Can Election 2014 Put the Nation Back on Track?

By Janice Shaw Crouse

The latest Rasmussen poll, released on Monday, April 14, indicates that more than half of Americans (52%) disapprove of President Obama’s job performance; worse, 58 percent view ObamaCare unfavorably (the highest level of disapproval in several months). Congress, too, comes in for censure with only nine percent of voters thinking that the country will be better off if incumbents are reelected.  This new poll reveals continued pessimism about the economy, direction of the country and disappointment with Mr. Obama’s presidency.  In February, a CBS poll showed that almost 60 percent of Americans (59%) are disappointed in the Obama presidency, an increase primarily among independents. There is the predictable dismay over the economy, ObamaCare, and foreign policy, but the most troubling -- and revealing -- area of concern is that Americans, by a wide margin, think that the country is on the wrong track (63%, wrong direction to 32%, right direction).
One of the most difficult challenges officeholders face is a voting public that thinks the country is on the wrong track.  It’s hard for politicians and pundits alike to accurately assess the origins of such judgments. Is it because of specific policy positions? Or, because Americans don’t like what they see happening around them?  Or, is it because people feel worse off than they did before?  Too many friends out of work?  Or is it because they see too many changes coming at them too fast, and they fear for their future prospects given ever more government regulation and intrusion along with the government’s massive budget deficits adding daily to the ballooning national debt?
I think the public’s reactions can be explained pretty simply with three statements: (1) The current administration is very divisive and controlling.  Anyone who disagrees with the prevailing, doctrinaire pronouncements of the reigning elite is slurred as bigoted, extremist, and/or ignorant and stupid. (2) Americans’ freedoms have been abridged in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. (3) Further, this administration has consistently politicized government in unprecedented ways. The situation involving CBS News investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson illustrates all three points. Attkisson recently resigned from CBS because of how the Obama Administration squelches journalists. She told Howard Kurtz of “Media Buzz” that the “chilling” manipulation of the Obama Administration interferes “in ways that have never come to bear before.” Attkisson reports that the “pressure on journalists for just doing their jobs” by this administration is the “strongest and most forceful in her 20 years on air.” She says they are “particularly aggressive,” “secretive,” and “manipulative” in going over the heads of reporters to their bosses and that the president’s “interference is unprecedented.”
Even Politico, an influential leftist website, acknowledges that coming days will reveal whether 2014 will turn out to be “simply a good year for the GOP or a rout.” There is no question that the public is angry and disgusted with “politics as usual” and there is deep disappointment with President Obama, even among those who did not vote for him but hoped that the first black president would do well.
As Politico points out, this summer will be pivotal.  The Supreme Court will issue its decision on the contraception mandate and religious liberty, probably in June. That decision will be a rallying cry for both the left and right in the days leading up to the 2014 elections. As Politico put it: “Upholding the mandate would incense social conservatives” and “striking it down would give Democrats an issue to galvanize women’s groups.”
Obama swept into office as the reincarnation of FDR, an aura that is long gone; all the luster of a conquering hero was eroded in short order. The man whose charisma and persuasive abilities drew record votes from youth and minorities simply blew it -- even while he presided over an entrenched liberal power base on the Hill (whose approval ratings are even more dismal than the president’s). The president’s cool demeanor became oblivious detachment from the political climate; his oratorical skills degenerated into wooden reading of the teleprompter screens; his “yes we can” attitude devolved into tribalism and race baiting. Everything that the “progressives” thought they had “won” is turning out to be like sandcastles crumbling before an onrushing tide of voter anger. Even worse, the administration and congressional leaders are responsible for the mountain of debt that is stifling economic growth and which will be an albatross around the necks of countless generations to come. The public is showing that they feel the sacrifice of individual freedom inherent in ObamaCare is too great a price to pay. Democrats have clearly over-reached in their frantic push to expand government control over the private sector.
Who could have predicted at the outset of the Obama Administration -- when the president rivaled John F. Kennedy in popularity -- that the mid-term elections would find the Republicans favored for massive wins, despite voter misgivings about them? Even more astonishing, who would have believed that Democrats and Independents would be distancing themselves from the president whose promise of national transformation would saddle our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren with tens of trillions of dollars in debt from radical policies, reckless spending, and out-of-control government expansion -- the extent of which most of us still cannot comprehend?
For most of us, the election of 2014 is not a matter of campaigns, rhetoric, or local outcomes; instead, the results that determine who controls the Senate -- and thus supports or blocks the president’s radical destructive agenda -- boils down to a question of whether this nation will survive. Ultimately, the 2014 election will go a long way toward revealing whether we can take a step back from the brink.

Common Core's Dirtiest Trick: Dividing Parents and Children

By Bruce Deitrick Price

When you look back at New Math (ca. 1965) and Reform Math (ca. 1990), one of the most striking and persistent features was that parents could not understand the homework their children brought home.
Mystified parents were trying to advise mystified children.  The parents, presumably the wise members of the society, were helpless to say anything useful when confronted by the weird complexities of “reform” math, which has now been rolled forward into Common Core.
Here is a commonplace horror story that can stand in for millions of others: “When Mike and Camille Chudzinski tried to help their son with his homework earlier this fall, they were bewildered. The fourth-grader brought home no spelling lists, few textbooks, and a whole new approach to solving math problems. When he tackled multi-digit addition, for instance, Patrick did not just line up the two numbers and then add the columns, as his parents had been taught to do. Instead, he sketched out a graph with a series of arrows and marks that appeared at first to his parents as indecipherable as hieroglyphics.”
When we hear these stories, we typically focus on the comical oddity of adults not being able to do homework intended for children.  How is that even possible?  But the ramifications are anything but funny.  The real damage is that Reform Math opens up fractures throughout society.  Parents are cut off from their children.  Parents and schools are pitted against each other.  Students are alienated from their teachers and schools.
Sociologist James Coleman said that the most important thing in successful education is what he called "social capital."  Ideally, parents, kids, schools, and community are on the same page, working toward the same goals.  In this way the children feel they are doing appropriate and necessary things.  Energy is used to complete tasks, not to debate the merits of the tasks.
Imagine the situation in Reform Math when parents can’t do even elementary problems in arithmetic.  Adults are angry; children are stressed.  Parents have conferences with teachers, and they complain later in front of the children that the teachers couldn’t give them any satisfactory answers.  Why would children be enthusiastic about mastering something that their own parents find impossible and reprehensible? 
All of this tension and hostility adds up to the perfect excuse for the child to lose interest in math, and in school generally.  We hear lots of stories about children who are miserable at school.  We shouldn’t be surprised.
In short, Reform Math is bad not just because it doesn’t teach math; it’s bad because it’s a society-wrecker.  This is Common Core’s dirtiest trick. 
In an intelligently organized society, the schools would do everything possible to involve parents in their children’s education.  Our Education Establishment is doing the reverse.  Schools seem intent on making parents turn their backs on their children’s education.
Driving parents out of the equation means driving education out of the equation.
Today, whenever schools are not getting good results, the first excuse the Education Establishment offers is that parents don’t want to help.  This is diabolical.  The schools do everything possible to make parents give up on education, and then the schools blame the parents.
Professor Michael Toscano writes, “Educational success is also dependent upon closure between families and their schools. In the case of the CCSS, little real ‘social capital’ exists between parents and schools, because the standards were adopted out of the reach of parents and because they will remain out of their reach. This is a crucial mistake. Education must be a common good that emanates from the relations of families in a community.”
When New Math was first introduced 60 years ago and parents complained, the official propaganda was that the new methods were so sophisticated that parents simply weren’t ready for them.  Many in the community accepted the claim that children would finally benefit from being pushed in this way.  That was a mistake.  New Math was, for all practical purposes, irrational.  It soon self-destructed, and then we knew that it, not parents, had been flawed all along.
This pattern continues.  The community should use a commonsense “smell test.”  Schoolwork too complicated for parents is too complicated, period.  It’s not appropriate for children.
Common Core has embraced and recycled all the worst ideas from “reform” math.  One has to conclude that the people responsible are hopelessly incompetent or hopelessly ideological.
The more you reflect on the flood of horror stories, the more you feel that Common Core commissars must spend their time concocting ways to alienate children and defeat parents.  The basic taunt seems to be: “Hey, you parents.  You can gripe and complain and thereby look foolish in the eyes of your children, or you can cower in surrender as you learn to put up with the artificial nonsense that we have devised, thanks to millions in grants from the government (your taxes used against you).  Haha, suckers.  You can’t win.  Obama promised a fundamental transformation, and the first thing we’re going to transform is your sense of importance as parents.  You must learn that you are insignificant.”
The divide between parents and children is a far more critical issue than many imagined.  The proper priority is that homework should be specifically designed to bring parents and children together.  Common Core seems cunningly designed to do the opposite.  That’s the main reason it must be defeated.

Progressive (Leftist) Insurance

The right ideological credentials mean never having to say you’re sorry

By Victor Davis Hanson

How do you ensure that you won’t be ostracized, denounced, or fired if you are a media celebrity, captain of industry, or high public official?
For some, sexist banter is certainly no problem. Stand-up comedian Bill Maher called Sarah Palin a c–t and a tw-t, but suffered no ill consequences. David Letterman joked on air that Sarah Palin’s 14-year-old daughter had had sex with Alex Rodriguez during a New York Yankees game. There was no downside to that either. President Obama tosses around “sweetie” as he wishes. No problem with that. No one believes Barack could be condescending to women.
It is not just that sloppy speech can, with the right ideological insurance, become irrelevant. Inconvenient truths can be insured against too. Barack Obama’s female staffers make far less than do their male counterparts, at least by the quirky sort of standards that the president himself applies to others to win petty victories in his vaunted war against the war against women. Bill Clinton had sexual relations with a young staffer, in what feminists would call a classic exploitative situation of disparate power. Most such bosses would be fired for hitting on their young assistants. If Woody Allen were not insured as a left-wing filmmaker, he would have been ostracized out of Hollywood.
Racism is not necessarily a job killer either. How could it be, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid claimed during the 2008 campaign that a “light-skinned” Barack Obama spoke with “no Negro dialect.” Joe Biden, himself a candidate in that election, said of Obama that he was the “first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean.” Despite such racist drivel, a fully ideologically insured Biden was rewarded with the nomination for vice president.
No one asks Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to step down from the Supreme Court; but in a quite frightening remark, she quipped that she was surprised about the uproar over abortion: “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” Frankly, that seemed a savage thing to say, especially given the inordinate percentages of abortions among minorities and the poor. Why did an uncouth Don Imus go on forced sabbatical from radio for his racial crudity, but not, say, Stephen Colbert for his own racial buffoonery? Is it that Colbert is never dead serious in a way Imus always is? No, it’s that Colbert had taken out ideological insurance, Imus not so much.
As far as inflammatory race baiting goes, one can say almost anything one wants — with the proper ideological insurance: Collate these comments by Chris Rock (the Fourth of July is “white people’s day”), Morgan Freeman on conservative opposition to Obama (the Tea Party is “going to do whatever [they] can to get this black man outta here”), Jamie Foxx on Django Unchained (“I kill all the white people in the movie. How great is that?”), or Hank Aaron on Republicans who oppose President Obama’s policies (they’re like the KKK). Certainly racial venom is not a career ender for the fully insured. Jay-Z, a frequent White House guest, is not shy about wearing a Five-Percent Nation medallion, which reflects an ideology that considers whites inferior devils.
Insensitivity to gay concerns is supposed to be professionally ruinous. But, really, it is not either. Alec Baldwin occasionally lets loose with anti-gay slurs and seems to be doing fine. Barack Obama strongly opposed gay marriage far more publicly than did the head of Mozilla. No one asks our president to resign, or for that matter the legion of Democratic politicians who ran on the premise that marriage is properly only between a man and a woman. They all were fully covered by low-deductible ideological insurance.
Criminal activity is no barrier either. Last week, at a convention hosted by activist Al Sharpton, Attorney General Eric Holder whined to Sharpton’s audience that he and Obama have been treated unfairly, his subtext being endemic racial prejudice. But Holder’s host knows a lot about racial prejudice. At that moment, Sharpton — who concocted the Tawana Brawley mythology, defamed a district attorney, and was forced to pay libel fines for his slurs; who avoided taxes; and who helped incite a fatal race riot — was back in the news, and not for his long history of racism, homophobia, and religious bigotry.
The latest revelations about Sharpton suggest that he was an FBI informant against Mafia criminals, apparently in some fear that drug charges would be lodged against him. The fully insured Sharpton’s entire career has been predicated on racist language and demagoguery — again hardly obstacles to serial White House invitations. Holder, who called Americans “cowards” and referred to African-Americans as “my people” (try that, John Ashcroft), complained of rudeness and a general divisiveness in the country. Was he referring to Obama’s request of Latinos that they “punish our enemies” or his own racialist language? No matter: Holder pays his insurance premium quarterly with either an accusation of racism or a loud affirmation of his progressivism.
Three miscreant California Democratic state senators — two charged with multiple felonies, one convicted of them — have only recently been put on leave. They are still receiving their state salaries. Since they are left-wing and of minority status, the scandals will soon be off the front pages, and calls for their resignations will be muted.
Lisa Jackson, the former EPA director, left the agency abruptly after it was disclosed that she had created a fake e-mail persona, among other things, to give herself (a.k.a. “Richard Windsor”) an EPA award for being a “scholar of ethical behavior.” Apple rewarded such ethical behavior by giving her a six-figure income as its new environmental liaison. Note well: Had Lisa Jackson Windsor expressed doubts about man-caused global warming rather than fabricated a false identity, then she might not have landed on a lucrative Apple perch — and might have been advised by Apple’s CEO to dump her Apple stock.
Does a poor record of achievement in helping minorities get one fired? Not really. In terms of minority income and employment, Barack Obama’s five years in the White House have been an abject disaster.
Is being rich, then, a class liability? That too depends on whether you bought progressive insurance. If you are a Silicon Valley billionaire who is loudly cool, hip, and left-wing, then offshoring and outsourcing is OK. No one worries that George Soros is a European pariah speculator who was convicted of insider trading in France in 2005, or that the fully insured Steyer brothers seek to trump the Koch model of giving millions to pet political causes.
The president deplores the Supreme Court’s striking down limits on campaign donations. He can do that because he hits the 0.01 percent up for quid pro quo cash in pursuit of noble causes. John Kerry married a millionaire, then a billionaire, and then tried to avoid sales and excise taxes on his huge yacht. That was a disturbing fact, but it was not brought up on the Senate floor — in the manner that Mitt Romney was falsely accused of being a tax cheat by Harry Reid. Reid long ago took out a huge progressive umbrella policy that so far has insured him against his libelous allegations, dubious financial entanglements, and racist statements.
Perhaps the most amply progressively insured operator in the world today is Al Gore. He pays high premiums for nonstop left-wing slurs (such as suggesting that a sitting president is in cahoots with Brownshirts). Yet it pays off when someone might lodge a claim against you. Imagine the following liability and the sort of ideological insurance necessary to defend against it: First, you hype a supposed climate disaster and then offer remedies for it — with your profit margin based on the degree of hysteria you have whipped up. Second, as a big-government, green liberal guru, you sell a failed cable-television network to a carbon-spewing, Islamist Gulf sheikdom, and rush the sale to beat a new hike in the capital-gains tax rate. Third, you ignore questions about why something so worthless might be worth so much to a mostly homophobic, misogynist, and religiously intolerant Middle East monarchy.
Gore’s insurance policies guarantee that he will never be shunned as a tax-dodging robber baron eager to grab petrodollars.
Sometimes progressive insurance involves far more than just liberal rhetoric. Perceptions, however superficial, matter as well. Had George Zimmerman just insured himself by taking his mother’s maiden name and Latinizing his first name, Jorge Mesa would not quite so easily have incurred liberals’ wrath in the Trayvon Martin case. Even the New York Times would have been stumped in its crude attempts to whip up racial hatred by reinventing Zimmerman with the neologism “white Hispanic.”
A Barry Dunham would not have had the resonance with liberals that the exotically multicultural brand of Barack Obama conveys. Even a preppy-sounding President Barry Obama would have had trouble playing golf so incessantly, in a way Barack does not.
Plagiarism is usually an absolute career killer. But you can take out progressive insurance against that as well. Just ask former plagiarists Joe Biden, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Juan Williams, and Fareed Zakaria.
Instead of paying monetary premiums, one supports the proper causes, says the properly cool things, joins the right organizations, and votes the correct way, and by those means purchases a liability policy against the careless mistakes, plagiarism, offhanded lapses, sexual peccadillos, gaffes, and bad jokes that otherwise could prove ruinous.
Complain about racists with the racist Jay-Z, blast the oil companies with the petrodollar billionaire Al Gore, frolic about with a young girl in the Oval Office with Bill Clinton, copy someone else’s work with Maureen Dowd, oppose the anti-abortionists with the eugenicist-sounding Justice Ginsburg — and you will never have to say you’re sorry.
For most people in the media, entertainment, politics, sports, and academia, taking out ideological insurance is a no-brainer.

Statistical Frauds of the Left

 

Liberals’ “war on women” consists of talking points to excite the gullible.

By Thomas Sowell

The “war on women” political slogan is in fact a war against common sense.
It is a statistical fraud when Barack Obama and other politicians say that women earn only 77 percent of what men earn — and that this is because of discrimination.
It would certainly be discrimination if women were doing the same work as men, for the same number of hours, with the same amount of training and experience, as well as other things being the same. But study after study, over the past several decades, has shown repeatedly that those things are not the same.
Constantly repeating the “77 percent” statistic does not make them the same. It simply takes advantage of many people’s ignorance — something that Barack Obama has been very good at doing on many other issues.
What if you compare women and men who are the same on all the relevant characteristics?
First of all, you can seldom do that, because the statistics you would need are not always available for the whole range of occupations and the whole range of differences between women’s patterns and men’s patterns in the labor market.
Even where relevant statistics are available, careful judgment is required to pick samples of women and men who are truly comparable.
For example, some women are mothers and some men are fathers. But does the fact that they are both parents make them comparable in the labor market? Actually the biggest disparity in incomes is between fathers and mothers. Nor is there anything mysterious about this, when you stop and think about it.
How surprising is it that women with children do not earn as much as women who do not have children? If you don’t think children take up a mother’s time, you just haven’t raised any children.
How surprising is it that men with children earn more than men without children, just the opposite of the situation with women? Is it surprising that a man who has more mouths to feed is more likely to work longer hours? Or take on harder or more dangerous jobs, in order to earn more money?
More than 90 percent of the people who are killed on the job are men. There is no point pretending that there are no differences between what women do and what men do in the workplace, or that these differences don’t affect income.
During my research on male-female differences for my book Economic Facts and Fallacies, I was amazed to learn that young male doctors earned much higher incomes than young female doctors. But it wasn’t so amazing after I discovered that young male doctors worked over 500 hours more per year than young female doctors.
Even when women and men work at jobs that have the same title — whether doctors, lawyers, economists, or whatever — people do not get paid for what their job title is, but for what they actually do.
Women lawyers who are pregnant, or who have young children, may have good reasons to prefer a 9-to-5 job in a government agency to working 60 hours a week in a high-powered law firm. But there is no point comparing male lawyers as a group with female lawyers as a group, if you don’t look any deeper than job titles.
Unless, of course, you are not looking for the truth, but for political talking points to excite the gullible.
Even when you compare women and men with the “same” education, as measured by college or university degrees, the women usually specialize in a very different mix of subjects, with very different income-earning potentials.
Although comparing women and men who are in fact comparable is not easy to do, when you look at women and men who are similar on multiple factors, the sex differential in pay shrinks drastically and gets close to the vanishing point. In some categories, women earn more than men with the same range of characteristics.
If the 77 percent statistic were for real, employers would be paying 30 percent more than they had to every time they hired a man to do a job that a woman could do just as well. Would employers be such fools with their own money? If you think employers don’t care about paying 30 percent more than they have to, just go ask your boss for a 30 percent raise!

The Case for a Little Sedition

The Bundy standoff reminds us that government is our servant, not our master.
 

By Kevin D. Williamson 

 

A great deal of the discussion about the Cliven Bundy standoff in Nevada has focused on the legal questions — the litigation between Mr. Bundy and the BLM, his eccentric (i.e., batzoid) legal rationales, etc. But as Rich Lowry and others have argued, this is best understood not as a legal proceeding but as an act of civil disobedience. John Hinderaker and Rich both are correct that as a legal question Mr. Bundy is legless. But that is largely beside the point.

Of course the law is against Cliven Bundy. How could it be otherwise? The law was against Mohandas Gandhi, too, when he was tried for sedition; Mr. Gandhi himself habitually was among the first to acknowledge that fact, refusing to offer a defense in his sedition case and arguing that the judge had no choice but to resign, in protest of the perfectly legal injustice unfolding in his courtroom, or to sentence him to the harshest sentence possible, there being no extenuating circumstances for Mr. Gandhi’s intentional violation of the law. Henry David Thoreau was happy to spend his time in jail, knowing that the law was against him, whatever side justice was on.

But not all dissidents are content to submit to what we, in the Age of Obama, still insist on quaintly calling “the rule of law.” And there is a price to pay for that, too: King George not only would have been well within his legal rights to hang every one of this nation’s seditious Founding Fathers, he would have been duty-bound to do so, the keeping of the civil peace being the first responsibility of the civil authority. Every fugitive slave, and every one of the sainted men and women who harbored and enabled them, was a law-breaker, and who can blame them if none was content to submit to what passed for justice among the slavers? The situation was less dramatic during the government shutdown, but every one of the veterans and cheesed-off citizens who disregarded President Obama’s political theater and pushed aside his barricades was a law-breaker, too — and bless them for being that.

Harry Reid, apparently eager for somebody to play the role of General Dyer in this civil-disobedience drama, promises that this is “not over.” And, in a sense, it can’t be over: The theory of modern government is fundamentally Hobbesian in its insistence that where political obedience is demanded, that demand must be satisfied lest we regress into bellum omnium contra omnes. I myself am of the view that there is a great deal of real estate between complete submission and civil war, and that acts such as Mr. Bundy’s are not only bearable in a free republic but positively salubrious. Unhappily, those views are not shared by many in Washington, and, if I were a wagering sort, my money would be on Mr. Bundy ending up dead or in prison, with a slight bias in the odds toward death.

Mohandas Gandhi and George Washington both were British subjects who believed that their legal situation was at odds with something deeper and more meaningful, and that the British were a legal authority but an alien power. (Washington is not really so much closer to London than New Delhi is.) Mr. Bundy is tapping into a longstanding tendency in the American West to view the federal government as a creature of the Eastern establishment, with political and economic interests that are inimical to those of the West and its people. And it is not as though there is no evidence supporting that suspicion. The federal government controls 87 percent of the land in Nevada, something that would be unheard-of in any state east of Colorado. Uncle Sam owns less than 1 percent of the land in New York, 1 percent of Maine, less than 1 percent of Rhode Island, less than 1 percent of Connecticut, but nearly half of New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, more than half of Utah and Idaho, and is practically a monopolist in Nevada. And a monopolist is rarely a good and honest negotiating partner. The original Sagebrush rebels objected to conservation rules written by Eastern environmentalists who had never so much as set foot in the lands they were disposing of; a century and some later, people travel more, but the underlying dynamic is the same.

There are of course questions of prudence and proportion to be answered here, and though I note that he uses the very strong phrase “lawless government,” I sympathize with Mr. Lowry’s desire that both sides should follow the law. But there is a more important question here: Is government our servant, or is it our master? The Left has long ago answered that question to the satisfaction of its partisans, who are happy to be serfs so long as their birth control is subsidized. But the Right always struggles with that question, as it must. The thing that conservatives seek to conserve is the American order, which 1) insists that we are to be governed by laws rather than by men and 2) was born in a violent revolution. Russell Kirk described the conservative ideal as “ordered liberty,” and that is indeed what we must aim for — keeping in mind that it is order that serves liberty, not the other way around. And it is the government that exists at the sufferance of the people, including such irascible ones as Mr. Bundy, not the other way around.

If the conservatives in official Washington want to do something other than stand by and look impotent, they might consider pressing for legislation that would oblige the federal government to divest itself of 1 percent of its land and other real estate each year for the foreseeable future through an open auction process. Even the Obama administration has identified a very large portfolio of office buildings and other federal holdings that are unused or under-used. By some estimates, superfluous federal holdings amount to trillions of dollars in value. Surely not every inch of that 87 percent of Nevada under the absentee-landlordship of the federal government is critical to the national interest. Perhaps Mr. Bundy would like to buy some land where he can graze his cattle.

Prudential measures do not solve questions of principle. So where does that leave us with our judgment of the Nevada insurrection? Perhaps with an understanding that while Mr. Bundy’s stand should not be construed as a general template for civic action, it is nonetheless the case that, in measured doses, a little sedition is an excellent thing.

— Kevin D. Williamson is roving correspondent for National Review.

'Race card' Holder is a disgrace

Silvio Canto, Jr.

My guess is that serious Democrats have to be horrified with AG Holder's comments about being treated "different."   We are watching an Attorney General who has no respect for the office he holds. He is acting like a partisan street politician rather than the top law enforcement officer in the US!
I agree with how John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky describe AG Holder's tenure:

"A veteran Justice Department lawyer says that Attorney General Eric Holder has politicized the department in a way he hadn’t seen before. In short, “Holder is the worst person to hold the position of attorney general since the disgraced John Mitchell.”
Now in his sixth year as attorney general, Holder has increasingly tilted the department in an ideological direction. It’s one thing to emphasize President Obama’s legal priorities. It’s quite another to decide not to enforce certain federal laws — such as the ban on marijuana — or urge state attorney generals to refuse to defend local laws on same-sex marriage. Legal changes are achieved through legislation, not through a sudden whim not to enforce them. No other attorney general has acted in this manner."

And no other Attorney General has ever accused his critics of "racism".
Remember Janet Reno?  Remember how she got treated after Waco '93?  Do you recall AG Reno saying that she was being treated differently because she is a woman?  On the contrary, she took responsibility for Waco and answered questions.
How about Alberto Gonzalez, the first Hispanic AG.  Did he "whine" about being treated differently?
From "Fast & Furious" to the "IRS," AG Holder has shown a preference for his side rather than the rule of law.  He targeted Arizona but looked the other way when California & Illinois issued driver's license to people in the US without papers.
On top of that, he has accused Texas and other states of "racism" because we want to protect the integrity of the election laws.
My father once told me that you can survive corrupt politicians but not a police chief.  In other words, those entrusted to enforce the law can not be corrupt or the whole system collapses.
Frankly, President Obama could do the country, and especially his administration, a big favor by telling AG Holder to spend more time with his family and leave public service.

How to Control the IRS

By Jon N. Hall

Americans despise and fear the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS has been discriminating against, and has even persecuted, conservative groups. The IRS will soon be policing ObamaCare compliance with thousands of new agents.The IRS is no longer just a collection agency. The IRS even has its own SWAT teams. Something needs to be done about the IRS.
The way to get control over the IRS is through tax reform. Several tax reform plans, such as the one from the Bowles-Simpson commission, have proposed the same thing: ridding the Tax Code of its exceptions. Exceptions are the exemptions, deductions, credits, write-offs, loopholes, and gimmicks that allow taxpayers to pay less than their tax rates would indicate.
These plans are headed in the right direction, but they don’t go far enough. What they should recommend is the complete elimination of all exceptions. That would allow for the lowest rates possible that would still bring in the same revenue. Eliminating all exceptions dictates setting the new tax rates to their current effective rates, what folks actually pay. So if one currently has an effective income tax rate of, say, 10 percent, under the new system that taxpayer would have a statutory income tax rate of 10 percent. The new low rates would be levied against every dollar of income.
I’ve written about this tax reform idea here, but I didn’t give readers an idea of what their new tax rates would be. People may be surprised at how low their new rates would be under this idea.
Consider these numbers:-6.5, -1.0, 3.0, 6.0, and 14.1. Those numbers are the Effective Tax Rates for Individual Income for the five quintiles for 2005; (see page 6 of this CBO report). Now consider that middle number: 3.0. It’s the average effective tax rate for the Middle Quintile. Notice that all the above effective tax rates except the highest one are below 10 percent.
With our progressive tax system, even middle-income earners now have multiple statutory tax rates. One’s first dollars are taxed at zero percent and one’s last dollars might be taxed at 28 percent. Rather than paying multiple rates, what would be so awful about those making the median income paying a flat 3 percent federal income tax rate on every dollar of their income?
It’s hard to say exactly what the new tax rates under this proposal would be, but currently the lowest statutory income tax rate is 10 percent. From this Tax Foundation chart for 2010, we see that the average effective income tax rate for all taxpayers was 10.1 percent. And from this Peter G. Peterson Foundation chart for 2011, we see that an average effective income tax rate of 10 percent didn’t kick in until incomes got into the top 10 percent.
So it’s safe to say that for the bottom 90 percent of income taxpayers that they would have new statutory income tax rates below 10 percent and the median income earners would have a rate of around 3 percent.
Earlier this month, I wrote an article about the IRS’s Form 1040EZ, and how those who use that form pay the maximum tax for their incomes. The article showed that while the Middle Quintile had an average effective income tax rate of just 3 percent in 2005, an unmarried taxpayer earning the average pretax income for that quintile who used the1040EZ would have had an effective income tax rate of 15.8 percent, more than five times the average.
Under the current tax regime, an unmarried individual filing the 2013 1040EZ would have an effective tax rate of below 10 percent only if his total income were below $38,950. In Peterson’s chart, that income would place one in the middle of Middle Quintile. That would lead one to conclude that someone with a middling income can have an effective tax rate equal to that of someone at the bottom of the top 10 percent of earners.
Taxpayers who currently don’t take advantage of the myriad exceptions in the Tax Code, including all 1040EZ filers not taking the EIC, would get a tax cut under the system I’m proposing. Only taxpayers whose use of exceptions is greater than average would get a tax hike.
To keep taxpayers paying closest to what they’re currently paying, there would need to be more tax rates than the current seven rates. But that need not complicate. Consider the 2013 Tax Table, it goes on for 12 pages and lists tax bills for incomes up to $100,000. There are 2,062 sets of tax bills. New tax bills that reflect an expanded set of new tax rates could easily replace the Tax Table’s current array of tax bills.
If a transparent, streamlined tax system that makes tax compliance as simple as it can possibly be is attractive to you, don’t hold your breath. There are powerful forces arrayed against such change, and some taxpayers think they can’t survive without their special exceptions. On April 4, George Will’s column “A tax reformer’s uphill push” put numbers on the dollar value of certain exceptions, such as “the deductibility of mortgage interest payments, a $70 billion benefit disproportionately benefiting affluent homeowners.” (Why don’t renters get to deduct their rent?)
Americans want their tax exceptions. Why pay the full freight when others will make up the difference? If the elimination of all exceptions in the tax code were being considered, throngs would descend upon Congress to argue for each exception. Eliminate the other exceptions if you must, but leave mine alone. They’d demand an exception be made for their exception.
One could make a case for just about every exception in the TaxCode, but then we’d never get tax reform. The reason to get rid of all exceptions in the Tax Code is because if even a single one remains, more exceptions will be added. If Congress wants to help certain enterprises, fine, but do it outside of the Tax Code.
Take the write-off for purchasing the Tesla, the all-electric sports car. Those who would buy the ultra-cool Tesla would do so regardless of whether there’s tax deduction for doing so or not. On March 30, 60 Minutes aired a fascinating segment on the founder of Tesla, Elon Musk. Mr. Musk is an entrepreneurial visionary; America could use scores more just like him. But that’s less likely given America’s byzantine tax system.
What those who benefit from tax exceptions need to realize is that they’re being subsidized not just by the super-wealthy who get hit by higher tax rates, but also by the middle class who don’t use exceptions. Now, I believe in a system of graduated rates, where lower-income earners have lower rates. But after lower rates have been awarded, that should be the end of it. Taxpayers with identical incomes should have identical tax bills. Democrats are now droning on ad nauseam about equal pay for equal work; but what about equal tax bills for equal incomes?
If one isn’t visited by an IRS SWAT team, one still might have a healthy dread of our federal collection agency. Although it is an utter perversion of America’s system of justice, if the IRS says you’re guilty, you will have to prove your innocence; if the IRS says you owe them, you’ll have to prove that you don’t owe them. So you had best save every record of every money transfer you receive, and for the rest of your life.
The problem with our federal income tax system is the exceptions in it.The mission of Lois Lerner’s division at the IRS is to police eligibility for exceptions. By eliminating all exceptions, the IRS could be seriously downsized. Indeed, Lerner’s entire division could be scrapped.
By eliminating all the exceptions in the Tax Code, the whole focus of the IRS would change. Rather than spending so much time determining whether taxpayers get to pay less in taxes, the IRS would be focusing on whether Americans are reporting all their income. By doing that, the IRS might even be able to scrounge up some new revenue.
The Tax Code is the means by which the government tries to control us. The Supreme Court could justify ObamaCare only by invoking the power to tax. Limits need to be put on that power or the IRS will run amok. If they get power, Republicans’ first order of business should be to radically simplify the Tax Code and to fundamentally transform the IRS.
Jon N. Hall is a programmer/analyst from Kansas City.