Burn, Baby, Burn

Arsonists Destroy Affordable-Housing Units of Elderly Black Poor

Al Sharpton’s Baltimore

 “No justice, no peace” finally blew into an urban riot.

By: Daniel Henninger , WSJ Opinion, April 29, 2015

‘No justice, no peace.”

In Baltimore now, they’ve got both.

When Al Sharpton popularized the chant, “No justice, no peace,” it was unmistakably clear that “no peace” was an implicit threat of civil unrest.

Not civil disobedience, as practiced by Martin Luther King Jr. Civil unrest.

Civil unrest can come in degrees. It might be a brief fight between protesters and the cops. It might be someone throwing rocks through store windows. Or it might be more than that.

Whenever groups gathered in large numbers to start the “no justice, no peace” demonstrations and listen to incitements against “the police,” we would hear mayors, politicians, college presidents and American presidents say they “understood the anger.” They all assumed that any civil unrest that resulted would be, as they so often say, “containable.” Meaning—acceptable.

In Ferguson, it was barely so following the Missouri grand jury’s decision in November not to indict a policeman for Michael Brown’s death. Businesses were demolished. As they were when street violence erupted in Berkeley, Calif. New York’s police stood aside while marchers intimidated much of the city and marauded through department stores.

But what the whole nation watched on television Monday for about nine hours in Baltimore was not “containable.” It was anarchy, an urban riot. It was civil unrest on a scale that left stores destroyed while buildings and blocks of inner-city Baltimore burned.

Every public official remotely in range of these “no justice, no peace” demos the past year over policing controversies in Ferguson or Staten Island had to understand, privately, that one might come to this. But not a single person in authority ever seriously pushed back against this message. No one said Al Sharpton or his clones should ratchet back this demagoguery lest the emotions unloosed and enlarged by social media in a city like New York, St. Louis or Baltimore blow into a big urban riot. Now it’s here, and parts of Baltimore are wrecked.

The one positive thing we learned watching the riot Monday is that these Baltimore neighborhoods have black leaders who know the difference between preening and progress.

Brandon Scott, a young city council member, spoke with blunt eloquence about being born in 1984 but knowing that the riots of 1968, whatever their justification, had left Baltimore physically and emotionally ruined for years. And now they were on the brink of again losing what he and others had tried to build in their neighborhoods. It was heartbreaking to hear the pastor who watched his new affordable-housing units for the elderly poor burn down Monday night.

In a better world, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake would step down, and Brandon Scott would step in to start the road back.

Al Sharpton never missed a beat Monday. With heavy rocks bouncing off the anti-riot shields of retreating police, he announced a May march from New York to Washington to publicize police violence against minorities. Naturally he criticized the looters.

President Obama called the Baltimore riot “counterproductive.” He said, in what apparently was a complaint, “I can’t federalize every police force in the country and force them to retrain.” The president mentioned federal grants for body cameras. Body cameras are an excellent idea. In fact, images from the shoulders of every cop in America should be streamed real time on the Web around the clock so everyone can watch and hear the details of cops interacting with every level of the community. Then let’s talk about who and what needs to change.

Mr. Obama said, “There’s a bunch of my agenda that would make a difference right now.” And then the president said: “Now, I’m under no illusion that out of this Congress we’re going to get massive investments in urban communities.” We’ll let Josh Earnest deny what the president was saying with this unattractive remark.

But over the past 40 years, even before Mr. Obama thought of it, Congresses like this one have committed uncounted billions of federal dollars to fund every conceivable project for urban America. Still, he’s right. Some communities remain about as stricken as they were in 1975, or 1968.

As to his contribution, Mr. Obama said, “We’re making investments so that they can get the training they need to find jobs.” But one has to ask: What jobs?

On Wednesday morning the year’s first-quarter GDP growth rate came in—0.2%. Next to nothing. For the length of the Obama presidency, with growth significantly below norm, unemployment for blacks aged 24 and younger has hovered between 30% and 50%. That’s the real powder keg, not the police.

As to Baltimore, familiar support will materialize from New York when the Sharpton retinue arrives in the burned out Baltimore neighborhoods on his way to a meeting in Washington with the new attorney general. What this means is that when Reverend Al walks out of the neighborhood, Baltimoreans will be in the same place they were this week before he showed up. No justice. Less peace.

Where'd You Go Joe DiMaggio?

High-Fiving As They Rub it in Your Face

Gerald Brofloski: You see Kyle, we live in a liberal-democratic society, and democrats make overstep with laws, these laws tell us what we can and can't say in the work place, and what we can and can't do in the work place.

Kyle Brovslofksi: Isn't that Fascism?
Gerald Brofloski: No, because we don't call it Fascism.

 --South Park 

Meanwhile, Back in America . . .

The growing distance between Washington and the public it dominates.

By PEGGY NOONAN, WSJ Opinion, January 31, 2014

The State of the Union was a spectacle of delusion and self-congratulation in which a Congress nobody likes rose to cheer a president nobody really likes. It marked the continued degeneration of a great and useful tradition. Viewership was down, to the lowest level since 2000. This year's innovation was the Parade of Hacks. It used to be the networks only showed the president walking down the aisle after his presence was dramatically announced. Now every cabinet-level officeholder marches in, shaking hands and high-fiving with breathless congressmen. And why not? No matter how bland and banal they may look, they do have the power to destroy your life—to declare the house you just built as in violation of EPA wetland regulations, to pull your kid's school placement, to define your medical coverage out of existence. So by all means attention must be paid and faces seen.

I watched at home and thought: They hate it. They being the people, whom we're now supposed to refer to as the folks. But you look at the polls at how people view Washington—one, in October, had almost 9 in 10 disapproving—and you watch a Kabuki-like event like this and you know the distance, the psychic, emotional and experiential distance, between Washington and America, between the people and their federal government, is not only real but, actually, carries dangers. History will make more of the distance than we do. Someday in the future we will see it most vividly when a truly bad thing happens and the people suddenly need to trust what Washington says, and will not, to everyone's loss.

In the country, the president's popularity is underwater. In the District of Columbia itself, as Gallup notes, it's at 81%. The Washington area is now the wealthiest in the nation. No matter how bad the hinterlands do, it's good for government and those who live off it. The country is well aware. It is no accident that in the national imagination Washington is the shallow and corrupt capital in "The Hunger Games," the celebrity-clogged White House Correspondents Dinner, "Scandal" and the green room at MSNBC. It is the chattering capital of a nation it less represents than dominates.

Supposedly people feel great rage about this, and I imagine many do. But the other night I wondered if what they're feeling isn't something else.

***

As the president made his jaunty claims and the senators and congressmen responded semirapturously I kept thinking of four words: Meanwhile, back in America . . .

Meanwhile, back in America, the Little Sisters of the Poor were preparing their legal briefs. The Roman Catholic order of nuns first came to America in 1868 and were welcomed in every city they entered. They now run about 30 homes for the needy across the country. They have, quite cruelly, been told they must comply with the ObamaCare mandate that all insurance coverage include contraceptives, sterilization procedures, morning-after pills. If they don't—and of course they can't, being Catholic, and nuns—they will face ruinous fines. The Supreme Court kindly granted them a temporary stay, but their case soon goes to court. The Justice Department brief, which reads like it was written by someone who just saw "Philomena," suggests the nuns are being ignorant and balky, all they have to do is sign a little, meaningless form and the problem will go away. The sisters don't see the form as meaningless; they know it's not. And so they fight, in a suit along with almost 500 Catholic nonprofit groups.

Everyone who says that would never have happened in the past is correct. It never, ever would have under normal American political leadership, Republican or Democratic. No one would've defied religious liberty like this.

The president has taken to saying he isn't ideological but this mandate—his mandate—is purely ideological.

It also is a violation of traditional civic courtesy, sympathy and spaciousness. The state doesn't tell serious religious groups to do it their way or they'll be ruined. You don't make the Little Sisters bow down to you.

This is the great political failure of progressivism: They always go too far. They always try to rub your face in it.

Meanwhile, back in America, disadvantaged parents in Louisiana—people who could never afford to live in places like McLean, Va., or Chevy Chase, Md.—continue to wait to see what will happen with the state's successful school voucher program. It lets poor kids get out of failed public schools and go to private schools on state scholarships. What a great thing. But the Obama Justice Department filed suit in August: The voucher system might violate civil rights law by worsening racial imbalance in the public schools. Gov. Bobby Jindal, and the parents, said nonsense, the scholarship students are predominately black, they have civil rights too. Is it possible the Justice Department has taken its action because a major benefactor of the president's party is the teachers unions, which do not like vouchers because their existence suggests real failures in the public schools they run?

Meanwhile, back in America, conservatives targeted and harassed by the Internal Revenue Service still await answers on their years-long requests for tax-exempt status. When news of the IRS targeting broke last spring, agency officials lied about it, and one took the Fifth. The president said he was outraged, had no idea, read about it in the papers, boy was he going to get to the bottom of it. An investigation was announced but somehow never quite materialized. Victims of the targeting waited to be contacted by the FBI to be asked about their experience. Now the Justice Department has made clear its investigation won't be spearheaded by the FBI but by a department lawyer who is a campaign contributor to the president and the Democratic Party. Sometimes you feel they are just laughing at you, and going too far.

In the past five years many Americans have come to understand that an agency that maintained a pretty impressive record for a very long time has been turned, at least in part, into a political operation. Now the IRS has proposed new and tougher rules for grass-roots groups. Cleta Mitchell, longtime attorney for many who've been targeted, says the IRS is no longer used in line with its mission: "They're supposed to be collecting revenues, not snooping and trampling on the First Amendment rights of the citizens. We are not subjects of a king, we are permitted to engage in First Amendment activities without reporting those activities to the IRS."

***

All these things—the pushing around of nuns, the limiting of freedoms that were helping kids get a start in life, the targeting of conservative groups—all these things have the effect of breaking bonds of trust between government and the people. They make citizens see Washington as an alien and hostile power.

Washington sees the disaffection. They read the polls, they know.

They call it rage. But it feels more like grief. Like the loss of something you never thought you'd lose, your sense of your country and your place in it, your rights in it.

Simple Thoughts on Race, Guns & Murder

For 'the Fun of It'

The debate we aren't having about a murder in Oklahoma.

WSJ Editorial, August 22, 2013

Three teenagers were charged Tuesday in the killing of a white college student in Duncan, Oklahoma, and part of the story is what didn't happen. There was no saturation cable TV coverage, no press conference featuring Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, and no statement from the Oval Office. The death of Christopher Lane, while as troubling as that of Trayvon Martin, will not become a national touchstone of racial and cultural debate or reflection.

But maybe it should. A 22-year-old Australian from Melbourne, Lane was attending East Central University in Ada, Oklahoma, to pursue his dream of playing that American pastime, baseball. He was visiting the parents of his girlfriend in Duncan after the two had recently returned from visiting Australia. Lane was jogging down a street on Friday evening when, according to prosecutors, he was shot in the back.

Police chief Dan Ford said that 17-year-old Michael Dewayne Jones, who drove the car and was charged with accessory to murder after the fact, told police that the three boys were bored and had killed Lane for "the fun of it." Prosecutor Jason Hicks said 16-year-old Chancey Allen Luna was sitting in the rear of the car when he fired a .22 caliber revolver and killed Lane.

There won't be any debate over "stand your ground" laws or self-defense in this case because Lane had no chance to defend himself. There is no evidence so far of a racial motive. Lane seems to have been shot simply because he was there.

The murder is a national story in Australia, where people are contemplating the horror of such casual killing in America. Some are focusing on the ease of obtaining a gun in the U.S., as (inevitably) is the reflexive CNN, and it would almost be a relief if we could blame such a murder on guns.

Then we wouldn't have to focus on a culture that produces teenagers for whom the prospect of shooting an innocent man in the back on a Friday evening apparently raised not a scintilla of conscience. That is the deeper tragedy, and the real scandal, of too much of American life.


That is also an issue of far greater consequence to the future of young black men than the acquittal of George Zimmerman in his awful showdown with Trayvon. If only Mr. Sharpton and his fellow black leaders paid attention to what was missing in the lives of those three teenagers. Maybe President Obama would even care to use it as one of his teachable moments.

Detroit Shrugged

Happening in a City Near You

Lessons From a Front-Row Seat for Detroit's Dysfunction

Running the city's transportation department was like being in the boiler room of the Titanic.

By: Bill Nojay, WSJ Opinion, July 29, 2013

Since Detroit declared bankruptcy on July 18, the city's crippling problems with corruption, unfunded benefits and pension liabilities have gotten the bulk of airtime. But equally at fault for its fiscal demise are the city's management structure and union and civil-service rules that hamstring efforts to make municipal services more efficient. I would know: I had a front-row seat for this dysfunction.

Last year, I served as chief operating officer of the Detroit Department of Transportation. I was hired as a contractor for the position, and in my eight months on the job I got a vivid sense of the city's dysfunction. Almost every day, a problem would arise, a solution would be found—but implementing the fix would prove impossible.

We began staff meetings each morning by learning which vendors had cut us off for lack of payment, including suppliers of essential items like motor oil or brake pads. Bus engines that the transportation department had sent out to be overhauled were sidelined for months when vendors refused to ship them back because the city hadn't paid for the repair. There were days when 20% of our scheduled runs did not go out because of a lack of road-ready buses.

The obvious solution for a cash-tight operation is to triage vendor payments to ensure that absolutely essential items are always there. But in Detroit, no one inside the transportation department could direct payments to the most important vendors. A bureaucrat working miles away in City Hall, not responsible to the transportation department (and, frankly, not responsible to anyone we could identify), decided who got paid and who didn't. That meant vendors supplying noncritical items were often paid even as public buses were sidelined.

A major expense for Detroit is the cost of lawsuits filed against the city for various alleged injuries on municipal property. At the transportation department, there were hundreds of claims arising from bus accidents alone. How many of those claims were fraudulent? How many were settled (with the cost of settlement and legal fees posted against DDOT's budget) at unnecessarily high cost?

It was impossible to know, since the city's law department handled all litigation and settled cases without consulting the DDOT staff. It was the law department's policy to settle virtually all claims—which meant that the transportation department became easy prey for personal-injury lawyers bringing cases with little or no merit, costing the city millions.

In the DDOT we tried to hire our own lawyers to fight these claims. But we were blocked by city charter provisions prohibiting any city department from hiring outside counsel without the approval of the Detroit City Council. When we inquired with the mayor's office we were told that the union representing the law department—in Detroit, even the lawyers are unionized—would block any such approval.

Disability and workers' comp claims were routinely paid with no investigation into their validity. More than 80% of the transportation department's 1,400 employees were certified for family medical-leave absences—meaning they could call in for a day off without prior notice, often leaving buses without drivers or mechanics. Management's only recourse to get the work done was to pay the remaining employees overtime, at time-and-a-half rates. DDOT's overtime costs were running over $20 million a year.

Then there was the obstructionism of the City Council. While I was at the DDOT, roughly 10% of bus-fare collection boxes were broken. In another city, getting a contract to buy spare parts to repair these boxes would be routine. The City Council publicly expressed outrage that we didn't fix the fare boxes, since the city was losing an estimated $5 million a year in uncollected fares.

But the reason we couldn't fix the fare boxes was that the contract for the necessary spare parts had been sitting, untouched, in the City Council's offices for nine months. Due to past corruption, virtually every contract had to be approved by the council, resulting in months-long delays. Micromanagement by the council was endemic; I once sat for five hours waiting to discuss a minor transportation matter while City Council members debated whether to authorize the demolition of individual vacant and vandalized houses, one by one. There are over 40,000 vacant houses in Detroit.

Union and civil-service rules made it virtually impossible to fire anyone. A six-step disciplinary process provided job protection to anyone with a pulse, regardless of poor performance or bad behavior. Even the time-honored management technique of moving someone up or sideways where he would do less harm didn't work in Detroit: Job descriptions and qualification requirements were so strict it was impossible for management to rearrange the organization chart. I was a manager with virtually no authority over personnel.

When the federal government got involved, it only made things worse. A federal lawsuit charging that the DDOT did not fully comply with the law in accommodating disabled riders had dragged on for years because of idealistic but painfully naïve Justice Department attorneys seeking regulatory perfection. I felt like a guy in the boiler room of the Titanic, desperately bailing to keep the ship afloat for a few more hours while the DOJ attorneys complained from their first-class cabin that their champagne wasn't properly chilled.

Detroit's other municipal departments had similar challenges. I would often compare notes with managers trying to run the city's street lights, recreation programs, police departments and smaller offices. All of us faced similar gridlock.


The last thing Detroit needs is a bailout. What it needs is to sweep away a city charter that protects only bureaucrats, civil-service rules that straightjacket municipal departments, and obsolete union contracts. A bailout would just keep the dysfunction in place. Time to start over.

You Have Zero Privacy

The Sum of All Fears

By DANIEL HENNINGER, WSJ Opinion, June 13, 2013

The IRS audits and NSA surveillance flow

 into the same national anxieties.

Here is Barack Obama commenting last Friday on the National Security Agency's antiterrorist surveillance programs: "We've got congressional oversight and judicial oversight. And if people can't trust not only the executive branch but also don't trust Congress and don't trust federal judges to make sure that we're abiding by the Constitution, due process and rule of law, then we're going to have some problems here."

Uh-huh.

Herewith a partial list of political groups that said they were subjected to over-the-top audits by the Internal Revenue Service:

Greenwich Tea Party Patriots, Greater Phoenix Tea PartyPatriots, Laurens County Tea Party, Northeast Tarrant Tea Party, Myrtle Beach Tea Party, Albuquerque Tea Party, San Antonio Tea Party, Richmond Tea Party, Manassas Tea Party, Honolulu Tea Party, Waco Tea Party, Chattanooga Tea Party and American Patriots Against Government Excess.

What that target list shows is there was never one "tea party." It was collections of citizens spontaneously gathering all over the country under one easy-to-remember name. Their purpose was to do politics. For that, their government hit them hard.

In January the pollsters at the Pew Research Center reported that for the first time a majority of Americans—53%—now agree that "the federal government threatens your own personal rights and freedoms."

This is far beyond concerns about the size of government. A majority of people now see the government of Madison, Jefferson and Franklin as a direct, personal threat.

So yes, we have "some problems" here.

People ask whether the IRS scandal will damage the president. Who knows? It depends on who talks to avoid prison. The IRS audits matter because they are a destructive event that happened at a particularly unsettled moment in the country's political and social life.

Cynics say presidents have always sicced the IRS on opponents. Perhaps. But those were simpler times. The IRS audit scandal and the NSA's metadata surveillance may be apples and oranges, but for many the distinctions aren't so obvious. We live today inside a constant torrent of big government and big data. No one should be surprised if a political backlash, however inarticulate, forms against both for inconsistent reasons.

Consider what people are asked to absorb in the news flow now—some of it political, some not. Beyond the IRS audits and NSA surveillance we have a Department of Justice penetrating press activity protected by the First Amendment, stories about Iran's hackers accessing the control-room software of U.S. energy firms, China hacking into everything, reports last month of cyberthieves siphoning millions of dollars from ATMs, rivers of email spam that fill inboxes alongside constant warnings to protect yourself against phishing and malware by storing industrial-strength passwords on encrypted flash drives, stories in this newspaper about social-media apps that exist mainly to collect your personal data for sale to advertisers.

Books have been written about governments using Web technology to censor and control their populations. What's good and evil, helpful and menacing, comes at us with equal force from the same technologies. "Dual-use" was formerly a phrase used mostly in the military. We're all living in a dual-use world now.

Electronic sophisticates say it's all good. Sun Microsystems' former CEO Scott McNealy famously said: "You have zero privacy. Get over it." That's what he thinks. This is a sum-of-all-fears environment tailor-made for eventually producing a public backlash. It's already in the water, with Sen. Rand Paul offering a Fourth Amendment Restoration Act, which he says would stop the NSA's data-mining program. That would be the one protecting us all from homicidal Islamist bombers.

Scott McNealy was almost right. Unavoidably, the citizens of the U.S. or any free society will have to reach an accommodation—a modus vivendi—with complex systems created by experts with abstruse knowledge. But if so, those citizens need to be free to talk about the terms of their accommodations. In short, they need to be free to do politics.

Effective antiterrorism programs such as metadata surveillance or for that matter efforts to produce progress through genetic manipulation may seem self-evidently good to their proponents. But these technologies are inevitably controversial and will only survive if they gain public support. Today that means exposing them to politics.

The goal of the IRS audits was to suppress politics, to shut up those "conservative" tea-party groups to increase the odds that Mr. Obama's side would win. One doubts that Mr. Obama's supporters were distressed about it. But this week they're stressed about "an alarming age of surveillance."

Whatever inchoate anxieties predated this presidency are now worse: a politics rife with suspicion and retribution, and most of the people believing the government, for starters, threatens their freedom.

One may hope Mr. Obama has sufficient political skill to protect the antiterrorism structures he inherited. It will be the job of the next president to prevent the public's sense of personal political threat from heading toward 60% and beyond.

How People Are Killed in America

Related News: California School (Hayward) Starts Toy Gun Buy-Back Program (6/10/13). Click here.

Statistic of the Day - Chicago

Where Bullies Work

The 'Chicago Way' Alive and Well

 The IRS Scandal Started at the Top

The bureaucrats at the Internal Revenue Service did exactly what the president said was the right and honorable thing to do.

By Kimberley Strassel, WSJ Opinion, May 19, 2013

Was the White House involved in the IRS's targeting of conservatives? No investigation needed to answer that one. Of course it was.

President Obama and Co. are in full deniability mode, noting that the IRS is an "independent" agency and that they knew nothing about its abuse. The media and Congress are sleuthing for some hint that Mr. Obama picked up the phone and sicced the tax dogs on his enemies.

But that's not how things work in post-Watergate Washington. Mr. Obama didn't need to pick up the phone. All he needed to do was exactly what he did do, in full view, for three years: Publicly suggest that conservative political groups were engaged in nefarious deeds; publicly call out by name political opponents whom he'd like to see harassed; and publicly have his party pressure the IRS to take action.

Mr. Obama now professes shock and outrage that bureaucrats at the IRS did exactly what the president of the United States said was the right and honorable thing to do. "He put a target on our backs, and he's now going to blame the people who are shooting at us?" asks Idaho businessman and longtime Republican donor Frank VanderSloot.

Mr. VanderSloot is the Obama target who in 2011 made a sizable donation to a group supporting Mitt Romney. In April 2012, an Obama campaign website named and slurred eight Romney donors. It tarred Mr. VanderSloot as a "wealthy individual" with a "less-than-reputable record." Other donors were described as having been "on the wrong side of the law."

This was the Obama version of the phone call—put out to every government investigator (and liberal activist) in the land.

Twelve days later, a man working for a political opposition-research firm called an Idaho courthouse for Mr. VanderSloot's divorce records. In June, the IRS informed Mr. VanderSloot and his wife of an audit of two years of their taxes. In July, the Department of Labor informed him of an audit of the guest workers on his Idaho cattle ranch. In September, the IRS informed him of a second audit, of one of his businesses. Mr. VanderSloot, who had never been audited before, was subject to three in the four months after Mr. Obama teed him up for such scrutiny.

The last of these audits was only concluded in recent weeks. Not one resulted in a fine or penalty. But Mr. VanderSloot has been waiting more than 20 months for a sizable refund and estimates his legal bills are $80,000. That figure doesn't account for what the president's vilification has done to his business and reputation.

The Obama call for scrutiny wasn't a mistake; it was the president's strategy—one pursued throughout 2012. The way to limit Romney money was to intimidate donors from giving. Donate, and the president would at best tie you to Big Oil or Wall Street, at worst put your name in bold, and flag you as "less than reputable" to everyone who worked for him: the IRS, the SEC, the Justice Department. The president didn't need a telephone; he had a megaphone.

The same threat was made to conservative groups that might dare play in the election. As early as January 2010, Mr. Obama would, in his state of the union address, cast aspersions on the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, claiming that it "reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests" (read conservative groups).

The president derided "tea baggers." Vice President Joe Biden compared them to "terrorists." In more than a dozen speeches Mr. Obama raised the specter that these groups represented nefarious interests that were perverting elections. "Nobody knows who's paying for these ads," he warned. "We don't know where this money is coming from," he intoned.

In case the IRS missed his point, he raised the threat of illegality: "All around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity, who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates . . . And they don't have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don't know if it's a foreign-controlled corporation."

Short of directly asking federal agencies to investigate these groups, this is as close as it gets. Especially as top congressional Democrats were putting in their own versions of phone calls, sending letters to the IRS that accused it of having "failed to address" the "problem" of groups that were "improperly engaged" in campaigns. Because guess who controls that "independent" agency's budget?

The IRS is easy to demonize, but it doesn't exist in a vacuum. It got its heading from a president, and his party, who did in fact send it orders—openly, for the world to see. In his Tuesday press grilling, no question agitated White House Press Secretary Jay Carney more than the one that got to the heart of the matter: Given the president's "animosity" toward Citizens United, might he have "appreciated or wanted the IRS to be looking and scrutinizing those . . ." Mr. Carney cut off the reporter with "That's a preposterous assertion."

Preposterous because, according to Mr. Obama, he is "outraged" and "angry" that the IRS looked into the very groups and individuals that he spent years claiming were shady, undemocratic, even lawbreaking. After all, he expects the IRS to "operate with absolute integrity." Even when he does not.
Write to kim@wsj.com.

When Words Mean Nothing

Ends Justify the Means

Hey, Idiot, There is a Process For This

Bloomberg Says Interpretation of Constitution Will ‘Have to Change’ After Boston Bombing

By Jill Colvin 4/22 

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Monday the country’s interpretation of the Constitution will “have to change” to allow for greater security to stave off future attacks.

“The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry,” Mr. Bloomberg said during a press conference in Midtown. “But we live in a complex world where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.”

Mr. Bloomberg, who has come under fire for the N.Y.P.D.’s monitoring of Muslim communities and other aggressive tactics, said the rest of the country needs to learn from the attacks.

“Look, we live in a very dangerous world. We know there are people who want to take away our freedoms. New Yorkers probably know that as much if not more than anybody else after the terrible tragedy of 9/11,” he said.

“We have to understand that in the world going forward, we’re going to have more cameras and that kind of stuff. That’s good in some sense, but it’s different from what we are used to,” he said.

The mayor pointed to the gun debate and noted the courts have allowed for increasingly stringent regulations in response to ever-more powerful weapons.

“Clearly the  Supreme Court has recognized that you have to have different interpretations of the Second Amendment and what it applies to and reasonable gun laws … Here we’re going to to have to live with reasonable levels of security,” he said, pointing to the use of magnetometers to catch weapons in city schools.

“It really says something bad about us that we have to do it. But our obligation first and foremost is to keep our kids safe in the schools; first and foremost, to keep you safe if you go to a sporting event; first and foremost is to keep you safe if you walk down the streets or go into our parks,” he said. “We cannot let the terrorists put us in a situation where we can’t do those things. And the ways to do that is to provide what we think is an appropriate level of protection.”

Still, Mr. Bloomberg argued the attacks shouldn’t be used as an excuse to persecute certain religions or groups.

“What we cant do is let the protection get in the way of us enjoying our freedoms,” he said.  “You still want to let people practice their religion, no matter what that religion is. And I think one of the great dangers here is going and categorizing anybody from one religion as a terrorist. That’s not true … That would let the terrorists win. That’s what they want us to do.”

You Couldn't Time It Better

Democrats Kickoff Convention on the Day Debt Clock Crosses $16 Trillion

Why I'm Pissed At My Parent's Generation

Their Grandchildren Will Suffer

American Character Is at Stake

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By NICHOLAS EBERSTADT, WSJ, August 31, 2012

The American republic has endured for well over two centuries, but over the past 50 years, the apparatus of American governance has undergone a radical transformation. In some basic respects—its scale, its preoccupations, even many of its purposes—the U.S. government today would be scarcely recognizable to Franklin D. Roosevelt, much less to Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson.

What is monumentally new about the American state today is the vast empire of entitlement payments that it protects, manages and finances. Within living memory, the federal government has become an entitlements machine. As a day-to-day operation, it devotes more attention and resources to the public transfer of money, goods and services to individual citizens than to any other objective, spending more than for all other ends combined.

The growth of entitlement payments over the past half-century has been breathtaking. In 1960, U.S. government transfers to individuals totaled about $24 billion in current dollars, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. By 2010 that total was almost 100 times as large. Even after adjusting for inflation and population growth, entitlement transfers to individuals have grown 727% over the past half-century, rising at an average rate of about 4% a year.

In 2010 alone, government at all levels oversaw a transfer of over $2.2 trillion in money, goods and services. The burden of these entitlements came to slightly more than $7,200 for every person in America. Scaled against a notional family of four, the average entitlements burden for that year alone approached $29,000.

A half-century of unfettered expansion of entitlement outlays has completely inverted the priorities, structure and functions of federal administration as these were understood by all previous generations. Until 1960 the accepted task of the federal government, in keeping with its constitutional charge, was governing. The overwhelming share of federal expenditures was allocated to some limited public services and infrastructure investments and to defending the republic against enemies foreign and domestic.

In 1960, entitlement payments accounted for well under a third of the federal government's total outlays—about the same fraction as in 1940, when the Great Depression was still shaping American life. But over subsequent decades, entitlements as a percentage of total federal spending soared. By 2010 they accounted for just about two-thirds of all federal spending, with all other responsibilities of the federal government making up barely one-third. In a very real sense, entitlements have turned American governance upside-down.

Government data on public transfers can be used to divide entitlement spending into six baskets: income maintenance, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, unemployment insurance and all the others. Broadly speaking, the first two baskets concern entitlements based on poverty or income status; the second two, entitlements attendant on aging or old-age status; and the next, entitlements based on employment status. These entitlements account for about 90% of total government transfers to individuals, and the first four categories comprise about five-sixths of all such spending. These four bear closest consideration.

Poverty- or income-related entitlements—transfers of money, goods or services, including health-care services—accounted for over $650 billion in government outlays in 2010. Between 1960 and 2010, inflation-adjusted transfers for these objectives increased by over 30-fold, or by over 7% a year.

Significantly, however, income and benefit transfers associated with traditional safety-net programs comprised only about a third of entitlements granted on income status, with two-thirds of those allocations absorbed by the health-care guarantees offered through the Medicaid program.

For their part, entitlements for older Americans—Medicare, Social Security and other pension payments—worked out to even more by 2010, about $1.2 trillion. In real terms, these transfers multiplied by a factor of about 12 over that period—or an average growth of more than 5% a year. But in purely arithmetic terms, the most astonishing growth of entitlements has been for health-care guarantees based on claims of age (Medicare) or income (Medicaid). Until the mid-1960s, no such entitlements existed; by 2010, these two programs were absorbing more than $900 billion annually.

In current political discourse, it is common to think of the Democrats as the party of entitlements, but long-term trends seem to tell a somewhat different tale. From a purely statistical standpoint, the growth of entitlement spending over the past half-century has been distinctly greater under Republican administrations than Democratic ones. Between 1960 and 2010, the growth of entitlement spending was exponential, but in any given year, it was on the whole roughly 8% higher if the president happened to be a Republican rather than a Democrat.

This is in keeping with the basic facts of the time:

Notwithstanding the criticisms of "big government" that emanated from their Oval Offices from time to time, the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and George W. Bush presided over especially lavish expansions of the American entitlement state. Irrespective of the reputations and the rhetoric of the Democratic and Republican parties today, the empirical correspondence between Republican presidencies and turbocharged entitlement expenditures should underscore the unsettling truth that both political parties have, on the whole, been working together in an often unspoken consensus to fuel the explosion of entitlement spending.

From the founding of our nation until quite recently, the U.S. and its citizens were regarded, at home and abroad, as exceptional in a number of deep and important respects. One of these was their fierce and principled independence, which informed not only the design of the political experiment that is the U.S. Constitution but also their approach to everyday affairs.

The proud self-reliance that struck Alexis de Tocqueville in his visit to the U.S. in the early 1830s extended to personal finances. The American "individualism" about which he wrote did not exclude social cooperation—the young nation was a hotbed of civic associations and voluntary organizations. But in an environment bursting with opportunity, American men and women viewed themselves as accountable for their own situation through their own achievements—a novel outlook at that time, markedly different from the prevailing attitudes of the Old World (or at least the Continent).

The corollaries of this American ethos were, on the one hand, an affinity for personal enterprise and industry and, on the other, a horror of dependency and contempt for anything that smacked of a mendicant mentality. Although many Americans in earlier times were poor, even people in fairly desperate circumstances were known to refuse help or handouts as an affront to their dignity and independence. People who subsisted on public resources were known as "paupers," and provision for them was a local undertaking. Neither beneficiaries nor recipients held the condition of pauperism in high regard.

Overcoming America's historic cultural resistance to government entitlements has been a long and formidable endeavor. But as we know today, this resistance did not ultimately prove an insurmountable obstacle to establishing mass public entitlements and normalizing the entitlement lifestyle. The U.S. is now on the verge of a symbolic threshold: the point at which more than half of all American households receive and accept transfer benefits from the government. From cradle to grave, a treasure chest of government-supplied benefits is there for the taking for every American citizen—and exercising one's legal rights to these many blandishments is now part of the American way of life.

As Americans opt to reward themselves ever more lavishly with entitlement benefits, the question of how to pay for these government transfers inescapably comes to the fore. Citizens have become ever more broad-minded about the propriety of tapping new sources of finance for supporting their appetite for more entitlements. The taker mentality has thus ineluctably gravitated toward taking from a pool of citizens who can offer no resistance to such schemes: the unborn descendants of today's entitlement-seeking population.

Among policy makers in Washington today, it is very close to received wisdom that America's national hunger for entitlement benefits has placed the country on a financially untenable trajectory, with the federal budget generating ultimately unbearable expenditures and levels of public debt. The bipartisan 2010 Bowles/Simpson Commission put this view plainly: "Our nation is on an unsustainable fiscal path."

The prospect of careening along an unsustainable economic road is deeply disturbing. But another possibility is even more frightening—namely, that the present course may in fact be sustainable for far longer than most people today might imagine.

The U.S. is a very wealthy society. If it so chooses, it has vast resources to squander. And internationally, the dollar is still the world's reserve currency; there remains great scope for financial abuse of that privilege.

Such devices might well postpone the day of fiscal judgment: not so the day of reckoning for American character, which may be sacrificed long before the credibility of the U.S. economy. Some would argue that it is an asset already wasting away before our very eyes.

—Mr. Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. Excerpted from "A Nation of Takers: America's Entitlement Epidemic," forthcoming from the Templeton Press.

Ugly Mishmash of Christian Fundamentalism, Racism & Authoritarianism

Conservatives have broader moral sense than liberals, says ‘Righteous Mind’ author

By Emily Esfahani Smith - Special to The Washington Times

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

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NEW YORK — In 2004, Jonathan Haidt had an experience that changed his intellectual life.

The influential moral and social psychologist — at the time an atheist and a liberal — was at the Strand, a used-book shop in New York, when the brown spine of a book called “Conservatism” caught his eye. Edited by historian Jerry Z. Muller, it was an anthology of readings from David Hume to Philip Rieff.

Three pages into the book, Mr. Haidt was floored — that is, sitting on the ground of the bookstore — paging through “all these gems of insight on the relationship between human flourishing and society,” the spirited 48-year-old academic recalled over tea and chocolate in his office at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

Its passages from Edmund Burke, Friedrich Hayek and Winston Churchill confirmed Mr. Haidt’s empirical research about the limits of rationalism, human nature’s flaws, the necessity of social institutions and the value of the sacred. That confirmation was surprising to the man who, frustrated by the presidential election defeat of John F. Kerry in 2004, entered the field of political psychology to “help liberals win.”

Before stumbling across the Muller anthology, the popular formerUniversity of Virginia psychology professor thought of conservatism as a “Frankenstein monster,” he says — an ugly mishmash of Christian fundamentalism, racism and authoritarianism.

But then, covering his copy of “Conservatism” with dense marginalia, he was forced to reconsider: “Might conservatives have a better formula for how to create a healthy, happy society?”

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Predictability

Rules for America's Road to Recovery

As Hayek taught us, predictable policies will help restore economic prosperity and preserve freedom.

By JOHN B. TAYLOR, WSJ Opinion, June 1, 2012

America's economic future is increasingly uncertain. In my view, unpredictable economic policy—massive fiscal "stimulus" and ballooning debt, the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing with multiyear near-zero interest rates, and regulatory uncertainty due to ObamaCare and the Dodd-Frank financial reforms—is the main cause of persistent high unemployment and our feeble recovery from the recession.

A reform strategy built on more predictable, rules-based fiscal, monetary and regulatory policies will help restore economic prosperity. That will be a daunting task, of course, but as they undertake the necessary changes, reformers should pay close attention to what the great economist and philosopher Friedrich A. Hayek wrote in the middle years of the last century.

Hayek argued that the case for rules-based policy goes beyond economics and should appeal to all those concerned about assaults on freedom. He wrote in his classic 1944 book, "The Road to Serfdom," that "nothing distinguishes more clearly conditions in a free country from those in a country under arbitrary government than the observance in the former of the great principles known as the Rule of Law."

Hayek added, "Stripped of all technicalities, this means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand—rules which make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers in given circumstances and to plan one's individual affairs on the basis of this knowledge."

Rules-based policies make the economy work better by providing a predictable policy framework within which consumers and businesses make decisions. But they also protect freedom, a concept Hayek developed in his 1960 book, "The Constitution of Liberty."

Hayek traces the relationship of the rule of law to freedom back to Aristotle, and then to Cicero, about whom he wrote, "No other author shows more clearly . . . that freedom is dependent upon certain attributes of the law, its generality and certainty, and the restrictions it places on the discretion of authority." Hayek also quotes from the Second Treatise of Civil Government by John Locke, the father of classical liberalism who had a profound influence on America's Founding Fathers: "The end [meaning the purpose] of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom . . . where there is no law, there is no freedom."

Hayek understood that a rules-based system has a dual purpose—freedom and prosperity. Thus the needed reforms in America today—and in any society overburdened by government intervention—are supported by two constituencies: those focused on freedom and those focused on prosperity.

But skeptics ask how a system of policy rules can work when politicians and government officials want to "do something" to help the economy or feel public pressure to do so. A rules-based system with less discretion sounds good in theory, they say, but rules mean you do nothing, and that is impossible in today's charged political climate and 24-hour news cycle.

Hayek had an answer to this. In "The Road to Serfdom" he wrote that it was wrong to say that the "characteristic attitude [of a rules-based system] is inaction of the state" and presented a counter example to this common view, saying that "the state controlling weights and measures (or preventing fraud or deception in any other way) is certainly acting."

Consider other examples. Rules for monetary policy do not mean that the central bank does not change the instruments of policy (interest rates or the money supply) in response to events, or provide loans in the case of a bank run. Rather they mean that they take such actions in a predictable manner.

But in the years immediately preceding the 2008 financial crisis, monetary policy deviated from the more predictable rules-based policy that worked in the 1980s and '90s—i.e., the Federal Reserve held rates too low for too long. Moreover, government regulators did not enforce existing rules on risk-taking at banks and other financial institutions, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Then came the discretionary stimulus packages and exploding debt, the regulatory unpredictability associated with ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank, which includes hundreds of rules still waiting to be written, and the unprecedented quantitative easing through which the Federal Reserve bought 77% of new federal debt in 2011.

The U.S. tax code has become particularly unpredictable. The number of provisions expiring has skyrocketed to 133 in 2010-12 from 11 in 2000-02. And now the epitome of unpredictable policy is upon us in the form of a self-inflicted "fiscal cliff" where virtually the entire tax code will be up for grabs by the end of this year.

It is deviation from a rule or a strategy that creates uncertainty and hinders prosperity. Thus, regulators who decide not to act when financial institutions take on risk beyond the limits of the rules and regulations are not being faithful to the law and indeed to the rule of law.

What can citizens do to achieve a more rules-based system? Here Hayek issued a warning. In a chapter in "The Road to Serfdom" called "Why the Worst Get on Top," he argued that there is a bias against individuals in government who firmly believe in rules-based policy. People who have the ambition to get to the top frequently have a bias toward discretionary interventionism, whether motivated by the desire to capture regulatory agencies on behalf of clients, advance the interests of cronies or indeed simply to position themselves for further career advancement later on.

Those who benefit directly from interventions will work hard to make sure that officials who favor discretionary activism advance. Firms in the financial industry, for example, that benefit from a bailout mentality will favor officials who are comfortable with bailouts. Perhaps the answer is to find people who are "overcommitted" to rules-based policy. Then, after all the inevitable pressures and perverse incentives, they may emerge with a sensible balance.

Some will claim, of course, that crises force policy makers to deviate from predictable rules. One can argue that bailouts and other discretionary interventions were needed during the panic of the fall of 2008, and perhaps they prevented a more serious panic. But that is like saying that the person who set fire to your house should be exonerated because he helped put out the fire and saved a few rooms.

Mr. Taylor is professor of economics at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His book, "First Principles: Five Keys to Restoring America's Prosperity" (Norton 2012), was awarded the 2012 Hayek prize by the Manhattan Institute. This op-ed is adapted from his Hayek Prize Lecture delivered on May 31.