Thursday, November 27, 2014
How the GOP Wave Could Boost Chances for a Constitutional Convention of the States
How the GOP Wave Could Boost Chances for a Constitutional Convention of the States
Nov. 27, 2014 12:30pm
The 2014 Republican tide might lift the movement for a convention of states to amend the Constitution, advocates said.
Republicans now control 69 state legislative chambers across the country, surpassing the party’s record of state Houses and Senates the GOP controlled in 1920, picking up of nine chambers this year. The party controls both the House and Senate in 30 states.
Tennessee and Louisiana passed resolutions calling for a Convention of the States in the 2014 legislative sessions to approve a federal balanced budget amendment, bringing the tally to 24 states, according to the State Government Leadership Foundation, a conservative group advocating for a convention. Some of those resolutions stretch back to the 1980s.
That’s within 10 of the magic 34 states needed to reach the two-thirds of state legislatures to call a state convention under Article 5 of the U.S. Constitution. If a convention approves an amendment, three-fourths of the states – 38 – must vote to ratify it. This option has never been used for amending the Constitution.
Tennessee House Speaker Beth Harwell, a Republican, said she heard interest in pushing for a convention of the states when attending a national state House speakers’ conference in September, because state leaders recognize the threat of overspending by the federal government.
“I believe it will give it momentum,” Harwell told TheBlaze of the movement for a convention. “[The debt] is the number one threat to the nation and people know something needs to be done. Momentum is going our way not the other way.”
She added that Tennessee lawmakers could assist other states.
“In Tennessee, we’d like to serve as an example to other states, and take questions on the legal issues in learning the process,” Harwell said.
The movement for an Article 5 convention became more popular after the publication of “The Liberty Amendments” by constitutional attorney and talk radio host Mark Levin in 2013. Levin advocated a balanced budget amendment among others constitutional amendments such as term limits in the book.
Some conservatives, however, have warned against a convention, fearing that it would open the door to special interests pushing for various other changes to the Constitution.
The Vermont state legislature approved a resolution calling for an Article 5 convention to allow restrictions on political campaign fundraising and spending, limits that were struck down by the Supreme Court.
Harwell believes the threat of a runaway convention is far outweighed by threat federal spending.
“I think they are sincere in their concerns,” Harwell said of critics. “But most legislatures have only passed resolutions calling for a convention on the balanced budget amendment. I don’t fear a convention will get out of hand as much as I fear a runaway government. The $17 trillion debt is a much larger threat.”
There are safeguards to prevent a runaway convention, said Micah Ketchel, director of policy and advocacy at the State Government Leadership Foundation.
“There have been literally hundreds of Article 5 applications passed over the years,” Ketchel told TheBlaze. “Even if you have enough states to pass an amendment, it still requires 38 states to ratify the amendment. There is such a firewall, this will not get out of hand.”
In Arizona, South Carolina and Wisconsin, the proposal for a convention on a balanced budget amendment was passed in one house but not the other during the 2014 legislative session. Ketchel anticipates these states will pass a call for the convention though both chambers in 2015. Further, both the Indiana House and Senate passed resolutions calling for a Convention of the States, but the language of the resolutions were not reconciled in 2014.
“There is no question this is going to move the ball in passing legislation in additional states,” Ketchel said. “We saw a lot of progress in the last legislative session.”
“This is an area at the state level that legislatures can be federally relevant,” he added. “At the end of the day, this could pressure Congress to take action and do something.”
illThanks, Big Government - Geo Will
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE www.nationalreview.com PRINT
November 26, 2014 8:00 PM
Thanks, Big Government
A look at some of the more entertaining recent headlines to come out of Obama’s America
By George Will
Before the tryptophan in the turkey induces somnolence, give thanks for living in such an entertaining country. This year, for example, we learned that California’s Legislature includes 93 persons who seem never to have had sex. They enacted the “affirmative consent” law directing college administrators to tell students that sexual consent cannot be silence but must be “affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement” and “ongoing throughout a sexual activity.” Claremont McKenna College requires “all” — not “both,” which would discriminate against groups — participants in a sexual engagement to understand that withdrawal of consent can be any behavior conveying “that an individual is hesitant, confused, uncertain.”
A severely moral California high-school principal prohibited the football booster club from raising money by selling donated Chick-fil-A meals because this company opposed same-sex marriage. The school superintendent approved the ban because “we value inclusivity and diversity.” Up to a point. At a Washington State community college, invitations to a “happy hour” celebrating diversity and combating racism said white people were not invited.
At Broward College near Miami, a conservative who was asking students if they agreed that “big government sucks” was told by a campus security guard that she must take her question to the campus “free-speech area.” She got off lightly: The federal government has distributed to local police, including those of some colleges and school districts, more than 600 surplus MRAP (mine-resistant ambush-protected) armored vehicles designed for Iraq and Afghanistan.
The federal government, which has Tomahawk cruise missiles and Apache and Lakota helicopters, used the code name “Geronimo” in the attack that killed Osama bin Laden but objected to the name of the Washington Redskins. The Department of Homeland Security, unsleepingly vigilant, raided a Kansas City shop to stop sales of panties emblazoned with unauthorized Royals logos. A U.S. Forest Service article on safe marshmallow toasting did not neglect to nag us: It suggested fruit rather than chocolate in s’mores. The droll Orange County Register wondered, “Why not replace the marshmallow with a Brussels sprout?” The federal government’s food police began cracking down on schools’ fund-raising bake sales: Step away from those brownies and put your hands on a fruit cup.
Niagara County, N.Y., spent $700,000 of its Tobacco Master Settlement Money not on fighting smoking but on golf-course equipment. In Seattle, the Freedom Socialist party, which favors a $20-an-hour minimum wage, advertised a job opening for a Web developer to be paid $13 an hour.
Joe Biden was off by 160,839 when citing the number of people killed in the 2011 Joplin, Mo., tornado. He said 161,000. But the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee expressed optimism about “the nation of Africa.” Barack Obama explained the Keystone XL pipeline: “It is providing the ability of Canada to pump their oil, send it through our land, down to the Gulf, where it will be sold everywhere else. That doesn’t have an impact on U.S. gas prices.” Someone very patient should try to explain to him that prices of petroleum are set by a global market.
Hamlet: “Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?”
Polonius: “By the mass, and ‘tis like a camel, indeed.”
Hamlet: “Methinks it is like a weasel.”
Polonius: “It is backed like a weasel.”
Hamlet: “Or like a whale?”
Polonius: “Very like a whale.”
Fortunately, Polonius was not among the Colorado Springs second-graders invited to use their imaginations in seeing shapes in clouds. Kody Smith said one looked like a gun. So, a behavior report was filed against the eight-year-old. A South Carolina high school student was arrested and suspended after having written a story about killing a dinosaur with a gun.
“The Great Immensity,” a climate-change musical financed by $700,000 from the National Science Foundation, quickly closed. Outgoing defense secretary Chuck Hagel, perhaps planning for wars with small carbon footprints, fretted that global warming “could threaten many of our training activities.” Alarmed by reports that global warming will cause a four-foot rise in sea levels, California governor Jerry Brown warned that “Los Angeles’ airport’s going to be underwater.” It is more than 120 feet above sea level. Because everything confirms the theory of impending catastrophic global warming, in 2005 Hurricane Katrina was called a harbinger of increasingly violent weather caused by . . . well, you know. Today, Louisianans are thankful that this was the ninth consecutive hurricane season without a major hurricane landfall.
— George Will is a Pulitzer Prize–winning syndicated columnist. © 2014 The Washington Post
November 26, 2014 8:00 PM
Thanks, Big Government
A look at some of the more entertaining recent headlines to come out of Obama’s America
By George Will
Before the tryptophan in the turkey induces somnolence, give thanks for living in such an entertaining country. This year, for example, we learned that California’s Legislature includes 93 persons who seem never to have had sex. They enacted the “affirmative consent” law directing college administrators to tell students that sexual consent cannot be silence but must be “affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement” and “ongoing throughout a sexual activity.” Claremont McKenna College requires “all” — not “both,” which would discriminate against groups — participants in a sexual engagement to understand that withdrawal of consent can be any behavior conveying “that an individual is hesitant, confused, uncertain.”
A severely moral California high-school principal prohibited the football booster club from raising money by selling donated Chick-fil-A meals because this company opposed same-sex marriage. The school superintendent approved the ban because “we value inclusivity and diversity.” Up to a point. At a Washington State community college, invitations to a “happy hour” celebrating diversity and combating racism said white people were not invited.
At Broward College near Miami, a conservative who was asking students if they agreed that “big government sucks” was told by a campus security guard that she must take her question to the campus “free-speech area.” She got off lightly: The federal government has distributed to local police, including those of some colleges and school districts, more than 600 surplus MRAP (mine-resistant ambush-protected) armored vehicles designed for Iraq and Afghanistan.
The federal government, which has Tomahawk cruise missiles and Apache and Lakota helicopters, used the code name “Geronimo” in the attack that killed Osama bin Laden but objected to the name of the Washington Redskins. The Department of Homeland Security, unsleepingly vigilant, raided a Kansas City shop to stop sales of panties emblazoned with unauthorized Royals logos. A U.S. Forest Service article on safe marshmallow toasting did not neglect to nag us: It suggested fruit rather than chocolate in s’mores. The droll Orange County Register wondered, “Why not replace the marshmallow with a Brussels sprout?” The federal government’s food police began cracking down on schools’ fund-raising bake sales: Step away from those brownies and put your hands on a fruit cup.
Niagara County, N.Y., spent $700,000 of its Tobacco Master Settlement Money not on fighting smoking but on golf-course equipment. In Seattle, the Freedom Socialist party, which favors a $20-an-hour minimum wage, advertised a job opening for a Web developer to be paid $13 an hour.
Joe Biden was off by 160,839 when citing the number of people killed in the 2011 Joplin, Mo., tornado. He said 161,000. But the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee expressed optimism about “the nation of Africa.” Barack Obama explained the Keystone XL pipeline: “It is providing the ability of Canada to pump their oil, send it through our land, down to the Gulf, where it will be sold everywhere else. That doesn’t have an impact on U.S. gas prices.” Someone very patient should try to explain to him that prices of petroleum are set by a global market.
Hamlet: “Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?”
Polonius: “By the mass, and ‘tis like a camel, indeed.”
Hamlet: “Methinks it is like a weasel.”
Polonius: “It is backed like a weasel.”
Hamlet: “Or like a whale?”
Polonius: “Very like a whale.”
Fortunately, Polonius was not among the Colorado Springs second-graders invited to use their imaginations in seeing shapes in clouds. Kody Smith said one looked like a gun. So, a behavior report was filed against the eight-year-old. A South Carolina high school student was arrested and suspended after having written a story about killing a dinosaur with a gun.
“The Great Immensity,” a climate-change musical financed by $700,000 from the National Science Foundation, quickly closed. Outgoing defense secretary Chuck Hagel, perhaps planning for wars with small carbon footprints, fretted that global warming “could threaten many of our training activities.” Alarmed by reports that global warming will cause a four-foot rise in sea levels, California governor Jerry Brown warned that “Los Angeles’ airport’s going to be underwater.” It is more than 120 feet above sea level. Because everything confirms the theory of impending catastrophic global warming, in 2005 Hurricane Katrina was called a harbinger of increasingly violent weather caused by . . . well, you know. Today, Louisianans are thankful that this was the ninth consecutive hurricane season without a major hurricane landfall.
— George Will is a Pulitzer Prize–winning syndicated columnist. © 2014 The Washington Post
For King Obama, Inconvenient Law Is Irrelevant Law
NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE www.nationalreview.com PRINT
November 27, 2014 12:00 AM
For Obama, Inconvenient Law Is Irrelevant Law
The president dismantles immigration law that he finds incompatible with his own larger agenda.
By Victor Davis Hanson
There is a humane, transparent, truthful — and constitutional — way to address illegal immigration. Unfortunately, President Obama’s unilateral plan to exempt millions of residents from federal immigration law is none of those things.
Obama said he had to move now because of a dawdling Congress. He forgot to mention that there were Democratic majorities in Congress in 2009 and 2010, yet he did nothing, in fear of punishment at the polls.
Nor did Obama push amnesty in 2011 or 2012, afraid of hurting his own re-election chances.
Worries over sabotaging Democratic chances in the 2014 midterms explain his inaction from 2012 until now. He certainly wouldn’t have waited until 2015 to act, because Republicans will then control Congress.
Given that he has no more elections and can claim no lasting achievements, Obama now sees amnesty as his last desperate chance at establishing some sort of legacy.
Obama cited empathy for undocumented immigrants. But he expressed no such worry about the hundreds of thousands of applicants who wait for years in line rather than simply illegally cross the border.
Any would-be immigrant would have been far wiser to have broken rather than abided by federal laws. Citizens who knowingly offer false information on federal affidavits or provide false Social Security numbers would not receive the sort of amnesties likely to be given to undocumented immigrants.
Obama has downplayed Americans’ worries about social costs and competition for jobs, but studies show illegal immigration has depressed the wages of entry-level American workers while making social services costly for states and burdensome for U.S. citizens.
Obama says he has the legal authority to rewrite immigration law without working with Congress. Yet on more than twenty occasions when it was politically inexpedient to grant amnesties, Obama insisted that he would not — or that such a move was prohibited by the Constitution.
Obama not long ago warned us about the dangers of granting amnesties by fiat. “The problem is that I’m the president of the United States, I’m not the emperor of the United States,” he said. On another occasion, he lamented, “Believe me, the idea of doing things on my own is very tempting. . . . But that’s not how our system works. That’s not how our democracy functions. That’s not how our Constitution is written.”
By setting aside settled immigration policy and ignoring statutes he finds inconvenient, Obama has set a new precedent that a president can arbitrarily declare what is valid and what is not valid immigration law. Should his successors make up their own versions of any federal statutes they choose, in areas ranging from abortion and gun control to drug enforcement and environmental protection?
Obama claims he has the legal authority to grant amnesty because Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush did it. But again, Obama predictably misleads. Both of those presidents worked with Congress to ensure that new immigration legislation would not split apart families. The amnesties they granted were in accordance with the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 and had only a fraction of the impact that Obama’s executive order would have.
More importantly, even those congressionally sanctioned and narrow amnesties were largely seen as failures. Past non-enforcement of immigration law helped lead to the explosion in illegal immigration of recent years.
Obama says Congress is stalling. But his characterization of congressional inaction simply means that the Congress does not wish to pass Obama’s version of immigration reform. In 2015, if the Republican Congress submits an immigration bill to Obama, he will likely veto it. Would he then term his own opposition “obstructionism”?
Obama has claimed that under his administration, deportations have increased. That, too, is untrue.
The fraudulent statistics used to make this claim redefine how deportation is measured — in much the same manner that other federal statistics like unemployment rates and GDP growth were recalibrated for partisan purposes. Under Obama, Mexican citizens who are apprehended after crossing the border and returned to Mexico are classified as having been deported.
Obama carefully omitted key details about qualifications for amnesty. He cited a criminal background check, but does that mean immigrants convicted of crimes such as driving under the influence or other serious misdemeanors will be deported? What about filing false federal affidavits or Social Security numbers — crimes that are usually felonies?
The president suggested that all undocumented immigrants are here to work. Most are. But recent statistics still suggest that almost 40 percent of undocumented immigrants rely on some sort of state or federal welfare assistance.
Obama will immediately reward millions of undocumented immigrants with exemption from immigration law. But does that mean those who do not qualify — those who committed felonies or serious misdemeanors, who have no sustained record of work, or who have been in the United States for only a year or two — will now face deportation that is as rapidly applied as amnesty?
Because Obama has serially misled the American people on key issues such as Obamacare, the Benghazi attacks, and his own prior constitutional inability to grant amnesty, there is no reason to believe him on the details of his new immigration move. Assume instead that Obama sees his executive order simply as a first step in a continual unilateral effort to dismantle immigration law that he finds incompatible with his own larger agenda.
For Obama, federal law is inconvenient — and therefore irrelevant.
November 27, 2014 12:00 AM
For Obama, Inconvenient Law Is Irrelevant Law
The president dismantles immigration law that he finds incompatible with his own larger agenda.
By Victor Davis Hanson
There is a humane, transparent, truthful — and constitutional — way to address illegal immigration. Unfortunately, President Obama’s unilateral plan to exempt millions of residents from federal immigration law is none of those things.
Obama said he had to move now because of a dawdling Congress. He forgot to mention that there were Democratic majorities in Congress in 2009 and 2010, yet he did nothing, in fear of punishment at the polls.
Nor did Obama push amnesty in 2011 or 2012, afraid of hurting his own re-election chances.
Worries over sabotaging Democratic chances in the 2014 midterms explain his inaction from 2012 until now. He certainly wouldn’t have waited until 2015 to act, because Republicans will then control Congress.
Given that he has no more elections and can claim no lasting achievements, Obama now sees amnesty as his last desperate chance at establishing some sort of legacy.
Obama cited empathy for undocumented immigrants. But he expressed no such worry about the hundreds of thousands of applicants who wait for years in line rather than simply illegally cross the border.
Any would-be immigrant would have been far wiser to have broken rather than abided by federal laws. Citizens who knowingly offer false information on federal affidavits or provide false Social Security numbers would not receive the sort of amnesties likely to be given to undocumented immigrants.
Obama has downplayed Americans’ worries about social costs and competition for jobs, but studies show illegal immigration has depressed the wages of entry-level American workers while making social services costly for states and burdensome for U.S. citizens.
Obama says he has the legal authority to rewrite immigration law without working with Congress. Yet on more than twenty occasions when it was politically inexpedient to grant amnesties, Obama insisted that he would not — or that such a move was prohibited by the Constitution.
Obama not long ago warned us about the dangers of granting amnesties by fiat. “The problem is that I’m the president of the United States, I’m not the emperor of the United States,” he said. On another occasion, he lamented, “Believe me, the idea of doing things on my own is very tempting. . . . But that’s not how our system works. That’s not how our democracy functions. That’s not how our Constitution is written.”
By setting aside settled immigration policy and ignoring statutes he finds inconvenient, Obama has set a new precedent that a president can arbitrarily declare what is valid and what is not valid immigration law. Should his successors make up their own versions of any federal statutes they choose, in areas ranging from abortion and gun control to drug enforcement and environmental protection?
Obama claims he has the legal authority to grant amnesty because Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush did it. But again, Obama predictably misleads. Both of those presidents worked with Congress to ensure that new immigration legislation would not split apart families. The amnesties they granted were in accordance with the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 and had only a fraction of the impact that Obama’s executive order would have.
More importantly, even those congressionally sanctioned and narrow amnesties were largely seen as failures. Past non-enforcement of immigration law helped lead to the explosion in illegal immigration of recent years.
Obama says Congress is stalling. But his characterization of congressional inaction simply means that the Congress does not wish to pass Obama’s version of immigration reform. In 2015, if the Republican Congress submits an immigration bill to Obama, he will likely veto it. Would he then term his own opposition “obstructionism”?
Obama has claimed that under his administration, deportations have increased. That, too, is untrue.
The fraudulent statistics used to make this claim redefine how deportation is measured — in much the same manner that other federal statistics like unemployment rates and GDP growth were recalibrated for partisan purposes. Under Obama, Mexican citizens who are apprehended after crossing the border and returned to Mexico are classified as having been deported.
Obama carefully omitted key details about qualifications for amnesty. He cited a criminal background check, but does that mean immigrants convicted of crimes such as driving under the influence or other serious misdemeanors will be deported? What about filing false federal affidavits or Social Security numbers — crimes that are usually felonies?
The president suggested that all undocumented immigrants are here to work. Most are. But recent statistics still suggest that almost 40 percent of undocumented immigrants rely on some sort of state or federal welfare assistance.
Obama will immediately reward millions of undocumented immigrants with exemption from immigration law. But does that mean those who do not qualify — those who committed felonies or serious misdemeanors, who have no sustained record of work, or who have been in the United States for only a year or two — will now face deportation that is as rapidly applied as amnesty?
Because Obama has serially misled the American people on key issues such as Obamacare, the Benghazi attacks, and his own prior constitutional inability to grant amnesty, there is no reason to believe him on the details of his new immigration move. Assume instead that Obama sees his executive order simply as a first step in a continual unilateral effort to dismantle immigration law that he finds incompatible with his own larger agenda.
For Obama, federal law is inconvenient — and therefore irrelevant.
981 Missouri Black Babies Aborted Since Michael Brown's Death, No Riots
LifeNews: 981 Missouri Black Babies Aborted Since Michael Brown's Death, No Riots
11.26.2014
To illustrate the utter hypocrisy and injustice regarding the black community following the death of Michael Brown, LifeNews published the depressing reality that 981 black babies have been aborted in Missouri since that fateful day back in August-and not a single person has rioted over their wrongful deaths.
LifeNews published the numbers in response to a blog post from a pro-life advocate in Missouri named Reverend Katherine. She wrote:
Since the day that Michael Brown died [Aug 9, 2014], another 981 Black Missourians have died; 9 per day, every day since then. These Black Missourians were unarmed, innocent, and had no ability to defend themselves and died in plain sight. But there is no outrage, no riots, not one protest.
So, while these rioters are trying to destroy my native city of St. Louis because of the death of one Black man, the rioters overlook the fact that just a couple of miles away at Planned Parenthood on Forest Park Avenue, another 109 Black babies have died since Michael Brown.
Why aren’t the rioters at Planned Parenthood defending themselves and their future generations? Why do they allow themselves to be essentially exterminated by abortion but riot over one?
Yesterday, LifeNews also excoriated Planned Parenthood after they condemned the Ferguson grand jury for not indicting officer Darren Wilson on Twitter. The abortion conglomerate hypocritically stated, "Conversations about our history of unjust systems are needed, even more so today."
Planned Parenthood CEO Cecile Richards also got in on the action when she tweeted: "This is not just an issue for Ferguson, this is an issue for America."
In response, LifeNews reminded readers that in 2012 there were more black babies aborted (31,328) in New York City than were born (24,758) according to the New York Department of Mental Health and Hygiene, amounting to 42.4% of all abortions committed in New York City.
A "history of unjust systems" indeed.
Wednesday, November 26, 2014
Schumer’s Obamacare Mea Culpa & What It Means for 2016
Schumer’s Obamacare Mea Culpa & What It Means for 2016
By Aaron Goldstein on 11.26.14 | 12:45PM
There was nothing genuine about Chuck Schumer's mea culpa on Obamacare yesterday. Then again there is nothing genuine about Chuck Schumer except that he genuinely wants to become the next Senate Majority Leader.
During a speech yesterday to the National Press Club, Schumer said that reforming health care was "a focus on the wrong problem." Former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau responded on Twitter, "Funny, I don't remember Chuck Schumer giving that advice when he was privately and publicly championing the Affordable Care Act in 2010." I can understand Favreau's anger, but does he honestly expect Schumer to stay with a sinking ship?
If Schumer can say that Obamacare was a mistake then look for other Democrats to follow up to and including prospective 2016 Democrat presidential candidates. The only way I can see Democrats vying for the 2016 nomination getting around the Obamacare albatross would be if they were to pledge to "reform" Obamacare (and were specific about the nature of their reforms) and/or if they were to embrace some Republican initiatives (i.e. tort reform, abolishing the tax on medical devices). But I suspect that most Democrats vying for the White House will deny the existence of Obamacare just as the Obama Administration denied the existence of Jon Gruber.
Fergeson: Did Obama pressure Gov. Nixon to keep the National Guard out?
Posted on November 25, 2014 by Paul Mirengoff in Crime, Ferguson shooting, Holder Justice Department, Law Enforcement, Obama administration
Did Obama pressure Gov. Nixon to keep the National Guard out?
I noted here that the National Guard wasn’t in Ferguson last night, and I wondered why. After all, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon had declared a state of emergency in the St. Louis area — the potential emergency being the impending grand jury decision — and had mobilized the National Guard. In addition, the mayor of Ferguson had requested the Guard’s presence.
Yet, the National Guard was nowhere to be seen in Ferguson. It should have been. The local police force was not up to the task of preventing the vandalism, looting, and arson that followed announcement of the grand jury’s decision.
Why wasn’t the National Guard deployed? Missouri Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder believes that Nixon was pressured by President Obama into not sending the Guard to Ferguson. Appearing on Fox News, Kinder asked:
Where were they [the National Guard] last night? The law-abiding citizens and business owners and taxpayers of the St. Louis region have the right to ask this governor to answer some questions.
Here’s my question that the governor must answer: Is the reason that the National Guard wasn’t in there was because the Obama administration and the Holder Justice Department leaned on you to keep them out?
I cannot imagine any other reason why the governor who mobilized the National Guard would not put them in there to stop this before it started.
I can. Nixon may be incompetent or he may be soft-headed. But Kinder’s explanation — that Obama and/or Holder pressured Nixon — seems at least as plausible.
Via NRO.
Believe your eyes, not liberal talking heads
Posted on November 25, 2014 by Paul Mirengoff in Crime, Ferguson shooting, Race and racial bias
Believe your eyes, not liberal talking heads
In the post just below, Scott refers to “the underlying behavioral disparities that are reflected in the numerical racial disparities” in incarceration rates, school discipline and so forth. As he notes, these behavioral disparities were on display for all to see last night.
It was surreal to hear liberal talking heads complaining about the number of African-Americans in prison while watching African-Americans (their “hands up” only as high as it takes to swing a baseball bat or carry stolen merchandise) smashing windows, setting fires, and looting stores. Clearly, there are some strong candidates for imprisonment who are running free.
The liberal talking heads also complained that African-Americans are the victims of rampant police brutality. But what evidence supports the claim?
Michael Brown’s case doesn’t support it. Brown was not singled out for mistreatment. He was a criminal suspect in a violent mood (as the convenience store video shows) who apparently resisted arrest and ended up in a fight with a police officer. Even if one disagrees with the grand jury and concludes that Brown did not pose a deadly threat, the shooting was hardly unprovoked.
Moreover, when was the last case before Brown’s in which a white police officer allegedly killed an African-American without justification? Brown’s case received so much attention in part because it is a rarity.
Last night, if anything, law enforcement was too restrained. I agree with Michael Brown’s cousin, a man named Pruitt. Interviewed on Fox News, he complained that law enforcement wasn’t doing enough to protect neighborhood stores and combat the looters.
Was law enforcement influenced by President Obama’s call for restraint? It shouldn’t have been. The mob wasn’t.
UPDATE: John Fund points out that the National Guard wasn’t present in Ferguson last night. This helps explain why law enforcement wasn’t more effective. But what explains the absence of the National Guard?
Believe your eyes, not liberal talking heads
In the post just below, Scott refers to “the underlying behavioral disparities that are reflected in the numerical racial disparities” in incarceration rates, school discipline and so forth. As he notes, these behavioral disparities were on display for all to see last night.
It was surreal to hear liberal talking heads complaining about the number of African-Americans in prison while watching African-Americans (their “hands up” only as high as it takes to swing a baseball bat or carry stolen merchandise) smashing windows, setting fires, and looting stores. Clearly, there are some strong candidates for imprisonment who are running free.
The liberal talking heads also complained that African-Americans are the victims of rampant police brutality. But what evidence supports the claim?
Michael Brown’s case doesn’t support it. Brown was not singled out for mistreatment. He was a criminal suspect in a violent mood (as the convenience store video shows) who apparently resisted arrest and ended up in a fight with a police officer. Even if one disagrees with the grand jury and concludes that Brown did not pose a deadly threat, the shooting was hardly unprovoked.
Moreover, when was the last case before Brown’s in which a white police officer allegedly killed an African-American without justification? Brown’s case received so much attention in part because it is a rarity.
Last night, if anything, law enforcement was too restrained. I agree with Michael Brown’s cousin, a man named Pruitt. Interviewed on Fox News, he complained that law enforcement wasn’t doing enough to protect neighborhood stores and combat the looters.
Was law enforcement influenced by President Obama’s call for restraint? It shouldn’t have been. The mob wasn’t.
UPDATE: John Fund points out that the National Guard wasn’t present in Ferguson last night. This helps explain why law enforcement wasn’t more effective. But what explains the absence of the National Guard?
Barack Obama, Troll (To Enrage GOP)
November 26, 2014 12:00 AM
Barack Obama, Troll
The president’s real goal with his immigration executive order was to enrage Republicans.
Maybe President Obama is just trolling?
For those who don’t know, in Internet parlance, trolling is an effort to elicit outrage from a specific group or the public generally. As the always useful — but not always G-rated, or spell-checked — Urban Dictionary explains, “Trolling requires deceiving [sic]; any trolling that doesn’t involve decieving [sic] someone isn’t trolling at all; it’s just stupid.” (Pro tip: When spelling “deceiving,” remember it’s “i before e except after c.”) The definition continues: “As such, your victim must not know that you are trolling; if he does, you are an unsuccesful [sic] troll.”
I don’t like the president’s executive action on immigration. I think it’s constitutionally dubious — for exactly the reasons Obama has insisted more than 20 times in the past. “I’m not a king. My job as the head of the executive branch ultimately is to carry out the law,” Obama told Telemundo in 2013. “When it comes to enforcement of our immigration laws, we’ve got some discretion. We can prioritize what we do. But we can’t simply ignore the law.”
If all King Obama was doing was opting not to deport some immigrants here illegally, he’d be on safer ground. But his new proposal would allow an estimated 3.5 million “undocumented Americans” to get all sorts of documents — Social Security numbers, work permits, drivers licenses, etc. That’s not prosecutorial discretion, that’s a rewrite of existing law.
Still, the fine print of what Obama is doing is far less dramatic than many of his defenders and critics claim. Some are comparing it to the Emancipation Proclamation, which is ridiculous. People who voluntarily come to America illegally are in no way comparable to poor souls kidnapped abroad and forced into eternal bondage. Moreover, the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t have a two-year time limit or require slaves to fill out paperwork and pay back taxes.
Others claim it’s no big deal and perfectly consistent with executive orders taken by Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. This goes too far the other way. Reagan and Bush were mostly cleaning up problems with laws passed by Congress. In the other instances, they were responding to specific foreign crises.
Meanwhile, the only “crisis” Obama claims he is responding to is Congress’s “failure to act.” This is a dangerous standard. We all know there is an entitlement crisis in America. Should the next Republican president, for example, unilaterally privatize Social Security because Congress refuses to fix it?
Even some on the right believe this is the equivalent of the Emancipation Proclamation — in its sweep, if not its moral stature. But roughly half of immigrants here illegally will remain unaffected by the measure. And, there’s very good reason to believe many of those eligible will not take up the offer. Indeed, the distinctions Obama draws between, say, long-term residents and short-term ones shouldn’t matter all that much if you favor family reunification, “getting out of the shadows” or “getting right with the law.”
A more plausible criticism is that Obama is trying to lay down precedents and create facts on the ground that will make it impossible to reverse his ratchet toward amnesty.
I’m sure that’s part of his thinking. Indeed, he says that’s his ultimate goal. He’s insisted several times that all Congress has to do is pass a bill that does what he wants and he’ll stop doing what he wants without Congress.
Which points to why I think he’s trolling. As Robert Litan of the Brookings Institution notes, Obama “could’ve done all this quietly, without making any announcement whatsoever.” After all, Obama has unilaterally reinterpreted and rewritten the law without nationally televised addresses before. But doing that wouldn’t let him pander to Latinos and, more important, that wouldn’t achieve his real goal: enraging Republicans.
As policy, King Obama’s edict is a mess, which may explain why Latinos were initially underwhelmed by it, according to a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll. But that’s not the yardstick Obama cares about most. The real goal is twofold: Cement Latinos into the Democratic coalition, and force Republicans to overreact. He can’t achieve the first if he doesn’t succeed with the second. It remains to be seen if the Republicans will let themselves be trolled into helping him.
Barack Obama, Troll
The president’s real goal with his immigration executive order was to enrage Republicans.
Maybe President Obama is just trolling?
For those who don’t know, in Internet parlance, trolling is an effort to elicit outrage from a specific group or the public generally. As the always useful — but not always G-rated, or spell-checked — Urban Dictionary explains, “Trolling requires deceiving [sic]; any trolling that doesn’t involve decieving [sic] someone isn’t trolling at all; it’s just stupid.” (Pro tip: When spelling “deceiving,” remember it’s “i before e except after c.”) The definition continues: “As such, your victim must not know that you are trolling; if he does, you are an unsuccesful [sic] troll.”
I don’t like the president’s executive action on immigration. I think it’s constitutionally dubious — for exactly the reasons Obama has insisted more than 20 times in the past. “I’m not a king. My job as the head of the executive branch ultimately is to carry out the law,” Obama told Telemundo in 2013. “When it comes to enforcement of our immigration laws, we’ve got some discretion. We can prioritize what we do. But we can’t simply ignore the law.”
If all King Obama was doing was opting not to deport some immigrants here illegally, he’d be on safer ground. But his new proposal would allow an estimated 3.5 million “undocumented Americans” to get all sorts of documents — Social Security numbers, work permits, drivers licenses, etc. That’s not prosecutorial discretion, that’s a rewrite of existing law.
Still, the fine print of what Obama is doing is far less dramatic than many of his defenders and critics claim. Some are comparing it to the Emancipation Proclamation, which is ridiculous. People who voluntarily come to America illegally are in no way comparable to poor souls kidnapped abroad and forced into eternal bondage. Moreover, the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t have a two-year time limit or require slaves to fill out paperwork and pay back taxes.
Others claim it’s no big deal and perfectly consistent with executive orders taken by Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. This goes too far the other way. Reagan and Bush were mostly cleaning up problems with laws passed by Congress. In the other instances, they were responding to specific foreign crises.
Meanwhile, the only “crisis” Obama claims he is responding to is Congress’s “failure to act.” This is a dangerous standard. We all know there is an entitlement crisis in America. Should the next Republican president, for example, unilaterally privatize Social Security because Congress refuses to fix it?
Even some on the right believe this is the equivalent of the Emancipation Proclamation — in its sweep, if not its moral stature. But roughly half of immigrants here illegally will remain unaffected by the measure. And, there’s very good reason to believe many of those eligible will not take up the offer. Indeed, the distinctions Obama draws between, say, long-term residents and short-term ones shouldn’t matter all that much if you favor family reunification, “getting out of the shadows” or “getting right with the law.”
A more plausible criticism is that Obama is trying to lay down precedents and create facts on the ground that will make it impossible to reverse his ratchet toward amnesty.
I’m sure that’s part of his thinking. Indeed, he says that’s his ultimate goal. He’s insisted several times that all Congress has to do is pass a bill that does what he wants and he’ll stop doing what he wants without Congress.
Which points to why I think he’s trolling. As Robert Litan of the Brookings Institution notes, Obama “could’ve done all this quietly, without making any announcement whatsoever.” After all, Obama has unilaterally reinterpreted and rewritten the law without nationally televised addresses before. But doing that wouldn’t let him pander to Latinos and, more important, that wouldn’t achieve his real goal: enraging Republicans.
As policy, King Obama’s edict is a mess, which may explain why Latinos were initially underwhelmed by it, according to a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll. But that’s not the yardstick Obama cares about most. The real goal is twofold: Cement Latinos into the Democratic coalition, and force Republicans to overreact. He can’t achieve the first if he doesn’t succeed with the second. It remains to be seen if the Republicans will let themselves be trolled into helping him.
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Benghazi: More on “more than fair”
Posted on November 23, 2014 by Paul Mirengoff in Benghazigate, Obama Administration Scandals
More on “more than fair”
Yesterday, I wrote about the report on Benghazi issued by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The report found essentially no fault on the part of the CIA or the military in its response the attack in Benghazi — findings that I consider sound.
The report also finds that the administration’s subsequent narrative about the attack was the product of a “flawed” process. What’s more it finds that aspects of the narrative were inaccurate. However, it did not find willful deception or bad faith on the part of any administration official.
The administration and its supporters will, I assume, construe the lack of such findings as exoneration. They should not.
The Committee made no determination one way or another as to the motivation and thought processes of Susan Rice and other administration officials involved in the post-attack spin. It found neither bad faith and dishonesty nor their absence.
Why didn’t the Committee make such findings, one way or the other? The main reason, I suspect, is that the Republican members wanted bipartisan agreement as to the facts (including the fact that Rice’s comments were inaccurate). Keep in mind too that the House Intelligence Committee is something of an island of bipartisanship in the stormy seas of Capitol Hill, which is probably a good thing given the vital and sensitive nature of its work.
Republican members must also have been mindful that Trey Gowdy’s special committee is tasked investigating the Obama administration’s post-attack behavior, among other things. Thus, the honesty and good faith of Team Obama (or the lack thereof) remains the subject of an important, well-publicized House investigation. Indeed, by not opining on this subject, the Intelligence Committee invites Gowdy’s committee to focus sharply on it, and precludes any valid claim that the issue was resolved by another committee.
That said, I still would have preferred a report that was fair, rather than “more than fair,” to administration. For the reasons I discussed yesterday, such a report would have inferred bad faith and dishonesty by Rice and probably others. However, I understand why the Republicans on the Committee settled for less.
Team Obama and its friends in the media may try to create the impression that the administration has dodged a bullet on Benghazi. In reality, it hasn’t.
Rather, a bipartisan House committee has found that key statements by the administration about Benghazi were false. And it has left for Gowdy’s committee the task of determining Whether the false statements were bad faith efforts to deceive.
Renewable Energy Will Never Work, But Can Nuclear?
Posted on November 23, 2014 by John Hinderaker in Energy Policy
Renewable Energy Will Never Work, But Can Nuclear?
Via the indispensable Watts Up With That? come two of the most interesting articles I have read in a very long time. The first is by two Google engineers who were charged with thinking creatively about how to replace fossil fuels with renewables. After four years, Google shut down the project. The engineers concluded that it simply couldn’t be done:
At the start of RE
As we reflected on the project, we came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach. ...
Incremental improvements to existing technologies aren’t enough; we need something truly disruptive to reverse climate change. What, then, is the energy technology that can meet the challenging cost targets? How will we remove CO2 from the air? We don’t have the answers. Those technologies haven’t been invented yet.
Note that these engineers are not climate skeptics; they assume that the global warming theory is true. On that assumption, renewable energy simply can’t make a significant difference.
The second article is a comment on the Google engineers’ analysis by Lewis Page in The Register. Page elaborates on the impossibility of renewable energy making a significant dent in carbon dioxide emissions:
Whenever somebody with a decent grasp of maths and physics looks into the idea of a fully renewables-powered civilised future for the human race with a reasonably open mind, they normally come to the conclusion that it simply isn’t feasible. Merely generating the relatively small proportion of our energy that we consume today in the form of electricity is already an insuperably difficult task for renewables: generating huge amounts more on top to carry out the tasks we do today using fossil-fuelled heat isn’t even vaguely plausible.
Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.
In reality, well before any such stage was reached, energy would become horrifyingly expensive – which means that everything would become horrifyingly expensive (even the present well-under-one-per-cent renewables level in the UK has pushed up utility bills very considerably).
That’s the bad news. The good news, Page argues, is that we already have the disruptive technology that is needed to replace fossil fuels–energy that is cheap, readily available and can be both distributed and dispatchable: nuclear power. Nuclear energy, he argues, is made expensive only by a ridiculous degree of over-regulation in the name of safety.
Both of the linked articles are brief and should be read in their entirety. Is Page right about nuclear power? I am not sure how low the true cost of electricity produced through nuclear energy could go, but I will say this: if climate alarmists really believed the claims they make about global warming–I don’t think they do–they would be agitating tirelessly for lightly-regulated nuclear energy.
Liberalism: Nihilist, Incoherent, or Both?
Liberalism: Nihilist, Incoherent, or Both?
Victor Davis Hanson puts his finger on the core meaning of Grubergate with his most recent column referring to the Gruber types as “Snobocrats.” It is worth recognizing that Gruberism isn’t just simple elitism, but has an overlay of snobbery about how much better are the Grubers of the world than the grubby middle class on whose behalf the Grubers endlessly toil and fret.
But this should raise a curious question: why all this toil on behalf of a large class of stupid, unworthy people? It is clear the core of cultural liberalism is disdain for the American middle class. (Indeed it is tempting to say that the chief political class conflict in America is between the Grubers and the grubbers.) Why build up a middle class that will, at best, be ungrateful, and, at worst, vote Republican? Is Hanson right that the correct term for understanding the Grubers amongst us is snobbery rather than the old fashioned noblesse oblige?
One explanation is that liberals don’t really care about the middle class at all, and in fact would like to destroy it. This is certainly true of the radical left, but it is probably not the deliberate intent of the liberal political class. (Whether they perceive the destructive effects of specific policies on the middle class is a separate question. You must never rule out stupidity and ignorance as an explanation for liberal actions.) The alternative explanation is that modern liberalism is mostly about making liberals feel better about themselves (as well as collecting fat consulting contracts to manage the complexities they come up with). This is closer to the mark, but doesn’t go far enough toward understanding the deep roots of why snobbery is not just a compulsion for liberals, but is in fact essential to modern liberalism.
That idea is not original to me. Hanson’s article sent me back to a minor classic essay from 1973, by the late John Adams Wettergreen in the Western Political Quarterly: “Is Snobbery a Formal Value? Considering Life at the End of Modernity.” This is a dense theoretical essay, not recommended for light reading. Wettergreen homed in on liberalism’s Hegelian dimension, which held that the ideals of equality and individualism represented the “end of history,” and that practically speaking all that is left is the struggle to achieve more perfect equality, either through revolution, if you’re a Marxist, or through “Progressivism,” if you’re a modern liberal. (And in both cases these problems are seen mostly as technical in nature: hence the technocracy of the Grubers.) This is at the root of that familiar liberal cliché, “on the side of history.” Most liberals are unaware of the pedigree of this theme, but always proceed according to the presumption that it is unnecessary to argue the premise. For a liberal, the doctrine of Progress is simply above rational argument.
But the “New Left” of the 1960s recoiled from the implications of this. The French Hegelian quasi-Communist Alexandre Kojeves wrote that “The American way of life is not the life-style proper to the final State because it is too vulgar.” From here flowed much of the vocabulary of the 1960s about finding “authenticity,” which found its way into nearly every nook and cranny of our culture (much to the fury of the New Left) and gradually overtook mainstream liberalism. Consider, as just one example, Hillary Clinton’s infamous 1993 speech on “the politics of meaning,” which in a sense was just Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech on steroids. Hillary ratified the idea that government wouldn’t just tend to your material needs, but would heal your soul, too. Because we’re better than you are.
The supposed backwardness of the American middle class is oddly reassuring to liberals, because it ratifies their formal snobbery. But it is snobbery that compasses the incoherence of a liberalism that seeks to shore up the middle class it disdains, and the hypocrisy of scowling at middle class materialism while scooping up million dollar government contracts to manage Obamacare. It also explains the rage of liberals when their “wave of history” collides with a riptide “wave election” that leaves them stranded on a sandbar.
Victor Davis Hanson puts his finger on the core meaning of Grubergate with his most recent column referring to the Gruber types as “Snobocrats.” It is worth recognizing that Gruberism isn’t just simple elitism, but has an overlay of snobbery about how much better are the Grubers of the world than the grubby middle class on whose behalf the Grubers endlessly toil and fret.
But this should raise a curious question: why all this toil on behalf of a large class of stupid, unworthy people? It is clear the core of cultural liberalism is disdain for the American middle class. (Indeed it is tempting to say that the chief political class conflict in America is between the Grubers and the grubbers.) Why build up a middle class that will, at best, be ungrateful, and, at worst, vote Republican? Is Hanson right that the correct term for understanding the Grubers amongst us is snobbery rather than the old fashioned noblesse oblige?
One explanation is that liberals don’t really care about the middle class at all, and in fact would like to destroy it. This is certainly true of the radical left, but it is probably not the deliberate intent of the liberal political class. (Whether they perceive the destructive effects of specific policies on the middle class is a separate question. You must never rule out stupidity and ignorance as an explanation for liberal actions.) The alternative explanation is that modern liberalism is mostly about making liberals feel better about themselves (as well as collecting fat consulting contracts to manage the complexities they come up with). This is closer to the mark, but doesn’t go far enough toward understanding the deep roots of why snobbery is not just a compulsion for liberals, but is in fact essential to modern liberalism.
That idea is not original to me. Hanson’s article sent me back to a minor classic essay from 1973, by the late John Adams Wettergreen in the Western Political Quarterly: “Is Snobbery a Formal Value? Considering Life at the End of Modernity.” This is a dense theoretical essay, not recommended for light reading. Wettergreen homed in on liberalism’s Hegelian dimension, which held that the ideals of equality and individualism represented the “end of history,” and that practically speaking all that is left is the struggle to achieve more perfect equality, either through revolution, if you’re a Marxist, or through “Progressivism,” if you’re a modern liberal. (And in both cases these problems are seen mostly as technical in nature: hence the technocracy of the Grubers.) This is at the root of that familiar liberal cliché, “on the side of history.” Most liberals are unaware of the pedigree of this theme, but always proceed according to the presumption that it is unnecessary to argue the premise. For a liberal, the doctrine of Progress is simply above rational argument.
But the “New Left” of the 1960s recoiled from the implications of this. The French Hegelian quasi-Communist Alexandre Kojeves wrote that “The American way of life is not the life-style proper to the final State because it is too vulgar.” From here flowed much of the vocabulary of the 1960s about finding “authenticity,” which found its way into nearly every nook and cranny of our culture (much to the fury of the New Left) and gradually overtook mainstream liberalism. Consider, as just one example, Hillary Clinton’s infamous 1993 speech on “the politics of meaning,” which in a sense was just Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech on steroids. Hillary ratified the idea that government wouldn’t just tend to your material needs, but would heal your soul, too. Because we’re better than you are.
The supposed backwardness of the American middle class is oddly reassuring to liberals, because it ratifies their formal snobbery. But it is snobbery that compasses the incoherence of a liberalism that seeks to shore up the middle class it disdains, and the hypocrisy of scowling at middle class materialism while scooping up million dollar government contracts to manage Obamacare. It also explains the rage of liberals when their “wave of history” collides with a riptide “wave election” that leaves them stranded on a sandbar.
How Obama and Chuck Hagel reached the end of the line.
THE HILL: How Obama and Chuck Hagel reached the end of the line.
While aides described the departure as a mutual decision based on shifting priorities at the Department of Defense, there are signs that tensions between Hagel and the White House contributed to the personnel change.
Hagel struggled to break into the president’s tight-knit inner circle, and clashed with influential White House officials on key policy initiatives. His frequent rhetorical missteps contributed to perceptions he was out of sync with the West Wing.
Ultimately Hagel believed the pivot to combating ISIS represented a dramatic change from the types of reforms he had hoped to accomplish during his tenure at the Pentagon, aides said.
White House and Defense officials said Hagel was tapped to spearhead efforts like combating sexual assault in the ranks and trimming the Pentagon’s budget to deal with sequestration.
Yeah, I think their priorities were off a bit. Plus:
The steady stream of stories in recent weeks that suggested Hagel was having a difficult time penetrating the president’s inner circle carried echoes of Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, two past Defense secretaries who went on to write tell-all books critical of the president’s handling of defense policy.
Former Democratic aide Brent Budowsky said Democrats across the Capitol saw Hagel’s ouster as the latest example of “unprecedented” drama created by “too tight and too controlling of an inner circle.”
Translation: Valerie Jarrett.
38
Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds
Understanding the Nihilist in the White House
Understanding the Nihilist in the White House
Obama is bent on destruction rather than creation, because destruction for its own sake is also part of the arsenal of nihilism.
Jean Kaufman
November 24, 2014
Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan is an example of a type of person with a good mind who has huge pockets of — I’m not sure exactly what to call it. Naivete? Trust? Idealism? Lack of comprehension? Almost willful blindness? She often gets to a certain point in understanding someone or something and then stops, refusing to open the door of the room she stands before, afraid to look inside. Or she opens it a crack, takes a tiny peek, and then slams it shut.
It is not just Noonan who does this sort of thing, either. If it were, it would hardly matter at all, even though she’s an influential columnist. This is the mindset of a great many people. It almost seems as though there are three kinds of humans in the world, and all of them are useful to Obama: those who are naive about human nature, those who are so cynical they equally condemn all politicians as equally bad/corrupt/selfish, and those who justify anything a public figure does if it furthers their own goals.
There’s a fourth: those who see more clearly that that. But of course, some of those who think they see clearly fall into one of the above categories.
Now for Noonan, who has written a column titled, “The Nihilist in the White House.” You know who it’s about:
The president’s executive action on immigration is an act of willful nihilism that he himself had argued against in the past. It is a sharp stick in the eye of the new congressional majority. It is at odds with—it defies—the meaning and message of the last election, and therefore is destructive to the reputation of democracy itself. It is huge in its impact but has only a sole cause, the president’s lone will. It damages the standing of our tottery political institutions rather than strengthening them, which is what they desperately need, and sets a template for future executive abuse. It will surely encourage increased illegal immigration and thus further erode the position of the American working class.
The term nihilism has quite a few definitions. One of them refers to a Russian revolutionary movement that advocated violent overthrow of the government during the 1860s-1880s. Obama is indeed a leftist, but that doesn’t seem to be his style (at the moment, he is the government), although it’s not difficult to believe that he would justify and order violence if he needed it and felt he could get away with it.
Nihilism also involves one or all of the following beliefs/attitudes: that life has no intrinsic meaning, that morality does not inherently exist, and/or that reality itself does not exist (“an extreme form of skepticism that denies all existence”). I don’t read Obama’s mind (or Noonan’s), but I think we probably can safely eliminate that last one from what Noonan might be talking about. Perhaps we can eliminate the first one; perhaps not. That leaves us with the middle definition, that morality does not inherently exist, and I think that is part of what Noonan might be getting at.
But it is clear that one of the main things that motivated Noonan’s use of the word “nihilist” for Obama was that he is bent on destruction rather than creation, because destruction for its own sake is also part of the arsenal of nihilism. In the paragraph of hers that I quoted above, she uses words that express this to describe the effects of Obama’s executive order on immigration [emphasis mine]: it is “destructive to the reputation of democracy itself,” it “damages the standing of our tottery political institutions,” and it “erode[s] the position of the American working class.”
I agree that Obama wants to destroy. His nihilism would be of the “active” type, however, because he also wants to create:
…”[A]ctive” nihilism on the other hand destroys to level the field for constructing something new. This form of nihilism is characterized by Nietzsche as “a sign of strength,” a wilful destruction of the old values to wipe the slate clean and lay down one’s own beliefs and interpretations, contrary to the passive nihilism that resigns itself with the decomposition of the old values.
In what does Obama believe, and what does he wish to create? His beliefs are those of the left: America must be punished and humbled for its crimes, which include colonialism and racism. And what does he want to build? He is dedicated to the idea that America must be remade into a leftist welfare state of the European type (or the Chavez type). Purposely encouraging illegal immigration seems a great way to further those goals, as well as (he believes) to gain the future votes of such immigrants and their offspring for the left.
Noonan ignores those goals, but that’s not the only way in which she exhibits naïveté. Here’s another:
This White House seems driven—does it understand this?—by a kind of political nihilism. They agitate, aggravate, fray and separate.
Translation: Obama and his White House are not carrying out their unifying, uplifting, positive rhetoric of yore. Instead of building (as other presidents of both parties have tried to do, and as Obama has said he wishes to do), they destroy. Instead of uniting, they separate. Is this deliberate, or are they unaware of what they’re doing?
My response to Noonan is this: are you joking? What part of “community activist” do you not understand? What part of “Alinskyite“?
But Noonan herself seems not to be aware of any of this. Or perhaps she is merely doubting and denying her own dawning understanding and its meaning, because it is too frightening. She refuses to connect the dots. And she is most assuredly not a dumb person, nor does she lack perceptiveness. But she has a blind spot for human evil, and would like to attribute the best motives to people rather than the worst, despite the evidence before her eyes.
In this she is not alone. Much of America ignored (and many still ignore) the evidence before their eyes, which is now irrefutable. Obama’s destructiveness is deliberate, and his goals are the remaking of American in a leftist image, and permanent power for the left. This continuing denial on the part of many Americans is one of the main reasons he may succeed.
Thursday, November 20, 2014
Williams: Say it loud: Black, GOP and proud
Williams: Say it loud: Black, GOP and proud
By Juan Williams - 11/17/14 06:00 AM EST
As a black Democrat I have to say: 2014 was a marquee year for black Republicans.
But the reaction from the NAACP and black Democrats has been revulsion.
Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), a member of the Democratic House leadership, dismissed Republican South Carolina Senator Tim Scott’s victory as insignificant: “If you call progress electing a [black] person … who votes against the interests and aspirations of 95
percent of the black people in South Carolina, then I guess that’s progress.”
Another critic of the black Republican ascendency, Darron Smith, wrote in the Huffington Post that Mia Love’s achievement in becoming the first black Republican woman elected to the House is “dangerous.”
“Mia [Love] and others like her are seemingly out of touch with the political realities of African Americans and what remains at stake for them,” he wrote. The election of a conservative black woman, he continued, was “quite dangerous for people of color, sending a message that society is post-racial when, in fact, hate crimes, police shootings of innocent and unarmed black men and boys, and vitriolic online attacks have dramatically increased since the election of our first black president.”
Smith’s harsh appraisal fit with Rep. Charles Rangel’s (D-N.Y.) assessment of the GOP’s midterm wave in the South, in which Republicans ousted Democrats in Arkansas, Georgia and North Carolina. As one of the House’s longest-serving black Democrats, Rangel began by making the fair argument that Republicans in the South are using voter identification laws to suppress black turnout.
But he then drew a line straight from white racists in former slave-holding states to the present-day GOP. Those racists, he asserted, were “frustrated with the Emancipation Proclamation … became Republicans, then Tea Party people.”
Love, Scott and Will Hurd — a 35-year-old former CIA agent who became the first black Republican elected to Congress from Texas since the Civil War — all had far-right backing.
In response to this liberal backlash, Condoleezza Rice, a black southerner and former secretary of State for a Republican president, accused the critics of “fear mongering among minorities just because you disagree with Republicans.”
Secretary Rice is exactly right.
Even if the overwhelmingly white Republicans in Congress are using Scott, Love and Hurd to provide cover for lingering racist elements in the party, there is no excuse for assuming these three are racial traitors, or for insisting that all black people think alike.
My son, Raffi Williams, is a black Republican and a deputy press secretary for the Republican National Committee. He has often pointed out to me that it is important to have diversity present at every table of political power.
The real racism at play here is among those self-declared progressives who gloss over the fact that black people who are politically conservative and Republican have just as acute a sense of racial history — and of racial pride — as do their liberal counterparts.
Is Colin Powell, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the first black secretary of State, a racial token because he is a Republican? This is a man who built a tribute to the Buffalo Soldiers. When Powell first came to national prominence, in his military role, denigrating comments came from the white men who resented his rise because they themselves wanted his job. It is a shame to see similar slurs being used by black people on this new generation of black conservatives.
One of my political heroes is William T. Coleman, a black Republican who served as secretary of Transportation in the Ford administration. Coleman, now 94, is a master of black history. He grew up in racially divided Philadelphia, helped Thurgood Marshall break down laws of segregation, and later used his political access to open doors for black people in government and corporate life.
Is that a token?
Scott is positioned to become Congress’s leading advocate for reform of a broken public education system that is failing too many children. With nearly half of black students dropping out of high school, there is a desperate need for new ideas in the Senate on education.
Similarly, Love, as mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah, focused on bringing more jobs to town. With black unemployment nationally over 11 percent, Love’s voice and her ideas for economic development create new opportunities for black Democrats to do business with Republicans.
Hurd’s CIA experience as an undercover officer in the Middle East brings a black man’s perspective to debates on dealing with Muslim extremists.
To be clear, it is up to Scott, Love and Hurd to be more than window dressing for a GOP with a major problem as a party defined by the anger of older, white, conservative men.
But they’ve beaten the odds so far. I’m rooting for them to do it again.
Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.
By Juan Williams - 11/17/14 06:00 AM EST
As a black Democrat I have to say: 2014 was a marquee year for black Republicans.
But the reaction from the NAACP and black Democrats has been revulsion.
Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), a member of the Democratic House leadership, dismissed Republican South Carolina Senator Tim Scott’s victory as insignificant: “If you call progress electing a [black] person … who votes against the interests and aspirations of 95
percent of the black people in South Carolina, then I guess that’s progress.”
Another critic of the black Republican ascendency, Darron Smith, wrote in the Huffington Post that Mia Love’s achievement in becoming the first black Republican woman elected to the House is “dangerous.”
“Mia [Love] and others like her are seemingly out of touch with the political realities of African Americans and what remains at stake for them,” he wrote. The election of a conservative black woman, he continued, was “quite dangerous for people of color, sending a message that society is post-racial when, in fact, hate crimes, police shootings of innocent and unarmed black men and boys, and vitriolic online attacks have dramatically increased since the election of our first black president.”
Smith’s harsh appraisal fit with Rep. Charles Rangel’s (D-N.Y.) assessment of the GOP’s midterm wave in the South, in which Republicans ousted Democrats in Arkansas, Georgia and North Carolina. As one of the House’s longest-serving black Democrats, Rangel began by making the fair argument that Republicans in the South are using voter identification laws to suppress black turnout.
But he then drew a line straight from white racists in former slave-holding states to the present-day GOP. Those racists, he asserted, were “frustrated with the Emancipation Proclamation … became Republicans, then Tea Party people.”
Love, Scott and Will Hurd — a 35-year-old former CIA agent who became the first black Republican elected to Congress from Texas since the Civil War — all had far-right backing.
In response to this liberal backlash, Condoleezza Rice, a black southerner and former secretary of State for a Republican president, accused the critics of “fear mongering among minorities just because you disagree with Republicans.”
Secretary Rice is exactly right.
Even if the overwhelmingly white Republicans in Congress are using Scott, Love and Hurd to provide cover for lingering racist elements in the party, there is no excuse for assuming these three are racial traitors, or for insisting that all black people think alike.
My son, Raffi Williams, is a black Republican and a deputy press secretary for the Republican National Committee. He has often pointed out to me that it is important to have diversity present at every table of political power.
The real racism at play here is among those self-declared progressives who gloss over the fact that black people who are politically conservative and Republican have just as acute a sense of racial history — and of racial pride — as do their liberal counterparts.
Is Colin Powell, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the first black secretary of State, a racial token because he is a Republican? This is a man who built a tribute to the Buffalo Soldiers. When Powell first came to national prominence, in his military role, denigrating comments came from the white men who resented his rise because they themselves wanted his job. It is a shame to see similar slurs being used by black people on this new generation of black conservatives.
One of my political heroes is William T. Coleman, a black Republican who served as secretary of Transportation in the Ford administration. Coleman, now 94, is a master of black history. He grew up in racially divided Philadelphia, helped Thurgood Marshall break down laws of segregation, and later used his political access to open doors for black people in government and corporate life.
Is that a token?
Scott is positioned to become Congress’s leading advocate for reform of a broken public education system that is failing too many children. With nearly half of black students dropping out of high school, there is a desperate need for new ideas in the Senate on education.
Similarly, Love, as mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah, focused on bringing more jobs to town. With black unemployment nationally over 11 percent, Love’s voice and her ideas for economic development create new opportunities for black Democrats to do business with Republicans.
Hurd’s CIA experience as an undercover officer in the Middle East brings a black man’s perspective to debates on dealing with Muslim extremists.
To be clear, it is up to Scott, Love and Hurd to be more than window dressing for a GOP with a major problem as a party defined by the anger of older, white, conservative men.
But they’ve beaten the odds so far. I’m rooting for them to do it again.
Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.
King Obama too Big for the Constitution
Obama Is About to Commit an Act of Constitutional Infamy
Peter Wehner 11.19.2014
The president will present his case on behalf of his forthcoming executive order on amnesty tomorrow at 8 p.m. I certainly hope President Obama addresses the arguments against his action that were repeatedly and passionately made by … President Obama. Our friends at National Review have put together a nice video here; I’d urge you to watch it. Mr. Obama is now acting like, in his words, an “emperor.” His hypocrisy is, even by his standards, staggering.
But hypocrisy is not unusual in politicians and presidents; firing a missile aimed at our constitutional form of government is. And that is what Mr. Obama is about to do.
As the liberal law professor Jonathan Turley put it last night, this is a “particularly dangerous moment” for the president to defy the will of Congress yet again, just 15 days after an election in which the American people registered their emphatic (anti-Obama) judgment. “What the president is suggesting is tearing at the very fabric of the Constitution,” according to Professor Turley. “We have a separation of powers that gives us balance. And that doesn’t protect the branches — it’s not there to protect the executive branch or legislative branch — it’s to protect liberty. It’s to prevent any branch from assuming so much control that they become a threat to liberty.”
What is about to happen may be the low point in a presidency filled with them. Mr. Obama is acting in a way that he himself knows–that he himself has said–is unconstitutional and indefensible. No matter. In an act of unmatched narcissism and selfishness, the president will create–he is thirsting to create–a constitutional crisis that is utterly unnecessary and will further polarize our political culture.
Mr. Obama is about to commit an act of constitutional infamy. This is a stain that will stay with him.
Peter Wehner 11.19.2014
The president will present his case on behalf of his forthcoming executive order on amnesty tomorrow at 8 p.m. I certainly hope President Obama addresses the arguments against his action that were repeatedly and passionately made by … President Obama. Our friends at National Review have put together a nice video here; I’d urge you to watch it. Mr. Obama is now acting like, in his words, an “emperor.” His hypocrisy is, even by his standards, staggering.
But hypocrisy is not unusual in politicians and presidents; firing a missile aimed at our constitutional form of government is. And that is what Mr. Obama is about to do.
As the liberal law professor Jonathan Turley put it last night, this is a “particularly dangerous moment” for the president to defy the will of Congress yet again, just 15 days after an election in which the American people registered their emphatic (anti-Obama) judgment. “What the president is suggesting is tearing at the very fabric of the Constitution,” according to Professor Turley. “We have a separation of powers that gives us balance. And that doesn’t protect the branches — it’s not there to protect the executive branch or legislative branch — it’s to protect liberty. It’s to prevent any branch from assuming so much control that they become a threat to liberty.”
What is about to happen may be the low point in a presidency filled with them. Mr. Obama is acting in a way that he himself knows–that he himself has said–is unconstitutional and indefensible. No matter. In an act of unmatched narcissism and selfishness, the president will create–he is thirsting to create–a constitutional crisis that is utterly unnecessary and will further polarize our political culture.
Mr. Obama is about to commit an act of constitutional infamy. This is a stain that will stay with him.
Obamacare Price Increase (Many More to Follow)
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
My Obamacare Story in 1 Picture
THIS is why Obama had new insurance premium prices held until AFTER the election! Last year, they were posted October 1st.
Thanks, Obama! And thanks Gruber and the “stupidity of the American voter!”
Read the rest of my post at The Political Insider.
Related:
Obamacare increases minimum premiums in Virginia by more than 350%!
My Obamacare Story in 1 Picture
THIS is why Obama had new insurance premium prices held until AFTER the election! Last year, they were posted October 1st.
Thanks, Obama! And thanks Gruber and the “stupidity of the American voter!”
Read the rest of my post at The Political Insider.
Related:
Obamacare increases minimum premiums in Virginia by more than 350%!
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