When Charles Murray’s best-selling Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 appeared a few months ago, the book’s fictional working-class neighborhood, Fishtown, became one more battleground in America’s 50-year-old culture war. Fishtown was representative, Murray argued, of a new white underclass in America—one produced by cultural decline, especially the collapse of marriage. Critics objected that the real source of misery in the nation’s Fishtowns wasn’t a lack of marriages; it was the extinction of manufacturing jobs. The disagreement was familiar to culture-war veterans: conservatives versus liberals, family breakdown versus dearth of good jobs, culture versus economics, David Brooks versus Paul Krugman.

Murray might have done more to acknowledge that globalization, technology, and the knowledge economy have wrenchingly changed the working-class world. Still, Coming Apart is correct: you can’t grasp what’s happening at the lower end of the income scale without talking about family breakdown. In fact, the single-mother revolution, as I’ll call it, takes us a long way toward understanding the socioeconomic problems on everyone’s mind these days: poverty, inequality, and the inability of those at the bottom to move up.

The single-mother revolution shouldn’t need much introduction. It started in the 1960s, when the nation began to sever the historical connection between marriage and childbearing and to turn single motherhood and the fatherless family into a viable, even welcome, arrangement for children and for society. The reasons for the revolution were many, including the sexual revolution, a powerful strain of anti-marriage feminism, and a superbug of American individualism that hit the country in the 1960s and ’70s.

The first public sign that the single-mother revolution had arrived came in 1965, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his controversial report on the black family. As a young assistant secretary of labor, Moynihan had stumbled across data showing that the percentage of black mothers who were unmarried at the time of their children’s birth was rising, reaching a then-staggering 24 percent, even while black male unemployment was falling. This puzzled Moynihan: Shouldn’t more male paychecks mean fewer single mothers? Moynihan realized that he was uncovering a new cultural phenomenon—voluntary single motherhood—and concluded that it would impede blacks’ economic progress.

After 1965 came the deluge. Other minorities and then whites joined the revolution, and it found plenty of extra recruits among the rapidly increasing number of women made single through divorce. In its broad outlines, the story is familiar by now. When Moynihan was writing, 93 percent of all American births were to women with marriage licenses. Sure, lots of these women might have married just before the baby bump, as had long been the case—but they nevertheless had husbands, with whom they formed a unit responsible for the coming baby. Over the next few decades, however, the percentage of babies with no father around rose steadily. As of 1970, 11 percent of births were to unmarried mothers; by 1990, that number had risen to 28 percent. Today, 41 percent of all births are nonmarital. And for mothers under 30, the number is 53 percent.

Read More at city-journal.org. By Kay S. Hymowitz.

(CBS News) CBS News has learned the House Oversight Committee will vote next week on whether to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress. It’s the fourth time in 30 years that Congress has launched a contempt action against an executive branch member.

This time, the dispute stems from Holder failing to turn over documents subpoenaed on October 12, 2011 in the Fast and Furious “gunwalking” investigation.

The Justice Department has maintained it has cooperated fully with the congressional investigation, turning over tens of thousands of documents and having Holder testify to Congress on the topic at least eight times.

However, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., says the Justice Department has refused to turn over tens of thousands of pages of documents. Those include materials created after Feb. 4, 2011, when the Justice Department wrote a letter to Congress saying no gunwalking had occurred. The Justice Department later retracted the denial.

“The Obama Administration has not asserted Executive Privilege or any other valid privilege over these materials and it is unacceptable that the Department of Justice refuses to produce them. These documents pertain to Operation Fast and Furious, the claims of whistleblowers, and why it took the Department nearly a year to retract false denials of reckless tactics,” Issa wrote in an announcement of the vote to be released shortly. It will reveal the vote is scheduled for Wednesday, June 20.

Read More at CBS News. By Sharyl Attkison.

Editor’s note: A longer version of this article first appeared at American Spectator.

The left-leaning magazine The Nation has published a list of what it deems America’s all-time, most influential progressives. The list, which you can review for yourself, is very revealing.

For starters, it’s fascinating that The Nation leads with Eugene Debs at number 1. Debs was a socialist. It was 100 years ago this year, in 1912, that Debs ran for president on the Socialist Party ticket.

Today’s progressives get annoyed if you call them socialists. Well, why is a pure socialist the no. 1 “progressive” on The Nation’s list?

Of course, progressives really get annoyed if you suggest they bear any sympathies to communism. That being the case, two other “progressives” on The Nation’s list are quite intriguing: Paul Robeson and I. F. Stone.

Paul Robeson was a proud recipient of the “Stalin Prize.” Even the New York Times concedes Robeson was “an outspoken admirer of the Soviet Union.” When Robeson in 1934 returned from his initial pilgrimage to the Motherland, the Daily Worker thrust a microphone in his face. The Daily Workerrushed its interview into print, running it in the January 15, 1935 issue under the headline, “‘I Am at Home,’ Says Robeson At Reception in Soviet Union.”

Read More at Western Journalism. By Paul G. Kengor.

A former Justice Department attorney says purely political considerations have motivated the DOJ to order the state of Florida to stop purging foreigners from its voter rolls.

Recently the state of Florida discovered 53,000 dead people registered to vote. Florida also found non-citizens on the voter rolls, and Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner began the process of removing them. But the DOJ sent a letter to Detzner ordering him to stop.

J. Christian Adams is the former Justice Department Attorney who worked in the DOJ Voting Section and now writes for PJ Media. He says the Justice Department’s request is way beyond the power of the federal government.

“Panic has set in in this administration over the last four weeks because of polling numbers showing things do not look good,” he tells OneNewsNow. “So the Justice Department, it appears, has responded accordingly by using the power of the federal government to force states like Florida to keep illegals on the voting rolls [and] to do other things in other states on voter ID, like South Carolina, to really attempt to ratchet the election in their favor.”

Read More at onenewsnow.com. By Chad Groening.

Recently in the news, it was reported that the Pentagon discovered that about 1800 crates worth of Chinese manufactured parts for some of our technology-driven weapons are USELESS! Apparently, the companies that brought these parts into the United States didn’t bother checking these parts to see if they actually WORKED before selling them to our military. Defense contractor Raytheon is among the most prominent of these companies.

This little scandal bodes the question: why are we buying sensitive military parts (parts that are needed to make weapons work) from Red China? Apparently, we Americans are too stubborn or thick-headed to learn our lessons easily. Red China has never stopped being Red China, In the last 6 years, they have blessed us with pet ingredients that basically killed about a thousand pets. Chinese birth control for the American pet world? Tainted tooth paste, tainted and destructive drywall ( look up Chinese drywall on the internet), defective tires, and lead paint tainted toys. Golly, they must really love us to send us such “quality products” huh?!

We have taken a lot of American jobs to China; think General Electric X-ray division among other things. G.E. Gateway computers was sold to the Chinese, who now import them back to the United States. You see the words”Made in China” on just about everything you buy today because they use cheap (slave) labor and can manipulate their currency to undercut the price of just about anything anybody else makes. In case you haven’t noticed, the Chinese are really good at what the Japanese used to do: copy (and sell cheaper) items that we all use!

They have even been able to reverse-engineer a new fighter plane that is a dead ringer for our F-22 Raptor stealth fighter; imagine that? Just because Chinese agents in this country are among the busiest in the world, engaged in industrial and military espionage, nobody should be alarmed in this country-should theyt? The way it has been going lately, all the Chinese have to do is ask the Obama administration for the secrets they want, make a nice campaign donation, and boom…..there they are!

What are the Chinese doing with all their new-found economic wealth? Feeding the poor? Repairing infrastructure? Not really; they seem to be spending their money on a massive military build up. One report in the news even said that China was building a huge UNDERGROUND complex…for what? China is also building itself something it never has had…..a modern BLUE WATER NAVY! It looks as though the Chinese may be setting the stage for a future challenge to the United States in the Pacific and elsewhere.

Read More at Western Journalism. By MJ Nellett.

Photo credit: terrellaftermath