Too much tree cutting dangerous!
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As a New Yorker who had planned months ago to be in Charleston last weekend, I had no idea what a world away the city would be.
Our hotel, the Francis Marion, was a five-minute walk down Calhoun Street, through Marion Park, to the Emanuel AME Church, where Dylann Roof allegedly murdered nine members of the church in its upper room on June 17.
President Obama came to Charleston on Friday to eulogize the Rev. Clementa Pinckney.Late Saturday morning, the surrounding neighborhood seemed normal. The farmers’ market was open for business in Marion Park. At the park’s entrance, a break dancer spun in circles on his hands to entertain tourists, while rap music poured from a speaker.
We walked away from the break dancer and past the park’s huge monument to John C. Calhoun, South Carolina’s famous 19th-century proponent of slavery. At the next intersection there was a police roadblock to ban traffic, and beyond that the white facade of Emanuel Church. In a few hours, funeral services were going to be held for Tywanza Sanders, 26, and Susie Jackson, 87.
Wonder Land columnist Dan Henninger on his trip to Charleston, South Carolina, and the political left’s war on religion. Photo credit: Getty Images.
Saturday morning in Charleston was sunny, hot and very humid. Red Cross volunteers across from the church offered free bottles of cold water. In the street and on the sidewalk there was a crowd, but not a very big crowd. Most of the TV cameras and media from Friday were gone on Saturday.
Most of the people who had come to have a look at Emanuel Church were wearing shorts and T-shirts. Some brought their small children. The people who had come to attend the funeral of Tywanza Sanders and Susie Jackson were wearing dresses, hats, dark suits, white shirts and ties. These were the members of the Emanuel congregation or friends, and they stood in a long, slow-moving line down Calhoun Street.
The funerals were scheduled to begin at 2 p.m., so it was hard not to be astonished at what happened when 2 o’clock came: The skies opened—a violent, wind-whipped downpour that instantly filled the street with running water. Standing under a small tent, one of the Red Cross ladies, a black woman, said, “Maybe this will wash it all away.”
Then lightning, with frightening explosive force, ripped the sky above the Emanuel Church spire. It was 2:03 p.m.
There has been more than enough to think about the past two weeks, since mad Dylann Roof put all this in motion. What the thoughts add up to, I think, is that Charleston in the future must remain an important place, not for the notoriety of this 21-year-old racist’s mass murder, and not for the taking down of the Confederate flag. Charleston is important for what it was before this happened.
After the first very friendly conversation with a black Charlestonian, on the way to Emanuel Church, one thinks that under the circumstances, this cordiality is very nice. And it kept happening.
A young man across from the church Saturday, whose wife was inside, gave us a lecture on Dylann Roof’s moral weakness, then grabbed our hands and said, “You take care of yourselves.” A housekeeping manager at the hotel, after a brief exchange about the week, threw her arms around us and then walked away.
It wouldn’t be like this in many other cities, notably up North, where anger often overwhelms everything.
Earlier in the week, the Charleston Post and Courier carried a story about local black leaders denouncing a public call to violence Wednesday by Malik Shabazz, president of Black Lawyers for Justice. “They are more than welcome here,” said Charleston activist James Johnson, “but take that hate home with them.”
At the corner of Calhoun and Meeting Streets, the only vendor, a black man, was selling T-shirts. The most prominent shirt said: “Charleston Strong: Standing as One Race.”
Along Calhoun, white banners covered the facades of buildings, most quoting the Psalms. The banner on the Sustainability Institute, opposite the church, said: “Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity—Psalm 133:1.”
Is Charleston the promised land of racial comity? Hardly. But since the shooting, many have noted the remarkable spirit of conciliation in Charleston. Where did that come from?
It didn’t come from their religion alone. It came from their habits of religion.
In the North, on campuses and in sophisticated circles, we are rapidly becoming unchurched, secularized. Which raises a question: Where will a predominantly secularized society learn virtue?
At churches like Emanuel AME, parishioners study the Bible. They learn and then relearn the same lessons of goodness and its inevitable absence.
Our smartphone-based politics has a way now of moving on quickly from anything that happens. But if there is a road away from hateful racial bigotry, it will require a few things. It will require politicians able to accept the possibility of racial progress. It will require a lot of people learning what the members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church knew a long time before the night of June 17.
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2) Hillary’s Email Story Unravels
Now that we know she edited the emails before turning them over, the entire record is suspect.
At the campaign kickoff on Roosevelt Island in New York City, June 13. PHOTO: LI MUZI/XINHUA/ZUMA WIRE
Clinton scandals have a way of bumping and rolling along to a point where nobody can remember why there was any outrage to begin with. So in the interest of clarity, let’s take the latest news in the Hillary email escapade, and distill it into its basic pieces:
• Nothing Mrs. Clinton has said so far on the subject is correct. The Democratic presidential aspirant on March 10 held a press conference pitched as her first and last word on the revelation that she’d used a private email server while secretary of state. She told reporters that she’d turned over to the State Department “all my emails that could possibly be work-related.” And she insisted that she “did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.”
Opinion Journal Video
Main Street Columnist Bill McGurn discusses the latest revelations about the former Secretary of State’s private emails. Photo credit: Associated Press.
Not true and not true. The State Department has now admitted that it is aware of at least 15 work-related emails that Mrs. Clinton fully or partially withheld. We know this only because congressional Republicans, as part of their Benghazi probe, required longtime Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal to turn over his correspondence with her. It revealed work-related emails that had not been disclosed.
These don’t appear to be random oversights, but rather emails that Mrs. Clinton would likely have had an interest in keeping from the public. Most appear to be instances of her telling Mr. Blumenthal about State Department business, even though he was a private citizen and was advising a business seeking contracts from the Libyan government. Others appear to contain discussions that might undermine Mrs. Clinton’s or the administration’s public position on the Libyan conflict.
We also know that the State Department has now upgraded at least 25 of Mrs. Clinton’s emails to “classified” status. State is suggesting this is no big deal, noting that it is “routine” to upgrade material during the public-disclosure process. But that’s beside the point. This isn’t about after-the-fact disclosure. It’s about security at the time—whether Mrs. Clinton was sending and storing sensitive government information on a hackable private email system. Turns out, she was. For the record, it is a federal crime to “knowingly” house classified information at an “unauthorized location.”
A quick correction: At least one thing Mrs. Clinton said in March was true. She deleted email. A lot of it.
• Nothing Mrs. Clinton has supplied to the State Department can now be trusted as legitimate. The real bombshell news was the State Department’s admission that, in at least six instances, the Clinton team altered the emails before handing them over. Sentences or entire paragraphs—which, by the way, were work-related—were removed. State was able to confirm this because it could double-check against Mr. Blumenthal’s documents.
But how many more of the 30,000 emails Mrs. Clinton provided have also been edited? The State Department has archives for its other employees, whom Mrs. Clinton often emailed, so in those cases it has the ability to check Mrs. Clinton’s version. It should now be obliged to do so, and then to produce a final tally of emails that can’t be verified as authentic because they were sent to people outside government, for whom there is no corresponding record.
• Mrs. Clinton is still playing games. Team Clinton says it doesn’t recognize much of the material Mr. Blumenthal supplied, and insists that all the emails from him were turned over. So: Either Mr. Blumenthal fabricated emails; Mrs. Clinton was deleting emails as she went along (and so didn’t have them at the final sorting process); or she’s not being truthful now. Every one of these scenarios is of concern, and deserves inquiry.
• The State Department is itself now part of this scandal. In addition to the 15 emails that Republicans discovered Mrs. Clinton did not turn over, they found another 45 that were withheld from Congress by State. All of those Blumenthal emails have now been released, and it is clear that all were Libya-related, and all fell under Congress’s subpoena. How many more have investigators not been given? The State Department meanwhile continues to play down Mrs. Clinton’s failure to produce, and her mishandling of classified information. This should be seen exactly for what it is: the Obamaadministration covering for the likely Democratic presidential nominee.
• The White House also needs to answer questions. This week State released the first batch of the Clinton emails to the public, nearly 2,000 in all. In them, we find that in 2009, David Axelrod, then an Obama adviser, requested and received Mrs. Clinton’s private email address. And he emailed her on it. Yet in mid-June Mr. Axelrod said on national TV that he “didn’t know” about her private server. How many other people in the administration knew about, sanctioned, and made use of the Clinton arrangement to shelter information?
As it is unlikely the press corps will begin this investigation anew, or with any fervor, the best chance of getting answers from Mrs. Clinton probably rests in her Democratic rivals for the nomination. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley have so far avoided touching the Clinton scandals, unwilling to risk blowback accusing them of undermining the likely nominee. But if those men truly believe themselves better fit for the presidency, they could do the country no bigger favor than to start pressing Mrs. Clinton to explain her actions. Somebody has to..
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday expressed alarm at the emerging nuclear deal between western powers and Iran currently taking place in Vienna. Speaking at the opening of the weekly cabinet meeting, Netanyahu said that "what's coming out of the nuclear talks in Vienna is not a breakthrough, it's a breakdown." Netanyahu said that the world powers were conceding more and more with each passing day. The emerging deal "will pave Iran's way to produce the cores of many atomic bombs and it will also flood Iran with hundreds of millions of dollars that will serve it in its aggression and its mission of terror in the region and the world," the prime minister warned. Netanyahu claimed that the emerging deal with Iran was worse than the nuclear deal that had been signed with North Korea which led to Pyongyang obtaining an arsenal of nuclear weapons. "However, here we are talking about a very big conventional and non-conventional threat against Israel, against the countries of the region and against the world," he stated. Iran and world powers made progress on future sanctions relief for Iran in marathon nuclear talks on Saturday, but remained divided on issues such as lifting United Nations sanctions and the development of advanced centrifuges. Diplomats close to the negotiations said they had tentative agreement on a mechanism for suspending US and European Union sanctions on Iran. But the six powers had yet to agree on a United Nations Security Council resolution that would lift UN sanctions and establish a means of re-imposing them in case of Iranian non-compliance with a future agreement. "We still haven't sorted a Security Council resolution," a diplomat close to the talks told Reuters. "We don't have Iran on board yet." Senior Iranian and Western diplomats echoed the remarks. Some of the toughest disputes, including the question of easing UN sanctions, were likely to be left for foreign ministers when they arrived in the Austrian capital on Sunday, officials said. "Even if and when issues get resolved at an experts level, there will remain some open issues that can only be decided by ministers," a senior US official told reporters. Iran is in talks with the United States, Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia on an agreement to curtail its nuclear program for at least a decade in exchange for relief from economic sanctions. The negotiators missed a June 30 deadline for a final agreement, but have given themselves until July 7. Foreign ministers not in Vienna are expected to rejoin their counterparts in a final push for a deal beginning on Sunday. Reuters contributed to this report. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 4).WRITTEN BY ED FUELNER
HERTIAGE FOUNDATION
We the People.” We’ve heard that phrase so often it’s easy to overlook its significance. But as we mark our nation’s birthday, we should take a moment to ask ourselves: What is the role of the people?
Our nation is unique because of its universal founding principles. At the heart of these principles is the belief that people are free by nature and possess inherent rights. The use each one of us makes of these rights will naturally be different, and the outcomes of those choices will naturally differ, too. But the choice remains ours.
Freedom is thus inextricably bound up with living our lives as we see fit. This is self-government in the truest sense of the term. We the people need not slavishly defer to experts. We can be trusted to govern ourselves.
That is why government must remain limited: The people have given it only limited powers, as described in the Constitution. When we allow government to take more than we have given it, our choices become meaningless. At worst, unlimited government is tyrannical; at best, it imposes a dull uniformity that crushes true diversity and saps the independent spirit of the people.
The founders strove to create a government that couldn’t be dominated by a single faction. That faction might be a minority or a majority. But no matter its size, it would inevitably seek to promote its own narrow interests at the expense of the liberties of the people.
One purpose of the Constitution’s checks and balances—one reason it divides and limits power—is to restrain the ambition of the powerful and promote “the general welfare.”
Yet as the federal government has grown over the past century, its business has increasingly become taking from Paul to benefit Peter, then borrowing from Peter to pay off Paul. What supporters of big government call the general welfare is merely the artful distribution of favors to particular factions.
The federal government is not supposed to be the most important institution in America. In securing the general welfare, it’s supposed to do only those things that are provided for in the Constitution.
It must, for example, provide for the common defense and regulate our relations with foreign nations. It must respect our right to enjoy the fruits of our labor by taxing lightly, and defend the freedom of the marketplace by ensuring the rule of law. And it must remember that the family and religion are where we learn virtue, and that without virtue, government cannot be both limited and free.
As John Adams stated: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” In the United States, government requires not merely the consent of the governed. It rests ultimately on the ability of the people to govern themselves. Thus, the first role—the first duty—of the people is to ensure that they remain virtuous and free.
That is why the American system is based on the rights of the individual, but not on individualism. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that “it is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor,” he captured a vital truth of American freedom. The founders placed great hopes in the Constitution, but they knew that no paper constraints could preserve liberty. That duty rested ultimately with the American people.
The role of the Constitution was to restrain and to check, and—as Washington wrote—to “raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair.” The words of the declaration, the lives of the founders, and the design of the Constitution can inspire, but on their own they cannot preserve the American republic.
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