Joy in Vikingland….

Packers  34  Vikings  37

( Bruce Kluckhohn-USA TODAY Sports / December 30, 2012 )Packers fan Karen Hurst poses for a picture with Vikings fan Ken Shank before the game.

Tyrannt Obama Performing Tyrantly

 

Obama’s Crisis Demagoguery

by Johathan Tobin       at    Commentary:

There may be a last-minute compromise reached today in the negotiations over the fiscal cliff, but not if President Obama has anything to say about it. Even as Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell were believed to have led the effort to have the structure of a deal in place for the two houses of Congress to vote on later today, the president emerged to make a statement that seemed geared to scuttling the negotiations.

In a campaign-style event, the president spoke of a possible accord between the two parties that would avert the immediate effects of the fiscal cliff being reached. But the bulk of his remarks were devoted to goading the Republicans into backing away from any deal. Not only did he gratuitously insult the GOP about their stands on the budget to the great amusement of the hand-picked audience of supporters, he also made it clear that the tax increases in any compromise would just be the start of what he hoped to accomplish. Even worse, he implied that spending cuts, especially the entitlement reform that is necessary for any long-term solution to the nation’s problems, are not really on the table as far as he is concerned.

Given the tone of his comments and the timing, Republicans should be forgiven for suspecting that his real purpose was to send the country over the cliff in the belief that only the GOP would be blamed for the disaster.

The president obviously thinks the very last moment before a fiscal catastrophe that would raise taxes on all Americans and impose devastating cuts in defense is a good time to mock the idea of spending cuts and to threaten further taxes. The only possible motivation for this is to convince suspicious Republicans that any give in their position will not be met even part of the way by the Democrats. In other words, if even now the president is unprepared to contemplate entitlement reform, then it is difficult to make the argument that they should do the responsible thing and compromise.

Through last year’s debt ceiling crisis as well as the fiscal cliff talks, the president has always behaved as if he thought he had nothing to lose by engaging in class warfare demagoguery. Since going over the cliff means raising more taxes and feeding the government beast that he seems uninterested in restraining as well as cutting defense spending, why shouldn’t he try to incite the GOP to refuse to agree to a deal?

But for him to behave in this manner on the very eve of the crisis while leaders of both parties are struggling to construct a makeshift measure that will get the nation past midnight is telling.

This is not just the confident manner of a re-elected president, but the contempt of a man who believes he doesn’t have to listen to anyone but himself. This may presage future fights over taxes in which he thinks he will continue to have the whip hand over the GOP. But the law of unintended consequences may eventually catch up with him. Though his soak-the-rich rhetoric resonates with many Americans, they also understand that entitlement reform is in the best interests of the nation and that raising taxes on millionaires won’t balance the budget. Few outside the hard left really believe, as Obama seemed to say today, that America only has a tax problem, not a spending problem.

If in the coming months and years these irresponsible tactics catch up with the president, we may look back on his behavior today and see it as the turning point in the debate. The Greeks had a word for the kind of behavior President Obama demonstrated today: hubris. His second term may well be blighted by it.

2013 Doctrine of the American Left: DAMN THE CONSTITUTION……FEMINIST RULE FOREVER!!

A Liberal Comes Clean:

We Hate the Constitution

by  Steven Hayward    at   PowerLine:

“I frequently bait the law professoriate with the axiom that if you really want to understand constitutionalism, and the U.S. Constitution in particular, don’t take constitutional law at an elite law school.  There you will only receive systematic mis-instruction in the subject.*  Joe Knippenberg reminds me that my AEI colleague Walter Berns always said that the problem with law professors is that they taught constitutional law, not the Constitution.   Hence most constitutional law professors treat the Constitution as a plaything from which to extract whatever outcome they want.

In some cases the general wording of clauses of the Constitution (like the Fourth Amendment’s “unreasonable” search and seizure clause) does require exercising judgment about how to apply the text to changing circumstances and technology.  But then there are those pesky clauses written with sufficient specificity (such as the “embarrassing” Second Amendment—as some liberals call it) that not even the inventive Cass Sunstein can find a clever interpretive workaround to generate the desired liberal result.  At such times this impulse yields to the suspicion that many liberals don’t really like the Constitution at all, and would junk it if they could.

Woodrow Wilson professed this openly.  But the Founders built well, knowing that the Constitution—the documentary embodiment of the Rule of Law replacing the Rule of Man (or Rule of the King, as practical matters had it in the 1780s)—would work only if it became an object of reverence in place of a monarch among the people.  As such, directly attacking the Constitution has always been a non-starter in American politics. Instead, liberals typically repair to the doctrine of the “living Constitution.”

Thus it is helpful when a liberal’s impatience with constitutionalism yields to the impulse to rip the façade away and declare their contempt for the Constitution.  Georgetown Law School professor Louis Seidman thus does us the favor of candor with his New York Times op-ed today entitled “Let’s Give Up on the Constitution.”  The first paragraph is enough:

AS the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.

The article is really not worth bothering with further.  There’s active commentary about it going on all over the blogosphere today.  (Start with Jonathan Adler and Wesley Smith if you are a glutton.)  As I sometimes like to say, “Our Constitution may not be perfect, but it’s better than the government we’ve got.”  Those “evil” and “archaic” provisions are why, despite 100 years of largely successful “Progressive” assault against our constitutional principles, the United States is still the freest nation in the world.

Let’s hope the higher education bubble breaks first and hardest at our intellectually corrupt law schools.

* There are a handful of isolated worthy exceptions, such as Mike McConnell at Stanford, Richard Epstein at NYU, Randy Barnett at Georgetown, Gerard Bradley at Notre Dame, John McGinnis at Northwestern, and most of the happy band who appear on the Volokh Conspiracy.  But as a proportion of the law professoriate they have to represent less than 5 percent of the total.”

Comment:   Reviewing the seven decades of my own education, I note the absence today of so many old time values and worship……such as honesty, search for truth,  clarity of thought,  and responsibility for ones own behavior in favor of the new feminized American disorder of life frosted by hysteria and other impediments to problem solving.

Not long ago we Americans  revered constitutional  government reminding those few who cared about or studied human foible of the superiority of Rule by Law over Rule by Man.    Rule of Law would be the superior, it was hoped, for it would arise from the fair and open debate and agreement  of  a free people  elected to solve problems to advance liberty in the people’s  pursuit of happiness as God would allow.  

Civilized people would then  be safe from the whims of tyrants, individuals  of the first class such as rule by Adolph Hitler,  Josef Stalin,  Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, Mao or  Pol Pot and those ‘pretender’  tyrants  Hugo Chavez and our own beloved  Barack Hussein Obama, of a second class,  who manage to invent law as it arrives with their  personal emotional  moods and schemes.   

Injustice in the American game played as Justice

This devoted Prager fan has been summoned to court on  Tuesday July 10, 2012.    It will not be a day as anyother day in this landscape gardener’s personal or professional history.

A few weeks ago I received the following notice in my afternoon mail following my normal workday.   It was from the State of Minnesota, Hennepin County, and had District Court written on the notice.

“You are hereby summoned to appear before the court to answer the enclosed complaint on:  “July 10, 2012:  Arraingment 9:30”.

“Bring this notice and the enclosed copy of your complaint and a valid State picture I.D. with you to court.   You may be detained after your court appearance for fingerprinting and photographing.”

“FAILURE TO APPEAR IN RESPONSE TO THIS SUMMONS WILL RESULT IN A WARRANT FOR YOUR ARREST.”

The second page of the summons begins:  “The State of Minnesota, Plaintiff, versus Glenn Herbert Ray, Defendant”…….and continues with a listing of four counts of charges:

“Count I…Charge:  TRAFFIC – RECKLESS OR CARELESS DRIVING;  DRIVES WITH WILLFUL OR WANTON DISREGARD FOR SAFETY

Count II…  Charge:  TRAFFIC – CARELESS DRIVING

Count III…Charge: TRAFFIC REGULATION – DRIVER FAILS TO USE DUE CARE TO AVOID COLLIDING WITH BICYCLE OR PEDESTRIAN

Count IV…Charge:  TRAFFIC REGULATION – DRIVER FAILS TO YIELD TO PEDESTRIAN IN CROSSWALK – NO TRAFFIC SIGNALS – 1ST OFF-M”

Listed with each count is “Offense Level” and in each account the level is a misdemeanor.    Listed with each count is the revelation of “Maximum sentence:  90 days or $1,000, or both”.   The Counts state also that each offense occurred “(on or about)”  05/10/2012.

One presumes the 90 days on each account isn’t to be spent near a beach  in Maui.

Wow!!!  I could spend a year in jail and be fined $4,000 for the following event which I shall relate as I experienced it:

I do remember the day, that is the afternoon of the event, which I shall label “the  confrontation”.

Background:    I have lived in the neighborhood a few blocks from where the confontration occurred for 39 years.  It is where I raised my family.   The neighborhood is where my boys went to school.   I have calculated that I have driven north on Williston Road in Minnetonka suburb northward to Minnetonka Boulevard more than 25,000 times, not counting Sundays, during this part of my life.   Each and every one of those travels have been pleasant and peaceful and totally without event.

The traveled part of Williston Road is less than a mile.   But this mile allows residents to enter the outside world as I could exiting at State Hwy 7 to travel east or west, or, as I do, turn north off  Lake Street Extension down Williston  Road around 600 feet to the semiphors at Minnetonka Blvd. where for almost all purposes, traffic  turns east or west.

I turn east and have overwhelmingly since I have worked in landscaping, for that is the entry to my landscaping world, ie, to where the vast majority of my clients live…..to the east and north of where I live. 

Less than 100 feet from that intersection, paralleling the rather traffic-busy, Minnetonka Blvd,  the city, or county developed a walking and running path of some length…20 miles plus, I would guess.   For about 15 years, when I ran distances for ‘enjoyment’, I ran that path maybe 100 times.   It was, and still is, more of a running track in appearance than a path.    In those days I’d run westward to Excelsior and back, and upon occasion to Excelsior and back a second time or third time on the same run.  Or, I would run to Dunn Brothers coffee shop in Minnetonka Mills and back home  for a quicky gallop.

Adult cyclists ride along Minnetonka Blvd. regularly, and often in large numbers wearing their cycling gear.   

Nevertheless, the running path is almost always vacant during the regular week.   I have never seen or heard of any ‘difficulty’, or “incident’ of any kind occurring at  Williston Road  and the running path which crossed it just a few feet south of the traffic signals at Williston Road and Minnetonka Blvd in the decades of its existence.

I trust the State, that is the County, to have recorded the date of the “controntation” accurately.   I made no calendar note of that day.   

I have long honored the police person as an individual, but have had little confidence in the profession’s   honesty, business  habits, and often their  ‘official’  behavior.

Above all, they have difficulty telling the truth.

For thirteen years I was  a public school teacher in Minneapolis, from 1960 to 1972.    I have many memories of police misbehavior, from lying to   brutality  usually perpetrated against   high school boys, at a  time high schools and junior high schools were still civilized to send ones off spring.

As I was driving my 30 miles per hour northward……after all, I’ll be 78 soon and drive cautiously, deliberately, but, by habit, comfortably,  I am nearing a turn off which allows northbound traffic to skip the traffic lights and move on to the east onto Minnetonka Blvd.  without stopping.   That is assuming, of course, everyone is cautious when  there is someone at the path, which upon some occasions, there would be….a runner waiting for the occasional vehicle to move on to the east.  

Except for morning and late afternoon traffic rush, there is very modest traffic running in any direction along Williston in either direction. 

The approaching confrontation was around 2:30.

Looking north on Williston, I noticed a vehicle or two idling at the intersection presumably awaiting the change of signal.   Nothing unusual there.

One cannot see the running path driving north on this street until one passes an enormous power tower rising only a few feet east of Williston Road itself, and only about 100 feet south of  the running path.   At the corner their is a bright yellow sign rising above other signals, to alert drivers there is a bike path nearby.

As always, and admittedly by habit, I slow down at passing the tower to check out my view of the path……which isn’t clearly in view as yet, but, by habit, I know where it is, despite the weeds and shrubbery Nature has seeded nearby.

There was not a human being in sight on Williston Road or off Williston Road….but suddenly from my right door side, I hear screaming and someone  wildly waving  arms above her head.

“You’re breaking the law…..you’re breaking the law”,  she was screaming which I began to discern as she appeared to attack the  Ford Ranger I had been driving, but was now stopping.

I admit I was startled.   The best way I can describe the feeling is one I have had in the past when a dog or cat ran out onto the street…..or anything, even a squirrel doing the same.     I have always reacted as alarmed.  It is natural to do so.    The mind reacts to avoid a ‘mishap’, by riling the body, by pumping it with ‘excited’  blood, which pumps both mind and heart to make some automatic  attempt to avoid the mishap.

Every driver knows this condition….is my bet.      I recoil automatically even for squirrels of whom I am not very fond.

Almost immediately, as if attacking my truck, this ‘wild woman’ is at my Ranger, and, although my windows are still closed I can hear she is still screaming the same scream, but has changed its tense……to the past;   “You have broken the law, you have broken the law…..and at about  the next ‘you’ve broken  the law,  I electronically lowered my right door window about 4 inches, and intentionally lowered it no further.   I thought she was a loony and was about to spit.

Keep in mind there is no human being at any age or size in front of my truck.   My Ranger is idle with this woman who appeared to me behaving like a  ‘maniac’  who had jumped out at my Ranger at my right window now hanging on my truck.

Nothing, no other topic  at all other than the charge I was “breaking” or had “broken”  the law came out of the attacker’s  mouth.

I’m guessing about a minute has passed by by now.   And then, angrilly, I yelled back at the shouter:

“What in Hell are you talking about?   Who do you think you are?    Where is your badge?   Where is your uniform?”….and my unfortunate trump card of speech, “You are no fucking cop!”

I regret the swear word and it has been referred to in the listing of charges agaisnt me.    I wish to note that the word was used for emphais, not to insult or demean anyone.   

The attacker was ‘hugging’ my truck.   She kicked it,   She pounded her fists on my window, and dislodged my right side back view mirror as I very carefully began to free my Ranger frum her hugging, and  drive away from the “confrontation” .

I moved ahead to the traffic light, avoiding the right turn turn off….mainly to avoid the shouter.   No human was in my view to the front, but with the exception of the ranter, I saw a fiftyish year old man sitting in what  I thought was a mechanized vehicle designed for the infirmed.   This entire scene from the attack until I turned east onto Minnetonka Blvd, took about a minute and a half.

At Minnetonka Blvd, as I was turning east I noticed my right side mirror had been twisted.    I parked   about 100 feet from where I had made the turn and got out  of the Ranger to fix the mirror.    From this spot I saw for the first time some people walking along the path.   They were  calmly sauntering from east to west  toward Williston Road.     I didn’t notice  any cyclists on their bikes, but then I didn’t look for any.   I did note that some on the path were walking their bikes.     I had no clue what their ages were.

I made no connection at all with the screaming wild woman who attacked my truck. 

As I was reviewing the incident on my way to work, I surmized that the angry gal must have been a runner who had run out onto Williston as I was approaching, and became startled…….and merely lost her cool.

I moved on in life…………even after  that evening when a police officer knocked at my door to ask me some questions about the event.

Obama’s Octopus Obamacare Looking for its Prey

ObamaCare Madness

The law’s implementation is turning into one pratfall after another –

The law’s implementation is turning into one pratfall after another –

from the Wall Street Journal –

“For sheer political farce, not much can compete with ObamaCare’s passage, which included slipping the bill through the Senate before dawn three Christmas eves ago. But the madcap dash to get ready for the entitlement’s October 2013 start-up date is a pretty close second.

The size and complexity of the Affordable Care Act meant that its implementation was never going to be easy. But behind the scenes, even states that support or might support the Affordable Care Act are frustrated about the Health and Human Services Department’s special combination of rigidity and ineptitude.

To take one example, for the better part of a year states and groups like the bipartisan National Governors Association and the National Association of Medicaid Directors have been begging HHS merely for information about how they’re required to make ObamaCare work in practice. There was radio silence from Washington, with time running out. Louisiana and other states even took to filing Freedom of Information Act requests, which are still pending.

Now post-election, new regulations are pouring out from HHS—more than 13,000 pages so far and yet nuts-and-bolts questions are still unanswered. Most of what we know so far comes from a 17-page question-and-answer document that HHS divulged this week, though none of the answers have the force of law and HHS says they’re subject to change at any moment.

HHS is generally issuing rules with only 30 days for public comment when the standard is 60 days and for complex regulations 90 days and more. But the larger problem is that HHS’s Federal Register filings reveal many of the rules were approved in-house and ready to go as early as May. Why the delay?

To take another example, the feds are building a data hub to determine who is eligible for Medicaid and ObamaCare’s “exchanges,” the bureaucracies that will dispense insurance subsidies and police the market. Many states have cut administrative costs by combining the application process for Medicaid, food stamps, cash assistance and other antipoverty programs, but HHS’s privacy rules say the hub can only be used for ObamaCare. So HHS will force states to become less efficient and flatly refuses to reconsider.

In a word, HHS is treating the states not as the partners it needs to give ObamaCare any chance of success, but as serfs.

HHS did finally if “conditionally” approve the exchange blueprints of six states this week, though it has yet to release any formal objective standards for conditional approval. Some 24 states are refusing to participate, so the agency will be running a federal fallback exchange that it won’t reveal how it will operate.

A federal exchange is a vast undertaking. The clearinghouses will be open to the uninsured but also to small businesses and people who already buy plans on the individual market. On average about a quarter of a state’s population are expected to at least browse the exchange options, and the share will be far higher in states with large numbers of uninsured people under 65, like New Mexico (24%), Georgia (22%) and Texas (27%).

If 20% of Americans use exchanges, that’s 62 million people. At a House Energy and Commerce hearing on Thursday, ObamaCare point man Gary Cohen all but took the Fifth on how he’ll deal with this and other challenges.

The exchange naysayers now notably include Chris Christie of New Jersey and Bill Haslam of Tennessee. Sure, they’re Republicans, but both Governors flirted with the idea and wanted to participate if it would result in a saner and more rational marketplace. The costs and risks were too high.

HHS also declared this week that states can decide either to expand Medicaid (after the Supreme Court decision made it optional), or not. But states are not allowed to make the partial expansion that many states would have considered. This all-or-nothing political gambit is meant to put the Governors in a bad political spot at home if they don’t expand, but the irony is that many of them would participate if HHS gave them more flexibility to manage their own programs  and control costs.

Yet HHS has made it almost impossible to qualify for Medicaid waivers. States aren’t even allowed to “go green” by using digital instead of paper applications. These “maintenance of effort” rules weren’t carved in stone tablets by LBJ. HHS formalized them in a regulation this February.

***

In other implementation hilarity, no fewer than 18 Democratic Senators and Senators-elect came out last week against ObamaCare’s $28 billion tax on medical device sales—and not just the usual penitents from Massachusetts and Minnesota. The list includes Chuck Schumer, Dick Durbin and Patty Murray.

“With this year quickly drawing to a close, the medical device industry has receive little guidance about how to comply with the tax—causing significant uncertainty and confusion for businesses,” they write about the tax most of them voted for.

The last entitlement to get off the ground was President Bush’s Medicare prescription drug benefit. Those rules were tied up with a bow by January 2005, giving business and government nearly a year to prepare—and that was far simpler than re-engineering 17% of the economy. No one knows where the current magical mystery tour is headed, especially not HHS.”

Tim Scott, the New Republican Senator from South Carolina

MEET THE NEW SENATOR FROM SOUTH CAROLINA

 

By STEPHEN MOORE     at   the Wall Street Journal

Republicans in need of encouraging signs for the new year need look no further than Tim Scott. He was appointed by Gov. Nikki Haley on Monday to succeed Jim DeMint as U.S. senator from South Carolina. Mr. Scott is a charismatic and principled economic and social conservative from the Deep South. He owes his rapid political rise in part to the tea party movement. Oh, and he is black.

In a few weeks, when the new Congress convenes, Mr. Scott, 47, will take his place as the first black senator from a former Confederate state since Reconstruction. This will make it exceedingly difficult for liberals to maintain their stereotype of the South as a land teeming with white racists. “If that were true,” he says, “how could I have been elected to Congress in a district that is 70% white?” He adds: “I have campaigned all over the state of South Carolina. It is the friendliest state in the country. And truly here people judge you by the content of your character not the color of your skin.”

Though he would clearly prefer to discuss substantive matters other than race—”I try to steer away from these issues,” Mr. Scott says—he recognizes that he has been thrust into the spotlight as a groundbreaking black politician. With some prodding, he reluctantly addresses the subject.

He says that he is fully aware of the challenge that he presents to the GOP’s traditional liberal critics. “I think one of the most threatening places to be in politics is a black conservative,” Mr. Scott says, “because there are so many liberals who want to continue to reinforce a stereotype that doesn’t exist about America.” What stereotype is that? “That somehow, some way, if you’re a Republican you’re a racist and if you’re black, there’s no chance for you in society.

“We have serious challenges in this nation. Some are racial. But in my life, the vast majority of people that have really afforded me the opportunity to succeed were white folks. Is there a better way to say that?”

Mr. Scott’s own story exemplifies the change in attitudes taking hold in the New South. When he first ran for office 18 years ago, for county council, even his friends were shocked. “People said, ‘Son, you’re running in the wrong party.’ They had never even heard of a black Republican. I ran against a white guy, who was a very popular Democrat at the time. I won, not because I was black and a Republican. I won because they liked my values.”

Mr. Scott is sitting down with me in the Cannon House Office Building a few days after his appointment. Chairs and desks are stacked in the halls, ready to be moved to the Senate.

Most conservatives and Republicans in South Carolina and around the country were delighted by Ms. Haley’s choice. But the left wasted no time pouncing on the appointee. Adolph Reed, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, took to the op-ed page of the New York Times with an indignant piece entitled “The Puzzle of Black Republicans.” Mr. Reed sneered that Mr. Scott holds positions “utterly at odds with the preferences of most black Americans” and that his rise fits “a morality play that dramatizes how far [blacks] have come. It obscures the fact that modern black Republicans have been more tokens than signs of progress.”

To the left, Mr. Scott is dangerous because he has challenged liberal orthodoxy his whole career.

When he was Charleston County Council chairman in 1997, he decided to post the Ten Commandments outside the building—a move ruled unconstitutional in a lawsuit brought by the ACLU. Mr. Scott believes the free-enterprise system holds the most promise for allowing the poor to escape poverty. He blames liberals for an attitude instilled in minorities that they can’t succeed in America because of racial barriers, “which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

He thinks racial-preference programs and racial quotas are “mostly unnecessary,” because while he supports goals to promote minority hiring, “you can’t force people into relationships.” He adds: “It’s the same as when I asked the same girl out 10 times, and she just didn’t want to go.”

Growing up in North Charleston, he attended a mostly white but desegregated high school and was elected president of the senior class. After graduating from Charleston Southern University in 1988, he went into the insurance business and shortly thereafter hung out his own shingle as Tim Scott Allstate, which grew to 3,000 customers. He was elected to state offices beginning in 1995, then in 2010—the year of the tea party—he ran for Congress and defeated Strom Thurmond’s son. In the House, his first act was to sponsor a bill to overturn ObamaCare.

Despite his storybook rise—”I never even imagined being in the United States Senate, it was never part of the plan”—Mr. Scott has felt the personal sting of racism and has had doors shut on him. In high school and college he was bullied and “sometimes I got hate-filled notes with racial slurs attached to my locker.”

It was made worse, he recalls, because “I was a kind of an oddball. Had three pair of pants and two pair of shoes. And you know, you rotate them and you got made fun of. I had buck teeth, they were going in two different directions. It was a challenging time.” The barriers, he is convinced, “only made my will to succeed even stronger.”

The two guiding influences of his life have been his mother, who always worked two jobs (“I’m living her American dream,” he says proudly) and the man he calls “my mentor,” John Moniz, a white Christian and one of the first franchise owners of Chick-fil-A restaurants. “He took me under his wing and for three or four years he was telling me that as a poor kid in North Charleston, that I could think my way out of poverty. I didn’t have to play football. I didn’t have to become an entertainer.”

One of the people who got him interested in politics, surprisingly enough, was Jesse Jackson. Mr. Scott didn’t necessarily agree with Rev. Jackson’s politics but was struck that a black man could run for president—which back in the 1980s seemed a revolutionary concept.

Another influence was the late, legendary Sen. Strom Thurmond. “In 1992, I was the vice chairman of his last re-election,” Mr. Scott says. Really? He worked for the formerly staunch segregationist? “He was a complicated man,” Mr. Scott says, “but people change their minds. They embrace truth. In the end he received around 30% of the black vote. I’d like to get there. If Strom Thurmond could get 30% of the black vote, any Republican can.”

Mr. Scott has also been active in the tea party, and he bristles at the suggestion that its influence is waning. “No. I think almost every American is a part philosophically with the tea party.” How so? Because of what the tea party stands for, he says: “Limited government, free markets, entrepreneurship, capitalism, and making the government smaller, less intrusive and keeping it out of your pockets.” Those are enduring American principles, he says. As for charges that the tea party is racist, he laughs. “I was warmly embraced by the tea party. They openly seek more minorities.”

If conservative ideas work better, how does he explain the re-election of Barack Obama, the most liberal president in a century? “People like Barack Obama. He’s a warm person.” By contrast, Republicans have failed miserably to get their message across. “Most of our problems this year,” Mr. Scott says, come down to violating his first rule of politics: “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care,” reciting an old line from the late Jack Kemp, another Republican he admired.

Then he tells a story: “I put together a group of mostly black pastors and thinkers in the new part of my district, near Hilton Head. I told them, ‘I don’t expect you to vote for me in November. I don’t know that you will vote for me ever. But we’re going to start a relationship today. And it’s not about the election. It’s about life. It’s about changing the course of history for kids who are coming behind us.’ ” He notes that one of the pastors in the meeting called him after his appointment to the Senate to celebrate the news.

Mr. Scott seems to have a talent for reaching out to voters who might be expected to be skeptical of a Republican. The first step, he says, is simply to convey your interest. When he recently addressed a gathering of Mexican residents of Charleston, he did his best to read his speech in Spanish. “Think about the fact that I flunked Spanish in high school. I am not bilingual, I’m bi-ignorant. But they were chuckling. It broke the ice.”

He says he is frustrated that Republicans seem to be no better at communicating during the fiscal-cliff negotiations than they were during the campaign season. Somehow, the GOP has allowed the focus of the talks to center on taxes for the rich: “We need a spending conversation, but you cannot have that in the middle of a revenue argument, so we can’t win. The American people want less spending and less debt, but we aren’t talking about that.”

Once he has taken up his place in the Senate, he says, he will try to spur more conversation about spending, but he will also address tax reform. He will introduce the “Rising Tide Tax Reform Act,” which would lower corporate taxes to 23% and allow for permanent repatriation of foreign earnings back into the U.S. “On the personal tax code,” he says, “I like the plan of lowering the tax rate so that we can increase the revenue.”

A major influence on his thinking about tax matters is economist Arthur Laffer—”one of my closest advisers.” Raising tax rates, especially on capital gains, Mr. Scott says, will result in less revenue.

If he succeeds in his mission on tax reform, he predicts: “Once we get to lower tax rates, and we execute more revenue coming in, our economy will start growing at a faster pace, and we’re going to like the results.”

In the Senate the man he most wants to emulate is Marco Rubio of Florida because “he has the warmth and communication skills that I like.” Can he fill the shoes of Jim DeMint, who is leaving to become the president of the Heritage Foundation? “I doubt it because there is only one Jim DeMint, not two. But I have a desire to make sure that his consistent conservatism continues.”

Mr. Moore is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.

A version of this article appeared December 22, 2012, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Meet the New Senator From South Carolina.

 

 

 

Dennis Prager, the Yeshiva Boy and the Pain of Christmaslessness

A Yeshiva Boy and Christmas

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

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When I was 20, I spent my junior year in college in England. When classes let out for the last two weeks of December, I traveled to Morocco, where something life-changing occurred. What happened was that I felt a longing, even an emptiness, I had never before experienced. Something was missing from my life, but I could not at first identify it. I knew it was not about being without friends or family — after all, I hadn’t been with family or friends for the previous three months. And it wasn’t about being alone — I had gotten used to traveling alone.This sense of missing something kept gnawing at me, until one day I realized what it was: I missed the Christmas season. I missed that time of year in America.At first I denied it. Growing up in an Orthodox Jewish home and in yeshivas (Orthodox religious schools where half the day was devoted to religious, and half the day to secular, studies), I had, of course, never celebrated Christmas. How, then, could I miss something that I never had? How could I, raised in an Orthodox Jewish world, miss the quintessential Christian holiday?But I could not conjure up any other explanation: I was in a non-Christian country, and therefore I heard no Christmas songs, saw no Christmas decorations, and Dec. 25 was just another day.

I subsequently spent a lot of time reflecting on why this yeshiva boy would miss the Christmas season.

I came to two life-changing realizations. First, though my yeshiva world did everything possible to ignore Christmas — we had school on Christmas Day, and we had a “midwinter vacation” at the end of January instead of a Christmas vacation — I really liked the Christmas season.

And, second, this Jew, whose rather insulated Orthodox upbringing overwhelmingly emphasized Jewish identity, was in fact intensely American.

My youth in New York had consisted of an Orthodox home, Orthodox synagogue, Orthodox yeshiva, and Orthodox friends. In that world, one’s American identity was never denigrated, but it was largely ignored. And Christianity was entirely ignored (though it was an annual ritual in my home to watch the midnight Mass from Rome).

Until I was in college, my contact with Christianity was almost nonexistent — except for Christmas decorations and Christmas music. Morocco made me realize that I missed something Christian, and that I felt profoundly American.

As the years passed, I came to treasure this season and to fall in love with America and its distinct values (what I call the American Trinity: Liberty, In God We Trust and E Pluribus Unum). While director of a Jewish institution from 1978 to1983, I volunteered to be Santa Claus for the Simi Valley Rotary Club, of which I was a member. So, during the same week that I led Sabbath services and study for about a thousand Jews, I also went to my Rotary Club meeting — what is more American than the Rotary Club? — and was the Santa Claus for a local department store.

It is that season now, and I never fail to get goose bumps when I hear Burl Ives sing “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas,” let alone when I attend a performance of Handel’s “Messiah,” surely the greatest religious music ever composed. I love hearing people wish each other “Merry Christmas.” When my Jewish day school-attending children were young, I used to take them to see homes that had particularly beautiful Christmas lights.

Those who wish to remove Christmas trees from banks and colleges and other places where Americans gather are not only attempting to rob the 90 percent of Americans who celebrate Christmas of their holiday, they are robbing this Jew, too.

And I first realized all this in a Muslim country.

Comment:     The torture of Christmaslessness nearly overwhelms me these days. Its pain is greater than the discomfort Dennis describes above,  for   I have  a half  generation of life  older than he.   

It  might as well be a century due to  the changes in America which have occurred when one adds two decades to the time before his awareness as an American and as a God-fearing person ever entered his presence when one can add the War year Christmases to contrast with  today’s Obamaland…….when no one had any money………when families spent Sundays together……when Americans had families……..When most Americans   had  real Mothers and real Fathers, real Uncles and Aunts, and a grandparent or two……

…….When one could hear Silent Night, Joy to the World, the First Noel, Oh Holy Night,  Adeste Fideles, and Hark, the Herald Angels Sing  somewhere on the street, in shops and certainly on  radio and in public school………Before  the intolerant, bigotted LEFT began to construct its lonely America led by  the  ethically and even morally  deprived and depraved.

Has any American heard Handel’s “Messiah”, its language and music, lately?

P.S.   God Bless You, Dennis Prager.

Obama’s Chicago Records 500th Murder for 2012

How is Lefty “PEACE AND LOVE”  dogma  doing in Obama’s Chicago these days?      Are the sounds   cooing and the muscles hugging from neighbor to neighbor  in  the Barack Obama inner city Democrat Party plantation FORTRESS?  

How well is the SIXTY YEAR, ONE PARTY, DEMOCRAT  DICTATORSHIP  doing on the cultural front, the economic front, or the  moral front during these many decades?   

Is its favorite American preacher, Jeremiah Wright still selling his ideas of paradise?

Let’s read the following article from U.S. News for perhaps a clue:

                                    GRIM MILESTONE:  CHICAGO RECORDS  500th HOMICIDE OF 2012

View more videos at: http://nbcchicago.com.

By Lauren Jiggetts and Lauren Petty, NBCChicago.com

A man gunned down Thursday on Chicago’s west side marked what police say is the city’s 500th homicide of the year. It’s a dubious distinction that hasn’t occurred since 2008, when the city ended the year with 512 murders.

Police are releasing few details about the shooting that happened around 9 p.m. in the 4900 block of West Augusta. The man was taken to Stroger Hospital, where he died.

At a peace dinner held Thursday, residents came together to talk about ways to end violence. Alderman Anthony Beale, who is running for Jesse Jackson Jr.’s old 2nd Congressional District seat, said Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy needs to change strategies.

“His philosophy is not working,” Beale said. “We need to put resources where the problems are, and then you will see crime drop across the city.”

Chicago surpassed 2011’s 435 murder total in October

Police said Chicago’s 499th homicide victim was a man who died after he was shot at least four times – including in the face and chest – in a Gage Park neighborhood alley Wednesday night on the Southwest Side.

Frederico Martinez, of the 5400 block of South California Avenue, died from gunshot wounds he suffered near his home, according to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office.

Police said the 32-year-old Martinez was standing with a female in an alleyway down the block from his home when a light-colored pick-up truck approached and somebody inside opened fire.

Martinez was shot in the face, chest and both arms and was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he died, authorities said.

Behind the troubling statistics, flashing lights and crime tape, communities throughout the city are searching for solutions.

“There’s no magic spell that can end it. It’s a matter of people and neighborhoods coming together and deciding that it’s not going to happen,” said neighbor Robert Grider.

Larry Pickens, who is running in the special election in the 2nd Congressional seat, offered a few suggestions Thursday: “Teaching our young people alternative dispute resolution, non-violent strategies for addressing conflict and getting guns off the street.”

Further comment:    The above statistics cover only the homicides  within  the boundaries of  the city of Chicago proper, where in the recent presidential election,  Barack Hussein Obama received over 90% of the vote  from the living and the dead who participated in the election.

The Usually Unworthy CNBC Comes Up with a Rick Santelli Special about our American Cliff

Usually  cackle emanating from American competitive news television is female.   It is reverently cherished at Fox and CNN;  far less coherently at MSNBC, the leading Obama news channel.

 Most cackle, if not all, winds up  unworthy and/or incapable  of comprehension due to the intellectually impaired who lead the noise, but  lose the  mind of the debate after first shreik.   Male cackle is rare…….for he is less likely to lose his ‘line of thought’ being penetratingly so single minded……so focussed……so male.

The following is and example of human male cackle……of the kind worth hearing:

Video from realclearpolitics: 

Santelli Goes On Mega Rant: “The Fed Doesn’t Have A Clue”

SANTELLI: “The Fed doesn’t have a clue, neither does the president, neither does Congress. Neither does Tim Geithner, who gives a speech about hitting the debt ceiling. I’d like to see if he could count to a million much less 16.4 trillion.” (from CNBC’s Squawk Box, via Daily Caller)

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2012/12/27/santelli_goes_on_mega_rant_the_fed_doesnt_have_a_clue.html

Obama Newsman David Gregory Snubs Ammo Restriction Law for NBC TV Show

FREE DAVID GREGORY

from the opinion page  of  the  Wall Street Journal

Moving right along in America’s gun control, er, “conversation,” we now have the illuminating debate over the alleged criminality of “Meet the Press” host David Gregory. Somehow this seems appropriate to the quality of the rest of the gun debate.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that Washington, D.C. police are investigating the notorious NBC News crime boss for using an unlawful rifle magazine as a prop for his Sunday program. The Post says Mr. Gregory had asked police for permission to acquire the 30-round rifle magazine, which is banned under D.C. law, but police refused. Mr. Gregory displayed the ammo anyway during his interview with Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association.

This has created an uproar, with gun rights advocates calling for Mr. Gregory’s indictment, if not yet the death penalty, and police acknowledging their probe.

How perfect can you get? Mr. Gregory interrogates Mr. LaPierre on the subject of whether to ban a magazine that it is illegal for Mr. Gregory to display but apparently easy enough to acquire in time for a Sunday morning broadcast. So here we have a possible indictment that would be entirely nonsensical of a journalist who was trying to embarrass an NRA official over an ammunition ban whose impact would be entirely symbolic.

Various media are also reporting that an online petition is underway on the White House website calling for Mr. Gregory’s indictment. It isn’t clear that Mr. Gregory is guilty of anything other than perhaps overzealousness in pursuit of the conventional gun-control wisdom, which is not a crime unless we want to empty newsrooms and fill up jails from coast to coast.

A version of this article appeared December 27, 2012, on page A12 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Free David Gregory.