year, global coal use grew by about 2 million barrels of oil equivalent per day. Let’s compare that soaring coal use with what’s happening with the political darlings of the moment: wind and solar energy. According to the BP data, global wind-energy production grew by about 500,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day and solar grew by about 150,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day. Thus, in 2013, global coal use grew at a rate that was roughly four times that of wind and 13 times that of solar.
But we needn’t look only at the coal numbers. Last year, according to the BP report, global oil use grew by about 900,000 barrels per day and natural-gas use by about 700,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day. Thus, in one year, global hydrocarbon consumption increased by about 3.6 million barrels of oil equivalent per day. Let’s compare that to the contribution of all global wind energy, which provided roughly 2.9 million barrels of oil equivalent per day in 2013, and all global solar, which contributed about 600,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day.
Looking at the numbers shows that in 2013, just the increase in hydrocarbon use was greater than the contribution of all global wind energy and all global solar energy combined.
The green Left continues to push the claim that the reason there’s been no major action to cut carbon dioxide emissions is that some evil cabal — quarterbacked by climate “denialists” who have a “hostility to science” — has been blocking change. (By the way, that’s exactly what New York Times columnist Paul Krugman claimed on June 9.)
The reality — as shown by the numbers — is far different. Coal, oil, and natural gas continue to supply about 87 percent of all global energy because those sources are able to provide the vast amounts of energy the world needs at prices consumers can afford. And for developing countries in particular, coal remains the fuel of choice because it is cheap and abundant, deposits are geographically widespread, and its price is not influenced by an OPEC-style cartel.
We can discuss the need for more action on climate change. But in doing so, we must also recognize that the U.S. has been leading the world in reducing its carbon dioxide emissions. Between 2005 and 2013, according to the BP numbers, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions fell by 8.7 percent. For comparison, emissions in Germany, which has spent about $100 billion on subsidies for renewables, have fallen by 4.6 percent. But the numbers in absolute terms are even starker. Since 2005, U.S. emissions have fallen by 563 million tons. That’s 17 times the reduction seen in Germany, where emissions have fallen by 40 million tons since 2005.
Meanwhile, since 2005, China’s emissions have grown by 71 percent, or about 3.9 billion tons, which is about six times the total reductions achieved in the U.S. and Germany. In the Middle East, emissions have jumped by about 600 million tons, an increase that effectively cancels out the combined reductions achieved in both the U.S. and Germany since 2005.
The punch line here is obvious: Numbers don’t lie. And when it comes to discussions about energy and climate change, we need a lot more numbers and a lot less hyperbole and wishful thinking.
— Robert Bryce is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His fifth book, Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper: How Innovation Keeps Proving the Catastrophists Wrong, was published May 13.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/380709/numbers-dont-lie-robert-bryce

America’s Security Today v. When George H.W. Bush Left Office: How Much We Have Lost

America’s Security Today v. When George H.W. Bush Left Office: How Much We Have Lost

By Clark S. Judge: managing director, White House Writers Group, Inc.; chairman, Pacific Research Institute

Last week marked the 90th birthday of President George H.W. Bush and the 89th of his wife Barbara. A splendid film honoring the former president aired on CNN – 41 on 41 (for the 41 people who spoke on camera about the 41st president) — and another on Fox News Channel. But it got me thinking – perhaps you, too, if you took in the programs and media stories marking those birthdays – of how much we have lost over the past 22 years.

For amidst all the well-deserved personal praise, one fact that to my mind should always be mentioned in connection with Mr. Bush was never spoken. Since the late 1920s and perhaps even since the end of the Taft Administration, general global peace and the United States itself have not been safer than they were by the end of the Bush 41 administration.

This achievement was, of course, the culmination of a twelve-year effort. Among that effort’s major markers were: the military build-up and modernization under President Reagan; the economic squeezing of the Soviet Union that combined with our own incredible economic growth, the build up itself and the Strategic Defense Initiative convinced the Soviet leadership that they couldn’t compete; the diplomacy of the open hand toward the Soviet leadership begun under Mr. Reagan and continued with great adroitness under Mr. Bush that offered the Soviets peace and respect not conquest or humiliation as alternatives to the status quo; and finally the firm establishment of the principle, via Mr. Bush’s response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, that the new international order would be based on rules, among them that no country would seize the territory of another.

I don’t need to tell you that one thing we’ve lost in just the last 12 months is that assumption of no room for territorial aggression and with it of a securely rules-based global order. Following the success of Russia’s seizure of the Crimean Peninsula and its continuing, if covert, invasion of the Eastern Ukraine, how can we feel secure of global peace when the new, new international order allows strong countries to gobble up weaker ones? To see how far we have descended in the past two decades, compare Mr. Obama’s “red line” to Mr. Bush’s “this will not stand.”

In part that loss has been a result of a total absence of historical knowledge, understanding and vision in the current administration. In part it stems from the gradual and now rapid abandonment of the military edge we enjoyed at the end of Mr. Bush’s term.

This last fact was brought home, at least to me, in a brilliant presentation that former senator Jim Talent gave to a retreat for Republican Capitol Hill staffers held in Philadelphia last week. I spoke on a panel that afternoon, so was present for the former senator’s luncheon address.

Mr. Talent’s talk was based on a paper that he and former senator John Kyl published last October under the joint sponsorship of the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation (http://bit.ly/1r5ZoFf). If it was typical of these two men’s work, you’ve got to lament what we lost when they left the Senate.

Here is the current situation as Talent laid it out.

By the time the current president entered office, the Navy had shrunk to the smallest size since World War I. The Air Force was smaller and its planes older than at anytime since its creation. The Army, which was underfunded before the Iraq War, lacked the funds to replace the equipment lost in that struggle and Afghanistan.

This decline was a product of the choices of the Clinton Administration – saving money by not adequately funding defense procurement — as well as of the stresses of the post 9/11 conflicts during George W. Bush’s terms, when the fighting consumed all available resources.

It has been made vastly worse over the past six years. The inadequate increases in procurement spending of the prior two presidencies have turned into cuts, currently set to total $1.3 trillion by 2018. The Navy is now routinely cancelling deployments. In April the Air Force grounded one-third of its planes. And the Army has cut back training for 80 percent of its soldiers. This all comes at a time, Talent noted, when threats are rising from China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, the countries of the “Arab Spring”, and a resurgent and rising al-Qaeda.

So this is what I found myself thinking last week. When George H.W. Bush left office, America and general global peace were more secure than at any time in a century. Today they are less secure than they have been in perhaps in as much as a half-century. To get back to where we were will be a tremendous task. Do we have it in us? 

http://www.hughhewitt.com/americas-security-today-v-george-h-w-bush-left-office-much-lost-clark-s-judge/#more-23749

 

Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   6/24/2014

A decade on, Iraq returns to this local conservative’s column

Chief Probation Officer Dave Muench will share his thoughts with the Tea Party Patriots tonight at 6 PM at the Westside Grange. Several other topics are on tap, including a video series on Agenda 21. Hardly a conspiracy theory, this United Nations-driven program’s goal is the ordering of land use and resource allocation in America to conform to global warming alarmist demands. In its design, humans should occupy less land in higher densities, while ever-greater expanses of earth’s surface should return to human- and resource-extraction-free conditions. That’s sustainability: you live in less, on less, use less and it will all cost you more.

It’s ironic that, in the 10^th year of writing this weekly, local, conservative-oriented column, the Iraq War is once again prominent and controversial. Many columns pushed back and refuted the incessant lies and propaganda from the anti-war left that proliferated in public debate on this page. As is often said, “a lie can circle the world before the truth can put on slippers,” the simplified (and deceptively simple-minded) “Bush lied, soldiers died” mantra fueled waves of hysterical anti-Bush/Iraq war zealots uninterested in a calm examination of counter-narratives.

Among factually true narratives: 1) Due to public support for the war, Democrats demanded votes so they could be on record supporting the 22 articles of indictment against Saddam Hussein justifying the “Authorization for Use of Force” in Iraq; 2) Those same Democrats, including Hillary Clinton (who cited President Bill Clinton’s intel), touted and professed their convictions over Saddam’s use and expected stockpiles of WMDs—recent news items reported that current ISIS militants took over an Iraqi WMD-stockpile facility, others deduced that chemical weapons used in Syria could only have come from Saddam—but, never mind;

3) Numerous commissions in America and Britain found no misrepresentation by their leaders of the intelligence used to make WMD-related pronouncements; 4) UN weapons inspectors concluded that Saddam Hussein retained and maintained the programs and capabilities to restart chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons once, as expected, sanctions were lifted on his regime; 5) As long as they respected, and gave obedience to, Saddam’s authority, terrorists were allowed to have training camps in Iraq—as long as Saddam could retain “plausible deniability” of encouraging them;

6) President Bush, faced with a military path to defeat in 2006, made the case for, overrode predictions of failure over, and—in one of the gutsiest military calls by a modern president—ordered the surge of troops and an expansion of strategy to deliver a crushing defeat of both Shiite militias and Sunni/al Qaeda terrorists. That prepared the way for elections that established the only Middle Eastern county (besides Israel) to have representative self-governance, accomplished only through “boots on the ground” and sacrifices by our military.

Wars have always been such. Massive destruction and loss of life necessarily accompanied the defeat of the South in the Civil War; likewise, World War II and Hitler’s Nazi-led Germany. Union troops occupied the South; tens of thousands of American troops remained in Germany to secure the gains and keep the people in a state of passive compliance. Likewise, Japan.

Presidents Truman and Eisenhower only secured a free, economically vibrant and safe South Korea with massive sacrifices and gutsy military calls. Such South Korean gains were also secured for that nation’s posterity by tens of thousands of our soldiers at the border with North Korea. Our military is an ever-present threat of America’s might coming down on the “Nork’s” pot-bellied dictators like the proverbial “ton of bricks” from Hades—if they try to impose starvation, impoverishment and brutal dictatorship on South Korea.

Bush’s Iraq: During the surge, America’s military, together with the “Great Awakening” among regular Sunnis, defeated Sunni terrorists; Marginalized Shiite militias posed diminishing threats to Iraq’s government; The parties and religious sects of Iraq regarded America’s military as fair arbiters of central governmental power; Our troops at combat outposts reported that the percent of missions encountering “hostile contact” declined from about 20-30 percent to about one percent.

That sounds like an expensive but successful conclusion of major hostilities under President Bush, which required only a residual force of some tens of thousands of soldiers and Marines, under diminishing physical threat, to sustain. I’ve read that Bush intended such a presence but wanted to leave maximum flexibility for his successor, Barack Obama, who chose the “bug out” approach, defying all of the lessons of past conflicts (America lost thousands of troops in the Philippines a century ago but stayed there to secure our hard-fought gains). Obama truly is losing what Bush and our brave, heroic military won.

By the way, America’s role in Vietnam could have ended successfully if 1) counterinsurgency efforts had been maintained, 2) if bombing of North Vietnam had continued until they pleaded for surrender, or 3) if Congressional Democrats had honored commitments to provide support and material to the elected government of South Vietnam against the North. Democrats and their news media sycophants simply do not want, for ideological reasons the way I see it, America and our military held up as models of success and strength in the world.

Just Say Yes to Cynicism

Just Say Yes to Cynicism

Young people are right to be skeptical of government.

By Windsor Mann
                       

During a Q-and-A session on Tumblr last week, President Obama complained to young people about young people. “You guys,” he said, “are fed a lot of cynicism every single day about how nothing works and big institutions stink and government is broken, and so you channel a lot of your passion and energy into various private endeavors.” This, apparently, is a bad thing, because it suggests that young people are insufficiently naïve about their politicians. That they are aware of the government’s failures makes it much, much harder to con them. As Obama sees it, the blame lies not with the government for failing but with the cynics who point out its failures.
Obama’s anti-cynicism is one of his signature themes. When running for president in 2007, he said his rival was “not other candidates” but “cynicism” itself. The rivalry is intensifying. Because his policies have failed so demonstrably, Obama, unable to persuade via argument, is resorting to his favorite non-argument: being against people who are against things.
Speaking to Democratic donors in Maryland last month, Obama said the GOP has been “captured by ideologues whose core premise is ‘no’ — who fundamentally believe that the problem is government.” Not only have they said no to Obamacare, but “they’ve said no to helping kids afford college,” Obama said at another fundraiser several weeks earlier. You do recall the “Just Say No to College” plank in the GOP platform, don’t you?
In his speech last month, Obama tried to sound a bipartisan note by praising three Republicans, all of them dead: Abraham Lincoln, who, Obama said, “thought infrastructure was a pretty good idea”; Theodore Roosevelt, who “thought conservation was a pretty smart thing”; and Dwight Eisenhower, who “thought it made sense for us [i.e., the federal government] to invest in science and education” (never mind that Eisenhower warned against “a scientific-technological elite”).
The implication was that today’s Republicans are somehow “against” infrastructure, the environment, science, and education. But the debate is not about whether roads, trees, and schools are worth having but about what the federal government can and should do about them. Its track record does not inspire.
Consider the federal government’s largest undertaking in the last half-century: the war on poverty. Proclaimed 50 years ago, it is still going on, with no end in sight. Forty-four years after Lyndon Johnson declared an “unconditional war on poverty in America,” then–presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said that, if elected, she would appoint “a cabinet-level position that will be solely and fully devoted to ending poverty as we know it in America.” She should have listened to Jimmy Carter, who in 1978 proclaimed before Congress, “Government cannot eliminate poverty.” For once, Carter was right.
But what is realism to most is cynicism to Obama. In his view, cynicism about the government, not the government itself, is the real problem.
At the Democratic National Convention two years ago, Obama said that Republicans believe the government “should do almost nothing.” If this were true, which it isn’t, it would put Republicans in the same ideological camp as the dead white men who wrote the Constitution. Nothing to be ashamed about.
Obama insists that voters want what the Democrats are offering. “On issue after issue,” he said, “people believe what we believe. But what they don’t really believe at this point is that government can get anything done.” Quite true, which is why trust in government is declining and why, in 2012, Americans elected a Democratic president and a Republican Congress — because, having experienced the unitary government of the Obama-Pelosi years, they wanted to stop the government from doing anything else. They voted for gridlock, and a divided government is the best way to get it.
All indications suggest that Obama believes in the two-party system, provided that both parties subscribe to the same platform — namely, his. “I actually want an effective, serious, patriotic, capable, sober-minded Republican party,” he said. Note the adjectives. Obama seems to be saying that patriotism — along with seriousness and sobriety – is attained, or at least enhanced, by agreeing with him. But the first adjective is the most asinine. According to Obama, the way for Republicans to be “effective” is to stop opposing him so effectively.
Democrats have been saying this for decades. In 1950 — at the height of Democratic hegemony — liberal historian and Kennedy sycophant Arthur Schlesinger Jr. penned an essay titled “The Need for an Intelligent Opposition,” in which he advised Republicans to be more like the Democrats. That is more or less what they did under Eisenhower, whose acceptance of the New Deal gave it bipartisan legitimacy.
Obama wants some bipartisan legitimacy for his own programs, particularly Obamacare, which passed through Congress without a single Republican vote. But rather than moderating his positions, the president is denouncing “cynicism,” as if cynicism per se were a bad thing. Obviously, it matters what one is cynical about, and whether the cynicism is warranted. When Obama says that cynicism “is always good for Republicans because it means folks don’t vote,” it’s hard not to be cynical about his anti-cynicism – and proud of the young folks who refuse to swallow what he is trying to feed them.
— Windsor Mann is the editor of The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism. Follow him on Twitter @WindsorMann.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/380682/just-say-yes-cynicism-windsor-mann

Fire the Worst Teachers

Fire the Worst Teachers

A four-word plan to fix America’s public schools

By Andrew Biggs

A California judge recently ruled that the state’s tenure, dismissal, and layoff rules for public-school teachers lead to “grossly ineffective teachers” being retained in the classroom, producing instruction so inadequate for poor and minority students as to be considered unconstitutional. Los Angeles County judge Rolf M. Treu’s ruling surely will be contested, and it is an open question how constitutional equal-protection clauses should be applied to school-personnel issues. But the ruling does raise important questions regarding the role that the firing of teachers should play in improving public education.
It’s been 30 years since the landmark report “A Nation at Risk” highlighted the dire state of America’s public schools. Since that time, education has undergone a series of supposed reforms, including massively increased spending, smaller classrooms, and higher pay for teachers with accreditation or master’s degrees. The number of students is barely greater today than it was in 1983, but there’s been a 57 percent increase in the number of school employees and a 40 percent rise in real per-employee compensation. The list of smaller-scale reforms would cover pages.
And what have we achieved? Not a lot: SAT and literacy scores have barely budged, and the U.S. remains a middling performer in international comparisons, despite spending much more than the typical developed country. While many schools are strong, education reform as a whole has been an ongoing, expensive bust. (At times, embarrassingly so: A recent news story points to the graduating class of Chicago’s Paul Robeson High School, whose prom theme, embossed on printed invitations, is “This Is Are Story.”)
Desperate times demand desperate measures. And so I propose an education-reform plan that is simple and achievable, and that peer-reviewed academic research indicates would improve student achievement and future earnings, save government budgets billions from its very first year, and boost long-term economic growth.
Here’s the plan: Fire the worst teachers. That’s it. Terminate their employment. Don’t replace them. Simply reallocate their students to other classrooms. This approach isn’t merely a sign of desperation, although a bit of desperation is hardly unwarranted after decades of unfruitful efforts. The “fire the worst teachers” strategy may in fact be the optimal way to improve education, a first-choice approach rather than a last resort.
Economists Raj Chetty and John Friedman of Harvard and Jonah Rockoff of Columbia University have documented the cost to students of having a poor schoolteacher. Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff estimate that terminating the worst 5 percent of teachers and reassigning their students to average-performing teachers would increase those students’ lifetime earnings by between $130,000 and $190,000. Put another way, to convince a rational child to willingly accept a poor-performing teacher, you’d have to write that child a check for up to $190,000 on the spot. These figures indicate that eliminating bad teachers may be the quickest way to improve the job prospects of low-income Americans, reduce income inequality, and boost our future economy.
But this fire-the-worst policy could have benefits beyond those calculated by Chetty and his co-authors. Economists Thomas Dee of Stanford and James Wyckoff of the University of Virginia recently analyzed Washington, D.C.’s IMPACT program, which financially rewards the best teachers and threatens the worst with dismissal. Dee and Wyckoff compared teachers who were near the thresholds for bonuses or dismissal threats with teachers who actually crossed the thresholds. They found that the highest-graded teachers performed even better as a result of IMPACT’s bonuses. The lowest-graded teachers who received dismissal threats, by contrast, were more likely to either improve their performance or to quit than nearly-as-poor teachers who weren’t threatened with firing. In other words, the threat of dismissal caused the worst-performing teachers to either shape up or ship out. In either case, the quality of teachers in the classroom improves.
Firing the worst also could restore prestige to teaching by treating public-school teachers as all other professionals are treated. The Albany Times Union found that over a five-year period, New York state schools terminated only 38 teachers out of a workforce of 132,000. Either public schools are extremely good at identifying the best teachers — something for which there is very little evidence — or they are reluctant to fire the worst. But top college graduates simply aren’t attracted to occupations in which it is all but impossible to get fired. Indeed, the best graduates flock to software, law, finance, and other occupations where job security is fleeting. The strongest employees aren’t afraid to be judged on their merits, and they want to be surrounded by co-workers who are equally confident. Simply put, despites teachers’ unions’ calls for teachers to be recognized and lauded as professionals, in almost no other profession is incompetence so difficult to punish. (Really, try to think of one.)
This fire-the-worst policy would also save state and local governments billions. There are around 3.1 million public-school teachers, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The average teacher salary in 2013 was around $56,000, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimating that teachers receive another $25,000 in annual benefits. That’s a conservative estimate, since it doesn’t include teachers’ retiree health costs or unfunded pension liabilities. But based on these figures, firing the worst 5 percent of schoolteachers would generate annual savings of around $12 billion from day one.
Now for the objections. For instance, if you fire the worst 5 percent of teachers and reassign their students, won’t class sizes increase? Sure, but there’s very limited research showing that class size matters very much, and no evidence that it matters more than teacher quality. According to the NCES, the student-teacher ratio declined from over 22 in 1970 to around 16 today. Have you noticed big educational gains? Has Korea been harmed by having 31 students per class? Teacher unions understandably favor small classes but, as Education Secretary Arne Duncan has noted, you’d much prefer your child to be in a large class with a good teacher than a small class with a bad one.
Likewise, how can we be sure that teacher assessments will accurately identify the worst-performing 5 percent? We can’t, though teacher assessments are probably a more objective performance measure than most non-teaching employees receive as part of their annual performance reviews. Moreover, the Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff calculations assume that teacher assessments aren’t infallible: If we could identify the worst 5 percent of teachers with absolute certainty, the earnings gains to their students would rise to a quarter million dollars.
But why not simply recruit better teachers rather than fire bad ones? For instance, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten has proposed a “bar exam” for teachers, a more rigorous qualification test before they can enter the classroom. Here we hit on a key reason why better firing may be more important than better hiring: It is notoriously difficult to identify the best teachers without seeing them perform on the job. Research by economists Cory Koedel of the University of Missouri and Julian R. Betts of the University of California at San Diego shows that teacher quality varies considerably and has a real impact on how much students learn. Unfortunately, however, “observable teacher qualifications” — such as college quality, field of study, years of work experience, certification, or advanced degrees — are much poorer predictors of teacher performance than actual value-added assessments of teachers once they’re in the classroom. Judging teachers before they enter the classroom appears to be as effective as signing an athlete without having him step on the field.
As Vanderbilt University economist Dale Ballou has shown, even when schools are offered teacher candidates with better credentials, such as higher GPAs, majors in subjects other than education, or degrees from better colleges, schools don’t appear to choose them. If anything, better qualifications may make an applicant slightly less likely to be hired. The best explanation is that principals and superintendents are not so much opposed to better applicants as they are to different applicants, and they favor applicants who took the traditional education-school route to teaching.
Moreover, despite Weingarten’s analogy to the law, the bar exam isn’t how the legal profession itself ensures quality. Yes, lawyers must pass the bar before they can practice law. But that’s just the bare minimum. To reach excellence, most law firms still follow a ruthless “up or out” model in which the best associates become partners and the rest are expected to leave. When looking for a lawyer, a smart client looks for much more than just a passing grade on a bar exam. Parents should expect more in the teachers who educate their children.
Wouldn’t teaching attract better candidates if it paid better? Maybe, but maybe not. Teaching itself does not pay badly: $56,000 on average for roughly ten months’ work, with a benefits package that’s about twice as generous as those in comparable private-sector jobs. Most job openings in teaching don’t lack for applicants. In Connecticut in 2012–13, for instance, the typical teaching-job opening drew 56 applicants, a pool that included “many acceptable applicants,” according to data from the state department of education.
Moreover, as Dale Ballou and University of Missouri economist Michael Podgursky have shown, higher pay actually could lead to less qualified teachers. Here’s why: As Ballou found, schools don’t consistently hire the most qualified applicants; at best, it’s a crap shoot. Raising average pay would reduce the number of job openings due to lower teacher retirements and would increase the number of applicants for each job that did open up. As a result, any particular applicant would have a lower chance of being hired.
For less-skilled college students, that’s not such a big deal: They can major in education, and if they don’t get a teaching position, that education degree is no worse for their job prospects than many other less rigorous fields of study, such as liberal arts or general studies, would have been. But now think of the best college students: If these students major in education in order to pursue a teaching job, they may give up the chance to major in engineering, finance, or other potentially lucrative fields. The “opportunity cost” of pursuing teaching is already higher for the best college students than for the worst ones, and raising average teacher pay would increase that opportunity cost by reducing the best students’ chances of getting a teaching job. Thus, the result of raising teacher salaries could be to reduce the quality of the applicant pool. A number of empirical studies have shown that schools that offer higher salaries or better work conditions don’t necessarily attract better-quality teachers.
Education is “complicated,” we’ll hear. Sure. But is teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic really more complicated than making software, or automobiles, or anything else in the modern economy? And is education so different that we shouldn’t even attempt to apply the incentives that work in pretty much every other business? Firing the worst teachers won’t fix everything that’s wrong with U.S. public education. As teachers’ unions point out, many children don’t come to school prepared to learn. But even those students could benefit from having a better teacher.
We’ve had No Child Left Behind, and Race to the Top, and Common Core — all while avoiding what any decent manager would do in his first day on the job: dismiss poor performers. Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch identified the bottom 10 percent of employees. “There is no sugarcoating this,” Welch says. “They have to go.” Why is it that Jack Welch cared more about the quality of the GE employee making your dishwasher than your elected officials care about the quality of teachers educating your children?
— Andrew G. Biggs is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/380727/fire-worst-teachers-andrew-biggs