On Hillary: Katha Pollitt thinks that women…

The New Neo Posted on by

…are too hard on Hillary Clinton because women are hard on other women.

Just when you think you’ve heard all the excuses possible for why Clinton isn’t receiving the approval she was expected to get, you see something creative like this:

My women college classmates (Radcliffe ”˜71) aren’t so excited about Hillary Clinton. An e-mail to our New York City potluck group elicited distinctly modified rapture. They’re bothered by her high-priced speeches and the aura of favor-trading and favor-banking around the Clinton Foundation. They don’t like her Wall Street connections, and they don’t like Bill (a”‰k”‰a the “ick” factor). Plus, she’s not progressive enough…

But this is where women differ from the other American groups underrepresented in politics. Racial and ethnic minorities can be extremely loyal to their own, but women are hard on other women””and feminists are no exception. Even the idea of electing a Democratic, pro-choice woman president doesn’t necessarily get a rousing cheer.

Actually, feminists are usually hard only on conservative women like Sarah Palin. When Palin was running for VP in 2008 I wrote a piece entitled “Palin unhinges feminists on the left,” and “unhinged” is really the correct word. For example, this quote was, unfortunately, fairly typical of the sort of invective that was routinely spewed towards Palin:

I confess, it was pretty riveting when John McCain trotted out Sarah Palin for the first time. Like many people, I thought, “Damn, a hyperconservative, fuckable, Type A, antiabortion, Christian Stepford wife in a ”˜sexy librarian’ costume ”” as a vice president? That’s a brilliant stroke of horrifyingly cynical pandering to the Christian right.

And then there was Professor Wendy Doniger:

I submit a piece that appeared at the website “On Faith,” under the aegis of Newsweek and the Washington Post. It was written by Professor of the History of Religions Wendy Doniger, who teaches at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and it contains the following astounding line referring to Palin [emphasis mine]: “Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman.”

Yes, women can be hard on women.

But back to Hillary. Pollitt tells us what she likes about Clinton, and why she’s very excited by her candidacy:

First, I’m excited about beating the Republicans, and she’s the best candidate for that job.

Translation: however bad Hillary may be, Republicans are by definition always worse. And besides, we haven’t got anybody else.

Second, Hillary will be the first woman president””and that is important. At this point in world history, it is embarrassing how backward the United States is. More than 70 women have been chosen to lead their nations, including in gender-conservative countries like Pakistan, Ireland, and the Philippines””and 22 nations have female leaders right now. What is the matter with us?

Translation: if Hillary is elected, I can finally feel proud of my country, which will then have attained a status right up there with forward-looking Pakistan.

By the way–although Pollitt ignores this fact—the late Benazir Bhutto, who remains to this day Pakistan’s only female prime minister, came to politics and the job in the same way Hillary Clinton has: by being related to a man who was the head of the country.

Pollitt goes on:

Third, Hillary is a feminist and is running as one””as she made clear in an April speech…[O]n a range of issues that matter to women””reproductive rights, healthcare, childcare, pay equity””she will move the ball forward. She will nominate liberal women and people of color to important posts.

Translation: she mouths the right feminist slogans, and she will appoint people from the favored special-interest groups.

But the most interesting thing about Pollitt’s article is that she had to write such a pep talk at all, in an effort to rally the faded, weary troops. What Pollitt’s message really boils down to is that Clinton is a woman and a Democrat; it’s the equivalent of the old “hold your nose and vote” that conservatives are so familiar with on the Republican side.

This isn’t the way it was supposed to be for Hillary. It may be enough to allow her to win, though.

[NOTE: I look at the Republican field, on the other hand, and I feel actual enthusiasm. A lot of these candidates seem decent, intelligent, and capable. My favorites so far are Walker, Rubio, Cruz, and Fiorina. Perry’s now in, too—not quite up there with the others for me, but with an excellent track record in Texas.

It’s an embarrassment of riches. Jindal’s good, too, although (as I’ve written before) I think he lacks that indefinable something to appeal to a broad swatch of voters, some sort of energy and magnetism that’s needed. But still, it’s by far the best Republican slate I can ever remember seeing. In a meritocracy, any of these people would beat Hillary, hands down. But the world is not a meritocracy.]

Our Orwellian immigration agencies

The New Neo Posted on by

Let’s rename a couple of government agencies.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement department (ICE) will henceforth be known as U.S. Immigration and Customs Non-Enforcement (ICN). The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will now be known as the Department of Homeland Insecurity (DHI).

Why? I think it’s self-evident, with this news only the latest chapter in a long, long line:

Most of the illegal immigrant criminals Homeland Security officials released from custody last year were discretionary, meaning the department could have kept them in detention but chose instead to let them onto the streets as their deportation cases moved through the system, according to new numbers from Congress.

Some of those released were the worst of the worst ”” more than 3,700 “Threat Level 1” criminals, who are deemed the top priority for deportation, were still released out into the community even as they waited for their immigration cases to be heard.

Homeland Security officials have implied their hands are tied by court rulings in many cases, but the numbers, obtained by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, showed 57 percent of the criminals released were by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s own choice, and they could have been kept instead…

ICE officials insist that those who are released are still monitored, often by electronic ankle bracelets but also through a system of phone checks or by paying a bond.

However, nearly all of those released under electronic monitoring broke the terms of their release, according to ICE numbers.

In fiscal year 2014, ICE put about 41,000 immigrants through electronic monitoring, and more than 30,000 of them broke the terms of their release ”” many of them racking up multiple violations. All told, they notched nearly 300,000 violations in one year alone, or an average of 10 instances per violator…

In 2013, the agency released 36,007 convicted criminals who were awaiting the outcome of their deportation cases. Those released had amassed 116 homicide convictions, 15,635 drunken driving convictions and 9,187 convictions stemming from what ICE labeled involvement with “dangerous drugs.”

The total dropped to about 30,000 in 2014 ”” but the seriousness of the offenses increased, with 193 homicide convictions among the detainees and 16,070 drunken driving convictions. There were also 426 sexual assaults and 303 kidnapping convictions, ICE said.

I doubt that even 20% of American would be okay with this. Why are we so powerless to do anything about it? Our president is perfectly fine with it, as well as many of our legislators, and most people don’t even know it’s happening.

Obama vs. Bush, the latest round

The New Neo Posted on by

George W. Bush in April 2013:

“History will ultimately judge the decisions that were made for Iraq and I’m just not going to be around to see the final verdict,” the two-term president told CNN in a wide-ranging interview.

“In other words, I’ll be dead.”…

“You learn that life doesn’t end after you’re president,” Bush said…

“I know this, that Laura and I gave the presidency eight years of our life. We gave it our all. Made the best judgment calls I could. I didn’t compromise my principles. And I’m a content man.”

Bush is still very much alive, and the judgment of history is still out. But at the moment, the judgment of Americans is going rather well for him:

According to the poll, 52% of adults had a favorable impression of George W. Bush, 43% unfavorable. When Bush left office in 2009, only about one-third of Americans said they had a positive opinion of him. This new poll presents a notable shift as Bush’s overall favorability has remained well below 50% for much of his time as a presidential alum…

Obama’s approval rating has…dropped since April, going from a near-even 48% approve to 47% disapprove split to a negative-tilting 52% disapprove to 45% approve…across party lines, from both men and women, from whites and non-whites.

Tipping point? Not that it matters; Obama isn’t going anywhere, unless a lot more people start clamoring for impeachment. A lot more.

missme

Student power and its origins

The New Neo Posted on by

I thought I’d highlight this observation by commenter “Caedmon” in the “Free speech on campus” thread:

I wonder how much influence high tuition fees have on this?…

When the high costs of tuition fees in the US are discussed the college students are usually seen as unfortunate victims. Might it not also be the case that paying thousands of dollars to sit in a lecture hall gives one a sense of entitlement?

In such a situation I might well feel that it was up to me to decide whether Lena Dunham was better than Shakespeare.

This is not to dismiss the influence of political correctness etc. just to suggest that high fees change the relationship between student and professor. The kid who has spent all summer baling hay to go to college might look on his Latin professor with veneration. The kid who has borrowed against his future earnings as a top Hollywood script writer does not hold his film studies professor in such high esteem.

This might not be so much the revolution devouring its own as America’s professors slowly waking up to the fact that they are now the servants of the little monsters they have created.

My response is that it’s an interesting notion, and I think it enters into the mix, but I’m not at all sure how much. Things were already changing back in the 60s, when tuition was not that high—not just in absolute terms, but in relative ones. Yet, in the words of the brilliant Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind:

”¦[S]tudents discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.

Bloom’s book came out in 1989, but in that passage he was describing certain matters that took place at Cornell, where he’d been a professor, in the year 1969. This was long before the marked tuition hikes we’ve seen in recent decades. I’ve written at length about what happened that year at Cornell and its significance, so I won’t recap it all in this post, but suffice to say that professors and administrators there proved that they were pushovers more interested in PC thought and placating student pressure (including, in the case of Cornell, the threat of violence by armed students) than in defending any principle they had supposedly held dear.

The issues were somewhat different back then. In Cornell it was race, and the establishment of a Black Studies department, as well as threatening a black student (Alan Keyes, as it turns out) who had disagreed with the protesters. In 1969 at Cornell the protagonists consisted primarily (although not solely) of young black men. Today they are more likely to be women, and many—although by no means all—are white women. What these groups of protestors have in common is that they are students who have realized they can all-too-often bully and threaten professors into doing pretty much whatever they say.

[NOTE: I’ve said I wouldn’t go into the whole Cornell 1969 story here, but I keep learning new and fascinating things about it. For example, in doing research for this post I found this article—generally quite sympathetic to the protestors—from which I learned the following:

Only days before the Straight takeover, on April 10, 1969, the Cornell administration had approved $240,000 to create an Afro-American Studies Center and a director, James Turner, had been identified months earlier. “The students wanted an autonomous program; they wanted the center to have control of its own destiny,” said Eric Acree, librarian at the Africana Studies and Research Center.

So Cornell was already slated to get an Afro-American Studies Center, but that wasn’t good enough for the demonstrators, who said they wanted it to be autonomous.

I had always figured that the black students at Cornell in 1969 had come there as part of some sort of affirmative action or outreach program to get more black students at Cornell in an era when they were ordinarily few and far between. Sure enough, that turns out to have been true, and President Perkins of Cornell was a pioneer in that respect:

In 1963, his first year in office, Cornell President James Perkins had launched the Committee on Special Educational Projects (COSEP) to increase enrollment of African-American students at Cornell and provide them with support services — the first program of its kind at a major American university.

Perkins, who had chaired the board of trustees of the United Negro College Fund, said Cornell wanted to “make a larger contribution to the education of qualified students who have been disadvantaged by their cultural, economic and educational environments.”

Perkins resigned the semester after the student takeover, saying: “it seemed to me quite clear that one way ”” a strange way ”” to contribute to healing the community was to resign.” So the demonstrators managed to force him out, too, despite how far he had gone to further the presence of black students at Cornell.

One other thing I noticed when reading this piece:

Early in the morning of Parents’ Weekend, 40 years ago this Saturday, 11 fire alarms rang out across the Cornell campus. At 3 a.m., a burning cross was discovered outside Wari House, a cooperative for black women students. The following morning, members of the Afro-American Society (AAS) occupied Willard Straight Hall to protest Cornell’s perceived racism, its judicial system and its slow progress in establishing a black studies program.

I would now bet a fair amount of money that the protestors who ended up occupying Willard Straight Hall were the same people who had set fire to the cross. Their motive would have been to establish a pretext for the entire episode, and to pretend it was white racists on campus who did it. I doubt we’ll ever know whether that’s the case or not. But that would be my guess, although it’s something I would not have thought of until recent years in which we’ve learned of the recent spate of fake racist and/or hate crimes on campus and elsewhere (see this).]

Free [sic] speech on campus

The New Neo Posted on by

Ace notes that even some liberal professors on campus are becoming alarmed (although for the wrong reasons) about the closed, doctrinaire, power-driven, anti-free-speech tactics of the social justice [sic] warriors on campus. He quotes a liberal professor named Edward Schlosser who writes at Vox:

This new understanding of social justice politics resembles what University of Pennsylvania political science professor Adolph Reed Jr. calls a politics of personal testimony, in which the feelings of individuals are the primary or even exclusive means through which social issues are understood and discussed. Reed derides this sort of political approach as essentially being a non-politics….

Personal experience and feelings aren’t just a salient touchstone of contemporary identity politics; they are the entirety of these politics. In such an environment, it’s no wonder that students are so prone to elevate minor slights to protestable offenses.

The press for actionability, or even for comprehensive analyses that go beyond personal testimony, is hereby considered redundant, since all we need to do to fix the world’s problems is adjust the feelings attached to them and open up the floor for various identity groups to have their say. All the old, enlightened means of discussion and analysis –from due process to scientific method — are dismissed as being blind to emotional concerns and therefore unfairly skewed toward the interest of straight white males. All that matters is that people are allowed to speak, that their narratives are accepted without question, and that the bad feelings go away.

While I read that, I was thinking “Schlosser’s afraid to say it, but he’s mainly talking about the influence of female students on the type of allowable discourse on campus these days.” Lo and behold, when I got to Ace’s commentary right afterward, he had written much the same thought: “This emotion-based style of ‘argumentation’ is, it is forbidden to say, chiefly a female one (a dopey, girlish female one, not a womanly one), and one that has been lately adopted by the more female-skewing girlboys who are easily dominated by group will.”

Yes.

And let me add that I experienced this personally (as an observer, not a target) in the early 90s when I returned to school for a Master’s degree. The trend was already quite highly developed and deeply entrenched at the time, much to my surprise, even though it had escaped my notice till I returned to campus life.

But I discovered it when the young women in an undergraduate class I was required to take for my Master’s—a class which, being in the social sciences, consisted almost entirely of women—were virtually all in favor of a definition of actionably offensive speech that went something like this: “speech that offends any person in the subjective sense, rather than speech that is in fact objectively offensive.” In vain I stood up in front of the 100-or-so students, most of them around twenty years younger than I, to ask what the limits of this might be, to suggest that it was wrong to allow the most sensitive among us to dictate what was unacceptable, and to speak up for free speech in general. I was met with uncomprehending stares and impatient dismissal, a fossil in my own time.

I realized that something was terribly, terribly wrong. Not one person appeared to agree with me, or if they did they weren’t saying so publicly or privately. And the professor, a woman just a couple of years younger than I, was clearly on their side. I have never forgotten it, and although at the time I didn’t put it in a political left/right context (that came later), I realized it was a frightening development and it made me feel very, very uneasy and quite alone.

Things have only got worse, with the advent of the internet, social media, and twenty-five more years of student marination in leftist memes. Campus liberals are now starting to feel its hot breath on their necks.

[NOTE: Two excellent and somewhat-related pieces: this and this. The latter is the chilling story of the Kafkaesque nightmare that liberal professor Laura Kipnis faced when was so bold as to criticize the “creeping bureaucratization and fear that surrounds sexual activity on campus.”]

Just thinking

The New Neo Posted on by

Isn’t it interesting how Josh Duggar’s sealed juvenile records were leaked to the media and published, but no one could manage to get Michael Brown’s?

[ADDENDUM: I wrote “leaked” above, but it turns out the records were released by the police chief, which is even more disturbing:

Gallagher reported that the release of Duggar’s juvenile police report was approved by Springdale Police Chief Kathy O’Kelley.

Disturbing details about the allegations against Duggar are revealed in the December 2006 police report.

Gallagher explained that the Freedom of Information (FOI) law in Arkansas states that the records of the arrest of a juvenile “shall remain confidential” and “shall not be subject to disclosure under the FOI.”

He noted that even though the names of the alleged victims are redacted in the police report, there are abundant details about who the alleged victims are.

State Sen. Bart Hester is calling for O’Kelley to be fired for releasing the police report to the media.

Hester said that O’Kelley acted recklessly by releasing the report and he is accusing her of re-victimizing the girls by making the allegations public.

This should be a big part of the story, because this is a violation by an official—a police chief—who indeed appears to have re-victimized the victims.]

The rising tide of anti-Semitism

The New Neo Posted on by

A reader sent me a link to this article by Rich Cohen in Tablet Magazine about how the post-WWII golden age for acceptance of Jews in America is past:

The horror of the Holocaust purchased us a 70-year vacation from history, though we didn’t know it. We believed the world had changed, as had human nature. Jews remained distinct in the new dispensation, but in a good way””a near-at-hand exotic, a symbol of exile, which we were told was the natural state of modern man. For perhaps the only time in history, you might actually want to be a Jew. Because of the close families and good husbands and yada yada. Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, Mel Brooks. To those of us who came of age in these years, the future seemed like it would be more of the same, the present carried on forever.

We were wrong.

If you go online and read the comments on any story about Israel or George Soros or search certain terms on Twitter, you begin to feel the golden age of the American Jews was just a moment in time. Perhaps the old paranoia stirs in me, but I see ominous signs everywhere…

Cohen is correct that things have gotten worse, even in this country, although they’re far worse in Europe than here and have been for quite some time. But he gets a lot of important things wrong, too, and his errors are instructive because they are emblematic of a way of thinking that’s so common as to be typical among American Jews of the liberal persuasion—which includes most Reform Jews and most ethnic but unaffiliated Jews.

Trying his darndest to figure out what happened and why, Cohen writes:

President Obama? I don’t blame him, but I do think his disgust with Benjamin Netanyahu, which seems almost physical, as if repelled by the stink of the man, has given certain practitioners the sense that it’s safe to come into the open…

Cohen has a kneejerk—almost physical, and certainly reflexive—refusal to blame Obama for what he then describes Obama as having done. Cohen doesn’t even feel he needs to explain why he won’t blame Obama, but I’d like to ask him: why not? Is it because you don’t want to be called racist, and think that any criticism of the man is ipso facto racist? Is it because you are a liberal and criticizing a liberal president constitutes being a traitor? Is it because you yourself can’t stand Netanyahu, but don’t feel the need to explain why because everyone who’s anyone hates Netanyahu for the same reasons or non-reasons? Don’t you think that a president who seems “repelled by the stink” of Netanyahu (your word, not mine), is expressing something that you should actually call anti-Semitic? And if so, why not?

Cohen has more to say:

Then there’s the Iran deal: To get the papers signed, the president must separate from Israel. To do that, he muddies the brand. That’s how he’s always campaigned, on health care, free-trade deals, against the right and the left alike: demonize the opponent and frame the issue. You’re for this deal, or you’re for war. In the process, President Obama has unintentionally, or thoughtlessly, given cover to the normalization of the old tropes of Jewish dual loyalty and war-mongering.

That’s a very rich paragraph in terms of mining the thought processes of a liberal apologist for Obama. Cohen is able to see the tactics Obama favors, the Alinsky-esque (although he doesn’t call it that) use of Rules for Radicals #12 (“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it”), and he correctly sees how it has hurt the Jews. But he subscribes to the “fool” definition of Obama’s actions in the old “fool vs. knave” dilemma: poor hapless Obama, who’s hurting Jews “unintentionally or thoughtlessly,” despite his vaunted smarts.

Iran made him do it, I guess.

The paragraph I quoted above from Cohen is followed without pause by the following:

It’s painful for those of us who love Obama. We voted for him and voted for him again. At best, the Iran deal seems misguided. Meant to avoid conflict, it will, by putting Iranian proxies on the northern and southern borders of Israel, make war inevitable.

What Obama did will, in Cohen’s opinion, “make war inevitable.” He says it has already increased anti-Semitism. And yet Cohen doesn’t just like Obama; he loves Obama (present tense, not past). He voted for him twice, and one gets the distinct impression that, if Obama were somehow to run for a third term, he would vote for him again, gladly. And it’s almost a certainty that if Hillary Clinton—Obama’s Secretary of State—runs in 2016, Cohen will have no hesitation whatsoever to pull that lever or or do whatever it takes to vote for her, too.

There is absolutely nothing in his essay that indicates he is able to connect the rise of anti-Semitism to the hard work the Left has done on its behalf, or to any sort of intention by Obama. The “knave” hypothesis is not something he considers possible. Nor does he appear to consider that, if Obama’s policies keep engendering bad consequences that Obama doesn’t intend, perhaps Obama isn’t quite the genius he was cracked up to be but is instead an incompetent and stupid fool rather merely an unlucky one. (As readers of this blog know, I tend to go quite strongly with “knave,” although every now and then there’s a bit of “fool” thrown in to keep it company).

What would it take for someone like Cohen, who seems to see certain things so clearly, but has a blind spot for so many others, to see the whole picture? I’m not at all sure there is anything that would do it.

If only Stalin knew.

Just helping a friend out: Dias Kadyrbayev sentenced in Boston

The New Neo Posted on by

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Dias Kadyrbayev were college pals and roommates. Both were originally from countries bordering the Caspian Sea—the former from Chechnya, the latter from Kazakhstan. And both are spending some time in prison:

A college friend of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was sentenced Tuesday to six years in prison after he apologized to the victims and their families for not calling police when he recognized photos of Tsarnaev as a suspect.

Dias Kadyrbayev, 21, pleaded guilty last year to obstruction of justice and conspiracy charges for removing items from Tsarnaev’s dorm room after recognizing his friend in photos released by the FBI days after the bombing.

Kadyrbayev was young, but he wasn’t so young that he didn’t know right from wrong. He was a friend of Tsarnaev’s, but although it may have been hard for him to believe his roommate was guilty, he certainly had good reason to be suspicious when Tsarnaev responded this way (and note the LOL from Tsarnaev, which supports my contention that he is actually a conscienceless psychopath):

At about 8:45 p.m. that night, Kadyrbayev sent Tsarnaev a text message: “U saw the news?”

In a reply text, Tsarnaev said he did, then said, “Better not text me my friend,” and added, “Lol.”

Kadyrbayev texted back, “u saw urself in there?”

Tsarnaev responded by telling him he could go to his dorm room and “take what’s there.”

It wouldn’t have required a giant brain to figure out that Tsarnaev was showing what’s called “consciousness of guilt.” At least Kadyrbayev doesn’t really try to justify what he did to cover up for Tsarnaev; he doesn’t even seem to understand his own motives, and I believe it’s the case that he’s not aware of exactly why he did what he did. I think what happened is that his loyalty to his friend overcame whatever slight and poorly-developed internal moral sense he possessed, and the idea of covering up his friend’s shame (paramount in honor/shame cultures) instead took over:

Kadyrbayev went to Tsarnaev’s room with two other friends. There, he and another man agreed to remove Tsarnaev’s computer and a backpack containing fireworks that had been partially emptied of their explosive powder. Kadyrbayev threw the backpack into a garbage dumpster. It was later recovered at a landfill after federal agents spent two days searching for it.

Kadyrbayev said Tuesday that he had no explanation for his actions.

“I can’t find an answer. I really can’t believe that I acted so stupidly,” he told Judge Douglas Woodlock before his sentence was imposed.

“Stupidly” is a funny word, isn’t it? How about “wrongly”? And it is nearly impossible to imagine he didn’t strongly suspect that Dzhokhar was guilty, since—in addition to the FBI photo—the backpack still had some fireworks in it.

Another report on Kadyrbayev has a fuller statement from him, one in which he uses the word “bad” rather than “stupid,” and which also highlights the prominence of shame in Kadyrbayev’s moral scale:

“I want to start by saying how truly sorry I am for all the victims, their families, their friends,” Kadyrbayev told the court. “I am ashamed by my actions. I know my bad decision put shame on my name.”

You’ll probably be pleased to hear that Kadyrbayev, who is not a citizen and was here on a student visa, will be deported back to Kazakhstan when he is finished serving his term.

There are two other friends of Tsarnaev’s facing sentencing. I don’t see much about them, but I believe that they are the same ones discussed here: Robel Phillipos, a naturalized citizen from Ethiopia, and Azabat Tazhayakov from Kazakhstan. It is highly possible that, had the young men not covered up for Tsarnaev, the death of MIT police officer Sean Collier might have been prevented.

Sympathy for the terrorists

The New Neo Posted on by

After all, they’re New Black Panthers who had planned to kill a prosecutor and the police chief in Ferguson, Missouri.

So, let’s give them a light sentence in a plea deal:

That means both men will be back on the street and free to continue terrorizing innocent people while still under the age of 30.

If convicted of the charges initially brought against them they would each have faced decades in prison.

The men were originally charged with plotting to kill Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch and then-Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson, and planning to blow up a Ferguson police station, police vehicles, and other area targets including (according to law enforcement sources) the famous St. Louis Gateway Arch monument.

No big deal.

Here’s a charming detail—how do you think they were going to pay for the explosives?:

These intended terrorists were in the process of accumulating the necessary quantity of bombs in the days leading up to the non-indictment of Police Officer Darren Willson.

Fortunately they had to put their operations on hold when they ran out of funds, and had to wait until the EBT card owned by the girlfriend of one of the men was replenished.

Waiting for the SCOTUS Obamacare subsidy decision: what next?

The New Neo Posted on by

Republicans are in a pickle, and have been since the moment Obamacare was passed.

You might think they’re in a good position, because the Supreme Court is considering overturning the state Obamacare exchanges and subsidies because of wording in the statute, and this would throw the entire Obamacare system into turmoil. The case in question is King v. Burwell, and it could be decided any day now.

But there’s one catch, and it’s a biggee: if the ruling goes against Obamacare, the press and the left will rail at the Republicans for being the big bad meanies who took away a lot of people’s subsidies. That was part of the beauty of Obamacare for the left, and one of the many many reasons they were so extraordinarily eager to pass it and pass it as quickly as possible: they wanted to create a dependence and an expectation, otherwise known as an entitlement, that would be tremendously hard to reverse.

You can ridicule Republicans all you want, and rail at them for cowardice if they want to do something to replace subsidies in the event that a King ruling takes them away from many people. But Republicans run the danger of being blamed, as they always do, for any ensuing debacle as a result of the ruling.

But what do the American people actually want if SCOTUS throws out the state exchanges and therefore the state subsidies? A substantial majority appear to want Congress to fix Obamacare rather than re-establish the state exchanges, according to this poll*. But what does that mean?

Some indications here (and the whole thing is worth reading for more details):

Voters view ObamaCare as having done more harm than good. They blame Congress for a poorly written law and they expect Congress to fix it. And they want those fixes to help everyone, not just those getting subsidies. They want those changes to make sense: more choices, the ability to buy insurance any time, and subsidies that follow people, not just exchange plans.

Voters understand that setting up ObamaCare exchanges will put states on the hook for the high operating costs to run those exchanges. They recognize that doing so will put more employers and individuals at the mercy of the IRS as it enforces more ObamaCare mandates. And they’ve seen the disastrous rollouts other states have experienced in setting up those exchanges. This is a problem created by the federal government. They don’t expect or want states to bail out Congress to vote against their state lawmakers the next time they’re up for re-election if they set up a state exchange.

But why, if Congress was so bad at setting up Obamacare in the first place, would it be so good at fixing it? And that’s true even though the first feat was accomplished by Democrats and the second would be performed by Republicans, because we know that the latter aren’t necessarily so great, either (boy, do we know it). Another thing the poll indicates is that respondents still seem wedded to subsidies, they just want them to not be tied so closely to policies sold on an exchange.

Those who say Republicans have no plan are right in that they have no unified and universally agreed-on plan, but they certainly have no lack of plans, plural. A new one was recently outlined by Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy, who is a doctor. The entire article is worth reading, but here’s an excerpt (and I think Cassidy’s statements are interesting not only for his plan itself but for the reasoning behind it):

Freshman Sen. Bill Cassidy (R., La.) wants the GOP to start thinking like the left.

In proposing the Patient Freedom Act, Cassidy believes he is doing just that””slowly chipping away at Obamacare by bringing federalism back into the health care system and getting the federal government out.

“Of course it would be wonderful [to repeal Obamacare now],” Cassidy told the Washington Free Beacon. “But as Paul Ryan says, President Obama is not going to sign a repeal of Obamacare.”

“The left was really good for decades””they were pushing, and pushing, and pushing [for health care reform],” Cassidy said. “We’re impatient. We want it all at once.”

“I think we have to be as strategic as they,” he said. “Plant those seeds, water, show people our alternative, and inch back.”

Cassidy…narrowly focused his bill to be a response to a ruling in favor of Burwell, which would take away subsidies in states that are operated by the federal exchange….

The Patient Freedom Act would give states the option of keeping Obamacare by establishing a state-based exchange, or using existing funding to provide tax credits to create Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) for the uninsured, averaging $1,500 per person.

“We are trying to give the state an option other than setting up an Obamacare exchange,” Cassidy said.

“The president, I’m sure, will make it easy [to set up a state exchange], because he wants his law to take root,” he said. “If we don’t have a better plan, it will take root.”

If states chose Cassidy’s option, they could do away with various mandates under Obamacare, including the individual and employer mandates and requirements for minimum essential coverage. The legislation would also equalize tax treatment, and require health providers to publish cash prices for services reimbursed from an HSA.

Price transparency would enable patients to know the price before booking an appointment for medical services such as a CAT scan, which Cassidy said can range between $100 and $2,500 depending on the time of day…

Cassidy’s bill borrows from other Republican alternatives to Obamacare in Congress, such as Rep. Tom Price (R., Ga.), whose replacement plan also offers tax credits. Cassidy said his is the only plan that would solve the gap in coverage if the Supreme Court does away with Obamacare subsidies.

Note also Cassidy’s statement about Obama wanting his law to “take root.” That’s exactly the sort of thing that happens with entitlements—they take root, and the roots are thick, deep, and tangled. Good luck pulling them out.

[* NOTE: One thing I noticed about the poll is that the demographics are based on the voting in the 2014 election. But the 2014 election was atypically small and atypically Republican, so the poll probably skews to the right.]

I was thinking…

The New Neo Posted on by

…how relatively quiet Obama has been lately in terms of news.

For years and years there have been daily outrages from him, new initiatives or statements that have made the blood of all conservatives boil.

Lately, not so much.

It occurs to me that—although I don’t think those things are over, not by a longshot—he may be resting a bit and viewing the fruit of his labors. After all, the transformation of America that he envisioned has been largely accomplished. The voting public has moved left. Government dependence has increased. The power of the federal government has increased. The newer Democratic candidates are more radical than ever before, and radicalism has been mainstreamed. Race relations have reached a new low for this century. Our standing in the world, the trust our allies had in us, and the fear our enemies had for us, have all been greatly undermined.

He must think he richly deserves a little bit of rest.

[NOTE: And yes, I’m well aware that Obama’s doing plenty right now under the radar. He’s not really resting, nor are his supporters. They actually never rest, although they probably sit down now and then.]

Our changing moral judgments

The New Neo Posted on by

graduate

More Americans are finding certain behaviors morally acceptable that are still widely considered unacceptable. In other words, approval (though still low) of these behaviors has been creeping up:

While a select few actions remain deeply taboo for much of the country, there has been an increasing shift to moral acceptability for some of these over time. Such actions include suicide (which 19% of Americans call “morally acceptable”), polygamy (16%) and cloning humans (15%).

Will they follow the route of once-disapproved-but-now-widely-approved behaviors such as premarital sex or gay/lesbian relationships? Or will they continue to remain in the dungeon like—and the low score of the following may surprise you, as it did me—adultery, which remains in the basement?:

On the other hand, “married men and women having an affair” has remained at the bottom of a list of 19 moral behaviors Gallup has measured, with only 8% considering it morally acceptable.

Not only is adultery at the bottom of the list, but I would wager it’s the most highly disapproved behavior that is most widely engaged in.

Or is it? Researchers have long had trouble gauging exactly how much hanky-panky is going on within marriage, but there are indications that it’s less widespread than commonly thought:

Taken together, in any given year, it looks like the actual likelihood of your relationship suffering from cheating is low ”” probably less than a 6 percent chance.

But over the course of your entire relationship, the chances of infidelity may rise to as much as 25 percent. Twenty-five percent ”” over the course of an entire relationship ”” is a far cry from the 50 percent number we hear from many so-called professionals and services trying to sell you something.

And to put cheating into perspective too, the relationship (or one of the people in the relationship) needs to be lacking in something.

Well, that’s a pretty low bar. Who isn’t lacking in something?

Another interesting fact is that these days, adultery is the only behavior on the list that is considered highly unacceptable (approval under 20%) by Americans 18-29; only 10% in that age group say it’s okay. That figure is similar to the disapproval rates in other age groups.

Most Americans now have no problem with out-of-wedlock births, at least in the moral sense (I’d guess there’s more practical disapproval than moral disapproval at this point, but the survey didn’t ask about that). This Gallup article from 2013 tracks some of the changes in a host of areas since around 2000, and it has been huge.

But most of the more recent changes in a 2014 poll have been among Democrats rather than Republicans. In other words, those who perceive that Democrats have moved more to the left, at least on the social dimension, are correct. The right has stayed surprisingly stable:

In the 12 years Gallup has asked this overall question, Democrats have become significantly more tolerant on many issues, while independents generally show a smaller shift in the same direction and Republicans’ views have changed little. The percentage of Democrats who say an issue is morally acceptable has increased for 10 issues, including abortion, sex between an unmarried man and woman, extramarital affairs, cloning humans, divorce, cloning animals, suicide, research using stem cells from human embryos, polygamy, and gay and lesbian relations.

In some cases, the change among Democrats has been substantial. For example, in 2003, 52% of Democrats said having a baby outside of wedlock was morally acceptable, and 40% of Republicans and 61% of independents agreed. This year [2014], 72% of Democrats, a 20-percentage-point increase, say it is morally acceptable. Meanwhile, Republicans have seen no change, with 40% still saying it is morally acceptable, although a higher 50% viewed it as morally acceptable last year. Independents have also not seen a change, with 60% saying having a baby out of wedlock is morally acceptable this year.

Republicans are slightly more accepting of gay and lesbian relations, sex between an unmarried man and woman, and divorce than they were in 2001, when these questions were first asked. Independents’ views on the first two issues (but not divorce) also have seen small shifts, but neither group has seen changes as drastic as those among Democrats.

I find that exceptionally interesting. However, we don’t know whether Republicans have toed the line, or whether those who used to call themselves Republicans but who shifted to the more accepting point of view have shifted their political allegiance to Democrat as well, leaving the more socially conservative within the Republican camp.

Generally, the changes have been among the old as well as among the young, so it’s not just the relentless drumbeat of the left in the school system that’s causing the shift.

If you were to track approval/disapproval of these things over a much longer time frame, my guess is that you would detect a slow increase (such as is now occurring with polygamy, for example) and then a sudden surge of approval, until it reaches a critical mass and the behavior is no longer considered a problem. That’s what probably happened with birth control, which now has the highest acceptance of all: in 2014, 90% had no moral problem with it.

Will acceptance of polygamy follow a similar sharply upward trajectory, or will it go the way of adultery, which has hardly changed in its approval figures over recent years?