Howard Hills

Open immigration under law and a tradition welcoming newcomers are pillars of our “nation of immigrants” heritage.  The America idea does not work, however, unless people coming to cast their lot with our country owe equal allegiance to our nation under law, and also have an equal right of consent to the laws under which we live.

While we also welcome visitors who come and go according to our laws, we cannot play host to a permanent subclass of migrants subject to our laws but lack the equal rights and duties of citizenship that make us one nation.  Even if migrants in such a subclass would consent to it, that is not a choice America can allow without diminishing what is noble about our republic.

If not reversed, the current cycle of border violation permissiveness, followed by legalization that merely ushers in the next wave of border violators, will institutionalize the presence of a permanent subclass in America.  In time, that [...] Continue Reading…

In the 2008 campaign Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid described candidate Obama as more appealing than typical black Americans because he was more light skinned and did not speak like most “negroes.”

When Biden thought he had a better chance at challenging Hillary than Obama, he betrayed his working class Catholic roots by condescendingly describing Obama as “clean and articulate,” which by liberal race baiting standards applied to Republicans would be decried as an admission that he saw most blacks as unclean and inarticulate.

I always said there is no racist like a liberal racist.  Before Obama proved them wrong, liberals had convinced themselves that blacks needed white liberal Democrats to run the political plantation to do for blacks what they can’t do for themselves, which is to govern and to lead.   Well, Obama proved the liberals wrong, and he is a strong and competent leader, far more so than [...] Continue Reading…

Sorry reader, but you have some work to do before you get to sample my provocative and alarming contributions to the gun control debate being inflamed by our esteemed Vice President.    I know it is like going to the dentist for some of you, but the gun control debate is so far off target that some constitutional context needs to be created to enable us to take aim at the real issues.

All constitutional rights can be regulated by law.   That includes the 2nd Amendment right of the people to keep and bear arms, as it does every other fundamental right protected by the Constitution.   So you can’t give your kids LSD because you think it will enable them to see God, and tell the judge you are exempt from federal law prohibiting the possession and use of LSD because you were practicing religion protected by the [...] Continue Reading…

Fox News contributor and “mental health expert,” Dr. Ketih Albow, interprets recent surveys of American college youth to mean we are “raising a generation of deluded narcissists.” Relying on analysis of intergenerational data on young adults by psychologist Jean Twenge, Ablow develops his own theory of decline and despair for the generation raised in era of social media and internet.

Yet, the personality traits exhibited by young people who are adapted to life with social media, reality TV and video game culture are the same personality traits young people always have exhibited. Depending on heredity and experienced environmental variables, the old innate versus acquired traits dichotomy, the brain is formed and functions in ways that both meet expected norms and deviate from predicted outcomes. So what else is new?

It is now an iconic cliche, if you will, to recall that Andy Warhol brilliantly predicted that our culture will adapt to [...] Continue Reading…

Reprinted from SocialHostLaw.com

Deputy District Attorney lobbies the Laguna Beach City Council in her official capacity for a Social Host Ordinance

Was appearance before local city council an abuse of her office, lobbying under the color of law?

By Howard Hills, Guest Columnist

On November 13, 2012, Orange County Deputy District Attorney Anna McIntire appeared before the Laguna Beach City Council to lobby for adoption of a Social Host Ordinance (SHO), making it a crime to allow a gathering in a private home at which an adult “knows or reasonably should have known” minors had access to alcohol. The SHO was explicitly and without reservation endorsed by Deputy DA McIntire in her official capacity – including provisions making hosting of a gathering a crime if adults present failed to take “reasonable steps” to prevent minors from drinking. If an adult “in control” of the gathering failed to take such reasonable steps, the act [...] Continue Reading…

Seattle’s QB Wilson arguably is a more consistent and workman-like anchorman than Washington’s RGIII.   The latter tends to deliver sometimes brilliant but uneven results.   Still, my instincts tell me the Redskins will win a messy-but-manly game against Seattle.

Indeed, if RGIII strings together enough of his trademark high performance moments and sustains a reliable degree of competitive competence (at a sufficiently if not necessarily significantly higher level than he did against Dallas), then Alfred Morris will have the offensive fundamentals in place to make the impact he has proven himself capable of delivering. If those elements come together, and there is every reason to expect that will be the case, the Redskins will have the platform to work and win, and the Seahawks will be in real jeopardy.

The most radical variable will be the Seahawk defense, which is not the stuff of football legend by any means, but [...] Continue Reading…

Until the current political farce in which Democrats and the media are creating panic about falling off the “fiscal cliff,” I thought the low point in Obama era American politics was when the American people sat still for passage of the law extending the benefits of nationalized health care in 2010, but delaying taxes to pay for it until after the 2012 election. All I can say about that is we deserve what we get under Obamacare, and it will be too late by the time we realize we don’t like it, if we can even remember what America was like before Obama.

But now we have reached a new low point in which we applaud the Democrats for out-smarting and out-manuevering the Republicans by creating the metaphorical myth of a “fiscal cliff,” in order to panic the public into supporting perpetual debtor nation status for America. What the polls [...] Continue Reading…

I am a free market capitalist who recognizes that venture capital entrepreneurs are among the vital core of working people who drive the creative engine of global wealth production.  We are counting on Wall Street to play a leading role in national and global economic recovery.

But I am unreconciled to the fact that consumers of banking and investment services – principally home mortgage holders and risk intolerant retirement investors – have had to play by the rules and be held accountable for bad choices made during the economic bubble that burst in 2008, while the bank and stock market financial service providers who collected fees facilitating those bad choices have been bailed out with tax dollars.

TARP may have been imperative to prevent catastrophic outcomes, but we will never know for sure because we didn’t let the market work, and we still don’t know if TARP merely delayed worse outcomes yet to be [...] Continue Reading…

As co-producers of the movie “Argo,” actors Affleck and Clooney demonstrate how anyone with the will and a movie studio can change history, from what it was to what they want it to have been instead.   Argo is a mildly compelling cinematic telling of the true story of how the Canadian embassy in Tehran helped a small group of U.S. embassy employees escape anti-American rage in Iran.   It is the tale of events that rocked the world after the new Islamist government in Iran allowed most of the embassy staff to be kidnapped and held hostage for the last half of Carter’s aimless and largely failed presidency.

I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Micronesia during the Iranian hostage crisis, living in a bamboo hut on the edge of an island lagoon. I woke up every morning and listened to reports about the sacking of our embassy and [...] Continue Reading…

Hosni Mubarak’s big mistake was to get old.  So Obama threw him under the bus.  Fine, he was a old dictator, screw him, right?   Obama seems to prefer the new generation of dictators throughout the world.

No matter that for decades Mubarak sustained an order of relative stability that allowed secularism and Islamism to co-exist in a powerful nation at the center of the Arab world.  When Mubarak sent police in civilian clothes into crowds of protesters on camels with sticks used to disperse crowds, that was where Obama and his emerging Co-President Hillary Clinton drew the line.  He was old, so Mubarak had to go.  Arrest, trial, jail or even possible execution was not of any concern, because  Obama did not want to be seen as interfering with the internal affairs of the “New Egypt.”   After all, Obama wants to end all vestiges of “American Imperialism,” right?

As [...] Continue Reading…