| Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty April 24, 2014 Why Do Gun-Rights Supporters Win When Other Conservative Causes Lose? Today I'm off to Indianapolis for the annual meeting of the National Rifle Association, with a few questions on my mind. The past two decades have not been a cavalcade of successes for conservatives. The national debt has grown and exploded, and Americans support a smaller government in the abstract but keep electing lawmakers who love to spend more. There's little or no stigma left to accepting government assistance, and 108 million Americans now live in a household that included people on "one or more means-tested program." As Charles Murray noted, the white working class now endures problems on par with poor African-American neighborhoods, with high rates of births out of wedlock, children raised in homes without fathers, higher unemployment, and lower church attendance rates. A culture of "delayed adolescence" is taking root, with more than a third of Millennials living with their parents and exceptionally high unemployment rates among the young, delaying the launch of careers and independent, responsible adulthood. After paying a high price in blood and treasure in Iraq and Afghanistan, the world seems as dangerous and unstable as ever. Our borders are unsecure, and there isn't even a national consensus that entering the country illegally should be punished with a serious consequence. And yet, in the middle of all this, the gun-rights movement has won, or is in the process of winning, one of the most substantive, far-reaching, and consequential policy victories in recent memory. They've won big at the Supreme Court , and we've seen gun control proposal after gun control proposal get rejected in the legislatures, state and national. Polls show tepid support for gun control, darting up after a horror like Newtown and then sliding back down again. Meanwhile, gun owners and their allies have proven, on both regular election days, recalls, and pre-emptive resignations, a stunning power to defeat lawmakers they oppose. Deep-pocketed foes like Mike Bloomberg spend fortunes, with little to show for it, at least so far. So why are Progressives so stymied here? What is the gun-rights movement doing right that the rest of the conservative movement can or should emulate? Or is the Second Amendment defenders' success unique to their issue? Put another way, gun owners are right, and quickly recognized that this administration and most of its Congressional allies will ignore, disregard, subvert, and seek to effectively nullify the Second Amendment. Of course, this same administration tossed a filmmaker in jail because they needed a scapegoat for the Benghazi attack and had the Internal Revenue Service target Americans based upon their political beliefs, suggesting they don't care much about the First Amendment. Then again, Obama's NSA pretty much shredded the Fourth Amendment. The assertion that the American government can execute an American citizen by drone strike, without a trial, more or less vaporizes the Fifth Amendment's declaration that "No person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" and the Sixth Amendment's assurance of a right to a speedy trial. While only one American has been targeted by the administration's drone-centric war on terror, one may conclude the preference for killing as opposed to capture constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, violating the Eighth Amendment. (Justice Scalia joked that being forced to read Obamacare's text constituted cruel and unusual punishment.) Of course, the president's policies have tried to dictate all kinds of policies to the states, smashing the Tenth Amendment's declaration that "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." To give President Obama credit, he hasn't attempted to quarter U.S. troops in our homes yet, so he's managed to leave a few corners of the Bill of Rights unviolated. If the NRA and like-minded groups can get millions upon millions of Americans motivated and determined to preserve and protect one portion of the Constitution… how do we get folks fired up for the rest of it? Which City Wants to Host a Bunch of Drunken Democrats in 2016? The Democratic National Committee has asked 15 cities to present bids to host the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 2016. Below, the 15 cities and each city's appropriate slogan for the convention: Atlanta: Obama's Economy May Not Be Hot, But Our Summer Temperatures Are! Chicago: Try Not to Get Shot, Delegates! Cleveland: We'll Love It Until We Learn What Their Baseball Team Is Called. Columbus: Okay, We're Just Throwing This One In to Flatter Ohio Voters. Detroit: The City That Best Symbolizes the Record of Democrats. Indianapolis: We'll Demand the Indy 500 Drivers Shift to Priuses. Las Vegas: Bringing the Nanny State to Sin City. Miami: Just Wait for the Opening Night Tribute to Fidel. Nashville: We'll Briefly Stop Sneering at People Who Listen to Country Music. New York: Taking the War on Charter Schools and Horse-Drawn Carriages National! Orlando: Saluting the Mickey Mouse Operation of the Departing Administration. Philadelphia: Nobody Tell Michelle About the Calorie Count of Cheesesteaks. Phoenix: Just Kidding, We Hate This State and Every Gun-Toting Xenophobe In It. Pittsburgh: This Convention and Whole Party Brought to You By the Labor Movement. Salt Lake City: Terrific, a Political Convention With Limited Access to Booze. Wouldn't we all love to see the Democratic Party and its attending protesters' traveling freak show running into the polite, buttoned-down, clean-living residents of Salt Lake City? It's like a mismatched-roommate reality show on a citywide scale. Elizabeth Warren, Shameless Opportunist Brian Walsh offers a nuclear strike on Elizabeth Warren's new autobiography: First, what's perhaps most notable about Warren's book is that she even includes a section called "Native American," in which she reportedly writes, "Everyone on our mother's side — aunts, uncles, and grandparents — talked openly about their Native American ancestry. My brothers and I grew up on stories about our grandfather building one-room schoolhouses and about our grandparents' courtship and their early lives together in Indian Territory." This is ironic because, until the Boston Herald first broke the news in April 2012 that Harvard Law School had repeatedly promoted Warren as a Native American faculty member, Warren never once mentioned these stories of her upbringing in a single press interview, speech, class lecture or testimony at any point, ever, in her decades-long career. What's more, Warren was not listed as a minority on her transcript from George Washington University where she began her undergraduate education, nor did she list herself as a minority when applying to Rutgers University Law School in 1973. In fact, it was not until she was in her 30s and focused on climbing the highly competitive ladder of law school academia that Warren apparently rediscovered her Native American heritage… Remarkably, Warren's explanation to the Boston Herald was that she listed herself as a minority in the hopes that she would be invited to a luncheon so she could meet "people who are like I am" and she stopped checking the box when that didn't happen. Perhaps it "didn't happen" because at no point, at any of the schools she attended or worked at, is there any evidence that Warren ever joined any Native American organizations on campus or in any way interacted with anyone in the Native American community. Ace, picking through the wreckage: For Elizabeth Warren to Play Indian when it suited her purposes is disgustingly self-serving. She is obviously one of two things: 100% White, or, by her claim, merely 99.2% white. Either way, she is White, and her parents were White, and her grandparents were White, and even her great-grandparents were White. I think you have to go to her great-great-grandparents before you find the one (1!) nonwhite contributor to her racial legacy. In no way has Elizabeth Warren ever suffered the sting of racial animus from White People due her race (which is White), nor have missed out on job opportunities due to her race (which is White), nor does her family start out in a Racial Ditch due to discrimination against its race (which, in case I didn't mention this, is White). Elizabeth Warren took advantage of racial set-aside employment opportunities for disadvantaged minorities despite never for one second in her entire life being disadvantaged by her race (which is White). Has she ever been a victim of racism? How would a racist even know to discriminate against her, unless she busted out her "family lore" and showed pictures of her grandmother with her "high cheekbones" and convinced the skeptical racist that she was anything other than a White Person In Good Standing? Check out Campaign Spot later today for a bit more about Elizabeth Warren that the senator prefers not to mention in interviews. ADDENDA: Over in Rolling Stone, Jeff Goodell reports, "Two high-level sources in the Obama administration told me recently that the president has all but decided to deny the permit for the pipeline… an Obama insider told me, 'The only question now is the timing of the announcement.'" From Our Sponsor:
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