RUTHFULLY YOURS

The ruthless exercise of power by strongmen and generalissimos is the natural state of human affairs.

I’m 41 years old, which doesn’t feel that old to me (most days), but history is short. With the exception of those trapped behind the Iron Curtain, the world as I have known it has been remarkably free and prosperous, and it is getting more free and more prosperous. But it is also a fact that, within my lifetime, there have been dictatorships in Spain, Portugal, Greece, Poland, India, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, South Korea, and half of Germany — and lots of other places, too, to be sure, but you sort of expect them in Cameroon and Russia. If I were only a few years older, I could add France to that list. (You know how you can tell that Charles de Gaulle was a pretty good dictator? He’s almost never described as a “dictator.”) There have been three attempted coups d’état in Spain during my life. Take the span of my father’s life and you’ll find dictatorships and coups and generalissimos rampant in practically every country, even the nice ones, like Norway.

That democratic self-governance is a historical anomaly is easy to forget for those of us in the Anglosphere — we haven’t really endured a dictator since Oliver Cromwell. The United States came close, first under Woodrow Wilson and then during the very long presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. Both men were surrounded by advisers who admired various aspects of authoritarian models then fashionable in Europe. Rexford Tugwell, a key figure in Roosevelt’s so-called brain trust, was particularly keen on the Italian fascist model, which he described as “the cleanest, most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen.” And the means by which that social hygiene was maintained? “It makes me envious,” he said. That envy will always be with us, which is one of the reasons why progressives work so diligently to undermine the separation of powers, aggrandize the machinery of the state, and stifle criticism of the state. We’ll always have our Hendrik Hertzbergs — but who could say the words “Canadian dictatorship” without laughing a little? As Tom Wolfe put it, “The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.”

Why is that? Is there something magical about Albion’s seed — Protestantism? the English language itself? the combination of the two in the King James Bible? — that inoculates the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand against the European intellectual disease? That disease mutates every 20 years, but the primordial strain of the virus is always identifiable: more power, centralized power, consolidated power. If you were observing Earth from space, or from Rome during the reign of Hadrian, you would not be likely to think of England as the planet’s great mover and shaker; it is just a little island sneered at by Europe’s great men as “a nation of shopkeepers.” But culture and history are sensitive to initial conditions, and somewhere between the drafting of the Magna Carta and the invention of the first power loom, a British butterfly flapped its wings in the right way at the right moment, and the deeply intertwined phenomena of the Industrial Revolution and the liberty revolution emerged together, creating an entirely new kind of civilization, one that showed the world that it is indeed a glorious thing to be a nation of shopkeepers. Walk through modern-day London, or drive through Houston, and see how their shopkeepers are keeping themselves — most of them won’t even bother to sneer at the memory of Napoleon and his grubby little wars.

But freedom, self-rule, and prosperity are extraordinarily delicate things. The natural state of the human animal is not security and plenty, but terror and privation. When the Romans overthrew Tarquin, they swore they’d never have another king. Soon enough, they had an emperor, a word deriving from the Latin imperator, which, some of my conservative friends would do well to remember, means “commander-in-chief.”

JOHN FUND: REMEMBER MISSISSIPPI- The maneuverings to keep Thad Cochran in the Senate will not soon be forgotten.
How far did the establishment GOP forces backing Senator Thad Cochran go in Mississippi this week? Too far, and their tactics are likely to leave permanent scars in a civil war with Tea Party forces that are out of all proportion to the importance the establishment placed on saving one 76-year-old senator’s ability to please Washington’s K Street lobbying interests.

“This is a win for the establishment, but it’s a win with an asterisk, because it’s so tainted that it might be one of those things where they’re going to be sorry they ever won the runoff in Mississippi,” Craig Shirley, a political consultant and the author of two respected biographies of Ronald Reagan, told Yahoo News this week.

The key to Cochran’s surprising victory was a disproportionately high turnout in precincts with high Democratic registration. Mississippi law permits voters to cross party lines in primaries, but it prohibits members of one party who voted in their party’s primary to participate in a runoff of the other party. It also bars them from voting in the runoff unless they intend to support the resulting nominee in the November election — an unenforceable requirement, but one that showed that the intent of the election law was, in this case, to let Republicans determine their own nominee.

The tactics used to convince black Democrats to vote for Cochran included the same kind of race-baiting that Republicans have complained about for decades. “The Tea Party Intends To Prevent Blacks From Voting on Tuesday” was the headline on a flier that indefatigable journalist Charles Johnson (twitter #chuckcjohnson) discovered had been distributed in heavily black precincts before the June 23 vote. Along with that unfounded incendiary message was a list of issue comparisons between Cochran and Chris McDaniel. Cochran was credited with such unconservative positions as support for federal pork projects and food-stamp funding. The flier carried no identification as to who produced it, a violation of federal law.

Curiously, another flier put out by the pro-Cochran Mississippi Conservatives PAC last week described Cochran’s positions in nearly identical language as the anonymous flier and even carried an identical photo of the senator. The slogan that Thad Cochran “Supports All Mississippians” is the same in both fliers.

“I don’t know who put it out,” former governor Haley Barbour, who raised boatloads of money for the Mississippi Conservatives PAC, told my colleague Eliana Johnson. “I can’t imagine the Cochran campaign did that.”

New York Soda Ban Loses Again Court of appeals rules Big Apple residents can buy big sugary beverages

New York’s appeals court struck down New York City’s ban on the sale of sweetened drinks larger than 16 ounces.

The state’s Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that the Board of Health appointed by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg exceeded the bounds of its regulatory authority in passing the law on March 12, 2013.

The four-to-two decision disappointed city officials who had hoped the court would reinstate the ban after two lower courts had already ruled against it, according to The New York Times.

The city stayed silent on whether it plans to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. An appeal is unlikely since the case concerns local government authority and legislation rather than federal issues, Gawker reported.

Bloomberg promoted the proposal as a way to control health conditions such as obesity and diabetes. The restriction would have applied to restaurants, delis, movie theaters, stadiums, and street carts, hitting big companies like Coca-Cola Co.

Restaurants, theater owners, and beverage companies sued, arguing that an appointed board, as opposed to legislative bodies, lacked the authority to impose the ban.

In her dissent, Judge Susan P. Read said the ruling overlooked precedent granting the Board of Health large scope to address public-health issues, such as prohibiting the use of lead paint in homes.

The ruling thwarts public-health advocates and the city’s Board of Health in their efforts to enact measures limiting the consumption of high-calorie drinks known to contribute to obesity.

The ban’s applicability had been questioned since its initial proposal. The restrictions were inconsistent, affecting establishments such as fast-food franchises while leaving convenience stores like 7-Eleven exempt. And though New Yorkers couldn’t purchase huge sports drinks for workouts, equally huge milkshakes and fruit juices remained fair game.

The American Beverage Association, the industry’s trade group, said in a statement that it approved the ruling and that the proposal “would have created an uneven playing field for thousands of small businesses in the city and limited New Yorkers’ freedom of choice.”

Her brand of populism could spell doom for Hillary’s White House ambitions.
Paging Elizabeth Warren: This is your moment.

In 2007, Democrats were delirious with rage about the Iraq war. Hillary Clinton, the “inevitable” presidential front-runner, had voted for the war and refused to apologize for it. Other leading candidates, including Joe Biden, John Edwards, and Chris Dodd, voted for it too. This left a huge opening for a credible antiwar candidate. Barack Obama, inexperienced and underqualified, nonetheless jumped into the vacuum. The rest, as they say, is history.

Today, the issue that obsesses the base of the Democratic party is income inequality. I think that’s foolish. The underlying causes of inequality — miserable economic growth, stagnating wages, poverty, etc. — are vastly more worthy challenges. Though, in fairness, many people actually have those problems in mind when they talk about inequality.

There’s another component to the inequality obsession: populism. People increasingly feel that economic and political elites are enriching themselves, not by making great products or selling valuable services, but by cutting backroom deals and selling influence. This rage is remarkably bipartisan. It is the one theme that loosely unites tea partiers and Wall Street occupiers alike.

Obscure economics professor David Brat toppled House majority leader Eric Cantor in a Virginia primary largely by tapping into that populism, particularly on such issues as immigration and Wall Street bailouts.

Senator Warren owes her left-wing hero status to the Democratic version of this kind of populism. She’s been talking for years about how the well-connected “rig the system” for their own benefit. Now, I find many of Warren’s proposed solutions — more regulation, more taxes, more government, etc. — abhorrent. But, believe it or not, I am not a Democratic-primary voter. Those who are love what Warren is selling.

Obama’s drone policy is more about politics than law

The Obama administration’s justification for the killing of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in 2011 has always been somewhat murky.

Awlaki was killed in Yemen along with another American, Samir Khan (editor of the al Qaeda magazine “Inspire”), when a missile fired from an American drone struck the car in which they were riding.

The best explanation of the legality of the killings was in a Justice Department “white paper” leaked by NBC in February 2013. It stated a cogent – if troubling – rationale. It said that if: (1) an “informed high level official of the US government” decided that the person posed an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States; and (2) capture was infeasible; and (3) the operation would be conducted in accordance with the law of war, then an American citizen who was a senior leader of al Qaeda or an associated force outside the United States could be assassinated by our government.

Many people were troubled by the power found to exist in any “informed high level official” to order the death of an American without due process of law. I was not one of them. A person who forswears his allegiance to America in favor of al Qaeda has become an enemy combatant who can be lawfully killed in battle by any American soldier. That is the law of war. In that respect, killing Awlaki with a drone strike was no different from the carefully-planned shooting down of Japanese Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto’s aircraft in 1943.

On Monday, the court-ordered release of a 31-page redacted Justice Department legal opinion revealed more of the rationale behind the Obama administration’s claim to the authority to kill American citizens without due process of law.

It begins by making clear that an American who kills another American outside the jurisdiction of the United States is guilty of murder. Going further than the Justice Department white paper, it invokes the “public authority” justification for law-breaking that covers acts such as a fire engine running a stop light to reach a fire. It concedes that the “public authority” justification doesn’t cover all actions by the Executive Branch, but finds – as the white paper did – that the September 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force authorized the president to kill an American who was associated with al Qaeda-related forces such as Awlaki.

“First Presbyterian Church of Fort Myers, Lee County’s oldest Presbyterian church, went on record Monday night opposition to the vote by its national governing body, Presbyterian Church USA, that they say condemns the nation of Israel and vilifies three American companies.

Rev. Paul deJong, senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Fort Myers, said the decision by the local church’s session was unanimous and will be sent to Presbyterian Church USA as a formal protest.

“We cannot and will not support Presbyterian Church USA in its misguided decision to divest itself of stock in companies whose products Israel uses in the occupied territories,” deJong said. “We stand in full support of Israel’s right to protect its citizens and of all American companies to engage in honest free enterprise.”

The center of the controversy was a vote Friday by the General Assembly of Presbyterian Church USA to sell stock it owns in Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard and Motorola because the companies make products used by Israel against Palestinians in the West Bank. The resolution passed 310 to 303.

“The actions of the denomination are at best misguided, at worst represent outright racism, and certainly give every appearance of intentionally promoting anti-Semitism. One must question the motives of anyone who vilifies Israel with greater fervor than any other nation, especially when we consider the numerous places in which violence is being reported continuously. Indeed, rarely in history has one side held so much power and yet used that power with such restraint as Israel is doing in our day,” Rev. deJong said.

Rev. deJong said First Presbyterian Church considers the Bible to be the Word of God and the Bible clearly states that the people of Jerusalem (those we now call Jews) are God’s chosen people.

“There is no defense for anti-Semitism in the guise of peace-making. We find this action by the PCUSA to be indefensible, and we wish to differentiate ourselves from all who would single out for condemnation either Israel as a nation or Jewish people as a race. We call upon all true Christians to do the same,” he said.

Presbyterian Church USA is the largest Presbyterian body in the nation with more than two million members.”

“Just Say No” was the anti-drug slogan coined by Nancy Reagan during her time as First Lady. Then as now, we had a portion of the population addicted to “mind altering substances” that put drug users into an alternate reality. Many of these addicts were enabled by a society that permitted them ready and plentiful access to these drugs.

Well – we now have a similar problem – we have addicts living in an alternate reality. Their inability to grasp the reality around them, or the ramifications of living in a dangerous world, has left them detached and isolated; they are also known as the Obama national security team.

The new addicts, and their alternate reality are fueled by their drug of choice — money – funds that they demand to fuel their completely ineffective foreign policy.

In this 21st century alternate reality, the Department of Defense (DoD) is at the spearhead of our national security – and primary consumer of money.

Congress is now being asked to fund the Pentagon’s “war chest,” basically a slush fund used to break the budget ceilings put in place by Congress (and signed into law by the President), without any strategy or idea as to what they will do with the money.

So – let us ponder this for a moment. The White House and DoD now want more money … to do what?

About those 300 U.S. military advisers that the Obama administration has ordered to Iraq.

They belong on the United States border with Mexico. They are urgently needed to assess what U.S. military force should be deployed immediately to secure our own border, not Iraq’s border, from what is surely the most unconventional and, I believe, the most dangerous war in our history. As tens of thousands of so-called unaccompanied alien children (UAC) crash our southern border, we are undergoing a war against the existence, the concept of the USA as a nation-state.

After all, a nation-state doesn’t exist unless it controls its borders and protects its citizens. We, the People, do neither. But the existential danger here comes not from the assault itself. Nightmarishly, it comes from the Obama administration, which, in its greatest betrayal, is leading, or at least supporting, the aliens’ charge.

That’s why the cavalry isn’t coming.

A normal government — one with the best interests of its own citizens at heart — would have taken immediate steps to 1) halt these border crossings that pose a dire threat to public health and safety, and 2) set in motion the deportation efforts necessary to return these illegal aliens to their home countries.

But the Obama administration is not a normal government. It saw these veritable columns of minor aliens forming, and, rather than stop them from entering the country, actually sought to help them, borrowing a phrase from Rep. Lou Barletta, R-Pa., wipe their feet on our “welfare welcome mat” and stay.

How do I know this? Every American should examine the Department of Homeland Security solicitation notice that appeared six months ago at the federal business opportunities site FedBizOpps.gov. The notice seeks “Escort Services for Unaccompanied Alien Children,” describing exactly the services now required to process, not deport, this massive influx.

According to this notice posted back on Jan. 29, 2014, DHS was already gearing up to receive “approximately 65,000 UAC in total.”

Senate 9, President 0
Obama pitches a shutout at the Supreme Court on recess appointments.

The Supreme Court handed President Obama his 13th unanimous loss in two years on Thursday, and this one may be the most consequential. All nine Justices voted to overturn Mr. Obama’s non-recess recess appointments as an unconstitutional abuse of power.

Over nearly 238 years of American history, the Supreme Court has never had to review the President’s authority to temporarily fill vacant executive offices when Congress is adjourned. Mr. Obama’s 2012 maneuver to void the Senate’s advice and consent role triggered a judicial intercession, and defeats at the High Court are seldom as total as this one.

Two years ago Mr. Obama packed the National Labor Relations Board with three new members and made Richard Cordray the chief of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Other Presidents have made such appointments and we’ve long supported that authority—as long as they are made when Congress is genuinely in recess.

But in this case the Senate was conducting pro forma proceedings (gavel in, gavel out, every three days) because neither chamber can adjourn without the other’s permission under Article I, Section 5. The House refused to consent to prevent Mr. Obama from making recess appointments, so he simply assumed the power to define on his own when a coequal branch of government is at work.

On this invention, the President could presumably make recess appointments overnight or during a lunch break, but Mr. Obama’s provocation was deliberate. “I refuse to take no for an answer,” he justified his behavior at a campaign event the day after the appointments. Democrats ran the Senate then and run it now. Mr. Obama merely thought the normal confirmation checks and balances too frustrating and preferred to install his union appointees without a debate.

He should have read the Recess Appointments Clause before Justice Stephen Breyer did it for him. In Noel Canning v. NLRB, a Washington state soda bottler challenged a board decision on grounds that the recess appointments were null and thus the board lacked the three-member quorum to do business. Because the Constitution delegates power to each branch to independently make their own rules, writes Justice Breyer, “the Senate is in session when it says it is.”

Her book tour exposes forgotten vulnerabilities and weaknesses.

News is surprise. The news out of Hillary Clinton’s book tour is that it hasn’t gone well. It was supposed to establish her iconic position in American political life while solidifying her inevitability. Instead it exposed vulnerabilities. The media was neither at her feet nor at her throat but largely distanced, which was interesting. Her claim that the Clintons were “dead broke” when they left the White House inspired widespread derision. Her exchanges on Benghazi didn’t bury the issue but kept it alive.

The scripted answers were tiring. The old trick of answering the question you wish you’d been asked instead of the one you were is weary to the point of antique. So is her tendency to filibuster. On Wednesday she almost committed candor in an interview with PBS’s Gwen Ifill. Ms. Ifill was teasing her out on the presidency. Hillary, with a look of good humor, said that frankly, “you have to be a little bit crazy to run for president . . . so totally immersed, and so convinced that you can bring something to that office”—and then she caught herself, mid-honesty, and lapsed into a long, fatuous aria about how she sees the people and they tell her of their struggles.

It was sad. She was almost interesting! Her tendency to check herself comes across more as a tic she can’t control than an attempt to maintain discretion.

The book was almost uniformly panned. Sales were disappointing, falling a reported 44% in the second week, which means word of mouth wasn’t good. To top it off, the Wall Street Journal and NBC released a poll taken at the height of the tour that said while 55% of Americans find her knowledgeable and experienced enough to be president, less than half consider her honest and straightforward.
But the tour yielded three positives. Mrs. Clinton put away the issue, if it was an issue, of age. She has sufficient energy, brightness and hustle to banter and parry with interviewers and audiences in a lengthy major national tour. There is nothing wrong with her brain. In fact, she changed the way you see her when you think about her. Twenty-two years ago, when she first arrived on the national scene, she was the brittle harridan in the headband, the high-ticket attorney who wasn’t gonna be bakin’ no cookies. That image has changed over the years, but during the tour the change became definitive. Now she’s Mom—mature, settled, with a throaty laugh and a thickening middle. Or grandma. After six years of presidential leadership from a lithe, supple, snotty older brother, Mom will seem an improvement.