American Elephants


“Obama’s Last Lecture” by The Elephant's Child
September 22, 2016, 6:27 am
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Capitalism, Domestic Policy, Economy, Foreign Policy, Free Markets, Politics, Progressivism, The Constitution, The United States | Tags: ,

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President Obama delivered his final address to the U.N General assembly on Tuesday. I listened to a bit online, and decided to get the transcript, as I prefer to read it unadulterated. The Wall Street Journal headline over their commentary was “Obama’s Last Lecture,” and my immediate response was “Please God, Make It So.” President Obama started right off to tell the delegates just what an impressive difference he had made in the world and how very important it was. As  usual, it was all about him.

From the depths of the greatest financial crisis of our time, we coordinated our response to avoid further catastrophe and return the global economy to growth.  We’ve taken away terrorist safe havens, strengthened the nonproliferation regime, resolved the Iranian nuclear issue through diplomacy.  We opened relations with Cuba, helped Colombia end Latin America’s longest war, and we welcome a democratically elected leader of Myanmar to this Assembly.  Our assistance is helping people feed themselves, care for the sick, power communities across Africa, and promote models of development rather than dependence.  And we have made international institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund more representative, while establishing a framework to protect our planet from the ravages of climate change.

This is important work.  It has made a real difference in the lives of our people.  And it could not have happened had we not worked together.  And yet, around the globe we are seeing the same forces of global integration that have made us interdependent also expose deep fault lines in the existing international order.

We see it in the headlines every day.  Around the world, refugees flow across borders in flight from brutal conflict.  Financial disruptions continue to weigh upon our workers and entire communities.  Across vast swaths of the Middle East, basic security, basic order has broken down.  We see too many governments muzzling journalists, and quashing dissent, and censoring the flow of information.  Terrorist networks use social media to prey upon the minds of our youth, endangering open societies and spurring anger against innocent immigrants and Muslims.  Powerful nations contest the constraints placed on them by international law.

He hit all his favorite progressive notes: inequality, the one percent controlling all the wealth, beggar thy neighbors policies, injustice undermining people’s faith in the system, soulless capitalism,  the gap between rich and poor, and I loved this one: “with further investment in infrastructure and early childhood education and basic research, I’m confident that such progress will continue.” About infrastructure, remember there weren’t any shovel-ready jobs. It has been a dismal eight years, with no real recovery, an economy never reaching even a basic 3% growth, an economy burdened by excessive regulation, overreaching controls, and of course the constant pursuit of some way, any way, to stop the normal warming and cooling of our planet, on which he has squandered billions to no avail whatsoever.

On the other hand he’s for democracy, our democratic Constitution, our Bill of Rights and the ideals which let our ordinary  people organize and march and protest.  The American narrative, I guess. It was a lecture.

The speech is here if you want to read it.

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Lots of Name-Calling, Not Much Common Sense! by The Elephant's Child
July 27, 2016, 10:03 pm
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Capitalism, Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Education, Freedom, Immigration, Law, National Security, Progressivism, Terrorism, The United States | Tags: , ,

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment
of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,
or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,
and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The establishment of religion bit means that the government shall not establish a state religion nor prefer one religion over another. Seems simple, but there have been continuous arguments over the meaning ever since.

In the current discussions of Moslem immigration, we are enjoined by fear of being called Islamophobic, bigoted, and, of course, racist—or be accused of violating the Constitution. Yet Americans watch what is going on in Europe as they try to cope with the influx of Muslim migrants and are deeply concerned that the numbers of “Syrian refugees” that President Obama is trying to get into the country will lead to similar rashes of killings by adherents of a radical version of Islam.

Most of Europe is more concerned about anti-migrant backlash than of figuring out how to deal with the migrants. The entire issue is deeply confused by fear of seeming not sufficiently compassionate, and leads to an absurd situation where the President of the United States scolded the American people for expecting him to at least  use the phrase ‘radical Islam’ in response to the massacre in Orlando.

“For a while now the main contribution of some of my friends on the other side of the aisle have made in the fight against ISIL is to criticize this Administration and me for not using the phrase ‘radical Islam,’” Mr. Obama said Tuesday, using his preferred acronym for Islamic State. “That’s the key, they tell us. We cannot beat ISIL unless we call them ‘radical Islamists.’ What exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change?”

Since the President asked, allow us to answer. We’re unaware of any previous American war fought against an enemy it was considered indecorous or counterproductive to name. Dwight Eisenhower routinely spoke of “international Communism” as an enemy. FDR said “Japan” or “Japanese” 15 times in his 506-word declaration of war after Pearl Harbor. If the U.S. is under attack, Americans deserve to hear their President say exactly who is attacking us and why. You cannot effectively wage war, much less gauge an enemy’s strengths, without a clear idea of who you are fighting.

Mr. Obama’s refusal to speak of “radical Islam” also betrays his failure to understand the sources of Islamic State’s legitimacy and thus its allure to young Muslim men. The threat is religious and ideological.

Islamic State sees itself as the vanguard of a religious movement rooted in a literalist interpretation of Islamic scriptures that it considers binding on all Muslims everywhere.

The administration is attempting, as usual, to ignore the standard refugee settlement process in America, and the UN and the administration are scheming to find other ways to boost the number of “Syrian refugees” entering the country, from 10,000 this year to possibly 200.000 a year.

Refugees and government officials are expecting this crisis to last 10 or 15 years. It’s time that we no longer work as business as usual … UNHCR next month [March 2016] is convening a meeting to look at what are being called “alternative safe pathways” for Syrian refugees. Maybe it’s hard for the U.S. to go from 2,000 to 200,000 refugees resettled in a year, but maybe there are ways we can ask our universities to offer scholarships to Syrian students. Maybe we can tweak some of our immigration policies to enable Syrian-Americans who have lived here to bring not only their kids and spouses but their uncles and their grandmothers. There may be ways that we could encourage Syrians to come to the U.S. without going through this laborious, time-consuming process of refugee resettlement.” (Emphasis added.)

“USC has revealed that it is offering five free tuition programs for Syrian refugees, including one in the school’s journalism program.”

It seems to me that some straight talk would help the situation. In the United States, we do not allow “honor killings,” homosexuals are accepted, not killed. and killers go to prison for a very long time or face execution.  Wife-beating or child abuse are against the law as is sexual assault. People are free to change their religion if they choose, and adherents of one religion are not allowed to attack those of a different religion. Our freedom of speech applies to everyone, and people may have differing opinions without fear. It’s not “Islamophobic” to tell people what they can expect, but may be helpful.

Bremen, Germany —”24 cases of migrant sexual assault at Music Festival.”

Zirndorf, Germany — Explosion of suitcase bomb next to migrant reception centre reported Bavarian Radio

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“A Retreat from Proactive Policing Has Unleashed Mayhem in the City by The Elephant's Child
July 20, 2016, 6:32 am
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Crime, Domestic Policy, Economy, Education, Law, Media Bias, Police, Politics, The United States, Unemployment | Tags: , , ,

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from City Journal

Chicago on the Brink

Heather MacDonald

Violence in Chicago is reaching epidemic proportions. In the first five months of 2016, someone was shot every two and a half hours and someone murdered every 14 hours, for a total of nearly 1,400 nonfatal shooting victims and 240 fatalities. Over Memorial Day weekend, 69 people were shot, nearly one per hour, dwarfing the previous year’s tally of 53 shootings over the same period. The violence is spilling over from the city’s gang-infested South and West Sides into the downtown business district; Lake Shore Drive has seen drive-by shootings and robberies.

The growing mayhem is the result of Chicago police officers’ withdrawal from proactive enforcement, making the city a dramatic example of what I have called the “Ferguson effect.” Since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, the conceit that American policing is lethally racist has dominated the national airwaves and political discourse, from the White House on down. In response, cops in minority neighborhoods in Chicago and other cities around the country are backing off pedestrian stops and public-order policing; criminals are flourishing in the resulting vacuum. (An early and influential Ferguson-effect denier has now changed his mind: in a June 2016 study for the National Institute of Justice, Richard Rosenfeld of the University of Missouri–St. Louis concedes that the 2015 homicide increase in the nation’s large cities was “real and nearly unprecedented.” “The only explanation that gets the timing right is a version of the Ferguson effect,” he told the Guardian.)

Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel warned in October 2015 that officers were going “fetal,” as shootings in the city skyrocketed. But 2016 has brought an even sharper reduction in proactive enforcement. Devastating failures in Chicago’s leadership after a horrific police shooting and an ill-considered pact between the American Civil Liberties Union and the police are driving that reduction. Residents of Chicago’s high-crime areas are paying the price.

……………………………………..(Do Read the whole thing)

The statistics are shocking. What we must pay attention to, however, are the incentives involved. When you tell residents of black neighborhoods that the reasons for many members of their families going to prison is not really because they committed a crime, but because the cops are racist, and the system is crooked, and tell them often enough, they’re apt to begin to believe it.

When neighborhoods come to believe that the cops are racist and don’t care about the black people they shoot, the police are inclined to back off a little more. When a cop is killed in the line of duty because the neighborhood believes they are racist, the police are more wary of stopping suspicious drivers or wading into s situation that looks like trouble.

That could all be perfectly innocent — just human nature. Policemen have families and want to go home at night. People in a neighborhood find it easier to believe the worst of cops than of their family members or next door neighbors. And so it escalates.

When the news on television blames the police, or the President of the United States suggests that he is going to pardon large numbers of federal prisoners because they are unjustly imprisoned by an unfair system — that seems pretty official, and likely true.

That hardly begins to touch on the incentives involved. When crime rates are high, fewer businesses are willing to locate in the neighborhood. With fewer businesses, there are fewer jobs, particularly for young men of an age to need their first working experience. If there are no jobs, there are drugs and gangs and petty theft and hatred of the police. Heather MacDonald enumerates the escalating steps, tragedy by tragedy, and on the other side the breakdown in order and control.

Accusations of endemic racism, economic injustice, housing segregation, mass incarceration, white privilege, disparate impact are problematic words that hurt more than they help.  Heather MacDonald’ s calm and careful analysis is important, and all parties involved would do well to understand her analysis.

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I’d Just like Some Straight Talk, and Honesty For a Change! by The Elephant's Child
July 19, 2016, 9:23 pm
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Capitalism, Crime, Economics, Foreign Policy, Free Markets, Military, National Security, Police, Regulation, Terrorism, The United States | Tags: , ,

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Every four years, I forget just how much I dislike political conventions. Not just theirs, but our as well. I’m already tired of how wonderful our candidate is and how dreadful their is. Conventions are big parties of excess. But then I may just be getting cranky.

I am exceedingly tired of being lectured by our president. He turned up on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal yesterday to lecture the Senate about their duty to confirm his nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. You always knew there was something not quite right about the claim that he had been a professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago. He was a lecturer in civil rights law, which he mostly used to teach Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.

The Constitution directs the Senate to advise and consent, not to approve. The Daily Caller subjected his op-ed to a fact check, and it didn’t fare well, directly from the words of, oh, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama when he voted to filibuster Justice Alito. (Politicians still are not familiar with the fact that we can quickly look up their words from yesterday and ten years ago.)

He’s getting very predictable when he scolds us. “That’s not who we are as Americans!” “That’s who we are, and who we have the capacity to be.” Or as John Podhoretz recently put it:

As usual, Obama made strange use of the word ‘we,’ because when he says ‘we,’ he means ‘you,’ and when he means ‘you,’ he means people who aren’t as enlightened and thoughtful as he and his ideological compatriots are.

Well, clearly, we are all a great disappointment to our president. I’m not alone in noticing. David Harsanyi did, at the Federalist.

At the funeral service for five slain Dallas cops, Barack Obama delivered another one of his needlessly politicized lectures. As is customary these days, those who were critical of his rhetoric were branded racists and unthinking haters.

That’s one theory.

Another one is that people might be put off by Obama’s grating habit of turning every tragedy into a sermon about our supposed collective failings. I doubt the president is substantively more partisan than the average politician, but like most people on the Left these days, he no longer bothers to make a distinction between a policy position and a moral struggle.

The issue of gun control, for example, isn’t a good-faith disagreement between people of different persuasions, but — like civil rights or suffrage — a struggle waged by the righteous against the evil (and sometimes those poor souls tricked by the NRA).

I went on a bit a few days ago about the fallacy of the term “gun violence” which is nothing but propaganda. It’s not the gun that is violent, but the shooter. Consider the latest terrorist attacks in France. We had truck violence in Nice, and axe violence on a bus. That allows us to ignore the terrorist (we can’t call them that) who committed the act because we “don’t know what their real motives were.”

That’s what I am cranky about — the purposeful misuse of language to confuse, or hide, or misplace blame. The world is a very dangerous place right now. It is impossible to deal effectively with those dangers if we cannot even use clear language. Fuzzy language reveals fuzzy minds, and the inability to take clear action.

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Another National Conversation About Race or Another Attempt to Increase Racial Division? by The Elephant's Child
July 14, 2016, 7:28 pm
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Crime, Domestic Policy, Economics, History, Law, National Security, Police, Politics, Progressives, Progressivism, Regulation, The United States, Unemployment | Tags: , ,

Economist Walter Williams wrote an important piece Tuesday titled “Challenges for Black People: The frank conversation needed in the black community,” at Frontpage magazine.

President Barack Obama and his first attorney general, Eric Holder, called for an honest conversation about race. Holder even called us “a nation of cowards” because we were unwilling to have a “national conversation” about race. The truth of the matter is there’s been more than a half-century of conversations about race. We do not need more. Instead, black people need to have frank conversations among ourselves, no matter how uncomfortable and embarrassing the topics may be.

Among the nation’s most dangerous cities are Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, Memphis, Milwaukee, Birmingham, Newark, Cleveland and Philadelphia. These once-thriving cities are in steep decline. What these cities have in common is that they have large black populations. Also, they have been run by Democrats for nearly a half-century, with blacks having significant political power. Other characteristics these cities share are poorly performing and unsafe schools, poor-quality city services, and declining populations.

Each year, more than 7,000 blacks are murdered. That’s a number greater than white and Hispanic murder victims combined. Blacks of all ages are killed at six times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined. According to the FBI, the police kill about 400 people a year; blacks are roughly one-third of that number. In Chicago alone, so far this year, over 2,000 people have been shot, leaving over 320 dead. It’s a similar tale of mayhem in other predominantly black cities.

Meanwhile, economist Roland G. Fryer, a tenured professor at Harvard University, who is black, has conducted a study of more than a thousand shootings in ten major police jurisdictions: Houston, Austin, Dallas, Los Angeles, Orlando and Jacksonville, were among the cities included in the study.

When the law enforcement data from Houston was isolated, Fryer was able to conclude that law enforcement officers were significantly less likely to shoot black suspects. As Fryer expected, police are more likely to use force towards a black suspect, but his research concluded that based on the statistics, African-American suspects are less likely to be shot in an altercation with law enforcement than suspects of other racial backgrounds. Fryer called it “the most surprising result of my career.”

Meanwhile, President Obama conducted a meeting, which he had called in the wake of the Dallas attack, of his Task Force on  21th Century Policing, which he appointed in December 2014. The task force has now released its one year progress report.

The assignment seems to be keeping the Black Lives Matter story-line going  Here’s how Obama summarized the status of his efforts:

The bad news is, as we saw so painfully this week, that this is really a hard job. We’re not there yet. We’re not even close to being there yet, where we want to be. We’re not at a point yet where communities of color feel confident that their police departments are serving them with dignity and respect and equality. And we’re not at the point yet where police departments feel adequately supported at all levels. (Read his whole statement)

According to observers, Dallas has a very well-run police department. The Chief is black. The officers responded quickly to shots fired, and rushed to protect the Black Lives Matter protesters, unaware that they were the targets, not the protesters.

President Obama has consistently attempted keep black Americans convinced that police are biased, that any failings of the black community can be blamed on racial prejudice, and that blacks are imprisoned unjustly because of bias, not crime. That’s why he is releasing so many from prison, why he wants their voting rights returned, and why he wants to integrate the black community into the suburbs.  Obama has already blamed racism for the two police shootings this week in Louisiana and Minnesota, though racism has not been cited as a cause by any officials.

President Obama met with representatives of several police groups on Monday, just one day before he made a speech in which he mentioned himself more than 40 times, at the memorial the police officers killed in Dallas. When the police representatives told him that he has not done enough to support America’s police forces, Obama rejected their criticism. Joe Biden told CNN that Obama talked about his support, gave a list of statements he had made, but then told the “police groups that they, their members and their police forces are part of a racist law enforcement system.

Progressives say ‘institutional racism’ exists when groups and organizations treat members of one racial group differently from another group, because any average differences between groups — in real-estate ownership, hiring rates or criminality, for example — is supposedly caused by racism.

President Obama said:

“I want to start moving on constructive actions that are actually going to make a difference,” he said during his evening press conference in Poland when he was asked about the Dallas attack.  …

The report urges the federal government to federalize police training and practices, via the use of federal lawsuits, grants and threats to cut federal aid. So far, Obama’s deputies have cajoled and sued more than 30 police jurisdictions to adopt federal rules in a slow-motion creation of a national police system, similar to the slow-motion creation of a federal-run health-sector via Obamacare.

Obama also used the press conference to insulate his federalized police program — and his allies in the Black Live Matter movement — from popular rejection after the five police were murdered by the anti-cop African-American in Dallas.

“The danger is that we somehow think the act of a troubled person speaks to some larger political statement across the country — it doesn’t,” Obama insisted. 

The Left Coast City of Seattle is responding to the “problem” that has been created by the federal government by creating a well-paid job to “fix” the problem. Zero Hedge is reporting that Seattle is hiring a “Race and Social Justice Manager to Achieve Racial Equality. The job will pay between $90,000 and $115,000. Clearly geared at millennial candidates, the posting seeks “any combination of education, experience and measurable performance that demonstrates the capability to perform the duties of this position.”

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How to Get your People to the Polls — Community Organizing 101 by The Elephant's Child
July 11, 2016, 9:01 pm
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Police, Politics, Progressives, Progressivism, Terrorism, The Constitution | Tags: , ,

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The Democratic Party is concerned about the upcoming election. The Millennials seemed to be enthusiastic about Bernie, but didn’t like Hillary.  And in general, many Democrats thought that Hillary was inclined to have trouble with the truth. Not a good sign. It is not surprising that the radical socialist/Marxist group Black Lives Matter appeared on campus last fall, with claims of campus racism. Oddly enough, whenever Democrats are worried about an election, the accusations of racism boil up to get Black Americans to the polls to vote Democrat.

Egged on by Black Lives Matter agitators, racial tension on the campus erupted in September after the black student body president and other activists lodged a vague complaint of an unspecified racial slur shouted at a single black student allegedly by a passing motorist. The activists weren’t even sure if the offending person was a student there.

Then there was a report of a tiny swastika drawn on the wall of a dormitory bathroom in a dormitory. No one’s sure if it was intended to insult Jews or blacks.

No matter, students of color insisted the two incidents symbolized the “systematic oppression” experienced by them at the university. And so they demanded President Tim Wolfe step down. And he did, followed by the chancellor. Both of them are white

The Hoover Institution had a December article on “The Real Cause of Campus Racism.”

At Harvard, a group of law students launched a campaign to remove the school’s seal because it contains the coat of arms of a slave owner. At Dartmouth, students and faculty marched in solidarity with black students at the University of Missouri in what was called a “black out” (the marchers all wore black). After days of protests at Yale, the university president announced plans for more academic study of race and ethnicity and for improvements in the experiences of people of color.

Most of the campus ‘incidents’ were just as ephemeral, and there were hoaxes galore. It was not a spontaneous uprising, but a well funded communist/socialist web of organizations that have been agitating against America for decades.

Obama spoke Sunday when he as taking questions from reporters as he wrapped up meetings with Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy in Madrid. He said that while protesters will sometimes say things that are “stupid'”or ‘imprudent” and associated Black Lives Matter with the abolition movement, and women’s battle to get the right to vote, and the union movement — called them all part of a great tradition of protest. Oh Please! It was Barack Obama who said that if he had a son, he might have looked just like Trayvon Martin. It was Barack Obama who sent the Justice Department in to establish that the death of  “gentle giant” — who had just robbed a convenience store and was trying to get the police officer’s gun was not indeed a violation of Civil Rights Law.

Obama is still struggling to discover the motive for Micah Johnson’s killing spree. Johnson spelled it out quite clearly. He just wanted to kill white policemen. DHS head Jeh Johnson said “it’s still relatively early” to conclude that Micah Johnson’s shooting was a hate crime.

According to all reports, Dallas has an admirable police department. The officers who were shot were killed as they were trying to protect protesters from what seemed to be random shots from an unknown assailant.

Barack Obama believes that he was elected, or so he says, to end the war in Iraq and empty Guantanamo. That is not true. He was elected to be the first Black President of the United States in the hope that he would bring racial healing to the country. He has been a complete failure at that as well.

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Obama is Dismantling Medicare by The Elephant's Child
July 3, 2016, 6:40 am
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Economics, Free Markets, Freedom, Health Care, History, Law, Politics, Progressivism, Socialism | Tags: , ,

Modern medicine has been a blessing for seniors. Before Medicare, old folks ended up in nursing homes or in wheelchairs with crippling illnesses. Now more seniors are able to get hip and knee replacements, cataract operations and heart procedures to spare them some of the worst parts of aging. And they are living longer. The American Journal of Public Health reported that a man turning 65 can expect to live 5 years longer than he would have in 1970.

The Obama administration has, as usual with the left, included lots of unnecessary goodies in order to get people to sign up with ObamaCare and Medicare. And with Medicare, they carefully eliminated many of the features that controlled costs and encouraged older folks to use it more carefully.  The so-called “donut hole” was designed as an incentive for seniors to use cheaper generic drugs instead of name-brands when they were equivalent.  It worked very successfully. Obama eliminated that.

Medicare has always faced the problem of the sheer numbers of retiring baby boomers, which has meant trouble for Medicare finances. Under the guise of “reform,” President Obama is dooming seniors to disability, needless pain and shortening their lives.

Hillary, economically clueless, is proposing to open Medicare to people in their 50s, so younger, healthier people would be competing with seniors for resources. Brilliant.

Obama, under the pretense of “reform,” is issuing a 962 page of new Medicare regulations. The reforms will make it harder for seniors to get joint replacements. New payment rules will shortchange doctors, discouraging them from accepting Medicare in the first place — which is already a problem. Hospitals will get bonuses for spending less on each senior patient, despite having higher death and infection rates. Seeing Medicare patients will be a money loser.

Because of new regulations on how doctors treat patients (the feds know better than the doctors) doctors spend time completing reports for the government. They spend their time with the patient glued to a computer screen instead of interacting with patients.

“Doctors who want to provide individualized care” will have to “either opt out of Medicare or simply not comply,” explains Richard Amerling, past president of the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons.

Obama’s rules are “far too complex and burdensome to be workable for most physicians,” warns John Halamka, a Harvard medical professor.

The new rules also make seeing Medicare patients a money loser. Annual fee increases for doctors are capped at a fraction of 1 percent — even though rents and other costs go up every year.

No wonder nine out of 10 solo practitioners admit they’ll avoid Medicare patients — right when 10,000 new baby boomers are joining each day.

Old folks with cancer will be in trouble. Doctors administering chemotherapy are getting a pay cut and told to choose the cheapest drug, regardless of what medication is best for the patient. Seniors needing knee and hip replacements likely to need rehab may have to settle for painkillers instead.

The administration claims the rules reward quality instead of quantity, but that’s a lie. Betsy McCaughey says that five of the hospitals who had the worst scores on patient outcomes — who get more infections and die sooner from heart problems and pneumonia than at other hospitals — have all gotten bonuses from Medicare because they are low spenders.

Remember the 2012 campaign when Obama accused Republicans or plotting to “end Medicare as we know it” and a video depicted a Republican pushing Granny’s wheelchair off a cliff?  Nasty and false claims, but now the Democrats are pushing America’s seniors off a cliff indeed.

Obama has made several remarks indicating that medical care is more important  for the young, who have more years ahead of them, than having expense wasted on the old, who could depend on pain killers instead. It would be a lot less offensive if he were not at the same time wanting to insure the votes of young women by promising free contraceptives to all, although they cost so little  few would have a hard time paying.

In a free competitive market, competition brings prices down, and the promise of profit makes people have new ideas, and take the risk to make them work. The Left despises the free market, and wants ever more control. They believe that they have the best ideas and they just need to be put to work. And if they aren’t working, new and more regulation will fix things. It’s a war of Individualism versus Collectivism — or Freedom versus Socialism. Perhaps you have noticed that they are starving in Venezuela and being killed in food riots. And their hospitals have no medicine, no antibiotics and no pain pills either.

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The Oath of Allegiance to the United States of America by The Elephant's Child
July 1, 2016, 9:45 pm
Filed under: Capitalism, Domestic Policy, Economics, Economy, Education, Election 2016, Foreign Policy, Free Markets, Freedom, Military, Politics, The Constitution, The United States | Tags: , ,

“I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I will bear arms on behalf of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States when required by the law; that I will perform work of national importance under civilian direction when required by the law; and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.”

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On July 4, 2012, in Phoenix, Arizona, about 250 new Americans take the oath of citizenship (reprinted from 2015)

In July, 2015, President Barack Obama stripped out the requirement for individuals becoming naturalized citizens to defend the United States through military service. On September 16. 2015,  President Obama said in a video aimed at convincing migrants to pursue American citizenship, that they didn’t need to assimilate.

“It’s not about changing who you are, it’s about adding a new chapter to your journey… and to our journey as a nation of immigrants,” Obama narrates in his two-minute video urging almost 9 million resident migrants to sign up for citizenship so they can vote in 2016.

There’s another new turn of phrase designed to hide or soften what he is doing. “Nine million resident migrants” — think about that for a moment. We wouldn’t want you to get all serious about an oath, or make you uncomfortable. There’s one graduate of Harvard Law School who apparently never really learned anything about the Constitution at all.

Human beings are tribal. It’s an instinct that comes down to us from the first humans, and it’s never completely gone away. Most of the nations of Europe are tribal. That’s why the Czech Republic separated from Slovakia. I don’t think you can become a German unless you have German ancestry, but I’m not sure about that. The countries of Europe each have their own languages and customs. The Middle East is divided between Sunni and Shia, with a large number of other tribes thrown in. And it seems to be human nature for the tribes to fight each other, over things serious or not so much.

Here we join big organizations, tea parties, bridge clubs, Rotary, Job’s Daughters, join a golf club, work for the Salvation Army or Food for the Poor, or just the Thursday night poker club. We form neighborhood clubs, research our ancestry, or join a gym. We are tribal by nature. We are drawn to people who share our interests or heritage, enthusiasm for quilting, or political leanings.

Americans came from all over, but what has bound them together was the formal oath of citizenship renouncing all other allegiance. You raise your hand and your solemnly swear, and you become an American —just as much as the immigrant whose ancestors came on the Mayflower or with the Winthrop fleet.

What Mr. Obama doesn’t get is that Americans are a tribe, we have a proud identity. Many Europeans say that you can identify an American in Europe by the way they walk—heads up, more confident. Does any other country celebrate their founding day with the hoopla and fireworks that we do?

The full-throated “USA, USA, USA” may be annoying, but it’s heartfelt. Howard Zinn may corrupt the young with his soviet-propagandized attempt at revising our history. The Reverend Jeremiah Wright may bellow “God Damn America “to the future president and his family, but there’s a reason why Stalin’s daughter, Khrushchev’s son, and one of Castro’s daughters all became American citizens. Russian oligarchs moor their yachts in New York harbor just in time to get their newborn child American citizenship, and wealthy Chinese just happen to be visiting the country when the baby is due.  Mexican women wade the Rio Grande to bear their children in the United States. Why do you suppose they do that?

A small bunch of English religious refugees seeking liberty undertook a dangerous Atlantic crossing to an unknown land. Joined by other discontented Europeans, before long they were pushing back against English taxes, English regulations and English regiments. After sending the British back home, and writing a constitution, Americans pushed on across the Appalachians, facing angry Indians, bears and starvation. First in bateaus, then on horseback and in covered wagons, they crossed the Rockies and conquered a continent, fought a bloody civil war to free the slaves.  World Wars, John Wayne, the Super Bowl, Star Wars, the Marshall Plan, GI Joe, Baseball, Dunkin’ Donuts, the Grand Canyon, — so many things go into the making of an American, including complaining about the government. But here, it’s your right to complain. In Stalin’s Russia — off to the Gulag. In today’s Syria, we don”t even want to think about that.

Don’t be messing with the Oath Of Allegiance, Mr. President. We know that you are out to “fundamentally transform the United States of America,” but if we had realized what you really meant by that, you’d be back in your house in Chicago and someone else entirely would be our president. You go too far.

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Who Are You Going To Believe? And Why? by The Elephant's Child
June 19, 2016, 8:49 pm
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Democrat Corruption, Foreign Policy, Immigration, Intelligence, Iran, Iraq, Islam, Law, Military, National Security, Syria, Terrorism, The United States | Tags: , ,

196725_5_Via American Thinker.

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Monumental Carelessness at the Highest Levels of Government by The Elephant's Child
June 14, 2016, 6:10 pm
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Foreign Policy, History, Intelligence, National Security, Politics, Progressivism, The United States | Tags: , ,

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Those unimportant emails, that were just for Hillary’s convenience, show that she picked a grossly unqualified donor to the Clinton Foundation to a very sensitive State Department advisory board that handled top-secret national security information — the International Security Advisory Board (ISAB) that deals with matters like nuclear disarmament and arms control. It’s a kind of carelessness that can get people killed.

After inquiries from ABC News, Clinton’s staff tried to “protect the name” of the Secretary of State, “stall” the ABC News reporter, but as soon as the donor, Rajiv Fernando, a Chicago securities trader who specialized in electronic investing, learned that the media was questioning the appointment, he resigned, saying he needed to devote more time to his business.

Fernando was a longtime and prolific donor to the Clintons, dating back to 2003. He was an early supporter of Hillary  Clinton’s 2008 bid for president giving maximum contributions to her campaign and to HillPAC in 2007 and 2008. He was a fundraising bundler for Hillary collecting more than $100,000 from others. Prior to the State Department appointment Fernando had given between $100,000 and $250,000 to the William J. Clinton Foundation and another $30,000 to a political advocacy group that indirectly helped Hillary retire her 2008 campaign debts by renting her campaign email list.

The ISAB is not a normal, or suitable, place to put a big donor. He was a “securities” trader, but not the same kind of “security” as those on the ISAB board. His associates on the board would have been David Kay, the former head of the Iraq Survey Group and UN Chief Weapons Inspector; Lt. Gen Brent Scowcroft, a former National Security Advisor to two presidents; two former congressmen; and Former Senator Chuck Robb. William Perry, the former Secretary of Defense, chaired the panel. The appointment would have qualified Fernando for one of the highest levels of top secret access.

Even more astounding is that Hillary could have believed such an appointment acceptable.  Hillary has long demonstrated a carelessness that is entirely out of line with the seriousness of the office to which she was appointed by President Obama. But then Obama’s appointment of Hillary wasn’t all that serious either.

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The Mind of the President, Still a Mystery After All These Years by The Elephant's Child
June 13, 2016, 9:51 pm
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Foreign Policy, History, Iran, Iraq, Islam, Israel, National Security, Politics, Regulation, Terrorism, The United States | Tags: , ,

obama-legacy
The American people have been trying for eight years to understand Barack Obama and to grasp just what his aims are. Why is he doing what he is doing? Here are the pieces I have saved that I find somewhat enlightening. No, I don’t think Obama was born in Kenya, nor does he hate America, nor is he trying to destroy America. He just has some odd beliefs that guide his actions.

Richard Epstein, Professor of Law, fellow at the Hoover Institution had a conversation about Obama on Uncommon Knowledge, with Peter Robinson. Epstein knew Obama at the University of Chicago, and through his next door neighbor who was Obama’s best friend at the time. Posted in 2012. The insight that Obama does not change his mind, that his ideas are fixed in concrete is important.

Fast forward to the present and Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes as he explains the Iran Deal, and how they pushed it through by lying to the American people.

Michael Doran, in a widely praised article in Mosaic Magazine took on the task of explaining  “Obama’s Secret Iran Strategy.”

And Elliott Abrams followed that up by explaining “What the President Thinks He’s Doing,” also in Mosaic Magazine, February 2015.

At ricochet, Herbert E. Meyer writes about “Obama’s Failed Experiment,” October 2, 2015.

Here’s Jeffrey Goldberg in a widely praised interview with President Obama on Syria and American Foreign Policy from The Atlantic, on June 12, 2016

And today, David Hazony, Editor of The Tower wrote about “The Mind of the President”

Obama  is clearly a  leftist radical who thinks that most of the problems of the world would be much less troublesome if the United States were not so involved with the world. We are the problem, in his mind. He emphasized that once again today. “We are to Blame, not Islamic terrorism, for the massacre,” by John Podhoretz. Podhoretz  says we, once again, have an unmistakable indication that Obama finds it astonishingly easy to divorce himself from a reality he doesn’t like — the reality of the Islamist terror war against the  United States and how it is moving to our shores in the form of lone-wolf attacks.

He called it “terror,” which it is. But using the word “terror” without a limiting and defining adjective is like a doctor calling a disease “cancer” without making note of the affected area of the body — because if he doesn’t know where the cancer is and what form it takes, he cannot attack it effectively and seek to extirpate it.

So determined is the president to avoid the subject of Islamist, ISIS-inspired or ISIS-directed terrorism that he concluded his remarks with an astonishing insistence that “we need the strength and courage to change” our attitudes toward the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.

Some of these pieces are long, but all are deeply informative. Their intent is not to attack the President, but to explore his mind. We are told that he is the most brilliant of all of our presidents, which I seriously doubt. But how can this man, who has taken an oath to protect and defend the American people and the Constitution of the United States possibly view the bloody, senseless massacre in an Orlando night club and announce primly that “We are to blame, not Islamic terrorism, for the massacre.” He has no understanding of the office he holds, none at all.

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Understanding the Obvious is Sometimes Difficult by The Elephant's Child
May 29, 2016, 8:30 pm
Filed under: Bureaucracy, Crime, Democrat Corruption, Domestic Policy, Foreign Policy, Iran, Iraq, Islam, Middle East, Military, National Security, Terrorism, The United States | Tags: , ,

ISIS Executions
I suspect that ISIS is having trouble with their fighters losing enthusiasm for the fight. More deserters. There have been reports in recent days that they are putting the disaffected in cages and dissolving them slowly in acid baths, and/or feeding them to viscous and starving dogs.

That is the idea of terrorism of course — to defeat the enemy by striking terror into his heart. But they seem to be running out of really gruesome ways to dispose of people. Beheading is passé. They’ve tried setting victims on fire in cages, and drowning them in cages — and apparently they are still having trouble with a lack of eagerness and a desire to escape among the militants.

Is this a good sign? It does make the official position of never calling a terrorist a terrorist seem a little silly, doesn’t it. And perhaps releasing “the worst of the worst” from Guantanamo in order to please European leftists isn’t such a good idea after all.

Here’s Charles Krauthammer on “the arc of the moral universe” which Obama insists “is long, but bends towards justice.”

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