The stimulus money intended to help Detroit-area folks obtain jobs really did succeed in aiding folks—all 2 of them. Although the money really wasn’t intended to help them find jobs, but only to help them get dressed.
A chunk of a 2009 stimulus grant meant to provide as many as 400 low-income Detroit residents with clothing for job interviews actually helped…2.
Read the whole thing.
I’ve written before on some of the aspects of affirmative action. Here are the views of our Attorney General, Eric Holder, on affirmative action.
Affirmative action has been an issue since segregation practices. The question is not when does it end, but when does it begin … When do people of color truly get the benefits to which they are entitled?
What’s Holder getting at? On a couple of minor notes, he apparently views benefits as entitlements, rather than things to be earned, at least insofar as “people of color” are concerned. Moreover, he’s simply ignorant of recent history. Affirmative action only developed in the 1970s—some 100+ years after emancipation, segregation, and the development of his party’s Jim Crow laws.
He considers that affirmative action must never end—it’s always to be kept in play. Yet there’s that stigma of affirmative action, whether or not justified: did the individual get the position because he was the best qualified, or because he best filled a political square? This is fair to “people of color,” how, exactly? Or to “people of no color?”
He exposes a breathtaking blindness to the segregation that is affirmative action. Groups always will be segregated—and so always actively barred from joining the mainstream—as long as they’re singled out for special treatment, such as affirmative action inflicts.
This is one of the especially corrosive aspects of such policies.
US District Judge Benson Everett Legg (Maryland District), in a Monday ruling has said that Maryland residents are not required, as a Marayland had had it, to convince authorities that they have a “good and substantial reason” to own a handgun.
Judge Legg wrote, among other things,
…the Court finds that the right to bear arms is not limited to the home. The signposts left by recent Supreme Court and Fourth Circuit case law all point to the conclusion that Woollard‘s ―claim to self-defense—asserted by him as a law-abiding citizen…—does implicate the Second Amendment, albeit subject to lawful limitations.
He went on [emphasis mine]:
A law that burdens the exercise of an enumerated constitutional right by simply making that right more difficult to exercise cannot be considered “reasonably adapted” to a government interest, no matter how substantial that interest may be. Maryland‘s goal of “minimizing the proliferation of handguns among those who do not have a demonstrated need for them,”…is not a permissible method of preventing crime or ensuring public safety; it burdens the right too broadly. Those who drafted and ratified the Second Amendment surely knew that the right they were enshrining carried a risk of misuse, and states have considerable latitude to channel the exercise of the right in ways that will minimize that risk. States may not, however, seek to reduce the danger by means of widespread curtailment of the right itself. “[E]ven the most legitimate goal may not be advanced in a constitutionally impermissible manner.”
At bottom, this case rests on a simple proposition: If the Government wishes to burden a right guaranteed by the Constitution, it may do so provided that it can show a satisfactory justification and a sufficiently adapted method. The showing, however, is always the Government‘s to make. A citizen may not be required to offer a “good and substantial reason” why he should be permitted to exercise his rights. The right‘s existence is all the reason he needs.
Maryland’s Assistant Attorney General, Matthew Fader, says he’ll appeal, saying “we” disagree, and taking note of the “very important implications of the ruling for public safety.” He’s wrong, though, on two counts: in the first place, the public safety is maximized by hewing to the Constitution, not by deviating from it. In the second place, he apparently wasn’t paying attention to the Legg’s ruling:
States may not, however, seek to reduce the danger [of misuse] by means of widespread curtailment of the right itself.
Judge Legg has the right of it.
The Progressive line on American foreign policy was first brought to light by Presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004 when he insisted, with a straight face, that America’s military policy must pass a “global test” before it can be implemented. That’s a policy that’s alive and well in the present administration, as this exchange during last week’s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing between Senator Jeff Sessions (R, AL) and Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, demonstrates (the exchange begins at about the 2:00 minute mark) [emphasis mine].
SESSIONS: Do you think you can act without Congress and initiate a no-fly zone in Syria without congressional approval?
PANETTA: …our goal would be to seek international permission, and we would come to the Congress and inform you and determine how best to approach this; whether or not we would want to get permission from the Congress, I think those are issues we would have to discuss as we decide what to do here.
SESSIONS: Well I am almost breathless about that because what I heard you say is, “we’re going to seek international approval and we will come and tell the Congress what we might do, and we might seek congressional approval” … Would you like to clarify that?
PANETTA: I have also served with Republican Presidents and Democratic Presidents who have always reserved the right to defend this country if necessary.
SESSIONS: But before you would do this, you would seek permission of the international authorities?
PANETTA: If we are working with an international coalition or NATO we would want to be able to get appropriate permissions in order to be able to do that. All of these countries would want to have some kind of legal basis on which to act.
SESSIONS: What “legal basis” are you looking for? What entity?
PANETTA: If NATO made the decision to go in, that would be one. If we developed an international coalition beyond NATO then obviously some kind of UN security resolution would be the basis for that.
SESSIONS: So you are saying NATO would give you a “legal basis?” And an ad hoc coalition of nations would provide a “legal basis?”
PANETTA: We would seek whatever legal basis we would need in order to make that justified. We can’t just pull them all together without getting the legal basis on which to act.
…
SESSIONS: I’m all for having international support, but I’m really baffled by the idea that somehow an international assembly provides a legal basis for the United States military to be deployed in combat. I don’t think it’s close to being correct. They provide no legal authority. The only legal authority that’s required to deploy the U.S. military is the Congress and the president and the law in the Constitution.
PANETTA: Let me, just for the record, be clear again. When it comes to the national defense of this country, the President of the United States has the authority under the Constitution to act to defend this country, and we will. If it comes to an operation where we’re trying to build a coalition of nations to work together to go in and operate as we did in Libya, or Bosnia, or for that matter, Afghanistan, we want to do it with permissions either by NATO or by the international community.
So, what do we have, then? Panetta has gone even farther than Kerry, now insisting that “international permission,” rather than the Constitution (which includes authorization by Congress), is the “legal basis” for American use of our military capability in an international effort. The administration seems to accept foreign control, foreign permissions, over whether we will use our military to conduct national defense activities in conjunction with foreign groups of countries; we have no authority of our own to employ our forces in that environment. The President, intimates Panetta, executes his national defense obligations absent Congress’ involvement, although there is a willingness to discuss “whether or not we would want to get [Congressional] permission.” Notice, also, that, even after Panetta’s “clarification,” neither the Constitution nor the Congress enter into it. Ever.
It seems as though, given the entirety of Panetta’s responses, that he didn’t even understand the questions.
As Sessions said, international support is good. But a sovereign nation needs no one else’s permission to use its military forces, either unilaterally or in concert with other nations. Period. That’s not the same as having an agreement with those others to engage in a joint action of some sort. Those agreements, though, only outline the various responsibilities of the members of the coalition (ideally founded on the individual capabilities of those members); they do not constitute permission for employment.
At least General Martin Dempsey (those first two minutes of the video) understands for whom he works.
h/t Power Line
President Reagan’s national security advisor, Robert C McFarlane, recently offered some thoughts on a government mandate he considered would actually support a free market. First, he lays out some background:
- Petroleum products drive 97% of all air, sea and land transportation in our country. Oil is truly the lifeblood of every industrial economy.
- The price of oil is set by a foreign cartel. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) owns almost]80% of global oil reserves yet produces only 36% of daily global supply.
- [I[ncreasing domestic production of oil or increasing fuel efficiency can reduce our trade deficit and the $400 billion (at current oil prices) we send overseas annually, but they won’t change the price we pay at the pump.
And thus, he says,
To outmaneuver OPEC we need to eliminate oil’s monopoly as the only transportation fuel.
His alternative fuel is natural gas from all those vast deposits embedded in shale, primarily in Pennsylvania, New York, Texas and Oklahoma. Cleaned up and compressed, CNG (compressed natural gas), or with some processing, methanol, would make a fine fuel for our cars and truck, McFarlane says. And he’s not far wrong on this, albeit NG has a considerably lower energy density than does gasoline.
Then he gets to his point:
Let’s open our market to good old American competition. …. Bills are now pending in both houses of the Congress…that seek to do exactly that by requiring car makers to enable fuel competition in their own product lines—adding flex-fuel, all electric, hybrid electric, or any other way auto makers choose to implement the law.
But this misses the point of a free market, capitalist economy with its inherent competition. If the product is viable in the market place—IFF the product is something folks actually want and would buy—then a mandate to produce is unnecessary. That natural market demand will drive production.
It’s true enough that some products have high barriers to entry, high initial costs to guts up a market; however, the automobile industry demonstrated that these need not prevent a market from developing: the car companies built their expensive factories, got their expensive distribution networks set up, and they did it all in a cutthroat competition environment. So it is with flex fuel vehicles. If there is a market for flex fuel cars and trucks, it’ll develop without need of mandates.
These bills don’t represent competition; they are government interfering in business decisions and in the market place. The mandate contained in the bills is no different than a mandate that all of us must buy, oh, say, health insurance or contraceptives, whether or not we want or would use them. Furthermore, mandates to produce (methanol) are mandates to buy (methanol); buying and selling are inseparable from each other—so such mandates limit both parties’ freedom of choice.