RUTHFULLY YOURS

It is ridiculous to believe that the 14th Amendment was intended to allow those who commit a criminal act to give birth to a “citizen.”
“Bin Laden 2016” raises the question: Does “birthright citizenship,” regardless of parentage, qualify one to become president of the United States?

Now that I have your attention, let’s consider a logical consequence of the current policy of the U.S. government, granting “birthright citizenship” to a child born in the United States of illegal immigrants, otherwise known as an “anchor baby.”

Section I of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

At the heart of the contentious debate over “birthright citizenship” is the phrase, “and subject to the jurisdiction of.” The author of the phrase, Sen. Jacob Howard of Michigan, made it abundantly clear during Senate debates that it does not apply to alien children:

On August 14, 1945, it was announced that Japan had surrendered unconditionally to the Allies, effectively ending World War II. Since then, both August 14 and August 15 have been known as “Victory over Japan Day,” or simply “V-J Day.” The term has also been used for September 2, 1945, when Japan’s formal surrender took place aboard the U.S.S. Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay. Coming several months after the surrender of Nazi Germany, Japan’s capitulation in the Pacific brought six years of hostilities to a final and highly anticipated close.

The reality of shared sacrifice is striking, seen even in the ads for Life Savers and Ray-O-Vac.

‘Tell me it’s really happening. I can’t look away from your eyes, John. If I did, you might disappear, the way you do in dreams. Let me just sit here and remember how your hand feels on my arm . . . I can touch the stripes on your sleeve. I can hear the clock tick. I can see my reflection in your eyes.”

Those words, from an advertisement for International Sterling tableware in Life magazine soon after World War II ended 70 summers ago, were accompanied by a photo of a wife greeting her returning serviceman husband.

The ad was hardly an anomaly. To leaf through wartime, and then immediate postwar, volumes of Life—which, in those years, was as close to a weekly American scrapbook as this country had—is to be struck by how thoroughly the fact of war permeated the nation’s thinking. And by how much the reality of shared sacrifice and participation—of every family being affected—seems to have faded during more recent conflicts.

Watching the Jackson Hole meeting for signs of an interest-rate increase—and pressing for other changes.

Step right up, folks. A three-ring circus on monetary policy is getting under way on Thursday at Jackson Hole, Wyo. Three conferences will be convening at the same time in the resort town, through Saturday, as the world waits for signs of whether the Federal Reserve will finally hike interest rates.

In the center ring, Federal Reserve brass will be gathering for the closed-door conference that is hosted annually by the Kansas City Fed. Janet Yellen is skipping the event, as chairs of the board of governors occasionally do. The town, though, will be full of her critics.

On the right, the American Principles Project will host a separate parley on the need to reform the monetary system by restoring the gold standard as the best route to full employment.

In the left ring, a third group, called Fed Up, will argue for placing a priority on job creation. The Washington Post reports that the organization’s “teach in” will cover “income inequality, efforts to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and whether the Fed should invest in municipal bonds.”

Hillary gets to the left of Obama on Arctic oil exploration.With the media transfixed by Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s will-he-won’t-he candidacy, some revealing policy news in the presidential campaign is being overlooked. Take Hillary Clinton’s decision to get to the left of President Obama on oil drilling in the Arctic.

The Obama Administration late last week gave final approval to Shell’s project to drill in the Arctic Ocean’s Chukchi Sea—seven years and billions of investment dollars since it won the lease in 2008. Mrs. Clinton wasted no time using Twitter to express her opposition. “The Arctic is a unique treasure. Given what we know, it’s not worth the risk of drilling,” she explained in fewer than 140 characters, which sounds like the amount of thought she put into the decision.

The College Board’s about-face on U.S. history is a significant political event.

In this summer of agitated discontent for American conservatives, we can report a victory for them, assuming that is still permitted.

Last year, the College Board, the nonprofit corporation that controls all the high-school Advanced Placement courses and exams, published new guidelines for the AP U.S. history test. They read like a left-wing dream. Obsession with identity, gender, class, crimes against the American Indian and the sins of capitalism suffused the proposed guidelines for teachers of AP American history.

As of a few weeks ago, that tilt in the guidelines has vanished. The College Board’s rewritten 2015 teaching guidelines are almost a model of political fair-mindedness. This isn’t just an about-face. It is an important political event.

The earlier guidelines characterized the discovery of America as mostly the story of Europeans bringing pestilence, destructive plants and cultural obliteration to American Indians. The new guidelines put it this way: “Mutual misunderstandings between Europeans and Native Americans often defined the early years of interaction and trade as each group sought to make sense of the other. Over time, Europeans and Native Americans adopted some useful aspects of each other’s culture.”

Readers of the higher education press and literature may be forgiven for supposing that there is more research on why there are not more women in STEM fields than there is actual research in the STEM fields themselves. The latest addition to this growing pile of studies appeared a few months ago in Science, and now Science has just published a new study refuting the earlier one.

In the earlier study, “Expectations of Brilliance Underlie Gender Distributions Across Academic Disciplines,” Sarah-Jane Leslie, a philosophy professor at Princeton, and several co-authors surveyed more than 1800 academics across 30 disciplines — graduate students, postdocs, junior and senior faculty — to determine the extent of their agreement with such statements as, “Being a top scholar of [your field] requires a special aptitude that just can’t be taught” and whether “men are more often suited than women to do high-level work in [your field.]”

Fields that believe innate brilliance is essential to high success, such as physics and philosophy, have a significantly smaller proportion of women than fields that don’t, such as Psychology and Molecular Biology.

Before his bombastic concert-in-the-park performance in Mobile, Donald Trump had come across chiefly as an amusing amateur whose total lack of basic political knowledge and essential reasoning ability had rendered him unwilling to do interviews that he could not phone in from the confines of his office. In Alabama, he broke out, transforming himself in the process into something else altogether. One part Alan Ginsberg, one part Jim Morrison, and one part Roderick Spode, Trump strode onto the Southern stage as might a troubled rock star. This, his insolent upper lip told the camera, was show time.

Attempting manfully to keep up with the spectacle, C-SPAN warned viewers bloodlessly that its closed-captioning system sometimes made mistakes and was therefore not to be trusted. One had to wonder how anybody could have known either way. Words, you see, are for losers. For the overrated. For the establishment. Real candidates leer and emote and strut back and forth.

At times resembling a man who hoped to discover whether methamphetamine or LSD served as the best accompaniment to a mostly whisky diet, Trump stood throughout his pageant in a cocksure fighting pose, breaking his stance only to turn around and bathe in the adulation. When he spoke, he did so as might a half-awake stranger at an underground poetry slam. His thoughts were meandering, irrational, and wholly self-contradictory; his grasp of reality left much to be desired; his aim was to offer up a firework-laden piece of self-serving performance art, aimed squarely at the unserious and the easily led. “I know how Billy Graham felt,” Trump preached before he launched into his quasi-hallucinogenic diatribe. Superficially, perhaps he does. But Graham, recall, was preaching about an external God.

Scott Walker got two things right recently. He got tough, and he got specific.

Walker’s toughness is one of his most valuable traits. In 2011, he withstood wily, obstructionist Democratic state senators who literally decamped Wisconsin for Illinois to prevent a quorum and thereby stymie Walker’s legislative agenda. He endured loud protests by some 100,000 ferocious, union-fueled demonstrators. Some of them urinated on his office door. Others scattered bullets on the state-capitol grounds. Walker survived chillingly specific death threats against him, his parents, and his children. The latter included details of the bus routes his sons took home from school.

Undaunted, Walker pushed ahead with landmark labor reforms. With equal courage, he won a vicious recall election, signed tax cuts and school-choice bills, terminated taxpayer funds to Planned Parenthood, and then faced down Democrats and free-spending union bosses at the polls last November. Walker easily secured reelection and, early this year, approved legislation that made Wisconsin a right-to-work state.

Despite his titanium core, however, Walker’s exterior demeanor is low-key, unassuming, and modest. The phrase “Sylvester Stallone trapped in Mister Rogers’s body” overstates both characteristics, but that vivid image telegraphs the point.

Vermont senator Bernie Sanders is beating Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, according to a survey of the presidential primary conducted by a Democratic-leaning firm.

Sanders leads Clinton 42 to 35 among New Hampshire Democrats. “We still find Hillary Clinton well ahead everywhere else, but it’s clear at this point that there’s a real race in the Granite State,” said Dean Debnam, the president of Public Policy Polling.

Clinton, who made a dramatic comeback victory in New Hampshire after losing to Barack Obama in the 2008 Iowa caucuses, has seen her approval rating there slip 15 points since April. “The main story in New Hampshire is how universally popular Sanders has become with the Democratic electorate,” according to PPP. “78 percent see him favorably to only 12 percent with a negative opinion — that makes him easily the most popular candidate on either side with their party’s voters. Meanwhile Hillary Clinton’s favorability numbers have taken a little bit of a hit — she was at 78/10 with Democratic [New Hampshire] primary voters in April, but now she’s at a 63/25 spread.”