The State Department has spent millions of taxpayers’ dollars acquiring Art. That is to say, paying for objects that its resident or consultant aesthetes swear are works of Art, worth every penny.

The acquisitions were apparently a priority for Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State. If you would see her monument, tour US embassies and look about you.

Fashionable Art doesn’t come cheap. So there was no money left to pay for such a humdrum thing as effective protection of the US diplomatic and CIA missions in Benghazi. Denied the security they needed, four Americans, including the ambassador, were killed there by savage jihadis. Well – Hillary might say – there has to be human sacrifice on the altar of Art, it makes all the difference, and if you don’t understand that, you are a philistine bourgeois.

Look on the bright side. The Art is displayed in many a US embassy. Americans can be proud.

In London, there’s a granite wall built by Sean Scully that cost $1million. We couldn’t find a picture of it, but it’s like this one displayed in an art gallery.

Daniel Greenfield illustrates an article on the subject – which inspired this post – with these pictures of works by Cy Twombly. The  top one is at the embassy in Rome.  

From his text:   

Beijing [embassy] contains $23 million worth of art. Bern has $1.2 million and Luxembourg has $2.2 million.

And here is the grave of Ambassador Stevens, murdered at Benghazi. We don’t know how much it cost, or who paid for it.

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Post Script: Here is some wall art that really has meaning. The wall is part of the US mission in Benghazi. The paint is blood. A hand put it there the night of the attack. It might have been the hand of Ambassador Stevens himself – or of one of his brutal killers. One does not have to read Arabic to know who signed in for the event on the other wall.

(Hat-tip: our reader and commenter donl)

“Nudging” the nation towards acceptance of unfreedom is the declared plan of the Obama gang.

Now comes an idea of how to “nudge”  Americans towards accepting state-controlled news and comment.

This is from an editorial in Investor’s Business Daily:

The FCC [Federal Communications Commission] has cooked up a plan to place “researchers” in U.S. newsrooms, supposedly to learn all about how editorial decisions are made. …

As if illegal seizures of Associated Press phone records and the shadowy tailing of the mother of a Fox News reporter weren’t menacing enough, the Obama administration is going out of its way to institute a new intrusive surveillance of the press, as if the press wasn’t supine enough.

Ajit Pai, a commissioner with the Federal Communications Commission, warned this week in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that a plan to dispatch researchers into radio, television and even newspaper newsrooms called the “Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs” is still going forward, despite the grave danger it presented to the First Amendment.

Pai warned that under the rationale of increasing minority representation in newsrooms, the FCC, which has the power to issue or not issue broadcasting licenses, would dispatch its “researchers” to newsrooms across America to seek their “voluntary” compliance about how news stories are decided, as well as “wade into office politics” looking for angry reporters whose story ideas were rejected as evidence of a shutout of minority views.

Pai questioned if such a study could really be voluntary, given FCC’s conflict of interest (and, he might have added, the Obama record of going after political opponents).

The origin of the idea is a recrudescence of the Fairness Doctrine, inoperative since 1987 or so, to provide equal time to leftist points of view in broadcasting and other media that otherwise wouldn’t have a willing audience in a free market.

It’s an idea so fraught with potential for abuse it ought to have news agencies screaming bloody murder. The very idea of Obama hipsters showing up in newsrooms, asking questions and judging if newspapers (over which they have no jurisdiction), radio and TV are sufficiently diverse is nothing short of thought control.

The FCC now says it will be “closely reviewing the proposed research design to determine if an alternative approach is merited,” as a result of Pai’s warning. Adweek actually reported that as a “retreat.”

It’s because of this don’t-rock-the-boat attitude that Reporters Without Borders said the U.S. had “one of the most significant declines” in press freedom in the world last year, dropping 13 places to a wretched 46th in its newly released global ranking.

If the FCC has its way, it can drop even further.

Could this menacing move wake up the media toadies of the Left at last? Will they now rise in fury against the spreading tyranny of the Obama government?

Seems not –

The reaction from the National Association of Broadcasters was mealy-mouthed. The FCC “should reconsider” “qualitative” sections of its study, it wrote.

So the Fourth Estate will squirm a little and then lie back and think of Cass Sunstein, Saul Alinsky, and – ah! – Barack Obama.

Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, they’ll keep the Red Flag flying here.

Senator Ted Cruz, in straight, strong, plain words, asks Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the IRS targeting of conservative groups and how Holder’s Department of Justice is handling the issue. He cites precedents. He speaks of abuse of power and conflict of interest.  Holder rejects the idea. He says that the precedents no longer apply, as he himself wrote new rules that protect him from any such probe.

Last night President Obama delivered a drab and depressing State of the Union address. The most discouraging point he made was that he would (continue to) implement his radical agenda by executive order, by-passing Congress.

To remind us all what America was and could be again, here’s President Reagan delivering a State of the Union address thirty-two years ago. The most important parts of it still have relevance today, and the speech and the speaker can still stir and inspire. (We overlook the few “God” references. The rest is fine.)

Clark M. Neily III and his colleagues at the libertarian Institute for Justice believe the United States would be more just if judges were less deferential to legislatures. In his book Terms of Engagement: How Our Courts Should Enforce the Constitution’s Promise of Limited Government, Neily writes that the United States is not “a fundamentally majoritarian nation in which the ability to impose one’s will on others through law is a sacred right that courts should take great pains not to impede.” America’s defining value is not majority rule but individual liberty.

Democracy may be better than all other systems of government, but it has a serious flaw. It allows a majority of the electorate to exert its will over the rest. A majority does not by virtue of sheer numbers know what’s best for the nation. A majority can be dangerously wrong – as when it elects a Hitler, an Allende, a Putin, a Mugabe, a Chavez, a Carter, an Obama.

Democracy needs to be restrained. Americans look to their courts to preserve them from the tyranny of the majority. Conservatives, whether in power or not, should be firmest in upholding the power of the judicial branch. Knowing this, many conservatives speak out against “judicial activism”, thinking that all activist judges are creatures of the Left. But judicial activism could be a protection against the Left.

Our introductory paragraph comes from an article by George Will, who further writes at the Washington Post where he is one of a very few voices of conservatism and reason:

Many judges …  in practicing what conservatives have unwisely celebrated as “judicial restraint,” have subordinated liberty to majority rule. Today, a perverse conservative populism panders to two dubious notions — that majorities should enjoy a largely untrammeled right to make rules for everyone, and that most things legislatures do reflect the will of a majority.

Conservatives’ advocacy of judicial restraint serves liberalism by leaving government’s growth unrestrained.

This leaves people such as Sandy Meadows at the mercy of government acting as protector of the strong. Meadows was a Baton Rouge widow who had little education and no resources but was skillful at creating flower arrangements, which a grocery store hired her to do. Then Louisiana’s Horticulture Commission pounced. It threatened to close the store as punishment for hiring an unlicensed flower arranger. Meadows failed to get a license, which required a written test and the making of four flower arrangements in four hours, arrangements judged by licensed florists functioning as gatekeepers to their own profession, restricting the entry of competitors. Meadows, denied reentry into the profession from which the government had expelled her, died in poverty, but Louisianans were protected by their government from the menace of unlicensed flower arrangers.

What Louisiana does, and all states do in conferring favors through regulations that violate individuals’ rights, is obviously unjust and would be declared unconstitutional if courts would do their duty. Their duty is to protect individual liberty, including the right to earn a living, against special-interest legislation. Instead, since judicial abdication became normal during the New Deal, courts almost invariably defer to legislatures’ economic regulations, which frequently are rent-seeking by private factions.

Courts justify dereliction of judicial duty as genuflection at the altar of majority rule, as long as the court can discern, or even imagine, a “rational basis” for a regulation — even if the legislature never articulated it. …

Conservatives clamoring for judicial restraint, meaning deference to legislatures, are waving a banner unfurled a century ago by progressives eager to emancipate government, freeing it to pursue whatever collective endeavors it fancies, sacrificing individual rights to a spurious majoritarian ethic.

The beginning of wisdom is recognizing the implications of this fact: Government is almost never disinterested. Today’s administrative state is a congeries of interests, each of which has a metabolic urge to enlarge its dominion and that of the private-sector faction with which it collaborates. …

Judge Janice Rogers Brown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit says of “rational basis” jurisprudence: “The judiciary justifies its reluctance to intervene by claiming incompetence — apparently, judges lack the acumen to recognize corruption, self-interest, or arbitrariness in the economic realm — or deferring to the majoritarian imperative,” which means “the absence of any check on the group interests that all too often control the democratic process.”

This process, Neily rightly insists, is not self-legitimizing, which is why judicial passivity is inconsistent with constitutional government. [And he] argues that to say that judicial invalidations of legislative acts should be rare is no more sensible than saying NFL referees should rarely penalize players for holding.

Conservatism’s task, politically hazardous but constitutionally essential, is to urge courts to throw as many flags as there are infractions.

If conservatives never forgive Chief Justice Roberts for validating the anti-American “Affordable Care Act”, they will be exercising better judgment than he did when he disregarded the essential fact that “America’s defining value is not majority rule but individual liberty”. 

A truth that should be universally acknowledged is that everything a government does it does badly. Sure, there are some things only government can do, or should do: first and foremost, if not only, defend the nation and protect individual liberty. And those are two things Obama doesn’t want to do.

Government meddling in the economy is at the very least a brake on prosperity, at worst a wrecker. (Vide Greece and Detroit.)

Thomas Sowell writes:

Since this year will mark the 50th anniversary of the “war on poverty,” we can expect many comments and commemorations of this landmark legislation in the development of the American welfare state. The actual signing of the “war on poverty” legislation took place in August 1964, so the 50th anniversary is some months away. But there have already been statements in the media and in politics proclaiming that this vast and costly array of anti-poverty programs “worked.”

Of course everything “works” by sufficiently low standards, and everything “fails” by sufficiently high standards. The real question is: What did the “war on poverty” set out to do — and how well did it do it, if at all?

Without some idea of what a person or a program is trying to do, there is no way to know whether what actually happened represented a success or a failure. When the hard facts show that a policy has failed, nothing is easier for its defenders than to make up a new set of criteria, by which it can be said to have succeeded. 

That’s what has happened with the “war on poverty.” It has failed, but the government and its hallelujah chorus will pretend otherwise.

Both President John F. Kennedy, who launched the proposal for a “war on poverty” and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, who guided the legislation through Congress and then signed it into law, were very explicit as to what the “war on poverty” was intended to accomplish.

Its mission was not simply to prove that spending money on the poor led to some economic benefits to the poor. Nobody ever doubted that. How could they?

What the war on poverty was intended to end was mass dependency on government. President Kennedy said, “We must find ways of returning far more of our dependent people to independence.” The same theme was repeated endlessly by President Johnson. The purpose of the “war on poverty,” he said, was to make “taxpayers out of taxeaters.” Its slogan was “Give a hand up, not a handout.” When Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark legislation into law, he declared: “The days of the dole in our country are numbered.”

Now, 50 years and trillions of dollars later, it is painfully clear that there is more dependency than ever.

Ironically, dependency on government to raise people above the poverty line had been going down for years before the “war on poverty” began. The hard facts showed that the number of people who lived below the official poverty line had been declining since 1960, and was only half of what it had been in 1950.

On the more fundamental question of dependency, the facts were even clearer. The proportion of people whose earnings put them below the poverty level – without counting government benefits – declined by about one-third from 1950 to 1965.

All this was happening before the “war on poverty” went into effect – and all these trends reversed after it went into effect.

The more the government does to “fight poverty”, the more poverty grows and spreads. Year after year, under the Obama administration, the number who “need” government assistance has increased, so that, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) as reported by CNS News –

A record 20% of American households, one in five, were on food stamps in 2013 … and …  the cost of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), was at an all-time high.

The USDA says that there were 23,052,388 households on food stamps in the average month of fiscal 2013, an increase of 722,675 from fiscal year 2012, when there were 22,329,713 households on food stamps in the average month. …

In the past five years alone, the number of households on food stamps has greatly increased. In fiscal year 2009 – Oct. 1, 2008 through Sept. 30, 2009 — the number of households on food stamps was 15,232,115. Five years later, in 2013, that amount had increased by 51.3% to reach 23,052,388 households.

It should be remembered that most of “the poor” in America are comparatively well off,  the least poor of the world’s  poor.

But if government would stop interfering, the economy would grow faster and people would have a better chance of doing well, and even becoming really (maybe gloriously) rich.

Always, figuratively speaking, the fatter the government, the thinner the people.

The Democrats sweep on to establish their tyranny over every aspect of our lives, and the Republican “opposition” flaps in the breeze.

This commentary comes from Investor’s Business Daily:

As Republicans watch from the sidelines, pinning their hopes on 2016, the president and his radical troops are storming local school and zoning boards in an unprecedented federal invasion.

Last week, after the attorney general and education secretary jointly announced an alarming new witch hunt against local school officials over allegedly racist disciplinary policies, we watched with keen interest Republican reaction. Disappointingly, barely a whimper was registered from the opposition party. …

We can’t imagine a more important kitchen-table issue — one that will directly affect middle class families — than school discipline.

By demanding schools suspend suspensions of school thugs, the administration’s race-mongers are threatening the safety and security of classrooms across the nation. They’re also threatening learning for white and minority students alike.

See our post, The Obama administration promotes race discrimination in schools, January 13, 2014 (two days ago).

You’d think this new policy, which ties compliance to education funding, would warrant endless debate on the airwaves. It’s already having real consequences, with dozens of school districts coming under federal investigation, and many others proactively easing punishment for even the most violent students.

Has the Republican Party to all intents and purposes given up opposing the Democrats in power? Or do Republicans not understand the gravity of what Obama and his cohorts are doing?

On another vital matter – housing – the Republicans seem equally quiescent.

There’s also been a TV blackout on what federal housing officials are doing to commandeer local zoning, another huge kitchen-table issue.

The administration claims building codes in the suburbs erect racist “barriers” to the mobility of urban minorities. A new HUD regulation demands city officials remove them or lose federal funding and face prosecution for discrimination.

They want to reduce regulations on building? They’d even do that in the interests of “diversity”? Truly leftism trumps all!

And is the sub-prime disaster starting all over again?

These policies will impact schools, crime and home values for years to come, yet the big media are not covering them. And Republicans are not raising a fuss.

There’s no talk of the housing bubble the administration’s social engineers are dangerously re-inflating, either, thanks to their quiet loosening of mortgage underwriting standards amid “financial reform” hype.

Average Americans are in the dark, under-informed and ill-served by not just the talking heads paid well to inform them, but also by the officials elected to represent their interests in Congress.

Regulation by regulation, rule by rule, executive order by order, consent decree by decree, this radical regime is quietly gaining increasing power over state and local policies, effectively ending federalism.

Under the Constitution, power to govern is shared between national and state governments, but this administration is trying to grab powers reserved for the people. It’s trying to control everything from school discipline to suburban development to even the location of grocery stores.

These same control freaks are micromanaging private business and financial affairs. The attorney general, housing secretary and Obama’s new credit czar know nothing about the qualifications of car and home loan applicants yet are acting like the nation’s loan officers.

They’re literally rewriting lending policies through consent orders. And few in Congress are questioning their authority.

All these court-approved decrees will remain in force, and the next crew will have to enforce them whether they like it or not (assuming Republicans can even get back into the White House).

So will all the regulations they’re packing into the Federal Register. The next administration would have to rescind every one of them, one at a time.

That won’t be easy even if they had the political will to do it. Obama’s embedding radicals in the federal bureaucracy who will make a career of fighting to keep those rules in place.

If Republicans think the only battle that matters is 2016, they are sorely mistaken.

The radical policies Obama’s pushing through now, with little resistance, will outlast his regime. The battle that should be joined is the battle right now.

Obama has threatened to veto any legislation that would keep sanctions on Iran until and unless the threat of it becoming nuclear-armed is lifted. Could it be any clearer that Obama wants Iran to become nuclear armed? Do we hear protest from the Republicans? Are they launching campaigns to inform the public, to rouse awareness, indignation, protest? Not that we’ve heard.

Democrats are urging Obama – not that he needs much urging – to bypass Congress and rule by executive order. Republican outcry?

In the middle of last year, Attorney General Eric Holder was held in criminal contempt by the House for refusing its demands to turn over documents relating to his “Fast and Furious” gun-running operation. He still hasn’t complied. Are the Republicans letting him get away with it?

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius – she who is in charge of making the implementation of the “Affordable Care Act” go so smoothly – has been stonewalling a congressional investigation. Are the Republicans  letting her get away with it?

Have the Republicans decided to do nothing until it’s time for another one of their insipid number to stand – if a wobbly stance on all issues can be called “standing” – for the presidency in 2016?

What would a Republican do if he got into the White House? Who knows?

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This is part of our Facebook summary of an article by Thomas Sowell on the need for Republicans to SPEAK:

The first time I saw New Jersey Governor Chris Christie on television, a few years ago, my first reaction was astonishment: “A talking Republican!” It would scarcely have been more astonishing if there had been a talking giraffe. For reasons unknown, most Republican leaders seem to pay very little attention to articulation – certainly as compared to leading Democrats, who seem to pay little attention to anything else. Governor Christie is in a class by himself when it comes to Republicans who can express themselves in the heat of political battle. When it comes to policies, I might prefer some other Republican as a 2016 presidential candidate. But the bottom line in politics is that you have to get elected in order to have the power to accomplish anything. It doesn’t matter how good your ideas are, if you can’t be bothered to articulate them. The fact that Christie is the current frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 – and is ahead of Hillary Clinton in the polls – makes him a target for a partisan media. Given that blatant partisanship, the need for a Republican candidate in 2016 who can make his case to the public, in spite of the media, is especially acute – even though it is much too early to try to predict who that candidate will be. At least Governor Christie has provided an example of the kind of articulation that is needed – indeed, imperative – if the Republicans are to have any chance of rescuing this country from the ruinous policies of the past few years.

Obama’s ignorance, his dyed-in-the-wool leftism, his anti-Americanism, his inexperience, should all have disqualified him, if not from a first term as president since the media protected him from any exposure then, but at least from a second term after it had become plain what unsuitable stuff he’s made of.

He gropes for someone to blame: former President George W Bush; the Republicans; little covens of saboteurs inside government agencies such as the IRS; anthropogenic global warming; insurance companies; the tea party; an obscure amateur video; the Koch brothers; … and now – suddenly – Big Government!

Charles Krauthammer sees Obama regarding activities of his own administration, effects of his own policies, messes caused by his own failures, with bewilderment.

We quote from Charles Krauthammer’s column in the Washington Post:

In explaining the disastrous rollout of Obamacare, President Obama told Chris Matthews he had discovered that “we have these big agencies, some of which are outdated, some of which are not designed properly”.

An interesting discovery to make after having consigned the vast universe of American medicine, one-sixth of the U.S. economy, to the tender mercies of the agency bureaucrats at the Department of Health and Human Services and the Internal Revenue Service.

Most people become aware of the hopeless inefficiency of sclerotic government by, oh, age 17 at the department of motor vehicles. Obama’s late discovery is especially remarkable considering that he built his entire political philosophy on the rock of Big Government, on the fervent belief in the state as the very engine of collective action and the ultimate source of national greatness. (Indeed, of individual success as well, as in “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”)

This blinding revelation of the ponderous incompetence of bureaucratic government came just a few weeks after Obama confessed that “what we’re also discovering is that insurance is complicated to buy.” Another light bulb goes off, this one three years after passing a law designed to force millions of Americans to shop for new health plans via the maze of untried, untested, insecure, unreliable online “exchanges”. 

This discovery joins a long list that includes Obama’s rueful admission that there really are no shovel-ready jobs. That one came after having passed his monstrous $830 billion stimulus on the argument that the weakened economy would be “jump-started” by a massive infusion of shovel-ready jobs. Now known to be fictional.

Barack Obama is not just late to discover the most elementary workings of government. With alarming regularity, he professes obliviousness to the workings of his own government. He claims, for example, to have known nothing about the IRS targeting scandal, the AP phone records scandal, theNSA tapping of Angela Merkel. And had not a clue that the centerpiece of his signature legislative achievement — the online Obamacare exchange, three years in the making — would fail catastrophically upon launch. Or that Obamacare would cause millions of Americans to lose their private health plans.

Hence the odd spectacle of a president expressing surprise and disappointment in the federal government — as if he’s not the one running it. Hence the repeated no-one-is-more-upset-than-me posture upon deploring the nonfunctioning Web site, the IRS outrage, the AP intrusions and any number of scandals from which Obama tries to create safe distance by posing as an observer. …

The paradox of this presidency is that this most passive bystander president is at the same time the most ideologically ambitious in decades. The sweep and scope of his health-care legislation alone are unprecedented. He’s spent billions of tax money attempting to create, by fiat and ex nihilo, a new green economy. His (failed) cap-and-trade bill would have given him regulatory control of the energy economy. He wants universal preschool and has just announced his unwavering commitment to slaying the dragon of economic inequality, which, like the poor, has always been with us.

Obama’s discovery that government bureaucracies don’t do things very well creates a breathtaking disconnect between his transformative ambitions and his detachment from the job itself.

It seems a likely way for a naive ideologue to react to the unintended consequences of trying to play dictator of the USA.

And those are only a few of them. What about the uncle he stayed with but said he had never met? And the ridiculous story that the Benghazi massacre was caused by an obscure video? And … So many more,  they come crowding into the memory …

Does Obama ever tell the truth?

Walter Williams is one of the rare thinkers whose opinion needs to be taken seriously. What he recommends cannot be dismissed, even if it is startlingly radical.

He writes that a crisis has developed in the United States for which the only good remedy would be a break-up of the union.

I believe our nation is at a point where there are enough irreconcilable differences between those Americans who want to control other Americans and those Americans who want to be left alone that separation is the only peaceable alternative. …

Our rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution have been grossly violated by a government instituted to protect them. These constitutional violations have increased independent of whether there’s been a Democrat-controlled Washington or a Republican-controlled Washington.

There is no evidence that Americans who are responsible for and support constitutional abrogation have any intention of mending their ways. …

Let’s look at the magnitude of the violations.

Article I, Section 8 of our Constitution lists the activities for which Congress is authorized to tax and spend. Nowhere on that list is there authority for Congress to tax and spend for: Medicare, Social Security, public education, farm subsidies, bank and business bailouts, food stamps and thousands of other activities that account for roughly two-thirds of the federal budget. Neither is there authority for congressional mandates to citizens about what type of health insurance they must purchase, how states and people may use their land, the speed at which they can drive, whether a library has wheelchair ramps, and the gallons of water used per toilet flush. The list of congressional violations of both the letter and spirit of the Constitution is virtually without end. Our derelict Supreme Court has given Congress sanction to do just about anything for which they can muster a majority vote.

James Madison, the acknowledged father of the Constitution, explained in Federalist Paper No. 45: “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce. … The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives and liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement and prosperity of the State.”

Our founder’s constitutional vision of limited federal government has been consigned to the dustbin of history.

Americans have several options.

We can like sheep submit to those who have contempt for liberty and our Constitution.

We can resist, fight and risk bloodshed and death in an attempt to force America’s tyrants to respect our liberties and Constitution.

A superior alternative is to find a way to peaceably separate into states whose citizens respect liberty and the Constitution.

My personal preference is a restoration of the constitutional values of limited government that made us a great nation.

We take his point. We agree with his analysis of the problem. But his last sentence, it seems to us, begs the question. How are those values to be restored?

If by secession, which states should secede? He does not say.

And if some do, what will be the consequences, within those states and in the nation as a whole?

Last time there was a movement to “peaceably separate the states”, there was a fight over that very issue, with much bloodshed and some 750,000 deaths.

The crisis may well be as severe as he says. A radical remedy may be necessary. But is there a mood in the country for it?

Of course we cannot be sure, but we guess Americans are far more likely now to “submit like sheep” to the growing tyranny of the federal government than risk life (such as it will be), and property (such as will be allowed), for the sake of regaining liberty.