Will Washington Ever Cut Spending?

By Deroy Murdock

Monday, December 24, 2012

 

Raul Castro is right.

 

The powerful brother of dictator Fidel Castro is almost always wrong. But he was perfectly right when he told comrades in Camaguey, Cuba: “No country has the luxury of spending more than it has.”

 

Even now, as America slouches toward the fiscal cliff, House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) and leading Republicans seem ho-hum about limiting federal expenditures and restraining a government gone crazy. Obama and top Democrats are downright allergic to these concepts. Too bad this Cuban tyrant’s rare words of wisdom escape Washington’s spendaholics.

 

There are billions of ways to shrink the $3.8 trillion federal budget. Let’s start with these:

 

First, the Mack Penny Plan, created by outgoing Congressman Connie Mack (R., Fla.), would cut a penny from each dollar that Uncle Sam spends each year, for eight years. In 2013, Congress would spend 99 cents per dollar disbursed today; in 2014, 98 cents, etc. Rather than consume 24.3 percent of Gross Domestic Product today, federal spending in 2020 would be capped at 18 percent, just below the 18.2 percent at which Bill Clinton left it.

 

Such steady reductions, spanning nearly a decade, finally would lasso the spending monster. Washington policymakers should be able to prioritize and reallocate funding within a predictable, slowly decreasing budget.

 

Second, Washington should terminate antiquated and extraneous programs.

 

  FDR launched the Rural Electrification Administration in 1935 to bring power to Appalachia. It morphed into the Rural Utilities Service and now spends taxpayer dollars to bring wind turbines and broadband Internet to the countryside, including an $81.6 million gift to VTel Wireless. Now that Appalachia has been electrified since at least 1960, let’s declare, “Mission accomplished,” thank the staff, retire them, and sell their offices.

 

  Except for food-safety inspections, the Agriculture Department creates little value. Americans can thrive without agrocrats dictating sugar prices and paying farmers some $1.8 billion annually not to farm. Food growers and eaters can manage without Washington’s relentless interference.

 

  Washington expands affordable housing, so millions of Americans can buy homes, and simultaneously supports housing prices, so millions of Americans can enjoy precious nest eggs. Which is it? Washington should close the Department of Housing and Urban Development and exit the housing sector, which it nearly demolished in 2008.

 

   Launched in 1970, the Public Broadcasting Service challenged the three original broadcast networks, back when many TVs received just 13 channels. Today, anyone unhappy with ABC, CBS, or NBC can watch C-SPAN, the History Channel, National Geographic, Turner Classic Movies, and literally hundreds of other culturally enriching cable channels. Thousands of DVD titles offer tremendous educational and artistic value. And don’t forget books. PBS and Jim Lehrer will survive once they fully depart the federal dole and let donations and other non-government money finance 100 percent of their budget rather than a mere 85 percent, as they do today.

 

 

Third, between December 2008 and December 2011, Washington-based executive-branch civilian employees grew from 345,326 to 368,706. This 6.8 percent expansion across Obama’s first three years is ripe for reduction, especially when we consider these feds’ paychecks. According to Bureau of Economic Analysis data analyzed by Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute, federal civilian employees in 2011 averaged $128,226 in total compensation ($84,671 in wages and $43,555 in benefits). Private-sector workers, meanwhile, earned half that: $64,560 ($53,463 in wages and $11,099 in benefits).

 

This federal-wage advantage can be obscene. Despite taxpayer bailouts of $170 billion and counting, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives get paid as if the housing bubble they helped create still were expanding. Based on median-cash-compensation figures in a December 10 report by the inspector general of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, 825 directors at Fannie and Freddie last year made at least $205,300. Among the agencies’ vice presidents, 166 received a minimum of $388,000. Thirty-one senior vice presidents saw at least $723,500. And eleven executive vice-presidents scored $1,718,200 or more. And this is what these 1,033 feds took home after wrecking the housing sector!

 

“The federal workforce has become an elite island of secure and high-paid workers, separated from the ocean of average American workers competing in the global economy,” Edwards commented. “Federal wages should be frozen or cut, overly generous federal benefits should be overhauled, and the federal workforce downsized through program terminations and privatization.”

 

Fourth, rather than grant Obama’s wish to borrow whatever sum he desires, former Reagan Treasury official and Forbes columnist David Malpass would impose a hard ceiling to curtail spending. Today’s debt limit is no such barrier. Instead, it resembles an elevator’s digital indicator that cheerfully chirps past each floor as it zooms skyward.

 

“The current law doesn’t work because it threatens defaults and government shutdowns, but not spending cuts,” says Malpass, an economist at Encima Global in Manhattan. “Better would be a permanent debt-to-GDP limit that forces Washington to do what it is paid for — make true spending choices.”

 

Malpass explains further: “A new law would give the president extra authority to cut spending (e.g., impoundment authority or a fast-track process for entitlement reform), but then shove him in that direction. When the debt ceiling has been breached, this law would require that the president give monthly spending updates to the public — in person. It would prohibit all raises for government employees making over $100,000 annually and require lobbyists to file weekly disclosures of their contacts. It would defund congressional travel while over the debt ceiling. The idea is to make Washington wear a hair shirt that is so uncomfortable that federal officials actually cut spending.”

 

If Washington will not stop hiking spending, spending hikes will stop Washington. How sad that nearly every Democrat and too many Republicans cannot grasp a concept self-evident even to a Cuban Communist.

It's Time for Media Control

By Derek Hunter

Sunday, December 23, 2012

 

Was there anything about the Sandy Hook massacre the media got right on the day it happened? In their rush to be first, they ignored their obligation to be right. Nearly every detail they disseminated Friday was wrong, even down to the name of the killer. Their desire to sensationalize had them shoving microphones in the faces of children who couldn’t possibly comprehend the events of the day. This was just the latest example of how out of control and dangerous the media has become, and it’s time government did something to protect us.

 

You’re probably asking yourself, “What about the First Amendment? Freedom of the press means we can’t regulate them, right?” Technically, yes. But since they, en masse, want to ignore the Second Amendment, to claim since it was written in a time of muskets, it is outdated and doesn’t apply to new guns, let’s apply the same to the First.

 

The First Amendment was written in a time of movable type printing presses and quills, not 24-hour cable news channels and the Internet. Using the media’s logic, the First Amendment doesn’t apply.

 

I’m not suggesting we should simply outlaw any media outside of print, but if we can limit the Second Amendment however we like, we can do the same to the First.

 

Congress should impose massive fines on those who get facts wrong. Not newspaper reporters – that’s dealt with a different way. But TV. As liberals love to remind us, broadcasters make their living over “public airwaves.” Conveying false information over them is a violation of the trust placed in those institutions by the public and should be punished.

 

The media would like to punish innocent gun owners for the actions of a tiny amount of guilty ones, so all media should be regulated because of the actions of a few bad ones.

 

NBC News, which I’m told was once a respected news organization, deliberately edited the 911 call in the Trayvon Martin case to make George Zimmerman sound racist when he was simply answering the dispatcher’s question. In the same case, the New York Times created a new race of humans – the “white Hispanic” – specifically to sensationalize that case into a racial issue. Although The Times is in print and thus protected, it also published that story on the Internet, which is not. Let’s punish The Times.

 

Zimmerman is suing NBC News and should win easily. But government could impose a minimum fine of, say, $1 billion for each offense. Doing so would bring about the end of the race to be first and restore the drive to be right. It also would ruin NBC News.

 

Media regulation could also be used to stop networks from conferring the fame on these the monsters they so desperately seek. They’re dead, but their name lives on in infamy, which is exactly what they want. Mentioning their name could be outlawed too.

 

All of this, of course, is absurd. The American people never would stand for it. We all exercise our free speech rights on a daily basis, and we’d never sit by and watch government outlaw speech. But many do exactly that with other parts of the First Amendment, particularly the religious freedom clause, and the Second.

 

No one would tolerate the creation of some sort of “special circumstances” where the Fifth Amendment wouldn’t apply and someone could be forced to testify in a criminal case against themselves – but somehow the Second is fair game.

 

How many laws did the Sandy Hook monster break in committing these murders? Why did he not respect the gun ban in the school? Because he was crazy. (That’s not to say he was stupid. Stupid and crazy, often used interchangeably, are two entirely different things.) Why aren’t we looking to see what warning signs were ignored by those around him and alert people to be on the lookout for those in others rather than the knee-jerk response of infringing on the rights of innocent Americans?

 

Liberals have a tradition of vilifying innocent people with the guilt of others. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Democrat FDR had Japanese Americans rounded up and essentially imprisoned for the sin of being Japanese. At its core, that’s what’s happening here.

 

Rather than focus on why this madman committed this heinous crime so we can prevent similar acts by equally ill people in the future, elected Democrats are ready yet again to impose government into areas the document they swore an oath to preserve, protect and defend expressly forbids. And the media, draped in the protections of that document, stands ready to be their willing accomplice in infringing upon others.

 

The American people cannot allow any of their rights – even if they choose not to exercise some of them – to be stripped away to appease an emotional mob being manipulated by politicians and fellow travelers in the media simply because unbalanced people abuse theirs. If we do, we might as well just surrender all of them now.

The Roots of Mass Murder

By Charles Krauthammer

Thursday, December 20, 2012

 

Every mass shooting has three elements: the killer, the weapon, and the cultural climate. As soon as the shooting stops, partisans immediately pick their preferred root cause, with its corresponding pet panacea. Names are hurled, scapegoats paraded, prejudices vented. The argument goes nowhere.

 

Let’s be serious:

 

The Weapon

Within hours of last week’s Newtown, Conn., massacre, the focus was the weapon and the demand was for new gun laws. Several prominent pro-gun Democrats remorsefully professed new openness to gun control. Senator Dianne Feinstein is introducing a new assault-weapons ban. And the president emphasized guns and ammo above all else in announcing the creation of a new task force.

 

I have no problem in principle with gun control. Congress enacted (and I supported) an assault-weapons ban in 1994. The problem was: It didn’t work. (So concluded a University of Pennsylvania study commissioned by the Justice Department.) The reason is simple. Unless you are prepared to confiscate all existing firearms, disarm the citizenry, and repeal the Second Amendment, it’s almost impossible to craft a law that will be effective.

 

Feinstein’s law, for example, would exempt 900 weapons. And that’s the least of the loopholes. Even the guns that are banned can be made legal with simple, minor modifications.

 

Most fatal, however, is the grandfathering of existing weapons and magazines. That’s one of the reasons the 1994 law failed. At the time, there were 1.5 million assault weapons in circulation and 25 million large-capacity (i.e., more than ten bullets) magazines. A reservoir that immense can take 100 years to draw down.

 

The Killer

Monsters shall always be with us, but in earlier days they did not roam free. As a psychiatrist in Massachusetts in the 1970s, I committed people — often right out of the emergency room — as a danger to themselves or to others. I never did so lightly, but I labored under none of the crushing bureaucratic and legal constraints that make involuntary commitment infinitely more difficult today.

 

Why do you think we have so many homeless? Destitution? Poverty has declined since the 1950s. The majority of those sleeping on grates are mentally ill. In the name of civil liberties, we let them die with their rights on.

 

A tiny percentage of the mentally ill become mass killers. Just about everyone around Tucson shooter Jared Loughner sensed he was mentally ill and dangerous. But in effect, he had to kill before he could be put away — and (forcibly) treated.

 

Random mass killings were three times more common in the 2000s than in the 1980s, when gun laws were actually weaker. Yet a 2011 University of California at Berkeley study found that states with strong civil-commitment laws have about a one-third lower homicide rate.

 

The Culture

We live in an entertainment culture soaked in graphic, often sadistic, violence. Older folks find themselves stunned by what a desensitized youth finds routine, often amusing. It’s not just movies. Young men sit for hours pulling video-game triggers, mowing down human beings en masse without pain or consequence. And we profess shock when a small cadre of unstable, deeply deranged, dangerously isolated young men go out and enact the overlearned narrative.

 

If we’re serious about curtailing future Columbines and Newtowns, everything — guns, commitment, culture — must be on the table. It’s not hard for President Obama to call out the NRA. But will he call out the ACLU? And will he call out his Hollywood friends?

 

The irony is that over the last 30 years, the U.S. homicide rate has declined by 50 percent. Gun murders as well. We’re living not through an epidemic of gun violence but through a historic decline.

 

Except for these unfathomable mass murders. But these are infinitely more difficult to prevent. While law deters the rational, it has far less effect on the psychotic. The best we can do is to try to detain them, disarm them, and discourage “entertainment” that can intensify already murderous impulses.

 

But there’s a cost. Gun control impinges upon the Second Amendment; involuntary commitment impinges upon the liberty clause of the Fifth Amendment; curbing “entertainment” violence impinges upon First Amendment–protected free speech.

 

That’s a lot of impingement, a lot of amendments. But there’s no free lunch. Increasing public safety almost always means restricting liberties.

 

We made that trade after 9/11. We make it every time the TSA invades your body at an airport. How much are we prepared to trade away after Newtown?

The Tired Race Card

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, December 21, 2012

 

When will liberals stop living in the past? Specifically, when will they accept that they aren’t all that stands between a wonderful, tolerant America and Jim Crow?

 

I was in the room when, during the Democratic convention, civil-rights hero John Lewis suggested that Republicans wanted to “go back” to the days when black men like him could be beaten in the street by the enforcers of Jim Crow. I thought it an outrageous and disgusting bit of demagoguery. The audience of Democratic delegates cheered in a riot of self-congratulation.

 

It’s bizarre. I spend most of my time talking or listening to fellow conservatives, and I never hear anybody talk about wanting anything of the sort. But to listen to liberals, that’s all we care about.

 

Toward the end of the presidential campaign, various liberal pundits — a great many of them born after the signing of the Civil Rights Act — thought it a brilliant and damning indictment to note that Mitt Romney ran strong in states that once constituted the Confederacy. When Barack Obama won, Jon Stewart conceded that at least Romney won “most of the Confederacy.”

 

These states committed the obvious sin of voting Republican while the president was black.

 

Just this week, in an essay for the New York Times, Adolph Reed attacked South Carolina governor Nikki Haley — the first female Indian-American governor in America — for appointing Representative Tim Scott to retiring senator Jim DeMint’s seat. Scott is a black man and a conservative Tea Party favorite.

 

So obviously, this is a very clever ploy to restore Jim Crow.

 

“Just as white Southern Democrats once used cynical manipulations — poll taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests — to get around the 15th Amendment,” Reed writes, “so modern-day Republicans have deployed blacks to undermine black interests.”

 

That’s it exactly. Indeed, that’s what the Tea Party was always about: undermining black interests.

 

When Herman Cain — another inconveniently black man — was the overwhelming preference among Tea Party activists for the Republican presidential nomination, a historian writing in the New York Times suggested that Cain could be seen as proof the legacy of the Ku Klux Klan lives on.

 

You know you’ve been pounding a square peg into a round hole for too long when you find yourself insinuating that a black man from Georgia represents the KKK tradition in contemporary politics.

 

More recently, liberal writers apparently convinced themselves that Republican opposition to Susan Rice becoming the next secretary of state was payback for the Emancipation or something.

 

“Angry over the reelection of the nation’s first black president,” vented a writer for The American Prospect, “a handful of old white senators — one of whom hails from the cradle of the Confederacy — launch hysterical and dishonest attacks on . . . a well-qualified African American woman.”

 

The Washington Post editorial board connected the dots, too, finding it important to note that of the Republican legislators expressing their reservations about Rice, “nearly half are from states of the former Confederacy.”

 

Of course, the same racist representatives of Dixie also thought it fine to confirm Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice for the same job.

 

It’s like a metastasizing cancer of delusion. Jim Sleeper, a lecturer at Yale and once a relatively sober-minded liberal writer, insists that opposition to gun control has something to do with the segregationist mind-set. Or something.

 

To watch MSNBC is to think the hosts see themselves as the official newsletter of the Underground Railroad.

 

Sure, there are racists in the Republican party. (There are some in the Democratic party, too.) And if you define racism as disagreeing with the Congressional Black Caucus or Barack Obama, the GOP is racist to the bone.

 

But the inconvenient truth is that conservatives are not only not racist, they aren’t a fraction as obsessed with race as liberals are.

 

Of course, that lack of obsession is no doubt itself proof of conservative racism. And why shouldn’t it be? Everything else is.

Jews in the Judean Desert?

By Cliff May

Thursday, December 20, 2012

 

More than 40,000 people have been slaughtered during the rebellion in Syria, and the death toll rises daily. The European Union does not appear to be particularly concerned. North Korea’s rulers have launched a three-stage rocket, moving closer to their goal of developing a nuclear-tipped ICBM, and they’re sharing nuclear-weapons technology with the world’s leading sponsors of terrorism in Iran. The EU does not seem to be worrying about that either. Israel is considering building homes on barren hills adjacent to Jerusalem. The EU’s 27 foreign ministers said they were “deeply dismayed” and warned Israel of unspecified consequences if the plan is carried out.

 

The European Union — recent winner, I should note, of the Nobel Peace Prize — has its priorities. So let’s talk about what the Israelis are doing to so distress them.

 

The area in which Israel may build covers 4.6 square miles. For the sake of comparison, Denver International Airport is 53 square miles. Known as E1, this area lies within a territory that has a much older name: the Judean Desert. Might Jews think they have a legitimate historical claim to the Judean Desert? This question is rarely asked.

 

For Israeli military planners, E1’s strategic value is more germane than its history. Developing it would help in the defense of Jerusalem, and would connect Jerusalem to Maaleh Adumim, an Israeli town with a population of 40,000. Media reports note that both Israelis and Palestinians claim Jerusalem as their capital. Media reports often fail to note that right now both Jews and Arabs live in Jerusalem — for the most part peacefully, with both populations growing — while Hamas vows to forcibly expel every Jew from Jerusalem. Such threats of ethnic cleansing also do not trouble the EU much.

 

It has been widely reported that if Israel should build in E1, the possibility of a two-state solution would be shattered. The New York Times was among those reporting this but, to the paper’s credit, it later published a correction, stating that building in E1 actually “would not divide the West Bank in two,” nor would it cut off the West Bank cities Ramallah and Bethlehem from Jerusalem. Anyone looking at a map would see that. People forget, or perhaps choose not to remember, that Israelis always have been willing to give up land for peace, including land acquired in defensive wars. Historically, that has not been a common practice, for a very sound reason: Aggression can be deterred only if it carries substantial risk. Nevertheless, Israelis gave up Gaza and the Sinai, and have offered to give up more land — at least 97 percent of the West Bank, retaining only those areas absolutely necessary for national security.

 

Israelis do want something in exchange: an end to the long conflict they have been fighting against those who insist that the Jewish people, uniquely, has no right to self-determination, no right to independence, no right to self-rule within their ancient and ancestral homeland.

 

What Israelis have received instead: missile and terrorist attacks and, last week, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal at a rally in Gaza proclaiming that “jihad,” armed struggle, will continue until Israel is defeated, conquered, and replaced — every square mile — by an Islamist theocracy. “Since Palestine is ours, and it is the land of the Arabs and Islam,” he said, “it is unthinkable that we would recognize the legitimacy of the Israeli occupation of it. . . . Let me emphasize that we adhere to this fundamental principle: We do not recognize Israel . . . The Palestinian resistance will crush it and sweep it away, be it Allah’s will.” He added: “We will free Jerusalem inch by inch, stone by stone. Israel has no right to be in Jerusalem.”

 

Within the EU there was a debate about whether to comment on that. Eventually, pressure from Germany and the Czech Republic led the EU to issue a mild rebuke to Hamas — a single paragraph in a three-page statement focusing on Israel’s “dismaying” behavior. Mahmoud Abbas, regarded as a moderate Palestinian leader, could not bring himself to call Mashaal’s latest threats wrong — or even unhelpful. Instead, Azzam Alahmed, a senior official in Abbas’s Fatah organization, described Mashaal’s speech as “very positive,” because it stressed the need for reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah. Such reconciliation would be achieved not by Hamas softening its positions, but by Fatah more explicitly agreeing that Israel’s extermination — rather than a two-state solution — remains the Palestinian goal, the final solution, if you will.

 

Just after the conclusion of the truce halting the most recent Hamas/Israel battle, Abbas went to the U.N. General Assembly to request that Palestine be recognized as a “non-member state.” The outcome was never in doubt — the UNGA, which cannot with a straight face be described as a deliberative body, has a reflexively anti-Israeli majority. Abbas’s action was a blatant violation of the Oslo Accords, under which any change in the Palestinians’ status is to come about only through negotiations with Israel.

 

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman laments that “the Europeans in general, and the European left in particular, have so little influence” in Israel. He is puzzled as to why that is. He insists that “it’s incumbent on every Israeli leader to test, test and test again — using every ounce of Israeli creativity — to see if Israel can find a Palestinian partner for a secure peace.” Only by so doing, he adds, can Israel “have the moral high ground in a permanent struggle.” If “creative” Israelis were to find such a partner, would Friedman be able to arrange a life-insurance policy for him? And between those threatening their neighbors with genocide — which is, indisputably, what Hamas is doing — and those offering to negotiate peace with their neighbors — which is what Israel is doing — can there really be ambiguity about who holds the moral high ground?

 

Evidently, there can — at least for Friedman and the EU and, I’m afraid, lots of other folks around the world. Israelis, and their few friends, may just have to learn to live with that as best they can.

We Know How to Stop School Shootings

By Ann Coulter

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

 

In the wake of a monstrous crime like a madman's mass murder of defenseless women and children at the Newtown, Conn., elementary school, the nation's attention is riveted on what could have been done to prevent such a massacre.

 

Luckily, some years ago, two famed economists, William Landes at the University of Chicago and John Lott at Yale, conducted a massive study of multiple victim public shootings in the United States between 1977 and 1995 to see how various legal changes affected their frequency and death toll.

 

Landes and Lott examined many of the very policies being proposed right now in response to the Connecticut massacre: waiting periods and background checks for guns, the death penalty and increased penalties for committing a crime with a gun.

 

None of these policies had any effect on the frequency of, or carnage from, multiple-victim shootings. (I note that they did not look at reforming our lax mental health laws, presumably because the ACLU is working to keep dangerous nuts on the street in all 50 states.)

 

Only one public policy has ever been shown to reduce the death rate from such crimes: concealed-carry laws.

 

Their study controlled for age, sex, race, unemployment, retirement, poverty rates, state population, murder arrest rates, violent crime rates, and on and on.

 

The effect of concealed-carry laws in deterring mass public shootings was even greater than the impact of such laws on the murder rate generally.

 

Someone planning to commit a single murder in a concealed-carry state only has to weigh the odds of one person being armed. But a criminal planning to commit murder in a public place has to worry that anyone in the entire area might have a gun.

 

You will notice that most multiple-victim shootings occur in "gun-free zones" -- even within states that have concealed-carry laws: public schools, churches, Sikh temples, post offices, the movie theater where James Holmes committed mass murder, and the Portland, Ore., mall where a nut starting gunning down shoppers a few weeks ago.

 

Guns were banned in all these places. Mass killers may be crazy, but they're not stupid.

 

If the deterrent effect of concealed-carry laws seems surprising to you, that's because the media hide stories of armed citizens stopping mass shooters. At the Portland shooting, for example, no explanation was given for the amazing fact that the assailant managed to kill only two people in the mall during the busy Christmas season.

 

It turns out, concealed-carry-holder Nick Meli hadn't noticed that the mall was a gun-free zone. He pointed his (otherwise legal) gun at the shooter as he paused to reload, and the next shot was the attempted mass murderer killing himself. (Meli aimed, but didn't shoot, because there were bystanders behind the shooter.)

 

In a nonsense "study" going around the Internet right now, Mother Jones magazine claims to have produced its own study of all public shootings in the last 30 years and concludes: "In not a single case was the killing stopped by a civilian using a gun."

 

This will come as a shock to people who know something about the subject.

 

The magazine reaches its conclusion by simply excluding all cases where an armed civilian stopped the shooter: They looked only at public shootings where four or more people were killed, i.e., the ones where the shooter wasn't stopped.

 

If we care about reducing the number of people killed in mass shootings, shouldn't we pay particular attention to the cases where the aspiring mass murderer was prevented from getting off more than a couple rounds?

 

It would be like testing the effectiveness of weed killers, but refusing to consider any cases where the weeds died.

 

In addition to the Portland mall case, here are a few more examples excluded by the Mother Jones' methodology:

 

-- Mayan Palace Theater, San Antonio, Texas, this week: Jesus Manuel Garcia shoots at a movie theater, a police car and bystanders from the nearby China Garden restaurant; as he enters the movie theater, guns blazing, an armed off-duty cop shoots Garcia four times, stopping the attack. Total dead: Zero.

 

-- Winnemucca, Nev., 2008: Ernesto Villagomez opens fire in a crowded restaurant; concealed carry permit-holder shoots him dead. Total dead: Two. (I'm excluding the shooters' deaths in these examples.)

 

-- Appalachian School of Law, 2002: Crazed immigrant shoots the dean and a professor, then begins shooting students; as he goes for more ammunition, two armed students point their guns at him, allowing a third to tackle him. Total dead: Three.

 

-- Santee, Calif., 2001: Student begins shooting his classmates -- as well as the "trained campus supervisor"; an off-duty cop who happened to be bringing his daughter to school that day points his gun at the shooter, holding him until more police arrive. Total dead: Two.

 

-- Pearl High School, Mississippi, 1997: After shooting several people at his high school, student heads for the junior high school; assistant principal Joel Myrick retrieves a .45 pistol from his car and points it at the gunman's head, ending the murder spree. Total dead: Two.

 

-- Edinboro, Pa., 1998: A student shoots up a junior high school dance being held at a restaurant; restaurant owner pulls out his shotgun and stops the gunman. Total dead: One.

 

By contrast, the shootings in gun-free zones invariably result in far higher casualty figures -- Sikh temple, Oak Creek, Wis. (six dead); Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Va. (32 dead); Columbine High School, Columbine, Colo. (12 dead); Amish school, Lancaster County, Pa. (five little girls killed); public school, Craighead County, Ark. (five killed, including four little girls).

 

All these took place in gun-free zones, resulting in lots of people getting killed -- and thereby warranting inclusion in the Mother Jones study.

 

If what we care about is saving the lives of innocent human beings by reducing the number of mass public shootings and the deaths they cause, only one policy has ever been shown to work: concealed-carry laws. On the other hand, if what we care about is self-indulgent grandstanding, and to hell with dozens of innocent children being murdered in cold blood, try the other policies.

Oh, We Forgot to Tell You ...

By Victor Davis Hanson

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

 

The second-term curse goes like this: A president (e.g., Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, etc.) wins re-election, but then his presidency implodes over the next four years -- mired in scandals or disasters such as Watergate, Iran-Contra, Monica Lewinsky, the Iraqi insurgency and Hurricane Katrina.

 

Apparently, like tragic Greek heroes, administrations grow arrogant after their re-election wins. They believe that they are invincible and that heir public approval is permanent rather than fickle.

 

The result is that Nemesis zeroes in on their fatal conceit and with a boom corrects their hubris. Or is the problem in some instances simply that embarrassments and scandals, hushed up in fear that they might cost an administration an election, explode with a fury in the second term?

 

Coincidentally, right after the election we heard that Iran had attacked a U.S. drone in international waters.

 

Coincidentally, we just learned that new food stamp numbers were "delayed" and that millions more became new recipients in the months before the election.

 

Coincidentally, we now gather that the federal relief effort following Hurricane Sandy was not so smooth, even as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Barack Obama high-fived it. Instead, in Katrina-like fashion, tens of thousands are still without power or shelter two weeks after the storm.

 

Coincidentally, we now learn that Obama's plan of letting tax rates increase for the "fat cat" 2 percent who make over $250,000 a year would not even add enough new revenue to cover 10 percent of the annual deficit. How he would get the other 90 percent in cuts, we are never told.

 

Coincidentally, we now learn that the vaunted Dream Act would at most cover only about 10 percent to 20 percent of illegal immigrants. As part of the bargain, does Obama have a post-election Un-Dream Act to deport the other 80 percent who do not qualify since either they just recently arrived in America, are not working, are not in school or the military, are on public assistance, or have a criminal record?

 

Coincidentally, now that the election is over, the scandal over the killings of Americans in Libya seems warranted due to the abject failure to heed pleas for more security before the attack and assistance during it. And the scandal is about more than just the cover-up of fabricating an absurd myth of protestors mad over a 2-month-old video -- just happening to show up on the anniversary of 9/11 with machine guns and rockets.

 

The real postelection mystery is why we ever had a secondary consulate in Benghazi in the first place, when most nations had long ago pulled their embassies out of war-torn Libya altogether.

 

Why, about a mile from the consulate, did we have a large CIA-staffed "annex" that seems to have been busy with all sorts of things other than providing adequate security for our nearby diplomats?

 

Before the election, the media was not interested in figuring out what Ambassador Christopher Stevens actually was doing in Benghazi, what so many CIA people and military contractors were up to, and what was the relationship of our large presence in Libya to Turkey, insurgents in Syria and the scattered Gadhafi arms depots.

 

But the strangest "coincidentally" of all is the bizarre resignation of American hero Gen. David Petraeus from the CIA just three days after the election -- apparently due to a long-investigated extramarital affair with a sort of court biographer and her spat with a woman she perceived as a romantic rival.

 

If the affair was haphazardly hushed up for about a year, how exactly did Petraeus become confirmed as CIA director, a position that allows no secrets, much less an entire secret life?

 

How and why did the FBI investigate the Petraeus matter? To whom and when did it report its findings? And what was the administration reaction?

 

Coincidentally, if it is true that Petraeus can no longer testify as CIA director to the House and Senate intelligence committees about the ignored requests of CIA personnel on the ground in Benghazi for more help, can he as a private citizen testify more freely, without the burdens of CIA directorship and pre-election politics?

 

It has been less than two weeks since the election, and Obama seems no exception to the old rule that for administrations which manage to survive their second terms, almost none seem to enjoy them.

 

The sudden release of all sorts of suppressed news and "new" facts right after the election creates public cynicism.

 

The hushed-up, fragmentary account of the now-unfolding facts of the Libyan disaster contributes to further disbelief.

 

The sudden implosion of Petraeus -- whose seemingly unimpeachable character appears so at odds with reports of sexual indiscretion, a lack of candor and White House backstage election intrigue -- adds genuine public furor.

 

The resulting mix is toxic, and it may tax even the formidable Chicago-style survival skills of Obama and the fealty of a so far dutiful media.

Maybe Minorities' Values Need Changing

By Dennis Prager

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

 

The most widely offered explanation for Mitt Romney's defeat is that the Republican Party is disproportionately composed of -- aging -- white males.

 

That is, alas, true.

 

But the real question is what Republicans should do with this truth.

 

There are two responses.

 

The nearly universal response -- meaning the response offered by the liberal media and liberal academics (and some Republicans) -- is that the Republican Party needs to rethink its positions, moving away from conservatism and toward the political center.

 

The other response is for conservatives and the Republican Party to embark on a massive campaign to influence, and ultimately change, the values of those groups that voted Democrat.

 

The Democratic Party, and the left generally, have done a magnificent job in identifying conservative values as white male values. One reason for their success is that they dominate virtually every lever of influence -- the high schools and universities, television, newspapers, movies, pop culture and everything else except talk radio. Another is that they really believe that conservative values are nothing more than white male -- especially aging white male -- values. Remember, leftism has its own trinity -- the prism through which it perceives the world -- race, gender and class. In this case the race is white; the gender is male; and the class is rich.

 

As a result of this identification, there is no debate over whether the minorities' (and single women's) values are correct or whether the values of the white males are correct. The left has successfully forestalled any such national discussion by simply reducing conservative values to the dying fulminations of a former ruling class.

 

In the words of New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, "Mitt Romney is the president of white male America."

 

This identification seems to be working. But it's intellectually dishonest. Aging white males are as important to the left as they are to the right.

 

In a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, liberal Harvard professor Benjamin M. Friedman strongly criticized the Tea Party. After citing "surveys showing that Tea Party members are 'predominantly white, male, older, more college-educated and better off economically than typical Americans,'" he noted parenthetically "they sound like, say, readers of The New York Review of Books."

 

Come to think of it, these people who make up the tea party also sound like the people who attend classical music concerts, who endow concert halls, museums, hospitals, and universities, and fund left-wing causes (George Soros, for example).

 

Perhaps when this generation of aging white males dies off, aging women, aging Latino and black males, and young people will become the readers of journals such as the New York Review of Books and endow symphony orchestras.

 

I suspect not. And if not, the left may come to regret its contempt for this particular group. Without aging white males, I doubt the New York Times would survive. How many young people, females, Hispanics and blacks subscribe to the New York Times?

 

Obviously the issue for the left isn't aging white males, it is conservatives, whether they are young or old, white or nonwhite, male or female. If female aborigines were conservative, the left would have a problem with female aborigines.

 

For conservatives, the issue is that for generations now, they have failed to make the case for their values. They haven't even conveyed conservative values to many of their children. And when they have, the university has often succeeded in undoing them.

 

The only answer to the "demographic" problem, therefore, is to bring women (single women, to be precise), young people, Hispanics, and blacks to conservative values. I wrote a column in September ("It's not Just the Economy, Stupid!") criticizing the Mitt Romney campaign for only talking about jobs and the economy. President Obama kept saying that this election was about two different visions of America. But like George Herbert Walker Bush, the Romney campaign appeared to disdain "the vision thing."

 

Our only hope for America is that every conservative takes upon him or herself the project of learning what American and conservative values are, coming to understand what leftism stands for, and learning how to make the case for those values to women, young people, blacks and Hispanics. That is what my radio show, latest book and Prager University are about. And while I am, happily, hardly alone, there are still far too few of us who understand "the vision thing." Surely the Republican establishment has not.

 

We should missionize for the American Trinity (Liberty, In God We Trust, E Pluribus Unum) as least as passionately as the left has missionized for its antithesis -- Egalitarianism, Secularism and Multiculturalism. Or we will lose America as we have always known it.

Are We All Europeans Now?

By Samuel Gregg

Monday, November 12, 2012

 

Following President Obama’s reelection last Tuesday, the No. 1 question I’ve been asked by family, friends, colleagues, and even a few philosophical sparring partners is whether America is now nothing more than just another (albeit rather larger) Western European country slouching down the road to economic turpitude while basking in a government-subsidized, debt-fuelled twilight of faded glories.

 

My short answer to such queries is: “No — at least not yet. And it is not too late to change course.” Let me explain.

 

Yes, the president’s reelection is reflective of enormous and disturbing cultural and economic trends in America. Millions of Americans do, for instance, seem committed to the expansion of government, either because they have intellectually rejected the free-enterprise system or, to be frank, because they personally benefit from interventionist arrangements. Why, for example, bother going through the hard work of turning around a company (which might involve telling unions that we’re not living in 1974 anymore) in order to compete in the global market, when you can get piles of taxpayer money to produce cars that no one apparently wants to buy? Incentives matter, including the perverse ones.

 

Nor can we deny the clear parallels between particular developments in America and Europe. Whether it is the welfare state’s growth via Obamacare, the ongoing acceleration of public-sector debt, the demonizing of the economically successful, our declining competitiveness vis-à-vis the rest of the world, the spread of crony capitalism, the obsessive living for me-myself-and-now, or our intellectually corrupt universities (which will surely be the next financial bubble to explode, and good riddance) — all the data suggest that, in important ways, we are on the path to becoming Europe.

 

That said, I’m not one of those who, in recent days, have seemed inclined to indulge their inner curmudgeon, apparently convinced that it’s more or less game-over for America and we’re doomed to Euro-serfdom. Why? One reason is that, in some very important ways, America is still not Europe. Here are a few of the more pertinent differences.

 

For one thing, we’re not involved in the grand political experiment of the euro: the altar at which Europe’s political class is apparently willing to sacrifice almost anything in the name of a unified-from-the-top-down Eurotopia. Granted, we have our own problems with a Federal Reserve that’s surely looking forward to a fourth round of quantitative easing as its way of helping the administration avoid the macro and micro reforms that are the only real way to restore American competitiveness — reforms that will upset key administration constituencies (such as those living in 1974).

 

Our little Fed difficulty, however, can — eventually — be addressed by changing the people who make monetary policy. That’s small potatoes compared with the prospect of a failed currency experiment that’s haunting the EU right now, not to mention the sheer economic dysfunction that efforts to preserve the euro are magnifying throughout Europe.

 

Second, the strength and persistence of private entrepreneurship continues to substantially differentiate America’s economic culture from that of Europe. America remains ahead — and, in some areas, continues to pull ahead — of most of Europe when it comes to private innovation. As noted in a World Bank report earlier this year, the elements that fuel innovation, such as ease in obtaining patents and availability of venture capital, continue (at least for now) to be far stronger in America than in most of Europe.

 

The same report specified that it is young firms driving innovative growth in America. Among America’s leading innovators in the Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard, more than half were created after 1975. They include firms such as eBay, Microsoft, Cisco, Amgen, Oracle, Google, and of course Apple. By contrast, only one in five leading innovators in Europe is young. In America, young firms make up an incredible 35 percent of total research and development done by leading innovators. Their European counterparts account for a mere 7 percent in the old continent. That’s great news for America and a major headache for Europe over the long term.

 

Third, we need to remember that America’s been here before. You need only read Amity Shlaes’s The Forgotten Man to know just how far America was driven from its economic moorings by Franklin Roosevelt. Then we had to endure the economic disaster of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Yet not even Roosevelt and Johnson could completely overturn the workings of the American experiment in the economy. And twelve years after Johnson left office, Ronald Reagan began his revolution.

 

At best, however, Reagan took America two or three steps back from the six steps forward that had been made by the Progressive crowd since the 1910s. Moreover, in some important respects, much of Reagan’s economic legacy has been undone over the past 15 years. But perhaps America’s greatest strength in resisting economic Europeanization is the fact that it remains what John Courtney Murray called a “propositional nation.”

 

By this, Murray meant that America not only has the capacity to renew itself by going back to its roots, which are formally identified in its founding documents, but had also demonstrated a willingness to do so. Few West European nations have shown a similar ability, not least because of so many Europeans’ diffidence about the worth of their own heritage.

 

So while thinking about questions such as how to connect Hispanics to the conservative cause without compromising the principles of that cause is important, even more significant in the struggle to bring America’s economy back from the brink of perpetual Eurostagnation is what some call “the vision thing.” That means undertaking something that, with some notable exceptions, many conservatives and free-marketers haven’t proved spectacularly good at: grounding sound market arguments upon a moral-cultural vision of what America is supposed to be.

 

Number-crunchers who think anything that can’t be quantified doesn’t exist won’t be excited by this. Nor, I suspect, will those conservatives disinclined to interest themselves in the messy details of supply and demand. Nonetheless, building and articulating the vision thing must be part of the way we persuade Americans who are tempted by the false promise of little work, nanny states, and endless intervention that Europeanization is not just economically and morally problematic — it’s also downright un-American.

A Pyrrhic Victory for America's Youth

By Scott W. Atlas

Monday, November 12, 2012

 

Dancing in Chicago, young voters gleefully celebrated President Obama’s victory. Indeed, voters younger than 30 may well have changed the outcome of the race. They represented 19 percent of all voters, even more than they did in 2008, and they favored President Obama by 60 to 37 percent, according to exit polling.

 

One college student asked me, “What exactly are they so excited about?”

 

Presumably, they aren’t celebrating their job prospects. Under this administration, unemployment of younger Americans and recent college graduates is not very different from the scandalous unemployment rates of youth in failing European countries whose misguided economic policies are creating a nearly jobless generation.

 

Presumably, they aren’t celebrating the increasing tax burdens awaiting the lucky few of them — mainly those who have studied hard and long and spent a great deal on both the direct and indirect (from delayed entry into the work force) costs of advanced education — who will finally attain lucrative jobs.

 

And presumably, they aren’t celebrating the changes in health care for themselves and their future children directly caused by the now inexorable progression of their president’s signature legislation. The list of unwelcome changes is long:

 

  Many people will not be able to choose their doctor, as millions will lose their current insurance plan and, along with it, their doctors.

 

  Private insurance companies, squeezed dry by the limits Obamacare places on their profit margins, will disappear, even though most doctors accept private insurance and it is proven to result in superior medical outcomes.

 

  Even young, healthy people will be forced to buy expensive health coverage, because Obamacare requires expansive coverage of high-cost care. Consumers will no longer be able to buy less comprehensive, lower-cost insurance, such as high-deductible plans with health-savings accounts, even if that insurance would make the most sense for them.

 

  Millions of Americans will be shifted into Medicaid, insurance that pays doctors and hospitals so little that the needed care will simply not be available — as proven again and again in the U.S. (where fewer and fewer doctors provide care to Medicaid and Medicare recipients, specifically because of low reimbursement rates), as well as in other countries dominated by government insurance.

 

  Parents and grandparents will lose access to the very medical technology and drugs that have revolutionized health care in the past half century; these will become less available to Medicare beneficiaries because of cuts by the Independent Payment Advisory Board.

 

  There will be fewer high-paying careers in the medical-technology industry: Obamacare’s misguided medical-device tax (on revenues, not just profits) is already destroying high-paying jobs for Americans and moving them overseas. More than 400,000 high-paying American jobs of the very sort young people seek are at risk because companies in California, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, and elsewhere are already eliminating jobs specifically because of Obamacare’s onerous taxes.

 

Our reelected president, so jubilantly cheered by young voters last week, has completely failed to address what is the single most important problem in America’s health care: the total cost burden on U.S. taxpayers. With Obamacare, one of the greatest intergenerational financial transfers in history, America’s younger generation will bear the burden of unsustainable, ever-expanding entitlements.

 

Presumably, the young voters who approved of the past four years and chose this year to follow the path set forth by President Obama know exactly what’s in store.

 

Well, I say go for it, keep on dancing, but watch out when the music stops.