The Grandfather, The autumn of patriarch Harry Reid

The Grandfather

The autumn of patriarch Harry Reid

Matthew Continetti, Free Beacon

Another man might have assumed, correctly, that launching a campaign of insult and insinuation against two billionaires would result in renewed attention to his own finances. Not Harry Reid. The Senate Democratic leader since 2005, and the Senate majority leader since 2007, is not one to reflect before speaking. His mouth runs far ahead of his brain.

In recent years Reid has declared an American war “lost” while our troops still fought overseas; praised President Obama for his “light” skin and “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one”; asserted falsely and without evidence that Mitt Romney had not paid any taxes for a decade; and said “Why would we want to do that?” when asked if he would fund cancer research during the government shutdown.

Now, with his majority in danger, his president unpopular, his floor agenda obstructed by members of his own caucus, Reid thrashes about uncontrollably. He calls Obamacare horror stories “untrue.” He says Obamacare numbers are not as high as projected because Americans “are not educated on how to use the Internet.” His Senate Majority PAC launches a $3 million ad campaign tying Republican candidates to two men most Americans have never heard of, two men who, funnily enough, are more popular than Reid.

From the floor of the Senate Reid says these two men, Charles and David Koch, are “un-American,” are trying “to buy America.” Without the terrible specter of the Koch brothers Harry Reid would be disarmed. He has no issue for his Democratic Senators to run on; the minimum wage and climate change are not enough. Nor has he another means of inspiring donors to open their checkbooks. He only has fear, fear of the Kochs, fear of extractive industry, fear of the portion of the elite that favors economic freedom. The Koch brothers, Reid says, “rig the system to benefit themselves.” He should know.

The fact that Harry Reid’s political and influence operation includes his five children has been established for some time. A few weeks ago, when I first heard Reid accuse private citizens of being un-American, I dredged up a Los Angeles Times article from 2003 with the headline, “In Nevada, the Name to Know Is Reid.” Chuck Neubauer and Richard T. Cooper’s meticulously researched and reported article begins with the story of the “Clark County Conservation of Land and Natural Resources Act of 2002,” a land bill of the sort that puts people to sleep. “What Reid did not explain” when he introduced the bill in the Senate, Neubauer and Cooper wrote, “was that the bill promised a cavalcade of benefits to real estate developers, corporations, and local institutions that were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbying fees to his sons’ and son-in-law’s firms.” I wonder why he left that part out.

Firms tied to the Reid family, the Los Angeles Times reported, earned more than $2 million from 1998 to 2002 “from special interests that were represented by the kids and helped by the senator in Washington.” How much more have they earned in the 11 years since this article was published? Land, energy, water, gaming, and mining—the Reids manage a diversified portfolio. They are not financial investors but political ones. Reid’s four sons are lawyers, as is his son-in-law. They make their money furthering the interests of paying clients, clients operating businesses in the state represented by Reid.

Those businesses are not necessarily American. After a 2011 trip to China Harry Reid began touting the virtues of ENN Energy Group, a Chinese firm that sought to build a $5 billion solar farm in Nevada. Reid’s son Rory represented ENN, though Rory claimed in a 2012 Bloomberg article never to have discussed “the project with my father or his staff.” Somehow, though, commissioners friendly with the Reid family agreed to sell property to ENN for one-sixth of the land’s appraised value.

The senator repeatedly expressed his support for the project. But ENN could not find a customer for its energy, and dropped its plans last June. In another instance Reid pressured Homeland Security officials to approve the visas of Chinese casino investors represented by Rory Reid. Rory’s brothers should not feel left out, however. Hoover Institution scholar Peter Schweizer says Papa Reid has “sponsored at least $47 million in earmarks that directly benefited organizations that one of his sons, Key Reid, either lobbies for or is affiliated with.”

Who could have been surprised, then, when the Washington Post in 2012 “uncovered nearly 50 members who helped direct millions of dollars in earmarks to projects that either held the potential to enhance the surroundings of a lawmaker’s own property, or aided entities connected to their immediate family,” and one of those members was Reid. The Post zeroed in on an almost $22 million earmark, passed close to a decade ago, that financed a bridge over the Colorado River. The bridge connects the gambling resorts of Laughlin, Nev., to Bullhead City, Arizona. Harry Reid owns 160 acres in Bullhead.

Reid and his family appear to work within the confines of the law, which should not be surprising, because Reid writes that law, and illegal activity hurts the bottom line. Others are not so careful. Last year one of Reid’s longtime donors, Nevada lobbyist Harvey Whittemore, was sentenced to two years in prison after being found guilty of violating campaign finance laws. Whittemore used associates as “straw donors” to run around donation limits, giving more than $130,000 in dirty money to Reid’s campaign. His sentence is delayed pending appeal.

This week we learned that Reid’s willingness to funnel other people’s money to members of his family extends to a third generation. On Wednesday the veteran Nevada journalist Jon Ralston reported that Harry Reid had used $31,000 in campaign funds to buy “gifts for my staff and supporters” from his granddaughter, Rory Reid’s daughter, Ryan Elisabeth Reid, a “performing arts professional” living in Brooklyn.

Ryan Reid is the artistic director of the Sprat Theatre Company, which says it receives donations from the likes of the Caesars Foundation, the NV Energy Foundation, the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, Keep Memory Alive, one Peter Palivos, and the Clinton Global Initiative. The Caesars Foundation is the charitable arm of Caesars Entertainment in Las Vegas, a Harry Reid contributor. A Caesars spokesman told Real Clear Politics that the Caesars Foundation had funded a proposal from Keep Memory Alive to bring Ryan Reid’s play to Vegas, because she needs the help. Keep Memory Alive and the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health are philanthropies founded by Larry Ruvo, general manager of Southern Wine and Spirits of Nevada, member of the American Gaming Association board of directors, and donor to Harry Reid’s Searchlight Leadership Fund PAC. Peter Palivos is a Las Vegas developer, Reid donor, onetime client of Rory Reid, and convicted felon. NV Energy is another Reid donor; a spokesman for that company told Real Clear Politics, and should probably tell the Sprat Theatre, that the theatre’s grant proposal is still under consideration. You have heard of the Clintons.

I have not seen the Sprat Theatre’s new piece, “One Day in the Life of Henri Shnuffle,” which concerns “moments of the title character’s life, from youth to old age, to demonstrate a fuller understanding of aging, Alzheimer’s, and the way others live,” but I do not doubt for a moment that it is so innovative, so compassionate, so compelling and cathartic that the numerous corporate and private sponsors who are financing its Vegas stint this coming October are writing their checks based totally on merit, without a moment’s thought to who Ryan Reid’s father and granddad are. There can be no other way: We all know the motives of liberal Democrats are pure, their hearts true, their lives guiltless of the favoritism and nepotism and self-interest and ideological blindness of Republicans and conservatives. Harry Reid is willing to go the extra step. He did nothing wrong in handing $31,000 of his donors’ money to his granddaughter, he told reporters, but he plans to reimburse his campaign anyway. What a saint.

“I must study politics and war,” John Adams said, “that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.” In Harry Reid’s America a man must win political office so that his sons may have the liberty to practice law and register as lobbyists, engage in rent-seeking and government relations and crisis management and communications, in order to give their children a right to live in Brooklyn, to enroll in the New School, to visit the Vermont Studio Center, to have cronies finance their off-off-off-Broadway shows, to enjoy their allowance from grandpa. This is the arrangement put before the voters this coming Election Day; this is the “system” rigged to benefit the family Reid; this is the configuration of power that Charles and David Koch want to disrupt. How awful of them. How “un-American.”

Condi at the Bat...

What can you do but laugh.

Condi Rice Blasts Obama on Weakness, Leadership

Says we can't afford to be war weary.

Stephen F. Hayes, The Weekly Standard

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accused Barack Obama of dramatically weakening the United States' position in the world, drawing a straight line between Obama’s ever-yielding foreign policy and the increasing troubles around the world.

“Right now, there’s a vacuum,” she told a crowd of more than two thousand attending the National Republican Congressional Committee’s annual dinner last night in Washington, D.C. “There’s a vacuum because we’ve decided to lower our voice. We’ve decided to step back. We’ve decided that if we step back and lower our voice, others will lead, other things will fill that vacuum.” Citing Bashar al Assad’s slaughter in Syria, Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, al Qaeda’s triumphant return to Fallujah, Iraq, and China’s nationalist fervor, she concluded: “When America steps back and there is a vacuum, trouble will fill that vacuum.”

Rice – measured in tone, but very tough on substance – excoriated Obama administration policies without ever mentioning the president by name. She mocked the naïve hope that “international norms” would fill the vacuum left by U.S. retreat and blasted the president for hiding behind the weariness of the public.

“I fully understand the sense of weariness. I fully understand that we must think: ‘Us, again?’ I know that we’ve been through two wars. I know that we’ve been vigilant against terrorism. I know that it’s hard. But leaders can’t afford to get tired. Leaders can’t afford to be weary.”

Rice’s speech was the highlight of an evening that brought in $15.1 million for House Republicans. The former secretary of state has mostly limited her political appearances since leaving office to major events. She delivered a well-received speech at a donor event that Mitt Romney held in Park City, Utah, in 2012 and addressed the Republican National Convention in Tampa that summer. But those familiar with her thinking say she’s determined to help Republicans pick up the Senate and maintain the House heading into the 2016 presidential elections.

House majority whip Kevin McCarthy introduced Rice and raised the prospect that she might become even more involved in politics in two years. After listing various prestigious positions she’s held, he noted, “There’s one thing that’s not on her resume and I want her to put her mind to it to resolve that in 2016.”

Rice has downplayed those suggestions and there’s little reason to believe she’s angling for a run. Still, she has been increasingly active on behalf of her fellow Republicans. Earlier this month, Rice spoke at a Kentucky fundraiser for Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and the spring convention for the California Republican party. Rice appeared in an ad touting Alaska Senate hopeful and Marine reservist Dan Sullivan, a spot paid for by Karl Rove’s super PAC, American Crossroads. In the coming months, she will make appearances for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Rice began her speech Wednesday with something of a civics lesson, praising the wisdom of the framers of the Constitution for the limits they placed on government and noting that Americans, despite being the “most individualistic people on this earth, are also the most philanthropic and communitarian.” Rice trundled through well-worn Republican lines on lower taxes and less regulation before once again touting the American system for its recognition of a “vast private space into which the government should not intrude” and a “personal space, where we respect each others’ choices.”

Before turning to foreign policy, Rice urged the crowd, including many Republican House members, to keep America a “nation of immigrants” and strafed liberals who send their kids to private schools but write New York Times op-eds claiming that school choice will ruin public schools.

But the most powerful part of her speech came when Rice expressed her frustration with Obama on national security. “As Ronald Reagan said: Peace only comes through strength,” she recalled.

“So, what are we doing? What are we doing when our defense budget is so small that our military starts to tell us that we may not be able to carry out all of the requirements put upon it? What are we doing, when a couple of weeks before Russia invades Crimea we announce that we are going to have an Army smaller than at any time since the Revolutionary – I’m sorry, not the Revolutionary War, but World War II. What are we doing? What are we doing? What are we signaling when we say that America is no longer ready to stand in the defense of freedom?”

Least Transparent Ever

One More Reason Why the Obama Administration is the Least Transparent Ever

John Hinderaker, Powerline

The Obama administration has a standard response to all scandals: it stonewalls. Getting information from the administration is like pulling teeth, only slower. Document requests and subpoenas go unanswered, or inadequately answered, for years.

So far Obama’s stonewall strategy has worked quite well. After a year or two, a scandal is treated as old news, even though the administration has never produced the information that would allow Congressional committees, reporters or the public to evaluate it. If the administration stalls long enough, it wins.

In perfecting the art of the stall, Obama has done something that has been tried by no previous president: he has put the White House into the loop when federal agencies respond to subpoenas and Freedom of Information Act requests. A group called Cause of Action has uncovered an April 15, 2009 memo by White House Counsel Greg Craig that lays out the administration’s unprecedented stonewall strategy. Craig’s memo went to every executive department and federal agency. You can read it here. The memo says, in part:

This is a reminder that executive agencies should consult with the White House Counsel’s Office on all document requests that may involve documents with White House equities. …

This need to consult with the White House arises with respect to all types of document requests, including Congressional committee requests, GAO requests, judicial subpoenas, and FOIA requests. And it applies to all documents and records, whether in oral, paper, or electronic form, that relate to communications to and from the White House, including preparations for such communications.

The phrase “White House equities” is undefined. It is not a legal term; it cannot be found in the Freedom of Information Act. Apparently a document has “White House equities” if it potentially could embarrass the Obama administration.

Mark Tapscott reported on Cause of Action’s discovery last week in the Washington Examiner:

The FOIA requires federal agencies to respond within 20 days of receiving a request, but the White House equities exception can make it impossible for an agency to meet that deadline.

In one case cited by Cause of Action, the response to a request from a Los Angeles Times reporter to the Department of the Interior for “communications between the White House and high-ranking Interior officials on various politically sensitive topics” was delayed at least two years by the equities review.

“Cause of Action is still waiting for documents from 16 federal agencies, with the Department of Treasury having the longest pending request of 202 business days.
“The Department of Energy is a close second at 169 business days. The requests to the Department of Defense and Department of Health and Human Services have been pending for 138 business days,” the report said.

There are two problems with the unprecedented White House review that the Obama administration has instituted. The first is that it takes forever. White House lawyers can simply sit on a subpoena until a year or two have gone by, and the potentially embarrassing issue has been forgotten. But the second problem is still more diabolical. The White House is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act. This means that if White House lawyers decide to cover up an Obama scandal by shredding documents that make the administration look bad, no one–no reporter, no Congressional committee, no private citizen–can serve a request that requires the White House to disclose what documents it destroyed. So adding a layer of White House lawyer review to the production of any sensitive documents–those with “White House equities”–means that inconvenient information may sink without a trace. We have no way of knowing how often this has happened over the last five years.

Which is, of course, exactly the way the least transparent administration in history wants it.

weak

Blub, blub, blub...

Thoughts on Ukraine

Thoughts on Ukraine

Mike Walker, Col. USMC (retired)

All,

Many in Western Europe and the United States who never listened to the realists have been caught flat-footed over Putin's aggression against Ukraine. Eastern Europe is a different story. Expect a  build up of military muscle in Poland and elsewhere.

The old saying goes that you cannot have a first rate military without a first rate enemy. Putin just created that enemy.

The question is: Where will Putin draw the line?

The Crimea has never been a historic region of Ukraine. In fact, it was never part of Ukraine until the 1960s. After the breakup in 1991, it was very awkward to have major Russian naval bases and it largest fleet in another country. That was a problem from the start. 

If Putin stops with the Crimea, holds a relatively free and fair referendum for union with Russia, they will likely vote to join.

Then we will be in a pickle if we oppose the transfer.

But what if the Crimea is not enough?

If Putin goes into eastern Ukraine, it will be a big problem.

Even though there are millions of ethnic Russians and millions more of Russian-speaking ethnic Ukrainians (which side they will pick is up in the air), that still leaves millions of Ukrainians, so will they start a bloody insurgency? Will we see the most massive wave of displaced refugees since 1945? That would be a humanitarian disaster of untold proportions.

If he goes for the whole enchilada, conquering all of Ukraine, he will be in deep s---.

The Russian Army has about 160,000 troops available. Ukraine has maybe 45,000 troops, 25,000 border guards, and 20,000 interior ministry paramilitary troops. Add in the reserves and the Russian Army could have a real fight on its hands.

But let us assume the talking heads are right and the Russian Army wins quickly, it will still be very bloody and now what? 

The place is too big. 

The entire Russian Army could not garrison a hostile Ukraine and it would be bled dry in a never-ending guerrilla war. Further, that war would not stop at the Ukrainian border. 

The guerrillas will necessarily take their terror campaign into Russia proper. What if they ally themselves with other ethnic separatists to include radical Islamists fighting the Russians now? It could turn into the bloodiest mess for Russia since the Nazi invasion.

It would only be a matter of time before the Russians realized that holding a hostile Ukraine exceeded the cost in blood and treasure that they would be willing to pay. 

Mike

IRS Abuses: Relearning Our History

IRS Abuses: Relearning Our History

Mike Walker, Col. USMC (retired)

Sixty years ago, the civil rights movement began in earnest an epic struggle to end legal discrimination.

That fight serves as an object lesson for those speaking out against the abuses of the IRS directed against our fellow citizens.

To set the record straight, I am not a member the Tea Party as I disagree with many of its policies, not the least of which is a sense that it stands for whatever any one of its proponents says on any given day, no matter how confusing or contradictory.

But the IRS targeting of the Tea Party is a moral wrong.

It is an abuse of power that every American, regardless of their political positions, should oppose. It is a threat to our political freedoms. History teaches why.

In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” laws enforced by the government were unconstitutional as they created an inferior class of citizens who were adversely discriminated against. That is exactly what the IRS is doing when it targets the Tea Party.

Let us take an example from Little Rock during the school desegregation struggles in 1957. The state government’s target then was the NAACP and here is what was done:

Legislation was enacted that “required organizations and individuals ‘challenging the authority’” of government officials [i.e. opposing segregation laws] “to register…and make regular reports of their budgets.” It further required the NAACP to reveal its members names.[1]

Back then, the purpose was to use government power to silence opposition to the state-sanctioned status quo of racial segregation and today, silencing the opposition is the aim of IRS Tea Party targeting.

In 1957, the government also tried to divide their opponents by “trying to get ‘good’ Negroes, and none of the ‘radicals’ who sued them” into the desegregated schools.[2] The goal was to punish those who spoke out against the status quo.

Now compare that to what the IRS is doing to Tea Party groups:

“The deal boiled down to this: We’ll do our job, the IRS said, if you give up your rights.”[3] When confronted with this government imposed inequality, Jenny Beth Martin of the Tea Party Patriots stood her ground and refused to allow what the IRS apparently deemed ‘good’ organizations to be granted greater rights “than those of us who had been targeted.”[4]

As in the 1950s, the goal of the IRS is to use the law to create an inferior class of citizen as punishment for speaking out against the status quo.

Civil rights mean civil rights for all.

Free speech means free speech for all.

When the government targets American citizens and offers “separate but equal” rights to silence them then it has done a great injustice to our nation and its people.

It was wrong in the 1954 and it is wrong sixty years later.

---

[1] See Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965, 25^th Anniversary Edition (New York: Penguin, 2013), p. 96. This is a “must read” book for any serious student of American history.

[2] Williams, Eyes on the Prize, p. 97.

[3] Kimberley A. Strassel, “All the President’s IRS Agents,” The Wall Street Journal, dated 28 February 2014.

[4] Strassel, “IRS Agents,” dated 28 February 2014.

Whither goest Ukraine?

Whither goest Ukraine?

Mike walker, Col. USMC (Retired)

Courage is a hard and costly word.

It seems the world is once again at a crossroads where courage is demanded and the junction is called Ukraine.

The Unites States has sailed into the path of isolationism to a degree not seen since the 1930s.

This isolationism is a bipartisan consensus and not simply an American problem. Europe, for example, has been more feckless than the United States and like the 1930s, never has an appeal to brute force been better received in the darkest quarters of humanity.

The parallels to the 1930s are frightening.

As then, the world’s liberal democracies are going through trying economic times, authoritarian regimes are rising in number and seem to be embracing naked military aggression to achieve their aims.

The appeasers and apologist are many. We recently had a United States senator sing praises of the repressive Cuban Regime that beggared belief to an extent unheard since Lindberg’s praise of the Nazi Germany.

Do not the destabilizing and cynical acts of Putin, falling on the heels of the Sochi Olympics, bring to fore memories of Hitler after the Berlin Olympics?

Is today’s conflict in Syria any less brutal, less significant, than the Civil War in Spain?

Are North Korean labor camps that different than those of the Nazis in the 1930s?

And what are we to say to the Filipinos who recently vowed to protect their nation from rapacious ultranationalists that hold too great a sway in Beijing? One leader compared their “David versus Goliath” struggle against Chinese militarist with that that of Czechoslovakia when it faced Nazi Germany.

What are we to make of a China who this week officially referred to our outgoing ambassador as a “banana,” a base racial slur aimed at his Chinese ethnicity meaning “yellow” on the outside and “white” on the inside?

Just who are these men in charge in Beijing?

Just how wrong were the appeasers and apologists for Putin and his host of likeminded tyrants?

Do we have the courage to do the right thing? 

Are we fated to repeat the mistakes of the past?

Whither goest us?

Venezuelan Fascism

Venezuelan Fascism

Mike Walker, Col. USMC (retired)

All, 

As Venezuela descends into economic failure and political authoritarianism, the young people are taking to the streets. As one youthful demonstrator recently told a reporter, “As long as there is repression, we will keep coming out.”

President Nicolas Maduro, the blow hard holding the reins of power in Caracas, is calling the people joining the student-led movement, “fascists.”

Really?

Let us take a closer look.

The founder of fascism was Benito Mussolini, a life-long socialist and nationalist.

He spent his early adulthood as an activist and leftist author becoming the editor of “Forward,” the official paper of the Italian Socialist Party. When the party split apart after the First World War, Mussolini took the expelled nationalist socialists and formed the National Fascist Party.

He believed in a one-party dictatorship and used the security services and his Black Shirts to intimidate and beat down – even assassinate – any opposition to his rule.

Nicolas Maduro is also a life-long socialist and nationalist. He spent his early life as an activist and radical union leader. As Hugo Chavez rose to power, Maduro was a principal organizer within the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.

Maduro believes in a one-party dictatorship and uses the security services and his paramilitary colectivos to intimidate, beat down – even assassinate – any opposition to his rule.

The fascists in Venezuela are not the protesters, they are Nicolas Maduro and the thugs who keep him in power.

Mike

Chicago Professionals

The mayor of Chicago… respect for the office.


CHICAGOLAND, PART TWO
Paul Mirengoff, Powerline


Arthur Bishop, the new director of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), was convicted in the 1990s of bilking his employer, a substance abuse counseling center, out of money received from its clients. According to the center’s director at the time, Bishop created a bogus program for convicted drunk drivers. He took money from patients and provided them with forms they wrongly believed would allow them to get their driver’s licenses back.

Unfortunately for Bishop’s victims, the center wasn’t licensed by the state to provide that service at the time. Bishop pleaded guilty to misdemeanor theft.

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, a Democrat, is standing by his decision to make Bishop the state’s top child-welfare official. He claims to see no connection between Bishop’s corruption and his ability to lead a department that has been plagued by charges of failure to keep track of its money. In December, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan sued a Chicago businessman and friend of a former DCFS director to recover millions of dollars in state grant money the businessman allegedly misspent.

If Quinn can’t see the connection between stealing and unfitness to run a large government agency, perhaps he can connect the dots on Bishop’s own “children and family” issues. Court records show that a paternity case was filed against Bishop in 2003, when he was a DCFS deputy director. DNA tests showed he was the father of Erica Bishop, then 17.

According to the child’s mother, Bishop, who was married to another woman when Erica was born, “denies his own daughter’s existence” even though “he visited us on numerous occasions at my parents’ house when she was a child.” The mother further alleged that Bishop “even asked me if he could live in with me if his wife put him out after she learned the truth.”

The mother obtained a $4,175 judgment against Bishop and health insurance coverage for Erica until she turned 18. But she was denied back child support after Bishop argued that she had never sought support of any kind from him and had concealed that he was Erica’s father.

A crook and deadbeat dad at the helm of Illinois’ Department of Children and Family Services. That, it seems, is the Chicago/Illinois way.

ANOTHER VICTORY FOR GUN RIGHTS

ANOTHER VICTORY FOR GUN RIGHTS

 JOHN HINDERAKER IN SECOND AMENDMENT

Yesterday a panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Peruta v. County of San Diego that the county’s broad prohibition against concealed carry violates the Second Amendment. The context was a California law that that generally bans both open and concealed carry, but allows individuals to apply to local authorities for a concealed carry permit. In San Diego County, an ordinary citizen could not get a concealed carry permit; rather, exceptional circumstances had to be demonstrated. Thus, as a practical matter the typical citizen couldn’t carry at all, either open or concealed. The court held that this scheme impermissibly infringes the constitutional right not just to keep arms, but to bear them. The court said that neither concealed carry nor open carry is constitutionally mandated, but some form of a right to carry must be broadly available to citizens. (“To be clear, we are not holding that the Second Amendment requires the states to permit concealed carry. But the Second Amendment does require that the states permit some form of carry for self-defense outside the home.”)

The court’s opinion is lengthy but well worth reading. It includes a historical survey of how the right to bear arms was understood at the time when the Second Amendment was adopted, and in the years thereafter. The court notes that there is a split among the circuits on this issue, which ultimately will have to be resolved by the Supreme Court. I don’t have any doubt that the Supreme Court, as currently constituted, would side with this 9th Circuit panel and uphold a right to carry arms as well as to bear them. The 9th Circuit opinion responds to and expressly rejects the reasoning that was used by the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Circuits:

[T]he analysis in the Second, Third, and Fourth Circuit decisions is near-identical to the freestanding “interest-balancing inquiry” that Justice Breyer proposed—and that the majority explicitly rejected—in Heller. See Heller, 554 U.S. at 689–90 (Breyer, J., dissenting) (proposing that in Second Amendment cases the court should “ask[] whether the statute burdens a protected interest in a way or to an extent that is out of proportion to the statute’s salutary effects upon other important governmental interests”); see also id. at 634–35 (majority opinion) (rejecting a “judge-empowering ‘interest-balancing inquiry’” as a test for the constitutionality of Second Amendment regulations because “no other enumerated constitutional right [had its] core protection . . . subjected to [such] a freestanding” inquiry).

That’s right: the courts would find absurd an argument that 98% of citizens should be deprived of their rights of free speech in order to serve some other governmental interest, but that same argument is still made with a straight face when the Second Amendment is at issue. The 9th Circuit opinion concludes by quoting the Supreme Court’s Heller and McDonald decisions:

We are well aware that, in the judgment of many governments, the safest sort of firearm-carrying regime is one which restricts the privilege to law enforcement with only narrow exceptions. Nonetheless, “the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table. . . . Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our Nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem. That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this Court [or ours] to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.” Id. at 636. Nor may we relegate the bearing of arms to a “second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees that we have held to be incorporated into the Due Process Clause.” McDonald, 130 S. Ct. at 3044.

For many years, of course, the right to keep and bear arms was a “second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees….” When Larry Tribe published the first edition of his treatise on Constitutional Law in 1978, he famously treated the Second Amendment in a single footnote. The amendment was more or less a dead letter. What changed? Several things: empirical research by John Lott and others showed that more guns do not mean more crime; legal scholars analyzed the genesis of the amendment and refuted the claim that it had no application outside of state-organized “militias,” and–most of all–a grass roots movement that ultimately encompassed millions of Americans promoted guns and gun safety, lobbied for modern carry legislation including “shall issue” requirements, and generally improved the image of guns and gun owners. The result of this grass roots movement is that at least 40 states now have “shall issue” laws.

My guess is that the legal revolution would not have happened without the grass roots movement. Scott has noted more than once that the image of the federal courts as bulwarks of civil rights, standing tall against the winds of prejudice to uphold unpopular freedoms, is almost entirely fictional. In reality, the courts have almost always bent with public opinion, as they did for a long time with regard to the Second Amendment.

That doesn’t mean that gun rights advocates can rest. While I think there is little doubt that the present court would agree with the reasoning in Peruta, that could easily change: Heller was decided 5-4. Liberals are revanchists on all issues. They do not accept that the flow of history can move in any direction but theirs, and they won’t give up. This is just one more reminder than any conservative who sits out an election is foolish.

Not Even a Smidgen?

Why So Much Anarchy?

Stratfor Global Intelligence

By Robert D. Kaplan

Twenty years ago, in February 1994, I published a lengthy cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, "The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet." I argued that the combination of resource depletion (like water), demographic youth bulges and the proliferation of shanty towns throughout the developing world would enflame ethnic and sectarian divides, creating the conditions for domestic political breakdown and the transformation of war into increasingly irregular forms -- making it often indistinguishable from terrorism. I wrote about the erosion of national borders and the rise of the environment as the principal security issues of the 21st century. I accurately predicted the collapse of certain African states in the late 1990s and the rise of political Islam in Turkey and other places. Islam, I wrote, was a religion ideally suited for the badly urbanized poor who were willing to fight. I also got things wrong, such as the probable intensification of racial divisions in the United States; in fact, such divisions have been impressively ameliorated.

However, what is not in dispute is that significant portions of the earth, rather than follow the dictates of Progress and Rationalism, are simply harder and harder to govern, even as there is insufficient evidence of an emerging and widespread civil society. Civil society in significant swaths of the earth is still the province of a relatively elite few in capital cities -- the very people Western journalists feel most comfortable befriending and interviewing, so that the size and influence of such a class is exaggerated by the media.

The anarchy unleashed in the Arab world, in particular, has other roots, though -- roots not adequately dealt with in my original article:

The End of Imperialism. That's right. Imperialism provided much of Africa, Asia and Latin America with security and administrative order. The Europeans divided the planet into a gridwork of entities -- both artificial and not -- and governed. It may not have been fair, and it may not have been altogether civil, but it provided order. Imperialism, the mainstay of stability for human populations for thousands of years, is now gone.

The End of Post-Colonial Strongmen. Colonialism did not end completely with the departure of European colonialists. It continued for decades in the guise of strong dictators, who had inherited state systems from the colonialists. Because these strongmen often saw themselves as anti-Western freedom fighters, they believed that they now had the moral justification to govern as they pleased. The Europeans had not been democratic in the Middle East, and neither was this new class of rulers. Hafez al Assad, Saddam Hussein, Ali Abdullah Saleh, Moammar Gadhafi and the Nasserite pharaohs in Egypt right up through Hosni Mubarak all belonged to this category, which, like that of the imperialists, has been quickly retreating from the scene (despite a comeback in Egypt).

No Institutions. Here we come to the key element. The post-colonial Arab dictators ran moukhabarat states: states whose order depended on the secret police and the other, related security services. But beyond that, institutional and bureaucratic development was weak and unresponsive to the needs of the population -- a population that, because it was increasingly urbanized, required social services and complex infrastructure. (Alas, urban societies are more demanding on central governments than agricultural ones, and the world is rapidly urbanizing.) It is institutions that fill the gap between the ruler at the top and the extended family or tribe at the bottom. Thus, with insufficient institutional development, the chances for either dictatorship or anarchy proliferate. Civil society occupies the middle ground between those extremes, but it cannot prosper without the requisite institutions and bureaucracies.

Feeble Identities. With feeble institutions, such post-colonial states have feeble identities. If the state only means oppression, then its population consists of subjects, not citizens. Subjects of despotisms know only fear, not loyalty. If the state has only fear to offer, then, if the pillars of the dictatorship crumble or are brought low, it is non-state identities that fill the subsequent void. And in a state configured by long-standing legal borders, however artificially drawn they may have been, the triumph of non-state identities can mean anarchy.

Doctrinal Battles. Religion occupies a place in daily life in the Islamic world that the West has not known since the days -- a millennium ago -- when the West was called "Christendom." Thus, non-state identity in the 21st-century Middle East generally means religious identity. And because there are variations of belief even within a great world religion like Islam, the rise of religious identity and the consequent decline of state identity means the inflammation of doctrinal disputes, which can take on an irregular, military form. In the early medieval era, the Byzantine Empire -- whose whole identity was infused with Christianity -- had violent, doctrinal disputes between iconoclasts (those opposed to graven images like icons) and iconodules (those who venerated them). As the Roman Empire collapsed and Christianity rose as a replacement identity, the upshot was not tranquility but violent, doctrinal disputes between Donatists, Monotheletes and other Christian sects and heresies. So, too, in the Muslim world today, as state identities weaken and sectarian and other differences within Islam come to the fore, often violently.

Information Technology. Various forms of electronic communication, often transmitted by smartphones, can empower the crowd against a hated regime, as protesters who do not know each other personally can find each other through Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. But while such technology can help topple governments, it cannot provide a coherent and organized replacement pole of bureaucratic power to maintain political stability afterwards. This is how technology encourages anarchy. The Industrial Age was about bigness: big tanks, aircraft carriers, railway networks and so forth, which magnified the power of big centralized states. But the post-industrial age is about smallness, which can empower small and oppressed groups, allowing them to challenge the state -- with anarchy sometimes the result.

Because we are talking here about long-term processes rather than specific events, anarchy in one form or another will be with us for some time, until new political formations arise that provide for the requisite order. And these new political formations need not be necessarily democratic.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, societies in Central and Eastern Europe that had sizable middle classes and reasonable bureaucratic traditions prior to World War II were able to transform themselves into relatively stable democracies. But the Middle East and much of Africa lack such bourgeoisie traditions, and so the fall of strongmen has left a void. West African countries that fell into anarchy in the late 1990s -- a few years after my article was published -- like Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ivory Coast, still have not really recovered, but are wards of the international community through foreign peacekeeping forces or advisers, even as they struggle to develop a middle class and a manufacturing base. For, the development of efficient and responsive bureaucracies requires literate functionaries, which, in turn, requires a middle class.

The real question marks are Russia and China. The possible weakening of authoritarian rule in those sprawling states may usher in less democracy than chronic instability and ethnic separatism that would dwarf in scale the current instability in the Middle East. Indeed, what follows Vladimir Putin could be worse, not better. The same holds true for a weakening of autocracy in China.

The future of world politics will be about which societies can develop responsive institutions to govern vast geographical space and which cannot. That is the question toward which the present season of anarchy leads.

Read more: Why So Much Anarchy? | Stratfor
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"Why So Much Anarchy? is republished with permission of Stratfor."

Oh Henry!

The church bells will ring across the land.

Maybe Henry will take up residence somewhere besides the Los Angeles area.

Grey Lady Down!

Mike Walker, Col. USMC (retired)

Grey Lady Down!

Now we know why the NYT got it so wrong with its Benghazi story.

On 24 January, NYT executive editor Jill Abramson admitted the self-professed "most transparent" administration in history is in reality the most secretive White House in history.

That goes a long way in explaining why the incredulous NYT story on Benghazi mirrored the Administration mythology that a video protest inspired the attack while al Qaeda had no influence over the murderers.

What the NYT is realizing is that there is no way to independently verify facts in Washington DC as almost all the “important” information comes from folks vetted by the White House.

The bottom line is that there are no significant independent sources in this administration. You repeat the White House line, take it or leave it.

I guess reality sucks sometimes on Eighth Avenue.

Mike

Government conspiracy theories aren't crazy

Government conspiracy theories aren't crazy
Glenn Harlan Reynolds

From the IRS to the NSA, Americans have reasons not to trust the Obama Administration.

At a tax symposium at Pepperdine Law School last week, former IRS chief counsel Donald Korb was asked, "On a scale of 1-10 ... how damaging is the current IRS scandal?"

His answer: 9.5. Other tax experts on the panel called it "awful," and said that it has done "tremendous damage."

I think that's right. And I think that the damage extends well beyond the Internal Revenue Service. In fact, I think that the government agency suffering the most damage isn't the IRS, but the National Security Agency. Because the NSA, even more than the IRS, depends on public trust. And now that the IRS has been revealed to be a political weapon, it's much harder for people to have faith in the NSA.

As I warned President Obama back in 2009 after he "joked" about having his enemies audited, the IRS depends on trust:

Should the IRS come to be seen as just a bunch of enforcers for whoever is in political power, the result would be an enormous loss of legitimacy for the tax system. Our income-tax system is based on voluntary compliance and honest reporting by citizens. It couldn't possibly function if most people decided to cheat. Sure, the system is backed up by the dreaded IRS audit. But the threat is, while not exactly hollow, limited: The IRS can't audit more than a tiny fraction of taxpayers. If Americans started acting like Italians, who famously see tax evasion as a national pastime, the system would collapse.

Since then, of course, the new "weaponized IRS" has, in fact, come to be seen as illegitimate by many more Americans. I suspect that, over time, this loss of moral legitimacy will cause many to base their tax strategies on what they think they can get away with, not on what they're entitled to. And when they hear of someone being audited, many Americans will ask not "what did he do wrong?" but "who in government did he offend?"
This is particularly true since the Obama administration is currently changing IRS rules to muzzle Tea Partiers.

As Kimberley Strassel reports in the Wall Street Journal, Obama's negotiating strategy on the omnibus spending bill that just passed revolved around using the IRS to keep Tea Party groups silenced:

One of the biggest fights was over GOP efforts to include language to stop the IRS from instituting a new round of 501(c)(4) targeting. The White House is so counting on the tax agency to muzzle its political opponents that it willingly sacrificed any manner of its own priorities to keep the muzzle in place. ... It's IRS targeting all over again, only this time by administration design and with the raw political goal — as House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) notes — of putting 'Tea Party groups out of business.'
Meanwhile, the person chosen to "investigate" the IRS's targeting of Tea Party groups in 2010-2012 is Barbara Bosserman, a "long-time Obama campaign donor." So the IRS's credibility is in no danger of being rebuilt any time soon.

Now comes the poor NSA. With the ongoing revelations that it has been vacuuming up telephone conversations from, basically, every American, the thing it needs most is for people to trust that it wouldn't abuse these huge powers. The problem is, if the IRS can be weaponized — and it clearly has been — how confident can we be that the NSA won't be? How confident, for that matter, can we be that it hasn't been politically weaponized already?

Spend a little while on Twitter or in Internet comment sections and you'll see a significant number of people who think that the NSA may have been relaying intelligence about the Mitt Romney campaign to Obama operatives, or that Chief Justice John Roberts' sudden about-face in the Obamacare case might have been driven by some sort of NSA-facilitated blackmail.

A year ago, these kinds of comments would have been dismissable as paranoid conspiracy theory. But now, while I still don't think they're true, they're no longer obviously crazy. And that's Obama's legacy: a government that makes paranoid conspiracy theories seem possibly sane.

The problem with government is that to be trusted, you have to be trustworthy. And the problem with the Obama administration is that, to a greater extent than any since Nixon's, it is not. Do not be surprised if the result is that people mistrust those in authority, and order their lives accordingly. Such an outcome is bad for America, but bad governance has its consequences.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is professor of law at the University of Tennessee and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself. He blogs at InstaPundit.com.