TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 824.
Archive for 2015
August 11, 2015
TEXAS GOVERNOR GREG ABBOTT SHARES THE BEST PARENTING ADVICE HE EVER RECEIVED with Paula Bolyard of the new PJ Parenting section.
THE POLITICS OF A PANIC.
The McMartin preschool case is the most famous example of the child abuse hysteria that swept across the nation three decades ago, and it is the focus of Richard Beck’s ambitious and meticulously researched new book, We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s. But it is not the only case, or even the most bizarre one, that Beck describes. In Kern County, a working-class area in central California, a couple was convicted of “selling their children for sex in area motels and abusing them while the children hung from hooks in the ceiling,” and other children “claimed their abusers wore black robes and brandished inverted crosses.” A Texas prosecutor said at trial that children were abused by a group of men “dressed as monsters and werewolves.” The panic was a national phenomenon, with communities descending into witch-hunt style investigations from Washington to Minnesota to Massachusetts.
Beck, an editor of the avant-garde literary journal n+1, is an able historian and a clear writer. His thorough analysis of media reports, police records and court transcripts successfully brings this nightmarish cultural episode to life. The book is a devastating indictment of the earnest but irresponsible detectives and psychologists who effectively projected their own fantasies into young children’s imaginations over the course of extended interrogations, and of overzealous prosecutors—including such high-profile figures as Janet Reno and Martha Coakley—who put innocent people in prison.
But We Believe The Children is not only, or even primarily, a work of history. It is first and foremost a sophisticated culture war polemic. Woven throughout Beck’s measured, journalistic accounts of the investigations and prosecutions is a radical political argument—an all-out attack on “the patriarchal nuclear family,” an institution that he sees as having no function whatsoever except to suppress individual freedom. It is the “patriarchal nuclear family,” Beck insists, that is the real cause of child sexual abuse. The heroes in his narrative are the radical feminists who sought to dismantle the family in the 1960s and 1970s. And the villains are the Reagan-era social conservatives who sought to stem its decline. According to Beck, these reactionaries created the 1980s hysteria by terrifying parents into thinking that alternative social arrangements would put their children in peril. . . .
There is something quite strange about Beck’s casual association, over and over again, of “the patriarchal nuclear family” with child abuse. As W. Bradford Wilcox and Robin Fretwell Wilson have pointed out, the data show that children living with their married biological parents are an order of magnitude less likely to be abused—sexually or otherwise—than children living in other social arrangements. Children are more likely to be abused by someone they live with than by a stranger, but stepfathers and men cohabitating with the child’s mother are among the most frequent perpetrators. One can debate the extent to which poverty factors into these statistics—poor children are more likely to live with single parents or step-parents—but there is no dispute that children living in the “patriarchal nuclear family” that Beck so despises are least likely to be harmed at the hands of their guardians. So Beck is standing more on ideological than empirical footing when he insists that the weakening of the family as a social institution from the 1960s onward was an unalloyed good, and that the conservative campaign to shore up the family is born purely out of fear, bigotry, and reaction. But that is his view, and he is certainly not the only person on the cultural left to see things that way. . . .
The large-scale feminist complicity with the hysteria would seem to undermine the notion that it was an anti-feminist enterprise. But Beck claims that the panicky, censorious, victim-oriented feminism that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s was merely a byproduct of the period’s conservative revival. Conservative arguments about sex had “gained so much momentum,” he writes, “that even some feminists joined in, arguing that the liberalization of sex had gone too far and produced not freedom but anarchy, danger, pornography, victimization and psychological trauma.” It might be the case that this type of feminism (as opposed to the more libertarian, sex-positive, 1960s version) was merely a projection of the culturally conservative mood of the 1980s, but it seems unlikely—not least because social conservatism today is weaker than it has ever been before, and yet what might be called “MacKinnon feminism” is as strong as ever, especially on college campuses.
One wonders if Beck deliberately chose to publish this book in the midst of the national outcry over campus rape in order to draw implicit parallels between the 1980s hysteria and what is taking place today.
Well, that’s certainly a parallel.
YES. NEXT QUESTION? Politico: Does Bernie Sanders Have A Black Lives Matter Problem?
WE NEED BETTER BACKUP POWER FOR CELLULAR/IP INFRASTRUCTURE: As phone companies ditch copper, they nix the ability to call during blackouts. We need to be hardening our systems. Of course, that would mean too many jobs for burly men.
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YES, NEXT QUESTION: Is Obamacare Too Complex to Work?
HANDS UP, DON’T LOOT: Ferguson Cops Shot A Guy Just Because He Was Shooting At Them, as Ferguson is in a state of emergency AGAIN — after police are shot at and shops looted as town marks anniversary of Michael Brown’s death.
As Jon Gabriel likes to say, “My favorite part about the Obama era is all the racial healing.”
RELATED: A friendly reminder from Kurt Schlichter:
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Rogue drones a growing nuisance across the U.S.
Rogue drone operators are rapidly becoming a national nuisance, invading sensitive airspace and private property — with the regulators of the nation’s skies largely powerless to stop them.
In recent days, drones have smuggled drugs into an Ohio prison, smashed against a Cincinnati skyscraper, impeded efforts to fight wildfires in California and nearly collided with three airliners over New York City.
Earlier this summer, a runaway two-pound drone struck a woman at a gay pride parade in Seattle, knocking her unconscious. In Albuquerque, a drone buzzed into a crowd at an outdoor festival, injuring a bystander. In Tampa, a drone reportedly stalked a woman outside a downtown bar before crashing into her car.
The altercations are the byproduct of the latest consumer craze: cheap, easy-to-fly, remotely piloted aircraft. Even basic models can soar thousands of feet high and come equipped with powerful video cameras — capabilities that would have been hard to foresee just a few years ago.
Well, maybe the government has been setting a bad example.
VACLAV HAVEL’S ‘POWER OF THE POWERLESS’ ENDURES, J. Christian Adams writes, and notes that Havel’s writing also explains why “The problems this nation faces will not vanish with the election of a Republican, no matter what the Beltway consultants tell you in radio ads and fundraising emails. The problems run much deeper now. The bureaucratic state has become unmoored from the political branches.”
Read the whole thing.
JOEL KOTKIN: The Peril to Democrats of Left-Leaning Urban Centers.
Twenty years ago, America’s cities were making their initial move to regain some of their luster. This was largely due to the work of mayors who were middle-of-the-road pragmatists. Their ranks included Rudy Giuliani in New York, Richard Riordan in Los Angeles, and, perhaps the best of the bunch, Houston’s Bob Lanier. Even liberal San Franciscans elected Frank Jordan, a moderate former police chief who was succeeded by the decidedly pragmatic Willie Brown.
In contrast, a cadre of modern mayors is minting a host of ideologically new urban politics that put cities at odds with millions of traditional urban Democrats. This trend is strongest on the coasts, but is also taking place in many heartland cities. Bill de Blasio is currently its most prominent practitioner, but left-wing pundit Harold Meyerson says approvingly that many cities are busily mapping “the future of liberalism” with such policies as the $15-an-hour minimum wage, stricter EPA greenhouse gas regulations, and housing policies intended to force people out of lower density suburbs and into cities.
For the Democrats, this urban ascendency holds some dangers. Despite all the constant claims of a massive “return to the city,” urban populations are growing no faster than those in suburbs, and, in the past few years, far slower than those of the hated exurbs. This means we won’t see much change in the foreseeable future in the current 70 to 80 percent of people in metropolitan America who live in suburbs and beyond. University of Washington demographer Richard Morrill notes that the vast majority of residents of regions over 500,000—roughly 153 million people—live in the lower-density suburban places, while only 60 million live in core cities.
This leftward shift is marked, but it’s not indicative of any tide of public enthusiasm. One-party rule, as one might expect, does not galvanize voters.
Left politics is all about getting away with things that the public isn’t enthusiastic for.
LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE:
● Chaser: Hillary’s Two Races: To Keep Ahead of the Investigators, and to Win the White House.
Both adding fuel to The Coming Middle-Class Anarchy.
NEWS FROM KANSAS: Milton Wolf, Jerry Moran Face Off Ahead Of Possible Primary Challenge.
As conservative Kansas doctor Milton Wolf considers a Republican primary challenge to Sen. Jerry Moran, he confronted the incumbent Monday over Wolf’s beef with the state’s Republican Party from his last campaign.
Last week, Wolf was cleared by the Kansas Board of Healing Arts from a charge he had divulged privileged patient information on Facebook. That charge was first raised during his 2014 primary challenge to Sen. Pat Roberts, which Wolf believes was furthered by the party’s leadership and Moran.
As Moran was kicking off one of his statewide town hall tours with a Monday stop in Wamego, Wolf was sitting in the front row.
“I’m glad you’re exonerated,” Moran told Wolf after he stood and asked a series of questions in which he alleged the senator was involved in advancing the board’s investigation.
Ahead of the confrontation, Wolf released a lengthy post on his political website in which he laid out his case that Moran had been involved in pushing the board to investigate him. Contrary to Wolf’s assertions, Moran told Wolf he had no previous knowledge of the investigation.
When asked by reporters in Wamego, Wolf again sidestepped the question about whether he would enter the race against Moran.
When politicians aren’t accountable, it helps to make them personally uncomfortable.
BRUTAL NEW AD FEATURING WOUNDED VET: WHY ARE WE MAKING NUCLEAR DEALS WITH A COUNTRY THAT TRIED TO KILL ME?
You can’t say we weren’t all warned when Obama promised us “peace in our time” in his second term inaugural address.
NBC NEWS: CHINA HAS BEEN READING PRIVATE EMAIL ACCOUNTS OF “MANY” TOP US OFFICIALS SINCE 2010: “No word yet on whether this includes Hillary, but she is a top US official, and she did of course use private email.”
NOBODY TELL PRESIDENT OBAMA: August Recess an Ideal Time for Art History Class at the Capitol.
Of course, Obama apologized to the art history community for his gaffe.
DEMOCRATS FOOLISHLY PURGE THEIR HEROES: By applying today’s standards, Presidents Jefferson, Jackson, Wilson & FDR get the boot.
But this is where political correctness inevitably leads: Just as 1984’s Newspeak Dictionary became progressively (pun intended) smaller in each succeeding edition, so must the left’s version of history, as well.
“BLACK LIVES MATTER” IS INCONSISTENT WITH BIG GOVERNMENT, Leon Wolf writes at Red State:
Obama stenographer Charles Blow had some rare moments of insight in his latest New York Times column on the “Black Lives Matter” movement and the GOP. As usual, however, Blow confused the cart for the horse and thus offered the complete wrong solution for the problem he is attempting to solve.
Blow noted, correctly, that a large driver of hostile interactions between police and black citizens is increased pressure from municipalities on police to become revenue generation machines:
I’m not a full-fledged capital-L libertarian, but this ad by the Libertarian Party at the peak of the left’s obsession with Occupy Wall Street in 2012 sums up the disparity in graphic terms simple enough for even a Timesman to understand:
But then, the whole dichotomy ongoing between Hillary, Obama, and Bernie Sanders supporters who demand bigger and bigger government and yet are concurrently waging war against the police as its enforcers is one of the curious paradoxes of the American left.
OF COURSE IT IS, IT’S A CORONATION, NOT A NOMINATION: O’Malley: Sparse debate schedule ‘undemocratic.’
Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley is keeping pressure on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to increase the number of Democratic presidential debates.
“We’re making a big mistake, as Democrats, if we try to limit debate and have an undemocratic process,” O’Malley said Monday on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports.”
“Shame on us as a party if the DNC tries to limit debate and prevents us from being able to put forward a better path for our people that will make the economy work for all of us again,” he said.
O’Malley — who trails front-runner Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in recent polling — has sharply criticized the schedule of six Democratic primary debates this cycle.
During an interview with The Hill last week, O’Malley accused party insiders of attempting to steer the race in favor of Clinton. Sanders similarly said he was “disappointed” in the limited number of debates.
DNC spokeswoman Holly Shulman reiterated on Monday that the party sees its current schedule as more than sufficient.
Like I said, it’s a coronation, not a nomination.
THE TED RALL TAPES, DIRECTOR’S CUT EDITION, as explored by Officer Jack Dunphy:
Rall’s tale of suffering at the hands of an LAPD officer prompted someone to send an email or write a memo to inquire if Rall had ever complained about the incident, and if so, what was the outcome. When it was learned that the incident had been investigated and found to have occurred in a manner that differed in most respects from the way Rall had described in the Times, someone in the LAPD picked up a phone or walked across the street and contacted someone at the Times. “Listen to this,” the cop probably said, “and make of it what you will.”
And at the Times, they listened, they were persuaded, and they handed Rall his cards.
“But not so fast,” say Rall and his supporters. “The enhanced version of the tape tells a different story.”
But does it? I’ve listened to the tape several times using high-quality Bose headphones, and I’m unable to hear some of the things Rall claims to hear. I also note that some of the things I can hear are incorrectly transcribed.
Read the whole thing.
NOBODY TELL DONALD TRUMP: Rapist-murderer of California woman was here illegally and had recently been arrested.
64-year-old Marilyn Pharis was sleeping in her home in Santa Maria, California on July 24 when 29-year-old Victor Aureliano Martinez Ramirez and 20-year-old Jose Villagomez broke in. The two men sexually assaulted, strangled, and repeatedly struck Pharis in the head with a hammer. She died eight days later.
Martinez Ramirez, it turns out, was in the U.S. illegally. Not only that, he had been arrested just two weeks before he murdered Pharis for possession of methamphetamine.
This arrest was Martinez Ramirez’s sixth in 15 months. Yet, all he received was a citation.
Why? Santa Maria police chief Ralph Martin explained that his department does not have the authority to hold suspects in custody because of their illegal immigration status, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) never provided a federal order to keep Martinez Ramirez in custody on an immigration hold as required by current law.
These are bad stories.
August 10, 2015
CHRIS STIREWALT: Sanders Trumps Hillary:
If Sanders can pack nearly 30,000 souls into a Portland, Ore. arena it’s fair to say that he is doing even better than Trump into harnessing the outrage that animates voters, particularly older, white ones, who believe that America is truly at the abyss. And remember that both Trump and Sanders share the view that a conspiracy between business and politics is at the core of the problem.
It may be Portlandia, but still…
The biggest difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, or between Clinton and Bush, if you prefer, is that on the GOP side there are lots and lots and lots of viable alternatives. As Thursday’s debate showed, Republicans have plenty of credible choices with reasonable electoral paths.
If Col. Sanders’ army succeeds in either scuttling Clinton’s nomination or pushing her so far to the left that she can’t scamper to the center next year, there’s no place for the party to go.
Stay tuned.