Serf's Up: Ag. Policy in America

Rather than letting American farmers decide for themselves what to plant, where to plant it, and when to plant it, the federal government pays farmers in some regions to grow selected crops and, in other regions, pays farmers not to grow those same crops.

That’s right:  On the one hand, the government pays farmers to grow corn.  On the other hand, the government pays farmers not to grow corn.  Some crops the government pays farmers simply to plow under.  Rather than farming their fields, some farmers farm the US Treasury.

That silly scheme -- letting the (literal) bean counters in Washington decide what amount of what crops ought to be planted each year, and where they ought to be planted -- and paying famers both to plant and not to plant the same crop -- predictably produces both shortages and surpluses.  In both cases, the outcome is bad:

(1.) When the supply of a product goes down, its price rises.  Crop shortages lead to higher food costs.  Exactly how much more we pay for corn and wheat you discover firsthand every time you go to the grocery store, where you often have to pay more than $4 a box for breakfast cereal.

(2.) Because surpluses need to be safely stored until they can be sold, surpluses lead to greater government expenses and, in time, to higher taxes.  We pay more than $5.5 billion a year just to store the surpluses that government micro-management of farmers now creates.  That figure does not include the money we already paid farmers both to plant and not to plant the same crop.

Only God Himself could know how much flaxseed, honey, oats, wheat, corn, soybeans, cotton, butter fat, grain sorghum, sweet potatoes, lettuce and peanuts ought to be produced in America each year, or by whom and where they ought to be produced.  That knowledge is simply impossible for mere humans.  Federal bureaucrats, who seem to think they are God, do not know such things.  Yet, in their insufferable God-aping hubris, they continue to impose their ignorance on the nation and its food supply.  They will not do what they must do:  Unleash the creativity and productivity of American farmers -- the best in the world.  Because each farmer knows his own land, his own equipment and resources, his own skills, and his own market best, farming freedom, not central planning, is the order of the day.

Consider the now legendary case of Stanley Yankus, who was the son of a Lithuanian immigrant and a chicken farmer in Dowagiac, Michigan.  Yankus raised wheat and barley in order to feed his chickens.  He sold none of the wheat and barely he raised.

Even though the Constitution protects us from the loss of life, liberty and property without due process, and even though it provides for equal protection under the law, Yankus was not free to raise feed for his chickens.  The Department of Agriculture decided that 36 states ought to have wheat-growing restrictions while the others do not.   Yankus lived in a state with restrictions.  Not to be able to grow wheat for his own chickens seemed to him the destruction of his freedom to make a living.  It made him feel like a second-class citizens, someone without the freedoms and privileges possessed by others.  So he grew his wheat and fed his chickens.  The Feds fined him for it.  His fines were equal to his entire year’s income.

In his testimony before Congress, Yankus said this:  “Many people have told me that I would lose everything by opposing these wheat laws.  What is everything?  Money is of no value to a slave. I think freedom is everything.”

For Yankus, being a self-sufficient poultry farmer proved impossible.  Loving his freedom and loving his chosen profession, he moved himself and his family to Australia.

We must not let the Feds turn our farmers into Washington's modern-day peasants and serfs.

  

Stanley Yankus:  http://www.life.com/image/50708520

Television and the Withering of Political Prudence

In America, we often repeat a very silly saying:  "The camera never lies."  The facts, however, are quite the opposite.  The camera does not bring the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

The camera lies.  The camera always lies. 

It always introduces a degree of falsity, sometimes a very large degree.  Nevertheless, because the camera provides what film makers and news directors call "the illusion of presence," and because we viewers tend uncritically to adopt a naïve realism toward what we see on camera, we accept that visual falsity almost without question.  We tend automatically to take the perspective of the camera as our own, even though a television camera is an inherently superficial newsgathering device, not simply because it is inescapably perspectival, but because its very presence changes things.

         As your own eyes have shown you repeatedly, human beings do not behave normally in front of a camera.  Children, football players, talk show audiences, and mere passers-by all act differently, all act up, when the camera turns to them.  We now know that nearly everyone has a mother (Hi, Mom!"), and that nearly everyone is a champion (We're number one!).  We also have seen in multiple cases that rioting subsides when the cameras are removed.

         You must remember that politicians behave according to that same camera-based principle. When the camera turns to them, they act up; they stop talking normally and start acting and speaking for the camera.  Superficial snippets of perceived personality have replaced dispassionate analysis and discussion; on-stage demeanor has replaced deliberation and debate.  After the election, the same techniques apply; those in power operate by the same principles as those who seek it.  Because the media loom so large in contemporary politics, we are subjected to endless bouts of spin control and to government by leaks, the current democratic version of disinformation.

         Political advisors now think like television news directors:  If it bleeds it leads; if it thinks it stinks.  Political advisors know that tough pictures mean that tough policies cannot likely be widely accepted, or at least not for long, because the viewing public has no stomach for it.  To talk about the morality of war is one thing, to show maimed children and riddled corpses on television every evening, to broadcast the horrible reality of soldiers and civilians killing and being killed, is quite another, even in a fully justified war.  The viewing public cannot long endure the harsh face of combat. 

         This is the lesson:  If you want to stop a public policy from continuing in effect, or else prevent it ever from being so, then you must relentlessly broadcast its unpleasant consequences -- and every policy, no matter how prudent, has them.  Almost no amount of sober analysis and cogent argumentation can overturn the conclusion that a policy is incurably evil once these graphic images have been seared into the minds of viewers, however contrived and anecdotal those images might be.  All too often, policies are defeated on the screen, not in Congress; in the news editor's office, not in the public square, in graphic, full-color pictures above the fold, not in delicate, difficult, and sustained deliberation.  Emotional potency, not reasoned deliberation, has become the political tool of choice.

         When we think clearly and carefully, we understand that anecdotal arguments are not as logically compelling as principled and logical demonstration.  But in issues of contemporary public policy and morality, that fact hardly matters because television is inherently geared toward anecdotes, towards gripping pictures and shallow, slanted stories, rather than rational discourse.

         I am not saying, of course, that all television news directors try consciously to deceive society, though doubtless some do.  I say only that the medium itself has a built-in falsification.  To get his or her story aired on a news broadcast, a reporter must show something gripping, something unusual.  Consequently, news reporters and photo-journalists tend to search for images with considerable visual impact, not for plain, unadorned fact.  News reporters crave face time on the tube.  They shape their stories in ways that make them an effective means of personal promotion.  Career considerations can, and have, made a casualty of truth.  And if, as we have been told on the highest authority, the truth sets us free (John 8: 32), then as long as we continue to subject ourselves to the enslaving errors and distortions of modern media, slaves we will remain.

The American voter seems to have forgotten that the highest and surest qualifications for statesmanship are virtue and wisdom, and that it takes far more than intelligence, energy or personality to govern well.  Character, not charisma, identifies the statesman and sets the statesman apart from the mere politician. 

             

Inflation: Obama's Undeclared Tax Increase

         Contrary to common parlance, inflation is not rising prices.  Nor is inflation the result of rising prices.  Rising prices are the result of inflation.  Inflation is when the government floods the marketplace with printing press money -- as it now is doing.  The consequences of that flood surround us on all sides, as I aim to point out.

Like other commodities, the value of money is determined by the interaction of supply and demand.  When the supply of money increases dramatically compared to the supply of goods and services, the value of money declines.  In that case, it takes more dollars to do what fewer dollars used to.  Because the Obama administration prints money day and night without end, the gallon of gas that cost $1.84 when he took office now costs $3.92 just half way through his term.  The rise in gasoline prices is not the result of decreased supply or radically increased demand.  They remain basically what they were when Obama took office.  The difference is inflation and the wild-eyed speculation it engenders, which taxes you at the incredible rate of more than $2 per gallon of gasoline.

Naturally, Obama could not have gotten passed a new tax of more than $2 per gallon of gas. Just trying it would have made the mid-term shellacking he and the Democrats suffered even worse.  Instead, he simply amped up the printing presses, thereby stealing value from every dollar of every person who owns even one, making gasoline prices rise dramatically -- just as it did nearly everything else -- which you have noticed whenever you bought milk, bread, cereal, or meat for your family -- or bought gas.  Thank inflation.  Thank the president. 

Why would Obama do it?

He did it because inflation favors debtors.  The Obama administration, you’ll recall, is the world champion of debt.   In order to reduce its own financial burdens, the government induces inflation.  Inflation allows debtors to discharge their obligations with dollars of reduced value.  It steals from creditors.  Creditors, therefore, are reluctant to make loans because inflation makes lending more likely a losing proposition.  If borrowers can just print a batch of reduced value dollar bills in order to pay their debts -- in other words, if borrowers were counterfeiters -- lenders will be justifiably reluctant to give them loans.  You’ve probably noticed that loans are harder to get.  Thank inflation.  Thank the president, the Counterfeiter-in-Chief.         

Because inflation means that today’s dollar is worth more than tomorrow’s, inflation discourages saving.  If you get more for your money by spending it now than if you spend it later, you spend it now.  But if you spend it now, savings diminish.  When savings diminish, there’s less money from banks for investment.  Less investment means fewer jobs and higher unemployment.  That is, by undermining the value and stability of the dollar, government undermines capital investment.  On the one hand, investors can’t easily get loans.  On the other, they are reluctant to enter into long-term commitments when the very value of money itself is unpredictable.  They can’t calculate what they’ll earn or what they’ll owe.  Unstable money drives businesses overseas, to places where the financial climate is more predictable.  You’ve probably noticed both the high rate of unemployment and the flight of American businesses to other countries.  Thank inflation.  Thank the president.

         Think of inflation as government alchemy.  In the Middle Ages, alchemists tried everything they could think of to turn some other substance into gold -- with predictable results.  Governments try the same trick now.  When Roosevelt took the US off the gold standard, he wanted to make paper serve as gold.  Paper is more easily manipulated than gold, and he wanted to manipulate the money.  Roosevelt became the anti-Midas:  Rather than everything he touched turning to gold, the gold he touched turned to paper.  The value of the dollar dropped accordingly.  The results are devastating, especially to the poor.

For example, if you were born into a poor family in 1944, and if, over those intervening years, you worked incredibly hard and managed to increase your family income by more than 3000 percent, you’d have fallen even further below the poverty line because of government-induced inflation.  Inflation makes the escape from poverty even more difficult than it already is because it requires ever-increasing amounts of money from you to produce your escape.  Inflation is a chain that binds the poor to their misery.  Perhaps you’ve noticed that the percentage of persons in poverty in America rarely goes down.  The cliff of prosperity is too high and steep to scale.  Thank inflation.  Thank the president.

Think of inflation as a teenager’s credit card.  The teen gets the goodies and the parents get the bills.  For “teenager,” read “government,” and because government prints its own stage money, for “government” read “tyrant” and “counterfeiter.” With inflation, the tyrant-counterfeiter gets the goodies, and you are left to pay his bills with the reduced-value dollars he has printed.

Now do you see?

Inflation is a weapon.  This administration aims it at us.

Perhaps you are one of those who expect government to help protect you from thieves. Perhaps you think that government ought to track down, capture, and punish counterfeiters.  But what if the thief and the counterfeiter are the government?  What happens when, say, the government prints several hundred billion dollars or so in order to pay its bills, thereby stealing value from its citizens’ financial resources?  This happens:  Dollars lose their value; loans are hard to get; prices rise precipitously; investment slows; jobs go overseas; unemployment is high; the poor are chained; and the nation’s prestige is diminished.

Welcome to Obama’s world.

As long as he’s your president, it’s your world too. 

Begin Here

"The thing that is in danger is the whole structure of society, and it is necessary to persuade thinking men and women of the vital and intimate connection between the structure of society and the theological doctrines of Christianity."

                                                Dorothy L. Sayers, "Creed or Chaos?"

"But what is a practical joke in a world

Of nonsense, what is a rational attitude

Towards politics in a world of ciphers . . .?"

                                                Louis MacNeice, "The Blasphemies"

            We are not born civilized. 

            We acquire civility, if at all, only later.  The truest and best way to acquire civility is under the guidance of a wise moral order, and under the nurture of a well-functioning traditional family.  While other paths to civility are possible and sometimes work, the happy combination of family and wise moral authority is the most dependable way to gain access to the hard-won wisdom of our ancestors, wisdom gained slowly and painfully over the centuries in the crucible of real life and in the light of revelation.

            In other words, because we human beings are not born civilized, we are always only one generation from barbarism. We must domesticate each new generation, just as we were domesticated in our turn.  To convert the brutes we all are born into the civilized persons we ought to be requires nothing less than the wisdom of God.  Barbarism is not behind us; it is within us, and it is persistent.  Our demons die hard, if at all.  If they are to die, God must kill them.  Government cannot.  The deepest and most profound human ills have no political solution.  To think and act as if they do is foolish.  How much time, effort, and treasure we have wasted trying to do by means of government what can never be done is far, quite far, beyond calculation.

            Faced with the perennial challenge of civilizing the next generation, and fully aware that in order to civilize it they must begin with God, Christian conservatives turn first to revelation, to the works and words God Himself, works and words graciously bestowed upon this fallen and twisted world, a world utterly lost and never to be found without them.  Thus, while Christian conservatives might value the good, the true, and the beautiful, they know that without God we can never find them or preserve them.  Indeed, without God we could not even convincingly define them.  While Christian conservatives set about conserving things like justice, the traditional family, and even civilization itself -- things always at risk and under siege -- they know that the best defense of them is the revelation of God, by which, and only by which, can things be seen and done aright.  I am not saying that we cannot begin without God.  I am saying that we cannot begin well without God.

Labor Union Folklore

I leave it to the labor unions to tell you about their virtues and their successes.  They are quite willing and able to do so.  I take it as my task simply to tell you about their weaknesses and shortcomings.  In this case, I want to tell you about union folklore.  I want to tell you about some of the things people think are true concerning unions but are not.

Let’s Play Monopoly

First, labor folklore suppresses the monopolistic tendencies and intentions of the unions themselves.  Unions intend to monopolize the work supply the corporation needs to purchase in order to produce its merchandise.  Unions want to eliminate the competition among prospective workers.  They want to be sure that a union shop hires only union workers, that the shop has no freedom to hire others.  If there’s competition among prospective workers, then the workers have to bid against each other in order to offer their services at the best price for the corporation.  In order to keep their wages artificially high, unions aim to eliminate competition.  They do it in many ways, some moral and legal, some not.

The most common way to keep others from competing for jobs is to pay large sums of money to elect legislators who will pass laws that eliminate worker competition.  Unions want a shop closed to worker competition, a shop wherein the union monopolizes the work supply -- which the elected legislators provide by passing laws toward that end.  It’s a special interest system from Hell:  What the unions want, the politicians provide; what the politicians want, the unions provide -- all others be damned.  Unions strive after, and frequently attain, job sovereignty.  They enclose the labor pool; they assert union fraternity over employer and competitive worker liberty.  In effect, they place “No trespassing" signs in front of the hiring office.  By doing so, unions stage an invasion on managerial prerogatives, by demanding control, or veto, over hiring and firing.

Collective bargaining is not an instrument of liberty, but of control.  Unions wield it precisely in order to restrain trade, namely the trading of money for work and of work for money that occurs freely between company and employees -- absent third party intervention or coercion.  Unions try very hard to prevent companies from dealing directly with free employees and free employees from dealing directly with companies, which is why so much relevant discussion has centered around whether or not antitrust law (law designed to preserve competition) ought to be applied to labor unions.  When unions apply pressure across an industry to drive up their income, unions call it collective bargaining.  When businesses do it, unions call it price fixing.

Perhaps a commonly employed analogy will serve:  Imagine that a homeowner, John, and a prospective buyer, Sam, were negotiating over the purchase of John’s home.  Imagine that Sam were invested with the bargaining privileges now enjoyed by labor unions.  In such a case, Sam would be able to deprive John of all other purchase offers.  Sam would be able to physically isolate John’s home and thereby to cut it of from all deliveries of any sort, even food, as well as to prevent personal movement into and out of John’s home so that, even if John were, say, an ambulance driver, he could not ply his trade or make his living.  Sam could impose at will a virtual boycott, or embargo, of John’s business, even if John did not work at home.  Were you or I to exert such coercive pressures on John, it would be called criminal.  When unions exert them, it’s called collective bargaining.  

Victims

Second, despite their monopolistic practices, unions want you to think of them as the victims, not the victimizers.  When non-union forces try to re-assert their liberty, unions portray that re-assertion as fascist tyranny.  Unions want you to forget that just as collective bargaining is a legally protected activity, so also is opposing it.

Unions are not victims.  On the whole, organized labor stands quite well up in the rankings of worker wages and benefits, both here and around the world.  Nevertheless, the perception remains that union workers are downtrodden and oppressed.  This mistaken notion of victimization is not simply a matter of cultural lag or of perceptions not keeping pace with reality, but of propaganda.  Unions purposely portray themselves as the stoop-shouldered cannon fodder of capitalist emperors battling each other over filthy lucre.

The picture is false.  Unions work for consumers.  Unions work for you.  Consumers -- mothers, store clerks, assembly workers, farmers, and dental assistants, not greedy capitalist emperors -- determine who gets and who keeps a job.  They do so with their dollars.  If a product’s price is too high, or if its quality is too low relative to that price, consumers send their money elsewhere.  When they do, they fire not only management, but union workers as well.  The consumer’s dollars, not the owner’s greedy desires, are the rising tide that floats the corporate boat, or else their absence is the torpedo that sinks it to the bottom of the financial sea.

Unions want you to think that they are victims of greedy capitalists when in reality they are simply unable to compete successfully for consumer dollars in the marketplace.  They do not present their failure in this regard as their failure, but as their victimization at the hands of others.

Union folklore says that others are greedy, not union members.  As everyone knows who thinks about it even for a moment, human nature and its manifold weaknesses is fully represented on both sides of the bargaining table.

We are the world

Third, labor folklore asserts that what’s good for unions is good for America.  It’s an old myth, and widely employed by many groups for their own advancement, whether by farmers, retailers, wholesalers, or public servants, that whatever is good for them is good for the nation.  In other words, unions are not the first or the only small group to assert that their interests are identical with the interests of the country.

This myopic self-centeredness  ignores the basic reality that if money is allocated in one direction it cannot be allocated in another at the same time.  When one sector gets a larger share in the consumers’ allocation of money, another sector gets less.  But the whole country is not thereby either diminished or enlarged.  When group A prospers at the expense of group B, the nation is not thereby either richer or poorer.  The gains (and losses) are relative:  They are relative to other groups in the economic equation.  The nation isn’t financially enlarged, just one portion of it.  What one sector gained, others paid.  The benefit is unidirectional, not universal.  What’s described as better off for the nation is simply reallocation.  Reallocation within the system is not the same as increasing the system.  The pie is not magically bigger, just cut up in different proportions.  That’s not good for the country, just good for one sector.  I’m not saying that economics is inescapably a zero sum game; I’m saying that mere reallocation is.

Indeed, one might argue that, because no industry is truly isolated from all others and therefore is impacted by what happens in them, when other companies consent to raise wages because of union pressure, they must also raise their prices in order to absorb the additional labor costs.  That means that the corporations and consumers who wish to purchase that company’s products must pay more, raising everyone else’s costs accordingly, thus making them worse off than before.  Those who are now worse off believe that they must demand more, which raises the price of their products, and drives the cost of living higher in ever-rising circles of upward pressure.  In this way, what’s good for unions is bad for everyone else, despite union folklore to the contrary.

Fieger, Foolishness, and Families

           Jeffrey Fieger thinks that Detroit’s problems are financial at the root and that they’ll be solved by money.  He thinks that the way to get money is through legalized prostitution, legalized drugs, and legalized gambling. 

He doesn’t know that a city’s liveability is determined by the moral fiber of its citizens and by the civic wisdom of its leaders, not by cash.  If you give money to a fool, to an addict, or to a profligate, the money disappears in an instant.  Fieger’s plan is a magnet for fools, not for families.  He doesn’t know that, because most of our problems are rooted in human nature, most of the challenges that confront us simply have no political solution.  Politics won’t fix human nature, though politics can undermine it.  If you want to undermine human nature and exacerbate our problems, Jeffrey Fieger is just the man for the job.

Fieger is the man best suited to produce further social destruction in Detroit because he does not know what we’ve known for centuries and centuries since the days of Aristotle’s Politics:  The fundamental building block of a society is the traditional family, not the whorehouse, the drug den, or the casino.  Whatever aids, supports, or defends the traditional family also aids, supports and defends society.  What does not, undermines it.  If a society is undermined long enough or fully enough, it collapses.  We are witnessing that ugly and disturbing slow-motion collapse daily in Detroit, and have been since the 1960s, when the government tried to make it a “model city.”

Nearly 50 years of uninterrupted Democratic rule and ill-conceived governmental machinations in Detroit have not produced a model city.   Quite the contrary:  It produced urban blight on the grandest scale the nation, maybe even the world, has ever seen.  But no matter how disastrous their policies, the Detroit blighters keep getting re-elected.  Fieger’s misbegotten policies are just the latest in a long series of foolish notions that unravel the very fabric of the community, namely the traditional family.  What does not build families does not build cities.  What injures the one injures the other.  If you're looking to vice to find civic redemption, you will look forever.  

Fieger has forgotten, if he ever knew, that we are always one generation from barbarism.  He’s forgotten that we are not born civilized, but must acquire civility some time later, if at all.  He’s forgotten that civility is best acquired in a traditional home and in a church, and not from the slot machines, drug dealers and prostitutes he currently pimps.  They are the breeding ground of moral and financial servitude; they are the enemy of the families and churches that alone will save us -- not the garden of freedom, prosperity, and productivity, or of the personal virtues from which they spring.

Gambling, prostitution, and drugs will not fix Detroit’s problems.  But they will make those problems worse, much worse, something Jeffrey Fieger’s shrunken imagination and under-informed proposals cannot fathom.  He says he can fix what’s wrong with Detroit “in five minutes.”  He thinks Detroit can’t get any worse.  He’s wrong on both counts, completely wrong.   It’s an ignorance and arrogance that makes the blood run cold -- and in the streets.  Violence, not peace, is the historic companion of vice.

Because you can’t build families on gambling, whoring and drugs, Fieger’s proposal is a frontal assault on families.  It is, therefore, a frontal assault on Detroit, or what remains of it, now that businesses and families have fled, and now that home after home, on block after block, in neighborhood after neighborhood have been reduced to empty, uninhabitable shells, where crime is prolific and where schools and education have fallen into nearly unfixable disarray and disrepair.  Some parts of the city could not be worse off if the city leaders had tried for years to turn them into a real-life stage-set for the next epic movie about the apocalypse, of which Fieger’s most recent public policy death wish is the latest embodiment.

It’s not the first time Jeffrey Fieger has been associated with killing off the sick and dying.

National Security and Partisan Politics

Islam's more consistent followers have declared war on all of American society, and therefore consider all members of our society fair game.  They kill children because children grow up to be soldiers.  They kill young women because young women give birth to more soldiers.  They kill workers because workers pay taxes that feed the military machine that resists the global imposition of sharia.  No one is safe because, to them, no one is innocent.

When I say “Islam's more consistent followers,” and not “Islamic extremists” attack us, I am saying, contrary to former President Bush, that Islam is not a religion of peace, either in its sacred texts or in its history.  It is a religion at war, and continually so, for centuries upon centuries. Violence is not an aberration. Violence is the modus operandi.  If Islam were a religion of peace, you’d hear those that now pose as Islamic moderates denouncing violence.  You’d hear that outcry arising from Islamic strongholds around the world.

Have I missed it?  

Perhaps it's a defect in me, but my mind runs habitually to the worst case scenario: dirty bombs, deadly chemicals, and poisonous biological agents all smuggled over American borders, both from the north and the south -- coupled with an American regime intent upon not protecting those borders and suing at law any state audacious enough to want to do so.  In other words, the worst case looks very much like today, when about one in ten of the illegal immigrants who invade our nation in that way is of middle-eastern (and presumably Islamic) background.

I read long ago that, given the desperately fallen character of our world, if you are not protected against the worst-case scenario, you are not protected.  The worst case sometimes happens.  If you are not protected against it, then your peace and security depend upon the good will of your enemy.  In that case, you have no peace and security.  The only real peace is a defendable peace, and ours, at the moment, is not properly defended.  To defend it now requires more -- much, much more -- than we have ever done before, both here and around the world.

The Obama administration is not up to the task, and never will be.  Despite this administration's declared aversion to fighting, it has us embroiled in three wars simultaneously.  Nevertheless, in the face of those three wars, and in the face of the global threat to which those three wars testify, our borders remain foolishly and recklessly under-protected.  That colossal stupidity might seem inexplicable, but it is not.

Try this thought experiment:  If ever you want to understand otherwise inexplicable public policy measures, you must ask yourself “Who benefits?”  On that count, if you wonder why the Obama administration does not close the borders, the answer lies in the preservation of partisan power.  In order to keep themselves more readily electable, Democrats maintain a porous border because they know that the great majority of those who cross our borders illegally, if and when they vote (whether in accordance with the law or not) can be expected to vote Democratic.

Just as FDR tried to stack the courts, Obama tries to stack the voter registration rolls.  Perhaps it’s a tactic he learned in Chicago, a city famous for that ploy, a city run now by his old crony Rahm Emanuel.

Naturally, if you call them on it, the Democrats won’t admit to such crass and craven partisan self-interest.  Rather, they transform your concern for the Constitution and for national security into racism.  They twist your commitment to civil defense and the rule of law into xenophobia.

Our deadliest enemies are glad for it.