Yahoo email…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is driving me crazy. It seems to be malfunctioning at the moment.

And I know, I know—a lot of you will tell me to go to Gmail, because it’s so much better. I have a Gmail account, too, and have had it for years, but something about the way it functions seems counterintuitive and awkward to me. I much prefer Yahoo—and Yahoo Classic, at that.

I get very set in my ways.

Right now I’m also transitioning from my Mac back to a PC: a Lenovo Thinkpad. I really like the keyboard and the lightweight sturdiness, but since I haven’t used a PC in ages I’m having to get used to Windows 7. And lots of other things.

For those of you who wonder why a got a PC instead of a Mac, the answer is here.

Literary leftists: Will Durant

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[NOTE: This is another installment in my series on literary leftists.]

You may know Will and Ariel Durant as the authors of a series of books on world history called The Story of Civilization, which I read one long-ago summer when I was bored and found myself in my in-laws’ house, which had the entire set. If you know something about their lives, you may also know that they met and married under rather suspect circumstances, to say the least, (the Durants, not my in-laws) although they had a very long and apparently happy marriage (the Durants and my in-laws).

Will Durant was a political changer, or perhaps you might say a half-changer or a partial-changer. In the Durant’s dual autobiography, entitled (appropriately enough) A Dual Autobiography, Will writes about his change experience. Although he remained a liberal to the end of his days, he had started out as a rabid socialist. Here’s the reason he gives for his change, which occurred when he was in his late 20s to early 30s and a student at Columbia:

I think it was my studies at Columbia University, as well as my slowly rising income, that diluted the wild radicalism of my 1914 letter to the New York Call into the mild liberalism of my pro-Wilson stand in 1916. The biology courses did most to sober me—though they merely expanded what I might have learned from Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1905. They forced me to recognize the social and political implications of the inescapable, omnipresent struggle for existence. Now I saw that struggle not merely in plants and animals, but as well in the competition of man against man, of woman against woman, of class against class, of state against state, of religion against religion, of idea against idea; competition is the law of life. In this view the socialist call for a warless and classless society seemed doomed by the processes of nature and the resultant nature of man.

Moreover, the study of psychology indicated that variety and inequality are rooted in the needs and method of evolution as a survival of advantageous differences in the struggle for existence. Almost every organism differs from every other; two peas are never quite alike. All men are unequal, even at birth, in physical qualities and mental capacities; and congenital superiorities combine with environmental differences in developing acquired inequalities. In every society the majority of abilities lies in a minority of men; so, in every society some concentration of wealth is natural, and grows with the complexity of the economy and the unequal value, to the community, of diverse talents in its individuals. In light of these ABC’s, it became clear to my budding brain that the communist ideal of equal reward and a classless society is impossible, and that socialism would have to reconcile itself to a considerable inequality of possessions and power…

Durant rejected communism because it did not hold up to the light of scientific observation of human behavior. But he could not go the whole way towards conservatism, because abandoning the dream was too much for him. He compromised and adopted the “hope that the proximate aims of socialism might be realized sooner, and with less turmoil, if socialists should carry on their campaigns within the Democratic Party.”

In 1932 Will and his wife Ariel (whose Jewish emigrant parents had come from Russia, and whose original name was Ida Kaufman) visited Russia. They still hadn’t given up their hopes for the leftist cause and Russia itself, whose revolution Durant had greeted with joy and optimism, despite his hard-learned lessons at Columbia. But once again, reality won out:

We became increasingly uncomfortable during our twenty-four days in Moscow. The inhabitants were glum in the vise of the Man of Steel; voices were hushed in fear of omnipresent spies; all publications were censored, elections were fixed, every air wave proclaimed the virtues of the state…

So we, who had come to Russia singing hymns to the great experiment, were glad to leave the scene of shattered hopes and broken men…Miserable and happy, we fled from paradise.

Durant went on to write a book about his experience, and he has something interesting to say about that, too [emphasis mine]:

I had written…several articles about our trip. My literary agent, the genial and enterprising George Bye, tried to dispose of these to Harper’s Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly; both of these rejected them on the ground that they would alienate too many readers; for Russia, in our Depression years, seemed to millions of Americans the last best hope of men…The articles [I wrote] frankly called the Soviet system a dictatorship over the proletariat, and described without glamour or prejudice—but perhaps with insufficient knowledge and understanding—the achievements and failures of Communist Russia in economics, morals, manners, religion, and government. I was warned, by a well-informed editor at Simon and Schuster, that the printing of these discourses in book form would further alienate the literary fraternity, and especially the reviewers, who were sympathetic with Russia…

I will conclude with an anecdote Durant tells about his encounter with the NY Times writer Walter Duranty (after whom PJ’s Duranty Prize is named) during that same 1932 trip:

Walter Duranty was of no help; when I asked him why he was sending such optimistic reports to the New York Times about conditions in Russia, when they seemed so discouraging, he answered gaily, “You don’t take these matters seriously, do you?” He was handsome and knew Russian; half the girls in the hotel were wooing him, and he had no reason for pessimism.

Durant is way too kind to Duranty, but he still manages to convey the idea of the reporter as a self-aggrandizing sociopath.

What was it in Durant that, despite his socialism, forced him to confront the truth about his philosophy, at least every now and then when it was staring him in the face? I think it was a dose of humility, a respect for reality, an interest in the course of history, and a difficulty in closing his eyes to unpleasant facts. Not everyone had those characteristics; some were a great deal more inclined to fool themselves.

Duranty, though, seems to have been a different case. More than that final “y” differentiated him from Durant. From what I can tell, Duranty was never fooling himself; he knew he was writing lies. He wanted to fool others. And if what Will Durant wrote about the press in the 30s was correct—and I have absolutely no reason to doubt it—many of them wanted to be fooled.

“New” Egyptian crisis

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When I saw the headline for this article—“Egypt analysts warn of new political crisis brewing”—I clicked on it because I actually thought for a moment that it meant there was a new crisis brewing in Egypt.

But of course, it’s the same old crisis, building up again after what might have seemed to the casual observor to be a brief lull. Actually, this crisis has been going on for nearly a century. It is the leitmotif of Egyptian politics, and it can be roughly summarized as: will the Islamists or the military control the country?

I’m not an “Egypt analyst.” I’m not any sort of Egypt expert at all. But even a brief look at modern Egyptian history will tell you about the longevity and ubiquity of the struggle. And so it took no special insight on my part to predict, as soon as I heard the first rumblings about the revolution in Egypt, that the Muslim Brotherhood would be the likely beneficiaries.

As Khalil Al-Anani, described in the article as “a Middle East expert at Durham University,” says: “This is the beginning of another phase of the fight over the future of Egypt.” This phase is a very exciting one for the Muslim Brotherhood, no doubt. Banned by Mubarek, they get the last laugh—or at least, the most recent one:

“It would be the first time the Muslim Brotherhood ascended to the highest office in the land anywhere in the Arab world,” said Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Doha Center, a think tank in Qatar. “This would be a major (and) symbolic victory for Islamist groups across the region.”

The Obama administration appears ambivalent about the Muslim Brotherhood, which has espoused virulent anti-American rhetoric throughout the years.

I’m not sure on what that statement about Obama’s ambivalence is based. In terms of action, he appears to have done a lot to encourage the Brotherhood’s ascendence and little or nothing to discourage it. And he has a history of friendliness to the group; for example:

Obama’s first attempt at outreach to Muslims came when he chose the head of a Muslim Brotherhood-linked group that had been named an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case to give a prayer during his inauguration ceremonies…Obama specifically invited representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood to attend his notorious speech to the Islamic world in Cairo in June 2009…

Of course, Obama is caught between a rock and a hard place in Egypt, because—as in so many other third world countries—the choices there are among types of oppression. Even a neocon like me is well aware that revolution and democracy in such countries can lead to tyranny (look at Iran, if you need an example) if it is not accompanied by guarantees of human rights and liberty (see this for Bolton’s suggestions on how that might be accomplished in Egypt).

The neocon endeavor has often been ridiculed as naively promoting democracy no matter what the consequences, and/or as devoted to military endeavors to do so. But as I’ve tried to explain in many articles listed under the category “neocons” on the right sidebar, that’s a caricature that ignores the neocon caution about democracy vs. liberal democracy, and the neocon preference for non-military means. Here’s more from Bolton (and Jeanne Kirkpatrick) on the subject:

Advocating democracy and actually building it are two radically different things. Jeane Kirkpatrick’s 1979 Commentary article, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” which first brought her to the attention of prospective presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, deftly skewered Jimmy Carter’s handling of two earlier regime crises, which may have uneasy parallels with what is transpiring in Egypt. Kirkpatrick’s characteristic honesty made famous the argument that pro-Western authoritarian governments had at least the potential for a gradual transformation to democracy, something no repressive communist government had ever done. But Kirkpatrick’s thesis was more profound than simply a Cold War polemic; she explained eloquently why proclaiming support for democratic ideals in no way guaranteed implementing them successfully. Her case studies were the Shah’s government in Iran and the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, replaced, respectively by ayatollahs in Tehran and Sandinistas in Managua. We thus moved from two authoritarian, pro-US regimes to two even more authoritarian, anti-US regimes, partially thanks to Carter’s bungling. The lesson was plain.

Kirkpatrick quoted approvingly from John Stuart Mill’s magisterial essay, “Considerations on Representative Government”, in which Mill described three preconditions for such governments to succeed: “One, that the people should be willing to receive it; two, that they should be willing and able to do what is necessary for its preservation; three, that they should be willing and able to fulfill the duties and discharge the functions which it imposes on them.” Americans have their own version of this insight, a perhaps apocryphal tale occurring in Philadelphia after the secret, closed-session drafting of the Constitution in 1787. As the story goes, a woman approached Ben Franklin on the street and said, “Well, Doctor, what have you given us, a republic or a monarchy?” To which Franklin reportedly replied, “A republic, Madam, if you can keep it.”

Today’s world is filled with failed efforts at democratisation…

There is no evidence I can see that Obama knows any of this—or that if he does, he cares or sympathizes.

[ADDENDUM: Here’s some more evidence that the Obama administration seems to be interested in furthering the cause of the Muslim Brotherhood:

he Obama administration warned Egypt’s military leaders on Monday to speedily hand over power or risk losing billions of dollars in U.S. military and economic aid to the country.

As Egypt’s Islamist candidate claimed victory in a presidential run-off, Pentagon and State Department officials expressed concern with a last-minute decree by Egypt’s ruling military council giving itself sweeping authority to maintain its grip on power and subordinate the nominal head of state. The move followed last week’s dissolution of parliament by an Egyptian court.

“This is a critical moment in Egypt, and the world is watching closely,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters. “We are particularly concerned by decisions that appear to prolong the military’s hold on power.”

And I’m perplexed by this piece by Max Boot. He makes sanguine statements about things we cannot possibly know (and which seem to me to be wishful thinking), such as these:

The best bet in the long run for weakening Brotherhood authority would be to allow it to rule…As long as a Brotherhood government must face voters in the future, popular sentiment will act as a check on its illiberal tendencies…

To those like me who would say “have you ever heard of Iran?,” Boot would undoubtedly reply: oh, this time it’s different. And perhaps it is, but I see no special reason to suppose that. Boot also writes that the Egyptian people “plainly long for Western-style democracy and not an Iranian-style theocracy or a sclerotic police state.” My response is, “so did the Iranian people, and look what it got them,” and “how do you know what the Egyptian people actually long for?”]

Victor Davis Hanson…

The New Neo Posted on by

…on Securitygate:

What I call “Securitygate” ”” the release of the most intricate details about the cyber war against Iran, the revelations about a Yemeni double-agent, disclosures about covert operations in and against Pakistan, intimate details about the Osama bin Laden raid and the trove of information taken from his compound, and the Predator drone assassination list and the president’s methodology in selecting targets ”” is far more serious than either prior scandal [Watergate or Iran-Contra]. David Sanger and others claim that all this was sort of in the public domain anyway; well, “sort of” covers a lot of ground. We sort of knew about the cyber war against Iran, but not to the detail that Sanger provides and not through the direct agency of the Obama administration itself.

Here is the crux of the scandal: Obama is formulating a new policy of avoiding overt unpopular engagements, while waging an unprecedented covert war across the world. He’s afraid that the American people do not fully appreciate these once-secret efforts and might in 2012 look only at his mishaps in Afghanistan or his public confusion over Islamic terror. Ergo, feed information to a Sanger or Ignatius so that they can skillfully inform us, albeit with a bit of dramatic “shock” and “surprise,” just how tough, brutal, and deadly Barack Obama really is.

Yet these disclosures will endanger our national security, especially in the case of a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. They will probably get people killed or tortured, and they will weaken America’s ability for years to work covertly with allies. Our state-to-state relations will be altered, and perhaps even the techniques and technology of our cyber and special operations wars dispersed into the wrong hands. There is nothing in the recent “exclusive” writings of David Sanger or David Ignatius that was necessary for the American people to know at this stage, unless one thinks that we had a right to the full story of the Doolittle Raid in 1942, or that Americans by July 1944 needed an insider account of the date and planning of D-Day, or that we should have been apprised about what was really going on in New Mexico in 1944…

[In Securitygate, the] press were lapdogs, not bull terriers. The leakers were not misguided whistle-blowers, but careerist insiders. We don’t quite have an investigative press these days, but rather a Ministry of Truth put in charge of Barack Obama’s public relations…

Read the whole thing.

Spambot of the day

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SCOTUS and HCR: thinking it over

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Not yet, but soon, the Supreme Court finally will be issuing its long-awaited ruling on HCR.

When? By the end of the month, and speculation abounds.

I won’t even try to predict what will happen; I’ve discussed the legal issues with HCR many times before.

I will say, however, that I think this article in the WaPo by Robert Samuelson neatly summarizes some of the major political and economic errors Obama was making when he pushed HCR:

(1) It increases uncertainty and decreases confidence when recovery from the Great Recession requires more confidence and less uncertainty…

(2) The ACA discourages job creation by raising the price of hiring…

(3) Uncontrolled health spending is the U.S. system’s main problem ”” and the ACA makes it worse…

(4) Obama’s program also worsens the federal budget problem.

To all of this, I’ll add that the methods by which HCR was passed went a long way toward adding to the people’s outrage.

Samuelson writes:

To all the ACA’s substantive defects is now added a looming political and constitutional firestorm. Whether the Supreme Court upholds the whole law, strikes it all down or discards only parts, anger and outrage will ensue. The court may be accused of usurping legislative powers or of cowering before White House intimidation. The ACA has become an instrument of the political polarization that the president regularly deplores.

Ah, but I would assert that although Obama “regularly deplores” it, he actually welcomes it. He would like it even better, of course, if everyone just agreed with him. But even Obama’s narcissism must recognize that’s not likely, and so the next best thing is political polarization and anger. All true Alinskyites would be proud.

And of course, Cloward and Piven would say that Samuelson’s four points are a feature, not a bug.

[NOTE: While researching this post, I came across a very curious article.

It’s curious not in that the writer uses her own personal tale of woe to highlight the callous cruelty of those who would challenge the HCR law. It’s curious in that it ignores and/or misstates several rather obvious facts—although, come to think of it, that’s not really so very curious either, is it?

The author is a young woman in her 20s named Selene Soria who claims that she is in constant pain because she lacks the money to pay for her wisdom tooth extraction which will cost $20,000. Now, the cost of everything has gone up in recent years, but there’s no place in the US where a wisdom tooth extraction would be anywhere near that figure. Even $2,000—which could be what Soria meant, because what’s a zero here and there—would be quite high for that particular procedure.

What’s more, Soria is already a Medicaid recipient. What led her to qualify for that benefit remains unspecified, but she is adamant that it should include dental as well. What’s more, it might end up doing so:

In the medical program that provides me with a caretaker and other services for other medical problems, I have a social worker assigned to my case. She has been trying to get the approval from the state so that I can use some of the funds allocated to my case to pay for my dental procedure.

The process started back in September of last year and last month I was notified that all the paperwork required for approval was sent to the state. All I had to do was wait and that is what I have been doing. In the meantime, the pain comes and goes.

I bet that to a lot of middle class people that sounds like a pretty good deal.

But that’s not all. Soria seems to be unaware that dental benefits are not included in HCR. Nor does she seem to know that regular dental insurance does not always cover wisdom tooth extraction.]

Juliet Poynz, changer?

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About a week ago marked the 75th anniversary of the disappearance of Juliet Poyntz. She’s hardly a household word, but her story is not atypical of those highly-placed Communists who turned on their former colleagues.

Poyntz was a Barnard history professor and one of the founders of the American Communist Party, who worked for a while for the prototype of the KGB. Like many others (but not enough others), she became disillusioned with Communism during the 30s when Stalin’s excesses became more obvious. She disappeared not long after that, and the case has never been solved.

Fast forward to now. Kevin Higgins is a contemporary Irish poet who, like so many other poets, started out on the far left—but unlike most of them, he’s moved somewhat rightwards. Although it’s only “somewhat” rightwards, “somewhat” is way too much for many on the left, and as a result he has dealt with some ire from former fellow travelers.

Although I “know” Higgins, I’ve never met him; we’ve corresponded from time to time (one of the best perks of the blogosphere is hearing from people such as Higgins). He’s written the following poem in remembrance of Juliet Poyntz’s disappearance:

WHEREABOUTS
for Juliet Poyntz (1886-1937)

You deliver envelopes
you must under no circumstances open
to men whose names you never ask
in hotel lobbies in Baltimore, Copenhagen,
Shanghai”¦ No one you know has seen
you in three years. On a New York street

you happen upon an old friend, you used to
like to disagree with ”“ those
big opinioned, diner nights
you can’t quite forget ”“ talk over
your new found
disgust: the white-walled cells
into which you’ve seen people
you call ”˜comrade’ one by one vanish
to be kept awake all night
and confess
under extreme electric light. Over coffee
you are full of
the book you’re planning to write.

Already evening. Earlier today,
at a chateau in central France,
Edward married Mrs Simpson.
You leave your room at
353 West 57th Street
to buy The New York Times
or some Lucky Strike
cigarettes. No luggage
nor extra clothes. Behind you,
everything you own.
A solitary candle
still burning.

Buried in the upstate woods
or smuggled aboard a tanker bound for
Archangel, Leningrad, Vladivostok”¦
You are never heard of again.

Happy Father’s Day

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This a slightly edited version of a previous post of mine.]

It’s Father’s Day. A sort of poor stepchild to Mother’s Day, although fathers themselves are hardly that. They are central to a family.

Just ask the people who never had one, or who had a difficult relationship with theirs. Or ask the people who were nurtured in the strength of a father’s love and guidance.

Of course, the complex world being what it is, and people and families being what they are, it’s the rare father-child relationship that’s entirely conflict-free. But for the vast majority, love is almost always present, even though at times it can be hard to express or to perceive. It can take a child a very long time to see it or feel it; but that’s part of what growing up is all about. And “growing up” can go on even in adulthood, or old age.

Father’s Day—or Mother’s Day, for that matter—can wash over us in a wave of treacly sentimentality. But the truth of the matter is often stranger, deeper, and more touching. Sometimes the words of love catch in the throat before they’re spoken. But they can still be sensed. Sometimes a loving father is lost through distance or misunderstanding, and then regained.

There’s an extraordinary poem by Robert Hayden that depicts one of these uneasy father-child connections—the shrouded feelings, both paternal and filial, that can come to be seen in the fullness of time as the love that was always, always there. I offer it on this Father’s Day to all of you.

THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house.

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Dance: three genres

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A friend sent me two videos of the precocious preteen dancer, Israeli Gaya Bommer.

The first featured Bommer in the sort of weird, techno, robotic, gymnastic sort of choreography that’s known as “contemporary” but that I don’t quite get and I really don’t like, although I can see she’s technically accomplished. The second shows her remarkable versatility, because it features classical ballet of a very traditional sort. She is twelve years old in both of them:

I find Bommer more interesting than most young dancers today. She’s highly precocious, but in a way that’s unusual—startling technique isn’t uncommon among youngsters lately, but it’s Bommer’s presentation more than anything else that makes her stand out. Her extremely mature use of her upper body (especially head and arms), and her focus and intensity and what’s known in dance as “attack,” are usually the last things a dancer develops, and are ordinarily relatively unformed at that age. Not so Bommer.

I’ve already said that I don’t much care for the “contemporary” clip. But ballet isn’t really Bommer’s genre either, despite her considerable charm; she lacks the strongly articulated feet and extreme turnout necessary, which usually are well-developed in a female ballet dancer by Bommer’s age. And her body proportions are far from ideal for the longest and most elegant lines.

I was mulling over the question of what genre might best suit Bommer’s gifts and style (not that she’s asking me), and it occurred to me that modern dance (as opposed to “contemporary”) might be her genre. In modern dance her body proportions and feet, and her not-especially-lovely/long legs, really wouldn’t matter—and her style of attack, attack, attack and groundedness could really shine.

And then, as luck would have it, I found a clip of Bommer doing some sort of modern dance, and I think she hits it right on the nose. Hard to believe this laser focus belongs to a 12-year-old—and in fact it doesn’t, because Bommer was only 11 here:

Obama and illegals: is it constitutional?

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So, who’s right about Obama’s announcement that, at least on his watch, we won’t be deporting any more illegals who came here as children with their illegal-immigrant parents: Utah’s Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, who says it’s well within the president’s power to decide not to enforce the law, or lawyer John Yoo, he of the Bush administration, who says Obama overreached in a manner that sets a dangerous precedent?

Shurtleff (who is a Republican, as the MSM makes sure to report, although he’s atypical in that he supports the president’s general policies on immigration, not just this order) says:

Law enforcement makes decisions based on the resources available to them ”” until Congress acts, we’ll be left with too many people to deport,” Shurtleff said. “The administration is saying, `Here’s a group we could be spending our resources going after, but why? They’re Americans, they see themselves as Americans, they love this country.’”

Shurtleff added that the decision, by allowing children brought here illegally to go to school and work, could encourage them to stay out of gangs ”” which he called a “conservative” goal. He dismissed the claim that this would encourage further illegal immigration, noting that the president’s plan has a cutoff ”” you are only eligible if you came here before you turned 16 and are younger than 30, and have been in the country for at least five continuous years.

Shurtleff’s second point is short-sighted, since the encouragement of further illegal immigration could easily occur because people might understandably consider that further down the road this sort of thing could become American policy, or could at least be extended by a friendly liberal president of the future.

As for Shurtleff’s second suggestion—that Obama’s action is a perfectly acceptable discretionary decision about how best to use our law enforcement resources—I’m with Yoo on that [emphasis added]:

The president’s right to refuse to enforce unconstitutional legislation, of course, does not apply here. No one can claim with a straight face that the immigration laws here violate the Constitution.

The second exception [to the rule that presidents must enforce laws passed by the legislature] is prosecutorial discretion, which is the idea that because of limited resources the executive cannot pursue every violation of federal law. The Justice Department must choose priorities and prosecute cases that are the most important, have the greatest impact, deter the most, and so on. But prosecutorial discretion is not being used in good faith here: A president cannot claim discretion honestly to say that he will not enforce an entire law ”” especially where, as here, the executive branch is enforcing the rest of immigration law.

Imagine the precedent this claim would create. President Romney could lower tax rates simply by saying he will not use enforcement resources to prosecute anyone who refuses to pay capital-gains tax. He could repeal Obamacare simply by refusing to fine or prosecute anyone who violates it.

So what we have here is a president who is refusing to carry out federal law simply because he disagrees with Congress’s policy choices. That is an exercise of executive power that even the most stalwart defenders of an energetic executive ”” not to mention the Framers ”” cannot support.

“Cannot support”? Ha! They can, and will, if they like the outcome.

As for Obama—this act of his doesn’t surprise me. It just surprises me that it took him so long.

It sets a very dangerous precedent, as Yoo points out. And get ready for more where that came from, even if Obama is defeated. There’s always that time between the November election and the inauguration in January in which to do some mischief.