Squaring the Culture

I didn’t even have to examine this one for 10 seconds. This is pure scam.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, alongside the now-completely-discredited chair of the IPCC, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, today announced the launch of an “independent” review of the IPCC’s processes and procedures at a press conference in New York. The review is to be conducted by representatives chosen by the InterAcademy Council, an international consortium representing the national academies of sciences from 15 separate nations. Here is their press release.

The announcement was carried by water-carriers from the Associated Press to the unthinking masses bearing this grotesquely misleading lede (with my emphasis added):

World’s top scientists to review climate panel

UNITED NATIONS (AP) – At a tumultuous time in U.N.-led climate negotiations, one of the world’s most credible scientific groups agreed Wednesday to plug the recent cracks in the authoritative reports of the United Nations’ Nobel Prize-winning global warming panel.

“We enter this process with no preconceived conclusions,” said Robbert Dijkgraaf, a Dutch mathematical physicist who co-chairs the group, the InterAcademy Council of 15 nations’ national academies of science.

Just look at the puffery in that lede. It’s “one of the world’s most credible scientific groups.” They’re reviewing an “authoritative” report, from a “Nobel Prize-winning” panel. They claim they have “no preconceived conclusions.”

There is a well-known, well-established process for correcting errors in scientific research, and This. Is. Not. It. Peer review has served the scientific community for centuries, and will serve here if it is carried out using a fair process with appropriate transparency and without governmental interference.

The AP report is pure propaganda. The IAC is not one of the most credible organizations in the world; it is a politically-oriented entity devoted to international governance. The heads of 15 National Academies of Sciences are 15 political operatives representing 15 governmental liaison bodies. Yes, I imagine they’re all professional scientists of some sort; that does not make these organizations any less political. The men calling for this report are thoroughly discredited already. The United Nations is devoted to internationalization, as is its sister organization, the IAC. They have a dog in the hunt: they both gain immense power from a finding of significant anthropogenic global climate effect. They both should stand a billion miles from the credibility recovery process and let others do the work. We have no reason to expect anything but a sham review that will go through the requisite motions and summarily declare the IPCC report golden.

I am completely disgusted. These frakking criminals are still attempting to co-opt the entire world’s governments by manufacturing “science” in a dishonest manner. They should be in prison for life, and that’s the merciful take. Let’s hope the honest process of peer review continues unmolested, so we can get a clearer take on what effect human activity has on the climate. The UN is not going to provide that, not in a million years.

George Will slammed Robert Reich to the mat on ABC News’ Roundtable yesterday over one of his recitations of Democratic party lies about health care — and please make no mistake, they are lies, not disagreements. Reich responded by what he considered a sure rebuttal, and gave away the core of the Democratic party belief structure — the notion that the American people are just too damned stupid to make their own health care decisions, and need the help of those incredibly bright liberals to make them for them, for their own good. Listen:

I’ve had a handful of serious conversations with sincere liberals over the years, on the rare occasions that they decided for some reason that it was worthwhile to make an attempt to understand the mentally challenged like me. In each instance, at some point in the conversation they revealed at the core of their thinking the same contemptuous notion: the average citizen in America has no idea how to run his own life, and needs to be directed in order to prevent him from destroying the world. It really is the foundation stone of progressive belief.

Where they get the evidence supporting the notion that they, the progressives, have been any more successful in ordering their lives than the average American, I can only guess. For my part, I’m with William Buckley, and would rather pick 200 citizens at random to make governmental decisions than allow the progressives’ 200 best minds to do it.

By the way, Reich’s first statement is the biggest lie of all. Nobody serious regards health care as the signature issue of our time; it doesn’t even appear on the lists of major issues when the American people are polled, except when the Democrats have manufactured yet another attempt to force national health care down the nation’s throat. What makes health care a major issue for Democrats is its usefulness in creating a permanent bureaucratic majority. They push the topic because it produces power for them, period.

Mark Steyn wrote one of his incisive rants for his syndicated column Friday that illustrates the genuine danger arising from the Democrats’ health care throat-jamming suicide, and explains why they’re willing to engage in Kamikaze tactics to get it passed. It has nothing to do with health care, nor with costs, and everything to do with creating a permanent, one-party state. Give the government enough power, and it does not matter which party sits atop it; the universal state has a momentum of its own.

Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever-expanding number of government jobs will be statists – sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily “compassionate” statists, but always statists. The short history of the post-war welfare state is that you don’t need a president-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life…

A bigtime GOP consultant was on TV, crowing that Republicans wanted the Dems to pass Obamacare because it’s so unpopular it will guarantee a GOP sweep in November.

OK, then what? You’ll roll it back – like you’ve rolled back all those other unsustainable entitlements premised on cobwebbed actuarial tables from 80 years ago? Like you’ve undone the federal Department of Education and of Energy and all the other nickel’n'dime novelties of even a universally reviled one-term loser like Jimmy Carter? Andrew McCarthy concluded a shrewd analysis of the political realities thus:

“Health care is a loser for the Left only if the Right has the steel to undo it. The Left is banking on an absence of steel. Why is that a bad bet?”

Tactically, there’s a lot we can say about what’s gone wrong to this point. Republicans gave in to Democrats on the need early on, so that today everybody is acknowledging that “we need to do something.” It’s crap. Eighty-five percent of Americans who are covered are satisfied with their health care, a statistic that no government system can touch. Most of those who are not covered are in no danger, and have chosen not to be covered. Things can be improved, sure, but there was no outcry for health care reform before the Democrats manufactured it, just as there was no outcry for health care reform before Democrats manufactured it in 1992; the public is concerned about immigration and Islamic terrorism. Controlling health care is a perennial desire of Democrats, who want it because of the permanent power it gives to government over crucial elements of life, like child-rearing. Democrats know instinctively that if a government bureaucracy controls a thing, Democrats control it — permanently.

Steyn and Andy McCarthy hit the right note: if it passes, we need the steel to roll this back. This, and all the other unsustainable entitlements that are choking the economy to death, and robbing our nation of strength. We need politicians willing to serve for one, unpopular term while they fix what the Democrats have been deliberately breaking for the last 80 years.

If you have not already seen this video of Rep. Paul Ryan (R, WI) explaining to Obama’s Health Care Summit how the Democrats have jimmied the numbers for their health care bill, watch it now. In just over five minutes, he exposes the smoke and mirrors in the Senate health care bill, the double counting, the covert moving of funds from Medicare and Social Security, the separate bills to hide spending. He reveals how dishonest an exercise health care “reform” has been from a fiscal standpoint. Key line: “Hiding spending does not reduce spending.”

Keep in mind that Ryan is just rehearsing the annual numbers. This does not include long-term liabilities, which is where the federal government really breaks the bank. Government uses cash accounting, like Girl Scouts who sell cookies might do with their cash pouch. If they used accrual-based accounting, like virtually every corporation in America does, the national debt would be closer to $65 trillion than to $12 trillion — and health care “reform” will add to that dramatically.

This comes into greater focus as we examine the CBO’s estimate that the Obama administration’s budget will generate a trillion dollars in deficits more than he has predicted, over the next 10 years. And of course, he has shoved the entire question of reforming Medicare and Social Security off to a “commission” that will not even report until after his first term has ended.

If anybody believes the Democrats are serious about addressing the nation’s debt, they need a ringing smack to the head. They really do believe that money grows on trees, and that it’s “immoral” to consider what we can actually afford when planning government programs. Just concerning health care alone, if you believe that the government can absorb 1/7 of the US economy and insure 40 million new enrollees without adding a single doctor or specifying a single, new source of revenue, and not vastly expand the deficit, you believe in faeries and leprechauns. And if you believe that the Obama administration’s projections of health care costs will not be shown to be grossly understated within the first year, just like every state-paid health insurance plan has and just like every federal entitlement program in history has, you should go get yourself a thorazine drip.

I picked up on two reports today from around the country that highlight citizen complaints in response to government cutbacks, another sign of what we should expect through the coming decade.

In the first, students at universities around the country are protesting the cutting of state funding for education, and apparently doing so in a disruptive fashion, blocking freeways and freeway on-ramps, slugging police officers, pulling fire alarms for no reason, and so forth.

The article reporting this, written by a half-dozen AP reporters, is a prime instance of leftist media bias, in that it carefully masks the political orientation of the protesters. It also avoids producing a hard count of the protesters, although one particular protest at UC Davis apparently produced about 300 people. The writers attempt to make this into a revolt by Everyman:

Students, teachers, parents and school employees rallied and marched Thursday at college campuses, public parks and government buildings in many U.S. cities in what was called the March 4 Day of Action to Defend Public Education.

Of course, this was a nationally-coordinated effort by hard leftists. Check the list of sponsors for the March 4th Strike and Day of Action in defense of public education in California; it reads like an exhaustive list of unions, union organizers, and hard-left action committees. We’re looking here at the classic strategy of neo-Marxists, using growing political instability as a springboard for fomenting revolution.

Imagine how the Tea Parties would have been reported if any of them had produced even a fraction of the deliberate, disruptive action this small protest produced.

The second instance is closer to grass roots. Citizens in Arizona are starting to complain about the state closing down highway rest stops as a cost-cutting measure. It apparently costs the state about $300,000 a year to keep a single rest stop clean and functional. The state closed 13 out of 18 rest stops; this is clearly only one of dozens of measures they’ll be taking to save money, as the Arizona Dept of Transportation is about $100 million in the red.

Frankly, I can appreciate the importance of a stop in the desert as well as the next man, but this highlights the sort of re-adjustment we’re all going to face in the coming years. The simple fact is that we have all gotten used to government activism in any number of public functions, a level of activism that government simply cannot sustain over the long haul. Even in a good economy, government cannot guarantee that your life will be easy, and will go bankrupt if it tries.

In 1997, my wife was incapacitated for about 6 months, and I had to take on the role of Mr. Mom. I had four kids aged from 6 to 16, and we had one television. I attempted to arbitrate the use of it so that each got to watch at least one show they really liked, but so they did not watch too much. That attempt failed, and they were all spending too much time in front of the tube; so one day, in a moment of lucid frustration, I unplugged the damned thing from right in front of the four of them, and carried it out to the curb.

The outcome was remarkable. The kids complained bitterly from the lack of TV for about a month. Then, suddenly, they all discovered reading and board games, and the complaints stopped. Suddenly, they were all using their brains during their leisure time. It was one of the best moves I ever made.

I bring it up because it illustrates what is going to happen as government recedes from our lives by necessity, as we start forcing government to live within its means. We’re not going to like losing what we have to lose. We’re going to feel the pain. We’re going to complain. And then, once we’ve gotten it out of our system, truckers will start carrying their own port-a-potties in the backs of their trucks, and we’ll learn to do without rest stops. Parents will start saving for college educations again instead of counting on the state to provide it for free. We’ll all begin doing for ourselves again.

So, expect to see two types of citizen unrest in the coming years: organized, opportunistic attempts to produce revolution, and sincere, well-intentioned griping about losing important services. Regarding the third type, citizens rebelling against an intrusive and overbearing government, let’s hope we don’t have to produce anything more disruptive than those actions we have already produced.

Speaking, as I was this morning, of politicians with the stones to make the necessary cuts in spending…

Mike Shedlock (with a hat tip to Michelle Malkin) reported on a remarkable speech by New Jersey’s new governor, Chris Christie to the New Jersey League of Municipalities, that illustrates what Real Men® who hold office will have to be doing for the next several decades.

He minces no words:

• government programs will have to be cut
• government salaries and benefits will have to be cut to the size and scope of comparable private sector salaries and benefits
• government-worker unions will have to cede power
• tax increases are not an option, and
• politicians will have to behave as though the next election does not matter.

In just five, tense weeks of holding office, he already has actions to match his words; budget officers showed him 378 ways to freeze spending to close a $2.3 billion gap in a $6 billion pool of money in the budget, and he signed 375 of them.

Listen to a few of his words:

What’s happening now, what you’re hearing is people are setting up a false choice, the same false choice that’s been set up in this building for decades, where they make you believe you can have everything you want to have. “Don’t worry, someone else will pay for it. We’ll tax business, or somebody else, to be able to pay for everything that you want. Don’t worry, you won’t have to do it.”

I heard someone in the legislature say two days ago that they wanted no fare hike in New Jersey Transit, no cuts in service, and no cuts in subsidy. And I was thinking to myself, man I should have made this guy treasurer. [Laughter] Because if you can pull that one off, you’re obviously magic.

This is the type of awful political rhetoric that people sent me to this city to stop.

I would love to be able to do that, but I can’t. I would love to tell you that municipal aid will stay level, but it’s not. And it’s not because we don’t have the money. So you need to prepare. You need to prepare for what’s coming down the line because we have no choice but to do these things.

… the political class is lagging behind the public on this. The public is ready to hear that tough choices have to be made. They’re not going to like it. Let me not confuse the two. They’re not going to like it, they’re not going to be happy, but they are ready to hear the truth.

In fact, they find it refreshing to hear the truth, and the pablum that gets spewed sometimes about “Don’t worry, I can spare you from the pain,” they’re tired of hearing that, because they have been hearing that for a decade, as we have borrowed and spent and taxed our way into oblivion.

You all know that these raises that are being given to public employees of all stripes, we cannot afford. You all know the state cannot continue to spend money it does not have. And you all know that the appetite for tax increases among our constituents has come to an end.

And so the path to reform and success is clear. We know what it is. We just have to have the courage to go there. What we are doing is showing people that government can work again for them, not for us. Government has worked for the political class for much too long. We have retreated, all of us at times, to the easy decisions, the painless decisions, that delay for another day the day of reckoning.

There’s no time left. We have no room left to borrow. We have no room left to tax. So we merely have room left now, to do this:

We are all reaching the edge of a cliff. And it reminds me a bit of that part of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where the had a seminal decision to make. So what did they do? They held hands and they jumped off the cliff.

We have to hold hands at every level of government, state county, municipal, school board. We have to hold hands and jump off the cliff.

Go read Mish’s partial transcript, or watch the whole 21-minute speech at New Jersey Network. It’s deeply refreshing.

And then find somebody like that to run for governor in your own home state.

Sen. Jim Bunning has just done the American people a huge favor, and we need to take careful note. He’s demonstrated for us all which Senators can be trusted to restore fiscal sanity to Congress, and which cannot. The number who can is small. I list them at the end of this post.

If you want the full description of the week-long flap Bunning created in the Senate, Michelle Malkin and the Heritage Foundation provide a reasonable level of detail. I will summarize the affair here.

A month ago, Democrats passed a bill in the Senate called “Paygo,” or Pay-As-You-Go, on a party line vote. Paygo basically requires the Senate to specify, in every bill that requires spending, where the money is going to come from. Its goal, on the surface, is to block bills that add to the deficit. Democrats passed the bill because they want to look like they’re concerned about the deficits (which they’ve quadrupled since they took over Congress.) Republicans opposed the bill because they suspected it was a cover to raise taxes dramatically.

I say “they want to look like they’re concerned” because the Senate has tried Paygo before, and it accomplished nothing. Paygo was in force from 1991 through 2002, During that period, the Senate approved $700 billion in entitlement expansions and tax cuts that were not paid for, in violation of the Paygo principle. They did it by adding to each bill a clause stating that the bill was an “emergency” bill, the exception permitted in Paygo. And yes, Democrats, the Republicans controlled the Senate for a good portion of that period. There are guilty parties on both sides.

Last week, true to form, the Senate proposed a $15 billion extension of unemployment and other benefits for which only $5 billion was paid for in the bill. They excused the other $10 billion by declaring the bill an “emergency” bill. And this is where Sen. Bunning jumped in.

Sen. Harry Reid, Majority Leader, attempted to pass the extension bill, which was actually a House bill (H.R. 4691,) by unanimous consent. Bunning simply stood up and said “I object.” This prevents the bill from passing by unanimous consent, and requires debate, cloture, and a roll call vote instead. What Bunning insisted on, in his objection, was that the Senate add specific measures to the bill that would explain where the $10 billion was going to come from; he suggested that they designate $10 billion from the TARP funds that have not been spent yet.

The Democrats proved what complete, vicious liars they are by demagoguing the matter for the better part of a week. They could simply have held discussion and the roll call vote, which would have prevented the delay. The delay was completely unnecessary, and occurred solely because the Democrats did not want their names associated with the passage of this bill that violates Paygo.

Rather than go on record, the Democrats went berserk. They blamed Bunning for the delay they were causing, by inaccurately calling the move a filibuster. They publicly flogged Bunning for voting against Paygo a month ago. They tried their best to make him look like a monster stealing bread out of the mouths of starving children. They screeched about Iraq war spending, as though that justifies irresponsible behavior here. They publicized it when he cursed from the back row. They kicked and screamed and lied like the infantile tantrum-throwers that they are.

And more than half the Republicans in the Senate blanched and ran away, too cowardly to stand by principle.

The nation is fiscally doomed. The dollar is about to collapse. Congress has created a fiscal nightmare over the past 70 years, and the concern being shown today is too small and too late by many orders of magnitude. But if the nation is ever going to return to sanity, and if the nation is even going to survive the coming collapse, we need representatives in the government who have the courage to enforce fiscal discipline. Specifically, what they will need the courage to do is what Bunning is doing here: 1) demanding that everything be paid for, and 2) withstanding vicious Democrats calling them names, because that’s what they’re going to do every time.

The Senate held the roll call vote last night, after dismissing on a procedural technicality an amendment to pay for the bill. We now know which Senators have the backbone at least to begin to actually solve the fiscal nightmare. Whether they have the stones to actually cut spending programs is another, more serious question, but one for another day.

Here are the names of the Senators who either voted against the bill in its fiscally irresponsible form, or did not vote:

Those who voted in favor of the bill lack the stomach to force the Senate to behave in a fiscally responsible manner. If your Senator’s name is not on this list, I recommend that you work to dump their cowardly ass on the pavement the next time they come up for re-election. It’s the ones on the “Nay” list who have been shown by the Bunning Barometer to have at least a little of the stuff that restoring fiscal sanity will require.

Note that there is not a single Democrat among the “Nays” — and frankly, we already know all we need to know about Sens. Byrd and Lautenberg, who did not vote. All the Democratic Senators deserve to be thrown into the sea with millstones around their necks. And they can take the 25 chicken-shit Republican Senators with them.

Thank you for the barometer, Senator Bunning. I’m sorry you’ve decided to retire. We need more like you.

I’m feeling a little bit sorry for Fox Sports writer Jason Whitlock, so I’m going to talk about race. I don’t often talk about race because it’s a dangerous topic; careers are ruined and jobs are lost because somebody said the wrong thing regarding something regarded as racial. Sometimes it’s not even about race at all, as in the various cases where somebody took heat for using the perfectly lucid but arcane adjective “niggardly” (meaning “stingy”, based on the Old Norse verb nigla, “to fuss about small matters”.) But race is a subject about which I know a little, being a white Christian/Jew who has served and worshiped under several black pastors, in mostly-black congregations and mostly-black home meetings for several decades, and engaged in evangelism in the black community many times.

Whitlock earns my sentiment because he made a fool of himself over race, and was duly but a little unfairly taken down by Peter Heck at OneNewsNow.com. The subject of the take-down was Whitlock’s long-after-the-fact riff on the Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning’s less-than-stellar performance in Superbowl XLIV. It’s a pretty decent riff, actually, in which Whitlock explains that though he likes Manning personally, and considers him one of the 10 Greatest QBs of All Time (which was the title of the article,) people were making lame excuses for him after the game. The simple fact that nobody seemed to want to admit, opines Whitlock, was that Manning was outsmarted by defensive back Tracy Porter. It was Porter who intercepted that crucial pass and scored a touchdown that put the Saints irretrievably ahead, ending Manning’s late-4th-quarter attempt to salvage the close game.

Here’s the spot where Whitlock goes completely loopy:

By Wednesday morning, I was so upset I grabbed my laptop and reached for The Card. I was going to make this column all about the elephant in the room:

In the biggest sporting event in the world, with a record number of people watching and on the game’s most important play, a black defensive back outsmarted a beloved white quarterback.

I know. That’s a truth many of you can’t handle. It makes you uncomfortable. You don’t even get what I’m really saying. All of us — white, black and brown — get so caught up in our stereotypes that we oftentimes miss what is right in front of us.

Tracy Porter outsmarted Peyton Manning and won the Super Bowl for New Orleans. End of story.

For all I know, Whitlock is right about the outsmarting part; what I understand about football would fit on one side of a single sheet of paper. I have to tell you, though, that the respective skin colors of the players never occurred to me until I read Heck’s take-down. I imagine that’s true for nearly everybody. It’s been a long, long time since the first black player broke the race barrier in the NFL. It’s been a long time since the first black quarterback, and the first black coach. It’s not an issue anymore. We simply don’t notice.

It’s obviously an issue to Whitlock, though. Why?

It’s tempting to take Heck’s line, and rag on the race-baiters of the left that use such incidents as political and social fodder. That’s a very real problem. Mostly white progressives have taken hold of race as a means of validating themselves. They buttress their own feelings of superiority by declaring themselves the champions of race, and their adversaries, the villains of race. They have to perpetuate the perception that racism continues as a serious social problem, because they continue to need validation. Solving the problem is the last thing in the world they want. The admission that their view of the problem is imaginary comes when they accuse their opponents of “talking in code;” that’s an admission that their adversaries never, ever say anything racist. So what makes them think they are? simply the need to be able to say it, and the political advantage that comes from that. It’s all the better if it can be said without any supporting evidence; that way, they’ll never have to stop.

But I don’t believe that Jason Whitlock is one of those, and I think Peter Heck is being a little unfair to call him one. Here’s why:

I was extremely socially awkward as a child, physically puny, weak, and wimpy. I took a lot of abuse for being weak, cowardly, and different, and I did a lot of things that were socially wrong and about which I still cringe when I think about them. You’d think I’d have gotten over that by now, and mostly I have, but it still has its subtle effects on my behavior. Because of accumulated childhood trauma, I never really feel entirely welcome in any group, even among friends. I’ve been known to avoid certain people for months over some insignificant thing I took as a slight, usually incorrectly. Also, I can’t watch certain films that remind me of painful things. Meet the Parents is a piece of comic genius, but every time Ben Stiller lies to make himself seem acceptable to Robert DeNiro, which is pretty much the entire film, I cringe and feel pain. It’s just not funny to me. It reminds me of things I did when I was a kid. People whose childhoods were less traumatic than mine can’t possibly understand my feelings, but they still affect me.

I imagine that in Jason Whitlock’s life, as in the lives of most blacks in America, he has faced dozens of incidents in which he saw fear in some stranger’s eyes who knew nothing about him aside from the fact that he was black, male, big, and nearby. He was probably suspected more than once of stealing, loitering, or planning mischief on the basis of no better evidence than that he was male and his skin was black. There are still plenty of places, one being Havertown, PA where my children live, where blacks get pulled over disproportionately, committing the crime they call “driving while black.” To say that I know how this feels would be patronizing and wrong; we can’t completely understand what we have not experienced. But I’m sure it hurts. Lots.

Does that excuse Whitlock’s just-plain-silly analysis of the support for Peyton Manning being motivated by race? No. But it does explain it somewhat. You see, Mr. Whitlock feels pain about which he can do nothing — as do we all. He’s mostly gotten over it, but it still affects his adult behavior in subtle ways — as do all our childhood traumas. And on this instance, it affected his analysis in a way that is simply unmistakable; it made him see race where no racial component was present.

Lynching blacks is vile; it does not happen anymore, and has not since the 1930s. Laws that ban blacks from certain public places, or relegate them to second-class status, are wrong; they don’t exist anymore, and have not since the 1960s. The personal pain that comes with being unfairly perceived as different is real, and still occurs; but that’s not generally the result of a crime, and cannot be made the subject of laws.

Human beings are naturally more comfortable among people who are like them. That’s not wrong, and social progressivism has done great damage to the culture by pretending that it is. Attempting to repress that as though it were evil is identical, in behavior terms, to attempting to repress sexual feelings as though they were evil; it does not work, and the attempt produces damaging distortions. We are who we are. And just like with sexual feelings, we can learn to control what we do with our very real feelings about different cultures, but we can only do it after we understand what they are. This cannot happen in an environment like ours, where merely mentioning that one has such ordinary feelings can result in financial and social ruin. Racial McCarthyism is evil, and must stop.

Moreover, some of the reactions black men grow up facing are perfectly rational reactions. Most people, white or black, see plenty of rowdy groups of young black men causing trouble in public or committing crimes on film. Most people see far too many news reels reporting violence by gangs of young black men. Consequently, when most people see a group of rowdy, young black men approaching them in public, they naturally feel fear. Jesse Jackson has admitted to this same feeling, himself. The cure for it is not to repress reasonable feelings, or to feel shame for feeling them; the cure for it is for young black men to clean up their act and behave in a civil and sensible manner. People fear them because in realty, a lot of them are fearsome. If they were not, the fear of unknown blacks would vanish.

I’ll say this, too, though it’s not strictly necessary for the topic: a lot of poor, young black men are angry. A lot of that anger gets expressed as anger against whites, but it’s not really that. The young, black men I knew when I was in the ghetto were angry at the parents that abandoned them or mistreated them — and they had good reason to be. Eventually, that anger got redirected toward the white society that they blamed for holding them down, but in truth, it was the lack of sound parental influence that was holding them down; the ones who had good parents were easily headed for the middle class. The solution to their anger does not lie in changing white society, it lies in getting black fathers and mothers to stop abandoning or mistreating their children.

Jason Whitlock is not guilty of race-baiting for political advantage, as Peter Heck says he is. However, it’s clear that the only person in the room who has a race problem is Jason Whitlock. As a culture, we need to recognize what that is, and we need to treat it with some understanding, but we don’t need to poison the political atmosphere with it. We can feel compassion, but it’s Jason Whitlock who needs to address his racial feelings, not anybody else.

Ironically, Whitlock himself explains why everybody is defending Peyton Manning, rather than acknowledging that he was outplayed. Look:

Some of you who read my column regularly think I have a major problem with Peyton Manning. I don’t. I enjoy watching him play. I admire the values he and his family project. I respect his work ethic. Even with an incomplete resume that will only improve, he is already one of the 10 best quarterbacks of all time.

Jason, everybody else sees exactly what you see in Peyton Manning, and that’s why they’re defending him: everybody wants to think well of the guy. He’s a good guy. We like guys like him in America. He validates the things we believe.

It has nothing to do with the color of his skin. I feel exactly the same way about Jimmy Rollins, shortstop for the Philadelphia Phillies. Rollins’ prayers and positive mental attitude are probably more responsible for the success that team has experienced over the last four years than any other single factor, including Ryan Howard’s 58-home-run season and Chase Utley’s astonishing hyper-competence. That makes Rollins a hero to me, and yes, it makes it that much more difficult for me to admit it when Jimmy’s being an idiot about some boast he made in public. None of us like to admit the faults of our heroes. Rollins, in case anybody does not know, is black, but honestly, I don’t notice that except when somebody else brings up race.

Race is still an issue because a lot of people need it to be, but it’s also an issue for some because they feel very real pain that’s related to how they were viewed. The only way these people will ever be healed is if we can talk plainly about why we react the way we do to certain cultural stimuli. That is not possible in the poisonous environment created by the opportunism of white liberals, but… we shall overcome, someday.

A Brooklyn, NY District Attorney’s office announced that it will not prosecute the ACORN office caught on tape advising reporters posing as a pimp and prostitute how to set up their business. The DA declared that no criminal activity was found, and will file no charges.

Jammie Wearing Fool raises the rather obvious question of a possible political motivation for the New York DA. He has no evidence about the investigation itself, but a source from within the DA’s office clumsily tried to hand the left a money quote in the NY Daily News account, and Ron Chusid at Liberal Values slavishly echoed it:

While the video by James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles seemed to show three ACORN workers advising a prostitute how to hide ill-gotten gains, the unedited version was not as clear, according to a law enforcement source.

“They edited the tape to meet their agenda,” said the source.

Huh? I recall watching an unedited video of at least one of their ACORN visits showing the entire conversation, and the full, unedited audio of each office visit has been posted on the Internet for months. Of course they edited the tape for the newsreels; news reports always cut out the fat and leave the meat. What did they expect, that they would cut out the “can in the backyard” part and leave them shaking hands and saying “hello?”

While Jammie seems to be correct about the DA office’s biases, just from a legal standpoint I’m not surprised that there was nothing actionable. The act caught on tape was a worker advising a couple that they should hide their profits from prostitution in a can buried in their back yard. I’m not sure that discussing an illegal venture is a crime, and “can in the back yard” is hardly a RICO-investigation-worthy money laundering scheme.

Still, we should not let the left pretend that this clears ACORN. It does not. The issue on the O’Keefe tapes was never that actionable crimes were being committed, it was that ACORN as an organization was routinely and deliberately engaged in undermining virtuous society. The shock of the tapes was that the workers on those tapes showed no surprise at all when confronted with a young couple clearly engaging in community- and life-destroying behaviors. They did not say “What you’re attempting is illegal, and we cannot help you” (except for one fellow in the New Orleans office, good on ‘im.) They did not call the police and describe the couple to them. They did not object to the immorality of it, or try to persuade the couple not to do what they were planning. They did not even blink. They simply engaged in business as usual — as though helping a pimp establish a house of prostitution using under-age illegals was just part of the daily routine.

Andrew Breitbart correctly called this “The Abu Graib of the Great Society.” The PimpGate affair ripped back the cover of “social justice” advocacy and displayed it for the corrupt moral inversion that it truly is. While it pinpoints ACORN, it highlights the moral bankruptcy of the culture built by Democratic party policies in the inner city, and implicates the Democratic party as a willing participant in the moral degeneration that ACORN represents. It is of a single piece with the destruction of Detroit, and the corruption and rot at the heart of New Orleans that we all saw after Katrina. Anybody who regards what we saw on the O’Keefe tapes as morally acceptable, even in the absence of a criminal indictment, is part of the rot.

Still, Democrats who were stung badly by their clear association with such a seamy organization will use “no indictments” as vindication, in the same manner — and displaying the same moral obtuseness — as they did with “lying about a blow job.” Brace yourselves, and be prepared with the correct answer. This changes nothing.

Oral arguments before the US Supreme Court begin tomorrow for the case of McDonald v Chicago, a challenge to the City of Chicago’s regulations that ban ownership of handguns in effect.

The case of the District of Columbia v Heller, which in June of 2008 struck down the District’s handgun ban and trigger lock requirement for violating the 2nd Amendment, settled the question of whether the 2nd Amendment applied only to organized militia or protected individual citizens. However, it settled the question only within federal jurisdictions. Consequently, McDonald and his associates filed their lawsuit, joined by the Illinois affiliate of the NRA, only hours after the US Supreme Court decided Heller.

The McDonald case will decide whether the Constitutional protections of the 2nd Amendment apply to states and local governments, which actually examines, not the 2nd Amendment, but the 14th. Let’s remember how the 14th Amendment begins, with relevant emphasis added:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, but was essentially gutted in 1873 in a New Orleans action called “the Slaughter-House Cases,” in which the US Supreme Court decided that the 14th Amendment’s “Privileges and Immunities” clause affected only the privileges that attached to US citizenship, not privileges that attached to state citizenship. This meant that future attempts to use the 14th Amendment to protect some right or other required that the plaintiff argue that the right in question was “fundamental” to US citizenship, by being “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty” (Duncan v. Louisiana, Mr. Justice Black concurring.) Only those rights that are essential to the concept of liberty need be protected from state law by the 14th Amendment, according to Mr. Justice Miller in 1873. The process of deciding which rights are protected by the 14th Amendment has been called “selective incorporation.”

The McDonald case seeks to change that, arguing for what is called “full incorporation” of the 14th Amendment — they are asking the Court to overturn the Slaughter-House Cases and find, instead, that the 14th Amendment requires that state laws grant to all citizens the rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.

Undoubtedly, if the majority of the Court decides to overturn the Slaughter-House Cases, we’ll be treated to yet another round of leftists shrilling over the “judicial activism” of the conservative majority on the Court. Let’s keep in mind what that really means. The left has lost a great deal of credibility over the past decades because they are perceived as having used the court system to write legislation and effect social change, calling on liberal judges to create law where the legislature had failed to do so. The US Supreme Court has done this in cases like Griswold v Connecticut, where the Court found a right to privacy enumerated within a “penumbra” of an “emanation” from other rights. The “right” to privacy was thereafter used for further mischief, overturning legitimate acts of the legislature concerning abortions and homosexuality and challenging the state’s right to regulate pornography and obscenity. The left, perceiving that they had lost ground in the public mind, has taken to accusing conservatives on the Court of “judicial activism” whenever they disagree over an interpretation of any Constitutional phrase. They’re deliberately misusing the term in order to obscure its meaning in the public mind, to erase the general perception that the left abuses the institutions of free government. From the left, in current instances, “judicial activism” means only that the majority has slain one of the left’s sacred cows.

No act that plausibly interprets standing law as the basis for a decision can properly be called “judicial activism” in the sense it was applied to the left. The 14th Amendment is standing law, and so is the 2nd Amendment; the question is where they apply, and deciding that question one way or the other does not constitute “activism” so long as the legal reasoning rests on valid interpretation of law.

In the Heller case, dissent arose based on what those judges considered legitimate state concerns for public safety. Since the right to keep and bear arms was conceived as a manner of keeping citizens safe from oppressive government, I have to think that even if their claims that legal handguns threaten public safety were true (they’re not,) the essential need for citizens to protect themselves against oppression should trump local safety requirements. That’s not a legal opinion — I’m not an attorney, but I feel certain that argument would not stand up in Court — but it’s a philosophical one.

However, it’s moot because the public safety concerns are pure bunk. Most of the abuse of handguns in the US is carried out by gang members using guns that are illegally obtained — illegal under laws that are not violations of the 2nd and 14th Amendments. Half the deaths from handguns are suicides, but people do not need a handgun to commit suicide (a $4 bottle of aspirin will do the trick), so banning handguns would likely not prevent those deaths. Nations exist in which all citizens within a certain age band are required by law to keep assault weapons in their homes (Israel and Switzerland,) and the crime and accident statistics in those nations are not like those in the US, so we know with certainty that the mere presence of firearms is not the cause of the US’ violence problem. Furthermore, it appears likely that handguns are used twice as often to prevent crime as they are to perpetrate it, so a ban is likely to increase rather than reduce gun crime, as it apparently did in Great Britain and Australia.

Be that as it may, the Court in Heller announced that it has no intention of reversing state and local laws limiting ownership of machine guns, signaling that while a law that has the effect of a ban runs afoul of the 2nd Amendment, one that effects public safety without banning items that are commonly used does not. This strikes me as inconsistent with their decision; while laws restricting access to “assault weapons” are popular, if laws banning one particular style of weapon (e.g. “handguns”) do not pass Constitutional muster, and if the purposes of the 2nd Amendment include citizen paramilitary ability, then laws banning any particular style of weapon should likewise not pass muster. But that’s a topic for another day. The next day or two should determine whether local handgun bans will remain in force, and we’ll hear the result of the arguments in a few months.