Crucifixion in Kiev

By Tim Kelleher

http://www.realclearreligion.org/

February 20, 2014

Orthodox priests pray as they stand between pro-European Union activists and police lines in central Kiev, Ukraine, early Friday, Jan. 24, 2014. (AP Photo/Sergei Grits)

Politics aside, it's hard to deny that the images beamed to the world from the opening of the Sochi Games were anything short of stunning.

Of course, removing the Olympics from political context is a challenge steeper than any we'll see in its events. And in the case of Sochi, the context is limned with welts of conflict.

When the last camera is packed and carried off to the next big thing, we may find that what was unveiled so impressively last week was more a testament to Russian stagecraft than proof the Russian nation has risen from its Soviet ashes to a greatness the world is obliged to acknowledge.

At the same moment, other images -- at times smuggled to viewers from Maidan Square in the neighboring capital of Kiev -- were telling an unscripted story in stark contrast to the orchestrated optics of Sochi.

Among the most powerful were of priests, standing in the icy breach between masses of protestors and government forces, each straining the leash-limits that keep Ukraine from the nightmare of civil war.

To Western eyes, these blokes, of long beard and foreign vestiture, might seem eccentric.Who are they, why is their presence tolerated, and what are those things they carry?

As for who, they are the sacerdotal face of Ukraine's major churches in the Orthodox tradition.What we mostly see them carrying are icons, the sacred images intrinsic to the Orthodox liturgical witness. Why has everything to do with who and what. For in Slavic culture, religion -- particularly the experience of Orthodoxy -- does not dwell on one side of an imagined wall never prescribed in that fruit of Magna Carta which are the American founding documents.

As I watched the Maidan priests, I found myself thinking of the film, On The Waterfront. The 1948 classic, written and directed by two American Jews, tells the story of long-suffering dock workers who, led by a fiery Catholic priest, rise up against the corruption and cruelty of a tyrannical mob boss. The film won a slew of Academy Awards including, Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay, as well as Best Actor for Marlon Brando.

In one pivotal scene, Karl Malden's Fr. Barry is in the hold of a cargo ship kneeling beside the body of a stevedore who's been killed in a hideous "accident." From the depths of this pit, Fr. Barry looks up, eyes ablaze, and begins exhorting the workers as several enforcers look on.

"...Every time the mob puts pressure on a good man, tries to stop him from doing his duty as a citizen, it's a crucifixion!...And if you don't think Christ is down here on the docks, you've got another thing coming!"

In Ukraine the Cross is a living reality, the central, animating paradox that is both the reminder of a dignity rooted in transcendent glory, and the very vehicle of its conveyance. Today, it took on special urgency as violence in Kiev escalated sharply, resulting in multiple deaths and injuries.

There are serious differences about what course Ukraine should take going forward. For reasons more complex than typically offered by the media, the choices are being forced along a sharpening line between the West and the Russian East that is approaching the dangerous intransigence of the Cold War.

In this regard, the axiomatic, "Without Ukraine, Russia is a country. With Ukraine, it is an empire," has lately been getting a workout. It needn't be literally true to illuminate important factors adding to the current crisis.

President Putin makes no secret of his view that Ukrainian independence is an illusion tolerated by Russia for as long as it serves the latter's purposes. Further, capitalizing on the role of Orthodoxy mentioned earlier, he has found religious "justification" for an expanded map of Russia. Invoking a revisionist image of ancient Kiev-Rus, modern borders "dissolve," giving way to a "deeper", "truer" identity -- one that happens to be geographically broader.

This vision of a greater Russia was recently echoed by the Patriarch of Moscow, in an ominous warning that Russia would be obligated to intervene should the situation in Ukraine devolve into civil war. Indeed, over the past year, the Patriarch has led a parallel campaign for an ecclesial hegemony that would subsume all Ukrainian Orthodox under his authority. The presence in Maidan of priests from each of the Orthodox churches -- including those within his jurisdiction -- is a bright sign that the attempt is being thwarted.

Its size, abundant resources, and that it is home to Russia's most important naval base, are just part of a long list that add up to Ukraine's importance. In short, Mr. Putin wants, and intends to have, Ukraine under the Russian umbrella. In current president Viktor Yanukovych, he has stubborn, clumsy, but manipulable partner. Much more needs to be said about this, but Ukrainians who may disagree on course, are nonetheless allied in this: the time of systemic injustice, bullying, intimidation, and trampling of rights is finished.

Moreover, the most immediate reason Ukraine is on the brink of civil war is not Putin, but Yanukovych. While this may be to Putin's short-term advantage, for long-burdened Ukrainians, it's a matter of first things first. And the first thing is to shatter a default condition of corruption that prevents a gifted people from reaching the level of dignity, productivity, and contribution worthy of them.

As in the example of Fr. Barry, the Cross held high in the hand of a Maidan priest speaks directly to this. For one side it is a shimmering hope, for the other, a looming threat. For both, it is the Truth that cannot be ignored.

Tim Kelleher is the new media editor for First Things.

(AP Photo/Sergei Grits)

Breaking the grip of the unions

By George F. Will, Published: February 18, 2014

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

Photograph by Erik Schelzig/AP Photo

Workers assemble Volkswagen Passat sedans at the German automaker’s plant in Chattanooga.

This year’s most important election will not occur in November, when more than 90 million votes will be cast for governors and national legislators. The most important election, crucial to an entire region’s economic well-being and to the balance of the nation’s political competition, has already occurred.

Last week at a Tennessee factory, workers rejected representation by the United Auto Workers union. The 712 to 626 vote — an 89 percent turnout — against unionizing the three-year-old Chattanooga Volkswagen plant was a shattering defeat for the UAW, for organized labor generally and for liberalism nationally. It was a commensurate victory for entrepreneurial federalism.

Sixty years ago, some 35 percent of the U.S. workforce was unionized, almost entirely in the private sector. Today, 11.3 percent is unionized . About half (49.6 percent) of this minority are government workers whose union dues do much to elect their employers. UAW membership has plummeted as far and fast as Detroit has — from 1.5 million in 1979 to about 380,000 in 2012. In 2011, UAW President Bob King said, “If we don’t organize these transnationals, I don’t think there’s a long-term future for the UAW.”

For 30 years the UAW has tried and failed to unionize a “transnational” — a factory making foreign-brand vehicles — in the South. The union may never have a better chance than it had in Chattanooga. The company, whose board includes representatives of a powerful German union, feigned neutrality but actually worked in close collaboration with the UAW. The union was given access to the plant, a workroom and other facilities, whilegroups opposing unionization were barred .

It is commonly, and carelessly, said thatWashington bailed out “the” automobile industry. Actually, government bailed out two of the three companies in one of the two U.S. auto industries — the UAW-organized one. The other industry, located in the South and elsewhere — Americans making 30 percent of the vehicles Americans purchase — did not need rescuing because it does not have a UAW presence, which helped ruin General Motors, Chrysler and their headquarters city, Detroit.

UAW officials blamed last week’s failure on “outside special-interest groups,” which describes the UAW in Chattanooga. In a characteristically shrill and clumsy intervention before the voting ended, Barack Obama accused Tennessee Republicans of being “more concerned about German shareholders than American workers.” He missed the detail that the shareholders’ company favored the UAW. The UAW, too, blamed Tennessee’s Republican politicians. Well.

VW received $577 million in tax breaks and other incentives to locate in Chattanooga, so Tennessee officials surely were entitled to speak about how unionization might harm the investment already made and might diminish the likelihood of additional help. Nowadays, however, liberalism responds to its unpersuasiveness by trying to get government to silence (as with the Internal Revenue Service) or punish (it is the National Labor Relations Board’s turn) speech by liberalism’s critics. So, the UAW may ask the NLRB to overturn the vote because of unfair labor practices, which supposedly amount to the fact that the UAW was not the only speaker during the debate before the vote. Anti-UAW billboards noted Detroit’s current prostration, and Sen. Bob Corker called the UAW “a Detroit-based organization.” Its headquarters, Solidarity House, is in Detroit.

Soon — certainly by the end of June — the Supreme Court probably will rebuke Obama for having made recess appointments to the NLRB while the Senate was not in recess. But given his administration’s culture of breezy indifference to legality, the NLRB might tug its forelock and do as the UAW demands.

In November, a prescient UAW organizer said the union would “probably lose” in Chattanooga if workers were granted a secret-ballot election. That is, the UAW favored a “card check” faux election, whereby unionization is approved when a majority of employees, confronted individually by union organizers, sign a card. The UAW could not prevent a proper election, but with the NLRB’s permission the campaign was compressed to nine days. This minimized the time for UAW opponents to make their case.

Despite the UAW’s attempt to do for the South what it has done to Detroit, the South can continue to practice entrepreneurial federalism. Capital is mobile. It goes where it is welcomed and stays where it is well treated, so states compete to create tax and regulatory environments conducive to job creation. Liberals call this a “race to the bottom.” Conservatives call it a race to rationality.

Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.

Read more about this topic:

Steven Pearlstein: The autoworkers, Volkswagen and the new, new South

Jennifer Rubin: Americans don’t buy what Big Labor and anti-immigrant groups sell

George F. Will: Appeals court limits labor board’s lawlessness

George F. Will: A defining moment for the court

Alex Berenson: Living the Spy Life

Garrison author’s new thriller may be his sixth bestseller

By Chip Rowe

http://philipstown.info/

Febriary 16, 2014

A number of spies, from the CIA and otherwise, owe Alex Berenson their lives.

He didn’t save them. He created them. Earlier this week the Garrison resident released his eighth novel starring CIA agent John Wells and a cast of far less savory operatives, all born of Berenson’s shadowy imagination, meticulous research and his experiences as a reporter in Iraq. The Counterfeit Agent, published by Putnam on Tuesday (Feb. 11), tails Wells as he tries to stop a mysterious group that hopes to fool the U.S. into invading Iran to end its nuclear ambitions. The first hint of trouble is a tip from deep inside the republic that Iran plans to assassinate a CIA station chief.

To say much else would be a spoiler.

Berenson, 41, a New Jersey native who studied history and economics at Yale, moved from the East Village to Garrison in 2012 with his wife, Dr. Jacqueline Berenson, a forensic psychiatrist. Their daughter, Lucy, is 17 months old. The Counterfeit Agent is dedicated to her.

Berenson introduced John Wells in April 2006 in The Faithful Spy, which he wrote after spending the fall of 2003 and summer of 2004 reporting from Iraq for The New York Times. His secret agent, the only American to ever infiltrate al-Qaida, spends years undercover in the mountains of Afghanistan, during which he converts to Islam and gains the confidence of a top al-Qaida leader. When Wells returns to the U.S., his bosses at Langley are unsure of his loyalties.

Wells sounds a lot like Nicholas Brody, the soldier-turned-terrorist in Homeland, but Berenson’s character predates the Showtime series by five years. Wells seems a clear inspiration for aspects of the Brody character (the key difference being Wells is loyal while Brody is not), and a co-creator of the show is an admitted fan of the books, so much so that the CIA handler in Homeland is named Saul Berenson in a nod to Alex. The author Berenson says his disappointment with the show is not creative but that his books are less likely to be turned into a TV series or films because of its success.

Regardless, Berenson has a large and loyal audience. The Faithful Spy won an Edgar Award from Mystery Writers of America for best first novel, and the softcover edition topped The New York Times paperback fiction list. In April 2008 he published a sequel, The Ghost War, and each February since has added another, starting with The Silent Man in 2009. The Midnight House(2010) took the ninth spot on the Times hardcover fiction list, The Secret Soldier (2011) landed at six, The Shadow Patrol (2012) at eight and The Night Ranger (2013) at 10. (Given the early reviews, The Counterfeit Agent is a safe bet to debut in the top five or 10 on the Feb. 23 list.) The novels, which are tightly written and clever, have each won critical praise as well as a consistent four of five stars after thousands of ratings on Goodreads.com and Amazon.

Berenson says it takes several months to outline each book, and several more to write it, at a pace of about 1,000 words per day. He often plots the twists and turns while walking the family dogs or running on Garrison’s snaked roads. The expansive view from his home of West Point is a daily reminder, he says, “that these institutions [in his stories] are real.”

While The New York Times Book Review has praised the writer for “his deep understanding of geopolitics and the shoddy compromises it demands,” he says reviewers tend to “overestimate how many contacts I have” in the spook brotherhood. He makes up for that with a reporter’s eye, visiting distant locales to gather convincing details (in The Counterfeit Agent alone, Wells travels to Guatemala, Thailand, Hong Kong and Istanbul). “What I’ve never been able to do is a true Graham Greene, where you live in a place for two or three years and get its rhythm,” he says. He doubts John Wells will be moving to Philipstown.

Berenson says his protagonist has matured over the years and is now more acutely aware of his inability to change the world even as he repeatedly saves it. In addition, while “Wells has always been a dark character, he’s sadder now,” Berenson says. “He fears he will never really be in love.” The leading men in modern thrillers, including Wells, are typically “cut from the same cloth as the modern Western hero. But I want him to feel the weight of what he’s done. Characters like Jack Ryan or Mitch Rapp never seem to make mistakes, such as killing someone they shouldn’t. They never seem to have to confront a situation where to get out of a mess bad things have to happen.”

After eight years of hazardous assignments, how much longer can John Wells survive? “People are worn out by the ‘Islamic’ thriller,” Berenson admits, “and his skills are all related to Islam. I spend a lot of time at the beginning of each novel shoehorning him into a new adventure. But while it might be easier to start afresh commercially, artistically it would be difficult. I’m not ready to leave him behind just yet.”

Book Review: ‘The Counterfeit Agent’ by Alex Berenson

By Alan Cheuse
http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/
February 11, 2014

Eight times out, counting this new one, and with each time Alex Berenson’s idiosyncratic invention, John Wells, a US secret-ops agent and convert to Islam, finds himself getting older and fighting harder for higher stakes in a novel that earns your attention and delivers an intriguing catch at the end.

Wells, who began his work infiltrating insurgent groups in Pakistan, long ago made the whole world his territory. Although as “The Counterfeit Agent” opens he is trying to settle down with a New England woman with whom he’s found great comfort. Good luck!

Before too long the forces of what at first seems a clear international menace have set in motion a political scheme for ginning up a war with Iran, and Wells gets called out of his domestic life — which really, truth be told, has begun to erode.

His girlfriend seems to understand this more than he does. At the end of a Caribbean cruise that he has agreed to in order to show his faith in their future, she gives him an ultimatum: 30 days to decide whether or not he wants to retire and make a new life with her or remain at the beck and call of his agency masters.

Just as they disembark in Miami, his telephone goes off and he takes on a new mission. As the pages go by the clock ticks for him double-time, with the peace, security, and happiness of both his private life and that of the greater world in the balance.

His mission? To ferret out the troublesome, and apparently rogue, operation that’s pushing the United States and Iran closer to Armageddon.

We watch as a shadowy female agent on the prowl for a large amount of fissionable material in South Africa works behind the scenes to set up attacks on several CIA station chiefs around the globe. We meet the rogue US agent who works for her, a man not only for hire but one with a motive for revenge, and we meet the gunmen he hires.

All this takes a while for Berenson to set up, but his clean, clear prose and solid grasp of global geopolitics make for compelling, believable scenes and chapters. By the time Wells gets into the thick of the case, one CIA agent lies dead in Southeast Asia, and the plot to heat up the Middle East, thanks to these events and some possibly questionable intel about that fissionable material, has become full-blown.

There’s a deep-throated Iranian military officer nicknamed “Reza” stationed in Turkey whose information has lent the plot desperate urgency, and Wells has the task of finding out whether or not he is authentic, and nearly dies in the process.

As we witness the mounting violence and intrigue as the plotters advance, Berenson ratchets up the tension by giving us a Washington mired in confusion and counterproductive thinking, poised to be duped by rogue actors.

Unfortunately some of this news comes in the form of an “info-dump,” nearly two pages long, typical of novels worse than Berenson will ever write — “The United States spent sixty billion dollars a year to spy on friends and enemies, tap phones, intercept emails, peek through windows . . . ’’ etc. Fortunately this comes toward the end of the otherwise neatly told story.

Certainly the rush of events in the final pages doesn’t make things any easier for Wells. It becomes quite clear that an agent whose girlfriend has essentially sent him packing, who barely escapes death in an abandoned factory in Istanbul, and who lives in a world with no shortage of global threat has a lot of work ahead of him — including apparently a sequel to this novel.

Alan Cheuse, the book commentator for NPR’s “All Things Considered,” can be reached at acheuse@gmu.edu.

Another Galling Betrayal

By Thomas Sowell 
http://townhall.com/
February 18, 2014


President Hamid Karzai at a press conference in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Jan. 25, 2014. Photo by Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images


The Afghanistan government's recent release of dozens of imprisoned terrorists, many of whom had killed Americans, was a galling betrayal of those Americans who died defending Afghanistan against the Taliban terrorists -- as well as those Americans who have returned home with arms or legs missing, or with minds traumatized beyond repair.

If we learn nothing else from the bitter tragedy of the war in Afghanistan, it should be that we should put an end forever to the self-indulgence of thinking that we can engage in "nation-building" and creating "democracy" in countries where nothing resembling democracy has ever existed.

It would be a feat to achieve one of these objectives, but to achieve both at the same time is a gamble that makes playing Russian roulette look like a harmless pastime.

F.A. Hayek said, "We shall not grow wiser until we learn that much that we have done was very foolish." Nothing is more foolish -- and immoral -- than sending men into battle to risk their lives winning victories that are later lost by politicians for political reasons.

That started long before the war in Afghanistan. Vietnam was a classic example. Years after that war was over, the Communist victors themselves admitted that they lost militarily in Vietnam, as they knew they would. But they won politically in America, with the help of Americans, including the media -- as they also knew they would.

The war in Iraq was more of the same. American troops won that war but our politicians lost the peace. Terrorists have now taken over, and raised Al Qaeda flags, in some Iraqi towns that American troops liberated at the cost of many lives.

How did this happen? It happened much the same way it happened in Afghanistan. We insisted on trying to create a "democracy" in the Middle East -- a place with a history going back thousands of years, without a single democracy.

What we created instead was a local ruler, placed in charge as a result of the blood and treasure of Americans, but independent of us, because he won an election that we insisted on holding -- as if there are no prerequisites for democracy.

To compound the problem, we had members of Congress constantly talking about pulling out of Iraq, and demanding a timetable -- despite what military madness it is to tell your enemy when you will be gone.

With American military support likely to be temporary and Iran's military presence next door certain to be permanent, how surprising is it that Iraq's leadership took Iran much more seriously than it took the United States?

Today, the Iraqi government is much more accommodating to Iran than to the United States, despite the fact that Americans put them in power. The very same scenario was repeated in Afghanistan, with President Obama himself announcing a timetable for the withdrawal of American troops.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai saw the handwriting on the wall -- and what it said was that American support was temporary but the Taliban was going to be around long after the Americans were gone. He too decided that it was better to try to get on the good side of our enemies, in this case by turning loose some terrorists.

It doesn't have to be this way.

After World War II, the American military took over the governments of Japan and West Germany. We did not start out by setting up some local leader who would be able to put his own interests above ours and work at cross purposes against us. Nor did we announce to the whole world when we planned to start reducing our troop levels in these countries.

Under the unchallenged supremacy of General Douglas MacArthur, Japan was indeed turned into a very different country, one in which democratic institutions could be phased in, at whatever pace the circumstances made prudent. Something similar happened in West Germany.

But this was not something that could be done quickly or on the cheap, with politicians sounding off in Congress about pulling out, and trying to micromanage from thousands of miles away. If we can't be serious, we have no right to send young Americans out into the hell of war.

Why People Carry Guns: A Response to David Frum

By David French

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner

February 17, 2014

I’m virtually certain that David Frum was simply trolling Twitter (a popular pastime) when he tweeted on Saturday: “Hypothesis: the people who most want to carry are the very last people on earth who should be allowed to carry.” 

In the remote chance that an otherwise-thoughtful person was actually arguing that the people who most want to exercise a constitutional right are the “very last people on earth” who should be allowed to exercise that right, I thought I’d take a moment to explain why a person carries. 

In my experience, those individuals who carry do so because they very consciously do not want to belong to the class of citizens that is inherently helpless — totally reliant upon the state to protect not just themselves but their family, friends, and neighbors. If the choice is between protectors and protected, they choose to be protectors. 

This identity is often inseparable from the notion that there is no set of government policies — no utopia — that can eliminate from human society the need for immediate protection. People can and will try to hurt others — using whatever means immediately available — and it strikes us as utterly reckless to be unprepared for this reality. 

The protected class has a different view. The protected class is a dependent class — not economically dependent of course, but dependent on the state in perhaps a more fundamental way (for their very lives) – and like members of other dependent classes, they are terrified of flaws in the state’s protective apparatus. Walled off from gun culture, they read the occasional, aberrant story of (legal) gun-owner stupidity or recklessness and cower in fear of a nonexistent threat. (While of course blithely sending their kids off to far more dangerous activities, like swimming in neighbors’ pools or riding in neighbors’ cars). 

To the protected class, private ownership of firearms is the flaw in the system that makes them feel vulnerable. It’s the barrier to the safety they crave but can’t provide.  

Thus the irreconcilable cultural divide: The very thing that provides security and safety for the gun-owner and his or her family frightens their non-gun-owning friends and neighbors, but the root of the problem is not the gun but the protected person’s very sense of themselves. 

Once a non-gun-owning friend asked me to show him my firearms. When I brought out my AR-15 (really a civilian version of the M4), I watched him physically wince, as if the thing itself was radiating some kind of malevolent energy. He sensed a threat. I sensed security.

How can we prevent that wince? That flinch? I’m not sure it’s possible absent a transformation in a person’s understanding of their own identity. Several months later that same friend was concerned that someone might be trying to harm one of his kids, and he knew the police were not — and could not be — omnipresent. In response to perceived danger, his very sense of self changed, and he understood that he had a nondelegable duty to protect his family. So he purchased a Glock and learned how to use it.

Good for him.

Let me close by countering Mr. Frum’s hypothesis with one of my own: “The people who most want to carry are those who most clearly understand their responsibilities to their families, their friends, and their fellow man.” They understand there is a difference between the protectors and the protected, and they don’t want to place their lives in the state’s hands.

Today's Tune: Kate Tucker - I'm on Fire

Obamacare’s war on jobs

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: February 13, 2014

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/

In the ongoing saga of the Affordable Care Act, oddly referred to by Democrats as the law of the land even as it is amended at will by presidential fiat, we are beginning to understand the extent of its war on jobs.

First, the Congressional Budget Office triples its estimate of the drop in the workforce resulting from the disincentive introduced by Obamacare’s insurance subsidies: 2 million by 2017, 2.3 million by 2021.

Democratic talking points gamely defend this as a good thing because these jobs are being given up voluntarily. Nancy Pelosi spoke lyrically about how Obamacare subsidies will allow people to leave unfulfilling jobs to pursue their passions: “Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.”

Nothing so lyrical has been written about work since Marx (in “The German Ideology”) described a communist society that “makes it possible for me to . . . hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.”

Pelosi’s vision is equally idyllic except for one thing: The taxes of the American factory worker — grinding away dutifully at his repetitive mind-numbing job — will be subsidizing the voluntary unemployment of the artiste in search of his muse. A rather paradoxical position for the party that poses as tribune of the working man.

In the reductio ad absurdum of entitlement liberalism, White House spokesman Jay Carney was similarly enthusiastic about this Obamacare-induced job loss. Why, Obamacare creates the “opportunity” that “allows families in America to make a decision about how they will work, and if they will work.”

If they will work? Pre-Obama, people always had the right to quit work to tend full time to the study of butterflies. It’s a free country. The twist in the new liberal dispensation is that the butterfly guy is to be subsidized by the taxes of people who actually work.

In the traditional opportunity society, government provides the tools — education, training and various incentives — to achieve the dignity of work and its promise of self-improvement and social mobility. In the new opportunity society, you are given the opportunity for idleness while living parasitically off everyone else. Why those everyone elses should remain at their jobs — hey! I wanna dance, too! — is a puzzle Carney has yet to explain.

The honest liberal reply to the CBO report is that a disincentive to work is inherent in any means-tested government benefit. It’s the unavoidable price of helping those in need because for every new dollar you earn, you lose part of your subsidy and thus keep less and less of your nominal income.

That’s inevitable. And that’s why we have learned to tie welfare, for example, to a work requirement. Otherwise, beneficiaries could choose to live off the dole forever. That’s why the 1996 Gingrich-Clinton welfare reform succeeded in reducing welfare rolls by two-thirds. It is not surprising that the same Obama administration that has been weakening the work requirement for welfare is welcoming the disincentive to work inherent in Obamacare.

But Obamacare’s war on jobs goes beyond voluntary idleness. The administration is now conceding, inadvertently but unmistakably, Obamacare’s other effect — involuntary job loss. On Monday, the administration unilaterally postponed and weakened the employer mandate, already suspended through 2015, for yet another year.

But doesn’t this undermine the whole idea of universal health coverage? Of course it does, but Obamacare was so structured that it is crushing small business and killing jobs. It creates a major incentive for small businesses to cut back to under 50 employees to avoid the mandate. Your business becomes a 49er by either firing workers or reducing their hours to below 30 a week. Because that doesn’t count as full time, you escape both the employer mandate to buy health insurance and the fine for not doing so.

With the weakest recovery since World War II, historically high chronic unemploymentand a shockingly low workforce participation rate, the administration correctly fears the economic consequences of its own law — and of the political fallout for Democrats as millions more Americans lose their jobs or are involuntarily reduced to part-time status.

Conservatives have been warning about this for five years. This is not rocket science. Both the voluntary and forced job losses were utterly predictable. Pelosi insisted we would have to pass the law to know what’s in it. Now we know.

Read more from Charles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

Read more on this topic:

The Post’s View: The Obama administration has a mandate on the health-care law, too

The Post’s View: The myth about job-killing Obamacare

Marc A. Thiessen: The Obamacare implosion is worse than you think

Ronald D. Rotunda: On the health-care mandate, Obama reaches beyond the law

From Russia with Euphemisms

In the Olympic coverage, Soviet horrors are being swept under the rug. 

By Jonah Goldberg

http://www.nationalreview.com/

February 14, 2014

Tatyana Zenkovich/EPA/Landov

Imagery from Russia's recent past – including the hammer and sickle that adorned the flag of the Soviet Union – is seen in the Opening Ceremony of the Sochi Olympics Friday. The display came in a portion of the program describing Russia's industrial growth.

Hannah Arendt coined the term “the banality of evil” to describe the galling normalcy of Nazi mass-murderer Adolf Eichmann. Covering his trial in Jerusalem, she described Eichmann as less a cartoonish villain than a dull, remorseless, paper-pushing functionary just “doing his job.”

The phrase “banality of evil” was instantly controversial, largely because it was misunderstood. Arendt was not trying to minimize Nazism’s evil but to capture its enormity. The staggering moral horror of the Holocaust was that it made complicity “normal.” Liquidating the Jews was not just the stuff of mobs and demagogues but of bureaucracies and bureaucrats.

Now consider the stunted and ritualistic conversation (“controversy” is too vibrant a word for the mundane Internet chatter) about the Soviet Union sparked by the Winter Olympics. The humdrum shrugging at the overwhelming evil of Soviet Communism leaves me nostalgic for the Eichmann controversy. At least Arendt and her critics agreed that evil itself was in the dock; they merely haggled over the best words to put in the indictment.

What to say of the gormless press-agent twaddle conjured up to describe the Soviet Union? In its opening video for the Olympic Games, NBC’s producers drained the thesaurus of flattering terms devoid of moral content: “The empire that ascended to affirm a colossal footprint; the revolution that birthed one of modern history’s pivotal experiments. But if politics has long shaped our sense of who they are, it’s passion that endures.”

To parse this infomercial treacle is to miss the point, for the whole idea is to luge by the truth on the frictionless skids of euphemism.

In America, we constantly, almost obsessively, wrestle with the “legacy of slavery.” That speaks well of us. But what does it say that so few care that the Soviet Union was built — literally — on the legacy of slavery? The founding fathers of the Russian Revolution — Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky — started “small,” merely throwing hundreds of thousands of people into kontslagerya (concentration camps).

By the time Western intellectuals and youthful folksingers like Pete Seeger were lavishing praise on the Soviet Union as the greatest experiment in the world, Joseph Stalin was corralling millions of his own people into slavery. Not metaphorical slavery, but real slavery complete with systematized torture, rape, and starvation. Watching the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, you’d have no idea that from the Moscow metro system to, literally, the roads to Sochi, the Soviet Union — the supposed epitome of modernity and “scientific socialism” — was built on a mountain of broken lives and unremembered corpses.

To read Anne Applebaum’s magisterial Gulag: A History is to subject yourself to relentless tales of unimaginable barbarity. A slave who falls in the snow is not helped up by his comrades but is instantly stripped of his clothes and left to die. His last words: “It’s so cold.”

Hava Volovich, a once-obscure newspaper editor turned slave laborer, has a baby, Eleonora, in captivity. Eleonora spends her first months in a room where “bedbugs poured down like sand from the ceiling and walls.” A year later, Eleonora is wasting away, starving in a cold ward at slave “mothers’ camp.” She begs her mother to take her back “home” to that bedbug-infested hovel. Working all day in the forest to earn food rations, Hava manages to visit her child each night. Finally, Eleonora in her misery refuses even her mother’s embrace, wanting only to drift away in bed. Eleonora dies, hungry and cold, at 15 months. Her mother writes: “In giving birth to my only child, I committed the worst crime there is.”

Multiply these stories by a million. Ten million.

“To eat your own children is a barbarian act.” So read posters distributed by Soviet authorities in the Ukraine, where 6 to 8 million people were forcibly starved to death so that the socialist Stalin could sell every speck of grain to the West, including seed stock for the next year’s harvest and food for the farmers themselves. The posters were the Soviet response to the cannibalism they orchestrated.

If it is conventional wisdom that the Nazi Holocaust was worse than the Soviet Terror, you would at least think earning the silver in the Devil’s Olympics would earn something more than feckless wordsmithery and smug eye-rolling from journalists and intellectuals. Imagine if instead of Sochi these games were in Germany, and suppose the organizers floated out the swastika while NBC talked of the “pivotal experiment” of Nazism. Imagine the controversy.

But when the hammer and sickle float by, there’s no outrage. There is only the evil of banality.

— Jonah Goldberg is the author of The Tyranny of Clichés, now on sale in paperback. You can write to him by e-mail at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Derek Jeter Lived a Dream, and Never Disappointed

By Tyler Kepner
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/sports/index.html
February 12. 2014



The greatest compliment we can give Derek Jeter, as he prepares to leave the grandest
stage in baseball, is that he never let us down. He has made thousands of outs and
hundreds of errors and finished most of his seasons without a championship. Yet he
never disappointed us.

This is no small feat for the modern athlete, in an age of endless traps and
temptations.

From cheating to preening to taunting — even to defensible acts, like fleeing to a
new team in free agency — the hero, almost invariably, breaks our heart sometime. Not
Jeter.

He grew up beside a baseball diamond in Kalamazoo, Mich., dreaming of playing
shortstop for the Yankees, and that is what he has done. He has never played another
position, never been anything but No. 2 for the Yankees. But this season, he announced
Wednesday, will be his last.

“The one thing I always said to myself was that when baseball started to feel more
like a job, it would be time to move forward,” Jeter said in a statement on Facebook,
adding later: “I could not be more sure. I know it in my heart. The 2014 season will be
my last year playing professional baseball.”

When Jeter played his first game at the old Yankee Stadium, on June 2, 1995, the
announced crowd was 16,959. By 2008, when he closed the ballpark with a speech to
the fans, the average attendance topped 53,000. For the Yankees, Jeter was the rightplayer at the right time, a model of stability and the embodiment of their ideals.

Jeter has compiled 3,316 hits (10th on baseball’s career list), winning five
championships while making more than $250 million in salary. But his impact has
always been greater than his numbers.

When Jeter joined the organization, as a high schooler drafted sixth over all in
1992, the Yankees were enduring their fourth consecutive losing season, driven to
disarray by the principal owner, George Steinbrenner, who was suspended at the time.
Jeter would become a centerpiece of the Yankees’ rebuilding, and the team has had
only winning records since, building a new stadium and launching a lucrative cable
network in the process.

Jeter has had plenty of help, from homegrown stars like Bernie Williams and
Jorge Posada to pricey imports like Mark Teixeira and C. C. Sabathia. But Jeter, the
captain, has always been out front. When injuries limited him to 17 games last season,
the Yankees lost attendance and ratings and fell in the standings.

“I’ve gone to Yankees games and I’ve asked kids outside the park, ‘Who are you
going to go see?’ ” said Dick Groch, the scout who signed Jeter. “Nine out of 10 kids
say, ‘Derek Jeter.’

“What a marquee player.”

Groch, who now works for the Milwaukee Brewers, continued: “Remember that
word: marquee. Babe Ruth was marquee. The money Ruth brought to the Yankees was
unbelievable, and Derek Jeter’s done the same thing. You could look at tons of
statistics, but they’ll never show you that.”

Jeter is perhaps the most secure, self-confident player in baseball, a sharp
contrast to the disgraced Alex Rodriguez, whose season-long suspension means that he
will never again be teammates with Jeter. Groch said he noticed these traits while
scouting Jeter, who smiled under pressure and showed the leadership skills of a chief
executive.

His skills stood out, too, of course, and the inside-out swing that would rifle so
many hits to right field intrigued Groch. Sometimes, if a hitter punches too many balls
the opposite way, it means he cannot catch up to the fastball. Groch asked the young
Jeter if he or the pitcher was dictating the action.

Jeter replied that it was his choice. He was using his ability to wait a split-second
longer so he could react to more pitches. And when he got a letter-high fastball over
the middle, Groch said, Jeter could still pull it over the left-field wall, the way he
would for a pivotal homer in the 2000 World Series against the Mets, and for his
3,000th hit in 2011.

By then, Jeter was so accomplished that it was easy to forget his initial struggles,
his 56 errors in Class A in 1993. His defense, especially his lack of range, would remaina flash point deep into his career, with many believing he was vastly overrated in the
field. But he made himself reliable enough to stay at shortstop, and in 1994 he was the
consensus minor league player of the year. He was on his way.

Jeter was the American League rookie of the year in 1996, when the Yankees won
the World Series, and the glare never bothered him. He remains a bachelor who dates
starlets, but his rules of engagement with the news media have worked because of his
unrelenting consistency. He never answers questions about his personal life — ever —
and so is rarely even asked.

No superstar in sports is more accessible than Jeter, who is available by his locker
before and after almost every game, mainly to take pressure off teammates. Group
interviews can play out like jousting matches, which Jeter always wins. He cannot be
baited into saying something that will linger as a story. He does not raise his voice,
rarely shows irritation and never goes off the record.

Jeter is often called boring, but that is not quite right. His reverence for Yankees
history, and his place in it, is endearing. He insists on using a recording of the late Bob
Sheppard, the public-address announcer whose career began the same day as Mickey
Mantle’s, before his home at-bats.

At the old Stadium, Jeter dressed next to the empty locker of another captain,
Thurman Munson, who was killed in a plane crash in 1979. When Phil Rizzuto, his
long-ago predecessor at shortstop, died in 2007, Jeter revealed that Rizzuto’s
autograph was the only one in his collection.

Jeter asked for just one artifact from the original Stadium: the overhead sign from
the dugout runway with Joe DiMaggio’s famous quotation, thanking the Lord for
making him a Yankee.

In his retirement statement on Wednesday, Jeter began by saying thank you.

By announcing his intention, Jeter all but ensures a farewell tour with gifts at
each opposing ballpark, as Mariano Rivera experienced last season. Ceremony does
not seem to be Jeter’s style, but he said he wanted to soak in his final moments, and
who would deny him the privilege?

Last week, Groch sent an email to Jeter’s agent, Casey Close, a former minor
leaguer he also signed years ago. Groch asked Close to give his regards to Jeter and his
family, and added a plea about the captain’s exit.

“Don’t let him go out not playing shortstop,” Groch said he told Close. “Don’t let
him go out playing left field or third base. Let him go out like Mo. Let him go out the
way he deserves.”

Image: Gregory Heisler, SI

Derek Jeter represented everything a superstar should be

By Tom Verducci

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/mlb

February 12, 2014

Derek Jeter strokes hit number 3,000 on July 9, 2011

So fatigued and dispirited was Yankees righthander David Cone as he walked off the mound in Game 5 of the 1995 American League Division Series in Seattle that for the next week he would seldom leave his New York apartment and he could not raise his right arm enough to even comb his air. Cone threw 147 pitches -- still the most in any LDS game -- the last of which resulted in a bases-loaded walk that tied a game the Yankees would lose. What happened when a forlorn Cone reached the dugout provided a subtle hint of what the next two decades in baseball would look like. The first one to get off the bench to console and congratulate him was a 21-year-old kid who wasn't even on the active roster: Derek Jeter.

Jeter was the consummate leader. He arrived in the big leagues fully baked. He understood from day one that it was better to be defined by championships than by statistics. He started with that premise, and upon that layered extraordinary talent and remarkable physical and mental toughness to become the archetype of what a Major League Baseball franchise player should be.

Jeter announced Wednesday this will be his final season playing baseball. A friend of Jeter's who did not want to be identified, and who knew the announcement was coming, said Jeter "is in a great place physically and mentally. He just feels really, really good about this." The friend said Jeter didn't want to be asked all season about retirement, and wanted to enjoy his last season without having to constantly parry the issue. He wanted to enjoy his exit with the fans, similar to how Mariano Rivera did last year.

Jeter is expected to hold a news conference next week in Tampa when the position players report to Yankees camp. He is going out on his own terms. Take a good look, folks, and appreciate one last season to watch the finest player of his generation and the greatest shortstop since Honus Wagner hung up his spikes in 1917.

"When you consider every dynamic of this sport he is the greatest player of this era," said Dodgers GM Ned Colletti. "He's a Hall of Fame player even without all the intangibles. But when you consider the championships, the character, the leadership and the way he represented baseball without fail with class and dignity and honor, there was nobody better. And he did it playing every day in the spotlight. He is everything you would want in a player."

Union chief and former teammate Tony Clark said in a statement, "For nearly 20 years, there has been no greater ambassador to the game of baseball than Derek Jeter."

Read the full text of Jeter's retirement announcement

It is true enough; such was Jeter's natural savoir faire in and out of spikes that he is the rare person whom men, women and children all wanted to follow. But the greatness of his ability actually became underrated because of the attention given his intangibles -- the way a casual fan praised them and the way a sabermetrician dismissed them.

If you would like to keep Wagner as the greatest shortstop of all time, go right ahead. The numbers are there. But keep this in mind, too: Baseball a hundred years ago, in quality, speed and skill, hardly resembled today's game; you might as well compare air travel today to air travel then. Teams would play entire games with one baseball -- even as pitchers were spitting licorice on it and fans were throwing it back to the field when it was hit foul. It was far easier for a great player to become great because of such uneven talent around him. In what we think of as the modern game, Jeter has built the best career at the position.

Alex Rodriguez? Please. The fraudulence to his career alone disqualifies him -- besides the fact that Jeter has played twice as many games at shortstop as Rodriguez. Cal Ripken? Close, but Ripken played 242 fewer games at shortstop, has 132 fewer hits, a much lower on-base percentage (.340-.381) and virtually the same slugging percentage (.447-.446). Arky Vaughan? He had more than a thousand fewer hits and never won a World Series.Ozzie Smith and his 28 career home runs? Robin Yount, who was done as a shortstop at age 28, or Ernie Banks, who was finished at the position at 30?

None of them match Jeter when it comes to the totality of the career at shortstop: the numbers, the longevity and the championships. Only Wagner has more hits, only Rodriguez has more runs, and, assuming Jeter plays at least 40 games there this year, only Omar Vizquel will have played more games at the position. Now when you add on the intangibles, Jeter becomes even more of the once-a-century shortstop. At the root of those intangibles are his parents, Dot and Charles. When you are around Jeter enough you cannot help but be impressed with how he was raised. In manner and strength, his reliability is extraordinary.

One day early in spring training 1997, just as Jeter was making it big on Broadway, Yankees manager Joe Torre called Jeter into his office.

"I know there are a lot of distractions out there," Torre told him. "You're a single guy in New York, you just won the Rookie of the Year award and you're a New York Yankee world champion. I just want to make sure you take nothing for granted."

"Don't worry, Mr. T.," Jeter said. "Baseball is the most important thing to me and always will be. I won't be distracted by anything."

Said Torre, "Never worried about him again. Never had to say anything else to him in all the years."

Three years later in the Subway Series against the Mets, the pressure weighed heavily on the Yankees in Game 4. They had lost Game 3 at Shea Stadium. The club was launching its own television network and the only disgrace worse to owner George Steinbrenner than losing the World Series would be to lose it to the Mets. Just before the game, with a wink in his eye, Jeter said to Torre, "I got you."

When Bobby Jones threw the first pitch over the plate Jeter smashed it for a home run. The series essentially was over at that moment.

CORCORAN: Watch the 10 greatest moments of Derek Jeter's career

Everywhere you turned in October after October there was Jeter. He was his own serial drama, a precursor to The Sopranos or Homeland. Playoff games became Jeter episodes. The Jeffrey Maier Homer. The Flip Game. The Leadoff Homer. Mr. November. The 5-for-5. And there was always that signature moment the camera loved: the fist pump after the last out.

Jeter was the most important force in the greatest dynasty in the expansion era, and, as a beloved iconic championship player in New York, the single most valuable player in the period of enormous economic growth for the industry. In his first eight full seasons in the majors (1996-2003), Jeter and the Yankees won 64 percent of their games and went 16-4 in postseason series, winning four World Series and missing two others by three games. During his 19 years, the Yankees have a .599 winning percentage with Jeter on the field (1,653-1,107, including postseason play).

Jeter didn't thrive on pure talent. When he showed up for instructional camp, coach Brian Butterfield had to teach him how to catch a baseball; Jeter had to learn to "take" the ball with his gloved hand and break his habit of always "giving" with it. He hit .210 in rookie ball and made 56 errors in his first full season in the minors. He hit like a man fending off a swarm of bees; his left elbow would flail out and away from his body and still does. He runs like a marionette, with elbows and knees askew. But something always stood out about the way Jeter carried himself.

"Right away it was obvious that the players -- you would notice it right away -- the players gravitated toward him," Butterfield said. "He was very well liked. He had a great disposition, a good sense of humor. He had a smile on face. When he got to working, that grin would melt into a serious look."

The quality in Jeter that may be least appreciated is his ferocity. He had absolutely no use for negativity and seethed when reporters would fish for a negative angle.

"I'm an optimist by nature," he once told me. "That's why when it comes to any negative stuff, I don't like to hear about it, I don't like to read about it, I don't like to know about it. I try to be positive."

For years reporters brought up the "eventual" move to another position, yet Jeter, like Barry Larkin and Smith, will leave the game having nothing to do with giving up shortstop. He was notoriously stubborn when it came to injuries, typically refusing x-rays on the grounds that they were meaningless because, no matter what they showed, he was playing anyway. When the bone in his ankle cracked in 2012, Jeter refused to be carted off the field. And he did not tolerate teammates who took days off or cut corners.

"One day in Kansas City," Torre said, "[reliever] Paul Quantrill came up to me unsolicited and just said, 'You know, I knew Jeter was a good player. But until now, after getting to play with him, I never knew he was this good.' I always thought that was such a great compliment."

The modern sports star is a highlight package best viewed from a distance. The more we know the less we like. We prefer to leave them as connect-the-dots pictures; we'll fill in what we don't know. We excuse bad behavior or selfishness because we love the talent. Jeter is the opposite of this phenomenon. He is best appreciated not for one skill, one season or one game, but over 20 seasons in which every day was played under the highest degree of accountability in the sport: in New York as a Yankee expected to win.

Read More: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/mlb/news/20140212/derek-jeter-retire-yankees/#ixzz2tCo3ciEk