Friday, July 5, 2013

Current Events - July 5, 2013



54 Months: Longest Stretch of 7.5%+ Unemployment on Record - See more at: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/54-months-longest-stretch-75-unemployment-record#sthash.ASL2pBSJ.dpuf


54 Months: Longest Stretch of 7.5%+ Unemployment on Record

Since January 2009, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as president, the United States has seen 54 straight months with the unemployment rate at 7.5 percent or higher, which is the longest stretch of unemployment at or above that rate since 1948, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics started calculating the national unemployment rate.

Today, BLS reported that the seasonally adjusted national unemployment rate for June was 7.6 percent, the same it was in May.

In December 2008, the month after Obama was first elected and the month before he was inaugurated, unemployment was 7.3 percent. In January 2009, it climbed to 7.8 percent. In February, the month Obama signed what the Congressional Budget Office would later determine was an $830 billion economic stimulus law, the unemployment rate climbed to 8.3 percent.

In the Obama era, the unemployment rate peaked at 10.0 percent in October 2010. It did not dip below 9 percent until October 2011, when it hit 8.9 percent.  From August to September 2012, it dropped from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent—the first time during Obama’s tenure it went under 8 percent.

Since then, the lowest it has gone has been 7.5 percent—the rate it hit in April. But after April, it ticked back up to 7.6 percent in May and stayed at 7.6 percent in June.

Prior to Obama’s presidency, the longest stretch of national unemployment at 7.5 percent or higher, as reported by the BLS, was 32 months from September 1981 through April 1984. From August 1981 to September 1981, unemployment climbed from 7.4 percent to 7.6 percent. It then stayed above 7.5 percent until April 1984, when it was at 7.7 percent. In May 1984, it dropped to 7.4 percent.

On January 10, 2009, Christina Romer, who was President-elect Barack Obama’s top economic adviser, and Jared Bernstein, who was Vice President-elect Joe Biden’s top economic adviser, published a report predicting that if Obama’s proposed stimulus plan were enacted the unemployment rate would not top 8 percent.

In a February 2013 report on the impact of Obama’s stimulus law—the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)—the Congressional Budget Office said that it estimated the law would have the net effect of increasing federal budget deficits by $830 billion between 2009 and 2019.

CBO also estimated that the stimulus had the impact in the last quarter of 2012 of lowering “the unemployment rate by between 0.1 percentage points and 0.4 percentage points.”

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/54-months-longest-stretch-75-unemployment-record#sthash.ASL2pBSJ.dpuf 

Employer mandate suspension to worsen deficit

President Obama's decision to suspend the employer mandate of ObamaCare will mean that $10 billion in fines, which were expected to be added to federal revenues, will not be received by the United States Treasury. This makes the delay what McClatchy News Service describes as "costly." Employers relieved of the financial burden might choose another word.
Tony Pugh of McClatchy writes:

The Congressional Budget Office estimates the federal government will lose $10 billion in employer penalties in 2015 because of the delayed enforcement. Likewise, many expect that federal outlays to help low- and moderate-income people purchase coverage will grow with employers no longer required to provide coverage next year.
"At a minimum, the federal revenue from fines is gone. More realistically, the costs of already bloated insurance subsidies will escalate and the red ink will rise," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a conservative think tank.

ObamaCare is a hopeless fiasco, a Pandora's Box of unintended consequences. If the media were not hopelessly biased, the public would be aware of the inability of this administration to make this scheme work, and would already be demanding repeal. The GOP must focus on stoking to fires of the repeal movement. 
 
PK'S NOTE: Yes, they think we're that stupid.

Reversing denial, State says Kerry was briefly on boat

 Secretary of State John Kerry was on his boat briefly on Wednesday, contrary to an earlier denial by the State Department, but was there only briefly and did not conduct official business while on board.

“While he was briefly on his boat on Wednesday, Secretary Kerry worked around the clock all day including participating in the president’s meeting with his national security council," spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Friday. Kerry also held calls "with Norwegian Foreign Minister Eade,Qatari Foreign Minister al-Attiyah, Turkish Foreign Minister Davutoglu, Egyptian Constitution Party President ElBaradei and five calls Ambassador Patterson on that day alone and since then he continued to make calls to leaders including Emirati Foreign Minister bin Zayed, Prime Minister Netanyahu and Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr.”  None of the calls were made from aboard the boat.

CBS News had initially reported that one of its producers spotted Kerry boarding the boat at the Nantucket Boat Basin on Wednesday afternoon, within hours of the removal of Mohamed Morsi from power in Egypt. But the State Department denied that Kerry had been there.

"Since his plane touched down in Washington at 4 a.m., Secretary Kerry was working all day and on the phone dealing with the crisis in Egypt," Psaki said Wednesday evening. "He participated in the White House meeting with the president by secure phone and was and is in non-stop contact with foreign leaders, and his senior team in Washington and Cairo. Any report or tweet that he was on a boat is completely inaccurate."

  http://www.politico.com/politico44/2013/07/reversing-denial-state-says-kerry-was-briefly-on-boat-167653.html

Blurring the Lines of the IRS Targeting

The IRS political saga marches on, but obviously, some really, really wish it wouldn't.

Exhibit A is this story from The New York Times, titled "IRS Scruinty Goes Beyond the Political."  It points out the not-too-surprising fact that there were groups besides  conservatives ones that received extra scrutiny from the IRS's nonprofit outfit -- to take an example prominently relied on in the linked piece, "open source" groups.

From this fact, the Times piece rushes to state (what one can only suspect are) highly welcome conclusions: 
[A] closer look at the I.R.S. operation suggests that the problem was less about ideology and more about how a process instructing reviewers to “be on the lookout” for selected terms was applied to any group that mentioned certain words in its application.
. . . 
“As soon as you say the words ‘open source,’ like other organizations that use ‘Tea Party’ or ‘Occupy,’ it gets you red-flagged,” said Luis Villa, a lawyer and a member of the board of directors of the Open Source Initiative. The I.R.S. feared that such groups were really moneymaking enterprises.
Fair enough.  But let's think about it. Making sure that "moneymaking enterprises" (i.e., for-profit groups) are not taking illegal advantage of nonprofit status is what the IRS nonprofit unit is supposed to be doing.  If the questions posed in that pursuit are unduly burdensome, that's something that can be discussed, but it's irrelevant to the scandal over the treatment of conservative groups.

The Times piece not only jumps to the conclusion -- still largely unsupported by facts -- that the IRS was simply incompetent, rather than corrupt, it also seeks to confuse related issues.  At this point, the outrage isn't about the IRS giving extra scrutiny to some groups applying for tax-exempt status.  It isn't about the use of BOLO lists, in general.  It isn't even about the inclusion of certain terms on BOLO lists. It's about the fact that, when agents did indeed "flag" ideological groups with names on the BOLO list, the IRS seems to have harassed only those with right-leaning views.

In a sense, this is the mirror image of the meme that Democrats and Obama's hand-picked IRS commissioner, Danny Werfel, tried to sell last week.    They pointed to the fact that there were BOLO lists with the terms "progressive" and "occupy" were on BOLO lists.  See? Lefty-sounding names appeared on some BOLO lists -- so all's fair, right?  Now the New York Times tries a new approach to achieving the same end: See? Other groups besides inherently political ones received extra scruinty -- so all's fair, right?

What the Times and the Democrats have in common is the objective of calling a premature end to any investigation by claiming that conservative-leaning groups were not unfairly or uniquely targeted.  But if that's the case:

Exit Questions:

Why has Russell George, the IG, adamantly insisted that his investigation suggests viewpoint discrimination?
Why did Cincinnati employees understand that only right-leaning groups were to be "kicked up" to Washington?

And the grandaddy of them all: Where are the left-leaning analogues to the conservative-leaning groups that were mistreated by the IRS?

Scrutiny that is intrusive and overbearing -- but evenhanded-- may be a sign of incompetence.  Scrutiny that is directed at only one side of the political spectrum hints at something much more sinister.  Nice effort by the Times -- but this investigation is far from over.

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/carolplattliebau/2013/07/05/blurring-the-lines-of-the-irs-targeting-n1634590 

WaPo reveals the ugly Chicago tactics of Obama

Readers of American Thinker are well aware of the bring-a-gun-to-a-knife-fight nature of Presiddnt Obama's political tactics. But for the Beltway denizens who read the Washington Post, not the Times or Free Beacon, may have an underdeveloped appreciation for the Alinsky influence at work in the nation's highest office. That's why it is encouraging to see Rachel Weiner of  the WaPo reporting:
In the summer of 2010, with Republicans poised to take over the House and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) in line to lead the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the White House started urging reporters to write negative stories about the congressman's past, a new book says.
New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich describes what he says were the anti-Issa efforts in "This Town," a condemnation of Washington self-obsession and self-promotion, a copy of which was obtained by the Washington Post.
According to Leibovich, former Obama deputy press secretary Bill Burton and suggested the reporter look into Issa's past.

Do liberals remember when "hope" was associated with Obama? Will it ever sink in on liberals that they were conned into backing a man very different than they imagined? Gutter politics, news management, and incompetence are the obvious legacies of Obama's time in office. Time to wake up, libs.

 http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/07/wapo_reveals_the_ugly_chicago_tactics_of_obama.html#ixzz2YC2ct1sm

Obama’s Global-Warming Folly

No, Mr. President, we don’t need a war on coal. 

The economy stagnates. Syria burns. Scandals lap at his feet. China and Russia mock him, even as a “29-year-old hacker” revealed his nation’s spy secrets to the world. How does President Obama respond? With a grandiloquent speech on climate change.

Climate change? It lies at the very bottom of a list of Americans’ concerns (last of 21 — Pew poll). Which means that Obama’s declaration of unilateral American war on global warming, whatever the cost — and it will be heavy — is either highly visionary or hopelessly solipsistic. You decide:

Global temperatures have been flat for 16 years — a curious time to unveil a grand, hugely costly, socially disruptive anti-warming program. 

Now, this inconvenient finding is not dispositive. It doesn’t mean there is no global warming. But it is something that the very complex global-warming models that Obama naïvely claims represent settled science have trouble explaining. It therefore highlights the president’s presumption in dismissing skeptics as flat-earth know-nothings.

On the contrary. It’s flat-earthers like Obama who refuse to acknowledge the problematic nature of contradictory data. It’s flat-earthers like Obama who cite a recent Alaskan heat wave — a freak event in one place at one time — as presumptive evidence of planetary climate change. It’s flat-earthers like Obama who cite perennial phenomena such as droughts as cosmic retribution for environmental sinfulness.

For the sake of argument, nonetheless, let’s concede that global warming is precisely what Obama thinks it is. Then answer this: What in God’s name is his massive new regulatory and spending program — which begins with a war on coal and ends with billions in more subsidies for new Solyndras — going to do about it?

The U.S. has already radically cut CO2 emissions — more than any country on earth since 2006, according to the International Energy Agency. Emissions today are back down to 1992 levels.

And yet, at the same time, global emissions have gone up. That’s because — surprise! — we don’t control the energy use of the other 96 percent of humankind.

At the heart of Obama’s program are EPA regulations that will make it impossible to open any new coal plant and will systematically shut down existing plants. “Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they’re having a war on coal,” explained one of Obama’s climate advisers. “On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.”

Net effect: tens of thousands of jobs killed, entire states impoverished. This at a time of chronically and crushingly high unemployment, slow growth, jittery markets, and deep economic uncertainty.

But that’s not the worst of it. This massive self-sacrifice might be worthwhile if it did actually stop global warming and save the planet. What makes the whole idea nuts is that it won’t. This massive self-inflicted economic wound will have no effect on climate change.

The have-nots are rapidly industrializing. As we speak, China and India together are opening one new coal plant every week. We can kill U.S. coal and devastate coal country all we want, but the industrializing third world will more than make up for it. The net effect of the Obama plan will simply be dismantling the U.S. coal industry for shipping abroad.

To think we will get these countries to cooperate is sheer fantasy. We’ve been negotiating climate treaties for 20 years and gotten exactly nowhere. China, India, and the other rising and modernizing countries point out that the West had a 150-year industrial head start that made it rich. They are still poor. And now, just as they are beginning to get rich, we’re telling them to stop dead in their tracks?

Fat chance. Obama imagines he’s going to cajole China into a greenhouse-gas-emissions reduction that will slow its economy, increase energy costs, derail industrialization, and risk enormous social unrest. This from a president who couldn’t even get China to turn over one Edward Snowden to U.S. custody.

I’m not against a global pact to reduce CO2 emissions. Indeed, I favor it. But in the absence of one — and there is no chance of getting one in the foreseeable future — there is no point in America’s committing economic suicide to no effect on climate change, the reversing of which, after all, is the alleged point of the exercise.

For a president to propose this with such aggressive certainty is incomprehensible. It is the starkest of examples of belief that is impervious to evidence. And the word for that is faith, not science.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/352690/obamas-global-warming-folly-charles-krauthammer

U.S. must suspend aid after Egypt’s coup

THERE IS no ambiguity about what happened in Egypt on Wednesday: a military coup against a democratically elected government and the wrong response to the country’s problems. The armed forces forcibly removed and arrested President Mohamad Morsi, who won 51 percent of the vote in a free and fair election little more than a year ago. A constitution ratified by a two-thirds majority in another popular vote last December was suspended; dozens of leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood have been arrested and a number of media outlets shut down. A little-known judge appointed as president and granted the power to rule by decree will be entirely dependent on the armed forces for his authority.
 Having not spoken up against the excesses of Mr. Morsi’s government, the Obama administration has, with equal fecklessness, failed to forthrightly oppose the military intervention. But there should be no question that under a law passed by Congress, U.S. aid to Egypt — including the $1.3 billion annual grant to the military — must be suspended.

Some in the administration and Congress will try to avoid this step, because of the armed forces’ history as a U.S. ally and guarantor of peace with Israel. But the suspension of aid is the necessary first step in a U.S. policy that advances the aim Mr. Obama laid out in a Wednesday night statement: “to ensure the lasting restoration of Egypt’s democracy.”

Following the removal from office of Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, military leaders promised — as they did again Wednesday — to ensure democratic rights and quickly move toward elections. They did neither. Liberal democratic leaders who had opposed Mr. Mubarak’s autocracy were singled out for repression; critical journalists and activists were prosecuted and jailed in military-run trials; and while elections were repeatedly postponed, a campaign was launched against civil society groups dedicated to promoting free elections and human rights, culminating in the arrest and prosecution of the staff of several U.S. nongovernmental organizations. The generals, meanwhile, insisted on constitutional provisions exempting the armed forces and its budget from civilian authority.

The Obama administration should now make clear to the new military-backed regime that aid will be restored only if a genuinely democratic transition is pursued in the coming months. That means tolerance for all peaceful political forces, including the Muslim Brotherhood — whose leaders, including Mr. Morsi, should be immediately released. It means acceptance of free assembly and free media, including the Islamist broadcasters that have been shut down. Any changes to the constitution should be the result of a consensus among all political forces, without diktats by the military. And there must be a firm — and short — timetable for new parliamentary and presidential elections. 

Had the armed forces not intervened, democracy probably would have led to the defeat within months of the Muslim Brotherhood in legislative elections. If it does not provoke the eruption of violent conflict, this coup may well ensure that Islamist forces, including more radical groups, grow stronger. The United States must focus on preventing the worst outcomes in a vital Arab ally, including civil war or a new dictatorship. That means dropping its passivity and using the leverage of aid to insist on a democratic transition.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/us-must-suspend-aid-after-egypts-coup/2013/07/04/cd53f248-e4a8-11e2-a11e-c2ea876a8f30_story.html

HEADSLAM HEADLINES:

Do we care about our privacy anymore?

Bill Press calls American people 'sheep' for lack of outrage about NSA data collection

Every Fourth of July, somebody reminds us there’s more to this national holiday than hotdogs and fireworks. Take time over the weekend, we are piously admonished, to remember what it’s all about. Annoying advice, perhaps, but important. And, this year, more so than ever because one of our most basic rights is under attack.

In powerful words that still stir our hearts, our Founding Fathers laid forth the foundation on which America is built: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” And those rights are so sacred “that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government.”

Clearly, the founders were telling us they wouldn’t tolerate any wholesale attempt to undermine our basic rights — and we shouldn’t, either. So where’s the outrage today over the massive invasion of our privacy by the National Security Agency? Have we forgotten how to fight?

All we’ve been talking about for the last two weeks is Edward Snowden. Where is he? Will he ever get out of the Moscow airport? Will he be granted asylum anywhere? Who cares? The real issue is not Snowden’s fate. It’s what Snowden revealed about the NSA’s collection of data, which we now know to be even more widespread than previously believed.

Under a broad interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, and with the full blessing of the court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, NSA’s amassing and storing a record of every phone call – every single phone call! – made in the United States: from what number, to what number and how long it lasted: what Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has called “a massive invasion of Americans’ privacy.” The NSA has also capturing records of every email sent outside the United States.

That’s not all. The latest documents leaked by Snowden reveal that the NSA is also routinely listening in on communications of many governments, including our allies in the European Union. It’s targeted 38 embassies and diplomatic missions in Washington and New York for surveillance. And it bugged conversations of delegates to the Group of 20 industrialized nations meeting recently in London. When Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, French President Francois Hollande and other European leaders expressed alarm over NSA’s global spying, President Obama defended it, insisting we’re just “trying to understand the world better.”

But, again, it’s well and good that European leaders are upset. What’s frightening is that there’s so little concern expressed by the American people. In the most recent Washington Post poll, 56 percent of Americans find the NSA spying program “acceptable.” Who knows why? Maybe it’s a result of post-September 11 syndrome, whereby we assume we have to surrender our privacy to help track down terrorists. Maybe it’s because we’ve already volunteered so much private information to Facebook, Amazon and Twitter anyway, we don’t care about privacy anymore. Or maybe it’s because Americans trust Obama where they didn’t trust Bush and Cheney. Sadly, for whatever reason, when it comes to fighting for our right of privacy, we’ve become a nation of sheep. 

That’s a mistake we will someday regret. We don’t have to go back to 1776 to be reminded of how tough our right of privacy was to secure and how valuable it is. The strongest argument for the Fourth Amendment’s right of privacy, in fact, came in the 1928 Supreme Court case of Olmstead v. United States – which was, ironically, the very first case about the government’s right to gather evidence by listening in on phone calls. By a 5-4 margin, the court held for the government. But the great Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote a blistering dissent, in which he tied the Constitution back to the Declaration of Independence.

To enable “the pursuit of happiness,” Brandeis argued, the makers of the Constitution “conferred, as against the government, the right to be let alone – the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.” He continued: “To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the Government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment.”

Under that logic, there is no way NSA’s unlimited data collection can be justified. And no way we should accept it.

http://www.wnd.com/2013/07/do-we-care-about-our-privacy-anymore/

The character of independence

It was easy for American observers to sympathize with the “Arab Spring” revolutionaries in Egypt.  They risked hardship, injury, and death to pack Tahrir Square in a massive demonstration against a corrupt government, presided over by strongman Hosni Mubarak for decades.  They spoke of freedom and democracy.  The cold geopolitical reality was that Mubarak was a reliable U.S. ally, and what replaced him was not.  But all those who risk everything in the name of democracy are singing the first few bars of the American song, and we can’t help but tap our feet to the fife and drum, and wish them well.

An even larger demonstration just overthrew the Arab Spring Egyptian government.  Those hard-won post-Mubarak elections installed a regime of Islamist blockheads whose primary “qualification” for government was the ability to recite Koranic verses from memory.  Their efforts to consolidate power left other Egyptians wondering if they had leaped from the kleptocrat frying pan into the theocrat fire.
The Egyptian people will try again.  They’re none to happy with the United States after our support for the deposed Morsi regime.  Some observers offer hope that it’s more of a personal distaste for Barack Obama and his Administration.  The anti-Obama banners carried through the streets of Cairo support that impression.  Maybe the jubilant Egyptians will still be willing to consider the American revolutionary example and learn something from it.

That would be wise of the Egyptians, because America still offers the paramount example of revolutionary success against tyranny.  In fact, it’s distressingly difficult to point to another example that turned out nearly as well, in either the short or long term.  We Americans have a romantic conviction that all the people of the world yearn to breathe free, with liberty and representative government ready to blossom in every corner of the world, once the hard frost of tyranny is cleared away from the soil of individual dignity.  It’s long past time for us to consider the melancholy reverse of this schoolboy optimism: liberty and representative government are remarkably difficult to nourish, and centuries of effort have produced many failures, measured against few great and enduring successes.

One reason for this uncertain track record is that liberty and representative government are two very different things.  Americans tend to assume the former flows from the latter – plant a seed of democracy, and the tree of liberty takes root.  That’s not true, and the authors of the America’s founding documents knew it wasn’t true.  They wrote with great wisdom and foresight about the necessity of restraining even the most frequently ratified, freely elected government.  Democracy (if we may take that term to include the process of electing representation in a republic) without a vigorous defense of liberty brings mob rule, or installs a set of well-organized and charismatic tyrants whose first order of business is ensuring they will never be voted out of office.  It transforms citizens into warring parties of bitter enemies whose votes determine, not the course of government, but the course of their daily lives.

What has been missing from all the revolutions that didn’t work out as well as ours?  What have we lost, to bring the American revolution to such a perilous hour, in which the restraints upon government decay into first theory, and then fiction?

It all boils down to a question of character.  Modern Americans may not fully appreciate how extraordinarily blessed with leaders of remarkable character our early government was.  James Madison, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson… they, and their colleagues, were among the most brilliant and expressive men of their day.  Read any portion of the Federalist Papers, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution if you seek proof.  The trove of wisdom held by our Founders was piled high with riches.
Presiding over the government they created was George Washington, among the most admired men in the world at the time, and perhaps in all of time.  For too many Americans, our first President has been reduced to a cartoon abstraction of integrity, the lad who could not lie about chopping down a cherry tree.  (Do today’s schoolchildren even learn that, or do I date myself by mentioning it?)  This does not capture the astounding dimensions of Washington’s esteem.

Reporting on a 2012 poll conducted by the British National Army Museum that named George Washington the greatest military enemy of Britain, and the American Revolution her worst defeat, U.S. News said it was “no surprise that the architect of that defeat is still one of Britain’s most despised historical figures.”  Perhaps so, but he wasn’t personally “despised” by his enemies at the time.  There was quite a difference between the glowing accounts of Washington in the British press during the war, and the contemptuous coverage of the rebel nation he fought for.  If the British had managed to kill him, they would have wept honest tears at his funeral.  (Let it be duly noted that not even George Washington’s esteem was universal or perpetual.  The American press took to calling him a “tyrant” for a while, after the Whiskey Rebellion.)

Can a revolution be consolidated into lasting peace, prosperity, and justice without such a leader?  When we think of great historical forces coming together to shape the destiny of a nation, we don’t always account for the importance of a few extraordinary men and women to lead their nation through the aftermath.  Great hours are often squandered by petty men.  Such hours call for more than intelligence and managerial skill.  Towering personal character and morality are required as well.  It’s no longer a fashionable notion, but in times past it was believed that clear, valuable thought was impossible without great character, because the serenity brought by a strong moral sense was essential to careful and honest deliberation.

Who can doubt that the turbulent sea of power released in the aftermath of a revolution, when jubilant people look with love and gratitude upon their liberators, is easily abused?  It’s a time of great temptation for those who find themselves in control of vast resources, with their self-regard inflated by the energetic regard of countless others, their appetite for vengeance against deposed loyalists keen, and their differences with revolutionary rivals sharpened by the defeat of the hated common enemy.  Personal character is the only reliable armor against such temptation, in the days before firm laws to restrain the power of the newborn State have been ratified.

The character of the people is crucial as well.  All of us, everywhere, get the government we deserve.  If we authorize abuse against our fellow citizens, it occurs, and then inevitably grows.  If we demand little character from our leaders, little is supplied.  If we grant our government the power to do whatever “most people” want, it quickly grows until it has little difficulty rounding up enough people to claim majority support for whatever the ruling class wants to do.  If dissent is not cherished, freedom withers.  You will find no intersection between the “tyranny of the majority” and the “consent of the governed,” for the authors of the Declaration of Independence didn’t say a just government should settle for the consent of some of the governed, or even most of them.

We hold the truths enshrined by the American Revolution to be self-evident, not just for us, but for all of mankind.  However, our Founders never said those truths would be easy to embrace.  On the contrary, they wrote often of the urgent need for people of character, both in the halls of government and the great open fields of citizenship.  Those modern readers who are dismayed by the religious language they used are foolishly discounting priceless wisdom, and failing to appreciate the value of humility as a republican virtue.  The truly great leaders of a free people are humble men and women.  Those are really hard to come by.  Intelligence, passion, and charisma are in greater supply, and they are far more easily demonstrated.  Revolutions are more common than Washingtons.

This Independence Day, let us wish the Egyptians well in their search for humble and capable leadership.  Let us join them.

http://www.humanevents.com/2013/07/04/the-character-of-independence/

Two Competing Political Philosophies

This week we celebrate our country's birth. Patriots honor America as a republic conceived as a polity in which all may live safely and securely in the enjoyment of their inalienable, God-given rights. We are inspired by the high idealism of the Founders and stirred by the poignant remembrance of all those who have fought, worked, and sacrificed to make the USA the freest and most prosperous country in the history of the world.

Our joy may be tempered by the realization that liberty and prosperity appear to be at risk. Particularly dismaying about this challenge to America is that it comes from within.

While the following statement is always true to some extent, today it is of existential importance: there is a battle being waged for the soul of America. It is fundamentally a battle of vision and values, of philosophies and principles. It is a struggle between those who adhere to the founding fathers' noble principles and those who -- whether from personal grudges or delusional self-importance, demoralized character or spiritual dullness, warped intellect or diabolical ideology -- wish to reinvent our beloved republic.

The philosophy of the founders was still predominant in our culture and national spirit in the 1950s. Every week, we heard the announcer of the TV series "Superman" proclaim without irony or apology the Man of Steel's commitment to "truth, justice, and the American Way." By "the American way,"we all knew that he referred to the freedom inherent in those God-given rights cited in the Declaration of Independence. Those who cherish and believe in those same venerable principles today have a philosophy that, if summarized in a single word, may be termed "Americanism."

There are myriad alternative philosophies to Americanism, more than can be listed. What all of them have in common is that they either repudiate American values, ideals, and principles outright or compromise them in some way. To varying degrees, they are illiberal, atavistic, elitist, retrograde, Old World philosophies -- that is, they have been tried before and have been found wanting. They may be repackaged to appear as new, fresh, progressive ideas, but they belong to other times and places. Again, for convenience, I'll lump together these anti-American philosophies under the label "alien," since they are foreign to America's founding principles.

Following is a partial list of the fundamental differences between Americanism and the alien philosophies that oppose it. Feel free to add to this list:

Americanism holds that government and law should be negative -- that is, that their purpose is to thwart evil and prevent the violation of individual rights; thus, law and government have a decidedly limited scope. Alien alternatives view the purpose of government and law as doing good things for people, thereby conferring upon government and law a virtually unlimited scope.

Americanism believes that government should act as an impartial umpire tasked with upholding impartial rules and letting the most talented and industrious reap the economic rewards of their efforts. The alien counterfeit believes in an intrusive, activist government that becomes the dominant economic player and picks winners and losers.

Americanism believes that individual rights are primary and government power secondary (see 9th and 10th Amendments). Alien philosophy believes that government power must supersede individual rights in the name of a "great" or "just" society.

Americanism holds that all men are created equal in the eyes of God -- that everyone is entitled to receive equal legal and governmental protection of their rights. Alien philosophy holds that nature or God -- depending on who its proponent believes is the creator of mankind -- blew it by making us different, and therefore it is up to "enlightened" (read: elitist) government leaders to remedy the defective natural order by making everyone economically equal.

Thus, in Americanism "justice" means equal treatment by the law, not unequal treatment designed to produce greater equality of result. The alien counterfeit version of justice is a corrupt nullity under which "justice" means violating the property rights of some Americans in order to bestow benefits on others.

In other words, Americanism is predicated on the rule of law -- the blind and impartial administration of justice that cares not whether a person is rich or poor, black or white, strong or weak. By contrast, the alien philosophy calls for a system of privileges -- that is, discriminatory laws that rob Peter to pay Paul.

Americanism holds that the legitimate way for individuals to prosper is to earn a living by providing something of value for others, thereby producing the wealth that one consumes. The alien antipode asserts that it is legitimate for individuals to enrich themselves via the political process whereby one may lay claim to wealth that others have produced. The American believes in making wealth, the alien, in taking it.

Americanism respects profits that result from creating wealth for others. The alien inversion rewards political "rent-seeking" behavior, whereby special interests exploit the political process to redistribute wealth and enrich themselves at the expense of others.

Americanism honors private property and upholds voluntary economic exchange as a fundamental human right. The alien attitude is to disparage and abrogate property rights while asserting the moral superiority of the involuntary exchanges effected by government transfer programs (of which there are now 2,235 at the federal level) thereby exalting the value system of criminals and institutionalizing theft as the modus operandi of government.

Americanism's fundamental tenet is that citizens of the Republic are the masters and government the servant. The alien philosophy throughout its long and tragic history exalts government elites as the masters directing the affairs of the people subservient to it.

Americanism includes gratitude for the many blessings we have enjoyed as Americans and, proceeding from a continuing basis of individual rights, a desire to use our liberty to attain a more perfect realization of our ideals. Aliens judge America harshly for having been imperfect and prefer a fundamental transformation into a "brave new world" in which individual rights and the "chains of the constitution" are the great obstacles to their power-hungry, utopian plans for us.

In sum, the American philosophy is liberty; the alien philosophy is tyranny. Ultimately, one or the other will prevail, for the two cannot coexist. We all know the choice we will have to make if our children are to observe their Fourths of July as celebrations of liberty as a living, daily reality rather than as a dim historical artifact.

God bless the USA.

Civil Liberties and the Civil War

One hundred and fifty years ago, on July 4, 1853, twin Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg decisively turned the course of the Civil War.  One consequence of that victory was the emancipation of slaves in America.  Another consequence has been the invention of a dangerous myth: that the federal government is the best vehicle for protecting civil liberties.  

This myth has been so potent that when the Supreme Court ruled this June that the "preclearance" provisions of the Voting Rights Act no longer applied to suspect jurisdiction, which included nearly all of the South, self-anointed "civil rights" leaders warned of great dangers.  Even among many conservatives, there is the false understanding that the Bill of Rights was intended to protect our liberties from all government.

Actually, the Bill of Rights is intended to protect American citizens and American states from the federal government, which was understood to be the greatest threat to civil liberties.  After the Civil War, the Supreme Court invented out of whole cloth the "Incorporation Doctrine" by which the Bill of Rights in the Constitution was deemed to apply to states as well as the federal government.

This was utterly unnecessary: every state has its own Bill of Rights, and the first thirteen states had these bills of rights in force before the federal Bill of Rights or even the Constitution.  These state bills of rights typically provided more civil liberties than the federal Bill of Rights.

Why, then, have Americans been persuaded that we need the federal Bill of Rights, federal laws, and federal courts to protect our civil liberties?  The legacy of the Civil War is the sole basis for this curious and flawed reasoning.  Grasping the irrationality of this belief requires dipping into American history before the Civil War.

Slavery existed in every state of the new United States.  By the time of the Civil War, most states of the Union had abolished slavery, and it was very likely that many of the slave states, on their own, were going to follow suit: Missouri, Delaware, Kentucky, and Tennessee, for example, were states in which slavery offended free working men and European immigrants and in which cotton, the cash crop which made slavery profitable, was not grown. 

Even in the Deep South, slavery faced profound problems.  France, England, Canada, and Mexico all had the same hostility to slavery that the North did.  Moreover, cotton was being grown in Egypt, India, and other regions with free labor at prices which could undercut the South.  Moral and economic pressures were going to doom slavery, and they could have done so without the horror of Civil War.

The Civil War and its aftermath of hyper-federalism masked why the Deep South began secession after Lincoln's election in 1860.  It was not because Lincoln had promised to use federal power to force emancipation upon states in the South.  It was rather because, for the first time, the slave-owning South had lost its iron grip on federal power.  This included making sure that any Democrat in the North who wanted to rise in Congress or to the White House supported the South on slavery.

Every president since John Quincy Adams had supported the enforcement of fugitive slave laws, had opposed emancipation of slaves in the District of Columbia, and had appointed Supreme Court justices who were sympathetic to slavery.  The idea that the Supreme Court protected civil liberties from state government excesses -- an unspoken theme in politics today -- reached its most macabre inversion in the odious Dred Scott v. Sanford decision.  Blacks, the court held, once slaves in the South, were always slaves in America.

The Supreme Court ran roughshod over states' rights of northern and western states which had no slavery.  The solid Democrat South wholeheartedly supported this federalization of slavery and the removal of the issue from legislatures to the federal bench.  In the party's 1860 Party Platform, Democrats said, regarding the slavery issue:

Resolved, That the Democratic party will abide by the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States upon these questions of Constitutional Law. ... Resolved, That the enactments of the State Legislatures to defeat the faithful execution of the Fugitive Slave Law are hostile in character, subversive of the Constitution, and revolutionary in their effect.

State governments, not the federal government, protect civil liberties.  Oppressed people seek freer and more sympathetic governments.  Blacks once fled Jim Crow Mississippi for Chicago, but today Chicagoans may flee the Windy City for the freer business climate of Mississippi. 

This marketplace of governments, when states' rights within a federal system are robust, also allows cultural and religious differences to be resolved, with everyone winning.  Mormon Utah has some of the strictest alcohol laws in the nation.  New York City, which has a very large Jewish population, closes its public schools on Jewish as well as Christian holidays.  State elected officials also live in the communities whose laws they make and enforce.  This is radically different from Washingtonians who nominally hail from Colorado or Florida, but who school their children and live their lives in the artificial hothouse of our nation's capital.

Civil liberties matter.  Defending those liberties is the very purpose of government, as our Declaration of Independence reminds us.  Those liberties thrive only when states are strong.  That is the real lesson of the Civil War.

 http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/07/civil_liberties_and_the_civil_war.html#ixzz2YCBPg87y

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