RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Cleverness is not wisdom.”
— Euripides, Bacchae

What exactly has birthed the Pajama Boy aristocracy — our overclass of pretentious, inexperienced, and smug 30-something masters of the universe?

Prolonged adolescence? Affluence? The disappearance of physical chores and muscular labor? The collapse of traditional liberal education and the triumph of the therapeutic mindset? Disdain for or ignorance of life outside the Boston–New York–Washington corridor? Political correctness as a sort of careerist indemnity that allows one to live a sheltered and apartheid existence? The shift in collective values and status from production, agriculture, and manufacturing to government, law, finance, and media? The reinvention of the university as a social-awareness retreat rather than a place to learn?

During the showdown over Obamacare, the pro-Obama PAC Organizing for Action put out an ad now known as “Pajama Boy.” It showcased a young fellow in thick retro-rimmed glasses, wearing black-and-red plaid children’s-style pajamas, and sipping from a mug, with a sort of all-knowing expression on his face. The text urged: “Wear pajamas. Drink hot chocolate. Talk about getting health insurance. #GetTalking.”

Most men in Dayton or Huntsville do not lounge around in the morning in their pajamas, with or without built-in footpads, drinking hot chocolate and scanning health-insurance policies. That our elites either think they do, or think the few that matter do, explains why a nation $20 trillion in debt envisions the battle over transgender restrooms as if it were Pearl Harbor.

In a case of life imitating art, Ethan Krupp, the Organizing for Action employee who posed for the ad, offered a self-portrait of himself that confirmed the photo image. He is a self-described “liberal f***.” “A liberal f*** is not a Democrat, but rather someone who combines political data and theory, extreme leftist views, and sarcasm to win any argument while making the opponents feel terrible about themselves,” he explains. “I won every argument but one.” I suspect that when Krupp boasts about “making opponents feel terrible about themselves,” he is referring to people of his own kind rather than trying such verbal intimidation on the local mechanic or electrician.

The most enduring and destructive superstition about American politics is that the president is “in charge of” the economy, and so it was no surprise to hear Hillary Rodham Clinton yesterday say that she’d put her husband “in charge of revitalizing the economy.” As my colleague Charles C. W. Cooke points out, this is an example of “talismanic” thinking, that what makes the world go ’round is having the tribal chieftain do that voodoo that he does so well.

There are some obvious problems with this line of thinking, the main one being that it is complete and utter undiluted poppycock.

It is true that the U.S. economy performed to general satisfaction during Bill Clinton’s presidency. But most of the big economic news of the 1990s had little or nothing to do with Bill Clinton, with government policies that were uniquely or mainly the work of Bill Clinton, or with the day-to-day management of public resources by the Clinton administration.

The Clinton-era boom was in no small part a continuation of the Reagan-era boom, which was, like the performance of the economy under previous and subsequent presidents, only partly a product of the president’s economic philosophy and policies. Two of the great economic-policy successes of the Reagan era — the taming of inflation and the bundle of reforms generally described as “deregulation” — were rooted in Carter-era policies. Ronald Reagan knew enough to understand that enduring the recession engineered by Paul Volcker and the Fed was necessary to wring inflation out of the economy, but he wasn’t terribly happy about it, and neither were voters: Reagan’s approval ratings were at 41 percent at the end of 1982, and his unpopularity cost Republicans a couple seats in the House. At the beginning of 1983, Reagan’s job-approval number was down to 35 percent. But in May of 1980, inflation had been 14.4 percent; in May of 1986, it was 1.5 percent, and Reagan’s approval number roughly doubled.

Was taming inflation Reagan’s doing? Volcker’s doing? Do we give Carter credit for choosing Volcker, or do we penalize him, knowing that he hadn’t wanted to do so but was pressured into it? Robert J. Samuelson and Paul Krugman have argued that out at some length, and the answer is inconclusive.

“Inconclusive” is the conclusion more often than not in these kinds of debates. The federal budget was in surplus (“primary surplus”) toward the end of the Clinton administration, as Mrs. Clinton points out. Why? Partly because of tax increases that Republicans fought vigorously against; partly because of spending controls that Democrats fought vigorously against; partly because of a stock-market bubble that liberated both the Clinton administration and congressional Republicans from making some really tough decisions.

On May 9, Vanita Gupta — the head of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice — uttered these words:

Here are the facts. Transgender men are men — they live, work, and study as men. Transgender women are women — they live, work, and study as women.

In other words, according to the DOJ, it is a simple “fact” that a man can have a menstrual cycle, that a woman can have a penis, and that men can get pregnant.

Then, on May 13, the administration purported to transform these “facts” into law by issuing a letter that threatened every single public school in America with the loss of federal funds unless it adopts the administration’s point of view that gender is defined not by biology but instead by personal preference.

The administration’s edict is clear: It interprets federal law to require schools to create a “safe,” “nondiscriminatory,” and even “supportive” environment for transgender students. Creating gender-neutral access to bathrooms or showers represent mere examples of how schools comply with the edict. In other words, the broad principle is “nondiscrimination,” and bathroom access is but one narrow application. Thinking through the broad principles reveals the depth and breadth of the administration’s power grab. The consequences will be profound.

First, the very act of teaching biology and human physiology will be hate speech unless it’s modified to conform to the new transgender “facts.” Teachers will have to take great pains to note that chromosomes, reproductive organs, hormonal systems, and any other physical marker of sex is irrelevant to this thing called “gender,” which, “factually,” is a mere state of mind.

Second, any statements of dissent — from teachers or students — will be treated as both “anti-science” and “discriminatory,” contributing to a “hostile environment” that schools are legally bound to prohibit. This prohibition will go well beyond the use of pronouns and into discussions of what it means to be male and female. The argument that a “girl” with a penis remains a boy will be treated exactly the same as an argument that blacks are inferior to whites or Arabs inferior to Jews.

You’ve probably never heard of Sebring, Ohio. Despite tainted water, which the EPA knew about for months before the public did, shipments of water bottles for the angry residents, two EPA employees being put on leave, and all the other elements of a scandal, it was missing something.

Sebring is 98% white. Ohio governor John Kasich is a Republican, but currently favored by the media. So talk of Sebring being the next Flint remained just that.

St. Joseph, Louisiana might have been the other “next Flint,” but before long Louisiana had elected a Democratic governor. St Joe’s is mostly black and there are no Republicans in sight to blame for its water crisis. Plenty of villages, towns and cities have tainted water. The cause is usually local, but the media is only interested if it has the right victims and the right villain for its manufactured drama.

The closest counterpart to the media’s wildly dishonest coverage of Flint’s water troubles was its Katrina reporting. Even though New Orleans had an incompetent Democratic mayor, who would be sent to jail, and a Democratic governor, all the blame was directed at the Republican president. The crisis coverage was filled with hyperbolic exaggeration in which Brian Williams’ own lies garnered no attention. New Orleans was a post-apocalyptic hell on earth where the residents had devolved to cannibalism. All because of Bush. The Flint coverage is the old Katrina coverage with Snyder swapped out for Bush.

If Romney had won the last election, Flint would be his fault. But with Democrats in the White House and in Flint, the media chose the lone Republican in the middle. It had no interest in asking questions about the EPA’s slow response to the crisis or in investigating local Flint politicians.

These included Councilman Wantwaz Davis, a convicted killer, whom the media celebrated as the hero of the Flint crisis, while dismissing his time in jail for murder. Davis was expert at getting media attention by playing up his background and denouncing the tainted water as “genocide”.

Zakia Nasrin was a promising student growing up in a pleasant suburb of Columbus, Ohio, after arriving here with her family in 2000 from Bangladesh. She graduated high school as valedictorian. She later enrolled at Ohio State University in a pre-med program after marrying Jaffrey Khan, who grew up in a tony neighborhood in Silicon Valley.

In May 2014, Zakia, Jaffrey, and Zakia’s younger brother Rasel Raihan traveled to the capital city of the Islamic State: Raqqa, Syria. According to U.S. intelligence officials, Rasel was killed there.

That’s the story related in a report published by NBC News yesterday on documents obtained from an ISIS defector showing registration forms of would-be fighters looking to join the group. The registration forms included 15 Americans; two were Jaffrey and Rasel.

This report raises several alarming issues.

According to NBC News, Jaffrey and Rasel were already known as extremists by the FBI after an informant’s tip. Suspicions were further raised when Jaffrey and Zakia claimed to have “lost” their passports while in Kenya. Rasel admitted to friends that he had been interviewed by the FBI. The report also claims that they were indeed on the terror watch list.

This is a recurring problem I’ve repeatedly identified here at PJ Media as “known wolf” terrorism: again and again, individuals who engage in terrorism or join terrorist groups are already known to law enforcement and national security agencies.

Why were these individuals allowed to slip into Syria? CONTINUE AT SITE

The directive on bathroom facilities for transgender students, sent last Friday by the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education to every public school district in the country, is not the first time the Obama Administration has swept American institutions under its administrative control.

In April 2011 Education, backed by Justice, sent every institution of higher learning what has come to be known in academia as the “Dear Colleague” letter. They don’t mean that in a friendly way. That 19-page letter described how the feds wanted every college and university to comply with the Administration’s expanding definition of Title IX requirements on sexual harassment. The letter wasn’t a law or even a regulation. It was described as “guidance.” As the nation’s public schools learned Friday, this gives “guidance” new meaning.
That meaning is that the Obama Administration intends to obliterate what is left of federalism, the principle that states retain powers not delegated to the national government. How else can one interpret Friday’s “guidance” on bathrooms, locker rooms and sports teams to public grade schools and high schools, long considered a symbol of local control?

The Administration’s letter to its “colleagues” in the nation’s public schools brings to mind Little Red Riding Hood, standing innocently before the large, smiling figure in granny clothes, except for the disconcertingly big, sharp teeth. The Obama teeth emerge on page two of the Education Department’s letter: “As a condition of receiving Federal funds . . .” Yes, unless the schools “treat a student’s gender identity as the student’s sex for the purposes of Title IX,” the school district may lose federal funds. CONTINUE AT SITE

Support for, or opposition to, mass immigration is apparently a class issue, not an ethnic or racial issue. Elites more often support lenient immigration policies; the general public typically opposes them.

At the top of the list are Mexico’s elites. Illegal immigration results in an estimated $25 billion sent back in remittances to Mexico each year. The Mexican government worries more about remittances, the country’s No. 1 source of foreign exchange, than it does about its low-paid citizens who are in the U.S., scrimping to send money back home. Remittances also excuse the Mexican government from restructuring the economy or budgeting for anti-poverty programs.

Mexico sees the U.S. the way 19th-century elites in this country saw the American frontier: as a valuable escape hatch for the discontented and unhappy, who could flee rather than stay home and demand long-needed changes.

American employers in a number of industries — construction, manufacturing, hospitality, and others — have long favored illegal immigration. Low-wage labor cuts costs: The larger the pool of undocumented immigrants, the less pressure to raise wages. That was why Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers in the 1970s occasionally patrolled the southern border in its vigilante-style “illegals campaign” to keep out undocumented immigrants while opposing guest-worker programs.

Moreover, the additional social expense associated with millions of undocumented workers — in rising health-care, legal, education, and law-enforcement costs — is usually picked up by the public taxpayer, not by employers.

Ethnic elites also favor lax immigration policies. For all the caricatures of the old melting pot, millions of legal immigrants still rapidly assimilate, integrate, and intermarry. Often within two generations of arrival, they blend indistinguishably into the general population and drop their hyphenated and accented nomenclature. But when immigration is mostly illegal, in great numbers, and without ethnic diversity, assimilation stalls. Instead, a near-permanent pool of undocumented migrants offers a political opportunity for activists to provide them with collective representation.

We’re living in the enlightened future so we know that applying the death penalty to the Muslim murderers of Americans is a form of outmoded barbarism. All right-thinking people know that it should be reserved for…

1. Critics of the administration

2. Women who don’t want men using the ladies room

3. Republicans in general

Not the mastermind of the murder of an American ambassador.

The Justice Department will not seek the death penalty against the Libyan militant charged in the Benghazi attacks that killed four Americans, federal officials have announced.

Ahmed Abu Khattala has been awaiting trial in federal court in Washington in connection with the September 2012 violence at a diplomatic compound in Benghazi that killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.

His attorneys had been imploring the Justice Department to remove the death penalty as a possibility if Khattala is ultimately convicted at trial.

On Tuesday, the department revealed its decision in a court filing that provided no explanation.

Charlie Brown used to run a fortified crack house in South Providence. Surveillance cameras kept an eye out for cops and a steel-reinforced door was built to keep them out. Brown had been dealing drugs for at least nine years. He had two previous drug convictions dating back to his twenties. His drug money was used to buy real estate, renovating and renting out the houses that he wasn’t using to sell drugs.

Despite all that, Brown’s lawyers tried to suggest that he lacked the “mental capacity” to understand his criminal case and suffered from lead poisoning. Mental capacity, often blamed on lead poisoning, is to modern criminal defense attorneys what phony claims of insanity used to be decades earlier.

But it didn’t work. Brown stayed in jail. Until Obama commuted his sentence.

Providence police Lt. Thomas Verdi had said, “These three defendants are notorious in Providence. This sends a message — that these individuals who are dealing drugs and involved in violent crimes will be apprehended and face serious, serious prison sentences — not locally, but in the federal system.”

He would have had better luck locally because Brown will be out next year. And he’ll be far from alone.

Artrez Nyroby Seymour was part of The Organization, a group of crack dealers in Chicago Heights that modeled their operation after the movie New Jack City. The Organization operated outside an elementary school whose children were never allowed out to play out of fear of its drug dealers.

Six months ago, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman issued a subpoena demanding that Exxon Mobil turn over records concerning its research on climate change. In March, Mr. Schneiderman took the predictable next step, announcing that a coalition of attorneys general will hold fossil fuel companies accountable. “The First Amendment, ladies and gentlemen, does not give you the right to commit fraud,” he said.

The threat to scientific inquiry and political speech is obvious. Not so widely recognized is the underlying violation of due process. Start with the fact that Mr. Schneiderman and the other attorneys general have relied, as their opening move, on a nonjudicial subpoena to force the disclosure of information.

Traditionally, federal and state governments could demand testimony, papers or other information in only very limited ways. A legislative committee could call witnesses and insist that they appear and testify. But an attorney general who wanted to rifle through a private company’s filing cabinet had to get a warrant signed by a judge based on probable cause, or had to ask a court overseeing a grand jury to issue a subpoena.

Otherwise the attorney general had to wait until he brought civil or criminal charges, and in a criminal case he could get only a very limited version of discovery. As the founding generation knew from experience, government demands for papers could be dangerous.

Much has changed over the past century. When civil discovery of evidence, now a common process, evolved in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some states, for the sake of convenience, allowed subpoenas for such purposes to be signed not by judges, but by clerks, and then even by parties in cases. The subpoena power thus began to drift out of the hands of the judiciary. CONTINUE AT SITE