Barack Obama: All-American

While I have never believed all the blather about President Obama being born in Kenya,  being a Muslim or having not actually graduated from college or law school, it was mainly because these seemed politically motivated rumors and implausible given all we know about Barack Obama.

What is much more clear, and depending upon your take might be a sigh of relief or a shake your head in disgust is: he’s a perfect example of an All-American president. What I mean is he is proving to be the all-too-typical power hungry imperialist type we’ve suffered through often in our nation’s history – the most glaring example in modern times being the Nixon administration .

From the love affair the Obama administration developed with the appointment of “czars” to positions of unelected power in order to circumvent congressional oversight, to the use (and threat to ramp up the use) of “executive orders” to avoid working and negotiating with Congress, to the without-abandon use of drones to dispatch “enemies” that only the President gets to define and identify.

Could the Administration carry out drone strikes inside the United States?” Brennan’s response: “This Administration has not carried out drone strikes inside the United States and has no intention of doing so.”

The absolutely comical linguistic and legal contortions of CIA chief Brennan and the always purposely obtuse Attorney General Holder are all you need to know about the style and substance of our All-American president.

   Obama’s Death Drone Dodge

Jacob Sullum|Mar. 13, 2013 7:00 am    reason.com

Last month the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence gave John Brennan, the new CIA director, another opportunity to answer a question he had dodged at his confirmation hearing: “Could the Administration car out drone strikes inside the United States?” Brennan’s written response: “This Administration has not carried out drone strikes inside the United States and has no intention of doing so.”

When asked how far President Obama is legally allowed to go in marking suspected terrorists for death, his administration has responded, again and again, with a description of what he so far has chosen to do. It is this kind of maddening evasiveness that provoked the inspiring, attention-grabbing filibuster that Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) staged last week, refusing to let Brennan’s confirmation proceed until the Obama administration deigned to address his questions about the president’s license to kill.

Although Paul declared“victory” and pronounced himself “quite happy” with the response he got from Attorney General Eric Holder last Thursday, very little was clarified. Here is the question that Holder chose to address in hisMarch 7 letter to Paul: “Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?” Holder said “the answer to that question is no.”

That sounds straightforward, unless you realize that, according to the Obama administration, the people it identifies as members or allies of Al Qaeda (including “financiers“) are engaged in combat even when they are driving down the street or sitting in their homes, far from any active battlefield. The administration does not acknowledge any geographic limits on the president’s purported authority to issue death warrants.

Although the Justice Department’s leaked white paper about targeted killings focuses on people who pose an “imminent threat,” it defines that term so broadly that pretty much any alleged terrorist would qualify. In any case, the white paper emphasizes that the criteria it discusses are sufficient to order someone’s death but may not be necessary.

Hence all the questions about killing suspected terrorists inside the United States even when they do not pose an immediate threat of violence. The administration’s slippery responses to those questions have only reinforced the suspicion that Obama is trying to keep all his options open.

Asked if “drone strikes” are “allowed with citizens within the United States” during an online Q&A session on February 14, Obama said“there has never been a drone used on an American citizen on American soil.” In a March 4 letterto Paul, Holder likewise declared that “the U.S. government has not carried out drone strikes in the United States and has no intention of doing so.”

But Holder added that “in the circumstances of a catastrophic attack” such as 9/11, he would “examine the particular facts and circumstances before advising the President on the scope of his authority” to order domestic military action. That phrasing suggests Holder was not talking about using deadly force to defend against an attack, which clearly would be justified.

If an airplane were about to crash into the Capitol, there would be neither the need nor the time to prepare a legal memo. So it’s a mystery what Holder was imagining when he raised this possibility.

The administration’s evasiveness reached comical heights at aMarch 6 hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Responding to questions from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Holder repeatedly refused to say whether it would be constitutional to use lethal force against a suspected terrorist in the U.S. who is not carrying out an attack but merely “sitting in a café” or “walking down a pathway.” Holder conceded only that it would not be “appropriate.”

Finally, after Cruz had given up on getting a straight answer, Holder said, “Translate my ‘appropriate’ to no. I thought I was saying no.” I’m not sure what that means, but it still counts as the administration’s clearest response to date.

 

The Non-Conversation About Gun Violence

The “national conversation” as the President and his allies like to call it, that we are having on “gun violence” and “sensible gun control legislation” is mostly illogical and nonsensical. Need evidence?

1. The recent congressional hearings on gun violence featured former congresswoman Gabby Giffords. She was shot last year at a public event by a crazy gunman. As a result she suffers greatly and will for the rest of her life. Ms. Giffords has shown great courage and resolve to rehabilitate herself though and be able to testify before Congress. Yet, what does she bother to say? Amongst other things – and the most replayed meme and soundbite – that “Too many children are dying; too many children. We must do something.”   This is pure emotion and not even objectively accurate.

1. Violent crime – including violent crime using guns – has dropped massively over the past 20 years

2. Mass shootings have not increased in recent years.

3. Schools are getting safer.

2. While the focus is on the sensational Newtown school murders of 20 school children last month, this focus is, again, done in order to prey upon emotion rather than reason. How about Chicago, the adopted hometown of the President and currently under the administration of the President’s former chief of staff (Mayor Rahm Emanuel)?  Chicago is starting off 2013 on pace to outpace the horrendous murder rate it infamously enjoyed in 2012: 506! In addition, and tragically, a young woman, who recently participated in the President’s inaugural ceremonies, was murdered in Chicago last week. Yes murder made the news but correspondingly, how often do we hear anything about the fact that Chicago has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the U.S.? Just what exactly have restrictive gun laws done to stop what Ms. Giffords is pleading for in her testimony (i.e., “too many children are dying”)? Answer: apparently nothing. Who is holding Mr. Emanuel and the President accountable for enforcing the thousands of gun laws already on the books?

3. In Hartford, CT on January 28, 2013 there was a public hearing on gun violence and one of the most eloquent statements made by citizens was by Henson Ong. Watch it here yourself.

Do we hear this side of the story? Do we hear the arguments and views of Mr. Ong equally aired by the media and given full hearing and analysis so that the “national conversation” can be just that, a conversation that gives and takes and considers all sides …. rather than legislators and the President telling us with an emotion-filled voice that we just need to “do something”.

 

What is the NRA thinking?

The media is full of stories and quotes of of outrage from politicians, pundits, news outlets, and average citizens regarding the National Rifle Association’s recent ad that refers to the “elitist and hypocirical” attitude of the President and other wealthy liberals (e.g., David Gregory) who want to restrict gun ownership and are against arming school personnel yet send their children to exclusive private schools that employ armed guards.

Certainly it seems risky if not questionable for the NRA to adopt this media strategy that invokes the children of the President and others when the most recent trigger for gun control advocacy was the tragedy of innocent children murdered in their school by a madman.

A little over a year ago though there was polling that showed a long term trend toward and a resulting majority of Americans disfavoring stricter gun control, including any new or tougher restrictions of so-called “assault weapons”. Fast forward to today and every poll you can find shows an increase in support for tougher restrictions, particularly for “assault weapons”. While the Newtown horror provoked understandably visceral emotions in nearly every American it is also logical to assume correspondingly that there is a percentage of the public that supported the NRA positions previously that were thinking emotionally and at least not driven by facts.

Why? I think a glaring fact that is typically glossed over or just not reported is that a super majority of Americans are in favor of gun ownership – the poll in 2011 cited above is prime example. Yet recent polls asking Americans if they favor banning “semiautomatic guns” shows a strong increase and in some polls a slight majority of support. Many handguns are semiautomatic. A majority of new hand gun sales are semiautomatics. It is a feature that many millions of average American gun owners prefer. So how do a majority of Americans – today, 30 days after Newtown – favor both hand gun ownership and the banning of a type of gun that would make 10s of millions of gun owners criminals unless they turn over their weapons to the government?

A good percentage of Americans are easily persuaded by emotion, current events and simplistic arguments (and polls). While I personally think the NRA’s recent ad campaign is silly that is because I think I’m not in that percentage of Americans swayed by current events and simplistic arguments….. those ads are not aimed at me.

The NRA hopes, even if ham handedly, they can focus on the emotions and knee-jerk thinking of the 10 or 15% of their formerly more ardent supporters. How is this different than the President parading out children to be at his side for his announcement of new gun control orders and calls for gun control legislation, clearly wanting to use emotion and images to buttress his views and policies.

 

The logical case against federal debt (The Project To Restore America)

A great article laying out the hypocrisy and evil of federal government debt. Read this to see if you agree with me: default on the federal debt would be bitter but effective medicine.

 

Guardrails Needed

Since the predicted Mayan Apocalypse seems to have passed without incident and the 14th Baktun is now underway we should use the reprieve to do some self-examination and assessment as a country.

There was a recent piece in the WSJ that is largely a re-print from 1993 by Daniel Henninger. It is quite appropriate that Mr. Henninger wrote nearly 20 years ago words that are still perfectly apt for today following the Newtown tragedy – as he wrote those words then following a widely publicized murder and pointed out that the root issues are cultural and that new legislation is merely a weak attempt to paper over (literally!) the real issues.

Have we learned anything since 1993? It seems the answer is a collective “not really”.

I highly reccomend Charles Murray’s recent book “Comimg Apart” for another somewhat similar but deeper view on the starting or tipping point of all this cultural mess in America.

Self control, self restraint, personal responsibility, delaying self gratification … we don’t have enough of thess and we can’t have too much of all of them.

—————————–

Henninger: No Guardrails, Again

For its own protection, American society needs to rediscover self-control and self-restraint.

By DANIEL HENNINGER

With Newtown, the American people seem to sense that it is a moment to stand down and think hard about whether something’s amiss in their society. And it’s not just the guns. We have been here before.

In 1993, the U.S. reacted with national shock at the murder of abortion-clinic doctor David Gunn. President Bill Clinton condemned the Gunn killing, and Sen.  Joe Biden called for legislative remedies. The Journal’s editorial-page editor then, Bob Bartley, asked me to write an editorial, and the result was “No Guardrails.”

What follows is an abbreviated version of that editorial, which was about the linkages between cultural disarray and personal disarray. Not much has changed in the years since.

***

The gunning down of abortion doctor David Gunn in Florida last week by Michael Frederick Griffin shows us how small the barrier has become that separates civilized from uncivilized behavior in American life. In our time, the United States suffers every day of the week because there are now so many marginalized people among us who don’t understand the rules, who don’t think that rules of personal or civil conduct apply to them, who have no notion of self-control.

As the saying goes, there was a time. And indeed there really was a time in the United States when life seemed more settled, when emotions, both private and public, didn’t seem to run so continuously at breakneck speed, splattering one ungodly tragedy after another across the evening news. How did this happen to the United States? How, in T.S. Eliot’s phrase, did so many become undone?

We think it is possible to identify the date when the U.S., or more precisely when many people within it, began to tip off the emotional tracks. A lot of people won’t like this date, because it makes their political culture culpable for what has happened. The date is August 1968, when the Democratic National Convention found itself sharing Chicago with the street fighters of the anti-Vietnam War movement.

The real blame here does not lie with the mobs who fought bloody battles with the hysterical Chicago police. The larger responsibility falls on the intellectuals—university professors, politicians and journalistic commentators—who said then that the acts committed by the protesters were justified or explainable. That was the beginning. America had a new culture for political action and for personal living.

The virtue known as self-restraint was devalued. Certain rules that for a long time had governed behavior also became devalued. Whatever else was going on here, we were lowering the barriers of acceptable political and personal conduct.

You can argue, as many did and still do, that all this was necessary because the established order wouldn’t respond or change. But then you still need to account for the nation’s simultaneous dive into extensive social and personal dysfunction. You need to account for what is happening to those people within U.S. society who seem least able to navigate the political and personal torrents that they become part of, like Michael Griffin.

Those endless demonstrations were merely one part of a much deeper shift in American culture—away from community and family rules of conduct and toward more autonomy, more personal independence. As to limits, you set your own.

The intellectuals and political leaders who led the movement did very well, or at least survived and even won celebrity and fame. They are born with large reservoirs of intelligence and psychological strength. But for a lot of other people it hasn’t been such an easy life to sustain. The personal crackups float like flotsam through the country’s hospitals and streets.These more vulnerable people, who in different ways must try to live along life’s margins, are among the reasons a society erects rules. They are guardrails. It’s true that we need to distinguish good rules from bad rules and periodically re-examine old rules. But the broad movement that gained force during the anti-war years consciously and systematically took down the guardrails. Incredibly, even judges pitched in.

But let’s get something straight about the consequences. If as a society we want to live under conditions of constant challenge to institutions and limits on personal life, then we should stop crying over all the individual casualties, because there are going to be a lot of them. That today is the status quo. The alternative is to start rethinking it.

***

When that 1993 editorial appeared, it received a strong response from many people who indeed thought that the status quo—a steady falling away of constraints on acceptable behavior—was dangerous. Now in 2012, President Obama is asserting, “These tragedies must end.” Odds are, Congress will pass a gun law. And that will be that.”No Guardrails” was not a plea for retrieving a mythical past. It argued that a no-limits culture was destructive and that we would be better off if our intellectual, political and cultural elites rediscovered—and publicly revered—the protective virtues of self-control and self-restraint.

If anything, unfettered egotism is worse than ever. The rehab clinics and streets are filled with personal tragedies no one will read about. These often involve a confused young person, who is not a potential mass murderer, but who in almost every instance is shattering families, their own and others, often forever.

The Newtown killings have brought forth another moment for the nation’s public and private leaders. A presidential speech and maybe a law can’t hurt. But what the nation needs from them is more leadership than that.

 

Reduce the Deficit Your Way: Build Your Own Plan!

This is a very cool little tool – try it yourself. It is a “Make Your Own Deficit-Reduction Plan” calculator that lets you choose amongst dozens of options for reducing annual budget deficits.

It clearly show what the options are and how many tough choices need to be made to reduce our annual budget deficits.

Once you get started though I believe you realize that it is not about shutting down the government it is about reducing all the things it attempts to do, some of which are obscenely expensive.

We simply can’t afford to do it all. So, try it yourself. What choices would YOU make?

 

Your Tax Dollars At Work (California Edition)

This is a nice article from NPR demonstrating the total lack of competence and basic understanding of sound fiscal management in the edu-ocracy that controls many school boards.

In California, as is pointed out in the article, there are many school districts that have succumbed to the equivalent of “pay day loans” to finance school construction projects.

The quote from Charles Ramsey, school board president of West Contra Costa School District is priceless:

“We’d be foolish not to take advantage of getting $25 million. You’d take that any day.

  Why would you leave $25 million on the table? You would never leave $25 million on the table.”

Well of course you would leave $25 million or any other amount on the table when the terms for obtaining the funds were not favorable or supported by your ability to pay in the future!

We see this all over our government at all levels where politicians and bureaucrats are detached from – and seemingly unaccountable for – making sound decisions and being good stewards with the public’s tax dollars.

I’ll finish with another quote from the article:

“It’s so irresponsible, that if I were on a school board I would get rid of that superintendent.“

Bill Lockyer, California state treasurer

Well said.