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The vast majority of the annual shooting homicides are committed by inner-city and minority youths below the age of 30. Handguns are involved in 80% of all murders. Rifles and shotguns account for less than 10% of homicides. The National Rifle Association is now blamed for generic gun violence, especially the mass shootings at schools, even though usually no one knows of any proposed gun law — barring outright confiscation of previously purchased firearms, bullets, and clips — that would have prevented the shooters at Sandy Hook and Columbine. Gun merchants are blamed by the president while in Mexico for...

Violating Americans’ privacy while failing to identify the terrorists among us All can agree that the Obama administration is mired in myriads of scandals, but as yet no one can quite figure out what they all mean and where they will lead. Benghazi differs from all the other scandals — and from both Watergate and Iran-Contra — because in this case administration lapses led to the deaths of four Americans. Nine months later, the administration’s problems of damage control remain fourfold: (a) there was ample warning that American personnel were in danger in Libya, and yet requests for increased security...

<p>His morality is to be judged by his professed aims, not his means of achieving them.</p> <p>Presidential ethics are now situational. Obama is calling for a shield law to protect reporters from the sort of harassment that his attorney general, Eric Holder, and the FBI practiced against Fox News and the Associated Press. Through such rhetoric, he remains a staunch champion of the First Amendment — even though he now has the ability to peek into the private phone records of millions of Americans.</p>

Presidential ethics are now situational. Obama is calling for a shield law to protect reporters from the sort of harassment that his attorney general, Eric Holder, and the FBI practiced against Fox News and the Associated Press. Through such rhetoric, he remains a staunch champion of the First Amendment — even though he now has the ability to peek into the private phone records of millions of Americans. The president is outraged that the IRS went after those deemed politically suspicious. So he sacked the acting head of the IRS, Steven Miller, who was scheduled to step down soon anyway....

We are blind to the contradictions in welcoming an immigrant but not making him one of us. Multiculturalism — as opposed to the notion of a multiracial society united by a single culture — has become an abject contradiction in the modern Western world. Romance for a culture in the abstract that one has rejected in the concrete makes little sense. Multiculturalists talk grandly of Africa, Latin America, and Asia, usually in contrast to the core values of the United States and Europe. Certainly, in terms of food, fashion, music, art, and architecture, the Western paradigm is enriched from other...

I did not think that the administration would be so haughty to go after the Associated Press and monitor their official and private communications, especially given that the source of most national security leaks par excellence was the Obama White House itself. The AP sat on a story until they were given a quiet administration go-ahead to publish the account—even as the administration desperately wanted to scoop them and high-five over the story of the Yemeni double agent 24 hours earlier than the AP. The administration went whole hog after two months of phone records to send a message to...

In Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, he ran to the left of Hillary Clinton as a moral reformer. Obama promised to transcend the old politics and bring a new era of hope-and-change transparency to Washington. Five years later, those vows are in shambles. True, the murder of four Americans in Benghazi has become a mess of partisan bickering. But the disturbing facts now transcend politics. The Obama administration -- the president himself, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney -- all at various times blamed an obscure video maker for the "spontaneous...

Boom or Bust? I have lived on the same farm for 59 years and seen at least three boom-and-bust farm cycles — one in the late 1960s, another in the early 1980s, and a third right now. I’ve witnessed raisins, for example, at $1,420 a ton 35 years ago, then $410 a ton, then $700 a ton — and now almost $2,000. The old wisdom insisted that almond acreage could never exceed 200,000 acres without a crash, that prices would never go over $1 pound to the farmer, that production could not go much over 3,000 lbs. per acre. Boom...

<p>Unlike Sandy Hook and gun control, the Tsarnaev case teaches real lessons about immigration.</p> <p>Barack Obama has a habit of trying to energize his legislative agenda by stoking the fires of emotionally charged current events — and in ways usually illogical and incoherent. The shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords and the horrible mass murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School were cited as reasons for rapid enactment of new gun-control laws — even though the proposed tougher registration rules would not have prevented either mayhem.</p>

As Orwell knew, taking over the culture starts with corrupting the language. Imagine if, during the campaign of 2008, someone had written the following: “If Barack Obama is elected president, then each year from now on the federal budget will be a trillion dollars in the red. He will pile up in two terms more debt than all previous presidents combined. Interest rates will stay at near zero; 7.6 percent unemployment will be proof of progress in creating jobs. Record use of food stamps, unemployment, and disability insurance will be hallmarks of recovery.

We can imagine what lies ahead in 2017 — no matter the result of either the 2014 midterm elections or the 2016 presidential contest.There will be no more $1 trillion deficits. About $10 trillion will have been added to the national debt during the Obama administration, on top of the more than $4 trillion from the eight-year George W. Bush administration. That staggering sum will force the next president to be a deficit hawk, both fiscally and politically.In addition, there will be no huge new federal spending programs — no third or fourth stimulus, no vast new entitlements. The...

On the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the back-and-forth recriminations continue, but in all the “not me” defenses, we have forgotten, over the ensuing decade, the climate of 2003 and why we invaded in the first place. The war was predicated on six suppositions. 1. 9/11 and the 1991 Gulf War. The Bush administration made the argument that in the post-9/11 climate there should be a belated reckoning with Saddam Hussein. He had continued to sponsor terrorism, had over the years invaded or attacked four of his neighbors, and had killed tens of thousands of his own people....

Obama, like Carter, may provoke one of our enemies to test our teeth and claws. Remember the medieval fable about the mice that wanted their dangerous enemy, the cat, belled, but each preferred not to be the one to attempt the dangerous deed? Likewise, the world’s bad actors have long wanted America belled, but, like the mice, so far they have not been stupid or daring enough to test America’s teeth and claws — that is, until now. In 2008 Barack Obama campaigned on the general principle that the entire Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols were either superfluous or illegal. That opportunistic...

History shows that the destruction of affluent societies is often self-induced. Why do once-successful societies ossify and decline? Hundreds of reasons have been adduced for the fall of Rome and the end of the Old Regime in 18th-century France. Reasons run from inflation and excessive spending to resource depletion and enemy invasion, when historians attempt to understand the sudden collapse of the Mycenaeans, the Aztecs, and, apparently, the modern Greeks. In literature from Catullus to Edward Gibbon, wealth and leisure — and who gets the most of both — more often than poverty and exhaustion, cause civilization to implode. One...

Almost a decade ago, Europeans and many progressive Americans were lamenting how the United States was going to miss out on the 21st-century paradigm symbolized by the robust European Union. Neanderthal Americans were importing ever more oil while waging a costly "war on terror" and fighting two conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our budget deficit in 2003 hit $374 billion. The EU avoided foreign conflicts and embraced soft power. Its declining military budgets and centralized transnational government ensured that it could address global warming and fund ever-expanding entitlements. Even the poorer Mediterranean nations reached new heights of prosperity. The Greek...

With a diminished team at State, Defense, and the CIA, Obama can be Obama. John Brennan, Chuck Hagel, and John Kerry will be confirmed. The three will provide a force-multiplying effect on the Obama foreign policy of disengagement. The chameleon Brennan will be very different from David Petraeus at the CIA; Hagel is no circumspect Leon Panetta; and there was a reason why the appointment of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state was greeted with praise in a way John Kerry’s will not be. The trio is less competent than their predecessors, but also perhaps more representative of a country...

The horrific Newtown, Conn., mass shooting has unleashed a frenzy to pass new gun-control legislation. But the war over restricting firearms is not just between liberals and conservatives; it also pits the first two amendments to the U.S. Constitution against each other. Apparently, in the sequential thinking of James Madison and the Founding Fathers, the right to free expression and the guarantee to own arms were the two most important personal liberties. But now these two cherished rights seem to be at odds with each other and have caused bitter exchanges between interpreters of the Constitution. Many liberals believe there...

As a senator and presidential candidate, Barack Obama said that he detested budget deficits. In 2006, when the aggregate national debt was almost $8 trillion less than today, he blasted George W. Bush's chronic borrowing and refused to vote for upping the debt ceiling: "Increasing America's debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that 'the buck stops here.'" In 2008, Obama further blasted Bush's continued Keynesian borrowing: "The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of...

On the One Hand… These should not be foreboding years. The U.S. is in the midst of a veritable energy revolution. There is a godsend of new gas and oil discoveries that will help to curtail our fiscal and foreign policy vulnerabilities — an energy bonanza despite, not because of, the present administration. Demographically, our rivals — the EU, China, Russia, and Japan — are both shrinking and aging at rates far in excess of our own. In terms of farming, the United States is exporting more produce than ever before at record prices. Americans eat the safest and cheapest...

We are still borrowing more than $1 trillion a year. Barack Obama has added more than $5 trillion to the national debt in just his first term alone. Such massive borrowing is unsustainable. Someone somehow at some time has to pay it back. Obama would agree. He once alleged that George W. Bush's much smaller deficits were "irresponsible" and "unpatriotic." Obama himself vowed to cut the budget deficit in half by the end his first term. Instead, Obama's annual deficits have never gone below $1 trillion. Three ways to establish a long-term trajectory toward a balanced budget were under discussion....

........There is nothing in Rice’s past to suggest that her own race, gender, or class was a disadvantage in her cursus honorum. In the nexus of elite universities and Democratic politics — whether Stanford University, the Rhodes Scholarship, or the Clinton administration — being black, female, and elite is far more advantageous that being white, male, and poor. In postmodern America, it is considered noble to prejudge people on the basis of their race and gender, but it can be ignoble to postjudge them on the basis of merit. Note, in this regard, that no one seems worried that Susan...

The second-term curse goes like this: A president (e.g., Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, etc.) wins re-election, but then his presidency implodes over the next four years -- mired in scandals or disasters such as Watergate, Iran-Contra, Monica Lewinsky, the Iraqi insurgency and Hurricane Katrina. Apparently, like tragic Greek heroes, administrations grow arrogant after their re-election wins. They believe that they are invincible and that heir public approval is permanent rather than fickle. The result is that Nemesis zeroes in on their fatal conceit and with a boom corrects their hubris. Or is the problem in...

Weighing over 250 pounds, not rickets, is a national plague. Riots target sneaker stores, not food bins. Sandra Fluke naturally become the epitome of frustrated liberal-mandated equality. We are to believe that an upscale white law student, who by choice enrolls at a Catholic university, is deprived because her university will not pay for her condoms or abortion pills. Her cell phone no doubt costs more than a year’s supply of prophylactics. The result is psychodrama, not class struggle, as liberals strain to find ways in which America is Les Misérables rather than the Kardashians, plagued by this obsession to...

Barack Obama won a moderately close victory over Mitt Romney on Tuesday. But oddly, nothing much has changed. The country is still split nearly 50/50. There is still a Democratic president, and an almost identically Democratic Senate at war with an identically Republican House, in a Groundhog Day America. Obama's win did not really reflect affirmation of his first term, given that the president made only halfhearted efforts to defend Obamacare, the stimulus, huge Keynesian deficits and his attempts to implement cap-and-trade. So if there is a second-term agenda, even Obama supporters don't quite know what it will be. Unlike...

<p>We have had ambassadors murdered abroad before, but we have never seen anything quite like the tragic fate of Chris Stevens. Amid all the controversy over Libya, we have lost sight of the human — and often horrific — story of Benghazi: a U.S. ambassador attacked, cut off and killed alone, after being abused by frenzied terrorists, and a second member of the embassy staff murdered, as two American private citizens rushed to the rescue, heroically warding off Islamist hit teams, until they were overwhelmed and also killed.</p>

Sandra Fluke spoke to ten people in Nevada. Michelle Obama (formerly of never-been-proud-before/downright-mean-country infamy) is accusing Republicans of talking down the country. Joe Biden, in his usual adolescent fashion, is gesticulating and acting up behind the stage while others try to speak, babbling about binders and the mythical war in Iran. Bill Clinton, as is his custom, is talking nonstop and monotonously about how Barack Obama should not be blamed for not achieving the sort of economic success that he feels his own genius achieved. Our president goes from rants about Big Bird to something infantile called Romnesia — in...

Our Age of DisbeliefWe live in an age of disbelief, in which citizens increasingly do not believe what their government says or, for that matter, what is accepted as true by popular culture.The Ministries of TruthDo you believe any more that some of our Secret Service agents — once the most esteemed of all professionals — on presidential assignment will not get drunk and womanize in their evening spare time? Do you believe that the grandees at the GSA — once the stern penny-pinchers that frowned when bureaucrats wanted a new bookcase — won’t flaunt the waste that they incur?...

Obama had the best of both worlds: He took office when gas was below $2 a gallon — saving the nation billions of dollars — and when the novel techniques of fracking and horizontal drilling had just tripled known U.S. reserves and promised to offer a godsend of new energy on federal lands. In other words, the future seemed to be all Barack Obama’s. Bill Clinton’s second term offered an easy blueprint of what bipartisan centrism might achieve. Balance the budget and create jobs, and the nation will forgive anything, from lying under oath to romancing an intern in the...

Obama’s debate performance was not out of character — and his supporters are worried. Usually after a presidential debate, both sides spin the results. But after the first face-off between President Obama and challenger Mitt Romney, Obama’s exasperated handlers made no such effort. How could they when most opinion polls revealed that two-thirds of viewers thought Obama lost?Within minutes of the parting handshake, the liberal base went ballistic. Bill Maher, Chris Matthews, and Michael Moore all but accused Obama of embarrassing the progressive cause. The post-debate spin focused not on whether the president had been creamed by challenger Mitt Romney,...

I thought of my fellow Californian Energy Secretary Steven Chu last week, when I paid $4.89 a gallon in Gilroy for regular gas — and had to wait in line to get it. The customers were in near revolt, but I wondered against what and whom. I mentioned to one exasperated motorist that there are estimated to be over 20 billion barrels of oil a few miles away, in newly found reserves off the California coast. He thought I was from Mars. California may face the nation’s largest budget deficit at $16 billion. It may struggle with the nation’s second-highest...

The world tacitly exempts the Middle East Muslims from rules of civilized behavior. Let us confess it: Many of the things that are bothersome in the world today originate in the Middle East. Billions of air passengers each year take off their belts and shoes at the airport, not because of fears of terrorism from the slums of Johannesburg or because the grandsons of displaced East Prussians are blowing up Polish diplomats. We put up with such burdens because a Saudi multimillionaire, Osama bin Laden, and his unhinged band of Arab religious extremists began ramming airliners into buildings and murdering...

The Obama ParadoxNo state has suffered the last four years as much as has California --- given that its progressive governor and legislative majorities serve as force multipliers for the Obama national agenda. We live in a 2X Obama state. And it is desirous for twelve or sixteen, not just four, more years in Washington.The bluest state is polling at a 20 to 24 point lead for Barack Obama. Who cares that it is struggling with nearly 11% unemployment and facing a $16 billion budget shortfall? What does it matter that its public schools rated variously from 45th to...

Like old King Ethelred the Unready, who either had no counsel or had no sense, or both, and often paid the Danegeld rather than attempt to deter the Norsemen, so Barack Obama and his lieutenants still believe that they can both appease radical Islam and convince others that is not what they are doing. Various top-ranking U.S. officials, for instance, following the lead of President Obama himself, for days insisted that the murder of the American ambassador to Libya was a spontaneous act of a crowd that got out of control, enraged by the release of an anti-Islamic video trailer...

Last week, Muslim mobs took to the streets to murder the American ambassador in Libya and three of his staffers. American embassies were attacked from Egypt to Yemen. Embarrassed White House Press Secretary Jay Carney and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice insisted that these assaults were just reactions to an insensitive video circulating on the Internet that disparaged Islam. As embassies burned, we were assured that there was no animosity directed at America in general, or at this administration and its foreign policy in particular. That is hogwash. The weeks-old video was a mere pretext, in the...

The Premodern Middle East and Postmodern West Don’t Mix, Mr. President Globalization certainly did not bring the premodern world of the Middle East closer together with the postmodern West — despite Barack Obama’s 2007 narcissistic vows that his own intellect and background could bridge such a gap. If anything, the more we know about each other, the more we sense we are back to Lepanto and the siege of Vienna. Since the 9/11 anniversary attacks, the Obama administration has seemed bewildered, petulant, and more or less shocked in Casablanca-style fashion about the hatred shown the United States — whether overt...

One of the ways of understanding the strange nonchalant response of the administration to prior warnings of trouble in the Arab Spring countries, and its contextualization of the violence on the anniversary of 9/11, is its belief that it is somehow separated from the object of the violence. Raging crowds and Islamic wrath could not possibly be connected to the enlightened Obama administration given the three years of laborious Muslim outreach and the long-ago departure of George Bush. So we are to think away all those burning flags, stormed consulates, and dead Americans, and instead remember that the violence “is...

The attacks on the U.S. embassy yesterday in Cairo and the storming of the American consulate in Libya, where the U.S. ambassador was murdered along with three staff members — and the initial official American reaction to the mayhem — are all reprehensible, each in their own way. Let us sort out this terrible chain of events.Timing: The assaults came exactly on the eleventh anniversary of bin Laden’s and al-Qaeda’s attack on America. If there was any doubt about the intent of the timing, the appearance of black al-Qaedist flags among the mobs removed it. The chanting of Osama...

There is little remaining controversy over the measures necessary to thwart terrorism. After the radical Islamist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the foiled effort to ram a fourth jet into the Capitol in Washington, no one envisioned that there would follow eleven years without another major attack. Since September 11, 2001, over 45 terrorist plots have been uncovered and foiled in the United States; al-Qaeda, as a terrorist threat, seems regionalized and without the ability to inflict mayhem on a similarly large scale on the Western world; bin Laden is no more; and the Arab...

Virtually every left-wing attack on Bush can legitimately be turned against Obama. It could not last — the attendee of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church sermonizing on tolerance; the practitioner of Chicago politics lecturing on civility; the most partisan voting record in the Senate as proof of a new promised bipartisanship; earlier books and speeches calling for hard-core progressivism as evidence of a no-more-red-state-blue-state conciliation. And in fact the disconnect did not last, and Barack Obama finds himself dealing with assorted chickens coming home to roost. In the summer of 2004, Michael Moore released a crude propaganda film, Fahrenheit 9/11,...

As gas prices climb back toward $4 a gallon, the Obama administration -- facing a tough re-election campaign and rising Middle East tensions -- is once again considering tapping the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. For years, administrations have bought and stored oil for emergencies, in fear of a cutoff of imported oil, as happened during the Arab embargo of 1973-74. But since 2009, the U.S. government has declared most federal lands off-limits to new oil and gas exploration -- despite vast recent finds of energy and radically new means to tap it. President Obama also canceled the most vital sections of...

Sometimes societies find themselves in pernicious cycles in which the perceived medicine seems worse than the known disease. The Roman satirist Juvenal lamented the ill effects of free food and free entertainment for the masses (“bread and circuses”) in part because he knew there was no remedy for the pathology in sight — and thus only a slow decline toward fiscal insolvency or riots were on the horizon. Any Roman emperor bold enough to rein in the Praetorian Guard, charge the mob for grain, and curb gladiatorial shows would earn a usurper marching on Rome from the provinces. So most...

Driving across California is like going from Mississippi to Massachusetts without ever crossing a state line. Consider the disconnects: California's combined income and sales taxes are among the nation's highest, but the state's deficit is still about $16 billion. It's estimated that more than 2,000 upper-income Californians are leaving per week to flee high taxes and costly regulations, yet California wants to raise taxes even higher; its business climate already ranks near the bottom of most surveys. Its teachers are among the highest paid on average in the nation, but its public school students consistently test near the bottom of...

The chief tenet of postmodernism is that truth and facts are arbitrary constructs, set up by the privileged to manipulate others less fortunate. In the case of our first postmodernist president, Barack Obama, there cannot be facts, past or present, only a set of shifting assertions that gain credence to the degree that they prove transitorily useful for progressive causes. A sympathetic biographer, David Maraniss, noted that almost all the touchstone events in Barack Obama’s mythographic memoir were fabricated. Of course, Obama would object to such a value-laden term and instead call them composites, impressions stitched together and presented as...

George Miller’s 1981 post-apocalyptic film The Road Warrior envisioned an impoverished world of the future. Tribal groups fought over what remained of a destroyed Western world of law, technology, and mass production. Survival went to the fittest — or at least those who could best scrounge together the artifacts of a long gone society somewhat resembling the present West. In the case of the Australian film, the culprit for the detribalization of the Outback was some sort of global war or perhaps nuclear holocaust that had destroyed the social fabric. Survivors were left with a memory of modern appetites but...

The Thrill Is Gone The last thirty days have made it clear that Barack Obama is not going to win the 2012 election by a substantial margin. The polls still show the race near dead even with over five months, and all sort of unforeseen events, to come. But after the Obama meltdown of April and May, I don’t think he in any way resembles the mysterious Pied Piper figure of 2008, who mesmerized and then marched the American people over the cliff. Polls change daily; gaffes and wars there may come aplenty. But Barack Obama has lost the American...

Forgotten in the latest hype about illegal immigration is the cycle of lawlessness that follows illegal entry into the United States. The simple fact is that once someone chooses to enter the U.S. illegally and remain here illegally, breaking the law, either deliberately or through indifference, becomes easier and habitual: obtaining false IDs, avoiding normal bureaucratic requirements, violating zoning laws, etc. And when the host, whether federal, state, or local government, sends a message that the issue is now entirely political rather than legal, often the illegal immigrant senses that he is (and should be) generally exempt from the mundane...

The 2012 election will hinge on the economy, not on U.S. foreign policy, unless there is a major overseas crisis — an Israeli attack on Iran, an Iranian detonation of a nuclear weapon, a Middle East war, a North Korean attack, or something of that sort. That said, there is much to lament in the current administration’s foreign policy. But Mitt Romney should be careful in critiquing the status quo, given that it is full of paradoxes and contradictions.The war on terror? Forget the absurd euphemisms like “overseas contingency operations� and “man-caused disasters,� the hypocrisy of railing against waterboarding...

Barack Obama, both substantively and symbolically, ran in 2008 as a much-needed healer. He was to bring the nation together as never before — a vow taken to heart by millions of voters of all backgrounds who ensured Obama’s 2008 victory. His biracial background and his uncanny ability to navigate through both Harvard Law School and the politics of Chicago community organizing seemed to make him ideally suited to usher in a postracial era — as was acknowledged, albeit quite crudely and insensitively, by both Harry Reid and Joe Biden in the 2008 campaign. Yet quite the opposite development tragically...

Until last week, Chief Justice John Roberts was vilified as the leader of a conservative judicial cabal poised to destroy the Obama presidency by overturning the federal takeover of health care. But with his unexpected affirmation, Roberts suddenly was lauded as the new Earl Warren -- an "evolving" conservative who at last saw the logic of liberal big government. Among our elites -- journalists, pundits and academics -- liberal Supreme Court justices are always deemed "open-minded," even as they are expected to vote in absolute lockstep liberal fashion. In contrast, a conservative justice is written off as reactionary or blatantly...

I have a confession to make: I don’t quite understand the jubilation among the conservative-Republican forces during the last two months of the Obama crack-up, and here, unfortunately, is why: 1. The so-called Obama crash. I believe that Obamism — 41 months over 8% plus unemployment, anemic GDP growth, serial $1 trillion deficits, unsustainable rates of new aggregate debt, the takeover of health care, record numbers on unemployment insurance and food stamps — is not only strangling the country, but in the long run will be seen as such by most Americans. Obama is incoherent ... (snip) What Does It...