Bad news today for President Obama, his Counterterrorism and Homeland Security Advisor, John Brennan, and other proponents of the idea that the United States can safely reach out to “moderate” elements within terrorist organizations like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Taliban.  In a 6-3 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court found that no distinction can be made between violent and non-violent wings of such groups and that the former will be beneficiaries of whatever “material support” is given them.

As Stephen Landman of the indispensable Investigative Project on Terrorism’s IPT News reported in a post Monday:

“The court roundly rejected the claims that there’s a distinction between aid to a terrorist group’s “social” wing, as opposed to its military wing….:

Material support meant to “promote peaceable, lawful conduct” can further terrorism by foreign groups in multiple ways. Material support is a valuable resource by definition. Such support frees up other resources within the organization that may be put to violent ends. It also importantly helps lend legitimacy to foreign terrorist groups – legitimacy that makes it easier for those groups to persist, to recruit members, and to raise funds – all of which facilitate more terrorist attacks.

As a result of this ruling upholding the material support statute, it remains illegal to provide to designated terrorist groups “any property, tangible or intangible, or service, including currency or monetary instrument or financial securities, financial services, lodging, training, expert advice or assistance, safehouses, false documentation or identification, communications equipment, facilities, weapons, lethal substances, explosives, personnel (one or more individuals who may be or include oneself), and transportation, except medicine or religious materials.”

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Barack Obama’s problem with top Afghanistan commander Gen. Stanley McCrystal is one of his own making.

McCrystal and his staff – in a much-ballyhooed article in Rolling Stone set to be published on Friday – are reportedly disdainful and disrespectful to the White House, Afghanistan envoy retired Gen. Karl Eikenberry and Vice President Biden.  That they were cannot be an accident.  McCrystal (and his boss, Gen. David Petraeus) were uncharacteristically vocal in the months Obama pondered his Afghanistan strategy.  They didn’t trust Obama then, and don’t now.

Obama chose McCrystal to command the counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan (read “nation-building” for “counterinsurgency”).  Both McCrystal and Petraeus (who helped draft the plan) agreed with President Obama’s July 2011 deadline for the campaign.

But it was – and is metaphysically impossible for the plan to work, as Petraeus and McCrystal both knew.  A counterinsurgency can succeed, but only with an open-ended commitment to it, and a decisive action to end the involvement of out-of-country allies of the insurgents.

Simply put, basing a strategy on nation-building is the catastrophic mistake that George W. Bush made in Iraq that Obama is now compounding in Afghanistan.

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Recent reports of Florida’s governor, Charlie Crist, inspecting the beaches of Miami seem to be more of a photo oops than anything else.   Obviously, I’m sure he’s concerned with his state, the revenue lost from canceled vacations, and the impending negative effects environmental disaster from the BP oil spill, it remains curious, though, why he hasn’t been back to the Gulf coast since early June.   Instead he has recently traveled to Miami and Disney World–in central Florida–to address the spill.  Yes, he’s touting that Florida’s hot spots are safe, but more attention needs to be paid by the governor to the Gulf coast.

Meanwhile, the Florida beach report states:

The beaches and waters at tourist hot spots like Destin, Fort Walton Beach and Okaloosa Island are open, according to the Emerald Coast Convention and Visitors Bureau, which represents the three destinations.

“The air here is also still fresh and clean, with no smell of oil whatsoever,” the bureau’s website said.

This beaches may very well be open, but the conditions of the beaches are debatable.  Swimmers I have interviewed at Destin have reported being covered in a gloss of oil after swimming in the Gulf, the water is not clear, and piles of oil-soaked dead seaweed have washed up on the shore.

Additionally, this is what the Destin shore looks on June 17, 2010.  This picture is not algea, it is of oil-soaked seaweed washing up on the beaches in large quantities.

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Recently, my colleagues in the U.S House of Representatives passed a bill that will undoubtedly further harm our already weakened economy by discouraging investment in businesses and real estate. With national unemployment at 9.5% and no sign of relief in sight for the real estate market, now is no time to be discouraging this type of investment and the jobs that it creates.

The American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act (HR 4213) that passed the House by a narrow margin included an extraordinary tax increase on carried interest returns from successful investments by real estate, venture capital, and private equity partnerships. This revenue is currently taxed at the 15% capital gains rate, which is already scheduled to increase to 20% next year. Carried interest provides incentive for investment partners to take the risky investments that are needed to create jobs and boost the economy.

The U.S. Senate expects to vote on the bill in the coming weeks. Senator Max Baucus introduced a compromise amendment that would tax a smaller portion of the carried interest revenue at the new higher rates, but the impact of any tax increase on carried interest will still be harmful and widespread. I will not vote for any bill that includes a tax increase on carried interest, and I will urge my colleagues to join me in opposition.

What’s most alarming about this tax rate increase is that it is deeply punitive on the very businesses we need to help stabilize our economy. The increase would overturn decades of partnership tax law, and these partnerships would be the only businesses in the country whose enterprise value would be taxed at the income tax rate rather than the capital gains tax rate. These partnerships would be unfairly punished for the mistakes of a few Wall Street managers, despite the fact that these partnerships are in the best position in our economy to continue to create and grow businesses and jobs.

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Today, in 1990, Checkpoint Charlie, the border crossing between the American sector of West Berlin and East Berlin, was dismantled. Twenty years later, almost no one remembers the Cold War. For those keeping score at home, we won. So far.

There’s an old joke about a Transylvanian cookbook. The recipe for an omelet starts off with this: “First, steal two eggs.” If that note really appeared in some country’s cookbook, don’t look for constitutional government or a free market system to arise there anytime soon. That’s because democracy is not something you can just plant, like shaking seeds out of an envelope.

Americans were blessed to have extensive experience of self-government when we made our bid for independence in the 1770s. And Americans at that time–all the most thoughtful ones at least–recognized the profound contradiction that human bondage represented. It was difficult to assert on the one hand that all government “derives its just powers from the consent of the governed” while holding millions of human beings as slaves. Amid many blessings, slavery was held to be a curse. It took another eighty years and fratricidal Civil War before those contradictions were resolved.

A free market can do many things efficiently and justly, but the free market is perverted when it treats humans as objects. Thus, almost all people recognize that slavery and international sex trafficking are wrong. Our laws protect artistic expression, but we demand strict enforcement of laws against child pornography. Such illicit trade cannot be honored as a part of legitimate commerce.

We already know something of the unusual ideas of human rights and commerce held by U.S. Solicitor General, Elena Kagan. Kagan has been nominated by President Obama to succeed the retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. Kagan also served in the Clinton White House, where she left an extensive paper trail of documented opinions.

Most interesting, perhaps, is Kagan’s support for cloning human beings. Clinton Library documents show that she opposed any effort by Congress to prevent human beings from being cloned specifically to create embryos that would be experimented upon, then killed. Gallup recently reported that 88% of Americans oppose cloning human beings. Kagan does not.

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Broken today at Breitbart.TV:

From speech at Case Western Reserve, 1997: “I loved what happened in the Bork hearings. I wrote a review of Stephen Carter’s book recently where I said, ‘no, he has it all wrong. The Bork hearings were great, the Bork hearings were educational. The Bork hearings were the best thing that ever happened to Constitutional Democracy.’”

On his first day in office, January 20, 2009, President Barack Obama issued a statement on the White House Web site promising Gulf Coast residents that his administration would not fail them like he accused his predecessor President George W. Bush.

Eighteen months later, those arrogant words are coming back to haunt Obama as the Gulf Coast is facing the third month of failure by Obama to marshall sufficient resources to protect the region from the massive BP oil spill.

“President Obama will keep the broken promises made by President Bush to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. He and Vice President Biden will take steps to ensure that the federal government will never again allow such catastrophic failures in emergency planning and response to occur.”

Politico reported the statement the day it was posted to a White House page titled “Additional Issues.”

Since then, the White House has edited the comment to remove the personal insult to President Bush so that it now reads:

“President Obama will keep the broken promises to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. He and Vice President Biden will take steps to ensure that the federal government will never again allow such catastrophic failures in emergency planning and response to occur. Within weeks of his inauguration, he made a renewed commitment to partner with the people of the Gulf Coast to rebuild now, stronger than ever.”

Based on the Politico report, the White House also edited out verbiage bragging about Obama’s post-Katrina trips to the region:

The site also points out that Obama “visited thousands of Hurricane survivors in the Houston Convention Center and later took three more trips to the region” and worked with the Congressional Black Caucus to help rebuild in the aftermath of Katrina.

The Obama administration has left a destructive trail of catastrophic failures in its wake over the BP oil spill, beginning with its failure to ensure that an adequate disaster plan was in place for BP’s Deepwater Horizon well to its failure to secure enough skimmers and booms to prevent the spill from reaching the shores of the Gulf states.

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Last week, Congresswoman Giffords met with General Patraeus on Capitol Hill. This meeting took place after we have lost over thirty American soldiers in Afghanistan this month. The burning question on Ms. Giffords’ mind was: what are we doing to “green” our bases?

This is a disgrace. Ms. Giffords sits on the House Armed Services Committee and yet seems to be unaware of the ever-changing and deteriorating situation in our longest war ever – Afghanistan. Instead, she used that meeting for political grand-standing to please the Obama Administration.

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Amidst all the political jockeying over the BP catastrophe, the main players are missing what is really uppermost on America’s mind: It’s the spill rate, stupid. It’s jobs, stupid. It’s the economy, stupid. And none of it is happening.

All eyes in Washington, Wall Street, and Main Street were turned this week to the congressional show trial featuring beleaguered BP CEO Tony Hayward. Hayward was a disaster. He played dumb. He stonewalled. And he never got honest about the colossal failure of human judgment at BP that caused this catastrophe.

But folks, seriously, what did you expect? Before this thing is said and done, Hayward and others at BP may very well be criminally indicted by the Justice Department. Hayward could eventually do hard time for all I know. So, of course, he stonewalled. Thank Eric Holder.

What Hayward should at least have done is talk about the progress being made in capping the spill rate, which is gradually going down. To most Americans, and especially those in the Gulf, it’s the spill rate of capture that matters most. Hayward also should have talked about the new BP relief well, which could be up and running in less than a month, to end this disaster. That would be great news for America, and her economy and stock market. Plus, he could have mentioned that BP is hiring thousands of workers to fill new jobs in the cleanup effort.

But Hayward was lawyered to the gills, which doesn’t make anyone happy, including me. And that’s precisely why these congressional show trials leave me bored, tired, and depressed.

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Like a relentlessly advancing cancer, the news about the US fiscal deficit and the accumulated debt, which is its result, keeps getting worse.  Every week the press discloses some supposedly “new” information about either the federal budget, economic failure, projections of economic growth, the effects of the so-called “doc fix” (about which we have written several times), the sorry fiscal condition of state and municipal finances, or some further jobs stimulus proposal, all of which pile more costs on this nation that, if it were a private business, would be considered broke.

Before looking at the most recent spate of deficit and debt related news, let us start with the CBO’s updated March 2010 report which estimated that the cumulative effects of the Administration’s budget proposals would add $9.7 trillion to our current deficit of $14 trillion (an amount equal to approximately ninety percent of our annual GDP and clearly approaching the danger zone).  This amount does not include any spending for enacting climate legislation or the effect of rising interest rates to service our debt or spending for contingencies from unplanned events which will inevitably occur.

Moreover, it projects economic growth every year at four percent when we have had only two quarters of growth at four percent or higher in the past five years and, at least since 1982, have never had four consecutive years of growth as high as four percent per annum.  That overly optimistic CBO assumption if not realized will raise the deficit and the accumulated debt, perhaps by trillions of dollars.

In recent days we see once again the fantasy of the most recent budget the president presented.  After just a few months it is outdated.  Mr. Obama has just asked Congress for an additional $50 billion in aid to state governments.  It is uncontested that state and local governments are in terrible fiscal condition and, of course, they can’t print money to inflate away their accumulated debts.  Cumulative state shortfalls in 2009 and 2010 alone are approximately $310 billion and projections for 2011 and 2012 combined are for an additional $300 billion.

State governments have in the past few years either borrowed with abandon or resorted to accounting gimmickry to approach balancing their budgets.  They have consistently looked for new sources of tax revenue or raised taxes on existing sources, making a reality of Ronald Reagan’s statement about government: “if it moves, tax it.”

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Expressing disapproval with some Obama administration actions, many on the right — and some on the left — are complaining that the executive branch wields far too much power.  Similarly, when President George W. Bush was in power, many on the left — and some on the right — complained that the executive branch wielded far too much power.  Seeing this bipartisan concern for unbridled expansion of presidential power and wishing to start restoring the office to its Constitutional limits, Congressman Geoff Davis (R-KY) has introduced the Regulations from the Executive In Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act.

The REINS Act would require Congressional authorization for any new Major Rule proposed by the executive branch. It now has now has 57 cosponsors, including noted Constitutionalist Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX).  It also enjoys the support of the Chamber of Commerce.  Under REINS, the numerous proposed regulations pertaining to health care, climate change, energy, financial regulation, and our economy would have to be submitted to Congress for approval.   REINS would continue to allow the executive agencies charged with writing rules to propose draft rules, but would end the delegation of Congressional authority that has enabled these agencies to enact them unilaterally.

Our Founding Fathers recognized the pitfalls of an all-powerful chief executive.  Fearing tyranny, our nation did not even have a president until 1789, preferring instead strong states, a weak Congress operating under the auspices of the Articles of Confederation, and no executive branch at all.  As this proved to be too weak for national cohesiveness, our founders drafted the Constitution to provide the nation with three co-equal branches of government: legislative, executive, and judicial.  All three were to operate within the limits defined by the Constitution.

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Immediately following the 9/11 attacks in New York City, Americans were reminded just how brave and important first responders, including fire fighters, police, and EMTs, are to us. Nearly a decade on, though, Big Labor and politicians are using them as a bargaining chip to push bad legislation.

As fellow BG blogger Warner Todd Huston writes in Investors Business Daily last week, through the benignly named Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act (H.R.413), Sen. Harry Reid “wants all first responders represented by collective bargaining rules emanating from Washington D.C.” He adds: Naturally this legislation is being pushed as a matter of ‘national security.’”

The problem is that the law not only is a giveaway to unions that would increase the cost of services for local and state governments, but the bill is just plain badly written. It would force significant changes in state laws for at least 16 states.

You know the bill is bad when the Washington Post editorial page is coming out against it — and the Post clearly sees through the attempt by Big Labor to leverage the public’s respect for firefighters and police.

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Democrats and the teachers unions are trying every which way to pass a $23 billion “education jobs fund” bill, a bailout for our public schools.  The money would be used to ease the ever-increasing burden of employee retirement costs, health care increases and other benefits.  The spending has little if anything to do with children.

But that hasn’t stopped the National Education Association from using children in its television advertising.  Kids are doing the dirty work for the adults because, of course, long-faced kids tugging at America’s heartstrings are much more impactful than a bunch of adults with their hand out.

The “education jobs fund” is little more than a back scratch for the teachers unions, because in 2008, they scratched the back of those currently in power in Washington DC with millions of dollars of campaign contributions and boots on the ground in key states and districts.

This all gets back to the fact that the NEA (and the AFT) wants to maintain its power and that is done through money and members.

Kids are an afterthought in the NEA’s political calculation, if they ever dawn on the union at all.

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On Wednesday last, I posted a piece documenting Barack Obama’s incapacity as an executive. I followed up on the following day with a brief examination of Bobby Jindal’s record as Governor of Louisiana – which illustrates admirably what Alexander Hamilton had in mind when he wrote that “energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.” Today, I will take a brief look at Chris Christie, Governor of New Jersey.

Chris Christie is an original. He is the first Republican to have won statewide office in New Jersey in a dozen years, and he did so on 3 November 2009 by ousting from office an immensely wealthy sitting Governor who had previously served five years as United States Senator from that state.

In certain respects, Christie, who is 47, is quite unlike Bobby Jindal. He did not become a freshman at Brown when he was 20, win a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford when he was 23, and serve as a cabinet secretary in state government when he was 25. He was not a boy wonder, and his rise has not been meteoric. Had you learned about him when he was 39 (as Jindal is now), you might well have concluded that he was a pretty ordinary guy.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, Christie grew in Livingston. In later years, he attended the University of Delaware, took a law degree at Seton Hall, and gained admission to the bar. After serving as an associate for six years, he became a partner in a law firm in Cranford, New Jersey, where he specialized in securities law, appellate practice, election law, and government affairs.

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Today, June 21, is the Summer Solstice. It is the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. Somehow, we think the days will seem even longer in the coming months.

Alexander Litvinenko was a hero in the mold of Mosab Hassan Yossef, the so-called “Son of Hamas,” who the US is sickeningly threatening to deport.  In fact, their fates may be quite similar if this is to happen, as in 2006 Litvinenko as you may recall was poisoned with Polonium-210, an extremely rare radioactive substance, and essential ingredient to early nuclear bombs.

Why was he poisoned?  Litvinenko, a former KGB/FSB agent who left the service and defected to London was a staunch critic of the Putin regime, and apparently knew too much for the Kremlin to bare.  For Litvinenko implicated the Russian government in a variety of terrorist attacks, abroad for example through their training of Al-Qaeda #2 Ayman al-Zawahiri in 1998, and disgustingly at home through an attempted bombing of an apartment complex in 1999, and the infamous 2002 Moscow theater and 2004 Beslan school attacks.

I recently read his book Allegations, which in light of recent events is proving quite prescient.

One argument he makes that should resonate with all of us regards political resistance to the criminal Russian government:

There is no need to break any law, even most cruel one, in order to remain humans and citizens.  All we need to do is to take a civic stance, to demand that the authorities strictly obey the constitution.  Putin and his propaganda team know this, so they try to divide us, to set us against each other.  In doing so, the Kremlin strategists appeal to the lowest instincts, using every ethnic, religious or property differences we may have.  That is exactly why we must understand that our common enemy now is Putin’s regime (Allegations, 100).

Is this not precisely what we are witnessing today?  Our citizens are peacefully demanding a return to the Constitution, while our Progressive Putins try to spark racial and class warfare to divide and conquer us.

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The Constitution of the United States of America is a remarkable document.  It is eloquent in its simplicity, clarity and in its power.  It revolutionized (first in America, and then throughout most of the western world) the relationship between those who are governed and those who govern.  It has served as a governing template for much of the democratic western world.

Every federal office holder swears allegiance to the Constitution, not to any leader, not to any party, not to any political philosophy—only to this document, which is the foundation upon which our form of government is based and against which all legislation and judicial actions are measured.  The President vows to do his job faithfully and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.

And while there is no way of divining what today’s crop of leaders would have thought of the Constitution had they been present at the founding when it was first circulated prior to ratification, we have our doubts whether many of today’s ruling class, including President Obama, would have found common cause with Washington, Adams (John), Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton or Jay, all of whom loomed so large on the emerging American landscape.

This speculation is not intended as criticism of our political leadership or of the president.  Many great American patriots who were present at the founding opposed ratification of the Constitution.  Indeed, such American icons as Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, George Mason and James Monroe, were resolutely opposed to ratification of the Constitution, so wary were they of concentrated federal power. Time has, of course, demonstrated the remarkable wisdom of those who fought for ratification and the value of the gift they bequeathed to us all.  The question raised by this essay, however, is posed as the basis for discussion of whether a document written so long ago, which lays out with simplicity certain fundamental rules and relationships, can truly guide this nation 221 years later.

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