Obama’s Amazing Achievements

His military intervention prompted some stunning reversals.

Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, March 31, 2011

By bombing Libya, President Obama has accomplished some things once thought absolutely impossible in America:

(a) War-mongering liberals: Liberals are now chest-thumping about military “progress” in Libya. Even liberal television and radio commentators cite ingenious reasons why an optional, preemptive American intervention in an oil-producing Arab country, without prior congressional approval or majority public support — and at a time of soaring deficits — is well worth supporting, in a sort of “my president, right or wrong,” fashion. Apparently, liberal foreign policy is returning to the pre-Vietnam days of the hawkish “best and brightest.”

(b) Europe first: Many Americans have long complained about the opportunistic, utopian Europeans. Under the protective U.S. defense shield, they often privately urged us to deal with dangerous foreign dictators — while staying above the fray to criticize America, at the same time seeking trade advantages and positive global PR. But now the wily Obama has outwaited even the French. He has managed to shame them into acting, with a new opossum-like U.S. strategy of playing dead until finally the Europeans were exasperated — almost as if the president were warning them, “We don’t mind the Qaddafi bloodletting if you, who are much closer to it, don’t mind.” The British Guardian and French Le Monde will be too knee-deep in the Libyan war, busy chalking up Anglo-French “wins” and worrying about European oil concessions, to charge America with the usual imperialism, colonialism, and militarism. We are almost back to the 1956 world of the Suez crisis.

(c) Iraq was just a prequel to Libya: Conservatives have complained that opposition — especially in the cases of then-senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden — to George W. Bush’s antiterrorism policies and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was more partisan than principled. Obama ended that debate by showing that not only can he embrace — or, on occasion, expand — the Bush-Cheney tribunals, preventive detentions, renditions, Predator attacks, intercepts and wiretaps, and Guantanamo Bay, but he can now preemptively attack an Arab oil-exporting country without fear of Hollywood, congressional cutoffs, MoveOn.org “General Betray Us”–type ads, Cindy Sheehan on the evening news, or Checkpoint-like novels. In short, Obama has ensured that the antiwar movement will never be quite the same.

(d) Monster-in-recovery: The Qaddafi clan has been wooing Westerners through oil money and multicultural gobbledygook. In the last few years, the British released the Lockerbie bomber, a native of Libya; Saif Qaddafi, the would-be artist and scholar and the son of Col. Moammar Qaddafi, essentially bought a Ph.D. from the prestigious London School of Economics; the creepy Harvard-connected Monitor Group hired out cash-hungry “scholars” to write tributes to Qaddafi’s achievements; and Mariah Carey, 50 Cent, Beyoncé, and other entertainers earned a pile of petrodollars by crooning for the Qaddafis. Then, suddenly, Obama spoiled the fun and profits by turning Qaddafi from a rehabilitated monster back into Ronald Reagan’s old “Mad Dog of the Middle East.”

(e) Stuff happens: Many supporters of the Iraq War condemned Abu Ghraib as the poorly supervised, out-of-control prison it was. Lax American oversight resulted in the sexual humiliation of detained Iraqi insurgents. It was a deplorable episode, in which, nonetheless, no one was killed, and yet it took an enormous toll on the credibility of Bush-administration officials. But while the media were covering the Libyan bombing and the Middle East uprisings, a number of Afghan civilians allegedly were executed by a few rogue American soldiers. That was a far worse transgression than anything that happened at Abu Ghraib during Bush’s tenure — but it was apparently an incident that, in the new media climate, could legitimately be ignored. Obama made “stuff happens” an acceptable defense for those doing their best to run a war from Washington.

(f) War really is tiring: The media serially blamed a supposedly lazy Ronald Reagan for napping during military operations abroad. George W. Bush was criticized for cutting brush at his Texas ranch while soldiers fought and died in Iraq. Obama rendered all such presidential criticism mere nitpicking when he started aerial bombardment in the midst of golfing, handicapping the NCAA basketball tournament, and taking his family to Rio de Janeiro.

(g) The road to Damascus? After Bush’s interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, many war-weary Americans believed that we would never again get involved in a Middle East war. But now, with Obama’s preemptive bombing of Libya, giddy American interventionists are again eyeing Iran, Syria — and beyond!

In short, Obama turned America upside down when he bombed Libya — and in ways we could have scarcely imagined.

The Unconcealed Truth About Carrying Guns

By Steve Chapman
Thursday, March 31, 2011

"Experience is a dear teacher," said Benjamin Franklin, "but fools will learn at no other." Give some credit to fools: At least they eventually learn from experience. What would Franklin say about people who don't?

By that, I refer to gun control advocates alarmed that the Illinois legislature may vote to let licensed individuals carry concealed handguns. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence calls the measure "dangerous." Kristen Rand of the Violence Policy Center says that it would lead to Tucson-style mass shootings as well as the killing of police.

But concealed-carry, as it is known, is not a radical notion in most of the country. Thirty-seven "shall-issue" states grant permits to carry to anyone meeting certain requirements, and 48 allow citizens to carry guns under some circumstances. The two holdouts? Wisconsin, where Republican Gov. Scott Walker has endorsed the idea, and Illinois, where Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn has not.

But Quinn has vexed many downstate Democrats by abolishing capital punishment and allowing same-sex civil unions. So speculation is that he may have to make it up to them by going along on concealed weapons.

The opponents rely on a litany of horribles. The Violence Policy Center in Washington claims that since May 2007, individuals licensed to carry guns killed 286 private citizens and 11 law enforcement officers and committed 18 mass shootings. This gory record, it asserts, destroys the myth that permit holders are generally law-abiding folks who behave responsibly.

In fact, VPC's own data, when inspected closely, doesn't dent the case for gun rights. Over the past four years, there have been more than 60,000 homicides in the United States. The slayings carried out by permit holders amount to fewer than one of every 200 murders. For every licensee who killed someone, there are more than 20,000 who didn't.

Nor does the evidence indicate that allowing people to carry pistols causes crime. Many of the shootings done by permit holders took place in their homes -- where you don't need a concealed-carry license to keep a gun.

Some of the killings weren't even done with firearms: Among the cases cited by the VPC is a 2008 strangling in Florida, allegedly by a man who was licensed to carry. How can strangulation be blamed on a concealed weapon permit? If a fisherman kills someone, do we ban fishing rods?

Often, notes Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck, the murders were premeditated or committed during the course of other serious crimes. In those cases, the license was irrelevant -- unless you assume that someone willing to break the laws against murder or rape would not be willing to break another law by packing a sidearm.

What is extremely rare is a homicide committed by a permit holder in a public place in a fit of anger. Reviewing an earlier two-year database compiled by VPC, Kleck found only five cases "where possession of a carry permit may have contributed to the occurrence of the killing." Such episodes are not quite flying pigs, but almost.

What the gun control groups don't tabulate is how many homicides have been averted by a licensed, concealed handgun. Kleck, who has done extensive research on the topic, says it is "quite reasonable to expect that thousands of lives are saved by defensive gun use by persons who carried guns in public places." Even if he's wrong, it would take only a handful of such incidents to offset the homicides "caused" by concealed-carry laws.

The problem for opponents is that they have sown fear from the beginning, only to harvest a meager crop. A generation ago, few states allowed concealed-carry. When Florida captured national attention by legalizing it in 1987, critics forecast mass carnage. When other states followed suit, the same predictions were heard.

But they turned out to be false alarms. Instead of an epidemic of violence, the nation saw a drop. Since 1991, the murder rate has been cut nearly in half. You don't have to believe that "shall-issue" laws caused the decline to grasp that they certainly didn't get in the way.

The record of the past two decades demonstrates that you can strengthen the right of law-abiding adults to protect themselves against crime without making the world more dangerous. That knowledge is helpful in Illinois, to those willing to learn from experience.

Reaganomics Key to Growth Then, Now

By Larry Kudlow
Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Last week I had the honor and privilege of participating in the Reagan Centennial celebration here in New York City. It was truly a wonderful event put together by the Reagan Presidential Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, and the Wall Street Journal. Almost all of the key surviving architects of Reaganomics were gathered together.

The purpose of the event, “Supply-Side Economics: From the Reagan Era to Today” was to review four key principles of economic growth initiated by President Reagan:

1) Low tax rates on a broad economic base

2) Sound monetary policy

3) Free trade

4) Sensible regulatory policy

It was these principles that unleashed a wave of economic growth that led to an era of unprecedented prosperity here in America. And it is these same principles that can restore our country to prosperity today.

Joining me in a special panel discussion moderated by CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo were two terribly bright thinkers: Lew Lehrman and Lawrence Lindsey.

You can watch the entire conference at www.manhattaninstitute.org.

Here are a couple excerpts from my panel remarks.

“Growth solves a lot of problems, OK? Growth solves budget problems, growth solves deficit problems, growth solves debt problems. I'm all for limiting spending. I just want to say that. Yes, yes indeed. We get back to 20 percent of GDP or less on spending, I am fine with that, OK? Fine with that. But I don't see debt as this new red menace out there. What I see is growth as the lord's savior to the economy and our fiscal position.”

“Just make the dollar sound and keep marginal tax rates low. The economy will grow beautifully. But if the dollar falls, as it's been falling for 10 years-- on the index it's at a 10 year low nearly--then it neutralizes the lower tax rates, you see what I'm saying? Because commodity prices soar and the capital flows outside the country, and it's a dreadful policy. So, low tax rates, limited government. Keep the dollar sound.”

Right now, Republican presidential candidates are beginning to prepare for the upcoming election and are formulating their respective policy agendas. The key question each GOP candidate should be asked is whether they have a real pro-growth agenda. This, along with a free market focus and a strong dollar policy are absolutely key.

We must keep the legacy of Reaganomics alive.

It Can’t Happen Here

U.S. nuclear reactors are far stronger than their Japanese counterparts.

Lou Dolinar
Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Would U.S. nuclear reactors fare better in some ultimate crisis than those in Japan? For weeks now, we’ve been lectured by nuclear critics who say the design and failures of the Fukushima Daiichi installation presage catastrophic failures in our own reactors. There’s good reason to believe the critics are wrong, though certainly the industry will learn lessons and apply technical tweaks.

Why? After 9/11, American nuclear plants underwent top-to-bottom safety review and upgrades unique in the world. Measures taken to protect against terror attacks can incidentally deal with the destruction of large areas of the plant, as well as subsequent catastrophic loss of electrical power, controls, and pumping equipment (among other dire scenarios) that fail in a fashion similar to what happened in Japan.

“You can have a tsunami, or an explosion, or an airplane hit the plant, but the plant must have on-site and off-site resources to prevent the release of radiation,” says Dr. Nils J. Diaz, former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission under President George W. Bush. Diaz was the key figure in developing the emergency-response plans.

President Obama referred obliquely to these measures when he said, “Our nuclear power plants have undergone exhaustive study and have been declared safe for any number of extreme contingencies.” The administration’s calm response to the crisis — in sharp contrast with, for example, Germany chancellor Angela Merkel’s, or even its own during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill — appears based on the fact that American facilities are uniquely hardened against disaster.

As usual in a major crisis, the mainstream media has maintained a strict blackout on saying anything good about the Bush administration, along with the robust nature of American nuclear power. “I’ve been on TV 28 times — from MSNBC to CNN to Fox News — and several times I’ve mentioned it, I’ve tried to be reassuring, but every time the point they try to make is how bad things are.” says Diaz, who’s even written a couple of unpublished op-ed pieces. By contrast, the alarmists, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, Friends of the Earth, the Institute for Policy Studies, and some Democratic-party officials, including New York governor Andrew Cuomo and Massachusetts congressman Ed Markey, have virtually monopolized the national discussion. Their failure to include the post-9/11 upgrades is disingenuous. As stories go, this is a pretty hard one to miss. It’s even laid out in some detail on the NRC website.

To be fair to the media, the government and the nuclear industry have been cagey about details that terrorists could exploit, which invariably triggers an itch of distrust among journalists. Some things aren’t public. In addition, experts say cultural factors are also at work in dampening the discussion: Information and advice flows more freely when Japanese managers are treated collegially, rather than lectured about their shortcomings. The U.S., in other words, can’t be seen by the Japanese as bragging about its own nuclear prowess.

Power operations are a good example of the difference between response here and in Japan: The Fukushima Daiichi cooling systems apparently functioned for a time on battery backup power, but when that ran out, emergency generators failed, and the reactors began heating up, eventually leading to explosions and further damage that still has the plant on shaky footing. An early power-up could have prevented all that, but the Japanese took days to string new lines to the site.

U.S. plants appear better able to maintain cooling and power — and to restore both fairly quickly if lost. A Tennessee Valley Authority facility recently displayed for the New York Times and several other outlets have portable backup batteries and some manual controls onsite to manage critical systems. As the Times’s Matthew Wald wrote, “One cart could power the instruments that measure the water level in the reactor vessel, an ability that Japanese operators lost a few hours after the tsunami hit. Another could operate critical valves that failed early at Fukushima.

“They’re like a backup to the backup,” Keith J. Polson, the T.V.A.’s vice president for the Browns Ferry site told the Times. “That’s what we think the Japanese didn’t have.”

Wald didn’t see important hardware that was dispersed both onsite and off — hardware developed during anti-terror preparations. These include generators, fuel oil, pumps, safety gear, more batteries, lights, and radiation suits, according to Eric Lowen, chief consulting engineer at GE-Hitachi, which designed the Japanese plants. For security reasons he couldn’t specify the location or say how quickly this equipment could be deployed, but one expert on emergency response estimated that within twelve to 24 hours, possibly less, would be enough. We’re also told there are now mutual-aid pacts between plant operators, to coordinate cross-training and the sharing of personnel.

Decision-making may be another problem that’s plagued the Japanese, and is also something U.S. planners examined closely after 9/11. Absent power, according to Lowen, plant operators followed protocol to flood the reactor with “fire water” — as its known in the business. There’s even a standard fitting to connect pumps or a fire truck, and standard guidelines for when to apply external water. Sea water or water from a hydrant works fine for cooling and ending the immediate emergency, but it is a highly destructive step: Anything other than distilled water will damage the plant and force its owners to decommission it.

Media reports suggest TEPCO delayed too long in flooding the reactor with sea water, in part because managers were unwilling to write off a multi-billion-dollar investment. Lowen and other industry experts are more sympathetic; they say the sheer level of destruction, the loss of life, and the personal loss in the country may have crippled decision making. Anthony Pietrangelo, chief nuclear officer with the Nuclear Energy Institute, says there’s still an information vacuum: “We don’t know whether they moved fast or slow.”

Still, judging from comments by operators and the NRC, there’s a stronger chain of command in place in the U.S., in part because of reforms after the Three Mile Island accident, where the plant operator delayed informing the NRC (which had minimal authority at the time anyway), and partly as a result of an increased emphasis on potential terror attacks. U.S. plant technicians also benefit from stepped-up safety drills, based on computer modeling, in which the NRC runs simulations at a faster pace than occurs in real life until workers’ every move becomes automatic, observes NRC spokesman Scott Burnell. People in the industry won’t come right out and say it, but one gets the distinct impression that a U.S. operator, to prevent a meltdown or radiation release, would not dither over sacrificing a reactor by flooding it with seawater. “I think we have the protocol in place where the action will be taken,” says Pietrangelo.

Post-9/11, the NRC verified some theoretical problems at nuclear plants the hard way: They ran so-called Red Team operations. Among the scenarios: flooding, airplanes crashing into facilities, and the successful penetration of a site by terrorists equipped with explosives. They’ve studied various vulnerabilities to cyber attacks and inside jobs. The NRC website indicates that they’ve also come up with methods for dealing with spent fuel pools like those that have plagued the Fukushima Daiichi plant, as well as dry storage casks for nuclear waste that are also considered problematic.

Besides the post-9/11 emphasis on security, there are other reasons why it is dubious to equate U.S. reactors to Japan’s.

While there are similarities among Japanese plants and the 23 GE Mark 1 plants in the U.S. –including the principal component (i.e. the reactor and the containment systems) — the overall design, which includes electrical systems and generators, is site-specific. For example, according to GE’s Lowen, TEPCO wanted to minimize the amount of space occupied by the six reactors. This creates a situation where problems with one reactor can interfere with another. In the U.S., operators generally opt to spread out their reactors or have fewer reactors on one site. Brown’s Ferry plant that the Times toured, for example, has three reactors; the Fukushima Daiichi has six. Conversely, Japanese plants are generally more earthquake resistant that those in the U.S. that don’t sit on geological faults.

Critics of the GE design typically cite a 1972 report that said, under some circumstances, the Mark I reactors, among the oldest still in use, could “tear containment apart and create an uncontrolled release,” as Dale Bridenbaugh was quoted as saying recently by ABC News. Bridenbaugh resigned from GE over the issue and later became a consultant to the film The China Syndrome. Another frequently quoted critic from the ’70s is Steven Hanauer, then a safety official with the NRC.

There are flaws in that argument. First, no reactor has torn itself apart. There have been unconfirmed stories of possible leaks. If there are indeed leaks, we won’t have a clue for months as to what caused them. For example, there was a report yesterday that one reactor may have melted down and breached containment — an apparent failure of cooling, not the reactor vessel. (The NRC, meanwhile, was saying that the situation appears to be stabilizing.) Given the magnitude of the earthquake and the tsunami, the reactors appear to have held up well beyond seismic and pressure design specs.

Second, GE issued a series of fixes, including the addition of bracing, to the Mark I in the 1980s to address criticisms, and those fixes were made mandatory in the U.S. by the NRC. GE says it doesn’t know whether those upgrades were ever implemented in Japan.

Finally, Bridenbaugh told ABC that the refits addressed the concern that prompted his resignation, even though “the Mark I is still a little more susceptible to an accident that would result in a loss of containment.” But in the nuclear industry, every new generation of plants is more robust than the one that proceeded it. The NRC, including Hanauer, greenlighted the revised design as well.

The one legitimate systemic issue is overcrowding of spent fuel rods in the cooling pool. In fact, many U.S. facilities have even more spent fuel than the Fukushima Daiich plant that should be disposed of elsewhere. In the United States, however, there’s one guy to blame: Senate majority leader Harry Reid, along with his gambling buddies in Las Vegas, who have blocked safe long-term storage at Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas, to protect the tourism industry from radiation-induced paranoia.

Overall, Diaz says, “we have the best system in the world to deal with large scale damage to the plants, including explosions and other external hazards. Could it be better? Sure. Is it continuing to be reviewed? Sure. Maybe additional changes will need to be made, but they will be minor.”

Taking Feminism Overseas

Economic development, democracy, and basic decency require empowering women abroad.

Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Feminism as a “movement” in America is largely played out. The work here is mostly done.

At a time when education matters more than ever, more American women attend college than men. More women graduate, with better grades and more advanced degrees. As Kay Hymowitz writes in her new book, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys: “For the first time ever, and I do mean ever, young women are reaching their twenties with more achievements, more education, more property, and, arguably, more ambition than their male counterparts.”

Even the fight for “pay equity” is an argument about statistics, lagging cultural indicators, and the actual choices liberated women make — to take time away from paid jobs to raise their kids (never-married women without kids earn more than men) or to work in occupations like the nonprofit sector that pay less.

These are the fruits of feminist success. And, as the father of a little girl, I’m grateful for many of feminism’s achievements. And as a conservative, I’m delighted that so much of the energy and passion on the right is fueled by women, a fact that causes no small amount of cognitive dissonance on the left. For instance, when Sarah Palin was tapped as the second woman on a presidential ticket in American history, University of Chicago professor Wendy Doniger fumed that Palin’s “greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.”

That is the kind of thing intellectuals say when they have nothing worth saying anymore.

The good news for those who want to continue the fight for women is that there is plenty of work left to do — abroad.

The plight of women in other countries is not only dire, it’s central to global poverty and the war on terrorism. Jihadism is largely a male problem. This shouldn’t be a surprise, given that jihadis commit mass murder in pursuit of a virgin bonus in the afterlife.

Islamist extremism and oppression of women go hand in hand. And while the correlation between poverty and terrorism is often overstated, the correlation between prosperity and women’s liberation is profound. Female education is tightly linked with GDP growth, lower birthrates, and even higher agricultural yields.

It’s also tightly linked with human freedom and decency, which is why no Islamic “spring” is possible without a feminist revolution. Countless Islamist countries practice gender apartheid and countenance wife-beating, honor killings, and female genital mutilation. Islamist radicals have thrown acid in the faces of young girls for trying to go to school.

In Turkey, long the crown jewel of secular, modern, and moderate Islam, the murder rate of women has gone up 1,400 percent since the country lurched toward Islamism, notes my American Enterprise Institute colleague Michael Rubin. In Egypt, those who hoped for a secular and democratic revolution are dismayed by the army’s burgeoning partnership with the Muslim Brotherhood and reports that the military forced “virginity tests” on female protesters taken from Tahrir Square.

After being admitted to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, Iran shepherded to passage the only resolution this session aimed at a specific country. Apparently Israel holds back Palestinian women somehow.

Meanwhile, as Omri Ceren of Commentary has noted, “Iranian prison guards rape female dissidents before executing them, lest their victims go to heaven as virgins. Iranian men get to avail themselves of temporary marriages, de facto legalizing the institutionalized slavery and rape of prepubescent girls. Iranian women are consigned to the backs of buses, have to shroud their bodies from head to toe.”

But there are signs of hope as well. In a widely circulating video, Veena Malik, a Pakistani model and actress, tears apart a smug Islamist mullah berating her for being “un-Islamic.” Not only does she stand up for a modern, humane Islam that can tolerate women and “fun,” she tells the cleric, “I am more angry with you people than you are with me.” Malik offers heroic moral clarity that should cheer anyone who has lamented the lack of moderate Muslims willing to condemn the extremists.

And she offers a reminder for us all that the real war for women’s equality is now a battle to be fought in foreign lands.

Students Who Get It!

By John Stossel
Wednesday, March 30, 2011


I went to Princeton in 1969, where they taught me that government could solve the world's problems. Put the smartest people in a room, give them enough taxpayer money, and they will fix most everything. During those years, I heard nothing about an alternative.

How things have changed!

I recently spent time with several hundred college-aged people at a Students for Liberty conference in Washington, D.C. Here were hundreds of students who actually understand that government creates many of the problems, and freedom -- personal and economic liberty -- makes things better.

I appeared at the conference along with David Boaz of the Cato Institute. Here are some highlights.

Karina Zannat, a student at American University in Washington, D.C., said, "A lot of my professors seem to think that even when politicians spend money in seemingly wasteful ways, we should be OK with it because every dollar spent is one dollar that goes toward income for an American citizen."

This is a common canard known as the "broken window" fallacy. The 19th-century French free-market writer Frederic Bastiat exposed it with the story of a boy who breaks a shop window, prompting some townspeople to look at the bright side: fixing the window will stimulate economic activity in the town. The fallacy, of course, is that had the window not been broken, the shopkeeper would have spent the money in more productive ways.

People often commit this fallacy -- have a look at what's being written in the wake of Japan's tsunami.

Meg Patrick of George Mason University asked about the Austrian business cycle theory. How delightful to meet a student interested in that! This is Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek's argument that when government inflates the money supply and holds down interest rates to create an economic boom, a bust, or recession, must follow because the prosperity is built on an artificial foundation.

Meg wanted to know if "the injection of fiscal stimulus into the economy (after the bust) disrupts the signals necessary to fix the current problem."

To which I replied: Sure does. The market is signaling that certain changes are needed, but stimulus spending interferes with those signals. If businesses are not allowed to fail, we don't get the market feedback we need.

David Boaz added: "If you get drunk, you have a hangover. I'm sure some of you have tried the theory: just keep drinking. But you can't keep drinking forever."

Ian Downie from the University of Virginia had a good question about spending: "Our congressional representatives have huge incentives to steal the wealth from the vast majority of the country and funnel it down to their constituents. What kind of systematic changes can we make to stop this perverse incentive machine?"

"The special interests are always there," Boaz said. "The challenge is to get the public interest -- the taxpayers -- to stick around after the election, to keep putting pressure on. And that is very difficult."

He went on to say we need constitutional limits on what government can do. We tried that, of course, but too many insiders have an incentive to interpret the limits so broadly that they are hardly limits at all. So government grows.

Grant Babcock, from the University of Pittsburgh, raised a good point: "If government grows in response to crises, what do we do? It seems like there is always another crisis on the horizon. It used to be international communism. Nowadays ... it's the threat of Islamist fundamentalism. ... Are we trapped?"

The media do keep inventing new crises. The global-warming crisis, the swine flu crisis, the pesticide crisis.

"The running-out-of-oil crisis," Boaz added.

Crisis is a friend of the state.

As Boaz pointed out, however, "sometimes there are crises that cause countries to go ... toward less government. New Zealand hit a crisis like that, and they actually reformed their economy. So there's at least the hope that the next crisis in the United States or Europe will cause people to say: 'This hasn't been working. We have to cut back.'"

After spending time with those students, I feel better about the future of America.

Spacing Issues

The C.A.A. has been experiences issues with the spaces between paragraphs. Hopefully Blogger can solve the issue soon. Sorry.

The Return of Stagflation

By Paul Greenberg Monday, March 28, 2011 Some of us have seen this movie before -- and didn't much like it the first time. The cast might have changed but the plot is the same: A president thinks he can keep spending-and-taxing, running up deficits and adding to the national debt, but escape the inescapable result: rising inflation. More dollars, less wealth. Why work, save, invest, put in overtime or start a business if the dollars you earn are worth less and less? Inflation is the most insidious of taxes, eroding people's savings, salaries, initiative. As the economy stagnates, national morale turns into national malaise. Consumer confidence drops, and so does American confidence in general. The series of interlocked, complex operations that is the American economy starts to sputter. Then comes the decisive blow: Unrest in the Middle East raises the price of oil to extortionate levels. It happened to Richard Nixon's presidency, then Jimmy Carter's. The oil shock ripples through the rest of the economy. Price controls -- and restrictions on domestic oil production -- only aggravate the crisis. The result: long lines at the pump, shortages in general, and ever higher prices. The country reaps the worst of both undesirable worlds: stagnation and inflation. A new word has to be coined to describe the new combination: Stagflation. Unemployment, inflation, interest rates, all hit double digits. The misery index, unemployment plus inflation, rises sharply. People feel trapped. As if they were on a treadmill headed down, down, down while prices keep going up, up, up. And there seems no way to get off. The intellectuals begin writing think pieces not about how to create the conditions for a robust recovery, but how to handle America's inevitable decline in the world. The country's leaders make empty excuses, put off the hard decisions necessary to reverse course, and temporize in general. Frustration grows. A sense of futility spreads. That's stagflation. Today's sequel -- call it Stagflation II -- has only started filming. There is still time to yell "Cut!" before the unhappy ending is upon us again. But will this president wake up in time? So far he's been sleeping through the opening scenes. Somebody needs to turn on the house lights and stop this production while there's still time. There's no shortage of decisive actions waiting to be taken. See the Bowles-Simpson report, with its list of ways to balance the budget. But there's little will to enact them. Somebody's favorite ox, or even calf, might be gored. And so the great ship that is the American economy stays on the same disastrous course, taking on water as it drifts toward ... the falls. Now, now, we're told, let's not be alarmist. There's nothing here that can't be explained away by the experts. Sure, inflation is growing ("February consumer prices up 0.5 percent" -- news item, March 18, 2011.) And the details behind the headline are scarcely assuring: "Consumer prices in the U.S. climbed more than forecast in February, led by the highest food prices since 2008 and rising fuel costs. The Consumer Price Index increased 0.5 percent, the most since June 2009, figures from the Labor Department showed Thursday in Washington...." But strip out the cost of fuel and food, we're assured, and "inflation is relatively subdued." That kind of unassuring assurance makes one wonder: Does whoever compiles these numbers pump his own gas or buy his own groceries? If so, hasn't he noticed what's happening? And it's happening to the core of the economy. For who can get by without food and fuel? What, Washington worry? The administration's budgeteers are still having fun with numbers. And still getting caught at it. To quote one, all too typical headline the other day: "Obama's budget is seen/ underestimating deficits." No kidding? Alas, at least for the administration, there's always some spoilsport around who insists on blowing the whistle: "WASHINGTON (Bloomberg News) -- President Barack Obama's 2012 budget would produce $2.3 trillion more in deficits over the next decade than the administration projects, according to the Congressional Budget Office." Is anybody surprised? What'll we find out next, that the projections for how much ObamaCare will cost are skewed, too? That won't surprise anybody who's been paying attention, either. As the economy hurtles on, following this too familiar script, what's most conspicuous -- by its absence -- is any constancy of purpose on the part of all the president's men. One day they're pushing an economic stimulus package -- Full speed ahead, inflation be damned! -- and the next issuing pro forma warnings about the danger of federal deficits out of control. There seems to be no single guiding principle at work, just a series of fits and starts in response to the crisis of the moment. In that respect, the president's economic policy matches his foreign policy: React to today's events rather than shape tomorrow's. It's hard to avoid the impression that once again the country is in the slippery grip of an ad-hocracy with no fixed purpose. But that's not quite right. This president does share one overriding concern with every other officeholder: his re-election. That seems to be his pole star; his every action is guided by it. If he has an ideology, that's it. The conspiracy theorists are wrong: Barack Obama isn't engaged in some insidious plot to turn the United States of America into just another European-style social democracy. That could be the result of all his twists and turns, but it's scarcely a conscious goal. It's just where we're drifting. And will continue to drift till the American people themselves wake up and decide to reverse course.

Voting with Their Feet

By Thomas Sowell Tuesday, March 29, 2011 The latest published data from the 2010 census show how people are moving from place to place within the United States. In general, people are voting with their feet against places where the liberal, welfare-state policies favored by the intelligentsia are most deeply entrenched. When you break it down by race and ethnicity, it is all too painfully clear what is happening. Both whites and blacks are leaving California, the poster state for the liberal, welfare-state and nanny-state philosophy. Whites are also fleeing the big northeastern liberal, welfare states like Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, as well as the same kinds of states in the midwest, such as Michigan, Ohio and Illinois. Although California has long been a prime destination of Asian immigrants and the homes of their descendants, the 2010 census shows a striking increase in the Asian American population of Nevada, more so than any other state. Nevada is adjacent to California but has no income tax nor the hostile climate for business that California maintains. The movement of the black population-- especially educated young blacks-- is the most striking of all. In the past, the massive movements of millions of blacks out of the South in the early 20th century was one of the epic migrations of a people-- comparable in size with the millions of the Irish who fled the famine in Ireland in the 1840s or the millions of Jews who fled persecution in Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In more recent decades, blacks have been moving back to the South, however. While the overall black population of the northeastern and midwestern states has not declined in the past ten years, except in Michigan and Illinois, the net increase of the black population nationwide has increasingly been in the South. About half of the national growth of the black population took place in the South in the 1970s, two-thirds in the 1990s and three-quarters in the past 10 years. While the mass migrations of blacks out of the South in the early 20th century was to places where there were already established black communities, such as New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, much of the current movement of blacks is away from existing concentrations of black populations. Blacks are moving to suburbs, and even to cities like Minneapolis. Overall, the racial residential segregation patterns are declining in the great majority of the largest major metropolitan areas. Among blacks who moved, the proportions who were in their prime -- from 20 to 40 years of age-- were greater than in the black population at large, and college degrees were more common among them than in the black population at large. In short, with blacks, as with other racial or ethnic groups, those with better prospects are leaving the states that are repelling their most productive citizens in general with liberal policies. Detroit is perhaps the most striking example of a once thriving city ruined by years of liberal social policies. Before the ghetto riot of 1967, Detroit's black population had the highest rate of home-ownership of any black urban population in the country, and their unemployment rate was just 3.4 percent. It was not despair that fueled the riot. It was the riot which marked the beginning of the decline of Detroit to its current state of despair. Detroit's population today is only half of what it once was, and its most productive people have been the ones who fled. Treating businesses and affluent people as prey, rather than assets, often pays off politically in the short run-- and elections are held in the short run. Killing the goose that lays the golden egg is a viable political strategy. As whites were the first to start leaving Detroit, its then mayor Coleman Young saw this only as an exodus of people who were likely to vote against him, enhancing his re-election prospects. But what was good for Mayor Young was disastrous for Detroit. There is a lesson here somewhere, but it is very doubtful if either the intelligentsia or the politicians will learn it.

Bag the Plastic Ban

Banning or taxing plastic bags causes more problems than it solves. Nat Brown Tuesday, March 29, 2011 Before they came for our light bulbs, they targeted our plastic bags. And they’re still after them. It all began in 2002, when Ireland enacted a plastic-bag tax for the clearly stated purpose of lowering the amount of litter in the country. The fact that it would also raise tax revenue was an added bonus. And sure enough, weeks after its passage, the New York Times was already reporting a 94 percent drop in plastic-bag use, as reusable bags quickly caught on among Irish shoppers. So naturally, when San Francisco (big surprise) became the first U.S. city to pass an all-out ban on plastic grocery bags, in 2007, supporters were quick to highlight Ireland’s case as an example of the positive impact such legislation would have on the environment. Aside from making up a sizeable percentage of total litter, they argued, the bags took up a large amount of space in landfills and were difficult to recycle. In the years since passage of the San Francisco ban, several more municipalities have enacted similar legislation, including bans in Santa Monica and the unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County and a tax in Washington D.C. In Oregon, a statewide plastic-bag ban has been introduced in the legislature, as have prospective statewide bag taxes in both Indiana and Maryland. And why not? Such legislation reduces the amount of solid waste, promotes the use of reusable bags, and (in the case of taxes) increases much-needed revenue for state and local governments all at once, right? Well, not quite. Unfortunately, study after study has shown that most of the supposed “benefits” of these bans and taxes have a negligible effect on the environment at best, and can actually have unintended consequences that cause greater environmental harm. Take Ireland, for example. When the New York Times reported the 94 percent decrease, it neglected to specify that it was referring only to plastic grocery-bag use. Sales of non-grocery plastic bags (garbage bags, etc.) rose an astonishing 400 percent, amounting to a net increase of 10 percent in total plastic-bag consumption. In an interview with National Review Online, Patrick Gleason, state-affairs manager of Americans for Tax Reform, explains why. “I don’t know about you, but bags from the store I usually keep to reuse again, to line waste bins, clean up after a pet, etc., so when you don’t have a stockpile built up and aren’t saving these bags, you have to go buy new ones. This goes together with the nonsensical nature of this policy, which has no positive impact on the environment. What’s the point of discriminating against bags on one side of the checkout from bags on the other?” Similar results were found in San Francisco, where, as Gleason notes, “not only was there no change in [the amount of] total litter, but plastic bags comprised a greater share of the litter after the ban.” The fact is that in most U.S. locations, plastic bags account for a small fraction of total litter and landfill space. Philip Rozenski, director of marketing and sustainability for Hilex Poly, the largest plastic-bag manufacturer in the U.S. (and admittedly not a disinterested party), told NRO: “It has been shown over and over again that bags are less than 3 percent of litter, and in many locations, like San Francisco before the ban, it was less than 1 percent of litter.” Contrary to the beliefs of many ban proponents, plastic grocery bags are 100 percent recyclable, and according to the EPA, 13 percent of bags and wraps were recycled last year. “Theoretically we can go up to 90 to 100 percent recycled content,” noted Rozenski, “but 60 percent of the bags are reused as bin liners by consumers, so we have an industry goal to get to 25 or 30 percent.” Unfortunately, banning the bags has usually led grocery stores to shut down their plastic-recycling programs, contributing further to the problem that was meant to be solved. In addition to the damaging environmental effects of these bans and taxes, there are often significant negative economic outcomes. Unlike Ireland, which had imported most of its bags from China, the U.S. has vibrant plastic manufacturing, recycling, and secondary industries, all of which would be hurt greatly were bans and taxes to increase. For example, Rozenski notes that most composite-lumber companies use recycled bag content when manufacturing their product. “You’re looking at 4,000, maybe 5,000 [recycling] jobs that are created, and it’s a growing industry. With composite lumbers, it puts the number getting near 10,000 direct and indirect jobs through plastic-bag recycling.” And as is almost always the case with legislation like this, the unintended economic consequences hurt the poor more than anyone else, since it destroys jobs and adds unnecessary additional expenses to daily life. Gleason noted that when a statewide ban was being considered in California, certain groups that one might not expect came out in opposition. “You had groups like the NAACP of California that were part of our opposition to this, because bag bans and taxes hurt lower-income houses, small businesses, and often minority neighborhoods the most. In D.C., small-business owners were the group of people that disdained the bag tax more than any other out there.” What about all that supposed new revenue from the plastic-bag tax in Washington D.C.? Gleason explains that it suffers from the same problem inherent in the cigarette tax. “These lawmakers, they want to raise the cigarette tax . . . but the thing is, they also say ‘We’re going to raise money off it, and we’re also going to stop or decrease the activity.’ Those two goals work at cross-purposes, so that’s why you see revenue projections come in far below what they think they’re going to get.” Finally, there’s the issue of the reusable bags that are supposedly a green alternative to plastic. Most of those used in the U.S. were manufactured in China, and numerous studies have documented unsafe levels of lead in the bags, far in excess of the allowable limits, a problem that prompted a statement by Sen. Chuck Schumer on the issue. Additionally, studies have found high levels of e. coli bacteria present in many reusable bags unless they are washed after every use, sparking additional concerns over public health. How will this whole debate turn out? Gleason is hopeful. “I think momentum is swinging in favor of those who oppose unnecessary bag taxes and bans. Lawmakers focusing on this stuff are going to find that the public by and large doesn’t agree with what they’re trying to do, and they think it’s a distraction from the real challenges facing states and localities.” Those who wish to feel virtuous can still carry reusable bags, but they should refrain from imposing their sense of rectitude on others.

Texas Shines Big in the 2010 Census

By Michael Barone Monday, March 28, 2011 The Census Bureau last week released county and city populations for the last of the 50 states from the 2010 Census last week, ahead of schedule. Behind the columns of numbers are many vivid stories of how our nation has been changing -- and some lessons for public policy, as well. Geographically, our population is moving to the south and west, to the point that the center of the nation's population has moved to Texas County, Missouri. That sounds like the familiar story of people moving from the Snow Belt to the Sun Belt, but that's not exactly what's happening. Instead, the fastest growth rates in the 2000-10 decade have been in Texas, the Rocky Mountain states and the South Atlantic states. We're familiar with the phenomenon of people moving to the West Coast. But the three Pacific Coast states -- California, Oregon and Washington -- grew by 11 percent in the last decade, just 1 percent above the national average, while the South Atlantic states from Virginia through the Carolinas and Georgia to Florida grew by 17 percent. In 2000, the South Atlantic states had 121,000 more people than the Pacific Coast states. In 2010 they had 2.8 million more. What's been happening is that people from the Northeast and the Midwest have been flocking to the South Atlantic states, not to retirement communities but to Tampa and Jacksonville, Atlanta and Charlotte and Raleigh, which are among the nation's fastest-growing metro areas. The South Atlantic has been attracting smaller numbers of immigrants, as well. Coastal California, in contrast, has had a vast inflow of immigrants and a similarly vast outflow of Americans. High housing costs, exacerbated by no-growth policies and environmental restrictions, have made modest homes unaffordable to middle class families who don't want to live in Spanish-speaking neighborhoods or commute 50 miles to work. California for the first time in its history grew only microscopically faster than the nation as a whole (10 percent to 9.7 percent). Metro Los Angeles and San Francisco increasingly resemble Mexico City and Sao Paulo, with a large affluent upper class, a vast proletariat and a huge income gap in between. Public policy plays an important role here -- one that's especially relevant as state governments seek to cut spending and reduce the power of the public employee unions that seek to raise spending and prevent accountability. The lesson is that high taxes and strong public employee unions tend to stifle growth and produce a two-tier society like coastal California's. The eight states with no state income tax grew 18 percent in the last decade. The other states (including the District of Columbia) grew just 8 percent. The 22 states with right-to-work laws grew 15 percent in the last decade. The other states grew just 6 percent. The 16 states where collective bargaining with public employees is not required grew 15 percent in the last decade. The other states grew 7 percent. Now some people say that low population growth is desirable. The argument goes that it reduces environmental damage and prevents the visual blight of sprawl. But states and nations with slow growth end up with aging populations and not enough people of working age to generate an economy capable of supporting them in the style to which they've grown accustomed. Slow growth is nice if you've got a good-sized trust fund and some nice acreage in a place like Aspen. But it reduces opportunity for those who don't start off with such advantages to move upward on the economic ladder. The most rapid growth in 2000-10, 21 percent, was in the Rocky Mountain states and in Texas. The Rocky Mountain states tend to have low taxes, weak unions and light regulation. Texas has no state income tax, no public employee union bargaining and light regulation. Texas' economy has diversified far beyond petroleum, with booming high-tech centers, major corporate headquarters and thriving small businesses. It has attracted hundreds of thousands of Americans and immigrants, high-skill as well as low-skill. Its wide open spaces made for low housing costs, which protected it against the housing bubble and bust that has slowed growth in Phoenix and Las Vegas. The states, said Justice Brandeis, are laboratories of reform. The 2010 Census tells us whose experiment worked best. It's the state with the same name as the county that's the center of the nation's population: Texas.

Resentment Studies

By Mike Adams Monday, March 28, 2011 Here in the Tar Heel state, the Republicans have taken over the House and the liberals are freaking out. Thank goodness they don’t have guns. Otherwise, they’d be shooting up the campus and causing irreparable harm by injecting lead into the public water supply. One university chancellor was so freaked out she said this about the proposed Republican budgets cuts: “If the Republicans get their way we’re going to have to raise tuition by $2000. That will mean that most of the expense of higher education will have to be paid by the people who are using it - as opposed to the general public.” That’s a frightening prospect for a liberal, now isn’t it? Just imagine a society where people have to pay for the goods and services they use instead of having “society” foot the bill. To live in such a world would make people accountable for their actions, which might actually motivate them to conserve scarce resources. And we can’t have people conserving because that sounds too much like "conservative." (Author’s note: The word “conservative” is considered hate speech on most college campuses. I have a theory that most academic programs lack rigor because the word “rigor” sounds like another word that is banned by campus speech codes – unless, of course, you’re a black or hyphenated American). But, of course, the chancellor was right this time – I guess a blind nut occasionally finds a squirrel. So there will be budget cuts and there will be resentment among Generation Entitlement (hereafter: Generation E) students. Therefore, I’ve come to the rescue with a plan that solves everyone’s problems. My plan helps us cut the state budget for higher education while helping to ease the resentment that will undoubtedly ensue among Generation E students. My plan is very simple: Combine African American Studies, Gay & Lesbian Studies, and Women’s Studies into one academic program called “Resentment Studies.” I know that initially some will resent my proposal. But allow me a chance to explain my thinking with a few examples: 1. After my recent column “Rigor Please,” I received an angry email from an African American Studies major. He said he resented my assertion that his major was not rigorous. He also said he resented my use of the term “rigor” in the title of the column. There’s no sense in letting this young man just stew in his resentment. I propose letting him study his resentment so he can take full advantage of it upon graduation. My brief interchange with that student gave me the idea for a Resentment Studies major. His African American Studies program had taught him to guilt people into silence (or into giving him entitlements) by hating his country and expressing resentment towards white people. So let’s just come right out with it and call it Resentment Studies rather than masking the true intention of African American Studies. 2. And, speaking of coming out, I got an email from an ex-student who happens to be gay. He said he was outraged to find out that I oppose gay marriage and have written numerous articles criticizing the gay rights movement. He said that (had he known my views) he would not have taken my class. He also said that (had he found out about my views while he was in my class) he would have withdrawn (from the course). He closed his email by inviting me to perform oral sex on him. I declined the offer because I’m a heterosexist pig. Rather than charging the kid with sexual harassment I decided to offer him a government entitlement by allowing gays (not just black ones) to major in Resentment Studies. Since the guy made it through a whole semester in my class without knowing my views on homosexuality he had no reason to be resentful. But, since he was resentful anyway, he should hone those skills in a new Resentment Studies program. Heterosexism breeds resentment – and so do breeders! We must, therefore, make room in our diversity mission for an academic program promoting gay resentment. And administrators should stop Stonewalling, now! 3. Speaking of NOW, we can’t allow the feminists to miss out on the opportunity to major in Resentment Studies. In fact, I’ve already recruited the first potential feminist major for our program. This young criminology student wrote a policy paper proposing the death penalty for second degree rape. I criticized the student - reminding her that the Coker and Kennedy (no, not Teddy) Supreme Court decisions do not allow executions for rape. But the student got a different reaction from a feminist faculty member who simply said “Good. We need more angry feminists.” Some people think we need more angry feminists like a fish needs a bicycle. But I think we need more angry feminists in Resentment Studies. Asking that criminology major to change to Women’s Studies would be so passé. Gender is such an antiquated concept. Thank goddess for Resentment Studies! I appreciate having the opportunity to defend my proposal before the first generation of Resentment Studies graduates decides to repeal the First Amendment. This will be the downside of teaching people to resent the Framers because they owned slaves. Of course, I know there are still people who are angered by my proposal – particularly black lesbians who can no longer triple major in African American Studies, Gay & Lesbian Studies, and Women’s Studies. They should be especially angry since they have to pay for one degree rather than having the “general public” supply them with three. On the other hand, I am confident that the really angry graduates will perform better during job interviews. Employers are dying to hire people full of resentment with the credentials to prove it.

Why Liberals Hate Clarence Thomas and Sarah Palin

By Star Parker Monday, March 28, 2011 In days when slavery was legal in this country, all slaves did not willingly resign to the grim fate cast upon them. The human spirit longs to be free. In some individuals, that longing beats so strong in their breast that they will take large personal risks, against great odds, to rebel against tyranny that has transformed their life into a tool for someone else’s will and whim. Slaves who had the temerity to run away from their plantation “home” paid dearly if they were caught and returned. Measures were taken to make them an example to others who might harbor similar thoughts about freedom. Among those measures were brutal public beatings of rebels to which other slaves were forced to bear witness and digest with great clarity the price of rebelliousness. Such is the fate today of those uppity souls who choose to challenge the authority and legitimacy of our inexorably growing government plantation. Those with interests for the care and feeding of this plantation cannot physically punish these rebels with the whip. Their whip is the mainstream media and the means of punishment of this virtual whip is not beating of a physical body but assassination of character. This perspective helps us understand the ongoing liberal obsession with destroying Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and former Alaska governor Sarah Palin. Thomas and Palin are particularly threatening to liberals because their lives fly in the face of liberal mythology. According to this mythology, the essential and ongoing struggle in our nation is a power struggle of interests between “haves” and “have-nots” rather than an ongoing struggle for human freedom. According to this mythology, there is an elite class of “haves” who, by virtue of fate and birth, control power and wealth. They are conservative because their only interest is to keep things as they are. Fighting against this conservative elite are noble “have-nots”, struggling, by any means possible, to get their fair share and against wealth distributed by an unjust and blind fate. A high profile conservative, whose very life and personal history poses an open challenge and affront to this mythology, is a liberal’s worst nightmare. If being a conservative means simply protecting the bounty passed on to you by your forebears, why would a man from a poor black family in the south, or a woman from a white working class family in Alaska, be a conservative? No less a conservative whose conservatism plays a role in a successful professional life? The liberal answer is that the only way this could be possible is that this is an individual of dubious character, on the take, and being paid off handsomely by conservative powers that be. After all, in the liberal mindset, the government plantation, carefully grown and nurtured by liberals over these years, supposedly on behalf of our unfortunate “have-nots”, should be the natural home for anyone of modest background and no inheritance. Not only should that individual want to live on the plantation, but you’d think they would want to participate in the noble cause of keeping it growing. The federal government plantation now sucks out one quarter of our economy. Seventy percent of federal spending now amounts to checks government cuts and mails to individuals. Where does it all lead? Look at Detroit. This is a government plantation poster child and portent of our nation’s future if this keeps up. The human spirit does long to be free. Many understand this but are intimidated to speak up. Some are brave and do speak up. Those who are successful, who know there is no future on the plantation, will be publicly flogged by the overseers. Such is the case of Justice Thomas and Mrs. Palin. But it is brave individuals like this, in public and private life, upon whom our future depends.

Collapse of the Obama Worldview

By Austin Hill
Sunday, March 27, 2011

“…Today I authorized the Armed Forces of the United States to begin a limited military action in Libya, in support of an international effort to protect Libyan civilians…”

Thus began a press conference with President Barack Obama. It was Saturday March 19th. While traveling in Brazil, he took a few minutes to announce that a military response to the Gaddafi crisis was underway.

Calling the matter “a limited military action in Libya” that would “protect Libyan civilians” was an earnest attempt at a positive spin. But this fact remains: after spending the first two years of his presidency insisting that the values of America and the Muslim world are consistent with one-another, now President Barack Obama was ordering bombs to be dropped on a predominantly Muslim country.

Might this fact suggest that some of President Obama’s philosophical assumptions about the world have been, perhaps, a bit inaccurate?

Over the years, our current President has demonstrated an adherence to three important philosophical schools of thought. For one, he would clearly appear to be a proponent of economic collectivism, the assumption that the overall economic wellbeing of everybody - “the group,” if you will - is more important than the economic rights and liberties of the individual. His push to make healthcare a “basic human right,” his attempts to raise taxes on the wealthy so as to better fund “middle class” programs, and his stated desire to “spread the wealth around” (the goal he famously uttered to the “Joe The Plumber” character in 2008) are all consistent with this philosophy.

President Obama also seems to adhere to “moral relativism.” In general terms, this is the assumption that ideas, values, and cultures are not objectively good or bad in and of themselves, but instead are all very subjective, and relative to one-another. Evidence of the President’s moral relativism is especially apparent in the ways in which he seems to view the tensions that exist between the Muslim world and those of us in the West.

From the earliest days of his presidential campaign in 2007, Barack Obama made it clear that there was nothing objectively bad or wrong about the propensity towards terrorism of the Muslim nations, but rather, Muslim terrorism had to be understood in the context of American “hostility” and President Bush’s aggression. This relativistic view led to some amazing policy pronouncements, in particular, Obama’s declaration that as President he would plan a diplomatic meeting with the Holocaust denying Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Since the days of the Carter presidency, America has recognized Iran as a nation that sponsors “state terrorism,” and as such, the past five Presidents have refused to engage with Iran’s “leader.” But if there is nothing objectively good or bad about nations, then the U.S. has no reason to ostracize a nation that sponsors terrorism. Thus, candidate Obama proffered a plan for a new, “post-Bush” approach to Iran, and announced that he would meet with Ahmadinejad.

Along with his convictions about collectivism and relativism, President Obama also seems to adhere to “internationalism.” This is the assumption that global wellbeing is more important than the interests of any one, particular nation, and that global good is achieved only when individual nations operate in concert with one another. These three philosophical assumptions likely led to candidate Obama’s promise that the “first thing” he would do as President would be to end the “senseless war” in Iraq.

But running for the presidency is one thing, and actually being President is another. And while the three philosophical platforms of collectivism, relativism and internationalism made for some enticing campaign rhetoric, they have not made for a better world – not for America, and not for anyone else.

The President has found that the war in Iraq is pragmatically impossible to end right now. Iran has responded to our President’s friendliness with taunting, jeering, and insults. And despite the President’s sharp increase in U.S. foreign aid to Hamas and the Palestinians, the Muslim world is as dangerous, and as hostile to the West as it has ever been (an effigy of President Obama was stamped on and beaten in the streets of Tripoli last week).

This flawed worldview has been painfully apparent in the midst of several recent world events. When the Egyptian uprising began earlier this year, President Obama initially urged “calm” while Vice President Biden insisted that Hasni Mubarak was a “good guy.” Yet the people of Egypt, longing for freedom and to have a voice in how they are governed, thought differently from our President and Vice President, and continued to protest until Mubarak was gone.

And now the “broad coalition” of the United Nations has done what President Obama could not: they made the moral judgment that the murderous tyranny of a Muslim dictator named Muammar Gaddafi was objectively wrong, and needed to be stopped. The President’s commitment to internationalism necessitated a military decision that his own moral relativism would have never allowed. Indeed, the Obama worldview has collapsed. But what does this mean for American influence in the future?

Of Sweatshops And Classrooms

By David Stokes
Sunday, March 27, 2011

On March 25, 1911—exactly 100 years ago—approximately 500 workers were crafting “shirtwaists,” blouses with puffy sleeves and tight waists. These garments were the height of feminine fashion in America during the years before World War I and worn by “Gibson Girls.” It was part of an image personifying beauty, with a touch of independence, popularized by illustrated stories developed by a guy named—yep, you guessed it—Charles Dana Gibson.

But the women and girls (primarily) working long hours to produce the “shirtwaists” were not likely to actually wear them. They were immigrants for the most part, underpaid and overworked. They labored on the Lower East Side of New York City in a sweatshop at 29 Washington Place—specifically on floors seven through ten. On that particular Saturday they were wrapping up their otherwise typical workweek of many more than 55 hours or so, when a small fire started in a scrap bin. One sad hour later, glowing embers bore witness to an event of unspeakable horror. Sirens wailed throughout the city and hundreds of people made their way toward the scene of billowing smoke, “arriving in time to see tangles of bodies, some trailing flames, tumbling from the ninth-floor windows,” as described in the 2003 bestseller by David Von Drehle, Triangle—The Fire That Changed America.

It was a moment as pivotal as it was tragic.

The death toll reached 146, most of them women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. They died from burns, asphyxiation, trauma from a fall, or combinations thereof. In the aftermath of the Triangle fire, the movement toward trade unionism accelerated. Various governmental entities investigated and acted on issues such as low wages, the use of child labor, and employee safety. Eventually, several dozen laws and ordinances were enacted or enhanced, permanently changing the American workplace.

And, yes, part of the equation was the development of a strong labor movement in the country. In fact, standing in the crowd watching events unfold on that fateful day 100 years ago was a young lady named Frances Perkins, who would later serve as President Franklin Roosevelt’s Labor Secretary (the first woman in a presidential cabinet). She was famous for her observation that the Triangle fire was “the day the New Deal began.”

Few Americans today, no matter the political posture or affiliation, would seriously challenge the idea that things as they were in sweatshops in 1911 needed to change. And the next year, 1912, when the Titanic sunk, things changed to make sure ships had more lifeboats. Tragedies have often been the catalyst for constructive change and this has a way of honoring the memory of the fallen.

But the idea that somehow the current labor unrest among public workers in places like Wisconsin somehow relates to what happened 100 years ago in New York City is not only a stretch, it’s a, pardon the term, complete fabrication. If history is to be used to inform modernity, at least let’s make it honest and applicable. To compare, as some have done and are doing, the plight of workers in the garment district in 1911 with the issues du jour facing public workers is beyond ludicrous. And it brings to mind Talleyrand’s words, “it’s worse than a crime; it’s a blunder.”

Are the classrooms of America akin to “sweatshops” of old (or in many countries today)? Do schoolteachers and other public employees face the same dehumanizing conditions as immigrant workers before World War I? Do the deaths of 20 workers on an inadequate and overburdened fire escape in 1911 compare to the “plight” of public school teachers in Wisconsin who receive over $50,000 in annual salary, full medical coverage, and ten weeks off in the summer?

Recently, I was in Europe and tried to change a flight to come home a day early and the airline wouldn’t work with me on it. I was not happy. Then I turned on the hotel television and watched scenes from the Tokyo airport. It put my “unhappiness” into perspective. I used to complain that I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.

Yes, American workers—private and public—owe a debt of gratitude to people who fought valiantly generations ago. We also owe honor to so many whose lives were sacrificed on altars of human greed and indifference. But the surest way to dishonor those who fought and died for a better standard of life today is to somehow think that our battles today are on par with theirs.

Not in the same league, frankly. Not even close.

What we have in the current public employee brouhaha is an argument on behalf of unionism for the sake of perpetuating unionism—all done in the education field, of course, in the name of the children. But even that rings hollow when considered in light of what the patron saint of public employee unions had to say. His name was Albert Shanker (1928-1997--former president of American Federation of Teachers) and he was famous for the line, “When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.”

His spirit seems to be alive and well across the board in the public employee labor movement.

The Art of Inconclusive War

Why is it that the United States no longer wins wars?

Mark Steyn
Saturday, March 26, 2011

It is tempting and certainly very easy to point out that Obama’s war (or Obama’s “kinetic military action,” or “time-limited, scope-limited military action,” or whatever the latest ever more preposterous evasion is) is at odds with everything candidate Obama said about U.S. military action before his election. And certainly every attempt the president makes to explain his Libyan adventure is either cringe-makingly stupid (“I’m accustomed to this contradiction of being both a commander-in-chief but also somebody who aspires to peace”) or alarmingly revealing of a very peculiar worldview:

“That’s why building this international coalition has been so important,” he said the other day. “It is our military that is being volunteered by others to carry out missions that are important not only to us, but are important internationally.”

That’s great news. Who doesn’t enjoy volunteering other people? The Arab League, for reasons best known to itself, decided that Colonel Qaddafi had outlived his sell-by date. Granted that the region’s squalid polities haven’t had a decent military commander since King Hussein fired Gen. Sir John Glubb half a century back, how difficult could it be even for Arab armies to knock off a psychotic transvestite guarded by Austin Powers fembots? But no: Instead, the Arab League decided to volunteer the U.S. military.

Likewise, the French and the British. Libya’s special forces are trained by Britain’s SAS. Four years ago, President Sarkozy hosted a state visit for Colonel Qaddafi, his personal security detail of 30 virgins, his favorite camel, and a 400-strong entourage that helped pitch his tent in the heart of Paris. Given that London and Paris have the third – and fourth-biggest military budgets on the planet and that between them they know everything about Qaddafi’s elite troops, sleeping arrangements, guard-babes, and dromedaries, why couldn’t they take him out? But no: They too decided to volunteer the U.S. military.

But, as I said, it’s easy to mock the smartest, most articulate man ever to occupy the Oval Office. Instead, in a non-partisan spirit, let us consider why it is that the United States no longer wins wars. Okay, it doesn’t exactly lose (most of) them, but nor does it have much to show for a now 60-year-old pattern of inconclusive outcomes. American forces have been fighting and dying in Afghanistan for a decade: Doesn’t that seem like a long time for a non-colonial power to be spending hacking its way through the worthless terrain of a Third World dump? If the object is to kill terrorists, might there not be some slicker way of doing it? And, if the object is something else entirely, mightn’t it be nice to know what it is?

I use the word “non-colonial” intentionally. I am by temperament and upbringing an old-school imperialist: There are arguments to be made for being on the other side of the world for decades on end if you’re claiming it as sovereign territory and rebuilding it in your image, as the British did in India, Belize, Mauritius, the Solomon Islands, you name it. Likewise, there are arguments to be made for saying sorry, we’re a constitutional republic, we don’t do empire. But there’s not a lot to be said for forswearing imperialism and even modest cultural assertiveness, and still spending ten years getting shot up in Afghanistan helping to create, bankroll, and protect a so-called justice system that puts a man on death row for converting to Christianity.

Libya, in that sense, is a classic post-nationalist, post-modern military intervention: As in Kosovo, we’re do-gooders in a land with no good guys. But, unlike Kosovo, not only is there no strategic national interest in what we’re doing, the intended result is likely to be explicitly at odds with U.S. interests. A quarter-century back, Qaddafi was blowing American airliners out of the sky and murdering British policewomen: That was the time to drop a bomb on him. But we didn’t. Everyone from the government of Scotland (releasing the “terminally ill” Lockerbie bomber, now miraculously restored to health) to Mariah Carey and Beyoncé (with their million-dollar-a-gig Qaddafi party nights) did deals with the Colonel.

Now suddenly he’s got to go — in favor of “freedom-loving” “democrats” from Benghazi. That would be in eastern Libya — which, according to West Point’s Counter Terrorism Center, has sent per capita the highest number of foreign jihadists to Iraq. Perhaps now that so many Libyan jihadists are in Iraq, the Libyans left in Libya are all Swedes in waiting. But perhaps not. If we lack, as we do in Afghanistan, the cultural confidence to wean those we liberate from their less attractive pathologies, we might at least think twice before actively facilitating them.


Officially, only the French are committed to regime change. So suppose Qaddafi survives. If you were in his shoes, mightn’t you be a little peeved? Enough to pull off a new Lockerbie? A more successful assassination attempt on the Saudi king? A little bit of Euro-bombing?

Alternatively, suppose Qaddafi winds up hanging from a lamppost in his favorite party dress. If you’re a Third World dictator, what lessons would you draw? Qaddafi was the thug who came in from the cold, the one who (in the wake of Saddam’s fall) renounced his nuclear program and was supposedly rehabilitated in the chancelleries of the West. He was “a strong partner in the war on terrorism,” according to U.S. diplomats. And what did Washington do? They overthrew him anyway.

The blood-soaked butcher next door in Sudan is the first head of state to be charged by the International Criminal Court with genocide, but nobody’s planning on toppling him. Iran’s going nuclear with impunity, but Obama sends fraternal greetings to the “Supreme Leader” of the “Islamic Republic.” North Korea is more or less openly trading as the one-stop bargain-basement for all your nuke needs, and we’re standing idly by. But the one cooperative dictator’s getting million-dollar-a-pop cruise missiles lobbed in his tent all night long. If you were the average Third World loon, which role model makes most sense? Colonel Cooperative in Tripoli? Or Ayatollah Death-to-the-Great-Satan in Tehran? America is teaching the lesson that the best way to avoid the attentions of whimsical “liberal interventionists” is to get yourself an easily affordable nuclear program from Pyongyang or anywhere else as soon as possible.

The United States is responsible for 43 percent of the planet’s military spending. So how come it doesn’t feel like that? It’s not merely that “our military is being volunteered by others,” but that Washington has been happy to volunteer it as the de facto expeditionary force for the “international community.” Sometimes U.S. troops sail under U.N. colors, sometimes NATO’s, and now in Libya even the Arab League’s. Either way, it makes little difference: America provides most of the money, men, and materiel. All that changes is the transnational figleaf.

But lost along the way is hard-headed, strategic calculation of the national interest. “They won’t come back till it’s over/Over there!” sang George M. Cohan as the doughboys marched off in 1917. It was all over 20 minutes later and then they came back. Now it’s never over over there — not in Korea, not in Kuwait, not in Kosovo, not in Kandahar. Next stop Kufra? America has swapped The Art of War for the Hotel California: We psychologically check out, but we never leave.

How Democrats View the World

A new Democratic foreign-policy consensus emerged from the Vietnam War, and it has been misguiding us ever since.

George Weigel
Friday, March 25, 2011

Criticism of the Obama administration’s handling of the current Libyan crisis, following hard on the heels of similar criticisms of its approach to the dramas of Tunisia and Egypt, has tended to focus on the president’s personality and his alleged incapacity for global leadership. There’s doubtless an element of truth in this, but the problem is likely far worse. The dithering, indecisiveness, feckless multilateralism, and lack of strategic vision that have been on sad display in recent weeks are the logical, if very dangerous, by-products of a cluster of ideas that have come to dominate the Democratic foreign-policy establishment.

Those ideas have a precise and definable origin: They first emerged when the New Left challenged the Truman/Acheson/Kennedy/(Scoop) Jackson Democratic consensus during the Vietnam War. In softer forms, they then became the new orthodoxy among Democratic foreign-policy mandarins like Cyrus Vance and Warren Christopher. Despite the fiascos to which these ideas led during the Carter and Clinton administrations (cf. the Iran hostage crisis and the American inability to prevent genocide in the Balkans), and despite the efforts of some in the old Democratic Leadership Council to change the intellectual template of Democratic foreign-policy thinking, these bad ideas have shown a remarkable resilience. They remain operative at all levels of the Obama foreign-policy team; they explain a great deal of what otherwise seems inexplicably stupid over the past several weeks; and they must be challenged by any 2012 Republican presidential candidate serious about American leadership in the world.

In briefest compass, eight ideas have shaped the foreign-policy perspective of today’s Democratic establishment. Different leaders will emphasize one or another of these ideas, and circumstances will dictate the ways in which these ideas are applied to real-world situations. However, anyone wanting to dig into the subsoil of the incompetence, ineptness, and just plain bad judgment currently on display had better be prepared to reckon with these eight ideas — and with the fact that people in power actually swear fealty to them.

1. Conflict is not the normal political phenomenon that it was assumed to be for millennia. Conflict is an aberration, and if there is conflict between nations or blocks of nations, or within nations, it must be because of some palpable injustice, the remedying of which will assuage the conflict in question and restore the natural order, which is peace. The idea that conflict results from the inevitable clash of interests and values in a plural world — which political thinkers from Augustine to Acheson assumed — is in fact not true. Moreover, the insights of psychology and psychiatry are of special utility in understanding the character of political conflict.

2. Peace is not a matter of a rightly ordered and law-governed political community; rather, “peace” is a state of mind that can be willed into being. The classic notion of the peace of order, which dominated Western thinking about the politics of nations from The City of God through the drafting of the Charter of the United Nations, is far too beholden to antediluvian ideas about the importance of power. There will be peace if all men learn to get along, and the redressing of what those who appear to be our foes deem to be their grievances will help hasten that day. In other words, peace is not a matter of the use of law and politics to resolve conflicts in an equitable way; peace is a matter of mutual understanding, to which structures of power are often an impediment.

3. The notion that the United States should actively seek to shape world politics is pernicious, not for the old isolationist reason that it’s bad for us, but because we tend to be bad for the world. Thus the United States should withdraw from the leadership role it has played in world affairs since 1941, scale down its military commitments, eventually end its work as global sheriff, and act as one among equals, not first among equals, in the affairs of nations. This will be good for the world, and it will keep in check that in-born American aggressiveness that led to debacles such as Vietnam.

4. The use of armed force is almost always a bad idea and reflects, not the intractability of certain situations to other forms of conflict-resolution, but a failure of imagination and will on the part of U.S. policymakers. Moreover, if a combination of pressures compels the occasional use of force, the prime strategic imperative is to devise an exit strategy that will end the use of force at the earliest possible moment. The notion of American forces permanently garrisoning certain strategically crucial locations, or maintaining freedom of the seas, is hopelessly antiquated and a likely cause of avoidable conflicts. If America eschewed the use of armed force save in extremis, others would do the same.

5. The present state system should be replaced by some form of international governance, in which multilateral and international bodies play the leading role. Rather than being guarantors of freedom and cultural continuity, nation-states, with their inherent aggressiveness, are a large part of the world’s problems. Whittling away the prerogatives of nation-states, to the point where the idea of state sovereignty eventually disappears, ought to be the long-term goal of U.S. foreign policy. In the meantime, every opportunity to seek multilateral solutions to immediate problems should be seized, and “unilateralism,” which simply reinforces the bad habits of the past, should be avoided at virtually all costs.

6. The primary responsibility of U.S. policymakers is to advance the construction of a multilaterally organized and run international order, not to defend and advance the interests of the United States. “National interest” is a morally dubious and strategically clumsy category for dealing with the world we live in. Identifying the interests of the United States and its fellow democracies with the good of the world (and the possible good of others) is even worse: an act of hubris that inevitably brings grief. The sooner American policymakers learn to “think globally,” the better the world will be. A happy by-product of this global-think will be a diminution of anti-Americanism around the world, which is primarily caused by our clumsiness and aggressiveness.
7. With the Cold War (which was in no small part Harry Truman’s fault) now over, there is no power, group of powers, or ideology that poses any grave threat to the United States. China’s ambitions are in its own neighborhood, as are those of Putin’s Russia, and neither country poses any serious threat to the world, or to a more equitable, peaceful world order. Jihadism, while problematic at this moment, will recede when an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty brings a two-state solution along pre-1967 boundary lines to the Middle East; meanwhile, jihadism is best addressed through a combination of airport body-scanners and American assurances of respect for Islam, a felt lack of which is at the root of a great deal of jihadist anger.

8. We are not the indispensable nation. There is nothing morally or politically distinctive, much less special, about the American democratic experiment in ordered liberty. So there is no distinctively American approach to world politics, and the United States ought not seek any distinctive role in 21st-century world affairs. However electorally inept it may have been at the time, George McGovern’s 1972 call — “Come home, America” — was essentially correct. America does best for the world by scaling back its self-understanding, lowering its expectations, and thinking of itself as simply another country. Doing so will gain us respect, lower tensions, and make conflict less likely.

These are the ideas that, in one form or another, lurk just beneath the surface of the thinking of virtually the entire Democratic foreign-policy establishment. They shape the minds of the people who form the talent pool from which Democratic administrations draw their senior foreign-policy officials. No Democrat who strongly challenges these ideas has a chance of being the Democratic presidential nominee. Moreover, the people who hold these ideas are firmly convinced that they are true.

That, and not some psychological tic of President Obama’s, is why U.S. policy has been what it has been since a Tunisian fruit vendor immolated himself and set North Africa and the Middle East ablaze. Ideas do indeed have consequences, for good and for ill.

Obama’s U.N. Debacle

The Obama administration’s big hopes of reforming the Human Rights Council from within are in shreds.

Anne Bayefsky
Friday, March 25, 2011

President Obama’s decision to place the United Nations at the center of his foreign policy took another hit Friday as the U.N. Human Rights Council ended its latest session in Geneva. One of the president’s primary justifications for joining the notorious council shortly after he assumed office was its mandatory five-year review process; if the U.S. was a member, the administration claimed, it could influence this process. The process, which quietly unfolded in back rooms in Geneva over the past six months, has been exposed to be a total fraud, taking the administration’s cover down with it.

Starting last fall, the Obama team was a very active participant in a working group of the council that had been set up to tackle reform. At the end of February, the working group produced a document summarizing its decisions, and on Friday the council passed a resolution adopting that document by consensus — that is, without a vote. Regardless of the fact that every serious recommendation of the United States was rejected, Obama’s diplomats refused to call for a vote on the resolution so that they could vote against it.

They did play a little game intended to fool uninformed listeners by claiming to “dissociate” the administration from the resolution. However, since the resolution has been adopted by consensus, it will proceed unimpeded to the General Assembly, where it will be rubber-stamped. The U.S. could not have stopped the resolution, but an American vote against the measure would have been a major blow to the credibility of the Human Rights Council. It also would have set up the U.S. to leave the council as a logical consequence of the failure to reform it.

The slap in the face to President Obama is painfully clear from a short list of American demands for reform and the council’s responses.

The council has an official, permanent agenda that governs all its meetings and consists of only ten items. One of those items is reserved for condemning Israel, and another is assigned to human rights in the other 191 U.N. member states. This session, for instance, produced six resolutions condemning Israel, one resolution each on four other states, and nothing at all on the remaining 187 countries. The American delegation huffed and puffed that this obvious discrimination — which characterizes every meeting of the council — must come to an end, and proposed that the two agenda items be rolled into one. The proposal was rejected.

The American delegation proposed creating easier trigger mechanisms for convening special sessions on specific countries when serious human-rights concerns arise. The proposal was rejected.

The American delegation proposed abolishing the council’s make-work “Advisory Committee.” It is currently populated by such human-rights luminaries as former Sandinista leader and suspended priest Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann. (Brockmann once served as president of the U.N. General Assembly and is best remembered for a series of anti-Semitic outbursts and for coming down off his podium to hug Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.) The proposal was rejected.

The American delegation proposed making public pre-screened complaints of gross and systematic violations of human rights that are received by the council. Specific cases, which have poured into the U.N. for over half a century from poor souls around the world, have never been revealed. The proposal was rejected.

The American delegation proposed expanding the time allocated to discussions of abuses in specific countries. The proposal was rejected.

The American delegation proposed that states running for a seat on the council should engage in a public dialogue with General Assembly members on their human-rights record, as measured by specific criteria. The proposal was rejected.

In all, the U.N. reports that 42 proposals were put forward by the American delegation orally and in writing. Only three were accepted. Those three addressed minutiae. For instance, the Obama team proposed allowing all states that wish to speak during the council’s “universal periodic review” (UPR) to be permitted to do so. The UPR is the procedure in which the council considers the human-rights record of every state, but the council tightly controls the time spent on each country. Council members are allotted three minutes’ and non-members two minutes’ worth of comments, regardless of the scope of the issues. Since the total time is fixed, would-be commentators are frequently silenced by ending up too low on the speakers’ list. The “reform” that was proposed and accepted? Keep the total time the same and reduce the allotted time per speaker. Thirty-second critiques of human-rights abuses, here we come.

Instead of admitting their complete inability to accomplish their mission of reforming the council, however, Obama’s representatives are scrambling to sweep the disaster under the rug. Admitting their error would no doubt strike at the heart of the president’s U.N. chorus line.

On March 31, 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.N. ambassador Susan Rice announced that the U.S. would seek to join the council “because we believe that working from within, we can make the Council a more effective forum,” and because “the Council . . . is scheduled to undergo a formal review of its structure and procedures in 2011, which will offer a significant opportunity for Council reform.” In a New York Times op-ed on Sept. 13, 2010, Eileen Donahoe — the United States’ ambassador to the council — called the review “a serious self-reflection exercise” and claimed that “if we do not sit at the table with others and do the work necessary to influence the process, U.S. values and priorities will not be reflected in the outcome.”

Now we know there was no “serious self-reflection.” U.S. values and priorities have not been reflected in the outcome. The reform opportunity is in shreds.

The result leaves the administration with two choices. Choice number one: Admit the fiasco. Refuse to lend legitimacy to a highly discriminatory agency designed to help members such as Saudi Arabia, China, and Cuba conceal their own abuses. And get out. Choice number two: Allow a bogus “reform” to be adopted by consensus, and stay put.

President Obama has evidently decided to take the second course, sending one more signal about how little he values Israel and how few are the number of human-rights victims around the world that stand any chance of capturing his attention.

ACLU: 'Communism is the Goal'

By Matt Barber
Friday, March 25, 2011

Irony is defined as "the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning." The term doublespeak means "evasive, ambiguous language that is intended to deceive or confuse."

There is perhaps no greater example of ironic doublespeak than inclusion of the phrase "civil liberties" within the inapt designation: "American Civil Liberties Union."

Indeed, few leftist organizations in existence today can compete with the ACLU in terms of demonstrated hostility toward what the Declaration of Independence describes as "certain unalienable rights" with which Americans are "endowed by their Creator."

Consider the doublespeak inherent throughout the "progressive" Goliath's flowery self-representation:

The ACLU is our nation's guardian of liberty, working daily in courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties that the Constitution and laws of the United States guarantee everyone in this country.

Now contrast that depiction with ACLU founder Roger Baldwin's candid vision:

I am for socialism, disarmament, and, ultimately, for abolishing the state itself... I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class, and the sole control of those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal.

Ironic, isn't it? So much for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." By combining straightforward segments from each ACLU rendering we arrive with an accurate portrayal. One that cuts through the doublespeak:

The ACLU is...working daily in courts, legislatures and communities. Communism is the goal.

In 1931, just eleven years after the ACLU's inception, the US Congress convened a Special House Committee to Investigate Communist Activities. On the ACLU it reported:

The American Civil Liberties Union is closely affiliated with the communist movement in the United States, and fully 90 percent of its efforts are on behalf of communists who have come into conflict with the law. It claims to stand for free speech, free press and free assembly, but it is quite apparent that the main function of the ACLU is an attempt to protect the communists.

To be sure, the "main function of the ACLU" is entirely counter-constitutional.

A shared objective between both Communism generally, and the ACLU specifically is the suppression of religious liberty; principally, the free exercise of Christianity.

Karl Marx, high priest of the ACLU's beloved cult of Communism, once said: "The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion."

Even the ACLU's own promotional materials overtly advocate religious discrimination: "The message of the Establishment Clause is that religious activities must be treated differently from other activities to ensure against governmental support for religion."

Utter hokum.

The First Amendment's Establishment Clause -- a mere 10 words -- says nothing of the sort. Its message is abundantly clear, requiring severe distortion to stuff within the ACLU's Marxist parameters. It merely states: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..." That's it.

Now let's break it down. What do you suppose the Framers of the US Constitution -- a document expressly designed to limit the powers of federal government -- intended with the word "Congress"? Did they mean State government? Municipal government? Your local school district? Your third grade teacher?

Of course not. They meant exactly what they said: Congress. As in: The United States Congress! It takes someone with a distinctly disingenuous ulterior motive to derive anything else.

Now what did they mean by "...shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion?"

Well, in a letter to Benjamin Rush, a fellow-signer of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson -- often touted by the left as the great church-state separationst -- answered that question. The First Amendment's Establishment Clause was singularly intended to restrict Congress from affirmatively "establishing," through federal legislation, a national Christian denomination (similar to the Anglican Church of England).

Or, as Jefferson put it: "[T]he clause of the Constitution" covering "freedom of religion" was intended to necessarily preclude "an establishment of a particular form of Christianity through the United States."

How far removed we are today from the original intent of our Founding Fathers. The ACLU is largely responsible for creating the gulf between the Constitution's original construction and its modern misapplication.

The ACLU remains one of America's most powerful secular-socialist political pressure groups. It relentlessly tramples underfoot the First Amendment, which guarantees sweeping and absolute liberty for all Americans -- including government employees -- to freely exercise their faith both publicly and privately without fear of reprisal: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

Examples of its constitutional abuses are manifold, but one of the most recent involves an ACLU assault against a group of Christians in Santa Rosa County, FL. Liberty Counsel represents those Christians.

An ACLU-crafted Consent Decree has been used as a weapon to threaten school district employees with fines and jail time for merely praying over a meal, and for exercising -- even while away from school -- their sincerely held Christian faith. You read that right. The ACLU is literally seeking to criminalize Christianity.

In August of 2009, Liberty Counsel successfully defended staff member Michelle Winkler from contempt charges brought by the ACLU after her husband, who is not even employed by the district, offered a meal prayer at a privately sponsored event in a neighboring county.

Liberty Counsel also successfully defended Pace High School Principal Frank Lay and Athletic Director Robert Freeman against criminal contempt charges, after the ACLU sought to have the men thrown in jail for blessing a lunch meal served to about 20 adult booster club members.

Under the Consent Decree teachers are considered to be acting in their "official capacity" anytime a student is present, even at private functions off campus.

Liberty Counsel describes this unconstitutional decree:

Teachers cannot pray, bow their heads, or fold their hands to show agreement with anyone who does pray. Teachers and staff cannot 'Reply' to an email sent by a parent if the parent's email refers to God or Scripture. Teachers either have to delete such references from the original email or reply by initiating a new email. Teachers and staff are also required to stop students from praying in their own private club meetings.

During witness testimony, Mrs. Winkler sobbed as she described how she and a coworker, who had recently lost a child, literally had to hide in a closet to pray.

Although the case continues, on Monday the ACLU suffered a tremendous setback while freedom took a significant step forward. Federal District Court Judge M. Casey Rodgers granted in part a Preliminary Injunction in favor of Liberty Counsel's twenty-four Christian clients.

Judge Rodgers concluded that even though "a preliminary injunction is an extraordinary and drastic remedy," one aspect of the Consent Decree -- its attempt to prohibit school employees from fully participating in private religious events -- is so flawed that it must be immediately halted.

The Court thus enjoined the School Board "from enforcing any school policy that restrains in any way an employee's participation in, or speech or conduct during, a private religious service, including baccalaureate" pending a trial on the merits.

"Progressives" are nothing if not consistent. As they gain confidence, they invariably rush across that bridge too far. They engage wild-eyed efforts to "fundamentally transform America" to reflect their own secular-socialist self-image.

I'm certain that both the bare-knuckle spirit of the American people and Liberty Counsel's enduring 92 percent win record against the ACLU will maintain a durable safeguard - an "impenetrable wall of separation" if you will - between our constitutionally guaranteed liberties and a subversive "progressive" agenda built upon the distinctly un-American creed: "Communism is the goal."