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Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
Surprise: The IRS leans left — way left
Surprise: The IRS leans left — way left:
How much did politics drive the Internal Revenue Service to target conservative activist groups?
As NRO’s Andrew Stiles notes, the “partisan union” at the IRS likely played a huge role:
Follow Meredith Jessup on Twitter
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Read more stories from TheBlaze
‘Bigoted, Religious [Zealots]‘: High School Senior Allegedly Expelled, Charged With Felonies Over Gay Relationship With ‘Consenting’ Fellow Student
‘The Daily Show’ Creator Makes Outrageously Offensive Anti-Conservative Joke About Okla. Tornado
Washington Times Writer: Fox News Scandal Goes ‘Much Deeper,’ W.H. Sitting on Something Top Obama Aides ‘Terrified’ About
University Will Investigate Christian Professor’s Intelligent Design Class Following Atheist Furor
See the First Behind-the-Scenes Photos as Beck and Mercury One Survey the Damage in Okla.
How much did politics drive the Internal Revenue Service to target conservative activist groups?
As NRO’s Andrew Stiles notes, the “partisan union” at the IRS likely played a huge role:
The IRS may be “an independent enforcement agency with only two political appointees,” in the words of White House press secretary Jay Carney, but its employees are represented by a powerful, deeply partisan union whose boss has publicly disparaged the Tea Party and criticized the Republican party for having ties to it.
The White House continues to insist that profound incompetence, not partisan malice, led the IRS to single out conservative groups applying for nonprofit status. If the testimony of acting commissioner Steven Miller is true, incompetence was certainly a factor. But given all that has come to light about the agency and its employees in recent days, it would be hard to believe that its targeting of conservative groups wasn’t also politically motivated.
As the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney and others have pointed out, the agency’s employees are heavily engaged in politics and lean considerably to the left. Records show that IRS employees in 2012 donated more than twice as much to the Obama as to the Romney campaign. Nearly two-thirds of all employee contributions over the last three elections cycles have gone to Democrats.
Related:
- The IRS is a political bully
- NBC correspondent wonders why Dems aren’t more outraged over IRS scheme
- Outgoing IRS chief: I wouldn’t say we ‘targeted’ conservatives, per se…
- Boehner reacts to IRS scandal: ‘Who’s going to jail over this?’
- Report: IRS deliberately waited until after election to admit scandal
Follow Meredith Jessup on Facebook
Read more stories from TheBlaze
‘Bigoted, Religious [Zealots]‘: High School Senior Allegedly Expelled, Charged With Felonies Over Gay Relationship With ‘Consenting’ Fellow Student
‘The Daily Show’ Creator Makes Outrageously Offensive Anti-Conservative Joke About Okla. Tornado
Washington Times Writer: Fox News Scandal Goes ‘Much Deeper,’ W.H. Sitting on Something Top Obama Aides ‘Terrified’ About
University Will Investigate Christian Professor’s Intelligent Design Class Following Atheist Furor
See the First Behind-the-Scenes Photos as Beck and Mercury One Survey the Damage in Okla.
Guest Post: Centralization And Sociopathology
Guest Post: Centralization And Sociopathology:
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,
Concentrated power and wealth are intrinsically sociopathological by their very nature.
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,
Concentrated power and wealth are intrinsically sociopathological by their very nature.
I have long spoken of the dangers inherent to centralization of power and the extreme concentrations of wealth centralization inevitably creates.
To Fix Healthcare, Let 100 Solutions Bloom (February 26, 2013)
Longtime contributor C.D. recently highlighted another danger of centralization: sociopaths/psychopaths excel in organizations that centralize power, and their ability to flatter, browbeat and manipulate others greases their climb to the top.
In effect, centralization is tailor-made for sociopaths gaining power. Sociopaths seek power over others, and centralization gives them the perfect avenue to control over millions or even entire nations.
Even worse (from the view of non-sociopaths), their perverse abilities are tailor-made for excelling in office and national politics via ruthless elimination of rivals and enemies and grandiose appeals to national greatness, ideological purity, etc.
As C.D. points out, the ultimate protection against sociopathology is to minimize the power held in any one agency, organization or institution:
After you watch these films on psychopaths, I think you'll have an even greater understanding of why your premise of centralization is a key problem of our society. The first film points out that psychopaths generally thrive in the corporate/government top-down organization (I have seen it happen in my agency, unfortunately) and that when they come to power, their values (or lack thereof) tend to pervade the organization to varying degrees. In some cases, they end up creating secondary psychopaths which is kind of like a spiritual/moral disease that infects people.
If we are to believe the premise in the film that there are always psychopaths among us in small numbers, it follows then that we must limit the power of any one institution, whether it's private or public, so that the damage created by psychopaths is limited.
It is very difficult for many people to fathom that there are people in our society that are that evil, for lack of a better term, and it is even harder for many people in society to accept that people in the higher strata of our society can exhibit these dangerous traits.
The same goes for criminal behavior. From my studies, it's pretty clear that criminality is fairly constant throughout the different levels of our society and yet, it is the lower classes that are subjected to more scrutiny by law enforcement. The disparity between blue collar and white collar crime is pretty evident when one looks at arrests and sentencing. The total lack of effective enforcement against politically connected banks over the last few years is astounding to me and it sets a dangerous precedent. Corruption and psychopathy go hand in hand.
A less dark reason for avoiding over centralization is that we have to be aware of normal human fallibility. Nobody possesses enough information, experience, ability, lack of bias, etc. to always make the right decisions.
Defense Against the Psychopath (video, 37 minutes; the many photos of political, religious and secular leaders will likely offend many/most; if you look past these outrages, there is useful information here)
The Sociopath Next Door (video, 37 minutes)
As C.D. observes, once sociopaths rule an organization or nation, they create a zombie army of secondary sociopaths beneath them as those who resist are undermined, banished, fired or exterminated. If there is any lesson to be drawn from Iraq, it is how a single sociopath can completely undermine and destroy civil society by empowering secondary sociopaths and eliminating or marginalizing anyone who dares to cling to their humanity, conscience and independence.
"Going along to get along" breeds passive acceptance of sociopathology as "the new normal" and mimicry of the values and techniques of sociopathology as the ambitious and fearful (i.e. almost everyone) scramble to emulate the "successful" leadership.
Organizations can be perverted into institutionalizing sociopathology via sociopathological goals and rules of conduct. Make the metric of success in war a body count of dead "enemy combatants" and you'll soon have dead civilians stacked like cordwood as proof of every units' outstanding success.
Make lowering unemployment the acme of policy success and soon every agency will be gaming and manipulating data to reach that metric of success. Make higher grades the metric of academic success and soon every kid is getting a gold star and an A or B.
Centralization has another dark side: those ensconced in highly concentrated centers of power (for example, The White House) are in another world, and they find it increasingly easy to become isolated from the larger context and to slip into reliance on sycophants, toadies (i.e. budding secondary sociopaths) and "experts" (i.e. apparatchiks and factotums) who are equally influenced by the intense "high" of concentrated power/wealth.
Increasingly out of touch with those outside the circle of power, those within the circle slide into a belief in the superiority of their knowledge, skills and awareness--the very definition of sociopathology.
Even worse (if that is possible), the incestuous nature of the tight circle of power breeds a uniformity of opinion and ideology that creates a feedback loop that marginalizes dissenters and those with open minds. Dissenters are soon dismissed--"not a team player"-- or trotted out for PR purposes, i.e. as evidence the administration maintains ties to the outside world.
Those few dissenters who resist the siren song of power soon face a choice: either quietly quit "to pursue other opportunities" (the easy way out) or quit in a blast of public refutation of the administration's policies.
Public dissenters are quickly crucified by those in power, and knowing this fate awaits any dissenter places a powerful disincentive on "going public" about the sociopathology of the inner circle of power.
On rare occasions, an insider has the courage and talent to secure documentation that details the sociopathology of a policy, agency or administration (for example, Daniel Ellsberg and The Pentagon Papers).
Nothing infuriates a sociopath or a sociopathological organization more than the exposure of their sociopathology, and so those in power will stop at nothing to silence, discredit, criminalize or eliminate the heroic whistleblower.
In these ways, centralized power is itself is a sociopathologizing force. We cannot understand the present devolution of our civil society, economy and ethics unless we understand that concentrated power and wealth are intrinsically sociopathological by their very nature.
The solution: a culture of decentralization, transparency and open competition, what I call the DATA model (Decentralized, Adaptive, Transparent and Accountable) in my book Why Things Are Falling Apart and What We Can Do About It.
Why Government Aid Programs Aren’t the Best Way to End Poverty
Why Government Aid Programs Aren’t the Best Way to End Poverty:
Based on the high standards of living enjoyed by their citizens, you might think that the governments of First World countries know how to create development. They don’t. Development isn’t created by anyone, not least well-intentioned politicians or development “experts”. The process of improving well-being only takes place in an environment that encourages constant innovation and experimentation.
Unfortunately, the state-led aid industry not only neglects the realities of development, but often takes actions that actively undermine it. For First World countries, development does not mean allowing other societies to go through the same messy process they did themselves. It entails top-down planning and grandiose promises that – this time – their plans will end poverty and suffering for good. Just consider the $9bn (£5.9bn) pledged to Haiti following its 2010 earthquake. Only a small portion was delivered, and even that has proven ineffective. Haiti’s President Michel Martelly recently concluded that aid “isn’t showing results”.
There are two reasons why state-provided aid cannot create society-wide prosperity. First, policymakers do not have access to the knowledge needed to allocate scarce resources to their best uses. In his critique of socialism in the 1930s and 1940s, Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek made this exact point, noting that even the most qualified and benevolent planners lack the knowledge to produce even the most basic items in a cost-effective manner.
Investor Thomas Thwaites recently embarked on a fascinating endeavour, the Toaster Project, which illustrates Hayek’s point. Thwaites tried to build a simple toaster from scratch. He quickly found the task was overly complex, involving hundreds of parts and materials from many locations. After much travel and effort to extract and process these materials, he constructed his (extremely ugly) toaster. Upon being plugged into an electric socket, it burned out within seconds. Thwaites realised that “the scale of industry involved in making a toaster is ridiculous, but at the same time the chain of discoveries and small technological developments that occurred along the way make it entirely reasonable.” No central planner determined the process, yet toasters are readily available. This is economic development.
The perverse incentives associated with aid are a second reason governments can’t create development. These exist both within the recipient and donor governments. For recipients, aid creates the incentive for already dysfunctional governments to remain ineffective. A cross-country study by Stephen Knack of the World Bank found that foreign assistance undermines the quality of political institutions in recipient countries through weakened accountability of political actors, more corruption, greater chances of conflict, and a weakening of the incentive to reform inefficient institutions and policies.
For donors, government agencies tend to focus on spending money as quickly as possible on observable outputs to signal their importance and the need for more money. In the absence of clear lines of accountability, money is often wasted. Consider that a recent report by the Special Inspector General for the Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) identified $8bn in funds that were either wasted or unaccounted for. When people are not held responsible for their actions, they tend to act carelessly. Aid efforts are plagued by similar issues.
Economic freedom, which requires general protections of person and property, avoids both of these problems. It does not fall prey to the knowledge problem that Hayek warned of because it recognises that attempting to micromanage economic outcomes is doomed to fail. Likewise, it avoids creating perverse incentives because it limits direct political interventions into voluntary interaction between people.
What can be done? Instead of looking to fix other societies, developed nations should focus on their own policies towards people living elsewhere. As the Toaster Project illustrates, increasing the extent of the market is the best means of delivering more and cheaper goods and services. If the desired end is to help the worst off, this provides a benchmark for judging policies: does it contribute to increasing the extent of the voluntary market? If the answer is “yes”, those policies will be most effective at improving living standards and removing suffering.
Expert Commentary
Based on the high standards of living enjoyed by their citizens, you might think that the governments of First World countries know how to create development. They don’t. Development isn’t created by anyone, not least well-intentioned politicians or development “experts”. The process of improving well-being only takes place in an environment that encourages constant innovation and experimentation.
Unfortunately, the state-led aid industry not only neglects the realities of development, but often takes actions that actively undermine it. For First World countries, development does not mean allowing other societies to go through the same messy process they did themselves. It entails top-down planning and grandiose promises that – this time – their plans will end poverty and suffering for good. Just consider the $9bn (£5.9bn) pledged to Haiti following its 2010 earthquake. Only a small portion was delivered, and even that has proven ineffective. Haiti’s President Michel Martelly recently concluded that aid “isn’t showing results”.
There are two reasons why state-provided aid cannot create society-wide prosperity. First, policymakers do not have access to the knowledge needed to allocate scarce resources to their best uses. In his critique of socialism in the 1930s and 1940s, Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek made this exact point, noting that even the most qualified and benevolent planners lack the knowledge to produce even the most basic items in a cost-effective manner.
Investor Thomas Thwaites recently embarked on a fascinating endeavour, the Toaster Project, which illustrates Hayek’s point. Thwaites tried to build a simple toaster from scratch. He quickly found the task was overly complex, involving hundreds of parts and materials from many locations. After much travel and effort to extract and process these materials, he constructed his (extremely ugly) toaster. Upon being plugged into an electric socket, it burned out within seconds. Thwaites realised that “the scale of industry involved in making a toaster is ridiculous, but at the same time the chain of discoveries and small technological developments that occurred along the way make it entirely reasonable.” No central planner determined the process, yet toasters are readily available. This is economic development.
The perverse incentives associated with aid are a second reason governments can’t create development. These exist both within the recipient and donor governments. For recipients, aid creates the incentive for already dysfunctional governments to remain ineffective. A cross-country study by Stephen Knack of the World Bank found that foreign assistance undermines the quality of political institutions in recipient countries through weakened accountability of political actors, more corruption, greater chances of conflict, and a weakening of the incentive to reform inefficient institutions and policies.
For donors, government agencies tend to focus on spending money as quickly as possible on observable outputs to signal their importance and the need for more money. In the absence of clear lines of accountability, money is often wasted. Consider that a recent report by the Special Inspector General for the Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) identified $8bn in funds that were either wasted or unaccounted for. When people are not held responsible for their actions, they tend to act carelessly. Aid efforts are plagued by similar issues.
Economic freedom, which requires general protections of person and property, avoids both of these problems. It does not fall prey to the knowledge problem that Hayek warned of because it recognises that attempting to micromanage economic outcomes is doomed to fail. Likewise, it avoids creating perverse incentives because it limits direct political interventions into voluntary interaction between people.
What can be done? Instead of looking to fix other societies, developed nations should focus on their own policies towards people living elsewhere. As the Toaster Project illustrates, increasing the extent of the market is the best means of delivering more and cheaper goods and services. If the desired end is to help the worst off, this provides a benchmark for judging policies: does it contribute to increasing the extent of the voluntary market? If the answer is “yes”, those policies will be most effective at improving living standards and removing suffering.
The Limbaugh Theorem
The Limbaugh Theorem:
Earlier this week I wrote a piece about how Barack Obama was criticizing “Washington’s priorities” and the IRS scandal, as if he had not been president for the past four years and four months. There is something brazen and audacious in even attempting something like this. I speculated that Mr. Obama is unable to take responsibility for the problems that have occurred on his watch for reasons rooted in cognitive dissonance (failures cannot possibly happen on the watch of the Great and Mighty Obama). He is engaged in what psychiatrists call disassociation.
A friend alerted me to the fact that a version of this analysis had already been offered up by Rush Limbaugh, who in the aftermath of the 2012 election was trying to make sense of the president’s ability to escape responsibility for his multiple failures. Why did polls show massive dissatisfaction with the country’s direction while at the same time supporting Mr. Obama’s agenda?This gave rise to what Rush calls the Limbaugh Theorem, which is that Obama has mastered the ability to always be seen as “opposing everything that’s happening, even the things he is causing to happen. He is on a perpetual campaign.” A variation of the Limbaugh Theorem can be seen in the unfolding scandals now buffeting the administration. According to Rush, “[Obama] gets away with everything precisely by appearing to have no involvement with it … He gets away with not being tied to [the IRS scandal] like he’s not tied to the jobs numbers, he’s not tied to the debt, he’s not tied to the economy. He’s not tied to anything going wrong.”
It seems to me the Limbaugh Theorem is on the mark, that Limbaugh once again got it right and got it early. Mr. Obama has shown a remarkable, Houdini-like ability to escape accountability for his mistakes. Part of the explanation for this undoubtedly has to do with an unprecedented bias in the press and how they choose to frame stories. Part of it may also have to do with what is known as “low information voters.” But the fact that the American people have allowed the president to escape responsibility for his failed policies time and again is clearly problematic. The question is whether Obama can replicate in his second term what he did in his first. I hope not, and in the end I believe the truth will out. But it’s not foreordained, and we’ll find out soon enough.
Earlier this week I wrote a piece about how Barack Obama was criticizing “Washington’s priorities” and the IRS scandal, as if he had not been president for the past four years and four months. There is something brazen and audacious in even attempting something like this. I speculated that Mr. Obama is unable to take responsibility for the problems that have occurred on his watch for reasons rooted in cognitive dissonance (failures cannot possibly happen on the watch of the Great and Mighty Obama). He is engaged in what psychiatrists call disassociation.
A friend alerted me to the fact that a version of this analysis had already been offered up by Rush Limbaugh, who in the aftermath of the 2012 election was trying to make sense of the president’s ability to escape responsibility for his multiple failures. Why did polls show massive dissatisfaction with the country’s direction while at the same time supporting Mr. Obama’s agenda?This gave rise to what Rush calls the Limbaugh Theorem, which is that Obama has mastered the ability to always be seen as “opposing everything that’s happening, even the things he is causing to happen. He is on a perpetual campaign.” A variation of the Limbaugh Theorem can be seen in the unfolding scandals now buffeting the administration. According to Rush, “[Obama] gets away with everything precisely by appearing to have no involvement with it … He gets away with not being tied to [the IRS scandal] like he’s not tied to the jobs numbers, he’s not tied to the debt, he’s not tied to the economy. He’s not tied to anything going wrong.”
It seems to me the Limbaugh Theorem is on the mark, that Limbaugh once again got it right and got it early. Mr. Obama has shown a remarkable, Houdini-like ability to escape accountability for his mistakes. Part of the explanation for this undoubtedly has to do with an unprecedented bias in the press and how they choose to frame stories. Part of it may also have to do with what is known as “low information voters.” But the fact that the American people have allowed the president to escape responsibility for his failed policies time and again is clearly problematic. The question is whether Obama can replicate in his second term what he did in his first. I hope not, and in the end I believe the truth will out. But it’s not foreordained, and we’ll find out soon enough.
Catastrophic Consensus: A Dissent From Spengler and Mead
Catastrophic Consensus: A Dissent From Spengler and Mead:
Spengler (aka David Goldman) is one of my close friends and a long-time guru. William Russell Mead is just a guru, but I’m an avid fan. So when I find myself disagreeing with both of them, I start by telling myself that I’m probably wrong.
They tell us that the Democrats and the neoconservatives have largely and wrongly agreed on the tumultuous events in the Middle East, starting with the invasion of Iraq, continuing through the fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and into the “Arab Spring” across North Africa and deep into the Persian Gulf. Spengler quotes the enthusiasts, from the Obama Administration to leading Republican pundits, hailing the onset of Arab Revolution. Here’s Spengler:
It wasn’t. There were plenty of decision forks along the highway, and for the most part we adopted the witty advice (was it Yogi Berra’s?), ”when you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
I was not part of that consensus (when I see near-unanimity, I run). I argued that we should stand by Mubarak, and if he fell, we should go all the way down with him. I thought it was a mistake to make Iraq the centerpiece of our war on terror, since Iran was the driving force of international terrorism. And I wrote monotonously that Iraq would never have decent security so long as the ayatollahs ruled in Tehran. So I’m not apologizing for myself when I say that I think Mead and Spengler have misdiagnosed the problem. They seem to think that it was wrong to support democratic revolution in the Middle East, because it was never likely to succeed. I think the problem is that we sometimes gave emotional support to the revolutionaries, but did not fight–fight politically, for the most part, only very rarely militarily–alongside them. That’s why there were so many banners saying “America, where are you?”
I also think that Spengler’s description of Obama’s policy, “soft power in pursuit of humanitarian goals,” is off the mark. The doctrine of protecting civilians from their own tyrants was invoked in Libya, and was used to justify the use of military power, not soft power. The other cases–from the very active and aggressive support of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, to the insistence that we can make a deal with the Iranian regime–are not examples of supporting humanitarian goals, but rather supporting radical Islamic movements and regimes.
Obama has talked a lot of talk, but took only a few very short walks, when he walked at all. Worse still, at crucial forks in the road, he didn’t take it. For the most part, he dithered. When the Iranian people rose up against the mullahcracy in 2003 and again in 2009, we either opted out (2003, Colin Powell’s “we don’t want to be part of this family squabble”) or reassured the tyrants (Obama sent reassuring messages to Khamenei in 2009).
I think revolution in Iran was possible, and that vigorous support from us would have greatly increased the odds for success (indeed, I think we could and should do it now). If that had happened, the whole world would have changed dramatically. Terrorists, from al Qaida to Hezbollah–Sunnis and Shi’ites–would have been gravely, perhaps fatally, weakened. The appeal of radical Islam would have diminished, and therefore the Muslim Brotherhood would have been less likely to topple Mubarak.
I also think that the anti-radical forces in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere could have been more effective with American political, economic and technological support. Condoleeza Rice gave a couple of excellent speeches along these lines, but action was pathetic. Hillary also gave a few speeches, often pretending that we really were supporting pro-democracy groups (but she couldn’t talk about it, you know). There was no there there.
So nothing was set in stone. We could have acted, but we didn’t, and when we did, our actions were either misguided or inadequate. Syria is a fine case in point. It may well be that, had we acted promptly to support the defectors from Assad’s army–the breakaway “Free Syrian Army”–along with the Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, the Baathist regime would have fallen, and we would have been in a strong position in Damascus. Instead, Obama dithered, permitting the jihadis to organize themselves, infiltrate the FSA, and strengthen the iron fists of Iran and Russia.
Could we not have done better? Maybe not, but we didn’t try, not because of misguided romanticism about Arabs, and not only because of a refusal to see Islamic radicalism as the terrible force it is. It’s much worse than that, in fact. In Syria, as elsewhere, a large war is being waged, and the United States is the ultimate target. It’s not just the jihadis, Russians and Ayatollahs. It includes the Chinese, the Venezuelans, the Qataris, a large chunk of the Saudis, along with Bolivians, Ecuadorians and Nicaraguans. Most of our pundits and policy makers never acknowledge this global conflict, and the Obama Administration is slashing our military and paramilitary capabilities instead of designing and conducting a winning strategy.
There is no escape from this war. Our enemies believe they are winning, and will not back off. As Mead rightly insists, we should try to learn from history, and we’d do well to start by acknowledging that there are real enemies out there, that we have to protect ourselves, and that support for democratic revolution is one very effective weapon against them.
Faster, please.
Spengler (aka David Goldman) is one of my close friends and a long-time guru. William Russell Mead is just a guru, but I’m an avid fan. So when I find myself disagreeing with both of them, I start by telling myself that I’m probably wrong.
They tell us that the Democrats and the neoconservatives have largely and wrongly agreed on the tumultuous events in the Middle East, starting with the invasion of Iraq, continuing through the fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and into the “Arab Spring” across North Africa and deep into the Persian Gulf. Spengler quotes the enthusiasts, from the Obama Administration to leading Republican pundits, hailing the onset of Arab Revolution. Here’s Spengler:
The Obama Administration saw its actions as proof that soft power in pursuit of humanitarian goals offered a new paradigm for foreign-policy success. And the Republican establishment saw a vindication of the Bush freedom agenda.And here’s Mead:
both are based on the flawed and distinctly American expectation of a happy ending. A little prudence would have done the neocons a world of good in Iraq, and a bit more of this underrated virtue would have helped both parties during the Libya fiasco and larger Arab Spring.We can all agree that none of them looks very smart today, which is the way of the world. Most of the time we blunder, in keeping with my conviction that the Almighty created man for entertainment value. And boy, have we blundered. We can agree with Mead and Spengler that hurling ourselves into the Syrian “civil war” might very well make things even worse. But we shouldn’t agree that, once we decided to embrace the cause of revolution in the Middle East, this unhappy outcome was foreordained.
It wasn’t. There were plenty of decision forks along the highway, and for the most part we adopted the witty advice (was it Yogi Berra’s?), ”when you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
I was not part of that consensus (when I see near-unanimity, I run). I argued that we should stand by Mubarak, and if he fell, we should go all the way down with him. I thought it was a mistake to make Iraq the centerpiece of our war on terror, since Iran was the driving force of international terrorism. And I wrote monotonously that Iraq would never have decent security so long as the ayatollahs ruled in Tehran. So I’m not apologizing for myself when I say that I think Mead and Spengler have misdiagnosed the problem. They seem to think that it was wrong to support democratic revolution in the Middle East, because it was never likely to succeed. I think the problem is that we sometimes gave emotional support to the revolutionaries, but did not fight–fight politically, for the most part, only very rarely militarily–alongside them. That’s why there were so many banners saying “America, where are you?”
I also think that Spengler’s description of Obama’s policy, “soft power in pursuit of humanitarian goals,” is off the mark. The doctrine of protecting civilians from their own tyrants was invoked in Libya, and was used to justify the use of military power, not soft power. The other cases–from the very active and aggressive support of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, to the insistence that we can make a deal with the Iranian regime–are not examples of supporting humanitarian goals, but rather supporting radical Islamic movements and regimes.
Obama has talked a lot of talk, but took only a few very short walks, when he walked at all. Worse still, at crucial forks in the road, he didn’t take it. For the most part, he dithered. When the Iranian people rose up against the mullahcracy in 2003 and again in 2009, we either opted out (2003, Colin Powell’s “we don’t want to be part of this family squabble”) or reassured the tyrants (Obama sent reassuring messages to Khamenei in 2009).
I think revolution in Iran was possible, and that vigorous support from us would have greatly increased the odds for success (indeed, I think we could and should do it now). If that had happened, the whole world would have changed dramatically. Terrorists, from al Qaida to Hezbollah–Sunnis and Shi’ites–would have been gravely, perhaps fatally, weakened. The appeal of radical Islam would have diminished, and therefore the Muslim Brotherhood would have been less likely to topple Mubarak.
I also think that the anti-radical forces in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere could have been more effective with American political, economic and technological support. Condoleeza Rice gave a couple of excellent speeches along these lines, but action was pathetic. Hillary also gave a few speeches, often pretending that we really were supporting pro-democracy groups (but she couldn’t talk about it, you know). There was no there there.
So nothing was set in stone. We could have acted, but we didn’t, and when we did, our actions were either misguided or inadequate. Syria is a fine case in point. It may well be that, had we acted promptly to support the defectors from Assad’s army–the breakaway “Free Syrian Army”–along with the Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, the Baathist regime would have fallen, and we would have been in a strong position in Damascus. Instead, Obama dithered, permitting the jihadis to organize themselves, infiltrate the FSA, and strengthen the iron fists of Iran and Russia.
Could we not have done better? Maybe not, but we didn’t try, not because of misguided romanticism about Arabs, and not only because of a refusal to see Islamic radicalism as the terrible force it is. It’s much worse than that, in fact. In Syria, as elsewhere, a large war is being waged, and the United States is the ultimate target. It’s not just the jihadis, Russians and Ayatollahs. It includes the Chinese, the Venezuelans, the Qataris, a large chunk of the Saudis, along with Bolivians, Ecuadorians and Nicaraguans. Most of our pundits and policy makers never acknowledge this global conflict, and the Obama Administration is slashing our military and paramilitary capabilities instead of designing and conducting a winning strategy.
There is no escape from this war. Our enemies believe they are winning, and will not back off. As Mead rightly insists, we should try to learn from history, and we’d do well to start by acknowledging that there are real enemies out there, that we have to protect ourselves, and that support for democratic revolution is one very effective weapon against them.
Faster, please.
"Study: Schools And Colleges Are Teaching The Wrong Type Of Math"
"Study: Schools And Colleges Are Teaching The Wrong Type Of Math": I absolutely agree. For some students, replace trig and calculus with statistics, personal finance, and enhanced numeracy. (See, for example, "Innumeracy and Risk Perception in Health Decision-making," in Wikipedia.)
The administration's chipping away at the First Amendment
The administration's chipping away at the First Amendment: Two cases make up a pattern that should not be ignored. A dangerous pattern. It now seems that the administration in its commendable zeal to plug national security leaks is willing to mislead judges in their applications for a warrant.
First we had the over-reach in obtaining the records for AP journalists in order to track down the leak that led AP to report on news ahead of the administration's planned press briefing to put out the very same information. There are many now who doubt whether the AP story did indeed put the American people at risk as the administration has claimed. But on that flimsy claim, the DOJ got a sweeping subpoena that allowed it to get two months worth the phone records from AP reporters. What is really chilling is that the administration can get such a subpoena without having to persuade a judge to grant a warrant.
Now that the media are informed of the lengths that this administration will go to track down news, they are confronted with the reality that the very administration they've been supporting is willing to stretch and violate its own guidelines and even to mislead a judge when seeking a warrant in order to stop journalists from reporting stories that they don't want reported. As AP's Pruitt said,
These two examples of how far the administration is willing to go in tracking down leakers are truly chilling examples of their willingness to chip away at the First Amendment protections for a free press. Remember that there were much more damaging stories to our national security that were leaked during the Bush administration and they never went this far in trying to access information from journalists. And this attitude towards the media is not limited to searching out leaks on national security stories. As Philip Klein writes,
Journalists need to wake up. As Kirsten Powers describes the history of the administration's 'war on Fox News',
First we had the over-reach in obtaining the records for AP journalists in order to track down the leak that led AP to report on news ahead of the administration's planned press briefing to put out the very same information. There are many now who doubt whether the AP story did indeed put the American people at risk as the administration has claimed. But on that flimsy claim, the DOJ got a sweeping subpoena that allowed it to get two months worth the phone records from AP reporters. What is really chilling is that the administration can get such a subpoena without having to persuade a judge to grant a warrant.
That these phone records even could be obtained without the AP’s awareness underscores a key feature of how the law views information related to telephone and other networked communications that can be a dangerous vulnerability for news organizations and independent journalists. While many of us may think of telephone calls as broadly “private,” these and other common communications are inevitably conducted over third-party networks, generating two legally distinct types of data: the “metadata” about the call and the “content” of the call. While the latter is protected under the general “right to privacy” of the Fourth Amendment, the former is not. This so-called “metadata” is considered the property of the network owner, and can therefore be subpoenaed directly from and disclosed by the provider without violating any constitutional protections.Reporters are now realizing that the government has this power to obtain their phone records without even letting the targets of the subpoena know that their records have been seized. What is truly disturbing is that in seeking the subpoena, the administration violated their own guidelines as AP's CEO Gary Pruitt said on CBS this weekend.
“Under federal law there’s a whole category of metadata called subscriber information that the police can get with a subpoena,” says Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who specializes on issues relating to criminal law, privacy and free speech. That metadata can include the name, address, payment method (including credit card number, if applicable), length of service, numbers dialed and call durations related a given account. Apart from one decision to the contrary, a subpoena is also generally sufficient to obtain mobile phone location information, as long as law enforcement can demonstrate that it is “relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.” This detailed location information can act as a digital trace of a mobile phone owner’s movements. Pruitt’s letter indicates that some journalists’ mobile phone records were also seized by the DOJ, though whether they obtained cell-site data is unclear.
"...Under their own rules, they are required to narrow this request as narrowly as possible so as to not tread upon the First Amendment," he went on. "And yet they had a broad, sweeping collection, and they did it secretly. Their rules require them to come to us first but in this case they didn't, claiming an exception, saying that if they had it would have posed a substantial threat to their investigation. But they have not explained why it would and we can't understand why it would."Pruitt went on to explain why the original story was important and why the administration didn't want it reported.
Pruitt said the AP acted "responsibly," holding the story for five days upon receiving guidance from the intelligence community that it posed a national security risk.Now comes this story that the Washington Post reported yesterday about how the administration told a judge that it was investigating James Rosen of Fox News as a co-conspirator for violations of the 1917 Espionage Act in his reporting on the administration's determination that North Korea might respond to UN sanctions with another nuclear test.
It was important for the American public to know about the CIA operation that thwarted an al Qaeda plot to detonate a bomb aboard a U.S.-bound airplane, he continued, because "the Department of Homeland security were telling the American public that there was no credible evidence of a terrorist plot related to the anniversary of the killing Of Osama bin Laden." That characterization was "misleading."
The shock is that as part of its probe the Administration sought and obtained a warrant to search Mr. Rosen's personal email account. And it justified such a sweeping secret search by telling the judge that Mr. Rosen was part of the conspiracy merely because he acted like a journalist.This is a criminalization of news reporting. As Ryan Lizza writes,
In a May 2010 affidavit in support of obtaining the Gmail search warrant, FBI agent Reginald Reyes declared that "there is probable cause to believe that the Reporter has committed or is committing a violation" of the Espionage Act of 1917 "as an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator." The Reporter here is Mr. Rosen.
And what evidence is there to believe that Mr. Rosen is part of a spy ring? Well, declares Mr. Reyes, the reporter published a story in June 2009 saying that the U.S. knew that North Korea planned to respond to looming U.N. sanctions with another nuclear test. That U.S. knowledge was classified. But the feds almost never prosecute a journalist for disclosing classified information, not least because reporters can't be sure what's classified and what isn't.
Rosen was not charged with any crime, but it is unprecedented for the government, in an official court document, to accuse a reporter of breaking the law for conducting the routine business of reporting on government secrets.As Politico reports, it seems that the reason that the administration was willing to go so far as to name Rosen as a co-conspirator was so that they could obtain the records without Rosen knowing what they were doing.
It appears the prosecutors' statements about Rosen having potentially committed a crime were aimed at allowing them to proceed through use of a search warrant rather than a grand jury subpoena or other means. Under the Privacy Protection Act of 1980, search warrants are only available to seize journalists' work products under certain circumstances, such as when the journalist himself or herself is suspected of committing certain crimes.The man who leaked the information to Rosen was indicted in 2010 but the administration which named Rosen as a co-conspirator in their affidavit seeking the warrant now doesn't plan to indict him.
Now that the media are informed of the lengths that this administration will go to track down news, they are confronted with the reality that the very administration they've been supporting is willing to stretch and violate its own guidelines and even to mislead a judge when seeking a warrant in order to stop journalists from reporting stories that they don't want reported. As AP's Pruitt said,
"...The government has no business having control over all, monitoring all of this newsgathering information from the Associated Press," he continued. "And if they restrict that apparatus, you're right - the people of the United States will only know what the government wants them to know and that's not what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they wrote the First Amendment."AP reports that they've already experienced sources within the government clamming up out of fear that the administration will be able to track them down through the sorts of subpoenas that were used against AP phone records.
These two examples of how far the administration is willing to go in tracking down leakers are truly chilling examples of their willingness to chip away at the First Amendment protections for a free press. Remember that there were much more damaging stories to our national security that were leaked during the Bush administration and they never went this far in trying to access information from journalists. And this attitude towards the media is not limited to searching out leaks on national security stories. As Philip Klein writes,
These investigations are shocking when taken alone, but as as Reason’s J.D. Tuccille notes, it’s important to consider these events in their broader context of the Obama administration’s long-running war against the free press. Last year, Bloomberg reported that Attorney General Eric Holder “has prosecuted more government officials for alleged leaks under the World War I-era Espionage Act than all his predecessors combined, including law-and-order Republicans John Mitchell, Edwin Meese and John Ashcroft.” The administration has also received a failing grade for its ignoring of Freedom of Information Act requests.Some reporters can't decide if the administration's application for a search warrant should be described as Orwellian or Kafkaesque. We're definitely not in "lightworker" territory now.
Taken together, all such actions have a toll. They mean that federal officials are less likely to blow the whistle on government wrongdoing and that journalists are less likely to obtain damning information that they can pass along to the public. The suggestion by the DOJ that Rosen broke the law, if followed to its logical conclusion, would mean the end of investigative journalism in America.
During his first term, liberal journalists often remarked at how “scandal free” the administration was, despite Solyndra, Fast and Furious and other revelations. But maybe what really happened is that the administration’s concerted effort to suppress the reporting of news was actually quite successful.
Journalists need to wake up. As Kirsten Powers describes the history of the administration's 'war on Fox News',
First they came for Fox News, and they did not speak out—because they were not Fox News. Then they came for government whistleblowers, and they did not speak out—because they were not government whistleblowers. Then they came for the maker of a YouTube video, and—okay, we know how this story ends. But how did we get here?
Turns out it’s a fairly swift sojourn from a president pushing to “delegitimize” a news organization to threatening criminal prosecution for journalistic activity by a Fox News reporter, James Rosen, to spying on Associated Press reporters. In between, the Obama administration found time to relentlessly persecute government whistleblowers and publicly harass and condemn a private American citizen for expressing his constitutionally protected speech in the form of an anti-Islam YouTube video.It is truly ironic that the man the media overwhelmingly supported for the presidency now leads an administration willing to limit their ability to report news on this administration. And it is even more ironic that the story that is turning the media on the administration comes from their attack on Fox News.
Where were the media when all this began happening? With a few exceptions, they were acting as quiet enablers.
Monday, May 20, 2013
The Spectator President—If Obama Didn’t Want The Tea Party Attacked, Why Did He Demonize Them?
The Spectator President—If Obama Didn’t Want The Tea Party Attacked, Why Did He Demonize Them?:
No, this is not Watergate or Iran-Contra. Nor is it like the sex scandal that got Bill Clinton impeached.
The AP, IRS and Benghazi matters represent a scandal not of presidential wrongdoing, but of presidential indolence, indifference and incompetence in discharging the duties of chief executive.
The Barack Obama revealed to us in recent days is something rare in our history: a spectator president, clueless about what is going on in his own household, who reacts to revelations like some stunned bystander.
Consider. Because of a grave national security leak, President Obama's Department of Justice seized two months of records from 20 telephones used by The Associated Press. An unprecedented seizure.
Yet the president was left completely in the dark. And though he rushed to defend the seizure, he claims he was uninvolved.
While the AP issue does not appear to have legs—we know what was done and why—it has badly damaged this president. For his own Justice Department treated the press, which has an exalted opinion of itself and its role, with the same contempt as the IRS treated the Tea Party.
The episode has damaged a crucial presidential asset. For this Washington press corps had provided this president with a protective coverage of his follies and failings unseen since the White House press of half a century ago covered up the prowlings of JFK.
The Benghazi issue is of far greater gravity. Still, Obama's sins here as well seem to be those of omission, not commission.
The president was apparently completely in the dark about the urgent requests from Benghazi
Topic:
On Topic
The AP, IRS and Benghazi matters represent a scandal not of presidential wrongdoing, but of presidential indolence, indifference and incompetence in discharging the duties of chief executive.
The Barack Obama revealed to us in recent days is something rare in our history: a spectator president, clueless about what is going on in his own household, who reacts to revelations like some stunned bystander.
Consider. Because of a grave national security leak, President Obama's Department of Justice seized two months of records from 20 telephones used by The Associated Press. An unprecedented seizure.
Yet the president was left completely in the dark. And though he rushed to defend the seizure, he claims he was uninvolved.
While the AP issue does not appear to have legs—we know what was done and why—it has badly damaged this president. For his own Justice Department treated the press, which has an exalted opinion of itself and its role, with the same contempt as the IRS treated the Tea Party.
The episode has damaged a crucial presidential asset. For this Washington press corps had provided this president with a protective coverage of his follies and failings unseen since the White House press of half a century ago covered up the prowlings of JFK.
The Benghazi issue is of far greater gravity. Still, Obama's sins here as well seem to be those of omission, not commission.
The president was apparently completely in the dark about the urgent requests from Benghazi
The press…
The press…:
…is finally scared.
When the WaPo and Glenn Greewald in the Guardian are leading the charge against him, you know (dare I hope?) that Obama may have finally overplayed his hand.
Here’s the article Read it.
…is finally scared.
When the WaPo and Glenn Greewald in the Guardian are leading the charge against him, you know (dare I hope?) that Obama may have finally overplayed his hand.
Here’s the article Read it.
A Lesson in Oxymora
A Lesson in Oxymora:
A Lesson in Oxymora – H/T Clare B.
The Food Stamp Program, administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is proud to be distributing this year the greatest amount of free Meals and Food Stamps ever, to 46 million people.
Meanwhile, the National Park Service, administered by the U.S. Department of the Interior, asks us “Please Do Not Feed the Animals.” Their stated reason for the policy is because “The animals will grow dependent on handouts and will not learn to take care of themselves.”
Thus ends today’s lesson!
A Lesson in Oxymora – H/T Clare B.
The Food Stamp Program, administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is proud to be distributing this year the greatest amount of free Meals and Food Stamps ever, to 46 million people.
Meanwhile, the National Park Service, administered by the U.S. Department of the Interior, asks us “Please Do Not Feed the Animals.” Their stated reason for the policy is because “The animals will grow dependent on handouts and will not learn to take care of themselves.”
Thus ends today’s lesson!
Yes, Liberals Run the Government
Yes, Liberals Run the Government:
Over the weekend, some in the mainstream press began the job of trying to resurrect the original story put out by the IRS that the targeting of conservative groups for scrutiny was the act of isolated rogue employees. The massive story attempting to unravel the confusing story of the targeting published in the New York Times yesterday not only seemed to get us back to thinking the affair was simply the product of people at the Cincinnati regional office who were “alienated” from the agency’s broader culture. It also portrayed the agents who perpetrated what almost everyone on both sides of the aisle thinks is an outrage as an underfunded, overworked band of “low-level” hard working people coping with an impossible task made necessary by conservatives trying to evade the tax laws.
The details provided by the Times investigation are interesting in that they give us a sense of the timeline of the targeting and the inadequate nature of supervision of the unit tasked with giving approval for requests by organizations for nonprofit status. But what it admittedly doesn’t do is to answer the main question that looms over the entire story: who gave the order for the targeting and who or what inspired the IRS officials to adopt such a blatantly partisan policy. It also ignores a clue toward solving this problem that Dave Weigel helpfully pointed out in Slate on Friday in his reaction to the astoundingly tone deaf performance of outgoing IRS chief Steven Miller at a congressional hearing: most of the people who work at the IRS are liberal.
As Weigel writes:
The White House is working hard to provide President Obama with what another generation would have termed “plausible deniability” about his knowledge of the scandal, and liberals are screaming bloody murder about any conservative who dares to accuse the administration of creating a culture which made such lapses inevitable. But while the president can claim he didn’t issue the order, it is another thing entirely to assert that those who did it weren’t seeking to do his will.
The Times story, like the inspector general’s report on the scandal that was made public last week, tells us what happened–but they don’t say why. That’s why the need for a more far-reaching and official investigation of the targeting, conducted with the sort of zeal that the Department of Justice normally reserves these days for the press, must follow.
The Times may have convinced itself that the people who targeted conservatives were isolated from the culture of the rest of the agency. But does anyone really believe that the singling out of every single group with the words “Tea Party” in their names for special scrutiny was hatched in a vacuum? The very fact that, as Weigel notes, the employees of a tax collection agency are probably inclined to think ill of tax protest groups should alert us to the very real possibility that politics and partisan bias are at the heart of this activity.
Over the weekend, some in the mainstream press began the job of trying to resurrect the original story put out by the IRS that the targeting of conservative groups for scrutiny was the act of isolated rogue employees. The massive story attempting to unravel the confusing story of the targeting published in the New York Times yesterday not only seemed to get us back to thinking the affair was simply the product of people at the Cincinnati regional office who were “alienated” from the agency’s broader culture. It also portrayed the agents who perpetrated what almost everyone on both sides of the aisle thinks is an outrage as an underfunded, overworked band of “low-level” hard working people coping with an impossible task made necessary by conservatives trying to evade the tax laws.
The details provided by the Times investigation are interesting in that they give us a sense of the timeline of the targeting and the inadequate nature of supervision of the unit tasked with giving approval for requests by organizations for nonprofit status. But what it admittedly doesn’t do is to answer the main question that looms over the entire story: who gave the order for the targeting and who or what inspired the IRS officials to adopt such a blatantly partisan policy. It also ignores a clue toward solving this problem that Dave Weigel helpfully pointed out in Slate on Friday in his reaction to the astoundingly tone deaf performance of outgoing IRS chief Steven Miller at a congressional hearing: most of the people who work at the IRS are liberal.
As Weigel writes:
In theory, the civil-servant structure should make an organization less prone to an eruption of bias or of hive-mind behavior. But that’s not how it works. Liberals are more likely to enter the civil service, and to stick to it, than conservatives are. And why not? Conservatives want to shrink the size of government; Republicans have negotiated deals federally, and in the states, that slashed or froze the size of the bureaucracies. Ron Swanson aside, the public sector is no place for a libertarian.None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who has had contact with the federal bureaucracy in the last century. Yet on every news talk show discussing this scandal, liberals and Democrats have accused Republicans of politicizing the scandal. But the reality is that the political slant on the story is the product of those who created this mess, not the conservatives who have complained about it. And the people who did the targeting are part of a largely liberal bunch of civil servants that are very likely to have been influenced by the complaints being lodged about the Tea Party by the president, his party and the mainstream liberal media.
Every single number proves this. Tim Carney has collected the campaign finance figures for IRS employees nationally and in the Cincinnati office. In the past three election cycles, IRS workers donated $247,000 to Democrats and $145,000 to Republicans. In Ohio, the number was skewed even further—75 percent to Democrats. According to a 2011 Gallup poll, around 40 percent of unionized federal employees identified as Democrats; only 27 percent identified as Republicans. State and local government employees are far more likely to be Democrats than Republicans.
The White House is working hard to provide President Obama with what another generation would have termed “plausible deniability” about his knowledge of the scandal, and liberals are screaming bloody murder about any conservative who dares to accuse the administration of creating a culture which made such lapses inevitable. But while the president can claim he didn’t issue the order, it is another thing entirely to assert that those who did it weren’t seeking to do his will.
The Times story, like the inspector general’s report on the scandal that was made public last week, tells us what happened–but they don’t say why. That’s why the need for a more far-reaching and official investigation of the targeting, conducted with the sort of zeal that the Department of Justice normally reserves these days for the press, must follow.
The Times may have convinced itself that the people who targeted conservatives were isolated from the culture of the rest of the agency. But does anyone really believe that the singling out of every single group with the words “Tea Party” in their names for special scrutiny was hatched in a vacuum? The very fact that, as Weigel notes, the employees of a tax collection agency are probably inclined to think ill of tax protest groups should alert us to the very real possibility that politics and partisan bias are at the heart of this activity.
Obama’s fingerprints are all over the IRS’s politically-motivated audits
Obama’s fingerprints are all over the IRS’s politically-motivated audits:
There are many ways to influence people or an organization, so in investigating the IRS audits of conservative groups, although it would be convincing (and legally determinative) to find a secret tape or a secret email from Obama ordering the policy, that really wasn’t necessary in order to let the IRS know what he wanted. Obama set the tone as a matter of public record, through speeches that were not the least bit subtle:
But that’s not all. Today we have an interesting story in the American Spectator describing a possible “smoking gun.” It turns out that the day before the IRS began to aggressively target Tea Party groups, the head of the union to which IRS employees belong (the NTEU, the National Treasury Employees Union), Colleen Kelly, met with Obama, according to White House logs. Of course, the content of that meeting is unknown, and I am certain that both parties will claim clean hands (where is Nixon’s taping system when we need it?). So it’s hard to have a deniable smoking gun.
But the article, although long, is well worth reading for another reason. It points out something about public sector unions:
President Obama himself may be able to successfully stonewall and deny, or even mount a “modified limited hangout” and keep the IRS scandal from touching him. But how on earth could one ever trust the even-handedness of the IRS again (assuming, of course, the dubious notion that a person ever trusted them in the first place)?
There are many ways to influence people or an organization, so in investigating the IRS audits of conservative groups, although it would be convincing (and legally determinative) to find a secret tape or a secret email from Obama ordering the policy, that really wasn’t necessary in order to let the IRS know what he wanted. Obama set the tone as a matter of public record, through speeches that were not the least bit subtle:
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.Please read the whole thing.
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.
But that’s not all. Today we have an interesting story in the American Spectator describing a possible “smoking gun.” It turns out that the day before the IRS began to aggressively target Tea Party groups, the head of the union to which IRS employees belong (the NTEU, the National Treasury Employees Union), Colleen Kelly, met with Obama, according to White House logs. Of course, the content of that meeting is unknown, and I am certain that both parties will claim clean hands (where is Nixon’s taping system when we need it?). So it’s hard to have a deniable smoking gun.
But the article, although long, is well worth reading for another reason. It points out something about public sector unions:
Not to be lost sight of here is the role of the NTEU in raising money for Democrats in the 2010 and 2012 election cycles — the exact period when the IRS was busy going after the Tea Party and the others to curb any possible influence the groups could have in the elections of 2010 and 2012.So the IRS employee union is engaged in political action against the very groups it was targeting. Sweet.
The NTEU, through its political action committee, raised $613,633 in the 2010 cycle, giving 98% of its contributions to anti-Tea Party Democrats. In 2012 the figure was $729,708, with 94% going to anti-Tea Party candidates. One NTEU candidate after another, as discussed last week in this space, campaigned vigorously against the Tea Party.
President Obama himself may be able to successfully stonewall and deny, or even mount a “modified limited hangout” and keep the IRS scandal from touching him. But how on earth could one ever trust the even-handedness of the IRS again (assuming, of course, the dubious notion that a person ever trusted them in the first place)?
IRS and AP Scandals Cast a Big Chill on Free Speech
IRS and AP Scandals Cast a Big Chill on Free Speech:
Chilling effect. That’s the term lawyers and judges use to describe the result of government actions that deter people from exercising their right of free speech.
There have been plenty of examples in the past 10 days.
The Obama administration’s Justice Department issued a sweeping demand for two months of office, cellular and home telephone records from multiple Associated Press reporters and editors to investigate an alleged breach of national security.
The AP story in question, on a foiled terrorist plot, had been withheld for days at the request of the CIA. It finally went out on the wire on a Monday, after the AP was told that administration spokesmen would officially announce it the next day.
That tends to undercut Attorney General Eric Holder’s claim that the story was based on one of “the top two or three most serious leaks that I have ever seen” and “put the American people at risk, and that is not hyperbole.”
I don’t think enough facts are known to conclude that Holder was wrong. But it does seem likely that the AP material was less damaging to national security than some stories The New York Times ran despite pleas from the George W. Bush administration.
Those were not followed by the kind of intrusive investigation launched in this case. You might not know it from reading much of the press, but Obama’s administration has been much more aggressive in investigating leaks than Bush’s ever was.
Another chill came from the targeting of conservative organizations by Obama’s Internal Revenue Service. IRS agents were selectively refusing to give tax-exempt status to organizations with “tea party” and “patriot” in their names.
Anti-abortion groups were asked to pledge that they would never picket Planned Parenthood clinics. Organizers were asked numerous personal questions, including what they said in their prayers. If that’s not chilling, I don’t know what is.
The acting director of the IRS was told about this activity in May 2012, and the chief counsel and deputy secretary of the Treasury Department were informed in June 2012.
Did they pass the information along to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner? Did he tell the president? Did the president ever ask?
The excuse given in some quarters is that in some cases IRS agents acted on their own or contrary to instructions. That may be plausible.
As my Washington Examiner colleague Timothy Carney has pointed out, personnel at the IRS are heavily Democratic. That’s probably true of most domestic government agencies.
But that’s a reason why a Democratic White House should be especially alert for evidence that civil servants are targeting political opponents for unfavorable treatment. Especially when, as here, there were plenty of reports in the press and the blogosphere indicating that it was going on.
But maybe this Democratic White House didn’t want to know. Or didn’t understand the need for vigilance. Maybe someone figured, hey, let’s not have this come out before the election.
The chill threatens to get even colder. It turns out that Sarah Hall Ingram, who served as head of the IRS office handling tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012 — when the targeting was going on — is now head of the IRS division in charge of the IRS office policing Obamacare.
She’s a career IRS lawyer, and it’s not known whether she was aware of the targeting — though it would be a little surprising if she wasn’t.
She’ll have a big job. The IRS is assigned a lot of work by the Obamacare law. It will impose penalties on Americans who can afford health insurance but choose not to buy it.
It will impose penalties on companies with more than 50 employees who work 30 hours a week and don’t provide government-mandated policies.
It will give tax credits to non-affluent purchasers of health insurance on state exchanges. The IRS says it can also give tax credits to such people in states that have federally run exchanges, though many argue the law does not authorize that.
In other words, the IRS is going to possess and process a large amount of information not only on your income but on your health insurance and perhaps your health.
The IRS was given these tasks by the drafters of Obamacare because no other government agency had the capability to gain access to people’s personal financial information. They may have thought that taxpayers would trust an agency that they had gotten used to dealing with.
That level of trust may not be as high as it was 10 days ago. Chilling effect, indeed.
Michael Barone, senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner (www.washingtonexaminer.com)
The post IRS and AP Scandals Cast a Big Chill on Free Speech appeared first on Human Events.
Chilling effect. That’s the term lawyers and judges use to describe the result of government actions that deter people from exercising their right of free speech.
There have been plenty of examples in the past 10 days.
The Obama administration’s Justice Department issued a sweeping demand for two months of office, cellular and home telephone records from multiple Associated Press reporters and editors to investigate an alleged breach of national security.
The AP story in question, on a foiled terrorist plot, had been withheld for days at the request of the CIA. It finally went out on the wire on a Monday, after the AP was told that administration spokesmen would officially announce it the next day.
That tends to undercut Attorney General Eric Holder’s claim that the story was based on one of “the top two or three most serious leaks that I have ever seen” and “put the American people at risk, and that is not hyperbole.”
I don’t think enough facts are known to conclude that Holder was wrong. But it does seem likely that the AP material was less damaging to national security than some stories The New York Times ran despite pleas from the George W. Bush administration.
Those were not followed by the kind of intrusive investigation launched in this case. You might not know it from reading much of the press, but Obama’s administration has been much more aggressive in investigating leaks than Bush’s ever was.
Another chill came from the targeting of conservative organizations by Obama’s Internal Revenue Service. IRS agents were selectively refusing to give tax-exempt status to organizations with “tea party” and “patriot” in their names.
Anti-abortion groups were asked to pledge that they would never picket Planned Parenthood clinics. Organizers were asked numerous personal questions, including what they said in their prayers. If that’s not chilling, I don’t know what is.
The acting director of the IRS was told about this activity in May 2012, and the chief counsel and deputy secretary of the Treasury Department were informed in June 2012.
Did they pass the information along to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner? Did he tell the president? Did the president ever ask?
The excuse given in some quarters is that in some cases IRS agents acted on their own or contrary to instructions. That may be plausible.
As my Washington Examiner colleague Timothy Carney has pointed out, personnel at the IRS are heavily Democratic. That’s probably true of most domestic government agencies.
But that’s a reason why a Democratic White House should be especially alert for evidence that civil servants are targeting political opponents for unfavorable treatment. Especially when, as here, there were plenty of reports in the press and the blogosphere indicating that it was going on.
But maybe this Democratic White House didn’t want to know. Or didn’t understand the need for vigilance. Maybe someone figured, hey, let’s not have this come out before the election.
The chill threatens to get even colder. It turns out that Sarah Hall Ingram, who served as head of the IRS office handling tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012 — when the targeting was going on — is now head of the IRS division in charge of the IRS office policing Obamacare.
She’s a career IRS lawyer, and it’s not known whether she was aware of the targeting — though it would be a little surprising if she wasn’t.
She’ll have a big job. The IRS is assigned a lot of work by the Obamacare law. It will impose penalties on Americans who can afford health insurance but choose not to buy it.
It will impose penalties on companies with more than 50 employees who work 30 hours a week and don’t provide government-mandated policies.
It will give tax credits to non-affluent purchasers of health insurance on state exchanges. The IRS says it can also give tax credits to such people in states that have federally run exchanges, though many argue the law does not authorize that.
In other words, the IRS is going to possess and process a large amount of information not only on your income but on your health insurance and perhaps your health.
The IRS was given these tasks by the drafters of Obamacare because no other government agency had the capability to gain access to people’s personal financial information. They may have thought that taxpayers would trust an agency that they had gotten used to dealing with.
That level of trust may not be as high as it was 10 days ago. Chilling effect, indeed.
Michael Barone, senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner (www.washingtonexaminer.com)
The post IRS and AP Scandals Cast a Big Chill on Free Speech appeared first on Human Events.
What the Obama Scandals Reveal About Progressive Ideology
What the Obama Scandals Reveal About Progressive Ideology:
Benghazi
The moment it came into office the Obama administration bought into the delusional narrative that Islamic jihadist terror is a response to Western historical crimes against Muslims, rather than an expression of Islamic theology. The Israeli “occupation” of Palestine, the depredations of colonialism and imperialism, the resulting dysfunctional economies and oppressive governments in Muslim countries, the arrogant xenophobia and intolerance of American culture, the invasions of Muslim countries after 9/11––all were identified as the “root causes” of terrorism.
Obama’s foreign policy, based on the assumptions of American guilt and the malign consequences of George Bush’s arrogant, unilateralist foreign policy, thus was an attempt to correct the bad policies and behaviors that instigated terror. Thus Obama apologized in his Cairo speech, eagerly extended a diplomatic “hand” to the genocidal mullahs in Iraq, rushed for the exits in Iraq and Afghanistan, supported the dubious “Arab Spring” uprisings and their Islamist prime movers like the Muslim Brothers, and distanced America from Israel.
The intervention in Libya seemed to be an easy way to validate these beliefs, at the same time avoiding the charge of retreat and withdrawal from America’s global responsibilities to advance human rights and protect the victims of tyranny. The overthrow of Gaddafi was sanctioned by the U.N. and engineered by NATO, thus confirming the progressive belief that unilaterally pursuing national interests was, like nationalism itself, immoral, and that only transnational collective action sanctioned by international institutions was legitimate.
For a while the optics were good. A creepy psychopath was eliminated, no casualties were suffered, and a seemingly secular democracy was aborning. The idealism of democracy promotion, one bungled by the unilateral, trigger-happy George Bush, was indulged at little political cost, while the “legitimate” war, against al Qaeda, was being pursued just as cheaply with out-of-sight, out-of-mind drone killings, proving that Obama was no crypto-pacifist squish. Hence the foreign policy narrative peddled during the presidential campaign that al Qaeda was on the ropes and democracy was on the march.
The attack on Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11, eight weeks before the election, exploded that narrative. Al Qaeda and its affiliates were not on the ropes, but were growing and expanding, and could swiftly organize the sack of an embassy office and the murder of four Americans, including an ambassador, humiliating the infidel superpower. Libya was not a democracy-in-the-making, but a Darwinian tribal and sectarian jungle dominated by jihadists armed with the weapons we put in their hands when we destroyed the Gaddafi regime. The refusal to beef up security in Benghazi, which would have been an admission that things weren’t so rosy in the fledgling democracy, now looked like a political calculation that cost American lives. Worse yet, once more the idea that terrorism is a response to our bad behavior was exploded, as many of those Libyans we had liberated turned against us, just as thousands of Afghans and Iraqis have.
So of course the attack had to be spun into something closer to Obama’s foreign policy narrative: the attack was caused by a “spontaneous” protest against an Internet video insulting Mohammed. The administration knew this was a lie the day of the attack, but could not admit this repudiation of Obama’s foreign policy claims so close to the election, and so kept repeating the lie for two weeks, trusting the media spaniels to spin the attack and collude in the still on-going cover-up. MORE
Front Page MagazineThe three scandals dominating the news this week all reveal the moral and intellectual corruption at the heart of progressive ideology. Whether are not these revelations gain enough traction to halt the country’s downward spiral is the more important question.
Benghazi
The moment it came into office the Obama administration bought into the delusional narrative that Islamic jihadist terror is a response to Western historical crimes against Muslims, rather than an expression of Islamic theology. The Israeli “occupation” of Palestine, the depredations of colonialism and imperialism, the resulting dysfunctional economies and oppressive governments in Muslim countries, the arrogant xenophobia and intolerance of American culture, the invasions of Muslim countries after 9/11––all were identified as the “root causes” of terrorism.
Obama’s foreign policy, based on the assumptions of American guilt and the malign consequences of George Bush’s arrogant, unilateralist foreign policy, thus was an attempt to correct the bad policies and behaviors that instigated terror. Thus Obama apologized in his Cairo speech, eagerly extended a diplomatic “hand” to the genocidal mullahs in Iraq, rushed for the exits in Iraq and Afghanistan, supported the dubious “Arab Spring” uprisings and their Islamist prime movers like the Muslim Brothers, and distanced America from Israel.
The intervention in Libya seemed to be an easy way to validate these beliefs, at the same time avoiding the charge of retreat and withdrawal from America’s global responsibilities to advance human rights and protect the victims of tyranny. The overthrow of Gaddafi was sanctioned by the U.N. and engineered by NATO, thus confirming the progressive belief that unilaterally pursuing national interests was, like nationalism itself, immoral, and that only transnational collective action sanctioned by international institutions was legitimate.
For a while the optics were good. A creepy psychopath was eliminated, no casualties were suffered, and a seemingly secular democracy was aborning. The idealism of democracy promotion, one bungled by the unilateral, trigger-happy George Bush, was indulged at little political cost, while the “legitimate” war, against al Qaeda, was being pursued just as cheaply with out-of-sight, out-of-mind drone killings, proving that Obama was no crypto-pacifist squish. Hence the foreign policy narrative peddled during the presidential campaign that al Qaeda was on the ropes and democracy was on the march.
The attack on Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11, eight weeks before the election, exploded that narrative. Al Qaeda and its affiliates were not on the ropes, but were growing and expanding, and could swiftly organize the sack of an embassy office and the murder of four Americans, including an ambassador, humiliating the infidel superpower. Libya was not a democracy-in-the-making, but a Darwinian tribal and sectarian jungle dominated by jihadists armed with the weapons we put in their hands when we destroyed the Gaddafi regime. The refusal to beef up security in Benghazi, which would have been an admission that things weren’t so rosy in the fledgling democracy, now looked like a political calculation that cost American lives. Worse yet, once more the idea that terrorism is a response to our bad behavior was exploded, as many of those Libyans we had liberated turned against us, just as thousands of Afghans and Iraqis have.
So of course the attack had to be spun into something closer to Obama’s foreign policy narrative: the attack was caused by a “spontaneous” protest against an Internet video insulting Mohammed. The administration knew this was a lie the day of the attack, but could not admit this repudiation of Obama’s foreign policy claims so close to the election, and so kept repeating the lie for two weeks, trusting the media spaniels to spin the attack and collude in the still on-going cover-up. MORE
Dealing with the President's willful ignorance and culture of intimidation
Dealing with the President's willful ignorance and culture of intimidation:
John Cornyn is on message in dealing with the scandal. It is implausible that the IRS scandal was cooked up in Cincinnati.
John Cornyn is on message in dealing with the scandal. It is implausible that the IRS scandal was cooked up in Cincinnati.
Economist Pete Morici: “The President sets a terrible standard by his own conduct.”
Economist Pete Morici: “The President sets a terrible standard by his own conduct.”:
Economist Pete Morici was on Fox and Friends yesterday morning and ripped President Obama and his administration for the “know nothing” narrative they’re trying to push in regards to the three major scandals enveloping them. He stated that the President has set a terrible standard by his own conduct. Check out the below clip.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Leaders in any organization set the tone through example and their enforcement or non-enforcement of the standards. When a leader’s example sets a terrible tone in an organization this is this tone their mid to lower level managers will feed off of. They will have their template as a model for all their actions. President Obama is the leader of the Democratic Party. He has set the tone for the Party and that tone has been extremely negative and combative towards any political opposition. Members of his party take their cue from his tone.
This explains why seven Democratic Senators led by Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) warned the IRS back in 2012 that if they didn’t crack down on political groups that were improperly claiming tax-exempt status they would introduce legislation to force their hand. We now know what this meant. Was it enough to swing an election? Maybe. However this action by these Senators happened because of the tone set by the Democratic Party leader (President Obama).
Over the last few weeks as these scandals have unfolded we have learned a great deal about our government under this administration. We have the IRS using the power we the people entrusted to them to suppress political opposition. We have a Department of Justice secretly seizing the phone records of Associated Press reporters and an Attorney General of the United States claiming he had nothing to do with it. And finally we have Benghazi and the editing of talking points by someone or some agency yet to be named.
All these major scandals have three things in common. The first is a breakdown in discipline on all three fronts. When discipline breaks down in any organization standards no longer matter. Rules no longer matter. And in this instance for two out of the three scandals the constitution no longer matters. The second thing that all these scandals have in common is the President was either out of the loop or can’t talk about it. Our consulate was attacked in Benghazi and our President was…well know one really knows where he was for sure. The one place he wasn’t that night was in the situation room. Our IRS was suppressing political opposition using the tax code and the President didn’t know anything about it. And finally the super secret operation that seized the phone records of AP journalists…well this is an ongoing DOJ investigation that the President and Attorney General can’t talk about. And finally the third thing they all have in common is that all the agencies that these scandals are coming out of fall under the President of the United States. And he knew nothing. That simply will not do.
The President needs to be held accountable. He is the CEO of America and we the people are the stakeholders. We hired him in a temporary position to do a job and he has failed to do. Whether through dereliction of duty, not fulfilling the responsibilities of his office, or outright incompetence this President has failed the stakeholders he works for. We can no longer turn a blind eye to the terrible standards this man has set. We must start thinking about the kind of America we want to pass on to the next generation and this President should not be a part of that conversation.
Liberty forever, freedom for all!
Economist Pete Morici was on Fox and Friends yesterday morning and ripped President Obama and his administration for the “know nothing” narrative they’re trying to push in regards to the three major scandals enveloping them. He stated that the President has set a terrible standard by his own conduct. Check out the below clip.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Leaders in any organization set the tone through example and their enforcement or non-enforcement of the standards. When a leader’s example sets a terrible tone in an organization this is this tone their mid to lower level managers will feed off of. They will have their template as a model for all their actions. President Obama is the leader of the Democratic Party. He has set the tone for the Party and that tone has been extremely negative and combative towards any political opposition. Members of his party take their cue from his tone.
This explains why seven Democratic Senators led by Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) warned the IRS back in 2012 that if they didn’t crack down on political groups that were improperly claiming tax-exempt status they would introduce legislation to force their hand. We now know what this meant. Was it enough to swing an election? Maybe. However this action by these Senators happened because of the tone set by the Democratic Party leader (President Obama).
Over the last few weeks as these scandals have unfolded we have learned a great deal about our government under this administration. We have the IRS using the power we the people entrusted to them to suppress political opposition. We have a Department of Justice secretly seizing the phone records of Associated Press reporters and an Attorney General of the United States claiming he had nothing to do with it. And finally we have Benghazi and the editing of talking points by someone or some agency yet to be named.
All these major scandals have three things in common. The first is a breakdown in discipline on all three fronts. When discipline breaks down in any organization standards no longer matter. Rules no longer matter. And in this instance for two out of the three scandals the constitution no longer matters. The second thing that all these scandals have in common is the President was either out of the loop or can’t talk about it. Our consulate was attacked in Benghazi and our President was…well know one really knows where he was for sure. The one place he wasn’t that night was in the situation room. Our IRS was suppressing political opposition using the tax code and the President didn’t know anything about it. And finally the super secret operation that seized the phone records of AP journalists…well this is an ongoing DOJ investigation that the President and Attorney General can’t talk about. And finally the third thing they all have in common is that all the agencies that these scandals are coming out of fall under the President of the United States. And he knew nothing. That simply will not do.
The President needs to be held accountable. He is the CEO of America and we the people are the stakeholders. We hired him in a temporary position to do a job and he has failed to do. Whether through dereliction of duty, not fulfilling the responsibilities of his office, or outright incompetence this President has failed the stakeholders he works for. We can no longer turn a blind eye to the terrible standards this man has set. We must start thinking about the kind of America we want to pass on to the next generation and this President should not be a part of that conversation.
Liberty forever, freedom for all!
Sunday, May 19, 2013
The End of Competition
The End of Competition: The American Dream does not actually require a red, white and blue flag or a dream. What it requires is a willingness to accept messiness.
Messiness is another word for chaos. And no one likes chaos. Chaos means that in the richest country in the world some people will be illiterate, others will be homeless and some will accidentally set themselves on fire because the fireworks don't come with enough safety warnings.
Those aren't good things. They're not things that governments and the squeaky wheels who make governments what they are think should be tolerated. They're messy.
Messy is all those things that people say someone should do something about, by which they don't mean themselves. What they really mean is that we should be living in a more orderly society. And an orderly society is one where things don't just happen. You have to file eight forms, duck six committees and debate four non-profits to have any chance of getting things done. And even then you probably won't.
Orderly societies have nailed down all the loose ends. There are fewer homeless people, mainly because they are now living in sixty thousand dollar per inmate shelters designed by progressive architects, but there are also fewer errand boys becoming Andrew Carnegie. What is really being lost is social mobility. The ladder up.
Meritocracy requires chaos. An orderly society isn't chaotic, it's stratified. The power has been parceled out to all the people who should have it. And there's only so much to go around. Newness is a threat because new things are unpredictable. They're chaotic. They disrupt the power structure.
The liberal argument is largely an argument for a society consolidated around government in service to progressive ideals. It's a tidy world in which governments and non-profits consume an always increasing share of everything else until there isn't anything else because it's been consolidated. The end result of that process however isn't progressive. It's tribal.
Power naturally consolidates along personal lines, not political lines. A society may begin by consolidating power so that all the non-profits can help the homeless and the people who can't read fireworks instructions, but, in a peculiar phenomenon, the homeless never seem to get helped much and fireworks accidents keep happening.
The phenomenon isn't really peculiar at all. Humanitarian work is a job that exists to eliminate itself. The only way to keep a job dedicated to solving the problem is to perpetuate the problem. Or to redefine the problem on a larger scale. All that is familiar enough from any number of non-profits and government agencies that exist to remind people to care about a problem that they don't care about.
Redefining the problem on a larger scale means more money, more power and more control. Any problem, whether it's homelessness, illiteracy or crime is a social problem and can only be solved by taking a holistic approach to everything. A city, a country and a world become a giant puzzle that can only be solved by manipulating all the pieces into place in the right order. The only way to solve the problems that never get solved is through total control over every human being on earth.
Power can only be consolidated ideologically for so long. Both the Russian and Chinese Communist revolutions eventually collapsed into familial profiteering. China's Princes and Russia's KGB clans brought down Communism in both countries and resurrected it as profiteering oligarchies eager to live the good life.
To some measure, Capitalism beat Communism, but more accurately tribalism beat internationalism, powerful men built systems that lock in privileges for their friends and families while tossing out the lefty ideologies that allowed their grandfathers to get close to those privileges. It's an old story and it's how the progressive experiments in the ideological consolidation of power will end here.
Power is personal. As is wealth. A system that consolidates enough power turns tribal as fathers look to pass on their privileges to their children until, like so many social services agencies, the system exists for the sake of the system.
Tribal systems are not meritocracies. They aren't interested in talent, but in a sense of order that derives from the consolidation of power. Their idea of civilization does not lie in their arts or sciences, only in the orderliness of power. Only when chaos assails them, is talent released out into the wild where unpredictable things happen. But the chaotic period passes and the old patterns assert themselves again strangling the wildness and consolidating it.
Despite the proliferation of wild communications technologies, our society is becoming more medieval. We have guilds, a secular clergy and a population too fragmented for nationalism. Republics are giving way to feudalism as people value being cared for more than opportunity. Even the old religious wars are returning with the special forces as our knights, the skyscrapers as our castles and the dole keeping the peasants on the urban voting farm.
Much of the progressive infrastructure exists to eliminate competition. Jobs and higher education are assigned by race, gender, orientation union membership and political affiliation. Starting a business grows harder each year without political connections. Success has less to do with the marketplace, than with the political picture.
The entire "You Didn't Build That" platform is about the end of competition. Policy statements like that lay out the proper place of the individual. Success doesn't come from competition, but from the decisions made by the government. If the decisions are wise, then competition is unnecessary. If they are unwise, then competition is futile.
The merit in meritocracy doesn't come from individual striving tested against the real world, but from the decision making process of political leaders. Merit is redefined, not in terms relevant to the field, but to the bigger political picture. It's not a matter of the best engineer, businessman or architect, but the engineer, businessman or architect whose identity and vision are harmonious with the big picture.
Holistic think global and act local politics of that nature is very orderly, in that it has no room for the individual. It is too concerned with the forest to care about a tree, let alone the lumberjack or the family that needs an affordable home. And the outcome of that mass dehumanization is a politics in which only the people in the inner circle of power are truly human and truly matter.
China and the Soviet Union killed millions for ideas and then finally for personal power. The end of a system that dehumanizes millions for a collective is a system that dehumanizes millions for the few who run it, the few who really matter and the few whose decisions build everything. Once you reduce the worth of a society to the few philosopher-kings, the commissars of correctness and the technocratic czars, then it becomes very easy to dump all the ideas that got them there and fall back on the old notions that some people are better than others.
Progressivism is about the management of chaos through the impersonal means of government authority. Eliminate enough of the chaos and what remains is a stultifying order that is not based on reason, but on power. The more power is consolidated in the name of something, the more institutions are mobilized to achieve its goals and the more every aspect of life is centralized, the less room there is for the wild creative chaos that moves societies forward through great leaps and bounds.
Civilization is haunted by the old industrial utopian idea that a rational society will be completely managed from the top down. Every progressive goal depends on a rigid system of authority that answers to calls from some civilian non-profits run by community organizers playing the role of the old soviets. The soviets were an illusion. A country was never going to be run by them. It was going to be run by powerful men like Lenin or Stalin who took control of the revolutionary chaos and imposed their own murderous order.
The progressive state is not going to be run by people who want more homeless shelters or more illegal immigration or more abortions. Those people are useful for putting the system into place by giving it the illusion of popular will, but they are unwanted once that has taken place. Once the power has been consolidated, the flimsy coalitions of activists who got it there quickly become a nuisance.
The trouble with all this isn't humanitarianism. It's not wrong to care about others. It is wrong to pass that caring off to an impersonal bureaucracy or to set up a system of mandatory caring or to disrupt the lives of others on a massive scale out of spiteful self-righteousness because they don't care enough. That is why studies show that while conservatives give charity, liberals give government.
A rational view of society begins with accepting an imperfect world. A demand for a rational society however is the irrational belief that government can perfect people. But how can government perfect people when it is made up of imperfect people? Consolidate power under a small number of people and their ranks will grow smaller and they will act no differently than every pharaoh, king and czar throughout history.
Worse than the tyranny is the death of so much of the energy that makes the next step possible. The managed chaos, the thin line between government intervention and anarchy based on a few documents, common sense and a national ethos is what made the American Dream possible. That dream is being strangled by the bureaucratic collectivism of liberal technocrats who imagine that piling one more institution, one more level of regulation and one more set of rules will produce only pros without the cons, product without pollution, wealth without poverty and good without evil.
The progressive consolidation imagines that organization can contain the messier side of man. Mostly it cannot. Instead organizations consolidate power in the hands of men who are worse than average in the name of improving mankind.
The end of competition is the beginning of tyranny.
Messiness is another word for chaos. And no one likes chaos. Chaos means that in the richest country in the world some people will be illiterate, others will be homeless and some will accidentally set themselves on fire because the fireworks don't come with enough safety warnings.Those aren't good things. They're not things that governments and the squeaky wheels who make governments what they are think should be tolerated. They're messy.
Messy is all those things that people say someone should do something about, by which they don't mean themselves. What they really mean is that we should be living in a more orderly society. And an orderly society is one where things don't just happen. You have to file eight forms, duck six committees and debate four non-profits to have any chance of getting things done. And even then you probably won't.
Orderly societies have nailed down all the loose ends. There are fewer homeless people, mainly because they are now living in sixty thousand dollar per inmate shelters designed by progressive architects, but there are also fewer errand boys becoming Andrew Carnegie. What is really being lost is social mobility. The ladder up.
Meritocracy requires chaos. An orderly society isn't chaotic, it's stratified. The power has been parceled out to all the people who should have it. And there's only so much to go around. Newness is a threat because new things are unpredictable. They're chaotic. They disrupt the power structure.
The liberal argument is largely an argument for a society consolidated around government in service to progressive ideals. It's a tidy world in which governments and non-profits consume an always increasing share of everything else until there isn't anything else because it's been consolidated. The end result of that process however isn't progressive. It's tribal.
Power naturally consolidates along personal lines, not political lines. A society may begin by consolidating power so that all the non-profits can help the homeless and the people who can't read fireworks instructions, but, in a peculiar phenomenon, the homeless never seem to get helped much and fireworks accidents keep happening.
The phenomenon isn't really peculiar at all. Humanitarian work is a job that exists to eliminate itself. The only way to keep a job dedicated to solving the problem is to perpetuate the problem. Or to redefine the problem on a larger scale. All that is familiar enough from any number of non-profits and government agencies that exist to remind people to care about a problem that they don't care about.
Redefining the problem on a larger scale means more money, more power and more control. Any problem, whether it's homelessness, illiteracy or crime is a social problem and can only be solved by taking a holistic approach to everything. A city, a country and a world become a giant puzzle that can only be solved by manipulating all the pieces into place in the right order. The only way to solve the problems that never get solved is through total control over every human being on earth.
Power can only be consolidated ideologically for so long. Both the Russian and Chinese Communist revolutions eventually collapsed into familial profiteering. China's Princes and Russia's KGB clans brought down Communism in both countries and resurrected it as profiteering oligarchies eager to live the good life.
Power is personal. As is wealth. A system that consolidates enough power turns tribal as fathers look to pass on their privileges to their children until, like so many social services agencies, the system exists for the sake of the system.
Tribal systems are not meritocracies. They aren't interested in talent, but in a sense of order that derives from the consolidation of power. Their idea of civilization does not lie in their arts or sciences, only in the orderliness of power. Only when chaos assails them, is talent released out into the wild where unpredictable things happen. But the chaotic period passes and the old patterns assert themselves again strangling the wildness and consolidating it.
Despite the proliferation of wild communications technologies, our society is becoming more medieval. We have guilds, a secular clergy and a population too fragmented for nationalism. Republics are giving way to feudalism as people value being cared for more than opportunity. Even the old religious wars are returning with the special forces as our knights, the skyscrapers as our castles and the dole keeping the peasants on the urban voting farm.
Much of the progressive infrastructure exists to eliminate competition. Jobs and higher education are assigned by race, gender, orientation union membership and political affiliation. Starting a business grows harder each year without political connections. Success has less to do with the marketplace, than with the political picture.
The entire "You Didn't Build That" platform is about the end of competition. Policy statements like that lay out the proper place of the individual. Success doesn't come from competition, but from the decisions made by the government. If the decisions are wise, then competition is unnecessary. If they are unwise, then competition is futile.
The merit in meritocracy doesn't come from individual striving tested against the real world, but from the decision making process of political leaders. Merit is redefined, not in terms relevant to the field, but to the bigger political picture. It's not a matter of the best engineer, businessman or architect, but the engineer, businessman or architect whose identity and vision are harmonious with the big picture.
Holistic think global and act local politics of that nature is very orderly, in that it has no room for the individual. It is too concerned with the forest to care about a tree, let alone the lumberjack or the family that needs an affordable home. And the outcome of that mass dehumanization is a politics in which only the people in the inner circle of power are truly human and truly matter.
China and the Soviet Union killed millions for ideas and then finally for personal power. The end of a system that dehumanizes millions for a collective is a system that dehumanizes millions for the few who run it, the few who really matter and the few whose decisions build everything. Once you reduce the worth of a society to the few philosopher-kings, the commissars of correctness and the technocratic czars, then it becomes very easy to dump all the ideas that got them there and fall back on the old notions that some people are better than others.
Progressivism is about the management of chaos through the impersonal means of government authority. Eliminate enough of the chaos and what remains is a stultifying order that is not based on reason, but on power. The more power is consolidated in the name of something, the more institutions are mobilized to achieve its goals and the more every aspect of life is centralized, the less room there is for the wild creative chaos that moves societies forward through great leaps and bounds.
Civilization is haunted by the old industrial utopian idea that a rational society will be completely managed from the top down. Every progressive goal depends on a rigid system of authority that answers to calls from some civilian non-profits run by community organizers playing the role of the old soviets. The soviets were an illusion. A country was never going to be run by them. It was going to be run by powerful men like Lenin or Stalin who took control of the revolutionary chaos and imposed their own murderous order.
The progressive state is not going to be run by people who want more homeless shelters or more illegal immigration or more abortions. Those people are useful for putting the system into place by giving it the illusion of popular will, but they are unwanted once that has taken place. Once the power has been consolidated, the flimsy coalitions of activists who got it there quickly become a nuisance.
The trouble with all this isn't humanitarianism. It's not wrong to care about others. It is wrong to pass that caring off to an impersonal bureaucracy or to set up a system of mandatory caring or to disrupt the lives of others on a massive scale out of spiteful self-righteousness because they don't care enough. That is why studies show that while conservatives give charity, liberals give government.A rational view of society begins with accepting an imperfect world. A demand for a rational society however is the irrational belief that government can perfect people. But how can government perfect people when it is made up of imperfect people? Consolidate power under a small number of people and their ranks will grow smaller and they will act no differently than every pharaoh, king and czar throughout history.
Worse than the tyranny is the death of so much of the energy that makes the next step possible. The managed chaos, the thin line between government intervention and anarchy based on a few documents, common sense and a national ethos is what made the American Dream possible. That dream is being strangled by the bureaucratic collectivism of liberal technocrats who imagine that piling one more institution, one more level of regulation and one more set of rules will produce only pros without the cons, product without pollution, wealth without poverty and good without evil.
The progressive consolidation imagines that organization can contain the messier side of man. Mostly it cannot. Instead organizations consolidate power in the hands of men who are worse than average in the name of improving mankind.
The end of competition is the beginning of tyranny.
Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and blogger and a Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Saturday, May 18, 2013
Liberal Hijacking of the National Conversation
Liberal Hijacking of the National Conversation:
And as Beck asks near the end of the clip, “Who are we being politically correct for?”
If you don’t like the answers you come up with, what are you going to do about it?
This video of Glenn Beck does some jumping around, but there is one overriding theme: the hijacking of the national conversation by the morally bankrupt Left.
Please take the time to watch this, and then ask yourself some tough questions, including: “Have I been taken in by any of this? Have I let them silence me? Have I let them intimidate me from standing up for what is right?”And as Beck asks near the end of the clip, “Who are we being politically correct for?”
If you don’t like the answers you come up with, what are you going to do about it?
IRS targets Obama’s enemies in extraordinary scandal
IRS targets Obama’s enemies in extraordinary scandal:
In this column, I focus on the IRS scandal, once again. For it is much the more serious of the two. There are two parts to the IRS scandal. The first is the obviously deliberate and targeted abuse harassment and attempted suppression of conservative groups. The second is the auditing of taxes of conservative political activists.
In order to suppress conservative groups the IRS demanded donor rolls, membership lists, data on all contributions, names of volunteers, the contents of all speeches made by members, Facebook posts, minutes of all meetings, and copies of all materials handed out at gatherings. When asked what its members were reading, one group responded: The U.S. Constitution! Now I can assure you from first hand experience that these questions are not routinely requested by the IRS. When The Locke Institute applied for 501 (c) 3 status in 1994, it took about a year to secure that status. But the questions were always fair and politically unbiased. And that was during the administration of President Bill Clinton, who was not above a dirty trick or two to harass his supposed enemies.
The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have publicly opposed the administration. Such politically-oriented audits constitute the use of government power to intrude on the privacy and shackle the political freedom of American citizens. The purpose is to overwhelm and intimidate – to kill the opposition, audit by audit by audit. Such behavior is to be expected of such low-lives as Vladimir Putin, Tsar of All the Russias. Perhaps now it must be expected by such low-lives as President Obama, Tsar of the United States of America.
Shame on you Barack Obama! You disgrace the high office that you are privileged to hold.
“We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate. The reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one likes what they’re seeing. The Justice Department’s assault on the associated Press and the ugly politicization of the Internal Revenue Service have left the administration’s credibility deeply, possibly irretrievably damaged….Something big has shifted. The standing of the administration has changed. As always it comes down to trust. Do you trust the president’s answers when he’s pressed on an uncomfortable story? Do you trust his people to be sober and fair-minded as they go about their work? Do you trust the IRS and the Justice Department? You do not.” Peggy Noonan, ‘This Is No Ordinary Scandal’, The Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2013President Obama, albeit sheepishly, acts as though these scandals are unconnected to the White House.Like the chief of police in Casablanca he is shocked, shocked, to discover in the newspapers what has happened! President Obama, however, is deeply connected to these scandals. He is not a bystander, like you and I. This happens to be his administration. The Justice Department and the IRS are his executive agencies. He runs and oversees them.
In this column, I focus on the IRS scandal, once again. For it is much the more serious of the two. There are two parts to the IRS scandal. The first is the obviously deliberate and targeted abuse harassment and attempted suppression of conservative groups. The second is the auditing of taxes of conservative political activists.
In order to suppress conservative groups the IRS demanded donor rolls, membership lists, data on all contributions, names of volunteers, the contents of all speeches made by members, Facebook posts, minutes of all meetings, and copies of all materials handed out at gatherings. When asked what its members were reading, one group responded: The U.S. Constitution! Now I can assure you from first hand experience that these questions are not routinely requested by the IRS. When The Locke Institute applied for 501 (c) 3 status in 1994, it took about a year to secure that status. But the questions were always fair and politically unbiased. And that was during the administration of President Bill Clinton, who was not above a dirty trick or two to harass his supposed enemies.
The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have publicly opposed the administration. Such politically-oriented audits constitute the use of government power to intrude on the privacy and shackle the political freedom of American citizens. The purpose is to overwhelm and intimidate – to kill the opposition, audit by audit by audit. Such behavior is to be expected of such low-lives as Vladimir Putin, Tsar of All the Russias. Perhaps now it must be expected by such low-lives as President Obama, Tsar of the United States of America.
Shame on you Barack Obama! You disgrace the high office that you are privileged to hold.
Articles: Unmasking Liberalism on the Arizona Range
Articles: Unmasking Liberalism on the Arizona Range
Conservatives contend that liberalism has never worked anywhere it has been tried, but if you accept liberal dogma as I've stated it, as liberals believe it, liberalism can't fail. It always works, by definition. If it happens to get the wrong results, that's someone else's fault, somebody else (George W. Bush) screwed it up. That is why, if you tell a liberal that what he or she is doing doesn't work, you are treated as if you have uttered an absurdity, as if what you have said reveals you are so uninformed you don't deserve a reply. It is also why liberalism fails as often as it does -- because it is flying blind. It is unable and unwilling to monitor and correct itself because doing the "right thing" according to liberal doctrine, always gets the "right" results -- whatever they are.
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