RUTHFULLY YOURS

Obama brings to mind the supposed Chinese curse: “May you live in exciting times.”

As I was lunching with a few conservative political types earlier this week, the subject turned, as it does, to the 2016 field. When the name of a highly regarded former governor came up, the judgment was unequivocal: “He’s just so . . . boring.” That was not intended as an endorsement.

It should be.

Barack Obama has been anything but boring. “May you live in exciting times” may be a fake Chinese curse, but the wisdom communicated therein is real. Thought experiment: Consider the presidency of Barack Obama from the point of view of the sort of person who is likely to support such men. Having vanquished George W. Bush, he has now given us: a military mess in Iraq complete with the deployment of U.S. troops and a mission that is probably unachievable; the continuing disintegration of Afghanistan and its reversion to a jihadist safe haven; an economy that is shrinking significantly and probably is dipping back into recession; a defense and intelligence apparatus that is abusing its powers and the trust of the American people in ways that are not obviously related to defeating terrorist plots; millions without health insurance; millions out of work; corruption in our public institutions, ranging from the IRS to our universities; a self-aggrandizing political elite that is busy enriching itself through the vulgar exploitation of political connections while incomes for ordinary Americans stagnate or decline; etc. There has been a great deal of excitement, but if you voted for Obama because you were angry about the wars, the surveillance state, and the economy, things aren’t looking any better at all.

The most boring president of the modern era probably was Dwight Eisenhower, whose administration was marked by relative peace, prosperity, and confidence in the effectiveness and integrity of our institutions. The most boring president ever surely was Calvin Coolidge, who pinched pennies and kept at his plow, more or less leaving the country free to go about its own business, which turned out to be an excellent economic program. Our most exciting recent presidents? John Kennedy, who was privately corrupt and publicly inept; Richard Nixon, who was privately corrupt and publicly corrupt; Bill Clinton, who combined the worst features of Kennedy and Nixon, adding a distasteful dose of sanctimony to the mix.

It is part of every election season. You can count on it like the sun coming up in the morning. The Democrats spread anger and fear in the black community over the imaginary Republican desire to “put y’all back in chains”, as Biden put it during the last election season.

“Those racist Republicans want to keep you from voting. They want to turn back the clock on civil rights. Republicans oppose big government because they hate black people. You must vote to stop them.” That’s the story they sell. It is a divisive and socially destructive tactic that does great harm to our country. But what it does to the country is a secondary issue for those who sell the lies. The primary goal is to get an angry, motivated voting block to the polls.

Thad Cochran was defeated by Chris McDaniel in the initial vote for Mississippi Senator but Cochran was not defeated by enough votes to avoid a run-off election. In preparation for the run-off election a decision was made by the Cochran team to tear the ‘race-baiting’ page from the Democrat playbook and to use it against McDaniel.

Large amounts of money were spent in Democrat districts on phone calls, fliers, and door-to-door pleas to encourage a vote against the racist Republican. A Cochran flier sold the lie that “Tea Party” candidate McDaniel “intends to prevent blacks from voting on Tuesday”. “Mississippi cannot and will not return to a bygone era of intimidating black Mississippians from voting. We must rise up on Tuesday to have our voices heard…”

This is classic, despicable race-baiting being used by a six- term Republican against a fellow Republican who had the nerve to challenge him and to challenge the way things are done in Washington.

Robocalls supporting Cochran targeted black districts with a message trashing the Tea Party and supporting President Obama. The message was essentially that the racist Tea Party was making it very difficult for our “African-American” president. Tea partiers want to oppose our wonderful president and so you need to vote against racists like McDaniel.

This was a race-based, pro-Obama, anti-Tea Party message paid for by Republicans. Establishment Republicans worked hard for and funded this dishonest campaign.

IN THE ALASKA PRIMARY OF 2010 LINDA MURKOWSKI LOST IN THE PRIMARY, BUT WENT ON TO MOUNT A THIRD PARTY CANDIDACY AND WON (INCIDENTALLY, USING AN ENDORSEMENT OF SENATOR TED STEVENS WHO WAS THEN DEAD). MURKOWSKI IS HARDLY A ROLE MODEL- BUT I CAN BE DONE AND McDANIEL CAME VERY CLOSE AND COULD MOUNT AN INDEPENDENT CAMPAIGN…..RSK

Mississippi state Sen. Chris McDaniel indicated moments ago that he’s not yet conceding last night’s runoff, arguing the election was “rife with irregularities” that need to be investigated.

With all precincts reporting, six-term incumbent Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) had 191,508 votes to McDaniel’s 184,815 — 50.9 percent to 49.1 percent.

According to FiveThirtyEight, “About 375,000 voters showed up Tuesday compared with 318,904 on June 3, an increase of more than 17 percent. Cochran raised his vote total by more than 38,000 votes, while McDaniel pulled in only an additional 30,000. That was more than enough to erase McDaniel’s 1,386 vote lead in the first round.”

Cochran’s strategy rested on widening the voter base: courting African-Americans who could legally vote in the runoff regardless of party as long as they hadn’t cast a ballot in the Democratic primary three weeks ago.

“The conservative movement is alive in Mississippi,” McDaniel said in a statement. “The Republicans who voted last night made it clear they’re looking for conservative change in Mississippi.”

“But the results also tell another story. They tell the story of some members of our party who are willing to engage in tactics unbecoming of the party of Ronald Reagan. It’s no wonder so many conservatives don’t feel welcome in the Republican Party,” he continued.

“If our party and our conservative movement are to co-exist, it is paramount that we ensure the sanctity of the election process is upheld. And we will do that. In the case of yesterday’s election, we must be absolutely certain that our Republican primary was won by Republican voters.”

McDaniel promised that “in the coming days, our team will look into the irregularities to determine whether a challenge is warranted.”

“After we’ve examined the data, we will make a decision about whether and how to procede [sic],” he said.

Here’s a headline from Forbes that caught my eye:

“IRS Employees Union Is ‘Very Concerned’ About Being Required To Enroll In Obamacare’s Health Insurance Exchange [1]”

You can’t blame ’em. Workers in the private sector are also “very concerned” about getting dumped into Obamacare’s subsidized insurance exchanges as, one by one, employers are forced to give up providing health insurance for their employees.

It’s possible that, like me, you are entertaining an un-Christian feeling of Schadenfreude about this happening to a large, widely loathed, and deeply politicized government agency.

But thing thing that should really arrest your attention about this headline, and the story it introduces, is contained in the first three words: “IRS Employees Union.”

The government’s tax collecting agency is unionized? Think about that for a moment.

The union in question is the National Treasury Employees Union [2]. According to the web site of the NTEU [3], the mission of the union is “to organize federal employees to work together to ensure that every federal employee is treated with dignity and respect.” That’s a tall order, in part because there are so very many federal employees. The NTEU’s web site includes a nifty interactive graphic that shows you just how many there are in each state: 279,622 in Texas, for example, 350,544 in California, 165,943 in New York, etc., etc. There are, in short, millions of them.

Karl Marx brought us the labor theory of value, which posited that the more work you put into producing something, the greater its worth.

That turned out to be rubbish [1]. If you build a bridge to nowhere, then no matter how much labor you have poured into the project, the bridge is useless. You could spend months digging a huge hole in the ground with a teaspoon; it would be a lot of work, but that is no guarantee that by the end you would have produced anything of value. Quite likely you would simply have squandered time, effort and better opportunities in order to dig yourself into a large hole in the ground.

So it goes for U.S. negotiators at the Iran nuclear talks in Vienna, who seem to be laboring under the theory that if they just work hard, and harder, and even harder, then in concert with Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany, they will produce a deal that will stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Actually, it’s even muddier than that. The aim by now seems to be to leave Iran with a nuclear program, but somehow promise that there will be no Iranian bomb at the end of this rainbow, and assure the world that Iran’s nuclear program will be — in the oft-repeated words of a U.S. senior administration official — “exclusively peaceful.”

It remains a mystery how that might work in practice, or what power, precisely, might enforce this vision of “peace” buttressed by Iranian nuclear facilities. On Tuesday, senior U.S. officials gave a briefing on the Iran nuclear talks — dubbed the P5+1 negotiations — to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Following the briefing, Rep. Ed Royce, chairman of the committee, released a statement [2]noting that “many Members of the Committee are concerned about the direction of these negotiations,” the biggest concern being that they are leading to a situation in which, ultimately, “it would be very easy for Iran to produce material for nuclear weapons — on a massive scale.”

But for U.S. officials engaged in these talks, the guiding imperative seems to be some sort of labor theory of diplomacy. Never mind the direction in which this diplomatic work crew might be shuffling. The idea seems to be that if the U.S. just works hard enough, with its cohorts, to produce a deal, then the deal will surely be worth something.

So we finally have the Beltway GOP plan to confront Obama administration lawlessness. Make that, to have someone else confront Obama administration lawlessness. Is there a contest to name the Republican strategy? I’d call it: “Please Don’t Make Me Use My Powers … The Obamedia Might Say Mean Things About Me.”

Mr. Obama’s sweeping lawlessness, a comprehensive assault on the separation of powers, is the subject of my new book, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment. The administration’s goal is to centralize governmental power in the executive branch. That is exactly what the separation of powers is designed to avoid, the Framers having grasped that the accumulation of all power in one set of hands had always been, and will always be, the road to tyranny.

Roll Call reports that House Speaker John Boehner (R., OH) will respond to this challenge to our constitutional framework by … wait for it … filing a lawsuit. The apparent aim of this theater is to persuade a judge to pronounce what is already patent: the president is flouting congressional statutes.

Speaker Boehner’s proposed suit is nearly as wayward as President Obama’s violation of his solemn oath to execute the laws faithfully. Under our system, in order to avoid having major public policy questions decided by the governmental branch that is not politically accountable to voters, the judiciary is limited to resolving concrete controversies — cases in which the party bringing the suit has actually been injured by a violation of law. Courts are thus prohibited from issuing advisory opinions: pronouncements that some course of conduct is or would be illegal.

Yet, that appears to be exactly what the speaker will ask them to do. Indeed Boehner’s spokesman, Michael Steel, reminded Roll Call that the House has already passed a bill that would expedite court consideration of House resolutions enabling lawsuits that challenge executive overreach. “The House has passed legislation to address this, but it has gone nowhere in the Democratic-controlled Senate,” Mr. Steel explained, “so we are examining other options.”

Obviously, Republican leadership does not see its “other options” as including the exercise of powers the Constitution gives Congress to stop executive lawlessness in its tracks, namely, cutting off the executive branch’s funding and impeaching executive branch officials who violate the law, carry out lawless policy, mislead lawmakers, stonewall investigations, and frustrate Congress’s constitutional oversight function. In essence, Boehner & Co. are fecklessly asking the courts to do their heavy lifting for them — a classic case of assuming the pose of meaningful action while in reality doing nothing. And tune in next week when Republicans get back to complaining about how activist judges are making the law rather than interpreting it.

In this time of partisan politics and societal narcissism, we, as a people – both individually and as a society – often forget the underlying idea behind e pluribus unum, “out of many, one,” our national motto. It is based in a notion that many individuals can come together to form a society – a free, civilized society, where each individual not only executes self-reliance and individual responsibility, but a level of benevolence and compassion that produces the feeling of a unique identity; of national “family.” But these modern times betray our roots, in action, thought and deed, making us (or many of us anyway) unworthy of the motto itself.

From the Baby Boomer “Me Generation” to the “Gen X-ers,” “Millenials” and “New Silent Generation,” each has been instilled with not only a unearned and falsely elevated sense of self-worth, but an entitled and self-centered sense of being that has led us away from e pluribus unum; away from the benevolence of brotherhood; away from the compassion that creates a truly civilized society. This has come to pass through the manipulation of our people by political opportunists and the elitism of the Progressive Movement.

I could delve into the minutia of the groups that have foisted this malady upon our nation, but that is not the focus of this article. Identifying these culprits as the source of the cancer does not serve to cure the cancer. But it does allow us to see how the cancer spreads. It spreads through the vicious concept of “divide and conquer.” Those who thirst for power instead of righteous service to the nation serve their lust by dividing our people to stand against ourselves. They pit labeled group against labeled group, fomenting resentment, envy, fear and even hated for our fellow man, simply so create a larger sub-group than their competitors, and simply to attain power and the ill-gotten riches that tearing apart a peoples affords.

https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/palestine-s-grand-mufti-hussein-bds-campaign-grand-mufti-of-palestine-take-back-your-call-india-will-never-boycott-israel

This petition will be delivered to:
Palestine’s Grand Mufti Hussein/BDS-Campaign

We Indians and concerned people worldwide are appalled at your (Grand Mufti’s) call urging India to Boycott Israel.

We will never Boycott Israel.

Indian villages and cities benefit from Israeli innovations in Agriculture and Water Technology.

Indian Institutes and Universities cooperate with Israeli partners in doing path breaking research and contribute to development of India.

India-Israel cooperation in defense and homeland security helps making India safe and secure.

We Indians want good relations with Arab nations on the basis of mutual respect. We reject pressure tactics against Israel and interference in India’s economic and foreign policy.

We respect the authority you hold as a man of faith, but reject your anti-Israel Boycott call, which is motivated by politics and aminosity against the State of Israel – the only true democracy in the Middle East, with equal right granted to members of all faiths.

We call upon Your Holiness the Grand Mufti to take back the call.

We share historic and civilizational ties with Israel and Jewish people.

We will never boycott Israel!

I mentioned this 2002 column of mine last week in connection with the Saudi Ambassador’s idiosyncratic response to it. But it seems appropriate to give it a full-blown rerun today, Thursday, as the US footie team – or “soccer”, as they call it here – prepares for its samba-sultry rendezvous with destiny and a rematch with Germany, the team that did for them 12 years ago.

I’d been thinking that this time round there was more interest in the World Cup than back then. But then I went on John Oakley’s show yesterday morning and the soccer banter ahead of my appearance reminded me that even Canada has an entirely different level of engagement with the sport. At any rate, that’s what caught my fancy three World Cups ago, when the American team looked at one point in danger of making it to the semi-finals, and maybe beyond, despite total lack of public interest – while in England and Ireland there were millions of fans in search of a team. This essay is anthologized in The Face Of The Tiger, personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available from the SteynOnline bookstore, and proceeds of which go towards my pushback against “hockey stick” warm-monger Michael E Mann and the Big Climate enforcers:

And so the dream dies. The boys gave it their best, they played well, but it wasn’t to be. They’re out of the World Cup, to the bitter disappointment of their supporters.

I refer, of course, to the United States team, the first in World Cup history with more players than fans. Across America yesterday, all nine of them gathered in bars to watch the big match, only to find that the other patrons preferred to see the Golden Girls re-run dubbed into Spanish on Channel 173 or the last half of Plastering Idol on the Sheetrock Channel. Twiddling my own dial in New Hampshire, I couldn’t find the game on anywhere except a French-language station from Quebec.

Is there any other sport where you can only follow the US team by watching foreign channels? No one was singing ‘Ere we go, ‘ere we go, ‘ere we go! – even though it’s by an American composer! But, cursed to be born in the US, that poor schmuck Sousa couldn’t even make a living in the soccer business, forced to stick to his day-job as a conductor. In fact, all the great football songs are by Americans – Rodgers and Hammerstein (“You’ll Never Walk Alone”) and Livingston and Evans, whose “Que Sera, Sera” has a British lyric of endearing directness:

A health spending plunge coincides with the new law’s launch.

Financial markets shrugged off Wednesday’s punch-in-the-stomach report that first quarter GDP shrank by 2.9% on an annual basis, far more than earlier estimates and the worst quarterly decline in five years. Optimists blame the weather and point to faster growth in the current quarter, which is reasonable but still shouldn’t overlook ObamaCare’s role in nearly sending the economy back into recession.

January saw the formal launch of the Affordable Care Act, and its attempt to transform U.S. health insurance and medical practice. So it’s notable that a major cause of the sharp downward revision in first-quarter GDP was a decline in consumer spending on health care. Lower exports and investment also played a role, but the overall decline in health spending from the previous quarter was a startling 6.4%.

Health spending is nearly always a positive contributor to GDP, and in the fourth quarter of 2013 it contributed 0.62%. But health spending fell so sharply in the first quarter that it subtracted 0.16% from economic growth. The Bureau of Economic Analysis, which calculates GDP, hadn’t been able to capture the magnitude of the health spending decline in its two previous estimates of first quarter growth.

The decline is especially shocking given that the arc of health spending is always up. The explanation can’t be that Americans suddenly had less demand for health care, or had a healthier winter. Our guess is that the turmoil caused by the disastrous ObamaCare rollout confused many consumers into delaying their health purchases. ObamaCare also caused millions of Americans to lose insurance they liked, and it no doubt took time for many to find new policies that suited them and they could afford.