Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior…
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More Legal Shenanigans from the Biden Administration’s Department of Education

Among the foremost threats to individual freedom in America is the abusive and oftentimes lawless behavior of federal administrative agencies, whose vast armies of overpaid bureaucrats remain unaccountable for their excesses.

Among the most familiar examples of that bureaucratic abuse is the Department of Education (DOE).  Recall, for instance, the United States Supreme Court’s humiliating rebuke last year of the Biden DOE’s effort to shift hundreds of billions of dollars of student debt from the people who actually owed them onto the backs of American taxpayers.

Even now, despite that rebuke, the Biden DOE launched an alternative scheme last month in an end-around effort to achieve that same result.

Well, the Biden DOE is now attempting to shift tens of millions of dollars of…[more]

March 19, 2024 • 08:35 AM

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Yes, There Are Two Americas; No, They’re Not What You Think Print
By Troy Senik
Thursday, August 06 2015
During the Obama years, we’ve been governed by the urban elite: a president who emerged from a Chicago college campus, a multi-millionaire San Francisco socialite running the House of Representatives and a Las Vegas gambling official presiding over the Senate while living out of the Washington D.C. Ritz-Carlton.

It’s the defining political cliché of our age: America is a politically polarized nation. How, exactly, are we divided? Well that’s a bit of a dealer’s choice: Republican vs. Democrat; haves vs. have-nots; religious vs. secular; coastal vs. inland; whites vs. minorities; business vs. labor. But no matter how you slice it, the one thing we seem to have established a consensus about is that we’re unable to establish a consensus.

After spending a few weeks traversing the country by car — visiting 20 states in the western 2/3 of the country — I’m increasingly convinced that we’re missing the real split. My travels took me from Malibu, California to Martin, South Dakota; from Sutherlin, Oregon to the South Side of Chicago. What I discovered along that broken, winding route: The real disjuncture — the headwaters of our political divide — is the urban-rural divide.

Start with the fact that rural America even exists, a fact that’s lost on many city-dwellers. (There’s a reason they call it “flyover country.”) This leads to a certain narrowness of perspective that becomes risible if you’re familiar with the wider world.

All the hand-wringing about urban sprawl, the need for “walkable cities,” and our new age of scarcity, after all, overlooks a pretty basic fact: The vast majority of the country is empty. As a friend of mine once responded to someone who worried aloud that America was running out of room: “Ever driven laterally across Kansas? There’s plenty of space left.”

What’s noteworthy here is that this lack of comprehension is asymmetrical. Rural Americans knows exactly what’s going on in the urban centers. How could they not? Their laws are made in Washington, D.C., and their media comes from New York City and Los Angeles. But how many big-city elites have a decent grasp on the daily rhythms of life in New Mexico or Louisiana (outside of Taos or New Orleans, that is)?

This isn’t to indulge in a sort of reflexive anti-urban populism. Sarah Palin notwithstanding, residents of New York’s Upper East Side and Billings, Montana, both have equal claims to be “real Americans.” It is to note, however, that many of the shibboleths of elite progressivism — a faith that’s practiced almost exclusively in wealthy urban enclaves — only make sense when you understand that our cosmopolitans are provincial in their own way.

Take, for instance, President Obama’s new EPA regulations mandating sharp cuts in carbon emissions and a new emphasis on renewable fuel sources. This program, will, by necessity, substantially raise energy costs. And if you live in a temperate coastal enclave where the air conditioning or the heater is only called upon to nudge the temperature in a few degrees one direction or the other, that’s not that big a deal. But try shouldering that burden when you’re trying to make it through a summer in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert or a winter in Fargo.
 
The same is true of illegal immigration. President Obama and his liberal supporters don’t think twice about amnesty proposals, because most of the immigrants they’re actually familiar with are either the kind of high-skilled white-collar workers you find at tech companies or the maids and gardeners beloved in affluent neighborhoods because they work hard at discounted prices.

It’s doubtful that any of them know what it’s like to live in neighborhoods populated by the likes of Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, the illegal immigrant who admitted to the senseless murder of Kate Steinle in the sanctuary city of San Francisco last month.

Pick virtually any topic and the dynamic is the same. Why should gentry liberals care about school choice? Their kids will go to the private academy of their choosing regardless. Why worry about people losing their doctors under ObamaCare? The progressive elite will be able to afford concierge medicine from whomever they like. What does it matter to slander the police as bloodthirsty racists? The cops are rarely called to their gated communities anyway.

During the Obama years, we’ve been governed by the urban elite: a president who emerged from a Chicago college campus, a multi-millionaire San Francisco socialite running the House of Representatives and a Las Vegas gambling official presiding over the Senate while living out of the Washington D.C. Ritz-Carlton.

That’s a troika that cares not one whit about life in rural America — nor, for that matter, about life in the suburbs or the most desperate parts of the inner city. And that largely explains why all those parts of the country have been done such a disservice by their tenure.

Barack Obama famously ran for president pledging to bring the entire country together as one. He then proceeded to govern a continental nation of over 300 million people as if it is just his Chicago neighborhood writ large. Keep that in mind the next time someone tells you that Democrats are the party of diversity.

Notable Quote   
 
Happy Easter!…[more]
 
 
— From All of Us at CFIF
 
Liberty Poll   

Do you believe the U.S. Supreme Court will ultimately reject the new Biden administration automobile emissions rule as beyond the scope of administrative agency authority?