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Ricochet has Tales From a Bomb Shelter.
I really thought I knew.
I mean, I had written about it, raised hell, and described it to the world. During Operation Pillar of Defense, I held a rally in support of Israel and gave a passionate speech: “15 seconds,” I said, ’15 seconds to make sure that you and the people you love are safe”. Imagine the terror, imagine the fear, and imagine not knowing the outcome. And I thought I knew — because I had seen it on YouTube, because I had read about it, and because I had spoken to those who lived it. How much more could there be to it? Turns out quite a lot more.
A week ago, I boarded a plane to Israel with my two sons. It was their first visit, and the excitement was palpable. We had rented a small house in TLV, just between the beach and Shuk HaCarmel, and for five straight days my kids called every day the best of their lives.
I was preparing dinner on the eve of the sixth day, waiting for my friends to arrive for one last night of food, wine, and talking all night. My children were sitting at the table watching a movie. Then I heard the sound — like the entire city was wailing with pain. The loudness of it is so frightening that it takes a few seconds before I even understand what I am hearing.
My first thought is that I have no idea what to do. …
John Fund thinks the courts may make the president learn to play well with others.
The legal positions of President Obama’s Justice Department have been slapped down unanimously a remarkable 13 times in the Supreme Court in the last two years. Over and over, even Obama’s own two appointees to the court — Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — have held that the president has exceeded his authority and violated the separation of powers. This coming week, we could see the second-highest court in the land rule that the administration broke the law in enforcing a key provision of Obamacare, calling into question once again Obama’s fidelity to the Constitution — and further endangering his signature program.
The case of Halbig v. Sebelius (since renamed Halbig v. Burwell, for the current HHS secretary) was argued before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Court in March. It attacks the central nervous system of Obamacare — the government exchanges that were set up to subsidize health insurance for low-income consumers. If the Supreme Court ultimately finds that the Obama administration violated the law in doling out those subsidies, it could force a wholesale revision of Obamacare. In January, The Hill quoted a key Obamacare supporter as saying that Halbig was “probably the most significant existential threat to the Affordable Care Act.” Jonathan Turley, a noted liberal constitutional-law expert at George Washington Law School, recently agreed, writing in the Los Angeles Times that Halbig “could leave Obamacare on life support.”
President Obama has increasingly exasperated both judges and constitutional scholars with his boasts about going around Congress when it doesn’t give him what he wants. …
Mark Steyn writes on the challenges of diversity.
Texas Governor Rick Perry was criticized for declining to greet President Obama at Austin-BergstromAirport when Air Force One touches down and the bazillion-car motorcade takes off for some vital Democrat fundraisers.
Obama made a conscious decision to, in effect, dissolve the southern border, and, quite reasonably enough, the “unaccompanied minors” of Latin America opted to take him at his word. One of his party’s most senior figures, and the woman who if things go well for them in November will be Speaker of the House and second in line of succession to the presidency, explicitly refuses to recognize the international boundary. Down there for a photo-op the other day, Nancy Pelosi declared: “This is a community with a border going through it.” It’s bogus, so why get hung up on tedious legalistic nonsense like “frontiers”?
Mr Obama and Ms Pelosi apparently see themselves as leaders of some post-Westphalian entity wherein the political elite use the Third World to reconfigure the citizenry to something more to their taste. But, having voluntarily liquidated US sovereignty at the southern border, in what sense then is Obama President of the United States? Why should the head of a sovereign state that’s renounced its sovereignty still expect to be entitled to all the perks thereof – like fawning governors greeting him at the airport? …
The justice department says we can’t mock the president. The most mockable president in centuries and we can’t have some fun? Charles Cooke at National Review has the story.
Nineteen terrifying words from the Omaha World-Herald:
“The U.S. Department of Justice has joined the discussions over a controversial float in the Norfolk Independence Day parade.”
Thus did the federal government dispatch an emissary to investigate a minor instance of Midwestern dissent.
A quick recap for the happily uninitiated: The “controversial float” in question was one of many included in this year’s Independence Day parade in Norfolk, Neb. The entry, which featured a zombie standing on an outhouse marked “Obama Presidential Library,” was created by a veteran named Dale Remmich, and was designed, Remmich claims, to express the “political disgust” that he feels at the Obama administration’s mismanagement of the Department of Veteran Affairs. As is the habit now, pictures of the float were quickly pushed around the Internet, attracting the attention and disapprobation of such august institutions as the Washington Post, CBS, ABC, and the Huffington Post — and, it seems, the interest of the United States Department of Justice. This week, the World-Herald reports, the DOJ “sent a member of its Community Relations Service team, which gets involved in discrimination disputes, to a Thursday meeting about the issue.” Present at the summit were the NAACP, the mayor of the Nebraska town in which the float was displayed, and the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, which sponsored the event.
Now for the obvious question: Why? What, exactly, was the problem here? Nobody was killed. Nobody was injured. Nobody had their material or spiritual interests injured, nor were they stripped of their livelihoods. …
If the DOJ wishes to control discord in the republic, perhaps they should turn their attention to Chicago where USA Today reports 82 shootings and 14 deaths in the Fourth of July weekend.
At least 14 people were killed and dozens more wounded in Chicago over the holiday weekend, breaking a relative lull in a city that has been fighting a high-profile battle against the scourge of gun violence.
Chicago has been under scrutiny since 2012, when it was the only city in the nation to record more than 500 homicides. This year, Chicago had 172 homicides through June 30 — nine fewer than the same period last year and 82 fewer than during the first six months of 2012.
While homicides are slightly down, shooting incidents have increased in Chicago during the first half of this year. Police reported 833 shooting incidents at the end of June 2013 compared with 880 shootings as of June 29. The 14 killed over the holiday weekend are among 82 shot in Chicago from late Thursday to early Monday morning.
“Going into a holiday weekend like this, we obviously had a plan— [the] plan included putting hundreds of more officers on the streets at the times that we needed them and in the places we needed them,” said Chicago Police superintendent Garry McCarthy. “What were the results? The results were a lot of shootings and a lot of murders, unfortunately.” …
Washington Times reports Chicago blacks call obama the worst president ever. Is this another reason for the DOJ to investigate Chicago? Turns out their problem is all the free stuff is going, not to them, but to illegal aliens.
… One man called for Mr. Obama to step down if he continued to shun the city’s problems.
“For the president to set aside all of these funds for immigrants and [have] forsaken the African-American community, I think that’s a disgrace,” the man told the blog Rebel Pundit. “He will go down as the worst president ever elected. Bill Clinton was the African-American president.”
As Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit is fond of saying, “The country is in the best of hands.” My Fox DC has the story of a TSA agent in Orlando who didn’t know where the District of Columbia is.
You probably learned the 50 United States in elementary school— but don’t forget about the nation’s capital. An Orlando Transportation Safety Administration agent apparently needed a geography refresher after refusing to let a D.C. man through a security checkpoint last weekend because he didn’t recognize his District of Columbia driver’s license as a valid form of identification. …