A Nation Of Men, Not Laws

Our Court system (like our regulatory bureaucracy) needs to be torn out root and branch. It is a cancer in our nation that no longer functions to maintain the rule of law. We are now a nation of men. Yesterday's two horrendous decisions by the Supreme Court offer yet more proof, if more is needed. In Texas Department of Housing v. The Inclusive Communities Project, the Court considered whether disparate impact theory can be used, standing alone, to establish racism under the Fair Housing Act. In King v. Burwell, the Court considered whether certain language in the statute limited federal subsidies to people in states that had established their own health care exchanges. Both cases involved "statutory construction."

Centuries old rules of statutory construction hold that, if a law is clear and unambiguous on its face, then the Court should construe it as written. If the law is ambiguous, than the Court has several methods to apply to construe the statute, including looking to legislative history. What the Court cannot do with any legitimacy is jettison those practices in order to insert their own policy preferences, in essence, unconstitutionally rewriting laws to suit their own ends. Yet that is what the Court did in yesterday in the above two cases that will substantially impact our nation.

In Texas v. The Inclusive Communities Project, the issue was whether disparate impact theory can stand alone as proof of racism in FHA cases. Since the 1960's, when someone dreamed up disparate impact theory, the left has seized upon it to prove institutional racism without the slightest proof of any actual racism. It is a horribly distorting theory that has been used in every possible scenario, from employment to housing to banking and many others. Indeed, it is that theory which, more than anything else, drove our nation into the Great Recession from which we have still not recovered. The theory is this - if a policy or simple selection shows that it is disparately impacting upon one of the left's victim classes, regardless if the policy is completely color blind and based on legitimate and validated concerns, such as, let's say, credit rating standards, then the institution can be held guilty of racism. No single legal theory has done more damage to our nation, nor been more abused by the left. It is not a theory that punishes racism, it is a theory that makes every business race centric and punishes legitimate standards.

In 2010, the Supreme Court held disparate impact theory unlawful in the employment context in Rici. It appeared that the Court was on its way to removing this cancerous theory from litigation. At least until the Texas case yesterday, when the Supreme Court held that disparate impact can be used in litigation against the FHA. You can read Justice Thomas's dissent beginning at page 32. The Fair Housing laws are silent on whether disparate impact can be used to establish a claim of racism. The legislative history is crystal clear that a showing of actual racism, "disparate treatment," is necessary to bring suit under the Fair Housing laws. The activist wing of the Supreme Court, this time without Chief Justice Roberts, ignored that legislative history to uphold use of disparate impact theory. What a travesty.

So the race hustlers can chalk up a huge win compliments of an out of control Court that is no longer a judicial body, but rather a highly politicized third policy arm of our government. The people the race hustlers purported to help, are not going to see it as a win, though:

Michael Skojec, a lawyer who filed a brief on behalf of Texas’s position, says what the country should be “trying to do is get people not to consider race, or think of people in racial terms”: “The disparate-impact concept encourages and requires people to think about race in every decision.” He points out that the city of Houston has over 43,000 families on its waiting lists for affordable housing, almost all of them black. But forcing the Texas Housing Authority to change its tax-credit allocations will mean that most of them will have to wait far longer to get a better place to live.

Then in yesterday's other obscenity, King v. Burwell, the activist wing of the Court, this time with Chief Justice Roberts, took it upon themselves to rewrite the plain language of Obamacare to allow the law to survive. This from Justice Scalia's well grounded dissent:

Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is “established by the State.” It is hard to come up with a clearer way to limit tax credits to state Exchanges than to use the words “established by the State.” And it is hard to come up with a reason to include the words “by the State” other than the purpose of limiting credits to state Exchanges. “[T]he plain, obvious, and rational meaning of a statute is always to be preferred to any curious, narrow, hidden sense that nothing but the exigency of a hard case and the ingenuity and study of an acute and powerful intellect would discover.” . . . Under all the usual rules of interpretation, in short, the Government should lose this case. But normal rules of interpretation seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved.

. . . .

Today’s opinion changes the usual rules of statutory interpretation for the sake of the Affordable Care Act. That, alas, is not a novelty. In National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 567 U. S. ___, this Court revised major components of the statute in order to save them from unconstitutionality. The Act that Congress passed provides that every individual “shall” maintain insurance or else pay a “penalty.” 26 U. S. C. §5000A. This Court, however, saw that the Commerce Clause does not authorize a federal mandate to buy health insurance. So it rewrote the mandate-cum-penalty as a tax. . . . The Act that Congress passed also requires every State to accept an expansion of its Medicaid program, or else risk losing all Medicaid funding. 42 U. S. C. §1396c. This Court, however, saw that the Spending Clause does not authorize this coercive condition. So it rewrote the law to withhold only the incremental funds associated with the Medicaid expansion. . . . Having transformed two major parts of the law, the Court today has turned its attention to a third. The Act that Congress passed makes tax credits available only on an “Exchange established by the State.” This Court, however, concludes that this limitation would prevent the rest of the Act from working as well as hoped. So it rewrites the law to make tax credits available everywhere. We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.

This is no longer a nation of laws. And unless the Courts, now the most dangerous branch of government, are uprooted and we start over with reforms in the nature of those proposed by Newt Gingrich, this nation will be forever dragged further and further away from the Constitutional framework drafted by our Founders into an activist nightmare.

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Wolf Bytes

Dennis Prager has a piece disagreeing with those family members of the people killed by the nutjob Dylann Roof in SC for forgiving said nutjob. I don't think that Mr. Prager quite gets the Christian doctrines. Their forgiveness is simply refusing to hold hate in their heart and to hope that the nutjob repents. That really is a refusal to allow themselves to have this nutjob power over them to effect their lives. It is not a call for releasing the nutjob or to not to have him pay for the consequences of his evil actions, which is where I think Prager misses the distinctions.

Prager also misses another distinction in the second half of his article, though I agree with most of his points in that second half. I doubt that you will find better race relations throughout the U.S. than in the southeast. There is a reason that so many blacks are migrating back to the southeast. There is a reason that the blacks in Charleston have not reacted in riots and outrage, either to this mass murder or to the police shooting of Walter Scott. Indeed, the horrible facts of the Roof's case show that he went to the Emanuel AME Church and was welcomed by the members into their Bible Study for an hour. Roof has since said that the people there were so nice to him, he almost turned away. Prager seems to be conflating the members of Emanuel Church with the race hustlers, and there he is wrong. The people of Emanuel Church, like most blacks, are not race hustlers nor reverse racists.

Have you read Michael Oren's new book, Ally? Robert Avrech gives it a good - and disturbing - review. Obama and his entire administration are anti-semitic.

First there was Rachel Dolezal:

And now we have a white Huffpo writer so caught up in white guilt that she won't reproduce because she does not want to spread white privilege. She is a true product of the teaching of grievance history and, as such, I applaud her decision. I personally think that all on the left should emulate her.

The only good thing about living in 2015 is that the insanity of the neo-Stalinist left and the fruits of their labor are now out in the open everywhere. It is no longer metastasizing in the dark, where its motives can be denied and obfuscated.

I finally found an English translation of Laudato Si here. The last time the Church weighed in on cutting edge science as a religious matter was with Galileo. It very rightfully didn't go well for the Church. I guess it is time for the Church to relearn that lesson. I wish they would require Popes to take a course in basic economics while they're at it.

I am all for free trade and agree with all of Kevin Williamson's points in his article at NRO. That said, I do not trust Obama or Republicans at this point, and I am incredibly wary about any trade deal that puts powers rightfully in the purview of our Congress in the hands of any sort of international tribunal, which apparently this proposed trade deal does in regards to certain visas.

Victor Davis Hanson weighs in on that iconic Democrat symbol, the Confederate Battle Flag. I agree with him. As a government sanctioned flag, get rid of it. Indeed, I agree with him that we should get rid of all left wing symbols of racism and separatism, such as the Black Caucus, La Raza, etc.

Thomas Sowell weighs in on why Hillary's record as Sec. of State should disqualify her from running for the President. It is a good restatement of the obvious.

Let's finish with a couple of public service announcements. One, ladies, tight jeans are solely for showing off, not for practical work. Two, I would not go to Vermont if I were you . . . at least if I expected to eat. First they gave us Bernie, now they outlaw GMO's. And then the hungry, penniless bastards will move south in search of food and gold where they will find it -- and then proceed to try to change the culture to match Vermont's. The lesson of Colorado is that we really do need to have border control, not just with Mexico, but also between functioning red states and escapees from the blue states.

But a good short reminder of the origin of the word Kamikaze and the failed Mongol invasions of Japan.

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Hillary, Rev. Brooks & The Black Vote

On Thursday, Hillary Clinton, speaking to a largely black audience in a three-quarters empty arena at Texas Southern University, made her pitch for why blacks, having voted between 85% to 90% on average for Democrats in every election for over fifty years, should continue to do so and pull the lever for her in 2016. She didn't address the problems with black poverty. She didn't address the problems of a shrinking black middle class. She didn't address black unemployment. She didn't address the high incidence of violent crime in the black community. She didn't address the horrendous educational opportunities for inner city blacks. She didn't even mention the breakdown in black families and the huge problem of unwed mothers in the black community. And to cap it all, she didn't let anyone ask questions who might raise these topics.

So just what reason could she possibly give to keep blacks voting Democrat? According to Hillary, racist Republicans want to keep blacks from voting. That and she wants to deal with the problems of black incarceration by passing a federal law to allow felons to vote. Only she and the Democrat party stand between blacks and a return to the Jim Crow policies of . . . Democrats, if you want to be accurate. And only that will solve all of the horrendous systemic problems in a large section of the black community that have gotten worse, not better, under fifty years of Democrat stewardship.

Is there anyone with an I.Q. over 50 and who is not part of the racial grievance industry who is actually buying this crap?

One person who is not is Pastor Corey Brooks who runs the New Beginnings Church on the South side of Chicago, a largely black enclave. And indeed, he has made an offer to Republican Presidential candidates to come speak at his Church -- an offer every one of them should be falling all over themselves to accept. This from the Daily Beast:

. . . “African Americans have been loyal to the Democratic Party,” Pastor Corey Brooks said. “But there is a group of African Americans that feel like the Democratic Party has not been loyal to us.”

Not far from O Block—named for a fallen gang member killed by a female assassin—is New Beginnings Church of Chicago, where Brooks sat in his office Wednesday morning laying out the case for Republican presidential candidates to visit the area.

So far, only Rand Paul already has taken him up on his offer—extended to all candidates of each party. The two walked through Parkway Gardens, an apartment complex along O Block, after Paul’s speech to his congregation.

Brooks isn’t the only person to believe a great change must occur for inner cities across the country to be able to break free from the poverty and crime that envelope them. But the pastor is looking to a different source than others for that change, one that doesn’t usually count O Block among its campaign stops: Republicans.

Look around the neighborhood that contains O Block — Woodlawn — and you’ll see why, Brooks said.

“We have a large, disproportionate number of people who are impoverished. We have a disproportionate number of people who are incarcerated, we have a disproportionate number of people who are unemployed, the educational system has totally failed, and all of this primarily has been under Democratic regimes in our neighborhoods,” Brooks said from the office of New Beginnings Church of Chicago, his own, Wednesday morning. “So, the question for me becomes, how can our neighborhoods be doing so awful and so bad when we’re so loyal to this party who is in power? It’s a matter of them taking complete advantage of our vote.”

So Brooks has mobilized.

Not only did he take it upon himself to bring Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner to New Beginnings as he ran to become the first Republican to lead the state in more than two decades, but Brooks also supported Rauner, something that didn’t exactly come roaring out of Chicago’s South Side.

And while Brooks has yet to announce publicly who he supports for president, his political leanings are well known in his church and around Woodlawn.

“They have a failing plan,” he said of Democrats. “A business owner wouldn’t allow the person who runs it to remain in charge for 50 years, constantly running it into the ground.”

But the reason he invited all active presidential candidates to New Beginnings isn’t to secure votes for the GOP, he said, but to give members of the community the opportunity to be as informed an electorate as possible.

And why not? Since the civil rights movement blacks have overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, both on the national and local levels, Brooks noted.

But the results simply aren’t there.

“They have a failing plan,” he said of Democrats. “A business owner wouldn’t allow the person who runs it to remain in charge for 50 years, constantly running it into the ground.”

A political science major at Ball State University, Brooks moved to Chicago 20 years ago from his hometown of Muncie, Indiana. In addition to his church, a bustling hub of activity that includes a spacious worship room complete with projection screens and theater seating, Brooks is preparing to break ground on a community center just across Martin Luther King Jr. Drive — without any government assistance, naturally.

When he first moved to the city he kept his political opinions to himself, not wanting to rock the boat, but after seeing a lack of progress he “couldn’t stomach it.” There is tension, he said, because growing up black on the South Side of Chicago means, for many, “You are a Democrat. Period.”

That has led to the Democratic Party taking the black vote for granted, Brooks said.

“And we don’t want anyone from any party taking us for granted.”

Across the board, it seems, Brooks is a Republican.

He spoke in strong terms about unions—“I can’t tell you how many guys come to me and tell they’re locked out of the trade unions for this reason or that,” Brooks said. “And in Chicago, the unions control everything.”

The pastor is in favor of legally possessing guns, even on the bullet-riddled South Side. And he blames the breakdown of the black family, partly due to social programs that “penalize” those who wish to marry and prevent them from continuing to receive government assistance, for the culture of violence that is so pervasive in urban areas from Woodlawn to West Baltimore.

“And that doesn’t even begin to get into the music and entertainment aspects of it,” Brooks said.

Brooks is not an anomaly, either. But overcoming the power and pressure of the Democratic Party’s relationship with the black community, despite its stance on social issues that often lean conservative, isn’t easy.

“In quiet areas,” Brooks said, “this is something we talk about.”

Some have replied to Brooks’s request to stop by his church for what he’s calling the American Urban Issues Presidential Series. While Paul is the only Republican to make the trip, so far, Brooks said he heard back from the campaigns of Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, and Bernie Sanders. . . .

Amen. Any Republican candidate who does not take advantage of this offer should not get the nomination for President, pure and simple. The cyclical and systemic problems of the black community are an obscenity in this day and age that needs to be a concern to every American. The Democrat policies, many well meaning when first adopted, have proven devastating to the black community and, as a consequence, this nation as a whole.

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Global Warming, The Temperature Record & The 97% Consensus

There's an old joke about a golfer whose best club in his bag was a pencil. So it would seem with those who are responsible for maintaining the temperature records. We've known for twenty years that they've been adjusting the historical climate data to make the records fit their theories. The latest on this is from Christopher Booker in his recent column, The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever:

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.

Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.

This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world – one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record. . . .

Following my last article, Homewood checked a swathe of other South American weather stations around the original three. In each case he found the same suspicious one-way “adjustments”. First these were made by the US government’s Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN). They were then amplified by two of the main official surface records, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) and the National Climate Data Center (NCDC), which use the warming trends to estimate temperatures across the vast regions of the Earth where no measurements are taken. Yet these are the very records on which scientists and politicians rely for their belief in “global warming”.

Homewood has now turned his attention to the weather stations across much of the Arctic, between Canada (51 degrees W) and the heart of Siberia (87 degrees E). Again, in nearly every case, the same one-way adjustments have been made, to show warming up to 1 degree C or more higher than was indicated by the data that was actually recorded. This has surprised no one more than Traust Jonsson, who was long in charge of climate research for the Iceland met office (and with whom Homewood has been in touch). Jonsson was amazed to see how the new version completely “disappears” Iceland’s “sea ice years” around 1970, when a period of extreme cooling almost devastated his country’s economy. . . .

Of much more serious significance, however, is the way this wholesale manipulation of the official temperature record – for reasons GHCN and Giss have never plausibly explained – has become the real elephant in the room of the greatest and most costly scare the world has known. This really does begin to look like one of the greatest scientific scandals of all time.

Then there is the claim that, among climate scientists, a 97% consensus exists that "climate change is real, man-made and dangerous." That number comes from a study, if it can be called that, by John Cook, a PhD student in psychology at the University of Queensland in Australia. This from Prof. Richard Tol commenting on that paper:

The 97 percent claim was taken from a study paper by Australian John Cook, Climate Communications Fellow for the Global change Institute at the University of Queensland, and his colleagues, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters in May, 2013. The paper says nothing about the would-be dangers of climate change and it counts the number of publications, rather than the number of scientists, in support of human-made climate change. Never let facts get in the way of a good story.

The paper is a treasure trove of how-not-to lessons for a graduate class on survey design and analysis: the sample was not representative, statistical tests were ignored, and the results were misinterpreted.

What was an incompetent piece of research has become a highly influential study, its many errors covered up.

Some of the mistakes in the study should be obvious to all. There are hundreds of papers on the causes of climate change, and thousands of papers on the impacts of climate change and climate policy. Cook focused on the latter. A paper on the impact of a carbon tax on emissions was taken as evidence that the world is warming. A paper on the impact of climate change on the Red Panda was taken as evidence that humans caused this warming. And even a paper on the television coverage of climate change was seen by Cook as proof that carbon dioxide is to blame.

Cook and Co. analysed somewhere between 11,944 and 12,876 papers – they can’t get their story straight on the sample size – but only 64 of these explicitly state that humans are the primary cause of recent global warming. A reexamination of their data brought that number down to 41 [emphasis added]. That is half a per cent or less of the total, rather than 97 percent.

The remainder of Cook’s “evidence” is papers that said that humans caused some climate change and, more importantly, papers that Cook’s colleagues thought said as much.

There is vigorous debate about how much humans have contributed to climate change, but no one argues the effect is zero. By emitting greenhouse gases, changing the landscape, rerouting rivers, and huddling together in cities, we change the climate – perhaps by a little, perhaps by a lot – but not one expert doubts we do. However, a true consensus – 100 per cent agreement – does not serve to demonize those experts who raise credible concerns with the state of climate research.

The trouble does not end there. Cook has been reluctant to share his data for others to scrutinize. He has claimed that some data are protected by confidentiality agreements, even when they are not. He was claimed that some data were not collected, even when they were. The paper claims that each abstract was read by two independent readers, but they freely compared notes. Cook and Co. collected data, inspected the results, collected more data, inspected the results again, changed their data classification, collected yet more data, inspected the results once more, and changed their data classification again, before they found their magic 97 percent. People who express concern about the method have been smeared. . . .

This all stinks of a canard. Even as questions arise, the left is engaged in an all out push to ensconce human caused climate change as dogma and as a primary driver of our laws and social policy. The push is on through Common Core to teach anthropogenic global warming as settled science in grades K-12. With all of the dangers we face in the foreign arena, from a newly energized China and Russia to nuclear proliferation throughout the Middle East and the continuing existential danger from radical Islam, President Obama spoke at the Coast Guard academy claiming that our greatest national security threat is climate change. With all of the horrendous issues facing the black community today in Obama's America, with growing violence, single motherhood, horrid schools and declining economic opportunities, Michelle Obama spoke at Oberlin College and claimed that climate change was the new civil rights movement.

Actually, it is hard to think of anything more perfectly designed to screw the middle and lower middle class than the many "green" policies and costs that would arise out of a full embrace of the climate change canard. That carbon tax on fossil fuels would go to feed the left, but it would act as regressive tax on all Americans. Just as it is hard to think of anything less pressing to our national security than anthropogenic climate change.

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Watcher's Council Forum: What Effect Will The Busload Of GOP Candidates Have On 2016?

Late blogging on last week's forum at the Watcher's Council. There were a wide variety of answers to the question this week, with more seeing the glass half empty than half full:

Ask Marion : I’d say the biggest immediate issue with nearly 20 Republican presidential primary candidates is logistics. Where do you put them all for the first couple of debates, before the numbers thin? How do you fit them all on one stage in the first debate set for August? Do you leave some out, including current and former governors and senators? Or do you hold two different debates in one night — with nine or ten candidates in one hour, and another nine or ten the next? And would either of those approaches be fair? Those were all questions after an earlier suggestion that Republicans might cap the first debate to nine… to twelve participants, which would mean that some prominent names might be excluded. TheNational Journal reports that the Republican National Committee (RNC) is now walking back the talk about a cap.

On the flip side, the Republican bench is deep and wide giving America some real choices while the Democrat Party has Hillary… yesterday’s politician, equally old and problematic Elizabeth Warren, old self-avowed socialist Bernie Sanders and a couple stragglers.

I say the greater issues for the GOP are:

The Republicans’ lack cohesiveness and a strategy, plus they have let the Dems get far ahead of them in the use of technology, however often underhanded, in getting out the vote!

Plus the Republican Establishment, who runs the RNC, favors the moderates and ignores some of the candidates that would be the true answers to America’s problems and just might be the dark horse winners.They along with the progressive media have even convinced some staunch conservatives not to follow their heart out of fear.

In today’s climate, the 2016 elections, especially after the GOP’s landslide in 2014, should be theirs, if those obstacles can be surmounted and if the base gets out to vote.

 Virginia Right! : We have a massive field of candidates already ranging from very good to very bad (in my not so humble opinion).

Having such a large number of candidates can be cumbersome, but it is good to get the ideas out all across the party spectrum. As Jeb Bush struggles in every category but money, it lets the Republicans who watch these things closely know that money may not be the deciding factor.

After 8 years of national devastation by Democrats, the last thing voters are clamoring for is another dynasty. Especially a Bush dynasty.

One of the most dramatic effects of the large field is the effect on the polls. The liberal press is positively awash in glory as Hillary tops pretty much every Republican in their “head to head” polling. But remember, these are the same pollsters that called the UK elections too close to call and completely missed the blowout for the Conservative party and let’s not forget the abysmal results of the last US election where the polls showed Democrats doing much better than they actually did.

Now toss in the huge Republican field and there is absolutely no way any “head to head” polling will produce any meaningful results. Few people are really paying attention at this point, and the responses cannot be trusted. Many Republicans will pick Hillary in a poll over a Republican candidate that is not to their liking. I’d probably pick Hillary in a poll over Lindsey Graham or Chris Christie. But I wouldn’t vote for her on election day.

And we now have O’Malley entering the race along with elderly Socialist kook Bernie Sanders. So far, the Democrats have only had Hillery to pick from. If nothing else, O’Malley will provide some of the Democrat on Democrat mud slinging that has been the mainstay of the GOP so far.

It is much too early to get too worked up on the large field. We are still 18 months away. The cannibalism has just begun. And the dialog will be interesting and enlightening as time goes by.

 JoshuaPundit : Ah hah hah hah!!! The Stupid Party strikes again. This is absolutely the Left’s dream come true.

20 or so candidates, all kissing up to the legacy media for space, all fighting tooth and nail like a pack of wild dogs for the same donor money, all saying things it will be impossible for the average low information voter to keep track of,, and ultimately boring quite a few of them. The Democrats will appear focused and centered by comparison, especially with the media helping them,

And of course, all providing oppo research,nasty quotes  and video loops free of charge to the Democrats on whomever survives the massacre. Since most of them label themselves as conservatives, one beneficiary will likely Jeb Bush. This is exactly how we would up with John McCain and Mitt Romney.

There are really only two possible bright spots I see. Hopefully we’ll be down to 3 or so serious candidates by the end of 2015. And two, if this many clowns are vying to be ringmaster of the circus, the real polls they’ve commissioned as opposed to the propaganda fed to the peasants by the media must be a lot more favorable to a Republican in the White House than we’re being lead to believe.

The Glittering Eye : The large Republican field tells us several things. Keep in mind that every U. S. senator at least at some point imagines him or herself a president-in-waiting. One of the things that the large field tells us is that there are a lot of youngish but very senior Republican senator and governors or ex-governors. That’s sometimes referred to as a “deep bench” but I think that’s overly kind.

The other thing that it tells us is that today’s Republican Party, although much more ideological than it used to be, still brings together some pretty disparate elements. Social conservatives, libertarians, and the “Republican establishment” (to the extent that there is a Republican establishment any more). That would yield a minimum of three candidates if each candidate represented only one of those elements. But they don’t. They represent combinations of those elements plus a few others so it shouldn’t be surprising that there are a lot of candidates.

As an outsider the advice I’d offer is to heed Reagan’s old Eleventh Commandment: thou shalt not speak ill of they fellow Republican. They should keep their sights trained on the president, Hillary Clinton, and the Democrats. Speaking ill of Republicans is the press’s job.

Laura Rambeau Lee, Right Reason: : What is a Republican? Looking at the cast of candidates and potential candidates running for president on the GOP ticket, very few can be considered true Republicans. Traditionally, a Republican is someone who supports free market capitalism, limited federal government, conservative social values, a strong military, and above all respects the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law.

Who among the current candidates can be counted as a true Republican? I believe this is what is hurting the party, and not necessarily the number of candidates. The big government progressives who call themselves Republicans are hurting the base and the party platform. Libertarian Rand Paul has the Young Republicans’ support for all the wrong reasons. It is becoming more and more difficult for the average voter to know where a candidate stands and that they can be trusted to keep their campaign promises once elected.

Sadly, I expect the number of candidates will hurt the party leading up to the presidential election in 2016, dividing Republican voters based on the issues most important to them. I also believe this will help propel Jeb Bush to the top of the list as the candidates drop out and throw their support, and money, behind him.

Wolf Howling : What a deep bench the Republicans are fielding this year, with sixteen people declared or expected to declare soon. It is an embarrassment of riches, and the amazing thing is that most of them are serious candidates who could in fact gain the nomination. There are just a few – Donald Trump, Chris Christie and Lindsey Graham – who, in my view, likely stand no chance. This deep field stands in direct contrast to the Democrat field of one tired old scandal ridden lady.

The problem for Republicans will be to quickly winnow the field. Inevitably, some who are worthy of consideration are going to get shafted because of limitations on who will be able to appear at the initial debates. But still, by the time the later rounds of the primaries arrive, we should have several strong candidates who have distinguished themselves from the pack. I think this is good for the party. It adds a real element of drama to the race, and that should capture national attention and most of the headlines as the primary season unfolds.

Bookworm Room: Considering how often the mainstream media cuts conservative voices out of the debate, there’s something to be said for having a wide variety of conservatives advocating their particular brand of conservativism, from Rand Paul’s loopy libertarianism (I prefer the Charles Murray variety myself) to Mike Huckabee’s old-fashioned southern Democrat demagoguery dressed up as conservativism, each of them adds something.

My fear, of course, is that Americans, rather than listening to the candidates, will tune out the tumult of voices — especially after the mainstream media gets done pillorying them as racists, homophobes, misogynists, warmongers, wacko birds, and whatever other labels it can stick on people who believe in the Constitution and believe in a constitutional America. My hope is that the most articulate voices among the crowd, such as Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or Carly Fiorina, even if they don’t prevail in the primaries, are able to turn voters on to the virtues of a true constitutional republic.

My other fear is that the big money in politics (including Left-wing groups intent upon making mischief), will keep Jeb’s candidacy afloat long enough for disaffected, confused, or disgusted voters to go for a familiar name.

Bottom line: Win or lose, these candidates have the potential to be good. They also create an irresistible target for the MSM, which will treat the Republican primary like a turkey shoot — and unfortunately, the establishment Republicans, like the pledges in Animal House, will bend over and show the target on their craven backsides:

GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD :Most likely solidify the message.

Also put an especial emphasis on Nat’l Security and Foreign Policy. Iowa will tell the tale – a culling if ye will – getting the top tier cats on the top tier. For now – the more the merrier!

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The Immutable Economic Law Of Bark & Demand

Keep raising the minimum wage and business owners will either go out of business, automate, or seek alternatives to employees priced beyond the actual value of their employment. If you don't understand the concepts, Kevin Williamson provides a good primer here, written with Bernie Sanders and his supporters in mind. Regardless, you can see the impact below:



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Egyptian TV: Is Obama Trying To Destroy America?

Actually, between the Iran deal, his decisions regarding our military, and his latest claim that climate change is our greatest national security threat, asking where Obama is trying to destroy America is not at all an unreasonable question. Unfortunately, you won't find this panel appearing in our MSM.



The clip is a translation provided by MEMRI.org.

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The Left's New Definitions Of Racism & Rape - It's All About Feelings

In this country, we live in an era virtually free of mainstream racism, just as we live in an era of relative gender equality (speaking of only two genders now) and of vastly declining violence against women. Yet if one were to believe the left, America today is rife with racism manifesting itself in countless microaggressions. Likewise, according to the left, there is a war on women being waged in America, one aspect of which is "rape culture," particularly on college campuses, where women are being subject to sexual assault by evil white men on a scale to rival the incidence of rape in the war torn Congo. Both claims, incredibly destructive to society as well as to individuals who get caught up in their web, are wholly disconnected from reality. So why is the left doing this, and how is the left justifying these canards?

In regards to both microaggressions and claims of rape culture, the left is taking this incredibly damaging tack because they want to balkanize America, and as part and parcel thereof, to keep minorities and women feeling as if they are under siege. With respect to race, this has been the playbook for over the past half century. When it comes to the modern radical feminists, however, there is a far more ambitious goal - to punish men as a whole and do away with societal norms of sex and family.

How they are trying to accomplish this is likewise obvious - do away with any objective standards for defining racism or rape. No longer is an actual act of racism necessary to sustain claims of racism. No longer is an act of rape or sexual assault necessary to sustain claims of rape or sexual assault. It is all now about the subjective feelings of the "victim."

This from Jim Goad in his article, Land of 1000 Microaggressions:

If a person of color feels offended by something a well-meaning white person said and no one knows they’re offended, is it still a hate crime?

This is the implicit question posed by the very idea of “racial microaggressions.” The concept seems to have been formulated by the racial-grievance industry to fill the savage dearth of truly aggressive acts committed by whites toward nonwhites over the past few generations.

In other words, if what used to be known as “racism” no longer exists, you have to greatly expand the term’s breadth so that it includes words, thoughts, and acts that have zero conscious hostility behind them. You have to make everything racist just to stay in business. . . .

Even if you have no hatred in your heart for a person of color and even if you make the most obsequious gestures of appeasement toward them, you are still hurting them and acting racist toward them because, well, you’re white, and that’s what you people do.

That’s what’s ultimately dangerous about this concept of “microaggresions”—even the demented fanatics who insist that such things actually exist will concede that the perpetrator may not harbor or exhibit any malice whatsoever. They may not even be the least bit conscious that they are being horrid bigots. Under this framework, bigotry is solely in the eyes of the accuser. No matter how pleasant your demeanor or how generously you act, you can still be bludgeoned over the head with baseless accusations of unconscious racism, and your accuser will feel like a good person for doing it.

I can’t imagine the agony of being a person of color on a college campus these days, what with all the microaggressions, microinsults, microinvalidations, microassaults, and especially all the microrape. Why, it’s enough to make a person of color want to drop out of college entirely. . . .

The study bears the catchy title of Racial microaggressions at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Voices of students of color in the classroom. I highly recommend it as the finest comedic document I’ve seen so far this year.

Sponsored by the University of Illinois Racial Microaggressions Project and conducted by a specially appointed “Racial Microaggressions Team” whose associates have colorful first names such as Efadul, Shinwoo, Tanisha, Sang, and Artesha, the study concludes that it really, really, really, really sucks to be a person of color on campus these days.

For example, a robust two-fifths of the online study’s respondents claimed they “felt uncomfortable on campus because of their race.” . . .

Some sample testimonials from the POCs who claim to have been microaggressed upon:

People do not necessarily say I do not belong, but I feel as if I do not when I am in a classroom and I am the one non-White person. (Latina, Female) . . .

Do read the entire article.

And if the testimonial in that last quoted paragraph sounds familiar, it should. Not but a few weeks ago, no less than Michelle Obama, a woman who has led a truly charmed life and now sleeps in the White House, gave a speech noting how victimized she felt by, what in so many words, were microaggressions. She even went so far as to note that she, as a minority and like all minorities, felt very uncomfortable going into museums and other places of culture in America.

For another outrageous example, thoroughly explored by Heather MacDonald in The Microaggression Farce, there is the case of UCLA Professor Val Rust. He committed the racist microaggression of "correcting the capitalization, grammar and punctuation of a minority student's paper." This from Ms. MacDonald describes the insanity:

Val Rust’s dissertation-prep class had devolved into a highly charged arena of competing victim ideologies, impenetrable to anyone outside academia. For example: Were white feminists who use “standpoint theory”—a feminist critique of allegedly male-centered epistemology—illegitimately appropriating the “testimonial” genre used by Chicana feminists to narrate their stories of oppression? Rust took little part in these “methodological” disputes—if one can describe “Chicana testimonials” as a scholarly “method”—but let the more theoretically up-to-date students hash it out among themselves. Other debates centered on the political implications of punctuation. Rust had changed a student’s capitalization of the word “indigenous” in her dissertation proposal to the lowercase, thus allegedly showing disrespect for the student’s ideological point of view. Tensions arose over Rust’s insistence that students use the more academic Chicago Manual of Style for citation format; some students felt that the less formal American Psychological Association conventions better reflected their political commitments. During one of these heated discussions, Rust reached over and patted the arm of the class’s most vociferous critical race–theory advocate to try to calm him down—a gesture typical of the physically demonstrative Rust, who is prone to hugs. The student, Kenjus Watson, dramatically jerked his arm away, as a burst of nervous energy coursed through the room.

After each of these debates, the self-professed “students of color” exchanged e-mails about their treatment by the class’s “whites.” (Asians are not considered “persons of color” on college campuses, presumably because they are academically successful.) Finally, on November 14, 2013, the class’s five “students of color,” accompanied by “students of color” from elsewhere at UCLA, as well as by reporters and photographers from the campus newspaper, made their surprise entrance into Rust’s class as a “collective statement of Resistance by Graduate Students of Color.” The protesters formed a circle around Rust and the remaining five students (one American, two Europeans, and two Asian nationals) and read aloud their “Day of Action Statement.” That statement suggests that Rust’s modest efforts to help students with their writing faced obstacles too great to overcome.

The same subjectivity now used to find racism rampant throughout our nation is equally apparent in the claims that our nation is involved in a "war on women," part of which is "rape culture." These claims come from radical feminists running the women's studies programs in our nation's ivory towers. Robert Stacey McCain, who has quite literally written the book on modern radical feminism - Sex Trouble - explains:

Once we go beyond simplistic sloganeering about “equality” and “choice” to examine feminism as political philosophy — the theoretical understanding to which Ph.D.s devote their academic careers — we discover a worldview in which men and women are assumed to be implacable antagonists, where males are oppressors and women are their victims, and where heterosexuality is specifically condemned as the means by which this male-dominated system operates.

Feminist professor Camille Paglia was sounding the alarm bells about this twenty years ago. This from her 1995 interview with Playboy:

The women's movement is rooted in the belief that we don't even need men. . . .

It's a mess out there. Men are suspicious of women's intentions. Feminism has crippled them. They don't know when to make a pass. If they do make a pass, they don't know if they're going to end up in court. . .

. . . [Y]ou can't have the Stalinist situation we have in America right now, where any neurotic woman can make any stupid charge and destroy a man's reputation. If there is evidence of false accusation, the accuser should be expelled. Similarly, a woman who falsely accuses a man of rape should be sent to jail. My definition of sexual harassment is specific. It is only sexual harassment--by a man or a woman--if it is quid pro quo. That is, if someone says, "You must do this or I'm going to do that"--for instance, fire you. And whereas touching is sexual harassment, speech is not. I am militant on this. Words must remain free. The solution to speech is that women must signal the level of their tolerance--women are all different.

Far too many people still view the modern feminist movement as merely one seeking fair and equal treatment with men. That was true of feminism until the late 60's when, just like the civil rights movement, it was co-opted by our modern neo-Stalinist left. But these truly radical and insane interpretations of feminism - that our society is inherently discriminatory against women, that white males are the implacable oppressors of women, and that all heterosexual sex is rape - was still largely confined to corners of the ivory tower until recently. Thus, in 1995, when Prof. Paglia was sounding her warning, it was easy to dismiss her. Not so any longer. These utterly toxic views are now mainstream and driving policy throughout our government and in academia.

To justify their claim of "rape culture," the radical feminists rely on bogus statistics. This from Ashe Schow:

The doom-sayers began with the statistic that 1 in 5 college women will be sexually assaulted to get their foot in the door. They screamed from the mountaintop that any woman in college will probably be raped any day now. Not in India, not in Iran, not in South Africa, but here. In America. On campus.

Using that false statistic (most are at least intelligent enough now to stop using it), activists began a crusade to right the injustices of the past (and potentially present) by swinging the pendulum to the other side. This, not surprisingly, has created a new problem of male students losing their due process rights and being treated as guilty until proven innocent.

But 1-in-5 isn't the only statistic being used to create these new policies. Now that the issue is consistently in the news, other statistics with equally dubious origins are cropping up.

One is that only 2 percent of rape accusations are false. This factoid traces back to a single source (Susan Brownmiller's 1975 book Against Our Will), which in turn cites a police officer talking about a study that no one has been able to find. But from this dubious claim springs the dogma that one must therefore believe all rape-accusers to be true victims.

Couple the notion that all accusers must be believed to another statistic — that relatively few men commit the majority of sexual assaults — and the prevailing logic becomes that anyone accused of sexual assault must immediately be treated as a serial rapist, because they likely are or will be.

This is how we get to a culture where an accusation is all the evidence needed in campus disciplinary hearings — and evidence and witnesses telling a different story are discounted.

With due process sacrificed, what the feminists have accomplished is to redefine rape and sexual assault so that they no longer require objective acts of rape or sexual assault. It is enough if, post coitus, a woman feels like she should not have engaged in the act of sex and wants to claim rape. Men are guilty until proven innocent.

Moreover, this view of heterosexual sex as rape is being written into black letter law:

California’s “yes means yes” law turns the idea of sexual consent upside down. Suddenly, nearly all sex is rape, unless no person involved reports it as such.

Consent, under the California law that is spreading to other American universities, is required to be “ongoing throughout a sexual activity and can be revoked at any time.” The law also states that “a lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent, nor does silence mean consent.” Also, previous sexual activity “should never by itself be assumed to be an indicator of consent.”

The law also states that incapacitation due to drugs or alcohol is considered nonconsensual. In theory, one could imagine that meaning black-out drunk or visibly not in control of one’s actions. But in practice, even having one or two drinks hours before sexual activity can constitute "too drunk to consent."

By this definition, the only sex that isn’t rape is sex where consent can be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt for every stage of the activity. Sure, that sounds reasonable, but the fact that one of the bill’s sponsors doesn’t know how anyone could prove consent tells you a lot about the bill.

The left's goal, to make and keep America balkanized, can only be sustained by taking away objective standards. How incredibly damaging it is to teach people that they are to view the world through the hypersensitive lenses of their gender or skin color, and that they are indeed being victimized if they simply feel that way. At this point, one could say the left's efforts with microaggressions and "rape culture" have reached the level of farce, but there is no humor in this game where the costs of the left's canards are so damaging to this nation. And there is no doubt that the groups hurt most are the women and the minorities who are taught that they are actually being victimized, then adjust their lives in respect of it.

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Memorial Day 2015

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Watcher's Council Forum: Who Are Your Three Favorite Heroes In American History?

Each week the Watcher's Council hosts a forum as well as a weekly contest among the members for best post. This week's forum question is "Who Are Your Three Favorite Heroes In American History?" I have been kindly invited to respond.

The first great American hero is our deity, God, or at least our relationship to him through religion. Rev. Jonathan Mayhew was the first, in 1750, to argue that the source of our British rights was God and to articulate a doctrine that can be summed up in the phrase "resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." His writings spread throughout the colonies and were adopted in various forms by most of the "dissenting" religions. When, in 1775, Boston royalist Peter Oliver wrote of the causes of the Revolution, he placed the blame squarely on the "Black [robed] Regiment" of clergyman who so roused the colonists in righteous defiance against the British. It is fair to say that the dissenting clergy, from Georgia to Massachusetts, played an indispensable role in driving the Revolution. To paraphrase one Hessian soldier, this was not an American Revolution, it was a Presbyterian Revolution.

As late as January, 1776, it was not clear what we intended by our fight with the British. Most colonists still wanted no more than an adjustment of our relationship with Great Britain, not an independent nation. Yet in January, 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense, the best selling book our nation has ever seen on a per capita basis but for the Bible. In it, Paine used largely biblical arguments against the divine right of Kings to rule. His arguments electrified the nation, and set us almost immediately on the path that ended less than six months later in the Declaration of Independence.

And then there were at least two "acts of God" during the Revolution that were so fortuitous and unusual as ought to leave in the most hardened atheist with a bit of uneasiness. The first was at The Battle of Long Island. The British had decimated our forces and had surrounded Washington and his 9,000 men. Had the British completed their attack, the Revolution would likely have ended there. Washington ordered a night withdrawal by boat. That night, a very unusual fog descended on the area, one so dense that soldiers said they couldn't see further than 6 feet to their front. The fog allowed the withdraw to continue through night to the dawn and after, until all 9,000 soldiers had crossed to safety.

The second "act of God" occurred as the British, in June 1776, attempted to capture the wealthiest port city in the colonies, Charleston, S.C. Had Britain succeeded, the whole nature of the Revolution would have changed. The centerpiece of the colonist's defense of Charleston was a half built fort on Sullivan's Island that the British expected to easily defeat with an infantry attack across the ford separating Isle of Palms from Sullivan's Island, a ford at low tide that virtually never exceeded three feet. Yet in June, 1776, a highly unusual wind pattern developed and, even at low tide, the water at the ford was over 7 feet deep. With the British infantry stopped cold, the fort survived the most devastating bombardment of the war even while the colonists wreaked destruction on the British ships, saving Charleston from occupation for a critical three years.

And then, of course, it was this view of God as the source of our rights that animated our Founders. Our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not bestowed by man. They are natural rights that come from God. The first and most important hero of our nation must be God.

The second most important person in American history is George Washington. People who study the Revolution call him the "indispensable man," and that he was. He took charge of an army of amateurs and led them against the world's superpower of the era. He was in an impossible situation against impossible odds.

Washington was never a great military commander. He was outfoxed all too often on the battlefield. Indeed, by December 1776, he had been beaten so badly over the preceding six months that everyone on both sides thought the Revolution was over but for the signing of surrender documents. Yet Washington, a man whose persistence and refusal to surrender was inhuman, on Dec. 25, 1776, led a beaten force of 2,500 across the Delaware River in horrendous conditions. The next morning, his soldiers surprised the best light infantry forces in America, the Hessians at Trenton, and won a victory so stunning that it literally saved the Revolution.

And while Washington's command of the Continental Army over the next seven years was critically important, it was his actions at and after the end of the war that proved of importance equal to his victory at Trenton. The history of revolutions was equally a history of successful military commanders taking power as dictator or King, from Caesar to Cromwell. But not with George Washington, who not merely voluntarily relinquished all power at the end of the war, but put an end to a revolt of officers who had not been paid.

Then it was Washington, called out of retirement, who lent his credibility to the Constitutional Convention that resulted in the drafting of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. And while all knew that Washington would be elected President - he was elected to two terms with 100% of the electoral college votes - Washington easily could have chosen to be President for life. But instead, he opted to go back into retirement after two terms. Washington was a hero and perhaps the single man indispensable to the creation of our nation.

The third choice for American hero is harder. There are so many who could legitimately take this position. Let me just give it to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The history of America's treatment of blacks is indeed a mark on this nation. Even after the end of slavery and the enshrinement of equal rights in our Constitution at the end of the Civil War, racism and unequal treatment were still rampant in this nation. Rev. King was born in 1929. He did not start the Civil Rights movement, but he became its most important voice. He shamed white America with their failure to live up to the promise of this nation, enshrined in our first Founding document, The Declaration of Independence, that "all men are created equal." Dr. King brought a moral message that our nation could not ignore, and he pushed it relentlessly, at great danger to himself, and he did so with non-violence. His speech in 1963 in Washington D.C., now known as the "I Have A Dream" speech, is perhaps the most recognizable speech in our nation's history, and rightly so. He finished the speech with a stirring call for an America where people are judged "not . . . by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

In our unique nation, Rev. King's call for equality was not only a moral clarion call, but a necessity if we are to survive as a melting pot. Since Rev. King's death, the movement he started has been wholly bastardized by the left for their own ends. That does not in any way detract from Rev. King's message, indeed, it only increases the need for us fulfill his vision.

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The Toxic Fruit Of Race Hustling - Seeing The World "Through A Glass, Darkly"

Having spent a good portion of my life in the infantry, a true melting pot of races, I never saw racism nor the toxic effects of the left's racial politics until I left the military and entered civilian life. We were brothers and sisters in arms and all Americans. Nothing so perfectly captures that as this video of a retired MSG during the Baltimore riots.



The attitude displayed by that man is pervasive throughout the military. There is no victim group mentality among minorities in the military. Tragically, the same cannot be said of our nation outside the military. Blacks in the civilian world are fed a steady diet of propaganda that they are victims of pervasive racism in this country and that any problems common to their group are all as a result of external racism. They are literally programmed to view everything in life through the lens of their skin color and to interpret anything negative that occurs to be the result of external racism. It is a deeply distorted, toxic vision of life.

Exhibit No. One, from Walter Hudson writing at PJM:

A Facebook friend of mine just set the above image as his profile cover photo. He’s an activist in the Black Lives Matter movement whom I became acquainted with while working on an election issue in my state.

I look at this picture, and the first thing I think is: Wow. That’s… that’s really offensive.

Then I look at it some more. I think about it. Then I realize that for some people, like my Facebook friend, this accurately represents how they perceive the world in which they live.

We can criticize that. We can tell them that they are wrong to view the world that way. We can insist that things aren’t as bad as an image like this makes them out to be. And we may be right. But maybe we should stop and consider how terrifying life has to get for this to become your perception.

What do we do with that? How can we have anything approaching a productive conversation about race relations and criminal justice issues when starting from such divergent perceptions of the status quo?

What do we do indeed. The left's message, that racism is pervasive in America and the single major problem blacks face in this country is believed throughout, it would seem, much of the blacks in this nation at every socioeconomic level.

Exhibit No. Two is Michelle Obama. She is a woman who sees racism in innocent events and ready to claim racism at the drop of a hat. Indeed, as Ian Tuttle points out, for Ms. Obama, and indeed, for all of the left's victim's groups, the mere feeling of alienation is taken as proof positive of it's reality. In Ms. Obama's case, racism exists because she subjectively feels it, irrespective of reality.

Michelle Obama has led a charmed life, from attending Princeton and then Harvard Law to a successful career and now to First Lady. Racism has not held this woman back. And yet, in giving the Commencement Address to Tuskesgee University last weekend, she spoke of how hard her life has been having to endure racist sleights. It was astounding.

Exhibit No. Three is Saida Grundy, newly hired professor at Boston University, who seems quite the reverse racist -- something wholly tolerated on the left. Indeed, our universities seem full of such people, who teach grievance, hatred and the canard of pervasive racism as part of a curriculum. As to Ms. Grundy:

. . . [T]he Boston Globe reported some of the tweets: "why is white america so reluctant to identify white college males as a problem population?" and "every MLK week i commit myself to not spending a dime in white-owned businesses. and every year i find it nearly impossible."

This is yet another woman who has apparently not been held back by racism, yet she sees all white males as a "problem?" Not merely is Ms. Grundy's philosophy abhorrent and insane, it is equally as abhorrent and insane that Boston University fully intends to employ this women to teach at the institution.

The left's goal is to keep America balkanized. They are certainly succeeding. And while the extinguishment of racism on any sort of appreciable scale in this country has seen significant portion of blacks in this country advance into the upper and middle class, there is a large substrata of blacks that have not:

By virtually every metric, while the lives of blacks have improved, and while many black individuals have been able to embrace the opportunities this country has to offer, a very substantial portion of blacks have not. It is obscene that, in America, some 25% of blacks live in poverty. It is obscene that, where in 1965, less than 30% of black children were born into a single parent family,that number is now over 70%. It is obscene that that 30 to 40 percent of inner city kids don’t graduate from school, and a very substantial number who do graduate are functionally illiterate. It is obscene that blacks are seven times more likely to commit violent crime than other races. And it is obscene that these problems are cyclical. Nothing the left has done for blacks has broken this cycle, and it all portends to get much worse as cities, where large numbers of blacks congregate and many of whom take public sector jobs, fall into bankruptcy and economic chaos from the failure of the blue political / economic model.

As toxic as the fruit of race hustling is on the left to keep blacks balkanized and feeling victimized by racism, the penultimate cost of that effort is being paid first and foremost by blacks themselves. And for every black in the civilian world that climbs into the middle or upper class, one has to wonder how many are held back nursing grievance politics instead of focusing on the opportunities available to them.

When the blacks rioted in Baltimore last month, doing millions of dollars in damage to the businesses and stores that serve their neighborhoods, they were acting out over perceived racial conflict with the police that led to the death of Freddie Gray. To put that into perspective, there are a host of problems affecting blacks in inner city Baltimore, from poverty to unemployment to single parent homes and high crime. Freddie Gray was one of 87 homicides having occurred in Baltimore City already this year. The reality is that a black living in Baltimore City has exponentially more to fear from other blacks than they ever have to fear from the police. Yet none of these other homicides send people out into the street or raise the community in arms to try and stop this devastation in their communities. It is only because blacks are fed a steady diet of victimhood and grievance politics that they are primed to riot, rather than address the real problems they face.

We'll give the last word to a man living in "the hood," as he describes it, Mr. Eric Thomas:

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