Weekly News Wrap-Up 5.24.13

By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com 

The IRS scandal of targeting conservative groups is messy, and the Obama Administration is going to look like it was drug through a hog lot before it’s through.  Lois Lerner, who was in charge of overseeing tax exempt groups, was put on administrative leave (with pay) after she pled the 5th.  Funny thing though, before she pled, she made a statement that said she basically did nothing wrong.  Then she answered a question and used her Constitutional right to not self-incriminate.  Republican lawmakers say because she testified and made statements, she can’t have it both ways.  Some say she waived her 5th Amendment right.  This screams for a special prosecutor, and Democrats are not going to stand in the way.  They are not going to cover for the White House.  It is amazing to me how little the President claims to know about the IRS scandal, Benghazi and Department of Justice investigating journalists doing their jobs.  I don’t know which is worse, a clueless President or a President knowing and doing nothing.   

The President does know something about the drone program that some say is nothing more than a drone murder program.  President Obama says he is going to “narrow” the parameters.  That’s cold comfort to the already more than 3,000 people who have been killed by drones in the Middle East.  Many were suspected terrorists, but many have been civilians hit by collateral damage.  This includes more than 100 children!  Could someone please tell me how we can go after al-Qaeda in places like Pakistan and Yemen and then turn around and arm al-Qaeda rebels in Libya and Syria?  Could someone please tell me how this murder program is compatible with the due process clauses in the Constitution?  Being “careful” or “narrowing” the scope does not take the place of charges, a public trial and being judged by a jury of your peers.  This should be the standard, at least, for U.S. citizens.  The government has finally admitted the U.S. has killed four Americans with drone strikes.  

Bernanke talked to Congress this week, and he blamed them for the economy not doing so well.  Boy, that’s rich.  The Fed is the reason for the 2008 financial meltdown in the first place.  They certainly didn’t oversee all these mortgage-backed securities that are now toxic.  The Fed has more than $3 trillion of this toxic debt on its balance sheet.  That’s, in part, what all the QE or money printing is all about.  Currently, the Fed is buying $40 billion a month of this junk to cover the fraud and gross mistakes of bankers.  Outrageous!  Why doesn’t Congress, either Democrat or Republican, ask Mr. Bernanke which banks are getting $40 billion each and every month?  This is nearly a half trillion dollars a year.  This is too stupid to be stupid.  They fight tooth and nail over $85 billion in cuts, and nobody wants to know who’s getting nearly a half trillion a year? 

Gold and silver were on a roller-coaster ride this week during Bernanke’s speech.  Gold was up $50 an ounce, then down $20!  Bernanke he’s says he’s going to taper QE, and then he says he might increase it.  Bernanke gave a little something to everybody, but the truth is the minute he stops the money printing, the economy crashes. 

The Middle East is still inching towards a wider war.  The Syrian civil war is spilling over to Turkey, Lebanon and, now possibly, Northern Israel and the Golan Heights.  The two countries are reportedly exchanging fire.  Al-Qaeda wants a wider war.  That way, the U.S. will be compelled to jump in.  Meanwhile, Iran is going ahead with a new nuclear plant.  The West is worried about Iran getting nuclear arms.  Iran says it has no intention of building a bomb. 

My heart goes out to the folks of Oklahoma City who suffered through a deadly storm.  Take a look at thebefore and after picture on the website.  It looks like an entire suburb was wiped clean off the face of the earth.  

Religion and Public Life in America

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on February 20, 2013, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Bonita Springs, Florida.

RELIGIOUS LIBERTY is being redefined in America, or at least many would like it to be. Our secular establishment wants to reduce the autonomy of religious institutions and limit the influence of faith in the public square. The reason is not hard to grasp. In America, “religion” largely means Christianity, and today our secular culture views orthodox Christian churches as troublesome, retrograde, and reactionary forces. They’re seen as anti-science, anti-gay, and anti-women—which is to say anti-progress as the Left defines progress. Not surprisingly, then, the Left believes society will be best served if Christians are limited in their influence on public life. And in the short run this view is likely to succeed. There will be many arguments urging Christians to keep their religion strictly religious rather than “political.” And there won’t just be arguments; there will be laws as well. We’re in the midst of climate change—one that’s getting colder and colder toward religion.

Recent court cases and controversies suggest trends unfriendly to religion in public life. In 2005, a former teacher at Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School in Redford, Michigan, filed an employment lawsuit claiming discrimination based on disability. The school fired her for violating St. Paul’s teaching that Christians should not bring their disputes before secular judges. The subsequent lawsuit revolved around the question of whether a religious school could invoke a religious principle to justify firing an employee. The school said it could, drawing on a legal doctrine known as the ministerial exception, which allows religious institutions wide latitude in hiring and firing their religious leaders. It’s in the nature of legal arguments to be complex and multi-layered, but in this case the Obama administration’s lawyers made a shockingly blunt argument: Their brief claimed that there should be no ministerial exception.

The Supreme Court rejected this argument in a unanimous 9-0 vote. But it’s telling nonetheless that lawyers in the Justice Department wanted to eliminate this exception. Their argument was straightforward: Government needs to have broad powers to address the problem of discrimination—in this case disability—as well as other injustices. Conceding too much to religious institutions limits those powers. Why should the theological doctrines of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, or of any other church, trump the legal doctrines of the United States when the important principle of non-discrimination is at stake? It is an arresting question, to say the least—especially when we remember that the Left is currently pushing to add gay marriage to the list of civil rights.

Concerns about the autonomy of religious institutions are also at work in the Obama administration’s tussle with the Catholic Church and her religious allies over the mandate to provide free contraceptives, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs. After the initial public outcry, the administration announced a supposed compromise, which has been recently revised and re-proposed. The Obama administration allows that churches and organizations directly under the control of those churches are religious employers and can opt out of the morally controversial coverage. But religious colleges and charities are not and cannot. To them, the administration offers a so-called accommodation.

The details are complex, but a recent statement issued by Cardinal Dolan of New York identifies the key issue: Who counts as a religious employer? It’s a question closely related to the issue in the Hosanna-Tabor case, which asks who counts as a religious employee. Once again the Obama administration seeks a narrow definition, “accommodating” others in an act of lèse majesté, as it were. The Catholic Church and her allies want a broad definition that includes Catholic health care, Catholic universities, and Catholic charities. The Church knows that it cannot count on accommodations—after all, when various states such as Illinois passed laws allowing gay adoptions, they did not “accommodate” Catholic charities, but instead demanded compliance with principles of non-discrimination, forcing the Church to shut down her adoption agencies in those jurisdictions.

Cardinal Dolan’s statement went still further. For-profit companies are not religious in the way that Notre Dame University is religious. Nonetheless, the religious beliefs of those who own and run businesses in America should be accorded some protection. This idea the Obama administration flatly rejects. By their progressive way of thinking, economic life should be under the full and unlimited control of the federal government.

Religious liberty is undermined in a third and different way as well. For a long time, political theorists like John Rawls have argued that our laws must be based on so-called public reason, which is in fact an ambiguous, ill-defined concept that gives privileged status to liberalism. In 2010, Federal District Court Judge Vaughn Walker overturned Proposition 8—the ballot measure that reversed the California Supreme Court’s 2006 decision that homosexuals have a right to marry—citing the lack of a rational basis for thinking that only men and women can marry. “The evidence shows conclusively,” he wrote, “that Proposition 8 enacts, without reason, a private moral view that same-sex couples are inferior to opposite-sex couples.” He continues by observing that many supporters of Proposition 8 were motivated by their religious convictions, which—following Rawls—he presumes should not be allowed to govern public law.

This line of thinking is not unique to Judge Walker. The influence of Rawls has been extensive, leading to restrictions on the use of religious reasons or even religiously-influenced reasons in public debate. In striking down Texas sodomy laws, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy noted that moral censure of homosexuality has “been shaped by religious beliefs.” The idea seems to be that moral views historically supported by religion—which of course means all moral views other than modern secular ones—are constitutionally suspect.

Here we come to the unifying feature of contemporary challenges to religious freedom—the desire to limit the influence of religion over public life. In the world envisioned by Obama administration lawyers, churches will have freedom as “houses of worship,” but unless they accept the secular consensus they can’t inspire their adherents to form institutions to educate and serve society in accordance with the principles of their faith. Under a legal regime influenced by the concept of public reason, religious people are free to speak—but when their voices contradict the secular consensus, they’re not allowed into our legislative chambers or courtrooms.

Thus our present clashes over religious liberty. The Constitution protects religious liberty in two ways. First, it prohibits laws establishing a religion. This prevents the dominant religion from using the political power of majority rule to privilege its own doctrines to the disadvantage of others. Second, it prohibits laws that limit the free exercise of religion. What we’re seeing today is a secular liberalism that wants to expand the prohibition of establishment to silence articulate religious voices and disenfranchise religiously motivated voters, and at the same time to narrow the scope of free exercise so that the new secular morality can reign over American society unimpeded.

Rise of the Nones
This shift in legal thinking on the Left reflects underlying religious trends. As the religious character of our society changes, so do our assumptions about religious freedom. The main change has been the rise of the Nones. In the 1950s, around three percent of Americans checked the “none” box when asked about their religious affiliation. That number has grown, especially in the last decade, to 20 percent of the population. And Nones are heavily represented in elite culture. A great deal of higher education is dominated by Nones, as are important cultural institutions, the media, and Hollywood. They are conscious of their power, and they feel the momentum of their growth.

At the same time, the number of Americans who say they go to church every week has remained strikingly constant over the last 50 years, at around 35 percent. Sociologists of religion think this self-reported number is higher than the actual one, which may be closer to 25 percent. In any event, the social reality is the same. As the Nones have emerged as a significant cohort, the committed core of religious people has not declined and in fact has become unified and increasingly battle tested. Protestants and Catholics alike know they’re up against an often hostile secular culture—and although a far smaller portion of the population, the same holds for Jews and Muslims as well.

These two trends—the rise of the Nones and the consolidation of the committed core of believers—have led to friction in public life. The Nones and religious Americans collide culturally and politically, not just theologically.

For a long time, the press has reported on the influence of religious voters, especially Evangelicals. Polling data shows that religiosity has become increasingly reliable as a predictor of political loyalties. But what’s far less commonly reported is that this goes both ways. In their recent book, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, Robert Putnam and William Campbell focused on the practice of saying grace before meals as an indication of religious commitment and found a striking correlation. Seventy percent of those who never say grace before meals identify as Democrats, compared to slightly more than 20 percent who identify as Republicans. Nones are extremely ideological. Meanwhile, among those who say grace daily, 40 percent identify as Democrats and 50 percent as Republicans. Religious people are more diverse, but they trend to the political right, and the more religious they are the more likely they are to vote Republican.

Other data also suggests a growing divide between the irreligious and religious. A recent Pew study confirms that Nones are the single most ideologically committed cohort of white Americans, rivaled only by Evangelical Protestants. They overwhelmingly support abortion and gay marriage. Seventy-five percent of them voted for Barack Obama in 2008, and they played a decisive role in his victory in 2012. In Ohio, Obama lost the Protestant vote by three percent and the Catholic vote by eleven percent—and both numbers rise if we isolate Protestants and Catholics who say they go to church every week. But he won the Nones, who make up 12 percent of the electorate in Ohio, by an astounding 47 percent.

I think it’s fair to say that Obama ran a values campaign last fall that gambled that the Nones would cast the decisive votes. For the first time in American political history, the winning party deliberately attacked religion. Its national convention famously struck God from the platform, only to have it restored by anxious party leaders in a comical session characterized by the kind of frivolity that comes when people recognize that it doesn’t really matter. Democratic talking points included the “war on women” and other well-crafted slogans that rallied their base, the Nones, who at 24 percent of all Democrat and Democratic-leaning voters have become the single largest identifiable cohort in the liberal coalition.

This presents the deepest threat to religious liberty today. It’s not good when the most numerous and powerful constituency in the Democratic Party has no time for religion. This is all the more true when its ideology has the effect of encouraging the rest of the party to view religion—especially Christianity—as the enemy; and when law professors provide reasons why the Constitution doesn’t protect religious people.

Religious Liberty Under the Gun
From the end of the Civil War until the 1960s, the wealthiest, best educated, and most powerful Americans remained largely loyal to Christianity. That’s changed. There were warning signs. William F. Buckley, Jr. chronicled how Yale in the early ’50s could no longer support even the bland religiosity of liberal Protestantism. Today, Yale and other elite institutions can be relied upon to provide anti-Christian propaganda. Stephen Pinker and Stephen Greenblatt at Harvard publish books that show how Christianity pretty much ruins everything, as Christopher Hitchens put it so bluntly. The major presses publish book after book by scholars like Elaine Pagels at Princeton, who argues that Christianity is for the most part an invention of power hungry bishops who suppressed the genuine diversity and spiritual richness of early followers of Jesus.

One can dispute the accuracy of the books, articles, and lectures of these and other authors. This is necessary, but unlikely to be effective. Experts savaged Greenblatt’s book on Lucretius, The Swerve, but it won the National Book Award for non-fiction. That’s not an accident. Greenblatt and others at elite universities are serving an important ideological purpose by using their academic authority to discredit Christianity, whose adherents are obstacles not only to abortion and gay rights, but to medical research unrestricted by moral concerns about the use of fetal tissue, to new reproductive technologies, to doctor-assisted suicide, and in general to liquefying traditional moral limits so that they can be reconstructed according to the desires of the Nones. Books by these elite academics reassure the Nones and their fellow travelers that they are not opposed to anything good or even respectable, but rather to historic forms of oppression, ignorance, and prejudice.

I cannot overstate the importance of these ideological attacks on Christianity. Our Constitution accords us rights, and the courts cannot void these rights willy-nilly. But history shows that the Constitution is a plastic document. When our elite culture thinks something is bad for society as a whole, judges find ways to suppress it. The First Amendment offered no protection to Bob Jones University, which lost its tax-exempt status because of a policy that prohibited inter-racial dating. As the Supreme Court majority in 1983 wrote in that case: “Government has a fundamental, overriding interest in eradicating racial discrimination in education . . . which substantially outweighs whatever burden denial of tax benefits places on [the University’s] exercise of their religious beliefs.”

In recent years the Supreme Court has been largely solicitous of religious freedom, sensing perhaps that our cultural conflicts over religion and morality need to be kept within bounds. But the law professors are preparing the way for changes. Martha Nussbaum, who teaches at the University of Chicago Law School, has opined that the colleges and universities run by Catholic religious orders that require their presidents or other leaders to be members of the order should lose their tax exempt status, because they discriminate against women. She allows that current interpretations of the First Amendment don’t support her view, but that’s not much comfort. All Nussbaum is doing is applying the logic of the Bob Jones case to the feminist project of eradicating discrimination based on sex.

Former Georgetown law professor Chai Feldblum—who is also a current Obama appointee to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—has written about the coming conflicts between gay rights and religious liberty. With an admirable frankness she admits, “I’m having a hard time coming up with any case in which religious liberty should win.” Again, the Bob Jones case is in the background, as are other aspects of civil rights law designed to stamp out racial discrimination. For someone like Feldblum, when religious individuals and institutions don’t conform to the new consensus about sexual morality, their freedoms should be limited.

It is precisely the possibilities evoked by Nussbaum and Feldblum that now motivate the Obama administration’s intransigence about allowing places like Notre Dame to be classified as religious employers. In the Bob Jones case, the justices were very careful to stipulate that “churches or other purely religious institutions” remain protected by the First Amendment’s principle of free exercise. By “accommodating” rather than counting Notre Dame and other educational and charitable organizations as religious employers, secular liberalism can target them in the future, as they have done to Catholic adoption agencies that won’t place children with homosexual couples.

A recent book by University of Chicago professor of philosophy and law Brian Leiter outlines what I believe will become the theoretical consensus that does away with religious liberty in spirit if not in letter. “There is no principled reason,” he writes, “for legal or constitutional regimes to single out religion for protection.” Leiter describes religious belief as a uniquely bad combination of moral fervor and mental blindness, serving no public good that justifies special protection. More significantly—and this is Leiter’s main thesis—it is patently unfair to afford religion such protection. Why should a Catholic or a Baptist have a special right while Peter Singer, a committed utilitarian, does not? Evoking the principle of fairness, Leiter argues that everybody’s conscience should be accorded the same legal protections. Thus he proposes to replace religious liberty with a plenary “liberty of conscience.”

Leiter’s argument is libertarian. He wants to get the government out of the business of deciding whose conscience is worth protecting. This mentality seems to expand freedom, but that’s an illusion. In practice it will lead to diminished freedom, as is always the case with any thoroughgoing libertarianism.

Let me give an example. The urban high school my son attended strictly prohibits hats and headgear. It does so in order to keep gang-related symbols and regalia out of the school. However, the school recognizes a special right of religious freedom, and my son, whose mother is Jewish and who was raised as a Jew, was permitted to wear a yarmulke. Leiter’s argument prohibits this special right, but his alternative is unworkable. The gang members could claim that their deep commitments of loyalty to each other create a conscientious duty to wear gang regalia. If everybody’s conscience must be respected, then nobody’s will be, for order and safety must be preserved.

* * *

The Arabic word dhimmi means non-Muslim. Under Muslim rule, non-Muslims were allowed to survive only insofar as they accepted Muslim dominance. Our times are not those times, and the secularism of the Nones is not Islam. Nevertheless, I think many powerful forces in America would like to impose a soft but real dhimmitude. The liberal and libertarian Nones will quarrel, as do the Shi’a and Sunni, but they will, I think, largely unify against the public influence of religion.

What can be done to prevent them from succeeding?

First and most obvious—defend religious liberty in the courts. Although I have depicted deep cultural pressures that work against religious liberty, we live in a society governed by the rule of law. Precedent matters, and good lawyering can make a substantive difference.

Second—fight against the emerging legal theories that threaten to undermine religious liberty. This is a battle to be carried out in the law schools and among political theorists. For decades, legal activists on the Left have been subsidized by legal clinics and special programs run in law schools. Defenders of religious liberty need to push back.

Third—fight the cultural battle. Legal theory flexes and bends in accord with the dominant consensus. This Brian Leiter knows, which is why he does not much worry about the current state of constitutional law. He goes directly to the underlying issues, which concern the role of religion in public life.

We must meet the challenge by showing that religion is indeed special. Religious people are the most likely Americans to be involved in civic life, and the most generous in their charitable contributions. This needs to be highlighted again and again. Moreover, we need to draw a contrast with the Nones, who tend to outsource their civic responsibilities and charitable obligations to government in the form of expanded government programs and higher taxes.

There is another, deeper argument that must be made in defense of religion: It is the most secure guarantee of freedom. America’s Founders, some of them Christian and others not, agreed as a matter of principle that the law of God trumps the law of men. This has obvious political implications: The Declaration of Independence appeals to the unalienable rights given by our Creator that cannot be overridden or taken away. In this sense, religion is especially beneficial. As Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI both emphasized, it gives transcendent substance to the rights of man that limit government. Put somewhat differently, religion gives us a place to stand outside politics, and without it we’re vulnerable to a system in which the state defines everything, which is the essence of tyranny. This is why gay marriage, which is sold as an expansion of freedom, is in fact a profound threat to liberty.

Finally, we must not accept a mentality of dhimmitude. The church, synagogue, and mosque have a tremendous solidity born of a communion of wills fused together in obedience to God. This gives people of faith the ability to fight with white fury for what they perceive to be a divine cause, which is of course a great force for righteousness—but also a dangerous threat to social peace, as early modern Europe knew only too well.

In conclusion, I want to focus not on fury but on the remarkable capacity for communities of faith to endure. My wife’s ancestors lived for generations in the contested borderlands of Poland and Russia. As Jews they were tremendously vulnerable, and yet through their children and their children’s children they endured in spite of discrimination, violence, and attempted genocide. Where now, I ask, are the Russian and Polish aristocrats who dominated them for centuries? Where now is the Thousand Year Reich? Where now is the Soviet worker’s paradise? They have gone to dust. The Torah is still read in the synagogue.

The same holds for Christianity. The Church did not need constitutional protections in order to take root in a hostile pagan culture two thousand years ago.

Right now the Nones seem to have the upper hand in America. But what seems powerful is not always so. If I had to bet on Harvard or the Catholic Church, Yale or the Mennonites in Goshen, Indiana, the New York Times or yeshivas in Brooklyn, I wouldn’t hesitate. Over the long haul, religious faith has proven itself the most powerful and enduring force in human history.

“Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.

Remember When Obama And Holder Went After Gibson Guitars? It All Makes Sense Now...

Remember Obama and Eric Holder’s attack on Gibson Guitars? Back in 2009 the Obama regime raided Gibson Guitars and demanded that its woodwork labor be done overseas. The original excuse by the Obama regime for their raid on Gibson Guitars was ‘environmental concerns.’ Court documents however, revealed that the raid and legal hassles were from a non-environmental question — which country is working on the wood? That’s right, the Obama regime wanted the ‘fingerboards’ produced outside the U.S. In something that was overlooked at the time but makes a lot more sense now, the Gibson Guitars CEO Henry E. Juszkiewicz is a Republican donor.

When the BS about the ‘wood’ came up as an excuse from the Obama regime to attack Gibson Guitars, the corrupt media never mentioned that Gibson’s competitors used the exact same wood and faced no problems from the government.

Gibson CEO Henry Juskiewicz became widely known after he reacted to the raid by protesting his company’s innocence of running afoul of arcane restrictions (the case here hinged on the degree the wood was finished in India, not whether it was endangered or illegally harvested) in the pages of national newspapers and in Senate hearings held by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).

Late last year Gibson settled with Department of Justice.

CEO Henry Juszkiewicz commented, “We feel that Gibson was inappropriately targeted, and a matter that could have been addressed with a simple contact by a caring human being representing the Government. Instead, the Government used violent and hostile means with the full force of the U.S. Government and several armed law enforcement agencies costing the taxpayer millions of dollars and putting a job-creating U.S. manufacturer at risk and at a competitive disadvantage. This shows the increasing trend on the part of the Government to criminalize rules and regulations and treat U.S. businesses in the same way drug dealers are treated. This is wrong and it is unfair. I am committed to working hard to correct the inequity that the law allows and ensure there is fairness, due process, and the law is used for its intended purpose of stopping bad guys and stopping the very real deforestation of our planet.”

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The Government Is Out Of Control.

Mark Steyn and the National Review spend time pointing out what the guy in Ohio already knew

Originally published at truthandcommonsense.com
Look, it’s simple. Infiltrate over a number of years an organization with a bunch of like minded folks and you are going to get a beast, that with the power it holds, will guarantee its own survival. Put in people who agree with that philosophy and you will end up with exactly what happened.


The long awaited leaders of the new America. Big centralized government. With them in charge.

What is this IRS thing all about? It is about a group of individuals working in a powerful agency that collectively see another group of citizens as a threat to the first group’s existence. Luckily for the first group, and unlucky for the second, is the first group has REAL POWER over the second group. Thus, the first group attempts to cripple or destroy the threat.

The Tea Party says smaller less powerful government. The IRS and almost everybody else in big government from HHS to DHS to FBI to DOJ to TSA to….on and on and on… BELIEVE the real threat to their power and survival doesn’t come from a bunch of ragtag Islamic terrorists getting welfare from the State while plotting to detonate a bomb. Seriously, what are the chances that bomb goes off and gets one of the members of the alphabet soup agencies in D.C.? BUUUTTTT… a President with a VP that hates big government and supporters who want to trim back its sails a tad, now THAT is a threat!

So, as Obama rails and his buddies rail about the danger of the Tea Party, his little minions of like mind do his bidding. Everybody is looking for a smoking gun. I’ll argue the entire rant starting with the Supreme Court to Beck to Rush to the Tea Party IS THE SMOKING GUN!! As I pointed out in a post, another writer gave us an example of a king’s rant about his former friend and how that ended up with the murder, by loyalists to the king, of that friend. The example was Thomas Beckett back in 1170! So the idea a leader can persuade his minions to do his bidding without actually picking up a phone (there were none in 1170!) is well established. I won’t even go into how Chairman Mao did the same thing. History is replete with examples.

Mark Steyn is his usual witty self. This time his humor and ability to make connections may be cute, but the subject is just too chilling.
Speaking at Ohio State University earlier this month, Barack Obama urged students to pay no attention to those paranoid types who “incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity.” Oddly enough, in recent days the most compelling testimony for this view of government has come from the president himself, who insists with a straight face that he had no idea that the Internal Revenue Service had spent two years targeting his political enemies until he “learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this.” Like you, all he knows is what he reads in the papers. Which is odd, because his Justice Department is bugging those same papers, so you’d think he’d at least get a bit of a heads-up. But no doubt the fact that he’s wiretapping the Associated Press was also entirely unknown to him until he read about it in the Associated Press. There is a “president of the United States” and a “government of the United States,” but, despite a certain superficial similarity in their names, they are entirely unrelated,…..

Did Obama know? I have a long back and forth with a friend about that. As though getting a hold of an email or a recording will put the dot on the “i” here. Or course Obama knew. But unless the guys in the “Chicago Way” led White House suddenly went brain dead, you won’t find an email or an audio recording or a witness (not one that will last long at least!). As I said to a friend the real tragedy is we are spending too much time on looking for one specific tree when in this case the WHOLE FOREST COMMITTED THE CRIME!

Are we to think the DHS coming out with lists explaining the real threat to America are those right wingers and small government types is somehow unrelated to an orchestrated effort by the IRS to cripple those same people while harassing Romney donors and leaking IRS information to pro-Obama sources? And the fact those pro-Obama sources turned around and made new reports out of the information and fed it to the willing press was just by accident? You have to appreciate the efficiency of the administration. And they only won by several million votes. One has to wonder what would have happened if the truth had come out…

Steyn relates to one case in particular that should make all of us just shudder. The big example was the Romney donor Vandersloot, who suffered audits from the IRS and also from another alphabet soup agency- the Department of Labor. But what happened to the small citizen is what caught my eye. A woman who wrote an article about Obamacare suddenly found herself in an audit (PS- if you are looking to arrest someone this is the case. You can flip the auditor and roll up the chain- just saying…)
If you believe this, there’s a shovel-ready infrastructure project in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you. In April last year, the Obama campaign identified by name eight Romney donors as “a group of wealthy individuals with less than reputable records. Quite a few have been on the wrong side of the law, others have made profits at the expense of so many Americans, and still others are donating to help ensure Romney puts beneficial policies in place for them.” That week, Kimberley Strassel began her Wall Street Journalcolumn thus:

Try this thought experiment: You decide to donate money to Mitt Romney. You want change in the Oval Office, so you engage in your democratic right to send a check.

Several days later, President Barack Obama, the most powerful man on the planet, singles you out by name. . . . The message from the man who controls the Justice Department (which can indict you), the SEC (which can fine you), and the IRS (which can audit you), is clear: You made a mistake donating that money.

Miss Strassel wrote that on April 26, 2012. Five weeks later, one of the named individuals, Frank VanderSloot, was informed by the IRS that he and his wife were being audited. In July, he was told by the Department of Labor of an additional audit over the guest workers on his cattle ranch in Idaho. In September, he was notified that one of his other businesses was to be audited. Mr. VanderSloot, who had never previously been audited, attracted three in the four months after being publicly named by el Presidente. More to the point he attracted that triple audit even though Miss Strassel explicitly predicted in America’s biggest-selling newspaper that this was exactly what the Obama enforcers were going to do. The “separate, sinister entity” of the government of the United States went ahead anyway. What do they care? If some lippy broad in the papers won’t quit her yapping about it, they can always audit her, too — as they did to Miss Strassel’s sometime colleague Anne Hendershott, a sociology professor who got rather too interested in Obamacare and wrote about it in the Journaland various small Catholic publications. The IRS summoned Professor Hendershott to account for herself, and forbade her husband from accompanying her, even though they filed jointly. She ceased her political writing.

The point here is don’t over think this. Don’t look for one particular smoking gun when all Americans are staring down the barrels of the 16inch cannons mounted on the big government battleship!

I often argue here and with my friends have we reached a tipping point. Actually, in a nation there are probably thousands of smaller individual tipping points where actions by government or by individuals in government have an outcome that results in an inability to reverse course like a ship that is run aground and flounders.

Maybe we need to start adding up the number of beached ships across the landscape and ask ourselves have the collective efforts caused the big tipping point? As we speak we have very confident “that nothing will happen to them” federal employees lying, deflecting and saying out loud that targeting individual Americans for their beliefs- because those beliefs are contrary to the big government mindset of its survival above all else- is legal. Maybe a bit tacky, but still legal. Think about that. Think back, if you are old enough, to anyone else ever saying that out loud and with such confidence.

With that, I’ll argue this President, as I predicted four years ago, was the catalyst that makes the answer yes. A resounding, destructive and horribly frightening YES!

How many becomes too many?

West Philly - Wildwood Conundrum

Originally published at theburningplatform.com

While walking down the street in Wildwood yesterday I noticed something that most people would find highly unusual. There was a gang of teenagers coming towards me and I wasn’t scared. It was because  they were all Asian and dressed in blue Morey’s Piers  work shirts.  They were headed to their jobs on the boardwalk. I had previously passed a gaggle of Eastern Europeans in blue Morey’s work shirts while riding my bike on the boardwalk. This is not a recent development. Morey’s has been employing foreign students for years to man their rides and concession booths.

The Morey family essentially runs the Wildwood Boardwalk. They operate the three amusement piers and many of the game and food booths. They have been model citizens and have done many good things for the town and the people. They have been the major player in Wildwood for decades.

They employ 1,500 people every summer and half of them are foreign students. They come from China, Thailand, Bulgaria, Egypt, Ireland and other Eastern European countries. This fact has always had me scratching my head. Morey’s pays them $7.50 to $8.00 per hour. They provide housing and transportation. They feed them lunch and dinner. The foreign workers are pleasant, efficient, and competent. They are clean cut and show up every day for work. They appear to be loving the experience.

You might be wondering how foreigners can come to the U.S. over the summer and get jobs when our real unemployment rate is north of 20%. It seems there is a Federal government program called the Summer Work Travel Program, run by the State Department.  It was created in 1961 to bolster diplomatic ties with other countries by way of cultural exchange. As a reminder, Federal programs NEVER die. They just get bigger. The primary purpose of the program is to acquaint foreign students with the culture and life of modern America and the distribution of other cultures among its inhabitants. I guess taking ride tickets and selling fried oreos to obese tattooed Americans is really acquainting them with our culture. Approximately 120,000 foreign university students are shipped over for three or four months every year to work low level tourist industry jobs.

The foreign students actually end up paying $2,000 to just get over here to work. Would-be participants typically first make contact with a recruiter in their home country. From there, they are connected with one of dozens of private “sponsors,” who are tasked by the State Department with overseeing the visa program. The sponsors acquire visas for students and connect them with employers or, at times, another company before they are granted entrance into the United States. Those who gain entry into the program typically spend more than $2,000 in travel expenses and fees to recruiters and sponsors, but some pay much, much more. “With recruiters, you don’t know how much they might be charging. We found someone who was charging $10,000,” said Allan Smith, chief executive officer at American Camp And Work Experience, the sole New Jersey-based Summer Work Travel sponsor. “On the other side,” Smith said, “you have employers who house kids, charging them over $100 a week. At the end of the summer, they end up owing the company money. When you get stuff like that, it hurts everybody.”

Morey’s does not treat their employees badly. But this program is not really a cultural immersion program. It’s a cheap labor program for American companies. Federal taxes are waived for participants in the program. That means Morey’s does not have to pay their 7.65% portion into the Social Security fund. But at the end of the day, I believe Morey’s when they say they can’t fill the positions locally. I do not believe Morey’s are racists, but there are very few African American or Hispanic workers on their piers. This is interesting since 31% of the local population is Hispanic and 12% is African American. The total local population is only 5,500, with only 500 or so residents between 18 and 24 years old. It makes sense that they would need teenagers from outside of Wildwood to fill their needs.

This brings me to West Philly and how the welfare state policies of this country are the reason the Morey family has to seek out good teenage workers from across the globe. My Section 8 neighbors have a 17 year old son living in the condo. He lives 50 yards from the Wildwood boardwalk between two Morey’s amusement piers. He does not work. Morey’s is going through a lot of effort to ship in teenagers from foreign countries. The people living next door have not interest in working. If they earned money working at a real job, they would lose some of their free shit. That kid has no interest in working on the Boardwalk. He has learned already that not working is easier and more profitable than working.

This entitlement attitude extends into West Philly. Philadelphia is 90 miles from Wildwood. There are 205,000 18 to 24 year olds living in Philadelphia. The true youth unemployment rate in Philadelphia is in excess of 50%. The black unemployment rate is north of 70%. How screwed up is our country that Morey’s couldn’t find 750 teenagers in Philadelphia to collect ride tickets and sell funnel cake? Any normal teenager would love to spend the summer at a shore house with an easy night time job. I blame the 45 years of welfare state policies for this ridiculous situation. The teenagers in West Philly have been raised with an entitlement mindset. Working would reduce their government freebies. Most of these teenagers have never had an example of two parents working hard at jobs. Many don’t even know their fathers. They have no concept of personal responsibility or getting ahead in life. They know their family EBT cards will be recharged on the 1st of the month. They aren’t capable of adding, subtracting, using correct grammar or dressing like a normal human being. The kids from China have a better grasp of the English language than kids in West Philly.

It is a sad reflection on our government run educational system, entitlement plantation mentality instilled by liberal do-gooder politicians, and complete lack of parental responsibility within the urban ghettos, that employers have to seek workers from 7,000 miles away when there are 200,000 teenagers only ninety miles away. Do you blame Morey’s for not hiring these Philadelphia teenagers?

The Church of Scotland's Scandal

By Dennis Prager and originally published at dennisprager.com

Earlier this month, the Church of Scotland issued a report titled "The Inheritance of Abraham? A Report on the 'Promised Land.'"The essence of the report is that according to the Bible, Jews have no more attachment to the land of Israel than anyone else. Hence "promised land" is in quotation marks in the report's title -- because there is no promised land.

In the report's words: "The New Testament contains a radical re-interpretation of the concepts of 'Israel,' 'temple,' 'Jerusalem' and 'land.' When the Bible mentions 'Israel,' it does not mean Israel; when it says 'temple,' the Bible does not mean the Jewish temple; 'Jerusalem' does not mean the city of Jerusalem; and 'land' does not mean land.

"Promises about the land of Israel," the report continues, "were never intended to be taken literally, or as applying to a defined geographical territory."

Even during the worst excesses of Christian anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages, it is doubtful that any normative Christian body declared that "Israel," "the temple," "Jerusalem" and "the land" no longer meant or were ever intended to mean what those words represent.

This claim is not only profoundly anti-Semitic. It is an act of theological forgery; it makes a mockery of the Bible as a coherent document and it renders Christianity inherently anti-Semitic.

It would be as if a major post-Christian religious body had announced that "Jesus," "Christ," "crucifixion" and "resurrection" had never meant what Christians and the New Testament had always understood them to mean. Imagine if a major Muslim body declared that Jesus means Muhammad; Christ means Quran; crucifixion means Islamophobia; and resurrection means the Hajj.

I have never equated criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. But the Church of Scotland report is not about criticism of Israel; it is about invalidating the Jewish people and invalidating the Jews' historically incontestable claims to the land upon which the only independent states that ever existed were Jewish.

--The Church of Scotland report asserts that the Bible does not support the existence of a Jewish state: "There has been a widespread assumption by many Christians as well as many Jewish people that the Bible supports an essentially Jewish state of Israel. This raises an increasing number of difficulties. ... "

--It asserts that justice and the existence of a Jewish state are mutually exclusive: "There is a direct conflict of interest between wanting human rights and justice for all and retaining the right to the land."

--It asserts that the Jews' return to Israel has no biblical basis.

--It asserts that the notion that the Jews have or ever had a special relationship with God -- one of the most oft repeated ideas in the Hebrew Bible -- is negated in that very same Bible: "That exclusivist tradition implied Jews had a special, privileged position in relation to God. But the prophetic tradition stood against this." The Chosen People is not chosen, in other words.

--It asserts that God's promise of the land to Abraham has nothing to do with the Jews; it is only about Jesus: "The promise to Abraham about land is fulfilled through the impact of Jesus, not by restoration of land to the Jewish people."

--It asserts that even Jesus -- that proud, religious Jew -- did not believe in any special relationship between God and the Jews: "Jesus offered a radical critique of Jewish specialness ... "

At the same time, this truly immoral document does not devote a word to why there were Palestinian refugees: While the Jews accepted the 1947-48 partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, all the neighboring Arab states rejected the partition and invaded the Jews in order to annihilate Israel at birth.

Nor does the report devote a single sentence to how Israel's occupation of the West Bank came about: In 1967, Israel's neighbors sought to exterminate Israel just as Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and most Palestinians and other Muslims in the Middle East today wish to now. And that only because of that war, won by Israel, did Israel come to occupy the West Bank of Jordan.

Nor is a word devoted to Palestinian national honoring of their numerous terrorists, or to the exterminationist and anti-Semitic propaganda that saturates Middle East media or to the widespread Palestinian support for terrorism (according to the just-released Pew Forum poll of Muslims, 40 percent of Palestinians support suicide terror).

And the Church of Scotland did not think it important to even hint at what happened in Gaza after the Israelis gave the whole of Gaza to the Palestinians: The Palestinians converted it into a terror-state that regularly launches rockets into Israel to kill as many Israelis as possible.

And, most vile of all, the Church of Scotland never once notes, let alone condemns, the Muslim countries and organizations that seek to annihilate Israel, an existential threat that no other country or people in the world face.

The Church of Scotland has given voice to the ugliest depiction of Jews since medieval times. The official reaction of the Scottish Jewish community is that Christian-Jewish post-Holocaust dialogue seems to have been a moral and intellectual waste of time. I do not agree. But if other Christian churches do not condemn the Church of Scotland -- despite its promise to revise its report to include a statement that Israel has a right to exist (!) -- even pro-Christian Jews will wonder whether the Scottish Jewish community's reaction is valid.

And how did this happen? The report is a combination of medieval Christian anti-Judaism and contemporary leftist anti-Zionism. For Jews and Israel, that's a lethal combination.

Living with a Sense of Eternity

Originally published at ligonier.org

It is commonplace today in Reformed theology to recognize that the Christian lives “between the times” — already we are in Christ, but a yet more glorious future awaits us in the final consummation. There is, therefore, a “not yet” about our present Christian experience. John Calvin well understood this, and he never dissolved the tension between the “already” and the “not yet.” But he also stressed the importance for the present of a life-focus on the future.

Calvin sought, personally, to develop a balance of contempt for the present life with a deep gratitude for the blessings of God and a love and longing for the heavenly kingdom. The sense that the Lord would come and issue His final assessment on all and bring His elect to glory was a dominant motif for him. This, the theme of his chapter “Meditation on the Future Life,” was a major element in the energy with which he lived in the face of the “not yet” of his own ailments and weakness. When he was seriously ill and confined to bed, his friends urged him to take some rest, but he replied, “Would you that the Lord, when He comes, should find me idle?” By living in the light of the return of Christ and the coming judgment, Calvin became deeply conscious of the brevity of time and the length of eternity.

This sense of eternity overflowed from his life into his work. It was so characteristic of him that it flowed out naturally in his prayers at the conclusion of his lectures. Here we see the wonderful harmony of his biblical exposition, his understanding of the gospel, his concern to teach young men how to live for God’s glory, and his personal piety. A fragment of one of these prayers, chosen almost randomly, fittingly summarizes this all-too-brief reflection on the heart of God that Calvin expressed in his learning and leadership:

May we be prepared, whatever happens,
rather to undergo a hundred deaths
than to turn aside from the profession of true piety,
in which we know our safety to be laid up.
And may we so glorify thy name
as to be partakers of that glory which
has been acquired for us
through the blood of thine only-begotten Son. Amen.

Adapted from Sinclair Ferguson’s contribution in John Calvin: A Heart for Devotion, Doctrine & Doxology.