The Constitution Is Not Incidental President Obama and the elite modern left think freedoms in our Constitution which are essential to the American experience are just incidental.
When we discussed it yesterday morning on Face the Nation, the exact content of President Obama’s speech last night was not clear. It was still possible it could represent a marked change in strategy on the part of the White House, given that a steady drumbeat of criticism from fellow Democrats had put their approach to dealing with ISIS in its weakest political positioning yet. The intelligence community has been increasingly clear that, contra the evidence in prior fudged reports, ISIS is not contained.
The opportunity was there for President Obama to announce that he has reevaluated his approach in light of new information, and that the commitment necessary to crush ISIS would require a much more unified coalition and additional forces on the air and ground. It would have represented in a small way an act of unity with George W. Bush, who reevaluated his approach to Iraq in the wake of the 2006 elections, and risked significant political capital to fight for the surge policy to achieve a semblance of stability in the region. Instead, the speech turned out to be exactly what we have come to expect from this president: a stubborn insistence that his strategy is working.
Instead, the speech turned out to be exactly what we have come to expect from this president: a stubborn insistence that his strategy is working, despite the haters, and a glorious flame-throwing eradication of the amassed men of straw. As Rob Tracinski writes this morning, the speech was a lame attempt at a new framing for the conflict with ISIS, blameshifting to Congress for failing to enact a new AUMF or gun control measures. It will do nothing to achieve anything of the sort, in part because, as with most Obama speeches in his second term, it is more about divisiveness than unity.
Consider Obama’s dismissive line about his political opponents regarding guns. “What could possibly be the argument for allowing a terrorist suspect to buy a semiautomatic weapon?” Well, let us focus on one: that the denial of rights without due process of law is unconstitutional. Eugene Volokh:
“[C]an a person be denied constitutional rights, not based on a past criminal conviction or even a restraining order issued in court under a “preponderance of the evidence” standard, but based just on the government’s suspicion? The Feinstein proposal would have provided that the government could bar gun sales to a person if two conditions were met: “the Attorney General” “determines that the [buyer] is known (or appropriately suspected)” to have been involved in terrorism-related conduct “or providing material support support or resources for terrorism,” and if the Attorney General “has a reasonable belief that the [buyer] may use a firearm in connection with terrorism.”
“That’s a very low bar — denial of a constitutional right based on suspicion (albeit “appropriate[]”) about a person’s connections, and belief (albeit “reasonable” belief) about a person’s possible future actions … I can’t see how that’s constitutional. And though the bill would have let the buyer go to court to challenge the attorney general’s decision, the attorney general would simply have had to show by a preponderance of the evidence that the two elements were satisfied — that the attorney general appropriately suspected the buyer and that she had a reasonable belief about what the buyer may do.”
If you believe in civil liberties at all, the idea that the Attorney General of the United States could deny an explicitly guaranteed individual right in the Constitution based solely on suspicion, without having to show cause to the courts, should absolutely give you pause. As a matter of politics, it is the sort of grandstanding position and assertion of righteousness we have seen time and again from this administration, operating as it does without any humility or any respect for Constitutional norms. But if the White House thinks this message, combined with the New York Times front page editorial, is going to move the needle on guns at all they are deluding themselves almost as much as they are about ISIS. The problem is that the elite modern left thinks all these things which are essential to the American experience are just incidental.
(As an aside, this stance also is going to cause more difficulties for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Expect that Republicans in Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Ohio and Pennsylvania will be using the gun issue to great effect. But that comes later.)
The problem is that the elite modern left thinks all these things which are essential to the American experience are just incidental. They see no connection between Constitutional freedoms and the character of the people; between religious liberty and church attendance and family breakdown; between gun ownership and self-reliance and respect for property; between crushing free speech and destroying our capacity for free thought and creativity; between the loss of American stoicism and the all-encompassing welfare state. They see these originating factors as irritants or unimportant, and think they can all be gotten rid of without fundamentally altering the nature of who we are as a nation.
The liberal elites do this in part because such things are incidental to their own daily lives. Casting aside the Bill of Rights won’t fundamentally change who they are, at least not in any near term. So because you do not use guns, you don’t care about people who do, and you cannot understand why they would ever need or want such things. Same with church. Same with awful public schools, in neighborhoods you would never live. Your tribe of social justice warriors who left the campus will be just fine, so long as the government isn’t threatening gourmet coffee shops or wifi access or prestige cable dramas. The first priority of the United States government and the president is to secure our liberties – it always has been, and always ought to be.
There is one other point President Obama made – that as commander in chief, he has no greater responsibility than the security of the American people. It is the sort of thing lots of presidents have said. It also happens to be false. If the safety and security of Americans took precedence over all else, then The New York Times’s argument that every AR-15 in the country should be purchased at the cost of billions and melted down into slag would be more palatable – still wrong, but a matter for debate. This is not the case. The first priority of the United States government and the president is to secure our liberties – it always has been, and always ought to be.
Elite liberals like Obama and the New York Times editorialists do not understand that when they argue the American citizenry no longer has the capacity to bear arms, they are arguing that we have lost the capacity for self-government. They are not just saying you only have the right to self-defense as the Attorney General deems you fit; they are saying the inalienable rights of American individuals are subordinate to the will of high-minded politicians. Their interest is in keeping you safe and secure. Whether you are free is, in the grand scheme of things, incidental.
Secretary of Defense Ash Carter made a historic announcement on Thursday stating the Pentagon will open all combat jobs to women with zero restrictions.
“This means that as long as they qualify and meet the standards, women will now be able to contribute to our mission in ways they could not before. They’ll be able to drive tanks, give orders, lead infantry soldiers into combat,” Carter said. This included special operation jobs like the Navy SEALS, Rangers, and Special Forces.
There are a few things to consider about integrating women into all aspects of combat military operations when the end state is maintaining the most elite and lethal fighting force in the world.
First of all, there has to be a mission standard, not a gender standard. That means all physical and mental requirements are set to a standard that is necessary to accomplish whatever mission each particular unit is tasked with. No quotas, no double standards, no “separate but equal” physical standards. An individual, man or woman, either qualifies or they don’t. No exceptions. This means only a few women will likely be able to qualify for these special operations and infantry units, and that’s okay. It’s about quality, not quantity. We want the best for the job.
Second, there’s a considerable amount of controversy surrounding unit cohesion and morale, and whether men will be willing to accept women in their ranks and whether it will detract from the mission. In my experience as a Kiowa Warrior helicopter pilot in a male-dominated unit, if women who are accepted to the same unit successfully accomplished the exact same tests, physical requirements, and had no special treatment, there won’t be an issue. Resentment will occur if female quotas are applied to each unit to satisfy political agendas. An individual, man or woman, either qualifies or they don’t. No exceptions.
That is why it is that much more critical to maintain the mission standard. There are always exceptions to the rules, but that’s called life. If people, regardless of their gender, can’t handle someone disliking them for no reason at all, they probably shouldn’t be trying out for the infantry or a special operations job.
Third, Secretary Carter’s decision to allow women to serve in all combat jobs now means that the Selective Service law is out of date and discriminatory towards men. In 1981, the Supreme Court ruled that a male-only military draft was constitutional because women were banned from combat jobs and the draft’s intent is to fill combat replacements during a time of war. Female exemption from combat jobs meant there was no requirement to register with the Selective Service. With Carter’s historic decision, American women could likely be signing up for the Selective Service within 30 days of their eighteenth birthday in the very near future.
Bottom line: qualified women should be given the opportunity to try out, the same way qualified men can. If we’re enforcing equality, there are no exceptions. Women should neither be given special treatment nor be used by politicians or appointees who want to fill quotas who think their presence in these new units will benefit optics.
Once the dust settles and the media buzz is over, the mission still has to be accomplished. National security must always remain the military’s top priority by ensuring that we have the best soldiers accomplishing their very daunting missions, regardless of their gender. Amber Smith is national security writer and commentator. She is a former U.S. Army Kiowa Warrior helicopter pilot-in-command and Air Mission Commander. She is a combat veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. For more information visit OfficialAmberSmith.com
What do you call it when elites fly their private jets to an international climate change conference to forge a deal with despots that caps American prosperity without our consent? You call it progressivism.
It took a handful of gunmen only one night to impede free expression in Paris. Yet, according to the president, a massive and expensive effort to curb the 0.1 to 0.2 C of warming we might see over the next decade — the worst case scenario predicted by alarmists — is the most critical project facing mankind.
It took a handful of gunmen only one night to impede free expression in Paris.
That doesn’t mean Obama won’t use the issue of terrorism to refocus our attention where it belongs. Millions of people might live in fear and suffer under the genuine, deadly threat of radical Islam, but the president contends the Paris conference itself is “a powerful rebuke to the terrorists” and an “act of defiance” in the face of extremism.
Why not? True believers are rarely dissuaded by reality. Socialist Francois Hollande, president of a country that was not only recently a target of Islamic terror, but also one that witnessed the bloodiest conflicts of the 20th century, claims that “never have the stakes been so high because this is about the future of the planet, the future of life.” Never?
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, a man whose divided nation still suffers unconscionable destitution and tyranny, told leaders that humankind has “never faced such a test” as climate change. Never?
These are preposterous exaggerations that have as much to do with history and science as the Book of Revelation. But that’s nothing new, is it? Obama alleged yesterday that without a climate change agreement there could be “submerged countries, abandoned cities, fields that no longer grow” — assertions that are no more than fearmongering, ratcheted up over the decades by frustrated environmentalists and now confidently thrown around by presidents. These prophecies are tethered to reality in the same way Donald Trump’s whoppers are, although the media treats the former with undeserving respect.
Transforming ideology into a ‘science’ is not a new development on the Left.
Transforming ideology into a “science” is not a new development on the Left. But the most useful indicators tell us that humanity’s prospects are on the upswing: poverty is declining, crops are producing higher yields, and humans are living longer and healthier lives despite the mild warming we’ve experienced. And in spite of these advancements (or maybe because of them) Western leaders are prepared, conveniently enough, to cap growth, spread wealth, and centralize power in the way progressives have always wanted to cap growth, spread wealth, and centralize power.
Ripe For The Taking
The world looks ready for a deal. Developing nations will receive reparations for the capitalist sins of advanced nations — around $100 billion each year. Corporations will be subsidized so they can create more unproductive industries to meet arbitrary caps. And the worst carbon offenders in the world will have to do nothing. What’s not to like?
If a deal can be reached, Obama will have to trust that communist China — the world’s most prodigious carbon emitter — will voluntarily implement economic restraints around 30 years from now, by which time the U.S. will have to reach a 26 to 28 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Obama will implement them unilaterally. So China will have more of a say in what happens to our environmental policy than Congress. But Obama will also negotiate with a number of other unsavory despots, like the homicidal Robert Mugabe, who represents the African position at COP-21 negotiations. He will not, however, bring the deal to Congress, which represents the majority of the American people.
China will have a more say in what happens to our environmental policy than Congress.
The Paris agreement might be the biggest, most crucial international deal the world has ever known, but it is not important enough to be subjected to the traditional checks and balance of American governance. Global warming “does not pause for partisan gridlock,” the president explained this summer. Or, in other words, the president does not have to “pause” for Congress if he feels like using the regulatory state to implement his preferred partisan policy.
This kind of circumvention will be cheered by those who once feigned indignation when prior presidents abused executive power. This is really important, as you know. Obama hopes “to make climate change policy the signature environmental achievement of his, and perhaps any, presidency,” says an approving New York Times editor. Progressives are perfectly content to surrender freedoms to fight global warming. Perfectly content to give the executive unprecedented power to “act.” And when the private jets come back, and the pretend offsets are cashed in, and the moralizing begins, you will know they did it for your own good.
It
is amazing how out of touch liberals sound when confronted by evil. It
is almost as if true evil doesn't exist in their worldview, and in
their mind any action we take to combat evil somehow makes the enemy
stronger. Somehow it's better stick our heads in the sand and do
nothing. I'm amazed by how many articles I've read recently that says
ISIS can't be defeated. Um...we took on the Germans and the Japanese at the same time in WWII. I think we can handle 5,000 technologically backward thugs in the desert.
And
so what if they recruit more? Wouldn't certain annihilation serve as a
pretty good deterrent? Certainly it discourages terrorism more than
doing nothing (which seems to be the standard Liberal answer to evil).
Why not use this moment to truly unite as a race and say no to Muslim
terrorists who kill those with whom they disagree, destroy cultural
treasures, and make a mockery of the 'international community' of which
the President is so fond.
ISIS can only succeed if we overreact — so we shouldn’t
Amidst a week of fear over what the Islamic State can do, it's worth
stopping to be clear about what it can't do. It can't invade Paris. It
can't launch an air war against the United States. It can't even hold
its ground — ISIS expert Will McCants estimates the group has lost
between 20 and 25 percent of its territory in recent months.
The attack ISIS launched against Paris
is a horror. But it should take nothing away from its tragedy to say
more Americans have died from gun violence in seven days than died in
the Paris attacks. That's not to downplay the threat of terrorism, but
rather to highlight what makes it different: its capacity to terrorize.
"Terrorism is a crime against the mind," the security expert Bruce Schneier told me
after the Boston Marathon bombing. "The message of terrorist attacks is
you’re not safe and the government can’t protect you — that the
existing power structure can’t protect you."
Fear makes people do stupid things, and it makes countries do stupid
things, too. And it is fear that is ISIS's real weapon here.
ISIS can't hope to defeat America or France on the battlefield. It
can't turn back our jets or harm our aircraft carriers. It can only hope
to make us so afraid that we do something stupid that either helps it
or hurts us. ISIS can only succeed if, blinded by rage and terror, we
achieve its goals for it. There are at least two ways that might happen —
and one of them is already happening.
So far, 27 governors have said they won't accept Syrian refugees (though, for all the bluster, that's not a decision they have the power to make).
Their fear is understandable; large refugee inflows seem like an
obvious way ISIS could smuggle in foreign fighters. There's been a lot
of discussion about the (apparently fake) Syrian passport one of the
ISIS operatives carried, but its authenticity is almost beside the point
— it's clear that a terrorist could try to enter the country disguised
as a Syrian refugee, and for many, that's reason enough to close the
door.
But the backlash against the refugees plays into ISIS's hands. As Zack Beauchamp writes:
ISIS despises Syrian refugees: It sees them as traitors to the
caliphate. By leaving, they turn their back on the caliphate. ISIS
depicts its territory as a paradise, and fleeing refugees expose that as
a lie. But if refugees do make it out, ISIS wants them to be
treated badly — the more the West treats them with suspicion and fear,
the more it supports ISIS's narrative of a West that is hostile to
Muslims and bolsters ISIS's efforts to recruit from migrant communities
in Europe.
And that narrative benefits ISIS tangibly, not just spiritually.
"If they can spur a backlash against refugees, then they can recruit
from that population when the backlash occurs," says Daveed
Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of
Democracies. "This was their playbook in 2005 and 2005 when they were
known as al-Qaeda in Iraq. They would attack Shias, spark a backlash
against Sunnis, and then recruit by posing as the defender of the
Sunnis."
How ISIS benefits from a war
If you listen to ISIS's rhetoric, the group is particularly angry
over the West's use of airstrikes and drones. In a statement claiming
credit for the Paris attacks, ISIS said:
Let France and all nations following its path know that they will
continue to be at the top of the target list for the Islamic State and
that the scent of death will not leave their nostrils as long as they
partake in the crusader campaign, as long as they dare to curse our
Prophet (blessings and peace be upon him), and as long as they boast
about their war against Islam in France and their strikes against
Muslims in the lands of the Caliphate with their jets, which were of no
avail to them in the filthy streets and alleys of Paris.
ISIS wants to sell its followers on a holy war to defend Islam, kill
the infidels, and build the glorious caliphate. What it's getting,
instead, is a merciless, impersonal pounding from air-dropped ordnance.
Ideally, ISIS would like to be left alone to build its state. But if
that's not going to happen, pulling the West into an endless ground war
in a heartland of the Muslim world is a much better recruiting
opportunity than inviting young men to sit and around and wait to be
bombed. A chance to fight the infidels in defense of your land is more
appealing than a chance to die at the hands of their superior
technology. For that reason, says Gartenstein-Ross, "inserting ground
troops into Syria could play into their hands."
Similarly, ISIS's attack in Paris has led to resurgent sentiment in
America that the West is locked in a war not just with ISIS but with
"radical Islam" — a formulation that many experts believe ISIS would
prefer, as it alienates Muslims and helps ISIS portray itself as
defenders of its faith rather than as a gang of medieval thugs,
extortionists, and murderers. (Here's a very good rundown of the "radical Islam" issue.)
"Nothing about what these assholes are trying to do is going to work"
I am not going to pretend that I have the answer to how the West
should respond to ISIS. But in terms of how we should think about ISIS, I
remember something Schneier said:
The damage from terrorism is primarily emotional. To the extent this
terrorist attack succeeds has very little do with the attack itself.
It’s all about our reaction. We must refuse to be terrorized. Imagine if
the bombs were found and moved at the last second, and no one died, but
everyone was just as scared. The terrorists would have succeeded
anyway. If you are scared, they win. If you refuse to be scared, they
lose, no matter how much carnage they commit.
To that end, the best reaction to ISIS I've seen has come from, of
all places, a British comedian on HBO. I doubt John Oliver knows what to
do about ISIS either, but he does know how to keep them in perspective.
"Nothing about what these assholes are trying to do is going to work," Oliver said. "France is going to endure. And I'll tell you why: If you're in a war of culture and lifestyle with France, good fucking luck."
ISIS isn't strong. It's weak. That doesn't mean it's not dangerous,
or that it can't hurt us. But we shouldn't pretend these are invincible
superterrorists. They're murderers fighting a war that they will lose
and we will win. Part of how they recruit young fighters is by
pretending that's not true — pretending they have a chance in this
fight, that they are strong, that they have the West on its heels. We
shouldn't indulge their fantasies. We can mourn their victims without
believing their propaganda.
The thing you need to remember about ISIS, says Gartenstein-Ross, is
it is not just weak in the West, it's also loathed across the Middle
East: "America is unpopular in the Middle East, but if we had ISIS's
approval rating, we would see that as a very, very serious strategic
problem. They have a terrible brand. So part of what we need to do is
simply avoid making mistakes that will let them present themselves as a
defender of Muslims. We need to make sure Muslims continue to
overwhelmingly reject ISIS."
Yale’s Idiot Children Hysterical Yalies protest a free-speech panel.
By Kevin D. Williamson — November 10, 2015
New Haven, Conn. — Really, Yale — you shouldn’t have! All this for little ol’ me?
It wasn’t really for little ol’ me, in fact. On Friday, I was honored to be a guest of the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale, where I participated in a panel on freedom of speech with the wonderful writer Harry Stein and Professor Bradley A. Smith, a noted law scholar. The Yale kids did their screaming best to prevent us from having a conversation about free speech — the Yale kids are utterly immune to irony — but the event went much as planned. Coming and going, we were chanted at by idiot children screaming, “Genocide is not a joke!”
Of course it isn’t. Yale kids, on the other hand . . .
For the first several years of my life, I thought that “Yale man” was a synonym for “caveman,” because the only references to Yale I’d ever heard were from Thurston Howell III, who greeted displays of barbarism with “Heavens! A Yale man!” I thought of that when the police officer was obliged to carry the shrieking protester out of the venue where he’d come to put a stop to our free-speech discussion. If you’re wondering about the genocide thing, so were we. Turns out it’s a fairly typical college story — which is to say, a fairly stupid story — the short version of which is that Yale’s sensitivity babysitter sent out a pre-Halloween e-mail reminding all the smart Ivy League kids not to dress up like Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer; Professor Erika Christakis offered a reply bemoaning that college campuses have become “places of censure and prohibition”; a few students consequently went bonkers because their safe spaces were being invaded; and — here’s where we come in — Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, one of our panelists, remarked that these hysterical ninnies were acting like Professor Christakis had burned down an Indian village.
Which is to say: The idiot children were screaming about Lukianoff because he said they were overreacting to Christakis’s criticism that they tend to scream and overreact.
Well played, idiot children.
Of course, these idiot children aren’t children. These are young adults who can serve in the military, get married, buy firearms, drink alcohol, etc. They are at the beginning years of adult life, but they are entirely unprepared for adult life. It’s fashionable to blame Yale and other elite institutions for this sorry state of affairs, but, while the colleges certainly do their share of damage, the truth is that these children are maladjusted buffoons when they show up in New Haven. Yale doesn’t make them into hysterical ninnies — their families do.
There is a certain strain of upper-middle-class American culture that cultivates an excess of self-importance that grows cancerous when it isn’t counteracted by a deep understanding that the world is full of things that are much more important than you are: God, country, the rest of the human race. That American striver culture has many invaluable aspects — it is the culture that produces the high-achieving students who go to Yale and other elite institutions — but in the absence of transcendent values it turns everybody into a miniature Donald Trump. If your concerns in life are limited to personal economic advancement and status whoring, then everything — literally — is about you. That’s when you see things like Lena Dunham’s dopey political advertisements, which reduce citizenship to another shallow channel of self-satisfaction: Never mind patriotism, never mind history, never mind anything else — what does your vote say about you? How do it make you feel?
I understand why the idiot children at Yale are so sensitive. Really, I do. I sometimes list in my mind all of the poor, suffering people who get a raw deal in this life, and Yale students are always right at the top, with the Bangladeshi orphans and women traded by sex traffickers in Vietnam. Yale isn’t a safe space, Congo isn’t a safe space — it all makes sense, as long as you don’t expect it to make sense.
No, genocide isn’t a joke. I’m sure that the women and children being raped to death by Boko Haram appreciate that the idiot children at Yale are making stern faces and pumping their fists. As for me, I think that they’re clowns, and worse than that, really: They’re bad citizens, and defective people from defective families. They aren’t motivated by good will, but by fear: of the dawning realization that they, as people, aren’t really all that important, despite having been told all their lives how important they are.
We’re all real sorry about your safe spaces and your pacifier and your stuffed puppy, Caitlyn. Really we are. Yet the perpetual revolution of configured stars continues in its indifference, and the lot of man is ceaseless labor, and though you may find the thought terrifying — and thinking itself terrifying — it may turn out to be the case that the screaming in the dark you do on campus is more or less the same screaming in the dark you did in the crib, the same howl for the same reason.
— Kevin D. Williamson is roving correspondent for National Review.
Many people may share Senator Bernie Sanders' complaint that he was tired of hearing about Hillary Clinton's e-mails. But the controversy is about issues far bigger than e-mails.
One issue is the utter disaster created by the Obama administration's foreign policy in Libya, carried out by Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.
An even bigger issue is whether high officials of government can ignore the law and refuse to produce evidence when it is subpoenaed. If they can, then the whole separation of powers -- the checks and balances in the Constitution -- gives way to arbitrary government by corrupt officials who are accountable to no one.
This is not the first time Hillary Clinton has defied the law to cover up what she had done. When Bill Clinton was president, back in the 1990s, both he and Hillary developed the strategy of responding to charges of illegal actions on their part by stalling and stonewalling when either courts or Congress tried to get them to produce documents related to these charges.
Hillary claimed then, as now, that key documents had disappeared. Her more recent claim that many of her e-mails had been deleted was just Hillary 2.0. Only after three years of stalling and stonewalling on her part has the fact finally come out this year that those e-mails could be recovered, and now have been.
By this time, however, Hillary and her supporters used the same tactics that both Clintons used back in the 1990s -- namely, saying that this was old news, stuff that had already been investigated too long, that it was time to "move on."
That was Hillary 1.0. More recently Hillary 2.0 said, melodramatically, "What difference, at this point, does it make?"
One of the things that the former Secretary of State was now trying to cover up was the utter disaster of the Obama administration's foreign policy that she carried out in Libya.
Having intervened in Libya to help overthrow the government of Muammar Qaddafi, who was no threat to America's interests in the Middle East, the Obama administration was confronted with the fact that Qaddafi's ouster simply threw the country into such chaos that Islamic terrorists were now able to operate freely in Libya.
Just how freely was shown in September 2012, when terrorists stormed the compound in Benghazi where the American ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, was staying. They murdered him and three other Americans who tried to defend him.
Moreover, the terrorists did not even have to go into hiding afterwards, and at least one of them was interviewed by journalists. That's how chaotic Libya had become.
Meanwhile, there was an American presidential election campaign in 2012, and Barack Obama was presenting himself to the voters as someone who had defeated Al Qaeda and suppressed the terrorist threat in the Middle East.
Obviously the truth about this attack could have totally undermined the image that Obama was trying to project during the election campaign, and perhaps cost him the White House. So a lie was concocted instead.
The lie was that the attack was not by terrorists -- who supposedly had been suppressed by Obama -- but was a spontaneous protest demonstration against an American video insulting Islam, and that protest just got out of control.
Now that Hillary Clinton's e-mails have finally been recovered and revealed, after three years of stalling and stonewalling, they showed explicitly that she knew from the outset that the attack that killed Ambassador Stevens and others was not a result of some video but was a coordinated terrorist operation.
Nevertheless, Hillary 2.0, along with President Obama and national security advisor Susan Rice, told the world in 2012 that the deaths in Benghazi were due to the video, not a terrorist organization that was now operating freely in Libya, thanks to the policy that got rid of the Qaddafi government.
Yet that key fact was treated by the media as old news, and what was exciting now was how well Hillary 2.0 outperformed the Congressional committee on television. If the corruption and undermining of the American system of Constitutional government eventually costs us our freedom, will the media say, "What difference does it make now?"
At the recent televised debate among candidates for the Democrats' nomination for president, Hillary Clinton declared that "the wealthy pay too little" in taxes and "the middle class pays too much."
Some people might wish to argue about whether that is true or not, but no rational argument can be made on either side of this issue, because the words used are completely undefined. Nor is Hillary Clinton the only one who talks this way.
It is one of the many signs of the mindlessness of our times that all sorts of people declare that "the rich" are not paying their "fair share" in taxes, without telling us concretely what they mean by either "the rich" or "fair share."
Whether in politics or in the media, words are increasingly used, not to convey facts or even allegations of facts, but simply to arouse emotions. Undefined words are a big handicap in logic, but they are a big plus in politics, where the goal is not clarity but victory -- and the votes of gullible people count just as much as the votes of people who have common sense.
What a "fair share" of taxes means in practice is simply "more." No matter how high the tax rate is on people with a given income, you can always raise the tax rate further by saying that they are still not paying their "fair share."
Advocates of higher tax rates can get very specific when they want to. A recent article in the New York Times says that raising the tax rate on the top one percent of income earners to 40 percent would generate "about $157 billion" a year in additional tax revenue for the government.
This ignores mountains of evidence, going back for generations, showing that raising tax rates does not automatically mean raising tax revenues -- and has often actually led to falling tax revenues. A fantasy expressed in numbers is still a fantasy.
When the state of Maryland raised its tax rate on people with incomes of a million dollars a year or more, the number of such people living in Maryland fell from nearly 8,000 to fewer than 6,000. Although it had been projected that the tax revenue collected from such people in Maryland would rise by $106 million, instead these revenues FELL by $257 million.
There was a similar reaction in Oregon and in Britain. Rich people do not simply stand still to be sheared like sheep. They can either send their money somewhere else or they can leave themselves.
Currently, there are trillions of dollars of American money creating jobs overseas, in places where tax rates are lower. It is easy to transfer money electronically from country to country. But it is not nearly so easy for unemployed American workers to transfer themselves to where the jobs have been driven by high tax rates.
Conversely, there have been some reductions in high tax rates that brought in more tax revenues at the lower rates. This happened as far back as the Coolidge administration in the 1920s. It also happened in the Kennedy administration in the 1960s, the Reagan administration in the 1980s and most recently in the Bush 43 administration. There was a similar reaction in Iceland.
There is nothing inevitable about either a higher or a lower amount of tax revenues, whether the tax rate is raised or lowered. The government can only set tax rates. How that will affect the tax revenues actually received depends on how people react, and you can know that only after the fact. Sophisticated projections have often been laughably wrong.
Contrary to the way some people on the left conceive of the world, neither rich people nor poor people are inert blocks of wood, to be moved about like pieces on a chess board, to carry out some grand design from on high.
Even outright confiscations of people's wealth, including whole industries in some countries, have failed to spread prosperity, and have even led to collapsing economies.
But politics is not about what happened in the past. That is left for historians. What politicians are interested in is what they can get the public to believe in the present and to vote on in the future. Plans to "soak the rich," who are not paying their "fair share," have worked politically, time and time again -- and may well work yet again in the 2016 elections.
Thomas' anectdotes about Hispanic baseball players and Indian spelling bee champions is thought-provoking. The fact that some groups over-index in certain populations is never attributed to discrimination (nor should it - that would be ridiculous). Why is it different in any other performance-based population (school & work)?
One of the many painful signs of the mindlessness of our times was a recent section of the Wall Street Journal, built around the theme "What's Holding Women Back in the Workplace?"
Whenever some group is not equally represented in some institution or activity, the automatic response in some quarters is to assume that someone has prevented equality of outcomes.
This preconception of equal outcomes requires not one speck of evidence, and defies mountains of evidence to the contrary. Even in activities where individual performances are what determine outcomes, and those performances are easily measured objectively, there is seldom anything resembling equal representation.
For 12 consecutive years -- from 2001 through 2012 -- each home run leader in the American League had a Hispanic surname. When two American boys whose ancestors came from India tied for first place in the U.S. National Spelling Bee in 2014, it was the 7th consecutive year in which the U.S. National Spelling Bee was won by an Asian Indian.
We all know about the large over-representation of blacks among professional basketball players, and especially among the star players. The best-selling brands of beer in America were created by people of German ancestry, who also created China's famed Tsingtao beer. Of the 100 top-ranked Marathon runners in the world in 2012, 68 were Kenyans. The list could go on and on. Although blacks are over-represented among professional football players, even the most avid National Football League fan is unlikely to be able to recall seeing even one black player who kicked a punt or a point after touchdown.
Should there be an article titled: "What's Holding Black Kickers Back in the NFL?" Could it be that blacks are more interested in playing positions where there is more action and -- not incidentally -- more money?
Should there be an article titled: "What's Holding Back Whites in the National Basketball Association?" Or an article titled: "What's Holding Back Non-Asian Indian Kids from Winning the Spelling Bee?" Lawsuits claiming discrimination have been won on the basis of statistical disparities far smaller than these.
Among the many reasons for gross disparities in many fields, and at different income levels, is that human beings differ in what they want to do, quite aside from any differences in what they are capable of doing, or what others permit them to do. Observers cannot just grab a statistic and run with it, though that is what is done too often in the media -- and even in courts of law.
Particular opportunities are seized by some groups and used to rise from poverty to prosperity. But, for other groups, those same opportunities might as well not exist, because other groups are oriented in different directions, and those opportunities might not even catch their attention.
As regards statistical disparities in the representation of women in various occupations or at different income levels, a number of outstanding female scholars, including Professor Claudia Goldin of Harvard, have shown many ways in which women's circumstances and priorities differ from those of men.
Men, for example, don't get pregnant. And where children are raised by a single parent, that parent is a mother far more often than a father. You cannot work the 60-hour weeks that are needed to reach the top in some fields when you have children to raise.
But we seldom hear about such facts, while we constantly hear charlatans loudly proclaiming numerical "gender gaps" in employment or pay, and suing for discrimination.
Charlatans are only half the story. The other half includes people who are gullible enough to be led around like sheep by those exploiting the prevailing political correctness dispensed in our schools, colleges and the media.
Moreover, the sheep in both high and low positions often also implicitly believe that the cause of statistical disparities must have originated wherever the statistics were collected, and therefore must be the fault of the employer -- even though the factors behind those disparities may have originated far from the employer and long before the people involved reached the employer.
So long as there is widespread gullibility, there will be charlatans ready to exploit it for their own benefit, either politically or financially.
The 'Affordable Housing' Fraud Thomas Sowell | Sep 29, 2015
Nowhere has there been so much hand-wringing over a lack of "affordable housing," as among politicians and others in coastal California. And nobody has done more to make housing unaffordable than those same politicians and their supporters.
A recent survey showed that the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco was just over $3,500. Some people are paying $1,800 a month just to rent a bunk bed in a San Francisco apartment.
It is not just in San Francisco that putting a roof over your head can take a big chunk out of your pay check. The whole Bay Area is like that. Thirty miles away, Palo Alto home prices are similarly unbelievable.
One house in Palo Alto, built more than 70 years ago, and just over one thousand square feet in size, was offered for sale at $1.5 million. And most asking prices are bid up further in such places.
Another city in the Bay Area with astronomical housing prices, San Mateo, recently held a public meeting and appointed a task force to look into the issue of "affordable housing."
Public meetings, task forces and political hand-wringing about a need for "affordable housing" occur all up and down the San Francisco peninsula, because this is supposed to be such a "complex" issue.
Someone once told President Ronald Reagan that a solution to some controversial issue was "complex." President Reagan replied that the issue was in fact simple, "but it is not easy."
Is the solution to unaffordable housing prices in parts of California simple? Yes. It is as simple as supply and demand. What gets complicated is evading the obvious, because it is politically painful.
One of the first things taught in an introductory economics course is supply and demand. When a growing population creates a growing demand for housing, and the government blocks housing from being built, the price of existing housing goes up.
This is not a breakthrough on the frontiers of knowledge. Economists have understood supply and demand for centuries -- and so have many other people who never studied economics.
Housing prices in San Francisco, and in many other communities for miles around, were once no higher than in the rest of the United States. But, beginning in the 1970s, housing prices in these communities skyrocketed to three or four times the national average.
Why? Because local government laws and policies severely restricted, or banned outright, the building of anything on vast areas of land. This is called preserving "open space," and "open space" has become almost a cult obsession among self-righteous environmental activists, many of whom are sufficiently affluent that they don't have to worry about housing prices.
Some others have bought the argument that there is just very little land left in coastal California, on which to build homes. But anyone who drives down Highway 280 for thirty miles or so from San Francisco to Palo Alto, will see mile after mile of vast areas of land with not a building or a house in sight.
How "complex" is it to figure out that letting people build homes in some of that vast expanse of "open space" would keep housing from becoming "unaffordable"?
Was it just a big coincidence that housing prices in coastal California began skyrocketing in the 1970s, when building bans spread like wildfire under the banner of "open space," "saving farmland," or whatever other slogans would impress the gullible?
When more than half the land in San Mateo County is legally off-limits to building, how surprised should we be that housing prices in the city of San Mateo are now so high that politically appointed task forces have to be formed to solve the "complex" question of how things got to be the way they are and what to do about it?
However simple the answer, it will not be easy to go against the organized, self-righteous activists for whom "open space" is a sacred cause, automatically overriding the interests of everybody else.
Was it just a coincidence that some other parts of the country saw skyrocketing housing prices when similar severe restrictions on building went into effect? Or that similar policies in other countries have had the same effect? How "complex" is that?
Chris Cuomo is a broadcast journalist, currently anchoring at CNN. He previously was the ABC News chief law and justice correspondent, and co-anchor for ABC’s 20/20. He’s also the brother of the current governor of New York and the son of a previous governor of New York.
Oh, and he has no idea where babies come from.
He interviewed Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) the day after the first GOP presidential primary debate last week. And Cuomo came out hard in support of abortion. That’s not particularly noteworthy in the current media environment, where journalists openly advocate for abortion.
But it is worth noting that he did it in a mind-numbingly idiotic manner.
Chris Cuomo Does Not Understand Politics. At All
First he tried to play gotcha by replaying a clip where Fox News’ Megyn Kelly wondered how Rubio justified ending lives just because they began “violently through no fault of the baby.” He had responded that he didn’t believe such terminations of lives were justified. A-ha! says Cuomo:
CUOMO: All right. The first situation, as you know now, 2013, you were on that bill 1617 that did have a carve-out for rape and incest. So, it seems that you had your own record wrong. Is that something you want to correct this morning?
Apparently Cuomo, who, again, is a major journalist, has never heard of politicians working to pass any piece of legislation other than pieces of legislation that could only be passed in the perfect dream world of the legislator. Rubio explained, calmly, that all pro-life politicians and groups, including the Catholic Conference of Bishops, support such pieces of legislation, because if passed they help protect some unborn children.
The arrogance, by the way, of not understanding how politics works and posing the question, “Is that something you want to correct this morning?” is too much, no? By the way, S. 1617—the “If You Like Your Health Care Plan, You Can Keep It Act“—was introduced in 2013 and was cosponsored by Rubio, but doesn’t mention abortion, rape, or incest. So Cuomo must have been confused about the legislation under discussion.
Also worth noting is that Rubio tried to help Cuomo understand this basic political process by noting that he supports a 20-week abortion ban but that such support does not mean he is in favor of abortions at 19 weeks.
Cuomo said he didn’t think that was a fitting analogy. He also claimed to understand Rubio’s argument but insist that some imagined inconsistency was still problematic. Rubio remained shockingly calm.
We’re not even close to the stupidest part of the interview. Before we get there, let’s note that when Rubio said he believed all human life is valuable and deserving of protection of the law, Cuomo responded
CUOMO: It’s interesting that draw distinctions about the old and the new in certain regards. But on this one, you say it’s timeless because as you know, our cultural mores in this country, certainly the opinions of women are not in step with what you’re saying right now. You’re comfortable with that?
The opinions of women are not pro-life? I know this is a common trope pulled out by radical abortion extremists such as Planned Parenthood, but in fact one’s sex does not explain one’s view on abortion. Men and women in America’s newsrooms might be uniform in their support of abortion, but the actual country is about as divided as can be. And depending on the questions you ask and the polling samples, the majority position swings back and forth. A recent Gallup poll showed 50 percent of Americans saying they were pro-choice—the first time it had been that high in seven years—but three years ago women were more likely to self-affiliate as pro-life than pro-choice.
It’s beyond time for the media to stop carrying water for the abortion industry by claiming that legalized killing of unborn children is something women all favor. We don’t. And we’re sick of the media spreading falsehoods that claim otherwise.
Besides, if we’re talking about unpopular abortion views, how about CNN start harassing abortion extremists about how their support for killing late-term unborn children is a view huge majorities of Americans oppose?
OK, here’s where the interview really gets good though. You can watch some of it here:
Let me explain. This is not the first time that Marco Rubio has had to explain the most basic science to our mainstream media. And I hope he does it again, because it’s absolutely hilarious to watch our media attempt to claim that “science” (invocation of which is best understood as an incantation of a beloved deity) hasn’t issued its ruling on the matter.
Over a year ago, Rubio said:
The science is settled, it’s not even a consensus, it is a unanimity, that human life begins at conception. So I hope the next time that someone wags their finger about science, they’ll ask one of these leaders on the left: ‘Do you agree with the consensus of scientists that say that human life begins at conception?’ I’d like to see someone ask that question.
Bump wrote a smug piece about how a pro-abortion doctors group says pregnancybegins when the human embryo implants in the lining of a woman’s uterus. He thought that this (recently changed) definition of pregnancy meant that implantation was when human life began, instead of when it actually begins, which is at conception.
If you are in any way confused about this process, here’s a very helpful and easy to understand animated video about it:
The video begins:
Fertilization is the epic story of a single sperm facing incredible odds to unite with an egg and form a new human life.
It is the story of all of us.
Emphasis mine. The animation explains the process of how a single sperm attaches to the egg cell membrane and how their outer membranes fuse. You can watch for the details, but note this from late in the video:
At this moment, a unique genetic code arises, instantly determining gender, hair color, eye color and hundreds of other characteristics.
This new single cell, the zygote, is the beginning of a new human being.
Here are many more examples of what “science” has to say about the fairly simple and obvious fact that human life begins at conception.
So I have this friend who is simultaneously very bad with directions but also adamant that she knows where she’s going. Thankfully this trait works out to be somehow charming. But on Cuomo, the combination of having no idea what he’s talking about and arrogance about same isn’t nearly so cute. Here’s a sample:
CUOMO: This is not my argument. This is a presented argument of science. It having a DNA map. So does a plant. It’s about when it becomes a human being. I’m not saying what I think in answer to that question. That’s not my position. But don’t you think, if you want to be a leader of the future, that’s a question that deserves an answers that is definitive beyond your faith, when does life begin. None of you are calling for any type at panel—
RUBIO: At conception. At conception.
CUOMO: That’s your faith. That’s your faith. That’s not science.
RUBIO: No, it isn’t. That’s science.
CUOMO: It is not definitive science.
RUBIO: Absolutely it is.
CUOMO: I will have scientists on this show all morning—
RUBIO: It absolutely is.
CUOMO: From all walks of life who will say, we cannot say it is definitely human life at conception.
In fact, no. All scientists know that life begins at conception. It’s so bleeding obvious and basic that it’s sort of like saying “things begin at the beginning!” No scientist will argue that human life does not begin when, well, it begins. Which is at conception.
Also, you’ll have to read the full transcript and make up your own mind, but I think Cuomo was kind of trying to argue that while something begins at conception, we don’t even know if it will or won’t be human as opposed to something else.
Chris Cuomo Has Vocational Confusion
Cuomo hilariously, if completely unconvincingly, tried to say that his lengthy and oddly focused rant against scientific basics (albeit while invoking science) was not a reflection of his own views (heh). He mentioned that he self-identifies as a Catholic, something also mentioned by abortion radicals such as Rep. Nancy Pelosi.
But the job of a mainstream journalist is not to lecture a politician, particularly if said lecture is riddled with scientific inaccuracies. It’s also not to give concern-trolling campaign advice, as he does here:
CUOMO: I’m saying, if you’re going to be a leader of the future, this is something that deserves an answer that goes beyond faith. That’s all I’m saying as a suggestion, not as an answer—not as a suggestion to the answer to the question.
Let’s leave apart the fact that Rubio repeatedly and accurately conveyed scientific arguments, as opposed to made a case from religion. Why is a CNN anchor giving a politician suggestions, based in completely and utter ignorance of science, anyway?
Listen, we all get that the media are all in on Team Abortion. It’s beyond obvious. But that they have to massacre science in the service of that campaign is certainly telling.
Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is a senior editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter at@mzhemingway
Executives of Planned Parenthood’s federally subsidized meat markets — your tax dollars at work — lack the courage of their convictions. They should drop the pretense of conducting a complex moral calculus about the organs they harvest from the babies they kill.
First came the video showing a salad-nibbling, wine-sipping Planned Parenthood official explaining how “I’m going to basically crush below, I’m going to crush above” whatever organ (“heart, lung, liver”) is being harvested. Then the president of a Planned Parenthood chapter explainedthe happy side of harvesting: “For a lot of the women participating in the fetal tissue donation program, they’re having a procedure that may be a very difficult decision for them and this is a way for them to feel that something positive is coming from . . . a very difficult time.” George F. Will writes a twice-weekly column on politics and domestic and foreign affairs. He began his column with The Post in 1974, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1977. He is also a contributor to FOX News’ daytime and primetime programming.View Archive Facebook RSS
“Having a procedure” — stopping the beating of a human heart — can indeed be a difficult decision for the woman involved. But it never is difficult for Planned Parenthood’s abortionists administering the “procedure.” The abortion industry’s premise is: At no point in the gestation of a human infant does this living being have a trace of personhood that must be respected. Never does it have a moral standing superior to a tumor or a hamburger in the mother’s stomach.
In 1973, the Supreme Court, simultaneously frivolous and arrogant, discovered constitutional significance in the fact that the number nine is divisible by three. It decreed that the status of pre-born human life changes with pregnancy’s trimesters. (What would abortion law be if the number of months of gestation were a prime number — seven or 11?) The court followed this preposterous assertion with faux humility, insisting it could not say when life begins. Then, swerving back to breathtaking vanity, it declared when “meaningful” life begins — “viability,” when the fetus is “potentially able” to survive outside the womb.
When life begins is a scientific, not a philosophic or theological, question: Life begins when the chromosomes of the sperm fuse with those of the ovum, forming a distinctive DNA complex that controls the new organism’s growth. This growth process continues unless a natural accident interrupts it or it is ended by the sort of deliberate violence Planned Parenthood sells.
Another video shows the craftsmanship of Planned Parenthood’s abortionists — tiny limbs and hands from dismembered babies. To the craftsmen, however, these fragments are considered mere organic stuff. People who proclaim themselves both pro-choice and appalled by the videos are flinching from the logic of their extremism.
Cecile Richards, Planned Parenthood’s president, apologizes for the “tone”of her operatives’ chatter about crushing babies. But the tone flows from Planned Parenthood’s premise: Why be solemn about meat?
Even partial-birth abortion is — must be — a sacrament in the Church of “Choice.” This sect knows that its entire edifice depends on not yielding an inch on its insistence that what an abortion kills never possesses a scintilla of moral significance.
In partial-birth abortion, a near-term baby is pulled by the legs almost out of the birth canal, until the base of the skull is exposed so the abortionist can suck out its contents. During Senate debates on this procedure, three Democrats were asked: Suppose a baby’s head slips out of the birth canal — the baby is born — before the abortionist can kill it. Does the baby then have a right to live? Two of the Democrats refused to answer. The third said the baby acquires a right to life when it leaves the hospital.
The nonnegotiable tenet in today’s Democratic Party catechism is not opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline or support for a $15 minimum wage. These are evanescent fevers. As the decades roll by, the single unshakable commitment is opposition to any restriction on the right to inflict violence on pre-born babies. So today there is a limitless right to kill, and distribute fragments of, babies that intrauterine medicine can increasingly treat as patients.
We are wallowing in this moral swamp because the Supreme Court accelerated the desensitization of the nation by using words and categories about abortion the way infants use knives and forks — with gusto, but sloppily. Because Planned Parenthood’s snout is deep in the federal trough, decent taxpayers find themselves complicit in the organization’s vileness. What kind of a government disdains the deepest convictions of citizens by forcing them to finance what they see in videos — Planned Parenthood operatives chattering about bloody human fragments? “Taxes,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., “are what we pay for civilized society.” Today they finance barbarism.
— Barack Obama, address to Planned Parenthood, April 26, 2013 Charles Krauthammer writes a weekly political column that runs on Fridays. View Archive
Planned Parenthood’s reaction to the release of a clandestinely recorded conversation about the sale of fetal body parts was highly revealing. After protesting that it did nothing illegal, it apologized for the “tone” of one of its senior directors.
Her remarks lacked compassion, admitted Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards. As if Dr. Deborah Nucatola’s cold and casual discussion over salad and wine of how the fetal body can be crushed with forceps in a way that leaves valuable organs intact for sale is some kind of personal idiosyncrasy. On the contrary, it’s precisely the kind of psychic numbing that occurs when dealing daily with industrial scale destruction of the growing, thriving, recognizably human fetus.
Planned Parenthood president responds to video(2:19) Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, apologized for remarks captured on video that show Deborah Nucatola, an executive of the organization, casually discussing abortion techniques aimed at preserving the internal organs of fetuses for use in research. Richards defended the organization’s tissue donation program, which she said is purely voluntary for the women and does not yield a profit for Planned Parenthood. (Thomas Johnson/The Washington Post)
This was again demonstrated by the release this week of a second video showing another official sporting that same tone, casual and even jocular, while haggling over the price of an embryonic liver. “If it’s still low, then we can bump it up,” she joked, “I want a Lamborghini.”
Abortion critics have long warned that the problem is not only the obvious — what abortion does to the fetus — but also what it does to us. It’s the same kind of desensitization that has occurred in the Netherlands with another mass exercise in life termination: assisted suicide. It began as a way to prevent the suffering of the terminally ill. It has now become so widespread and wanton that one-fifth of all Dutch assisted-suicide patients are euthanized without their explicit consent.
The Planned Parenthood revelations will have an effect. Perhaps not on government funding, given the Democratic Party’s unwavering support and the president wishing it divine guidance. Planned Parenthood might escape legal jeopardy as well, given the loophole in the law banning the sale of fetal parts that permits compensation for expenses (shipping and handling, as it were).
But these revelations will have an effect on public perceptions. Just as ultrasound altered feelings about abortion by showing the image, the movement, the vibrant living-ness of the developing infant in utero, so too, I suspect, will these Planned Parenthood revelations, by throwing open the door to the backroom of the clinic where that being is destroyed.
It’s an ugly scene. The issue is less the sale of body parts than how they are obtained. The nightmare for abortion advocates is a spreading consciousness of how exactly a healthy fetus is turned into a mass of marketable organs, how, in the words of a senior Planned Parenthood official, one might use “a less crunchy technique” — crush the head, spare the organs — “to get more whole specimens.”
The effect on the public is a two-step change in sensibilities. First, when ultrasound reveals how human the living fetus appears. Next, when people learn, as in these inadvertent admissions, what killing the fetus involves.
Remember. The advent of ultrasound has coincided with a remarkable phenomenon: Of all the major social issues, abortion is the only one that has not moved toward increasing liberalization. While the legalization of drugs, the redefinition of marriage and other assertions of individual autonomy have advanced, some with astonishing rapidity, abortion attitudes have remained largely static. The country remains evenly split.
Key moments from the undercover recording with Planned Parenthood executive(7:56) The anti-abortion group Center for Medical Progress posted a long version of the conversation between a Planned Parenthood executive and undercover actors on YouTube along with an shorter version that has been shared widely. These are excerpts of the longer version. (CenterforMedicalProgress.org)
What will be the reaction to these Planned Parenthood revelations? Right now, to try to deprive it of taxpayer money. Citizens repelled by its activities should not be made complicit in them. But why not shift the focus from the facilitator to the procedure itself?
The House has already passed a bill banning abortion after 20 weeks. That’s far more fruitful than trying to ban it entirely because, apart from the obvious constitutional issue, there is no national consensus about the moral status of the early embryo. There’s more agreement on the moral status of the later-term fetus. Indeed, about two-thirds of Americans would ban abortion after the first trimester.
There is more division about the first trimester because one’s views of the early embryo are largely a matter of belief, often religious belief. One’s view of the later-term fetus, however, is more a matter of what might be called sympathetic identification — seeing the image of a recognizable human infant and, now, hearing from the experts exactly what it takes to “terminate” its existence.
The role of democratic politics is to turn such moral sensibilities into law. This is a moment to press relentlessly for a national ban on late-term abortions.
The Insidious Political Power of Minimum-Wage Laws
By Kevin D. Williamson — July 29, 2015
One of the great spectacles of the day is the sight of French workers engaged in violent protests, aggrieved that their economic positions are being undermined by the cheap labor of foreign workers — Germans, in this case.
A bit of advice for the workingmen of France: When the people who make Mercedes-Benz and Leica are the cheap foreign labor you’re complaining about, perhaps it is time to reconsider some basic economic assumptions.
The dispute pits the French farmers’ unions — because of course French farmers are unionized — against the German dairy cartel, which bears the Teutonically sinister-sounding name Milchindustrie Verband. It sounds like the sort of outfit that ought to employ Ernst Stavro Blofeld. In fact, everything sounds 27.5 percent more evil in German; a recent confrontation between German dairy farmers and commercial buyers featured the slogan “Milch Ist Macht!” — “Milk Is Power!”
As the International Labour Organization runs the numbers, what this means is that workers in France, the nation with the eleventh-highest wages in the world (averaging $2,886/month), is feeling victimized by unfair competition from Germany, the nation with the 13th-highest wages in the world (averaging $2,720/month). The free-trading nations that dominate the top spots on the list — the United States, the United Kingdom, Norway, etc. — do not seem to believe themselves much victimized by relatively low-wage workers in Sweden and Canada. Odd, that.
As welfare-state models go, the best ones seem to be the most straightforward: Impose high taxes on one end and write large checks on the other. This template has the added benefit of being honest and transparent, which is why no politician willingly embraces it.
The worst kind of welfare state is the welfare state that is ashamed of itself and therefore feels obliged to pretend to be something it isn’t. Instead of forthrightly taxing individuals and businesses and converting that revenue to welfare benefits in an honest and transparent way, covert welfare statists usually attempt to disguise welfare payments as wages. Artificial wage increases imposed by law perform the same function as ordinary welfare benefits — transferring income from politically disfavored groups to politically favored groups — but the revenue doesn’t show up on the government ledger as taxes and the outlays don’t show up as spending. Everybody in government gets the opportunity to engage in a little delicious moral preening about how they’re doing the right thing for the hardworking people of wherever while maintaining fiscal discipline, as if the underlying facts of the policy — “Patron X shall give Client Y at least Z amount of money” — weren’t fundamentally identical to those in a transparent welfare state.
Which is to say, laws mandating wages and benefits beyond market prices are political money laundering for unpopular welfare payments. They work brilliantly: Americans have a generally low opinion of welfare programs, but large majorities of us — including majorities of Republicans — support raising the minimum wage.
The problem, as coddled French dairymen and millions of unemployed Americans ought to know, is that a wage is a price — the price of a particular quantity of labor — and when prices go up, demand goes down. Politicians may break all sorts of laws, but they cannot break the law of supply and demand.
In the U.S. context, what this means is that the left hand of government spends its time adding to the cost of employing Americans with wage and benefits mandates while the right hand of government spends its time trying to enact legislation that will prevent these higher costs from having their natural effect, e.g. by restricting trade with those perfidious low-wage foreigners in Germany and Sweden, or by bribing and bullying companies into knuckling under to political demands. This produces a labyrinthine network of mandates, penalties, and subsidies that is so complex as to be incomprehensible to anybody without the time and resources to make a careful study of the matter, which in effect renders the architecture of this secondary welfare state invisible to the typical voter.
And that, of course, is the point.
The current fashion among progressives is the demand for a $15/hour minimum wage. Bernie Sanders supports it, Elizabeth Warren supports it, Martin O’Malley supports it, and Hillary Rodham Clinton . . . won’t quite answer the question.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that a $15/hour minimum wage would throw 3.3 million Americans out of work. Jonathan Meer and Jeremy West of Texas A&M put the number at 6.6 million lost jobs; Jeffrey Clemens and Michael Wither’s estimate for the National Bureau of Economic Research puts the number of lost jobs at 16.8 million. (More here.)
If those jobs do in fact disappear, the politicians will try to redress this development with more economy-distorting subsidies and penalties, and when these fail you can be confident that Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump will make a lot of noise about the wily Chinese and dirty Mexicans “stealin’ our jobs!”
Last week I debated New York Times columnist and Nobel-prize-winning economist Paul Krugman in front of 2,000 people at FreedomFest in Las Vegas. It was billed as the economic showdown of the year, and the major theme was socialism vs. capitalism.
Given the financial turmoil in Greece, Puerto Rico, Argentina and most of the eurozone, it would be hard to think of a worse time for Krugman to be defending big government.
That might explain why at the last minute he got cold feet and vetoed cameras in the auditorium. That was a huge disappointment because the debate should have been seen by hundreds of thousands of people. But some bootleg videos can be found on YouTube for those interested in watching the massacre — though I'm admittedly biased.
Still, the debate was cordial and particularly helpful in illuminating how the left sees the world working. Krugman is witty and sharp and a staunch advocate of nearly everything government does. He defended the Postal Service, ObamaCare, Medicare, the minimum wage and the welfare state — which he says is rapidly shrinking.
The first issue we squared off on was "stimulus." My point was that Obamanomics gave America the weakest recovery in at least three generations and is running $2.5 trillion in GDP and 8 million jobs behind the Reagan recovery.
Krugman's response was that the 2008 financial crisis was so catastrophic that 2% growth was the best we could expect. Except that even the Obama administration admits that the recovery turned out weaker with the stimulus than we would have seen without it.
During the debate Krugman called John Maynard Keynes one of the two greatest economists of all time. But when Keynesian economics was put to the test by Obama, it crashed.
My main attack was that socialism, progressivism, Krugmanism — whatever "ism" you call it — is in collapse everywhere: Greece, Portugal, Argentina, Puerto Rico, Connecticut, etc.
He had a tough time explaining the meltdown in Greece. It's a socialistic state that has high tax rates on the rich, generous welfare benefits, strong unions, a tight regulatory environment and all the other things Krugman preaches — and it's now functionally bankrupt.
He argued that the creditors are being too harsh and that there has been too much government austerity. But there is no Greek austerity. Government spending climbed to 59% of GDP in 2013 and is still at 49%. Debt as a share of GDP has soared to 175%. This is a spending splurge, not austerity.
Krugman is for a single-payer health care system and argues that socialist health care systems provide better health outcomes at cheaper cost around the world. My response was that third-party payer systems in education and health care are what's driving up costs and that health care premiums paid by families are rising way faster than Obama predicted. Where are the $2,500 in family savings?
Medicare is apparently the glittering success story of government, yet it's running unfunded liabilities in the tens of trillions of dollars.
Krugman was lamest in explaining the migration of a thousand people a day from blue states to red. Blue states follow Krugman's advice with higher tax rates, costly welfare programs, forced union laws and tort systems that reward trial lawyers over people and businesses. He did concede that land-use restrictions in blue states were deterring development.
His response to the far superior economic performance of Texas and Florida over California and New York, for example, was to argue that the migration is due to air conditioning. Most of the audience howled at that one, but he wasn't joking. Apparently people are moving from San Diego to Houston for the weather.
At the end of the debate we were asked what three policies would be best for promoting prosperity in America. I argued for school choice, personal accounts for Social Security and a flat tax. He argued for more power to unions to reduce income inequality. He wants to give more power to unions that have bankrupted the steel industry, the auto industry, the states, localities, public school systems and all of Europe. This is a remedy?
Krugman blamed Republicans, George W. Bush and capitalism for the Great Recession. But I couldn't resist noting that Krugman never wants to take responsibility for his own policy blunders.
In late 2002 he advised that "to fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment." And to do that "Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble." We got the Krugman housing bubble; the rest is history.
My big takeaway from the debate is that advocates of free-market capitalism need to aggressively call out the Krugman-Obama-New York Times-Hillary Clinton-IMF crowd for bringing misery and decline to so many places around the world with their wildly irresponsible debt and spending policies. They're on the run because their model is imploding right before our very eyes here in the U.S. and around the world.
Perhaps worst of all, their obsession with income inequality and spreading the wealth is only making the poor poorer, and driving the middle class downward, as even Clinton herself acknowledged this week. Krugman and his followers are on the losing side of history. No wonder he didn't want this debate televised.
• Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and part of the Investor Business Daily's Brain Trust.
When you write a column, as did I two weeks ago, headlined “The worst agreement in U.S. diplomatic history,” you don’t expect to revisit the issue. We had hit bottom. Or so I thought. Then on Tuesday the final terms of theIranian nuclear deal were published. I was wrong.
Who would have imagined we would be giving up the conventional arms and ballistic missile embargoes on Iran? In nuclear negotiations? Charles Krauthammer writes a weekly political column that runs on Fridays. View Archive Facebook RSS
When asked Wednesday at his news conference why there is nothing in the deal about the American hostages being held by Iran, President Obama explained that this is a separate issue, not part of nuclear talks.
Are conventional weapons not a separate issue? After all, conventional, by definition, means non-nuclear. Why are we giving up the embargoes?
Because Iran, joined by Russia — our “reset” partner — sprung the demand at the last minute, calculating that Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry were so desperate for a deal that they would cave. They did. And have convinced themselves that they scored a victory by delaying the lifting by five to eight years. (Ostensibly. The language is murky. The interval could be considerably shorter.)
Obama's full remarks on Iran nuclear deal(67:40) President Obama defended his nuclear deal with Iran during a news conference on Wednesday, saying the deal represented a "powerful display of American leadership and diplomacy." (AP)
Obama claimed in his news conference that it really doesn’t matter, because we can always intercept Iranian arms shipments to, say, Hezbollah.
But wait. Obama has insisted throughout that we are pursuing this Iranian diplomacy to avoid the use of force, yet now blithely discards a previous diplomatic achievement — the arms embargo — by suggesting, no matter, we can just shoot our way to interdiction.
Moreover, the most serious issue is not Iranian exports but Iranian imports — of sophisticated Russian and Chinese weapons. These are untouchable. We are not going to attack Russian and Chinese transports.
The net effect of this capitulation will be not only to endanger our Middle East allies now under threat from Iran and its proxies, but also to endanger our own naval forces in the Persian Gulf. Imagine how Iran’s acquisition of the most advanced anti-ship missiles would threaten our control over the gulf and the Strait of Hormuz, waterways we have kept open for international commerce for a half-century.
The other major shock in the final deal is what happened to our insistence on “anytime, anywhere” inspections. Under the final agreement, Iran has the right to deny international inspectors access to any undeclared nuclear site. The denial is then adjudicated by a committee — on which Iran sits. It then goes through several other bodies, on all of which Iran sits. Even if the inspectors’ request prevails, the approval process can take 24 days.
And what do you think will be left to be found, left unscrubbed, after 24 days? The whole process is farcical.
The action now shifts to Congress. The debate is being hailed as momentous. It is not. It’s irrelevant. The Iran deal: Who’s for it and who’s not
Congress won’t get to vote on the deal until September. But Obama is taking the agreement to the U.N. Security Council for approval within days . Approval there will cancel all previous U.N. resolutions outlawing and sanctioning Iran’s nuclear activities.
Meaning: Whatever Congress ultimately does, it won’t matter because the legal underpinning for the entire international sanctions regime against Iran will have been dismantled at the Security Council. Ten years of painstakingly constructed international sanctions will vanish overnight, irretrievably.
Even if Congress rejects the agreement, do you think the Europeans, the Chinese or the Russians will reinstate sanctions? The result: The United States is left isolated while the rest of the world does thriving business with Iran.
Should Congress then give up? No. Congress needs to act in order to rob this deal of, at least, its domestic legitimacy. Rejection will make little difference on the ground. But it will make it easier for a successor president to legitimately reconsider an executive agreement (Obama dare not call it a treaty — it would be instantly rejected by the Senate) that garnered such pathetically little backing in either house of Congress.
It’s a future hope, but amid dire circumstances. By then, Iran will be flush with cash, legitimized as a normal international actor in good standing, recognized (as Obama once said) as “a very successful regional power.” Stopping Iran from going nuclear at that point will be infinitely more difficult and risky.
Which is Obama’s triumph. He has locked in his folly. He has laid down his legacy, and we will have to live with the consequences for decades.
