Columnist.
President Obama is soon expected to issue an executive order that would make it possible for some illegal immigrants, many of whom are the parents of children who are American citizens, to live and work in this country without the threat of deportation, in effect granting amnesty to up to five million people. Beyond concerns over the constitutionality of a president deciding which laws to uphold and which to ignore in violation of his oath to "faithfully execute" laws passed by Congress, is the effect these unauthorized immigrants will have on what we know as America.
"Stupid is as stupid does" -- Forrest Gump Unless you regularly follow conservative media, you may not have heard what one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) thinks about you. Jonathan Gruber is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology health economist who helped craft Obamacare. In a rare moment of unvarnished candor, Gruber told an audience last year at the University of Pennsylvania the law passed because of the "stupidity of the American voter."
At a dinner sponsored by the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation last Thursday (I am an unpaid national advisory board member), there was a debate about wealth redistribution. A team of Canadian students who think government should "spread the wealth around" faced off against a team of American students who think government has no business doing any such thing. The theme continued when former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) debated Chrystia Freeland, a member of Canadian Parliament. While all of this was informative, civil, interesting and at times entertaining, the final speaker, CNBC commentator Larry Kudlow, may have uttered the most profound thought of the evening.
Having missed a July deadline for reaching an agreement with Iran over its nuclear program, the six world powers party to the talks -- the United States, Russia, China, France, United Kingdom and Germany -- have set November 24 as their new deadline. Iran says there will be no extension if a deal isn't reached. Given the Obama administration's horrible record in the Middle East -- treating Israel as an enemy and Islamic dictatorships as potential friends -- things don't look good for an agreement that will curtail or reverse Iran's pursuit of a nuclear weapon.
Forget the race "card." In this election, Democrats have been playing the entire race "deck." The Wall Street Journal has listed some of the more outrageous ads and flyers designed to frighten African-Americans into believing that all opposition to President Obama's policies and to the Democratic Party is a sign that lynch mobs may soon return. The milder stuff includes a letter to black voters from the Democratic National Committee appealing for racial solidarity. Imagine the response if Republicans asked for racial solidarity from white people.
Gov. Jeb Bush (R-FL.) is thinking seriously about running for president in 2016, according to his son, George P. Bush. According to Commentary magazine, Jeb Bush had an impressive record as governor, including tax reductions totaling $20 billion. Given that performance, why is Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, upset? Politico, and many others, assert it's because of an answer Bush gave in 2012 to a hypothetical question posed by a member of the House Budget Committee, which resurfaced now as he contemplates running for president. Bush was asked if he could accept tax increases of $1 dollar for every $10 dollars in spending cuts. He said he could and seemed enthusiastic about the 10-for-1 formula.
American Christians have been slow to the point of near silence when it comes to speaking out about the atrocities committed against their fellow believers by the Islamic State in Iraq (ISIS). The Jewish people are much better models in solidarity when Jews are persecuted. Members of ISIS have targeted Christian churches, destroyed symbols of Christian faith and killed Christians because of their beliefs, but from American Christians we hear very little. Even President Obama, a self-described Christian, rarely speaks about the persecuted. Reality television producer Mark Burnett and his actress wife, Roma Downey, are trying to raise awareness and money to help displaced and threatened Iraqi Christians who survived the genocidal attacks against them.
"Rabbi, is there a proper blessing for the czar?" He thinks for a moment and responds: "May God bless and keep the czar ... far away from us!" -- "Fiddler on the Roof" Today, "czar" is a term encouraged by the media to describe one who oversees a specific government policy. According to The Atlantic.com, President Franklin Roosevelt "solidified the trend" of using the word czar to identify policy appointees. Some modern presidents appointed several czars. Ronald Reagan named just one, a drug czar. He was Carlton Turner, director of the Drug Abuse Policy Office. How well that worked can be seen in the increasing numbers of states, and the District of Columbia, that have legalized or decriminalized the use of marijuana.
Houston recently passed an ordinance through its city council that has sparked quite a bit of controversy amongst conservative evangelicals. The Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO), a broad-sweeping, left-leaning law trumpeted by the City of Houston and its openly gay mayor, Annise Parker, is supposed to protect gay, lesbian and transgender people from discrimination. All well and good, but according to the Independent Journal Review, the ordinance to ensure nondiscrimination, discriminates against those of faith who oppose it. Five pastors, members of Houston's conservative, evangelical base, oppose HERO, as does the liberal Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and the pastors aren't being too quiet about it. They're circulating petitions and gathering signatures in an attempt to get the law repealed. The City of Houston came up with a way to get them to stop. It issued subpoenas for pastors to turn over "All speeches, presentations, or sermons related to HERO, the Petition, Mayor Annise Parker, homosexuality, or gender identity prepared by, delivered by, revised by, or approved by your or in your possession," so that it could, according to Time.com, "determine how the preachers instructed their congregants in their push to get the law repealed."
Some people I know refuse to watch the news or read the papers these days, and who can blame them? The headlines are depressing and no one seems to be in charge. The stock market rises and falls, playing "now you see it, now you don't" with your 401k, the Ebola virus is on the move, infecting more and more people, while the United States pretends there isn't anything at all to worry about. ISIS, which is something to worry about, marches steadily forward, despite U.S. and "coalition" airstrikes, and Turkey, which has thousands of troops on its border with Iraq and Syria, refuses to help the Kurds repel these Islamic fanatics from further conquests.
After World War II, the Marshall Plan helped rebuild a devastated Europe. The key word in that sentence is "after." Last weekend at a conference of donor nations held in Cairo, Egypt, to discuss rebuilding Gaza, following the latest exchange of rockets between Hamas and Israel, Secretary of State John Kerry pledged an additional $212 million in U.S. aid for the project, nearly doubling the total U.S. commitment (so far). The Palestinian Authority claims rebuilding could cost $4 billion.
Three points need to be made about Monday's decision by the Supreme Court not to decide whether the equal protection clause of the Constitution grants people of the same sex the right to marry. Point 1: While the court's liberal wing probably wanted to accept cases banning same-sex marriage in five states that have been overturned by three different federal appeals courts in recent months, the conservative majority, along with swing Justice Anthony Kennedy, apparently wished to see states resolve the issue. Perhaps they sought to avoid another Roe vs. Wade in which a previous court overturned all state abortion laws, creating a controversy that continues today. Even so, Kennedy waded into the deep again on Wednesday, blocking the appeals court ruling declaring gay marriage legal in Idaho and Nevada, but it's likely only a temporary delay.
The Ebola virus is not a threat, but ISIS is. That's what some of our leaders tell us. Should we believe them? Do they have a track record for truth-telling that would lend them credibility? ISIS hasn't (yet) invaded America, but Ebola has. We are bombing ISIS in Syria, but treating Ebola here as an interloper that can be controlled. There is nothing to worry about. No need to panic. Pay no attention to the disease behind the curtain. Experts are in charge and we must always trust our experts. Do you? I sure don't. Sometimes it seems the priority of our elected officials and experts is self-protection rather than the protection of the public, which they are supposed to serve. We only know what they tell us. We presume they have access to accurate information, but we only get their version of the truth.
"No one should be ashamed to admit they are wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that they are wiser today than they were yesterday." -- Alexander Pope President Obama is known for wanting to "spread the wealth around," but he has now gone a step further. He is spreading blame around for his failure to notice the rapid rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria. On "60 Minutes" last Sunday night, the president, who tends to use the personal pronoun when taking credit for perceived successes, blamed his Defense Intelligence Agency chief, James Clapper, for bad intelligence about ISIS.
College freshmen are completing their first month on campus. According to the website The Other Freshman 15, "The first 15 weeks of college can be the riskiest for sexual assault. ... One out of five students experience rape or sexual assault while they are in college, and in the great majority of cases (75-80 percent), the victim knows the attacker." The Washington Post recently carried a front-page story about campus sexual assaults. As the father of former college students, two of whom are daughters, I was stunned by the presumptions in the story. It was written in a way that assumed all female college students will have sex and get blind drunk at parties where they will be assaulted by young males.
On his Fox News show Monday night, Bill O'Reilly suggested using mercenaries to fight the Islamic State (ISIS) instead of U.S. ground forces, which President Obama has repeatedly vowed not to deploy. The use of mercenaries is as old as warfare itself. Alexander the Great used them. King George III hired German mercenaries to fight for the British in the American Revolution. Today mercenaries go by other names, like “contractor." The president is to be commended for assembling a coalition that includes Arab states, but why are our European allies not part of it? Britain hasn't sent planes, though British citizens have been killed by jihadists. An ISIS splinter group in Algeria claims to be holding a French national hostage and vows to kill him unless France halts its attacks on ISIS positions in Iraq, but France isn't joining the president's coalition to hit ISIS targets in Syria.
In the fairy tale "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," Ali Baba, a poor woodcutter, is in the forest when he hears a group of robbers approaching on horseback. Afraid, he climbs a tree and hears one of the men say, "open sesame." A door opens in a rock and the men go in, the door shutting behind them when another says, "close sesame." When they leave, Ali Baba climbs down and approaches the rock. He says, "open sesame" and it opens for him. Inside he discovers jewels and gold, which he takes, becoming rich himself.
After some hand-wringing over British citizens who have chosen to fight with ISIS, Prime Minister David Cameron said he thinks one reason for the defection is that too many of the defectors have forgotten what it means to be British. As a means of fighting the radicalization of young people, he wants all of Britain's schools to again teach "British values." It is a diagnosis Americans would do well to consider because an unknown number of Americans (FBI Director James Comey says he doesn't have a precise number because they are "hard to track") have abandoned their country to fight with jihadists.
Prior to his annual steak fry, retiring Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said this about Hillary Clinton to Dan Balz of The Washington Post: "...she is much more progressive in her thoughts and her inclination than most people may think." Liberals have embraced the word "progressive" because it sounds more forward-looking than "liberal," which has a track record voters periodically reject when the ideology doesn't live up to its declared goals (think Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Michael Dukakis, John Kerry, John Edwards and Al Gore, among others).
The "indefinite suspension" of Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice for knocking out his then-fiancé, now wife, in an elevator at an Atlantic City casino has again provoked debate about domestic violence and what the National Football League tolerates when it affects a star player. Ravens head coach John Harbaugh, who last spring testified to Rice's good character, says a new video has "changed things." Rice was initially suspended for two games after part of a video showed Rice dragging fiancée Janay Palmer from the elevator. When TMZ released the rest of the video, it showed Rice punching Palmer in the face inside the elevator, knocking her unconscious. The video also shows her spitting at him and both of them exchanging obscenities.
