Contrary to popular media memes, the success of Missouri’s Proposition C -- which blocks the enforcement of Obamacare in the state -- was not the product of moneyed interests, insurance-company perfidy, or an uninformed citizenry. And it was not solely the product of Republican primary voters.

According to Missouri Ethics Commission documents filed before the election, opponents of Prop C outspent proponents by at least four-to-one. Missourians for Health Care Freedom, the organization set up to promote Prop C, raised a little over $100,000. The Missouri Hospital Association, which opposed the measure, spent upwards of $400,000. Insurance companies were nowhere to be found in the documents.

#ad#The opposition had the additional benefit of free coverage from almost every newspaper and television-news outfit in the state. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Kansas City Star ironically labeled proponents of Prop C “freeloaders,” and ultimately had to print corrections to their assertions that no organized opposition to Prop C existed.

In light of the amount spent by opponents of Prop C, and of the negative media coverage, the theory that the electorate voted for the Prop C because it remained uninformed of the measure’s flaws wouldn’t pass the scrutiny of a death panel.

The truth is that simple word of mouth, aided by social media, drove voters to the polls on August 3. The use of Twitter, Facebook, e-mail listservs, and various state blogs brought information to the public, both within the state and nationally. Once the information became available, a relatively small number of tech-savvy Missourians were able to carry the message to their friends and neighbors. Armed with this knowledge, Missourians were not fooled by the coordinated message of the opposition. In fact, tens of thousands voted in favor of Prop C but did not vote in the Senate or state-auditor primaries.

Block Captains, a program instituted by the St. Louis Tea Party and utilized by the plethora of similar organizations scattered around the state, enabled the relatively low-budget Prop C campaign to magnify its message tenfold. Many pundits have commented on the lack of money collected by the many tea parties scattered across the country, but that never fazed the spartan St. Louis organization. The Block Captain program trained everyday citizens to become their own grassroots political organizations. Individuals trained under the program were not directed by the St. Louis Tea Party leadership, but were encouraged to work on whatever politician’s campaign they deemed most important. They formed groups of about ten people each, and trained new individuals to form even more groups.

These individuals, though they worked for different campaigns, all got the word out about Prop C in their literature, speaking, and civic evangelism. Without official financial support or campaign coordination, these individual Block Captain teams had an outsize impact on the more traditional Republican groups campaigning across the state. Rather than taking orders, the individuals were influencing the way in which candidates campaigned.

#page#The remarkable success of Prop C came about with little money or resources. At one point, the cash-strapped campaign ran out of yard signs. The Facebook page became a clearinghouse for low-cost solutions to the problem. Bumper stickers, homemade signs, and many other ideas were created at home by individuals, vetted by larger groups, and then distributed through personal social networks and e-mail chains.

What surprised me, whether it should have or not, was that women between the ages of 40 and 60 were the most active participants. Most of the creative solutions and drive to get the message out on Prop C came from this demographic. The media missed these committed activists -- who put their heads down and worked instead of focusing on getting attention from the press. That undercurrent of motherly and grandmotherly support ignited Prop C activism, and one would be ill-advised to ignore this segment of the population as a political force in the upcoming elections.

#ad#As to who voted, Missouri is an open-primary state with many unaligned voters. Competitive races existed at all levels, in all parties. About 40,000 more votes were cast on Prop C than on the candidates for Missouri’s open U.S. Senate seat. Even some Democrats supported Prop C: About 320,000 votes were cast for Democrats in the Senate primary, but Prop C received only 271,000 “No” votes. About 15 percent of supporters of Robin Carnahan, the Democrat nominee for Senate, voted in favor of Prop C, with that number reaching as high as 20 percent in St. Louis City, a Democratic stronghold.

Prop C passed with 71 percent of the vote, but it was no easy task. The Prop C campaign conducted no internal polls, and the closest approximation of the vote came a month earlier and was not on point: A poll showed that about 60 percent of Missourians were not happy with the national health-care bill. Anything short of that number on Prop C would have been touted as a defeat in the media, and with the $400,000 the opposition spent, such a result seemed entirely possible.

One thing is for sure: Those paying close attention in Missouri have a newfound faith in and respect for our highly informed and effective electorate.

-- Benjamin Evans is an attorney in Missouri, and worked with Missourians for Health Care Freedom during the primary election.

We are in an era of no confidence in any people or institutions, extreme incivility in public discourse and even in respectable journalism, whiplash changes in public attitudes and the status of public personalities, and an addiction to magnifying every problem to an epochal crisis of terrifying proportions. There are other familiar symptoms of such times, including an otherwise irrational rise in the price of gold, frequent changes of government in even the stablest and most advanced countries, and wild poll fluctuations for almost everything. Fickleness is a manifestation of instability, but conditions are not, in fact, as dire as these symptoms would indicate; there is just a lack of confidence, as opposed to seething and potentially uncontrollable and violent discontent (of which there is little sign in any important jurisdiction).

#ad#There has been plenty of regretful comment about the tendency of American political faction leaders to apostrophize each other in absurdly exaggerated terms, amplified, where that is possible, by much of the media. A casual but observant person arriving in America from a completely tranquil place would likely conclude that Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, and some others are primitive hate-mongers and advocates of official barbarism, supported by masses of apparently tea-drinking humanoid troglodytes. They would be encouraged to this view by Speaker Pelosi’s assertion that opponents of the recent health-care changes were happy to march under the emblem of the Nazi swastika, and by frequent references by politicians and even judges to those with reservations about same-sex marriages as religious bigots, their feet and minds locked in the cement of Old Testament absolutism requiring the death by stoning of any dissenter from the most rigorously traditional behavior. And they would have been given to understand that any lack of enthusiasm about constructing a 15-story mosque a few hundred yards from the site of the deadliest assault ever conducted on the territory of the United States by people purporting to be virtuous, aggrieved, militant Muslims, is an unpardonable affront to American traditions of sectarian tolerance.

 

If the same observers, arriving like Pan from a very different place, alit into the opposite camp, they could be pardoned for thinking that the president, vice president, speaker of the House of Representatives, Senate majority leader, mayor of New York, and many, perhaps most, other prominent elected officials in contemporary America are cowardly, treasonable, Americaphobic appeasers of the enemies of all that the United States has ever aspired to represent and promote in its most idealistic moments.

With Nancy Pelosi, as with the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, there is an understandable reservoir of doubt about someone who promotes abortion on demand at the public’s expense, an identical status of heterosexual and homosexual arrangements, and the commendability of assisted suicide as “death with dignity” (all respectable arguments even to those who do not agree with them), while pitching to the mainstream Roman Catholic 25 percent of America. They observe the outward signs of devotion to that faith: The House speaker demurely kissed the ring of the pope before the cameras of the nation when the pontiff, as is normally the case when visiting North America, offered his hand for a conventional handshake and no acts of deferential veneration, on the White House lawn. (Again, it is perfectly correct for a co-religionist to do this, and Mrs. Pelosi managed it with the flirtatious elegance of Graham Greene’s colonial communicants in A Burnt-Out Case, but it is slightly incongruous for someone who so strenuously champions legislation contrary to important official tenets of the Roman Catholic faith.)

It is not three months since the New York Times was blazing away at every apparent revelation, no matter how remote or implausible, of alleged clerical sexual misconduct in the Roman Catholic Church. The anti-Catholic media of the West were fatuously advising the Vatican to “rebrand” itself, and the Church’s ancient foes were doing a St. Vitus’s Dance of solidarity as the giant bumblebee of Roman Catholicism prepared to fold its wings and fall down dead after its imposture of 20 centuries. In fact, there was no such occurrence, and there was no noticeable impact on either religious observance or new vocations. The Ark of the Faith is almost invulnerable to the notorious failings of mere men.

The media were enabled to desert this falling comet of oversold urgency and leapt to the next apocalypse, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. It quickly emerged that the entire ecology of the world was going to be severely disturbed. The fact that pollution on this scale continued for years on end in the world wars, and yet the world regained its equilibrium, was not allowed to muddy the waters of irretrievable disaster. We were for it, right up to the day when President Obama confirmed that the well had been plugged and that 76 percent of the oil that had been spilt had been collected or assimilated into the ocean. Even if this was an exaggeration, and even if the yelps of incredulity from the victims of the problem, in the fishing and tourism industries of the southern states especially, were more than complaints of the swift sunset on the lucrative relief programs that had been put in place, it was the end of the world-shaking crisis that had been touted from the rooftops of the media for three months.

#page#

It seemed to me that a world record had been set by former Japanese prime minister Yukio Hatoyama, who descended from an approval rating of 80 percent (vs. 18 percent disapproval) to a disapproval rating of 78 percent (vs. 19 percent approval) in nine months. But the new deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom, Nicholas Clegg, seems to have surpassed that, by going from a 72 percent approval rating in June, the highest of any British party leader since Winston Churchill (when he was head of an all-party national government, Britain’s greatest statesman in Britain’s finest hour), to an approval rating of 8 percent in August.

#ad#No one appears to have any purchase or perspective on the tide of events. This is aberrant, but will only subside when the foremost pillar of international secular stability, the United States government, regains the confidence of the world, which has looked to it since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s time as the ultimate source of assurance and continuity. The rough ecclesiastical equivalent, the Holy See, to the disappointment of its detractors, has just shown how to manage a severe crisis: Acknowledge it, express a believable determination to deal with it, and produce and implement a plan of action to do that. Pope Benedict XVI is not above reproach and, contrary to widespread mythology, does not claim to be infallible, but he has acknowledged the evil of child and adolescent molestation in the clergy and put believable controls and personnel in place to eradicate the problem as swiftly and justly as possible.

Public discourse would be less contentious and the usual barometers of confidence -- such as currency, precious metals, vital commodities, and stock-market values -- would quickly improve and stabilize if the president of the United States plausibly tackled the greatest problems he was elected to address. If he unveiled a plan to reduce spending, raise revenues, manage the national-debt crisis (including Social Security and bankrupt states), and ensure reasonably non-inflationary money-supply increases for the balance of the decade; proposed an energy program that would drastically reduce dependence on foreign-oil imports, cut the current-account deficit and the world oil price, and devised an environmental-protection plan that did not exceed the scientifically proven extent of global warming and related problems; produced a bipartisan plan to reduce health-care costs while increasing availability, by increased competition and the taxation of sumptuous care not now paid for by the recipient; and stopped this demeaning charade with Iran and militarily smashed its nuclear military program -- the comparative resulting calm would replicate the serenity that followed the inauguration of Ronald Reagan and release of the Iran hostages in 1981.

There is no precedent in the history of the U.S. presidency for someone to run such a brilliant campaign for the nomination of his party and for election as the incumbent president did, and to have as much difficulty getting to grips with the main problems he decried and promised to solve once decisively empowered to do so. Amongst the very most astute campaigns for the presidency ever waged were those culminating in the elections of Andrew Jackson in 1828, Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and 1940, Richard Nixon in 1968, and Ronald Reagan in 1980. In each case, the four years that followed were among the most eventful, and successful, in the nation’s history, even when terrible but just wars had to be fought and won, in the 1860s and 1940s. America and the world are still waiting, with dwindling hope and patience, for President Obama to be the worthy heir to Candidate Obama. While waiting, the national interest requires the Republicans to elevate a suitable replacement this autumn.

 

— Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full. He can be reached at cbletters@gmail.com. 

 

Bill Bennett -- former education secretary, former drug czar, best-selling author, and radio host, among other things -- has recently become a senior adviser to a new company, Safe Communications, whose first product, MouseMail.com, is designed to help combat the problems of cyberbullying and sexting. During a week in which the White House is holding a summit on bullying, National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez talked to Bennett about this private-sector effort to help families.


KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Shouldn’t parents know who is texting their children, and what the communications are about?

#ad#WILLIAM J. BENNETT: On the first part, absolutely. On the second, yes, in ugly or bad cases. A key thing about allowing children to text and have smartphones is for parents to have a conversation with their children first -- a very serious conversation. MouseMail and other products for older children require such a conversation and enhance it.

The way MouseMail works, parents have to first approve who is sending their child texts. They can of course add names any time, but the requirement of parental approval forces parents to be involved, to have that first (and, hopefully, ongoing) conversation with their child or children. As for the content of the e-mails and texting, once the parent approves the who, we do not encourage spying -- the child can e-mail and text freely, so long as what he is sent, and is sending, is not vulgar language, bullying language, or sexting imagery. If the language goes that way, it is blocked and sent to the parents -- for them to approve, or not approve, and go back to having that conversation with their child.


LOPEZ: Should kids even have phones?

BENNETT: I thought a lot about this before becoming involved in this company, Safe Communications. As I looked more and more at the research, the scholarly writing, and the data, I thought of this as being a good deal like computers and children. Our children now live in a digital age, where electronic communication, as one scholar put it, is not just “part of their life” but in many cases “is their life.”

Clearly, that’s too much, but there is a lot of it now; it is a very big part of children’s lives and will remain so -- that’s undeniable. I saw the statistics showing that over 70 percent of teens text and that in the majority of cases parents want their children to have equipment such as smartphones -- for all kinds of good reasons like security and being able to get in touch with their children and enabling their children to get in touch with them. I realized this is the world in which we live; children are going to spend a lot of time online, and we have to accompany them and help them. There are good things we can do to make our children’s digital lives safe.

#page#I think of driving, too: We’re not going to be able to keep our children who turn 16 from driving (at least not forever). But what we can do is encourage safe driving, explain to them why seatbelts are important, have airbags in the cars, and give them safe cars with a lot of instruction and conversation about the importance of being safe when they drive.


LOPEZ: What exactly is cyberbullying? How many children are experiencing it, and how badly?

#ad#BENNETT: This is a great and difficult question. Even the experts in psychology I have read admit it is a difficult thing to define. As Prof. Robin Kowalski and her Clemson University colleagues who have studied this write: “Cyberbullying casts a wide net that captures a number of different types of behaviors. Still, at its core, cyberbullying involves bullying through the use of technology such as the Internet and cellular phones . . . and it exists on a continuum of severity.”

As for how many and how badly, one of the disturbing things I’ve noted from all the research and polling I’ve read is that such research and polling becomes dated almost as soon as it’s published given the rapidity with which more and more children are going online and using mobile phones and home computers -- and the younger and younger the children are when they start doing this.

I threw this question out to my audience on my radio show after a friend told me he knew of a nine-year-old with a cell phone who did a lot of texting. You can imagine what I heard next. Callers telling me about their children at age eight with cell phones. We see this taking place at even younger ages. In many cases, again, parents want their child to have a mobile phone: so the parents can stay in touch, and so the child can stay in touch. But then, as with a lot of tools originally meant to be used for all the right reasons, corrupt behavior can creep in, and ugly things can begin to take place, and it can create and has created predators on children.

What’s interesting to me about this is relating some of it to my old job as drug czar. Of course, we never want children to begin to even get close to drugs. But when a child does, from peer pressure or other reasons, a certain level of volition, of self-action has to take place. The child does have to take hold of a joint and inhale it, or whatever. Peer pressure may be behind it, but the child does have to act. With cyberbullying and sexting, that part is not true, and that’s what is so pernicious. A completely innocent child can be bombarded, without wanting anything to do with it, or even thinking about it.

As for how many, I’ve seen numbers showing that over 30 percent of teens have experienced some form of cyberharassment. My fear is that those numbers will go up.


LOPEZ: Something else has to be the reason for the increase in suicides, right? Deaths seem to be too easily explained by such fads, don’t they?

BENNETT: I almost despair of talking about this because the suicides we read of that are tied to cyberbullying and sexting are, yes, extreme cases. But when you Google these phrases, you see it.

#page#And suicide, at the extreme, is not the only problem. Again, to borrow from Robin Kowalski, what we see more of is such things as “depression, anxiety, social isolation, nervousness, lowered self-esteem, deficits in school performance, and impaired health.” These are things no parents would want for their child and no child would want.


LOPEZ: I do sometimes worry that we’re following the poll numbers of some sensationalistic media. Do you worry that we’re making too much of sexting and cyberbullying and whatever’s next?

#ad#BENNETT: I don’t. When I spoke about this on my radio show, I got a lot of calls and e-mails from parents and friends of parents with children who have been victimized. And some of the stories are just horrific. I think the research is pretty much in now: Cyberbullying and sexting are real problems of the digital age, and look to be getting worse, happening to younger and younger children. These experiences can leave an indelible mark on a child; they can alter childhood, and endanger children’s innocence.


LOPEZ: Are kids worse today? Are threats worse today? Are temptations worse today? Is this all just a new version of an old problem?

BENNETT: I simply don’t know. I do think the means and immediacy of danger do increase with advancements in access. Do we get more information in the digital age? Do we have more access to it? Good information -- knowledge, works of great art and philosophy and theology? No question. But do we also get a proliferation and more access to a lot of bad -- even dangerous -- material? Yes, as well. And you know me -- I don’t believe parents can just surrender. I never have. We still have to push back as hard as the age that pushes against us, to borrow from Flannery O’Connor.


LOPEZ: How does MouseMail work? Why would you get involved in it?

BENNETT: I was approached by a group of investors and thought leaders who had started looking into this issue, this growing problem. They asked me if I would speak with them and get involved. I had seen some stories on cyberbullying and sexting. Did some more research on it, became convinced of how pernicious the problem was. Then I met with them, a number of times, and decided that what they were doing was important and that perhaps I could be of some help.

As for how MouseMail works, in brief: MouseMail.com blocks harassing and sexting e-mails and texts sent to your child’s phone and home computer; and it blocks harassing and sexting e-mails from being sent from your child’s phone and home computer.

You simply take a BlackBerry, iPhone, or Droid and disable the standard text-message system (and don’t enable the e-mail system). You go to MouseMail.com and sign up for our program: $12.95 a month. The parents and child talk, the parents approve those who can send their child messages, and from then on the child will use MouseMail as his e-mail and texting platform.

#page#The child can go to MouseMail via his smartphone or home computer. And then he can e-mail and text safely -- and the parents do not have to supervise or spy; they can have a sense of peace. MouseMail will catch and block any cyberbullying, vulgar, or sexting messages. All those messages then go to the parents, not the child. The parents can allow the message to go through or not. A child e-mails and texts safely through MouseMail; nothing goes to the parent unless it has objectionable content.

#ad#So, if you want your child or grandchild to have a smartphone, now you can; without the worry of all the terrible things we’ve read and heard about. If your child uses MouseMail as his e-mail and texting platform, he will be e-mailing and texting safely.


LOPEZ: This can’t be foolproof, can it?

BENNETT: One has to be very cautious in making such a guarantee. But we think we have the best checks and safeguards available. One often has to play catch-up to the dangers facing our children, but we’ve committed to staying very vigilant and to continually updating and improving, to try to stay ahead of the predators. As one of our leading people said to me, “We are committed to growing with families.”


LOPEZ: How do you know it’s for real? Endorsement is a precarious business, isn’t it?

BENNETT: Yes. This is a bit of a joke at my radio syndicate, where the sales people get nervous when they approach me with a product to sell, knowing I turn down so many of their prospects. I have to spend a lot of time thinking about and looking at something. I’ve done that with Safe Communications. I did a lot of research on this and spoke to several experts in the field. I’ve been to the company headquarters; I’ve spent a lot of time with the people who designed it. And before I signed on, I saw to it that I would have a lot of say both in who would be on the board and in how the company would promote and continually redesign and improve this product (as one needs to do with any digital technology). I really like this team and am proud to be a part of it.


LOPEZ: So how do parents teach virtue in this environment?

BENNETT: It all begins with, it has to begin with, a conversation between a parent or both parents and a child. This is similar to the work we’ve done on preventing drug use. The more the parents talk about it with the child -- and the more time a child and his parents talk generally -- the less likely is such dangerous behavior. I’m in favor of more parent-child conversation, and MouseMail and Safe Communications’ other products require this, beginning with a talk about who is an approved communicator with the child. We also give parents access to information about cyberbullying, sexting, and safe communication.

There is no substitute for parents, but we can look for and make helpful auxiliaries available. As Charles Eliot, a former president of Harvard, once put it: “In the campaign for character, no auxiliaries are to be refused.”


LOPEZ: Is the Internet a dangerous thing for families?

BENNETT: It certainly can be. It can also be a great tool. Used in moderation, used correctly, the Internet can be a great instrument for research, for accessing and downloading works of great knowledge, information, beauty. Used wrongly, it can be an instrument for accessing trash. It can be dangerous. Texts and e-mails can be shocking and degrading; they can also be uplifting and memorable -- I think of the many wonderful messages from my children that I’ve received and saved. Like fire, the Internet can be used for good or ill; man has to tame it.

I think in the end I go back to St. Paul and his dictum. Whether you are religious or not, it is still a good rule on these things: “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable -- if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things.” I would say “focus on” such things. But that rule is timeless.

— Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online.

 

‘The pace of economic recovery is likely to be more modest in the near term than had been anticipated.” Those were the carefully chosen words of the Federal Reserve Board after its meeting Tuesday. Translation into English: We wuz wrong.

So were a lot of people, including departing White House economics adviser Christina Romer, who wrote that the Obama Democrats’ February 2009 stimulus package would hold unemployment below 8 percent.

It wasn’t just administration spokesmen who expected a solid recovery. California economist Bill Watkins in New Geography recalls a conference last fall in which all the other economists presented rosy scenarios and only he forecast extended malaise. He was relieved that his colleagues didn’t pelt him with tomatoes.

#ad#It’s easy for Republicans to make partisan hay of all this. They can point out, as Bush administration economist Larry Lindsey does in The Weekly Standard, that the congressional Democrats’ stimulus package was not the timely, targeted, and temporary measure recommended by national economic director Larry Summers.

They can add that the threat of new regulations as bureaucrats interpret the health-care and financial-regulation bills and of pending tax increases as the Bush cuts expire have created a climate of uncertainty in which consumers don’t consume, banks don’t lend, and businesses don’t create jobs.

All true. But in this summer of unrecovery, it’s still important to understand how so many smart people got so much so wrong.

One answer comes from economist Arnold Kling. Writing for The American, Kling argues that the collapse of the housing market and the financial crisis disrupted what had been “a sustainable pattern of specialization and trade” and that we need to let the market economy develop a new one.

Instead, the policies of the Obama Democrats have been aimed at propping up the old order — holding up housing prices and the mortgage market, keeping the Detroit auto companies in place, maintaining the lush standard of living of public-employee-union members (the purpose of the $26 billion the House was summoned back to Washington to approve Tuesday).

Unsustainable patterns of production, Kling writes, prevent the trial-and-error process of private investment that creates new jobs and new patterns of production that will be sustainable.

Across the Atlantic, Marc De Vos, director of the Itinera Institute, a Brussels think tank, advances similar arguments in his book After the Meltdown. The financial crisis, he argues, has brought a revival of “state capitalism,” in which governments “have an increased and distorting role in economics.”

“The state should be the partner of the market, not the owner or manipulator of the market,” he writes. “Governments should not pick economic winners and losers. The state may be back, but the politicians should be modest.”

Modesty, unfortunately, is not the dominant character trait of a president who predicted that his election would be seen as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

But facts are stubborn things. The fact that the private-sector economy has not responded as administration economists expected and confidently predicted should be a wake-up call.

It shows the limits of expert knowledge and of the ability of political actors to make optimal economic choices.

The intellectual firepower of this administration may be high. But so was the intellectual firepower of the postwar British Labour governments that nationalized steel, auto companies, and the railroads.

That didn’t turn out so well, and for decades, the British economy lagged behind those of America and its European neighbors. State capitalism has been tried before. It didn’t work.

Market capitalism works better because it doesn’t depend on one set of actors to make all the choices. Entrepreneurs with a vision for the future can take their chances, and most may fail. But some will turn out to be Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, who change our world in ways that 99 percent of economic experts were unable to predict.

In the meantime, American voters seem prepared to return a negative verdict on the Obama Democrats’ version of state capitalism. Bailout favoritism and crony capitalism, it turns out, are not vote-winners.

The open question is whether Republicans will present and advance public policies that leave the way open for market capitalism to find its way to a new sustainable pattern of production, as it has done before. Let’s hope for that kind of change.

-- Michael Barone is senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner. © 2010, The Washington Examiner.

Anti-Hispanic, anti-gay, anti-Muslim, anti-black -- it is hard to keep track of all the recent allegations of bigotry.

State representatives in Arizona overwhelmingly passed, to popular acclaim, an immigration law that the Obama administration has, for now, successfully blocked in federal court. Arizonans simply wanted the federal government to enforce its own laws, yet they were quickly dubbed bigots and racists -- more worried about profiling Hispanics than curtailing illegal immigration.

In California, a federal judge has just overturned Proposition 8 ensuring traditional marriage. Voters in November 2008 had amended the California constitution to recognize marriage only between a man and woman, while allowing civil unions between partners of the same sex.

#ad#Californians took that step in response to the state Supreme Court’s voiding of Proposition 22, a similar referendum on traditional marriage that California voters passed in 2000. Apparently, a stubborn majority of Californians still think of marriage as it has been followed in some 2,500 years of Western custom and practice. In contrast, gay groups have framed the issue as one of civil rights, often charging prejudice on the part of their opponents.

Another controversy is brewing a mere 600 feet from Ground Zero in lower Manhattan, site of the 9/11 attacks, where a Muslim group wishes to build a $100 million, 13-story mosque. Opponents feel this is hardly a way to build bridges across religious divides, but instead a provocative act that tarnishes the memory of the nearly 3,000 people who died at the hands of radical Islamic terrorists.

New York State residents poll in opposition to the project. Their unease reflects legitimate questions over the nature of the foreign funding for the project, and the disturbing writings and statements of the chief proponent of the plan, Feisal Abdul Rauf. They also worry that radical Islamists will use the mosque’s construction (it will probably rise before the World Trade Center complex is rebuilt) as a propaganda tool.

In response, once again the majority has been dubbed bigoted and prejudiced, this time against Muslims, for asking for a more appropriate location, farther away from Ground Zero.

After lengthy investigation, Rep. Charles Rangel, former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, is facing charges of unethical conduct. In response, Rangel has scoffed that a plea-bargain offer was nothing more than an “English, Anglo-Saxon procedure.” The implication was that ongoing prejudice, not moral lapses, caused Rangel’s problems.

Rangel’s charges come at a time when Rep. Maxine Waters faces ethics questions for allegedly using her office to steer federal money to a bank that was associated with her husband. And since eight members of the Congressional Black Caucus have recently faced ethics inquiries, we are hearing that race, not unethical conduct, is the real reason for the investigations.

These diverse cases offer some lessons.

One, legitimate public concerns can be attributed to religious, ethnic, or racial prejudice in hopes that the debate will hinge on supposedly bad motives rather than convincing arguments. Ad hominem attacks are always a sign of shaky logic.

Two, in most of these cases, the majority is opposed by a variety of activist groups, government officials, and judges. The charge of bigotry is usually expressed in terms of a sophisticated, liberal-thinking elite reining in the emotional and illogical unwashed masses. We saw proof of that with the release of confidential e-mails from the controversial “JournoList” group, which was comprised largely of influential liberal journalists, one of whom openly advocated defaming their opponents by calling them racists.

Three, these cry-wolf tactics are now stale. A real danger is that when legitimate charges of prejudice are leveled in the future, most will shrug and ignore them.

We live in a complex, multiracial, and religiously diverse society. A majority of black voters in California opposed gay marriage. Most Muslims probably concurred. Some 70 percent of Americans expressed support for the Arizona law, an overwhelming figure that would have to include some Asians, blacks, and Hispanics. White and Hispanic congressional officials have faced ethics charges, often more serious than those leveled against Rangel and Waters.

In other words, there is no simple ideological, racial, or religious divide between a monolithic “us” and “them.” We have devolved to the point where promiscuously crying “Bigot!” and “Racist!” signals a failure to convince 51 percent of the people of the merits of an argument.

It is too often that simple -- and that sad.

-- Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky by Nicholas von Hoffman (Nation Books, 237 pp., $26.95)

Nicholas von Hoffman’s short, breezy, and informative sketch of Saul Alinsky -- and of the decade he spent with him working as a community organizer -- offers us a very different take on the legendary activist than the narrative we are accustomed to. This is especially the case for those conservatives who consider Alinsky close to the devil. Alinsky made the comparison himself, invoking Lucifer, along with Thomas Paine and Rabbi Hillel, in the epigraphs to his classic, bestselling 1971 guide, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals. As Alinsky put it, clearly facetiously, Lucifer was “the very first radical#...#who rebelled against the establishment,” and who was so effective “that he#...#won his own kingdom.” But the reality of Alinsky and his work was significantly different from what this tongue-in-cheek self-presentation -- and, a fortiori, today’s conservative attacks on Alinsky -- would have us believe. He was not a radical believer in Big Government, and he probably would have had serious problems with Barack Obama’s agenda.

#ad#Alinsky became famous by organizing ethnic workers in the old Chicago stockyards from 1939 to the end of the 1950s, where he created the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council as the vehicle to organize them. Because of his work, von Hoffman notes, “what had been an area of ramshackle, near-slum housing tilting this way and that had been rebuilt into a model working-class community of neat bungalow homes.”

Candidly, von Hoffman adds that Alinsky did not challenge the neighborhood’s pattern of segregation, which had “become an impregnable fortification of whites-only exclusionism.” Back in 1919, these same workers played a part in the famous 1919 Chicago-area race riots, in which 500 people, most of them black, were wounded and 38 killed. Alinsky did manage to obtain permission for blacks to have unmolested passage through the Back of the Yards as they were on their way to other places -- which seems little by today’s standards, but, as von Hoffman notes, was a major accomplishment then.

As for the Neighborhood Council’s funding, it came not from government largesse, but from -- of all things -- the illegal-gambling activities of Alinsky’s partner, Joe Meegan. This spoke to Alinsky’s longstanding friendly relations with gangsters, thugs, and the organized-crime syndicates. That source of funding meant that any pressure from government to end racial exclusion would come to naught. Moreover, Alinsky’s belief that the people had to determine their own destiny meant, for him, that if the people wanted an all-white community, they should not be challenged on the matter. Although he wanted integration, and hoped that he could select and induce a few middle-class black families to buy homes in the Back of the Yards neighborhood and then convince whites to accept them, his partner Meegan nixed the idea. “Even public discussion of a Negro family,” von Hoffman writes, “would have the same effect as news that the bubonic plague was loose.” Even fair-minded whites in the area believed that blacks’ moving in meant “slumification, crime, bad schools, and punishing drops in real-estate values,” and hence the simple idea of an interracial neighborhood “would destroy the community and the council.” Alinsky’s code of loyalty to the Back of the Yards Council came before his personal opposition to segregation. (As von Hoffman rationalizes it, “the leaders behind the whites-only policy were his friends.”) The people pursued a policy he abhorred; and he had no choice but to stand with the people.

#page#An even more surprising revelation is that Alinsky admired Sen. Barry Goldwater, whose libertarian objections to the proposed 1964 civil-rights act he shared. Countervailing power from organizations, not decisions made by courts, Alinsky thought, was the only way to achieve permanent change. Thus, von Hoffman tells us, “he was less than enthusiastic about much civil-rights legislation,” and during Goldwater’s run for the presidency, he had at least one secret meeting with the conservative senator, during which they discussed Lyndon Johnson’s civil-rights proposal. “Saul,” von Hoffman writes, “shared the conservative misgivings about the mischief such laws could cause if abused,” but would not publicly oppose the bill, since he had no better idea to propose in its place.

#ad#Alinsky also opposed Martin Luther King Jr.’s attempted march in Chicago in 1965, criticizing King for not building a “stable, disciplined, mass-based power organization.” He saw King as a man without local roots, who did not know the community, and who did not have any idea about how to organize it. Von Hoffman writes that King led “a little army stranded inside a vast and hostile terrain,” whose efforts “accomplished nothing except to reinforce the perception” that King “was an outsider.”

But what did Alinsky think about the other major liberal ideas of the time -- for example, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program, or Robert F. Kennedy’s program for the poor? According to David Horowitz, the conservative activist and author -- in his very influential pamphlet “Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model” -- Alinsky’s radical organizers had a responsibility to work “within the system.” They did not follow the path advocated by the New Left, who preferred to utter meaningless calls for “revolution.” Thus, Horowitz writes, they “infiltrated the War on Poverty, made alliances with the Kennedys and the Democratic Party, and secured funds from the federal government. Like termites, they set about to eat away at the foundations of the building in expectation that one day they could cause it to collapse.” While the New Left created riots like that at the Chicago Democratic convention in 1968, “Alinsky’s organizers were insinuating themselves into Johnson’s War on Poverty program and directing federal funds into their own organizations and causes.”

According to von Hoffman, though, Alinsky had nothing but contempt for activists who gladly took money from the government, and hence his own group did not work within or for the government’s War on Poverty programs. Writes von Hoffman:

Although Alinsky is described as some kind of liberal left-winger[,] in actuality big government worried him. He had no use for President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society with its War on Poverty. He used to say that if Washington was going to spend that kind of dough the government might as well station people on the ghetto street corners and hand out hundred-dollar bills to the passing pedestrians. For him governmental action was the last resort, not the ideal one.

Moreover, according to von Hoffman, Alinsky also opposed putting community organizers on the government payroll, as Bobby Kennedy sought to do, since “it made an independent civil life next to impossible.” It also created the conditions by which any administration could use their work for “social and political control.” It would “stifle independent action,” and possibly turn paid organizers “into police spies.” As von Hoffman sees his mentor, Alinsky opposed not only big government, but also large corporations and big labor. What he wanted was not revolution -- despite his radical rhetoric meant to appeal to the New Left -- but “democratic organizations which could pose countervailing power against modern bureaucracies.” Thus, in von Hoffman’s view, Saul Alinsky was a radical, but a Tory radical or a radical conservative: a man with a libertarian sensibility who supported all the little men fighting against any large structure, whether it was the government, a corporation, or organized labor.

#page#In today’s America, conservatives have paid a great deal of attention to what was -- until its recent demise after a series of scandals -- the largest and most successful community organization, ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). Critics have accused the group of electoral fraud, of shakedowns of large banking and manufacturing firms, and of helping to create the housing bubble by fighting to have community banks grant loans to those who had no way to pay them back. Many of the critics claim that the organization, formed in 1970, was inspired by Alinsky’s methods and concepts -- but Alinsky had nothing to do with its founding.

#ad#This is an important issue, because the great interest Alinsky has for commentators today stems largely from his reputed influence on Barack Obama. One often hears critics of President Obama’s policies proclaim that he is acting “straight out of the Alinsky playbook.” Because Obama was a community organizer for a brief time before going to law school, many people have assumed that, as a disciple of Saul Alinsky, he was committed thereafter to apply Alinsky’s principles as a guide for whatever position he held in life. Many therefore assume that he is now acting on them as president.

It is true that Obama’s mentors were trained by Alinsky’s organization. In re­searching a piece for The New Republic in 2007, Ryan Lizza spoke to Gregory Galluzzo, one of the three men who instructed Obama when he became a community organizer. Galluzzo told Lizza that many organizers would start as idealists, and that he urged them to become realists and not be averse to Alinsky’s candid advocacy of gaining power, since “power is good” and “powerlessness is evil.” Galluzzo taught Obama that people have to be organized according to their self-interest, and not on the basis of what Obama himself has characterized as “pie-in-the-sky idealism.”

In 1992, Obama famously worked for a voter-registration group called Project Vote, which was an ACORN partner, and helped Carol Moseley Braun defeat an incumbent U.S. senator in the 1992 Democratic primary. A few years later, Lizza reported, Obama became ACORN’s attorney, and won a decision forcing Illinois to implement the Motor Voter Law, with what the Wall Street Journal’s John Fund called “loose voter-registration requirements that would later be exploited by ACORN employees in an effort to flood voter rolls with fake names.” Obama cited ACORN first on a list he composed in 1996 of key supporters for his campaign for the state senate.

So Obama’s association with ACORN was real, and close. This, combined with the fact that Obama taught Alinsky’s methods when he worked with community organizers, has led many to assume that Alinsky himself approved of ACORN. Von Hoffman, however, challenges this notion. He writes: “[ACORN’s] cheekiness, truculence, and imaginative tactical tropes have an Alinskyan touch but the organization’s handling of money, embezzlement, and nepotism would have drawn his scorn. Nor would he have been comfortable with the large amounts of government money flowing into the organization.” (Emphasis added.) This conclusion is essentially confirmed by the activist and writer John Atlas, whose new pro-ACORN book, Seeds of Change: The Story of ACORN, explains that the group broke with the Alinsky model in a number of ways -- most importantly, by applying for and receiving government contracts.

According to von Hoffman, Alinsky had nothing but disdain for the New Left with which Obama was associated. He thought Bill Ayers was wedded to “petulant ego decision making,” as well as a “comic-book leftism whose principal feature was anger at a government which did not do as they bade it. Their foot-stamping anger and humiliation at their failures#...#made them believe they were justified in taking up violence.” He saw the Weather Underground as a group prone to tantrums and “Rumpelstiltskin politics.”

#page#Alinsky’s own approach had some major successes. In Rochester, N.Y., he got Eastman Kodak to agree to hire more blacks. In 1965, he had been approached by ministers from Rochester after Martin Luther King Jr. had turned down an overture from them. This in itself provides an interesting contrast with some of the activism of later times: Alinsky took action after he was asked to intervene by community ministers. This was quite different from the kind of shakedown associated in more recent years with Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton, the kind in which large corporations fill an organization’s coffers with money in exchange for a hands-off agreement.

#ad#Yet, even in the Rochester fight, Alinsky’s methods often appeared rather comical, and it is rather hard to believe that they were taken seriously. According to von Hoffman, what Alinsky proposed, and scared the city’s elite with, was a scheduled “fart-in” at the Kodak-sponsored Rochester Symphony. He planned to gather black activists -- for whom concert tickets had been bought -- for a pre-concert dinner made up exclusively of baked beans. This would be his substitute for sit-ins and picket lines. Alinsky called it a “flatulent blitzkrieg,” and the result of this threat (along with other tactics, including the use of proxies at stockholder meetings) evidently was a settlement in which the city fathers agreed to the demands. In Chicago, he threatened a “piss-in” at O’Hare Airport, which immediately led the city to the bargaining table. That such juvenile tactics worked perhaps says more about the fears of the politicians than the genius of Alinsky.

Alinsky had some impressive backers. Among them was the old giant of the mine workers’ union, John L. Lewis, who advised him and supported him. (Like Lewis, he used Communists as orga­nizers on his staff. He disdained the Communist Party and its Marxist and pro-Soviet positions, and regarded its members as “servants of an antidemo­cratic foreign power” -- but because he valued the organizing skill of individual Communists, he hired them as staffers anyway.) He also bonded with key figures in the Catholic archdiocese of Chicago. The whites he sought to organize were mainly believing Catholics, and thus Alinsky became particularly close to Fr. John O’Grady, whom von Hoffman credits with doing away with clerically dominated local charities and replacing them with charities run by professionals from social-work schools in Catholic colleges and universities. Later, Alinsky became close to the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, with whom he regularly corresponded. He also befriended Cardinal Stritch and Fr. Jack Egan, who got the archdiocese to give him the money to launch organizing drives in the 1950s. This constituency is hardly what one thinks of as a force for social revolution in America.

So what were Alinsky’s goals in the end? Von Hoffman does not really answer this question, perhaps because Alinsky never did. Before people decide whether Saul Alinsky was a man with an actual revolutionary plan, they owe it to themselves to take into consideration von Hoffman’s contrary assessment of the father of community organizing.

-- Ronald Radosh, an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute and a blogger for PajamasMedia.com, is the author of Commies: A Journey through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left.

Riding a record of unprecedented government spending, rising debt, a government takeover of the health-care system, high unemployment, and proposals to tax everything they stumble across, Democrats have put themselves in position for an epic electoral defeat that will rival the Republican debacles of 2006 and 2008.

Given this record of Democratic ineptitude and the voters’ reaction to it, one would think that Republicans would be talking about these issues every day. Instead, Republicans and conservatives have spent recent weeks talking about such distracting side-issues as immigration, the 14th amendment, gay marriage, and when and where mosques should be built.

#ad#No doubt these are important issues to various constituencies. But, the merits of the issues aside, if Republicans believe that the key to victory this year is to refight the culture wars, they are mistaken.

Today, the Republican base is fired up, and Democrats are dispirited. To see how important that is, look no further back than 2008, when overall Republican voter turnout was down by 1.5 percent. Putting this in perspective, in the crucial swing state of Ohio, Barack Obama received 40,000 fewer votes in 2008 than did John Kerry in 2004. Yet, Obama carried the state while Kerry lost it.

Despite their repeated threats to stay home if Republicans deviated from a commitment to conservative social issues, it wasn’t the Religious Right that deserted Republicans in 2008 (or 2006, for that matter). Turnout among self-described members of the Religious Right remained steady from 2004 to 2008, and these voters remained loyally Republican. Roughly 70 percent of white evangelicals and born-again Christians voted Republican in 2006, and 74 percent in 2008, essentially in line with how they have been voting for the past two or three decades.

It was suburbanites, independents, and others who were fed up with the Republican drift toward big government who stayed home -- or, worse, voted Democratic in 2008. Republicans carried the suburbs in both 2000 (49 to 47) and 2004 (52 to 47), but in 2008, suburban voters -- notably wealthy, college-educated professionals, many of whom consider themselves moderate on social issues but economically conservative -- voted for Barack Obama by a margin of 50 to 48. The switch among voters in the suburbs of Columbus, Charlotte, and Indianapolis, for instance, was largely responsible for moving Ohio, North Carolina, and Indiana into the Democratic column. Democrats also continued their gains in the more independent, libertarian West.

#page#These independent and suburban voters are now regretting their Democratic flirtation. They didn’t vote for record deficits, the health-care bill, bailouts to banks and auto companies, or cap-and-trade. Having rejected big-government conservatism, they never realized they were going to get even-bigger-government liberalism.

But these voters are not culture warriors. Polls show that while they are fiscally conservative, and very upset by excessive government spending and rising deficits, they are socially moderate, tending toward indifference or even support on issues like gay marriage.

#ad#It is true that many vulnerable House Democrats this year represent culturally conservative districts. But those Democrats are likely to share the same positions on social issues as their Republican opponents. One is not likely to get to the right of, say, Tom Perriello (D., Va.) on social issues. But if cultural issues come to dominate the fall campaign, it could hurt Republican candidates in more moderate suburban districts -- candidates like, say, Keith Fimian, who is challenging Gerry Connolly in northern Virginia. On the other hand, both Connolly and Perriello voted for the stimulus, the health-care bill, and cap-and-trade.

If one needs a template for victory, Republicans need look no further than last year’s gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey. Bob McDonnell and Chris Christie did not run as culture warriors. Instead they won their upset victories on issues like jobs, the economy, and a commitment to limited government.

The polls are overwhelming. Those are the issues that voters care about, not whether two men in California get married. Republicans should focus on creating jobs, reducing spending, repealing Obamacare, and cutting the size of government -- and leave the culture wars for another day.

-- Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution.

 

In Washington, government officials rarely (if ever) admit to making policy mistakes, even when they’ve clearly botched things up. Take Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent decision to bless a formal civilian nuclear-cooperation agreement with Vietnam.

Secretary Clinton endorsed the deal in Hanoi without demanding -- as Washington recently did with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) -- that Vietnam forswear making nuclear fuel, a process that can bring states within days or weeks of acquiring nuclear weapons.

This immediately raised eyebrows on Capitol Hill. Just months before, State Department officials had pitched the UAE agreement as the new “gold standard” for nuclear-cooperation pacts worldwide. After getting briefed on the Vietnam deal, Hill staffers on both sides of aisle feared Foggy Bottom was throwing in the towel on nonproliferation.

#ad#State could have taken its points and sent U.S. diplomats back quietly to get the tougher UAE conditions. Instead, supporters of the Vietnam accord dug in their heels.

First, they claimed that the deal in no way changed U.S. policy. Washington, they argued, never intended to push the UAE conditions outside of the Middle East.

In fact, the U.S. struck the UAE deal in pursuance of a country-neutral approach to sharing civilian nuclear technology that President Bush and Russia’s Vladimir Putin announced back in July 2007. Their joint declaration aimed to promote civilian nuclear cooperation globally while trying to convince states lacking nuclear weapons to forgo making nuclear fuel.

Throughout 2008, U.S. diplomats offered nuclear-power deals and sought no-nuclear-fuel-making pledges, not only from the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, Turkey, Morocco, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, but also from Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Taking this international approach helped address Arab concerns that the U.S. had one nonproliferation standard for them and another for everyone else.

Which brings us to the second official defense of treating Vietnam differently. “Given#...#the genuine threat of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East,” a senior State Department official told the Wall Street Journal, “we believe the U.A.E.#...#agreement is a model for the region,” but “these same concerns do not specifically apply in Asia.”

How’s that? Last month, Secretary Clinton blew the whistle on North Korea’s possible assistance to a covert Burmese nuclear-weapons effort. Also, since 1990, the U.S. and its allies have pressed Pyongyang to give up its nuclear-weapons activities, lest those activities goad South Korea or Japan to go nuclear.

Seoul, which U.S. officials have caught covertly attempting to make nuclear weapons at least twice, now wants to produce its own nuclear fuel. Japan already does produce its own fuel and has stockpiled at least 1,000 bombs’ worth of plutonium. Further south, Taiwan tried covertly to acquire nuclear weapons at least once and is now developing a missile than could hit Beijing. As for China, it keeps modernizing its nuclear-weapons forces under a dark cloak of secrecy.

All of this suggests that pushing one nonproliferation policy for the Middle East and another for a “quiescent” Asia is delusional. More important, no one’s buying it: Middle Eastern officials resent the double standard, and the Chinese -- who view Vietnam as a potentially hostile vassal state -- are taking offense.

That brings us to Foggy Bottom’s final defense of the deal: Washington, our diplomats argue, must work with the world as it is, not as it wishes it to be. Vietnam wants nuclear-power reactors. France, Russia, Japan, and China are vying to build them. If America wants to influence Vietnam and secure reactor sales, it must bend to reality and drop the UAE conditions.

This pitch, however, ignores an embarrassing truth: Vietnam is unlikely to buy American. In fact, to do so, it would have to forswear suing U.S. firms for damages a nuclear accident might inflict off-site -- a demand that America’s government-backed nuclear competitors do not make. In any case, the key reason for cutting the deal wasn’t to generate U.S. jobs, but rather to tighten our strategic ties with Hanoi by formally authorizing it to receive sensitive nuclear goods. America’s commercial losses if Washington demanded that Vietnam adhere to the UAE conditions, therefore, would be essentially zero.

As for the contention that the U.S. has no effective leverage over the behavior of its nuclear competitors, just the opposite is the case. That leverage is actually substantial, and it’s also increasing, as foreign companies such as Rosatom, KEPCO, Hitachi, Toshiba, and AREVA seek to expand their business with the U.S. In fact, these government-backed firms are not just trying to sell America more, but (as I have detailed elsewhere) are pleading for billions in U.S.-taxpayer-backed loan guarantees to expand their business in the U.S.

Meanwhile, Congress, ever eager to promote the UAE conditions, is planning on tightening America’s nonproliferation laws. Some on Capitol Hill are already toying with the idea of cutting off foreign firms that refuse to make the UAE conditions a requirement of the nuclear assistance they offer overseas. The House is expected to take up these matters in the fall, around the time U.S. negotiators are scheduled to meet their Vietnamese counterparts to finalize the proposed nuclear deal.

One would like to think that the discussion will focus on more than just minor details, and that Washington will do what it can to avoid any further Vietnam-style blunders in the area of nuclear diplomacy, whether inside or outside of Asia. What this will first require, though, is an admission of the obvious: that someone in the executive branch made a mistake.

-- Henry Sokolski is executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, D.C., and author of Controlling the Further Spread of Nuclear Weapons.

In the words of our second president: We are a government of laws, not of men. This key principle, which places our Constitution above our leaders, set young America apart from the governments of monarchical Europe. Regrettably, President Obama is endangering this venerable tradition by deliberately and systematically seeking to expand executive power well beyond its proper boundaries. In the process, he is trampling both the constitutional authority of Congress and the sovereign rights of the states.

This bold power grab is directed at immigration, which is predominantly a domestic-policy matter, where unilateral presidential authority is inherently weak. Obama’s efforts appear to be driven by crass political considerations, making them all the more unprecedented and unfortunate.

#ad#The principles of separation of powers and federalism comprise the foundation of America’s constitutional structure. Separation of powers enables Congress to play a dominant role in domestic affairs and the president to enjoy robust authority in military and foreign affairs. Federalism limits the authority of the federal government and allows the states to wield ample police powers. The Obama administration’s immigration policy provides a vivid example of blatant disregard for separation of powers and federalism.

As its first order of business, the administration canceled state and local law-enforcement programs designed to help federal authorities arrest illegal aliens. Next, it proceeded to rewrite federal immigration laws. A recently leaked Department of Homeland Security memo describes a detailed plan for back-door amnesty for illegal aliens; it explains how to enact “meaningful immigration reform absent legislative action.” Finally, under White House direction, the Department of Justice has challenged Arizona’s new immigration statute -- because Arizona actually took existing federal immigration law seriously and decided to enforce it.

In the Arizona case, the Obama administration claims that the president’s constitutional authority over foreign affairs gives him the power to control immigration enforcement within our borders, and that this authority trumps any attempt by Arizona to enforce federal immigration law. What is truly remarkable about this claim is that the Arizona law is entirely consistent with federal statutory law. The conflict arises because the president has conspicuously chosen not to enforce a federal immigration law, even though his first duty is to “faithfully execute” the law.

President Obama could have gone to Congress and asked it to gut federal immigration statutes. He might even have gotten his way, as he did with health care, aided by sizable Democratic majorities in the House and the Senate. However, this strategy might not have provided a quick or even favorable political result. So, instead, the White House came up with a vast assertion of presidential power that strikes at the heart of the Constitution.

To emphasize, the real conflict here is not between Arizona and the federal government as a whole. Congress gave state law-enforcement agencies the right to check immigration status. The administration’s effort to strip Arizona of its rights under federal law reflects the view that presidential power over foreign affairs trumps congressional authority over domestic policy. In other words, the Obama administration is challenging Congress and the laws it has legitimately passed.

Furthermore, the administration is trampling on the principles of federalism. States are sovereign governments with their own traditional police powers to protect the safety, health, and welfare of their citizens. The administration ignores this constitutional principle by denying Arizona its law-enforcement prerogatives, based on vague assertions of presidential foreign-policy interests. By that logic, there is no exercise of state prerogatives that the president cannot override all by himself.

President Obama’s actions are unlike anything the American people have seen before. Indeed, they are in an entirely different category than the actions of previous presidents, which were undertaken largely in wartime and prompted by grave challenges posed by foreign enemies. It was during times like these that robust assertions of executive power were most appropriate. The famous “steel seizure” case, in which President Truman tried to assert control over domestic steel production by claiming labor strikes were impairing his ability to pursue the Korean War successfully, was a high-water mark of such efforts, which were invariably countered by resistance from Congress and the courts. (President Truman lost his case.)

Today, President Obama is striving to accomplish a great deal more than President Truman ever dreamed of doing. He is disregarding a clear set of statutory requirements contained in federal immigration law, and he is greatly expanding presidential power -- all without tackling a genuine national-security threat. His unilateral effort to reshape America’s immigration policy is eroding the separation of powers, evading checks and balances, and destroying federalism. These actions are hostile to the core of our Constitution.

This president seems committed to running a government of men that rules without regard for the law. A government of laws is what the Constitution requires, and what the American people demand.

-- Bill McCollum is the attorney general of Florida and is proposing the Florida Immigration Enforcement Act of 2010.

It’s like clockwork. Whenever conservatives propose a constitutional amendment, progressives suddenly rediscover the delicate gears of the Constitution and the horrible dangers of “tinkering” or “tampering” with its precision craftsmanship. Consider the sudden brouhaha over the idea of revising the 14th Amendment to get rid of automatic birthright citizenship (which would make us more like that alleged progressive nirvana known as “Europe,” by the way). Here’s Angela Kelley of the liberal Center for American Progress on Sen. Lindsey Graham, who started the amendment chatter: “He’s not one to tamper with the Constitution, so I’m surprised he would even suggest this.”

“While everyone recognizes that there are problems with our immigration system in this country,” Elizabeth Wydra of the progressive Constitutional Accountability Center tells NPR, “my perspective is: Let’s try to fix this through legislation and not tinker with the genius of our constitutional design.”

#ad#But wait a second. Progressives love to tinker with the constitutional design. They simply do it by stealth, appointing Supreme Court justices such as Elena Kagan, who, her testimony notwithstanding, everyone knows will treat the Constitution like Felix the Cat’s magic bag; when she searches the document hard enough, you know she’ll find what she’s looking for.

But when conservatives who talk about reverence for the Constitution also want to update it in a way that is actually consistent with the “genius of our constitutional design,” they are hypocrites and radicals.

Liberal devotees of the “living Constitution” always made a fair point. The Founding Fathers never envisioned a world with jet planes, split atoms, stem-cell therapies, one-click porn, or MTV’s Jersey Shore. Similarly, the ratifiers of the 14th Amendment would be stunned to learn, in July of 1868, that they had just created an adamantine right for homosexuals to marry one another and receive state benefits to boot, as a federal judge in California recently decided (overruling, I might add, the will of California voters).

Hence, liberals claim, we need an evolving Constitution that, as President Obama writes in The Audacity of Hope, “is not a static but rather a living document, and must be read in the context of an ever-changing world.” But as legal analyst Ed Whelan has noted, this “living document” argument is a straw man. Of course justices must read the document in the context of an ever-changing world. What else could they do? Ask plaintiffs to wear period garb, talk in 18th-century lingo, and only bring cases involving paper money and runaway slaves?

The issue is not whether the world is ever-changing, but whether judges should treat the Constitution as ever-changing to meet their own agendas and desires, often over the lawfully expressed preferences of voters, legislators, and the Founders.

Still, if the Constitution is unclear or inadequate, what’s a strict constructionist to do? Propose changes, and you’re dubbed a hypocrite and a radical for wanting to “tinker with the genius of our constitutional design.” Or else you’re guilty of hypocritical conservative judicial activism.

The relevant fact is that central to the genius of the Constitution’s design are the mechanisms to change it. That process is arduous, requiring long and deliberate debates at the national and state levels. (In over two centuries, thousands of amendments have been proposed, 33 have been approved by Congress, and only 27 have been ratified by the states. That’s not tinkering, that’s craftsmanship.)

When one discusses the Constitution on college campuses, students and even professors will object that without a “living Constitution,” blacks would still be slaves and women wouldn’t be allowed to vote. Nonsense. Those indispensable changes to the Constitution came not from judges reading new rights into the document but from Americans lawfully amending it.

From birthright citizenship and gay marriage to flag-burning and gun rights, I trust the American people to change the Constitution when necessary (after lengthy debate) more than I trust five out of nine unelected justices with lifetime tenure, hiding behind closed doors and away from TV cameras.

What are the opponents of “tinkering” afraid of? I suspect sullying the genius of the Founders takes a distant backseat to their real fear: losing a fair fight.

-- Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi deserves a swift rap on the knuckles for hiding underneath the desk of the American schoolteacher. In a cynical ploy to evade accountability for the Democrats’ continued fiscal recklessness, Pelosi accused opponents of the $26 billion public-employee-union-bailout bill of “demeaning” teachers -- and nurses, police officers, and firefighters. Pelosi took great offense at Republican leaders’ calling out the Big Labor special interests pushing the emergency summer rescue. But if they walk, talk, spend, and lobby like special interests, let’s call them what they are.

#ad#I have nothing against public-school teachers. My mother was one. My children are taught by some of the best in the nation. And over the years, I’ve reported on valiant battles between rank-and-file educators in government schools and their fat, bloated unions’ leaders, who’ve transformed their professional organizations into wholly owned Democratic subsidiaries. My opposition to the so-called “Edujobs” bill (more accurately: the BigGovJobs bill) stems not from meanness but from compassion for millions of dues-paying school employees being used as special-interest human shields.

According to the D.C.-based Labor Union Report, the National Education Association in 2009 “raked in a whopping $355,334,165 in ‘dues and agency fees’ from (mostly) teachers around the country.” It spent close to $11 million more than it took in -- $50 million of which union leaders poured into “political activities and lobbying” for exclusively left-wing and Democratic partisan causes and candidates.

Its primary mission? No, not educational excellence. Not “the children.” Political self-preservation. The “Edujobs” bill will essentially redistribute tax dollars to teachers’ unions to the tune of $36 million for the NEA and $14 million for the American Federation of Teachers, according to the Grand Rapids (Mich.) Press.

School officials have said they have no idea what strings would be attached to the money, whether state legislatures would approve the cash as part of special supplemental budgets, how long the money would last, and how they would pay for stop-gap measures while waiting for the taxpayer funds to flow.

As for the “emergency” invoked by Pelosi at the behest of Big Labor, as Republican critics point out, states and the feds still have more than $30 billion in unspent stimulus funds sitting in government coffers. And school districts are already in the midst of rehiring school workers laid off earlier this year -- without the latest “Edujobs” initiative.

Last July, the National Education Association’s retiring top lawyer, Bob Chanin, speaking at the NEA’s annual meeting in July, made the union’s true interests transparent:

Despite what some among us would like to believe it is not because of our creative ideas. It is not because of the merit of our positions. It is not because we care about children and it is not because we have a vision of a great public school for every child. NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have power.

And we have power because there are more than 3.2 million people who are willing to pay us hundreds of millions of dollars in dues each year, because they believe that we are the unions that can most effectively represent them, the unions that can protect their rights and advance their interests as education employees.#...#

This is not to say that the concern of NEA and its affiliates with closing achievement gaps, reducing dropout rates, improving teacher quality and the like are unimportant or inappropriate. To the contrary. These are the goals that guide the work we do. But they need not and must not be achieved at the expense of due process, employee rights and collective bargaining. That simply is too high a price to pay.

Left-wing radical Saul Alinsky taught his education acolytes well. Teacher organizers, he counseled, must commit to a “singleness of purpose.” No, not serving children’s needs, but serving the “ability to build a power base.” If that isn’t the dictionary definition of “special interest,” what is?

-- Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery, 2010). © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Do you associate dirt with great music? You might if you were the parent of kids attending the Interlochen summer music program in Michigan. For their third and second summers respectively, my teenage sons have plunged into six weeks of intensive music education, performance, and instruction. I arrived for the final weekend and was greeted by two artistically elevated, high-spirited, and undeniably grubby young men. (Several pairs of gray/brown socks that began life white have been sent to their reward.)

I wrote about the incomparable Interlochen camp (there is also an arts academy during the academic term) last year. “Twenty-five hundred students in grades 3-12 from every state in the union and 40 countries converge on this breezy sylvan enclave between two sparkling lakes for several weeks of intensive training and performance in music, art, theater, opera, dance, motion picture arts, and writing. Even if you’ve never heard of Interlochen, now in its 82nd year, you’ve certainly heard from its alumni.”

#ad#This is not a camp just for prodigies -- though there are more than a few of those. My older son was bowled over by a 14-year-old trumpeter from Peru. This kid could not just produce pure, clear, gorgeous tones; he could also play “The Carnival of Venice” while turning the trumpet in circles on his mouth. And you thought such parlor tricks died with Mozart.

But you needn’t be a budding genius to get in -- just deeply committed to learning and improving. And that brings me to the culture of the place. This kind of camp is such a refreshing antidote to the spirit of the age -- that sensibility that began in the kid-centric 1950s and has continued its stultifying grip ever since: the so-called “youth culture.” I bow to no one in my affection for the young -- and I’ll have more to say about that in a minute -- but the idea, which has gained currency in Western society over the past half-century, that kids have a culture of their own and that adults needed to truckle to it and attempt not to seem “uncool” by revealing unfamiliarity -- well, that was rot. A culture that believes it has more to learn from the young than to teach them is dying.

For six weeks every summer, eager and aspiring kids troop to Interlochen to be more fully immersed in Western culture -- their inheritance. The Western musical tradition is open to all, of course (and frankly, the Chinese are contributing tremendously to its continued flowering), but it has a specific history, particular rules and conventions, and exacting standards. The adults at Interlochen have knowledge and skills, and the kids are there to learn from them. There’s a concept!

Nor is this only the work of Dead White European Males -- though that would be okay; DWEMs scaled many of the heights of human achievement. But the tradition is alive and developing. And for kids, there is a particular thrill to playing not just the work of the greats but also new pieces by composers still working. My older son, for example, performed Karel Husa’s “Music for Prague 1968,” an atonal piece for concert band that would not have been my first choice to purchase from iTunes. But like the kids, I learned that Husa had written this as a protest of the brutal Soviet repression of Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring. Agonized and harsh, the music fits the subject and opened my mind, if just a bit, to the possibilities of atonality. The kids learned the music (super fast), and the history, too. The band finished the program with Sousa’s “The Stars and Stripes Forever” (it was July 3), which my son thought seemed incongruous. “Not completely,” I said. “Rejoice that you were born in America.”

Everything about a youth orchestra or ensemble is satisfying to the soul. Seeing them take their places, arrange their music stands, grapple with the larger instruments (one bassoon player was barely big enough to hold the thing), and then await the concertmaster is to see something both adorable and deeply admirable. The entry of the concertmaster, his or her bow, the tuning of the orchestra, and then the entry of the conductor -- all are rituals passed down for centuries. And while we cannot delude ourselves that music and morality have any connection (Wagner anyone?), we cannot deny that these rituals are deeply civilized.

There is something special about the way they play as well. You wouldn’t confuse the World Youth Symphony Orchestra (the camp’s top ensemble) for the New York Philharmonic -- but there is a particular energy and vitality that the kids bring to music. This is love’s first bloom. Each of these talented young musicians will one day play better, but perhaps never again with the kind of exuberance and excitement they convey now. Their passion virtually glows from the stage and lifts the audience.

It’s well worth the extra socks.

-- Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

At this point, the question about CAIR should be: Why does anyone care? Care about anything CAIR officials say, that is.

The notorious Council on American-Islamic Relations is back up to its old tricks. CAIR officials figure our ten-minute attention span has lapsed, and that we’ve probably forgotten by now that, in the 2007–08 prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) -- a case in which several Islamists were convicted in a scheme that poured millions of dollars into the coffers of the terrorist organization Hamas -- CAIR was named as, and shown to be, an unindicted co-conspirator. CAIR reckons that the heat is off, so it’s back on the “Islamophobia” soapbox, demanding an apology from FBI director Robert Mueller.

An apology for what? The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces had the temerity to invite Robert Spencer -- one of the nation’s leading experts on Islamist ideology -- to lecture federal agents on Islamist ideology.

#ad#Spencer’s lecture departed from the government’s “religion of peace” dogma, which holds that there is no Islamist aggression, that there is no civilizational jihad to destroy the West from within (never mind that CAIR’s progenitor, the Muslim Brotherhood, has bragged about its “sabotage” campaign), and that terrorism is not merely unconnected to Islam but, in fact, is anti-Islamic. According to this thinking, Islamist groups like CAIR have a monopoly on what Americans -- including American law-enforcement and intelligence agents -- are permitted to hear about Islam from academic, media, and government sources. No dissenting views are permitted, no matter how steeped the dissenters may be in Islamic doctrine and no matter how much these dissents accord with what your lyin’ eyes are seeing.

“When I speak with the American,” said Nihad Awad, “I speak with someone who doesn’t know anything.” Awad is now CAIR’s executive director. He made this statement at a Marriott Hotel in Philadelphia on Oct. 27, 1993, when he was the public-relations director for the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP). He and about two dozen other Islamist activists were meeting to brainstorm about how they might be able to continue supporting Hamas and to derail the Oslo Accords -- the Clinton administration’s effort to bring a peaceful, two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

For Hamas supporters, there can be no peaceful two-state solution, because they deny Israel’s right to exist. That is why, to this day, the charter of Hamas (which was established at the start of the intifada in the late Eighties) calls for the elimination of Israel by violent jihad. But in 1993, the United States was cracking down on Hamas. It would soon be designated a terrorist organization, and providing material support to it would be made a crime.

The Philadelphia conferees realized they were “marked” men, as one of them put it. Omar Ahmad, then the IAP president and Nihad Awad’s boss, openly worried about U.S. government surveillance, counseling his confederates to use the inversion “Samah” in their conversations to avoid uttering the word “Hamas.” As it happened, the FBI was secretly bugging the meeting. It was thus able to record Ahmad calling himself “Omar Yahya,” the better to conceal his identity from Bureau snoops.

When later compelled to testify about the meeting, Ahmed said he couldn’t recall being in Philadelphia, though the tape captured his calling the meeting to order. Awad, too, had a bout of amnesia when asked about the meeting during a 2003 deposition. But the tape showed him to have been a very active participant. When he gave his cohorts the aforementioned advice about American ignorance, his point was that we are easy for Islamists to deceive. Speaking with Americans was different, he posited, from communicating with “the Palestinian who has a martyr brother or something.” A “martyr,” of course, is one who gives his life (often by suicide bombing) in the terror campaign against Israel.

#page#
Elaborating on the communications point, Omar Ahmad observed, “There is a difference between you saying, ‘I want to restore the ’48 land,’ and when you say, ‘I want to destroy Israel.’” If you confined yourself to saying the former, Palestinians would understand that you meant the latter, while unwary Americans would figure you were just making a political statement. Similarly, Ahmad suggested saying, “Yasser Arafat doesn’t represent me, but Ahmed Yassin does.” Palestinians would understand that this meant one was a supporter of Hamas (which Yassin founded), while clueless Americans would be in the dark.

Shukri Abu Baker, the HLF leader and a friend of Awad and Ahmad, concurred in that sentiment. The Islamists were at war, he reminded his confederates, and the prophet Mohammed had counseled that “war is deception.”

#ad#Deception is CAIR’s métier. It was created precisely because the marked men at the Philadelphia meeting realized they needed a new vehicle: one that was not tainted by a prior history of Hamas support, one that had media savvy, and one that could set up shop in Washington and portray itself as a “civil rights” organization rather than just another Islamist mouthpiece. In America, when lobby groups complain that someone’s civil rights have been violated, opinion elites take notice.

At the Philadelphia meeting, Ahmad complained, “We don’t have influence over the Congress.” The organization he envisioned would accrue political influence “by infiltrating the American media outlets, universities, and research centers.”
 
CAIR was formed the following summer, with Omar Ahmad and Nihad Awad sliding over from IAP to run it.

There should have been no question, though, about where CAIR was coming from -- even for unwary Americans. The IAP had been started by Mousa abu Marzook, the leading Muslim Brotherhood figure in the United States, and Sami al-Arian, a Brotherhood operative who went on to become a top leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another terrorist organization. When Israel apprehended Yassin, Marzook succeeded him as the head of Hamas, running the organization from his Virginia home until he was deported in 1994. Meanwhile, al-Arian turned his teaching perch at the University of South Florida into a PIJ outpost; in 2006, he was finally convicted of conspiring to support a designated terrorist organization.
 
Under Marzook, the IAP anchored the Palestine Committee. This committee was established by the Muslim Brotherhood to “increase the financial and moral support for Hamas.” At the HLF trial, an internal Muslim Brotherhood report, dated July 30, 1994, identified CAIR, along with the IAP, the HLF, and another Marzook creation, the United Association for Studies and Research, as members of the Palestine Committee. Ghassan Elashi, one of the defendants convicted for using HLF to underwrite Hamas’s terror war, had run an IAP office in California before starting CAIR’s chapter in Texas.

Elashi is just one example of a CAIR figure either convicted or deported as a result of terrorism investigations. There have been several others.

#page#
To no one’s surprise, CAIR vigorously opposed al-Arian’s prosecution and Marzook’s deportation, calling the latter “anti-Islamic” and “un-American.” As Daniel Pipes recounts, CAIR also referred to the terrorism conviction of Omar Abdel Rahman (the “Blind Sheikh” behind the cell that bombed the World Trade Center in 1993) as a “hate crime.” When Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States in 1998 and then bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, a Los Angeles billboard called him “the sworn enemy”; and CAIR demanded the billboard’s removal, calling it “offensive to Muslims” while denying bin Laden’s responsibility for the embassy attacks.

CAIR’s purpose is to further what the Muslim Brotherhood calls its “grand jihad” to destroy America from within. That is why it is consistently a cheerleader for Islamist terrorists and a thorn in the side of American national security, opposing every sensible measure to protect our homeland.

#ad#“Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant,” Ahmad is quoted as saying in 1998. “The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.”

A key tactic in carrying out this supremacist agenda is to suppress its critics. With their media acumen, CAIR operatives know there is nothing more debilitating for a public figure in America than to be portrayed as a racist or a bigot. Islamists have thus coined the phrase “Islamophobe” to stigmatize those who dare speak forthrightly about the extremely troubling aspects of Islamic scripture, particularly of sharia, Islam’s legal and political framework.

We are not, it bears emphasizing, speaking about people who lie about Islam or smear all Muslims as terrorists. Islamists are targeting the truth-tellers. If they can intimidate their critics into silence, they have inched yet closer to the goal of supplanting our First Amendment with their sharia, which condemns as “blasphemy” any speech or expression that casts Islam in a poor light. Blasphemy can be savagely punished -- and, in contrast to the Western idea of defamation, truth is no defense.

Thus is CAIR trying to intimidate the FBI into ostracizing Robert Spencer. As he demonstrates daily at Jihad Watch, the invaluable site he founded, he is effective and immune to Islamist scare tactics. Because Spencer won’t quiet down, CAIR officials have concluded that it will be necessary to have the U.S. government silence him. They know the government, the FBI in particular, has a history of being overly solicitous toward Islamist apologists. They are banking on getting satisfaction out of Mueller, and they’ve brought out the big guns to turn up the heat. Their letter has now been signed by Grievance Industry eminence Jesse Jackson (who better to give sensitivity lessons than the guy who labeled New York City “Hymietown”?) and by such groups as the Islamic Society of North America (another unindicted co-conspirator in the Hamas case, but one for which Obama-administration majordomo Valerie Jarrett nonetheless gave the keynote address at its 2009 annual convention).

If any party is owed an apology or explanation from our government, it is the American people -- over the government’s courtship of CAIR. For years, even though the Justice Department was in possession of information showing the key role CAIR officials played in the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hamas-support network, government agencies, including the FBI, continued turning to CAIR for “liaison” duties. Top brass forced our law-enforcement agents to endure CAIR-prescribed sensitivity training, and, in the case of the Department of Homeland Security, even published a CAIR press release on an agency’s taxpayer-funded website, enabling CAIR to pass itself off as a civil-rights organization. This went on until finally, following the convictions in the HLF case (to say nothing of the emerging indications that CAIR itself may be under investigation), the FBI cut off ties with the group in 2009, citing its Hamas connections. That was a stand for which Mueller won strong bipartisan praise on Capitol Hill. Here’s hoping he sticks to his guns.

-- Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

One in ten children born in this country has an illegal immigrant for a mother. Every one of those children of illegal immigrants is a U.S. citizen. Birth on American soil automatically qualifies a child for citizenship, whatever his parents’ legal status. (Birth above American soil -- on a helicopter, for example -- also counts.) Many conservatives want to change the law: to make it so that the children of illegal immigrants will no longer automatically be citizens. It is a misguided, and potentially disastrous, response to the problems created by our immigration policies.

#ad#Those problems certainly exist. Granting citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants makes it harder to enforce the immigration laws. If illegal immigrants have children while they’re here, officials have three choices: Deport the whole family, including the young U.S. citizens; deport the adults and break up the family; or do nothing. The last option tends to win out. The critics say that “birthright citizenship” rewards, and thus stimulates, illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants know that they can drastically reduce their chances of being deported if they have children.

The children of illegal immigrants also impose costs on the taxpayer. Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favors restrictions on immigration, has studied the impact of illegal immigrants on the federal budget. He finds that while they often pay payroll taxes and do not use welfare or Medicaid disproportionately -- both facts run counter to popular wisdom -- they nonetheless cost the federal government $10 billion a year. (CIS was also the source for the one-in-ten-children estimate with which this article began.) Some state governments also suffer substantial losses. The Federation for American Immigration Reform, another restrictionist group, estimates that educating the children of illegal immigrants and providing other services cost California $10 billion in 2004.

Most countries don’t offer birthright citizenship. The Republican platform in 1996, during the last high tide of anti-immigration sentiment, called for America to join the majority. President Bush’s men took that line out of subsequent platforms; it didn’t fit with his pro-immigration, compassionate conservatism.

Now Rep. Nathan Deal, a Republican from Georgia, is worrying the White House with a bill to end automatic citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants. He has 81 co-sponsors, all but one of them Republicans.

#page#Deal says that birthright citizenship is a “magnet for illegal immigration.” It is also based, he says, on a (longstanding) “misinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment.” The first words of that amendment read, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Sen. Charles Schumer quoted those words during his questioning of Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito. He pushed Alito to agree with him that they clearly required citizenship for all children born in America. “Do you agree this is a fairly clear and straightforward provision of the Constitution?” asked the senator. Alito responded that there were active disputes about the meaning of the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” some of which could come before the Court, and therefore he declined to answer.

#ad#Schumer kept pressing him about the amendment’s “clear language.” “What imaginable argument could there be for a statute that Congress could deny the citizenship to those born in the United States, say, on the grounds that their parents were illegal aliens?” And again: “I simply ask you to give us an interpretation of one of the most direct and clear provisions in the United States Constitution.”

Schumer is wrong. The language isn’t clear and direct. “Subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is a legal term of art, not immediately accessible to laymen. Our instinct is to think that it means “subject to the laws thereof.” We assume that the amendment is saying that anyone who is born here, and can be prosecuted under our laws, is a citizen. But there are problems with that interpretation. For one thing, almost everyone on U.S. territory has to obey U.S. law. The common reading of the amendment thus reduces that qualifier, “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” to meaninglessness. Normally, constitutional provisions are interpreted on the assumption that each word matters.

John Eastman, a law professor at Chapman University who also directs the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, argues for an alternative reading. He notes that the language of the amendment, proposed in 1866, was designed to provide a constitutional basis for the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which gave citizenship to “all citizens born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power.” He also points out that Sen. Lyman Trumbull, one of the leading supporters of the Fourteenth Amendment, said that the phrase meant subject to the “complete” jurisdiction of the United States -- that is, “not owing allegiance to anybody else.”

Sen. Jacob Howard, who introduced the provision in the Senate, agreed, explaining that children in Indian tribes, though subject to American jurisdiction in some respects, would not qualify for citizenship under the amendment. An amendment to make that clear was rejected as redundant. The Supreme Court initially followed this reading. Thomas Cooley’s influential 19th-century treatise on constitutional law also distinguished between a “qualified and partial jurisdiction” that subjected people to American laws, and the “full and complete jurisdiction” that qualified them for citizenship.

In 1898, however, a divided Supreme Court read birthright citizenship into the amendment -- the interpretation that has prevailed ever since. (The Court did not, however, explicitly comment on the status of children born to people who were here illegally.)

Representative Deal and his colleagues are probably right to say that the Court got it wrong: The Constitution, as originally understood, does not demand birthright citizenship. It’s something that Congress ought to be able to bestow -- or take away. But whether congressmen should try to take it away, at least for the children of illegal immigrants, is a different question.

#page#For one thing, it is extremely unlikely that Deal’s bill will become law. Compare it with the cause of limits on immigration levels. Such limits are pretty popular with the public, according to polls, but have aroused such fierce opposition among media, political, and business elites that they have not been made into law. Ending birthright citizenship would arouse even fiercer elite opposition, but without public support. In a Rasmussen poll from last November, opponents of birthright citizenship held a mere 49 to 41 percent edge. And that’s with wording favorable to their cause.

#ad#Deal does not think that his bill will set back Republicans’ efforts to increase their share of the Hispanic vote. “Those who come to our country the right way, legally, are the very ones, regardless of their national origin, who are asking us to do something about illegal immigration.” It’s true that legal immigrants tell pollsters that they would like curbs on illegal immigration. That doesn’t mean, however, that they will react well to Republican politicians who call for restrictions. Most Hispanics are likely to be outraged if Republicans appear to go after Hispanic children. Suburban moderates will conclude that Republicans are punishing children for the sins of adults -- and they won’t be entirely wrong. Many Republican congressmen will oppose Deal’s bill on principle, and others will consider it political poison. The Democrats will attack it at every turn.

But let’s say it somehow manages to pass Congress anyway. And let’s say the president decides that he no longer cares about being seen as a compassionate conservative, and signs the law. It still won’t take effect: It’s a safe bet that the courts won’t allow it, whether or not they should. In other words, even making assumptions that are helpful to the bill’s proponents, the energy spent getting it enacted will be wasted.

If the number of illegal immigrants can be brought down -- by, for example, stepping up enforcement at the border and the workplace -- the fact that their children are counted as citizens will be less of a problem, too. The problems that Deal and his colleagues attribute to birthright citizenship are more truly the consequences of a failed immigration policy. That policy is what needs to be fixed. As Mark Krikorian, the head of CIS, puts it, “When the bathtub is overflowing, you turn the faucet off before you try to mop up the water.”

If birthright citizenship were ended without that larger policy reform, we would likely wind up with large numbers of families who would stay here for generations but never become citizens. Do we really want to adopt the German model of immigration?

Opposition to birthright citizenship is often found among opponents of the president’s guest-worker proposal. But it is a more natural cause for the supporters of that proposal. If you want to invite workers here temporarily and deport those who overstay their welcome, you had better make sure that any children they have while here aren’t citizens. (If, on the other hand, what you really want is a permanent increase in immigrant labor and are merely selling it as temporary for political reasons, you wouldn’t care.)

Deal’s legislation may be an understandable expression of frustration with the federal government’s failure to control the borders. But ending birthright citizenship is not a crucial piece of immigration reform. It’s a costly distraction from it.

-- Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor of National Review, in whose February 27, 2006, issue this article first appeared.

Imagine you are one of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s top political strategists. The polls show your party needs a game-changer, something that will transform what looks like a losing political hand into a winner. “I know,” you shout, “let’s push for a large tax increase on the ‘fortunate few’ -- the 2 or 3 percent of the population with so much money they won’t even miss a few thousand bucks. The other 97 or 98 percent will feel no pain, and we’ll be able to call ourselves deficit hawks when all those billions start rolling in.”

On paper, this strategy may look promising. But a close look at who will pay the tab, where they live, and who represents them on Capitol Hill suggests that this approach has some major political flaws.

#ad#First, a few facts. When the Times Square ball falls on New Year’s Eve, the top tax rate on wages will jump by more than 13 percent, to 39.6 percent; the capital-gains tax will leap by a third, to 20 percent; and the tax on dividends will more than double, leaping to 39.6 percent from 15 percent.

Other taxes are slated to rise, too. Tens of millions of middle-income families will not only see their own marginal tax rates increase, but will also see the tax credits they claim for their children cut in half, their marriage-penalty relief vanish, and the current 10 percent tax bracket on the first $12,000 of their income increase to 15 percent.

In sum, tax-hike Armageddon looms, and the political lines are clearly drawn. Every single Republican lawmaker in Congress has called for stopping these hikes. But many leading Democrats -- such as Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, Speaker Pelosi, and Senate majority leader Harry Reid -- see things differently. While they insist they won’t let taxes rise on the middle class, they believe it is only “appropriate” to boost taxes significantly for the wealthiest 2 to 3 percent of Americans. It is, they insist, the best way to reduce the burgeoning federal budget deficit.

Their plan is straightforward: Soak only the top-earning households in America -- those earning more than $200,000 as single filers or $250,000 as married couples. Economically, they argue, it’s a free lunch. Pelosi summed up the progressive macroeconomic view this way: “The Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest people in America did nothing to grow the economy during the Bush administration, did not create jobs, [and] did not reduce the deficit.” And House majority leader Steny Hoyer articulated the microeconomic rationale: “Those who are doing well will not have their lives adversely affected [by these tax increases].”

Not only do they see no economic harm in squeezing an extra $75 billion or so each year from our most productive citizens, but Democratic political strategists also see this soak-the-rich strategy as a political winner. Lori Montgomery of the Washington Post explains:

Raising taxes is usually a perilous move. But Democrats, facing the potential loss of their majorities on Capitol Hill, believe that the [tax increase] strategy will both force Republicans to defend tax breaks for a tiny, wealthy minority and expose GOP hypocrisy on budget deficits.

So there you have it. Divide that “tiny, wealthy minority” from the rest of us. Pit those idle rich against the hoi polloi. Let “the little people” keep their tax credits and their pathetic 10 percent tax bracket, and they will reward you at the polls for sticking it to those haughty country-club types.

What’s not to like about that road to political victory in November?

Well, a couple of things. According to the most recent IRS income-tax data, that “tiny, wealthy minority” encompasses more than 4.3 million households. Counting spouses, children, and other dependents, you’re talking about putting 12.5 million living, breathing Americans in the tax-hike crosshairs.

That’s an average of nearly 29,000 “rich” constituents per district -- no small potatoes in an era when lawmakers break out in night sweats whenever district offices report that disgruntled voters are asking when they will hold town-hall meetings.

#page#
Of course, no district is “average.” The number of “rich” households varies dramatically from one district to the next. No fewer than 100 House districts boast at least 40,000 “rich” constituents (for the full list, go here); 68 districts are home to 50,000 or more; and 25 districts have 75,000 or more. One of those 25 is VA-11, located in the D.C. suburbs. Its current representative, Democrat Gerry Connolly, acknowledges that constituents have been lighting up his phone lines. As a result, he has been making the rounds on cable news and saying that now is not the time to raise taxes on anyone, including the rich.

Connolly is no supply-sider; his concern is a prudential one. While tax increases on the wealthy may one day be appropriate and necessary, he argues, the “fragile” nature of our economic recovery precludes such a move for the time being. He’s on stronger ground when he points out that the top 5 percent of income earners generate 30 percent of all economic activity; hitting them with a draconian tax hike would surely throttle the recovery.

#ad#According to the latest IRS income-tax data, Connolly’s district ranks among the 20 wealthiest in the nation. Counting spouses and kids, fully 84,804 of his constituents live in “rich” households. That’s over 11 percent of his constituency.

Several of Connolly’s Democratic colleagues find themselves in a similar bind. Topping the list is freshman Rep. Jim Himes in CT-4. More than 146,000 of his constituents -- who comprise over a fifth of his district’s entire population -- live in high-income households that will be asked to fork over an astonishing $1.7 billion in additional taxes next year. That’s more than $39,000 per household.

When we consider how many other competitive House districts have significant numbers of “rich” constituents, it becomes clear that the politics of “taxing the rich” may turn out to be more complex than Democratic strategists first envisioned. Indeed, the progressives’ class-warfare gambit may backfire disastrously this November.

-- Michael G. Franc is vice president of government relations for the Heritage Foundation.

Gun fun     August 1 -- White rabbits!

Today the Derb mansion is permeated by the smell of Hoppe’s No. 9. We had a glorious day of shooting yesterday. Took my son and one of his friends to a big range nearby, of which one of my own friends is a member. We shot skeet with three different shotguns; we shot half a dozen pistols; we shot two rifles.

Star of the show was the AR-15, which turns even a duffer like me into a marksman. We were clipping the bull’s-eye at 100 yards. “A bad workman blames his tools”; conversely, when a tool does a superb job for you, you bask in quite unjustified pride.

Then, back home, out come the cleaning rods and patches and oil and Hoppe’s No. 9.

#ad#Why you should make friends with guns     Apart from the fact that guns are fun, you should give some thought to the direction the U.S.A. is headed.

As municipalities sink under the weight of pension and benefit liabilities for their employees, with stagnant or falling revenues, law enforcement will be one of the things to go. In some places this has already happened. East St. Louis announced at the end of July that it is to lay off 19 of its 62 police officers. Back in June the city of Maywood, Calif., went further, laying off all its employees. Sure, these are poor cities (statistics here and here), but the rot will climb up the pilings, you may be sure.

When it does, Joe Citizen, you’ll be on your own law-enforcement-wise. Get yourself some guns. Learn how to use and maintain them. Teach your family members how to use them.


EFTA revisited     Not that law enforcement is in such great shape anyway. You could ask our own Conrad Black, now out on bail after serving three years of a six-and-a-half-year sentence for#...#what? Nobody can explain it to me.

Coincidentally, the July 24 issue of The Economist ran an article on the ferocious enforcement of pettifogging laws. We read about the hapless George Norris, 65 years old and a collector of orchids. Because the paperwork was not correct on some orchids he’d imported from South America, Mr. Norris was in technical violation of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, to which the U.S. is a signatory. Mr. Norris’s home was stormed by a SWAT team, he spent 17 months in prison, and his life and health have been ruined. Oh yes: “For bringing some prescription sleeping pills into prison, he was put in solitary confinement for 71 days.”

This is emblematic of a broader problem. In spheres where the government should be busy in action -- guarding the nation’s borders, for example -- anarchy reigns. In trivial matters that, in a sane order, would not concern the government at all, they practice a savage tyranny.

#page#
The main way they do this is by creating so many laws and regulations, and signing on to so many of those busybody Conventions cooked up by dimwit bureaucrats in Karachi or Kuala Lumpur, that anyone they decide to pick on is bound to be in violation of something.

The Economist:

There are over 4,000 federal crimes, and many times that number of regulations that carry criminal penalties. When analysts at the Congressional Research Service tried to count the number of separate offences on the books, they were forced to give up, exhausted. Rules concerning corporate governance or the environment are often impossible to understand, yet breaking them can land you in prison. In many criminal cases, the common-law requirement that a defendant must have a mens rea (i.e., he must or should know that he is doing wrong) has been weakened or erased.

#ad#The main driving force here is sloth. Throwing 65-year-old orchid fanciers in jail is nothing like as much hard work as tracking down terrorists or people smugglers. Anarcho-tyranny is just EFTA at work: the Easier-For-Them Association.


More EFTA     For a look at EFTA in action on the local level, consider the experience of my next-door neighbor. He’d left his truck parked in his driveway in our uneventful, law-abiding suburban neighborhood. In the wee hours one morning, thieves broke into the truck and took what they could find, including his wallet. They mainly just wanted his money, but took out his credit cards anyway, and scattered cards and wallet over a nearby lawn.

However, there was one credit card they hadn’t been able to pull out, though obviously they’d tried -- it was stuck halfway out of its pocket. My neighbor showed this to the police, saying: “You should be able to get really good prints off that.” The police laughed at him. “We don’t do prints for theft-from-vehicle.”

This, please note, is one of the most extravagantly remunerated police forces in the nation. With vacation and various other negotiated time allowances, Suffolk County cops work fewer days a year than schoolteachers. They are, in other words, spoiled rotten.

They are members of EFTA, though, so they can do what they like. What they like is, to do as little as possible. They won’t catch many thieves if they don’t dust for prints on a vehicle break-in; but hey, so what? Not dusting is Easier For Them.

Stick around. Pretty soon they won’t dust for prints on burglary with assault. Then they won’t dust for prints on rape. Then they won’t dust for prints on murder. They’ll still be locking up 65-year-old orchid fanciers, though. Anarcho-tyranny -- it’s Easier For Them.

Get yourself some guns.


County heroes     The Suffolk County Police Department may be spoiled, rude, arrogant, and deeply unhelpful, but our Sheriff’s Office is an entirely different matter.

I refer of course to the case of Derbyshire v. Loathsome Dog-Mauling Hippie Scoundrel. I am glad to report that the long trek through the county courts, and the Sheriff’s Office that enforces the orders of the courts, is at last over. I got my check, with interest!, and it is now safely deposited in my puny bank account.

Moral of the story: You can get satisfaction out of the Small Claims system, if you peg away doggedly (ha!) at it. This is still a nation of laws, not hippies. It just needs a year or so of your time.

Meanwhile: All glory, laud, and honor to the noble Sheriff of Suffolk County and his heroic deputies! May their tribes increase! May the wombs of their wives be ever fruitful! May their sons be manly and their daughters chaste!#...#Etc., etc.

#page#
The office and the man     Manly, yes. There’s been a meme floating around recently to the effect that our president is a bit of a girly man.

It seems to have started with this picture, taken at the G8 summit in June. Leaders of the Free World are assembled for a photograph. A comely young woman drops her papers and bends down to gather them. Sarkozy and Berlusconi are leaning over at gravity-defying angles to get a look at the lady’s posterior. Harper seems to be trying to see which part of his anatomy the lady is checking out. The Japanese guy, whoever it was that month, wants her to notice his seersucker. Medvedev is thinking about potatoes. Obama looks the way he mostly looks, i.e., as if about to preach a sermon on sin and redemption.

#ad#As evidence that the president is a girly man, this is thin stuff. I’m not sure that leering at women’s backsides tells us anything about a guy, other than that he’s straight; but if it does, what should we make of this?

Sarah Palin nonetheless picked up the meme in her famous cojones remark. You can see her point, in relation to the topic she was talking about.

There’s a case to be made on other grounds that Barack Hussein Obama is actually Beta High-strung Obama. There is that horrendous autobiography, for example, long stretches of which read like the diary of a whiny, self-obsessed teenage girl. And then, I don’t recall any evidence of Obama’s ever having done anything dangerous or physically strenuous.

Wait a minute (you cry): Didn’t Obama, in his Community Organizer days, live and work in Chicago’s rough’n’tough South Side ghetto? Some danger points for that, surely.

Actually, no. As Steve Sailer points out:

Obama didn't live in any of the communities he putatively organized. Obama would commute to the slums he was supposed to organize from the security of Hyde Park. Going back two decades, he has made his home in that sliver of the South Side that's so well organized by a rich institution, the John D. Rockefeller-founded University of Chicago, that it has its own private police force.

It’s been a soft, easy, non-character-forming kind of life, floating ever upwards on the praise, adulation, and projected hopes of others, without ever actually having done anything much -- certainly nothing that might break a nail.

On the other other hand, you could say the same of many other presidents, some of them fine conservative heroes. My own favorite, Calvin Coolidge, never did anything more dangerous than farm work (though farm work is strenuous) and riding a mechanical horse for exercise in the White House. Ronald Reagan rode actual horses -- as Coolidge must have done on the farm -- and furthermore performed as much military service as he reasonably could; but his life was hardly an action movie.

I leave the matter open. For sure Barack Obama is facing some severe stress tests in the years to come. Let’s see how he copes; and for the sake of the country, let’s hope he copes well.


Long Live Our Glorious Asbestos!     I had a bit of fun on the July 23 Radio Derb with serpentine, the California state rock. Serpentine is common in California -- that’s why they made it the state rock -- but some varieties contain traces of asbestos.

Once mined enthusiastically in California, asbestos is now the most politically incorrect mineral known to man, at least American Trial Lawyer man. Its fibers are implicated in lethal lung diseases, so that trial lawyers have for decades been hunting down anyone suffering from those diseases and bringing lawsuits on their behalf against the nearest deep-pocketed entity that could be connected in some way, however tenuous, with use of asbestos.

#page#
With the serpentine-asbestos link firmly established, that would include pretty much any private or public enterprise in California. Banks, for example, whose counter tops are often made from polished serpentine, because its color resembles the green ink used on paper money. Imagine the joy on the faces of trial attorneys when they learned this fact. We can sue every bank in California!

With this in mind, the trial lawyers are sponsoring a bill in the California state senate to defrock (de-rock?) serpentine -- i.e., strip it of its status as State Rock.

#ad#Well, I had just got through recording that Radio Derb segment when I paid a visit to the Russian Children’s Welfare Society in New York City. There I met a new hire, a very beautiful and charming young lady named Yana. She was of course Russian. Making small talk, I asked where she had been born. “In the Urals,” she replied. “A small town named Asbest.” Asbest? “Yes, like in ‘asbestos’.”

Sure enough, there it is, up in the Urals: Asbest. Population 72,822 in 2006, according to Britannica, and still digging out asbestos by the ton. I bet in the Soviet period there were billboards at the approaches to the town boasting LONG LIVE OUR GLORIOUS ASBESTOS! Perhaps they are still there.

So when the trial lawyers get through stripping California banks of their assets, perhaps they’ll all head over to try their luck in the Urals. Hey, I can dream.


The paragon of animals     I was talking to a friend who had for some years run a small retail menswear store in the Midwest. He also had an academic career to take care of, so from time to time he would put managers in to look after the store.

He: The thing that makes a good manager is, the ability to hire good employees.
Me: What’s the definition of “good employee”?
He: One who doesn’t steal too much.
Me: Say what? Do employees really steal so much?
He: There’s always a proportion. Rarely less than a quarter, maybe a third of the people you hire. You have to try to keep it down.

Later in the conversation we circled back to his retail experiences. He got on to customer pilferage.

Me:  So the customers are stealing too?
He:  You can’t imagine.

What a low-down, nasty piece of work is man!


Under the tombstone     Turning out some boxes in the back of the garage, I came across a lucite “tombstone,” recording for posterity an issue of mortgage-backed bonds in June 1984, face value $152,713,000.

Here are the names of the underwriting firms:

The First Boston Corporation
Salomon Brothers Inc.
Merrill Lynch Capital Markets
Bear, Stearns & Co.
Goldman, Sachs & Co.
Lehman Brothers
Morgan Stanley & Co.
Drexel Burnham Lambert
E.F. Hutton & Company, Inc.
Prudential-Bache
L.F. Rothschild, Unterberg, Towbin
Smith Barney, Harris Upham & Co.
Thomson McKinnon Securities Inc.

#page#
Where are the snows of yesteryear? Well, of those particular snows, only two are still clinging to the mountainside: Goldman Sachs (who dropped the comma at some point in these 26 years: I never noticed that before) and Morgan Stanley. The rest are gone, gone with the wind -- actually, mostly swallowed up by bigfoot megafirms like Morgan and Citigroup.

What was that about “too big to fail”? Seems there were a lot more small fishes in the pond in 1984 than there are now. That’s pond life for ya, I guess.

#ad#Israel deports illegals     Isn’t there some way we can hire Israelis to run our immigration system? They sure know how to do it.

U.S. economy dodges a bullet     Nellie Derbyshire started her first real job this month, as an intern on the trading floor of one of the downtown exchanges. She is thrilled with it, and the Derbs are infinitely grateful to the friends down there who gave her the opportunity.

There has been only one Maalox moment so far. Three or four days into the job Nellie arrived home, ran right upstairs to my office, burst right in without knocking, and told me in great excitement: “Dad! Today I entered my first trade!”

I was at the computer concentrating on something and didn’t process the words properly. I thought I heard her say she had made a trade. Great thundering cascades of alarm and anxiety neurons fired off in my brain. My ditsy 17½-year-old daughter is trading options on commodity futures? OMG! Call broker! Short the market!

In fact all that had happened was that a trader, having made his trade, had passed the numbers to Nellie to enter into the computer. (Under the eye of an experienced trading assistant, let me add, and the numbers to be then subjected to several levels of validation by the trading systems. This is not even conceivably a fat-finger situation. Let me further add that my daughter is only somewhat and occasionally ditsy, while beautiful, smart, and charming withal.)

For a fleeting moment there, though, I thought our name might go down in the annals of infamy as having supplied the straw that broke the back of the poor, staggering U.S. economy.


Math Corner     I was totally overloaded with responses to last month’s puzzle, the famous (notorious?) “Tuesday’s Child” conundrum. Many thanks to all who participated. I’m sorry I couldn’t respond personally to more than a fraction. My solution here.

Rather than offer a puzzle this month, I’m just going to direct your attention to this news story about dominoes, which Jamaica is striving to make an Olympic sport.

The status of Olympic sport is still a long way off but Jamaica is hoping that by playing host to the 10th World Domino Championships in 2012, it will be able to push the more professional side of the game.

Why does everything have to be so serious nowadays? Wait a minute, though:

Domino competitions see players setting up from daybreak and going through until the early hours.#...#A "Q," or quarter-liter bottle of white rum, is often a key element of the event.

Now that’s more like it! Dominoes and alcohol go together in England, too, where it is (or was, don’t ask me) a popular pub game. My grandfather John Henry Knowles was a keen player. Among my remotest memories are visiting with him and Grandma at their collier’s cottage in Staffordshire. He’d take down his box of dominoes from the top shelf of the dresser and I’d play with them for hours: not playing the game -- I could barely count -- just stacking them up into towers and walls.

There’s considerable math to be mined from dominoes. Try this site for example. Number 2 and Number 5 look interesting.

-- John Derbyshire is an NRO columnist and author, most recently, of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism.

 

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is some sort of bigot. In a speech about the Ground Zero mosque and religious freedom, Bloomberg stipulated that “it is fair to ask the organizers of the mosque to show some special sensitivity to the situation.”

Why do they, of all the sects represented in New York, have to show “special sensitivity”? Does the mayor demand “special sensitivity” of St. Paul’s Church, the Episcopal parish a few blocks from Ground Zero? And who appointed him arbiter of “special sensitivity”? Where in the First Amendment does it give mayors the power to enjoin builders of churches, synagogues, or mosques to show sensitivity, special or otherwise?

#ad#It must be that the mayor harbors a subtle animus toward Muslims that impels him to impinge on their constitutional rights in violation of all that this country holds dear. Or so one would conclude if Mayor Bloomberg’s obtuse hostility to opponents of the Ground Zero mosque were turned against him.

The mayor unloosed a self-righteous oration about how critics of the project are disgracing the memory of firefighters who died in 9/11, among other offenses against truth, justice, and the American way. But even he had to admit that there’s something different about building a mosque so close to the site of a horrific, history-changing act of Islamic terrorism. What Bloomberg refuses to see is that those who want to block the mosque are demanding a truly meaningful gesture in “special sensitivity.”

Namely, moving it elsewhere. If the founders of the project are as serious about interfaith bridge-building as they say, they’ll be delighted to find a less controversial location. Rubbing hurt feelings raw is not an act of understanding. Stoking a religiously charged debate at Ground Zero is not a blow for tolerance. They are provocations, by people who either are witless or understand exactly what they are doing.

It is true that Islam as such is not responsible for 9/11, but symbolism and the sensibilities of New Yorkers and victims of 9/11 can’t be discounted. When the Anti-Defamation League bravely bucked elite opinion to oppose the project, its national director, Abe Foxman, made an illuminating comparison with a Carmelite convent established outside Auschwitz in the 1980s.

Carmelites were not a cog in Adolf Hitler’s death machine. Survivors of the Holocaust and Jewish groups nonetheless found the Catholic outpost offensive, which was enough for Pope John Paul II to ask the nuns to move. True interfaith bridge-building is made of such forbearance.

The organizers of the mosque, in contrast, relish their hot-button address. Feisal Abdul Rauf, the project’s imam, wrote a book called What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America. But as former prosecutor Andy McCarthy points out, it was published in Malaysia under the more pungent title A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Dawa in the Heart of America Post-9/11 (dawa is Islamic proselytism). A noncommercial edition was published by two organizations that have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and promote Hamas.

Rauf himself won’t condemn the Palestinian terror group. Asked about Hamas in a recent radio interview, he said, “Terrorism is a very complex question,” the stock answer of anyone excusing terrorism. “I am a peace builder,” he explained -- so long as peace-building doesn’t require saying a discouraging word about the Palestinian murderers of innocent Jews.

Even if Rauf has the best of intentions, a $100 million mosque is an open invitation to Saudi funding. Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute has documented how Saudi educational materials at American mosques exhort Muslims to spill the blood of infidels and Jews, in interfaith bridge-building, Wahhabi-style. If the Ground Zero project relies on Saudi money, the desert monarchy will have pulled a perverse twofer -- funding the radical version of Islam that created Ground Zero, then funding the mosque that outraged the families of the victims.

No thanks. Good taste and common sense should prevail, or what Mayor Bloomberg, in his surpassing wisdom, calls “special sensitivity.”

-- Rich Lowry is editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail, comments.lowry@nationalreview.com. © 2010 by King Features Syndicate.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece has been amended since its original posting.

The title of this column seems unbelievable, but it is in fact what happened in America this past week. And almost no one has noticed.

After 50 years of being inundated with stories of white racism, and being taught in college that in this white-dominated society only a white can be a racist, the American public has been properly brainwashed into accepting the otherwise incredible: A black man murdered eight white people at his place of work because they were white, and the media story is about the murderer’s alleged experiences of racism.

#ad#Here’s the Associated Press report from August 7, four days after the murders. It was reprinted in the Washington Post and throughout America:

To those closest to him, Omar Thornton was caring, quiet and soft-spoken.#...#But underneath, Thornton seethed with a sense of racial injustice for years that culminated in a shooting rampage Tuesday in which the Connecticut man killed eight and wounded two others at his job at Hartford Distributors in Manchester before killing himself.

“I know what pushed him over the edge was all the racial stuff that was happening at work,” said his girlfriend, Kristi Hannah.

“He always felt like he was being discriminated [against] because he was black,” said Jessica Anne Brocuglio, his former girlfriend. “Basically they wouldn’t give him pay raises. He never felt like they accepted him as a hard working person.”

Thornton changed jobs a few times because he was not getting raises, Brocuglio said.

The New York Times’s August 3 headline read: “Troubles Preceded Connecticut Workplace Killing,” and in the second paragraph, the Times reported: “He might also have had cause to be angry: he had complained to his girlfriend of being racially harassed at work, the woman’s mother said, and lamented that his grievances had gone unaddressed.”

On August 7, the Washington Post’s headline read, “Beer warehouse shooter long complained of racism.”

In fact, just before he started shooting, Thornton had been told he had the choice of quitting or being fired for stealing beer, and there was video proof of his doing so. But this fact -- the one indisputable and most pertinent pre-murder fact -- got lost within the larger context of Thornton’s claims of being a victim of whites.

#page#Those preoccupied with Thornton’s charges of workplace racism might wish to reflect on this: Racists and otherwise bigoted murderers always blame their victims. Medieval Christians who murdered Jews blamed the Jews for poisoning wells, using Christian children’s blood in making their matzo, or some other terrible crime. Whites who lynched blacks blamed those blacks for rape or some other terrible crime. Nothing is new about the Thornton racist murders except that the society in which they occurred concentrated on the racist’s excuses rather than on his murders.

#ad#Just as leading liberals would not ascribe Islamist motives -- until there was no possibility of denying them -- to recent Muslim attacks on Americans, so the liberal media -- i.e., almost all news outlets in America -- are not branding these Connecticut murders for what they are: racist. Thornton actually told the 911 operator, “I wish I could have gotten more of the people [i.e., whites].”

We are repeatedly told by liberals -- both whites and blacks -- that America needs an honest dialogue on race. Needless to say, they don’t mean it, because the moment a white or a black says anything critical of black behavior, he is labeled racist or Uncle Tom. So most nonliberal whites and blacks just keep quiet.

One result is this morally upside-down reporting of the murders in Connecticut.

Another example is the liberal narrative on blacks in prison: “There are more black men in prison than in college.” Every decent American regards this fact as a major tragedy. But most Americans believe that the fault lies primarily with the black criminals, not with a racist society. Most Americans believe that blacks who mug, rape, rob, or murder commit those crimes for the same reason whites do -- they lack a sufficiently strong conscience.

But the dominant liberal narrative is that while white criminals are criminals, black criminals are largely victims.

Another example was the liberal narrative of the 1992 “Rodney King riots” in Los Angeles. It was perfectly expressed by the major newspaper of that city, the Los Angeles Times. During the riots, in which innocent Koreans, whites, and others were beaten, maimed, and killed and their businesses burned to the ground, the daily special section on the riots in the Times was titled “Understanding the Rage.” When blacks riot, whites are the reason. When a black murders eight whites in Connecticut, whites are the reason.

One terrible consequence of this liberal attitude toward black violent crime is that too many blacks come to believe that less is expected of them morally than from whites. And the truth is that most Americans on the left do expect less from blacks.

But saying any of this gets us nowhere because it is simply labeled racism. If you don’t believe me, check leftist reactions to this column on the Internet.

Most liberal leaders want an honest dialogue about race as much as they want to honestly describe the murders in Connecticut.

— Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. He may be contacted through his website, dennisprager.com.

 

A graduating senior at Hunter College High School in New York gave a speech that brought a standing ovation from his teachers and got his picture in the New York Times. I hope it doesn’t go to his head, because what he said was so illogical that it was an indictment of the mush that is being taught at even our elite educational institutions.

Young Justin Hudson, described as “black and Hispanic,” opened by saying how much he appreciated reaching his graduation day at this very select public high school. Then he said, “I don’t deserve any of this. And neither do you.” The reason? He and his classmates were there because of “luck and circumstances.”

#ad#Since Hunter College High School selects its applicants from the whole city on the basis of their test scores, “luck” seems a strange way to characterize why some students are admitted and many others are not. If you can’t tell the difference between luck and performance, what has your education given you, except the rhetoric to conceal your confusion from others and perhaps from yourself?

Young Mr. Hudson’s concern, apparently, is about what he referred to as the “demographics” of the school -- 41 percent white and 47 percent Asian, with blacks, Hispanics, and others obviously far behind. “I refuse to accept” that “the distribution of intelligence in this city” varies by neighborhood, he said.

Native intelligence may indeed not vary by neighborhood, but actual performance -- whether in schools, on the job, or elsewhere -- involves far more than native intelligence. Wasted intelligence does nothing for an individual or society.

The reason a surgeon can operate on your heart, while someone of equal intelligence who is not a surgeon cannot, is because of what different people actually did with their intelligence. That has always varied, not only from individual to individual but from group to group -- and not only in this country, but in countries around the world and across the centuries of human history.

One of the biggest fallacies of our time is the notion that, if all groups are not proportionally represented in institutions, professions, or income levels, that shows something is wrong with society. The very possibility that people make their own choices, and that those choices have consequences -- for themselves and for others -- is ignored. Society is the universal scapegoat.

If “luck” is involved, it is the luck to be born into families and communities whose values and choices turn out to be productive for themselves and for others who benefit from the skills they acquire. Observers who blame tests or other criteria for the demographic imbalances that are the rule -- not the exception -- around the world, are blaming whatever conveys differences for creating those differences.

They blame the messenger who brings bad news.

If test scores are not the same for people from different backgrounds, that is no proof that there is something wrong with the tests. Tests do not exist to show what your potential was when you entered the world but to measure what you have actually accomplished since then, as a guide to what you are likely to continue to do in the future. Tests convey a difference that tests did not create. But the messenger gets blamed.

Similarly, if prices are higher in high-crime neighborhoods, that is often blamed on those who charge those prices, rather than on those who create the higher costs that follow from higher rates of shoplifting, robbery, vandalism, and riots, which costs are passed on to those who shop in those neighborhoods. The prices convey a reality that the prices did not create. If these prices represent simply “greed” for higher profits, then why do most profit-seeking businesses avoid high-crime neighborhoods like the plague?

It is painful that people with lower incomes often have to pay higher prices, even though most people are not criminals, even in a high-crime neighborhood. But misconstruing the reasons is not going to help anybody, except race hustlers and politicians.

One of the many disservices done to young people by our schools and colleges is giving them the puffed-up notion that they are in a position to pass sweeping judgments on a world that they have barely begun to experience. A standing ovation for childish remarks may produce “self-esteem,” but promoting presumptuousness is unlikely to benefit either this student or society.

-- Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

When President Obama took over from George W. Bush, many European diplomats and human-rights activists were energized. They hoped the so-called Obama effect would lead to America’s championing a new golden era for international human rights as it re-engaged with the United Nations and brought obstructionist countries --supposedly alienated by the Bush administration’s arrogance -- back to the path of progress. But these idealists have had a rude awakening: Under Obama, things have taken a turn for the worse.

The Bush administration was cool toward the U.N. human-rights structure for a simple reason: It did not want to confer legitimacy on a system that rogue states and their supporters have turned into an instrument of tyranny. Accordingly, the U.S. decided to boycott the U.N.’s discredited Human Rights Council, where China, Russia, and various Islamic states have waged war on freedom of expression and shielded each other from criticism and scrutiny.

#ad#The Obama administration, by contrast, apparently believes that participation and dialogue in itself is more important than the outcome.

The latest demonstration of American impotence at the U.N. came on July 28, when the General Assembly adopted a resolution proclaiming that clean water and sanitation is a human right to be provided by government. The U.S. timidly abstained rather than vote against the measure. Why should America be afraid to state that human rights are meant to protect individuals from tyrannical governments, not to give governments greater power over their citizens’ lives by monopolizing essential commodities?

While the nonbinding resolution might easily be dismissed as “nonsense upon stilts” (in the phrase of Jeremy Bentham), it marks yet another milestone in the decline of the influence of democracies at the U.N. This decline has been accelerated by the Obama administration’s refusal to confront countries such as Russia, Pakistan, and China, which dominate the Human Rights Council. The U.S. has generally refrained from criticizing the worst human-rights violators, and was also unable to prevent Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya from becoming a member of the council.

The Obama administration has also accepted seemingly harmless compromises that actually chip away at human rights. The best example came in October 2009, when the U.S. and Egypt cosponsored a resolution on freedom of speech that condemned “negative religious stereotyping.” This is not one of the permissible restrictions on free speech under international human-rights law, so it suggests a protection of religions and religious symbols. That very interpretation was emphasized by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which declared that “negative stereotyping or defamation of religions was a modern expression of religious hatred and xenophobia. This spread not only to individuals but to religions and belief systems.” The U.S.-Egypt resolution may aid Cairo in its efforts to repress dissidents such as the blogger Kareem, who has been imprisoned for four years for “insulting Islam.”

#page#
America’s current coddling of tyrants at the U.N. stands in sharp contrast to the days when President Reagan infuriated Fidel Castro and his cronies by appointing former Cuban political prisoner Armando Valladares to serve as U.S. ambassador to the (now-defunct) U.N. Commission on Human Rights. Obama’s approach is worryingly similar to that of European countries, many of which voted for the water-and-sanitation resolution. These countries long ago accepted their dwindling influence in Geneva and New York, and they offer little hope of change.

#ad#To Americans, who are protected by the freedoms of the U.S. Constitution rather than by international human-rights conventions, the alarming developments at the U.N. may seem irrelevant. But despite the gross failures of the U.N. human-rights system, the language of international human rights still holds sway in many parts of the world. Governments, NGOs, activists, academics, and journalists often attach great weight to human-rights developments at the world body. Therefore, those who are able to shape the meaning of human rights have a powerful tool to advance political agendas that are quite opposed to individual freedom and protection against tyranny.

Already, human-rights language has started to degenerate into Newspeak where tolerance means censorship and freedom means more government. If this continues unopposed, America will find it increasingly difficult to advance the values of life, liberty, and property under the banner of human rights. Because to a German, an Indonesian, or a Kenyan, human rights is just as likely to mean the right to be given water and socialized medicine and to repress discussion with “hate speech” laws.

If the U.S. wants to be taken seriously as the leader of the free world, it must champion the cause of freedom at the U.N. by actively leading a coalition of democracies, confronting authoritarians, and shaming the spoilers. Alternatively, the U.S. could decide that human rights are best championed outside the U.N. and build a credible alternative. But sitting on the fence is tantamount to surrender.

-- Jacob Mchangama is head of legal affairs at CEPOS, an independent free-market Danish think-tank, and an external lecturer of international human-rights law at the University of Copenhagen.