Epstein on Obamanomics

Richard A. Epstein is a public intellectual whose comments on politics are typically incisive and enlightening.  In this column he takes on Obama's comments on the economy and his solutions to its problems, making the point that Obama has no even rudimentary knowledge of economics and how the economy works in real time.  For anyone who has worked in the private sector and understands supply and demand and other forces that direct and control free markets, all this is painfully obvious.  Here's Epstein on this point:

Farewell to Supply and Demand

The President’s speech at Knox College needs some close deconstruction because it sheds harsh light on a problem that has dogged his domestic policy agenda from the beginning: intellectual rigidity. The President, who has never worked a day in the private sector, has no systematic view of the way in which businesses operate or economies grow. He never starts a discussion by asking how the basic laws of supply and demand operate, and shows no faith that markets are the best mechanism for bringing these two forces into equilibrium.

Because he does not understand rudimentary economics, he relies on anecdotes to make his argument. He notes, for example, that the Maytag plant that used to be in Galesburg is no longer in operation—it closed in 2004—but he never asks what set of forces made it untenable for the business to continue to operate there. He never mentions that Maytag’s relocation of its manufacturing operations to Mexico may have had something to do with a strong union presence or the dreadful economic climate in Illinois.

Unfortunately, our President rules out deregulation or lower taxes as a way to unleash productive forces in the country. Indeed, he is unable to grasp the simple point that the only engine of economic prosperity is an active market in which all parties benefit from voluntary exchange. Both taxes and regulation disrupt those exchanges, causing fewer exchanges to take place—and those which do occur have generated smaller gains than they should. The two-fold attraction of markets is that they foster better incentives for production as they lower administrative costs. Their comparative flexibility means that they have a capacity for self-correction that is lacking in a top-down regulatory framework that limits wages, prices, and the other conditions of voluntary exchange.

Epstein's entire article is here.

This the comment of a Powerline reader who has lived in the suburbs of Detroit for a lifetime;

 A reader with first-hand experience recounts Young’s role in Detroit’s downfall:

I listened to some of your appearance the other day on the Bill Bennett show on my way to work. I would have loved to call and offer my two-cents worth on the situation in Detroit, but can’t afford the time to sit on hold for an extended period. Maybe when I retire in a year or two.

A little biographical detail to set the stage: I am not a native Detroiter. I grew up in the Upper Peninsula, went to undergraduate school in Ann Arbor from 1970-74, spent a few years in California sowing wild oats (no seed grew, thank goodness) and moved back to Michigan and into the Detroit area in 1978. It has been home ever since. As a youngster, I viewed Detroit from afar, as a college student I watched TV and listened to radio daily from Detroit while seldom actually going into the city, and as a resident I have lived in several of the suburbs but never in the city. I have watched the slow motion train wreck over several decades.

Listening to the discussion on the Bennett show, it was pretty clear that everyone gets it that the unions were probably the single biggest economic factor in the decline of the city. However, there was elephant in the room that no one seemed to want to talk much about and that is the role of race in the culture and politics of the current situation. I would submit that it was also a huge factor in the decline of Detroit and will, sadly, probably be the factor that will derail any rebound. The politics of race in Detroit are poisonous and I lay that at the feet of Coleman Young.

Young was far left, a fellow traveler of the CPUSA through membership in affiliated organizations and was deeply involved with the UAW. He was Mayor of Detroit for 20 years, from 1974 to 1994. I believe he made a cynical decision to make Detroit a majority black city, largely for his own political benefit. Whites had left the city in large numbers following the riots in ’67, but Young, I believe, was happy to see them go and subtly let them know they weren’t really wanted there anymore. The higher the black to white ratio in the city, the tighter was his grip on power.

In his years in power there were two techniques he used to cement his power and influence. One was to pack the city payroll with supporters, a tried and true tactic of municipal governments everywhere. However, his deep ties to the union movement opened the door for a huge amount of influence in compensation negotiations resulting in the high wages and generous benefits, including pensions, which are plaguing the city now.

The second technique he used was to keep race relations at a boil. When I moved here in 1978 the Detroit metro area was almost unbelievably segregated. Most suburbs, with a few notable exceptions, had only tiny black populations. Almost all the blacks in the metro area lived in the city and almost all the whites in the suburbs. My first drive up Jefferson Ave from the center of the city into the Grosse Pointes was eye opening. Within 3-4 blocks it changed from a filthy street with abandoned buildings and rundown store fronts covered with graffiti and protective steel gratings to a tree lined avenue with large well maintained homes with immaculate landscaping. There was a virtual Maginot line at the border of Detroit.

Young was a master of exploiting this divide and creating friction with the “suburbs” (dogwhistle for “whites”) and regularly used this to foster a “them (white) vs us (black)” mentality in his voter base. He was always the guy standing up to “the suburbs” and they loved him for it. He was mayor for life. Sadly, this technique was extremely effective, to the point where it not only worked on blacks in Detroit, it also worked on the whites in the suburbs. To this day, almost twenty years after Young left office, the animosity is such that any cooperative endeavors between Detroit and its surrounding communities are always fraught with a significant dose of racial politics. Blacks always think that whites want to take over and whites don’t see any benefit in doing anything that helps the city.

While the racial segregation of the Detroit metro area has eased over the years, this has actually worked to the detriment of the city. Over the past several decades crime has gone up and services have declined, making the city a much less desirable place to live, as population figures confirm. The vast majority of that population loss, I believe, has been the black middle classes who left the city for the suburbs. It is perfectly understandable that they want to move their families to where the streets are safer and services are better, most notably the school districts. The result is that the city is now largely populated by an underclass that is very poorly educated and pretty much only capable of working at the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. Functional illiteracy has been estimated at nearly 50% and over a third of the population is on welfare. It is a tragedy and it will be a primary factor in keeping the city from any meaningful rebound, at least in the next couple of decades. The human capital is just not there to rebuild an economic infrastructure capable of lifting the city out of its financial difficulties. (Digression: if current lawsuits filed by pensioners to protect their interests are successful a huge proportion of meager city operating finances will be untouchable and other city services will suffer enormously in the future, digging an even deeper hole for the city.)

However, the legacy of Coleman Young will be another major and perhaps even more deleterious contributing factor. The animus still runs deep between the city and any outsiders. In the current situation, the emergency manager (although black) is seen as an agent of the State government which is currently in the hands of the Republican Party (and therefore white). Understanding the Coleman Young school of politics one would expect that the voters in Detroit would react negatively to “white people” trying to take over and disempower them and this is exactly what is happening. There is very little cooperation from the city with what is going on. Dave Bing, the current mayor, has been vilified for not being sufficiently confrontational and those city officials fighting the State and the Emergency Manager every step of the way have lots of support from the populace.

One illustrative example: Belle Isle is a city park on an island in the Detroit River. Years ago it was in fact a jewel of the city. Now it is dilapidated, overgrown and generally very disreputable looking. The State offered to take over the operation of the park on a long term lease basis. The State would rehab the property and foot the bill for staffing the park. The hue and cry from the city was immediate and overwhelmingly negative and the idea was swept into the dustbin rather quickly. This proposal was such an obvious win for the city, reducing city expenditures, improving infrastructure and quality of life for Detroit residents, and it was attacked vociferously based strictly on racial politics. Sadly it played out pretty much exactly as I expected when I first heard about the proposal. Thank you, Coleman Young.

So, to make a long story short, I am afraid that I have to agree with your assessment that it will probably be more difficult for the city of Detroit to rebound than the country of Greece. At least two huge hurdles need to be surmounted and I am skeptical about either.

Our reader’s reference to Belle Isle reminded me that I recently posted a photo of that park taken in 1908, along with a number of other century-old photographs. If you missed that post, you should check it out. Belle Isle Park, 1908:

Detroit was a better place in 1908, but to be fair, it is not the only city of which that could be said.

Deconstructing ABC's Zimmerman trial coverage

Anyone interested in accurate reporting will not get it from ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, or any of the print media like Time, Inc, NYTimes, Washington Post, LATimes, and dozens of other corrupt outlets around the country. Anyone interested in the truth should shun these outlets.  The latest evidence of this fact comes from Jack Cashill, a real investigative journalist who works for himself because none of these outlets would have any interest in his kind of reporting.  Fortunately there are a few media venues available to Jack and the few others like him, and we are all the better for them.  His latest deconstruction of the reporting of ABC's coverage of the Zimmerman trial follows:

July 28, 2013

ABC Still Corrupting Zimmerman case

By Jack Cashill

In a perverse bit of post-trial agitprop, ABC News somehow recruited the one woman of color on George Zimmerman's "all white" jury and twisted her words to reflect the presumed editorial position of ABC News. In this clip from an exclusive Robin Roberts interview which has played just about everywhere including CBS News, Roberts says to the juror, "Some people have said, point blank, 'George Zimmerman got away with murder.' How do you respond to those people who say that?" In the edited video ABC floated about, "Maddy" answers unhesitatingly, "George Zimmerman got away with murder. But you can't get away from God."

This clip led to headlines like "Juror Says Zimmerman 'Got Away With Murder'" in the New York Times. In the article by Lisetta Alvarez -- the reporter who gave the world the phrase "White Hispanic" -- there is not even a mention of the prompt by Roberts. The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune ran comparable headlines.

What none of these publications mentioned -- and kudos to Slate's William Saletan for breaking the story -- is that the producers at ABC edited Maddy's response to have her say something she never intended. In the unedited version, after Roberts asks her leading question, Maddy pauses, starts her response over, and clearly plays back Roberts' question as the stated premise to her own answer, "But you can't get away from God."  In other words, this is how she would answer that question if asked.  She never implied Zimmerman got away with murder, nor agreed with the premise. In fact, she stood by her decision to acquit Zimmerman.

ABC's reporting on this case has descended to a hitherto unexplored level of journalistic malfeasance. "He called police. They suggested he stay in his car," Robert says in her introduction to Maddy's interview. How, one wonders, could ABC get something so fundamental so wrong at this stage of the game?  No, the dispatcher, who is not a police officer, never suggested Zimmerman stay in his truck, nor did he even recommend he go back to it.  Disinformation of this caliber has fed black paranoia for more than a year and continues unabated.

This corruption, I suppose, should not surprise. From the very beginning, ABC News took the lead in disinforming America about the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. The Martin family public relations guru, the very white Ryan Julison, was bragging about landing interviews with ABC within two weeks of the shooting in February 2012.  "Coordinated interviews with Good Morning America and the family of Trayvon Martin," Julison boasted on his Facebook page on March 10 of that year. "This has certainly struck a nerve around the country." 

On March 13, ABC's Matt Gutman violated just about every known rule of journalism, tweeting that George Zimmerman "shot 17yr old teen bc he was black, wore hoodie walking slowly."  From day one, Gutman worked under the elitist assumption that the Sanford police were either corrupt, incompetent or both and discounted whatever information led them to refrain from arresting Zimmerman, "likely not 2 be arrested."

Late on March 16 Gutman posted a piece on the ABC News website that helped set the tone of the coverage to come. He based its inflammatory headline, "Trayvon Martin Neighborhood Watch Shooting: 9-1-1 Tapes Send Mom Crying From Room," fully on the word of Julison and admitted as much. In the accompanying video piece for Good Morning America Gutman may have set a new national record for most mistakes of consequence in a two-minute news byte:

GUTMAN: It was February 25^TH.

TRUTH:  It was February 26^th.

GUTMAN: Trayvon was staying at his stepmother's.

TRUTH: Martin was a staying with Brandy Green, a girlfriend of his father's. His mother as well as his stepmother, Alicia Stanley, lived in greater Miami.

GUTMAN:  He left for the store at half-time of the NBA All-Star Game.

TRUTH:  He left hours earlier. He was dead before the game started.

GUTMAN:  The "gunshots" are triggering outrage

TRUTH:  There was only one gunshot.

GUTMAN:  Trayvon was "100 pounds lighter."

TRUTH:  He was less than fifty pounds lighter.

GUTMAN:  "You can hear him stalk Martin."

TRUTH:  He did not stalk Martin. When the dispatcher said to Zimmerman, who was following Martin, "We don't need you to do that," Zimmerman said "okay" and stopped. ABC edited out Zimmerman's "okay" and followed immediately with Gutman saying, "But then came the gunshots."

GUTMAN: Zimmerman had a record -- "battery on a police officer and resisting arrest."

TRUTH: The charges had been dropped. Gutman did not mention that fact.

GUTMAN: Police have been accused of "correcting one eyewitness, while ignoring another."

TRUTH: Yes, but the Sanford PD did so for good reason. Several eyewitnesses had seen very little. Others had seen a lot. On one 9-1-1 call from Witness #11 desperate cries of "help" are clearly audible for roughly forty seconds until they promptly stop with a gunshot. The investigators knew it was Zimmerman who was crying out. An hour after the shooting, that eyewitness, Jonathan Good, told the Sanford PD that he saw a "black man in a black hoodie on top of either a white guy . . . or an Hispanic guy in a red sweater on the ground yelling out help." According to Good, the black man on top was "throwing down blows on the guy MMA [mixed martial arts] style."

Gutman may not have heard the audio of these interviews, but "Jon" had spoken on camera to a local ABC affiliate the day after the shooting. "The guy on bottom who I believe had a red sweater on was yelling to me, 'help, help,'" Good said. "I told them to stop and I was calling 9-1-1." In the days when real journalists still walked the planet, the case would have been closed right there.

On March 28, one week after CNN's Anderson Cooper falsely accused Zimmerman of saying "f---ing coons" on his call to the dispatcher, and one day after NBC's The Today Show crudely edited that same call to make Zimmerman sound like he was racially profiling Martin (and got sued for it), ABC News tried to regain its rightful place in the false accusation race. Leading the charge was ace fact-twister Gutman. His online lede was a powerful one: "A police video taken the night that Trayvon Martin was shot dead shows no blood or bruises on George Zimmerman."

As Gutman related, the initial police report claimed that Zimmerman was bleeding from the back of the head and the nose, but in the video, obtained exclusively by ABC, "No abrasions or blood can be seen." Although Gutman did not say so, he surely implied that Zimmerman and the police conspired to exaggerate his injuries.

The folks at the indispensable Conservative Treehouse wasted no time in busting this scam. The police surveillance video, which, Gutman boasted, "was obtained exclusively by ABC News" seemed to move as it shadowed the police and Zimmerman. CCTV surveillance video cameras do not move. They are fixed and stationary. Bottom line: this was not the original video or a digital copy of the original. It was video of a video, quite possibly taken by a Team Trayvon ally using an iPhone or something like it and given to Gutman.

In releasing this copy, Gutman failed to mention the obvious reason for the apparent lack of "blood or bruises" -- namely the loss of resolution from the original to the duplicate, not to mention the fact Zimmerman's wounds had been tended to at the scene.

I could go on with another year's worth of deception by Gutman and ABC, but by April 2012 the network had done more than its share in getting Zimmerman arrested. Now, its all-stars -- Gutman and Roberts chief among them -- are doing their best to deny him vindication.  In the process, of course, they stir the embers of racial unrest, but when you've got a personal limo driver to take you to and fro, that's apparently not much of a worry.

Jack Cashill's new book "If I Had A Son" is now available for pre-order.Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/07/abc_still_corrupting_zimmerman_case.html#ixzz2aMXWFcFC 

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Anthony Weiner's wife Huma's connection to radical Muslims

Where would we be in this country without the reporting of the redoubtable Andrew McCarthy and the many others at National Review, the magazine started and run by William Buckley for decades?  It bears remembering that McCarthy was the successful U.S. prosecuting attorney on the Blind Sheik case, that incarcerated that Muslim madman for his role in planning the first bombing of the twin towers in NYC in the 1990's.  McCarthy has kept alive the extreme threat posed by the Muslim Brotherhood and by the extremist Muslims out there.  Without his effort we would realistically have no idea how recklessly dangerous are the Obama administration's policies toward Muslims and the Middle East.  This story about Anthony Weiner's wife and her association with The Muslim Brotherhood and its various support groups would never see the light of day absent McCarthy's reporting.  In the case of Huma, Weiner's wife, the burden is on her to explain her relationship with these radical groups.  It would be helpful if some so-called news organization like the NYTimes would turn a few of their investigative journalists loose on this subject but for some inexplicable reason(s) this never seems to happen.

The Huma Unmentionables

Charlotte’s revulsion over Huma Abedin’s calculated “stand by your man” routine is surely right. Still, it is amazing, as we speculate about Ms. Abedin’s political future, that the elephant in the room goes unnoticed, or at least studiously unmentioned.

Sorry to interrupt the Best Enabler of a Sociopath Award ceremony but, to recap, Ms. Abedin worked for many years at a journal that promotes Islamic-supremacist ideology that was founded by a top al-Qaeda financier, Abdullah Omar Naseef. Naseef ran the Rabita Trust, a formally designated foreign terrorist organization under American law. Ms. Abedin and Naseef overlapped at the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs (JMMA) for at least seven years. Throughout that time (1996–2003), Ms. Abdein worked for Hillary Clinton in various capacities.

Ms. Abedin’s late father, Dr. Zyed Abedin, was recruited by Naseef to run theJMMA in Saudi Arabia. The journal was operated under the management of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, a virulently anti-Semitic and sharia-supremacist organization. When Dr. Abedin died, editorial control of the journal passed to his wife, Dr. Saleha Mahmood Abedin — Huma’s mother.

Saleha Abedin is closely tied to the Muslim Brotherhood and to supporters of violent jihad. Among other things, she directs an organization – the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child. The IICWC, through its parent entity (the International Islamic Council for Dawa and Relief), is a component of theUnion for Good (also known as the Union of Good), another formally designated terrorist organization. The Union for Good is led by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the notorious Muslim Brotherhood jurist who has issued fatwas calling for the killing of American military and support personnel in Iraq as well as suicide bombings in Israel. (As detailed here, the Obama White House recently hosted Qaradawi’s principal deputy, Sheikh Abdulla bin Bayyah, who also endorsed the fatwa calling for the killing of U.S. troops and personnel in Iraq.)

Like Sheikh Qaradawi, who helped write the charter for the IICWC, Saleha Abedin is an influential sharia activist who has, for example, published a book calledWomen in Islam that claims man-made laws enslave women. It reportedly provides sharia justifications for such practices as female-genital mutilation, the death penalty for apostates from Islam, the legal subordination of women, and the participation of women in violent jihad. Dr. Abedin has nevertheless been hailed in the progressive press as a “leading voice on women’s rights in the Muslim world” (to quote Foreign Policy). What they never quite get around to telling you is that this means “women’s rights” in the repressive sharia context.

Back to daughter Huma. In the late mid to late Nineties, while she was an intern at the Clinton White House and an assistant editor at JMMA, Ms. Abedin was amember of the executive board of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) at George Washington University, heading its “Social Committee.” The MSA, which has a vast network of chapters at universities across North America, is the foundation of the Muslim Brotherhood’s infrastructure in the United States. Obviously, not every Muslim student who joins the MSA graduates to the Brotherhood — many join for the same social and networking reasons that cause college students in general to join campus organizations. But the MSA does have an indoctrination program, which Sam Tadros describes as a lengthy process of study and service that leads to Brotherhood membership — a process “designed to ensure with absolute certainty that there is conformity to the movement’s ideology and a clear adherence to its leadership’s authority.” The MSA gave birth to the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the largest Islamist organization in the U.S. Indeed the MSA and ISNA consider themselves the same organization. Because of its support for Hamas (a designated terrorist organization that is the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch), ISNA was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case, in which several Hamas operatives were convicted of providing the terrorist organization with lavish financing.

As I’ve recounted before, the MSA chapter to which Ms. Abedin belonged at George Washington University

has an intriguing history. In 2001 [to be clear, that is after Ms. Abedin had graduated from GWU], its spiritual guide was . . . Anwar al-Awlaki, the al-Qaeda operative who was then ministering to some of the eventual 9/11 suicide-hijackers. Awlaki himself had led the MSA chapter at Colorado State University in the early nineties. As Patrick Poole has demonstrated, Awlaki is far from the only jihadist to hone his supremacist ideology in the MSA’s friendly confines. In the eighties, Wael Jalaidan ran the MSA at the University of Arizona. He would soon go on to help Osama bin Laden found al-Qaeda; he also partnered with the Abedin family’s patron, Abdullah Omar Naseef, to establish the [aforementioned] Rabita Trust — formally designated as a terrorist organization under U.S. law due to its funding of al-Qaeda.

Ms. Abedin served as one of Secretary of State Clinton’s top staffers and advisers at the State Department. As I’ve previously detailed, during that time, the State Department strongly supported abandoning the federal government’s prior policy against official dealings with the Muslim Brotherhood. State, furthermore, embraced a number of Muslim Brotherhood positions that undermine both American constitutional rights and our alliance with Israel. To name just a few manifestations of this policy sea change:

• The State Department had an emissary in Egypt who trained operatives of the Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations in democracy procedures.
• The State Department announced that the Obama administration would be “satisfied” with the election of a Muslim Brotherhood–dominated government in Egypt.
• Secretary Clinton personally intervened to reverse a Bush-administration ruling that barred Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the Brotherhood’s founder and son of one of its most influential early leaders, from entering the United States.
• The State Department collaborated with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a bloc of governments heavily influenced by the Brotherhood, in seeking to restrict American free-speech rights in deference to sharia proscriptions against negative criticism of Islam.
• The State Department excluded Israel, the world’s leading target of terrorism, from its “Global Counterterrorism Forum,” a group that brings the United States together with several Islamist governments, prominently including its co-chair, Turkey — which now finances Hamas and avidly supports the flotillas that seek to break Israel’s blockade of Hamas. At the forum’s kickoff, Secretary Clinton decried various terrorist attacks and groups; but she did not mention Hamas or attacks against Israel — in transparent deference to the Islamist governments, which echo the Brotherhood’s position that Hamas is not a terrorist organization and that attacks against Israel are not terrorism.
• The State Department and the Obama administration waived congressional restrictions in order to transfer $1.5 billion dollars in aid to Egypt after the Muslim Brotherhood’s victory in the parliamentary elections.
• The State Department and the Obama administration waived congressional restrictions in order to transfer millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian territories notwithstanding that Gaza is ruled by the terrorist organization Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch.
• The State Department and the administration hosted a contingent from Egypt’s newly elected parliament that included not only Muslim Brotherhood members but a member of the Islamic Group (Gamaa al-Islamiyya), which is formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization. The State Department refused to provide Americans with information about the process by which it issued a visa to a member of a designated terrorist organization, about how the members of the Egyptian delegation were selected, or about what security procedures were followed before the delegation was allowed to enter our country.
• On a trip to Egypt, Secretary Clinton pressured General Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, head of the military junta then governing the country, to surrender power to the parliament dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and the then–newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi, a top Brotherhood official. She also visited with Morsi; immediately after his victory, Morsi had proclaimed that his top priorities included pressuring the United States to release the Blind Sheikh. Quite apart from the Brotherhood’s self-proclaimed “grand jihad” to destroy the United States . . . the group’s supreme guide, Mohammed Badie, publicly called for jihad against the United States in an October 2010 speech. After it became clear the Brotherhood would win the parliamentary election, Badie said the victory was a stepping stone to “the establishment of a just Islamic caliphate.”

As more recent events remind us, this is not an exhaustive account of Obama-administration coziness with the Muslim Brotherhood. It is just some of the lowlights.

When a handful of House conservatives tried to draw the attention of the State Department’s inspector general to some of these matters – wondering how on earth someone with Ms. Abdein’s background could have qualified for a top-secret security clearance – they were castigated by the Obama White House and the Beltway Republican establishment. As reaffirmed in the last 24 hours, Ms. Abedin’s connections to prominent Islamic-supremacist figures and groups are deemed unsuitable for public discussion – Egyptians may be able to eject the Muslim Brotherhood, but in today’s Washington it is raising questions about the Muslim Brotherhood that gets you run out of town.

Naturally, what did get Washington chattering was a scandal far more typical in Clinton circles — the lucrative arrangement Ms. Abedin struck with Mrs. Clinton’s State Department that allowed her, after returning from maternity leave, to draw a $135,000 State Department salary while remaining in New York, not actually working at Foggy Bottom, and moonlighting as a “strategic consultant” for an outfit called Teneo – founded by Bill Clinton’s chum Doug Band.

What a racket. The marriage to Huma Abedin, a Clinton insider, enables Anthony Weiner to resurrect a debased career and deflect attention from his psychotic antics even as he continues them. The marriage to Anthony Weiner, a prominent Jewish progressive, enables Huma Abedin to deflect attention from her associations with various Islamic supremacists even as, during her tenure as a top State Department official, American policy embraces Islamic supremacists.

But let’s not discuss that.

Obama makes race relations worse

Heather MacDonald usually cuts to the chase writing about subjects she covers and she doesn't disappoint in this piece on Obama's recent speech on race.  It is only Obama who disappoints typically as he manages to make most subjects he decides to opine on even more confusing and opaque.  On race matters his entire term has been one of missed opportunities, especially so because of his race and platform.  Were he a sincere and honest person, he might have done much to turn the black ghetto population around and put it on the path to leaving poverty and criminal behavior.  Instead by continuing the blame game he has managed to make the blacks worse off and race relations even worse than when he came into office.  We're looking at a lost cause i9n this man and his administration.

Obama Strikes Out by Heather Mac Donald - City Journal

The only question about President Obama’s surprise Trayvon Martin expostulation on Friday is whether it was the worst speech he’s ever given or simply the worst race-related speech. Obama has now put the presidential imprimatur on the crudest kind of racial victimology, in the process diminishing his office and undermining his own record of occasionally speaking the truth about inner-city dysfunction.

Obama begins with a perfunctory nod toward respecting the jury’s not-guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman murder trial. (Zimmerman, as the world knows, was a neighborhood-watch volunteer in a community that had been plagued by black burglaries; he shot and killed the 17-year-old Trayvon Martin during a fight after wrongly suspecting the unarmed teen of being a neighborhood intruder.) Obama then launches into a lesson, presumably for the edification of clueless whites, about the “context” of the trial and “how [black] people have responded to it and how people are feeling.” According to Obama, there is nary a law-abiding black man today who has not been the object of fear and suspicion as he goes about his business:

There are very few African-American men in this country who haven’t had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me.

And there are very few African-American men who haven’t had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me, at least before I was a senator. There are very few African-Americans who haven’t had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often.

There is no question that in some “contexts,” as Obama would put it, black males elicit heightened scrutiny. In some neighborhoods, shopkeepers do closely watch, if not actually trail, young black males who enter their stores. And there is also no question that being viewed with fear when you are free of any criminal intent is infuriating and can lead to a humiliating sense of being a second-class citizen. This is an experience that all Americans should regret.

But the overwhelming reason for such a reaction, where it exists, is astronomically higher rates of black crime. In New York City, blacks commit 70 percent of all robberies and 63 percent of all grand larcenies, though they are just 23 percent of the population; whites commit 4 percent of all robberies and a little over 10 percent of all grand larcenies, though they are 35 percent of the population. Every American city with a black population shows comparable disparities. In some “contexts,” black crime is even celebrated. Earsnot, a New York graffiti vandal glorified in the documentary Infamy, mocks the trusting retail managers whodon’t follow him as he cases their stores for merchandise: “You have that customer-shopkeeper thing going on, and they have no idea that you’re stealing—no idea. Or, they know that you’re stealing, and they see you in there mad times, and they still can’t stop me because I’m so nice.” According to Infamy’s admiring producers, Earsnot and his crew “commit grand larceny” every day, a walking crime spree that has undoubtedly led many a floor supervisor to adopt exactly the defensive posture that Obama condemns.

The newly rechristened “bash mobs” that have been terrorizing pedestrians and workers in, among other locations, downtown Chicago, Washington,Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles, are a black phenomenon, though a squeamish press shrinks from pointing that out. Someone who has been attacked by, or is simply the witness of, rampaging black teens is unlikely to be blasé if he later sees a group of rowdy black youth approaching. Obama may think that a heightened pulse rate or a tightened grip on a purse is an overreaction to such gratuitous violence, but it is an inevitable one. Here is a proposal: For a good five-year stretch, blacks bring their crime rate down to white and Asian levels. Once it becomes widely understood that blacks are no more likely to steal, rob, rape, or shoot than whites or Asians, we’ll see if blacks still elicit the defensive reactions that Obama alleges in elevators and department stores.

Obama grudgingly acknowledges the elevated black crime rate, only to soft-pedal it: “I think the African-American community is also not naive in understanding that statistically somebody like Trayvon Martin was probably statistically more likely to be shot by a peer than he was by somebody else.” No, not “probably.” “Statistically,” Trayvon Martin was absolutely more likely to be shot by a peer than by “somebody else.” That does not make the killing of Trayvon Martin any less tragic, but the fact remains that blacks are gunning down blacks at an astronomically higher rate than whites are. Blacks commit upwards of 80 percent of all shootings in New York City, for example; whites, between 1 and 2 percent. New York police officers hope against hope every time that they are called to a shooting incident that they will find a white perpetrator, to balance out the sad monotony of black (and Hispanic) gun violence. They are almost always disappointed.

Obama appears as ignorant about the violent aftermath of the Zimmerman verdict. “If I see any violence, then I will remind folks that that dishonors what happened to Trayvon Martin and his family,” he announced righteously. He should start reminding. “People protesting George Zimmerman’s acquittal marched along Crenshaw Boulevard [in South Central Los Angeles last] Monday night, stomping on cars, chasing bystanders and storming a Wal-Mart,” reported the Los Angeles Times. Any last vestiges of the Rainbow Coalition quickly disintegrated. Fellow Trayvon Martin protester Cuauhtemoc Negrete was punched in the back of the head and robbed of his bike, an attack that he attributes to anti-Latino bias. In Hollywood the next night, “calls started flooding into dispatchers about 8:30p.m. of roaming groups of youths, about 10 or 15 to a group, running into streets, stealing from stores and robbing pedestrians.” Businesses in downtown Oakland, California, are still sweeping up the broken glass after several days of vandalism, including a hammer assault on a restaurant waiter. Downtown Oakland perfected this drill after the 2009 and 2010 anti-police riots.

More significant than Obama’s underplaying of black criminality, however, is his move to “contextualize” it: “Black folks do interpret the reasons for that [crime rate] in a historical context. We understand that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods around the country is born out of a very violent past in this country.” Try telling the fiercely law-abiding residents of Central Harlem and the South Bronx that a teen who mugs an elderly lady needs to be understood “in a historical context.” These brave proponents of law and order, who faithfully attend police-community meetings to show support for their cops, know that what leads a young boy to shoot at a rival gang member is not a lynching from a century ago but the breakdown of parental authority and self-control today. The “root causes” excuse for crime undermines the efforts of these heroic urban watchdogs to strengthen bourgeois norms. And even if it were the case that the primary determinant of current black criminality were this country’s despicable history of slavery and segregation, the only people who can overcome that legacy now are blacks themselves, through self-help and personal responsibility. (University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax has forcefully madethis point.)

Obama embraces the “racist criminal-justice system” conceit as well: “The African-American community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws, everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws.” In fact, the effort in the academy to prove such ongoing racial disparities consistently fails, without denting the zeal with which advocates peddle the poisonous idea.

Obama’s prescriptions for the alleged failure of white America to understand black anger at the Zimmerman case are arguably worse than his diagnosis of the causes of that anger. He wants more police agencies to collect racial data on traffic stops and other enforcement activity, and he calls on the Department of Justice to help local police agencies “think about potential racial bias.” The Zimmerman case was not about purportedly racist police stops, of course. But police profiling is a must-have component of the racial-victimology toolbox. Such data-collection mandates accomplish only one thing: providing fodder for lawsuits against the police, since every police agency accurately targeting its resources against crime will produce racially disparate enforcement data. The Department of Justice is already forcing itself on local law enforcement regarding “anti-bias” training, regardless of its lack of expertise in policing.

We also need to do more to “bolster and reinforce our African-American boys,” according to Obama, “and to give them the sense that their country cares about them and values them and is willing to invest in them.” Reality check: the country has spent hundreds of billions of dollars over the last five decades trying to uplift black boys (and girls). Virtually the entire federal and state education establishment is focused on a single goal: closing the achievement gap between white and black students, no matter the cost. Under President George W. Bush, Washington imposed onerous testing and data-collection mandates on schools in the hope of equalizing black and white test scores, even if schools did so by undereducating their highest-performing students. If a black boy simply graduates from high school with a GPA that passes the laugh test, private colleges across the nation will beat down his door to recruit him. Public universities insist on the right to use equally blatant racial preferences to admit their own treasured store of underqualified black students. If that black undergraduate finishes college, elite employers and professional schools will zealously seek him out. Individual philanthropists in cities large and small rush to offer high school and college scholarships to black boys; all that the beneficiaries have to do is stay in school and out of jail. Foundations roll out program after program to keep black boys off the street. Captains of industry have become experts in school reform in order to improve the life prospects of black boys.

But this effort seems lost on Obama. He proposes, as if it were a novel idea, gathering together “business leaders and local elected officials and clergy and celebrities and athletes and figure out how are we doing a better job helping young African-American men feel that they’re a full part of this society and that—and that they’ve got pathways and avenues to succeed.” Like every other such convocation, with its inevitable tail of taxpayer and privately funded programs, this gabfest will fail, because it omits the one group of adults who would make a difference in black boys’ lives: their fathers. If black boys knew that their fathers, not just “their country,” “care about them and value them,” in Obama’s words; if their fathers were married to their mothers and involved in their moral formation; if those boys were raised with the expectation that they themselves must be responsible for their own children, this futile parade of programs could finally come to an end.

Obama’s silence about black family breakdown at this particular moment, when he knew that his words would get maximum attention, is a monumentally lost opportunity. It is also deeply puzzling, given that in the past Obama has admirably broken the taboo against mentioning the toll of fatherlessness—if not as often as the catastrophe merits, at least more than the race industry would like. His failure to address the issue now suggests that the rhetorical conventions of black victimology, once activated, are so powerful that they crush anything that stands in their way.

As for Obama’s final call “for all of us to do some soul-searching, . . . to ask yourself your own questions about, am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can”: of course we should never condone or cultivate prejudice. But to turn one incident into a symbol of national anti-black racism is ludicrous on every front. Even were there any indication that Zimmerman was a blind bigot (which he wasnot), that fact would not implicate the country at large.

Or perhaps Obama is impugning the jury here, though criminal-law experts are virtually unanimous in judging the acquittal a fair response to the prosecution’s charges. But if we’re going to do some soul-searching, Obama could ask what drives the recent urban rampages or greatly asymmetrical black-on-white crime. If white teens were marauding through black neighborhoods assaulting passersby and store employees, the Justice Department would have sent in armies of federal prosecutors, if not the National Guard, faster than you can say “hate crime.” Black parents are allegedly warning their children against racist whites based on one tragic incident; in any other “context,” that would be called “profiling.”

Until now, Obama has left the race-mongering to his administration and has largely kept race out of his own self-presentation. That is as it should be, regardless of a president’s skin color. The aspiration of color-blindness is an essential one, and increasingly within reach. Now, however, Obama is being celebrated as “really” a “black president,” not just one who happens to be black. But if a white president lectured blacks about why whites are losing patience with black victimology, that would rightly be viewed as a betrayal of the office.

Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Detroit's demise

Mark Steyn says it all about Detroit's decline from a major U.S. city to a third world slum city.

Mark Steyn: Motown no more

By the time Detroit declared bankruptcy, Americans were so inured to the throbbing dirge of Motown's Greatest Hits – 40 percent of its streetlamps don't work; 210 of its 317 public parks have been permanently closed; it takes an hour for police to respond to a 911 call; only a third of its ambulances are drivable; one-third of the city has been abandoned; the local Realtor offers houses on sale for a buck and still finds no takers; etc., etc. – Americans were so inured that the formal confirmation of a great city's downfall was greeted with little more than a fatalistic shrug.

But it shouldn't be. To achieve this level of devastation, you usually have to be invaded by a foreign power. In the War of 1812, when Detroit was taken by a remarkably small number of British troops without a shot being fired, Michigan's Governor Hull was said to have been panicked into surrender after drinking heavily. Two centuries later, after an almighty 50-year bender, the city surrendered to itself. The tunnel from Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit, Mich., is now a border between the First World and the Third World – or, if you prefer, the developed world and the post-developed world. To any American time-transported from the mid-20th century, the city's implosion would be literally incredible: Were he to compare photographs of today's Hiroshima with today's Detroit, he would assume Japan won the Second World War after nuking Michigan. Detroit was the industrial powerhouse of America, the "arsenal of democracy," and, in 1960, the city with the highest per capita income in the land. Half a century on, Detroit's population has fallen by two-thirds, and in terms of "per capita income," many of the shrunken pool of capita have no income at all beyond EBT cards. The recent HBO series "Hung" recorded the adventures of a financially struggling Detroit school basketball coach forced to moonlight as a gigolo. It would be heartening to think the rest of the bloated public-sector workforce, whose unsustainable pensions and benefits have brought Detroit to its present sorry state (and account for $9 billion of its $11 billion in unsecured loans), could be persuaded to follow its protagonist and branch out into the private sector, but this would probably be more gigolos than the market could bear, even allowing for an uptick in tourism from Windsor.

Sean Delonas / Cagle Cartoons

So, late Friday, some genius jurist struck down the bankruptcy filing. Judge Rosemarie Aquilina declared Detroit's bankruptcy "unconstitutional" because, according to the Detroit Free Press, "the Michigan Constitution prohibits actions that will lessen the pension benefits of public employees." Which means that, in Michigan, reality is unconstitutional.

So a bankrupt ruin unable to declare bankruptcy is now back to selling off its few remaining valuables, as I learned from a Detroit News story headlined "Howdy Doody May Test Limits Of Protecting Detroit Assets." For those of you under 40 – okay, under 80 – Howdy Doody is the beloved American children's puppet, in Western garb with a beaming smile and 48 freckles, one for every state, which gives you some idea of when his heyday was. The "Howdy Doody Show" ended its run Sept. 24, 1960, which would have made sense for Detroit, too. The city's Institute of Arts paid $300,000 for the original Howdy Doody puppet – or about the cost of 300,000 three-bedroom homes. Don't get too excited – you can't go to Detroit and see him on display; he's in storage. He's in some warehouse, lying down doing nothing all day long, like so many other $300,000 city employees. Instead of selling him off, maybe they should get him moonlighting as a gigolo and sell it to HBO as "Hungy Doody" ("When you're looking for the real wood"). What else is left to sell? The city of Windsor has already offered to buy the Detroit half of the Detroit-Windsor tunnel, perhaps to wall it up.

With bankruptcy temporarily struck down, we're told that "innovation hubs" and "enterprise zones" are the answer. Seriously? In my book "After America," I observe that the physical decay of Detroit – the vacant and derelict lots for block after block after block – is as nothing compared with the decay of the city's human capital. Forty-seven percent of adults are functionally illiterate, which is about the same rate as in the Central African Republic, which at least has the excuse that it was ruled throughout the Seventies by a cannibal emperor. Why would any genuine innovator open a business in a Detroit "innovation hub"? Whom would you employ? The illiterates include a recent president of the School Board, Otis Mathis, which doesn't bode well for the potential workforce a decade hence.

Given their respective starting points, one has to conclude that Detroit's Democratic Party makes a far more comprehensive wrecking crew than Emperor Bokassa ever did. No bombs, no invasions, no civil war, just "liberal" "progressive" politics day in, day out. Americans sigh and say, "Oh, well, Detroit's an 'outlier.'" It's an outlier only in the sense that it happened here first. The same malign alliance between a corrupt political class, rapacious public sector unions and an ever more swollen army of welfare dependents has been adopted in the formally Golden State of California, and in large part by the Obama administration, whose priorities – "health" "care" "reform," "immigration" "reform" – are determined by the same elite/union/dependency axis. As one droll Tweeter put it, "If Obama had a city, it would look like Detroit."

After the Battle of Saratoga, Adam Smith famously told a friend despondent that the revolting colonials were going to be the ruin of Britain, "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation" – and in a great city, too. If your inheritance includes the fruits of visionaries like Henry Ford, Walter Chrysler and the Dodge brothers, you can coast for a long time, and then decline incrementally, and then less incrementally, and then catastrophically, until what's left is, as the city's bankruptcy petition puts it, "structurally unsound and in danger of collapse." There is a great deal of ruin in advanced societies, but, even in Detroit, it took only six decades.

"Structurally unsound and in danger of collapse": Hold that thought. Like Detroit, America has unfunded liabilities, to the tune of $220 trillion, according to the economist Laurence Kotlikoff. Like Detroit, it's cosseting the government class and expanding the dependency class, to the point where its bipartisan "immigration reform" actively recruits 50 million to 60 million low-skilled chain-migrants. Like Detroit, America's governing institutions are increasingly the corrupt enforcers of a one-party state – the IRS and Eric Holder's amusingly misnamed Department of Justice being only the most obvious examples. Like Detroit, America is bifurcating into the class of "community organizers" and the unfortunate denizens of the communities so organized.

The one good thing that could come out of bankruptcy is, if those public-sector pensions are, cut and government workers are forced to learn what happens when, as National Review's Kevin Williamson puts it, a parasite outgrows its host. But, pending an appeal, that's "unconstitutional," no matter how dead the host is. Beyond that, Detroit needs urgently both to make it noninsane for talented people to live in the city, and to cease subjecting its present population to a public "education" system that's little more than unionized child abuse. Otherwise, Windsor, Ontario, might as well annex it for a War of 1812 theme park – except if Gen. Brock and the Royal Newfoundland Fencibles had done to Detroit what the Democratic Party did they'd be on trial at the Hague for war crimes.

A reminder of the causes of the '07/'08 financial collapse

Stanley Kurtz wrote this very clear explication of the cause of the financial meltdown of '07-'08.  The article appeared in the NYPost October 13, 2008.  Lest we all forget, Obama was closely allied and supportive of ACORN, the criminal organization that was instrumental in several ways in electing him in '07.  We are paying the price in our economy today, and will continue to in the future, for the outrageous co-opting of our banking system by ACORN, the CBC (Congressional Black Caucus), Ted Kennedy and all the other corrupt largely democrat congressmen who created and supported the CRA dating back to Jimmy Carter's administration in the '70's.  Anyone without work and/or otherwise suffering in the U.S. economy today, has these groups and politicians involved in this fiasco to thank.

SPREADING THE VIRUS

TO discover the roots of to day's economic crisis, consider a tale from 1995.
That March, House Speaker Newt Gingrich was scheduled to address a meeting of county commissioners at the Washington Hilton. But, first, some 500 protesters from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) poured into the ballroom from both the kitchen and the main entrance.
Hotel staffers who tried to block them were quickly overwhelmed by demonstrators chanting, "Nuke Newt!" and "We want Newt!" Jamming the aisles, carrying bullhorns and taunting the assembled county commissioners, demonstrators swiftly took over the head table and commandeered the microphone, sending two members of Congress scurrying.
The demonstrators' target, Gingrich, hadn't yet arrived - and his speech was cancelled. When the cancellation was announced, ACORN's foot soldiers cheered.
Editorial writers from Little Rock to Buffalo condemned ACORN's action as an affront to both civility and freedom of speech. Editorialists also pointed out that the "spending cuts" the protesters railed against were imaginary - Gingrich proposed merely to slow the growth in some welfare programs and turn control back to the states.
Yet ACORN had only just begun. Two days later, 50 to 100 of the same protesters hit their main target - a House Banking subcommittee considering changes to the Community Reinvestment Act, a law that allows groups like ACORN to force banks into making high-risk loans to low-credit customers.
The CRA's ostensible purpose is to prevent banks from discriminating against minorities. But Rep. Marge Roukema (R-NJ), who chaired the subcommittee, was worried that charges of discrimination had become an excuse for lowering credit standards. She warned that new, Democrat-proposed CRA regulations could amount to an illegal quota system.
FOR years, ACORN had combined manipulation of the CRA with intimidation-protest tactics to force banks to lower credit standards. Its crusade, with help from Democrats in Congress, to push these high-risk "subprime" loans on banks is at the root of today's economic meltdown.
When the role of ACORN and congressional Democrats in the mortgage crisis is pointed out, Democrats reply that banks subject to the CRA represent only about a quarter of the loans that led to our current troubles. In fact, the problem goes way beyond the CRA.
As ACORN ran its campaigns against local banks, it quickly hit a roadblock. Banks would tell ACORN they could afford to reduce their credit standards by only a little - since Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the federal mortgage giants, refused to buy up those risky loans for sale on the "secondary market."

Page 2 of 3

That is, the CRA wasn't enough. Unless Fannie and Freddie were willing to relax their credit standards as well, local banks would never make home loans to customers with bad credit histories or with too little money for a downpayment.
So ACORN's Democratic friends in Congress moved to force Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to dispense with normal credit standards. Throughout the early '90s, they imposed ever-increasing subprime-lending quotas on Fannie and Freddie.
But then the Republicans won control of Congress - and Rep. Roukema scheduled her hearing. ACORN went into action to protect its golden goose.
IT struck as Roukema aired her concerns at that hearing. Pro testers, led by ACORN President Maud Hurd, stood up and began chanting, "CRA has got to stay!" and "Banks for greed, not for need!" The protesters then demanded the microphone.
With the hearing interrupted and the demonstrators refusing to leave, Roukema called the Capital Police, who arrested Hurd and four others for "disorderly conduct in a Capital building" - a charge carrying a penalty of a $500 fine, six months in prison or both. As the police arrived, two of the protesters menacingly approached Roukema's desk, still demanding the hearing microphone.
Requests to the Capital Police to release the activists from Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-Mass,) failed. Then Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) showed up at the jail and refused to leave until the protesters were released; the Capital Police relented.
Meanwhile, instead of repudiating ACORN's intimidation tactics, Rep. Kennedy berated Roukema for arresting one of his constituents and accused the Republicans of preparing for "an all-out attack on CRA." He also promised to introduce legislation to expand the CRA's coverage to mortgage bankers and large credit unions.
THIS little slice of political life from 1995 had a variety of ripple effects. Above all, ACORN's intimidation tactics, and its alliance with Democrats in Congress, triumphed. Despite their 1994 takeover of Congress, Republicans' attempts to pare back the CRA were stymied.
Instead, Democrats like Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Reps. Kennedy and Waters allied with the Clinton administration to broaden the acceptability of risky subprime loans throughout the financial system, thus precipitating our current crisis.
ACORN had come to Congress not only to protect the CRA from GOP reforms but also to expand the reach of quota-based lending to Fannie, Freddie and beyond. By steamrolling the GOP that March, it had crushed the last potential barrier to "change."

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Three months later, the Clinton administration announced a comprehensive strategy to push homeownership in America to new heights - regardless of the compromise in credit standards that the task would require. Fannie and Freddie were assigned massive subprime lending quotas, which would rise to about half of their total business by the end of the decade.
WHEN the ACORN-Democrat alliance finally succeeded in blocking Republicans from restoring fiscal sanity in 1995, the way was open to virtually unlimited lending quotas - and to a whole new way of thinking about credit standards.
Urged on by ACORN, congressional Democrats and the Clinton administration helped push tolerance for high-risk loans through every sector of the banking system - far beyond the sort of banks originally subject to the CRA.
So it was the efforts of ACORN and its Democratic allies that first spread the subprime virus from the CRA to Fannie and Freddie and thence to the entire financial system.
Soon, Democratic politicians and regulators actually began to take pride in lowered credit standards as a sign of "fairness" - and the contagion spread.
And when financial institutions across the board saw that they could make money by trading what would once have been considered junk loans, the profit motive kicked in. But the bad seed that started it all was ACORN.
HOW does Barack Obama fit into all of this? Obama has been a key ally of Chicago ACORN going back to his days as a community organizer.
Later, as a young lawyer, he offered leadership training to the activists who were forcing Chicago banks into high-risk subprime loans. And when he made it on to the boards of Chicago's Woods Fund and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, he channeled money ACORN's way.
Obama was perfectly aware of ACORN's intimidation tactics - indeed, he oversaw a Woods Fund report that boasted of managing to fund the radical group despite its shocking behavior.
And as a lawmaker, in Illinois and in Washington, he has continued to back ACORN's leglislative agenda.
ACORN's high-pressure tactics live on. And congressional Democrats are still covering for ACORN, funneling it money and doing its legislative bidding. ACORN also continues its shady ways, using a vast network of technically separate but in fact quite interconnected organizations to evade federal laws on the politicized use of government money.
Perhaps most disturbing of all, the Obama campaign appears to have little more regard for freedom of speech than Reps. Kennedy or Waters did when they backed up ACORN's thugs in 1995. The campaign actually practices ACORN-style tactics, sending out "action wires" that call on supporters to block Obama critics from radio appearances (a tactic once applied to me) and demanding legal actions against unfriendly political advertisers.
As a presidential candidate, Obama promises a massive national-service program closely allied with the nonprofit sector. He wants to remove "barriers for smaller nonprofits to participate in government programs."
In other words, he plans a massive effort to funnel America's youth into volunteer work alongside the likes of ACORN. So Obama's favorite community organizers may soon be training your child.
ACORN's alliance with the Democratic Party is at the root of the current financial meltdown. And Barack Obama has stayed true to ACORN's ways.
Pretty soon, the folks who poured into the Washington Hilton to shut down Speaker Gingrich in 1995 may no longer need to take over the microphone. They'll be in charge of it.
Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington.

A lawless administration is getting away with it

Andrew McCarthy identifies the nature of the Obama presidency in an article in The National Review Magazine part of which is excerpted below.  Clearly this administration is selective in the laws it chooses to enforce, for the most part ignoring the Constitution and it separation of powers clauses.  This is regrettable because this flagrant behavior undermines the rule of law and will encourage subsequent administrations that are so inclined to do likewise.  As McCarthy points out, we have at least taken a step toward dictatorship, and if one does not believe this he should read up on the acquisition of power in a constitutional democracy as it occurred during the 1930's in Germany.

Obama’s Rule by Decree | National Review Online

Thus Obama eschews enforcement of the immigration laws not because they are comparatively trivial or adequately covered by state police — indeed, his most notable enforcement efforts are directed not at illegal aliens but at states who dare attempt to see to the law’s faithful execution. Obama’s discretionary non-enforcement is not a good-faith husbanding of federal resources but a cynical enterprise in rewarding lawbreakers and cultivating them as a dependable political constituency. His Justice Department practices racial discrimination in the enforcement of the civil-rights laws, a grievous betrayal of the Constitution, in order to appease and empower his political base.

The faithful execution of laws is never partisan; under Obama, the execution of laws is intensely partisan. He purports to make “recess appointments” when Congress is not in recess. He skirts Congress’s constitutional war powers by pretending that attacking another country (Libya) is not making war. If his core supporters are damaged by the suffocating laws he champions — most prominently, Obamacare — he claims the power to “waive” their provisions selectively. Meanwhile, huge bureaucracies are encouraged, expressly or by nod-and-wink, to harass the president’s opponents and push forward his redistributionist, production-strangling, Islamist-empowering agenda. The executive order — formerly an intra-branch efficiency device designed to organize the exercise of the president’s constitutional powers and the enforcement of Congress’s laws — has effectively become legislation, the president substituting his edicts for our laws.

In a vibrant, pluralistic society, law, as an expression of the sovereign will, is unavoidably a product of compromise. In the contentious process, the competing sides bend; they settle on something that neither, given their druthers, would support; and they honorably agree to abide by the result. Under Obama, however, massive laws are enacted — such that no one can conceivably know what the law is. Then the president enforces the parts he approves of, contemptuously disregards the parts that enticed naysayers into compromising, and presumes to amend or repeal inconvenient provisions at his whim.

That is not the rule of law. It is how a dictatorship works.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy.