Baby, I'm A Star: Marco Rubio's Push For Immigration Reform

Hard to believe just a few months ago that Marco Rubio was the Tea Party's "New Reagan" (like the Boss used to be the "New Dylan," I guess). Now he's working with the despicable likes of Chuck Schumer and Dick Durban to pass left-wing legislation, making major policy pronouncements in Spanish, and creating an atmosphere where his aides feel comfortable dumping on American workers:

“There are American workers who, for lack of a better term, can’t cut it. There shouldn’t be a presumption that every American worker is a star performer. There are people who just can’t get it, can’t do it, don’t want to do it. And so you can’t obviously discuss that publicly.”

That crack might make some sense - not everyone can be Steve Jobs, after all - if the Schumer-Rubio bill sought to address this alleged shortfall in "star performers," but it doesn't. Instead, the emphasis is on the mass migration of low-skill, low-wage, low-education laborers, and their extended families. Maybe there's a Mexican Sergey Brin mixed in among these huddled masses, but I doubt it. Mexico's idea of a "star performer" is Carlos Slim. With the exception of an increased number of tech viasas, there is nothing in the bill that would encourage the sort of high-skilled, well educated entrepreneurial people to emigrate to the United States. Instead, we will continue the depressing, dysfunctional status quo: millions of marginal types either entering illegally or staying after their tourist visa expires get all the political attention, while immigrants educated up to the Phd level languish on waiting lists or give up and go home. 

This "star performer" stuff is a crock anyway. Since when are Americans expected to be "stars?" The expectation is that you work hard and are productive. That's all you can expect from the mass of humanity. And who are the star performers among the current population of illegals? Is there a star performer in the lettuce patch looking to pivot to avocados? 

As bad as this is, Rubio's apparent tendency to say "security first!" in English, while promising "legalization first!" in Spanish is worse. It's the old Arafat trick of saying something moderate to an English-speaking audience while saying the opposite in another language. It's the perfect tool of the demagogue, and something even Obama has not dared to do. I know, I know. George Bush used to speak Spanish to crowds too. (Bush did it! is a bi-partisan "get out of jail" card), but there is a vast difference between throwing in a sentence or two of Spanish lingo, and actually making political promises in Spanish to a Spanish-speaking audience. 

Our only hope, I guess, is that it's the Spanish speakers who are being lied to by the cynical border-firsters in the Gang of 8 (hah!), but we all know what's really going on. Rubio is the front for an obfuscatory effort to pass dubious legislation that won't even accomplish its stated goals. 

It could be that Rubio knows something the rest of us don't know about the electorate a la Obama circa 2007, and this effort will strengthen his aspirations while giving us a chance to rationalize our immigration system, but, after seeing Rubio's performance over the last few weeks I kind of doubt it. 

Great Guitars: Poison Ivy Rorscach

The Cramps' guitarist took the twangy rockabilly/Duane Eddy sounds of early rock'n'roll, mixed them with a punky sense of dread, and spent 30 years touring the world in one of the longest-lived bands of any genre (The Cramps only stopped when singer Lux dropped dead a couple years ago). Not a great virtuoso, of course, but that's really not the point.

Lone Nut Theory: Robert Kennedy Jr.'s Politics and Advocacy

If there's a living embodiment that Life Is Not Fair, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has to be Exhibit A. Born into an illustrious political family, he blew up any chance at elected office through criminality and drug addiction that persisted well into adulthood. Now an environmentalist and progressive activist, Kennedy seems perpetually in the public eye, at least that part of the eye trained on the innumerable cable news shows on which he appears. But, watching him is a painful experience. His "impassioned" advocacy quickly veers into hair-flipping rants, especially when challenged from his political right. Most people in his position are either in an early grave, in prision, or living in tiny hovels filled with yellowing "Nader For President" flyers. We all know what has saved RFKJ from such a fate: his name and his $$, but in America that's more than enough. He is the ultimate "Fortunate Son."

(not only that, he - like many progressives - is adept at using the tax code and trust law to set up non-profit foundations to hide his assets and pay himself and his family comfortable salaries. Not that the IRS has ever shown any interest in that).

Folks on the right have had his number since he first dropped out of Harvard, but for Democrats and progressives, RFKJ is still an admired figure. But, his anti-vaccination crusading has apparently freaked out the good libs at Slate:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. likes to talk. When he calls you to discuss vaccines, he talks a lot, uninterruptably. He called Keith Kloor after Kloor wrote a story for Discover about RFK Jr.’skeynote address to a convention of people who think vaccines cause autism. You can read about their conversation at Kloor's blog. Phil Plait wrote a story about RFK Jr. forSlate last week, pointing out that the idea that vaccines cause autism is a crackpot theory that has been thoroughly debunked, that it is dangerous, and that RFK Jr. is one of its most effective proponents. 

RFK Jr. was displeased. His managing director emailed me (I’m the health and science editor) to say that the story was full of inaccuracies, and I offered to correct any errors right away. He said Kennedy wanted to speak to Plait or me; I requested comments or corrections in writing; we went back and forth. Eventually Kennedy got me on the phone and he talked and I listened. 

Slate doesn’t give equal time tocreationists, and given the overwhelming evidence, we would never publish a story claiming that vaccines cause autism. But it’s fascinating, in a horrified head-shaking sort of way, to hear how anti-vaxxers think. I requested a transcript or video of Kennedy’s speech to the 2013 AutismOne/Generation Rescue Conference, but neither the conference hosts nor Kennedy’s office provided them. I can tell you what he said to me instead. 

The short version of the vaccine conspiracy theory (if you are stuck on the phone with RFK Jr., you will be subjected to the long version) is that a vaccine preservative called thimerosal causes autism when injected into children. Government epidemiologists and other scientists, conspiring with the vaccine industry, have covered up data and lied about vaccine ingredients to hide this fact. Journalists are dupes of this powerful cabal that is intentionally poisoning children. 

For a guy whose family has such a distinguished record of public service, Kennedy says some pretty awful things about government employees: “The lies that you are hearing and printing from the CDC are things that should be investigated.” He spoke to one scientist (he named her but I won’t spread the defamation) who, he said, “was actually very honest. She said it’s not safe. She said we know it destroys their brains.” 

I asked the scientist about their conversation. She said there is in fact no evidence that thimerosal destroys children’s brains, and that she never said that it did.

And so on. It's probably too much to expect Slate's "Science and Health Editor" to wonder, hey, if the haphazardly educated RFKJ is wrong about vaccines, he might not be right about the other scientific matters on which he so passionately rants. 

Great Guitars: Stuart Adamson

Big Country's lead guitarist was a tone hound of heroic proportions. That "bagpipe sound" from their first album was just the beginning. All you need to know is that The Edge eulogized Adamson by saying Big Country wrote the songs he wished U2 could write.

Plumbing The Depths: Is the Stupid Party Becoming the Moron Party

Another Republican politician - this time Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) and no I've never heard of him before - is going through the media wringer after daring to put the words "abortion" and "rape" into the same sentence. He actually had good reason to as all he was trying to say was that the incidence of abortions resulting from rape were low. Not that this matters. Outrageous outrage is going down as we speak, but that's not really my concern. I'm more exorcised by the likes of ostensible center-right commentator Jonathon S. Tobin* who declares Cong. Franks to be an unfortunate manifestation of the "moron factor" sapping the GOP of it manly essence.

Republicans have spent the last several months arguing about the lessons of the 2012 election with both establishment types and grass roots activists mixing it up on a variety of issues. But if there was one conclusion that surely everyone in the party agreed upon it was that GOP candidates and officials needed to avoid mentioning rape, especially when discussing their opposition to abortion. The spectacular idiocy of Missouri senatorial candidate Todd Akin—who publicly doubted that women could become pregnant as a result of rape—didn’t just transform his opponent Claire McCaskill from a certain loser to an easy winner and sink Indiana Republican Richard Mourdock, when the latter said something not quite as foolish. It also allowed Democrats to trash all Republicans as Neanderthal nitwits seeking to abuse women. 

But apparently Arizonan Republican Representative Trent Franks didn’t get the memo. Franks demonstrated that yesterday when he claimed during a Judiciary Committee debate that the incidence of pregnancy from rape is “very low.” But Franks had to repeat the assertion even in a later clarification before he realized what he had done. With a single phrase, Franks had handed Democrats on the committee and elsewhere a chance to revive their fake “War on Women” theme that helped mobilize the Democratic base in 2012. Though it can be asserted that they didn’t need any new excuses to try the same tactic in 2014, Franks has made it a lot easier. Just as was the case in 2012, Republicans are learning the hard way that foolish statements—even if they are ripped out of their context or unfairly characterized—allow Democrats to change the subject from serious moral issues to a topic they’d rather talk about: why some Republicans are morons.

Oh, come on. Republicans will always suffer for their abortion related "gaffes" because the pro-abortion crowd only wants to discuss baby killing in the context of these sorts of meltdowns. There was nothing factually incorrect in Franks' statement. (although we don't know what the exact percentage of abortions arise from rape). I can't imagine there is a huge number of rapes resulting in pregnancy. (statutory rape is another matter, of course). And, the point he was trying to make is an important one. He's trying pass a bill outlawing abortions after 20 weeks - at this point, a six month preemie can easily survive outside the womb - and responding to NARAL types wailing about rape:

After the committee meeting, Franks told POLITICO: “My bill does nothing to restrict abortion even before the first five months, so all issues related to rape are long since dealt with.” 

He said that Democrats are the ones who “constantly want to inject” rape into the abortion debate and have done so ever since the original Roe v Wade case. By focusing on rape instead on “the child that was being killed” they try to change the dynamics of the debate, he said. “So sometimes Republicans get beat up for having to respond to it, but it’s always the left that brings it up because it results in Republicans getting beat up by it.”

Agreed that pro-life Republicans probably need a seminar to practice their lines for moments like this, but what are they supposed to say? The rape question always comes up, and it needs to be batted away, only it can't be batted away because the left brings up rape precisely to strike the sort of gaffe gold they found in Todd Akin.

Democrats make all sorts of moronic, not to mention evil, claims re: abortion. Just today Nancy Pelosi made some crazy comment that late-term abortions are "sacred ground." (ugh!) She also responded to questions about the murderous abuses of Kermit Gosnell by saying she deplored them, but, no, did not plan to work to pass any legislation that would make Gosnell's practices illegal. Give me the "moron" Trent Franks any day over this.

* can't forget the "S." Jonathon Sssssssssssssss. Tobin, ladies and gentlemen!

Edward Snowden: Hero Or Zero?

That was the question of the day on the radio and the official Free Will formulation is (drumroll): "Zero + 2."

The guy's a zero for a lot of reasons, mostly having to do with his deciding unilaterally to release classified information to the leftoid Guardian, a publication that has gone out of its way to undermine America. Then there's his laughable claim that Hong Kong was some kind of libertarian, free speech paradise. Good to know our worldly transnational sophisticates haven't caught up with the news that HK stopped being a free trade entrepot back in 1999. Snowden doesn't talk or act like a patriot, so excuse me if I don't join the "Snowden = Paul Revere" chorus line.*

Still, he gets points for making us confront an ugly reality, namely that the gov't is collecting an enormous amount of personal information about us and our interactions with the world. I get it that the NSA is making use of this information under close supervision and only when there is a probable cause rationale for running our numbers through a database. Other than that, it's just sitting there, inert. No, I don't find that reassuring. Instead, each of us now has a digital sword of Damocles over us, waiting to fall when we run the wrong google search, or receive too many phone calls from the wrong continents. The gov't won't look at you until it does, something that we have learned from the IRS and which we should not soon forget (also note that Mr. Patriot doesn't seem to have been motivated by the IRS's torment of conservatives and Tea Partiers).

But, what Snowden should be making us ask is whether all of this meta-data gathering is the best use of our time and resources. The whole point is to fight terrorism (remember that?) but it's hard to see that the system is working well when we've got a couple yokels from Chechnya blowing up the Boston Marathon without much trouble. We're seemingly spying on true blue Americans (and patting them down in airports) while studiously avoiding the Muslims who are causing all of this trouble in the first place!

There's one way to fight a war against a shadowy transnational guerrilla movement with a deadly ideology: kill as many of them as you can when you can; capture the ones with valuable information and then never let them go; seek out and destroy their leaders, etc. Doing targeted  computer searches of phone records and internet searches makes sense when you are fighting a war in such a manner. We *kind of* did that under Bush - and the left never stopped wailing about  the shredding of the Constitution and the slaughter of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan. So now we have this new strategy: drone killings from afar and electronic snooping of every American's phone and internet records. Not an improvement.

(And what about the low quality of the folks who are getting top secret clearances so they can work on all of this electronic snooping? It was bad enough that soccer mom Valerie Plame could plausibly call herself a CIA operative, but at least she was getting her hands dirty. Bradley Manning was a gay Welsh 20 year old from Oklahoma with relationship issues. In an earlier era, he would not have been in the army, but in the Obama era, he had a security clearance that gave him access to State Dept. emails. Snowden is a high school drop-out with a naive view of life and freedom in other countries and who donated money to Ron Paul - not that there's anything wrong with that, but a Paul-bot is not the sort of person you would want with top secret clearance.)

Edward Snowden committed crimes and has acted in a way that has hurt the United States. His motives are mixed at best. But, given the expense and low success rate of the intrusive programs he has revealed, it would be nice to see a re-appraisal of what exactly we are doing to ourselves in the name of national security.

* and please don't expect me to appreciate your ability to parse the difference between Snowden and the worm Bradley Manning.

Great Guitars: Piggy

Nowadays, every metal band is "experimental" in some way, but back in the late-80's, Voivod's Denis "Piggy" D'Amour was one of the few thrashers out there who were citing the likes of Robert Fripp and Blixa Bargeld as influences.

Search Engine: The Obama Administration's Surveillance State

I'm not a criminal law attorney so I have no idea whether the NSA's seizing all of Verizon's customer records is unconstitutional (fwiw, the steadfast likes of John Yoo and Andy McCarthy see nothing wrong). And, maybe there's some logical rationale for the newly revealed (but years' long) effort to poke through the servers of some of the internet's biggest names, but I've got a more basic question: is any of this data mining accomplishing anything?

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post. 

The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.

I ask whether any of this is accomplishing anything because you may have noticed that, despite all of this intensive trolling through phone records and internet searches, two kids from Chechnya - one of whom had even been in contact with the DHS and FBI - managed to set off bombs at the Boston Marathon without much trouble. The Tsaernovs seem to have spent a lot of time on the phone and on the 'net, but still managed to slip through.

I haven't normally gone along with the black helicopter/Parallax View approach to issues like this, but after the IRS scandal, I literally do not trust the gov't at all. Sure, everyone's talking about how there are all these protections, and the searches are focused on "patterns" and the like; but isn't that what the IRS was doing? Plugging search terms like "Patriot" and "9/12" into their computers to better target the people they wanted to target? Seems like whatever the NSA guys were doing could just as easily been turned towards that direction without much trouble.

(plus, we are still being treated to 2012 election post-mortems featuring Democrat operatives crowing about how their data-mining efforts helped them to better target voters. Data mining, you say? And how do we know you also weren't using data mining to target your political enemies?)

As usual, Obama defenders are falling back on their first refuge: this program started under Bush. But, my memory was that Dems were calling for impeachment and worse - remember all of those assassination fantasies? - when the original NSA program was revealed by the NY Times. Now, Obama has taken the Bush-era data mining efforts and exploded them.

Either this stuff is dangerous and unconstitutional or it's not, but it looks like to the left "unconstitutional" really means "didn't go far enough."

Spit Take: Local Pol Busted In Stamp Licking Scandal

Disgraced former Santa Clara County Supervisor George Shirakawa Jr., who has already resigned his seat and plead guilty to misappropriating campaign funds, has been arrested again for his role in sending out an "illegal" campaign mailer on behalf of his former chief of staff. The evidence? A match between genetic material found in the spittle on the mailings and a DNA swab taken during the Supe's arrest earlier this year: 

In an extraordinary DNA match, saliva left on the stamp of a scandalous and illegal San Jose political campaign mailer three years ago led to the arrest of a disgraced former Santa Clara County supervisor, prosecutors said. 

George Shirakawa Jr. was arrested Wednesday on charges of impersonating City Council candidate Magdalena Carrasco in May 2010 by sending mailers that linked her to the communist government in Vietnam, said Jeff Rosen, the Santa Clara County district attorney. 

"What is offensive about the flyer," Rosen said, "is that this is a photo of Magdalena Carrasco right across from the flag of North Vietnam." 

The hit piece - whose origin has long been a mystery - was sent to residents of a district with a large population of Vietnamese Americans, and it may have affected the outcome of a tight council race. 

Carrasco finished second in the June 2010 primary by 20 votes, then lost a November runoff election against a former Shirakawa aide, Xavier Campos, by just 400 votes.
Neither Carrasco nor Campos returned calls seeking comment. Prosecutors would not say if Campos was cooperating with investigators.

Now, there's a lot of material to unpack from such a frankly absurd story, it's hard to know where to start:

1. Shirakawa is, needless to say, a Democrat. Not only that, he's the scion of a Democrat family with a long-standing history in South Bay politics. 

2. While it's amusing to think of the grossly obese Shirakawa hunched over his kitchen table licking stamps and stuffing envelopes with a bizarre graphic tying a Hispanic woman to the Commie North Viet Namese, we are also getting a not-so-funny glimpse into the world of, if not voter fraud, certainly voter misdirection. If it's hard to find the sort of shadowy figures who practice this sort of stuff, it might be because the politicos themselves, and maybe their immediate families, are the ones doing it. 

3. If I were Xavier Campos, the "beneficiary" of this dodge, I wouldn't be feeling very appreciative right now. 

4. Note that all of this "DNA-swab-taken-at-his-arrest" stuff is coming just two days after the Supreme Court ruled that such swabs do not violate the Fourth Amendment. It's almost as if the DA was patiently waiting to spring this charge on Shirakawa. 

5. The timing of this has drawn the ire of Shirakawa's attorneys, and rightly so. They negotiated an elaborate "resignation/guilty plea" resolution to his other crimes, and the DA pops up with this the day before the ex-Supe was to be sentenced. Defense counsel is crying foul saying they had agreed to a global settlement of all of Shirakawa's crimes. The DA was clearly holding this back for later. 

6. The mailer has been called every word in the book: "libelous," "scandalous," "scurrilious," etc. But what made it "illegal?" Apparently because Shirakawa included Carrasco's campaign ID number on it, thus making it look like an official Carrasco campaign document. But, read the DA's comments in the story; he seems to think the flyer itself was illegal for combining Carrasco's face with the Viet Namese flag. That's illegal???? 

7. It's hard to believe anyone's vote could be swayed by Shirakawa's flyer - it's incredibly primitive, not to mention stupid - but Carrasco lost by a whisker-thin margin. I am unable to resist that "surrounded by idiots" feeling, even if we're talking about Democrats here. 

8. Note that the offending mailer was targeted at an immigrant community, and was calculated in its ham-fisted way, to offend its political sensitivities. And it worked! This doesn't speak well for the assimilation and sophistication of our treasured immigrant brethren. In fact, it raises the question once again whether there are people voting in American elections who are citizens and actually have the franchise.  

9. Shirakawa is obviously a classic example of the gutter level corruption you can find in any municipality. One imagines a lot of cash-in-envelopes have passed through his hands over the years.

10. But at least he never led a "war on women!"

The Hope & Change Obama-Era Middle Class Blues

The Atlantic has one of those "middle class wages are stagnant and people can't get ahead anymore" articles. What's unique about this one is that it is coming smack in the middle of the era of Hope & Change. Normally, these sorts of articles only run during Republican administrations: "I'm Working Really Hard, But I'm Not Getting Ahead." 

Americans love to believe that anyone can get ahead, that they can build a better life than their parents had, simply by working hard enough. The evidence suggests, however, that this is less and less the case. Just working hard will no longer suffice, especially for Americans who haven't been born with wealth or particular talents. More and more, education has become the key to moving up--from poverty into the middle class, from the middle class into affluence--or to holding onto the middle-class lifestyle in which one was raised. 

There is also growing--though still nascent--evidence that from one American generation to the next, mobility is declining. It's getting harder, that is, to work your way into a higher income level than the one into which you were born. A son's adult income in the United States is about half dictated by how much his father made, a percentage that is nearly as high as in any country in wealth-by-birthright Europe, according to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. In Europe, family connections and the circumstances of one's birth are considered crucial determinants of success, a consequence of the entrenched aristocracies in the United Kingdom and, to a lesser extent, Italy and France. 

This is far from the up-by-the-bootstraps, Horatio Algeresque self-image that most Americans hold dear. In the United States, immobility is a way of life, especially for the very rich and the very poor. 

I don't know. I feel like I've been reading articles like this my whole adult life. Still, there is a point worth exploring, which stories like this only approach indirectly, if at all: a big problem is that middle class "basics" - houses, cars, college education, health insurance - have gotten so expensive as to be almost unattainable; while "luxuries" like smartphones, designer clothes, indie music, artisanal food, etc have become cheap and widely available. Coincidentally*, the basics are what have attracted the most attention from the gov't.

(Also, note that the Atlantic - reflecting conventional wisdom among the intelligencia - thinks that education is the key to upward mobility, rather than hard work or determination. There was a famous published in 1994 that tried to warn the public and policy makers of this, but no one paid any attention and attacked the Bell Curve as being beyond the scope of polite discourse.)

Not everyone can "make it" in America. That's not really the point. We can't all be Steve Jobs, after all. Also, the idea that "the rich" (whomever they are) are either staying rich or getting richer is just ludicrous. A lot of fortunes have been lost over the last 4-5 years with many members of the upper class downsizing their lives to an extreme degree. Maybe you don't see them - it is an invisible hand - but they are there, believe me. But still, it does seem something is out of whack when people can't buy a home, but can carry an i-phone around with more computing power than anything the wealthiest person in the world could buy just a couple decades ago.

*if you don't hear the sarcasm there, you are not paying attention. 

Great Guitars: Wilko Johnson

Dr. Feelgood's guitar player managed to create one of the choppiest, sharpest sounds around using his fingers instead of a pick to play his Telecaster. A high energy rhythm machine in the Chuck Berry/early Stones vein, Johnson was also one of the links between 60's garage rock and post-punk players like Johnny Marr.

Great Guitars: Alvin Lee

The great Alvin Lee died earlier this year, fondly remembered, but mostly seen as a second-tier Brit Blooze guy. Back in the day, though, Lee's tag was "fastest guitar" in rock. He was certainly the fastest player pre-EVH. Here's Ten Years After's famous Woodstock showstopper "I'm Going Home," but give a listen to Cricklewood Green and Sssh. If you like your psychedelia blues-based,  these are monsters.

In Defense of Richard Nixon

All of the invidious comparisons between Obama's scandals and those of Richard Nixon have stuck in many craws. Bill Kristol, for one, has had enough:

I protest. Will no one stand up for Richard Nixon? Richard Nixon was a combat veteran, a staunch and brave anti-Communist, a man who took on the liberal establishment and at times his own party's as well, a leader who often thought for himself and had the courage of his convictions, a president who assembled a first-rate Cabinet and one who—while flawed both in character and in policy judgment—usually tried to confront the real problems and deal with challenges of his times. Richard Nixon led neither the country nor his own administration from behind.

Hear! Hear! Nixon may have had plenty of faults, but at his best he was a true statesman who worked at an elevated level for virtually his whole adult life. He was arguably the last president we've had who would have lost the all-important "who would you rather have a beer with?" primary. His administration not only saw the moon landing, and the opening of China. It also saw the taming and defeat of the revolutionary forces set in motion by the Great Society. Whether with the Hiss case, or ending the Viet Nam War on honorable terms, Nixon faced down those who would destroy America. For all his faults, he was a great man who did great things, something you can't say about the president to whom he is presently being compared. 

Fire & Brimstone: Sheldon Whitehouse Talks About The Weather

This is a couple days old, and he's already semi-apologized, but this Sheldon Whitehouse rant in the Well of the Senate is one for the ages:



Here's a summary:

Whitehouse spent 15 minutes chastising GOP senators and justified his remarks by alluding to states that seek federal assistance in the wake of natural disasters. 

“So, you may have a question for me,” Whitehouse said. “Why do you care? Why do you, Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, care if we Republicans run off the climate cliff like a bunch of proverbial lemmings and disgrace ourselves? I’ll tell you why. We’re stuck in this together. We are stuck in this together. When cyclones tear up Oklahoma and hurricanes swamp Alabama and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover. And the damage that your polluters and deniers are doing doesn’t just hit Oklahoma and Alabama and Texas. It hits Rhode Island with floods and storms. It hits Oregon with acidified seas, it hits Montana with dying forests. So, like it or not, we’re in this together.” 

Whitehouse went on to condemn the current Republican position on global warming, citing economic, environmental and diplomatic damages. 

“You drag America with you to your fate,” he continued. “So, I want this future: I want a Republican Party that has returned to its senses and is strong and a worthy adversary in a strong America that has done right by its people and the world. That’s what I want. I don’t want this future. I don’t want a Republican Party disgraced, that let its extremists run off the cliff, and an America suffering from grave economic and environmental and diplomatic damage because we failed, because we didn’t wake up and do our duty to our people, and because we didn’t lead the world. I do not want that future. But that’s where we’re headed. So I will keep reaching out and calling out, ever hopeful that you will wake up before it is too late.”

In other words, you darn Republicans are destroying the world with your capitalism and your Climate Change Denial, and now you are coming to ask for tornado disaster relief? Good day, sir! 

All of this on the day a tornado destroyed Moore, OK and at a time when the death toll was being reported as much higher than it turned out to be (including erroneous reports of dozens of children killed). One imagines Sen. Whitehouse's staff getting ready to contact "Moore parents" and offer to fly them to DC on Air Force One to lobby for a carbon tax. 

Now it's easy enough to say, Jesus, what a nut; but that the guy's a US Senator! Someone had to vote for him. Plus, he's got that dumb "Time To Wake Up!" poster next to him, so he must have thought he was reflecting his constituents' heartfelt beliefs. 

The boring truth, of course, is that "we" have been dealing with tornadoes since the first Conestoga wagons crossed the Great Plains. The Moore tornado, as bad as it was, was not nearly as deadly as the worst ever, which killed hundreds. And, tornadoes are certainly not caused by "global warming" or whatever else the poli-sci majors who are GW's greatest proponents might believe. 

Whitehouse clearly believes not only that GW is real and that it is killing us; but also thinks that Republicans should be punished in some way for "causing" GW. His idea, I guess, is to withhold disaster relief. (and big spending libs have pulled out the green eyeshades when disaster has struck Texas, Tennassee, and even Staten Island). Or maybe they could double the number of IRS agents in OK. Whatever it might be, it's clear that a lot of liberals would like to see conservatives suffer for their sins (that sin being conservatism).

The Real Benghazi Scandal

With Day 1 of the Benghazi hearings in the can, it's hard to know where to begin: altered talking points, murdered ambassadors, State Dept. review boards, YouTube videos, orders to "stand-down," etc. If there doesn't seem to be an immediate political pay-off it's because there's been so much information coming so quickly, it's hard to absorb. Still, I think there's one inescapable conclusion that  we can already draw, and it's the real Benghazi scandal:

We have a chickensh*t president and (had) a chickensh*t Secretary of State who, God help us, aspires to be president herself.

I say this with all due respect*, of course.

Obama and Hillary actively worked to depose Hosni Mubarak and Col. Qaddafi under the guise of an alleged democratic revolution sweeping the entire Middle East when in fact the "democrats" were just Islamists with Twitter accounts. The deposing of Qaddafi was supposed to be the exemplar of the sort of "lead from behind" way of war that would accomplish everything "dumb" George Bush tried to do in Iraq, but at the fraction of the cost in blood and treasure. Having overthrown the government and unleashed a typical jihadi maelstrom, Obama and Hillary deposited Amb. Stevens and three dozen diplomats and intelligence types into a hellhole and then left them for dead once the inevitable happened and the Muslims began seeking out Americans to kill.

Then they went out and blamed a video, supposedly made in America, for the violence. In other words, our American president tried to blame us and our First Amendment right to free expression for a coordinated attack by our deadliest enemies. He even went to the UN and said this. If there is another American president who would have even contemplated doing such a thing, let alone done it, I'd like to know his name.

Then, during the few precious minutes when Mitt Romney challenged Obama on his misfeasance and non-feasance, the president smugly demanded that we "look at the transcript," where you could indeed find a single generic sentence about "terror" from the one public statement he gave about Benghazi - and that settled that! As if the whole controversy was over a prepared statement in the Rose Garden and not the cold-blooded abandonment of our diplomats.

By any definition you choose, that is chickensh*t behavior.

It's probably true that there wasn't much you could do from DC to save the 4 men who died, but so what? They made no effort to save them, and actively stopped the efforts of the few people who tried to take the initiative and rescue the embattled mission. And, forget the 4 dead, what about the three dozen survivors, some of them grievously wounded, who were also abandoned to their fates by the progressive Jesus who went to sleep while his diplomats fought furiously for their lives? The Obama-ites left them to die. Say what you will about George Bush or Ronald Reagan, but they wouldn't have let this play out that way.

The million dollar question is whether this will discredit Obama and Hillary in the eyes of the public. Well, I don't know. The whole point of covering up Benghazi was to preserve the story line that al-Qaeda was dead and the Arab Spring was going great. The depressing lesson from the 2012 election is that there are tens of millions of Americans who are happy to look the other way so long as they keep getting their government money, whether for food stamps, "free" health care, condoms, abortions, Obama-phones, layabout jobs in the bureaucracy or whatever. Amb. Stevens may have died, but at least the Tsarnaev family still had their subsidized housing! (and there's a sort of grim irony in the younger Tsarnaev brother getting his US citizenship on the same day as the Benghazi attack, isn't there?)

This is the president we've got now. That's the real scandal.

*i.e. none

Non-controversial: Obvious Conclusions About the Boston Bombers

I'm not in the mood for stirring up trouble, so I'll just jot down some of the obvious truths we can agree have grown out of the Boston Marathon bombing:

We got some Mighty Warriors For Allah out there: a couple yokels from Chechnya on welfare (and look like were drug dealers, too) who blew up women and children wearing jogging clothes.

Sure the mom is nuts, but she's also an instigator and as much a jihadi as her kids. That's how the dynamic works with the Palestinians - the young men do the killing, but the moms and sisters are back at home barking at them to kill more Jews.

That aunt in Toronto is something else, too. I assume she's the mom's sister.

Really, if we're going to have chain migration, we need to have chain deportation too. (except for the uncle. He's cool.)

Seeing these Muslim women's finger-jabbing, self-justifying rants, I'm reminded of what they used to say about New Dealers like Alger Hiss who were really secret Communists - the wives were more left-wing than the hubbies.

American Moms & Dads, if your cute daughter who wants to "work for the Peace Corps" ends up in an abusive relationship with a swarthy foreigner and walks around wearing one of those stupid hijab-things - she has emotional problems.

The political refugee segment of immigration law is a relic of WW2 and the Cold War. Where we once welcomed hard-working, brilliant refugees from Eastern Europe, Cuba, and Viet Nam; now we're bringing in Somalis and Chechans who are likely not even our allies in whatever political fight they are supposedly leaving behind.

There are people out there who have been educated in US schools up to the PhD level - and they have no real ability to remain in the US once their student visas are tapped out. Meanwhile the mom and younger brother seem to have been on the citizenship fast-track. That's is stupid, dysfunctional, indefensible, etc. And there is no sign that this is going to change through the immigration reform being touted by the "progressive" crowd. (unless you are an illegal immigrant DREAM-er, of course)

I'm guessing the mom and younger bro did not read the brochures they received at their citizenship ceremony.

Remember how the symbol of our pre-9/11 fecklessness was how we were giving visas to Arabs seeking flying lessons, but who didn't want to learn to take-off or land? Now we've got Tamerlan Tsarnaev: the political "refugee" (who took lengthy vacations in his land of oppression) drug dealer on welfare who was investigated by the FBI and KGB, and who was arrested for domestic violence in this country - and all we were doing was "slow walking" his application for citizenship.

I'm sure one of the reasons US Intelligence (oxymoron alert) blew off the Russians' multiple warnings about Chechan terrorists in the US is because the Russkies are viewed as the "bad guys" in the Chechan Wars. The way things have been working out, I'm thinking the Russians had the right idea from the beginning.

I don't have access to any special knowledge, and have no real specialty in foreign affairs. All I do is read the newspapers. But, even I knew the following about Chechan terrorism pre-Boston Marathon:

1. Muslim 

2. blew up some Russian airliners using female suicide bombers 

3. attacked an elementary school and killed hundreds of children. (it was Newtown x 20).  

4. took a theater full of the Muscovite equivalent of New York Times readers - with dozens killed as a result.  

5. no direct connection to the US

Is it unfair for me to say that no one in the US government, at least at the FBI, DHS or ICE knows any of the above?

UPDATE: this doesn't really fit the "non-controversial" theme, but...remember the Rand Paul question to Eric Holder? (can you use a drone on a US citizen sitting in a café in the United States?) Remember how Holder hemmed and hawed? Everyone thought the AG was being obtuse, but in retrospect, doesn't it seem likely that Holder knew that there were US citizens out there (like Bro. #2) who were connected to Muslim terrorism and wanted to keep his options open? (and didn't want to admit that the gov't is granting citizenship to terrorists or people connected to terrorists).

Blame Game: Will Dastardly Chechan Terrorists Derail Obama's Second-Term?

4 dead, scores injured, a major American city in lock-down, a splashy explosion at one of America's premier public events; but let's focus on what's really in danger: Obama's second-term agenda. 

The Boston Marathon terrorist attack allegedly hatched by two brothers from Chechnya is threatening to disrupt President Obama’s second-term agenda. 

Opponents of immigration reform — the most promising priority of Obama’s second term remaining after the defeat of gun control — are already using the attack to try to slow progress on a bipartisan Senate bill. 

More broadly, the attack is raising questions about how the administration should deal with 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was captured Friday after an exhaustive manhunt in Boston, and concerns over whether the FBI was too complacent in letting his older brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev out of its sight after interviewing him in 2011. 

The issues are expected to create political problems and distractions for Obama, whose fight against terrorism has largely been a political success highlighted by the killing of Osama bin Laden.

There's a more fundamental reason why Obama's "second-term agenda" is in trouble: it's incredibly stupid and poorly thought out; built on a "mandate" from an election won by demonizing the opposition, splashing gov't $$ on his constituents, and promising to raise taxes. 

Let's look at the numbers:

There was the afore-mentioned tax increase - hey! promise kept! - that hit the economy just in time to slow down growth once again. 

There's the apparently botched effort to prepare for the implementation of Obamacare. Regardless of your thoughts on socialized medicine, this is sheer political malpractice. 

There's the immigration reform effort that is custom-designed to maximize border crossing while minimizing border security. It's also set up to continue the dysfunctions of a system that allows automatic entry to political refugees from sh*t-holes like Somalia and Chechnya, while American-educated Phd's languish on 10-year waitlists. 

There's the "crafty" effort to blame sequestration on every conceivable social ill even though (1) the numbers were pitifully small (2) Obama's guys were the ones who conceived sequestration and (3) these geniuses broadcast far and wide that they were going to use sequestration as a wedge against the GOP, who unsurprisingly didn't line up for their usual turn as whipping boy. Bill Clinton must slap his forehead watching this ham-handedness. 

And there was gun control - what was dumber, the executive orders, (including one from Obama directing Obama to nominate a new ATF chief)? Or the legislation that would have done nothing to stop mass murderers? Or the "women's magazine"-style politicking by which Americans were emotionally blackmailed? 

And great job unifying the country this week, Healer-in-Chief. The Boston Marathon was on Monday. We heard the usual/expected blather about "coming together" and how there are "no Republicans or Democrats," but on Wednesday Obama gave an angry speech denouncing his opponents in the gun control debate as liars (that's what he said!) interested in preserving the right to massacre children. Unity! 

And, don't ever forget that he's the smartest guy to ever hold the office of President of the United States!

Sorry, but if Obama's second-term agenda fails - and I hope that's what happens - it will be his own damn fault. 

Gun Fury: Newtown Parents In Washington

I wasn't going to do this, but the efforts of some (not all) of the Newtown parents to guilt-trip Americans into surrendering their Second Amendment rights have really crossed a line. Here is "Newtown mom" Francine Wheeler giving the president's weekly address:

Francine Wheeler blinked past her tears, looked straight into the camera and asked Americans to push for tougher gun laws, drawing on courage she said comes from the memory of her 6-year-old son, Ben, murdered in his first-grade classroom in Newtown, Connecticut. 

"His boundless energy kept him running across the soccer field long after the game was over," said Wheeler, describing her son during what is usually President Barack Obama's weekly Saturday address to the nation. 

"He couldn't wait to get to school every morning," she said, her voice breaking, her husband David beside her, sighing and swallowing hard. 

The address was the culmination of a week of emotional pleas in Washington from families of the 26 people killed by a gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14. 

"To us, it feels as if it happened just yesterday," Wheeler said, recounting the horror of waiting at the firehouse after the shooting "for the boy who would never come home." 

The massacre has spurred Obama to propose new restrictions on guns - politically difficult measures in a country where constitutional rights to own guns are defended by powerful lobby groups like the National Rifle Association. 

Obama brought the Newtown families to Washington on Monday aboard Air Force One after he gave a speech in Connecticut urging action on his plans.

I'm sorry, but does Wheeler, or anyone else, honestly think her pain over losing her son is not something that would be shared by any decent parent in her position, even the dread Wayne LaPierres or Ted Cruzes of the world? What happened to Ben Wheeler and his classmates was awful. Just awful. I couldn't stand to watch news coverage of the event. Don't even get me started on the political ghouls like Michael Bloomberg and Diane Feinstein who leaped for the cameras before lunchtime on that terrible Friday morning, seeing an opportunity to "win" a political argument they had lost years ago. But, Wheeler's pain is universal. It has nothing to say about gun control, background checks, or the other ephemera that the Senate is debating. 

We're not supposed to attack Wheeler and her cohort, but I have to ask what was the point of her presentation. She addresses nothing about the substance of the pending gun control bills, or how they might or might not be constitutional. I don't even know if the murder of her son has changed her views on gun control. She's an upper-income woman from suburban Connecticut. Odds are, she didn't like guns before 12/14/12, and would have supported the president's efforts at anytime, regardless of her circumstances. 

And, let's talk about the president and his "efforts" to address Newtown. What's he done? Made some speeches denouncing the opposition and acting like he - the president of the United States - is being thwarted by dark forces led by the NRA and/or Mitch McConnell. I can't do anything! he seems to moan. Bullsh*t. There's plenty he could do above and beyond his flurry of executive orders. (how's it going implementing those, btw? Did he ever follow through on his order to himself to nominate a new ATF chief?) The president is, after all, the president. He runs the executive branch! He could get out there and actually go after the bad guys he claims to want to put of business: the criminals committing gun crimes and the gun runners making illegal weapons sales. He could lead a national "conversation" about violent video games and movies. He could get behind an effort to resolve the vexing mental health questions that arise from these events. (and address the unspoken question of whether psychotropic drugs have played any role in the psychoses of mass killers). 

But all Obama's doing right now is making Republican Senators squirm on Meet The Press, and that might be all he accomplishes because - and this is the biggest joke - everyone knows that whatever legislation manages to pass out of Congress would not have stopped Adam Lanza or anyone else from committing mass murder. 

Is that what Ben Wheeler's blood is going to buy? The temporary discomfort of some RINO's who probably secretly agree with his grieving mother anyway? 

As an example of how a president who is serious about solving a seemingly intractable problem, look at how the Reagan Administration waged the War On Drugs. Sure, there was some legislating involved, especially with the notorious mandatory sentencing laws; but the president didn't sit around waiting for Congress to act. The Justice Department and other cabinet departments were mobilized to focus on drug interdiction and prosecution. On the PR side, there was Nancy Reagan's earnest and effective "Just Say No" campaign, along with a million PSA's culminating in the famous "This is your brain on drugs" commercial. We can sit around arguing how effective all of this was,  but there is no doubt that an executive branch committed to a particular policy can throw a lot of resources around in a hurry. 

So is Obama prosecuting gun crimes? No. In fact, such prosecutions have declined under his watch. How hard would it be to call Eric Holder and tell him to turn this around? About as hard as Ronaldus placing a telephone call to Ed Meese I would imagine.

Is the Obama administration going after gun runners or underground dealers? Are you kidding? They ran the biggest gun running operation in history! Plus, I just don't think there are any sort of large-scale underground gun dealers out there, anti-gun propaganda notwithstanding. Why would there be?

Is the Obama Administration producing PSA's about gun safety? (Moms & Dads, don't leave your freaking weapons lying around! Especially when you know your son is a nut!) Of course not, and they are demonizing the one organization out there that does, the NRA, which produces a wealth of gun safety information.  

When is the First Black President going to use his bully pulpit to address the perpetrators of the vast majority of gun crimes: young black men? 

It's not as if these would be controversial. Wayne LaPierre, at his much maligned post-Newtown press conference called on the president to do the above, and more. The NRA wants criminals rounded up and sent to prison whether they are Adam Lanza or anonymous South Side wanna-be's. They just don't want law abiding citizens to be hassled along the way. 

Most important, maybe, the president might want to take a look at his rhetoric, and that of his fellow progressives, over the last 4 years. A lot of it has focused its vitriol on the wealthy and well-to-do, always with the subtext that their wealth is somehow misappropriated. Who did Adam Lanza target, after all? The children of the 1% whom we are told are responsible for all that is wrong in American society. Children who were born into what many on the left consider the white power structure. 

Sure you can say Adam Lanza was crazy or evil, but why couldn't have this been a political act, no different than a Palestinian blowing himself up at a school bus stop? 

I know there's a show biz aspect to politics, but this "Mrs. Wheeler Goes To Washington" routine is so bogus you can practically see the wires and the blue-screen. No one doubts her pain and anguish. How could you? But, she is going as a human shield to shut down debate, a phenomenon first identified by Ann Coulter years ago. We're not supposed to criticize her, yet she is flying around in Air Force One and is being shuttled to meetings with numerous Senators by lobbyists and a former "strategist" for Bill Clinton. (among his noble bits of strategy was navigating Slick's bimbo eruptions. Why would you want to shake hands with this guy, let alone let him shepherd you around Capitol Hill?) Are Americans supposed to watch this soap opera and collapse on to their fainting couches en masse? Apparently. 

The GOP will always be the Stupid Party, but Democrats are crafting arguments designed to appeal to stupid people. I'll take honest stupidity any time. 

I'm Getting Closer To My Home

Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Grand Funk!

The Republican Party and Our Forgotten Second Founding Fathers

Georgetown law prof Randy Barnett has been doing a slow-rolling study of the abolitionists writers and lawyers who provided the intellectual and moral arguments in support of ending slavery and passing the 14th Amendment. First was his "Whence Comes Section One? The Abolitionist Origins of the Fourteenth Amendment." Now comes a paper remembering Salmon P. Chase. Here is the abstract and table of contents: 

The name Salmon P. Chase is barely known and his career is largely forgotten. In this Article, I seek to revive his memory by tracing the arc of his career from antislavery lawyer, to antislavery politician, to Chief Justice of the United States. In addition to explaining why his is a career worth both remembering and honoring, I offer some possible reasons why his remarkable achievements have generally unremembered today.

Contents

Introduction: Constitutional Abolitionism.............................654

I. Chase’s Rise to the Chief Justiceship ......................................656

A. Chase’s Early Years........................................................................ 656

B. Chase as an Antislavery Lawyer ...............................................659

C. Chase as an Antislavery Political Leader..............................668

II. The Chief Justiceship of Salmon P. Chase ..........................676

A. Chase’s Duties as Chief Justice..................................................676

B. Chase’s Opinions on Reconstruction.......................................677

1. In re Turner............................................................................................677

2. Texas v. White .......................................................................................679

C. Chase on the Enumerated Powers of Congress.....................683

1. United States v. Dewitt.........................................................................683

2. The Legal Tender Cases........................................................................687

D. Chase on the Privileges and Immunities of Citizens
of the United States..............................................................................694

III. Why Has Chase’s Career Been Forgotten? ..........................697

Conclusion ...............................................................................................701

Chase was a towering figure in his day: governor of Ohio, Treasury Secretary, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He helped found no fewer than three national political parties: the Liberty Party, the Free Soil Party (even coining its slogan "Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor and Free Men"), and of course the Republican Party*. He was also an attorney who spent years refining abolitionist legal arguments. And, apparently, Chase Bank was (posthumously) named for him. It's a bit much to say he's "forgotten" - anyone who reads about the Civil War era will come across his name - but it is certainly true that Chase's accomplishments deserve more note than current historic understanding grants to him. 

As Barnett notes, Chase and his cohort, whom Barnett dubs "constitutional abolitionists," successfully found a middle ground between the competing sides of the slavery question. On the one hand, Democrats insisted that slavery was constitutional, and would eventually insist that, as a matter of constitutional law, blacks were mentally inferior and slavery should spread through the territories, and even into the northern states. On the other, full-mooners like William Henry Garrison insisted that disunion - and the rending of the Constitution - was the only proper "solution" to the slavery question. Great, but what if you just want to go to work and raise a family without worrying that the government will fall apart before lunch? Chase, et al.'s middle ground preserved the Constitution through the fire and brimstone of the Civil War.

The Constitutional Abolitionists relied on close readings of the Constitution to point out that (1) there was nothing in the Constitution specifically approving slavery (read the Confederate Constitution to see how that's done); and (2) other parts of the Constitution, especially the Fifth Amendment made involuntary servitude unconstitutional. Whatever Founding Father nods and winks southerners relied on to support their arguments were meaningless as they couldn't be found in the text. These might be obvious points now, but back then they were literally dynamite. When Abraham Lincoln - the greatest of the Constitutional Abolitionists - won the presidency, the South knew the jig was up, at least with regard to the slavery question. (No, the issue of state's rights was not "resolved" by the Civil War. Only children and Ivy League graduates could believe that).

Barnett rightly laments that the Constitutional Abolitionists, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, are largely obscure as historic figures and rarely register in high or low culture. Well, join the club. Unless you are a progressive princeling or a member of an oppressed class, your would-be admirers have to actively work to seek out your biography. Plus, how can the likes of Lysander Spooner (google him) measure up to Beyonce'? 

Still, there is one group of Americans who should rectify their ignorance in this area: members of the Republican Party, who are often as ignorant of the noble origins of their party and philosophy as anyone else. Read Whence Comes Section One. It is literally inspiring (and ought to provide the basis for a very good book). On the most important political questions in American history, our guys were 100% right. Modern-era Democrats might claim their pursuit of "social justice" should take pride of place, but nothing can compare to the freeing of the slaves. Republicans seeking inspiration in these times would do well to learn more about their own founding fathers. 

* NB: Chase started and ended his political career as a Democrat, however, even running for the Democrat presidential nomination in 1868.