Friday, July 18, 2014
Barker's Newsbites: Friday, July 18, 2014
Quick, everyone... LOOK... look towards Russia... Ukraine... the Crimea...
Look ANYWHERE but to America's southern border!
Look ANYWHERE but to our own country... our own problems... our own steady decline.
Or...
OR...
Keep your eyes on the ball... the balls... that "they" would have you ignore.
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jul/17/air-force-command-nominee-is-1st-woman-non-pilot/
The White House has picked the first female general to head the Air Force in the Pacific...
* WAIT... WAIT... WAIT...
* SIT DOWN. TAKE A DEEP BREATH. OK... RESUME READING...
...which will make her the first non-pilot to command air power in such a large theater of operation.
* NON-PILOT...
* AIR FORCE...
* PACIFIC...
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
Officials said pilots historically have commanded Air Force war-fighting components for the Pacific and for U.S. Air Forces Europe; Air Forces Central, which covers the Middle East and Afghanistan; and the 1st Air Force, which is part of Northern Command and protects U.S. skies.
* DUH...!!!
A retired pilot said there is a reason the Air Force historically has put a pilot in charge of large combatant command Air Forces. “It is because you make operational decisions that require the understanding of what you are going to ask pilots to execute in combat where the wrong decisions mean the difference between life and death,” the retired pilot said.
(*SIGH*)
Gen. Robinson was nominated amid a diversity push by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and a general focus on women’s issues by the White House.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jul/18/two-third-illegal-immigrant-children-okd-asylum/
Nearly two-thirds of unaccompanied illegal immigrant children requesting asylum this year have had their initial applications approved, the House Judiciary Committee reported Friday...
(*PURSED LIPS*)
According to the Judiciary Committee’s numbers, 65% of unaccompanied children’s asylum applications are approved by the initial asylum officer so far in 2014.
* AND...
Even those who are refused can ask for an appeal, which means the total number who end up staying, with government permission, is likely to be higher.
* OH... AND BY THE WAY...
That figure doesn’t include the others who never apply for asylum and try to disappear into the shadows, or who spend years in the country awaiting court dates.
Smugglers have told Central Americans that if they can get to the U.S. border, they will be processed and released into the interior of the country, where they can disappear into the shadows.
* AND...
[And] gaining asylum is a legal entry into the U.S., and is likely to reinforce the smugglers’ message.
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/382859/inflation-vacation-amity-shlaes
A lot of people who watched Rick Santelli blow up on CNBC the other day thought the same thing: “That guy needs a vacation — and so do I. The world just doesn’t make sense to him, or maybe me, either.” So you head up to the cabin. Maybe it’s the same cabin you rented back in 2000, before your kids. You just want a quiet reality check, a chance to think it all through. You swear you’ll turn off your phone. You and your family need time to remind yourselves how good you have it.
But there’s one nuisance that can interrupt your seven-day idyll just as surely as a blackfly or a mosquito. That nuisance is the price zap.
The first zap comes even before you get in the car. Your daughter wants a haircut so she can feel the sun on her neck. Great. But then she reports she needs $45 for the cut. What? A haircut used to be $20. You fork out, hiding your irritation. You expected haircuts to be high, but not this high.
The next zap comes on the road. A gallon of gas is $4.00. You expected gas to be high. But not this high.
The cottage you rented is nice, but the rent is more than you expected. It’s hot in the cabin, and your other daughter wants to see The Fault in Our Stars one more time. So you head over to the theater. The ticket is $10.00. Your spouse asks you to pick up some coffee. A pound is $5.20...
* AND AT $5.20/LB. YOU'RE TALKING THE CHEAP STUFF!
Maybe you have a child in camp. They still write real postal letters, so you stop at the post office to send her some stamps. Stamps are 49 cents each. (You hope that your daughter can save her stamps and use them next year. You tell the lady you’ll take the “Forevers.”)
* A GIMMICK WHICH ASSUMES FUTURE CONGRESSES WILL BAIL-OUT PRESENT LOSSES... WHICH IS - UNFORTUNATELY - A GOOD BET.
The lake is blue. You go for a swim with a buddy. You two went to the same state school. You believe in public education, and are wondering if your kids will also go to State. His son is starting as a freshman in your old dorm in just four weeks. Celebrate! But then he lets you know that the cost all in is going to be $38,000 and change. Back in 2000, it was $18,400. And when you went, in 1995, tuition and board were only $16,000. And that’s a state school. You knew the price would be high. But not this high. Private school for your kids? Time to forget about it.
About three days in, you do just what you wanted not to. You snap at your daughter. You take a call from a client. Suddenly those little mosquito bites have you itching all over. You feel like maybe you have to get back to the city.
In other words, you’re beginning to realize that maybe you don’t have it so good. Your pay isn’t high enough to let you ignore these prices. Wage growth overall is slower than it should be; your pay certainly hasn’t doubled since 2000, like the price of the movie ticket.
* FOLKS... UNDERSTAND... IT'S GONNA GET WORSE!
Have you lost out entirely? Not really. The realtors name a price for your house that’s more than you expected. Too bad you can’t sell right now.
(*SMIRK*)
* AND IF YOU DID WANT TO SELL NOW... WHAT WOULD THE PRICE OF YOUR NEW HOME BE...?
(*SHRUG*)
Your pension is up, but you have a squishy feeling that money won’t be able to keep up with these prices. The money you have in the Roth IRA is adding up, but it’s clear politicians may zap your stash later by turning the Roth into a taxable vehicle. They’ll probably do that right around when you retire.
(*SHRUG*)
* AND YA KNOW WHAT, FOLKS... WE HAVE RETIREMENT SAVINGS! WE DO! MOST PEOPLE DON'T. AGAIN... MOST PEOPLE DON'T! THE STATS ARE CLEAR ON THIS!
* FOLKS... YOU PROBABLY JUDGE YOUR PEERS BASED MOSTLY UPON APPEARENCES. WELL... APPEARENCES CAN BE DECEPTIVE. BUT BEYOND THAT... UNDERSTAND... MOST PEOPLE ARE NOT "US." THEY DON'T MAKE THE MONEY WE MAKE. THEY DON'T LIVE THE LIFESTYLES WE LIVE. WE DRIVE THRU THEIR NEIGHBORHOODS - NOT TO THEM.
(*SHRUG*)
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
You’re on vacation. Other people are water skiing, so you have a few hours to think about this. When you wake up from your sofa snooze, you see there is another way to look at the discomfort you’re experiencing: The price zap is an inflation zap. The reason you thought you could afford this vacation in the first place was that you know a little about money. All the official numbers, especially the Consumer Price Index, say that inflation is reasonable. Economists you respect tell you the wages are low because of “misallocation of resources.” Janet Yellen, the new Fed chairman, says she’s not worried. Maybe she will have a good vacation.
* YEP! THE RICH AND POWERFUL ARE GETTING RICHER AND MORE POWERFUL...
But other numbers suggest that inflation is higher than what the official data suggest.
* THE "OFFICIAL" NUMBERS ARE DELIBERATELY UNDERSTATED... STIFFLED. (GOVERNMENT LIES AND MANIPULATES... BIG FRIGGIN' SURPRISE, HUH?)
One set, from which some of the price bites above were taken, is here.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-14/feeling-poorer-through-power-inflation
For a more thorough review of why official numbers err, have a look at the work of John Williams...
http://www.shadowstats.com/
Some change is good — that’s what modernity is about. But what monetary authorities don’t recognize is that too much change in money’s value, up or down, can be enervating to the average person. An old money that keeps its old value sustains a mood of trust in society. This summer Jerry Jordan, the former president of the Cleveland Fed, penned a blistering notice of the change in central-banking culture on his website, Sound Money Project: “Clearly I was wrong a few years ago when I asserted ‘there were no central bankers or ministers of finance who would publicly argue that the prevailing inflation rate was too low.’ It now seems they all do.”
Go back farther, and you find central bankers who pointedly tolerated no inflation. President Calvin Coolidge put it simply: “Inflation is repudiation.”
(*STANDING OVATION*)
Today, because of our national “repudiation” — or plain denial — of inflation, we tend to find that kind of trust only among good friends or family — and there only if you all can avoid talking about prices. People begin to doubt themselves when personal inflation experience does not align with official inflation data. Writers trying to describe the German hyperinflation of the 1920s often wrote of the “blow” of seeing currency go to nothing. Such blows were their own dramatic version of those little zaps.
Which takes us back to Rick Santelli.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU9U3ZnAD5E
What Santelli is really talking about is getting the Fed back to a point where it cares about inflation. If you study the last part of the video, where the CNBC host gets bullied into silence by Steve Liesman, you’ll see the problem. The price today for talking about inflation is itself too high.
Santelli doesn’t really need a vacation, but he sure deserves one. Then he and maybe some others can return to argue again. It’s time for a real debate on inflation to commence. And knowing that such a debate was out there sure would make it easier to come back to work.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/383059/what-gop-should-do-maggie-gallagher
The RNC has recruited 16,630 volunteer precinct captains who live in the communities to help 200 paid staff, including 15 data directors, 30 Hispanic engagement officers, and 15 African-American and eight Asian-American engagement staff, all of whom have as their primary goal turning out 10 million “low-propensity Republican voters.”
The winds are at the GOP’s back as Obama’s popularity sinks, his aloofness grows, the economy stalls, and the historic sixth-year pickup by the party out of power kicks in.
Republican voters are much more motivated, the generic preference is now split, and the Dems have too many seats to defend.
The assembled Republican-party firepower is patting themselves on the back for working together, but the elephant in the room — well, actually, this being the Republican club, there are lots of elephants lining the glass-cased shelves in the room – but the really big elephant in the room, which the assembled political hotshots lightly skip by, is the question: What is the Republicans’ winning message?
It would be hard to believe the GOP could blow it in 2014, with the economy, and the world, and the border, and our health-care system all disintegrating while a visibly aloof president watches as his party goes nuts over non-issues like contraception.
* NO. NOT HARD AT ALL! THE GOP ISN'T KNOWN AS "THE STUPID PARTY" FOR NOTHING! THEY ARE QUITE CAPABLE OF PULLING DEFEAT OUT OF THE JAWS OF VICTORY! (LOOK AT 2012!)
The GOP’s single biggest need is a clear narrative for why voters are experiencing broad and deep drops in their own families’ standard of living. Massive wage stagnation and climbing health-insurance costs combine with price increases in the things that consume middle- and working-class family budgets: groceries, gas, utilities. Main Street hurts while Obama’s Wall Street favorites feast on government guarantees.
* YES!
It’s not “jobs” or “job creation” per se, it is the broad persistent decline in purchasing power that is weighing most heavily on voters’ minds. A good place to start would be describing that concern and explaining it, between now and November, and coming up with something that helps. It is our most urgent need.
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/352704/lefts-central-delusion-thomas-sowell
The fundamental problem of the political Left seems to be that the real world does not fit their preconceptions. Therefore they see the real world as what is wrong, and what needs to be changed, since apparently their preconceptions cannot be wrong.
A never-ending source of grievances for the Left is the fact that some groups are “over-represented” in desirable occupations, institutions, and income brackets, while other groups are “under-represented.”
From all the indignation and outrage about this expressed on the Left, you might think that it was impossible that different groups are simply better at different things. Yet runners from Kenya continue to win a disproportionate share of marathons in the United States, and children whose parents or grandparents came from India have won most of the American spelling bees in the past 15 years.
(And has anyone failed to notice that the leading professional basketball players have for years been black, in a country where most of the population is white?)
Most of the leading photographic lenses in the world have — for generations — been designed by people who were either Japanese or German. Most of the leading diamond-cutters in the world have been either India’s Jains or Jews from Israel or elsewhere.
Not only people but things have been grossly unequal.
More than two-thirds of all the tornadoes in the entire world occur in the middle of the United States. Asia has more than 70 mountain peaks that are higher than 20,000 feet and Africa has none.
(Is it news that a disproportionate share of all the oil in the world is in the Middle East?)
Whole books could be filled with the unequal behavior or performances of people, or the unequal geographic settings in which whole races, nations, and civilizations have developed. Yet the preconceptions of the political Left march on undaunted, loudly proclaiming sinister reasons why outcomes are not equal within nations or between nations.
All this moral melodrama has served as a background for the political agenda of the Left, which has claimed to be able to lift the poor out of poverty, and in general make the world a better place. This claim has been made for centuries and in countries around the world. And it has failed for centuries in countries around the world.
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
Some of the most sweeping and spectacular rhetoric of the Left occurred in 18th-century France, where the very concept of the Left originated in the fact that people with certain views sat on the left side of the National Assembly.
The French Revolution was their chance to show what they could do when they got the power they sought. In contrast to what they promised — “liberty, equality, fraternity” — what they actually produced were food shortages, mob violence, and dictatorial powers that included arbitrary executions extending even to their own leaders, such as Robespierre, who died under the guillotine.
In the 20th century, the most sweeping vision of the Left — Communism — spread over vast regions of the world and encompassed well over a billion human beings. Of these, millions died of starvation in the Soviet Union under Stalin and tens of millions in China under Mao.
Milder versions of socialism, with central planning of national economies, took root in India and in various European democracies.
If the preconceptions of the Left were correct, central planning by educated elites who had vast amounts of statistical data at their fingertips and expertise readily available, and were backed by the power of government, should have been more successful than market economies where millions of individuals pursued their own individual interests willy-nilly.
But, by the end of the 20th century, even socialist and communist governments began abandoning central planning and allowing more market competition. Yet this quiet capitulation to inescapable realities did not end the noisy claims of the Left.
In the United States, those claims and policies have reached new heights, epitomized by government takeovers of whole sectors of the economy and unprecedented intrusions into the lives of Americans, of which ObamaCare has been only the most obvious example.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/383051/obama-albatross-john-fund
With less than four months to go until Election Day, Democrats increasingly have no confidence in the Obama White House’s political instincts.
* IN PLAIN ENGLISH... THEY'RE STARTING TO WORRY ABOUT HIS PSYCH PROFILE AS WELL...
* HEY... READ ON... THIS AIN'T NO AD HOM!
As a result, more and more Democratic candidates are avoiding the president when he comes to their neighborhood. Senator Mark Udall famously avoided showing up with Obama at a fundraiser in the senator’s honor in Colorado last week. John Foust, the Democratic congressional candidate in a suburban Virginia district just outside Washington, D.C., snubbed the president this week by failing to show up for a presidential event in his area.
Representative Henry Cuellar of Texas was flabbergasted by Obama’s petulant refusal to visit the Texas border last week, calling him “aloof” and “detached” and his decision “bizarre.”
Bob Beckel, a former Democratic campaign consultant, said on Fox News this week that he spoke with a Democrat “intimately involved in [Obama’s] campaigns, both of them.” The message was sobering: “He said you have to know what it’s like to get through [presidential counselor] Valerie Jarrett and Michelle Obama, and I think that’s a tough deal for anybody on a staff to do. . . . [Obama] lives in a zone that nobody else goes to.”
All of Washington is talking about our detached president — one who would go to two fundraisers in New York last night after a plane carrying 23 Americans was shot down over Ukraine.
* HAS THAT BEEN CONFIRMED...? THE NUMBER OF AMERICANS KILLED...???
In 2012, Obama famously flew off to fundraisers in Las Vegas the day after the Benghazi attack killed our ambassador to Libya and three other Americans.
(*NOD*)
“Obama does not appear to relish being chief executive,” writes liberal journalist Edward Luce in the Financial Times. Luce notes that Obama has headlined 393 fundraisers since he took office, double the number that George W. Bush had attended at this point in his presidency.
* AS I OFTEN NOTE, FOLKS, OBAMA HAS A TENDENCY TO DOUBLE-DOWN (OR WORSE!) ON THE WORST OF BUSHES DECISIONS!
Veteran journalist Patrick Smith writes, “I can think of two names for this. One is ‘outmoded arrogance.’ The other is ‘asleep at the wheel.’ Whatever the moniker, some measure of incompetence lies behind it.”
A disengaged, petulant president who gives the impression that someone else is minding the White House store isn’t good for the country.
One presidential historian says that if the president’s bizarre behavior deepens, people will start making jokes comparing Obama to President Woodrow Wilson, who was debilitated by illness during his last two years in office, with decisions increasingly made by his aides and his wife, Edith. “The comparisons of course wouldn’t be fair, but they don’t have to be to have elements of truth to them.”
* IF ONLY THE AVERAGE AMERICAN COULD BE COUNTED ON TO BE ABLE TO IDENTIFY WHO WOODROW WILSON WAS - LET ALONE KNOW MUCH ABOUT HIM.
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD IN DISGUST*)
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/383055/future-without-electricity-stephen-moore
Could the radical Green movement in America make mankind’s future resemble a science-fiction Earth ruled by apes?
This weekend I went to the see the blockbuster movie Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and an Investor’s Business Daily editorial this week got me thinking about a bleak scenario. Our future won’t have ape rulers, but, IBD points out, a world without energy might well look similar.
In the movie, bands of humans are resisting a global government of super-intelligent monkeys, gorillas and the like. The humans lack access to electricity, making their struggle — let along the normal life we know today — nearly impossible.
They are rendered powerless — literally.
The simian despots understand that depriving the humans of access to electricity will keep them underfoot.
I wonder how many Americans got the subtle message here: Energy is the master resource. Without it, we return to a Stone Age existence. Life in its absence is nasty, brutish and short.
Is that where the radical Greens, one of the most influential political forces in America today, would take us? If we continue to follow their advice, electric power and fuel will become more expensive (as President Obama has [freely and even perhaps enthusiastically] admitted).
The Investor’s Business Daily editorial noted, “as the Sierra Club, billionaire Tom Steyer and the Obama administration rage war against coal and other fossil fuel,” we could end up seeing “rolling brownouts and even blackouts in the years ahead.”
* BILLIONAIRES HAVE THEIR OWN GENERATORS... AND PLENTY OF GAS OR WHATEVER ELSE THEY NEED.
In other words, the apocalypse confronting America may not be the havoc of “climate change,” but a slow-motion return to a medieval lifestyle.
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING...
Consider the Obama administration’s ongoing war on coal, marked most recently by new EPA regulations requiring dramatic reductions in carbon emissions from power plants. America gets about 40% of its electricity from coal-fired plants, as IBD notes.
The greens say, no problem, we will shift to renewable energy. But it’s not so simple, as IBD points out: States with onerous renewable-energy standards such as Colorado and California are still relying heavily on coal to fill in the gaps during bad weather or periods of high demand.
There is a reliable, green, economical alternative: natural gas. It’s become cheap and abundant due to new smart drilling technologies. But the environmentalists are busy devising strategies to shut down natural gas as an energy source as well, raising unsupported objections to fracking, one of the methods used to extract it. The Sierra Club says we have to move “beyond natural gas,” even though natural gas is reducing carbon emissions.
(*ROLLING MY EYES*)
And as IBD notes, the Left has little love for other sources of electricity, either, such as nuclear and hydro. In fact, the editorial notes, we get about 90% of our power from sources that the Left is trying to shut down.
Sorry, for the foreseeable future, we aren’t going to get our power for our $18 trillion economy from wind turbines and solar panels. And if we begin to try, prices are going to skyrocket.
As for our major transportation fuel, the Greens think oil is a “dirty” fuel that causes global warming. They’re trying to stop domestic drilling anywhere they can. They say we should move to electric cars. Fine. But where are we going to get the electricity to power the batteries?
* AGAIN...
But where are we going to get the electricity to power the batteries?
Last summer our suburban home in northern Virginia lost power for two days during a storm. No lights, no computers, no air conditioning, no TV, no iPods or iPhones. To my three sons, this was like hell on earth. "How did people live without electricity," they wondered.
"Very poorly," I told them.
I wonder how many young people will be so excited about “green energy” when such outages are commonplace and they come to the realization that life without those “dirty” sources of power won’t be so wonderful.
We don’t need apes to destroy our planet. The green humans seems to be doing a fine job of it all on their own.
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://michellemalkin.com/2014/07/18/mrs-obamas-operation-va-scandal-distraction/
Barack and Michelle Obama are quite the diversionary tag-team. He blames everyone else for his problems. She takes credit for progress on his behalf that he doesn’t deserve and distracts public attention from his avalanche of failures with endless feel-good photo-ops.
While the shirker in chief golfed and grubbed for money at closed-door celebrity fundraisers this week, his East Wing flak-catcher provided him cunning cover on the still-festering VA scandals.
Mrs. Obama flew to Los Angeles to declare "a war" - or something - on veterans’ homelessness.
At a "summit" with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti on Wednesday, she said the neglect of our men and women in uniform, abandoned on the streets after returning from battle, should “horrify all of us.”
Of course, vet homelessness is a shame, and it should be eradicated. But the timing of Mrs. Obama’s remarks — not to mention her glaring omissions — is calculated cynicism on Louboutins.
President Obama’s human deflector sprinkled her remarks with various anecdotes about vets struggling to get back on their feet. But not once in her 2,700-word speech did Mrs. Obama mention the horrifying stories of veterans neglected, abused, manipulated and crushed by corrupt VA bureaucrats under her husband’s administration.
* ONE MORE TIME...
[N]ot once in her 2,700-word speech did Mrs. Obama mention the horrifying stories of veterans neglected, abused, manipulated and crushed by corrupt VA bureaucrats under her husband’s administration. Instead, she spent the rest of the speech bragging about “my husband” launching "this initiative" and "that program" to do right by the vets.
Various federal agencies live-tweeted the event; Mrs. Obama’s fan base oohed and aahed. And the Veterans Affairs media relations and social media tracking teams undoubtedly high-fived each other as they tallied up the positive press.
Meanwhile, more whistleblowers who will never gain Mrs. Obama’s public sympathy or accolades gave damning testimony about the “culture of corruption” at the VA.
One told Capitol Hill lawmakers about how her car was dented after she reported manipulation of veterans’ benefits claims in Philadelphia.
Others were put on leave or harassed.
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
“Retaliation culture is a cancer,” said Dr. Christian Head, who was investigating time-card fraud inside the Greater Los Angeles VA Health Care System.
* AND UNLIKE MRS. OBAMA, THESE PEOPLE ARE TESTIFYING UNDER OATH... UNDER THREAT OF PERJURY.
A new report by the VA inspector general provided more details of how bureaucrats made pending benefits cases vanish and mishandled or intentionally lost paperwork related to claims in a mad attempt to reduce the 600,000-case backlog. Linda Halliday, an assistant inspector general, ticked off all the new targets of investigative probes: Baltimore, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Oakland, Houston and Little Rock, Ark.
Asked whether she believes in the integrity of data being supplied to her by VA officials, Halliday told the House Veterans Affairs Committee: “No. … I don’t want to say I trust them.”
(Goodbye, hope and change. Hello, lying liars.)
And how’s this for horrifying: Yet another VA IG report released this week affirmed that the Baltimore VA “had inappropriately stockpiled about 8,000 documents” containing sensitive personal information and processed and unprocessed claims-related mail with the potential to affect benefits payments. “More than 9,500 documents and 80 claims folders lacked the oversight necessary to ensure timely claims processing,” investigators said.
* GEEZUS...
Translation: Feckless VA drones sat on their plump, worthless backsides while the desperate entreaties of our nation’s best and bravest clogged their do-nothing desks.
The horrors of government ineptitude and malpractice are behemoth. The OIG also affirmed this week that the same kind of book-cooking happening across the country took place at Philadelphia VA offices. Staffers changed dates on old claims to make them look new. Whistleblowers exposed systematic document shredding and piles of veterans’ unanswered correspondence stuffed in boxes and cabinets.
Still to be probed: cherry-picking of claims to inflate performance; 32,000 unanswered electronic queries from veterans seeking information about their benefits claims; and duplicate payments being written off.
The first lady’s Operation VA Scandal Distraction may have been a success for one day. But evasion-by-photo-op can’t work forever.
* IT WORKED THROUGH 2012...
(*SHRUG*)
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/383020/liberals-liberty-problem-michael-barone
Liberals just aren’t very liberal these days.
The word “liberal” comes from the Latin word meaning freedom, and in the 19th century, liberals in this country and abroad stood for free speech, free exercise of religion, free markets, and free trade — for minimal state interference in people’s lives.
* POLITICAL SCIENTISTS REFER TO THESE TRUE LIBERALS AS "BIG L" LIBERALS... "Liberals" as opposed to "liberals."
In the 20th century, New Dealers revised this definition by arguing that people had a right not only to free speech and freedom of religion but also, as Franklin Roosevelt said in his 1941 Four Freedoms speech, freedom from fear and from want.
Freedom from want meant, for Roosevelt, government provision of jobs, housing, health care, and food. And so government would have to be much larger, more expensive, and more intrusive than ever before.
That’s what liberalism has come to mean in America (in Europe it still has the old meaning), and much of the Obama Democrats’ agenda consists of logical outgrowths — Obamacare, the vast expansion of food stamps, attempted assistance to underwater homeowners.
But in some respects the Obama Democrats want to go further — and are complaining that they’re having a hard time getting there. Their form of liberalism is in danger of standing for something like the very opposite of freedom, for government coercion of those who refuse to behave the way they’d like.
* OBAMA IS A MAN OF THE LEFT. HE'S FAR TO THE LEFT OF A "SMALL L" LIBERAL (i.e. "liberal).
Example one is the constitutional amendment, sponsored by 43 of the 55 Democratic U.S. senators, that would cut back on the First Amendment and authorize Congress and state legislatures to restrict political speech.
* AND IF THIS IS THE FIRST YOU'RE HEARING OF IT...
(*SIGH*)
The amendment [S.J. RES. 19] is poorly drafted and leaves many questions dangerously open (who qualifies for the media exception?), perhaps because its sponsors know it has no significant chance of passage.
https://beta.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/senate-joint-resolution/19/text
It also seems animated by a delusionary paranoia: Democrats profess to be afraid they’ll be swamped by a flood of rich people’s money, even though their rich supporters have raised more than the other side’s in recent years.
* ONE... MORE... TIME...
even though their rich supporters have raised more than the other side’s in recent years.
Many [so-called] conservatives wanted to change the First Amendment in order to prosecute flag burning...
* NOT ME... BUT...
(*SHRUG*)
Today’s liberals, in contrast, want to change the First Amendment to restrict political speech, which is the core value the Founders sought to protect.
* YEP.
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
Or consider liberals’ recent attitude toward free exercise of religion, made plain in their reaction to the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision declaring the ObamaCare contraception mandate invalid as a violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
The RFRA was passed, with three dissenting votes, and signed by Bill Clinton in 1993. It was prompted by a Supreme Court decision upholding the penalization of Oregon Indians for using peyote, which they claimed was a religious rite.
In passing RFRA, liberals and conservatives alike responded as Americans have often done when small groups have claimed laws infringed on their religious beliefs: They put a higher priority on a few individuals’ free exercise of religion than they did on widely supported laws of general application.
Thus Congress allowed for conscientious objectors to be exempt from military service in World War II, in which more than 400,000 U.S. service members died. Even in a national emergency, when lives were at stake, Americans were willing to accommodate religious beliefs that a large majority did not share.
Today’s liberals take a different view. They want to make Hobby Lobby’s owners pay for what they regard as the destruction of human life. They spent much time arguing the owners are mistaken (actually, they have a plausible scientific basis for their belief). But the point about freedom of religion isn’t that everyone has to agree. On the contrary: Almost no one agreed with the Oregon Indians’ beliefs about peyote. They just thought the larger society should not use compulsion to bar them from practicing their religion. Today’s liberals seem comfortable with using the force of law to prevent people from doing so.
* AGAIN...
Today’s liberals seem comfortable with using the force of law to prevent people from doing so.
(*NOD*)
Or consider the Supreme Court decision in Harris v. Quinn, ruling that caregivers for disabled relatives paid with Medicaid funds are not state employees and thus cannot be forced into a public-employee union.
Today’s liberals did this in President Obama’s Illinois to channel public money away from low-income caregivers and toward public-employee unions that do so much to fund and support the Democratic party. They seem unembarrassed by this crass political motive and indifferent to the plight of the needy.
Today’s liberals seem bent on pushing people around, preventing them from speaking their minds and practicing their beliefs. It’s not just the language that’s changed.
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