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Celebrating Mothers

 By Alan Caruba

As someone who had the great good fortune to have had a remarkable mother, a woman who embraced being my Mother by providing unconditional love and support for my various activities and decisions over the course of my life, I approach the subject of motherhood with the knowledge that this does not apply to everyone.

I have friends whose mothers were true horror stories. One wonders how they survived theirs. And, of course, I can only approach the topic from a son’s point of view. A mother’s relationship with a daughter may differ, but I cannot speak to it. Daughters, too, have benefitted or paid a price for their mothers.

What struck me as I contemplated the forthcoming Mother’s Day was the way my Mother, born in the early 1900’s both loved being a mother and, well before the woman’s movement that demanded equality, was in the adult school workplace teaching the art of gourmet cuisine for some three decades.

Rebecca acquired a great following and her classes were always sold old. Mother, who occasionally expressed regret she had not attended college, had an encyclopedic knowledge, not only of food, but of wines. Not only would she author two cookbooks, she would become the first woman board member of the Sommelier Society of America.

Need it be said that dinner was the highlight of our days together, Mother, my Father Robert, and myself. An older brother was largely gone out of our lives as the result of service in the Army and marriage shortly thereafter.

Mother brought to her classes the philosophy she lived at home. My Father adored her. Their marriage exceeded sixty years together. He delighted in her success. That was reflected in an atmosphere of love that imbued our lives together.

Mother lived to age 98, passing away in 2002. A day never passes without thoughts of her. I was truly blessed in the same way my Father, her friends, and countless students felt. She imparted a philosophy that saw life as a constant opportunity to learn about one’s passions and to pursue them.

The modern American holiday of Mother’s Day was first celebrated in 1908 when Anna Jarvis held a memorial for her mother in Grafton, West Virginia. She had begun her campaign to have Mother’s Day become a recognized holiday in 1905, the year her mother passed away. As she put it, your mother is “the person who has done more for you than anyone in the world.” Several states officially recognized Mother’s Day and in 1914 President Wilson signed a proclamation creating Mother’s Day on the second Sunday in May as a national holiday.

There have been men whose mother’s contributed in significant ways to the success they achieved. To call them Mama’s Boys is to realize that the relationship had both a good and not so good effect on them. Elvis Presley began his rise when he went to Sun Records in Memphis to record some songs as a birthday present for his mother, Gladys. He was her only child and had a very close, loving relationship. She was living with him at Graceland until she passed away in 1958.

Another Mama’s Boy was General Douglas MacArthur. The youngest of her three sons, when he went off to West Point, she followed, taking up residence at a hotel where she could keep an eye on him. Reportedly they got together for an hour after he dined with his fellow students. He, of course, grew up to lead America to victory in the Pacific Theatre of World War Two. There was nothing about him that suggested his mother’s close attention and love did anything but prepare with a great sense of self-confidence.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the only son of Sara and she was as controlling a mother as one could imagine. After he married Eleanor without Sara’s approval, she gave them a townhouse in Manhattan which connected to her own! Reportedly, Franklin latter admitted he had been terrified of her mother his entire life. That, however, did not interfere with his rising to become President and one of the great leaders of his times.

One might speculate that, for good or ill, being a Mama’s Boy, loved and/or controlled applies in some fashion to the sons of all the mothers.

The fortunate ones like myself can grow up to bask in the love of their mothers and look back on their lives together with memories that guide our present lives.

To me, motherhood, along with fatherhood, has surely got to be the most important job any woman or man can undertake.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

Obama's Economic Disaster

By Alan Caruba

Commenting on the rioting in Baltimore, the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Henniger was almost to the end of his April 30 text when he said “On Wednesday morning, the year’s first-quarter GDP growth rate came in—0.02%. Next to nothing. For the length of the Obama presidency, with growth significantly below norm, unemployment for blacks aged 24 and younger has hovered between 30% and 40%. That’s the real powder key, not the police.”

Most Americans do not put the state of the economy at the heart of everything else is occurring. Instead they listen to politicians apply the blame to everything other than themselves. President Obama spent his entire first term blaming George W. Bush for the bad state of the economy he inherited, but instead of addressing it, he increased it by imposing ObamaCare, radically altering how many would be hired while others were cut to a part-time status. The bill added a number of taxes as well.

When 2015 arrived in January CNS News reported that “A record 92,898,000 Americans 16 and older did not participate in the labor force in December, as the labor force participation rate dropped once again to 62.7 percent, a level it has not seen in 36 years,” according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

Remember those unemployed young blacks? In March the BLS noted that a record of 12,202,000 black people were not in the labor force. The unemployment rate for black people in March was 10.1 percent, which is nearly double the overall unemployment rate of 5.5 percent.  For black teens, age 16 to 19, the unemployment rate was even higher at 25.0 percent, meaning that one in four black teens who were actively seeking a job did not have one.

By the beginning of April, the BLS reported that “a record 93,175,000 Americans 16 and older did not participate in the labor force in March, as the labor force participation rate dropped to 62.7 percent, the lowest level seen in 37 years.”

Also in April, the BLS reported that “a record 56,131,000 women, age 16 years and over, were not in the labor force the previous month, as the participation rate for this group dropped to 56.6 percent—a 27 year low.

It was no surprise that the Department of Agriculture reported that “The number of beneficiaries who receive compensation from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), otherwise known as food stamps, has topped 46,000,000 for 37 straight months.”

The U.S. Census Bureau started 2015 with news that one out of five young adults—white, black, Hispanic—and ages 18 to 34, currently live in poverty!  That’s 13.5 million people, “up from one in seven (8.4 million people) in 1980.”

If all this strikes you as very bad news, it gets worse. In February, the Daily Caller’s White House Correspondence, Neil Monro, reported that “President Barack Obama has quietly handed out an extra 5.46 million work permits for non-immigrant foreigners who arrived as tourists, students, illegal immigrants or other types of migrants since 2009.”

“’The executive branch is operating a high parallel work-authorization system outside the bounds of the (immigration) laws and limits written by Congress (and which) inevitably reduces job opportunities for Americans,’ said Jessica Vaughan, the policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies” which filed the FOIA request the revealed this travesty.

So it didn’t matter to  Barack Obama that millions of Americans were out of work while the White House masterminded a secretive program to provide non-Americans access to the jobs that were available.

We are living in the midst of an economic disaster and despite the often rosy headlines the reality is one that Stephen Moore, the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, took note of in January in The Washington Times. He identified “hidden indicators” of the true state of the economy as 2015 began:

“The $1 trillion growth gap. This economic recovery is the lowest in 50 years”

“The restless recovery. It’s been 10 years since Americans in the middle class got a pay raise that kept pace with inflation.”

“Inequality is worse. The Gini coefficient (as measured by the Census Bureau), the left’s favorite measure of income inequality, rose each of Mr. Obama’s first four years in office, breaking all-time highs in both 2011 and 2012, and it remains high.”

“The debt has grown by $7.3 trillion. When Mr. Obama entered office the national debt was under $11 trillion. Now it’s more than $18 trillion…it will be $19 trillion when he leaves office.”

The record speaks for itself. Americans are worse off today than when Obama took office in 2009. In the years since then he has totally failed to take the best understood steps to push back against a recession and unemployment. He has expanded the federal government. He has failed to initiate a reform of the nation’s tax code to stimulate investment and expansion. 

The nation’s first black President has so poorly served the interests of the African-American population that they are worse off today. He has practiced “equal inequality” by afflicting our other demographic groups, younger workers, woman, and everyone else who has been left unable to afford college and unable to purchase a home and start a family. These years will be seen in retrospect as a desert of opportunity.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

Holding the Voters in Contempt

 

By Alan Caruba

Today’s lead story in The Wall Street Journal is about the result of its latest poll regarding Hillary Clinton. It says a lot about why she and the leaders of the Democratic Party must surely hold its core members in contempt. “Support for her among Democrats remains strong and unshaken.”

In the seven weeks since she announced her candidacy to be the next President of the United States and then virtually vanished from view, the news about her destroying private emails that should have been public records and the shenanigans of hers and Bill’s foundation have taken their toll.

The share of people with a negative view of Hillary says the Journal “jumped to 42% from 36%” and “only a quarter of registered voters said they view her as honest and straightforward, down from 38% last summer.”  Only a quarter? You mean that many people still think she’s honest?

As Peter Wehner opined in Commentary “the depths of the Clinton’s corruption and avarice is stunning” noting that “The Clintons have known for years that Hillary would run for president—and yet they still undertook this transparently unethical and potentially politically catastrophic action” referring to their foundation’s actions and the “deletion of 30,000 emails, another breathtaking inappropriate, and possibly illegal act.”

The track record of the Democratic Party at this early point in the 2016 campaigns makes one ask why anyone would still support it, its lone candidate, and its representatives. The economy has been in the tank for the whole of the Obama administration, the same one that a Democrat-controlled Congress foisted ObamaCare on the nation without ever having read the bill.

The President’s primary obsessions these days are making sure Iran gets to have a nuclear arsenal, extending diplomatic recognition to Cuba, the leading Communist nation in our hemisphere, and making sure that our southern border remains so porous that thousands of illegal aliens can gain access.

I would be happy to tell you what Hillary’s objectives and policies are, but other than repeating the same old, failed liberal crap of the past, there’s nothing specific to identify. Does she want to “help the poor”, “protect the middle class”, et cetera? Well, sure she does. As to anything else, her opinion today is often in direct opposition to her opinion of yesterday. She’s not saying much and with reason; as often as not she makes a fool of herself in the process.

If you were a leader in the Democratic Party would you take a dim view of those who vote to keep your candidates in office? Would you, however, even once ask why the Party is unable to produce more than one candidate for President (forget Bernie Sanders—he’s a Socialist who votes with the Democratic caucus) at this point?

And who is that candidate? It is a former First Lady who has spent her entire life in politics riding the coattails of her husband, a charming rascal who has cheated on her for decades. Together they have been in more scandals than can be listed here.

They may have been “dead broke” when they left the White House, but they now own two houses and are worth millions, not the least because as Obama’s Secretary of State the foundation took in millions in donations and Bill took in millions to give speeches, often from the same donors. Was the U.S. foreign policy purchased over her four years? Was the security of the emails she was sending breached? Definitely. Can you name a single treaty or major foreign policy achievement of Hillary Clinton’s service as Secretary of State? Neither can she.

Pause now and compare that the dynamism of the Republican Party. As Gov. Mike Huckabee announces today, its slate of presidential candidates is as lively a group as one can imagine. The Party has asserted control in Congress to the point where the White House knows it no longer has free reign to destroy the nation in every imaginable way.

That’s why voters will in 2016 likely rebuke the Democratic Party in an electoral bloodbath. It’s why the voices within and beyond the Party should be calling for Hillary to step aside. It won’t happen, but it should.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

A Pox on Baltimore

By Alan Caruba

Thanks to an infection and the antibiotics taken to rid myself of it, I have had several days of being able to do little more than watch the news on television, listen to it on the radio, and reading about it in my daily edition of The Wall Street Journal. If there was anything else happening in the world, you would not know it because it was 24-7 Baltimore, Baltimore, Baltimore.

Specifically, it was about the arrest and death of Freddie Gray, a known drug dealer and user with an extensive rap sheet. There are different descriptions of the manner of his death, but the details of the autopsy are still obscure beyond a reference to having received a blow to his spine. This is attributed to having been placed in the police van, shackled hand and foot, but not having a safety belt applied.

The response from a certain element of Baltimoreans was to begin to loot, vandalize and set fire to their own neighborhoods by way of protesting alleged police brutality. This followed his funeral on Monday. The Mayor’s response was to tell the police to stand down and let the protesters have their way. When that predictably did not work, the National Guard was called in and a curfew imposed.

Capping these events was the indictment of the six arresting officers by the State’s Attorney General, Marilyn Mosby that included charges of second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter. That seemed to appease the mob that passes for Baltimore’s citizens.

I wish I could say I have sympathy for Freddie Gray and his family, but I don’t. I wish I could say that I feel sorry that Baltimore has been a state of decline and decay since the last riots in 1968, but no one asks why the trillions of dollars poured in comparable cities since the days of Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” hasn’t demonstrated any results.

I wish I could say that the connecting factor between Baltimore, Detroit, and other Democrat-controlled cities was the primary reason that their citizens suffer unemployment, why their children attend schools that fail to teach them even fundamental skills, but what has evolved in these distressed cities is a culture that does not emphasize the traditional family, demand better education, and replaces the work ethic with the “entitlement” check. The Baltimore mother who chastised her son to keep him from participating in the riot is single and has five other children.

These cities are daily crime scenes. The riot was a crime scene.

And who is accused of Freddie Gray’s death? Members of the Baltimore Police Force who initially spotted Gray, a 25 year old with a criminal record, and went to investigate what they had observed. He ran. They ran after him. That’s what we want and expect our police to do.

The indictment, a purely political act intended to quell the angry mood of those Baltimoreans who protested by committing crimes, is an attack on every police officer in America. Most are good men and women, but like any other profession, there are some bad ones. The legion of police who protect us do not go around murdering suspects indiscriminately.

Tell that to State Attorney Mosby. Then consider that Freddie Gray’s attorney, William H. Murphy, Jr. donated $5,000 to her campaign. Consider that her husband, Nick Mosby, is a Baltimore city councilman with lots of reason to see the riots quelled.

What these cities and the decades reaching back to the 1960s all represent is a vocal resentment of police authority. Back then they were called “pigs.” America has been drifting away from the traditional respect and regard we have had for our police.

The problem isn’t the police.

It’s liberal notion that raising taxes and heavily regulating businesses large and small will somehow attract them to our cities. It doesn’t work that way. Our cities have become great dumping grounds for people who interest the Democratic Party only around election time.

And that is a problem for the police. It will be a growing problem for everyone if we cannot return to a decent respect for our police.

So, for now, a pox on Baltimore and on all the politicians from the President on down who keep telling us the police are the problem, not the world of Freddie Gray’s roaming our city’s streets.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

In Recovery

 

Life at "Warning Signs" it going to take a rest in the week ahead. There will be no commentaries while I take my antibiotics and get lots of rest. I expect to be writing again by May 10.

 

Thanks for visiting "Warning Signs" and for your donations to sustain it.

 

 

Alan Caruba,

Editor

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