Judge Righteously

Black and White, Left and Right

3/22/2016 - Thomas Sowell Townhall.com

Much is made of the fact that liberals and conservatives see racial issues differently, which they do. But these differences have too often been seen as simply those on the right being racist and those on the left not.

You can cherry-pick the evidence to reach that conclusion. But you can also cherry-pick the evidence to reach the opposite conclusion.

During the heyday of the Progressive movement in the early 20th century, people on the left were in the forefront of those promoting doctrines of innate, genetic inferiority of not only blacks but also of people from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe, as compared to people from Western Europe.

Liberals today tend to either glide over the undeniable racism of Progressive President Woodrow Wilson or else treat it as an anomaly of some sort. But racism on the left at that time was not an anomaly, either for President Wilson or for numerous other stalwarts of the Progressive movement.

An influential 1916 best-seller, "The Passing of the Great Race" -- celebrating Nordic Europeans -- was written by Madison Grant, a staunch activist for Progressive causes such as endangered species, municipal reform, conservation and the creation of national parks.

He was a member of an exclusive social club founded by Republican Progressive Theodore Roosevelt, and Grant and Franklin D. Roosevelt became friends in the 1920s, addressing one another in letters as "My dear Frank" and "My dear Madison." Grant's book was translated into German, and Adolf Hitler called it his Bible.

Progressives spearheaded the eugenics movement, dedicated to reducing the reproduction of supposedly "inferior" individuals and races. The eugenics movement spawned Planned Parenthood, among other groups. In academia, there were 376 courses devoted to eugenics in 1920.

Progressive intellectuals who crusaded against the admission of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe, branding them as genetically inferior, included many prominent academic scholars -- such as heads of such scholarly organizations as the American Economic Association and the American Sociological Association.

Southern segregationists who railed against blacks were often also Progressives who railed against Wall Street. Back in those days, blacks voted for Republicans as automatically as they vote for Democrats today.

Where the Democrats' President Woodrow Wilson introduced racial segregation into those government agencies in Washington where it did not exist at the time, Republican President Calvin Coolidge's wife invited the wives of black Congressmen to the White House. As late as 1957, civil rights legislation was sponsored in Congress by Republicans and opposed by Democrats.

Later, when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was sponsored by Democrats, a higher percentage of Congressional Republicans voted for it than did Congressional Democrats. Revisionist histories tell a different story. But, as Casey Stengel used to say, "You could look it up" -- in the Congressional Record, in this case.

Conservatives who took part in the civil rights marches, or who were otherwise for equal rights for blacks, have not made nearly as much noise about it as liberals do. The first time I saw a white professor, at a white university, with a black secretary, it was Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago in 1960 -- four years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

She was still his secretary when he died in 2006. But, in all those years, I never once heard Professor Friedman mention, in public or in private, that he had a black secretary. By all accounts, she was an outstanding secretary, and that was what mattered.

The biggest difference between the left and right today, when it comes to racial issues, is that liberals tend to take the side of those blacks who are doing the wrong things -- hoodlums the left depicts as martyrs, while the right defends those blacks more likely to be the victims of those hoodlums.

Rudolph Giuliani, when he was the Republican mayor of New York, probably saved more black lives than any other human being, by promoting aggressive policing against hoodlums, which brought the murder rate down to a fraction of what it was before.

A lot depends on whether you judge by ringing words or judge by actual consequences.

Judge Napolitano is Right

The President, the Court and Immigration

4/21/2016 - Judge Andrew Napolitano Townhall.com

In 2014, President Barack Obama signed 12 executive orders directing various agencies in the departments of State, Justice and Homeland Security to refrain from deporting some 4 million adult immigrants illegally present in the United States if they are the parents of children born here or legally present here and if they hold a job, obtain a high-school diploma or its equivalent, pay taxes and stay out of prison.

Unfortunately for the president, the conditions he established for avoiding deportation had been rejected by Congress.

In response to the executive orders, 26 states and the House of Representatives sued the president and the recipients of the orders, seeking to prevent them from being enforced. The states and the House argued that the president effectively rewrote the immigration laws and changed the standards for the deportation of unlawfully present adult immigrants.

The states also argued that because federal law requires them to offer the same safety net of social services for those illegally present as they do for those lawfully present, the financial burden that the enforcement of those orders would put upon them would be far beyond their budgetary limits. Moreover, they argued, enforcement of the president's orders would effectively constitute a presidential command to the states to spend their own tax dollars against their wishes, and the president lacks the power to do that.

In reply, the president argued that the literal enforcement of the law creates an impossible conundrum for him. He does not want to deport the parents of American children, as that destroys families and impairs the welfare of children; and he cannot deport children who were born here, as they are American citizens. Hence his novel resolution.

The case was filed in Texas, where a federal district court judge agreed with the states and signed an order that prohibited the feds from enforcing the president's orders, pending a full trial. The feds appealed.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans upheld the injunction against the president. In so doing, it agreed with the states that the financial burden on them that would come from the enforcement of these executive orders would be unconstitutional. It also agreed with the House of Representatives that the president exceeded his authority under the Constitution and effectively rewrote the laws.

This week, the Supreme Court heard the feds' appeal. Because the seat formerly occupied by the late Justice Antonin Scalia for 30 years is still vacant, the court has just eight justices -- for the most part, four conservatives and four liberals. A tie vote in the court, which appears likely in this case, will not set any precedent, but it will retain the injunction against the president. The most recent time this happened was 1952, when the court enjoined President Harry Truman from seizing steel mills during the Korean conflict.

Though the issue here is immigration, the constitutional values underlying the case are more far-reaching. Since the era of Woodrow Wilson -- accelerated under Franklin D. Roosevelt, enhanced under Lyndon B. Johnson and brought over the top under George W. Bush -- Congress has ceded some of its powers to the president. It has enabled him to borrow unlimited amounts of money and to spend as he sees fit. It has looked the other way when presidents have started wars, arrested Americans without charge or trial and even killed Americans.

Can Congress voluntarily give some of its powers to the president, either by legislation or by impotent acquiescence when the president takes them?

In a word, no.

The purpose of the division of powers -- Congress writes the laws, the president enforces the laws and the courts interpret them and decide what they mean -- is to preserve personal liberty by preventing the accumulation of too much power in one branch of government.

The 26 states and the House told the Supreme Court this week that the president is enforcing the laws not as Congress wrote them but as he wishes them to have been written, because he actually directed officials of the executive branch to enforce the versions of the laws that he rewrote instead of the laws on the books.

That arguably violates his oath of office, in which he agreed that he would "faithfully" enforce all federal laws. We know from his notes that James Madison, when he drafted the presidential oath, insisted that the word "faithfully" be inserted so as to impress upon presidents their obligation to enforce laws even if they disagree with them.

During oral argument in the court this week, there was a bizarre exchange over terminology that the president used in his orders. In a weird series of questions, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. asked whether the president's executive orders could be salvaged constitutionally by excising or changing a few words. This was improper because it treated an executive order as if it were a statute. It is not the job of the court to find ways to salvage executive orders as it is to salvage statutes, because the Constitution has given "all legislative Powers" to Congress and none to the president.

Statutes are presumed to be constitutional. Executive orders that contradict statutes are presumed to be unconstitutional, and the court has no business trying to save them.

All presidents from time to time have exercised discretion upon individuals when it comes to enforcing laws that pose hardships. But none has done so for 4 million people, and none has written substitute laws of his own making. Until now.

Dumbed-down Populace = Incompetent Government

Widespread Ignorance Threatens Our Republic

3/10/2016 - Jerry Newcombe Townhall.com

“Who is our nation’s capital named after?” seems like an easy question for any fifth grader to answer correctly.

But a man named Mark Dice went out to the streets of San Diego and asked this question in numerous man- on-the-street interviews, asking that very question. His results can be seen here, and they are shocking.

Many of the adults he spoke to in these Jay Leno-style interviews had no clue. One lady even offered up Lincoln as the answer. He asked, “Lincoln, DC?” She then realized her error and said, “Washington, DC.”

An older gentleman answered the question correctly, as if it were perhaps a trick question. But the interviewer noted that this was a tough question for millennials to answer correctly.

A couple vacationing from Italy got it right, but they were surprised when Dice told them that many Americans didn’t get it right. He noted, “We’re talking to stupid Americans.” And he added, “Making fun of Americans is a favorite past-time.”

One fellow had an “I [HEART] DC” shirt on. He couldn’t remember at first who District of Columbia was named after. His excuse was “I just woke up.” Then, with some prompting from the interviewer, he remembered it was Washington, but he could not remember George’s first name.

The scary thing about these tip of the iceberg examples of widespread ignorance is that these people vote.

America has poured billions and billions of dollars into our educational system, and this is what we get out of it?

Some scholars have noted that the longer you are in school, the dumber you become.

The founders believed that “we the people” should be in charge of our nation. They gave us a great deal of freedom because we were an educated and a moral populace.

The man after whom our nation’s capital is named made this point in his Farewell Address (1796): “Promote…as an object of primary importance institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge.”

The founders understood that our experiment in self-government could only be maintained by a well-educated populace. James Madison, one of the key architects of the Constitution, once noted: “A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.” 

Bestselling author Eric Metaxas, has a new book coming out soon, called If You Can Keep It(Viking). The title harkens back to a time just after the Constitutional Convention, in the year of our Lord 1787, when a lady asked Ben Franklin what kind of government the founders were giving us.

Franklin’s reply was, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.” If widespread ignorance in this land continues, including willful ignorance of the moral laws of God, we won’t keep it.

I remember years ago when I was a guest on a hostile radio show. It came after one of the Supreme Court decisions that they got right by a 5-4 majority. The Court affirmed that the Equal Access Act passed by Congress was constitutional.

The Equal Access Act, still theoretically in effect, declared that if a high school allowed for extra-curricular clubs after hours, they could not prevent a Bible club from also forming.

If the chess club could use the PA system or bulletin board to announce their upcoming meeting, so could the Bible club.

I was defending that law against both the host and a guest who felt that the schools should not allow anything of a religious nature---especially if it is Christian.

One of the points I made that seemed to resonate with my hostile opponents, however, was my claim that part of the reason I was sacrificing to send my children to a Christian grade school was so that they would not only learn about God, but so that they would learn correctly about math and history and geography.

Tragically, our schools are now too often places of political correctness but not historical correctness or geographical correctness or scientific correctness---or biblical correctness.

Today, we have millions of functional illiterates. There are graduates of high school who literally cannot read their own diplomas. In contrast, John Adams said (around 1800) that to find an uneducated man in New England was a rare as a comet.

To put that in context, those New Englanders were taught first and foremost biblical truths. That’s why they started schools in the first place---at every level. This includes the Ivy League schools of Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and Brown, all of which were created for the express goal passing on Christian learning to the next generation.

As we have moved away from our Christian roots, we have also moved away from basic literacy. No wonder a handful of fellow Americans chosen at random either can’t name our nation’s capital or don’t know who it is named after.

Obama Administration Advances Ideological Agendas

The Politicization of the English Language

4/7/2016 - Victor Davis Hanson Townhall.com

Last week, French President Francois Hollande met President Obama in Washington to discuss joint strategies for stopping the sort of radical Islamic terrorists who have killed dozens of innocents in Brussels, Paris and San Bernardino in recent months. Hollande at one point explicitly referred to the violence as "Islamist terrorism."

The White House initially deleted that phrase from the audio translation of the official video of the Hollande-Obama meeting, only to restore it when questioned. Did the Obama administration assume that if the public could not hear the translation of the French president saying "Islamist terrorism," then perhaps Hollande did not really say it -- and therefore perhaps Islamist terrorism does not really exist?

The Obama administration must be aware that in the 1930s, the Soviet Union wiped clean all photos, recordings and films of Leon Trotsky on orders from Josef Stalin. Trotsky was deemed politically incorrect, and therefore his thoughts and photos simply vanished.

The Library of Congress, under pressure from Dartmouth College students, recently banned not just the term "illegal alien" in subject headings for literature about immigration, but "alien" as well. Will changing the vocabulary mean that from now on, foreign nationals who choose to enter and reside in the United States without being naturalized will not be in violation of the law and will no longer be considered citizens of their homeland?

Did the Library of Congress ever read the work of the Greek historian Thucydides, who warned some 2,500 years ago that in times of social upheaval, partisans would make words "change their ordinary meaning and ... take that which was now given them."

These latest linguistic contortions to advance ideological agendas follow an established pattern of the Obama administration and the departments beneath it.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's described Egypt's radical Muslim Brotherhood as "largely secular." CIA Director John Brennan has called jihad "a legitimate tenet of Islam," a mere effort "to purify oneself."

Other administration heads have airbrushed out Islamic terrorism by referring to it with phrases such as "man-caused disaster." The effort to combat terrorism was called an "overseas contingency operation," perhaps like Haitian earthquake relief.

The White House wordsmiths should reread George Orwell's 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language," which warned that "political writing is bad writing" and "has to consist largely of euphemism."

Obama has said the greatest threat to future generations is "climate change," a term that metamorphosed from "global warming." The now anachronistic term "global warming" used to describe a planet that was supposedly heating up rather quickly. But it did not account for the unpleasant fact that there has been negligible global temperature change since 1998.

Rather than modifying the phrase to "suspected global warming" or "episodic global warming," the new term "climate change" was invented to replace it. That way, new realities could emerge. Changes of all sorts -- historic snows, record cold, California drought, El Nino storms -- could all be lumped together, supposedly caused by man-made carbon emissions.

Volatile weather such as tornadoes, tsunamis and hurricanes was sometimes rebranded as "climate chaos" -- as if Western industry and consumer lifestyles were responsible for what used to be seen as fairly normal occurrences.

The term "sanctuary cities" describes municipalities that in neo-Confederate fashion deny the primacy of federal immigration law and refuse to enforce it.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch used the term "justice-involved youth" to describe young criminals arrested and charged with crimes. From such terminology, one might think the offenders' "involvement" meant that they were parole officers or young lawyers.

So what is the point of trying to change reality by making up new names and phrases?

It's mostly politics. If Hollande had used the label "skinheads" to describe European right-wing movements, the White House might not have altered the video. If a half-million right-wing Cubans were pouring illegally into Florida each year, or if 100,000 Serbs were crossing the border from Canada, the Library of Congress might not object to calling them "illegal aliens." Clapper and Brennan are unlikely to claim that the Crusades were largely secular or an exercise in self-purification.

The Obama administration probably would not describe rogue police officers charged with crimes as "justice-involved police." If cities with conservative mayors declined to enforce the Endangered Species Act or federal firearms statutes, they probably would not be known as "sanctuary cities," but rather as "nullification cities."

Orwell also wrote about a futuristic dystopia ruled by a Big Brother government that created politicized euphemisms to reinvent reality. He placed his novel in the year 1984, warning Westerners about what was in their future.

We are now 32 years beyond 1984, but we are at last living Orwell's nightmare.

A Little Sarcasm For a Change

Crisis at the Canadian Border - A Prescient Look at the Consequences of a Republican Win in November

The flood of American liberals sneaking across the border into Canada has intensified in the past week, sparking calls for increased patrols to stop the illegal immigration. The Republican Presidential primary campaign is prompting an exodus among left leaning citizens who fear they'll soon be required to hunt, pray, and live according to conservative ideas about the Constitution.

Canadian border farmers say it's not uncommon to see dozens of sociology professors, global warming activists, and "green" energy proponents crossing their fields at night.

"I went out to milk the cows the other day, and there was a Hollywood producer huddled in the barn," said Southern Manitoba farmer Red Greenfield, whose acreage borders North Dakota . “The producer was cold, exhausted and hungry. He asked me if I could spare a latte and some free-range chicken. When I said I didn't have any, he left before I even got a chance to show him my screenplay, eh?"

In an effort to stop the illegal aliens, Greenfield erected higher fences, but the liberals scaled them. He then installed loudspeakers that blared Rush Limbaugh across the fields, but they just keep coming.

Officials are particularly concerned about smugglers who meet liberals near the Canadian border, pack them into electric cars and drive them across the border where they are simply left to fend for themselves after the battery dies.

"A lot of these people are not prepared for our rugged conditions," an Ontario border patrolman said. "I found one carload without a single bottle of Perrier drinking water. They did have a nice little Napa Valley cabernet, though, and some kale chips."

When liberals are caught, they're sent back across the border, often wailing loudly that they fear retribution from conservatives. Rumors have been circulating about plans being made to build re-education camps where liberals will be forced to drink domestic beer and study the Constitution.

In recent days, liberals have turned to ingenious ways of crossing the border. Some have been disguised as senior citizens taking a bus trip to buy cheap Canadian prescription drugs. After catching a half- dozen young vegans in blue-hair wig disguises, Canadian immigration authorities began stopping buses and quizzing the supposed senior citizens about Perry Como and Rosemary Clooney to prove that they were alive in the '50s. "If they can't identify the accordion player on The Lawrence Welk Show, we become very suspicious about their age," an official said.

Canadian citizens have complained that the illegal aliens are creating an organic-broccoli shortage, buying up all the Barbara Streisand c.d.'s, and renting all the Michael Moore movies. "I really feel sorry for American liberals, but the Canadian economy just can't support them," an Ottawa resident said. "How many art-history majors does one country need?"