The impulse of liberals is to run things

Today's News

The impulse of liberals is to run things

By Walter E. Williams
Some statements and arguments are so asinine that you’d have to be an academic or a leftist to take them seriously. Take the accusation that Republicans and conservatives are conducting a war on women. Does that mean they’re waging war on their daughters, wives, mothers and other female members of their families? If so, do they abide by the Geneva Conventions’ bans on torture, or do they engage in enhanced interrogation and intimidation methods, such as waterboarding, with female family members? You might say that leftists don’t mean actual war. Then why do they say it?

What would you think of a white conservative mayor’s trying to defund charter schools where blacks are succeeding? While most of New York’s black students could not pass a citywide math proficiency exam, there was a charter school where 82 percent of its students passed. New York’s left-wing mayor, Bill de Blasio, is trying to shut it down, and so far, I’ve heard not one peep from the Big Apple’s civil rights hustlers, including Al Sharpton and Charles Rangel. According to columnist Thomas Sowell, the attack on successful charter schools is happening in other cities, too.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder recently stated that we must revisit the laws that ban convicted felons from voting. Why? According to a recent study by two professors, Marc Meredith of the University of Pennsylvania and Michael Morse of Stanford, published in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, three-fourths of America’s convicted murderers, rapists and thieves are Democrats. Many states restrict felons from voting; however, there’s a movement afoot to eliminate any restriction on their voting. If successful, we might see Democratic candidates campaigning in prisons, seeking the support of some of America’s worst people.

Decades ago, I warned my fellow Americans that the tobacco zealots’ agenda was not about the supposed health hazards of secondhand smoke. It was really about control. The fact that tobacco smoke is unpleasant gained them the support of most Americans. By the way, to reach its secondhand smoke conclusions, the Environmental Protection Agency employed statistical techniques that were grossly dishonest. Some years ago, I had the opportunity to ask a Food and Drug Administration official whether his agency would accept pharmaceutical companies using similar statistical techniques in their drug approval procedures. He just looked at me.

Seeing as Americans are timid and compliant, why not dictate other aspects of our lives – such as the size of soda we may buy, as former Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried in New York? Former U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesman John Webster said: “Right now, this anti-obesity campaign is in its infancy. ... We want to turn people around and give them assistance in eating nutritious foods.” The city of Calabasas, Calif., adopted an ordinance that bans smoking in virtually all outdoor areas. The stated justification is not the desire to fight against secondhand smoke but the desire to protect children from bad influences – seeing adults smoking.

The late H.L. Mencken’s description of health care professionals in his day is just as appropriate today: “A certain section of medical opinion, in late years, has succumbed to the messianic delusion. Its spokesmen are not content to deal with the patients who come to them for advice; they conceive it to be their duty to force their advice upon everyone, including especially those who don’t want it. That duty is purely imaginary. It is born of vanity, not of public spirit. The impulse behind it is not altruism, but a mere yearning to run things.”

Hobby Lobby case creates unusual allies

By Kathleen Parker

When it comes to tackling complicated legal issues, one would be hard pressed to conjure a less likely partnership than Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz and Baylor University President Ken Starr.
Well, okay, there was the David Boies and Ted Olson confederacy fighting for gay marriage rights after they took opposite sides during the 2000 Bush-Gore election dispute. Still, witnessing Dershowitz and Starr discuss and largely agree on religious liberty issues raised by the case popularly known as Hobby Lobby was pleasantly jarring.

The two convened at the Willard Hotel on Monday, the day before oral arguments in the case were presented to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a delightful back-and-forth punctuated by yarns and anecdotes, the two legal luminaries affirmed at least two points of agreement: (1) separation of church and state is good for religion; (2) corporations are people and people are corporations (echo Mitt Romney?) and, therefore, Hobby Lobby should be permitted an exemption from the contraceptive mandate imposed by the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
To back and fill a bit: Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., a family-owned arts and crafts chain of more than 500 stores and 13,000 employees, is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the federal government. Hobby Lobby President Steve Green, who told a dinner crowd Monday night that he has distributed Bibles to a billion people worldwide through his personal ministry, claims that he shouldn’t be forced to participate in what he views as life-terminating contraception, including IUDs and the so-called morning-after pill.
The core of the argument is that Green’s business is protected by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), passed by Congress and signed by President Bill Clinton in 1993. The RFRA basically requires that the government prove “compelling interest” when someone’s religious rights are “substantially burdened” by what the state wishes to do. Although individuals and religious groups are clearly covered by the RFRA, it isn’t clear whether the act’s protections also extend to companies.

Dershowitz and Starr kicked off an afternoon of discussions as part of a symposium co-sponsored by Baylor University and Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs. Starr, a former U.S. solicitor general, described the lawsuit as a “conflict of vision” – big government vs. a family that has devoted itself to Christian mission work. While Starr’s stewardship of a Baptist university might make his favorable view of the plaintiffs’ position unsurprising, Dershowitz’s sympathy for Hobby Lobby may come as a surprise to many.
Proclaiming his love both for religion and the separation of church and state, he called the government’s brief “silly and trivial.” And though he thinks birth control is good for society – and he approves of the ACA – neither of those considerations matter.

It’s the principle.
Contrary to protestations from certain entities that subvert all issues for political gain, the Hobby Lobby case is not about birth control or women’s rights or even universal health care. It is, in Dershowitz’s summation, about “whether or not the statutes in the penumbra of the Constitution require a religious exemption.”
Period.
As a final note of clarification, the Green family did not pick this battle.
The federal government did when it imposed what could be considered a secular belief system on people who happen to be business owners with strong religious convictions about abortion.
In a brief sidebar: Don’t you find it curious that the biological fact of life at conception is characterized as an article of faith (religious), while denial of that life vis-a-vis its involuntary termination is viewed as ultimately sacred? One of life’s little mysteries.

Whatever one’s views on these matters, they are of no consequence.
The fact that I personally favor birth control doesn’t alter the logic of what I’ve just written.
It merely suits me to believe as I do in order to get through life as I find most convenient.
It doesn’t make me right, except under secular law, which a great many people find less compelling than the higher laws of nature – or of God. Your choice.
In any case, the first principle of religious freedom should be treated as paramount, as often and at every stage possible, agreed both Starr and Dershowitz. And both hope that the Supreme Court will find a way to accommodate Hobby Lobby.

The court’s ruling is expected sometime in June.

Seeing Past the Obama Meme

The Daily Bell

Chickens come home to roost for Obama ... Today's quiz: What do Vladimir Putin's aggression and ObamaCare's troubles have in common? OK, that was too easy. It is impossible to dismiss as mere coincidence the Russian Bear's invasion of Ukraine and the continuing mayhem of the Affordable Care Act. In their own ways, each reflects the full flowering of the policies of Barack Obama. His chickens are coming home to roost, and what a mess they are making. – New York Post

Seldom do we see an article that incorporates so many dominant and sub-dominant social themes so seamlessly. Obama is attacked in this article for a variety of reasons and is portrayed as a weak president whose behavior is making the world a more dangerous place. He is painted as an ideologue who wants to create socialism at home and peace via palliation abroad. His inability to "move" Europe and Russia in the directions he seeks is further evidence of his lack of gravitas and his dangerous disengagement from the world as it really is.

The article compares Obama's handling of his country to Putin's regime in Russia and makes the case that Putin is a far better leader and a more competent administrator. "America's standing and influence have declined," and this is a direct result of Obama's worldview and subsequent flawed decision making.

Here's more:

Obama's sixth year in the White House is shaping up as his worst, and that's saying something. He's been in the Oval Office so long that it is obscene to blame his problems on George W. Bush, the weather or racism. Obama owns the world he made, or more accurately, the world he tried to remake.

... Ideologues love to dream, and some do it eloquently. Robert Kennedy famously said: "There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why . . . I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?" Mario Cuomo, no slouch at dreaming, nonetheless offered a caveat, saying, "You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose."

Obama hasn't figured out the difference. Even more alarming, he shows no signs of trying to learn. In the ways of the world, he remains a know-it-all rookie. The view from his faculty lounge has no space for reality. Anything that doesn't fit the grand plan is dismissed as illegitimate.

So while global hot spots multiply and the world grows dangerously unstable, the president still plans to slash the military. His trip abroad last week further secured his reputation for historic ineptitude. It wasn't that the trip was a disaster — it never rose to that level. His presence and his promises simply made no difference.

He failed to move the European Union toward a firmer stance on Russia, created bizarre headlines by differing with the Vatican over what he and the pope discussed, and got not-so-veiled threats from the Saudis about Syria and Iran. He could have stayed home and not done worse.

... ObamaCare is the domestic expression of the president's ineptitude. The law that was supposed to fix health care has become a problem for millions, and now enjoys mere 26 percent approval, a poll finds. It is proving so unworkable that the White House has given up defending it as written and instead simply changes key provisions when they prove impossible to implement or politically inconvenient.

... A Caesar at home and a Chamberlain abroad, Obama manages to simultaneously provoke fury and ridicule. He bullies critics here while shrinking from adversaries there. He divides the country and unites the world against us, ­diminishing the nation in both ways. His reign of error can't end soon enough, nor can it end well.

Damning, eh? Yet one could equally argue exactly the opposite points.

It is not Russia, apparently, that destabilized Ukraine but the US and Britain. There is plenty of evidence of this beginning with Victoria Nuland's assertion that the US funded "democracy" – and thus contributed to the Ukraine's destabilization over decades – with some US$5 billion.

To maintain as this article does that those who engineered the Ukraine's regime change did not foresee that Putin would seek immediately to annex Crimea is ludicrous. Obama is castigated as "weak" but Putin's behavior was surely part of a larger, predictable strategy that the West expected and the Pentagon, in particular, expected. Putin certainly played his part.

There is plenty of evidence as well that the US State Department helped to lay the groundwork for "color revolutions" in such disparate places as Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Mali and Syria.

Iraq and Afghanistan were outright wars in which the US and Britain – along with NATO – made significant military commitments. It remains to be seen if Iran will suffer a similar fate. Chaos is ever the friend of globalism, after all, and there are significant globalist forces at work in the West.

And then there is Obamacare. The incompetence is extraordinary and the implementation is breathtakingly inept. But are we to conclude from this that the Obama administration has simply failed to do things properly? Or perhaps there are other reasons why the rollout has been plagued with a variety of failures.

Those behind Obamacare surely see the current system as merely a stopgap measure on the way to a single payer system – a national healthcare program that backers would have tried to implement if they could. Seen from this perspective, the incredibly flawed rollout of the new system actually creates the conditions for further reform.

It would seem that Obama's reputation is being sacrificed to achieve certain results. His apparent incompetence at home sets the stage for further health care reforms and an additional consolidation of medical services.

Abroad, Obama's perceived "weakness" lays the groundwork for further provocations by Russia and perhaps China as well. In an era where people are better informed about larger globalist manipulations, the ability to re-engineer certain Cold War tensions is surely useful.

It is "directed history" that is at work here. The catastrophe of Obamacare will lead to further nationalizations of health care. The apparent weakness of the US response to Russian provocations will lead to an even more energetic security state in the US along with a resurgent military-industrial complex.

The article castigates Obama as authoritarian at home and submissive abroad. But perhaps Obama is merely playing the role that is demanded of him.

As we peer behind the curtain, we can actually see these manipulations being played out. They remind us that in the 21st century, as in previous centuries, nothing is as it seems and both government and economic policies are subject to secret forces that operate with agendas that are never fully explained.

We are fortunate, however, in this Internet Era that we can actually see these promotions being initiated and pursued. This knowledge gives us important insights into how the world is organized and what might be coming next. And these insights can be used to anticipate a variety of sociopolitical, economic and investment trends.

Here at The Daily Bell, we try to point them out on a regular basis. We try to analyze the reality "behind the memes," along with other elements of the alternative media.