Urban Blues

 

Some thoughts on the destructive nature of Democrat governance and its manifestation in the Baltimore riots.

 

WSJ editors (4/29) --

 

"You’re not supposed to say this in polite company, but what went up in flames in Baltimore Monday night was not merely a senior center, small businesses and police cars. Burning down was also the blue-city model of urban governance.

 

Nothing excuses the violence of rampaging students or the failure of city officials to stop it before Maryland’s Governor called in the National Guard. But as order starts to return to the streets, and the usual political suspects lament the lack of economic prospects for the young men who rioted, let’s not forget who has run Baltimore and Maryland for nearly all of the last 40 years.
The men and women in charge have been Democrats, and their governing ideas are “progressive.” This model, with its reliance on government and public unions, has dominated urban America as once-vibrant cities such as Baltimore became shells of their former selves.

 

...The dysfunctions of the blue-city model are many, but the main failures are three: high crime, low economic growth and failing public schools that serve primarily as jobs programs for teachers and administrators rather than places of learning.

 

...Our point is not to indict all cities or liberals. Many big-city Democrats have worked to welcome private investment and reform public education. Some of the biggest cities—New York, Boston and San Francisco—have also had inherent economic advantages like higher education and the finance and technology industries.
But Baltimore also has advantages, not least its port and one of the nation’s finest medical centers in Johns Hopkins. If it lacks the appeal of New York or San Diego, that is all the more reason for city officials to rethink their reliance on high taxes, government spending and welfare-state dependency.

 

...It’s not that we don’t know what to do. Rudy Giuliani proved that in New York City, which he helped to revive in the 1990s starting with a revolution in policing that brought crime rates to record lows. A good part of this was policing in areas that had previously been left to the hoodlums.
His reward (and that of his successor, Mike Bloomberg, who built on Mr. Giuliani’s policies) was to become a villain of the liberal grievance industry and a constant target of attack. Few blue-city mayors elsewhere have been willing to take that heat."

Kevin Williamson --

 

"St. Louis has not had a Republican mayor since the 1940s, and in its most recent elections for the board of aldermen there was no Republican in the majority of the contests; the city is overwhelmingly Democratic, effectively a single-party political monopoly from its schools to its police department. Baltimore has seen two Republicans sit in the mayor’s office since the 1920s — and none since the 1960s. Like St. Louis, it is effectively a single-party political monopoly from its schools to its police department. Philadelphia has not elected a Republican mayor since 1948. The last Republican to be elected mayor of Detroit was congratulated on his victory by President Eisenhower. Atlanta, a city so corrupt that its public schools are organized as a criminal conspiracy against its children, last had a Republican mayor in the 19th century. Its municipal elections are officially nonpartisan, but the last Republican to run in Atlanta’s 13th congressional district did not manage to secure even 30 percent of the vote; Atlanta is effectively a single-party political monopoly from its schools to its police department.

 

American cities are by and large Democratic-party monopolies, monopolies generally dominated by the so-called progressive wing of the party. The results have been catastrophic, and not only in poor black cities such as Baltimore and Detroit. Money can paper over some of the defects of progressivism in rich, white cities such as Portland and San Francisco, but those are pretty awful places to be non-white and non-rich, too: Blacks make up barely 9 percent of the population in San Francisco, but they represent 40 percent of those arrested for murder, and they are arrested for drug offenses at ten times their share of the population.

...Yes, Baltimore seems to have some police problems. But let us be clear about whose fecklessness and dishonesty we are talking about here: No Republican, and certainly no conservative, has left so much as a thumbprint on the public institutions of Baltimore in a generation. Baltimore’s police department is, like Detroit’s economy and Atlanta’s schools, the product of the progressive wing of the Democratic party enabled in no small part by black identity politics. This is entirely a left-wing project, and a Democratic-party project.

 

When will the Left be held to account for the brutality in Baltimore — brutality for which it bears a measure of responsibility on both sides? There aren’t any Republicans out there cheering on the looters, and there aren’t any Republicans exercising real political power over the police or other municipal institutions in Baltimore. Community-organizer — a wretched term — Adam Jackson declared that in Baltimore “the Democrats and the Republicans have both failed.” Really? Which Republicans? Ulysses S. Grant? Unless I’m reading the charts wrong, the Baltimore city council is 100 percent Democratic.
 

...The evidence suggests very strongly that the left-wing, Democratic claques that run a great many American cities — particularly the poor and black cities — are not capable of running a school system or a police department. They are incompetent, they are corrupt, and they are breathtakingly arrogant. Cleveland, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore — this is what Democrats do. And the kids in the street screaming about “inequality”? Somebody should tell them that the locale in these United States with the least economic inequality is Utah, i.e. the state farthest away from the reach of the people who run Baltimore.

 

Keep voting for the same thing, keep getting the same thing."
 

Jay Nordlinger --

"The young rioters have had their butts kissed for a long time. They’ve been told they are victims — victims of a society rigged against them. A racist society.

They’ve been told they aren’t free in life, but shackled. They’ve been brought up to regard themselves as entitled and victimized, at the same time.

In truth, they are among the luckiest people in the whole world: to have been born American. Millions, probably billions, would be happy to trade places with them. The rioters are free to make of life what they will. Their shackles are mental and spiritual. “You’ve got to be carefully taught,” goes a song. These young people have been grossly mistaught — misled — by the “grievance industry” (to use shorthand).

Just about the worst thing you can do to a child is tell him he’s a victim — when it’s not true. Even when it is true, it may be unwise. It is surely damnable when it’s not true.

Where I’m from, the worst thing you could be was a Republican or conservative. I mean, it was terribly uncool. But life forced me into it — into conservative Republicanism. I saw that contemporary liberalism was sick at its core. I see it in Baltimore, and the responses to it, now."

Items Of Interest

An astounding Quinnipac poll result - 54 percent of Americans say Hillary Clinton is not honest or trustworthy.
Forty-six percent don't feel this way?

Observation by a Tweeter --

Did you commit the crime? If you're innocent: "No, I did not." If you're a Clinton: "There is no evidence"

Another Tweet -- Evidence of the Clinton Foundation's "alleged" tax fraud.

Here is how the most transparent administration in history responds to the Clinton-Uranium One-Russia scandal. Jonathan Karl, reporter for that far right wing network, ABC News, asks the questions. Responding, WH Press secretary Josh Earnest does his best Sergeant Schultz impersonation. (I...know...nothing!)

Fox News' Bret Baier does a good job summing up the salient points of the scandal in less than 10 minutes.

And to put all this in context, a blast from the past.

The GOP candidate, whomever he or she is, should make the "Russian Reset" video a prominent feature of his/her 2016 campaign. And Hillary's laugh track should be turned into a downloadable wake-up alarm for smartphones. No one could possibly sleep through that sound.

Clinton scandal columns by --

Jonah Goldberg

Kim Strassel

Andrew McCarthy --

...We should consider the Obama administration’s legal standards. ...the Justice Department has just filed its indictment of Senator Robert Menendez (D – NJ) on various corruption charges. The prosecution’s theory is that Menendez accepted “things of value” in exchange for using his political influence to benefit a big-time donor. Sen. Menendez counters that he did nothing wrong — i.e., that there is no nexus between, on the one hand, the hefty contributions, private jet rides to ritzy resorts, and other posh gifts he received, and, on the other hand, the use of his office in ways that just happened to favor the donor.

We are still at a very early stage of scrutinizing the Clinton Foundation, but we can already say two things with confidence:

(1) The millions upon millions of dollars the Clinton Foundation has collected from foreign donors and others with significant self-interest in U.S. government policy — during a time when Mrs. Clinton had a key role (and the prospect of an even bigger role) in designing U.S. government policy — makes the gifts to Menendez look like chump change.

(2) To the best of our knowledge, Menendez never withheld his emails from the government or wiped his server clean.

A reactionary homophobe speaks --

I believe marriage is the fundamental bedrock principle that exists between a man and a woman, going back into the mists of history as one of the founding, foundational institutions of history and humanity and civilization, and that its primary, principal role during those millennia has been the raising and socializing of children for the society into which they are to become adults.
-- Hillary Clinton, 2004

And there was this from the president, expressing his deeply held religious conviction.

I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian — for me — for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. God’s in the mix.
-- Barack Obama, April, 2008.

God's no longer in the mix, I guess.
Clinton states precisely the secular conservative argument against gay marriage. Obama conveys the position of the Hobby Lobby, Chick-Fil-A, Christian wedding cake baker crowd.

Here is Obama lamenting the deaths of two hostages during a recent U.S. drone strike against Al-Queda targets --

It is a cruel and bitter truth that in the fog of war generally and our fight against terrorists specifically, mistakes—sometimes deadly mistakes—can occur.

Wait. What? The fog of what? Obama is waging what? This wasn't just a Kinetic Military Action in support of an Overseas Contingency Operation that went awry?

A letter appearing in the WSJ, 4/24/2015 --

The often repeated shibboleth that forms the basis for Hillary Clinton’s gripe that “the average CEO makes about 300 times what the average worker makes” is a canard that seems to have originated with the AFL-CIO’s Paywatch website statement that in 2012 “[t]he CEOs of S&P 500 index companies made, on average, 354 times the average wages of rank-and-file U.S. workers.” The Executive Paywatch website, however, clearly acknowledges that this ratio is “based on [an] AFL-CIO analysis of average CEO pay at 327 companies in the S&P 500 index, which disclosed 2012 CEO pay data as of April 1, 2013.” Simply put, the ratio doesn’t represent the pay differential between an average CEO and an average worker as Mrs. Clinton and many others have claimed.

For 2012, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that there were 255,940 non-self-employed CEOs in the U.S. For the same year, the BLS likewise estimated that the mean annual salary of these CEOs was $176,840. When compared with the July 2012 seasonally adjusted average annual pay of $34,645 for production and nonsupervisory employees on private nonfarm payrolls in the U. S., as also estimated by the BLS, the ratio of the average CEO pay to the pay of an average employee as calculated by the AFL-CIO shrinks from 354 to 1 to just over 5 to 1.

Thousands of words have been written depicting CEO pay as inflated, and statements such as that offered by Mrs. Clinton are often uncritically accepted.

Prof. Arthur G. Bedeian
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, La.

Kevin Williamson made much the same point in a recent column.

Discussions of CEO pay generally focus on the Fortune 500 or on publicly traded corporations. This is a mistake, for many reasons: The Fortune 500 CEOs are by definition an unusual group — there are only 500 of them in a nation of 310 million — which means that using them to judge executive pay, or even chief-executive pay, is like combining the incomes of the year’s New York Times bestselling authors and those of the screenwriters behind the year’s hit movies and television shows to get an impression of what an American writer makes, or using the New York Philharmonic to get an idea of what an American musician makes. In reality, the average American CEO — the average chief executive — makes a little less than $200,000 a year. Paul Krugman makes more than that for a part-time gig thinking deep thoughts about . . . economic inequality. 

Williamson is notable (among many other things) for his scathing depictions of abhorrent public figures (Harry Reid, Lena Dunham, etc), so it's good to see him take the lead going after Hillary Clinton and her flacks. Here are KW's recent columns on the servility of Paul Begala, the superficiality of the Clinton campaign, and Hillary at Chipotle --

A few weeks ago, I was at a Subway in a small town in Michigan, and there was a woman in front of me who was making the most complicated Subway order I ever have witnessed, i.e., a foot-long sandwich with different ingredients on each half — peppers on one half, no peppers on the other, onions and olives on the no-peppers half, etc. She paid with small coins and divided the sandwich with her friend — a single foot-long sandwich costs less than two six-inch sandwiches, and as she counted out the last pennies, it was obvious that this made a difference. The two shared a fountain drink, which I gather is against Subway policy, but nobody was making a fuss about it.

... Those two women in a dead-end Michigan town, not starving but far from prospering, literally counting their pennies — they will have to endure a great deal of unhappiness in life. Having that unhappiness made into an instrument of ambition for conniving politicians who pantomime the lives of “everyday Americans” only adds insult to injury.
 
Holman Jenkins (WSJ) --

As the late economist and social thinker Mancur Olson taught, political bargains of the past are the burden of the future.

Peggy Noonan --

Republicans know—they see it every day—that Republican candidates get grilled, sometimes impertinently, and pressed, sometimes brusquely. And it isn’t true that they’re only questioned in this way once they announce, Scott Walker has been treated like this also, and he has yet to announce. Republicans see this, and then they see that Mrs. Clinton isn’t grilled, is never forced to submit to anyone’s morning-show impertinence, is never the object of the snotty question or the sharp demand for information. She gets the glide. She waves at the crowds and the press and glides by. No one pushes. No one shouts the rude question or rolls out the carefully scripted set of studio inquiries meant to make the candidate squirm. She is treated like the queen of England, who also isn’t subjected to impertinent questions as she glides into and out of venues. But she is the queen. We are not supposed to have queens.

Rep. Lamar Smith on the religion of global warming --

At least the United Nations’ then-top climate scientist, Rajendra Pachauri, acknowledged—however inadvertently—the faith-based nature of climate-change rhetoric when he resigned amid scandal in February. In a farewell letter, he said that “the protection of Planet Earth, the survival of all species and sustainability of our ecosystems is more than a mission. It is my religion and my dharma.”

...Christiana Figueres, the official leading the U.N.’s effort to forge a new international climate treaty later this year in Paris, told reporters in February that the real goal is “to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years.” In other words, a central objective of these negotiations is the redistribution of wealth among nations. It is apparent that President Obama shares this vision.

Kevin Williamson explores left wing fictions --

It is not the case that American society is organized according to the principles of an 18th century slaver called Willie Lynch. It is not the case that crime is evenly distributed among various demographic groups. It is not the case that one in three or one in five or one in 50 women in college will be raped, or even that college campuses have elevated rates of sexual assault. It is not the case that crack cocaine was distributed in inner-city neighborhoods by the CIA or that the World Trade Center was taken down by covert demolition. It is not the case that we are suffering from out-of-control crime, or that crime is at anything other than historically low levels. It isn’t the case that the Republican party is controlled by the Koch brothers or Israeli intelligence officers. It isn’t the case that pharmaceutical companies have suppressed all-natural cures for cancer or that oil companies have suppressed an automobile engine that runs on saltwater. There are no Illuminati. Race, crime, global warming – there is no controversy in which we can lie our way to the truth. The more we hunt for imaginary villains, the less firm a grasp we have on reality. 

KW on Good Guys vs Bad Guys --

In popular culture, it is a commonplace that we could have cures for AIDS or cancer if not for the greed of doctors and pharmaceutical companies, that we could have cars that run off of sunshine and goodwill if not for the wickedness of the oil barons. Progressive media is entirely captive to the Evil-Man Theory of Everything, and popular left-leaning commentators such as Thom Hartmann are as crude in their illiterate moralism as any 1930s demagogue – indeed, as economic analysis, their views are indistinguishable from those of Father Coughlin.

... Every time you hear a politician or activist explain that the world is the way it is because villainous so-and-so is the tool of unsympathetic thus-and-such while heroic so-and-so really cares about sympathetic thus-and-such, what you are hearing is about as meaningful as the croaking of poorly educated frogs or explanations based on the four humors, hepatomancy, astrology, or the keen insights of John Oliver, each of which is about as intellectually defensible as the next.
  
KW on balancing order and liberty --

In the 800 years since the ratification of Magna Carta, we have not managed to come up with a political solution that does not in the end present us with a choice between servility and revolution. The Left, being schizophrenic, wants revolution and servility simultaneously: smashing store windows on Saturday night, cashing a welfare check on Monday.

Victor Davis Hanson's column on thought police. Here he mocks Hillary's laughably mendacious explanation for her e-mail fiasco. --

To believe the media’s acceptance of Hillary Clinton’s e-mail yarns, we would have to engage in mental gymnastics that would make Rose Mary Woods’s physical contortions during Watergate seem a trifle in comparison. Hillary sort of had four mobile devices, but also sort of had only one. Everyone knows you need two separate smartphones to have two separate e-mail accounts, and thus she had only one of each. She protected her server from hackers by having bodyguards on the premises — but not from her more dangerous alter ego, who deleted thousands of e-mails and crashed her server. She wanted a private account to e-mail her husband – and, as proof, Bill Clinton said he had written only two e-mails in his entire life. She swears that she knew which e-mails were private and which were public, and so understandably destroyed the former to prove just that to the American people. What Hillary Clinton did was not at all unusual, although no other high-ranking administration official communicated only through a private e-mail account and server. Listening to her gibberish was like an exasperated Dorothy watching the stammering Oz as the tiny man behind the curtain frantically twisted dials and pulled levers to let out steam and project a defiant, though empty, talking head. 

Bill Whittle details a couple of the laws violated by Madam Secretary Clinton.

Andrew McCarthy --

We seem to have forgotten that the point of the Constitution is not to accomplish great things; it is to prevent government from doing overbearing or destructive things. The achievement of great things was left to the genius and ambition of free people confronting challenges without stifling constraints. The Constitution’s constraints can indeed be stifling. Quite intentionally so: They are there to prevent legacy-hunting ideologues and feckless fixers from rolling the dice with our lives.

Deroy Murdock on Obama's delicate way of war --

When the Islamic State first emerged, it traversed Iraqi and Syrian deserts in pick-up trucks. A few days of relentless bombing would have reduced these maggots to cinders. Instead, Obama’s daintiness let them seize territory the size of Great Britain. The group now has infiltrated Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen, sealed an alliance with Boko Haram in Nigeria, and much more.

Anyone who looks at the nuclear deal and sees success is living in a world of rainbows and unicorns.
Mortimer Zuckerman (WSJ op-ed) explains.

Dick Cheney --

If you had somebody who, as president — who wanted to take America down. Who wanted to fundamentally weaken our position in the world, reduce our capacity to influence events. Turn our back on our allies and encourage our enemies, it would look exactly like what Barack Obama is doing. I think his actions are constituted in my mind are those of the worst president we’ve ever had.

Arthur Herman hypothesizes that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's obsession with "getting" VP Cheney tragically led to an extension of the Iraq war.

Matt Purple on the weakened state of liberalism --

Of the top ten job-creating states in 2014, according to Gallup, seven were under total Republican control (it would be eight if Nebraska didn’t have a nonpartisan legislature). Of the ten states that created the fewest jobs, only one was under total Republican control and four were under total Democratic control.

These side-by-side economic comparisons—brought to you by federalism, another great conservative idea—have created a personnel shortage in the Democratic Party as voters toss out failed liberal governors. Consider that the Democrats’ presidential frontrunner for 2016 is Hillary Clinton, who’s been on camera without interruption since 1992 yet hasn’t held elected office since 2009. Consider too that her only potential challengers are a one-term senator from Massachusetts and a former governor from Maryland whose protégé was thrashed at the ballot box last year.

Or consider my old pal Dannel Malloy, the new head of the Democratic Governors Association. Malloy is governor of Connecticut, an economic leper colony ranked dead last in those Gallup job creation rankings. Why let him fail upwards into the DGA, often considered a stepping stone to national prominence? Perhaps because Malloy is all Democrats have left. Only 18 Democratic governors survived last year’s elections, after Republicans prevailed in blue states like Illinois and Maryland.

Malloy plans to reverse this trend by doubling down on progressivism. “If you abandon being a Democrat, they will always choose the Republican in that situation,” he said. In point of fact! Let’s hope he holds up himself as an example and pressures other Democrats to raise taxes 77 times.

None of this is to write off Hillary Clinton or chase some permanent Republican realignment chimera. It’s simply to observe that in the current snapshot of the political landscape, liberalism is as weak as it’s looked in at least ten years. Presented with a searing economic recession, Republican ideas worked, Democratic ideas didn’t, the public rewarded Republicans with everything except the presidency, and Democrats flew into a rage. That could change tomorrow or 50 years from now, but it remains an exhilarating and unexpected political narrative.

And finally, from the They Really Keep Track Of These Things Department (at ESPN) --

RHP Masahiro Tanaka made just the 10th start Saturday night by a Yankees pitcher since 1914 with at least seven scoreless innings, two-hits-or-fewer, no walks and at least eight strikeouts. It was the first one by a Yankees pitcher since Randy Johnson on July 26, 2005.

Settled Science Circa 1977

Leonard Nimoy (RIP) sums it up.

So You're Telling Me There's A Chance

Everything that's needed to know about the Iran nuclear negotiations in three tutorials, one by Charles Krauthammer, one by Andrew McCarthy and the third - a devastating critique by two former Secretaries of State, Henry Kissinger and George Shultz.

The Insidious "Larger Truth"

In this essay, Kevin Williamson examines how progressives' totalitarian aspirations are advanced by the utilization of fictitious "crises" and "emergencies".

Emergencies are occasions for suspending the usual systems of checks and balances, due process, the transparent and careful consideration of documented evidence, and — notably — for curtailing the rights of the accused. If there really were an epidemic of rape on college campuses, and if college administrations really were guilty of covering that up, then the rational thing to do would be to make colleges “mandatory reporters” — those who are legally obliged to alert the police when they are informed of an alleged sexual assault. (Progressives already are arguing that universities act in loco parentis — one of the defenses of campus speech codes — so this would hardly represent an expansion of their reading of the university’s role in the lives of students.) But this is the one thing that the self-identified activists, feminists, and progressives always resist.

 

The reason for that is that even when American justice miscarries, as it did in the daycare cases, the appeals process generally provides an opportunity for evidence to be properly examined, for all accounts to be heard and evaluated, and for the rights of the accused to be considered. (Generally.) On the other hand, the emotionally driven kangaroo courts run by sundry deans of students — dealing in shame and recrimination rather than evidence and due process — are quite a bit closer to what progressives prefer than the traditional criminal-justice process, with its patriarchic history, its Anglo-American rationalism, its niggling insistence upon the documentation of reality (all of it no doubt rooted in “privilege” of one sort or another) rather than its blind obedience to what members of various elevated victims’ groups sometimes refer to as “my truth,” as though truth required that qualifier.

 

The progressive project requires that American elites become acculturated to such processes, because the major obstacles to the progressive project are the rule of law, our constitutional order, and competing centers of power outside the state, all of which are on the progressive enemies list: corporations, churches, private schools, tradition-minded social organizations, etc. It takes a certain highly cultivated view of the world to see the Boy Scouts as the enemy.

KW also looks at the politics transforming a serious problem - California's ongoing drought - into a catastrophe.

California has X amount of water at its disposal, and it has politicians in charge of overseeing how it gets divvied up. Which politicians? The same ones responsible for the current sorry state of California’s water infrastructure, of course. Should be a hoot.

...the fundamental problem is that nobody knows what a gallon of water in California costs. Water allocations are made mainly through politics rather than through markets, with the state’s legal regime explicitly privileging some water uses over others.

 

There are two possible ways to allocate water in California: The people in Sacramento, Governor Brown prominent among them, can pick and choose who gets what, with all of the political shenanigans, cronyism, inefficiency, and corruption that brings. Or Californians can get their water the same way they get most everything else they need and value: by buying it on the open market. This is an excellent opportunity to apply the cap-and-trade model that many progressives favor when it comes to carbon dioxide emissions, with an important difference: This deals with real, physical scarcity, not artificial scarcity created by regulation.

(Incidentally, it here bears repeating that notwithstanding the inaccurate proclamations of Governor Brown and President Obama, California’s drought almost certainly is not the result of global warming; the climate models supporting the scientific consensus on global warming predict wetter winters for California, not the drier winters that have produced the current crisis. California’s climate is complex, but a great deal of it is dominated by desert and arid to semi-arid Mediterranean conditions.)

...Whether the commodity is water or education or health care, if you care about something, put a price tag on it. You can’t afford for it to be cheap, and you sure as hell can’t afford for it to be free.

The Left's Justifiable Immunity

Kevin Williamson compares the crimes of Watergate with the crimes committed by the current leftist gang in Washington. Guess which is worse? Guess which go unpunished?

Richard Nixon was a snake who understood himself as such but had sufficient vestigial conscience to be ashamed of his snakery. When Tricky Dick wanted to spread a nasty rumor about a political rival, he insisted on a few degrees of separation between the deed and himself; when Harry Reid wants to spread lies about someone, he does so from the Senate floor and then laughs about it. In Nixon’s time, the political misuse of the IRS was considered a serious crime; today, it happens quite in the open without consequence. When Nixon insisted that his attorney general violate his official responsibilities for political reasons, Elliott Richardson understood what duty required, and resigned; Eric Holder, by way of comparison — suffice it to say that he understands his duty somewhat differently.

 

...If the other side is evil, then anything is permissible. Of course Harry Reid doesn’t feel guilty about lying about Mitt Romney: “He didn’t get elected, did he?” Of course so-called progressives are willing to lock up nonconformist bakers or merrily cheer on those who promise to set their businesses on fire. Of course the Obama administration will try to sign us up for a phony nuclear deal with Tehran that undermines our national security — and that of our allies — in the service of its own political interests.
 

“Who is G. Gordon Liddy?” Among other things, a criminal who did his time. Who is Lois Lerner? A criminal who almost certainly will never hear the prison door slam shut behind her, who probably will live out her days on a generous pension paid for by the very same taxpayers whose government she converted into a weapon to be used against them. There are those who call this “progress.”
 

The War Against Free Association

An excellent piece by Deroy Murdock - attacking Indiana's new Religious Freedom Restoration Act from the Right.