At Issue this week... December 11, 2013 2013 Will (26) Answer Man Seamans-Shook (14) Cell Phones on Planes Saunders (6) Charitable Giving Jacoby (22) China Bay (29) Buchanan (31) Schlafly (30) Common Core Norris (27) Contract with America Greenberg (4) D.C. Shooting Farah (18) Dear Mark Levy (19) Drones Lowry (14) Government Charen (5) Napolitano (11) Immigration Jeffrey (21) Karzai, Hamid Tyrrell (30) Knockout Game Elder (23) Law of the Land Krauthammer (1) Materialism Thomas (5) Medal of Freedom Greenberg (18) Media Bias Bozell (25) Prager (24) Shapiro (2) New York Crime Coulter (7) NFL Malkin (20) Obamacare Limbaugh (6) McCaughey (13) Morris (13) Obama Presidency Barone (17) Bozell (3) Lambro (12, 16) Lowry (15) Massie (15) Thomas (25) Williams (17) Pakistan Barone (28) Pope Francis Murchison (26) Presidential Pardon Saunders (10) Republican Party Buchanan (8) Victimhood Sowell (22) Walker, Scott Will (10) Wall Street Towery (9)
Law of the Land by Charles Krauthammer
An outbreak of authoritative lawlessness
F
or all the gnashing of teeth over the lack of comity and civility in Washington, the real problem is not etiquette but the breakdown of constitutional norms. Such as the one just spectacularly blown up in the Senate. To get three judges onto a coveted circuit court, frustrated Democrats abolished the filibuster for executive appointments and (non-Supreme Court) judicial nominations. THE PROBLEM is not the change itself. It’s fine that a president staffing his administration should need 51 votes rather than 60. Doing so for judicial appointments, which are for life, is a bit dicier. Nonetheless, for about 200 years the filibuster was nearly unknown in blocking judicial nominees. So we are really just returning to an earlier norm. The violence to constitutional norms here consisted in how that change was executed. By brute force — a near party-line vote of 52-48. This was a disgraceful violation of more than two centuries of precedent. If a bare majority can change the fundamental rules that govern an institution, then there are no rules. Senate rules today are whatever the majority decides they are that morning. What distinguishes an institution from a flash mob is that its rules endure. They can be changed, of course. But only by significant supermajorities. That’s why constitutional changes require two-thirds of both houses plus three-quarters of the states. If we could make constitutional changes by majority vote, there would be no Constitution. As of today, the Senate effectively has no rules. Congratulations, Harry Reid. Finally, something you will be remembered for. Barack Obama may be remembered for something similar. His violation of the proper limits of executive power has become breathtaking. It’s not just making recess appointments when the Senate is in session. It’s not just unilaterally imposing a law Congress had refused to pass — the DREAM Act — by brazenly suspending large sections of the immigration laws. We’ve now reached a point where a flailing president, desperate to deflect the opprobrium heaped upon him for the false promise that you could keep your health plan if you wanted to, calls a hasty news conference urging both insurers and the states to reinstate millions of such plans. Except that he is asking them to break the law. His own law. Under Obamacare, no
insurer may issue a policy after 2013 that does not meet the law’s minimum coverage requirements. These plans were canceled because they do not. The law remains unchanged. The regulations governing that law remain unchanged. Nothing is changed except for a president proposing to unilaterally change his own law from the White House press room.
Charles
Krauthammer (c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group
That’s banana republic stuff, except that there the dictator proclaims from the presidential balcony. Remember how for months Democrats denounced Republicans for daring to vote to defund or postpone Obamacare? Saboteurs! Terrorists! How dare you alter “the law of the land.” THIS WAS nonsense from the beginning. Every law is subject to revision and abolition if the people think it turned out to be a bad idea. Even constitutional amendments can be repealed — and have been (see Prohibition). After indignant denunciation of Republicans for trying to amend “the law of the land” constitutionally (i.e. in Congress as-
sembled), Democrats turn utterly silent when the president lawlessly tries to do so by executive fiat. Nor is this the first time. The president wakes up one day and decides to unilaterally suspend the employer mandate, a naked invasion of Congress’ exclusive legislative prerogative enshrined in Article I. Not a word from the Democrats. Nor now regarding the blatant usurpation of trying to restore canceled policies that violate explicit Obamacare coverage requirements. And worse. When Congress tried to make Obama’s “fix” legal — i.e., through legislation — he opposed it. He even said he would veto it. Imagine: vetoing the very bill that would legally enact his own illegal fix. At rallies, Obama routinely says he has important things to do and he’s not going to wait for Congress. Well, amending a statute after it’s been duly enacted is something a president may not do without Congress. It’s a gross violation of his Article II duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. A SENATE with no rules. A president without boundaries. One day, when a few bottled-up judicial nominees and a malfunctioning health care website are barely a memory, we will still be dealing with the toxic residue of this outbreak of authoritative lawlessness. November 29, 2013
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Conservative Chronicle
MEDIA BIAS: December 4, 2013
Cases of Obama Worship Syndrome
W
hen George W. Bush was weight man. Morgan, with stars in his president of the United eyes, asked crisis-management expert States, many of the left Judy Smith, “After the perfect Barack fell prey to what columnist Charles Obama — who’s a perfect physical Krauthammer called “Bush Derange- specimen to many people’s eyes — matter?” After towment Syndrome:” “the acute onset of does it eling himself off, paranoia in othMorgan then asked erwise normal whether Americans people in reaccould even stomtion to the poliach “a regular cies, the presi(c) 2013, Creators Syndicate kind of guy who dency — nay — the very existence of George W. likes cheeseburgers and beer, but apBush.” With Bush out of office, BDS pears to be a straight talker?” Morgan’s OWS pales in comparison has waned somewhat. Unfortunately, it has been replaced by a converse condi- to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who intion, just as grave and dangerous to the famously declared that Obama made mental stability of its victims: “Obama his leg tingle. But that’s just the first Worship Syndrome.” Primarily affect- symptom of Matthews’ OWS: He’s ing low-information voters and mem- also declared Obama “the perfect fabers of the mainstream media, Obama ther, the perfect husband, the perfect Worship Syndrome attributes impos- American,” explaining that Obama sible capabilities to Obama’s politi- has “never done anything wrong in cal opponents, finds excuses for every his life, legally, ethically, whatever;” Obama failure in everyone around him he’s blamed the sun for Obama’s paand praises the president as the finest thetic June 2013 speech in Berlin (it politician — nay, human being — of glared off his teleprompter, Matthews insisted); and he’s compared Obama to our time. Henry V among others. Morgan and Matthews are extreme ON MONDAY evening, for example, CNN’s Piers Morgan considered cases for sure. But the most widewhether New Jersey Gov. Chris Chris- spread symptom of OWS lately is the tie could run for president as an over- media’s bizarre insistence that Repub-
Ben
Shapiro
lican opposition to Obamacare is responsible for the botched rollout. “You could argue that there are some Republicans that are trying to sabotage the law,” NBC’s White House correspondent Chuck Todd said back in July. The Washington Post did a full story quoting members of the Obama administration blaming Republicans for Obamacare’s rolling record of epic failure. Jamelle Bouie of the Daily Beast wrote that the “Affordable Care Act needed GOP cooperation to succeed.”
fully attempted to defund Obamacare, somehow bear blame for Obamacare’s slow-motion collapse. It’s not just Obamacare. After spending years trumpeting Obama’s supposed hardheadedness on Iran, the media has now performed a complete about-face on the issue: Iran has suddenly become a potential peace partner, and Obama is a historic peacemaker. Sure, Iran has already declared its intention to continue enriching uranium, has said it will continue building the Arak nuclear reactor and has THIS IS idiotic. Obama rammed never backed off its stated intention to through Obamacare legislation with- destroy Israel. But “The One” must be out a single Republican vote. As he defended. has repeatedly stated, it is “the law.” It is his job to implement the law, given OBAMA WORSHIP Syndrome that he runs the executive branch. Yet is far more dangerous than Bush Dehis media defenders continue to main- rangement Syndrome. Speaking truth tain that Republicans, who unsuccess- to power is often worthwhile, even when such action springs from personal dislike. But drool-cup god-worship is never worthwhile, especially with such a power-hungry commander in chief.
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December 11, 2013 OBAMA PRESIDENCY: December 4, 2013
Obama’s picture-perfect propaganda
I
t might seem like another day in important functions of the executive Tea Party Land when a conser- branch of government.” All of which begs the question: vative columnist accuses Presianyone recall the last dent Barack Obama’s White House of Why? Can a news photographer “airbrushing history” like the Stalin-era time has taken a photo Soviet Union. But of Obama that’s the columnist isn’t caused him ema conservative. barrassment? ApIt’s Dana Milparently, Obama bank of the liberal (c) 2013, Creators Syndicate isn’t satisfied that Washington Post complaining about what’s happened to the photos aren’t hostile. They have to make him look good — or he’ll have his White House news photographers. He’s not alone. A New York Times guy do it. The New York Times reports that photographer has publicly compared Team Obama to the Soviet Tass news Obama photographer Pete Souza is an “almost constant companion” of the agency. What is going on? president. He was even allowed to get AS THE WHEELS come off the married in the White House Rose GarBarack Obama Hope-and-Change Bus, den. Of the 315 trips Obama has made the White House is now restricting ac- on Air Force One, Souza has traveled cess to the very media that have done on 313, according to the count of CBS little but throw roses at the president’s news hound Mark Knoller. Souza posts feet for the last five years. Many presi- his photos on Twitter, Flickr and Instadential “photo opportunities” now only gram shortly after he takes them, and allow official White House photogra- news agencies run these official pictures phers, causing the media to stir with as “news.” As the media’s protest letter points out, “You are, in effect, replac“tensions” and write letters of protest. “Journalists are routinely being de- ing independent photojournalism with nied the right to photograph or video- visual press releases.” The most famous visual press retape the president while he is performing his official duties,” the White House lease was the White House Situation Correspondents’ Association and other Room photo of Obama and his top aides news organizations wrote in a letter to watching the takedown of Osama bin Press Secretary Jay Carney. “As surely Laden in 2011. It was airbrushed to as if they were placing a hand over a obscure a classified document next to journalist’s camera lens, officials in this Hillary Clinton, which raises the next administration are blocking the public question: Has Souza retouched other from having an independent view of pictures? He claims he hasn’t, but with
Brent
Bozell
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the Gulf of Mexico to show the water has recovered from the BP oil spill; and Obama sitting alone on the Rosa Parks bus, in the same row Parks sat. The Dec. 1 Times story on the media protest displayed a photo from July capturing the Obama family listening to a tour guide inside Nelson Mandela’s old prison cell on Robben Island. But other occasions that seem more like news events are closed off from news photographers, from the meeting with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to one with inspirational Pakistani shooting victim and teen activist Malala Yousafzai. It’s hard to imagine a liberal media photographer making antiObama hay out of those. The White House also has its own videographers who create videos on his weekly activities with headlines from presidential statements, like the puketastic latest: “Kindness Covers All of My Political Beliefs.” How much does that sound like a People’s Republic? Next he’ll tell us to call him “Dear Leader.” This stonewalling explains why the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a report in October attacking Obama’s record on transparency. “When you call the White House press office to ask a question or seek information, they refer us to White House websites,” Chris Schlemon, Washington producer for Britain’s Channel 4, told the organization. “We have to use White House website content, White House videos of the president’s interviews with local television stations and White House photographs of the president.” ANY MEDIA outlet could resist this trend by rejecting any (or even most) official White House photos and video. But no one is that rebellious. Obama’s banking that the media’s protests will fade and he can continue to build his legacy — one propagandistic photograph at a time.
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Conservative Chronicle
CONTRACT WITH AMERICA: December 2, 2013
Time for a new Contract with America Does anybody remember the Contract ing problems, not just carping criticisms with America besides historians? of a failing and then flailing president. More of us should. Especially politi- And that is just what the country cians, reformers and the increasing num- got in the midterm elecber of Americans tions of 1994. dissatisfied with Republicans where the country campaigning for seems to be headCongress that year ed — in a handadopted the same (c) 2013, Tribune Media Services basket. national agenda, point by point. They called their proA LOT OF Americans were worried gram, drawn up and presented by a young about the country’s direction in 1994, congressman from Georgia named Newt too, when a bright young president from Gingrich, the Contract with America. Arkansas who had been inaugurated with That contract wasn’t just a collection such high hopes was foundering, and the of the usual political platitudes, but a country with him. His administration contract. A solemn commitment. A covwas beset with a spate of scandals of his enant. And each of its clauses came with own making, each with the customary a draft statute ready to be introduced, de-gate appended to its name, from Travel- bated and passed into law: Term limits. gate to Troopergate to Fornigate to other Tort reform, aka “Loser Pays.” Balanced -gates galore. budgets. Lower taxes, specifically on the For a while there, the beleaguered kind of investments that produce jobs new president couldn’t even find a nomi- and real economic growth. Tax reform nee for attorney general who hadn’t tried that would include a bigger tax credit to get out of paying taxes for her house- for families with small children. Welhold help, a particularly low but widely fare reform that would emphasize work, accepted habit among the well-to-do. not handouts — in short, independence To top it off, the new president’s health rather than continued dependence. And a care plan, which was really his wife’s pet requirement that Congress be covered by project, was falling apart even before it the same laws it passes for the rest of us. could be rammed into law. (If only the Not like Obamacare today, with its spesame fate had befallen Obamacare, its cial subsidy for members of Congress author might be a good deal more popu- and their swollen staffs. lar today. Some defeats are victories in Contract offered, contract accepted. disguise.) Came Election Day in November of that As for the opposition party, the Re- year, the GOP scored its biggest gains in publicans were no more popular back 40 years, winning control of both houses then than they are now, and the country of Congress. That contract would even wanted something more than just opposi- win over a Democratic president evention from them. It wanted clear, positive, tually. After only brief resistance, Bill specific responses to the nation’s mount- Clinton agreed to a complete revamp of
Paul
Greenberg
the welfare system (it became workfare) and balanced budgets. No one benefited more from the Contract with America than he did, winning re-election as a reform president. NOW ANOTHER president faces a crisis of national confidence. And it’s time for the GOP to offer another Contract with America, one that should include a complete revamp of the president’s fastcollapsing health care program. If it can’t be dropped entirely, the whole Rube Goldberg contraption needs to have every part of it replaced. For example: Why not let us just plain citizens buy health insurance with pretax dollars the way corporations do? Why not expand our health savings accounts instead of eliminating them? Why not let folks buy policies that offer coverage for just catastrophic illnesses instead of be-
ing forced to buy all the bells and whistles that drive insurance premiums sky high? Why not let Americans keep our insurance instead of forcing us to drop it? (And our doctors, too.) Why dump millions of us into Medicaid without giving us any choice of insurance companies? Let us buy insurance across state lines to make health care plans affordable in more than name. And so constructively on, point by point. Yes, such basic reforms might require that Obamacare be repealed in spirit if not in name. Because what’s needed is a 180-degree course correction. It won’t be easy to right this sinking ship called Obamacare. But the whole country might breathe a sigh of relief if it could be turned around completely. No one might benefit more from such an about-face than the president himself, who would finally be able to restore the nation’s confidence in his leadership. He would have proven wise enough to recognize his mistakes, humble enough to acknowledge them, and strong enough to correct them. “The curious task of economics,” said an economist of note named Friedrich Hayek, “is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” The curious accomplishment of Obamacare has been to demonstrate how little our planners and politicians know about health care — and how easily they can complicate, obfuscate and generally screw it up. A NEW, UPDATED Contract with America would begin by reforming Americans’ health care coverage but not end there. It ought to go on to cover much of the same ground the old contract did in 1994, like cutting the deficit and balancing the budget, strengthening national security and encouraging economic growth. The old contract was rolled out only six weeks before the election. Let’s not wait that long before unveiling a new, improved one.
5
December 11, 2013 GOVERNMENT: December 3, 2013
Obamacare and government’s failures
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e conservatives are always on about the “unintended consequences” of government programs, but we didn’t expect the Obama administration and congressional Democrats to provide such a vivid object lesson. If the tipsy, teetering debut of Obamacare invites a new skepticism about the capacity of government to run things, it will be the most welcome unintended consequence since Alexander Fleming left his staphylococci samples on a workbench over summer vacation. Government programs, after all, fail frequently but are almost never held to account, far less held up to ridicule.
CONSIDER EDUCATION. In an era everyone keeps telling us is hitech-centered, only about 75 percent of American students graduate from high school. In major cities, the figure is closer to 50 percent. Detroit, Education Week reports, graduates only 46 per-
cent of students; Denver, 50 percent; met with at least consternation, if not Los Angeles, 52 percent; and New York outright rebellion. But no, these failing City, 54 percent. As for what those di- schools chug along, failing to educate in some cases, failing plomas signify, it varies a lot. A 2009 and even to provide for survey by Comthe physical safety mon Core found of their students. It that fewer than is reformers who half of American are branded as danhigh schoolers (c) 2013, Creators Syndicate gerous rather than could place the the government Civil War in the correct half-century, 25 percent thought that permits this dereliction. Is education too complicated and Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue after 1750 and 33 percent couldn’t multifactorial? If you think so, have a glance at No Excuses: Closing the Raidentify the Bill of Rights. American students lag behind their cial Gap in Learning, by Stephan and peers from other developed nations in Abigail Thernstrom. But meanwhile, math, technology and literacy. You’d let’s look at Medicaid because Obamthink that parents, especially those in acare is expanding this failed program. poor neighborhoods, would be in the DEAMONTE DRIVER was a sevstreets protesting. You’d think the failure of government to provide such a ba- enth-grader in Prince George’s County, sic good to its citizens — particularly Md., who died because he couldn’t after demanding and getting increasing get a dentist appointment. Avik Roy subventions year after year — would be tells his story in How Medicaid Fails
Mona
Charen
MATERIALISM: December 3, 2013
Black Friday: Dark night rises “If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.” — John Lennon “Black Friday” was a metaphor beyond the merchants’ bottom line. Headlines on last Friday’s Drudge Report reflect a culture that is being trampled by the greed and me-only attitude of a growing number of us: — “Mall mayhem ... — Suspected shoplifter shot after dragging cop through KOHL’s parking lot ... — Brawls ... Man stabbed over parking spot ... — Shopper Kicked Out Of WALMART For Filming Fight ... — Man shot walking home with big screen ... — Shoppers Trampled in Race for $49 Tablet ... — SALVATION ARMY kettles stolen ... — Woman pulls stun gun in argument over Walmart shopping cart.” ONCE SUCH stories seemed isolated, even bizarre. In the era of flash mobs and a growing entitlement mentality fueled by politicians and “income inequality” alarmists, these far too frequent instances now seem to be symptomatic of a decaying culture. Like those with symptoms of illness who refuse to see a doctor, ignoring this pestilence that is destroying our foundations ensures it will get worse. These incidents are the result of a nation that has ceased to impose — yes, impose — the
old values that served previous generations well. The dark night is rising and it isn’t a Batman movie. The latest, but probably not the last, expression of what I mean is what used to be called assault and battery, but now is labeled the “knockout game” in which mostly young men see if they can randomly knock another person unconscious with a single punch.
Cal
Thomas (c) 2013, Tribune Media Services
People and nations must be ruled by something, or there is anarchy. Either it is God, or secular laws that control our lower nature. Today, we are out of control as we pursue happiness through prosperity in the false hope money and things will satisfy. The problem with prosperity is that one is never satisfied. As the ancient writer said, “Whoever loves money never has money enough; whoever loves wealth is never satisfied with his income.” (Ecclesiastes 5:10) Who today is satisfied with their income and circumstances? IN MY neighborhood there are old houses built during World War II, and at that time they sold for well under $20,000. One of these houses is currently on sale for more than $1 million. Far larger and more expensive homes stand
on lots where smaller and cheaper homes once stood. These new homes are called “tear-down houses.” How many regard these larger houses as steppingstones to an even-bigger next house? What is the purpose, other than ego fulfillment? The estate sale is the end of it all. If things satisfied, wouldn’t Americans be the most satisfied people on Earth? We have more stuff than any generation before ours. The overflow we deposit in rented public storage units. The stock market is up substantially, but we want it to go higher with no bursting bubble this time. Then what? What will we do with more? Will tomorrow’s more satisfy when today’s more hasn’t? Previous generations had less and yet seemed to have more of what matters: more character; more virtue; more contentment, all of it reinforced by parents, clergy and, for the most part, culture. In our day, materialism has become a false god we worship in the vain hope it will bring peace. In our conspicuous consumption we are self-immolating and the fuel is materialism. Writer Jess C. Scott has said, “If money’s the god people worship, I’d rather go worship the devil instead.” GIVEN THE behavior of so many on “Black Friday” and other examples of cultural decay and national decline, many of us seem to be doing just that. Israel’s King David warned, “The wicked freely strut about when what is vile is honored among men.” (Psalm 12:8). Can’t say we haven’t been warned.
the Poor. When Deamonte complained of a toothache in September 2006, his mother began calling around, seeking a dentist who would take a patient with Medicaid coverage. Several months and dozens of phone calls later, she finally found one who explained to her that Deamonte had six abscessed teeth and required the services of an oral surgeon, which once again, prompted another frustrating round of phone calls and several months of delay. A week before his surgery was finally scheduled, Deamonte complained of a severe headache. He was rushed to the hospital where doctors found his dental infection had spread to his brain. Brain surgery revived him for a while but after a few weeks, he died. Long waits and poor care are not exceptions in the Medicaid program but regular features. A recent Pediatrics study found that Medicaid/State Children’s Health Insurance Program patients were unable to get urgent dental appointments 64 percent of the time, compared with five percent for those with private insurance. It was similar for patients with severe asthma and juvenile diabetes. Roy highlights studies that show patients with Medicaid coverage not only have worse health outcomes than those with private health insurance, but also that they fare worse even than those with no health insurance at all. Medicaid reimburses physicians at roughly half the rate of private insurance. Some liberals want doctors to be coerced into providing care, which is the logical extension of the Obamacare cram-down model. In fact, the program will add about 17 million new enrollees to Medicaid. This will increase wait times even further and put more strain on an already-failing system. Medicaid patients clog emergency rooms because they cannot get primary care doctors to see them, Roy argues. A system of catastrophic coverage combined with “concierge” service (paying physicians $80 per month to see each Medicaid patient) would cost $3,460 per person, or 42 percent less than what Obamacare proposes to spend. “It’s not wrong to spend a large sum of money on health care for the poor,” writes Roy. “It is wrong to waste large sums of money on health care for the poor.” OR ON ANYTHING else. It’s even worse to waste large sums of money on programs that make everyone, on balance, worse off than competing arrangements would. Let’s hope that the troubles of Obamacare open people’s eyes to alternatives. We’ve tamely accepted government failure to our sorrow.
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Conservative Chronicle
OBAMACARE: December 3, 2013
Website, schmebsite, keep your eyes on the ball
I
’m not sure which the Obama administration is better at, deceiving the American people into accepting its initial policy changes or conning them into accepting, after the fact, the lowering of expectations for these failed policies. JUST LOOK at this president’s miserable track record on both counts. His administration predicted his exorbitant stimulus package would create boatloads of “shovel-ready” jobs (not to mention reduce unemployment), but it didn’t even come close. In response, Obama insisted the economic circumstances he inherited were far worse than he had imagined. He also cynically joked away his promise to generate shovel-ready jobs — as if to say the American people were fools and dolts for taking him seriously about such a claim. Obama repeatedly promised that his government-induced green projects, such as Solyndra, would produce thousands of jobs. When the project and similar ones went belly up, he didn’t so much as flirt with offering an apology or a plausible explanation but just implied that such colossal failures were bumps in the road toward transitioning into a green economy, and he blithely announced more federal millions dedicated to similar boondoggles. The examples are endless, but let’s move on to the Obamacare website debacle, with which the administration is setting records for both incompetence and chutzpah. Assuming you haven’t been living with Jed Clampett’s descendants in the sticks where there is no access to television or the Internet, you’re well aware of the stunningly egregious Obamacare website rollout. It would have been infinitely inexcusable had the administration spent tens of thousands of dollars on it and had a shorter window to make it work. But it had several years to plan and implement it and has wasted — and continues to waste — hundreds of millions of dollars on it. But why worry about mere hundreds of millions dedicated to the website? Columnist Morgan Brittany reports that one section of the abominable law authorizes the allocation of some $8 billion just to promote Obamacare. How did the administration handle the website failure? Well, Obama said, “It’s on us.” But then he proceeded to blame Republican obstruction and casually changed the deadline to Nov. 30. As the end of November approached, the administration’s barlowering aficionados moved into high gear and said that things were much better but that they were still just expecting to have it work for 80 percent
of users, a figure that any Republican 50,000 users at a time; it loads slowly; president would have been savaged for small businesses won’t be enrolled until after the 2014 midterm elections; suggesting. problems will impede Indeed, instead of apologizing, technical the government’s the administration ability to verify usboasts that the ers’ identities and website is “less the transmission prone to errors” of accurate enand is “on track (c) 2013, Creators Syndicate rollment data to to work for a vast insurance providmajority of users.” (Even former White House press ers; and some crucial parts of the site secretary Robert Gibbs called BS on haven’t even been built yet. In addition, though the administrathat one.) Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius claims tion says the system is working 95.1 “dramatic” improvement but recom- percent of the time (excluding schedmends potential “customers” (read: uled maintenance), the industry stansubjects) use the site during “off-peak dard for websites is 99.9 percent, and hours.” Comforting, huh? Kind of like “anything below that,” reports the “the dog ate my website.” But hey, Washington Examiner, “is considered if you can’t fulfill your disingenuous a failure and 95.1 percent is a disaspromises, why not change the rules ter.” The Examiner also calls into midgame? It’s not about producing re- question the administration’s claim sults but about duping and pacifying that it’s working for 80 percent of users. “Centers for Medicare and Medicpeople. aid spokeswoman Julie Bataille was a APART FROM the rationaliza- bit vague about whether that goal had tions and bar-lowering shenanigans, been met.” But let’s keep our eyes on the big the administration is flat out defrauding us again. As Breitbart and others ball, shall we? Regardless of the adare reporting, the site can handle only ministration’s obfuscation, mendac-
David
Limbaugh
ity, scapegoating, weasel-wording, ex post facto reductions of expectations, and smoke and mirrors manipulation, the website will eventually work in a technical sense. Yet when all that fairy dust has settled, the substantive problems with Obamacare will remain, as people will continue to suffer involuntary divorces from their plans and doctors, be coerced into paying more for coverage, lose control over their own health care decisions, and receive lesser-quality and less timely care. Doctors will reportedly face a 24 percent pay cut in both Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, which will force even more of them out of the profession than Obamacare is already doing, and Obamacare will continue to bend the cost curve up, not down, and destroy American jobs. IMPROVEMENTS TO the disgraceful website, as inferior as they are, are but distractions from the real problem, which is Obamacare proper — a legislative menace that must be repealed. Not massaged, not corrected, not amended, not fixed but outright repealed.
CELL PHONES ON PLANES: November 28, 2013
Smart phones, foolish choices “In space, no one can hear you scream” was the tag line for Ridley Scott’s breakthrough 1979 sci-fi flick, Alien. With the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to revisit its 22-year ban on using cellphones in flight on passenger planes, that could change. OH, JOY, was my first thought. That obnoxious Alec Baldwin wannabe who makes the crew nag him until he turns off his toys is going to have his loud way with everyone from boarding to landing. The past few decades have seen a transformation of the friendly skies. With smaller seats, tighter rows and shrinking food, cellphone usage could be the final element that turns air travel into the equivalent of taking Bay Area Rapid Transit. You want to read the newspaper, but it’s hard to concentrate when a nearby passenger is barking orders to his staff, a young stud is lying to his partner and another passenger is talking about absolutely nothing — but loudly. Flight attendants are not amused. “Any situation that is loud, divisive, and possibly disruptive is not only unwelcome but also unsafe,” quoth a statement from the Association of
Flight Attendants. “In emergencies,” the union also pointed out, cellphone “use would drown out announcements and distract from life-saving instructions from the crew.” Not even the head of the Consumer Electronics Association wants to allow passengers to yap on their devices. “I’m a human being,
Debra J.
Saunders (c) 2013, Creators Syndicate
and I fly a lot,” Gary Shapiro told me. “I’ve yet to meet anyone who thinks it’s a good idea,” not even cellphone executives. “I flew five of the last seven days” last week, he added. “I think I would shoot myself if people were talking on the plane.” Shapiro advocates banning voice phone calls except in emergencies. THE FCC DIDN’T help itself by announcing its thinking in mid-November, before the holiday travel season, when peak demand and bad weather lead to flight cancellations, annoying delays and a spirited anger at airline policies. Commissioners will vote Dec.
12 whether to move the proposal forward for public comment. Hmm. Public comment. I hope they can turn down the volume. For the FCC’s part, Shapiro noted, emitting electronics need not jam a plane’s radio frequencies. A new rule should allow passengers to text friends and retrieve data. That’s good. Our Betters in Europe, without controversy, allow passengers to talk on their mobile phones. The old Airfones didn’t ruin flying, probably because they were so pricey. The FCC is supposed to make rulings based on technology, The Washington Post editorialized. That’s what the FCC proposes to do, so let airlines experiment and decide what works best. That’s the free market, I tell myself. And it’s wrong to oppose change because it’s change. So let the airlines experiment. In the end, this being America, the outcome will be settled by lawyers. If airlines do choose to allow unfettered phoning, there will be horror stories, and there will be brawls, and there will be lawsuits. IN THE MEANTIME, there’s always the public transportation bromide: earbuds.
7
December 11, 2013 NEW YORK CRIME: November 27, 2013
So is it too soon to say ‘I told you so?’
B
They’re not alone. (Thus de Blasio’s ack in September, the New York Times promoted Bill de election.) In 2001, Richard Goldstein Blasio’s mayoral candidacy of the Village Voice announced on MSwith an editorial titled, “Don’t Fear the NBC’S Hardball, “I feel less safe today York City than I did 20 Squeegee Man.” The editorial informed in New years ago.” This was readers that crime a position Goldstein wouldn’t get developed after takworse under de ing a vow to never Blasio because leave his apart“policing is far (c) 2013, Ann Coulter ment, allow visibetter than it used tors, read a newsto be, thanks to innovations by Mayor David Dinkins.” paper, watch TV or listen to the radio. A couple of weeks ago, the Times (Emphasis added — the Times was not ran another item downplaying the combeing sarcastic.) ing crime surge under Mayor de Blasio. UNDER THE policing “innova- Former hedge fund manager Neil Bartions” of Mayor Dinkins, the annual sky wrote a column mocking his felmurder rate in New York City rose to an low one-percenters for fretting about all-time high of 2,245 in Dinkins’ first the new mayor with this advice: “Calm year in office. After four years of hard down.” (I find few balms as soothing as work, the murder rate had dropped by being told to “calm down.”) Reluctantly, Barsky admitted (17 about 10 percent, to a merely astronomtimes) that he is a very rich man. As he ical 1,995 per year. In Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s very explained, he, too, enjoys the city havfirst year in office, the murder rate fell ing been turned into a “a millionaires’ 20 percent. The Times acknowledged the playground” and having a mayor who dramatic drop in crime with an article is “one of us.” (Bloomberg’s not one titled, “New York City Crime Falls But of me, buster.) He sniffed that he found Just Why Is a Mystery.” By Giuliani’s “this affluent angst more than a bit overlast year in office, there were only 714 wrought.” They have learned nothing and formurders in the entire city, a drop of 64 percent from Dinkins’ personal best. By gotten nothing. Liberal zealots view de Blasio as a continuing Giuliani’s aggressive crime policies, Mayor Michael Bloomberg got breath of fresh air because he’s stuck the murder rate for 2012 down to 419 in in policies of the 1960s. That’s when Americans were assured by brain-dead a city of eight million people. But at the Times, they think we’ve liberals that if we could just improve been living in hell since Giuliani’s elec- criminals’ self-esteem, crime would distion, and the most urgent priority for the appear. You’ll see! The result? The violent crime rate next mayor is to get back to Dinkins’ quadrupled. New York.
Ann
Coulter
We never got an apology on behalf of the tens of thousands of Americans who were murdered, maimed, raped and robbed as a direct result of liberal law enforcement strategies — much less the show trials these people deserved. LIBERAL ACTIVISTS just waited out Giuliani and Bloomberg. Now they’re ready to retry all the old ideas. Mayor-elect de Blasio recently met with convicted criminals to get their views on policing policies. Wow! Look at de Blasio’s new ideas! The ex-cons actually complained to de Blasio that they don’t like being watched so much. The left simply refuses to believe that locking up criminals has any effect on crime and insists we just need to explain to them that committing violent felonies is wrong. (New York Times headline
from Aug. 10, 2000: “Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction.”) It’s strange because liberals totally understand cause-and-effect when it comes to ... well, um, nothing. Suggesting that the “one percent” — such as himself — are the most terrified of a de Blasio mayoralty, Barsky claimed that the massively rich have been the primary beneficiaries of record-low crime rates in New York — “those who can actually afford its housing, attend concerts in Lincoln Center, eat in its fancy restaurants and pay for parking to boot.” That could be said only by someone who has never been the victim of a violent crime. Could someone please mug this guy? www.orientaltrading.com The rich in New York are always the last to experience a spike in crime. They might not even notice when the murder, rape and robbery rates go through the roof under de Blasio — for the very reasons Barsky names: They can afford expensive neighborhoods, paid parking and concerts at Lincoln Center. It’s the poor and middle-class New Yorkers, unprotected by doormen, chauffeurs and ticket-takers, who will be the first victims of de Blasio’s innovative new ideas on policing. The non-one percent live in neighborhoods that aren’t the province of multimillionaires, with doormen standing guard every 15 yards. They park their cars on the street, eat lunch in public parks and attend free concerts — all of which are also open to criminals. Newwave Brooklyn is about to become crime-wave Brooklyn. FOR A NEWSPAPER that claims not to be worried about rising crime rates under de Blasio, the Times sure dedicates a lot of ink to assuring us that it’s not going to happen — and if it does, it won’t be de Blasio’s fault. In anticipation of a return to the glory days of David Dinkins, let me be the first to say, I told you so.
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Conservative Chronicle
REPUBLICAN PARTY: November 29, 2013
Let President Obama play the Iran hand
W
For, egged on by Bibi Netanyahu hen, after the massacres at Newtown and the Wash- and the Israeli Lobby AIPAC, the neoare anticipating the return of ington Navy Yard, Repub- cons gress to start work licans refused to outlaw the AR-15 rifle C o n on new sanctions or require backon Iran. Should ground checks for they succeed, they gun purchasers, just might abort we were told the the Geneva talks party had com(c) 2013, Creators Syndicate or even torpedo mitted suicide by the six-month deal with Iran. defying 90 percent of the nation. While shaking a fist in the face of When Republicans rejected amnesty and a path to citizenship for illegal the Ayatollah will rally the Republican aliens, we were told the GOP had just base, it does not appear to be a formula for winning the nation. forfeited its future. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll WHEN HOUSE Republicans re- from Tuesday, by 44-22 Americans apfused to fund Obamacare, the govern- prove of the deal NATO, Russia and ment was shut down and the tea party China cut with Tehran to freeze its nuclear program. was blamed, word went forth: While two-thirds do not trust Iran The GOP has destroyed its brand. Republicans face a wipeout in 2014. when it says its program is not deIt will take a generation to remove this signed to build nuclear weapons, fully 65 percent believe “the United States mark of Cain. Eight weeks later, Obama’s approv- should not become involved in any al is below 40 percent. Most Ameri- military action in the Middle East uncans find him untrustworthy. And the less America is directly threatened.” Only 21 percent disagree. GOP is favored to hold the seats it has This is the nation that rose up last in the House while making gains in the summer and told Obama it did not Senate. For this reversal of fortunes, Repub- want to get involved in Syria’s civil licans can thank the rollout of Obam- war, and told Congress to deny Obama acare — the website that does not the authority to order air strikes — red work, the revelation that, contrary to line or no red line. Even if the Iran deal collapses, 80 Obama’s promise, millions are losing health care plans that they liked, and percent of Americans would favor a the reports of soaring premiums and return to the sanctions regime and negotiations. Only 20 percent would supsinking benefits. Democrats, however, might take port military action against Iran. In summary, while Americans do comfort in the old maxim: If you don’t like the weather here, just wait a while. not trust Iran, they do not want war
Pat
Buchanan
with Iran. They want to test Iran. On this issue, Obama is in sync with his countrymen. Why, looking at these numbers, would Republicans return to Washington with a full-metal-jacket, “axis-ofevil” attitude, with John McCain becoming again the face of the party? WHY WOULD Republicans return to Washington and throw away the winning hand that is Obamacare? It is ravaging the president’s reputation for competence and his credibility, and calling into question the core philosophy of the Democratic Party — that Big Government is America’s salvation. Why would Republicans return to the bellicosity that cost the party both
Houses in 2006 and the White House in 2008? That 20 percent of the nation which favors war with Iran, in the event of a deal collapse or breakdown in the talks, is already in the GOP corral. If Republicans seek to broaden their base, why abandon Obamacare, where a majority agrees with them, for an issue, renewed hostility to Iran, where a majority disagrees? Would it not be playing into Obama’s hand to allow him to assume the role of statesman, who, with “all options on the table,” is willing to negotiate with an enemy rather than take us to war with him? Did not Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan all go this same route? If Bibi, AIPAC, the neocons and their congressional allies should sabotage the negotiations or scuttle the existing or future deal with Iran, maneuvering us into another war in the Middle East that America does not want, how do they think this will sit with the voters in 2016? If Iran is deceiving us and is hellbent on breaking out of this deal and making a dash to a bomb, we will know about it months if not years before Iran ever tests a device, let alone builds a bomb, miniaturizes it and marries it to a delivery system. We would have more than enough notice to abort any test and neutralize Iran’s nuclear program. And the nation would unite behind action, were it seen that Iran had lied to us to buy time to build and test a bomb. BUT IF THE Republican Party leads Congress in imposing new sanctions, and the Iranians walk out, and the NATO-Russia-China coalition breaks up, and a chance for peace in the Persian Gulf seems to have been thrown away, the GOP will pay the price. And rightly so.
9
December 11, 2013 WALL STREET: November 28, 2013
Disaster for Wall Street and White House Republicans will attempt to shut the And the band played on. As the holiday season approaches, government down for a second time. they are dancing on Wall Street with They escaped what looked likely to the Dow, S&P and NASDQ either at be an endless avalanche of elite mecriticism for their or approaching all-time highs. And d i a October shutdown while his popuonly because of the larity is rapidly complete flop of the joining his Health rollout of ObamCare Reform Act acare. Its failure near the bottom of (c) 2013, Creators Syndicate was so massive the political trash heap, the tin-eared President Obama that it actually diverted the media’s atcontinues to glide on the dance floor of tention away from their sport of choice the White House celebrating the Dem- — beating up Republicans. And the disaster that is the Affordocrats clampdown on filibusters and an ill-advised agreement on nukes in Iran. able Care Act is likely to embolden conservative members of Congress BUT AS THIS year races to an end, to stage their next fight over the issue there looms a huge set of problems, all that, in reality, has been paramount in interconnected, that could not only end their minds for years, that of the debt any vestige of political happiness in ceiling. That leads us to the other dance the White House, but also put an end partner in our holiday season scenario: Wall Street. to the exuberance on Wall Street. After learning that the Federal ReThe scenario goes something like this: It begins with a continued unrav- serve had no immediate plans to stop eling of the Affordable Care Act. With shoveling printed dollars to purchase even the likes of CBS News now re- our own Treasury bonds, and seeing porting that millions of Americans will both the shut down and debt ceiling continue to face cancellation of their crisis averted, equities shot up to allhealth insurance, even those who re- time highs. And that made sense since ceive those benefits through their em- the low-interest rates that result from ployers, the likelihood that Obamacare the Fed’s feeding the beast has left will somehow turn the corner towards investors with nowhere else to gain a reasonable return for their money. popularity is unlikely. But the partying and dancing in the Looming in the not-so-distant future is another round of dealing with East Room of the White House and at the budget and the debt ceiling. Most posh establishments haunted by the experts doubt that even the boldest of elite of the financial world this holiday
Matt
Towery
season could be followed by a 2014 But, as we all know from past bubpolitical and economic hangover of bles that have burst, “leading econommassive proportion. ic indicators” often aren’t so leading. That means that at some point early AS THE Affordable Care Act con- into the new year, the Fed may feel that tinues to draw more critics, it also, the economy is stronger than it truly is through its implementation, is leaving and begin the reduction in bond buymore and more Americans uncertain backs that seems to have Wall Street as to the availability and cost of their gurus quaking in their boots. health care in years to come. Whether About that same time, Congress their fear will be reflected in decreased will start considering the debt ceiling, consumer confidence, either in the last which by most calculations must be few months of this year or perhaps ear- addressed in real terms by March or ly into 2014, remains to be seen. April. Emboldened GOP conservative members of the House and Senate believe that Obamacare will be so unpopular by then that they will be capable of holding the raising of the debt ceiling hostage as a bargaining chip to kill off Obamacare. They might be right. But by around March it is possible that the wizards of Wall Street will suddenly feel a squeeze from the Fed. That could come just as they suddenly realize that conservatives might just have the juice and the courage to call the bluff of President Obama and the endless parade of bankers and CEOs he always frightens into joining him, who will be demanding that, once again, the nation should take on more debt. Of course the elite media and pundits will expect the Republicans to back down for fear of dire economic consequences. What many of those Republicans will know is that, but that time, the party for the White House and Wall Street may well already be coming to an end both politically and financially. I WOULDN’T want to be President Obama or a Democrat after that ... and I probably wouldn’t want to be heavily invested in Wall Street’s house of cards, either.
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Conservative Chronicle
SCOTT WALKER: December 1, 2013
Scott Walker: Wisconsin’s action governor
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n 2011, tens of thousands of gov- fund union contributions to Democrats. ernment employees and others, Barack Obama and his national labor enraged by Gov. Scott Walker’s allies made Wisconsin a battleground they knew that when determination to break the ruinously because Indiana made payexpensive and ing union dues opparalyzing grip tional, 90 percent that government of state employees workers’ unions quit paying, and had on Wiscon(c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group similar measures sin, took over the capitol building in Madison. With produced similar results in Washingchanting, screaming and singing sup- ton, Colorado and Utah. Walker raised more than $30 million, Walker has long experience in the assembling a nationwide network of plemented by bullhorns, bagpipes and drum circles, their cacophony shook furnace of resistance to the looting of conservative donors that could come the building that the squalor of their oc- public funds by the public’s employ- in handy if he is re-elected next year. cupation made malodorous. They spat ees. He was elected chief executive of Having become the first U.S. governor on Republican legislators and urinated heavily Democratic Milwaukee Coun- to survive a recall election, he is toon Walker’s office door. They shouted, ty after his predecessor collaborated day serene as America’s first governor with other officials in rewriting pen- to be, in effect, elected twice to a first “This is what democracy looks like!” sion rules in a way that, if he had been term. When he seeks a second term, his WHEN THEY and Democratic leg- re-elected instead of resigning, would probable opponent will be a wealthy islators failed to prevent passage of Act have given him a lump-sum payment opponent who says her only promise is 10, they tried to defeat — with a scurri- of $2.3 million and $136,000 a year for to not make promises. This is her atlous smear campaign that backfired — life. tempt to cope with an awkward fact: an elected state Supreme Court justice. She will either infuriate her party’s libTO FIGHT the recall — during eral base or alarm a majority of voters They hoped that changing the court’s composition would get Walker’s re- which opponents disrupted Walker’s by promising either to preserve or reforms overturned. When this failed, appearance at a Special Olympics peal Act 10. they tried to capture the state Senate event, and squeezed Super Glue into Walker is politely scathing — a neat by recalling six Republican senators. the locks of a school he was to visit — trick — of Mitt Romney’s campaign, When this failed, they tried to recall Walker. On the night that failed — he PRESIDENTIAL PARDON: December 3, 2013 won with a larger margin than he had received when elected 19 months earlier — he resisted the temptation to proclaim, “This is what democracy looks like!” Walker recounts these events in Unnother Thanksgiving has didn’t know how to game the system intimidated: A Governor’s Story and passed without a presidential like a pro, he got life without parole. a Nation’s Challenge. Most books by That’s a misleading term, according commutation for Clarence incumbent politicians are not worth Aaron, who, at age 24, was sentenced to to Julie Stewart, president of Families the paper they never should have been life without parole for a first-time non- Against Mandatory Minimums. It’s not written on. If, however, enough voters violent drug conviction in 1993. a sentence of life as much as a sentence read Walker’s nonfiction thriller, it will President Barack Obama has the un- to live until you die in prison. make him a — perhaps the — leading fettered power to pardon ex-cons and candidate for his party’s 2016 presi- commute the sentences of federal indential nomination. mates. Yet this term, he has used that Act 10 required government workers power to commute the sentences of turto contribute 5.8 percent of their sala- keys only — no people, even though the (c) 2013, Creators Syndicate ries to their pensions (hitherto, most American Civil Liberties Union figures paid nothing) and to pay 12.6 percent that close to 2,000 nonviolent offenders of their health care premiums (up from are serving sentences of life without paIn 2007, President George W. Bush six percent but still just half of what role in federal prisons. asked the Department of Justice pardon the average federal worker pays). Both attorney to revisit its recommendation percentages are well below the privateAARON WAS not a buyer or a sell- to deny Aaron a commutation. Pardon sector average. By limiting collective er but a facilitator who hooked up two attorney Ronald Rodgers told the White bargaining to base wages, Act 10 freed professional drug dealers. All but one of House he still believed that Aaron’s peschool districts to hire and fire teach- Aaron’s confederates has been released tition should be denied. Problem is, acers based on merit, and to save many from prison. His remaining co-defen- cording to a 2012 inspector general’s millions of dollars by buying teach- dant is due for release next year. report, Rodgers withheld vital inforers’ health insurance in the competitive Why did Aaron get the longest time? mation on the case — that the sentencmarket rather than from an entity run He didn’t testify against the higher-ups, ing judge and prosecutor’s office had by the teachers’ union. Restricting col- who sold or bought nine kilograms of reversed their staunch opposition to a lective bargaining to wages ended the cocaine and planned to traffic another commutation. sort of absurd rules for overtime com- 15 kilograms. They cooperated with pensation that made a bus driver Madi- authorities. Also, the buyer planned to EVEN THOUGH he misled the preson’s highest paid public employee. convert the powder cocaine into crack vious president, Rodgers remains on the Act 10’s dynamite, however, was the (which carries a harsher federal manda- job. Attorney General Eric Holder gives provision ending the state’s compulso- tory minimum sentence). The govern- lip service to reforming the draconian ry collection of union dues — some- ment was able to charge defendants for sentencing system, yet after winning retimes as high as $1,400 per year — that quantities not traded. Because Aaron election, his boss has not shown mercy
George
Will
especially of Romney’s statement that “I’m not concerned about the very poor” because “we have a very ample safety net.” The imperative, Walker says, is to “help them escape the safety net.” “OUTSIDE THE Washington beltway,” he says pointedly, “big-government liberals are on the ropes.” No incumbent Republican governor has lost a general election since 2007. Since 2008, the number of Republican governors has increased from 21 to 30, just four short of the party’s all-time high reached in the 1920s. He thinks Republican governors are in tune with the nation. If re-elected, he probably will test that theory.
No mercy this Thanksgiving
A
Debra J.
Saunders
to a single nonviolent offender. “Pardon Power” blogger P.S. Ruckman Jr. rates the Obama administration as “one of the most merciless in history.” Bush had a better record. I can hear apologists leap to the president’s defense. Obama dare not use this power, they pant, because Republicans would slam him for it. For those critics, I have two words: Eugenia Jennings. Never heard of her? That’s because there was no hue and cry when Obama commuted the Illinois woman’s sentence in 2011 in time for her to make it home for Christmas. She is the only recipient of an Obama commutation. Jennings was an 18-year-old mother when she was sentenced to 22 years for her third drug offense — selling a small amount of crack cocaine to a federal informant. She clearly was no criminal mastermind, but in prison, she wised up and earned an electrician’s diploma. Jennings died from leukemia in October. The Alton Telegraph reports that 200 people attended a standing-roomonly service for a woman whom “many hold as a symbol of strength and redemption.” THERE IS nothing stopping Obama from repeating this amazing success. I have to figure he just doesn’t care.
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December 11, 2013 GOVERNMENT: November 28, 2013
What if Thanksgiving exposes the government?
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hat if another Thanksgiv- who spy and lie don’t lose their jobs no ing Day is upon us and matter how they lie or upon whom they because of the government spy or who gets elected? W h a t if this holiday of turkey we have less to be thankful for than we football and family is did at the last one? What if at every a n d the modern-day verThanksgiving libsion of bread and erty is weakened circuses? What if and the governbread and circuses ment is strength— which Roman ened? What if (c) 2013, Creators Syndicate emperors gave to Thanksgiving’s warm and breezy seduction of gratitude the mobs to keep them sated — are just is just the government’s way of induc- the government’s way today of keeping ing us to think we should be grateful for us sated at the end of every November? What if the government expects us it? to give thanks to it for letting us have WHAT IF we don’t owe the govern- Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday ment any thanks for anything? What if off? What if the president thinks he’s a the government owes us back all the freedom and property it has stolen from king? What if he claims the power to us? What if the government has pro- kill people outside the Constitution? duced nothing and owns nothing, save What if some of these people were your what it has coerced us to give it? What sisters or neighbors or friends? What if if the courts have ruled that the govern- he thinks he’s so smart that he knows ment can lie and cheat with impunity in what choices we should make? What if order to acquire our property or assault he makes those choices for us? What if we each have the natural right our freedoms? What if the government lies and to choose how to care for our own bodcheats regularly to enhance its own ies, but he has used the coercive powwealth and power? What if the govern- ers of the law to tell us how to do so? ment claims that its power comes from What if that law compelled all persons the consent of the governed? What if no to pay for more health insurance than one consented to the government’s spy- they needed or wanted or could afford? ing and lying except those who person- What if the president deceived dupes in Congress into voting for that law? ally and directly benefit from it? What if the government is afraid to What if the president deceived millions tell us all it is doing to us for fear we of Americans into supporting that law? might vote it out of office? What if that What if the president forced you to pay vote would change nothing? What if the for a health insurance policy that funded spying and lying continued no matter killing babies in their mothers’ wombs? What if the president knows what who ran the government? What if those
Andrew
Napolitano
you want and need because his spies have captured your every telephone call, text and email? What if the Declaration of Independence says that our rights are personal, inalienable and come from God? What if the Constitution says that among our inalienable rights are the right to be left alone and the right to be different? WHAT IF the president took an oath to uphold the Declaration and the Constitution but believes in neither? What if he believes that our rights come from the collective consent of our neighbors, whom he can influence, or, worse yet, from the government, which he can control? What if he believes that he can invade our right to be left alone by spying
on us and lying to us and destroy our right to be different by killing us? What if he actually did all these things? What if only individuals foolish enough to do so give up their own rights but cannot give up the rights of those of us who refuse to surrender them? What if the government can only constitutionally take away personal freedoms when a jury has convicted someone of a crime? What if the government thinks it can take our rights away by ordinary legislation or by presidential fiat? What if it has done so? What if someone who once worked for the government knew all this and risked life and limb to tell us about it? What if the government at first denied that it lies to and spies upon all Americans? What if it demonized the whistle blower? What if it chased him to the ends of the Earth because he revealed awful truths? What if everything Edward Snowden revealed about the government turned out to be true? What if it is the personal courage and constitutional fidelity of Edward Snowden for which we should be thankful? What if the government hates and fears our freedoms just as it hates and fears the revelation of the awful truths Snowden possesses? What if our thanks are due primarily to the Author of our freedoms, who made us in His image and likeness, and to those who have exercised those freedoms to seek and reveal the truth? What if it is the truth, and not the government, that will keep us free? What if we have the right to pursue happiness no matter what the government says? What if we have the right to be unique no matter what the government wants? What if the freedom to seek the truth will bring us happiness? WHAT IF that freedom which is still ours is a just cause for a happy Thanksgiving, after all?
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Conservative Chronicle
OBAMA PRESIDENCY: December 3, 2013
President Obama’s report card: Failing
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s President Obama approaches the end of his fifth year in office, he’s nearing the time for his annual report card. It isn’t a pretty picture. Americans are giving him failing grades, as polls show his job approval scores plunging to the lowest level in his presidency. Only 41 percent approve of his performance in office, while 52 percent now disapprove of the overall job he’s been doing. THERE ARE plenty of reasons for Obama’s dismal marks: from his foreign policy blunders and a troubling decline in our national security defenses, to a still-high unemployment economy that remains sub-par and sluggish. Not to mention the Obamacare debacle that’s become a disastrous metaphor for his administration’s incompetence. However, these and other failures aren’t being pointed out just by his Republican opponents, but by Democrats, too, who are deeply troubled by what they see on a range of issues. New York Times economics columnist Paul Krugman, one of Obama’s earliest supporters, recently raised the prospect of a painfully weak, job-starved economy lasting a great deal longer than most economists expected. “What if depression-like conditions are on track to persist, not for another year or two, but for decades?”, the Nobel Prize-winning economist wrote late last month in his widely syndicated newspaper column.
Krugman’s answer is that “economic briefed regularly in secret by the govreality is what it is. And what that re- ernment’s top security officials, are tellality appears to be right now is one in ing us a far different and more alarming which depression rules will apply for a story. very long time.” “The terrorism threat against the Krugman is not alone in his dire U n i t e d States is increasing depiction of the and Americans are economy. Other not as safe as they Democrats were were a year or two saying the same ago,” the two thing, including chairs said in a (c) 2013, United Media Services Lawrence Sumjoint interview on mers, the former CNN’s State of the Union Sunday, acchairman of Obama’s White House cording to the Washington Post. Economic Council and secretary of the Feinstein told CNN that now “there Treasury under President Clinton. are more terrorist groups than ever, with In a recent high-profile lecture before more sophisticated and hard-to-detect the International Monetary Fund’s an- bombs,” the Post reported. “There is a nual research conference, Summers said huge malevolence out there,” the senafor the first time that we could be in for tor said. a long period of “chronic and systemic Does that sound like we’re safer to economic sluggishness.” you? In other words, this economy isn’t going to get much better, folks. We’re YET, PERHAPS no other domestic going to slog through a painful, jobless social welfare shortcoming in this adperiod for the rest of Obama’s presiden- ministration has been as shocking as the cy. More on this in a moment. multiple failures of Obamacare. More recently, the two House and The White House is telling us this Senate leaders of the national security week that the botched computer system intelligence committees in Congress — is improved, but Obama also told us we including Democratic Sen. Dianne Fein- could keep our existing insurance polistein of California — said that America cies, a preposterous claim that turned now faces a growing terrorist threat. out to be false. Obama won re-election by telling But as of Tuesday, the system was voters that al Qaeda’s terrorist ranks still producing a lot of error-ridden apwere “decimated,” we had them “on the plications. Up to one-third of them had run” and that we were much safer as a mistakes — meaning that many people result. But Feinstein and Republican may not have the coverage that they exRep. Mike Rogers of Michigan, who are pect next month.
Donald
Lambro
While the focus has been on fixing the online apparatus, the deeper problems embedded in his health care law are even more ominous. We’re going to see many more layoffs and much more part-time hiring by businesses to stay under the 50-job threshold for mandated health care coverage. And we’re already seeing sharply higher premiums because of the government-mandated benefits (pediatrics, birth control and other services) many older Americans do not need or want. And wait until the IRS gets its tax penalty program up and running for the uninsured and the punitive bills start to be mailed out. But that’s just the tip of Obama’s iceberg. Our government has become a mess of unworkable, wasteful, duplicative, archaic, unaffordable programs and agencies. And critics, including a top Obama ally, say that Obamacare’s botched rollout is a prime example of “the absence of good management in the U.S. government.” “Despite more than three years of lead time and $400 million to $600 million in taxpayer money, the government can’t seem to deliver something that is bread and butter to the average online retailer,” Obama’s former chief of staff, William Daley, and Harvard public policy professor Linda Bilmes wrote in Sunday’s Post. “Poor management is undermining public trust in our government,” they added. One guess who that is. Among their fix-it proposals: a major, government-wide consolidation of programs and bureaucracies to shrink the size and cost of government. But over the past five years, Obama has been working to expand the size and cost of government, not reduce it. Obamacare is his latest costly nationwide experiment. Meanwhile, none of the president’s job descriptions get worse marks than his handling — well, actually, mishandling — of the jobless economy. Gallup reports that 41 percent of the Americans they poll say they’re “struggling,” and another four percent say they’re “suffering.” Its surveys further find that 8.3 percent are unemployed, and 17.2 percent say they’re underemployed but can’t find full-time work. Krugman’s column also raised this disturbing question: “But what if the world we’ve been living in for the past five years is the new normal?” A NUMBER of economists now believe this to be the case, until we put someone else in charge who understands how capitalism can restore American prosperity once again.
13
December 11, 2013 OBAMACARE: December 4, 2013
Lying to the sick and to the vulnerable
T
he Affordable Care Act gets more and more curious. President Barack Obama promised to protect those with pre-existing conditions and help the uninsured. Yet these vulnerable groups are getting clobbered. Congress needs to show mercy and protect them now instead of waiting until the entire misadventure plays out. Here’s a plan of action. ONE OF THE president’s biggest lies to sell Obamacare was claiming it would protect people with pre-existing conditions. He even lied that his mother Stanley Anne Dunham, a cancer victim, suffered because her insurer used the pre-existing-condition excuse to drop her. The truth, revealed in a 2011 biography, is that she had employer-provided insurance that paid her hospital bills until the end of her life. Since 1996, employer-provided plans have been barred from dropping or excluding anyone
based on a pre-existing condition. So is therapy, being forced to change health plans and oncologists is a life-or-death Medicare and Medicaid. The problem of pre-existing condi- issue. State insurance commissioners are tions affects about two million people in the individual market. The best options scrambling to delay the closings. In pools should permafor sick people are being closed because truth, the nently be kept open of Obamacare. In and funded with 35 states, the sick money slated for have relied on the Obamacare exhigh-risk pools, changes. where premiums (c) 2013, Creators Syndicate The high-risk are subsidized to pools are an honest keep them within reach. But every high-risk pool is way to subsidize care for the sick, and scheduled to close on Dec. 31, 2013, they’ve worked for 25 years, even with or shortly after, because the law directs long waiting lists. Obamacare replaces ill patients to enroll in Obamacare ex- them with a devious method — luring young people into exchange plans at change plans. The problem is that most exchange premiums far higher than the cost of plans severely limit choice of hospitals care to offset the cost of sick people in and doctors, excluding specialty hospi- the same pool. The exchanges rip off the tals such as Memorial Sloan-Kettering young and downgrade care for the sick. But the administration is doubling Cancer Center in New York City. For a cancer patient in the middle of chemo- down on marketing them. Already it has
Betsy
McCaughey
OBAMACARE: December 4, 2013
Barack Obama hurts blue states
I
n the wake of President Obama’s decision to allow state insurance commissioners to decide if the cancellations of health insurance policies Obamacare has forced are to stand, Democratic, blue-state commissioners are digging a hole for the president and for their party. So deep and so wide is the hole that it may serve as a grave in which to enter their party’s fortunes in the 2014 election. OBAMA GAVE these commissioners the power to let insurance companies waive the cancellations after an outpouring of bitterness and outrage forced Senate Democrats to hunt for a way to blunt the anger their constituents felt at having their policies cancelled. Not only did the cancellations force them to pay more for insurance — and perhaps also lose the doctors and hospitals with whom they had been working — it served as a bold reminder that the president lied when he promised that they could keep their plans and their doctors if they wished. In red states, Republican insurance commissioners have generally decided to let insurers and their customers cooperate to waive the cancellations. But the true believers in the blue states who serve as insurance commissioners have largely refused. So the very voters upon whom the Democratic Party must depend are the most likely to continue to be forced to cancel the policies they want, despite their wishes and protests. It’s hard to think of a more short-
sighted policy than to anger your own voters in such a heavy-handed way. Now the arguments about big government and regulation will no longer be theoretical to Democratic voters. They will be forced to endure the cancellation of their own health plans. The legions that have lost their individual health insurance plans are only the tip of the iceberg. Tens
Dick
Morris (c) 2013, Creators Syndicate
of millions could face the cancellation of their group or employer-provided health insurance. The decision of the blue-state insurance commissioners to sustain these cancellations assures plenty of ammunition for Republicans who oppose Obamacare and a vast willing constituency, right in the heart of blue America, willing to listen. BUT OBAMA’S gift to blue states doesn’t stop there. The Supreme Court has granted states the right to opt out of the Medicaid expansion built into the Obamacare legislation. Those who have Ok’d raising the Medicaid threshold for eligibility to 133 percent of the poverty level are finding that there are millions eager and willing to take advantage of the program. Some of these are already eligible and others are not. Both groups will cost state taxpayers a lot. One now and the other later.
Immediately, the new Medicaid enrollees who have always been eligible but who haven’t signed up until now, will cost states a bundle. These new enrollments will only receive the federal reimbursement that Medicaid has always had — usually between a half and a third of the cost varying by state. The new extra reimbursement will not be available for this new group of enrollees. We don’t know how many there are, but in Washington state, onethird of the new Medicaid enrollees were eligible before Obamacare was passed. So no extra reimbursement for them. And in three years, the states must pay 10 percent of the cost of the new enrollees who were made eligible by the Obamacare law. And three years after that? Who knows. The net effect of this new spending — only in blue states, which accepted the Medicaid expansion — will be huge increases in taxes now, in three years and in six years. The divide between the high-tax blue states and the low-tax red states will be heightened to the disadvantage of the Democrats in the blue states, particularly when jobs flow to red states. SO, ALL IN all, Obamacare sends a crushing political burden to blue states, but a much milder one to red states. The Democratic policies carry within themselves the seeds of their own destruction.
spent $6 billion to create and promote Obamacare exchanges. Not a dollar of that has gone to medicine, surgery or bedside care. Putting everyone in the same risk pool is a major cause of Obamacare sticker shock. Maintaining high-risk pools will keep premiums down in the individual market. AS DIVIDED as Congress is, Democrats and Republicans should find common ground in preserving and expanding the high-risk pools. A second simple remedy both parties should support to help the vulnerable is COBRA subsidies for people who get laid off so they can afford to keep their on-the-job coverage. According to the Congressional Budget Office and the American Enterprise Institute, about half of the uninsured regain coverage within 12 months, generally because of a new job. (It may take a bit longer during the current slowdown.) These people need help paying COBRA premiums. In 2009, Congress enacted a temporary 65 percent federal subsidy for 18 months. According to a U.S. Treasury analysis, it increased COBRA participation by almost 50 percent. A larger subsidy for a shorter period would have done even more. But Obamacare replaced COBRA subsidies with something grossly inferior: Medicaid. Being dumped into Medicaid means losing access to your doctors. The 2009 COBRA program cost $2 billion (about $2,000 per recipient). Funding high-risk pools would cost $22 billion a year ($11,000 per enrollee, according to the national association of these pools). That’s less than the $26 billion budgeted for the unpopular and still empty exchanges in 2014, and half of what is budgeted for 2015. Beyond these two remedies, there may soon emerge bipartisan support to halt the damage from Obamacare. The compromise’s first step should be repealing Subtitles C, D, E and F of Title 1 of the law. It would leave in place the Medicaid expansion that covers the indigent and popular provision allowing children to stay on their parent’s plan until age 26 and eliminate the job-killing employer mandate, individual mandate, exchanges and most importantly, the provision making all individual and group health plans conform to a Washington-knows-best benefits package. UNLESS THAT costly provision is repealed, employers will drop coverage for millions in 2014. Hardest hit will be the people the president promised to protect: those with pre-existing conditions. Without high-risk pools, where will these sick people go? Into a rabbit hole?
14
Conservative Chronicle
DRONES: December 2, 2013
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and our robot future It’s not going to be that easy, of Jeff Bezos has seen the future of recourse. Imagine the lawsuit the first tail delivery, and it is the drone. When the storied CEO of Ama- time an Amazon drone hits someone crashes into someone’s roof. zon told 60 Minutes that he’s work- or luck getting the ing on 30-minute delivery by tiny And good Federal Aviation unmanned octocopAdministration ter, it prompted an to play along. In instant wave of disits wisdom, the belief and derision. agency issued One wag on Twitter (c) 2013, King Features Syndicate an advisory joked that Amazon would offer free shipping to all mili- against the commercial use of drones back in 2007. Full-blown certification tary-aged Muslim males. of unmanned aircraft may not start unOUR CULTURE is primed to cele- til 2020. Bezos is nonetheless onto somebrate the new and marvel at technological innovation — except when it comes thing, as he has been before. (It once to the drone. Then, the first reaction of would have seemed a fantasy that you many people is to muse about shooting could sit at a computer and order with the newfangled contraptions out of the “1-Click” goods to be delivered to your sky. If the country is to be kept safe, home the next day.) Drone technology evidently, all aircraft within the United still needs to mature, but it will. Over States must always and forevermore be time, drones will become cheaper, more precise and more robust. manned. As Derek Thompson of the Atlantic The root of the drone’s image problem is obviously its outsized role in the points out, Bezos is wise to be thinkwar on terror, where it is a highly effec- ing ahead, given how rapidly dominant tive tool of surveillance and assassina- retailers are overtaken by more nimble tion. That doesn’t mean it’s exclusively competitors. As of 1982, according a tool of warfare or inherently nefari- to Thompson, Sears was still the bigous, any more than that is true of air- gest retailer in America. Soon enough, planes, guns, helicopters, barbed wire, it would be a fraction of the size of sandbags or tracked vehicles — all of Wal-Mart. In imagining a drone future, which play their part in horrific wars, Bezos is honoring the prime directive of retail: Get people what they want, and are still useful civilian tools. Certainly, nothing could be more cheaper and faster, using the latest blissfully pacific than the promotional technology. video for Amazon Prime Air. It shows a HE’S NOT the first to think about drone picking a small package up from a warehouse conveyor belt — where drone delivery. Domino’s in Britain it was placed by a human — and then flew a demonstration pizza-delivery taking it on a pleasant jaunt in the air flight earlier this year. Fred Smith before dropping it outside a satisfied of FedEx has talked of switching the company’s fleet over to drones. A fucustomer’s door.
Rich
Lowry
turistic “blended wing” design that doesn’t distinguish clearly between body and wing would allow more room for cargo, according to Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired and now the CEO of 3D Robotics. Assuming the FAA gets out of the way, drones could have a variety of applications that don’t involve spying or firing missiles at terrorists. They could be used to monitor power lines and pipelines. They could be used in search-and-rescue. They could be used in making movies and promotional videos. They could be used to evaluate storm damage. And they could be valuable to farmers.
Chris Anderson believes drones may be the future of agriculture, allowing farmers to monitor large fields more carefully, and use water and pesticide with greater precision and care. Japan has realized this for a long time. Its ministry of agriculture began promoting the use of drones in the early 1980s. Now, 40 percent of Japan’s rice crop is sprayed by unmanned aircraft. SCOFF AT Jeff Bezos, if you like. But our robot future is already here, and it will inevitably take flight.
ANSWER MAN: December 11, 2013
T h e A n s w er M an THANKSGIVING 1. Meleagris gallopavo is an oddlooking bird that is known for his bare head, wattle and iridescent plumage. By what name is this creature more commonly known? 2. How did the turkey get its name? 3. From where do wild turkeys originally come? 4. How many Puritans sailed aboard the Mayflower? 5. This English-speaking Pawtuxet was credited with helping the Plym-
Dawn
SeamansShook (c) 2013, Creators Syndicate
outh colonists form an alliance with the local Wampanoags. The partnership led to a three-day festival of thanks-giving, now thought to be the first thanksgiving. Name the Pawtuxet Indian.
15
December 11, 2013 OBAMA PRESIDENCY: November 29, 2013
Saul, Herod and Obama: A Christian perspective
F
riday morning past, I read 1 Samuel 16:7, as part of my daily devotions. It’s a passage I’ve read countless times, but it reverberated anew in the wake of recent observations. The passage reads: “But the Lord said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature, because I have refused him; for the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.” THE PASSAGE caused me to think of Ephesians 5:9, “For the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness and righteousness and truth.” Why, you ask, am I mentioning this? I mention it because Obama’s outward appearance — specifically the color of his skin has blinded most blacks specifically, and others in general who claim to be Christians, while they ignore in Obama the very things that God spoke directly to pursuant to leaders and those who claim to be believers in Christ.
Proverbs 6:16-19 reads: “These six liar, an advocate of murdering unborn things doth the Lord hate; yea, seven are children, an advocate of homosexual an abomination unto Him: A proud look, intercourse and those [are] just for And don’t give me the a lying tongue, and hands that shed in- starts.” old “no one’s perfect” nocent blood, An and “we all need Jeheart that deviseth sus” lines in referwicked imaginaence to Obama. tions, feet that are Let’s say, for swift in running to (c) 2013, Mychal Massie the sake of argumischief, A false ment, that Joshua witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord Dubois is a minister in the tradition of Jeremiah Wright, what about the other among brethren.” Now, with the weight of God’s Word ministers who claim to be born-again as my witness, how can any true, born- men of God and leaders in their commuagain minister of God applaud Obama nity? Can support for murdering unborn (or his wife, but I’m not talking about children be defined as “goodness and her right now)? On October 23, I com- righteousness” displayed as “Fruit of mented on my Facebook page, “Joshua the Spirit?” Forget what Lucifer’s chilDubois, who is supposedly a Pentecos- dren would try to argue as reasonable; tal minister has authored a book titled, God’s perspective on homosexuality is The President’s Devotional. It’s suppos- clearly stated in Leviticus 20:13. God’s edly a collection of devotions he sent word reads: “If a man also lie with manto Obama daily ... I’d like to know how kind, as he lieth with a woman, both of a true, born-again Pentecostal minister them have committed an abomination could remotely praise a mendacious ...” God called the act punishable by
Mychal
Massie
OBAMA PRESIDENCY: November 28, 2013
The bad faith presidency
A
t the end of the day, the root of President Barack Obama’s mendacity on Obamacare was simple: He didn’t dare tell people how the law would work. He couldn’t tell people how the law would work. Forthrightness was the enemy. It served no useful purpose and could only bring peril, and potentially defeat. It had to be banished. Instead, President Obama made the sale on the basis of dubious blandishments and outright deceptions. IF THIS IS the only way to pass your signature initiative — and a decadeslong goal of your party —it ought to give you pause. But Obama was a natural at delivering sweeping and sincereseeming assurances that just weren’t true. This kind of thing is his metier. If he were awoken at 3 a.m. and told that he had to make the case for nationalizing the banks by denying he was nationalizing the banks, he would do an entirely creditable job of it, even without a teleprompter. The salesmanship for Obamacare represents in microcosm the larger Obama political project, which has always depended on throwing a reassuring skein of moderation on top of left-wing ideological aims. All politicians are prone to shaving the truth, giving themselves the benefit of the doubt and trying to appear more reasonable than they are. Obama has made it an art form. Bad faith is one of his signal strengths as a politician, and it
makes him one of the greatest frontmen progressivism has ever had. He will never admit his deep bias toward the growth of the federal government, or that he doesn’t care that much if Iran gets the bomb, or that he is liquidating the American leadership role in the Middle East. No, no — he is just trying to make government work, giving diplomacy a chance and pivoting to Asia, respectively.
Rich
Lowry (c) 2013, King Features Syndicate
IN THIS VEIN, the things that the president couldn’t say about Obamacare keep mounting. The New York Times reported the other day on how the word “redistribution,” which aptly describes the law’s intent and effect, is anathema. “These days the word is particularly toxic at the White House,” according to the paper, “where it has been hidden away to make the Affordable Care Act more palatable to the public and less a target for Republicans, who have long accused Democrats of seeking ‘socialized medicine.’ But the redistribution of wealth has always been a central feature of the law and lies at the heart of the insurance market disruptions driving political attacks this fall.” Heaven forbid that the president tell people that. The Times notes that the last time the president mentioned redis-
tribution, it was — of course — to say that he wanted nothing to do with it. The president styles himself a committed pragmatist. At a fundraiser the other day, he averred, “I’m not a particularly ideological person.” He just happened to risk Democratic control of Congress to advance the cause of nationalized health insurance. And happened to insist on the left-most plausible version of the law. And happened to defend it with every power at his disposal. In private, the president admits that he has kept his true ideological self carefully under wraps. According to the authors of Double Down, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, Obama brought up climate change in a political strategy meeting in 2011 as an example of his undue caution. “Maybe I should just come out and say what I really feel about this,” he said. “Maybe I should just go out and say what I think about everything.” As a crazy thought experiment, his aides let him dabble with heartfelt sincerity. To the next meeting he brought a list of causes dear to him, all liberal cliches: climate change, immigration reform, poverty, Israeli-Palestinian peace, closing Gitmo and gay marriage. Only gay marriage surfaced in the presidential campaign because he couldn’t bear any longer to hide what he really thought on the issue. HE KNEW the danger of too much forthrightness.
death with their blood upon them. And yet Obama advocates homosexual marriage and the contamination of our military with the practice of open homosexuality. What do we as Christians follow, the words of God or the words of man? GOD CAN BE no plainer than his scriptures, stating that God hates “a proud look, a lying tongue ... and he that soweth discord among the brethren.” Obama knowingly lied, even though his most trusted advisors tried to convince him against doing so, pursuant to our ability to keep our doctors and to keep our current health plans. Obama was fully aware that nearly 70 percent of Americans with individual health plans would have them canceled and be forced to enroll in Obamacare. He knowingly lied to the Catholic Church saying Catholic hospitals would not be forced to comply with abortion and birth control provisions mandated in Obamacare. There was no ambiguity. Obama knowingly and purposefully lied, and he lied to get his way even though by doing so tens of millions of people will be harmed. His arrogant, troublesome behavior and his lying are compounded because as we witnessed with Saul and Herod, God demands more of His leaders. Obama himself knowingly and repeatedly lied, and he encouraged his subordinates to lie while Americans and families mourned the loss of Ambassador Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty who were murdered in Benghazi. Obama has done nothing to promote racial harmony. To the contrary, we can document incident after incident of his helping to promote racial disharmony, starting within his own Justice Department. If we are Christians, the indwelling Holy Spirit of God keeps our minds focused on God and His will. That is undeniable fact. Ergo I contend there is only one reason for Obama omitting the words “under God” in his version of the Gettysburg Address — he is not a Christian. If we are children of God, the mind of God is in us. On what level can that be said of Obama? Black people and black ministers specifically, and pretend-to-be Christians in general, look at the color of Obama’s skin, his swagger, and they swoon, but God looks on the color of Obama’s heart and sees darkness. OBVIOUSLY MY words can be applied to John Boehner, Karl Rove, Nancy Pelosi, and nearly all other politicians. But other politicians aren’t afforded the dismissal of their actions as Obama is because other politicians aren’t held to a lower standard based on their skin color.
16
December 11, 2013
Blaming Republicans for the mess that is Obamacare
S
oon after President Obama CEO Council meeting in Washington told the White House press last week. corps that he was solely reAnd he also suggested the Repubsponsible for the botched Obamacare licans’ “ideological resistance to the rollout, he decided to shift part of the idea of dealing with the uninsured and blame onto Republicans. people with pre-existing A mea culpa conditions” was can be hard to also a factor in deliver in public what went wrong. when you are the Republicans kind of politihad their own (c) 2013, United Media Services cian who thinks ideas about how he never makes mistakes and rarely, if to provide wider access to lower-cost ever, apologizes for anything that goes health care, but it was not the costly, wrong. But Obama’s apologies have government-run, top-down bureaua brief shelf life, and a few days later cracy Obama wanted and got from the they had reached their expiration date. Democrats. The larger organizational probSO AT A gathering of business lems that presumably led to the mess executives on Nov. 19, the president the government is still trying to fix concluded that he had done enough stemmed from the political bickering groveling over his utterly false claim in Washington that threatened to damthat “If you like your health insurance age his presidency’s signature achievepolicy, you can keep it” and went on ment, Obama further suggested. the political attack. Both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue Somehow he decided the Republi- needed to “break through the stubborn cans in Congress were partly to blame cycle of crisis politics and start workfor the bungled mess that he and his ing together,” he said. administration had created. It wasn’t Well, I did a little checking with all his fault. constitutional scholars, and no one can He also said the broken online sign- find any provision in the Constitution up system was in the process of being that gives lawmakers any role in the fixed and would be up and running at executive branch to help implement or full throttle by the end of November. administer laws passed by Congress. That doesn’t seem to be the case enObama has made bombastic claims tirely, but more on that in a moment. over the course of his presidency that Then he turned on the Republicans have not proven true. But to blame with a vengeance. He suggested that the Republicans — who control only their intransigent political opposition one-half of Congress — for any part had inhibited the law’s implementa- this debacle is a huge reach, to say the tion. least. “One of the problems we’ve had is By the way, he also blamed the govone side of Capitol Hill is invested in ernment’s archaic computers, saying its failure,” he told the chief financial the federal IT system is “not very efofficers at the Wall Street Journal’s ficient.”
Donald
Lambro
Well, whose fault is that? He’s the But bigger financial problems loom chief executive who is in charge of on the horizon that could bring Obamseeing that the laws are carried out in a acare crashing down before it even fair and efficient way and ensuring that gets started. they work and meet all deadlines. One is the need to get very large numbers of younger, healthier people JUDGING FROM the mountain of to sign up for insurance to pay for oldgovernment audits that have exposed er and sicker beneficiaries. The adminwaste, inefficiencies and other skull- istration promised the insurance indusduggery in his administration, he’s not try this would happen, but now that is the least bit interested in the details and very much in doubt. process of running anything — least of “I now think there is little hope all his health care mess. we are going to get enough younger, Now, about his claim that Obam- healthy people to sign up, and that acare’s online computer system would means that this law is in grave danger be fixed and ready for business by Nov. of financial collapse,” Robert Lasze30: Well, not all of it. wski, president of Health Policy and His promise to the CFOs came im- Strategy Associates, a health care inmediately after an administration of- dustry consultant, told the Washington ficial who oversees the technical side Post. of the federal health insurance marketThe number of people who have place told Congress that 30 to 40 per- signed up thus far is relatively small, cent of the overall system was unfin- far from the tens of millions of appliished and not ready to go. cants needed to make it work. Henry Chao, deputy chief informaThere are also troubling questions tion officer for the Centers for Medi- about whether the Internal Revenue care and Medicaid Services, said major Service will be ready to carry out nearparts of Obama’s program, including ly four dozen new tasks under the law. its accounting and payments to insurThe IRS must figure out who has ance companies, were still incomplete. insurance and who does not, and thus Reuters reports: “If the business whom it will fine for being uninsured, functions are not in place on time, plus begin to distribute billions of dolit could create havoc with a system lars in insurance subsidies. through which billions of dollars in Meanwhile, five million Americans federal tax money will flow to subsi- have had their private insurance polidize coverage for consumers who oth- cies canceled, and businesses are layerwise could not afford it, insurance ing off employees or reducing hours industry officials said.” worked to avoid Obama’s unpopular “The upshot is that the (financial and unworkable insurance mandates. management) ... appears to be way off track and getting worse,” a CMS offiAND OBAMA has started to blame cial said in a July 8 email obtained by the Republicans — who warned this Reuters. would happen and voted against it. The first payments are due by midto late January, but now we learn that November 27, 2013 the accounting system is far from ready to process the most critical part of Obamacare.
This Week’s Conservative Focus
Obama Presidency
17
Welcome to the president’s kludgeocracy
H
ow is it possible that Barack Obama did not know that his beloved healthcare.gov website was a botch? That’s a question many thoughtful people (including thoughtful Democrats) are asking. We heard him say that he wouldn’t have boasted that it would be as easy to use as amazon.com or obitz.com had he known that it wouldn’t. I’m not “stupid enough,” he said at his Nov. 14 press conference. Most Americans agree that’s true. ONE THING WE do know is that this is a chief executive who does not want to hear bad news, or at least effectively discourages his subordinates from bringing it to him. He made a decision to take the question of intervention in Syria to Congress after consulting, on a walk in the White House lawn, with his chief
of staff. Any staffer with knowledge Effective executives take special of congressional opinion on the is- pains to ferret out bad news from the orsue could have told him that he didn’t ganizations they command. They know come close to having the votes. t h a t most underlings like And it’s known to tell their superiors that his White that things are going House counsel, fine. Kathryn Ruem“A culture that mler, learned the prefers deluding (c) 2013, Creators Syndicate week of April the boss over de22 from Treasury livering bad news lawyers that the Internal Revenue Ser- isn’t well equipped to try new things,” vice had, in her words, “improperly writes Internet pioneer Clay Shirky on scrutinized several ... organizations by his eponymous blog. As Shirky explains, using words like ‘tea party’ and ‘pa- in developing software there is a “a tradtriot.’” eoff between features, quality and time.” Evidently, she didn’t tell the president, who said he learned about the “IF YOU WANT certain features at scandal only when it was made public a certain level of quality, you’d better be by IRS official Lois Lerner May 10. able to move the deadline,” he writes. Counsels to former presidents of both “If you want overall quality by a certain parties say they would have informed deadline, you’d better be able to simply their bosses immediately. delay or drop features. And if you have
Michael
Barone
Blacks and Barack Obama
I
n a March 2008 column, I criticized pundits’ concerns about whether America was ready for Barack Obama, suggesting that the more important issue was whether black people could afford Obama. I proposed that we look at it in the context of a historical tidbit. IN 1947, Jackie Robinson, after signing a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers organization, broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball. He encountered open racist taunts and slurs from fans, opposing team players and even some members of his own team. Despite that, his batting average was nearly .300 in his first year. He led the National League in stolen bases and won the first Rookie of the Year award. There’s no sense of justice that requires a player be as good as Robinson in order to have a chance in the major leagues, but the hard fact of the matter is that as the first black player, he had to be. In 1947, black people could not afford an incompetent black baseball player. Today we can. The simple reason is that as a result of the excellence of Robinson — and many others who followed him, such as Satchel Paige, Don Newcombe, Larry Doby and Roy Campanella — today no one in his right mind, watching the incompetence of a particular black player, could say, “Those blacks can’t play baseball.” In that March 2008 column, I argued that for the nation — but more importantly, for black people — the first black president should be the caliber of
a Jackie Robinson, and Barack Obama is not. Obama has charisma and charm, but in terms of character, values, experience and understanding, he is no Jackie Robinson. In addition to those deficiencies, Obama became the first person in U.S. history to be elected to the highest office in the land while having a long history of associations with people who hate our nation, such as the Rev. Jeremiah
Walter
Williams (c) 2013, Creators Syndicate
Wright, Obama’s pastor for 20 years, who preached that blacks should sing not “God bless America” but “God da-America.” Then there’s Obama’s association with William Ayers, formerly a member of the Weather Underground, an anti-U.S. group that bombed the Pentagon, U.S. Capitol and other government buildings. Ayers, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack, told a New York Times reporter, “I don’t regret setting bombs. ... I feel we didn’t do enough.” OBAMA’S ELECTORAL success is truly a remarkable commentary on the goodness of the American people. A 2008 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll reported “that 17 percent were enthusiastic about Obama being the first African American President, 70 percent were comfortable or indifferent, and 13 percent had reservations or were uncomfortable.” I’m 77 years old. For al-
most all of my life, a black’s becoming the president of the United States was at best a pipe dream. Obama’s electoral success further confirms what I’ve often held: The civil rights struggle in America is over, and it’s won. At one time, black Americans did not have the constitutional guarantees enjoyed by white Americans; now we do. The fact that the civil rights struggle is over and won does not mean that there are not major problems confronting many members of the black community, but they are not civil rights problems and have little or nothing to do with racial discrimination. THERE IS every indication to suggest that Obama’s presidency will be seen as a failure similar to that of Jimmy Carter’s. That’s bad news for the nation but especially bad news for black Americans. No white presidential candidate had to live down the disgraced presidency of Carter, but I’m all too fearful that a future black presidential candidate will find himself carrying the heavy baggage of a failed black president. That’s not a problem for white liberals who voted for Obama — they received their one-time guilt-relieving dose from voting for a black man to be president — but it is a problem for future generations of black Americans. But there’s one excuse black people can make; we can claim that Obama is not an authentic black person but, as the New York Times might call him, a white black person. December 4, 2013
a fixed feature list and deadline, quality will suffer.” You find out what works by testing, “even if that means contradicting management’s deeply held assumptions and goals.” But the testing of the Obamacare website was, he says, “late and desultory.” Government doesn’t have to work this badly. The Obama administration had 42 months from the passage of Obamacare to the scheduled rollout of healthcare. gov. The Pentagon, still the world’s largest office building after more than 70 years, was built in 18 months. But that was accomplished by men who knew that the Commander-inChief, Franklin Roosevelt, expected results. Roosevelt could be an inspiring orator. But he also showed a gift for selecting the right men (and, occasionally, women) to reach goals that he thought were really important. Barack Obama seems to lack that knack. He has advanced to the highest position in government without having demonstrated the ability to get results outside a political campaign. He is the product, as the Hoover Institution’s Peter Berkowitz writes, “of the same progressive version of higher education that simultaneously excises politics from the study of government and public policy while politicizing education.” “This higher education,” Berkowitz continues, “denigrates experience; exalts rational administration; reveres abstract moral reasoning; confidently counts on the mainstream press to play for the progressive political team; accords to words fabulous abilities to remake reality; and believes itself to speak for the people while haughtily despising their way of life.” Or to put it more pithily, Obama knows how to use words well. But he doesn’t seem to understand how the world works. “We’re also discovering,” he said at that press conference, “that insurance is complicated to buy.” Yup. There is a reason public policy in industrial age America (and other democratic countries) moved toward greater regimentation and standardization. Centralized command and control was a good way to run assembly lines. There is a reason also that public policy in the information age, elsewhere and here until 2008, moved toward more market mechanisms. Central planners have a hard time anticipating how IT systems and consumers will respond. THAT’S ESPECIALLY true when chief executive doesn’t want to hear — and perhaps cannot imagine that there will be — bad news. Welcome to the kludgeocracy. November 29, 2013
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Conservative Chronicle
MEDAL OF FREEDOM: December 2, 2013
Of honors and honor: The Medal of Freedom
F
oreign honors and imitations thereof don’t seem to thrive on this side of the Atlantic, prestigious as they may be back in Europe. Consider the annual presentation of Presidential Medals of Freedom, our version of Britain’s honors list, which by now must include the names of thousands of honorees. Who can remember them all? Or any of them. Maybe the Medal of Freedom is supposed to be our equivalent of the Legion of Honor in France, which dates back to Napoleonic times. Its design has had to be changed over the years and regimes, as the empire gave way to a succession of republics. (The French always did keep up with fashion, whether sartorial or political.) BY NOW THE annual announcement of Medal of Freedom recipients at the White House has all the style of any other celebrityfest. It’s become a regularly scheduled event, like the Oscars, rather than a recognition of rare distinction. It’s long had the look and flavor of an imported product rather than one rooted in native soil. Much like the comic-opera uniforms Richard Nixon once imposed on the White House guards for a mercifully brief time. Still, some of the names on the list of those being honored with a Medal of Freedom stand out every year. They’re usually the names of figures being awarded the medal posthumously. Maybe because their merit has survived their death, or even been emphasized by it. This year’s list, for example, included Daniel Inouye’s name. He’d earned the Medal of Honor long ago — in recognition of his heroism in the European theater with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most decorated military unit in American history. Only later would he become a mere senator. Some of us have always wondered what the Germans must have thought when they found themselves being cut to pieces by American troops who looked Japanese. (“Is there something the Fuehrer hasn’t told us?”) Another honoree this year was the late Sally Ride, the scholar-astronaut who not only took part in American space missions but took a leading part in investigating them when they turned into American tragedies. Her death last year — of pancreatic cancer — remains a fresh and painful loss. One more name on this year’s list stands out — not just because the honor was so well deserved but because it was so long in coming. Bayard Rustin’s name was well-known to historians of the American civil-rights movement — but not to the general public. Even though he engineered one of the most peaceful and therefore successful revolutions in modern history. But he always avoided the limelight. He was the man behind the
.EVEN SOME of those who would scenes who made it all work while the have liked nothing better than to drive a stars took their turn on the stage. Bayard Rustin had always understood stake through Jim Crow’s cruel heart had that it was not racial integration that was qualms about bringing hundreds of thouthe unnatural imposition on the American sands of protesters to the nation’s capital. envisioned violent scenes way of life, but racial segregation. So, in They — attacks, riots, chaos ... the his calm, deliberate. businesslike way, he kind of scenes organized its disapthat would set pearance. Through the cause of civil demonstration afrights back anter demonstration, other hundred peaceful protest after (c) 2013, Tribune Media Services years. peaceful protest, each But when this March on Washington one greater than the last. And when Martin Luther King finally materialized, it could have been an imapproved the biggest and most peaceful mense church service. All was peace. As demonstration of them all — a march the image of Father Abraham looked on on Washington that would draw 200,000 approvingly, this huge, instant congrepeople and galvanize the American con- gation marched and prayed, sang and science — he would naturally turn to dreamed. Black and white together, just Bayard Rustin to organize it. The great as the old civil-rights song said. And gathering in front of the Lincoln Memo- when the march was over, it had left nothrial in August of 1963 would prove Ba- ing behind but good feelings. The vicyard Rustin’s greatest achievement over a tory had been complete, for it had been lifetime devoted to peaceful protest. It is completely organized. Almost nobody still celebrated to this day — every year noticed the organizer-in-chief. That’s the way he wanted it. on its anniversary.
Paul
Greenberg
Only now has Bayard Rustin been properly honored, his life of quiet accomplishment quietly recognized. Such are the triumphs of peace and patience, which are as enduring as they are gradual. If there was anything remarkable about Bayard Rustin, it was his dull, predictable consistency. A conscientious objector in war, he remained a pacifist even while fighting for racial justice. Over the course of a lifetime devoted to peaceful protest, he stuck to his principles. He believed in justice and he believed in nonviolence. And he never gave up on either one. His was an honorable life. A GOOD and faithful servant, he knew the work of his hands would last, unlike that of those who burned crosses and blew up churches. When the haters baited him, Bayard Rustin knew he would overcome them. When the Black Power types came to the fore, to strut and fret their brief hour on the stage, he knew he would outlast them. He knew something else: Honors fade; honor doesn’t.
D.C. SHOOTING: December 4, 2013
The strange death of Miriam Carey
I
mother was killed by police. Independent news website WND has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the forensics report to no avail. An attorney hired by Carey’s family, Eric Sanders, asked Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate the incident. Immediately after he did, Sanders was arrested at his Long Island home for allegedly failing to pay off court settlements SHOTS WERE fired at Carey near in an unrelated case dating back to 2005. What the heck is going on here? the White House barrier at 15th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, according to police. And she was killed in a hail of police gunfire after she apparently brought her car to a halt on the 100 block of Maryland Avenue NE — posing no apparent danger to anyone. Witnesses said police (c) 2013, Creators Syndicate also fired shots at Carey on ConstituAS FAR AS I can tell, Carey did little tion Avenue near the Senate Hart Office more than make a wrong turn and bump Building. Yet, we still don’t know how many a security barrier near the White House. shots were fired at Carey on Oct. 3. We She may have been disoriented, a sympdon’t know how many shots hit her. And tom of postpartum depression, when she all videos of the final incident have mys- had guns pointed at her by law enforcement officials. But imagine the fright of teriously disappeared from the Internet. The Secret Service, Capitol Police and a young mother at cops firing guns at her Washington Metro Police were all in- car when her 14-month-old baby is in the volved in the incident, throughout which back seat. What possible justification could there Carey’s 14-month-old baby was in her car. And press reports suggest the mother be for killing Carey? Why couldn’t she was suffering from postpartum depres- be subdued, arrested and tried for whatever laws she may have violated? Why sion. For an incident two months ago that did armed officers of at least three law paralyzed Washington for hours, we enforcement agencies allegedly execute know little about what actually happened her in cold blood? Why has there been no and why a young, single, unarmed black satisfactory public explanation of what t has been exactly two months since Miriam Carey, a young, single, unarmed black mother and dental hygienist from Connecticut, was gunned down in the streets of Washington, D.C., after driving her black Infiniti into a security post near a White House entrance and leading police on a chase to the U.S. Capitol.
Joseph
Farah
transpired that day? And where is the public outcry over this seemingly senseless murder? Let’s talk about the video. We live in a surveillance society. Nowhere are cameras more prevalent than in Washington, D.C. There is video of Carey’s approach to the White House gate. There is video of the chase that led to her death. But where is the video of the final scene when Carey emerges from her vehicle and is shot down? Does anyone else think it is strange — and a little mysterious — that no video is publicly available, despite the heavy presence of media on the ground, police helicopters, surveillance cameras, etc.? Does anyone believe video of those final moments just doesn’t exist? And what about the forensics report? Why two months after the incident, has it still not been released? Is anyone besides WND demanding it? Why so little curiosity about what, from my perspective, seems to be an outrageous misuse of police firepower? Carey’s family and friends have suggested she had delusions about Obama stalking her. The tragic irony is that she ultimately fell victim to a police-state mentality Obama helped foster in the capital city. IT’S TIME for the Secret Service, Capitol Police and Washington Metro Police to come clean on the death of Carey. It’s time for the public to demand it. It’s time for Obama and Holder to order it.
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December 11, 2013 DEAR MARK: November 30, 2013
Reading is fundamental — so volunteer “Wear the old coat and buy the new book.” — Austin Phelps, 19th Century Minister and Educator Since our youngest daughter began school this year, my wife has used some of her newly found free time tutoring students in reading at two of our local public elementary schools. The experience thus far has been enriching, but sadly also enlightening in a cynical way.
FOR MY WIFE, helping children learn to read has been enlightening for the all of the reasons you might expect; seeing the smiles on children’s faces when they’ve actually read something on their own, helping a child feel that sense of accomplishment, and the introspective joy of knowing you’ve had a positive impact on a young person’s life. The downside of this experience is that we’ve learned the school system is in desperate need of volunteer reading tutors because children are falling behind and not reading at the appropriate grade level. One of the primary reasons is that kids are not being read to at home. Please know that I am not trying to generalize and paint with a broad brush. I understand that every home situation is unique; and the lack of reading time occurs for a variety of reasons, often involving factors beyond the children’s and parents’ control. But when there are capable parents or guardians in the home and I hear that a child is not being read to, my blood boils.
Combine that with the announcement that the new PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One video game consoles were released, each selling one million units on the first day, and my blood goes nuclear. I’m not trying to cite cause and effect, but according to the Entertainment Software Association, 68 percent of people who play video games in some form or fashion are over the age of 18.
Mark
Levy
(c) 2013, Creators Syndicate
I DON’T begrudge anyone for needing a recreational respite from reality, but not to the detriment of reading to a child or, for that matter, having a child read to you. Surely reading with your kids brings you more satisfaction than splattering the brains of some imaginary combatant in a pallid video game. Many might ask, “what’s the big deal, don’t we need blue-collar workers too?” That’s true, but here are some startling statistics. According to the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy: — 14 percent of adults, or 32 million, cannot read. — It is estimated that two-thirds of students who cannot read proficiently by the end of fourth grade will end up in jail or on welfare.
— Over 70 percent of America’s inmates can’t read above a fourth grade level. This shouldn’t be a partisan issue, but thanks to the ever-increasing liberal agenda in our public schools, we have eliminated God, watered down standards and discouraged academic excellence and competition all in the name of fairness and political correctness. In typical liberal Washington fashion, the solution has been to throw more borrowed money at the problem. We already spend almost $13,000 per student nationally; this money needs to be reprioritized. Forget about the social engineering in schools and get back to the three R’s. Ronald Reagan gave an excellent description of what the goal of education should be when he said, “education is not the means of showing people how to get what they want. Education is an exercise by means of which enough men, it is hoped, will learn to want what is worth having.” IF WE CAN improve the literacy rate, little Johnny and Susie can socially engineer themselves. With this in mind, I urge you to call your local school district, and volunteer. Dear Mark is a public platform for your enrichment and entertainment. Email your questions to marklevy92@aol. com.
CONTACT INFORMATION Individual Contact Information Greenberg - pgreenberg@arkansasonline.com Jacoby - jacoby@globe.com Krauthammer - letters@charleskrauthammer.com Levy - marklevy92@aol.com Lowry - comments.lowry@nationalreview.com Malkin - malkinblog@gmail.com Napolitano - freedomwatch@foxbusiness.com Saunders - dsaunders@sfchronicle.com Schlafly - phyllis@eagleforum.org Thomas - tmseditors@tribune.com Will - georgewill@washpost.com Contact through Creators Syndicate Michael Barone, Austin Bay, Brent Bozell, Pat Buchanan, Stephen Chapman, Mona Charen, Linda Chavez, Larry Elder, David Harsanyi, Terry Jeffrey, Larry Kudlow, David Limbaugh, Dick Morris, William Murchison, Chuck Norris, Oliver North, Dennis Prager, Dawn Seamans-Shook, Ben Shapiro, Thomas Sowell Contact - info@creators.com Contact through Universal Press Ann Coulter Contact by mail : c/o Universal Press Syndicate 1130 Walnut Street Kansas City, MO 64106 Answers from page 14
THE ANSWER MAN D awn S eamans - S h o o k
Need to make a correction on your mailing label?
Contact us at 800-888-3039 or email: conserve@iowaconnect.com
ANSWERS 1. Wild Turkey. 2. In the 1540s, the guinea fowl, a bird with some resemblance to the turkey, was imported from Madagascar through Turkey by traders known as “turkey merchants.” The guinea fowl was also nicknamed “turkey fowl.” The Spanish brought turkeys back from the Americas by way of North Africa and Turkey, where the bird was mistakenly called the same name. Europeans who encountered the bird in the Americas latched on to the turkey fowl name, and the term was condensed simply to turkey. 3. The wild turkey is native to North America. 4. There are only two known persons, out of the 104 Mayflower passengers (including two babies born), who were Anglicans and Puritans: Christopher Martin, Governor of the ship, and his stepson, Solomon Power — neither of whom left any descendants. 5. Samoset.
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Conservative Chronicle
NFL: December 4, 2013
Anti-gun NFL: National Frauds’ League
T
The NFL is free to accept or reject he National Football League’s hypocrisy and selective de- any advertiser it wants to, of course. cency standards reek like a But its “prohibited content” list seems post-game locker room. On the one a far more accurate description of your hand, the organization refuses to run average Super Bowl half-time perforad rundown. Bea firearms manufacturer’s self-defense mance and tween Janet JackSuper Bowl ad under son’s wardrobe the guise of neutralmalfunctions ity and taste. Yet, the and Beyonce’s professional football leather-clad conglomerate rou(c) 2013, Creators Syndicate dry-humping, tinely revels in raunthe football exchiness, gratuitous physical violence and anti-gun screeds. ecs have embraced lucrative vulgar ads over the years that have featured: — An upside-down clown who apWELCOME TO the National pears to pour Bud Light beer up his Frauds’ League. Guns and Ammo magazine first rear end. — A bizarre sex-change operation broke news last week of the sports empire’s rejection of a commercial created analogy to tout Holiday Inn’s hotel upby gun-maker Daniel Defense. The pol- grades. — A barefoot Kenyan runner vioished paid spot emphasized home security protection and self-defense without lently dragged to the ground by white even showing or mentioning any of its hunters and forced to wear a pair of actual products. But a quick flash of the Just For Feet running shoes. — A flatulent Budweiser horse company’s logo at the end of the ad, which includes a DDM4 rifle, appar- whose emissions cause a candle to ently violated the NFL’s high-minded torch a woman’s hair. — Ad characters getting electrocutadvertising regulations. The fantasy-land football ad policy ed, run over by buses, kicked, punched, document will launch even the casual tackled, thrown out of high-rise buildSuper Bowl viewer into a fit of giggle- ings and attacked by crotch-biting snorts. It outlines copious content re- dogs. Skeezy Super Bowl spots have destrictions covering alcohol, “nude or semi-nude performers,” firearms, gam- graded women with everything from bling, and “movies, video games and soapy car washes and jiggling bikini other media that contain or promote tops to squirty burgers and suntan loobjectionable material or subject mat- tion sessions to group stripper pole ter (e.g., overtly sexual or excessively dances. The NFL regularly airs trailers for violent Hollywood movies and vidviolent material).”
Michelle
Malkin
eo games. In the aftermath of the Newtown massacre last year, for example, a commercial promoting the shoot-emup flick Gangster Squad aired during a Colts-Texans game, and a spot promoting the M-rated video game “Hitman: Absolution” aired during a post-game show. THE NFL’S laughable ad policy also restricts “social cause/advocacy advertising,” presumably in the interest of neutrality. But the league itself has discouraged players from using weapons at home for legal self-defense
and has opposed legal Wisconsin concealed-carry weapons holders from bringing their weapons into Lambeau Field. Meanwhile, notorious motormouth Bob Costas was free to hijack Sunday Night Football last year to attack America’s “gun culture.” The wannabe MSNBC host exploited the murder-suicide of NFL player Jovan Belcher, claiming that “handguns do not enhance our safety” and ignoring the millions of successful defensive uses of handguns. But God forbid an advertiser be allowed to show a family safe and secure because they exercise their Second Amendment rights, right? The NFL’s got its Swiss cheese-standards, dagnabbit, and the standards must be enforced! Despite Daniel Defense’s offer to replace the weaponry image in the company logo with an American flag, the ban by the NFL and its Super Bowl broadcasting partner Fox stands. “We believe in protecting our families. We believe in our Second Amendment, which is the right to protect ourselves,” Marty Daniel of Daniel Defense said this week in appealing the decision. “We believe in the First Amendment, which is really the issue here. We are trying to exercise our First Amendment rights to give our opinion on the Second Amendment.” THANKFULLY, THE NFL’s political fumbles and broadcasting double standards have given self-defense advocates the chance to take the ball and run with it. And gun-owning sports fans who are sick of being denigrated by the sanctimonious sports syndicate hold the ultimate weapon: the remote control.
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December 11, 2013 IMMIGRATION: December 4, 2013
Which immigrant should be your neighbor?
D
Daniel — also because of his funaniel and Samuel were both born in Monterrey, Mexico damental beliefs — consciously dison the same day in 1990 and covered as an adult what he instincknew as a child: He baptized by the same priest two Sun- t i v e l y was a conservative, days later. who embraced Both attended work and famthe same primary ily along with his and secondary faith. schools. Both (c) 2013, Creators Syndicate Samuel was dreamed of some day moving to the United States. But not particularly concerned with any of these things. there the similarity ends. At the age of 23, both Samuel and Samuel dropped out of school in tenth grade. Daniel graduated from Daniel still dreamed of moving to the secondary school, went on to the uni- United States. Which of these two hypothetical versity and graduated at the top of his men would be more likely to illegalclass. ly cross the U.S. border and illegally THE LAST time Samuel ever work and settle in the United States? Earlier this year, the Congressional walked through the door of a church is when he walked out of one just after Budget Office prepared a “description” receiving the sacrament of confirma- of the immigrant population in the tion. Daniel served as an altar boy and United States for House Budget Chairattends Mass every Sunday, every holy man Paul Ryan. According to the CBO, there were day and often on other days as well. After dropping out of school, Samu- 11.5 million “unauthorized” aliens in el held a series of jobs, doing unskilled the United States as of 2011. These labor. After graduating from college, did not include large numbers from the Daniel took a teaching job at a lo- Coptic community in Egypt, the Orthocal high school and attended graduate dox community in Syria, or from Keschool at night, hoping eventually to nya, South Korea or south Sudan. But, according to the CBO, 59 perearn a doctorate in history. Daniel is habitually honest. In keep- cent of the illegal immigrants in the ing with his religious faith, he would United States were from Mexico, while never knowingly break a law unless it another 14 percent were from El Salvawas plainly an unjust law — such as dor, Guatemala and Honduras. In analyzing the educational attainone that required him to discriminate against somebody because of their race ment of immigrants, the CBO did not distinguish between the legal and the or to pay for an abortion.
Terry
Jeffrey
illegal, but it did show a sharp distinction between those from Mexico and Central America and those from elsewhere. While 54 percent of the immigrants from Mexico and Central America were high school dropouts, only nine percent of those from Africa, Oceania and Asia were. While 45 percent of people from Africa and Oceania held a bachelor’s degree or higher, only seven percent from Mexico and Central America did. If educational attainment is the test, Samuel, the high school dropout, is more likely than Daniel, the aspiring history professor, to come to the United States from Mexico. AS I NOTED in this column in June, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, offered an amendment to the Senate immigration bill that would have required illegal aliens seeking legalization to disclose “all the names and Social Security account numbers that the alien has ever used to obtain employment in the United States.” Sen. Chuck Schumer objected.
“When people are living in undocumented status, there are times, I suppose, when they’ve made up identities, made up Social Security numbers,” he said. “I just don’t see how, when you’ve lived here 10 years, and you’ve had many different identities, many different numbers, you’re going to remember them all.” In 2009, according to the inspector general of the Social Security Administration, the agency received 7.8 million W-2 forms where the name and Social Security number did not match — often meaning the form was filed on behalf of an illegal alien using a fake or stolen number. This, too, mitigates in favor of Samuel being the man who illegally immigrates to the United States. Daniel would never — let alone habitually — assume a false identity or use a fraudulent or stolen Social Security number. Last year, the Pew Hispanic Center surveyed “unauthorized” Latino immigrants, asking if they identified with, or leaned toward, one of the major political parties. Thirty-one percent said they identified with the Democratic Party and 23 said they leaned toward it. Only four percent said they identified with the Republican Party, while 15 percent said they leaned toward it. Twentyseven percent said they did not identify with or lean toward either party. Daniel, considering his true and deeply held moral and religious convictions, could never identify with or lean toward a political party dedicated to the legalized killing of unborn babies and state-sanctioned same-sex marriage. Since the majority of “unauthorized” Latino immigrants do lean toward a party dedicated to these things, this also seems to suggest Daniel would not be the man to illegally immigrate to the United States. When people are tempted to argue that it would be compassionate to give a “pathway to citizenship” to the illegal aliens in this country, they should think about the Daniels of this world — whether they are living today in Mexico or Egypt. THEY ARE not breaking our immigration laws precisely because they live their lives according to the values that made this country great.
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Conservative Chronicle
CHARITABLE GIVING: December 1, 2013
‘Tis better to give, but some give more
W
hen it comes to charitable giving, America is a worldbeater. According to Giving USA, an annual compendium of national data on philanthropy, Americans last year donated more than $316 billion to charity, or roughly two percent of GDP. Contrary to popular belief, most of that money didn’t come from foundations or corporations. It came from individuals. In 2012, donations from private American households added up to about $223 billion.
WHETHER MEASURED per capita or as a share of national wealth, charity in other countries doesn’t come close. The extraordinary generosity of ordinary Americans has often been noted. Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, calls it the nation’s most salient feature. “The truly extraordinary thing about the United States is not how much we produce ... nor how much we consume,” Brooks wrote in Who Really Cares, his eye-opening 2006 book on the charitable habits of Americans. “Rather, it is how much we give. America is a land of charity.” That’s in the aggregate, the view from 35,000 feet. Seen as a whole, Americans are indeed charitable standouts. Not even Canada, so similar to the United States geographically and culturally, shows the same commitment. “Private monetary generosity in Canada is considerably lower than in the United States,” noted the Fraser Institute, a leading Canadian think tank, in a report last December. “This generosity gap undoubtedly limits the ability of charities to improve the quality of life in Canada.” But not all Americans donate. There are generosity gaps here too. Writing recently in Philanthropy magazine (the quarterly journal of the Philanthropy Roundtable), Karl Zinsmeister usefully surveys the scholarly research. American generosity varies by region. Studies by Fraser and the Catalogue of Philanthropy, which use IRS data from itemized tax returns, show a consistent pattern. “Measured by how much they share out of what they have available, the most generous Americans are not generally those in high-income, urban, liberal states like California or Massachusetts,” Zinsmeister writes. “Rather, people living in areas that are more rural, conservative, religious, and moderate in income are our most generous givers.” Similar findings come from studies not based on IRS figures. The Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a detailed survey of households that has been collecting data continuously since 1968, shows that Americans living in the Mountain States give more than twice as much of their income to charity as residents of New England and the MidAtlantic.
A report last year by the Chronicle routinely give away more of what of Philanthropy adjusted the data to they earn. Where religious practice is account for differences in the cost of weakest, charitable giving — even to causes — dwindles. living. Even with allowances for the s e c u l a r No wonder New higher bite taken England is a lagby housing, food, gard. health care and And yet, New taxes, residents Englanders do of the Northeast (c) 2013, Boston Globe know how to give. gave less of their The same survey discretionary income to charity than Americans else- that ranks Maine, Massachusetts, Conwhere. “Red states are more generous necticut, New Hampshire, Vermont than blue states,” the chronicle con- and Rhode Island dead last in percentage of income donated to charity also cluded. ranks them first in charitable participaSO ARE STATES and cities where tion — the percentage of residents who church attendance is strongest. In the donated some amount. “New EnglandSouthern “Bible Belt” and areas with ers reflect, and indeed may lead, the large Mormon populations, residents extraordinary American propensity to
Jeff
Jacoby
donate to others,” Zinsmeister points out. “They just don’t give as much as residents of other regions.” Discussions of charity — who gives, who doesn’t — invariably become fodder for the culture wars. Let’s face it, an unmistakable aroma of hypocrisy wafts when those who preach a politics of compassion and denounce the greed of their ideological opponents turn out to be bleeding-heart tightwads. BUT MAKING a political point will never feel as good as making a charitable gift. And there is no better retort to a charge of stinginess than an act of generosity. When it comes to charitable giving, America is a worldbeater. So be an American, and give.
VICTIMHOOD: December 3, 2013
A challenge to our beliefs
D
epressing news about black students scoring far below white students on various mental tests has become so familiar that people in different parts of the ideological spectrum have long ago developed their different explanations for why this is so. But both may have to do some rethinking, in light of radically different news from England. The November 9th-15th issue of the distinguished British magazine The Economist reports that, among children who are eligible for free meals in England’s schools, black children of immigrants from Africa meet the standards of school tests nearly 60 percent of the time — as do immigrant children from Bangladesh and Pakistan. Black children of immigrants from the Caribbean meet the standards less than 50 percent of the time. AT THE BOTTOM, among those children who are all from families with low enough incomes to receive free meals at school, are white English children, who meet the standards 30 percent of the time. The Economist points out that, in one borough of London, white students scored lower than black students in any London borough. These data might seem to be some kind of fluke, but they confirm the observations in a book titled Life at the Bottom by British physician Theodore Dalrymple. He said that, among the patients he treated in a hospital near a lowincome housing project, he could not recall any white 16-year-old who could multiply nine by seven. Some could not even do three times seven. What jolts us is not only that this phe-
nomenon is so different from what we are used to seeing in the United States, but also that it fits neither the genetic nor the environmental explanation of blackwhite educational differences here. These white students in England come from the same race that produced Shakespeare and the great scientist Sir Isaac Newton,
Thomas
Sowell (c) 2013, Creators Syndicate
among other world class intellects over the centuries. But today many young whites in England are barely literate, and have trouble with simple arithmetic. Nor are these white students the victims of racial discrimination, much less the descendants of slaves. With the two main explanations for low performances on school tests obviously not applicable in England, there must be some other explanation. And once there is some other explanation in this case, we have to wonder if that other explanation — whatever it is — might also apply in the United States, to one degree or another. IN OTHER WORDS, maybe our own explanations need reexamination. What do low-income whites in England and ghetto blacks in the United States have in common? It cannot be simply low incomes, because children from other groups in the same lowincome brackets outperform whites in England and outperform blacks in America. What low-income whites in England and ghetto blacks in the United States
have in common is a generations-long indoctrination in victimhood. The political left in both countries has, for more than half a century, maintained a steady and loud drumbeat of claims that the deck is stacked against those at the bottom. The American left uses race and the British left uses class, but the British left has been at it longer. In both countries, immigrants who have not been in the country as long have not been so distracted by such ideology into a blind resentment and lashing out at other people. In both countries, immigrants enter a supposedly closed society that refuses to let anyone rise — and they nevertheless rise, while the native-born at the bottom remain at the bottom. Those who promote an ideology of victimhood may imagine that they are helping those at the bottom, when in fact they are harming them, more so than the society that the left is denouncing. We in America have gotten used to vast gaps between blacks and whites on test scores. But this was not always the case, in places where there was anything like comparable education. Back in the 1940s, before the vast expansion of the welfare state and the ideology of victimhood used to justify it, there was no such gap on test scores between black schools in Harlem and white, working class schools on New York’s lower east side. YOU CAN FIND the data on pages 40-41 of an article of mine in the Fall 1981 issue of Teachers College Record, a journal published by Columbia University — that is, if you think facts matter more than rhetoric or social visions.
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December 11, 2013 KNOCKOUT GAME: November 28, 2013
The knockout game — NYT/NPR say no big deal
T
he “knockout game” — and sault of three white girls on Halloween the media underreporting of night, 2006, in Long Beach, Calif., just it — combines the breakdown outside Los Angeles. Without provocaof the family with the media’s conde- tion, a mostly black mob of 30 to 40 and adults brutally scending determination to serve as a t e e n s kicked, punched public relations and pummeled bureau for blacks. three young white The “game” is a women, slamdare in which a ming them to the young man — all (c) 2013, Creators Syndicate ground, ripping the perps appear to be male people of color, mostly blacks earrings from their lobes and beating — tries to literally knock out an inno- them with a skateboard. One of the viccent bystander with one blow. Both Na- tims had 12 fractures in her face that retional Public Radio and the New York quired multiple surgeries, and had damTimes say these reports of the “knockout age to her teeth and her eyesight. The game” being widespread are overblown women also suffered internal injuries and concussions. But for the efforts of a and do not represent a trend. Really? black good Samaritan, who waded into ACCORDING TO Colin Flaherty, the crowd to help the girls, they might author of White Girl Bleed A Lot: The well have died. The Los Angeles Times, the major Return of Racial Violence to America and How the Media Ignore It, the metropolitan hometown paper, for one knockout game has gone national. He whole week did not write a single word describes “knockouts” in Philadelphia, about the Long Beach incident, which Atlantic City, St. Louis, Birmingham, took place only twenty-some miles from Chicago, Charlotte, Milwaukee, Den- the paper’s headquarters. Eyewitnesses ver, Minneapolis, Georgetown, New to the brutal attack reported many in the York City, Greensboro, Baltimore, Las mob yelling, “We hate white people, f--Vegas, Kansas City, Miami, Cleveland, whites!” during the rampage. Yet when authorities first charged 10 Nashville, Peoria, Seattle, Saratoga Springs, Atlanta and a host of others of the youths with felony assault a week later, they declined to file hate crime towns and cities. From a distance, the media can spot charges. When hate crime charges were some lone idiot holding up an offen- filed against eight of the youths a full sive sign at a tea party rally. But when three weeks after the attack, the local it comes to black perp/white victim NAACP branch said, “We do not have crime, there is a very different attitude. sufficient information to determine Consider the media reaction to the as- whether this is a true hate crime, and
Larry
Elder
we just have to monitor this.” One of the Long Beach defendant’s uncles published a pamphlet explaining that “white bi--hes” — another of the epithets allegedly hurled at the white victims — is an acceptable phrase in some urban environments. NPR FINALLY got around to mentioning Long Beach — a month later. And the NPR piece was really about whether blacks, given America’s history of racism, can even commit a “hate crime.” NPR moderator Farai Chideya put the following question to her guests: “...Some people say black folks cannot be racist because the root of the issue
is power. So what do you make of this crime where you’ve got 12- to 17-yearolds and, you know, black people attacking whites? Is this a traditional hate crime? Should it be prosecuted as such? People in the community are kind of divided about that.” Perhaps Chideya might ask the young white female victims whether they felt that their black attackers lacked “power.” Flaherty describes a mob attack at the Milwaukee State Fair, in which hundreds of blacks roamed inside and outside the fairgrounds, singling out and attacking whites. Local media broadcast the 911 calls from panicked fairgoers. He also writes about similar attacks at the Iowa State Fair over a three-day period, where a police report says some blacks involved were chanting, “Beat Whitey Night.” So why is this happening? Look to the family. As then-presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama told a mostly black congregation: “Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems or run away from home or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.” In 1960, only five percent of children were born into single-parent households. Today it’s 40 percent, with nearly 75 percent of black children born to single mothers. DEAR FATHER, Dear Son, my latest book, is about the importance of fathers — even gruff, tough ones like my Marine dad who was raised in Jim Crow South — in instilling the values of right and wrong, and of empathy for others. Kids from homes with good values don’t go around knocking people out.
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Conservative Chronicle
MEDIA BIAS: December 3, 2013
We live in a world of lies: Vested interests
R
emember the terrible murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyo. in 1998 — tortured, beaten and left hanging on a fence to die — because he was gay? The American people were led from the outset to believe that Shepard was the victim of a hate crime, murdered because he was gay. And that is how virtually every American still views the story. In the words of Congressman Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), “Matthew Shepard is to gay rights what Emmett Till was to the civil rights movement.” A play based on Shepard’s killing, The Laramie Project became, according to the Wall Street Journal, “one of the most produced theatrical shows in the country.” And in 2009, Congress passed, and President Barack Obama signed, the Matthew Shepard Law, which expanded the definition of hate crimes to include crimes motivated by a victim’s actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability. IT TURNS OUT that Matthew Shepard’s murder had nothing to do with his being gay. As early as 2004, the ABC News program 20/20 broadcast (to its credit) a denial by both murderers, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, that the murder had anything to do with Shepard’s being gay. It was, they both claimed, a robbery gone bad. “It was not because me and Aaron had anything against gays,” Henderson told ABC. As a result, ABC News was widely attacked by all those who had a vested interest not in truth, but in maintaining the homophobia story: the liberal media, the gay rights movement and the lawyers for the victim’s mother. The New York Times reported: “Those leading the charge against the heavily promoted ABC report [included] Joan Garry, executive director of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD).” Sean Maloney, the aforementioned congressman who was then the lawyer for Judy Shepard, Matthew Shepard’s mother, called the program “’just bad journalism ... there is a mountain of evidence that anti-gay bias was a trigger for the beating that left Matthew dead after they robbed him.” Now a book has been published, written by Stephen Jimenez, himself a gay man, that confirms the accuracy of the 2004 ABC News report. Matthew Shepard was involved in the hyperactive Wyoming meth drug culture; he was murdered over a drug deal; and his primary murderer was a bisexual who had probably slept with Shepard. The media aspect of this case was summed up in a Wall Street Journal
review: “Mr. Jimenez’s book is most None of this story was true. useful in illuminating the power of the First, the tree was never reserved media to shape the popular conception for white students. As the Associated of an event. It shows how a desire for press reported in September Manichaean mo2007: “According rality tales can to teachers and lead us to overschool administrasimplify the hutors, students of man experience.” all races congre(c) 2013, Creators Syndicate That’s a bit gated under it at delicate. Actually one time or anit shows how powerful the left-wing other.” media are, how they are dedicated to Second, the nooses had nothing to do agendas rather than to truth, and how with lynchings or race. As the Christian much of what Americans believe is Science Monitor reported in October shaped accordingly. 2007: “An investigation by school offiRemember the 2006 story about cials, police, and an FBI agent revealed nooses that were hung by racist white the true motivation behind the placing students in Jena, La. to signify lynch- of two nooses in the tree ... [They] were ings? understood to be a prank by three white As CNN reported: “Jena’s racial ten- students aimed at their fellow white sions were aggravated in August 2006, friends, members of the school rodeo when three white teens hung the nooses team. the day after a group of black students received permission from school adREMEMBER THE white laministrators to sit under the tree — a crosse team players at Duke University place where white students normally charged with gang rape of a black stripcongregated.” per — and how the New York Times That was the national story: There and Duke University and everyone in was a tree near the high school under between reported this as an example of which only white students sat, one day privileged white boys’ racism? a black student sat under the tree, and That, too, was all a lie. The stripper the next day nooses were hung from made up the whole story. (Last week, the tree. As late as August 2007, the she was convicted of murdering her Washington Post still wrote about “Jim boyfriend. Have you read about that?) Crow-like hangman’s nooses dangling The list of lies is almost endless. from a shade tree at the local high The New York Times reporter in the school.” Soviet Union, Walter Duranty, denied
Dennis
Prager
that there was a famine in the Ukraine in 1931-32 — the Communist-induced famine that killed about five million Ukrainians. And he won a Pulitzer Prize for it. The media portrayed the Kennedy assassination as the product of Dallas’s “right-wing” “climate of hate” — even though a card-carrying Communist committed the assassination. The media told us over and over about a heterosexual AIDS “epidemic” in the U.S. There was none. The media fabricated the heterosexual epidemic in order to remove stigma from gay males and in order to garner support for more AIDS research money. Why all this mendacity? There are truth tellers and there are liars on the right and on the left. But for the left, truth is subordinated to whatever it is the left most cares about: gay rights, minority rights, women’s rights, government health care and environmentalism being only the most obvious current examples. That’s why talk radio, conservative websites, Fox News and conservative opinion pages, such as those of the Wall Street Journal and Investors Business Daily, are so important. EUROPE DOESN’T have them. And its population is brainwashed. No wonder Europeans believe that America and Israel are the most dangerous countries in the world. Their media told them so.
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December 11, 2013 MEDIA BIAS: November 29, 2013
The ugly end of the Duke lacrosse story
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n Nov. 22, with the national media focused on the 50th anniversary of former President John F. Kennedy’s death, few noticed the story of a jury in North Carolina convicting Crystal Mangum of murder in the 2011 kitchen stabbing death of her boyfriend Reginald Daye. Why should that fact fixate the national media? ON ITS OWN, it shouldn’t. But in 2006 and 2007, Mangum’s false charges of rape against three Duke University lacrosse players caused a national tsunami of media sensation, an angry wave of prejudiced coverage presuming the guilt of rich white college boys when being accused by an African-American stripper. More than any other media outlet, the New York Times trumpeted Mangum’s rape accusations, even after they fell apart. As other liberal media were backing away, the Times published a notorious, error-riddled 5,700-word lead
story on Aug. 25, 2006, by Duff Wil- the khaki-pants crowd of SAT wonder son, who argued there was enough evi- kids.” She lamented, “some news media dence against the players for Michael jackknifed as they moved from victim’s to angel-tinting the Nifong, the atrocious local prosecutor advocate lacrosse team.” (who would later To Roberts, the be jailed and disfalse accuser nevbarred), to bring er stopped being the case to trial. the victim. RobWithin the (c) 2013, Creators Syndicate erts never wrote Times, perhaps the a retraction for her most aggressive accuser was then-sports columnist Sele- columns that relentlessly championed a na Roberts, who made a habit of com- false narrative. She is the Al Sharpton of paring the accused Duke lacrosse play- sports columnists. ers to drug dealers and gang members. THE COVERAGE ended. Well, Roberts continued to lob charges of white privilege in her last column on the there was one small trickle of news. In subject in 2007: “Don’t mess with Duke, December 2010, the New York Times though. To shine a light on its integrity ran a tiny wire item in the sports sechas been treated by the irrational mighty tion about the Duke lacrosse “victim” as a threat to white privilege. Feel free to being found guilty of “misdemeanor excoriate the African-American basket- child abuse and damaging property. A ball stars and football behemoths for the Durham County jury convicted Crystal misdeeds of all athletes, but lay off the Mangum, 32, of contributing to child lacrosse pipeline to Wall Street, excuse abuse or neglect, injury to personal
Brent
Bozell
OBAMA PRESIDENCY: November 28, 2013
A way to ruin Thanksgiving
F
or some, Thanksgiving is difficult enough with abrasive relatives gobbling up your food without a scintilla of gratitude. Now President Obama comes along with a proposal that could cause turmoil in even the happiest of homes. THE PRESIDENT wants us to discuss politics, immigration reform and Obamacare at our holiday tables. Imagine the scene. One of your kids is home from college, having been indoctrinated by liberal-leaning professors with politics mired in the ‘60s, and he or she begins lecturing Grandpa Joe or Aunt Marie about the necessity of visiting the Obamacare website (if they can get on) and buying health insurance. Let the bickering begin! The only thing worse than discussing politics at the dinner table is discussing religion there. In a speech during a fundraising swing through San Francisco, the president delivered a line that is more laughable than any you’d find in a latenight comedian’s monologue. In support of immigration “reform” the president responded to a group of hecklers demanding he use his executive powers to stop deportations: “...we’re a nation of laws. That’s part of our tradition. And so the easy way out is to try to yell and pretend like I can do something by violating our laws.” Excuse me, but aren’t illegal immigrants the ones who are violating our laws?
Hasn’t President Obama violated the Affordable Care Act by unilaterally offering delays and other incentives to labor unions and favored groups? As for deportations, according to the Department of Homeland Security, the Obama administration has deported more immigrants annually than the George W. Bush administration.
Cal
Thomas (c) 2013, Tribune Media Services
WOULDN’T THAT make for a great debate between Uncle George, who hates the idea of lawbreakers entering the country and then demanding citizenship, and Suzie, the college junior, who thinks we shouldn’t have borders anyway and her uncle should catch up with the times? That’s what President Obama said in his San Francisco speech: “The only thing standing in our way right now is the unwillingness of certain Republicans in Congress to catch up with the rest of the country.” Republican resistance to “the times,” if that means endorsing lawbreakers, is something else for which we should be thankful. To this president, everything is political, even Thanksgiving and Christmas. Organizing for Action (OFA), a nonprofit social welfare organization and community organizing project whose agenda closely aligns with that of Obama and the Democratic Party, has come up
with talking points for its minions to use as we gather around the turkey platter this holiday season. Here’s the guidance from the OFA script: “At Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, people will be under the misconception that the government-designed health-payment plans are too expensive. Tell them: There are a variety of plans available in the new health insurance marketplace, so you can pick one that fits your budget. There’s also financial assistance available based on how much you make.” As Rush Limbaugh noted on his radio program: “Thanksgiving is a national American holiday, and its purpose is to thank God for the United States of America, and instead Obama acolytes are being propagandized to take over Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners to convince people to give thanks to Obama for Obamacare.” But then, in 2008, and for far too long afterward, wasn’t Obama treated by much of the media and his youthful followers as a messianic figure with powers unlike any other president or human being, a political superhero able to leap all obstacles in a single bound? TAKE MY advice: To improve the prospects for a happier holiday season in your house, don’t bring up immigration, Obamacare, or even Obama. Talk about the pilgrims; talk about the Founders. Talk about why you’re thankful for an America that is strong enough to survive its presidents, especially those who turn out to be turkeys.
property and resisting a public officer after a February confrontation with her live-in boyfriend.” Then, in 2011, Mangum was indicted for murdering her boyfriend. Again, it was a tiny item in the Times — a brief at the bottom of page B-14 of the sports section, under “Lacrosse:” “Crystal Mangum, who falsely accused three Duke players of raping her in 2006, was charged with murder in the death of her boyfriend.” So when Mangum was convicted of murder on Nov. 22, now would it garner serious attention? The Times ran a tiny, 98-word wire story. There were no burning columns from the successors of Roberts. Now remember that the entire time Mangum was ruining the reputations of three young men, the media kept her identity a secret. But now that her secret of lying and even murder is out, the secret remains, at least on the media’s radar screen. There were no Duke-accuser updates on ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS, USA Today or the Washington Post. Like Roberts, ABC legal reporter Terry Moran didn’t easily let go of the blame-the-rich-whites game in the spring of 2007, writing for his ABC blog: “Perhaps the outpouring of sympathy for (the falsely arrested Duke lacrosse players) is just a bit misplaced ... As students of Duke University or other elite institutions, these young men will get on with their privileged lives ... They are very differently situated in life from, say, the young women of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team.” Those women were briefly, unfairly smeared one day in a bad Don Imus joke at 6 a.m., as “nappy-headed hos.” Few would have heard it if liberals hadn’t flagged it. Just as liberals flagged some falsely accused lacrosse players who were only guilty of being rich and white. On Saturday, Nov. 23, CNN offered two segments on Mangum’s conviction. Defense attorney Mark Geragos offered a strong post-trial verdict: “I thought at the time that that (Duke lacrosse) prosecution was not only ill-advised but that prosecutor and we were vindicated to some degree was — ended up being disbarred.” “Now you have a woman, and, you know, somebody had remarked to me this morning, karma is a bi--h,” he said. “You’ve got a situation where, you know, she had at least arguably a decent defense in this case, but has absolutely no credibility.” THE NATIONAL media also lost credibility in this Mangum mess. Their coverage at the start was outrageous, as was their suppression at the end.
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Conservative Chronicle
2013: November 28, 2013
The year 2013: For these we give thanks?
W
e are tomorrow’s past, so this Thanksgiving give thanks for 2013, a year the future might study more for amusement than for edification. HealthCare. gov performed the public service of defeating Barack Obama’s ascription of every disagreeable effect to one of two causes — George W. Bush or global warming. Concerning the latter, a CNN anchor wondered if an asteroid that passed by Earth on Feb. 15 was “an effect of, perhaps, global warming.” The Los Angeles Times announced that it had stopped publishing letters questioning global warming caused by human activity. WHICH MAKES sense, if you agree with the New Yorker’s resident expert, who called the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on warming “the last word on climate change.” It evidently is the first science to reach the end of its subject, all questions answered. Therefore it is puzzling that dramatic predictions of an unusually high number of 2013 hurricanes were dramatically wrong. Paleoanthropology has not reached its last word. The story of human evolution may have been simplified by conclusions reached this year about a 1.8 million-year-old skull found in the Caucasus in 2005. The earliest human remain found outside of Africa indicates that our ancestors emerged from Africa as a single species, not several species. Its brain was about one-third the size of today’s human brains. Some of today’s brains. A Tennessee judge’s ruling was reversed: She had ordered a family to change their child’s name, Messiah, because that “title” has “only been earned by one person.” At the school where a Maryland kindergartner is supposed to learn reasonableness, school officials interrogated him for more than two hours before notifying his mother that he possessed a cap gun. Fortunately, it contained no caps; otherwise it would have been deemed an explosive. Michigan educators forced the removal of the little plastic soldiers a mother had put on cupcakes she brought to school on her son’s birthday. ON SEPT. 17, Constitution Day, a student at Modesto Junior College was told to stop distributing copies of the Constitution until he had filled out the requisite forms for permission to use the college’s designated “free speech area.” The Bank of England is putting Jane Austen on a new 10-pound note because without a woman on some notes, British currency would “not command respect and legitimacy.” Queen Elizabeth II is on all notes. When Britain’s education secretary said children
should learn to add and subtract, and Leicester parking lot were confirmed memorize some of the nation’s kings to be those of Richard III, missing for and queens, a teachers’ union objected. most of the 528 years since he lost the Bosworth. He remains The union had hitherto said: “For the Battle of buried beneath the state to suggest bad reputation acthat some knowlquired at the hands edge should be of the Tudors’ talprivileged over ented PR speother knowledge (c) 2013, Washington Post Writers Group cialist, William is a bit totalitarian Shakespeare. in a 21st-century In Washington, even local governenvironment.” American University in Washington, D.C., scheduled a course ment is demented: The Metropolitan Area Transit Authority threatened Henon “The 50 Shades Trilogy.” The infantilization of adults con- ry Docter with “arrest, fines and impristinued with the marketing of $600 onment” for the crime of unregulated High Rollers, which are Big Wheels gardening. Docter had filled 176 empty for (biological, not actual) grown-ups. planters at the Dupont Circle subway MSNBC, commemorating the 50th an- stop. The Transit Authority was briefly niversary of Gov. George Wallace’s at- deterred by the public outcry against tempt to prevent the integration of the its threat to punish Docter for his unUniversity of Alabama, identified Wal- compensated act of beautification. But then it had the 1,000 morning glories lace as a Republican. Human remains found beneath a and other plants ripped out.
George
Will
Those vigilant about our welfare never sleep; Canadian relief supplies for Oklahoma tornado victims were stopped at the U.S. border until every item could be itemized in alphabetical order and its country of origin noted. You can’t be too careful. AS THE NATIONAL Park Service and NASA understand. They are among the federal agencies that have their own SWAT teams. The Department of Agriculture, however, stresses sensitivity. A video of its “cultural sensitivity training” shows employees being instructed to call the Pilgrims who created Thanksgiving “illegal aliens.” Of course there were no immigration laws to make any one of the first Thanksgivings illegal — for which fact, give thanks. Someday, if there is no Agriculture Department, more thanks to be given.
POPE FRANCIS: December 3, 2013
The pope and Rush Limbaugh
Y
ou’d have thought the president of the NRA had called for the tarring and feathering of mourning dove hunters! All it took for Pope Francis to bring down on himself the Wrath of Rush Limbaugh last week was to disrespect — or appear to be disrespecting — capitalistic economics, in the context of calling for a new Christian evangelism.
moning the church to put off torpor and present Christ to a world in need of him. “I invite all Christians everywhere,” the pope said, “to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus ... I dream of a missionary option, that is, a missionary impulse capable of transforming everything ...” And more of the same — much more.
“THE WORSHIP of the ancient golden calf,” said the pope, “has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose.” Further: “The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase.” There was, to make matters worse, some severe language regarding “trickle-down economics” and that good old Darwinian notion called “survival of the fittest.” Raw, bloody meat, all of this — the cause of widespread fuming and fumigation. “This is just pure Marxism ... actually unbelievable,” said Mr. Limbaugh, who spoke for many of my brother and sister conservatives. Liberals, by contrast, jumped for joy and satisfaction. This made things worse yet from the conservative perspective. What would be next — a papal bear hug for Obamacare? Lost amid conventional media blather concerning the 47,560-word apostolic exhortation “Evangelii Gaudium” (“The Joy of Evangelism”) was any real sense of what Francis was up to: sum-
Murchison
William
(c) 2013, Creators Syndicate
AMID TUMULT over the healthcare.gov website and animated speculation over who can beat Hillary, Francis addressed mankind’s spiritual calling. He shoved political matters to the side. More properly, he spoke of the world’s conundrums in the context of God’s love for the world. What kind of talk was this? Many wished to know. It was religious talk. That was the problem. The pope’s holistic view of the human condition broke across boundaries and surged down side roads, as well as broad boulevards familiar from the six o’clock news. He wanted to save souls! What an idea — one that meant submitting the whole human enterprise to divine oversight: in the name, yes, of freedom. “God’s mercy has willed that we should be free.” Really? How would that be? To talk of freedom is to talk of politics and economics — isn’t it? From the chair of Peter, the view is more encompassing. The mercy of God that leads to freedom, mercy appor-
tioned to the weak as well as the powerless, the poor and the one percent, is the divine property the people would show the world. Economics, Marxist or classical, is a means — just that, a means — to the end the pope would show the world: barriers leveled, hatreds stilled, vices quenched before the throne of God. This, according to no economics text; according, rather, to historic Christian understandings: “My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my savior ... for he that is mighty hath magnified me, and holy is his name ...” And on from there, to a better place, by grace. Mercy, grace, love — the pope’s language isn’t well understood in a world that’s wide open to self-satisfactions of every kind and set against human limitations. The robust evangelism for which Francis calls will have a rough goings on on the right and the left and all points in between. By the Christian yardstick that Francis brandishes, Man (meaning, of course man and woman) isn’t the measure of all things, far less an economic tool or widget. Man, in Christianspeak, is the image of God. We may believe or disbelieve. The new pope — who makes people’s eyes pop nearly every time he speaks — sees with different eyes. His gaze sweeps across the immensity of time. Evangelism is the joy and the sacred purpose he commends to the church, whoever dwells in the White House. A SLIGHTLY bedazzled Episcopalian can only wish him well.
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December 11, 2013 COMMON CORE: December 3, 2013
Feds’ three tentacles in the Common Core (Part 4)
I
n Part 1 of my series on the ComPolitiFact further accused Bean of mon Core State Standards being confusing the facts and separation beinfused into 45 state public school tween the longitudinal data syssystems, I revealed how the feds spent tems and CCSS. And it also $350 million of cited CCSS orgataxpayer money, nization officials, giving grants and who affirmed waivers to muscle that “there are no states and local data collection (c) 2013, Creators Syndicate school districts to requirements accept the standards. And that was after with Common Core.” (Can you imag2009, when feds awarded, in the De- ine “no data collection” requirements partment of Education’s words, “gover- in the most overreaching national acanors approximately $48.6 billion ... in demic system and standards to date? If exchange for a commitment to advance it sounds too good to be true, you can essential education reforms ... including: bet it is. Read on.) college- and career-ready standards (aka But then PolitiFact explained that CCSS).” many Georgia schools are in fact using inBloom and cited Robert Swiggum, IN PART 2, I showed how the feds chief information officer of the Georare injecting their progressive agenda gia Department of Education, who coninto curricula taught to U.S. kids in el- fessed that his state’s system “collects ementary, middle and high schools via data points in about 10 categories,” intheir educative minions posted in aca- cluding “a student’s name, grade, gendemic arenas and among CCSS curricula der, ethnicity, birth date, attendance, creators. enrollment history, test scores, courses Last week, I began to give you the taken and grade received, and any third piece of evidence of the feds’ col- subgroup (example: English language laborations and entanglements within learner, retained, economically disadCCSS — namely that they are creating vantaged).” and expanding a national database to And each of those categories has substore and access your kids’ private infor- levels of students’ personal information, mation obtained through a technological too. PolitiFact itself elaborated, “Each project within CCSS, an informational of the categories has dozens of data mega-overreach and push within their points that can vary depending on how 2009 $48.6 billion bribe to governors. many tests each student takes, those test PolitiFact, a so-called fact-discerning scores, the number of courses taken and website, accused Angela Bean, an execu- the length of time a student has been in tive board member of the Fayette County school.” (Ga.) Republican Party, of exaggeration So let me get this straight: Beginwhen she said informational wings with- ning in 2009, the Obama administrain CCSS were, in the Newnan Times- tion began a massive overreach, push Herald’s words, “designed to collect up and expansion of an informational and to 400 data points on each child, which technological student tracking system can include personally identifiable data. that stores a wide range of academic and ... The data will be collected by a com- personal information of every student in pany called inBloom, created by the Bill the U.S. from preschool through college and Melinda Gates Foundation.” and into the workforce.
Chuck
Norris
At the same time, the administration begins a massive overreach, push and expansion of a new national academic standard system, called Common Core State Standards, which will cover every core classroom subject from kindergarten through high school and be the basis of 85 percent of curricula and progress assessments. YET WE’RE supposed to believe naively that the standards, curricula, assessments for teachers and students, and plethora of personal student data will not intersect, intertwine or be combined with or use the technological communication system through which all student data and progress in public schools are recorded and transmitted? The longitudinal data systems and CCSS were developed and enlarged side by side during the same time and same presidential administration, but the CCSS testing and performance will not be recorded and monitored via the LDS? Is it merely coincidental that the feds spent billions expanding both systems simultaneously over the past few years yet there is no congruency or intended purpose between the ginormous national construction of CCSS and the expanding LDS informational pipeline? Hogwash! Who’s kidding whom? To not recognize how LDS will clearly serve the information gathered under CCSS is to overlook any connection between a hot dog and a hot dog bun. In fact, if you believe LDS and CCSS are solo and separate academic coincidences in an ever-expanding federal government that has been funding and promoting both, I have a London bridge to sell you in Lake Havasu City, Ariz.! CCSS and LDS are partners in crime. It will be impossible for one to operate without the other, based upon the very reason they were created, which was to complement each other. They are destined to be married and become one, just as they have been living together in secret in the minds of bureaucrats and educrats. LDS will serve under CCSS, plain and
simple, inasmuch as teachers and curricula will conform to LDS mandates, too. And the primary problem remains that both CCSS and LDS are two of the greatest overreaches by the federal government — in cahoots with state educrats — and encroachments on student privacy and parental rights, all under the banner of the new “Common Core” education. And if you think I’m just connecting conspiratorial dots, then let me remove all doubt by citing a document anyone can read on the website for the National Center for Education Statistics, which is the primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing data related to education in the U.S. and other nations and is located within the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. The NCES produced four books on building longitudinal data systems. The first one is titled Traveling Through Time: The Forum Guide to Longitudinal Data Systems,” which also gives a glimpse into their informational future. In Chapter 5 of that book — titled LDS Benefits: Why Should We Build These Systems? — the NCES clearly explains for all to read: “Longitudinal data system (LDS) is not just a compliance system that will feed the state and federal governments more data. An LDS has the potential to make high quality, timely data available to all stakeholders to help them ... leverage significant educational change.” Any questions? Welcome to the future of fed ed and having your family’s personal information float across the Internet for “key stakeholders,” from your house and the local schoolhouse to statehouses and the White House. IT’S TIME to ship fed ed to some remote deserted island! And we can start by stopping Common Core. Next week, I will answer the question: “Is Common Core really good for children?”
28
Conservative Chronicle
PAKISTAN: December 3, 2013
For Pakistan and the U.S., one delusion after another
N
ot many foreign policy ex- granted independence to India and perts would argue with the agreed to set off several geographically proposition that the country s e p a r a t e d provinces as a predomiMuslim Pakistan. with which the United States has the n a n t l y Muhammad Ali most problematic Jinnah, Pakistan’s relationship is charismatic first Pakistan. leader, died a year Most Ameriafter indepencans, when they (c) 2013, Creators Syndicate dence; his succeshave thought about it, have taken a similar view since sor was assassinated in 1951. Most of Osama bin Laden was killed in a raid the time since then, Pakistan has been by Navy SEAL Team Six in May 2011. under military rule. That’s no coincidence. As Haqqani BIN LADEN WAS hiding in plain points out, Pakistan was given one-sevsight in Abbottabad, Pakistan, just a enth of undivided India’s resources but few miles from Pakistan’s military one-third of its military. The decision academy. It is hard to believe that his was made to keep the military despite whereabouts weren’t known to Paki- the cost to economic development. The military was furious that Instan’s military or its intelligence agendia retained most of Muslim-majority cy, the ISI. It has been apparent for some time to Kashmir. Ever since, it has directed those who are well-informed that ele- most of its military efforts against Inments in the Pakistani military and ISI dia. Pakistani leaders were convinced have been aiding the Taliban and other terrorist elements on both sides of the that their nation was the “pivot of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, both be- world” and reached out immediately fore and after the attacks of Sept. 11, and repeatedly to the United States for military aid. They used any arms they 2001. But the problems began long before got to confront and, on occasion, fight that, as Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s am- India and to pry Afghanistan away from bassador to the United States from 2008 its alliance with India. On occasion, this proved disastrous. to 2011, explains in his just-published book Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan, When the military suppressed parliathe United States and an Epic History mentarians from the geographically separate East Pakistan, people there of Misunderstanding. “Since 1947,” the year Pakistan be- rebelled and, with India’s encouragecame independent, he writes, “depen- ment, created the new nation of Bandence, deception and defiance have gladesh. Haqqani castigates Pakistani leadcharacterized U.S.-Pakistan relations.” That year was the year when Britain ers’ illusions and those of Americans
Michael
Barone
who thought they could move Pakistan in other directions. Dwight Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, irritated by India’s neutral posture in the Cold War, credited Pakistani leaders’ avowals of anti-Communism. RICHARD NIXON and Henry Kissinger used Pakistan as a channel in their opening to Communist China. Kissinger actually flew on his secret trip to China from a base in Pakistan. During the Reagan administration, Pakistan cooperated with American efforts to reduce Communist influence in Afghanistan. In the process, the Pakistanis supported jihadis, resulting in blowback after the end of the Cold War.
American leaders were encouraged by the warm relationships they built with Pakistani military and intelligence officers. They failed to note that the Pakistanis concealed from their people their cooperation with the United States and instead sponsored anti-American propaganda. India changed in response to the Cold War, moving toward market economics, freer trade and warm relationships with the United States. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both advanced something like a de facto alliance. Haqqani would like Pakistan to progress similarly. But under President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s and the military and ISI since, it has moved toward Islamist strictures and support of terrorists. India has fostered rapid economic growth and a vibrant high-tech sector. Pakistan’s economy has mostly stagnated under the burden of the overlarge military. There is no evidence, Haqqani argues, that India wants to conquer Pakistan. But there is plenty of evidence that elements in Pakistan’s government have facilitated acts of terrorism against India, like the 2008 attacks in Mumbai targeting the Taj Mahal Hotel and a Jewish community center, and the 2011 bombings there. Pakistan has aided the Taliban in Afghanistan both before and after Sept. 11, Haqqani notes, with only a pause after U.S. officials pressured President Pervez Musharraf right after the attacks. WHAT SHOULD both sides do now? Haqqani calls for “a recognition of divergent interests and an acknowledgement of mutual mistrust.” Better to base policy on a realistic appraisal rather than on one magnificent delusion after another.
29
December 11, 2013 CHINA: December 4, 2013
Asia pivot, with a flinch: Miscalculation?
V
ice-President Joe Biden’s Japanese authority, but wants China strong reaffirmation of the and Japan to solve the dispute peaceU.S.-Japan alliance is bet- fully. However, an ADIZ involves air fense, which involves ter news following bad. The bad news d e a military threat. Airis what made the craft entering a recAmerican reafognized ADIZ must firmation necesidentify themselves sary: China’s latto the national est act of “barbed (c) 2013, Creators Syndicate air controllers. If wire diplomacy,” they fail to do so, the extension of its Air Defense Identification Zone to they may go down in flames. Implicit armed threat is another include a disputed chain of Japaneseadministered islets northwest of Oki- rub — for Washington. Last week, after China declared the new ADIZ, nawa. the Obama Administration tested it, THE JAPANESE call the disputed vigorously. Two un-armed B-52s flew islets the Senkakus. The Chinese call through the zone. The bombers did not identify themselves to Chinese them the Diaoyu. Two names for a territory may sim- air controllers; Chinese interceptors ply be colloquial artifacts. When the didn’t disturb them. Bluff called and miscalculation rehistory is ugly, however, one man’s idiom is another man’s curse. “Double vealed? After the B-52 sorties, Washington names” are often the cartographer’s mark of lingering animosity between told U.S. civilian aircraft to recognize neighboring states. Many Chinese, the ADIZ. If the flinch is defensible with good reason, resent Imperial Ja- as caution and a diplomatic gesture to pan’s brutality during World War 2. China, Japan ordered its civilian airWhen Beijing spars with Tokyo, Chi- craft to ignore the ADIZ completely. Hasty miscalculation by Chinese nese nationalists applaud — at least nationalists remains the Obama Adthat is one interpretation. This ADIZ’s line of barbs, however, ministration’s preferred explanation also snagged another major American for the ADIZ. In Tokyo this week (on his way to ally in East Asia. The zone includes a reef claimed by South Korea. Ay, visit Chinese president Xi Jinping), Vice-President Biden told Japan’s there’s the rub. Official U.S. policy is to bridge the Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that the animosity. The U.S. recognizes current U.S. firmly supports Japan’s rejec-
Austin
Bay
tion of China’s claim. “The U.S. and Japanese security liaison,” Biden said, “is the cornerstone, not merely in the Pacific region, but the cornerstone on which our security is built for the next 20 years.” Biden’s statement reaffirmed an economic and geo-strategic fact. The U.S. sees Japan as an essential global security partner, not a Pacific Ocean trip wire.
cific region” as “increasingly severe.” And it is. Biden and Xi have meetings with photo ops. Good diplomatic guests, on what was touted as a friendly meet and greet, don’t scold their hosts, at least not too overtly. With that in mind, Biden avoided directly branding China’s expanded ADIZ gambit as a grave diplomatic error. Still, at a subsequent news conference, the vice-president laABE CALLED Biden’s visit “time- mented the “risks of miscalculation” in ly,” which it was. He described “the Asia. His palpable innuendo provides security environment in the Asia-Pa- Beijing with a diplomatic line of retreat. But did Beijing really miscalculate? For decades, China has been expanding its perimeter, with re-asserting historical Chinese rights to territory as the reason, or excuse. China used it in 1950 when it invaded Tibet. In 1962, China drove India from disputed Himalayan territory. In the 1970s, China renewed claims to islands held by Vietnam and seized them. Then China began producing maps of the South China Sea extending its maritime borders — lots of provocative dotted lines. Now Chinese and Filipino ships clash over disputed seas. China, ultimately diplomatic, backs its dotted line claims with military muscle — and barbed wire. WITH JAPAN and South Korea, China faces tougher opponents, so the extended barbed wire hides behind the label “defense.” Yes, miscalculation may be Beijing’s tactical excuse. But including South Korea was definitely part of the message. Beijing is telling Washington that future relations hinge on the U.S. accepting extended Chinese hegemony in Asian waters. If that brings a grimace to Joe Biden’s photo op face, so be it.
30
Conservative Chronicle
CHINA: December 3, 2013
Look out for those Chinese imports
N
ow that America is importing most of the ingredients in our prescription drugs and the majority of the foods we eat, it’s important to look behind the label. It may or may not tell you where the products come from. Your prescription drugs may be coming from Communist China. Drug research in China has fallen under a cloud since 2006 because 13 of the top 20 global drug makers have set up research and development centers in China. Yes, it’s cheaper to do research there but, as one auditor said, “with cheaper research comes greater risk.” RESEARCHERS DID not report the results of animal studies about a drug already being tested in humans, a breach described by drug researchers as a “mortal sin.” Auditors also reported that Chinese workers did not properly monitor clinical trials and they paid hospitals in ways that could be seen as bribery. China’s purchase of pork producer Smithfield Foods Inc. for $4.7 billion has U.S. officials concerned about how this could affect the safety and availability of heparin. That’s an important blood thinner derived from pig intestines that is widely used in U.S. heart surgery and kidney dialysis. This would be the biggest Chinese takeover of a U.S. company. Smithfield is the world’s largest pork producer, with 46,000 employees in 25 states, and is a major supplier of crude heparin, which is already stressed and could soon be in short supply. In 2007 and 2008, nearly 150 people suffered serious reactions and 94 people died after being treated with contaminated heparin. U.S. inspections in China are not what we are used to in the United States. For example, U.S. inspectors came and went from a Walmart-certified factory in Guangdong Province in China this fall, approving its production of specialty items that are on U.S. shelves for Christmas sales. Unknown to the inspectors, none of the kiddie items, such as reindeer suits, were manufactured at the factory being inspected, but had been outsourced to a never-inspected cheaper rogue factory. Pets are in danger, too. Mysterious canine illnesses and deaths have been linked to jerky treats from China, and two manufacturers pulled leading brands off their shelves. Dog lovers are warned that many jerky treats say “product of the USA” but that label merely means they were packaged in the U.S. while the ingredients are Chinese. Federal officials said the current outbreak sickened 3,000 dogs and 10 cats and killed about 600 canines. Chickens raised and slaughtered in China are planned to be on U.S. grocery
store shelves next year. The USDA noti- tries with tainted products. Chinese fied China in September that four of its baby milk killed Chinese babies after processing plants have been cleared to melamine was added to conceal the low protein count. begin processing chickens from the U.S. m i l k ’ s China has sold and then sell them Americans a dazin the American zling array of market. counterfeits and Free trade is forgeries includbringing us fish (c) 2013, Creators Syndicate ing copyrighted raised in China’s books, music and sick rivers such as the Yangtze. By the time the fish swim expensive fashion apparel. The China to the fish ponds, the water has accumu- Bee Products Association claims that lated raw sewage, agricultural pesticides half of all honey sold in China is fake. China’s latest venture into deception and the heavy metal output of poorly is collecting empty bottles of genuine regulated industrial plants. An increasing percentage of vaccines alcohol, refilling them with a cheap is manufactured in China and sold in U.S. substitute from who knows where, and pharmacies. China boasts of 30 vaccine- then reselling this counterfeit alcohol to producing companies that will soon be popular bars and restaurants in Beijing. The police discovered 37,000 bottles of producing one billion doses a year. CHINA TOPS the list of coun- this fake alcohol ready to be delivered.
Phyllis
Schlafly
China’s counterfeit alcohol is generally made from one of three bases: ethylene glycol (antifreeze) which attacks the kidneys and heart and is potentially fatal; methanol which attacks the retinal nerve and can result in blindness; and isopropyl (rubbing alcohol). AN EXPERT on Chinese health at the Council on Foreign Relations, Yanzhong Huang, explained the big difference between Chinese and U.S. medicine safety. U.S. vaccines are kept safe by supporting institutions such as “the market economy, democracy, media monitoring, civil society, and a business ethics code,” plus inspections and regulations, severe punishment for violators and lawsuits by trial lawyers. Communist China doesn’t tolerate any of those safety precautions.
HAMID KARZAI: November 28, 2013
A gentleman’s answer to Karzai
I
t appears that President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan is acting up again. As if President Barack Obama does not have enough on his hands with HealthCare.gov and hotspots spreading around the globe, he now has Karzai, the Importunate. The Afghan prima donna is threatening our president’s role as a wartime president, a role he has not been particularly comfortable in, but at least it is popular with some Americans. Now the playing of “Hail to the Chief” may become somewhat subdued all because of Karzai’s demands. He is refusing to sign a status of forces agreement allowing us to leave U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan after the war, troops that would be used to protect Afghans! LAST WEEK, Karzai summoned a meeting of his country’s elders, called a loya jirga, and attempted to hammer out a long-term agreement with the United States and its NATO allies for training Afghan troops and providing security after hostilities are ended in 2014. Obama, ably assisted by his then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton, utterly botched a similar status of forces agreement at the end of our involvement in Iraq. He does not want a reprise. Unfortunately, Karzai is being disagreeable in the extreme even with his loya jirga. Though the loya jirga sided with the Americans on arrangements for our forces to continue in the country beyond 2014, Karzai kept tacking on demands to the negotiations, making it very unlikely that a |treaty can be signed by the end of 2013, which Obama insists on. For instance, Karzai’s spokesman,
Aimal Faizi, has said that Karzai will not sign an agreement if “another [U.S.] soldier steps foot into an Afghan home.” That will be difficult because American troops cannot desist from “home entries,” when that means affording sanctuary to marauding bands of Taliban when they slip into a local farmer’s home for refuge.
R. Emmett
Tyrrell (c) 2013, Creators Syndicate
THEN, TOO, President Karzai has added that he wants American assistance in initiating peace talks with the Taliban. One way the Americans could assist would be to release all 17 Afghan citizens in the Guantanamo Bay detention center. Finally, Karzai repeated his non-negotiable demand that he will not sign any agreement until after the Afghan presidential elections in April. Even the loya jirga was stunned. When he finished with his demands, the Afghan president turned to Susan E. Rice. She is President Obama’s national security advisor and had flown to Kabul in a surprise appearance to emphasize how serious Obama is about getting an agreement by year’s end. Karzai simply said to Rice: “Madame Rice, the ball is in your court.” What is our president to do with this unwelcome ball? May I suggest a variant of the Tyrrell Doctrine? First formulated in my authoritative After the Hangover, The Conservatives’ Road to Recovery, the Tyrrell Doctrine took is-
sue with the well-intentioned but in the end hopelessly quixotic idea of “Nation Building.” The United States government has not a clue as to how we might transform, say, Iraq into a democracy, much less Afghanistan, which is very content as things stand now with its trusty loya jirga, its tribes and its warlords. Arguably, even I would be satisfied with these instruments of government if I lived there. According to my Doctrine, when the United States Armed Forces are dispatched to a lawless country where obstreperous terrorists are endeavoring to do us mischief, it shall be sufficient to kill the malefactors, wreak a little chastening havoc and depart. Romans built well-paved roads and aqueducts, but they also wanted an empire. Americans only want peace and quiet and an opportunity to do business back in Peoria. We need no empire. The way to adopt the Tyrrell Doctrine to President Karzai’s demands is to bid him a dignified adieu, but with a caveat. If in the future members of his citizenry sally forth to threaten the hair of an American or an American ally, then they can expect our Air Force overhead and very shortly thereafter the sky to rain down on them the utmost violence. We shall dispatch terrorists in his midst whether he likes it or not. Then we depart. There will be no rebuilding. We have tried that sort of thing, and he in his rudeness proved it useless. GET ON WITH your election next spring, Karzai. You are welcome to your presidency for however long you can keep it.
31
December 11, 2013 CHINA: December 3, 2013
Has the Asian tiger gone tiger? Seems so
W
And since Richard Nixon returned hen Montecore, one of two white tigers in the Las Ve- Okinawa in 1972, Tokyo has adminisgas act of Siegfried and tered the uninhabited Senkakus, which claimed by the JapaRoy, turned and almost killed Roy on were first nese Empire in the stage, the reaction was that late 19th century. the tame and comChina contends placent beast had that all territories gone berserk. acquired by the Comedian (c) 2013, Creators Syndicate Japanese Empire Chris Rock was were forfeited and nearer the mark: “That tiger ain’t go crazy; that tiger should have been vacated with the Japanese surrender in 1945. Before Japan’s went tiger.” seizure of the islands, says Beijing, they SEEMS OUR Asian tiger is going had been Chinese territory. Yet, now, with naval vessels of both tiger as well. Sharply escalating its clash with Ja- nations plying the waters around the ispan over ownership of the Senkaku lands and fighter jets overflying these Islands, Beijing has established an air rocks, it is hard see either the China of defense identification zone over the Xi Jinping or the Japan of Shinzo Abe islands and a huge stretch of the East backing down before a clash occurs. And should that happen, we are in it. China Sea. Before entering its ADIZ, Clearly, China precipitated and says Beijing, all planes must now notify pushed this crisis. Since the new cenChina. The United States responded by fly- tury began, it has been asserting longing two B-52s through the zone. Ja- dormant and extravagant claims of napan and South Korea sent fighter jets tional sovereignty. China has laid claim to all the Parathrough, also without permission. China then sent a squadron of fighters over the cel and Spratly islands and virtually the entire South China Sea, parts of which, islands. Now, in a move that has startled To- and the resources beneath, are claimed kyo, the United States has advised U.S. by Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines airliners entering China’s new ADIZ to and Brunei. In 2001, a Chinese fighter crashed alert China. Japan considers this tacit U.S. recognition of China’s territorial a U.S. surveillance plane 80 miles off Hainan island, forcing it down, whereclaim. While America is not a party to the upon China held the crew captive and dispute over who owns the islands, un- stripped the plane of its intelligence der our security treaty, we are obligated equipment, until it got an apology from to come to Japan’s defense if islands ad- the Bush administration. China has also laid claim to virtually ministered by Tokyo are attacked.
Pat
Buchanan
the entire East China Sea, which is bor- absolute and permanent power on some dered by South Korea as well as Japan. other animating force. China is rooting its new claims in the It has declared the Yellow Sea and Taiold standbys — history, tribe and nation wan Strait off limits to the U.S. Navy. — the natural recourse of rising powers. With corruption rampant, and glaring CHINA ALSO occupies Indian territory taken in war half a century ago, economic equality between its billionthough it has lately muted its claim to aires and its hundreds of millions subvast tracts in Russia’s Far East along the sisting on $2 a day, China needs a cause to divert the masses and keep them Amur and Ussuri rivers. China and Russia fought a border united — behind the leaders and against those the leaders designate as enemies. war there in 1969. The Chinese people are being told What is the China of Xi Jinping they have enemies who seek to deny about? With Maoism and Marxism a dead their country its place in the sun. Some faith, the Communist Party is no lon- use the Dalai Lama to effect a breakger able to invoke world revolution to away of Tibet. Others encourage Musjustify its monopoly on power. Xi Jin- lim Uighurs to split off Xinjiang and ping’s party needs to ground its claim to create an East Turkestan. The dilemma for China is that in stoking nationalism with claims of sovereignty over all adjacent seas, Beijing risks uniting its neighbors against it. China could end up isolating itself, as Asian neighbors turn to the United States for protection. Push Japan hard enough and China may effect a change in its constitution, Japan’s rearmament, and another look by Tokyo at nuclear weapons. Pushed too hard, the U.S, and Japan, China’s largest trading partners, could shift their reliance on goods to Southeast Asia. As for America, we might want to reflect on the decision to throw open our markets to Chinese goods and to incentivize U.S. companies to shift factories, technology and jobs to a rising China How wise does that look, now that the Asian tiger feels strong enough to begin to push the United States out of the Western Pacific, its sovereign seas, and its sphere of influence? HOW WILL this all end? This week, China is sending its first probe to the moon — as Congress debates an increase in food stamps.
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Wednesday, December 11, 2013 • Volume 28, Number 50 • Hampton, Iowa