Christianity, Culture, Vocation
As I predicted, the news media is turning on the Obama administration. Not just because the Justice Department, trying to trace a leak, subpoenaed phone companies for a list of calls made and received over two months by 20 reporters from the Associated Press (including both office and personal cell phones). According to the Washington Post, tensions have been simmering between the White House and the press corp for some time. [Read more...]
The Senate confirmed Chuck Hagel as our new Secretary of Defense. Though Hagel, a former Senator from Nebraska, is a Republican, most Republicans opposed him for his criticism of Israel, his rejection of sanctions against Iran, his opposition to nuclear weapons, and other “dovish positions.” Hagel will join John Kerry, confirmed as the new Secretary of State, as key cabinet members in the second Obama administration. [Read more...]
Homeschooling in Germany is illegal and is punished harshly with fines, imprisonment, and even the taking away of children from their families. A family that suffered that persecutionfor homeschooling their children came to the United States seeking religious freedom, as so many other immigrants have done, and an immigration judge recognized their jeopardy in their home country and granted them asylum. But Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Homeland Security are disputing that ruling and are seeking to deport the homeschooling family. [Read more...]
John Ransom says that our economy is so messed up that economists don’t even have tools to describe what is happening:
To give you an idea how bad the jobs report released on Friday is, consider this fact: The employment situation in the country is so bad that economists can’t accurately measure it with the existing tools they use to measure jobs. In other words, we have entered a period in our country not contemplated by economists. They simply don’t have the tools to measure what’s actually occurring in the jobs market.
Modern economists never imagined a scenario in which a country with as much wealth, power and innovation as United States could stretch out a jobs recession as long as the country has under Obama. . . .
We have a record amount of money in the system doing a record amount of nothing right now. And still the government policy wonks keep thinking that by injecting more money into a system already over-burdened by its money supply we will eventually get different results. . . .
The result is that investors today are still buying US Treasuries despite the fact that after calculating for the real inflation rate Treasury bonds are delivering net negative returns. In other words, investors choose to park money someplace where they are guaranteed to lose money. Because with Treasuries at least they know that their losses will be limited. If they invest in expanding businesses, they know they could lose their entire vig to the G-Men.
This phenomenon, where investors would rather have losses than any risk, has an effect on jobs.
As most of the commentariat is noting, the top-line unemployment number- the one that makes all the headlines- is going down not because of an improving jobs market, but rather because people are dropping out of the workforce at a record pace.
The 8.1 percent unemployment number is meaningless. It actually doesn’t exist. It’s like measuring an 8 foot board with a 12 inch ruler. Shortening the ruler doesn’t make the board smaller.
The rate at which Americans are participating in the jobs market is now 63.5 percent. More than one-third of Americans qualified to work have despaired of ever finding a job under Obama. That’s the highest number of Americans who have sat on the sidelines rather than look for work since 1981. For over a year the workforce participation rates have plunged, coinciding with expiring unemployment benefits.
And the problem is not that there is a lack of money in the system to sustain the economy. But there is a notable lack of demand. Demand comes from confidence that consumers and business feel about the health of the economy. Unlike politicians, those of us in the real world can’t spend what we don’t have. We have to manage our lives using the cash that we actually have at hand.
The problem here is not that businesses and banks don’t have money. Currently the money supply (MZM) stands at a record $11 trillion. Yet the velocity at which the money has moved through the system has plunged under Obama. Money is sitting in accounts, not contributing to GDP growth, but rather just chasing the price of hard assets up because people who make decisions fear that the worst in the economy is yet to come.
Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, Sarbanes-Oxley, TARP, public pensions, John Corzine, Solydnra and the UAW have done a fantastic job of muddying the waters for corporate America as well as small business owners and the self-employed.
These hostile acts taken by or on behalf of Big Government have our economy idling in place.
Economic conditions are so bad that the standard tools used by economists to explain current conditions can’t measure the depth of the peoples’- or the economy’s- depression. Jimmy Carter had the Misery Index. People, meet the President of the United States: Barack Hussien Obama.
The Obama Index is the new index for measuring our despair.
Michael Hirsh, writing in the National Journal, in the course of a discussion of the Obama administration’s new Middle East policy quotes an unnamed State Department official as declaring that “the war on terror is over.”
The Obama administration is taking a new view of Islamist radicalism. The president realizes he has no choice but to cultivate the Muslim Brotherhood and other relatively “moderate” Islamist groups emerging as lead political players out of the Arab Spring in Egypt, Tunisia and elsewhere. The Muslim Brotherhood officially renounced violence decades ago, leading then-dissident radicals such as Ayman al-Zawahiri to join al Qaida.
It is no longer the case, in other words, that every Islamist is seen as a potential accessory to terrorists. “The war on terror is over,” one senior State Department official who works on Mideast issues told me. “Now that we have killed most of al Qaida, now that people have come to see legitimate means of expression, people who once might have gone into al Qaida see an opportunity for a legitimate Islamism.” In a Tuesday night update to this post, White House spokesman Tommy Vietor clarified that while the “war on terror” concept has been dropped, “we absolutely have never said our war against al Qaida is over. We are prosecuting that war at an unprecedented pace.”
The new approach is made possible by the double impact of the Arab Spring, which supplies a new means of empowerment to young Arabs other than violent jihad, and Obama’s savagely successful military drone campaign against the worst of the violent jihadists, al Qaida.
Some of the smarter hardliners on the Right, like Reuel Marc Gerecht, are coming to realize that the Arab world may find another route to democracy–through Islamism. The question is, how will this play politically at a time when Obama’s GOP rival, Mitt Romney, is painting the president as a weak accommodationist?
via Can Obama Safely Embrace Islamists? – 2012 Decoded.
Thus, the end of the war on terrorism does not mean that we can have a big celebration in Times Square, much less that we can stop getting strip searched at airports. It means that the administration wants to cozy up to at least some jihadists, without considering them our enemies.
Wise or unwise?
The federal government is forbidden, by law, to establish a national curriculum for the public schools. So, instead, the Department of Education is orchestrating a “voluntary” movement by dangling federal money to the states that go along. So far, 45 states are on board, creating a de facto national curriculum. Peter Wood of the Chronicle of Higher Education, no less, calls foul:
Before 1965, the federal government more or less left the matter entirely to the states, but that year President Johnson championed legislation, the Elementary and Secondary School Act (ESEA) that put the federal government in the business of funding portions of school districts’ budgets. The framers of the bill, aware that one thing leads to another, put in stiff statutory limitations that prohibited federal involvement with the K-12 curriculum.
Lots of federal legislation affecting the schools has followed over the years but all of it has stuck to the principle that the curriculum is a no-go area for federal authorities. The General Education Provisions Act (GEPA), the Department of Education Organization Act, and the No Child Left Behind Act were solidly aligned on this point. As GEPA put it:
No provision of any applicable program shall be construed to authorize any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system…
There are no acts of Congress that create significant loopholes in these prohibitions, and none that offer up a contrary principle inviting the federal government to step into curricular matters.
These laws have been a source of frustration for would-be education reformers, left and right, who often have often been drawn to the idea that with the benefit of a little federal government muscle they could, at last, cut through the seaweed that has so far choked every effort to reform the nation’s public schools.
The Obama administration, facing the same legal obstacles as all its predecessors, chose a novel tactic. It orchestrated a program under the auspices of National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) which proposed standards that the states would be free to adopt. But “free” came with some sweeteners. The Race to the Top dangled hundreds of millions of dollars among those states that chose to adopt the Common Core. As for those states that chose not to…they face some interesting consequences too. I wrote about this last year in “The Core Between the States.”
Eitel and Talbert’s nineteen-page analysis of the legal standing of the Common Core State Standards mounts a powerful case that the Obama administration has overstepped itself. The Road to a National Curriculum does its most devastating work by quoting from Department of Education documents that lay out in plain language the effort to use federal resources to achieve results prohibited by statute. One such document, for example, explains, “The goal of common K-12 standard is to replace the existing patchwork of State standards that results in unequal expectations based on geography.”
Whether you think that is a worthy goal is beside the point. Over the last fifty years Congress has repeatedly told the executive branch of the U.S. government “keep out” of the school curriculum.
via The Core Conundrum – Innovations – The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Wood points out that whether one favors a national curriculum or not, this is surely a violation of the law.
What would be the advantages of a national curriculum? (Would it be likely to lift academic standards and improve learning for the entire country?) What would be the disadvantages? (Wood thinks it would squelch what bright spots there are and drag all schools down into mediocrity.) What other issues do we need to be concerned about?
HT: Jackie
The Constitution carves out space for religion so that it does not fall under government jurisdiction. So, as Charles Krauthammer points out, the government, which currently demands jurisdiction over everything, is re-defining religion:
And thus, the word came forth from [Health & Human Services director Katherine] Sebelius decreeing the exact criteria required (a) to meet her definition of “religious” and thus (b) to qualify for a modicum of independence from newly enacted state control of American health care, under which the aforementioned Sebelius and her phalanx of experts determine everything — from who is to be covered, to which treatments are to be guaranteed free of charge.
Criterion 1: A “religious institution” must have “the inculcation of religious values as its purpose.” But that’s not the purpose of Catholic charities; it’s to give succor to the poor. That’s not the purpose of Catholic hospitals; it’s to give succor to the sick. Therefore, they don’t qualify as “religious” — and therefore can be required, among other things, to provide free morning-after abortifacients.
Criterion 2: Any exempt institution must be one that “primarily employs” and “primarily serves persons who share its religious tenets.” Catholic soup kitchens do not demand religious IDs from either the hungry they feed or the custodians they employ. Catholic charities and hospitals — even Catholic schools — do not turn away Hindu or Jew.
Their vocation is universal, precisely the kind of universal love-thy-neighbor vocation that is the very definition of religiosity as celebrated by the Gospel of Obama. Yet according to the Gospel of Sebelius, these very same Catholic institutions are not religious at all — under the secularist assumption that religion is what happens on Sunday under some Gothic spire, while good works are “social services” properly rendered up unto Caesar. . . .
Therefore: To flatter his faith-breakfast guests and justify his tax policies, Obama declares good works to be the essence of religiosity. Yet he turns around and, through Sebelius, tells the faithful who engage in good works that what they’re doing is not religion at all. You want to do religion? Get thee to a nunnery. You want shelter from the power of the state? Get out of your soup kitchen and back to your pews. Outside, Leviathan rules.
via The Gospel according to Obama – The Washington Post.
We see this same new definition in the government’s failed litigation in the Hosanna-Tabor case. It’s basically the same one used in the former Soviet Union, which provided for “religious freedom” in its constitution, construed as private interior beliefs, while at the same time forbidding evangelism, worship, education, religious child-raising, and any other external expression of religion in actual life.
Michael Gerson on the Obama administration’s mandate that Roman Catholic institutions, as well as those of other churches and pro-life organizations, must provide employees health insurance that will give them free birth control, sterilization, and abortifacients:
The religious exemption granted by Obamacare is narrower than anywhere else in federal law — essentially covering the delivery of homilies and the distribution of sacraments. Serving the poor and healing the sick are regarded as secular pursuits — a determination that would have surprised Christianity’s founder.
Both radicalism and maliciousness are at work in Obama’s decision — an edict delivered with a sneer. It is the most transparently anti-Catholic maneuver by the federal government since the Blaine Amendment was proposed in 1875 — a measure designed to diminish public tolerance of Romanism, then regarded as foreign, authoritarian and illiberal. Modern liberalism has progressed to the point of adopting the attitudes and methods of 19th-century Republican nativists. . . .
The implications of Obama’s power grab go further than contraception and will provoke opposition beyond Catholicism. Christian colleges and universities of various denominations will resist providing insurance coverage for abortifacients. And the astounding ambition of this federal precedent will soon be apparent to every religious institution. Obama is claiming the executive authority to determine which missions of believers are religious and which are not — and then to aggressively regulate institutions the government declares to be secular. It is a view of religious liberty so narrow and privatized that it barely covers the space between a believer’s ears.
Obama’s decision also reflects a certain view of liberalism. Classical liberalism was concerned with the freedom to hold and practice beliefs at odds with a public consensus. Modern liberalism uses the power of the state to impose liberal values on institutions it regards as backward. It is the difference between pluralism and anti-clericalism.
The administration’s ultimate motivation is uncertain. Has it adopted a radical secularism out of conviction, or is it cynically appealing to radical secularists? In either case, the war on religion is now formally declared.
via Obama’s radical power grab on health care – The Washington Post.
More fundamental than government, more important than politics, is the rule of law. Not only the citizens but the rulers must follow their own laws. Otherwise, no matter who is in power, you have rule by decree, which is nothing more than the arbitrary exercise of power; that is to say, tyranny. Victor Davis Hanson is worried that we are losing the rule of law:
The new lawlessness at the federal level. . . is predicated on “social justice”: those deemed “in need” shall be exempt from the law; those “not in need” shall not.
The War Powers Resolution, like it or not, is the law of the land. It requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of committing armed forces to military action. Without an authorization of the use of military force or a declaration of war, the military cannot remain in combat abroad. That’s why George W. Bush went to Congress to authorize the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. During the heated rhetoric over the Iranian missile controversy, presidential and vice-presidential candidates Obama and Biden both expressed support for the resolution — apparently outraged that Bush might unilaterally bomb Iran without notifying a Senator like themselves.
So when we recently passed the 60-day limit after the initial and continual use of armed forces in Libya, why did not Obama seek permission from Congress?
Here the question is not the usual Obama hypocrisy that has seen him demagogue and damn Guantanamo, preventative detention, tribunals, renditions, the Patriot Act (just signed by a former critic via computerized autopen from the UK no less), and Predators — only to expand or embrace them all. Rather, the problem is a question of legality itself.
Is the War Powers Resolution the law of the land or not? Or are we to assume a progressive president is complying with both UN resolutions and an Arab League mandate, and therefore, as the good internationalist and Nobel laureate, sees no reason to consult, as American law requires, his own elected U.S. Congress — the latter a more suspect and reactionary body that does not enjoy the moral stature of the UN or the Arab League? . . .
In that regard, an administration is sworn to uphold the established law; why, then, was the Defense of Marriage Act arbitrarily rendered null and void without legislative appeal, simply because it was considered illiberal by those now with executive power? Can President Obama and Attorney General Holder de facto declare a law unconstitutional and then not enforce it? Could a renegade conservative counterpart likewise declare Roe vs. Wade unconstitutional, and go after abortionists because it deemed them too liberal?
Or perhaps a better example is the bailout to Chrysler that was contingent upon reversing the contractual order of creditors, putting union members and retirees, contrary to law, to the front of the line, and those who held Chrysler debt to the rear. Was the logic something like the following spread-the-wealth notion: Bondholders are wealthier anyway and so have enough money already; union members — and Democratic stalwarts — actually do the work, and so have a moral claim to the money that trumps the superfluous legal right of the wealthy and powerful?
Or we might ponder the administrative decision by bureaucratic decree to stop a company like Boeing from opening a new airline production line in South Carolina, purportedly because it is a red, right-to-work state. Again, the logic is that companies cannot open factories where they wish, since they have moral obligations that must stand above a mere legal notion of freedom of commerce and association.
Do we remember the voter intimidation case dropped against the Black Panthers — on the supposition that, given the history of the poll tax and Jim Crow voter discrimination, a little minor pushback is small potatoes?
Then we come to federal immigration law, or rather the deliberate effort to undermine it — in a fashion that goes well beyond the neglect of the law shown by previous administrations. The Obama administration is going to court, along with Mexico, to sue the state of Arizona that is trying to find ways to bolster a federal law that the administration will not enforce.
But it gets worse: the Obama administration tries to subvert states that wish to follow its own laws, but ignores cities that deliberately flaunt them by declaring themselves “sanctuary cities.” And consider entire states like California, whose Assembly just passed its own version of the “Dream Act” to provide millions in state funds to support illegal aliens at the state-run colleges and universities (at a time when the state is $15 billion short in balancing its annual budget, and, due to such a shortage of funds, must release 40,000 prisoners because of an inability to comply with a court order addressing overcrowding). . . .
Where does this end, this effort by Ivy League lawyers and civil libertarians to substitute supposedly enlightened progressivism for purported reactionary law? We easily and rightly condemn the crime when the Right tries to overthrow legality in the cases of a Franco, Hitler, Greek colonels, or Pinochet, who are easily identified as autocrats and dictators openly subverting constitutional government. But the assault from the Left is more insidious, given that the miscreants do it in self-declared high-minded fashion for “us.” I think here of the frightening trial of Socrates in ancient Athens, the ascendency of the Jacobins during the French Revolution, or Hugo Chavez’s thuggery in Venezuela — not coups as much as overdue punishment of “them.”
Without the law, there is nothing.
Via Works and Days » Land of the Lawless.
The Washington Post is publishing excerpts from Bob Woodward’s new book <a href=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1439172498?ie=UTF8&tag=cranach-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1439172498″>Obama’s Wars</a><img src=”http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=cranach-20&l=as2&o=1&a=1439172498″ width=”1″ height=”1″ border=”0″ alt=”" style=”border:none !important; margin:0px !important;” />. It includes a fascinating account of some hard-ball diplomacy played by national security director General James Jones and CIA director Leon Panetta with the president of Pakistan.
If, God forbid, the SUV had blown up in Times Square, Jones told Zardari, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Should a future attempt be successful, Obama would be forced to do things that Pakistan would not like. “No one will be able to stop the response and consequences,” the security adviser said. “This is not a threat, just a statement of political fact.”
Jones did not give specifics about what he meant. The Obama administration had a “retribution” plan, one of the most sensitive and secretive of all military contingencies. The plan called for bombing about 150 identified terrorist camps in a brutal, punishing attack inside Pakistan.
Wait a second, Zardari responded. If we have a strategic partnership, why in the face of a crisis like the one you’re describing would we not draw closer together rather than have this divide us?
Zardari believed that he had already done a great deal to accommodate his strategic partner, at some political risk. He had allowed CIA drones to strike al-Qaeda and other terrorist camps in parts of Pakistan, prompting a public outcry about violations of Pakistani sovereignty. He had told CIA officials privately in late 2008 that any innocent deaths from the strikes were the cost of doing business against senior al-Qaeda leaders. “Kill the seniors,” Zardari had said. “Collateral damage worries you Americans. It does not worry me.”
As part of the partnership, the Pakistani military was billing the United States more than $2 billion a year to combat extremists operating in the remote areas near the Afghan border. But that money had not prevented elements of the Pakistani intelligence service from backing the two leading Afghan Taliban groups responsible for killing American troops in Afghanistan.
“You can do something that costs you no money,” Jones said. “It may be politically difficult, but it’s the right thing to do if you really have the future of your country in mind. And that is to reject all forms of terrorism as a viable instrument of national policy inside your borders.”
“We rejected it,” Zardari responded.
Jones and Panetta had heard such declarations before. But whatever Pakistan was doing with the many terrorist groups operating inside its borders, it wasn’t good or effective enough. For the past year, that country’s main priority was taking on its homegrown branch of the Taliban, a network known as Tehrik-e-Taliban, or TTP.
Panetta pulled out a “link chart,” developed from FBI interviews and other intelligence, that showed how TTP had assisted the Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad.
“Look, this is it,” Panetta told Zardari. “This is the network. Leads back here.” He traced it out with his finger. “And we’re continuing to pick up intelligence streams that indicate TTP is going to conduct other attacks in the United States.”
This was a matter of solid intelligence, Panetta said, not speculation.
Jones and Panetta then turned to the disturbing intelligence about Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the group behind the horrific 2008 Mumbai attacks that had killed 175, including six Americans.
Pakistani authorities are holding the commander of the Mumbai attacks, Jones said, but he is not being adequately interrogated and “he continues to direct LeT operations from his detention center.” Intelligence shows that Lashkar-e-Taiba is threatening attacks in the United States and that the possibility “is rising each day.”
Zardari didn’t seem to get it.
“Mr. President,” said Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi, who was also at the meeting, “This is what they are saying. . . . They’re saying that if, in fact, there is a successful attack in the United States, they will take steps to deal with that here, and that we have a responsibility to now cooperate with the United States.”
“If something like that happens,” Zardari said defensively, “it doesn’t mean that somehow we’re suddenly bad people or something. We’re still partners.”
No, both Jones and Panetta said. There might be no way to save the strategic partnership. Underscoring Jones’s point, Panetta said, “If that happens, all bets are off.”
via Obama: ‘We need to make clear to people that the cancer is in Pakistan’.
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