Saturday roundup

Great piece by Akhil Rajaseskar at The Federalist entitled "It Doesn't Matter If You Love the Constitution If your Neighbors Don't Know What It Says."

His first paragraph states clearly and succinctly just what the Constitution's raison d'être is:

The Constitution of the United States was created with a simple purpose: to limit government. Imbued with various separations and specific endowments of power, the Constitution is America’s ultimate obstacle to government tyranny, higher and more powerful than any person, institution, or office.

Just how ignorant are post-Americans about the supreme law of their land?

A study conducted last year by the Annenberg Center of Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania showed that only 26 percent of Americans could name all three branches of government, while more than a third (37 percent) surveyed couldn’t name even one of the five freedoms or rights guaranteed by the First Amendment–religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition.

Former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once lamented Americans’ ignorance of the Federalist Papers: “It is such a profound exposition of political science that it is studied in political science courses in Europe. And yet we have raised a generation of Americans who are not familiar with it.”

Indeed, most states’ history and civics classes today are “mediocre to awful,” according to a 2011 study published by the American Bar Association. When states’ standards for history classes were graded for “content and rigor” and “clarity and specificity” on scales from A to F, a whopping 28 states earned grades of D or F, while only 9 earned an A- or B.

He then looks into the funny business by which SCOTUS benches have found other bases besides the Constitution on which to come to their decisions:

 Starting in 1903 with Lochner v. New York and picking up the pace since, the legal class has been steadily dismantling public understanding of and access to the Constitution by introducing strange and novel concepts into constitutional interpretation that any well-informed common citizen would be hard-pressed to find. From substantive due process to “penumbras” and “emanations” of rights, lawyers have found new ways of convincing people that the Constitution has hidden meanings. We now live in a popular culture that is incapable of exercising the power it was given — the power it needs — because it has been wrenched from our hands and reclaimed by those we have come to regard as our intellectual superiors.

Ominous new survey of college students:

Many U.S. college professors now regularly share their own social and political beliefs in class, and their students feel increasingly afraid to disagree. That’s according to a new national survey of undergraduates due out next week. 

When students were asked if they’ve had “any professors or course instructors that have used class time to express their own social or political beliefs that are completely unrelated to the subject of the course,” 52% of respondents said that this occurs “often,” while 47% responded, “not often.”

Post-America is finding ways to make the "A"CA optional.  Measures include repealing the individual mandate, association health plans, short-term duration plans, arrangement whereby an employee of a company can purchase a plan on the individual market and the company can reimburse him or her for the premiums tax-free, and expanding the ability of states to design their own versions of the "A"CA.

Andrew McCarthy at NRO reports on an ominous ruling by the European Court of Human Rights:

When he was 50, the prophet of Islam took as his wife Aisha, who was then six or seven. The marriage was consummated when Aisha was nine.

This is not a smear. It is an accurate account of authoritative Islamic scripture. (See, e.g., Sahih-Bukhari, Vol. 5, Book 58, Nos. 234–236.) Yet it can no longer safely be discussed in Europe, thanks to the extortionate threat of violence and intimidation — specifically, of jihadist terrorism and the Islamist grievance industry that slipstreams behind it. Under a ruling by the so-called European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), free speech has been supplanted by sharia blasphemy standards. 

The case involves an Austrian woman (identified as “Mrs. S.” in court filings and believed to be Elisabeth Sabaditsch Wolff) who, in 2009, conducted two seminars entitled “Basic Information on Islam.” She included the account of Mohammed’s marriage to Aisha. Though this account is scripturally accurate, Mrs. S. was prosecuted on the rationale that her statements implied pedophilic tendencies on the part of the prophet. A fine (about $547) was imposed for disparaging religion.

Mrs. S. appealed, relying on Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. That provision purports to safeguard “freedom of expression,” though it works about the same way the warranty on your used car does — it sounds like you’re covered, but the fine print eviscerates your protection.

Article 10 starts out benignly enough: Europeans are free “to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.” But then comes the legalese: One’s exercise of the right to impart information, you see, “carries with it duties and responsibilities.” Consequently, what is called “freedom” is actually “subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties” that the authorities decide “are necessary in a democratic society,” including for “public safety” and for “the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others.”

Translation: Europeans are free to say only what they are permitted to say by the unelected judges of the European courts. Truth is irrelevant. As the jurists reasoned in the case of Mrs. S., a person’s freedom to assert facts must be assessed in “the wider context” that balances “free” expression against — I kid you not — “the right of others to have their religious feelings protected,” as well as “the legitimate aim of preserving religious peace.”

It is thus verboten to say things that might upset Muslims. Particularly offensive is mention of Islam’s many doctrinal tenets that make us cringe in the 21st century — approbation of child marriage, violent jihad, the treatment of women as chattel, the duty to kill apostates, and so on. That these tenets are accurately stated, supported by undeniable scriptural grounding, is beside the point. Or as the ECHR put it, reliance on scripture could be classified as “an abusive attack on the Prophet of Islam, which could stir up prejudice and put at risk religious peace.”

What the vestiges of Western civilization are coming to: I say something that is true; it hurts your feelings, so — of course — you blow up a building; and it’s my fault.

I've long maintained that any organization with the term "human rights" in its name is up to no good.


Oh, sheesh, yet a further ratcheting up of our societal combustibility: 7 dead, several others shot at a Pittsburgh synagogue during Saturday prayer service.

We have, over the last 50 years, become a nuttier society. That's the fundamental problem from which these others - shoot-ups of public places, male strippers who mail pipe bombs, the drug epidemic, drag queens reading to little kids in public libraries, transgender bathrooms, lies about perfectly qualified Supreme Court nominees, forms of artistic expression enamored of perversion and ugliness - stem. We badly need God.

UDATE:

California under Freedom-Hater domination is a bastion of income inequality:

After factoring for costs of living, California is the poorest state in the union. An average of 14 percent of Americans live below the poverty line by census measures. Compare that with the 19 percent of Californians who live below the poverty line and the situation is clear. The census measures factor in housing costs and wellbeing with programs like food stamps and housing assistance. Altogether, the state government has made life for poor and middle class Californians nearly unbearable.

How? California renters pay an average of $1,440 per month, much higher than the national average of $1,010 per month. In 2015, more than 40 percent of Californians spent over 30 percent of their income on housing. Today, 29 percent of them spend over half their earnings on housing. Median home values, at $529,000, are more than double the national median of $239,800. Residents who can afford rent or a mortgage are on the hook for electricity rates burdened by green initiatives and regulation that grew 500 percent faster than the national average from 2011 to 2017.

“Not In My Backyard” development and construction restrictions mean that California cities are much more expensive for the poor, with Los Angeles having the highest proportion of income going towards rent in the nation. The state and its cities use environmental and zoning laws to restrict housing, which often disallows large scale development of apartments. The result? Less access for middle class residents.

From 2011 to 2016, California increased spending on administration at more than double that of teacher pay. Its public employee system disincentivizes government thrift and saddles taxpayers with debt that outstrips the national average. A private sector employee would have to save $2.6 million to receive the same retirement as a California Highway Patrol officer. On top of a burdensome state income tax, California has the highest sales tax in the country along with property tax rates that disproportionately punish the poor and lead to housing problems.

Traditional left wing prescriptions simply have not worked in the state, which an opinion column in the Los Angeles Times dubbed the “poverty capital” of the United States. Housing vouchers increase the cost of living. The number of those with no health insurance in California fell by more than half after the state expanded Medicaid, yet poverty remains near historic highs. California spends the third most per capita on welfare programs, yet its economy continues to fail the poor and middle class.

Despite having just 12 percent of the national population, California represents nearly a third of all Americans on welfare. Federal taxpayers shell out more than half of the $6.7 billion in the California Work Opportunities and Responsibility to Kids program. In Texas, 6 percent of families in poverty receive welfare. In California, the figure is 66 percent. Can you guess where the poverty rate is lower? Not California.

The combination of government overreach and ineffective programs creates a brutal dichotomy of very rich and very poor. California is the fourth most unequal state in the union with so many homeless who face diseases like typhus and hepatitis. The number of people living on the streets in California increased by nearly 14 percent to more than 130,000 in 2017. Mark Zuckerberg is worth $70 billion, while San Franciscans have an app that helps them track human feces on the sidewalk.

Most of the caravan people are turning down the Mexican government's offer of asylum, which includes temporary IDs and work permits, medical care, schooling for their children, and housing in local hostels.

At The Weekly Standard, Andrew Eggar's list of "conservatives" who pushed the false-flag narrative in the pipe-bomb case contains pretty much the names you'd expect: Ann Coulter, Dinesh D'Souza, Bill Mitchell, Candace Owens, Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs.

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