Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty January 31, 2014 Hooray for 'Irish Democracy'! Great news -- tax filing season has begun! Really, it was delayed ten days this year. The IRS said it needed to delay the start of tax season because of the government shutdown . . . which ended in mid-October. An early contender for phrase of the year of 2014 is "Irish Democracy," brought to our attention by Glenn Reynolds: In his excellent book, Two Cheers For Anarchism, Professor James Scott writes: One need not have an actual conspiracy to achieve the practical effects of a conspiracy. More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called 'Irish Democracy,' the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal, and truculence of millions of ordinary people, than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs. Now I'll be honest, I thought "Irish Democracy" just involved a lot of drinking. Richard Fernandez of the Belmont Club elaborates on the history: This policy was adopted by the Irish Republicans as an alternative to directly confronting the British Empire in the early 20th century. For those unfamiliar with the idea, its clearest expression was given in the movie "Michael Collins", when the main character counseled the crowds against going head to head with London: "we have a weapon more powerful… than any in the whole arsenal of the British Empire! That weapon… is our refusal! … There is one weapon that the British cannot take away from us: we can ignore them." And that's exactly what's happening, Reynolds argues, across a whole range of Federal Government programs from the War on Drugs, Border Control, War on Terror and even Obamacare. They are becoming dead letters. They exist but not really. People aren't exactly refusing to obey the laws. There are just so many regulations out there and so little time to obey them that inevitably 24 hours runs out before you can comply with them all… Reynolds' use of the word "Irish" is particularly apt because the ringleader of the current uproar is that well known denizen of the Emerald Isles, Murphy.Murphy is present wherever incompetence, bankruptcy and overreach are to be found. And Murphy right now is all over the place. Pete Sepp of the National Taxpayers Union, among others, wonders how the IRS is coping with the massive new changes going into effect this year with the implementation of Obamacare -- and whether that played a factor in this year's delayed start to tax season. Dan Pilla, a critic of the IRS and executive director of Tax Freedom Institute in Minneapolis, said the delay isn't surprising. "They've got a lot of programming to do," he said. "But I do know that in 2013, there was significantly less impact on IRS than in 2012, when it took Congress until Jan. 1, 2013, to pass the American Taxpayers Relief Act, and that delayed the filing season. It took the IRS a long time to get caught up from that. ... They didn't have that kind of programming changes this time around." . . . The IRS estimated it would spend nearly $1 billion in 2013 on information technology costs alone, Pilla said. Estimates are that it will take a minimum of 5,000 and perhaps as many as 16,000 new employees to carry out mandates under President Obama's signature health care law. "I am concerned about the IRS' capacity to manage this massive legislation," Pilla said. The IRS's new responsibilities are big and complicated . . . The Government Accountability Office last year calculated that for the IRS alone, implementing ObamaCare would be a "massive undertaking that involves 47 different statutory provisions and extensive coordination." Among them: "disclosure of taxpayer information for determining subsidy eligibility," "drug manufacturer tax" and "high-cost health plan tax." Senate staffers created a mind-boggling graphic showing ObamaCare's various agencies and regulators, which can be viewed at http://1.usa.gov/acamess. . . . and chunks of the law like the Small Business Health Options Program get tossed aside or delayed indefinitely over . . . you guessed it, "complexity." How can they enforce what they don't understand themselves? Let's face it, the noncompliance of "Irish Democracy" will be exceptionally appealing to a public with a long and proud record of ignoring things it doesn't want to think about: "Bankrate's latest Health Insurance Pulse survey shows that fewer than half (45 percent) of all respondents correctly identified the March 31 cutoff to purchase insurance under health reform's "individual mandate" provision. . . . 62 percent of survey respondents expect the March 31 individual mandate deadline to be pushed back, while only 29 percent expect it to stand." You may be practicing Irish Democracy and not even know it! Apparently GOP Leaders Felt the Party Was Too Unified Heading into 2014 Why . . . are we doing this? Quin Hillyer: "The Buchananite Right is against doing immigration reform this year. National Review's editors are against it. William Kristol is against it. Unions have historically opposed the idea -- and most union and non-union laborers other than the illegals themselves still do. The Heritage Foundation is against it. Most conservative grassroots activists groups are against it. The always-wise Peter Kirsanow of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is against it. The talk radio hosts are against it. Leading conservative (and centrist) bloggers -- Michelle Malkin, and the folks at RedState, and Mickey Kaus -- are against it. The libertarian Jack Kemp disciple Deroy Murdock is against it. Polls consistently show the public as a whole ranks immigration reform way down the list of priorities." Fred Bauer: "If the House chooses to continue to wade into the immigration debate, this kind of racially inflammatory rhetoric will continue and likely escalate. And if Republicans are going to attack fellow GOPers as racists, one can only imagine the demagogic vitriol pouring out of the left on this issue." Then Again, Maybe an Idiotic Tweet Is Worth Getting Upset About Remember yesterday's lament that perhaps the Right gets too upset or wastes too much energy fuming about idiotic or incendiary Tweets? Yeah, maybe I'm wrong. MSNBC President Phil Griffin, faced with an uproar online, apologized to the Republican national chairman on Thursday for an "outrageous and unacceptable" tweet by the network that accused conservatives of hostility toward biracial families. Griffin, who acted hours after party chairman Reince Priebus vowed to keep Republicans off the cable channel, also said he has fired the staffer involved. "We immediately acknowledged that it was offensive and wrong, apologized, and deleted it," Griffin said in a statement. "I personally apologize to Mr. Priebus and to everyone offended." Even before Priebus turned the monumentally offensive Twitter message into a political issue, other Twitter users delivered a thunderous condemnation almost instantaneously, well before the mainstream media noticed the trend… Given the controversy over Melissa Harris-Perry and her panel mocking Mitt Romney and his adopted black grandson—for which she profusely apologized—this is the last thing that MSNBC needed. A classic self-inflicted mistake that rubbed salt in America's racial wounds. Save the Owls! Shoot the Owls! Save the Owls and Shoot the Owls! Remember the spotted owl? 
That little critter had a big impact on U.S. environmental law in the Pacific Northwest: …In the historical context of looking back sixteen years, it seems obvious that the victors in the spotted owl war were those environmentalists who turned a seemingly absurd proposal into a national cause, a matter of presidential debate and finally a fait accompli. By the time the sawdust cleared, national forest harvesting west of the Cascades and the Sierra had declined by more than 80 percent—and more than 90 percent in key forests near the urbanized Puget Sound basin. By the recent accounting of the Associated Press, nearly 7 million acres, or 28 percent of the national forest in western Washington, Oregon and northern California, were protected from logging by the Clinton administration's 1994 Northwest Forest Plan. In addition, 4.6 million acres were open to logging, and of that, only 1.1 million acres were classified as old growth. The impact on jobs and the economy were, if not catastrophic, serious: Between 1988 and 1998, the number of lumber and plywood mills in Oregon declined by nearly half, from 252 to 127. Twenty mills closed in Douglas County alone, according to timber consultant Paul Ehinger of Eugene. Some 2,800 jobs in the wood-products industry in Douglas County vanished within two years of the owl being listed. More than half of the 60,000 Oregon workers who held jobs in the wood-products industry at the beginning of the 1990s no longer had them by 1998, according to a report published in the Journal of Forestry in 2003. By the end of the decade, nearly half of those who left the timber industry disappeared from state employment records. The missing workers were likely either retired, unemployed or living in another state. Jim Geisinger, the (Douglas Timber Operators) executive director from 1976 to 1981 and now the executive vice president of Associated Oregon Loggers, said that in the early '80s, the Umpqua National Forest sold 360 million board feet a year. "Today, Umpqua National Forest is selling only about 10 percent of that," he said. A study by economists from the Portland-based consulting firm ECONorthwest, Oregon State University and the Oregon Employment Department tracked 18,000 former timber workers between 1990 and 1998 who found another job in Oregon. Nearly half found work in the service and retail sectors. One-third were employed in the manufacturing and construction industries. It turns out that despite all the regulations, the population of the spotted owl kept declining, year by year, even after all the new restrictions and regulations on the timber industry. Yesterday, Phil Kerpen called my attention to this anecdote: An experiment to see if killing invasive barred owls will help the threatened northern spotted owl reverse its decline toward extinction is underway in the forests of Northern California. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Friday that specially trained biologists have shot 26 barred owls in a study area on the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation northeast of Arcata, Calif. They plan to remove as many as 118 barred owls from the area, keeping the 55 known barred owl nesting sites open over the next five years to see if spotted owls increase, said Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Robin Bown. Contractors go to an area that barred owls are known to be in, play a digital caller to attract them, and shoot the birds with a shotgun. The service is spending $3.5 million over six years to remove 3,600 barred owls from sites in Oregon, Washington and California. That terminology is a bit Orwellian, isn't it? We "removed" the owls by tracking them, attracting them, and then blasting them full of birdshot until they were dead. Remember that next time the Fish and Wildlife Service ask you to "remove" your trash. So the environmentalists' plan to save the owls . . . is to shoot other owls. Now, come on. We're conservatives. We know that this isn't a real solution. Put aside the concerns that this constitutes big government meddling in Charles Darwin's biological free market. This is a territorial dispute between two species, and one is aggressive and invasive. The only thing that stops a barred owl . . . with a gun . . . is a spotted owl with a gun. It's time to arm the spotted owls and enact a "stand your ground" law that guarantees the spotted owl's right to use deadly force to defend themselves without any requirement to evade or retreat from a dangerous situation. You will get the spotted owls' guns when you take them . . . from their cold, dead talons. I'll leave the last words on this to a very wise source from the Pacific Northwestern town of Twin Peaks, Washington, Major Garland Briggs of the U.S. Air Force: 
ADDENDUM: Your tax dollars at work: "Just as the long-suffering American public waiting on those security lines suspected, jokes about the passengers ran rampant among my TSA colleagues: Many of the images we gawked at were of overweight people, their every fold and dimple on full awful display. Piercings of every kind were visible. Women who'd had mastectomies were easy to discern—their chests showed up on our screens as dull, pixelated regions. Hernias appeared as bulging, blistery growths in the crotch area. Passengers were often caught off-guard by the X-Ray scan and so materialized on-screen in ridiculous, blurred poses—mouths agape, à la Edvard Munch. One of us in the I.O. room would occasionally identify a passenger as female, only to have the officers out on the checkpoint floor radio back that it was actually a man. All the old, crass stereotypes about race and genitalia size thrived on our secure government radio channels."
To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com
| Why not forward this to a friend? Encourage them to sign up for NR's great free newsletters here. Save 75%... Subscribe to National Review magazine today and get 75% off the newsstand price. Click here for the print edition or here for the digital. National Review also makes a great gift! Click here to send a full-year of NR Digital or here to send the print edition to family, friends, and fellow conservatives.
| National Review, Inc.
Manage your National Review subscriptions. We respect your right to privacy. View our policy. This email was sent by:
National Review, Inc.
215 Lexington Avenue, 11th Floor
New York, NY 10016 | 
Comments
Post a Comment