Urban dead end? Move South.

Michael Barone, in the conservative Washington Examiner, tells us that gun violence is up 60% in Baltimore so far this year compared to 2014, Homicides are up 180% in Milwaukee, 25% in St. Louis, 32% in Atlanta and 13% in New York.

Barone quotes Heather MacDonald of the conservative Manhattan Institute, who provided the above stats. MacDonald attributes the increase to “intense agitation against American police departments over the past nine months,” propagated by mainstream media, the Eric Holder Justice Department and the Barack Obama White House. Together, they maintained that unarmed innocent blacks are being slaughtered by racist police. "Black lives matter," they proclaimed, as if, in MacDonald’s words, most cops believed the opposite.

To MacDonald, the problem is "offices scal[ing] back on proactive policing under the onslaught of anti-cop rhetoric." Proactive "broken windows" policing --searching for guns, approaching petty criminals and catching them on possession crimes that block more serious criminal activity -- is being replaced by police non-benign neglect, even as the resulting rise in homicide victims mostly kills blacks.

Indirectly taking issue with the MacDonald/Barone hypothesis, Carl Cannon of the conservative “RealClearPolitics” website seeks to document police literally getting away with a “shoot first” culture. Cannon quotes a Washington Post study that found police shooting 385 people to death in the first five months of 2015, and details two grim cases where police unnecessarily gunned down unarmed suspects (race not specified).

Yet from Cannon’s own story, we learn that of the 385 killer cop cases nationwide, 62 involved unarmed suspects. That means 84% of those killed were armed. Additionally, of the total number of deaths, only 105, or 27%, were black, while 180 were white.

At least Cannon is honest enough to provide figures that undermine the usual “white cops killing unarmed blacks; black lives matter” meme.

Let’s say the question of police behavior -- whether damped down by anti-cop hostility to the point it’s unleashing an urban crime wave, still marked by a “shoot first” mentality, or both -- deserves further examination.

Joel Kotkin, in the liberal “Daily Beast,” is more concerned with the underlying tragedy of life -- and death -- for those forced to live in our high-crime ghettos. Kotkin says,

The most dangerous places in in the U.S. in terms of violent crime tend to be heavily black cities, led by Detroit, Oakland, Memphis, St. Louis, and Cleveland. Baltimore ranks sixth. . . the average poverty rate in the historical core municipalities in the 52 largest U.S. metro areas remains at 24.1%.

neighborhoods suffering entrenched urban poverty actually grew in the first decade of the new millennium, increasing in numbers from 1,100 to 3,100 and in population from two to four million. In other words, poverty spread but also became far more intense in cities. “This growing concentration of poverty,” note urban researchers Joe Cortright and Dillon Mahmoudi, “is the biggest problem confronting American cities.”

Kotkin is worried about “a hardening of class and racial divisions.” Inner Baltimore, for example, functions as a “dead-end, a cul-de-sac for dreams of a better future.” Kotkin finds that two in five Americans feel race relations have gotten worse since Barack Obama took office; only 15% believe things are better under our first black president.

Kotkin asks, “How do we reverse this ugly trend?” His answer:

•  an improved economy is more important than ramping up social spending. States like New York, Massachusetts, California and Illinois spend almost twice as much on welfare payments than do North Carolina, Texas, or Florida. Yet overwhelmingly the best results for blacks are found in the former Confederacy, states not known for their generosity to the poor or interest in redress by race. 

• Blacks go South not because they like the politics but because they seek betterment. Sunbelt cities have more broad based opportunities for middle and working class residents than do the “post-industrial economies” of California and the Northeast corridor.

Government is “good and bad”. . . and necessary.

In a recent post, I said that government can be “good and bad.” That’s different from what I said elsewhere in the same post: “government is the problem.”

It may make more sense, going into the 2016 election, for Republicans to hold to the view that government can be “good and bad.” GOP guru Karl Rove is suggesting such a shift, noting that under Barack Obama, the country has become

more supportive of bigger government. The Wall Street Journal/NBC poll regularly asks whether government should “do more” or whether it is “doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals.” In December 2009, almost a year after Mr. Obama was inaugurated, 44% said government should do more while 47% said government was doing too much. By November of last year, the first figure had risen to 52%, while the second held nearly flat at 46%.

Rove added:

the GOP can no longer take for granted the plurality of economic conservative voters. New technologies are disrupting the economy, creating anxiety among working-class Americans. Republicans must offer an agenda that improves their lives. Making the moral case for limited government and greater freedom is important, but not enough. Middle-class voters want concrete answers to real-world concerns about their paychecks, job security, high taxes, education and health care—starting with a comprehensive replacement for ObamaCare.

Rove concludes that the GOP’s 2016 campaign must pull in “millions who have not voted Republican” recently, something done by nominating a candidate who appeals beyond the base.

Former Bush 43 speechwriter Michael Gerson, writing in the Washington Post in April, added specifics while making Rove’s point:

globalization and the technological revolution have made it difficult for many Americans to find dignified work, sufficient to supporting a family, particularly when they have limited skills and education. Modern capitalism has left some communities in serious need of transitional help -- and the transition may last a long time. Some type of redistribution is necessary. But it should be, in the reform conservative view, redistribution that favors work, family and the accumulation of useful skills.

Gerson is talking about government programs, necessary since

the current blue-collar and lower-middle-class economy -- because of global labor markets and automation -- cannot function in a way compatible with our conception of social justice. The main reform conservative policy responses are wage subsidies (through an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit), payroll tax cuts, apprenticeship programs, dramatic increases in the child tax credit and a welfare system that requires work in exchange for benefits.

Gerson goes so far as to say that

there is a crisis in modern capitalism. It . . . comes from the introduction of tremendous competitive pressures into the labor market. Those who lack human capital, knowledge and skills are being left behind in large numbers. And government can't be a bystander. . . government needs to prepare as many people as possible for competitive labor markets and subsidize wages at the lower end so that unskilled labor can result in a decent life.

Unsurprisingly, such government-action recommendations coming from so-called conservatives are bound to generate serious blowback. Here’s an example, from conservative “Federalist” senior editor David Harsanyi:

Gerson’s rationale for a reformicon agenda has a strong and disagreeable “abandoning free-market principles to save the free-market system” vibe to it. If it’s not only about how we tax people, but about ceding some of our deepest philosophical beliefs, it’s going to be a nonstarter.

We do face something approaching Gerson’s economic “crisis,” while at the same time, Harsanyi rightly suggests the crisis has more to do with government’s failures than those of “modern capitalism.” Still, “government is the problem” is not going to win in 2016, as yet another conservative, Selena Zito in Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, tells us from troubled Appalachia.

In a plea for unity over continued division, Zito writes:

in the past eight years[, t]he “us and them” gap has escalated general mistrust; it has isolated our society's doers and makers from those who hold wealth and power. This isn't just about politics anymore; it is about values. Our nation is at odds with the intellectual elite in wealthy, urban and academic enclaves, who now control the engines of industry. To the rest of us, those engines are not robust machines; they're like little red tricycles.

Main Street Americans do not want to face such uncertainty. . . Not one person currently running for president is addressing the majority of Americans who want to know just who is going to lead all of us forward, the haves as well as the have-nots. We don't want another president who divides us even further. We want someone who will take us — together — to a better place in order to tap into our country's greatest resource, which has always been our people.

“Capitalism + good government.”

Obama, Progressives, Shame, and American Exceptionalism

Ashley Kelleher at work in the U.S. city with highest poverty rate: Reading PA.

“Even as progressives claim to speak for ‘the people,’ the increasingly manifest reality is that their power flows from the death star in Washington.”

--Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal

From George Orwell’s 1984, we learned that:  

“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”

In our last post, we showed progressives adding: 

“Defeat is victory.”

And today, from the Washington “death star,” progressives seek to foist upon us a new 1984-style quotation: 

“Shame is patriotism.”

This new quote is distilled from Greg Jaffe of the progressive Washington Post’s article entitled, “Obama’s new patriotism: How Obama has used his presidency to redefine ‘American exceptionalism.’” Conservatives are associated with the old patriotism that exalted the American experience, a patriotism that reacted with hostility to Barack Obama’s saying in 2009, "I believe in American Exceptionalism just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."

To Jaffe, current Republican criticism reflects:

Obama’s effort in the seventh year of his presidency to articulate a new and radical form of American exceptionalism. While American exceptionalism in recent decades has centered around the exercise of American power and influence in the world, Obama’s conception is more inwardly focused. It’s a patriotism that embraces the darker moments in American history and celebrates the ability of the unsung and the outsiders to challenge the country’s elite and force change. [emphasis added]

Jaffe says Obama has evolved from the person who in 2009 downplayed American exceptionalism as no different than Greek exceptionalism:

Five years later, and a little grayer, Obama [in 2014] summed up his feelings on the subject differently. “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,” he told graduating cadets at the U.S. Military Academy.

Yes, but Obama’s is a progressive exceptionalism that “embraces the darker moments in American history.”

Check out the three drop quotes in Jaffe’s article. The quotes lead us down a path from traditional American exceptionalism to Obama’s “radical” version. The quotes are from the 2014 General Social Survey, done by the University of Chicago in cooperation with the Washington Post:

• 84% of people agree with the statement “I would rather be a citizen of America than of any other country in the world.”  

Comment: OK, so now we are all “exceptionalists.”

• 70% of U.S. adults agree “the world would be a better place if Americans acknowledged America’s shortcomings”  

Comment: Some will see “acknowledging shortcomings” as an important step in redefining downward America’s place in the world. Others say, “Well yes, we aren’t perfect.”

• 64% of U.S. adults agree “there are some things about America today that make me feel ashamed”  

Comment: Of course, the meaning of “ashamed” varies from person to person. The poll shows Republicans are more “ashamed” than Democrats today, and were 20% less “ashamed” in 2004, when Bush was president.

In his article, Jaffe quotes Anne-Marie Slaughter, ex-Obama administration State Department official, who provides background “color” to Obama’s redefinition of exceptionalism:

When American history is told by the winners, by white [males] who were in charge, it looks one way. When American history is told by people who are every bit as patriotic, but who saw a different side, of course it is going to change.

Jaffe writes that in his Selma, Alabama speech on March 7, 2015, the 50th anniversary of the historic “Bloody Sunday” march for voting rights, Obama laid out his new, progressive version of American exceptionalism. Obama said,

What could be more American than what happened in this place? What could more profoundly vindicate the idea of America than plain and humble people — the unsung, the downtrodden, the dreamers not of high station, not born to wealth or privilege, not of one religious tradition but many, coming together to shape their country’s course? That’s what America is. Not stock photos or airbrushed history, or feeble attempts to define some of us as more American than others. We respect the past, but we don’t pine for the past. We don’t fear the future; we grab for it. America is not some fragile thing.

Nice about the “plain and humble” heroes. But Obama also likes trotting out his “straw men,” so at Selma the president also pointed to those who would “define some of us as more American than others,” who “pine for the past,” “fear the future,” and see America as “some fragile thing.”

Evidently, Obama thinks his Selma speech might be a Gettysburg-like historical masterpiece, because the White House gave Jaffe special access to the drafts and discussions that went into preparing Selma’s redefinition of exceptionalism. In the process, Jaffe discovered Obama’s “straw men” alive in an early draft, where the president wrote:

Those who only understand exceptionalism as preserving the past; who deny our faults or inequality; who say love it or leave it; those are the people who are afraid. Those are the people who think America is some fragile thing.

These “straw men” are what conservatives have come to expect from our “one America: red, white, and blue” president. And in the president’s early draft language, there is an unmistakable echo of the much earlier Obama who when confronted with a different group of “plain and humble people,” also well-separated from the corridors of wealth and power, treated them with more disdain than the praise he heaped on Selma’s civil rights heroes.

Recall that on April 6, 2008, Obama told us:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Well, now the jobs have been gone for seven years more. But we shan't worry for their fate, especially if “shame is patriotism.”

Vietnam: When Losing Means Winning

"The United States has been engaged in five wars since World War II. In only one of them did it reach its stated objective.”

--Henry Kissinger (2014)

Kissinger’s comment, upsetting as it is, is mostly true.

Dominic Tierney (b. 1977) is an associate professor of political science at Swarthmore College and author of The Right Way to Lose a War: America in an Age of Unwinnable Conflicts. He has a lead article in Atlantic titled, “Why Has America Stopped Winning Wars?”  In it, Tierney tells us:

It’s not easy for . . . Americans to think deeply about battlefield disaster. American culture is a victory culture. Coded into the American DNA are the fear of failure and the celebration of winning. . . whether it’s a Christian prevailing over sin, a pioneer mastering the natural world, or a sportsman reaching the pinnacle of his profession. . .

Tierney adds that

when America’s recent record at war is one for five, that victory culture starts to look like wishful thinking, unhealthy braggadocio, and illusory triumphalism—good for the nation’s self-esteem, perhaps, but not good for handling reality. It’s time to reckon with the hard truths of conflict.

Tierney’s identification with “reality” and “hard truths” over “wishful thinking, unhealthy braggadocio, and illusory triumphalism” makes his anti-war bias self-evident. Tierney welcomes American defeat in war, presumably with the hope America will stop wasting lives and money overseas.

Kissinger, on the other hand, delivers his “one in five” victory tally with a sense of regret. He does acknowledge that Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan “divided the American opinion in such a way that it is very difficult to distill a consistent center of direction."  That’s a guarded way of saying anti-war sentiment trumpeted by progressives such as Tierney -- or in the case of Vietnam, Tierney’s elders -- stopped the U.S. war effort in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan from reaching what Kissinger called “its stated objective.”

Tierney argues he’s on the right side of history because:

• when the U.S. “waded into far-flung quarrels featuring culturally alien enemies,” it handed “the opponent home-field advantage.” 

• “It’s limited war for Americans, and total war for those fighting Americans. The United States has more power; its foes have more willpower.”

• “The U.S. military also failed to adapt to a new era of civil wars and guerrilla conflict. . . big-unit warfare. . . tactics proved disastrous in civil wars, where indiscriminate violence can cause collateral damage, lose hearts and minds, and recruit more insurgents.”

• “Since the prize on offer is less valuable, the acceptable price to pay in lives and money is also dramatically reduced. To achieve victory, the campaign must be quick and decisive—with little margin for error.” 

•  “combat debacles can cast a long shadow over the American home front. The exit strategy could spark domestic uproar, congressional rebellion, and even blood on the streets” 

Tierney’s “history” is junk. Here’s why:

1. Korea was two wars, and Kissinger wrongly calls Korea a stalemate. In the first, starting from the tiny Pusan perimeter, we drove the North Koreans off the map, rolling to the Chinese border. China said, “no you don’t,” launched a surprise invasion, and pushed us back past Seoul well into South Korea. That war we lost. China, a big country with a really big army, won. It was Douglas MacArthur’s hubris that took on China. Harry Truman fired MacArthur, replaced him with Matthew Ridgway in 1951, Ridgway drove the Chinese back into North Korea, and we settled for the status quo ante--a non-Communist South Korea. Once MacArthur’s 1950 China misadventure was over, Korea ended as a victory over Communist aggression.

2. We won “Desert Storm.”

3. Everything else Tierney’s distorted record details is Vietnam. Giving opponents a “home field advantage” -- Vietnam. “Limited war” for us, “total war” for the enemy -- Vietnam. “Indiscriminate violence” losing “hearts and minds” -- Vietnam and only Vietnam. A too high “price to pay in lives” -- that’s Vietnam, where those dying included tens of thousands of draftees, not Iraq and Afghanistan where casualties have mostly been professionally-compensated volunteers (every life matters, but to professionals, risk comes with the territory). “Combat debacles” causing “domestic uproar, congressional rebellion, and even blood on the streets” -- that’s all Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam.

Following George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, you could not convince progressives like Tierney that Iraq was anything but Vietnam redux, with oil added. The Democratic Party, transformed by Vietnam, could not and cannot treat their success in pulling the U.S. out of Vietnam as anything less than a wonderful victory.

So getting America out of Iraq became a similar mission, and in Tierney’s eyes, a similar triumph -- the “Vietnam Peace” of his generation. This myth continues, even though the Bush surge in 2007-08 defeated al Qaeda in Iraq and left a country at peace. Obama ruined that peace by 1) failing to secure a “status of forces” agreement with Iraq, and 2) subsequently withdrawing all American forces there, which led directly to today’s Islamic State (ISIS) threat to take over Iraq.

And then there is Afghanistan. Obama and Democrats once considered Afghanistan and our victory over the Taliban the “good war.” But once Iraq was over, progressives were determined to repeat their “U.S. out of Iraq” peace triumph in Afghanistan. Tierney doesn’t have his “lost war” victory in Afghanistan yet, but it’s certainly on the way, after Obama, having first endorsed (half-heartedly) a surge there that might have stabilized the nation, only months later reversed that surge and ordered an end to U.S. combat in Afghanistan by 2016.

In both Iraq and Afghanistan, America -- contrary to Tierney’s wishes -- should be supporting those nationals still willing to fight for their freedom. That we don’t is thanks to Tierney, his fellow progressives, and their distorted, Vietnam-shaped view of history.

In fairness to the progressive view, Tierney and company most sincerely oppose “wasting” U.S. resources abroad; they instead would spend the money on government programs at home. They would feed the “Blue Beast”.

Confession to confusion: two references to personal attacks.

I personally attack Hillary Clinton for her corrupt politics? And in the very next post, in the process of explaining the “endowment effect,” I accuse Democrats of engaging in personal attacks? Self-examination seems in order.

One reason Ronald Reagan was a successful politician was that he could brush off personal attacks. He reasoned voters cared most about policies, whereas the Democrats who disliked him -- upper class liberals mostly -- viewed politics as about personalities, and could not believe voters would actually choose a dumb, former B-grade movie actor over qualified Democrats such as Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale. Living in the elite, you know your fellow leaders, and expect the best qualified to do the most important job.  

Hillary Clinton is smart, experienced, and qualified by background to be president. The 2016 election, in my view however, isn’t about her qualifications. It’s about her titanium-strength links to a corrupt political order built over decades that by 2016, exists primarily to sustain itself in power, and has showed under Barack Obama an inability to fix the economy, to manage foreign affairs, and even to run government competently (out-of-the-blocks failure to keep lobbyists out of government, a failed economic stimulus, corrupt subsidies to green energy firms, a “too big to fail” bank reform that coddles big banks at the expense of regional banks, failures in running the IRS and the Justice Department, including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, corruption at the General Services Administration, a botched roll-out of Obamacare at DHS including “if you like the plan you have, you can keep it; if you like the doctor you have, you can keep your doctor, too,” false promises about zero middle-class tax increases, massive, embarrassing corruption at the Veterans Administration, corruption in the Drug Enforcement Administration and even in the Secret Service, botched handling of the ebola crisis at the Centers for Disease Control, the single most respected government agency, a corrupt TSA that passes through 95% of targeted contraband, federal workers getting away with owing $3.5 billion in taxes).

Corrupt describes the close working relationship between big money and the Democratic Party, first evident in Obama’s becoming the first president to reject (in 2008) the money and restrictions of publicly-financed presidential elections, followed by the blow-out money election of 2012 (Obama outspent Romney, even though Romney spent tons just to win the nomination), with Obama focused entirely on getting out his vote and defaming Romney as "Obama for America" blotted out economic failure and high unemployment.

Corrupt also explains the Democrats willingness to bypass the will of the people as expressed in the 2010, 2012, and 2014 congressional elections. These elections have turned Congress from overwhelmingly Democratic to Republican-controlled in just four years. Because our elected representatives in Congress are now Republican, Democrats rule by corrupt executive orders, contrary to a U.S. Constitution founded upon a separation of powers between legislative and executive branches. Corruption means a presidency defying the people’s rule as expressed through Congress, ignoring popular displeasure with the way Democrats run the economy, foreign policy, and government.

So to this observer, Hillary Clinton isn’t a personality. She’s the latest seeking to stand atop the rice pile, ruling a corrupt operation that no longer works. Democrats’ vicious focus on Republican personalities results from an unwillingness to discuss real issues -- the economy, foreign policy, government corruption -- while keeping in power the tired, status quo, decades-old “Blue Model.” So yesterday.

Why Democrats fight dirty to defend the status quo.

One country, two parties. One party is defending the Blue Model; the “Blue Beast” -- government and those who benefit from outsized government control. The other party wants more freedom, more pluralism, less government. But it doesn’t control government, the media, the culture, the upper reaches of crony capitalism. It lacks the power of the state.

We have frequently quoted Cornell economist and author of Luxury Fever Robert Frank, "Animals will fight viciously to protect territory that they hold, but they won't fight nearly as hard to extend their territory."  

“fight viciously.”

Frank has explained the dynamic of America’s current two-party system. In a report for the BBC, correspondent Jonny Dymond informed us that:

we are hard-wired to be more concerned about losing something we have than we are enthused about gaining something in the future. Behavioural psychologists call it the "endowment effect" or "status quo bias". And campaign strategists exploit it to the full.

Dymond had learned from a June 19, 2008 article in the Economist that introduced readers to the “endowment effect”:

once someone owns something, he places a higher value on it than he did when he acquired it—an observation first called “the endowment effect” [in 1980] by Richard Thaler, who these days works at the University of Chicago. . .

[The] neoclassical economists[’] assumption [is] that individuals act to maximise their welfare (the defining characteristic of economic man, or Homo economicus). The value someone puts on something should not, therefore, depend on whether he actually owns it. But the endowment effect has been seen in hundreds of experiments, the most famous of which found that students were surprisingly reluctant to trade a coffee mug they had been given for a bar of chocolate, even though they did not prefer coffee mugs to chocolate when given a straight choice between the two.

Brian Knutson of Stanford University describes a brain-scanning study he carried out recently. The pattern and location of the activity he observed suggests the endowment effect works by enhancing the salience of possible loss.

what is going on? Owen Jones, a professor of law and biology at Vanderbilt University, and Sarah Brosnan, a primatologist at Georgia State University, suspect the answer is that, in the evolutionary past, giving things up, even when an apparently fair exchange seemed to be on offer, was just too risky.

The [endowment effect] complicates the negotiation of contracts, as people demand more to give up standard provisions than they would have been willing to pay had they bargained anew.

In “Bloomberg,” Michael Lewis reports on parellel findings made by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, psychologists at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  Tversky and Kahneman concluded that:

human beings were not just occasionally irrational, but systematically irrational.  They had predictable biases -- for instance, they were inclined to draw radical conclusions from tiny amounts of information.   .   . most significantly, people responded very differently when a choice was framed as a loss than when it was framed as a gain. Tell a person that he had a 95% chance of surviving some medical procedure and he was far more likely to submit to it than if you told him he had a 5% chance of dying.

Looking at the worst of politics in my lifetime -- Southern segregationist violence against civil rights protesters in the early 1960’s, the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention police riot, shooting student protesters at Kent State in 1970, Nixon’s Watergate in 1972, Lee Atwater’s crypto-racist Willie Horton ads used to extend the Reagan-Bush era in 1988, the systematic, personal attacks on Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston, Henry Hyde, and Ken Starr, justified by the Atwater model and used to defend Bill Clinton in the late 1990s, and the systematic, personal attacks on John Boehner, Paul Ryan, and especially Mitt Romney in 2012 -- all occurring when the party in power is on the losing side of the issues, shows me the viciousness of status quo defenders holding onto what they have.

The endowment effect.

Hillary, Electing a President We Trust to be Bad

From Tom Bevan, the conservative boss of “RealClearPolitics”:

A Quinnipiac poll showed Hillary Clinton running a substantial deficit [on] honest[y] and trustworth[iness]. Only 39% of voters said yes, while 53% said no. Among the crucial voting bloc of Independents, the gap expands to 31% yes and 61% no. . . [emphasis added] Yet the same poll showed Clinton leading all of her potential Republican rivals in head-to-head general election match-ups. So [polls] support Democrats’ contention that the relentless stream of unseemly stories about the Clinton Foundation is merely “a distraction” that is unimportant to voters.

Puzzled conservatives are beginning to explain how we could elect as president an unambiguously corrupt person. Here’s the view of Heather Wilhelm on why Hillary moves smoothly from scandal to scandal:

very few Hillary fans are Hillary fans because they see her, first and foremost, as “uncorrupted.” The issue of corruption, in fact, is barely a blip on their radar screens. Many hard-core Clintonites are just fine with growing, interconnected, technocratic, managerial government and the quiet crony capitalism that naturally accompanies it. Clinton’s campaign, being a business of sorts, knows and understands this, embracing its candidate’s core competency and ultimate projected image: the “connected,” well-known grandmother queen who “knows the ropes” and can help us all.

“and can help us all.” Wilhelm has “got it.”

We are a divided nation between those who see government as a force for good, and those who believe government is the problem. Those closet to government know how corrupt and inefficient it is. It’s good and bad, but overall, it’s working for “me.” It draws taxes from those who can afford to pay, and it pays salaries or awards contracts to millions who in their own small to big ways, work angles to hold onto and expand what they have. It works because it pays off outsiders at the top who have accommodated to the system, and it helps millions below -- the victims of life -- who see government in terms of benefits received, and in return provide Democrats the votes that keep the government party in power.

The government base needs a leader who will preserve -- at any cost -- a system that works, in some fashion, in its corrupt way to be sure, for them. Right now, that person is HIllary.

Inner Cities: Personal Responsibility and Single Parents

Baltimore, April 2015

Catholic Ross Douthat, the New York Times house conservative, must walk a fine line between pushing his personal views and alienating his liberal audience. In the following statement, he is quietly defending traditional marriage. . . very quietly:

What a society believes and teaches about the link between sex, marriage and procreation has major implications for how, when and whether people couple, marry and raise children, which in turn has implications for every other societal arrangement.

Douthat means we’re better off with one father and one mother, bonded by marriage vows, raising their own children. That’s it. He’s not condemning anything.

In the same article, Douthat names abortion and hints at a problem:

In the . . .early ’70s, the pro-choice side of the abortion debate frequently predicted that legal abortion would reduce single parenthood and make marriages more stable, while the pro-life side made the allegedly-counterintuitive claim that it would have roughly the opposite effect; overall, it’s fair to say that post-Roe trends were considerably kinder to Roe’s critics than to the “every child a wanted child” conceit.

Douthat is making a very important point. The birth choice upper class parents believe is best for everyone isn’t working at the class level where choice means government subsidies and freedom from “marriage-first” morality.

African-American Columbia University professor John McWhorter, writing in the liberal “Daily Beast,” is much clearer than Douthat about how liberal good intentions have damaged urban America. McWhorter asserts that three key dynamics since the Civil Rights era began 50 years ago have generated the “inner-city misery” we see today:

First, the Black Power ideology that proliferated in the 1960s and ’70s discouraged black communities from maintaining the old-time mantra that adversity meant that blacks have to try twice as hard. The wise insight was that after centuries in the United States, the persistent double standard was demeaning, and while that made basic sense, it changed black America’s orientation towards individual initiative. That helps explain, for example, why only in the ’60s did it become common for poor blacks to burn their own neighborhoods in protest. Even amidst Jim Crow, black people did not do this.

Second, in the late ’60s, partly in response to the riots of the Long Hot Summers, welfare was transformed from a time-limited program intended for widows to an open-ended program that didn’t care whether recipients ever got jobs. This had the unintended consequence of discouraging marriage, and made it easier for women to raise kids without the father around. This, a story too little told, decisively impacted the black experience nationwide.

Finally, the War on Drugs created a black market alternative to legal work for poor black men underserved by bad schools. Frankly, “The Wire” explained this dynamic better than any academic analysis.

That’s 1) victimization replacing individual initiative, 2) family collapse, and 3) drugs. 1-2-3.

Michael Barone, in the conservative Washington Examiner, notes that liberals and conservatives now share a similar concern, even if their solutions differ:

Our kids, at least many of them, are not doing very well. The reason, writes [liberal] Harvard professor Robert Putnam in his just-published Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, is the "two-tier pattern of family structure" that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. . . Starting in the late 1960s, rates of divorce, unmarried births and single parenthood rose sharply among all segments of society. About a decade later, they fell and leveled off among the college-educated.

Among the bottom third of Americans in education and income, however, the negative trend accelerated. In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was alarmed that 26% of black births were to unmarried children. The rate is about twice that for the least educated third of Americans of all races today. [emphasis added]

This shouldn't come as a surprise. Charles Murray's 2012 book Coming Apart describes the same phenomenon among white Americans. Curiously, Putnam [ignores] Murray's work. But Putnam agrees with Murray (perhaps grudgingly) that this is bad for the kids involved.

Like most high-education Americans, [Putnam] doesn't want to denounce people for breaking old moral rules even when that hurts their kids. The libertarian Murray doubts that government can do much. But he thinks that high-education elites, with their strong family structures, can. They need to "preach what they practice." Bloomberg's Megan McArdle, agreeing, nominates Hollywood for a lead role. Midcentury America's universal media -- radio, movies, television -- celebrated the old rules.

Hollywood preaching sound morality? So last century; so gone by the ‘60s.

Clintons’ stuck in “yesterday” (reprise).

Quotation without comment.

From Jonah Goldberg, Chicago Tribune Content Agency:

Denise Rich with Friends Bill and Hill

Marc Rich [was] a shady billionaire indicted for tax evasion and defying trade sanctions with Iran during the U.S. hostage crisis. Rich fled to Switzerland to escape prosecution.

[When] Bill Clinton pardoned Rich[, t]he ensuing scandal was enormous. . . It was widely believed that Rich had bought his pardon. Denise Rich, his ex-wife, had made huge donations to the Democratic party, including $100,000 to Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign and $450,000 to the foundation building Bill Clinton’s presidential library.

Liberals were infuriated. “You let me down,” wrote the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen. “It’s a pie in the face of anyone who ever defended you. You may look bad, Bill, but we look just plain stupid.”

“It was a real betrayal by Bill Clinton of all who had been strongly supportive of him to do something this unjustified,” exclaimed then-Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.). “It was contemptuous.” Senator Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) chastised, “It was inexcusable.” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd suggested Clinton had “traded a constitutional power for personal benefit.” Jimmy Carter all but called it bribery and said it was “disgraceful.”

The April 30, 1975 fall of Saigon echoes 40 years later.

“Last Days of Vietnam,” by Robert F. Kennedy’s grand-daughter Rory Kennedy, is a documentary showing on PBS on the anniversary of Saigon’s fall. It is excellent TV, nominated for the best documentary Oscar.

But it is historically inaccurate. It attributes the North Vietnamese Spring 1975 assault on the South and its surprisingly swift final victory to Watergate, Richard Nixon’s August 1974 resignation, his replacement by a less-fanatically-anti-Hanoi Gerald Ford, and Ford’s inability to get an emergency appropriation for South Vietnam through a Democratic Congress in April 1975.

Here’s what really happened, the fact Kennedy ignored:

The Case–Church Amendment was legislation approved by the U.S. Congress in June 1973 that prohibited further U.S. military activity in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia unless the president secured Congressional approval in advance. This ended direct U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War. [emphasis added]

In the conservative Wall Street Journal, Robert F. Turner tells us that:

As Yale University’s John Lewis Gaddis wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2005, “Historians now acknowledge that American counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam were succeeding during the final years of that conflict; the problem was that support for the war had long since crumbled at home.” . . Protesters, as angry as they were misinformed, ultimately persuaded Congress in May [sic] 1973 to prohibit spending on further U.S. combat operations in Indochina.

It wasn’t Nixon, it wasn’t Ford. It was the anti-war movement, a radicalized Democratic Party, and ultimately Congress that, reflecting popular opinion in 1973, pulled the rug out from under South Vietnam.

And what are the implications of Saigon’s fall for 2015? Timothy Naegele, commenting on the Turner article, says,

We won [Vietnam] militarily. Then Congress turned its back on the Vietnamese people, as the author notes ("Congress ultimately snatched defeat from the jaws of victory"); and the rest is history. The same is true of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And what about Iran, with Obama’s embrace of the wrong side there? Former George W. Bush speechwriter Mark Thiessen, in the Washington Post, writes:

The Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act that Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) negotiated with Obama . . . is a terrible bill that virtually guarantees that Congress will give its de facto stamp of approval to any agreement Obama concludes with Iran. The reason is simple: Instead of requiring that Congress vote to affirmatively approve any Obama-Iran agreement before it can take effect, the Corker-Cardin bill allows the agreement to take effect unless it is disapproved by Congress. . . under a disapproval mechanism, the burden shifts to congressional opponents of the Iran deal, who need to convince not simple majorities, but super majorities, in both houses if they want to kill the deal.

Is "Corker (R)-Cardin (D)" an echo of the Vietnam era "Case (R)-Church (D)"?

The myth of China’s ghost cities.

Chinese Ghost City

China has “ghost cities” -- blocks and blocks of empty structures. But unlike those of the Golden West, Chinese ghost cities represent the future, not some lost past. Wade Shepard, author of Ghost Cities of China -- a book which chronicles his research on China's urbanization movement, tells us how it works in China’s boom economy:

There are nearly 600 more cities in China now than there were when the Communist Party took over in 1949. This large-scale urban transition began in the early 1980s, when rural areas began being rezoned as urban en masse and the city took center stage in China’s plans for the future.

In the early 2000s . . .urbanization . . . kicked into high gear. New urban developments began popping up seemingly everywhere — along the outskirts of existing cities as well as in the previously undeveloped expanses between them. Many cities doubled or even tripled their size within relatively short spans of time. In just 15 years Shanghai alone grew sevenfold and its population increased to more than 23 million from 6.61 million.

Mega-regions (click to enlarge)

China’s broader urbanization movement shouldn’t be thought of as a developmental free-for-all. . . Ten massive new urban conglomerations called mega-regions [see map] have been proposed in strategic locations across the country. These are essentially city clusters of 22 million to more than 100 million people each that are to be connected through infrastructure, economically, and, potentially, even politically.

Shepard says Beijing forces local municipalities to cover 80% of their expenses with only 40% of national tax revenue. Land sales cover the difference, with municipalities buying cheap rural land, re-designating the land urban, reselling it at the higher urban rate, and pocketing the difference.

Developers buying these new plots must build something -- on land far outside the mature, built-up urban areas.  The result, according to Shepard: vast apartment complexes, giant malls, and commercial streets with no population base to support them.  Ghost cities.

Most Chinese urban developments move through this phase to fill out with businesses and people:

Essential infrastructure gets built, shopping malls open, and places where residents can work are created. [W]hen urban areas of high-density housing are even half full there’s still a large number of people living there — more than enough for the place to socially and economically function as a city. It generally takes at least a decade for China’s new urban developments to start breaking the inertia of stagnation. But once they do, they tend to keep growing.

But “Quartz,” a New York-based business web-news outlet, cautions that

China’s mega-cities and mega-regions aren’t being built with an eye toward maximizing the advantages and minimizing the downsides of creating these massive metropolises. Most importantly, the mega-regions are being built around a small number of city centers, many of which are surrounded by concentric circles of commuters and bedroom communities that makes traffic hellish and pollution even worse.

According to “Quartz,” half the 10 mega-regions are either dominated by a single major center, or by a limited number of centers packed closely together. As a consequence, everyone will want to work close to city center, meaning sky-high property prices and transportation headaches.

 The new urban China. Anything but “ghost.”

After 15 years, NASDAQ tops out.

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the NASDAQ, after rising 21 points, ended at 5056, exceeding its all-time closing high of 5049 reached on March 10, 2000. While the Dow Industrials and the S&P 500 have notched dozens of new records in recent years, it has taken the Nasdaq over 15 years to recover from the dot-com bust (see graph).

The Dow closed at 18,059, or -230 off its March 2 peak. The S&P 500 ended at 2,113, just -4 below its all-time high, also on March 2. The March 2 combined total for the three indexes was 25,414, as against yesterday’s 25,228. On this red letter day for the NASDAQ, with the three indexes all at or near their all-time highs, the New Fox Index -- which captures movement into stock market “outer space” first achieved in May 2013, the escape velocity attained by soaring past old-time market theoretical limits of a Dow of 15,000, an S&P 500 of 1,600, and a NASDAQ of 3,500, for a total of 20,100 -- hit +5,128 (see chart).

The markets' next big target, assuming the boom continues, will be a Dow of 20,000.  Remember, though, as financial guru Bernard Baruch (1870-1965)  used to say, "The main purpose of the stock market is to make fools of as many men as possible."

The Cultural Wars: a little balance.

There are signs of life on the cultural wars’ losing side. First, Jon Stewart is leaving “The Daily Show” in August. There is only one Jon Stewart. He is truly funny, funny enough to have won 19 Emmys, to have hosted the Oscars twice, and to have become the highest-paid late night comedy host. He will still be around, but losing Stewart’s daily “fake news” spot does cut the left’s cultural fire power. 

“Hamilton’s” Lin-Manuel Miranda

Second, as conservative Peggy Noonan noted, the hip-hop musical “Hamilton” is an off-Broadway smash headed for the Great White Way. Broadway is the heart of left-wing culture, far more predictably left than Hollywood. So to have a politically-incorrect celebration of America’s founding succeed is a phenomenon truly worth noting.

Third, John Sides, in the liberal Washington Post, has written that “it’s both premature and an over-generalization to conclude that, somehow, the ‘culture war’ favors Democrats.” Sides states this over-simplification is based primarily on shifting sentiment, especially among the young, toward same sex marriage.

To make his point, Sides quotes the latest Washington Post poll, which found that Democrats are united 70% to 26% in favor of gay marriage while Republicans are opposed 54% to 40% on an issue that’s fast swinging toward that Democratic majority.

Yet on other issues, Republicans are more united. And independents can be close to siding with the GOP.

Republicans are more linked to religious freedom than Democrats aren't, according to Pew. By a 68%/28% majority, Republicans favor allowing businesses to refuse to provide services to same-sex weddings on religious grounds, while Democrats, by a closer 64%/33% margin, would force the religiously-guided businesses to provide the services. Independents split 51%/45% in favor of mandating the services.

And a Gallup poll found Republicans more united behind “pro life” (68%/27%) than are Democrats behind “pro choice” (62%/32%). On abortion, Gallup reported the country as a whole has been fairly evenly divided since “pro life” caught up with “pro choice” in 2002. Last year, it was at 47%/46% “pro choice.”

Abortion is the most significant cultural issue shifting away from the left. More and more are digesting facts such as those conservative Mollie Hemingway wrote about in the webjournal “Federalist:”

unborn children being operated on in the womb receive anesthesia and are treated as patients and yet unborn children at the same age can be killed without any anesthesia administered for their pain. . . only seven countries permit elective abortion as late as the United States does . . . two of those countries are human rights abusers China and North Korea.

Napp Nazworth, in the conservative “Christian Post,” writes:

The Democratic Party supports legal abortion until the baby is born, according to Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. When asked if abortion should be legal until the moment of birth, she answered that the decision should be left to the mom and her doctor, adding, "Period. End of story."

According to a January Marist poll, the position that Wasserman Schultz claims for the Democratic Party is not supported by the vast majority of Americans [--] 84% support restricting abortion to some combination of the first trimester or only cases of rape, incest and to save the life of the mother.

Gay marriage is helping Democrats over Republicans, but abortion may no longer work for Democrats.

Hillary Clinton IS Stuck in “Yesterday”

Hillary Rodham, circa 1971

 "You are being rediscovered again as the New Left-type politicos are finally beginning to think seriously about the hard work and mechanics of organizing."


--Hillary Rodham, Berkeley California, July 8, 1971 letter to radical organizer Saul Alinsky

“Yesterday is over.”

 --Marco Rubio

Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote her Wellesley thesis on Saul Alinsky’s theory of community organizing in 1968--47 years ago. The tactics remain very much a part of today’s Democratic Party, as Pepperdine professor Pete Peterson found out when Congressman Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), who calls himself an Alinskyite, used them against a Peterson colleague at Pepperdine. Wrote Peterson:

[Democrats] adopting Alinsky’s tactics [do] not . . . fit with Alinsky’s philosophy. [Alinsky’s] Rules for Radicals is meant to empower the weaker against the stronger. Alinsky writes: “The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

what has happened is that a generation of American politicians who came of age during Saul Alinsky’s lifetime has moved into positions of institutional power that he so often derided as “the enemy.” They are showing an inability to leave behind Alinsky’s tactics that were intended for the weak against the strong. Civil discourse and academic freedom suffer while the “Prince” becomes more powerful.

Hillary Rodham was there at the dawn of the revolution that transformed the Democratic Party into an elite, Northeast-upper Midwest, anti-war, Ivy League-led institution working through academia and the media. New Democrats followed the well-worn tradition of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt in seeking to remake America via a centralized, progressive government, but one liberated from the drag of its former conservative, Southern base, and less concerned about working class whites living outside the South.

This new Democratic Party lost 5 of 6 presidential elections from 1968 to 1988, lost Congress in 1994, held the White House under moderate Southerner Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, and lost again in 2000 and 2004.

But then, as Daniel Henninger tells us in the conservative Wall Street Journal:

After defeating the Clinton organization in 2008, the progressive left finally got full control of the Democratic Party. There is no chance they will let [Hillary] Clinton even glance toward the center in the next 19 months. The Democratic left didn’t like the Clintons in 2007 and still doesn’t. . . Clinton is a Democrat inheriting the economic headwinds of the Obama presidency. . . Her solution: Make big government bigger. . . income maintenance, education subsidies, refundable tax credits, expanded Social Security payments and, needless to say. . . ObamaCare. . . the lady in the Scooby van has to spend 19 months arguing for more of the same.

In words that ring true to conservative America, Commentary’s Peter Wehner writes that Clinton is “likely to be the nominee of a party that is utterly intellectually exhausted.” So yesterday.

But Wehner adds:

That said, Mrs. Clinton knows how to raise money, she is unlikely to face a serious primary challenger, her party has won five of the last six popular votes in presidential elections, and (unlike her husband) she is disciplined. And because she is a woman, electing her would make Clinton a historic figure in a way that Barack Obama was on race. The political potency of that should not be underestimated.

Wehner continues:

here’s a prediction: She, her team, and her party will obsess on cultural issues and attempt to divide the nation around them to a degree we have never quite seen before. She’ll do this both because she is a liberal woman and because she has very little to say on economic and foreign policy matters. Mrs. Clinton will go into this election believing the “culture wars” to be the best and safest political ground for her. She will portray Republicans as engaged in a “war on women” in such a way that past efforts will look like a walk in the park. The distortions, mob mentality, and smear campaign that characterized the reaction of the left to the Indiana version of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (the federal version of which Bill Clinton signed into law) will be amplified by a factor of a hundred. If Hillary Clinton could talk about contraception, abortion, evolution, same sex marriage, and equal pay for equal work every day between now and November 2016, she would.

As National Journal’s Ron Brownstein has written, Democrats are “confident that they represent an expanding majority of public opinion.” [Democratic] pollster Stanley B. Greenberg captures this almost unprecedented Democratic assurance when he declares flatly: “Republicans are on the losing side of all [cultural issues].”

All themes familiar to readers of this blog. “Yesterday” isn’t about new. But so far, it’s working.

What must be new is the Republican response. Wehner warns that Republicans

need to be seen as promoting the human good and defending human dignity. . . they should look to Pope Francis. . . The degree to which Francis has favorably altered the perception of the institution he represents — not by changing doctrine but by acting and speaking in a way characterized by grace and genuine human sympathy — is remarkable.

Another conservative, Victor Davis Hanson of Stanford’s Hoover Institution, reminds us how separated the Clintons and their unparalleled fundraising elite are from the population with whom a Pope Francis-like appeal would connect:

The Clintons rightly sense that the one-percenters . . . feel awfully bad about their privilege. Thus they will feel much better about indulging their endless material appetites, if they give large tax-deductible contributions to the spread-the-wealth, help-the-helpless shtick of elite Democrats. Huge federal redistributionist policies may fail and hurt the minorities and poor, but for now they are . . . the only insurance that the gates of the rich will not be stormed or their private schools and neighborhoods flooded.

For Republicans to deliver change that benefits the nation, they must first talk with the language of Pope Francis, then convince voters “equal opportunity” and “upward mobility” will work for them and their loved ones.

Republicans: bracing for the cultural wars.

In our earlier series on liberals winning the culture wars, we learned from Shelby Steele that

Liberals successfully smother conservatism by identifying it as another word for American evil. Tainting conservatism — its principles, policies, and personalities — with past American shames remains for liberals an “endless font of power.”

And we heard from William Voegeli that

The claim of equality on the heartstrings of a democratic people is naturally stronger and resonates more than the claim of liberty. The Democratic pitch — the promise of free stuff and fairness — is near impossible to beat head on.

The sudden effort to overturn religious freedom laws in Indiana and Arkansas, led by gay activists who see bigotry in conservative Christian opposition to participating in gay weddings, turned into a nationwide firestorm when the (Democratic) media and leading corporations (who play ball with Democrats) joined gays in denouncing the laws. The attack forced Republican governors in both states to back off within days.

Observing the spectacle, Paul Gigot, editorial pages editor of the conservative Wall Street Journal, predicted on the “Journal Editorial Report” (4.4.15, 0:15 mark):

We’re going to have one of these fights every two weeks between now and 2016 because Democrats feel they are on the offensive; they can stigmatize Republicans who are acting very defensively.

Dick Morris, the former Bill Clinton adviser who helped pull the president to the center 20 years ago, bluntly reminds us that

Democrats have to win in order to survive. Politics, for them, is no spectator sport. It's their living, their entitlement checks, their government handouts. They cannot afford, literally, to lose.

And Jonathan Last, in the conservative Weekly Standard, similarly writes that “radicalism is really about just one thing: power.”  While Last feels that “once people begin to challenge the dogmas, they collapse in a cascade” because loss of power snowballs into more--and more open--criticism, “the bad news” is that progressives will “deal out a great amount of harm before they are discredited.”

For Republicans, its been, all-in-all, a tough decade. As this blog has often warned, people fight harder to hold what they have than they do to get something new.

Democrats: is demography destiny?

Future Republicans?

Democratic strategist Doug Sosnik, a former Bill Clinton advisor and author of “big-think” memos on politics, recently wrote in the liberal Politico that “demography is destiny.” Youth, arriving in new cohorts, unmarried women, growing in numbers, and especially minorities “will increasingly shape the outcome of future presidential elections.” As Sosnik notes,

We first saw the impact of how these demographic changes can alter the politics of a state back in the 1980s when California rapidly shifted to what is now a solidly Democratic state. . . the central elements and attributes of our country will increasingly be reflected by the fast-growing, ethnically diverse states that tend to skew younger than the rest of the country.

The New York Times’ David Brooks, a classic elitist conservative (snob) who sometimes poses as the Republican he once was, seems to have taken issue with Sosnik’s analysis. Whatever the prompt, Brooks recently observed that

there’s a growing body of evidence to suggest that, in fact, Democrats do not enter [the 2016] election with an advantage. There are a series of trends that may cancel out the Democratic gains with immigrants, singles and the like.

Brooks points to “three big things” that may at least temporarily hold off the Democratic “demography is destiny” realignment:

1. the aging of the electorate. . . People tend to get more Republican as they get older, and they vote at higher rates. . . This aging effect could have a big impact in . . . Wisconsin, Ohio, Iowa, Michigan and Pennsylvania. [Emphasis added. We have already identified Ohio and Pennsylvania as two of 2016’s key “swing states.”]

2. Democrats continue to lose support among the white working class. In 2008, Barack Obama carried 40% of white voters with a high school degree. By 2012, that was down to 36%. . . In 2009, Republicans had a 20-seat advantage in House districts that were majority white working class. Today, they have a 125-seat advantage.

3. Democrats [now do] worse among college-educated voters. Obama won white college graduates in 2008, but he lost them to Mitt Romney in 2012.

Brooks also noted that “Hispanic voters, at least in Sun Belt states, are getting more Republican as they move up the educational ladder” (see above photo).  And playing off the well-known fact the Democrats are the party of government and Republicans are not, Brooks added that

faith in government is near all-time lows. In a Gallup survey, voters listed dysfunctional government as the nation’s No. 1 problem. . . American voters. . . used to think it was bloated and ineffective. Now they think it is [also] rigged to help those who need it least.

Retiring, Timesman John Burns Subtly Jabs New York Times

John Fisher Burns

John Burns, the New York Times’ senior foreign correspondent, is retiring after 40 years reporting from South Africa, Soviet Russia, the China of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, Iraq, and Bosnia, while chronicling the wars, assassinations and other disasters of India, Pakistan, North Korea, Afghanistan and others. As he steps down, Burns says, “What those years bred in me, more than anything else, was an abiding revulsion for ideology, in all its guises.”

But having seen the worst of totalitarianism and the human price its victims pay, Burns is depressed that ideology has such a grip on politics among free societies. Burns writes:

My impatience with ideology has carried over in recent years to my encounters with the societies in the West that are my home: to the widespread propensity, as I have sensed it, for people who lack the excuse of brutal duress that is a constant in the totalitarian world to fall sway to the formulaic “isms” of left and right, each of them full of Yeats’s “passionate intensity,” that excuse, and indeed smother, free thinking.

[In] the West. . . it can be depressing beyond words to hear the loyalists of a given political creed — whether of the left or the right — adopt the unyielding certainties common in totalitarian states. Our rights to think and speak freely have been won at great cost, and we abuse them at our peril.

Comment: Burns is careful in his criticism, referring to “left and right,” then “left or the right.” So let’s be blunt for Burns, who surely has no love for ideological conservatives. His real target seems to be the left-wing ideology that has seized control of the New York Times in the years since Burns first began work there; since he started at what was--once--the world’s greatest newspaper.

American universities: Pride before the fall?

Harvard Yard

The American university system is the world’s best. So why is it no longer serving the teachers and students at its heart?

Colorado law professor Paul F. Campos, writing in the progressive New York Times, found that 45 years ago, 78% of college and university professors were full time, but that now:

fully half of postsecondary faculty members are lower-paid part-time employees, meaning that the average salaries of the people who do the teaching in American higher education are actually quite a bit lower than they were in 1970.

And as many by now know, what’s driving increasing university costs

is the constant expansion of university administration[, which] at colleges and universities grew by 60% between 1993 and 2009. . . 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.

This means, for example, that

while the total number of full-time faculty members in the [California state university] system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221% increase.

Administrative costs are a major reason why college graduates in 2014 faced an average student loan debt of more than $30,000 — the highest amount ever recorded.

Iran: Obama’s “Nixon Goes to China” Legacy at a Crossroads

Barack Obama has a strategy for getting his “go to Tehran by giving Iran the bomb, just not now” program though a Republican congress. He paints Republicans as the party of war, the enemy of peace (see cartoon).

Obama does so not to overpower the GOP, but to force fence-sitting Democrats to choose between backing their president or siding with (evil) Republicans. He wants, as suggested earlier, the most liberal 34 senators to sustain his veto of any GOP-led anti-Iran efforts.

Obama’s execution of his divide-and-rule strategy re. Iran is already underway. Last week, speaking in the Rose Garden, the president said:

when you hear the inevitable critics of the deal sound off, ask them a simple question:  Do you really think that this verifiable deal, if fully implemented, backed by the world’s major powers, is a worse option than the risk of another war in the Middle East?

“inevitable critics. . . sound off.” He means (evil) Republicans, and he means to shame loyal Democrats into backing his Iran sell-out. So he warns:

If Congress kills this deal . . . then it’s the United States that will be blamed for the failure of diplomacy.  International unity will collapse, and the path to conflict will widen. The American people understand this, which is why solid majorities support a diplomatic resolution to the Iranian nuclear issue. 

“If Congress kills. . . solid majorities support a diplomatic resolution” means “Democrats, I’m talking to you! Do you stand with me or with (evil) Republicans; with the people or with the enemy?!”

Obama, as we all know by now, is playing for a place in history similar to that achieved by Henry Kissinger in 1971, when Kissinger turned great enemy Red China into a sometime U.S. partner, a triumph marked by Richard Nixon’s epic 1972 visit to Beijing and Shanghai. Iran is arguably our biggest enemy today, and Obama wants his own historic visit to Tehran and Isfahan. Democratic foreign policy gurus sidelined by Kissinger’s great China triumph also want their own piece of world history.

But now, Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei has threatened the supposed agreement by ruling out “extraordinary supervision measures” over Iran’s nuclear activities, adding that “Iran’s military sites cannot be inspected under the excuse of nuclear supervision.”  Khamenei also said sanctions “should be lifted all together on the same day of the agreement, not six months or one year later.”

And another event is jarring Obama’s reach for destiny. Henry Kissinger, still alive and coherent, has attacked the Obama negotiations with Iran, indirectly calling them no echo of his 44-year-old triumph with China.

Kissinger’s views are bound to carry weight with Congress, including Democrats. Writes Kissinger, along with fellow ex-Secretary of State George Shultz:

Cooperation is not an exercise in good feeling; it presupposes congruent definitions of stability. There exists no current evidence that Iran and the U.S. are remotely near such an understanding. Even while combating common enemies, such as ISIS, Iran has declined to embrace common objectives. Iran’s representatives (including its Supreme Leader) continue to profess a revolutionary anti-Western concept of international order; domestically, some senior Iranians describe nuclear negotiations as a form of jihad by other means.

Kissinger is saying Iran is no China. While China worked with the U.S., Kissinger sees Iran as a danger to all, including the U.S.:

The final stages of the nuclear talks have coincided with Iran’s intensified efforts to expand and entrench its power in neighboring states. Iranian or Iranian client forces are now the pre-eminent military or political element in multiple Arab countries, operating beyond the control of national authorities. With the recent addition of Yemen as a battlefield, Tehran occupies positions along all of the Middle East’s strategic waterways and encircles archrival Saudi Arabia, an American ally. Unless political restraint is linked to nuclear restraint, an agreement freeing Iran from sanctions risks empowering Iran’s hegemonic efforts.

Kissinger and Shultz conclude:

the projected nuclear agreement will reinforce, not resolve, the world’s challenges in the region. Rather than enabling American disengagement from the Middle East, the nuclear framework is more likely to necessitate deepening involvement there—on complex new terms.

From Kissinger’s mountaintop, the Obama effort looks “JV.” And frightening as a result.

Easter and the Pope of Hope

Pope Francis

It’s Easter. Christianity is in decline in the developed world, Christians are disappearing from the Muslim-dominated Middle East and Africa, and the most important living Christian leader, the Pope, as former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin once noted, has not one single division.

In this context, it’s significant that Forbes magazine last fall named the militarily-deprived Pope Francis the world’s fourth most powerful person, trailing only Vladimir Putin (Russia), Barack Obama (U.S.), and Xi Jinping (China). Forbes said of the pontiff:

The spiritual leader to one-sixth of the world's population -- 1.2 billion souls[ -- ]Pope Francis has made it his mission to transform the longstanding conservative image of the Catholic Church. In October, the pontiff said the theories of evolution and the Big Bang are true, adding that God is not "a magician with a magic wand." He also shocked the world last year when he said "Who am I to judge?" when discussing homosexuality. The first Jesuit and Latin American Bishop of Rome preaches compassion for the poor and a greater role for women while signaling the church to quiet its focus on "only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptives."

Francis is the first pope since Pope John XXIII -- who like Francis gained the Keys of Rome late in life at age 76 -- to move the Holy See unambiguously to the left. John created Vatican II (1962-65), the major event leading Catholicism into the modern world. It’s taken half a century for a very conservative Catholic hierarchy to digest the Vatican II reforms. Now Francis, the first pope from outside Europe since the Syrian Gregory III in 741, is pushing reform sharply forward again. As Francis X. Rocca recently wrote in the conservative Wall Street Journal:

The Pope’s vision of Vatican II has translated into a dramatic shift in priorities, with an emphasis on social justice over controversial moral teachings and [with] a friendlier approach to secular culture. . . the church in Europe and the U.S. [has seen] a steep decline in attendance at Mass and in adherence to traditional morality, [along] with the sexual revolution and the spread of contraception and legalized abortion. As pontiff, Francis [is] demanding a “poor church for the poor” and excoriating free-market ideologies[, adding] that the church should show “mercy” toward divorced and remarried Catholics.

Comment: The faith we celebrate at Easter--whether Catholic, mainline Protestant, Orthodox, or Evangelical--truly is “love thy neighbor as thyself;” a “poor church for the poor,” believing in redemption and hope. The rise of secularism throughout the Western world peels away those attracted to the church primarily for its historical connection to power, and leaves behind a body of Christians from many backgrounds drawn to the church’s original teachings, messages Francis truly seems to understand and live by.