Columnist.
President Obama gave two commencement addresses in one to graduates of Morehouse College in Atlanta, Ga., last weekend. It would be easy for this conservative to critique the political and social elements of his speech. Instead, I choose to focus on the inspirational part. The president struck the right note at the historically all-male college. African-American men in America need more role models and encouragement to counter the reality, reinforced by much of the media, of too much failure, crime, imprisonment, out-of-wedlock births, a disproportionate abortion rate and other social maladies affecting many in the black community.
Given last week's revelation that the IRS targeted conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status, it's worth recalling President Obama's Ohio State University commencement address. The president decried "voices" warning "that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner." It's no longer lurking. It's here. Testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee by the outgoing acting IRS commissioner, Steve Miller, as well as numerous statements by individuals claiming they have been harassed and intimidated by IRS agents, reveal a government agency out of control, or more precisely, under the control of political hacks. It's doubtful this was a freelance operation. J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration, testified he knew as early as June 2012 that the IRS was targeting conservatives, but did nothing to stop it during the presidential campaign. Who else knew?
It was the pictures and riveting testimony that convinced a Philadelphia jury that abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell was guilty of murdering three infants born alive following botched late-term abortions and also guilty of the involuntary manslaughter of Karnamaya Mongar, who overdosed on Demerol during an abortion at Gosnell's clinic. How ironic that the Gosnell decision was delivered the day after Mother's Day. The two-month trial has reignited the abortion debate. But while many states have managed to impose some restrictions on abortion clinics and establish informed consent laws and in some cases require a woman to view a sonogram before aborting an unborn child, abortion on demand for almost any reason and at almost any stage of pregnancy remains legal in every state.
In his defense of President Obama, Press Secretary Jay Carney is beginning to sound a lot like Ronald Zeigler, Richard Nixon's spokesman. Carney only has to use the word "inoperative," as Ziegler did when incriminating evidence surfaced that proved his previous statements untrue. Following what appears to be a cover-up in the Benghazi attack, the Washington Post has obtained documents from an audit conducted by the IRS's inspector general that indicate the agency targeted for special scrutiny conservative groups with "tea party" and "patriot" in their names, as well as "nonprofit groups that criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution."
In 1998 when President Clinton signed the bipartisan Internet Tax Freedom Act, which prohibited state and local taxation of Internet access and Internet-only services, the purpose was to promote the commercial potential of the Internet, especially for start-ups and small businesses. Congress extended the bill three times, the latest until 2014. Now there's the Marketplace Fairness Act, which, writes the Washington Post, "would allow states and local governments to require large Internet retailers and other 'remote sellers' with sales over $1 million annually to collect sales taxes and send the revenue to the appropriate location." This bill, which the Senate voted 69-27 to approve, would undo the protections Republicans and Democrats once felt necessary to promote e-commerce.
"Mainstream media" are alarmed by reports that billionaires Charles and David Koch are considering the purchase of Tribune Company's eight daily newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. When Warren Buffett spent $344 million to purchase 28 newspapers, there were mostly sighs of relief from journalists glad to keep their jobs. However, reaction to reports of the Koch brothers' interest in buying the Tribune papers was quite different. Charles and David Koch, you see, are conservative libertarians, not liberals. Will the Kochs, gasp, force their conservatism on readers? Will they sully journalism's good name? Truth is, no one knows what the Kochs plan to do.
There's the story of a woman with five kids who was asked if she had to do it all over again would she have five children? "Yes," she said, "just not these five." That's the way I feel about the immigration "reform" bill introduced by the Senate's bipartisan "Gang of 8." I'm all for an immigration bill, just not this immigration bill -- at least in its present form. One of the "gang" members, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL.), indicated the bill has problems that need fixing when he said in a recent interview: "Let's try to fix it. Let's try to change it, but to just say let's defeat the whole thing; I don't think that's a productive approach either. I think this is a starting point that obviously we can and should improve."
Addressing a meeting of Planned Parenthood last Friday, President Obama accused pro-lifers of wanting to "turn back the clock to policies more suited to the 1950s than the 21st century." Like any decade, the '50s had its problems -- racism, discrimination, sexism -- but I'll defend the '50s on other grounds, if the president will defend the decade that followed. In the '50s, for much of mainstream America drugs were something you bought at a pharmacy with a prescription; living together meant getting married first, then having babies; abortion was not legal; our culture wasn't the enemy; metal detectors were instruments one took to the beach to find loose change and schools and the streets were mostly safe.
One of the consequences of abandoning a standard by which right and wrong can be judged is our increasing inability to mete out punishment that fits the crime. In fact, too often we weigh extenuating circumstances rather than guilty actions. In the case of the Boston bombers, observers search for reasons why the attacks occurred. But the failure to view the attackers as anything other than simply guilty and judge them accordingly, is similar to the U.S. government's attitude toward the Middle East, which often sees Israel as the major impediment to peace. There is little expectation that Israel's enemies be held accountable, much less punished for terrorist acts, hateful rhetoric against Jews and their refusal to reciprocate Israel's peace offerings. The irrational reasoning goes that we must work to understand why they hate and kill, not hold them accountable for hating and killing. The Tsarnaev brothers are killers. They should be punished as killers.
The last time there was a terrorist attack on America, we got the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration. Each entity has spent billions to keep us safe, but neither could stop two brothers, Tamerlan, a permanent resident, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, a newly minted U.S. citizen, who lived in America and, reportedly, became radicalized jihadists, from killing and maiming innocent people at the Boston Marathon last week. According to Dana Priest and William M. Arkin of The Washington Post, "Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. ... An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances. ... In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings -- about 17 million square feet of space."
President Obama rightly asked us not to "jump to conclusions" about motives or responsibility for the two bombs that exploded Monday at the Boston Marathon, killing three and wounding more than 170. That request was pre-emptively ignored. Some couldn't wait to project their biases and political agendas on this latest act of terror. In a tweet Monday, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof blamed Senate Republicans for blocking confirmation of a new ATF director. MSNBC's Chris Matthews said, "Normally, domestic terrorists, people, tend to be on the far right..." Peter Bergen, CNN's national security analyst, echoed Matthews on "The Lead" with Jake Tapper.
BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- The death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has prompted reactions from Britain's far left that takes bad taste to new extremes. During its Top 40 music countdown Sunday night, BBC Radio 1 was "forced" to play a seven-second clip of "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead" from the 1939 film "The Wizard of Oz," because Thatcher haters had bought enough copies during a feverish online campaign to bump it to the top of the pop charts. It ultimately reached the number two spot, 5,000 sales short of the top position. If you think U.S. politics has become too corrosive, consider the British variety. Call it patty cake vs. cage fighting.
MANCHESTER, England -- There is a story about Margaret Thatcher, which is probably apocryphal, but speaks volumes about the strength of Britain's first female prime minister, who died Monday at age 87. Following her election in 1979, the story goes that Thatcher took her all-male cabinet out to dinner. The waiter asked what she would like. "I'll have the beef," she said. The waiter asked, "What about the vegetables?" "They'll have the same," Thatcher replied. "Thatcher Saved Britain," read a headline in the Daily Telegraph. No, Thatcher inspired citizens of Great Britain to have less faith in government and more self-reliance, so that they could save themselves. Ronald Reagan tried to do the same for America.
In 1983 when President Reagan ordered the deployment of missiles in Europe as part of his "peace through strength" strategy to counter the Soviet Union, the very liberal town of Takoma Park, Md., declared itself a "nuclear free zone." City officials passed an ordinance known as The Takoma Park Nuclear Free Zone Act, which said, "...work on nuclear weapons is prohibited within the city limits..." If North Korea follows through on its threat to nuke the United States (or had Russia in the '80s launched a nuclear attack), Takoma Park would not be "nuclear free" for long, but the ordinance made some people feel as though they were doing something constructive, something meaningful, about the nuclear threat, and wasn't that their point?
My first question after reading about seven teachers in an Atlanta, Ga., public school accused of altering standardized test scores to make it appear students performed better than they actually did was: How could they!? The seven were nicknamed "the chosen" and, according to Georgia state investigator Richard Hyde, the less than magnificent seven sat in a locked room without windows, erasing wrong answers and inserting correct ones. It's one thing for a child to cheat on a test; it's quite another for teachers to do it. Compounding the cheating scandal is that the children in this elementary school are mostly poor and African-American. How are they helped to develop a moral sense, not to mention an academic foundation that will lift them out of poverty, if they get the message that cheating is better than achieving?
There are many successful liberals, so why do so many of them wish to subsidize failure for the poor, instead of showing them how to succeed? Take Dr. Ben Carson, as one example. Dr. Carson, the renowned neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Md., is enjoying a certain amount of celebrity unrelated to his profession for speaking his mind about how individuals and the nation might succeed if more Americans were less dependent on government. Dr. Carson, who is African-American, has been denounced as insufficiently black because he won't toe the liberal line when it comes to big government and the implication that those in the African-American voting bloc, huge supporters of the Democratic Party, who fall below the poverty line, cannot succeed without it. The fact that many have not succeeded with government has apparently escaped the notice of his critics.
"If there is anything that links the human to the divine, it is the courage to stand by a principle when everybody else rejects it." -- Abraham Lincoln History is full of warnings about what happens when people follow public opinion instead of standing by their principles. In its most extreme manifestation, public opinion might well become mob rule when vigilantes take the law into their own hands. Major media have whipped the crowd into its latest frenzy over same-sex marriage, or should I say "marriage equality," the latest euphemism, likely intended to make the masses more accepting of what was once unacceptable. And the masses, which increasingly answer "none" when asked about any religious affiliation or moral code, appear ready for it. The U.S. Supreme Court, not the Supreme Judge, now rules supreme.
Last week, politicians who helped craft the Affordable Care Act (ACA) celebrated in self-congratulatory style the third anniversary of that monstrosity which will soon extinguish health care as we've known it. The president's promises about the ACA saving money and allowing you to keep your existing health plan are proving false, as many predicted. The Department of Health and Human Services maintains the law will make health care more affordable and accessible. The Wall Street Journal, reminding readers of that claim, reported last week that health insurers are privately warning brokers: "premiums for many individuals and small businesses could increase sharply next year." The 2013 Deloitte Survey of U.S. Physicians, a survey of more than 600 physicians from the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions, found that "Six in 10 physicians (62 percent) said it is likely many of their colleagues will retire earlier than planned in the next one to three years."
President Obama should listen to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the "founder" of shuttle diplomacy. Kissinger told Bloomberg TV's Judy Woodruff recently that he sees little hope in the "Arab Spring," nor is he optimistic about peace in the region following the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood. Welcome to the party, Dr. Kissinger. Some of us who have been denigrated for taking seriously the Muslim Brotherhood's goal to promote radical Islam worldwide are happy for you to join us in Realityville.
The Maryland legislature recently voted to abolish capital punishment in the state, making Maryland the sixth state in the last six years to eliminate the death penalty. The primary argument for repealing the law is that our justice system is imperfect and it's possible an innocent person could be condemned. Indeed, anti-death penalty activists presented Kirk Bloodsworth, a former death-row inmate, convicted of the 1984 rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl. His conviction was overturned on appeal after the court found the prosecution had withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense. However, Bloodsworth was retried and sentenced to two life terms, a conviction later upheld on appeal. In 1993, Bloodsworth was exonerated after DNA linked someone else to the crime.
