Unless voter integrity efforts take root this year, the notion of free and fair elections could become a relic of American history, Catherine Engelbrecht warned listeners during the “True the Vote National Summit in Houston, Texas yesterday. Engelbrecht, who is the president and founder of the organization, cited specific instances throughout the country where the number of voters listed on registration rolls exceeded the actual number of eligible voters. She also said it was far too easy for non-citizens to obtain voter registration forms.
“The next few months are critical to the telling of our story,” she said. “Our goal is the make the 2012 elections the freest and fairest the country has ever seen.” Engelbrecht acknowledged this is a tall order. The various pressure groups opposed to photo identification requirements are very well funded and well organized. But they are not on the side of public opinion.
The latest survey from Rasmussen finds that 64 percent of likely U.S. voters see voter fraud as a serious problem. The same survey also reports that 73 percent of Americans do not view photo ID laws as being discriminatory.
Other speakers included Anita MonCrief, a former ACORN/Project Vote employee, turned conservative activist.
“I was very sheltered until I met the Tea Party people,” she said. “We were all black Catholics, we liked Jesus and JFK.”
MonCrief recalled a meeting in Little Rock, Arkansas, where ACORN activists outlined a “socialist wish list” that included universal health care and environmental justice. It was at this point that MonCrief began to have misgivings about the ACORN network that were further cemented when she became privy to the close connection between the 2008 Obama campaign and the Project Vote affiliate, she explained.
The collusion between President Obama’s Department of Justice and far left pressure groups that are out to block voter fraud investigations and intimidate state officials was a major theme of MonCrief’s talk.
“Our country is under attack from the inside,” she said. “The Department of Justice has gone wild; it is not working on behalf of the American people. It is working for these pressure groups.”
MonCrief also described how ACORN activists exploited loose voting standards throughout the country in the past few election cycles. Phone calls were made to the offices of secretaries of state throughout the country to identify where it would easiest to manipulate and exploit provisional ballots; these are the ballots used when question are raised about a voter’s eligibility.
Other speakers included Pat Caddell, a Fox News Contributor, and Democratic political strategist. Caddell discussed how the disputed Bush-Gore 2000 presidential race has impacted subsequent elections. The George Soros funded, Secretary of State Project (SOS), for instance, has successfully positioned key figures into office who are sympathetic toward ACORN, and other pressure groups, Caddell explained.
Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, who was elected with support from Soros and ACORN, oversaw the recount that ultimately resulted in election of Al Franken as that state’s Democratic U.S. Senator. Franken had been behind Republican Norm Coleman before the recount.
“Every stolen election is a bullet in the heart of what this country is about,” Caddell said.
Franken provided the 60th vote needed to pass Obamacare.
Former big league first baseman Bill “Moose” Skowron died today of congestive heart failure following a long battle with lung cancer. He was 81.
Skowron spent 14 seasons in the bigs, nine of them with the New York Yankees. He also spent time with the Los Angeles Dodgers, Washington Senators, Chicago White Sox and California Angels. Between 1955 and 1963, Skowron played in every World Series except for one (1959). He earned four World Series rings with the Bronx Bombers (1956, 1958, 1961 and 1962) and one with Dodgers in 1963 when they swept the Yankees in four. Skowron was also named to six American League All-Star teams. He was selected in five consecutive years for the Yankees from 1957 to 1961 and once with the Chisox in 1965. Skowron finished his career with 1,566 hits, a respectable .281 lifetime batting average, 211 homeruns and 888 RBI.
In recent years, Skowron worked for the White Sox in community relations. Here is Skowron letting his hair down in an interview at a golf tournament organized by former White Sox slugger Ron Kittle a few years back.
Over at NRO, Peter Robinson did a week long interview segment with Pat Buchanan. In today’s final installment, Buchanan discussed his abrupt departure from MSNBC earlier this year following the publication of his latest book Suicide of a Superpower:
What do all of these terms racist, sexist and homophobic(inaudible)? They’re all the same thing. They’re synonyms for heretic and what I am is a heretic to the conventional wisdom as it moves further and further left.
Well, Buchanan was no heretic at MSNBC during the Bush bashing days and loved Obama every bit as much as Rachel Maddow. He was a useful idiot and performed this function well. In fact, Buchanan told Robinson that he had “a very good tenure at MSNBC.” But once Obama got elected, Buchanan outlived his usefulness and it was only a matter of time before he did something that would result in his dismissal. MSNBC has been an overtly ultra left-wing entity for most of the time Buchanan was in its employ. Buchanan knew full well the environment he was in, chose to stay in it and cashed their checks. He doesn’t get any sympathy from me.
This is turning absurdist. Six full days after the mob beating in Mobile involving 20 people or so (with two reports now calling it as many as 40), with ALL those involved supposedly living on the same street, Mobile police still have arrested only one man and said they doubt they will ever arrest more than three others. But it gets worse: The man arrested is already out on bond, despite a lengthy criminal record.
Meanwhile, police are now casting doubt on the story of the man’s family, claiming they have changed their story, even though nothing they are saying is really a change from what they have told others for days.
I live in Mobile. I don’t want to believe what I am about to say. But I am now suspecting that officials in Mobile are trying to sweep this all under the rug in order to avoid more national attention of an unwanted sort. At first I thought it was innocent wishful thinking on their part in denying that this was a bigger incident than it was; now, unless I see otherwise, I am suspecting something more obstinately, willfully blind.
We should not sit back and let a man be beaten by 20 people, or beaten by several while a dozen or more incited them to continue the beating, and accept some bogus contention that only three or four deserve arrests and that this was all just nothing to worry much about because it was the continuation of an ongoing personal dispute (with no racial connotations, supposedly, although in the end that is only slightly material).
What the police report comports not at all with my own, fairly brief personal on-scene investigation, nor with more extensive on-scene investigations by several other mainstream news organizations.
This smells like a bit of a cover-up.
It is a cover-up that would never occur if the race of the people involved were reversed.
We must all be dedicated to color-blind justice, and a color-blind society. This is anything but.
I don’t care what the races are that are involved. I don’t care if the skin color is magenta with chartreuse freckles. I want justice. I want accuracy. I want truth.
This is NOT racial rabble-rousing. This is an insistence that the truth come out and put in full context: The context is something in between a “revenge for Trayvon” thing and a mere, totally non-racial personal dispute. I truly believe that the overwhelming majority of American blacks and whites are not racist. But I also believe the media applies horrendous double-standards that excuse some racism while seeing other racism where it doesn’t exist.
Without the full story, all sides will believe the worst, and nobody will learn anything.
I am not interested in seeing some wort of bogus “hate crimes” prosecution. I just want prosecutions, period. And not just three or four, much less the pitiful single arrest that we’ve seen so far. Worse, for the man arrested to already be out on bond is absurd, considering that he has such a long rap sheet. Usually, if somebody has been sentenced to long terms, but had part of those terms suspended, the suspensions carry with them a probationary period as well. it defies belief to think that none of the several suspended sentences carries a probation through which the older charges are reinstated upn further arrest, or at least with some stipulation that bond be higher, or impossible, to get if the subsequent arrest is for a serious violent crime.
This just smells to high heaven.
There is no excuse for us to be sitting here today with not a single person in jail, six days after a mob beating. Meanwhile, the Mobile police darn well ought to be patrolling Delmar Drive, and providing protection for all its residents, black and white alike.
Detroit Tigers outfielder Delmon Young was arrested in front of a hotel on Sixth Avenue in New York City this morning for allegedly assaulting a man while shouting anti-Semitic slurs and has been charged with an aggravated harassment hate crime, a misdemeanor. Young, 26, was apparently intoxicated at the time of the incident.
The Tigers are in New York to play a three game series against the Yankees starting tonight. As of this writing, the Tigers nor MLB have taken any disciplinary action against Young. However, I would be shocked if Young were in the lineup tonight especially in front of a crowd with more than its share of Jewish fans.
This isn’t the first time Young’s temper has got the better of him. In April 2006 (in fact, it was six years ago yesterday), when Young was playing with the Durham Bulls (the Triple A team for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays as they were then known), he was suspended for 50 games for throwing his bat at a the home plate umpire after being ejected for arguing balls and strikes after he was called on out strikes during a game against the Pawtucket Red Sox.
Young was brought up to the bigs later that season and had his first full season with the Devil Rays in 2007. Despite finishing runner up in the AL Rookie of the Year balloting behind Dustin Pedroia of the Boston Red Sox, the rechristened Rays dealt Young along with infielder Brendan Harris and outfielder Jason Pridie to the Minnesota Twins for pitcher Matt Garza and infielder Jason Bartlett. Garza and Bartlett, of course, were key members of the Rays’ 2008 AL championship team.
After adequate seasons in 2008 and 2009, Young had a breakout season with the Twins in 2010 hitting .298 with 21 homeruns and 112 RBI finishing 10th in the AL MVP balloting. However, Young (along with almost every other Twin) took a step back in 2011. Last August, the Twins dealt Young to the Detroit Tigers for minor league pitcher Cole Nelson. Young helped the Tigers win the AL Central and played well in the post-season.
However, Phil Mackey, an ESPN reporter based in the Twin Cities, was relieved the Twins had dealt him because he and his fellow reporters never knew what they were going to get with Young. Mackey summed up Young this way, “Sometimes surly. Sometimes charming and engaging.”
Well, it would appear that Delmon Young’s surly side was on full display this morning.
Naturally, I am disturbed about these accusations of anti-Semitism. Are they true? If it is true then how long has he harbored these feelings? Does his older brother Dmitri, himself a former big leaguer, also afflicted with the world’s oldest hatred? I am hardly the one who is bothered by this development. Consider the thoughts of Rabbi Jason Miller, who is also a loyal Tigers fan:
When I read the news about Young, my heart sank to the floor. My oldest son is 8. In the past year he has become a die hard Detroit Tigers fan. He knows all the players by name. He knows their uniform number and their statistics (just like I did when I was a Tigers fan at that age). How am I supposed to explain to my son that Delmon Young was drunk, got into a street fight, yelled an anti-Semitic slur and got arrested? To my son, Delmon Young is a hero. He cheers for him. He prays that Young will hit a home run when he comes up to bat. I don’t think that it ever occurred to my son (or to me for that matter) that Delmon Young hates Jews in an inebbriated, full-of-rage Mel Gibson sort of way.
I know there’s a lot left to be desired about humanity and human beings. But when Delmon Young or anyone steps up to the plate the last thing I ask myself, “Is he an anti-Semite?” But consider the numbers. At any given moment, there are 750 men who are on the rosters of a major league team. If you took 750 random men between the ages of 18 to 49 there would be invariably be a few bigots amongst them. So chances are there’s someone in a big league clubhouse who doesn’t like Jews or other religious, racial or ethnic groups, drunk or sober. Like poverty, hatred will always be amongst us. However, that doesn’t make it any less disappointing when that hatred comes to the surface in all its ugliness.
UPDATE: The Tigers have removed Young from their active roster and have placed him on the restricted list pending further information.
In response to the frenzied anticipation for David Frum’s debut novel Patriots (available in paperback May 7, so start pitching your tents outside Borders!) the Huffington Post has been serializing Frum’s cheeky Washington satire online. Today HuffPo features, on its exclusive left-hand column, part 5 of Mr. Frum’s entry into the arts and letters, and one of the characters seems surprisingly familiar. While devoted Frum-philes obsess over the similarities between the artist and his central literary creation “Walter” (a moderate Republican opinion blogger for mainstream news sites, or something) a colorful supporting character named “Freddy Catesby” caught my eye:
“So you are probably wondering: Why has Freddy Catesby invited me to lunch? Freddy Catesby, the founder of the Constitutional Review, Patriot News guest host, and bestselling author! Freddy Catesby: who has known U.S. presidents, who has entertained a British prime minister in his home, and who — people say — once dated the Princess of Wales. And it’s this same Freddy Catesby who is taking me out to lunch. Why? It’s the most natural question in the world! It’s exactly what I’d be wondering if I were sitting in your chair.”
The waiter filled Catesby’s wine glass, then looked questioningly at me. What the hell. I nodded yes.
“To understand why I invited you, you have to understand me. I’m not only the founder of Constitutional Review, although I’m proud of my role in launching the magazine. You know that Time magazine called us the most influential political magazine in the country on our 10th anniversary? I’ll put you on the list for our 30th anniversary dinner next month as my guest, I’ll put you at my table.
No, no, don’t thank me — it’s my pleasure.
“All those things I’ve accomplished, all the awards and accolades — they mean nothing to me. I live for my principles, not for recognition. What I care about is fighting the Kultursmog. You know I coined the term?”
Quite the honor. As the late Dorothy Kilgallen once quipped, “You’re nobody in this town until you’ve been skewered by Frum!”
Just as it was gaining momentum and attracting attention, Twitter shut down and silenced an account that promoted a free market vision for environmentalism timed with Earth Day. Special credit here belongs to Eric Bolling, who used his own twitter account and his program “The Five” on Fox News to bring attention the cause.
The account, @FreeMarket_US, a project of Americans for Limited Government (ALG), went live a few days before Earth Day and proceeded to pick up considerable steam. On Earth Day, the official website for Free Market America was launched and its Facebook and Twitter components started to come to life as well. The first video put out by Free Market America, “If I wanted America to fail,” got over 120,000 hits in less than 36 hours — that’s not too shabby.
Adam Bitely, an editor for Net Right Daily, the official website for ALG, described what happened after the Twitter account was suspended mid-way through Earth Day.
“After numerous attempts to contact Twitter and see what the story was behind the suspension, ALG launched a twitter campaign against twitter,” he wrote. “Urging all of our followers to contact @twitter to ask why the Free Market America site has been suspended, thousands came to our defense.”
Bitely credited Bolling and others including Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) who tweeted to her more than 270,000 followers multiple times, talk radio host Neal Boortz (@talkmaster), and Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, for bringing pressure on Twitter.
The account was eventually restored. But the lesson here is for free market activists to remain and vigilant at a time when green pressure groups, and their allies in old and new media, are out to stifle dissenting views.
For latest please follow @freemarket_us, @billwilsonalg, @netrightdaily and @limitgovt.
You might recall that Chicago White Sox pitcher Philip Humber threw a perfect game against the Seattle Mariners last Saturday afternoon.
Tonight, Humber was far from perfect against the Boston Red Sox. In five innings, Humber gave up nine runs on eight hits while issuing three walks. Humber surrendered a grand slam to Kevin Youkilis while giving up two homeruns to Jarrod Saltalamacchia. It just goes to show that in baseball you can go from perfection to pitiful from one outing to the next.
Interestingly, the Red Sox have won four straight games since blowing a 9-0 lead against the New York Yankees last Saturday.
Underscoring just how out of touch with ordinary Americans the president has become, the Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard reports that blue collar Democrats in swing states are none too pleased with the 17 lavish vacations that the Obamas have taken.
Pollsters who have conducted focus group discussions about the state of the economy found that on numerous occasions these 2008 Obama voters volunteered that the First Family has taken too many vacations. “The theme is that the first family ‘is out of touch’ with working class voters,” pollster John McLaughlin said after discussions with voters in Cleveland and Pittsburgh. More here.
One of the horrifying sideshows of the Trayvon Martin carnival is how NBC News edited audio of George Zimmerman’s 911 call to create the false impression that Zimmerman had said, “This guy looks like he’s up to no good … he looks black.”
As Dan Riehl at Breitbart.com’s Big Journalism reported last month, NBC edited out a key part of that call. Zimmerman said that Martin appeared to be “on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.” The 911 dispatcher then asked, “Okay, is this guy, is he white, black, or Hispanic?” Zimmerman was merely answering the dispatcher’s question.
Not only did NBC edit the audio, but also edited Zimmerman’s quotes as published on its Internet site, helping to foster the false belief that Zimmerman had singled out Martin because of his race. Yesterday, NBC News fired a producer/reporter at its Miami affiliate — the second such reported firing in connection with the deceptive edit — and the Miami Herald quoted an unnamed official at the Miami station:
“The network is very sensitive about the whole Al Sharpton/MSNBC issue, so when the right-wing bloggers started hammering, they needed to throw them fresh meat,” said the station source, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the controversy. “It’s not at all clear how this happened. Obviously, there was miscommunication.”
This would seem to suggest that NBC News is sacrificing low-level personnel — throwing “fresh meat” to “right-wing bloggers” — in an effort to evade corporate responsibility for an unethical deception that inflamed racial tensions in the Martin case. This enraged me:
Journalism has evidently become so politicized that there is apparently no longer even any need for NBC News to pretend that it is engaged in anything other than partisan propaganda — even when, in the pursuit of an overtly political agenda, they are providing manufactured falsehoods to serve as fodder for dangerous racial demagoguery.
Executives at NBC News need to provide a full accounting of how this happened. For weeks on end, their MSNBC cable outlet stoked the flames of outrage over the Martin case, outrage the network itself helped create with its editing of Zimmerman’s 911 call. NBC’s credibility as a news organization is at stake, and the network’s executives themselves — who created the corporate culture in which such deceptive “reporting” was tolerated — must be held responsible.
As I reported yesterday, the Mobile Police Department is ludicrously claiming that it is likely that no more than three people will be arrested for the now-infamous mob beating of a man in Mobile because the other 17 or so people were supposedly just “onlookers.” Leaving aside the fact that this hardly squares with the manifold reports to the contrary, let’s assume that only three people actually landed blows. To call the others mere “onlookers” when they were almost all engaged in mob action, yelling, cheering, or whatever, is outrageous. Last I checked, incitement to violence is itself a crime. Frankly, I think the circumstances merit numerous arrests based on Alabama criminal code law 13A-11-4: Inciting to Riot. Even 14 year-olds have been charged under this statute, for instigating multi-person fights.
ANYBODY who provides encouragement to the commission of a crime is an accessory thereto, which is a criminal offense usually treated as if it represents the same degree of culpability as the actual attacker.
If the Mobile police end up arresting only three people, it will be almost certainly be a monumental injustice, and amount to sweeping a crime under the rug.
Over on the main site, John has authored a well-crafted take on Marco Rubio’s foreign policy address, given yesterday at the Brookings Institution. There will be plenty of time to tackle the nature of “neo-Reaganism” in a post-Cold War world, but for now, I’ll couch my response to the timbres of neoconservatism.
John writes:
The neocons are often cast as the villains of the Bush years, blamed for leading the country into a calamitous Mesopotamian misadventure. The historical record doesn’t really support this narrative. The invasion of Iraq was supported by a broad swath of the right, left, and center.
Fair point. In fact, 373 senators and representatives — from both sides of the aisle — were somehow duped into believing the following:
1. Iraq’s exaggerated power presented a critical threat to America’s national security;
2. A de facto ally (however unpleasant) against Islamic fundamentalism, and a strategic counterbalance to Iran needed to be removed, as swiftly as possible;
3. The invasion and “liberation” of a Muslim country in the Middle East would not become a recruiting poster for Islamic terrorists;
4. The U.S. invasion of Iraq would not destabilize the region or topple “friendly” regimes in neighboring Arab states;
5. We could create a stable, liberal democracy that would be friendly to American interests, despite the fact that an electoral democracy would, predictably, put Shi’a groups in power — groups supported by Iran since Ba’athi repression drove many to seek sectarian sanctuary; and,
6. An invasion and long-term occupation of Iraq would pay for itself, and not cost trillions of dollars, bust the budget or throw the U.S. economy into a tailspin.
I’m sure both John and I could go on, and on, listing the false promises/premises of America’s efforts in Iraq. Flattening the logic that bound presumptive fabrications is an exercise in ease. As such, I’d respectfully counter that shortsighted, neocon-driven consensus was just ill-advised groupthink, unimproved by hindsight.
Now as far as the surge goes…
Continue reading…I agree with Quin Hillyer that having Joe Biden lecturing Mitt Romney on foreign policy doesn’t exactly help their cause. It would be like Obama lecturing us on the virtues of humility.
Remember, when during his debate with Sarah Palin, he said the U.S. & France had “kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon”? Surely that was news to the people of Beirut.
On the other hand, that didn’t stop them from getting elected.
So-o-o-o-…. So Joe Biden is lecturing Mitt Romney on foreign policy. That’s rich. Next up, Bobby Petrino or Gregg Williams on coaching ethics. After that, Newt Gingrich on humility, and George McGovern on the virtues of hawkishness.
Biden’s list of foreign policy blunders, or self-contradictions, is long. He advised against the bin Laden raid. He was wrongly against the first Gulf War. He was wrong for more than a decade on the Cold War. He even harmed national security by blurting out the secret location of the Veep’s emergency bunker.
As Foreign Policy writer Thomas Ricks once asked, “When was the last time Biden was right about anything?”
This EPA official who said his strategy is to “crucify” oil and gas companies ought be fired before week’s end. Period. This isn’t regulatory enforcement, it’s criminal prosecutorial abuse. Then again, the Obama administration is rather good at such regulatory abuses.
Fire this man. Now.
Jeff Lord makes the case that the Obama presidency is really the second term of Jimmy Carter. If nothing else, by putting the DNC acceptance speeches of Carter in 1980 and Obama in 2008 side by side, Jeff demonstrates that liberals haven’t had any new ideas in at least thirty years. I know I am being generous and am sure one could convincingly argue that it’s been nearly fifty years since liberalism had the semblance of an original thought.
He also cites Hamilton Jordan’s 1979 memo to Carter in which part states, “We will be re-elected or not re-elected based largely on your performance as President.”
Well, like Carter, Obama can’t run on his record. However, Barack Obama is no Jimmy Carter.
First, Jordan might argue about the myth of the incumbent President but Obama didn’t have a Ted Kennedy to worry about. The last incumbent President to lose an election without a primary challenger was when Herbert Hoover was unseated by FDR in 1932. As for Obama, the Democratic Party might not be as in love with him as they were in 2008 but their base is solidly behind him. Obama has at least 40% of the electorate in his back pocket.
Second, Obama enjoys all kinds of advantages Carter could only dream of - a billion dollar war chest, a field organization that can turn out the vote and a sympathetic, if not sycophantic media behind his re-election effort.
Third, Obama is no peanut farmer. Let’s keep in mind that Obama has spent his entire adult life having had things handed to him (i.e. Columbia, Harvard Law Review, Sidley Austin, a teaching position at the University of Chicago, author of an autobiography, Illinois State Senate, U.S. Senate, author of a second autobiography and now the White House.) Obama views the presidency like an entitlement and will fiercely protect it from someone who has the audacity to take it away from him. President Obama plays for keeps.
Fourth, contrary to popular belief, Bill Clinton was not the first black President. If Chris Matthews is already asking about how the electorate could contemplate “dumping the first African-American President” then imagine what things will be like in six months from now? Throw in the Trayvon Martin shooting and it will be utterly relentless. There might be just enough white liberal guilt out there to put Obama over the top.
Fifth, as Jeff notes when Jordan penned that memo he did not know who Carter would be facing the following year. Well, the Obama team had a pretty good idea from the outset who they would be facing and as one unnamed Democratic strategist with close ties to President Obama said last August, “Unless things change and Obama can run on accomplishments, he will have to kill Romney.”
Sixth, which brings me to Romney. Jeff writes, “Ronald Reagan challenged the entire foundation of liberalism, effectively asking voters to repudiate not just Carter but liberalism itself.” While the Obama campaign will move heaven and earth to paint Romney as a right-wing extremist it remains to be seen as to whether Romney will “challenge the entire foundation of liberalism” much less ask voters to repudiate Obama.
Don’t get me wrong. Romney could win the election. While 1980 could provide some useful information during the course of the 2012 campaign let us remember that we are not living in 1980 anymore. This isn’t a 13-channel universe where a home computer is still a novelty, Asteroids is a cutting edge video game and people need to take community college courses to learn how to use a microwave. In a universe where mountains can be moved by a single Tweet, the 2012 campaign is going to present its own unique set of challenges.
Above all else, I think by comparing Obama to Carter there is a danger in underestimating Obama. Now I don’t think Obama is intelligent enough to be in the same room with Romney much less qualified for an entry level job in one of Romney’s companies. But there are plenty of people who don’t hold Obama in such low regard. They might not be in love with Obama but they might not be so sure about Romney either and they too have a vote. If Romney is to win them over then he can’t rely on Carter’s cardigan. He must earn it.
This morning, in an interview on CNBC, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) was told by CNBC anchor that a recent poll shows Mitt Romney trailing Barack Obama among Catholics.
Without hesitation, Ryan said “Leaders change polls. We don’t follow them.”
‘Nuf said.
Ryan’s interview was primarily about pro-growth economic policy and his upcoming “America’s Enduring Promise” speech at Georgetown University. Ryan asked the simple and powerful question (simple is often important for powerful, after all) “Why don’t you just keep your money in the first place?” rather than jumping through federal hoops, hoping Washington, DC may give you some of your money back.
Rep. Ryan made many other important points; I encourage you to watch the entire 12 minute interview.
Paul Ryan is getting better in front of the camera with each passing month. The left portrays him as slightly more evil than Satan, but anyone who actually sees and hears Ryan can’t help but believe that his high hopes for America and goodwill toward Americans are heartfelt and sincere. Mitt Romney will have to consider him for VP, though I would prefer Ryan to stay where he is for now and just try to teach Romney to understand the budget.
(Paul Ryan for President in 2016 or 2020!)
Just got back from a press conference at Mobile police HQ. Before I get into that, please allow this clarification and apology. In my original blog post yesterday, while blasting Al Sharpton and other national figures for their double-standard in not engaging in advocacy for beaten white people, I also in passing asked why Mayor Sam Jones had not spoken up. In retrospect, putting Jones in the company of Sharpton et al was unfair to Jones. My beef with Jones was not based on any race-related actions or inaction on his part, nor was it based on any apparent hypocrisy on his part. Instead, it was a leadership issue: I thought this was a situation where the mayor should have been out front, verbally “laying down the law” as it were, and that he should already have made a statement. I still think so. But to mention him in the same breath as Sharpton, in the context of Sharpton’s racial double standards, was thoughtless on my part, and I apologize. I may have policy and stylistic differences with Mayor Jones, but he has very little history of anything approaching racial demagoguery.
…..
Okay, ‘nuff said on that. Moving on to the press conference: Forgive me if I sound cynical, but I came away far less impressed, if that’s even possible, with the Mobile police statements than I had been before.
Several people, including the mayor and several top police officials (but not the chief), spoke. Without getting into the weeds with lots of specific quotes (for now) attributed to specific people, here was the gist of the message:
1) They actually believe that only three people were “involved” as “active participants” in the assault. The rest were “onlookers.” They may end up therefore only arresting three people (although, under heated questioning, some by me, they said they of course won’t rule out more arrests if their investigation warrants it).
2) They have “absolutely no reason to believe” that racial motives played a role in the assault. Yeah, really. Even when asked specifically to divorce the case from the purported reference to Trayvon Marton, and asked directly whether “deep-seated racial tension even just between two men” (the victim and the man arrested today) played a role, the lead investigator said “the evidence and the investigation that we’ve found just don’t support that.” Furthermore, officials repeated their contention that the Trayon Martin reference was mere hearsay from one witness — even though at least three media sources have each reported at least three witnesses who said they heard it with their own ears.
3) The mayor has asked for and received a federal investigation by the FBI and the U.S. Attorney just in case any federal violations were involved. All appropriate law enforcement outlets and agency, local/state/federal, are “fully involved and engaged.”
Frankly, items one and two above do not appear to be remotely credible. This isn’t to say they are wrong, but it certainly doesn’t comport with what multiple media reports have found on both counts. As I reported earlier,
Continue reading…Jim Antle draws our attention to the Supreme Court once again being less than impressed with the arguments advanced by Solicitor General Donald Verilli this time over Arizona’s immigration law.
There is a great deal to be unimpressed about. U.S. v. State of Arizona & Brewer argues that S.B. 1070 would “conflict with and undermine by the federal government’s careful balance of immigration enforcement priorities and activities” by imposing “significant and counterproductive burdens on the federal agencies charged with enforcing the national immigration scheme, diverting resources and attention from the dangerous aliens who the federal government targets as its top enforcement priority.” But as I argued back in July 2010:
When the DOJ argues that S.B. 1070 “will impose significant and counterproductive burdens on federal agencies” what they mean is that the ICE operated Law Enforcement Support Center in Williston, Vermont could get a lot more phone calls from Arizona. So it could blow the overtime budget of DHS. The is an administrative issue, not a constitutional one. Perhaps it will cause some inconvenience for the feds. But let us never confuse inconvenience with unconstitutionality.
But then again what else can we expect of the Obama Administration? An administration whose Attorney General admitted under oath that he had not read the Arizona immigration law and had only glanced at it.
At CFIF, I blast Eric Holder for his continuing effort to undermine fire departments nationwide out of a warped sense of racial justice.
Corrupt Attorney General Eric Holder’s war on white people continues. In its latest installment, the Justice Department on Monday sued the city of Jacksonville, FL, to force the city to jettison the written promotion exams in its fire department. According to Holder and his leading racialist instigator, civil rights division chief Thomas Perez, black people can’t be expected to decipher written questions about firefighting, and it is therefore against the law to ask them to do so.
In today’s Justice Department, the soft bigotry of low expectations has joined with the hard bigotry of seeing whites as racists to create a toxic brew of racial tension…..
Read the rest of it. Again, it’s here.
Police have now made one arrest for the mob beating in Mobile. For what it is worth, both this man who was arrested and the woman who screamed at the WKRG reporter yesterday were prominently in the street when I drove down Delmar Drive last night to do my own investigation, both looking rather angry. Hence my line in this morning’s column about not wanting to conduct interviews with them once it was already dusk.
Anyway, this arrest comes nearly four full days after the incident. We eagerly await the other 19 or so arrests that obviously should be forthcoming. As most of the participants reportedly came from just one city street, it really shouldn’t be all that difficult to find them, now should it?
Meanwhile, I am really starting to believe the police department is deliberately trying to cover up the racial angle, wholly dishonestly. Consider this story from Fox-10 in Mobile, one of several that quotes police spokesman saying rather definitively that race really played no role.
Cpl. Chris Levy with Mobile police said their investigation shows the incident stems from an ongoing dispute between the Owens and Rawls.
Police also wanted to release that no one has confirmed that this attack was “in retaliation for Trayvon Martin,” as one witness reported.
Not to put too fine a point on this, but this is bunk. If it was just an ongoing dispute between two men, why were 20 others all involved? And why do they keep insisting that “one witness” reported the reference to Trayvon Martin, when at least three, and possibly more, have reported that reference, to at least three different reporters?
Look, the way to deal with racial violence is not to sweep it under the rug, but to acknowledge it for what it is, explain that it won’t be tolerated, explain that justice is or should be color-blind, and ask people of all races to show that we are better than this. Otherwise, it’s like the proverbial container of boiling oil with a very tight lid: Eventually, the steam blows the lid and does a lot more damage than if you just let the steam out naturally.
Democrats and sympathetic media types like to cite the personal likeability of President Obama as an indicator of his reelectability (just today on MSNBC, Jonathan Capehart did it). So it seemed a no-brainer that Obama would go on Jimmy Fallon’s show last night to do some humorous personal appeals. In 2008, I wrote that candidate Obama only had two jokes: “I’m great” or “I’m only pretty great.” Why hasn’t Obama grown out of his ego-inflating “I’m Pretty Awesome” approach to humor?
Obama’s cameo on Fallon’s show featured him “slow-jamming” the news (video below). Except Obama didn’t make any jokes. He just read off the usual talking points about student loans (appealing to the youth vote amirite?). The whole stunt was based off of having other people do funny things around him while he was himself. When your whole shtick is simply contrasting your stature with the clownishness of comedians you’re not being funny. And does it really count as playing the “straight man” if you really think you are above all of it? Or when you crack jokes and they fall flat?
In fact, Obama thinking himself to be pretty awesome has been something of a buzzkill of late. At National Review, Jim Geraghty pointed out this excerpt of Jodi Kantor’s new book:
Obama had always had a high estimation of his ability to cast and run his operation. When David Plouffe, his campaign manager, first interviewed for a job with him in 2006, the senator gave him a warning: “I think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I’ll hire to do it,” he said. “It’s hard to give up control when that’s all I’ve known.” Obama said nearly the same thing to Patrick Gaspard, whom he hired to be the campaign’s political director. “I think I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Obama told him. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”
This bit appeared in a New York magazine profile:
The president’s friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett sometimes pointed out that not only had he never managed an operation, he’d never really had a nine-to-five job in his life. Obama didn’t know what he didn’t know, yet his self-confidence was so stratospheric that once, in the context of thinking about Emanuel’s replacement, he remarked in all seriousness, “You know, I’d make a good chief of staff.”
He thinks he’s capable of anything. But a key part of being funny is often insecurity and self-deprecation, qualities he appears to lack.
When Obama appeared on Saturday Night Live in his contest against Hillary Clinton, he couldn’t even muster a funny line. The one thing he said was: “I have nothing to hide. I enjoy being myself. I’m not going to change who I am just because it’s Halloween.”
L.O… uh. Hm.
To be fair, yes, one has to be very self-confident to make it out of a single-parent childhood and meet with success, let alone to become president. But at some point, you take into account your limitations and chuckle at yourself. Instead, Obama seems pretty confident to lord it over us: He’s awesome. Just totally awesome.
(UPDATE: Worth saying, I think Fallon is hilarious in this.)
By most accounts, Paul Clement bested Solicitor General Donald Verrilli in oral arguments concerning the federal health care law. It sounds like it was more of the same as Clement against crossed swords with the solicitor general in the Obama administration’s attempt to overturn Arizona’s SB 1070. The Washington Times reports:
Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. said the federal government has limited resources and should have the right to determine the extent of calls it gets about possible illegal immigrants.
“These decisions have to be made at the national level,” he said.
But even Democratic-appointed justices were uncertain of that.
“I’m terribly confused by your answer,” said Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who went on to say that the federal government can always decline to pick up illegal immigrants when Arizona officials call.
The Supreme Court is hearing the Obama administration’s constitutional challenge to Arizona’s attempt to crack down on illegal immigration in the state.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) really thinks George W. Bush was a fantastic president. In his major foreign policy address to the Brookings Institution, the possible Mitt Romney running mate puts himself strongly on the side of first-term Bush, Joe Lieberman, and the broader activist tradition. He also criticizes those who hold contrary views in his own party.
This is a battle that has been brewing for some time. I’ve written about the Tea Party foreign split between Rubio and Rand Paul, which has manifest itself in the senators’ disagreement over Georgia’s role in NATO, among other issues.
UPDATE: Rand Paul delivered a foreign policy address at Johns Hopkins University last year.
Today’s Mobile Press-Register contains excellent reporting (on the heels of two days of great reporting by local TV station WKRG) about the racial mob beating of Matthew Owens in Mobile on Saturday night, courtesy of staff writers Brendan Kirby, Rhoda Pickett, and Robrt McClendon. They flesh out what I reported in my column this morning, which is that the victim is no prince, but instead a confirmed troublemaker.
Some neighbors said they have witnessed belligerence from Owens in the past, and police reports show that he has gotten into scrapes before with others — both black and white.
“He probably did as much to instigate this as anybody,” said Marsha Skipper, who lives next door.
…
Skipper, who is white, said she gets along with her black neighbors and has not had problems with the black children. She said it would be bad for the neighborhood to turn the incident into the opening salvo of a race war.
“I don’t want to see a racial issue with this,” she said. “I don’t want to see a black-white issue out of this.”
On the other hand, despite the absurd statements from the Mobile police downplaying the racial angle, the P-R showed ample evidence of just that:
One of Parker’s neighbors, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, said he was watching a movie with his family when he heard the confrontation. The neighbor, who is white, said several of the black residents were shouting racial slurs.
He said one of the assailants shouted, “This is justice for Trayvon,” an apparent reference to the unarmed black teenager in Florida whose shooting death at the hands of a Hispanic neighborhood watch volunteer sparked a racial fury.
This is not how Trayvon Martin should be remembered, as an instigator of racial violence. One victim does not require that another, unrelated victim be created for some sort of racial expiation of sins.
At the rally protesting the Trayvon Martin case in Florida sponsored by Al Sharpton, with Sharpton looking on approvingly, radio host Mark Thompson fulminated openly about this country still being “a system of racism and white supremacy.” That is a sick lie, and a dangerous one because it sends the message that society cannot be trusted — which to some minds means that racial vigilantism is the only solution. We are better than this. There should be no victims, black or white. We still await Sharpton demanding justice for Matthew Owens.
Mitt Romney finally scored that knockout blow he had been looking for throughout the primaries. According ton one report, it is “highly likely” that Gingrich will endorse Romney as he suspends his campaign.
So what now? Well, Romney will obviously be the nominee. That was a strong likelihood before Rick Santorum dropped out and became certain once Santorum suspended his campaign. But Santorum’s exit gave Gingrich an opportunity to become a protest vote for those who were unhappy about Romney’s nomination, which even yesterday’s primaries ranged from about a third of Republicans turning out in the Romney-friendly New England states to more than 40 percent in Pennsylvania and Delaware. That would have made Gingrich somewhat relevant to the race again even though he was too far behind to actually win, and would allow him to close his campaign on somewhat of an up note.
Last night’s results made clear that this wasn’t likely to happen. Now deeply in debt, Gingrich doesn’t really have the resources to fight on in North Carolina and Texas. It’s not clear he will even finish second in other remaining primaries, after running third or worse everywhere but Delaware last night. Gingrich always ran an underfunded and undiscipline campaign, which he was able to keep alive by excelling at free media opportunities like debates and collecting super PAC money from Sheldon Addelson. Both sources of oxygen have since been cut off.
Now Ron Paul, whose campaign still has money, will keep trying to dominate the delegate selection process in enough caucus states to get his name placed in nomination in Tampa while seeking Virginia-like primary results in a few remaining large states. In Virgina, Paul was the only candidate on the ballot with Romney and he managed to break 40 percent. But last night’s results showed consolidating the anti-Romney vote isn’t easy, and that vote may shrink with Gingrich’s departure. The reality of a Romney nomination is setting in.
The Obama administration has proclaimed its interest in a pivot to the Pacific, but Europe grows more interesting all the time. Governments are falling left and right in response to the European Union (and the Eurozone) effort to impose budget discipline and pull back the countries on the brink.
At the same time, the Eastern European nations are mostly trying to build a future with Europe and away from the old bully in the schoolyard who used to beat them up. If you want to follow what’s going in the area Donald Rumsfeld thought of as “New Europe,” the Center for the Study of Former Soviet Republics is a good place to dig in.
And it just so happens that Doug Bandow and I are contributing content.
It appears that Newt Gingrich will suspend his campaign today. Speaking to a Republican crowd in North Carolina this morning, Gingrich said, “It’s pretty clear Governor Romney is going to be the nominee.”
Many words could be used to describe the Newt 2012 campaign. Dull is not amongst them. Last summer, it appeared his campaign was over before it started with key staff defecting once Rick Perry entered the race. But following a series of impressive debate performances in which he challenged President Obama to seven one on one Lincoln-Douglas debates, Republican voters began to give Newt a second look. After Herman Cain’s troubles began last November, Newt shot to the top of the polls.
However, as the Iowa Caucuses approached, the remaining candidates turned their attention to Newt and he did not whether the scrutiny well. Most damaging were the ads put out by PACs supporting Mitt Romney. Discontent from the Republican establishment didn’t help his cause either. Gingrich finished a distant fourth in both Iowa as the anti-Romney vote began to coalesce around Rick Santorum. Gingrich fared no better in New Hampshire with another fourth place finish.
Yet Newt found a new lease on life in the days leading up to the South Carolina primary with two impressive debate performances centering on exchanges with Juan Williams of Fox News and John King of CNN. Both exchanges earned Newt standing ovations. As it turned out, they were the only standing ovations any candidates received during the GOP debates. What also worked for Newt was releasing his tax returns while Romney hemmed and hawed. Palmetto voters awarded him with a double digit victory over Mitt Romney.
But the Romney Super PACs replicated in Florida what they had done in Iowa. Romney also outperformed Gingrich in two debates in Tampa and Jacksonville and ended up besting him in the Florida Primary by 15 points neutralizing Gingrich’s triumph in South Carolina ten days earlier. Newt never recovered. The only other contest he won was in his political base of Georgia on Super Tuesday. If Newt could not withstand the scrutiny of the Romney Super PACs then how could he possibly withstand the scrutiny of the even better funded Obama Super PACs?
Since then, with campaign money running dry, Gingrich has been going through the motions and visiting zoos around the country.
I think Newt will eventually endorse Romney but like Santorum I don’t think he’ll be in any great hurry to do it.
Alas, Newt is not the new Nixon. There will be no more Newt to kick around.
H/T Mike R.
Mitt Romney and every American voter need to listen carefully, and learn…
Out walking this morning I ran into one of the top political prognosticators in the country. We chatted about Obama’s chances of reelection and Romney’s Veep nominee search.
He said that Obama will “lose the white vote badly,” but that he could still win. Refusing to commit to a prediction, he said that the outcome will be “extremely close,” and that the race will largely turn on permutations in the economy before November.
On the topic of Romney’s Veep search, he said that Romney would be wise to consider Mike Huckabee if Mitt’s Evangelical support continues to flag. He also placed Mitch Daniels on his suggested short list for Romney. As for Jeb Bush, he said that Romney should study whether or not Bush’s name is still radioactive. What about Rubio? “The idea that a Cuban-American could win the Hispanic vote for the Republicans is criminally stupid,” he replied. He added that Rubio is a flake who received his political education in corrupt-as-hell Tallahassee.
There’s a question I think our media and political class ought to be asking now that Apple has announced another spectacular quarterly earnings report. Simply put, how can we spur greater economic growth and the creation of more innovative and highly successful companies such as Apple?
Such a discussion, unfortunately, is sadly lacking in the public dialogue and debate. President Obama, after all, doesn’t really care about economic growth. He’s more interested in punishing entrepreneurs and small businesses under the guise of tax “fairness.”
Republicans, meanwhile, seem more interested in containing the rising sea of red ink, which threatens to bankrupt America.
The GOP is right to focus on debt reduction; the debt bomb must be defused. Still, without far more robust economic growth, the path to fiscal suicide and national decline will be relentless and unyielding.
Fundamental tax reform would be a good place for Republicans to start. Because our tax code punishes success, Apple is forced, perversely, to keep most of its earnings overseas, where there is little or no taxation. Investing that money in America, by contrast, means paying a confiscatory 35 percent corporate tax rate, which is almost 12 times the rate that Apple pays overseas.
The amount of money involved here is quite significant. Apple’s corporate coffers have accumulated $110 billion to date. And American high-tech companies as a whole have an estimated $1 trillion in untapped overseas profits, reports Bloomberg.
President Bush’s 2005 Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform had the right idea: Move to a territorial tax system in which we recognize that capital, especially today, is mobile; and that, therefore, it simply doesn’t pay (literally and figuratively) to try and tax the overseas earnings of American companies.
Instead, allow U.S. firms to repatriate their overseas earnings and to invest in America.
“An economic distortion caused by the tax code — by which foreign corporations operating in the U.S. are favored over U.S.-based corporations, and U.S. corporations are discouraged from investing here — would be removed,” notes Justin Fox on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network.
Fox himself is agnostic about the benefits of a territorial tax system. Yet, he’s honest enough to admit (albeit with some equivocation) that what’s at issue is “whether we want to maximize economic growth or maximize corporate tax revenue.”
The Obama administration, of course, wants to maximize corporate tax revenue; it wants to create and feed the entitlement state. The Republicans should offer up a more promising and inspiring free-market vision, one centered on economic growth and the tax reform needed to effect such growth. Now.
Off his list of places he can win, that is. Whether Newt Gingrich knows it or not — and I suspect he finally does — it is over for his presidential campaign. He was counting on an upset victory in Delaware. Instead he has lost by nearly 30 points. At the moment, that is the only state where Gingrich is even running second.
With Rick Santorum out of the race, Gingrich was supposed to be able to harness the remaining anti-Romney vote. He could press the idea of a conservative alternative all the way to the convention in Tampa, keeping Mitt Romney honest by reminding him that he still had fences to mend with the Republican base. He could have ended his campaign respectably, perhaps even with a Southern primary win or two.
Tonight shows that is unlikely to happen. Romney has won Delaware, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania without any resistance from Gingrich. As I write this, the former House speaker is in fourth place in the Keystone State. Gingrich was already trailing in Texas and who knows what polls will show in North Carolina, the two best opportunities for keeping Romney from running the table in the remaining primaries.
Santorum was at least waving the anti-Romney banner and Ron Paul is building a movement for his supporters within the GOP. Newt is doing neither. There is no meaningful reason for Gingrich to carry on.
When Mitt Romney said in a Republican debate that illegal immigrants could be encouraged to self-deport, the smart people all laughed at him. But the latest Pew Hispanic Center report suggests that this may, in part, be happening. Consider:
Much of this has to do with relative economic conditions in the United States and Mexico. But immigration enforcement is also playing a role.
National Journal has an interesting take on what this could mean for the conventional wisdom about the Hispanic vote, long assumed to be a harbinger of Democratic dominance, going forward.
On Monday, President Obama sketched plans for his administration’s genocide prevention policies in a speech at the U.S. Holocaust Museum. The so-called Atrocities Prevention Board will serve as an opinion aggregator of senior officials from across the government, and will provide for synchronized intelligence-sharing and policy preparation in response to the threat of mass killings.
Last year, the White House identified the prevention of mass atrocities and genocide as a critical national security interest – not to mention moral responsibility – of the United States.
Fair enough. Since the time of St. Augustine, it has been ethically justified to save the innocent from certain harm. Now, modern considerations of national interest have been more broadly defined to include interventions aimed at ending genocide, mass murder, mass rape or slavery as morally obligatory.
One might add that given recent abuses of the “humanitarian” label, multilateralism is now morally significant when considering the “Five Ws” of military intervention.
Ideally, the end goal of such intervention is neither annexation nor damage to long-term territorial integrity; however, questions of sovereignty and the use of force weigh against the consequences of systematic violations of human rights.
In his speech at the Holocaust Museum, Obama discussed actions he’d taken to prevent mass murder since assuming office. He asked his audience to recall justifications for military intervention against the Gaddafi regime, premised on an imminent threat to Libyan civilians.
Of course, the UN’s altruistic R2P mandate quickly dissolved into a radical departure from its stated aim to protect unarmed innocents in Benghazi. Instead, Western powers decapitated Colonel Gaddafi’s deeply entrenched power structure and cleared space for the establishment of a shadow regime we neither understand, nor particularly care to discuss.
Have just wars and humanitarian interventions now declared open season on existing sovereignty through forcible, if barely justifiable, democratization and regime change? If regime change is now a cause of war, this would suggest a significant expansion of the just war doctrine of jus ad belli.
This is problematic for a number of reasons. But above all else, humanitarian intervention is chronically shortsighted.
I’ll echo the president: consider Libya. Shifty militias that fought Gaddafi now ignore hollow ceasefires to fight one another. Absent an actual gendarmerie, the ruling National Transitional Council has proven powerless to convince the umpteen private militias who fought Gaddafi to lay down their weapons. Tuareg fighters, armed to the teeth by the Gaddafi regime, are stoking tensions in neighboring Mali. 680,000 Libyan refugees fled the country during the fighting, and many remain holed-up in Egypt and Tunisia – threatening their own transition to representative regimes.
Perhaps most importantly, President Obama’s Libya campaign sunk any hopes of multilateral mandate to intervene in Syria – or anywhere else for that matter – now that we’ve reminded Russia and China we’re ready, willing, and able to impose ordnance-laden statecraft on pesky, problem regimes. I assure you, veto power exercised at the Security Council is more than a protective measure to shelter a close ally and arms buyer in Bashir al-Assad – it’s a bold statement against an evolving Western imperium to topple unfriendly autocrats, via UN diktat.
Given this reality, and Obama’s admission that “we cannot and should not […] intervene militarily every time there’s an injustice in the world,” one wonders why he wasted our time announcing an advisory panel that could do more harm than good, if it wasn’t completely toothless, to begin with?
By the way, the entitlements numbers I cited earlier have a lot to do with why I take a dim view of describing George W. Bush as a “fantastic president.” Here are the projections for Medicare Part D, the prescription drug benefit passed by a Republican-controlled Congress (though the House had to be dragged along kicking and screaming) and signed into law by Mr. Fantastic: $6.8 trillion in unfunded liabilities over a 75-year horizon and $14.3 trillion over an infinite horizon. Those are bigger long-term deficits than for Medicare Part A, the hospital insurance program.
None of this gives Barack Obama a pass on his dismal record, which frequently consisted of taking Bush-era overspending and throwing it into hyperdrive. If Obama wants to blame his failures on someone who has been out of office nearly four years, that reflects poorly on him. If conservatives want to heap unqualified praise on a president for bankrupting the country at a slower rate than Obama, that will reflect poorly on us.
The desire to say nice things about a fellow Republican who looks a bit better when compared to his successor is somewhat understandable, especially when considering personal relationships and friendships. But promising future conservative leaders should hold higher standards when applying superlatives to budget-busters from the red team. Until we make a clean break from big government conservatism, we can’t make a clean break from Obamanomics.
Last night, the Alberta Progressive Conservatives won their 12th consecutive majority government. The Tories won 62 out of 87 seats. The Wildrose Party is the official opposition with 17 seats while the Liberals and NDP each won four seats. Alison Redford was elected Premier in her own right after assuming the premiership by winning the Tory leadership convention last October following the retirement of her predecessor Ed Stelmach.
The Alberta Tories were first elected in August 1971 under the leadership of Peter Lougheed dislodging the Social Credit Party which had been in office since 1935. In 1985, Lougheed was succeeded by his former Calgary Stampeders teammate Don Getty who was in office until 1993. Getty was succeeded by Calgary mayor Ralph Klein who served as Premier for 13 years before being succeeded by Stelmach. By the end of their new term the Alberta Tories will have been longest standing provincial government in Canadian history. The Nova Scotia Liberals were in power from 1882 to 1925 while more recently the Ontario Tories (a.k.a. The Big Blue Machine) were in power from 1943 to 1985.
As you can imagine when a government stays in power that long it acts like it owns place and corruption, abuse of power plus government waste are sure to follow. You could think of the Wildrose Party (the wildrose is Alberta’s official flower) as a Prairie version of the Tea Party. To give you an idea of how long the Tories have governed Alberta, Wildrose Party leader Danielle Smith was only four months old when the Tories were first elected in 1971.
Many thought that Wildrose would do to the Tories what the Tories did to the Socreds more than four decades ago. But obvously a lot of people changed their minds at the last minute and stuck with what they knew. No doubt that people who normally would have voted Liberal or NDP decided to vote Tory to keep out Wildrose. It certainly didn’t help that a couple of Wildrose candidates uttered racist and homophobic comments nor did it help Smith when she refused to disavow those statements. If Smith wants to dislodge the Tories in 2016 then she needs to impose greater discipline on those who carry the Wildrose banner. The good news is that Smith seems to understand that this cost her dearly.
In case you missed this bit of yesterday’s bad news, let me recap: Social Security and Medicare are running combined long-term deficits of $63.3 trillion according to reports released by the retirement programs’ trustees. The Medicare trust fund will be running on empty as of 2024 and Social Security’s fund will be exhausted by 2033, but the reality is much worse: both trust funds may as well be filled with kitty litter.
To cash in the IOUs the feds have stuffed in the two biggest entitlements’ trust funds to maintain the accounting fiction that they are insurance programs rather than intergenerational transfer payments, taxes will have to be raised or other government spending cut unless reforms are passed soon. Both programs for the elderly are already paying out more in benefits than they are collecting in payroll tax revenue.
“In 2011, Social Security’s cost continued to exceed both the program’s tax income and its non-interest income, a trend that the Trustees project to continue throughout the short-range period and beyond,” Social Security’s trustees explained. Although the payroll tax holiday was a factor, the program would have still run deficits without it.
“Beginning in 2008, expenditures exceeded income, and the Trustees expect this situation to continue throughout the projection period,” Medicare’s trustees wrote. And even these projections assume cuts in payments to physicians that aren’t terribly likely to happen. Congress has overriden these reductions every year since 2003.
Mob-violence instigator Al Sharpton, racial shakedown artist Jesse Jackson, and Honorary New Black Panther (HNBP) Eric Holder now have a test: Do they have any shred of decency, humanity, and justice left in their race-hustling souls?
This story is now taking off in my town of Mobile, AL:
According to police, Owens fussed at some kids playing basketball in the middle of Delmar Drive about 8:30 Saturday night. They say the kids left and a group of adults returned, armed with everything but the kitchen sink.
Police tell News 5 the suspects used chairs, pipes and paint cans to beat Owens.
Owens’ sister, Ashley Parker, saw the attack. “It was the scariest thing I have ever witnessed.” Parker says 20 people, all African American, attacked her brother on the front porch of his home, using “brass buckles, paint cans and anything they could get their hands on.”…. As the attackers walked away, leaving Owen bleeding on the ground, Parker says one of them said “Now thats justice for Trayvon.”
Where is mayor Sam Jones on this? Nowhere to be found. Where is Sharpton? Jackson? Holder? Is this not a “hate crime” (if such a thing really exists)? Is this not a civil rights case? Is this not something that cries out for justice against a clearly racially motivated attack? Maybe Mr. Holder thinks of himself as a nation unto himself, which would indeed make him a “nation of cowards” when it comes to matters racial. Otherwise, he certainly would have the guts to step in and order an investigation.
C’mon, Mr. Sharpton: Come show that you aren’t a vicious thug with compassion only for black people. Come on down and have a press conference demanding justice for Matthew Owens.
For that matter, where is our post-racial president? The least he could do is invite Joe Biden down to Mobile with him to bring a beer to Mr. Owens if Mr. Owens recovers from his beating. Or do white victims not matter in Barack Obama’s world?
Then again, the neighbors of Mr. Owens, white and black alike, need to come forward. Somebody knows at least some of the criminals who beat Mr. Owens. When 20 or more people are involved, somebody is bound to talk, even if there were no uninvolved witnesses. Well, where are they? Where are the fine citizens of Mobile who insist that justice should be color blind?
Look, Mobile is hardly a hotbed of racial injustice. When the rest of Alabama was burning in the 1960s, then-Mayor Joe Langan quietly integrated Mobile, legally speaking, in one uneventful afternoon. In 2005, with a black voter registration in the low 40s, Mobile elected black county commissioner Sam Jones as mayor (with my support). There is no sociological mumbo jumbo, no excuse, no reason whatsoever for blacks in Mobile to take such issue with a white man who asks kids to stop playing basketball so loudly in the street.
What this is, is a sickness of the first order. Come on down MSNBC. Come on down, ABC. Come on down, Washington Post. Come on down, New York Times. Cover this story. Demand justice. Ask what’s wrong with black America that it could countenance such vicious, racist criminality.
Wait — what’s that you say? You say it’s not fair to blame all of “black America” for the actions of two dozen men?
Gee, maybe you have a point there. Maybe these were 20 criminals who ought to spend 20 years apiece in jail, but who are no more indicative of the rest of their nation or culture than… well, than “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman is for non-black America, or than Jared Lee Loughner, a disturbed lefto-anarchist, is for conservative America or Tea Partiers.
Maybe these criminals ought to be rounded up, arrested, charged, tried, convicted, and imprisoned as if they are all outrageously depraved individuals, not as if they somehow represent some group sickness. Wow, what an idea: treating people as individuals.
Still, HNBP Holder has an obligation — does he not? — to make sure his civil wrongs division investigates to make sure there isn’t anything else involved.
Coward.
Today Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Delaware hold their Republican primaries. Mitt Romney was poised to do well even when Rick Santorum was still actively campaigning, with Pennsylvania the only obviously competitive state. Without Santorum, Romney is well positioned for a clean sweep.
But it will still be interesting to see how big the remaining anti-Romney vote is. Newt Gingrich is trying to win Delaware, where even some Romney supporters claim the former speaker has some chance. In the absence of reliable polling data, it is hard to know whether this is a pipe dream. But Christine O’Donnell upset Mike Castle in the First State in 2010. Steve Forbes also briefly revived his flagging 1996 presidential campaign in Delaware. Forbes, the only candidate to campaign in the state that year, won unexpectedly and gave himself a boost going into the Arizona primary.
Santorum was a two-term senator from Pennsylvania, where he will still be on the ballot. The polls were starting to move against him even while he was still in the race, but states sometimes reward native sons. I noted this weekend that Howard Dean won Vermont in 2004 after suspending his campaign.
Ron Paul won 20 out of 24 delegates in Minnesota. He had finished second in the popular vote in the state’s caucus. There are reports of six other caucus states where Republicans are bracing for a possible delegate coup by the Paul forces, who remain active and relatively well funded.
I”m not predicting any huge upsets tonight, but we could learn how little or much work Romney still has to do to win over his party.
Now here’s a role-reversal: The editors of National Review, never fans of John Edwards, examine the charges against him and conclude that “it is our obligation to come unenthusiastically to his defense.” On the other hand, Walter Shapiro, who once was an admirer of Edwards, thinks that the prosecution’s case is stronger than it looks at first blush. Here’s NR:
Edwards’s mistress, Rielle Hunter, was paid off by his supporters. The financial chairman of Edwards’s presidential campaign, the late Frederick Baron, gave financial support to Hunter and to Andrew Young, the staffer who lied about being the child’s father. In a picturesque twist, another Edwards supporter, the heiress Bunny Mellon, is believed to have sent Hunter checks secreted in boxes of chocolate, though her lawyer denies that she knew her money was going to Hunter.
The prosecution’s case is built upon a note from Mellon, who described herself as “furious” about the way in which Edwards was lampooned for his infamous $400 haircuts. “From now on,” she wrote, “all haircuts, etc., that are necessary and important for his campaign — please send the bills to me… . It is a way to help our friend without government restrictions.” And she did indeed write some $725,000 in checks for sundry expenses — all of which went to Hunter, not to the Edwards campaign.
Because none of the money went to the campaign, and none of the money went for campaign expenses — inasmuch as maintaining a mistress is not a campaign expense — it is difficult to see why this should be prosecuted as a campaign-finance violation. At most, the evidence would seem to justify charging Mellon with conspiring to subvert campaign-finance laws, though in the event those laws were not subverted, since her money did not go toward financing the Edwards campaign.
Shapiro agrees that Count One of the indictment, the charge relating to Baron, is flimsy, but suggests that Count Two, the charge relating to Mellon, might be more damning:
[T]he trial will raise the strong possibility—and you will have to trust me on the sourcing for this—that the then-97-year-old socialite was as ignorant of the existence of Rielle Hunter (or any other Other Woman) as any Democratic voter besotted with John Edwards. When she was asked for the money, delivered in seven installments beginning in June 2007, she apparently thought that she was donating in some round-robin fashion to the Edwards campaign, not covering up an affair…
If the trial shows that Mellon believed her checks for $725,000 were intended for campaign purposes, Edwards’s defense under Count Two could be severely curtailed. Edwards’s most straightforward defense—that he sought Mellon’s money in order to hide the affair and pregnancy from his wife Elizabeth—would suddenly vanish. If Bunny Mellon did not know about the affair, how could her contributions be personal rather than political?
Election law expert Rick Hasen responds that he doesn’t think that’s the right question — it’s Edwards’s intent, not Mellon’s, that is legally relevant, and “under the murky law on what constitutes ‘personal use’ of funds received during the course of a campaign, Edwards has at least a plausible argument his intent was to save his marriage and not to help his campaign.” Hasen adds a link to a guest-post on his Election Law Blog by Rick Pildes that goes further, arguing that Edwards didn’t commit a crime regardless of anyone’s intentions, on the theory that the legal definition of a campaign contribution must be objective rather than subjective. Hasen offers Pildes’s argument as evidence that “even if the jury convicts, there’s a good chance the conviction won’t stand.”
The liberal Center for American Progress claims that Obamacare will save both seniors and taxpayers money. The group’s Think Progress site touts a new report by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) showing that taxpayers will save $200 billion and Medicare recipients $60 billion through 2016 courtesty of the Affordable Care Act.
Even this wouldn’t be much in the context of Medicare’s multi-trillion dollar shortfall. But if you read the fine print, Medicare’s chief actuary doesn’t think these projections are very realistic. Richard Foster pours the following cold water: “the financial projections shown in this report for Medicare do not represent a reasonable expectation for actual program operations in either the short range (as a result of the unsustainable reductions in physician payment rates) or the long range (because of the strong likelihood that the statutory reductions in price updates for most categories of Medicare provider services will not be viable).” Emphasis mine, hat tip Peter Suderman.
The reduction in physician payments isn’t going to happen, at least not to the extent envisioned by the federal health care law. And the assumptions about health care productivity improvements probably won’t pan out either, at least not to the extent necessary to make these projections realistic. It’s like the old joke about economists trying to rescue themselves from a pit: “First, assume a ladder.”
With Mitt Romney moving toward the Republican presidential nomination, the veepstakes are now in full bloom. Chris Christie is being scrutinized for his judicial picks. Others are being tested in the polls. It will therefore be interesting to see if there is any reaction of this interview with Marco Rubio.
Before CNN’s Candy Crowley tried to pin Rubio down on whether he’d accept a place on Romney’s ticket, she asked him how a President Romney would differ from President George W. Bush. “I haven’t gone through the comparison,” the Florida senator replied. “I think that presidents serve in different times with different challenges. And so I think that George W. Bush, in my opinion, did a fantastic job as president over eight years, facing a set of circumstances during those eight years that are different from the circumstances that a President Romney would face.”
“Fantastic” was also the adjective Rubio used to describe his friend Jeb Bush as a possible Romney running mate himself. Obviously this won’t be a big deal to parts of the Republican base, who like the Bushes. But much of the country — ranging from moderate swing voters to some Tea Party conservatives — would like the next administration to be different from George W. Bush’s.
François Hollande won the first round of balloting in the French presidential election yesterday, and faces incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy in a runoff Sunday after next. Polling shows that Hollande is favored to win:
Three French polls conducted Sunday evening as results came in predicted Hollande would win the May 6 runoff by 8 to 12 percentage points. Ipsos, CSA and IFOP said economic worries drove many voters.
Americans should be rooting for Sarkozy, explains Pierpaolo Barbieri at The New Republic:
Hollande… is ultimately hostage to an unreformed Socialist Party: With France’s powerful and obstinate unions overrepresented in the party ranks, the Socialists have been consistently against necessary economic reform. Predictably, Hollande says he is eager to bring back the 35-hour week and roll back pension changes at a time when the whole region—and arguably the whole world—is swimming in the opposite direction. His proposal for a 75 percent marginal tax rate would be laughable, if it hadn’t been offered in earnest.
After arguing that Hollande could cause a rift with Germany that threatens the Eurozone (and by extention the global economy), Barbieri adds:
In other international affairs, there’s little to look forward to from a President Hollande. He has hinted at a decreased role in NATO and a more critical stance toward America. In other words, Washington can expect an unwelcome return to the Jacques Chirac years. (It should come as no surprise that Chirac is said to be casting his vote for the Socialist.)
Not to invoke the “even the liberal New Republic…” cliché, but it does say something about the state of French politics that so much of Barbieri’s critique would be as much at home in a conservative publication as it is in the center-left TNR. This item by Brad Plumer gives a flavor of how far left France tilts; the Gaullist Sarkozy would scarcely be center-right by American standards, and the “far right” party led by Marine Le Pen — who made a big splash yesterday by winning nearly 20% of the vote — is, like most European nationalist parties, bitterly hostile to the free market.
Barbieri argues that an upset by Sarkozy is not impossible. Let’s hope so.
Displaying the tone-deafness that doomed his presidential campaign, Jon Huntsman compared the current state of the Republican Party to Communist China. Complaining about the Republican National Committee’s decision to un-invite him from a fundraiser after he called for third party competition, Huntsman told reporters in New York, “This is what they do in China on party matters if you talk off script.”
Needless to say, the Communist Chinese can do a lot worse things to you than rescind your invitation to a posh fundraiser. Huntsman later explained he was “waxing philosophical.” It was precisely Huntsman’s tendency to express his extremely mild dissents from the GOP platform in such world historic terms, combined with his not-too-thinly veiled contempt for those to his right, that kept him an also-ran.
Not to be outdone, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wonders if America needs an “Arab spring” because the last vestiges of constitutionally limited government make it so darned hard to get anything done. (Presumably by Arab spring he doesn’t mean the Muslim Brotherhood taking over the government.) In recent years, all Washington has been able to ram through is Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, the Patriot Act, the Iraq war, Sarbanes-Oxley, TARP, the stimulus, Dodd-Frank, and Obamacare. I’m probably missing something. “We can’t be great as long as we remain a vetocracy rather than a democracy,” Friedman concludes.
Beam me up, Scotty.
Erick Erickson offers some helpful advice to Mitt Romney about not taking Evangelical voters for granted. Again, this is not meant to tear down Romney, but to tell him how to avoid making a fatal error.
Again and again I hear people say that Evangelicals or other conservatives will “vote for Romney anyway,” so Romney doesn’t need to reach out to them with a good V-P pick, or whatever. Not to be too blunt, but… that is one of the most idiotic statements in all of politics. How many times do we need to watch elections to know that turnout matters? And how many times do we need to see that people really, really, really will stay home if they aren’t inspired?
Karl Rove famously said that an estimated 4 million Evangelicals who were expected to vote for GW Bush instead stayed home in 2000 when word got out in the final weekend about Bush’s old drunk driving arrest. Obviously, that almost cost Bush the election. This is important stuff. Voters motivated by a strong ideology also often are voters who will help put a pox on both houses by refusing to vote. That’s just political reality. If Romney doesn’t understand that and act accordingly to avoid such a fate, he will lose, and drag us all down with him.
Kathryn Lopez has a moving, insightful, eloquent column on the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast and on Rick Santorum’s message that got lost in the shuffle of him feeling queasy upon reading a famous JFK speech. Please do read it.
Here’s a nice passage:
Santorum, like Kennedy, is keen on the founding principle that the president should not attempt to impose his religious views on the nation. In a speech two years ago, he said that “while the phrase ‘separation of church and state’ doesn’t appear in the Constitution, the concept of keeping the government apart from religion does.” And, like Kennedy, he believes that a candidate’s religious affiliation shouldn’t be a disqualifier for office. But the Kennedy speech presented a model for pushing religion to the margins of our public life, a fact that has impoverished a nation that once prized religion as an “indispensable” support to “political prosperity,” as our first president put it.
Charles J. Chaput, the current archbishop of Philadelphia, has said that Kennedy was “sincere, compelling, articulate — and wrong.”
Now this next bit I’m going to offer has nothing to do with what Kathryn wrote, but I can’t resist: Wouldn’t it be fun tomorrow if Santorum’s home state voters gave him a large percentage of the votes even though he has officially suspended his campaign? It would certainly provide conservatives a boost in keeping Mitt Romney’s feet to the conservative fire.
I’ve written several times on my web site about Judge Janice Rogers Brown, who was nominated to the federal Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit by President Bush. In my view, Judge Brown is one of the best, and perhaps the best, federal judge in America — which is why Ted Kennedy so fiercely (but unsuccessfully, despite an initial Democrat filibuster) opposed her nomination.
Judge Brown’s fierce intellect was on full display in her concurrence in a recent court decision in the case of Hettinga v US in which the owner of a few large dairies argued unsuccessfully that a law which impacts only him (but does not name him and could theoretically impact others in a similar situation) was an unconstitutional bill of attainder.
The full decision can be found here, but for your review I offer below only Judge Brown’s concurring opinion, which should be must-read material for every high school and college “civics” or law-related class, and in every law student’s introductory materials. (The full opinion has an extra dozen pages, most of which is not necessary to understand Judge Brown’s commentary, though for law geeks like me it is an interesting read, in part because it shows the destructive influence of reliance on bad precedent.)
The document below includes the first two pages of the full decision packet, which has the name of the case, the participants, and the first couple of paragraphs of the per curiam decision (in this case the unanimous decision of the three-judge panel) followed by Judge Brown’s concurrence.
One can almost feel Judge Brown’s anger at the Supreme Court’s reprehensible stance that decisions relating to economic regulation will be given the Court’s lowest level of scrutiny and generally resolved in favor of Congress rather than those whose rights are being trampled by Congress. (For more on the history of this, read about the 1938 Supreme Court case, made in the shadow of FDR’s Court-packing threat, called Carolene Products, and its infamous Footnote Four, which has done untold damage to our nation by allowing Congresses and Presidents to run roughshod over what our Founders would certainly have considered fundamental rights.)
One of the most remarkable things about Judge Brown is that a formerly ultra-liberal (she says she was borderline “Maoist”) daughter of an Alabama sharecropper has become one of the leading pro-liberty minds in America and in our federal judiciary. Sadly for the nation, one of the other most remarkable things about Judge Brown is that she is so frequently a voice in the wilderness, lost among a bunch of judges and politicians whose views would make James Madison shudder in revulsion with what his “constitutional” republic has become, and with how little respect those who should most honor our Founding principles — and who take an oath to uphold them — actually have for them.
I urge you to read Judge Brown’s opinion, and to share it with others.
I suggest you click the “read fullscreen” button (a square with four arrows pointing out from the center) next to the “Download” button above the document to make your reading easier. Hit the ESC key when finished reading…
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/119373466/Judge-Janice-Rogers-Brown-concurrence-in-case-of-Hettinga-v-US
I watched 60 Minutes and saw Bob Simon’s story on the exodus of Christians from Israel and the West Bank and thought it was a complete load of rubbish.
Simon blamed Israel’s security fence and checkpoints for this exodus. His sanctimony was unbearable whether he was berating Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren for calling the President of CBS about the segment or when he asked left-wing Israeli journalist Ari Shavit, “Do you think the Israeli government ever thinks of the fact that if Christians aren’t being treated well here, and America is an overwhelmingly Christian country, that this could have consequences?”
Well, I think of a majority of American Christians believe that Christians are being treated far more harshly in Iraq, Syria and Egypt than in Israel. How many Christian churches have been burned down by Israelis? How many Christians have been murdered inside Israel? And yet 60 Minutes singles out Israel for scorn. Well, it’s not the first time. In a 2009 story about Jewish settlements, Simon described Israel as an Apartheid state.
Any segment 60 Minutes does on Israel (and for that matter the Middle East) should be looked upon with the sternest possible skepticism.
1. Thirty-two votes. That’s all Orrin Hatch needed to clinch the nomination for a seventh term at the Utah Republican State Convention this weekend. Instead he’ll be forced into a June primary. He’s still heavily favored to win, but I wondered if Hatch made a mistake by attacking his opponents as “radical libertarians” right as the tide was turning in his favor. The senator later backtracked.
2. The biggest upset at the Utah GOP gathering came in the race for the 4th district congressional nomination. Saratoga Springs Mayor Mia Love stole the show with her speech and then clinched on the second ballot, taking over 70 percent of the vote. The likeliest outcome going into the convention was a primary between Love and Carl Wimmer, a former state legislator who had been endorsed by U.S. Sen. Mike Lee and Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff. Shurtleff’s backing turned out to be less of a blessing than a curse.
Love had already brought down the house and won endorsements from opponents who were eliminated on the first ballot. Speaking in support of Wimmer, Shurtleff advised Utah Republicans to “pick a person with a proven record” rather than a “novelty.” Love, the daughter of Haitian immigrants, is black. The crowd booed and some felt it put Love over the top. Shurtleff apologized, Wimmer endorsed the nominee, and Love will now get a chance to take on Democratic Congressman Jim Matheson this fall.
3. Virgil Goode won the Constitution Party presidential nomination this weekend. The former Virginia congressman — who had previously been elected as a Democrat, independent, and Republican — is the conservative third party’s most politically experienced nominee. Unlike Alan Keyes four years ago, Goode was able to overcome his record of supporting the Iraq war and the Patriot Act. The Constitution Party opposes both policies. Darrell Castle, the party’s 2008 vice presidential nominee, made a last-ditch effort to derail Goode but came up short in his own bid for the nomination.
4. Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primary lost much of its luster once native son Rick Santorum suspended his presidential campaign, but it will still be worth noting how large the anti-Mitt Romney vote will be. I’m not aware of any polls that have been done at the state level since Santorum called it quits. In 2004, Howard Dean managed to win his home state of Vermont after he had already ended his presidential bid. Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul, who were both born in Pennsylvania, are still in the race.
5. On Friday, there was speculation that Gingrich wouldn’t be in the race much longer when word came that campaign stops in North Carolina and elsewhere were on hold. The campaign later blamed a “communications glitch” and confirmed that they will press on. Romney has struggled in Southern states on his way to the Republican nomination.
6. Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia isn’t sure he will vote for Barack Obama in November, though he says he isn’t sold on Romney either. “I am just waiting for it to play out. I am not jumping in one way or another,” he said. “I’m worried about me.” Manchin is running for reelection this year in a state Obama is almost certain to lose.
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A man of faith in a godless age is hitting Americans where it hurts.
Mr. and Mrs. American Spectator Reader, let P.J. O’Rourke talk sense to your kids.
In Britain, defending your property can get you life.
The debacle of this president’s administration is both a cause and a symptom of the decline of American values. Unless Congress impeaches him, that decline will go on unchecked. An eminent jurist surveys the damage and assesses the chances for the recovery of our culture.
It won’t take long for conservatives to scratch this presidential wannabe off their 2008 scorecard.
The American Christmas, like the songs that celebrate it, makes room for everybody under the rainbow. Is that why so many people seem to be hostile to it?
Was the President done in by the economy, or by the politics of the economy?
H/T to National Review Online
