Click on WORD or PDF for full content
John Fund has two articles that inspire hope. In the first, Fund reports on a true post-racial candidate.
Tim Scott, a state legislator from Charleston, S.C., captured 68% of the vote to win a House GOP primary runoff last night. Because the district is overwhelmingly Republican, Mr. Scott is almost guaranteed to win the fall race, becoming the first black Republican elected from the Old Confederacy since the 1890s. …
…Mr. Scott is an American success story. He grew up poor, his parents divorcing when he was age 7. His mother worked 16 hours a day to provide for two children. Mr. Scott was in danger of dropping out of high school when a conservative businessman who ran a Chick-fil-A fast-food restaurant inspired him to keep going. After graduating from college, he went into the insurance business and won election to the state legislature in 2008.
When the local congressional seat opened up this year, he jumped into the race with a conservative platform calling for repeal of ObamaCare and a simplified tax code. His stance won him the support of the Club for Growth, which helped raise $313,000 for his campaign. No doubt you’ll find Mr. Scott featured on many news shows next year as the Republican House Caucus’s new history-making member.
Abigail Thernstrom celebrates Tim Scott’s victory.
… It is often said that southern whites will not vote for black candidates. Wrong. They will not vote for blacks with the far-left message of most of the Congressional Black Caucus. Scott doesn’t fit the mold. Get on his website; his message is that of a solid Republican: “If I can seek opportunity, not security, I want to take the calculated risk to dream and build, to fail and to succeed. I refused to barter incentive for dole.” He describes himself as a “believer in small government” and entrepreneurship, as well as an opponent of Obamacare. “President Obama’s health care bill taxes too much, spends too much, is bad for our health care, and is unconstitutional. Tim Scott will fight against government takeover of health care,” his site reads. …
John Steele Gordon too.
…That a black man could beat the son of the legendary segregationist so badly in a district where the Civil War began — the district where Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861 — is a measure of just how much the South has changed in the last 50 years, and the country’s politics and race relations along with it.
But assuming Scott is elected, he needn’t apply for membership in the Congressional Black Caucus, of course. It’s a measure of how little the left in American politics has changed in the last 50 years that the Black Caucus — devoted to race-based politics and victimology — admits only liberal Democratic members.
Thomas Sowell says that BP’s oil spill slush fund is unconstitutional and sets a bad precedent.
…Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a president has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever he deems worthy of compensation? Nowhere.
And yet that is precisely what is happening with a $20 billion fund to be provided by BP to compensate people harmed by their oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. …
…With vastly expanded powers of government available at the discretion of politicians and bureaucrats, private individuals and organizations can be forced into accepting the imposition of powers that were never granted to the government by the Constitution.
If you believe that the end justifies the means, then you don’t believe in Constitutional government. And, without Constitutional government, freedom cannot endure. There will always be a “crisis”– which, as the president’s chief of staff has said, cannot be allowed to “go to waste” as an opportunity to expand the government’s power. …
Obama’s drilling moratorium was overturned. The WSJ editors wrote an excellent article that delineates the sloppiness of this government power grab.
As legal rebukes go, it’s hard to get more comprehensive than the one federal judge Martin Feldman delivered yesterday in overturning the Obama Administration’s six-month moratorium on deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
In a remarkably pointed 22-page ruling, the judge made clear that even Presidents aren’t allowed to impose an “edict” that isn’t justified by science or safety. …
The collusion of big government and big business frequently benefits both, to the detriment of taxpayers. David Harsanyi ponders the angles on the oil spill slush fund.
…No, it doesn’t matter that Barack Obama was the top recipient of BP’s political action committee and individual bucks over the past 20 years. It is irrelevant that BP was a founding member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership and lobbies for cap-and-trade schemes.
According to a Wall Street Journal article, in fact, the administration’s compensation fund has a little something for BP, as well. “In the end,” the piece states, “one aim of the fund — and a prime reason BP agreed to it — will be to minimize lawsuits against the company.” …
…Surely, the Trial Lawyers Association could enlighten the White House to the benefit and fairness of class-action suits. If the arrangement is broken, or too slow, shouldn’t we have some tort reformed? Is it really “mediation” when the administration and an oil company collude to decide what’s best for the victims? …
Roger Simon thinks that the president would like to call the whole thing off.
…I am not being metaphorical here — I am quite serious. The more I have thought about this, the more I am convinced Barack Obama no longer wishes to be president. The degree that he admits this to himself, I am not sure. But I rather suspect that in the small hours of the morning he fantasizes he were anywhere but 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And who could blame him? By almost any measure, he is doing a terrible job. …
…This is a beaten man, struggling to show he is not, even though everybody knows he is. …
IBD Editors call BS on promises to get rid of federal red tape.
After President Obama’s dramatic BP address to the nation, there was reason to think federal red tape would be cut to save the Gulf Coast. Silly us. Bureaucrats are back at it, halting Louisiana’s sand berms.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Tuesday shut down a critical dredging operation off the Chandelier Islands in the Louisiana Delta. …
Hugh Hewitt may have found the catchphrase of the coming elections. Enough!
…There is a vast, coast-to-coast recognition of “oiiohh” — Obama is in over his head. I have offered the T-shirt to my radio audience, and they are moving quite briskly. The “messiah” has become a punch line.
What could he do to turn it around, I asked John Podhoretz, editor of the newly energized and sparkling Commentary magazine. “Things his ideology will never allow him to do,” John replied, and we went on to talk about extending the Bush tax cuts and standing resolutely beside Israel in the face of serial provocations. …
…If the GOP runs on extending the existing tax rates five years while bringing a massive ax to the federal budget, they will sweep all before them. “Enough!” is the one-word bumper sticker showing up across the country and uniting every candidate from the center to the libertarian right.
“Enough!” is enough of a slogan. Not even the Republicans can screw that up.
In the San Francisco Chronicle, Debra Saunders thinks that McChrystal should stay for the sake of the troops.
…In failing to check his subordinates’ derisive talk, McChrystal allowed for a situation that now demands very public apologies. Worse, it could alter the course of Operation Enduring Freedom, as the general put it, “knee-deep in the decisive year.” …
…McChrystal and his inner circle behaved in a manner that was stupid, arrogant and immature. In their thoughtlessness, they let down troops who have made tremendous sacrifices.
A year into the Obama surge and a year before the reputed July 2011 withdrawal deadline, there are some 94,000 U.S. personnel serving in Afghanistan. Their interests must come first. They deserve the best military commander available. …
The Streetwise Professor adds his comments on McChrystal and Afghanistan.
…But regardless of the reasons for the disclosures to a freaking rock magazine (the most damaging of which came from the mouths of the General’s staffers, rather than his own), they give a glimpse of a very disturbing, dysfunctional relationship between the military commanders in the field in Afghanistan, and the entire civilian chain of command, from the Ambassador in Kabul, to the National Security Advisor, to the VP, and to the President himself. The men in the field apparently have nothing but contempt for Obama and those who work for him. (Only Hillary comes off well–another reason, as if she needs one, to watch her back.) Moreover, such backbiting is hardly a harbinger of victory: instead, it is a symptom of a failing military effort.
It is hard to say whether it would be worse if the disdain is warranted, or not. My sense is, though, that the distrust of the field commanders for the civilian leadership is largely merited. Obama only talked about Afghanistan during the campaign to demonstrate his tough guy bona fides. When in office, his reluctance to take charge of the war was palpable. Instead of leadership, he gave a series of dog ate my homework excuses, played Hamlet, and finally “decided” on a strategy that was fundamentally flawed and doomed to failure. He has subsequently all but washed his hands of the matter, relegating it to the very bottom of his priority pile; McChrystal’s discouraged and discouraging assessment reported in the article is probably an accurate one. …
McChrystal should have been fired. Turns out the dumb ass voted for Obama. Proof positive he’s a fool. Jennifer Rubin on the flap.
The news of the day is certainly Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s interview with Rolling Stone magazine and the potential fallout. Fox News reports:
‘The article says that although McChrystal voted for Obama, the two failed to connect from the start. Obama called McChrystal on the carpet last fall for speaking too bluntly about his desire for more troops. “I found that time painful,” McChrystal said in the article, on newsstands Friday. “I was selling an unsellable position.” It quoted an adviser to McChrystal dismissing the early meeting with Obama as a “10-minute photo op.” “Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was. The boss was pretty disappointed,” the adviser told the magazine.
The article claims McChrystal has seized control of the war “by never taking his eye off the real enemy: The wimps in the White House.” ‘ …
Written before the McChrystal flap Marc Thiessen details why the Afghan surge is failing.
…What the Obama administration does not seem to appreciate is that the reason its surge is not working, while the surge in Iraq did, is because President Bush refused to set a artificial deadline for withdrawal. So when American commanders on the ground promised Iraqi tribes we would stick with them if they joined us in the fight, their word was credible. Iraqis had confidence that we would see the job through to the end, and not abandon their country to the enemy. Today, Afghans have no such confidence in America. …
…But let us not forget that it was President Obama decided to set an artificial deadline for withdrawal at the same time he announced the surge—effectively announcing our departure before additional American forces had even left for Afghanistan. This decision could prove to be an unmitigated disaster, one which may have doomed the mission in Afghanistan from the start. …