Jason Isbell – The Troubadour of the New South

Submitted by cullmansense on Mon, 2013-07-15 01:29

http://cullmansense.com

My adoration for Jason Isbell is no secret. It is rooted in his brilliantly folkloric southern sensibilities. His previous work, particularly his 400 Unit albums, listen like parables of the modern south, utilizing the iconic imagery for anyone below the Mason-Dixon but still reflective of something poignantly personal. While these elements are all present in SOUTHEASTERN, he has never produced a more intimate album. Isbell is confessional and reflective about his struggles with alcohol and cocaine, his reckless youth, and his transformative sobriety. And in typical fashion, he is both direct and allegorical depending on the song or the verse. Melancholy regret and remembrances do not dominate all tracks; there is also a celebration, as Isbell is clearly happy with who he has become- a sober man in love.

For instance, COVER ME UP and TRAVELING ALONE tell the story of someone who has crossed a personal Rubicon inviting hope and happiness into a darkened life. The shadow of that darkened life swirl around the set list as the song LIVE OAK metaphorically discusses the elements of our past that haunt us using the canvas of American outlaw mythology. This track, more than any other, draws obvious parallels with the darker side of American music legend Johnny Cash.

With the metaphor stripped away, YVETTE and SONGS THAT SHE SANG IN THE SHOWER seem to be deeply cutting experiences that expose moments of Isbell's reckless youth. In SONGS, Isbell's lyrical genius weaves a vivid story though the words are Spartan- "On a lark, on a whim, I said there's two kinds of men in this world and you're neither of them. And his fist cut the smoke. I have an eighth of a second to wonder if he got the joke." The scene is painted, the brushstrokes few. Then, in the aftermath, a confessional- "In a room by myself. It looks like I'm here with the guy that I judge worse than anyone else. So I pace and I pray and I repeat the mantras that might keep me clean for the day."

In SUPER 8, Isbell delivers the carefree, irresponsible country tinged rock and roll songs that harken back to his DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS days. The riches of Isbell's transformation do not only manifest in his lyrics; his wife, Amanda Shires, his obvious anchor in a storm of temptation, is a marked presence on the album. The sweeping violin, played by Shires, transforms the song NEW SOUTH WALES from a story about strangers in a strange land to an authentic English (via Australia) folk ballad. Nowhere is Isbell's gift of intelligence in language, metaphor, and imagery more polished that in STOCKHOLM and ELEPHANT, where he wrestles with falling in love and death respectively. Both songs layer innuendo, meaning and cliché within Isbell's typical narrative clarity. The album is a journey of reflection and change, so the fitting capstone is RELATIVELY EASY. This is the grown-up, sober Isbell seeing the big picture of life. Despite problems, personal demons, loss, and trivial irritations, things for Jason Isbell have become "relatively easy."

I had the opportunity to catch the last show in the first leg of his SOUTHEASTERN album tour in Chattanooga, TN on Saturday night. For those that know the Chattanooga Choo-Choo Hotel and campus, you may know the venue. Nestled in the far back of the tourist hotspot is a former roller rink turned rock venue called Track 29. The large standing room, place was lined with dedicated fans. Isbell is always a stellar live performer with his backing band the 400 Unit (named for The Shoals infamous mental ward).

He is one of the rare performers who sound better and richer live than in the confined and controlled environment of the studio. The most striking aspect of the show was the crowd’s eagerness to sing along and celebrate his new album. Usually, at a show, the attendees all eagerly await the “hits” or a personal favorite. Here, songs that are scarcely a month old were sung in chorus from an adoring crowd as if they were perennial hits. When Isbell’s lyrics took a personal turn and his sobriety was mentioned the entire crowd rejoiced, unprovoked, in support and celebration of his life style change.

During his encore, he took the stage alone and did an acoustic rendition of a favorite from his days in the Drive- By Truckers. The song, TVA, could not have found a more receptive audience, as the Florence born Alabama native praised the Tennessee Valley Authority as a continuing economic and cultural boon created in the depths of the Depression. He was after all playing to a Chattanooga crowd in the very heart of the TVA. The feeling that pulsed through the crowd was almost religious. He and the band closed with a rare cover, the Rolling Stones’ CAN’T YOU HEAR ME KNOCKING. The Stones like Isbell are one of rock and rolls greatest gifts, irrevocably tied to the sounds of the Alabama Shoals.

I'll leave this hopefully insightful commentary with perhaps my favorite turn of phrase in an album filled with them. It is indicative of the trials and redemptions related in this masterpiece called SOUTHEASTERN- "A heart on the run keeps a hand on a gun. You can't trust anyone. I was so sure what I needed was more I'd shoot out the sun. Days when we raged, we flew off the page. Such damage was done. But I made through `cause somebody knew I was meant for someone."- COVER ME UP by JASON ISBELL

RECOMMENDED LISTENING- Alabama Pines, TVA, Stockholm, Heart on a String, Decoration Day, Outfit, and the album Live in Alabama by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit (2012)

By Dillon Lee

Filmmaker, CHS Theatre Director, Pop Culture Critic-At-Large

The Obama Administration’s Race-Baiting Campaign

Democrats want 2014 to be an us-versus-them election. 

By Andrew C. McCarthy

http://www.nationalreview.com/

July 20, 2013

Eric Holder (AP)

The first thing to remember is that, with the Obama administration, there are no coincidences.

The attorney general of the United States is engaged in a shocking extrajudicial publicity campaign. Eric Holder is prosecuting George Zimmerman in the court of public opinion because he knows he wouldn’t have a prayer of convicting him in a court of law. Worse, in doing so, Holder is quite deliberately stoking resentment and tension — under the guise of leading a “national conversation” about race.

At precisely the same time, the United States secretary of health and human services has loathsomely injected race into the debate over Obamacare. Toward the conclusion of this week’s NAACP grievance fest, Kathleen Sebelius took the podium to demagogue Obamacare opponents. The fight against them, she inveighed, is reminiscent of “the fight against lynching and the fight for desegregation.” She made these inflammatory remarks just as violence was erupting over Zimmerman’s acquittal in the Trayvon Martin shooting, no small thanks to Holder’s accomplice, Al Sharpton.

These episodes are not unrelated. They are coordinated.

The second thing to bear in mind is that race-baiting is the last resort of scoundrels whose insipid policy claims cannot survive collision with real-world conditions. The incitements that transform policy debates into an us-versus-them rumble are not about race per se. They are about advancing a hard-left agenda through the community organizer’s crude bag of tricks — the extortion that Alinskyites euphemistically call “direct action.” It is what happens when social-justice prescriptions turn out to be unjust and unworkable.

Sebelius is not agitating because she actually believes there is some faint connection between Jim Crow and opposition to socialized medicine. Sensing that no one was looking as the country kicked back for an extended Independence Day weekend, the president’s Myrmidons conceded that Obamacare is collapsing of its own fiscally reckless weight. Alinskyites are about power. Obama realizes he won’t have much left if Democrats are yoked to a smoldering train wreck in advance of the 2014 midterms. So he is struggling to keep it a looming train wreck. A third-string Treasury bureaucrat was thus dispatched to announce, in passing, that Obama has “waived” the employer mandate until 2015.

Quite apart from the lawless imperiousness of this maneuver, it is not going to work. Not being well acquainted with the private sector, the president may not realize that, for corporate executives, planning ahead means more than scheduling the next tee time. As National Review’s editors have observed, Obamacare has already “complicated business decisions touching on everything from long-term investments to hiring to the number of hours worked by part-time employees.” It is, right now, a ball and chain around the ankle of a high-unemployment, no-growth economy.

Even if Obama gets his way — such that only the employer mandate is delayed, with Republicans unable to shame Senate Democrats into putting off the equally noxious individual mandate — the calendar is not in his favor. The administration cannot allow 2014 to be an election about policy. It has to be an us-versus-them election, with the “us” enjoying the “animated by rage” advantage. What we saw from Holder and Sebelius this week is the ugly start of a wickedly divisive enterprise.

The rule of law demands that criminal statutes be applied faithfully and that law-enforcement officials respect due process by conducting their investigations in silence, speaking publicly only when they are prepared to file charges they can prove in court. Yet Holder and his Department of Social Justice have publicly and unethically agitated against George Zimmerman for over a year: partnering with Sharpton, saber-rattling about a federal civil-rights prosecution, and browbeating Florida officials into charging Zimmerman with murder despite evidence woefully insufficient to meet the statute’s terms.

Now, Holder is ensnared in this web of his own making. The state prosecution predictably failed, and it turns out there has never been a plausible civil-rights prosecution. Holder can commission all the bizarre anti-Zimmerman “tip lines” he likes; it won’t fill the cavernous holes in his case.

Obviously, he knows this. But he has also dramatically raised the expectations of Obama’s hard-left base — and note that the anti-Zimmerman protests are being driven at least as much by Occupy types and outfits such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation as by anguished supporters of the Martin family. After all the attorney general’s bold talk, they want to know where the civil-rights indictment is. Holder’s stall is that he is “investigating,” but Trayvon Martin was killed nearly a year and a half ago. How long does it take to investigate a comparatively straightforward altercation about which Florida has already completed a full-blown trial and the FBI has already conducted exhaustive interviews?

So in his NAACP stem-winder, Holder refocused the community organizer’s lens from civil-rights laws to “stand your ground” (SYG) laws. You are to believe that, while he’d love to charge that civil-rights case, he is being frustrated — justice is being frustrated — by these self-defense provisions that “sow dangerous conflict in our neighborhoods.” According to Holder, justice for Trayvon mandates that SYG be repealed. Effectively, the attorney general would surrender the streets to criminal aggressors by imposing a “duty to retreat” on law-abiding citizens.

SYG has become the proxy for the case the Left can’t win. The game is given away by Holder’s race-mongering echo chamber. Pressed by Fox’s Bill O’Reilly, radio commentator Tavis Smiley admitted that Zimmerman’s trial had been consistent with Florida law. But, he groused, “it’s the law I have a problem with.” Taking Holder’s bloviating to its illogical end, Smiley explained that Florida law gave Zimmerman a “right to stand his ground” but insidiously deprived Martin of this same right because our nation generally views black men “as a menace to society.”

Please. Martin did not just “stand his ground” when Zimmerman followed him; he initiated the fateful physical confrontation by attacking Zimmerman and brutally beating him. But the point is that Zimmerman’s right to stand his ground was utterly irrelevant to the case. Its newfangled pertinence is a fabrication of the Left. The Monday-morning quarterbacks now claim that SYG has seeped into all Florida law; thus, it was dispositive in the deliberations that led to Zimmerman’s acquittal.

In truth, Zimmerman did not claim the immunity of SYG because SYG matters only when there is an opportunity to retreat. If you are lying on the ground being pulverized, the fact that you’d have a right to stand your ground in the unlikely event you could get to your feet is beside the point.

The legacy media, which is joining the racialized campaign against SYG just as it joined the racialized campaign to charge Zimmerman, is quick to point out that a juror, in a CNN interview, mentioned SYG as a factor in the jury’s consideration. What they don’t tell you, though, is that it was the blunderbuss prosecutors, not Zimmerman’s lawyers, who injected SYG into the trial testimony.

Zimmerman did not ask for the pretrial hearing to which a person claiming SYG immunity is entitled. It was the prosecutors, in their desperation to come up with some modicum of evidence that Zimmerman intended to commit murder, who adduced testimony that he had taken a criminal-justice course that covered SYG laws. The suggestion, if you can follow this, was that maybe the shooting was sort of premeditated. (If you took addition in the first grade, you’d better not bounce a check in Florida — who knows what they’ll charge you with?)

Nevertheless, Zimmerman’s lawyers posited a classic self-defense strategy, under the standards that existed long before SYG was enacted in Florida. SYG had nothing to do with Trayvon Martin’s death.

Nothing more, that is, than opposition to Obamacare has to do with segregation. But logic won’t stop the bloody shirt of racial politics from being waved in dutiful pursuit of the Left’s dream world. It’s a world where you’d better hope everyone has “free” health care. With your right to self-defense stripped away, it won’t do you much good that the state’s police are nowhere in sight when you find yourself besieged . . . and with no better chance to retreat than George Zimmerman had.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy.

Today's Tune: Jason Isbell - Pancho and Lefty (Live)

The Saga of Gabriel Allon Flows On in 'The English Girl'

Book Review Jackie K Cooper

http://www.huffingtonpost.com

July 11, 2013

The English Girl by Daniel Silva

When you read a book by Daniel Silva you are always secure in knowing his story is going to unfold in an interesting manner. You open the pages and the words just flow, pulling you along with its tide of a plot and a wave of characters. Once you immerse yourself in this story you cannot fight the tide nor can you stop and disembark from the story. You will go to its destination and enjoy the journey. Such is certainly the case with Silva's latest novel THE ENGLISH GIRL.

Once again we are transported to the world of super Israeli spy and operative Gabriel Allon. It is a world that is very timely and Allon deals with happenings of today, tomorrow and yesterday. He moves from country to country in order to accomplish his mission. In THE ENGLISH GIRL it takes him to Britain, Corsica and Russia among other places, but his base of operations is always Israel.

In this story Allon is trying to solve the disappearance/possible kidnapping of a woman named Madeline Hart. She is "the English girl" to whom the title refers. Madeline has been on vacation in Corsica when she disappears. Allon gets the call asking him to investigate what happened to her and if possible to find her. The Israelis want him to do it as a favor to the British.

Finding out what happened to Madeline only takes up half the book. There are other circumstances that come into play regarding her disappearance that fill out the remainder of the story. This second half adventure is based on a situation that is just as intriguing as the circumstances in the first.

The plot is tricky and enjoyable, but it is not the main reason to read this story. The main attraction in a Gabriel Allon book is, and always shall be, the character of Allon himself. This man has many facets to his personality and Silva has complete control when writing about them. There is never a slip up; never a contradiction.

Even better Allon is not a Superman. He is totally human and sometimes very fallible. His strengths, however, outweigh his weaknesses but the weaknesses give him his humanity. Readers respond to this part of his character and love him even more for being human.

You can lose yourself in a Silva book. You can get caught up in the twisting adventures that are undertaken, and you can steep yourself in information about the characters that populate the pages. Allon's world is not a solitary place. It takes a village, or at least a large group of people to get his missions accomplished. Everyone in his orbit is unique and essential.

Block out some time for this great novel. Allon is a great political operative, but Silva is an even greater writer. That is what makes THE ENGLISH GIRL a must read.

THE ENGLISH GIRL is published by HarperCollins. It contains 406 pages and sells for $27.00.

Jackie K Cooper
www.jackiekcooper.com

Two Necessary Books

By Elise Cooper
http://www.americanthinker.com
July 20, 2013

On June 30th Egyptians took to the streets in a 'second revolution' to demand the removal of the dictatorial President Mohammed Morsi. Raymond Ibrahim's latest book, Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians is a fascinating read given the context of what is currently happening in Egypt. A second informative book also discusses this topic, A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot's Fight to Save his faith, by Dr. Zuhdi Jasser.

Ibrahim's parents emigrated from Egypt to the U.S., and raised him as a Coptic Christian. He is able to use his fluent Arabic and his past travels to uncover the truth about the lack of religious freedom in Muslim lands. Dr. Jasser is also a first-generation American but he was raised as a Muslim who believes in the principles of the U.S. Constitution: liberty, freedom, and separation of Mosque and faith. American Thinker interviewed authors Daniel Silva, Raymond Ibrahim, and Dr. Jasser about their books as they relate to the current events in Egypt.

A quote in Daniel Silva's, a New York Times best-selling author, latest book The English Girl, "If the American President isn't careful, his two most important foreign policy achievements will be a nuclear Iran and the restoration of the Islamic caliphate." Since he once lived in Egypt and was a Middle East correspondent he reflected to American Thinker, "If the Muslim Brotherhood succeeded in cementing its grip on Egypt they would have turned it into something like an Islamic Republic of Egypt."

Ibrahim agrees, and points to the many Arabic videos that show Morsi, the former Egyptian President, as stating, "The Koran is our constitution, Muhammad is our leader, jihad, in the path of Allah, is our way, and martyrdom is our inspiration." In fact, this sounds a lot like a slogan from Al-Qaeda. Ibrahim emphasizes that their very name, Muslim Brotherhood, not Egyptian Brotherhood, shows how this group is not inclusive, nor is it a secular group as James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, referred to them.

Dr. Jasser emphasizes that the West has allowed the Muslim Brotherhood to deceive the Egyptian people by defining democracy as elections. "The Obama administration should have understood that democracy is not a light switch that can be turned on, but has to develop over time to get a viable party system. This revolution happened because people realized there was not a mechanism for a no-confidence vote or the ability to impeach Morsi. As much as I am not a fan of the Egyptian military there was no other option. All they did was to remove a dictator."

Ibrahim thinks it is laughable that there are American politicians and media figures who refer to Morsi's election and his government as democratic. Under this regime there was no freedom of religion and no rights for women. In fact, Morsi tried to impose Sharia Law when he was in power.

Dr. Jasser cannot understand how people do not recognize the attempts by the Muslim Brotherhood to base their constitution on Islamic theocracy, without having any separation of powers, parameters of free speech and religion, as well as equating criticism of Morsi with criticism of Islam. "I met with some of the Christians and women's groups who refused to stay in the process of modernizing the Constitution because they saw it as a corrupt process."

As Andrew McCarthy pointed out in a recent article, McCain once referred to the Muslim Brotherhood as "a radical group that, first of all, supports Sharia law; that in itself is anti-democratic -- at least as far as women are concerned." Yet, now McCain wants to cut off American aid to the Egyptian military. Ibrahim sees "McCain and those like him as either naïve or cynical. I am hoping for the latter, that he has a plan and is using the aid card as a political strategy. For me, it comes down to either ignorance or stupidity. The human rights issues in Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood should not be ignored. In the book, I tried to show how, in the past, the West did not see themselves as liberal and soft, with a multicultural mentality. Now a lot of politicians in the name of democracy want to support those that are committing atrocities. I am hoping my book shows why that should not be the case."

A quote from Ibrahim's book could almost reflect John McCain's flip-flop: "Long gone are the days when the West, confident, and proud of its own ways, attracted Muslims to its civilizational achievements. Now, apologizing for its 'sins' and demonizing its own Christian heritage while whitewashing the cultures and histories of others, the West only pushes Muslims back to reclaiming their Islamic heritage."

Ibrahim also wants Americans to understand that the Muslim Brotherhood only makes up 4% of the population compared to the Coptic Christians, who make up about 20%. Yet, one of the first things Morsi did was to appoint Muslim Brotherhood members to all the important posts, without any Coptic Christians represented. He also shows throughout the book how the Coptic Christians were the scapegoats for the Muslim Brotherhood and were blamed for everything that went wrong, a la the Jews in pre-World War II Germany.

Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians and A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot's Fight to Save his faith are necessary reading for understanding Egypt and the Mideast as a whole. As Ibrahim told American Thinker, "This book shows how Christians are a snapshot for what happens to others under Islamic rule," while Dr. Jasser asserts that "a cornerstone for democracy in Egypt must be a separation and an opposition to Sharia Law." This is no more relevant than today with Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood.

The author writes for American Thinker. She has done book reviews, author interviews, and has written a number of national security, political, and foreign policy articles. 

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/07/two_necessary_books.html at July 20, 2013 - 06:26:28 AM CDT

The Downfall of Detroit

It took only six decades of “progressive” policies to bring a great city to its knees. 

By Mark Steyn

http://www.nationalreview.com/

July 19, 2013

Ilegally dumped tires sit in front of a vacant, blighted home in a once thriving neighborhood on the east side of Detroit, Michigan. (Reuters)

By the time Detroit declared bankruptcy, Americans were so inured to the throbbing dirge of Motown’s Greatest Hits — 40 percent of its streetlamps don’t work; 210 of its 317 public parks have been permanently closed; it takes an hour for police to respond to a 9-1-1 call; only a third of its ambulances are driveable; one-third of the city has been abandoned; the local realtor offers houses on sale for a buck and still finds no takers; etc., etc. — Americans were so inured that the formal confirmation of a great city’s downfall was greeted with little more than a fatalistic shrug.

But it shouldn’t be. To achieve this level of devastation, you usually have to be invaded by a foreign power. In the War of 1812, when Detroit was taken by a remarkably small number of British troops without a shot being fired, Michigan’s Governor Hull was said to have been panicked into surrender after drinking heavily. Two centuries later, after an almighty 50-year bender, the city surrendered to itself. The tunnel from Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit, Michigan, is now a border between the First World and the Third World — or, if you prefer, the developed world and the post-developed world. To any American time-transported from the mid 20th century, the city’s implosion would be literally incredible: Were he to compare photographs of today’s Hiroshima with today’s Detroit, he would assume Japan won the Second World War after nuking Michigan. Detroit was the industrial powerhouse of America, the “arsenal of democracy,” and in 1960 the city with the highest per capita income in the land. Half a century on, Detroit’s population has fallen by two-thirds, and in terms of “per capita income,” many of the shrunken pool of capita have no income at all beyond EBT cards. The recent HBO series Hung recorded the adventures of a financially struggling Detroit school basketball coach forced to moonlight as a gigolo. It would be heartening to think the rest of the bloated public-sector work force, whose unsustainable pensions and benefits have brought Detroit to its present sorry state (and account for $9 billion of its $11 billion in unsecured loans), could be persuaded to follow its protagonist and branch out into the private sector, but this would probably be more gigolos than the market could bear, even allowing for an uptick in tourism from Windsor.

So, late on Friday, some genius jurist struck down the bankruptcy filing. Judge Rosemarie Aquilina declared Detroit’s bankruptcy “unconstitutional” because, according to the Detroit Free Press, “the Michigan Constitution prohibits actions that will lessen the pension benefits of public employees.” Which means that, in Michigan, reality is unconstitutional.

So a bankrupt ruin unable to declare bankruptcy is now back to selling off its few remaining valuables, as I learned from a Detroit News story headlined “Howdy Doody May Test Limits of Protecting Detroit Assets.” For those of you under 40 — okay, under 80 — Howdy Doody is the beloved American children’s puppet, in western garb with a beaming smile and 48 freckles, one for every state, which gives you some idea of when his heyday was. The Howdy Doody Show ended its run on September 24, 1960, which would have made sense for Detroit, too. The city’s Institute of Arts paid $300,000 for the original Howdy Doody puppet — or about the cost of 300,000 three-bedroom homes. Don’t get too excited — you can’t go to Detroit and see him on display; he’s in storage. He’s in some warehouse lying down doing nothing all day long, like so many other $300,000 city employees. Instead of selling him off, maybe they should get him moonlighting as a gigolo and sell it to HBO as Hungy Doody (“When you’re looking for the real wood”). What else is left to sell? The City of Windsor has already offered to buy the Detroit half of the Detroit/Windsor tunnel, perhaps to wall it up.

With bankruptcy temporarily struck down, we’re told that “innovation hubs” and “enterprise zones” are the answer. Seriously? In my book After America, I observe that the physical decay of Detroit — the vacant and derelict lots for block after block after block — is as nothing compared to the decay of the city’s human capital. Forty-seven percent of adults are functionally illiterate, which is about the same rate as the Central African Republic, which at least has the excuse that it was ruled throughout the Seventies by a cannibal emperor. Why would any genuine innovator open a business in a Detroit “innovation hub”? Whom would you employ? The illiterates include a recent president of the school board, Otis Mathis, which doesn’t bode well for the potential work force a decade hence.

Given their respective starting points, one has to conclude that Detroit’s Democratic party makes a far more comprehensive wrecking crew than Emperor Bokassa ever did. No bombs, no invasions, no civil war, just “liberal” “progressive” politics day in, day out. Americans sigh and say, “Oh, well, Detroit’s an ‘outlier.’” It’s an outlier only in the sense that it happened here first. The same malign alliance between a corrupt political class, rapacious public-sector unions, and an ever more swollen army of welfare dependents has been adopted in the formally Golden State of California, and in large part by the Obama administration, whose priorities — “health” “care” “reform,” “immigration” “reform” — are determined by the same elite/union/dependency axis. As one droll tweeter put it, “If Obama had a city, it would look like Detroit.”

After the Battle of Saratoga, Adam Smith famously told a friend despondent that the revolting colonials were going to be the ruin of Britain, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation” — and in a great city, too. If your inheritance includes the fruits of visionaries like Henry Ford, Walter Chrysler, and the Dodge brothers, you can coast for a long time, and then decline incrementally, and then less incrementally, and then catastrophically, until what’s left is, as the city’s bankruptcy petition puts it, “structurally unsound and in danger of collapse.” There is a great deal of ruin in advanced societies, but even in Detroit it took only six decades.

“Structurally unsound and in danger of collapse”: Hold that thought. Like Detroit, America has unfunded liabilities, to the tune of $220 trillion, according to the economist Laurence Kotlikoff. Like Detroit, it’s cosseting the government class and expanding the dependency class, to the point where its bipartisan “immigration reform” actively recruits 50–60 million low-skilled chain migrants. Like Detroit, America’s governing institutions are increasingly the corrupt enforcers of a one-party state — the IRS and Eric Holder’s amusingly misnamed Department of Justice being only the most obvious examples. Like Detroit, America is bifurcating into the class of “community organizers” and the unfortunate denizens of the communities so organized.

The one good thing that could come out of bankruptcy is if those public-sector pensions are cut and government workers forced to learn what happens when, as National Review’s Kevin Williamson puts it, a parasite outgrows its host. But, pending an appeal, that’s “unconstitutional,” no matter how dead the host is. Beyond that, Detroit needs urgently both to make it non-insane for talented people to live in the city, and to cease subjecting its present population to a public “education” system that’s little more than unionized child abuse. Otherwise, Windsor, Ontario, might as well annex it for a War of 1812 theme park — except if General Brock and the Royal Newfoundland Fencibles had done to Detroit what the Democratic party did they’d be on trial for war crimes at The Hague.   

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2013 Mark Steyn

Today's Tune: Neil Diamond - Holly Holy (BBC Concert - 1971)

A Bombshell in the IRS Scandal

No, it wasn't confined to a few rogue workers in Cincinnati.

By Peggy Noonan

http://online.wsj.com

July 19, 2013

The IRS scandal was connected this week not just to the Washington office—that had been established—but to the office of the chief counsel.

That is a bombshell—such a big one that it managed to emerge in spite of an unfocused, frequently off-point congressional hearing in which some members seemed to have accidentally woken up in the middle of a committee room, some seemed unaware of the implications of what their investigators had uncovered, one pretended that the investigation should end if IRS workers couldn't say the president had personally called and told them to harass his foes, and one seemed to be holding a filibuster on Pakistan.

Still, what landed was a bombshell. And Democrats know it. Which is why they are so desperate to make the investigation go away. They know, as Republicans do, that the chief counsel of the IRS is one of only two Obama political appointees in the entire agency.

To quickly review why the new information, which came most succinctly in a nine-page congressional letter to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel, is big news:

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IRS Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division revenue agent Elizabeth Hofacre, left, and retired IRS tax law specialist Carter Hull testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Capitol Hill on Thursday.

When the scandal broke two months ago, in May, IRS leadership in Washington claimed the harassment of tea-party and other conservative groups requesting tax-exempt status was confined to the Cincinnati office, where a few rogue workers bungled the application process. Lois Lerner, then the head of the exempt organizations unit in Washington, said "line people in Cincinnati" did work that was "not so fine." They asked questions that "weren't really necessary," she claimed, and operated without "the appropriate level of sensitivity." But the targeting was "not intentional." Ousted acting commissioner Steven Miller also put it off on "people in Cincinnati." They provided "horrible customer service."

House investigators soon talked to workers in the Cincinnati office, who said everything they did came from Washington. Elizabeth Hofacre, in charge of processing tea-party applications in Cincinnati, told investigators that her work was overseen and directed by a lawyer in the IRS Washington office named Carter Hull.

Now comes Mr. Hull's testimony. And like Ms. Hofacre, he pointed his finger upward. Mr. Hull—a 48-year IRS veteran and an expert on tax exemption law—told investigators that tea-party applications under his review were sent upstairs within the Washington office, at the direction of Lois Lerner.

In April 2010, Hull was assigned to scrutinize certain tea-party applications. He requested more information from the groups. After he received responses, he felt he knew enough to determine whether the applications should be approved or denied.

But his recommendations were not carried out.

Michael Seto, head of Mr. Hull's unit, also spoke to investigators. He told them Lois Lerner made an unusual decision: Tea-party applications would undergo additional scrutiny—a multilayered review.

Mr. Hull told House investigators that at some point in the winter of 2010-11, Ms. Lerner's senior adviser, whose name is withheld in the publicly released partial interview transcript, told him the applications would require further review:

Q: "Did [the senior adviser to Ms. Lerner] indicate to you whether she agreed with your recommendations?"

A: "She did not say whether she agreed or not. She said it should go to chief counsel."

Q: "The IRS chief counsel?"

A: "The IRS chief counsel."

The IRS chief counsel is named William Wilkins. And again, he is one of only two Obama political appointees in the IRS.

What was the chief counsel's office looking for? The letter to Mr. Werfel says Mr. Hull's supervisor, Ronald Shoemaker, provided insight: The counsel's office wanted, in the words of the congressional committees, "information about the applicants' political activities leading up to the 2010 election." Mr. Shoemaker told investigators he didn't find that kind of question unreasonable, but he found the counsel's office to be "not very forthcoming": "We discussed it to some extent and they indicated that they wanted more development of possible political activity or political intervention right before the election period."

It's almost as if—my words—the conservative organizations in question were, during two major election cycles, deliberately held in a holding pattern.

So: What the IRS originally claimed was a rogue operation now reaches up not only to the Washington office, but into the office of the IRS chief counsel himself.

At the generally lacking House Oversight Committee Hearings on Thursday, some big things still got said.

Ms. Hofacre of the Cincinnati office testified that when she was given tea-party applications, she had to kick them upstairs. When she was given non-tea-party applications, they were sent on for normal treatment. Was she told to send liberal or progressive groups for special scrutiny? No, she did not scrutinize the applications of liberal or progressive groups. "I would send those to general inventory." Who got extra scrutiny? "They were all tea-party and patriot cases." She became "very frustrated" by the "micromanagement" from Washington. "It was like working in lost luggage." She applied to be transferred.

For his part, Mr. Hull backed up what he'd told House investigators. He described what was, essentially, a big, lengthy runaround in the Washington office in which no one was clear as to their reasons but everything was delayed. The multitiered scrutiny of the targeted groups was, he said, "unusual."

It was Maryland's Rep. Elijah Cummings, the panel's ranking Democrat, who, absurdly, asked Ms. Hofacre if the White House called the Cincinnati office to tell them what to do and whether she has knowledge of the president of the United States digging through the tax returns of citizens. Ms. Hofacre looked surprised. No, she replied.

It wasn't hard to imagine her thought bubble: Do congressmen think presidents call people like me and say, "Don't forget to harass my enemies"? Are congressmen that stupid?

Mr. Cummings is not, and his seeming desperation is telling. Recent congressional information leads to Washington—and now to very high up at the IRS. Meaning this is the point at which a scandal goes nowhere or, maybe, everywhere.

Rep. Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican, finally woke the proceedings up with what he called "the evolution of the defense" since the scandal began. First, Ms. Lerner planted a question at a conference. Then she said the Cincinnati office did it—a narrative that was advanced by the president's spokesman, Jay Carney. Then came the suggestion the IRS was too badly managed to pull off a sophisticated conspiracy. Then the charge that liberal groups were targeted too—"we did it against both ends of the political spectrum." When the inspector general of the IRS said no, it was conservative groups that were targeted, he came under attack. Now the defense is that the White House wasn't involved, so case closed.

This is one Republican who is right about evolution.

Those trying to get to the bottom of the scandal have to dig in, pay attention. The administration's defenders, and their friends in the press, have made some progress in confusing the issue through misdirection and misstatement.

This is the moment things go forward or stall. Republicans need to find out how high the scandal went and why, exactly, it went there. To do that they'll have to up their game.

Al Sharpton, Posh Populist

Living large among the 1 percenters. 

By Jonah Goldberg

http://www.nationalreview.com/

July 19, 2013

If Tom Wolfe were writing The Bonfire of the Vanities today, he’d need a scene in the Grand Havana Room in New York City. It’s an Olympian den fit for what Wolfe called the “Masters of the Universe” — the super-rich gods of finance who today go by the name “the 1 percent.” Taking up the penthouse floor of 666 Fifth Avenue, the Grand Havana Room is a private, invitation-only cigar club and four-star restaurant. Through its windows, you can see the toiling salary men 39 floors below as they scurry about like ants, some furtively smoking in doorways, ever fearful of Nanny Bloomberg’s All-Seeing Eye.

Named by Business Insider as one of the “11 exclusive clubs Wall Streeters are dying to get into,” the Grand Havana Room is where power brokers and celebrities hobnob with captains of industry in one of the last places where it’s still legal to smoke in the Big Apple.

Immune as I am to the seductions of class resentment and Jacobin envy, I will admit it: I love the place. If invited, and if I could afford it, I’d join.

The one question I have is: Who’s paying for Al Sharpton’s membership?

“The Rev” is an omnipresent member of the club. After his MSNBC show, he’ll swing by for dinner and cigars amid the other Masters of the Universe. I couldn’t confirm that he repaired there after he broadcast his radio show, Keeping It Real, from Zuccotti Park to show his solidarity with the 99-percenters.

The reason I ask who’s paying for his membership is that Sharpton’s relationship with money has always been complicated. When he claimed he didn’t have the resources to pay damages in a defamation suit he lost, Sharpton was asked in a deposition how he could afford his suits. He didn’t own them, he replied, someone else did. He was merely granted “access” to the garments as needed. The same went for his TV, silverware, etc.

There’s a metaphor in there somewhere. In our overly therapeutic culture, we talk a lot about “enabling” pathologies, self-destructive behavior, etc. Well, Sharpton is a pathology enabled by the very system he loathes.

In a healthy society, Sharpton might be on parole now — not the must-get guest for Meet the Press and Today on issues of racial justice. He was a ringleader in perpetuating the evil Tawana Brawley hoax, in which he and two corrupt lawyers (now disbarred) falsely accused assistant district attorney Steven Pagones and others of gang-raping a 15-year-old girl in a racist attack (Brawley claimed that she’d been smeared with feces and had had racist epithets written on her body). No person of any ideological stripe could doubt it was a fraud — except, that is, for the unrepentant Sharpton, who recently insisted “something happened.”

If he’d been locked up for that, he might not have helped incite the Crown Heights riots in 1991. After a tragic car accident in the New York neighborhood in which a Jewish driver accidentally struck and killed a black child named Gavin Cato, Sharpton stoked anti-Semitic rage. At the funeral for Cato, amid shouts from the crowd of “Heil Hitler!” (one banner read, “Hitler did not do the job”), Sharpton didn’t call for reconciliation; he inveighed against “diamond dealers.” During the riots Jews were beaten in the street, and eventually a Hasidic tourist from Australia, Yankel Rosenbaum, was stabbed to death.

Perhaps if Sharpton had been shunned for his role in that, he might not have encouraged yet more violence in 1995, when he led protests against the eviction of a black-owned record store. Sharpton fueled rage on his radio show and at rallies to the point where one of the protesters ran into a Jewish-owned store whose owner was wrongly blamed for the eviction, shot several people, and then burned the place down, killing seven (mostly Hispanic) occupants.

But he was shunned for none of it. Nor was he shunned for his sometimes cavalier compliance with tax laws or his shabby shakedowns of corporations for donations. In fact, in a culture that increasingly rewards shamelessness, Sharpton got in on the ground floor and has been cashing in on his access ever since. The attorney general himself celebrates his “partnership” with Sharpton.

Sharpton is even hailed as an expert on racial tensions, which in a funny way is true. The establishment he constantly seeks to “speak truth” to has enabled him in every conceivable way. He doesn’t just have access to his suits, he’s been given access to just about everything the 1 percent has to offer, including the very best cigars.

— Jonah Goldberg is the author of the The Tyranny of Clichés, now on sale in paperback. You can write to him at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

The Post-Zimmerman Poison Pill

By  Heather Mac Donald

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner

July 19, 2013

The most poisonous untruth being peddled in the wake of the George Zimmerman acquittal is the claim that American justice is racist. The criminal law regularly announces that black Americans are “worth less than other Americans,” Cardozo Law School professor Ekow Yankah wrote on the New York Times opinion page this week. It wasn’t activists who “injected” race into the discussion, scoffed The American Prospect’s Jamelle Bouie on Monday, the “criminal-justice system” is “already” racial. An e-mail alert on Wednesday from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School proclaimed: “An ugly truth rears its head again: Racial disparities are alive and well in our criminal-justice system.”

The idea that the criminal-justice system discriminates against blacks — and that this bias explains blacks’ disproportionate presence in custody — is a staple of civil-rights activism and of the academic Left. Every effort to prove it empirically, however, has come up short. A 1994 Justice Department survey of felony cases from the country’s 75 largest urban areas discovered that blacks actually had a lower chance of prosecution following a felony than whites did and that they were less likely to be found guilty at trial. Alfred Blumstein has found that blacks are underrepresented in prison for homicide compared with their arrest rates. A meta-analysis of charging and sentencing studies showed that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms, according to criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen.

Criminal-law professors across the political spectrum agree that the Zimmerman verdict resulted from prosecutorial overkill, not juror bias. The trial was scrupulously fair and presented the prosecution with full opportunity to make its case.

Close on the heels of the “biased justice system” conceit, however, is the preposterous implication that the primary homicide threat faced by young black males comes from honorary whites such as George Zimmerman. “Our children are targeted. Our community is targeted,” Martin Luther King III told the NAACP national convention on Wednesday. Protesters at the Orlando, Fla., courthouse this week held signs proclaiming “Endangered species: young black men and boys.” The New York Times ran an article today about the “painful talks” black parents are having with their children about how not to get gunned down by whites. A nurse’s assistant in Missouri told the Times: The whole situation ‘“would just make me skeptical about what crowd of white people I put [my son] around.’”

In fact, if a black parent wants to radically reduce his son’s chance of getting shot, he should live in a white neighborhood. New York’s crime profile is typical of urban-crime disparities across the country. The per capita shooting rate in predominantly black Brownsville, Brooklyn, is 81 times higher than that of predominantly white and Asian Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, according to the New York Police Department. Blacks in 2012 committed about 75 percent of all shootings in New York, and whites a little over 2 percent, though blacks are 23 percent of the city’s population and whites 35 percent. Blacks are 60 percent of the city’s homicide victims. Their killers? They aren’t white.  

The picture is the same nationally. Black males between the ages of 14 and 24 committed homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic males combined in the same age category in 2008, resulting in a homicide victimization rate nearly as disproportionate. As for interracial crime, black homicide offenders in 2010 had nearly three times the absolute number of white and Hispanic victims as there were black victims of white and Hispanic homicide offenders, despite blacks’ much lower population numbers.

The “white death threat” meme predominated in the immediate aftermath of the tragic Trayvon Martin shooting as well, of course. But in the intervening year and a half, the mainstream media have been forced, however fleetingly and inchoately, to acknowledge the black-on-black shooting spree that continues to characterize urban America, despite the country’s 17-year crime drop. The January 2013 slaying of 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton, a majorette in the Chicago marching band that had played at Obama’s inauguration, triggered sporadic attention to Chicago’s hardly unique gun violence over the following months. Even if the press was unwilling to point out that the killers of such inner-city victims share their skin color, that fact should have been obvious to anyone who has even the most remote contact with reality.  

Yet this recognition of the real source of black homicide risk has evaporated completely in the wake of the Zimmerman verdict, and we are back to the “rampaging white racists” conceit. The American Prospect’s Bouie even argues that “there’s no such thing as ‘black-on-black’ crime.” Black-on-black crime is simply a matter of proximity, he says; blacks kill each other because they usually live next to each other. But Asians also frequently live next to each other; we don’t try desperately to ignore “Asian-on-Asian” crime, however, because their crime rate is so low.

Honesty about disproportionate rates of black crime requires acknowledging another truth as well: Trayvon Martin’s race could well have been a factor in Zimmerman’s initial suspicion of him. But that is because the known suspects in the recent pattern of burglaries in his neighborhood were black. Had Asians been breaking into homes, consistently with an elevated rate of Asian crime, an unknown Asian teen wandering the neighborhood could also have drawn the attention of a neighborhood-watch volunteer. To recognize the possibility of criminal profiling at the onset of the encounter is not to justify in any moral sense the killing of an unarmed black teen or to diminish the horror of that encounter’s conclusion. The Martin case is an undeniable tragedy. But if one extremely rare shooting of an unarmed black teen by a non-black neighborhood-watch volunteer is leading black parents to warn their children about getting shot by whites, it is no less natural that people faced with blacks’ actually elevated crime rate are going to view teens who fit the black-thug look with a greater degree of trepidation. If shopkeepers in an area plagued by black robbery and shoplifting go into heightened awareness mode when black youth congregate outside their store or enter it, their response is not only inevitable, it is also rational, based on the evidence. The most efficient solution to such reactions is to bring the black crime rate down to the rates of white and Asian crime.

An eight-year-old girl was killed, and two other children and their grandmother wounded, in Oakland on Wednesday night when an unknown gunman sprayed their apartment with bullets. I’m guessing, based on historical crime rates, that the gunman is black. Do the people grandstanding today about “racial profiling” think otherwise?

— Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor at the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and the author of Are Cops Racist?

Today's Tune: The Rolling Stones - Doom And Gloom