Senior Palestinian Authority official Mohammed Dahlan told PA TV last week that deceased former leader Yasser Arafat had managed to fool the world with his public condemnations of anti-Israel terrorism.
Dahlan said the international community demanded that Arafat condemn terrorism against Israel in order to win land concessions from the Jewish state, so he did just that. But behind the scenes, Dahlan said Arafat continued backing the use of terrorist violence against Israelis, a fact that Western leaders only acknowledged toward the end of Arafat’s life.
“Arafat would condemn [terror] operations by day while at night he would do honorable things,” said Dahlan, who today serves as top advisor to Arafat’s successor, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.
This comes as no real surprise to anyone who paid attention to Arafat’s Arabic-language speeches, or to his actions. But it is unusual to see a top Palestinian official overtly boasting of how they pulled the wool over the world’s eyes.
The number of Venezuelan media outlets not controlled by Hugo Chavez’s government is already dwindling, but the few that remain are still too independent. So Venezuela is considering abolishing the last vestiges of its free press:
A tough new media law, under which journalists could be imprisoned for publishing “harmful” material, has been proposed in Venezuela.
Journalists could face up to four years in prison for publishing material deemed to harm state stability.
Public prosecutor Luisa Ortega Diaz, who proposed the changes, said it was necessary to “regulate the freedom of expression” without “harming it”.
Oh, they’re not going to harm freedom of expression? That’s a relief.
Jay Nordlinger, at the Corner, has written a lot about the diminishing number of safe zones, places where people of different political persuasions can interact amiably. One big non-safe-zone is academia, where the majority ideology tends to be liberal, and where liberals delight in injecting political attacks into matters having nothing to do with politics.
Case in point: At a faculty meeting yesterday, we were discussing the process by which the department would fill an important position that is soon to become vacant. One person joked that Sarah Palin should get the job. Most of the room dutifully laughed.
I was perplexed. The joke was not at all funny, it was just weird. Sarah Palin is just one of countless people who would be inappropriate for the job, and who wouldn’t want it, and who weren’t relevant to the conversation. It would have made just as much sense to joke that Sidney Crosby should get the job, or any other name one might draw from a hat.
So why does the Sarah Palin “joke” elicit a laugh, while the Sidney Crosby “joke” would presumably elicit only an uncomfortable silence? I think that members of this particular political mindset have been conditioned to believe that Sarah Palin is inherently funny. Her very name is a joke for all contexts.
I was reminded of what C. S. Lewis wrote about flippancy in the Screwtape Letters. For any readers who may not be familiar with the Screwtape Letters (I like to pretend), they are a series of letters written by a senior devil to a junior devil, giving advice on how to tempt a young man away from the “Enemy” (i.e., God). In chapter eleven, Uncle Screwtape takes on the topic of laughter and recommends flippancy as the best form for the devils’ purposes:
But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy; it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practise it.
House Democrats have declined to subpoena available records that might reveal whether other members of Congress got discounted VIP mortgages from subprime lender Countrywide Financial Corp. similar to the sweetheart deals given Democratic Sens. Chris Dodd and Kent Conrad. . .
Any subpoena must be issued by the committee’s chairman. But because Democrats control Congress, there are no Republican committee chairmen. . . Daniel Frahm, a Bank of America spokesman, said the bank is ready to turn over the Countrywide VIP documents if it receives a subpoena.
A friend called to my attention the home page of the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem, which is devoid of any material pertaining to Jews or Israelis. Every item visible on the page is about Palestinians.
A fair reflection, I think, of where this administration’s sympathies lie and how it sees Jerusalem.
Surely an exaggeration, right? I had to see for myself.
No exaggeration. On the web page of the US consulate in Israel’s capital there are seventeen featured items. Of those, twelve relate to the Palestinian Authority or to Palestinians, one advertises two Fulbright fellowship programs (one for Palestinians and one for Arabs), one relates to the “peace process,” and the other three relate to the United States. Not one relates to Israel or Israelis.
UPDATE (8/6): It’s not just the web site. It seems that the Jerusalem consulate is essentially the embassy to Palestine, as a matter of official policy:
Claudia Rosett has since asked a few questions and was told by a press officer at the Consulate that it is “100 percent independent” of the embassy in Tel Aviv, reporting not to the U.S. Ambassador in Israel but directly to the Secretary of State in Washington.
We have promised for years that we would move our embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, but we have never gotten around to it, for fear of offending the Palestinians. At the same time, we’ve built an embassy to the Palestinians in that very city. Doesn’t that send a clear message?
Keith Hennessey has turned the CBO analysis of the House Democrats’ horrifying health care bill into a horrifying chart:
You can see the huge tax increase outstripped by the even huger spending increase. In the long run, the outlook is even more horrifying:
These are the official CBO numbers. The true story is worse still. The marginal tax rates being contemplated (around 50%) are well up the Laffer curve, so the new taxes won’t bring in nearly as much money as predicted by the CBO’s model.
The Washington Times has a lengthy account of how the Black Panther voter intimidation case came to be dismissed, after Justice Department lawyers had already won the case. Thomas Perrelli, the #3 official at the Justice Department (and a political appointee, of course), made the final decision that a suitable penalty for flagrant voter intimidation was an injunction against doing it again.
We’re seeing a lot of “White House defends Biden” stories, like this one:
White House Press Secretary Roberts Gibbs on Monday called Vice President Biden an “enormous asset to the administration,” insisting that the loose-lipped No. 2 is not a distraction even after the State Department had to walk back his thorny comments on Russia. . . The latest surprise came when [Biden] suggested that Russia will cooperate with the United States on a range of issues because the country is a mess.
“I think we vastly underestimate the hand that we hold,” Biden said during an interview with The Wall Street Journal at the end of his trip to Georgia and Ukraine. “Russia has to make some very difficult, calculated decisions. They have a shrinking population base, they have a withering economy, they have a banking sector and structure that is not likely to be able to withstand the next 15 years, they’re in a situation where the world is changing before them and they’re clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable.”
This drew a swift rebuke from the Kremlin, as the Obama administration has repeatedly said it wants to “reset” relations with Russia. The two countries produced a string of agreements on nuclear stockpile reduction and other matters following Obama’s recent trip to Moscow.
He’s right about Russia’s tough situation, but is it smart to be taunting them? I think the whole “reset” idea is foolishness, but if we’re going to try it, we ought to really try it.
Ever notice that those who endorse high taxes and those who actually pay them aren’t the same people? Consider the curious case of Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel, who is leading the charge for a new 5.4-percentage point income tax surcharge and recently called it “the moral thing to do.” About his own tax liability he seems less, well, fervent.
Exhibit A concerns a rental property Mr. Rangel purchased in 1987 at the Punta Cana Yacht Club in the Dominican Republic. The rental income from that property ought to be substantial since it is a luxury beach-front villa and is more often than not rented out. But when the National Legal and Policy Center looked at Mr. Rangel’s House financial disclosure forms in August, it noted that his reported income looked suspiciously low. In 2004 and 2005, he reported no more than $5,000, and in 2006 and 2007 no income at all from the property.
The Congressman initially denied there was any unreported income. But reporters quickly showed that the villa is among the most desirable at Punta Cana and that it rents for $500 a night in the low season, and as much as $1,100 a night in peak season. Last year it was fully booked between December 15 and April 15.
Mr. Rangel soon admitted having failed to report rental income of $75,000 over the years. First he blamed his wife for the oversight because he said she was supposed to be managing the property. Then he blamed the language barrier. “Every time I thought I was getting somewhere, they’d start speaking Spanish,” Mr. Rangel explained.
Mr. Rangel promised last fall to amend his tax returns, pay what is due and correct the information on his annual financial disclosure form. But the deadline for the 2008 filing was May 15 and as of last week he still had not filed. His press spokesman declined to answer questions about anything related to his ethics problems.
Public opposition to the auto bailouts may translating into consumer buying decisions, with 46% of Americans now saying they are more likely to buy a car from Ford because it did not take government money to stay in business. . .
At the same time, nearly one-out-of-five Americans (19%) say someone in their family or a friend has chosen not to buy a car from GM or Chrysler because they took bailout money. . .
One-out-of-three investors (33%) say it is very likely that the government will give an unfair advantage to the bailed-out automakers.
A new study shows that, contrary to the the popular impression that upside-down mortgages are generally due to adverse market movements and resetting ARMs, most are actually due to reckless choices made by the borrower:
In crafting programs to prevent foreclosures, policymakers have assumed that the primary reason homeowners owe more on their home than it is worth is that they bought at the top of the market. In other words, they’ve lost equity primarily through forces beyond their control.
A new study challenges this premise and finds that excessive borrowing may have played as great a role.
Michael LaCour-Little, a finance professor at California State University at Fullerton, looked at 4,000 foreclosures in Southern California from 2006-08. He found that, at least in Southern California, borrowers who defaulted on their mortgages didn’t purchase their homes at the top of the market. Instead, the average acquisition was made in 2002 and many homes lost to foreclosure were bought in the 1990s. More than half of all borrowers who lost their homes had already refinanced at least once, and four out of five had a second mortgage.
The original loan-to-value ratio for these borrowers stood at a reasonable 84%, but second and third liens left homeowners with a combined loan-to-value ratio of about 150% by the time of the foreclosure sale date.
Borrowers, meanwhile, took out around $2 billion in equity from their homes, or nearly eight times the $262 million that they put into their homes. Lenders lost around four times as much as borrowers, seeing $1 billion in losses.
That last figure is staggering: these borrowers took eight times the amount of money out of their houses as they put in. Now the government is going to step in to try to “save” them?
Democrats are considering a video game tax to fund their health care catastrophe and to discourage inactive lifestyles. It’s hard to imagine that a video game tax could bring in much money, and I’m not aware of any study that supports the hypothesis that taxing video games would result in healthier lifestyles.
Out of my gaming companions, most do not live sedentary lives. In fact, a surprising number are firefighters. On-duty firefighters need something to do while they wait around in the station for a call and video games fit the bill. I also understand that video games are popular among soliders deployed to inhospitable locations like Afghanistan and Iraq. (I generally don’t game with them, though, due to time differences and network latency.) Firefighters and soldiers would be surprised to learn of their inactive lifestyles.
This is all anecdotal, of course. But again, as far as I’m aware, these proposals are being made on mere conjecture. One would also get different anecdotes from children, I’m sure, but children are actually a small segment of the video game market:
As younger generations grow and have children of their own, more parents are playing video games than ever before – 36% of parents play video games. “Families that play together stay together” can now mean playing video games.
Eighty percent of gamer parents play video games with their kids.
Forty-seven percent of video game players are between the ages of 18 and 49. The fastest growing demographic is the 50-plus crowd. This doesn’t mean that kids aren’t playing video games anymore; far from it… they still represent 28% of all gamers out there.
More and more older Americans are playing video games than ever before. Video games are perfect activities for seniors by providing activity without physical stress. They offer health benefits with coordination, balance and endurance. 24% of Americans over age 50 played video games last year, and that number should only increase.
The average game buyer is 38 years old, five years older than the average player. This gap in age represents the scores of parents buying games for their children, and the tremendous influence parents have on sales.
It has been a long time since there was any real doubt that Venezuela supports FARC, the communist rebel/terrorist group in Colombia. It has been particularly clear since a Colombian raid captured a FARC computer containing files detailing Venezuela’s support. But Hugo Chavez claimed the files were a fraud, and those with reason to do so pretended to believe him.
Swedish-made anti-tank rocket launchers sold to Venezuela years ago were obtained by Colombia’s main rebel group, and Sweden said Monday it was demanding an explanation.
Colombia said its military found the weapons in a captured rebel arms cache and that Sweden had recently confirmed they originally were sold to Venezuela’s military. . .
The head of the Swedish government agency that supervises weapons exports, Jan-Erik Lovgren, told Swedish Radio that the weapons were sold to Venezuela in the 1980s.
Lovgren said the incident — a clear violation of end-user licenses — could affect future decisions on whether to allow weapons sales to Venezuela.
Naturally, Venezuela is continuing to deny everything, but their denial doesn’t even make sense:
Venezuela’s justice minister, Tareck El Aissami, on Monday dismissed the report of the missiles, denying that “our government or institutions have ever collaborated with any type of criminal or terrorist organizations.”
He told state television that the case of the rocket launchers appears “a cheap film of the U.S. government.”
Venezuela needs to give up the charade. Sweden sold the weapons to Venezuela, and Colombia has them now. How did Colombia obtain them, if not the way it said?
Despite their denials, influential Democratic Sens. Kent Conrad and Chris Dodd were told from the start they were getting VIP mortgage discounts from one of the nation’s largest lenders, the official who handled their loans has told Congress in secret testimony.
Both senators have said that at the time the mortgages were being written they didn’t know they were getting unique deals from Countrywide Financial Corp., the company that went on to lose billions of dollars on home loans to credit-strapped borrowers. Dodd still maintains he got no preferential treatment.
Dodd got two Countrywide mortgages in 2003, refinancing his home in Connecticut and another residence in Washington. Conrad’s two Countrywide mortgages in 2004 were for a beach house in Delaware and an eight-unit apartment building in Bismarck in his home state of North Dakota.
I’m not that much of a student of history, but I knew that Emperor Hirohito did not attend the Japanese surrender ceremony at the end of World War Two. Oops:
President Obama has put securing Afghanistan near the top of his foreign policy agenda, but “victory” in the war-torn country isn’t necessarily the United States’ goal, he said Thursday in a TV interview.
“I’m always worried about using the word ‘victory,’ because, you know, it invokes this notion of Emperor Hirohito coming down and signing a surrender to MacArthur,” Obama told ABC News.
The Washington Post, under the headline “A Case of Getting What You Pay For”, reports:
The evolution of heart attack treatment over the past three decades is a story of doing more things to more people at greater expense with better results. It is a portrait in miniature of medicine in the United States.
Although inappropriate care, high administrative costs, inflated prices and fraud all add to the country’s gigantic medical bill, the biggest driver of the upward curve of health spending has been the discovery of new and better things to do when someone gets sick.
“Money matters in health care as it does in few other industries,” wrote Harvard University health economist David Cutler in 2004. “Where we have spent a lot, we have received a lot in return.”
Beyond heart attack treatment, similar stories can be told about cancer, premature birth, arthritis, HIV infection, mental illness and innumerable other common conditions. The trend in all of them toward more intensive, expensive and better treatment is not likely to change with health-care reform, however constituted.
Providing health insurance to the 47 million Americans who don’t have it — the key feature of the bills before Congress — is likely to expand heart attack treatment and increase spending on it, not pare it back and reduce the cost.
For the second time this month, congressional budget analysts have dealt a blow to the Democrat’s health reform efforts, this time by saying a plan touted by the White House as crucial to paying for the bill would actually save almost no money over 10 years.
A key House chairman and moderate House Democrats on Tuesday agreed to a White House-backed proposal that would give an outside panel the power to make cuts to government-financed health care programs. White House budget director Peter Orszag declared the plan “probably the most important piece that can be added” to the House’s health care reform legislation.
But on Saturday, the Congressional Budget Office said the proposal to give an independent panel the power to keep Medicare spending in check would only save about $2 billion over 10 years- a drop in the bucket compared to the bill’s $1 trillion price tag.
“In CBO’s judgment, the probability is high that no savings would be realized … but there is also a chance that substantial savings might be realized. Looking beyond the 10-year budget window, CBO expects that this proposal would generate larger but still modest savings on the same probabilistic basis,” CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf wrote in a letter to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer on Saturday.
This “plan” is really a plan to have a plan. It doesn’t identify any savings; it creates a commission to find those savings. And that idle speculation is how health care reform is supposed to pay for itself. (I’ll be impressed if the panel finds enough savings to pay for its expenses.)
It also strikes me that the plan is constitutionally dubious. It sounds to me as though the plan would delegate legislative power to the proposed panel, which is unconstitutional.
I have to say, I am greatly enjoying the spectacle of President Obama’s ill-advised decision to wade into the Gates affair. The president called his news conference to try to rally support for his increasingly unpopular effort to “reform” health care. The last thing he should have done was change the subject. When asked about it, he should have said (as Charles Krauthammer suggests) something like “I am a friend of Gates, and therefore I’m inclined to believe his story. But since there’s no way I can know what actually happened, I’ll decline a comment.”
But he just couldn’t help himself. True to form, he had to opine, whether he was conversant with the facts or not. And, at the risk of sounding cynical, it’s fortunate that he did. The top story the next day wasn’t health care, but the president’s attack on the Cambridge police. He blunted any impact his press conference might have had.
POSTSCRIPT: Regarding the affair itself, the facts are in dispute. The police might have behaved inappropriately, or maybe not. (Power Line argues that their actions might well have been reasonable.) But one thing is clear; Gates was foolish. The police have the power to arrest people on the flimsiest justification, and they often do. Whether or not his anger was justified, arguing with the police was likely to get him in trouble. That’s not the way things should be; it’s just the way they are.
French anti-work activists are opposing a proposed law that would make it legal to work on Sunday. They plan to protest, once they get back from their summer holiday:
Jean Dionnot, a former boxing champion, founded The Collective of Sunday Friends in 2006 to lobby against modifying Sunday trading rules. He said he was appalled by the new law. “Now people will spend their Sundays wandering in malls,” he said.
Mr. Dionnot said he was pausing his campaign for a while, but would resume his fight in September. “It’s the holiday break now,” he said.
Hillary Clinton apparently hasn’t learned yet that words are important on the international stage:
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said this week a nuclear Iran could be contained by a U.S. “defense umbrella,” setting off tremors in the Middle East.
Since making the remark on a television chat show in Thailand, Clinton has backpedaled, saying she was only restating existing policy and not referring to any sort of formal guarantees of protection under an American “nuclear umbrella.”
And when Israeli officials raised alarms that she seemed to suggest the U.S. was resigned to a nuclear-armed Iran, Clinton and senior State Department officials hastily insisted such a prospect was still unacceptable and that no policy had changed.
Extending the “nuclear umbrella” is serious business, and shouldn’t be thrown around as small talk. It’s a pity the president chose his Secretary of State for political considerations, rather than foreign policy competence.
The latest Rasmussen poll shows that, for the first time, a majority disapproves of President Obama’s job performance, 51% to 49%. He also faces an eight point deficit among those who feel strongly, 38%-30%. Only 37% of independents approve.
Other polls have also shown a sharp drop in the president’s numbers, but still have him in the mid-fifties. Why is Rasmussen’s result different? They explain:
When comparing Job Approval data from different firms, it’s important to keep in mind that polls of likely voters and polls of all adults will typically and consistently yield different results. In the case of President Obama, polls by all firms measuring all adults typically show significantly higher approval ratings than polls of likely voters. Polls of registered voters typically fall in the middle. Other factors are also important to consider when comparing Job Approval ratings from different polling firms.
Most polls use a broader sample most of the time, even during election campaigns, and shift to likely voters just before the election takes place. I think Rasmussen does better by being consistent.
It’s also worth nothing that Rasmussen did the best job at predicting the outcome of the 2008 election, tied with Pew Research. (CNN did slightly better with its actual prediction, but had a much wider margin of error, giving it a greater average error.)
UPDATE: What Rasmussen calls the approval index (strong approval vs. strong disapproval) hits double digits at -11, with 29% strongly approving and 40% strongly disapproving.
Doing the arithmetic, that means 29% strongly approve, 20% weakly approve, 11% weakly disapprove, and 40% strongly disapprove. Wow.
UPDATE: For what it’s worth (not much), Zogby has Obama down as well, at 48% approval against 51% disapproval. But Zogby is usually a left-leaning poll, so it might be worth something. In the 2008 election Zogby over-estimated Obama’s margin of victory more than nearly any other major poll (only CBS/NYT and Newsweek did worse). Even the Fair model, which does no polling and doesn’t even know who the candidates are, did better.
[John Holdren] was confirmed with little fanfare on March 19 as director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, a 50-person directorate that advises the president on scientific affairs, focusing on energy independence and global warming.
But many of Holdren’s radical ideas on population control were not brought up at his confirmation hearings; it appears that the senators who scrutinized him had no knowledge of the contents of a textbook he co-authored in 1977, “Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment,” a copy of which was obtained by FOXNews.com.
The 1,000-page course book, which was co-written with environmental activists Paul and Anne Ehrlich, discusses and in one passage seems to advocate totalitarian measures to curb population growth, which it says could cause an environmental catastrophe. . . Holdren and his co-authors spend a portion of the book discussing possible government programs that could be used to lower birth rates.
Those plans include forcing single women to abort their babies or put them up for adoption; implanting sterilizing capsules in people when they reach puberty; and spiking water reserves and staple foods with a chemical that would make people sterile.
To help achieve those goals, they formulate a “world government scheme” they call the Planetary Regime, which would administer the world’s resources and human growth, and they discuss the development of an “armed international organization, a global analogue of a police force” to which nations would surrender part of their sovereignty.
Holdren now says that he does not hold the views expressed in the book he co-wrote, and never did. He has not explained why then he allowed his name to be attached to the book.
AFP describes last Wednesday’s anti-Zelaya demonstration in Tegucigalpa this way:
Hundreds of white-clad demonstrators on Wednesday protested against Zelaya’s return in the capital, where the situation has become increasingly polarized.
“We don’t like you, Mel,” one banner read in Wednesday’s demonstration, using Zelaya’s nickname.
Zelaya’s supporters meanwhile have announced their own demonstrations.
(Emphasis mine.)
A photograph of the demonstration suggests that there might have been a wee bit more than merely hundreds in the demonstration:
I’ll accept his apology as genuine, but it doesn’t entirely settle the matter. The troubling thing about the incident wasn’t so much Amazon’s action, but their capability to do it. Bezos can’t put this back in the box, now that we know about that capability. Bezos needs to explain what Amazon will do to protect the ebooks that we already own.
According to a new Rasmussen poll, more people (31%) say that the stimulus has hurt the economy than helped (25%). When you combine that with the 36% who say it has had no impact, that’s a 67% majority. But it sure did provide a lot of pork.
At the risk of repeating a point made by others, I think it’s worth noting that President Obama is going about overhauling our health care system in a strange manner. One would expect a leader, particularly one who is considered highly cerebral by many, to carefully craft a health care reform plan after a period of intense study. One would expect further that the leader would fight for his plan, compromising only around the edges and under extreme duress. One would not expect a leader to defer to others in his party simply to get a plan, any plan, passed by a certain date.
But Obama is, in the words of David Brooks, deferring to the Old Bulls in Congress on health care reform. He appears to be engaged in an ad hoc process whereby proposals are being cobbled together more or less on the fly and then adjusted in response to the political circumstances as they appear on a given day. . .
It is shocking that Obama would attempt to overhaul our health care system — this vast and critical portion of our economy — on such a short timetable and in such a haphazard fashion. The public senses the absurdity of his approach. It expects Obama to act like the careful, studious leader it voted for. Plainly, though, he has shed that cover.
Yes, Obama has made it clear (almost in as many words) that it is more important to do something, anything, than to do the right thing.
“The time for talking is through,” but the time for reading has apparently not yet arrived. In a conference call yesterday, President Obama admitted that he doesn’t know what’s in the bill for which he’s trying to rally support:
During the call, a blogger from Maine said he kept running into an Investors Business Daily article that claimed Section 102 of the House health legislation would outlaw private insurance. He asked: “Is this true? Will people be able to keep their insurance and will insurers be able to write new policies even though H.R. 3200 is passed?” President Obama replied: “You know, I have to say that I am not familiar with the provision you are talking about.”
Lobbyists Write National Policies: For example, Vice President Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force of oil and gas lobbyists met secretly to develop national energy policy. . .
Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s Plan . . .
Make White House Communications Public: Obama will amend executive orders to ensure that communications about regulatory policymaking between persons outside government and all White House staff are disclosed to the public.
Conduct Regulatory Agency Business in Public: Obama will require his appointees who lead the executive branch departments and rulemaking agencies to conduct the significant business of the agency in public, so that any citizen can see in person or watch on the Internet these debates.
Obama administration officials have rejected a watchdog group’s request for a list of healthcare industry executives who’ve been meeting secretly in the White House with Obama staffers to discuss pending healthcare changes being drafted there and in Congress.
According to the Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington, which is suspicious of the influence of health industry lobbyists and company officers, it received a letter from the Secret Service citing an Obama Justice Dept. directive and denying access to visitor logs under the “presidential communications privilege.”
It’s not just Obama and Bush, either. The Clinton administration also had secret meetings with health care lobbyists, and there was a lawsuit in that case too. Transparency is much more popular with presidential candidates than with presidents.
A rule we can rely on to be unfailingly applied is this: No matter how much the government controls the economic system, any problem will be blamed on whatever small zone of freedom that remains. This of course is evidence of a rigged game. The government can’t possibly monitor and regulate absolutely every transaction that takes place in a country. Stalin and Hitler couldn’t do it by a long shot. So anything that displeases the ruling regime can easily be laid at the doorstep of freedom and be used as an excuse for stamping out whatever traces of liberty still exist.
President Obama has irked close allies in Congress by declaring he has the right to ignore legislation on constitutional grounds after having criticized George W. Bush for doing the same.
Four senior House Democrats on Tuesday said they were “surprised” and “chagrined” by Obama’s declaration in June that he doesn’t have to comply with provisions in a war spending bill that puts conditions on aid provided to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
In a signing statement accompanying the $106 billion bill, Obama said he wouldn’t allow the legislation to interfere with his authority as president to conduct foreign policy and negotiate with other governments.
Earlier in his six-month-old administration, Obama issued a similar statement regarding provisions in a $410 billion omnibus spending bill. He also included qualifying remarks when signing legislation that established commissions to govern public lands in New York, investigate the financial crisis and celebrate Ronald Reagan’s birthday.
“During the previous administration, all of us were critical of (Bush’s) assertion that he could pick and choose which aspects of congressional statutes he was required to enforce,” the Democrats wrote in their letter to Obama. “We were therefore chagrined to see you appear to express a similar attitude.” . . .
Obey and the other House lawmakers said this week that Obama’s signing statement on the war bill will make it tougher in the future to persuade other lawmakers to support the World Bank and IMF.
If Congress can’t place conditions on the money, “it will make it virtually impossible to provide further allocations for these institutions,” they wrote.
Let me be clear. Israel’s security is sacrosanct. It is non-negotiable. The Palestinians need a state that is contiguous and cohesive, and that allows them to prosper — but any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel’s identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognized and defensible borders. Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.
The United States views East Jerusalem as no different than an illegal West Bank outpost with regard to its demand for a freeze on settlement construction, American sources have informed both Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
Now that Barack Obama no longer needs to court Jewish voters, East Jerusalem has gone from part of the undivided capital of Israel to an illegal West Bank outpost. Another one for the “who are the rubes” file.
I noted yesterday that George Miller, chairman of the House Education and Labor committee, was claiming that the CBO scored his bill as revenue-neutral over ten years, when in truth the CBO scored it as adding $239 billion to the deficit over ten years.
Today, Politico has an explanation for Miller’s story, sort of. Apparently $245 billion of the bill’s spending is for Medicare payments to doctors, and was put there to gain the support of the AMA. The Democrats argue that that part of the bill doesn’t count. Voila, $6 billion surplus.
In my own budget, the only way to make spending not count is not to spend the money. I wish I were as clever as the Democrats.
UPDATE: In the original post, I said the Democrats were planning to use accounting gimmicks to hide the $245 billion. That’s what I understood the Politico article to be saying with its reference to “new accounting rules,” but now it looks like I misunderstood. The chicanery the Democrats are attempting is political, not accounting. (I’ve corrected the post accordingly, but the mistake lingers on in the permalink.)
This statement from the Energy and Commerce committee explains the Democratic argument a little bit better:
The bill’s long-term reform of Medicare’s physician fee schedule to eliminate the potential 21 percent cut in fees, and put payments on a sustainable basis for the future, will cost about $245 billion. Those costs, however, are not included in the net calculations above, as they will be absorbed under the upcoming statutory “pay go” legislation that is pending in the House.
So the $245 billion doesn’t count because it also appears in some other bill that’s under consideration. Well, at least I understand what they’re saying now.
The Democrats are trying to have it both ways. If they don’t want to count the $245 billion, they can simply take it out of the bill. Leave it in the other bill and pass that one. (Or better yet, don’t.) But that’s exactly what they cannot do. The $245 billion fee adjustment was the AMA’s price for supporting the bill. If they take it out, they risk losing the AMA’s support. It’s a package deal.
The CBO doesn’t score a bill based on what else might be done in other political realities. If it’s in the bill, it counts. It’s ridiculous to pretend otherwise.
UPDATE: This AP article lays things out pretty well.
Oh well. The planes are still in the House bill, but I don’t expect they’ll survive. Hopefully we’ll never have to fight anyone with an air force again.
The last issue of the Economist had a special report on Texas and California. In short, Texas is cleaning California’s clock. Texas is flourishing due to its business-friendly policies; even in the recession Texas is doing better than most. California is just the opposite. The report’s opening article concludes:
How Texas responds to these forces will determine its future. Get it right, and the state will remain business-friendly and globally competitive, with high employment and a rising standard of living. Get it wrong, and Texas could follow California (which “flipped” from Republican to Democratic control in part thanks to rapid immigration) down the road of high taxes and excessive regulation. This route has bankrupted California and is prompting a net 100,000 people to leave each year. Many of them head for Texas. One simple statistic tells that tale: it costs nearly three times as much to rent a self-drive van for a one-way journey from Los Angeles to Houston as the other way around.
That’s just two states, but National Review has a broader analysis (subscription required). They charted unemployment against political preference (as measured by presidential elections) across the states and found a clear correlation between Democrats and unemployment:
The longer a state has been Republican, the better off it is. The longer a state has been Democratic, the worse off it is.
Three months ago President Obama ordered his cabinet to find ways to cut the federal budget $100 million (that is, 0.003%) within 90 days. The order to cut such a tiny amount was widely derided, even on the left. Paul Krugman pointed out that Obama could cut $100 million every day for his entire term and still not make a dent in the budget.
But now it seems that even $100 million was too much for this administration to cut:
On April 20, President Obama challenged his Cabinet to cut $100 million in spending over the next 90 days.
The deadline came — and went — without a report from the White House on whether or not that promise was fulfilled.
Asked about the spending cuts, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Monday that information still was being compiled.
This is becoming a pattern for this president. He makes an announcement with great fanfare, but doesn’t actually have a plan to accomplish it. He sets a deadline by which a plan will be devised, and the deadline passes silently with no plan. The crazy thing is that this goal (unlike, say, closing Guantanamo) is easy, or at least it should have been.
In the early days of the Obama administration, the president announced — with great fanfare — that he was overturning all the Bush administration detention policies. He didn’t have new policies to replace them with, though. In reality, he was just announcing a plan to have a plan.
It turns out that even the plan to have a plan wasn’t so rigid:
The Obama administration on Monday pushed back its own deadline for devising new anti-terrorism policies.
The decision had been expected, as presidentially appointed task forces have failed to meet a six-month schedule for making policy recommendations on how terror suspects should be interrogated, held in custody or handed over to other countries.
Senior administration officials said Monday that the report on detention will be delayed six months and the report on interrogation and transfer policy will be delayed two months.
The cynics who suggested that intending to change policies was much easier than actually changing policies have been pretty well vindicated. Not that anyone is paying attention any more.
He said he had been a highly regarded member of the force, and had so “impressed my superiors” that, at 18, “I was given the ‘honor’ to temporarily marry young girls before they were sentenced to death.”
In the Islamic Republic it is illegal to execute a young woman, regardless of her crime, if she is a virgin, he explained. Therefore a “wedding” ceremony is conducted the night before the execution: The young girl is forced to have sexual intercourse with a prison guard – essentially raped by her “husband.”
“I regret that, even though the marriages were legal,” he said.
Why the regret, if the marriages were “legal?”
“Because,” he went on, “I could tell that the girls were more afraid of their ‘wedding’ night than of the execution that awaited them in the morning. And they would always fight back, so we would have to put sleeping pills in their food. By morning the girls would have an empty expression; it seemed like they were ready or wanted to die.
“I remember hearing them cry and scream after [the rape] was over,” he said. “I will never forget how this one girl clawed at her own face and neck with her finger nails afterwards. She had deep scratches all over her.”
The CBO has scored the House Democrats’ health care bill and it’s a disaster. By 2019 the deficit would be widened $65 billion per year and the gap continues to grow each year, despite a massive tax hike. That’s assuming that the tax hike brings in as much revenue as projected, which it won’t. Also, despite the cost, the plan does not achieve universal coverage; it reaches only two-thirds of the uninsured.
But there’s a curious fact about the House Democrats’ plan. The tax hike is effective in 2011, but the new spending is not effective until 2013. Why is that? I think it’s to make the short-term outlook better. Since they’ll run up $49 billion in new taxes before the spending kicks in, it will take until 2016 for the plan to start losing money. (Again, assuming the tax hike works as predicted.)
So tomorrow’s Democratic spin will be that the plan cuts the deficit. The qualifier “through 2015″ will be mumbled when it’s said at all. The further qualifier “after which it’s a catastrophe” won’t even be hinted at.
UPDATE: Alternatively, they might just lie. From the office of George Miller, chairman of the House Education and Labor committee, comes this press release:
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released estimates this evening confirming for the first time that H.R. 3200, America’s Affordable Health Choices Act, is deficit neutral over the 10-year budget window – and even produces a $6 billion surplus.
This is an outright lie. The CBO scoring (linked above) says it would generate a $239 billion deficit over ten years, not a $6 billion surplus. The longest window over which it would generate a surplus ($4 billion) is six years.
UPDATE: Miller’s number is based on the notion that $245 billion of the bill doesn’t count.
The New York Times is running a series on the evils of cell phone use while driving. Its latest article is chock-full of anecdotes about serious accidents caused by cell-phone use, and laments how people are not responding to the research:
Extensive research shows the dangers of distracted driving. Studies say that drivers using phones are four times as likely to cause a crash as other drivers, and the likelihood that they will crash is equal to that of someone with a .08 percent blood alcohol level, the point at which drivers are generally considered intoxicated. Research also shows that hands-free devices do not eliminate the risks, and may worsen them by suggesting that the behavior is safe.
A 2003 Harvard study estimated that cellphone distractions caused 2,600 traffic deaths every year, and 330,000 accidents that result in moderate or severe injuries.
Yet Americans have largely ignored that research.
This line of argument has always struck me as asinine. It makes good sense to require drivers to have both hands available, so I’ve never been opposed to hands-free requirements. But opposing cell-phone use because it is distracting misses one major point: there are lots of distractions while we drive. We listen to the radio, we talk to people in the car, we have screaming children. (And those are just the reasonable things; there’s also stupid things like eating or applying make-up.) How do the risks of cell phone usage compare to all those other distractions? It seems likely that using a hands-free cell phone is more distracting than listening to the radio, about the same as talking to someone in the car, and quite a bit less than screaming children. But no one is talking about banning carpools, which surely lead to in-car conversations, or banning the transporting of children.
The NYT article did have something useful though. It had a link to a Department of Transportation publication containing an up-to-date (as of 2005) bibliography of research on the subject. On the assumption that the most respectable research appeared in peer-reviewed journals (this is the case in most fields, although not as much in mine), I looked up a handful of the articles on-line. In three cases I was able to find the actual paper, and in three I had to settle for the abstract.
What I found surprised me. None of the abstracts (nor the full papers when I could find them) discussed comparisons between cell-phone use and other distractions. In this, I imagine I was just unlucky (surely someone has looked at the question). But I did notice that all the studies were more measured that the reporting would suggest.
The most interesting was the 2003 Harvard study to which the NYT article alluded. As an aside, it did estimate that eliminating cell phone use would save 2600 lives. But that is not what the study was about. The study did a cost-benefit analysis. It built an economic model and compared the costs of a cell phone ban against the benefits in terms of lives and property saved.
The study found that eliminating cell phone use would be a break-even proposition. In fact, it would be a small net loss. And that doesn’t take into account the intangible cost of the reduction of our liberty. The study also found that eliminating cell phone are a very expensive way to save lives when compared with other possible safety measures. Finally, it’s worth noting that even a total ban on cell phone usage would not eliminate cell phone usage, nor would it probably even come close (see below).
The White House is being forced to acknowledge the wide gap between its once-upbeat predictions about the economy and today’s bleak landscape.
The administration’s annual midsummer budget update is sure to show higher deficits and unemployment and slower growth than projected in President Barack Obama’s budget in February and update in May, and that could complicate his efforts to get his signature health care and global-warming proposals through Congress.
The release of the update – usually scheduled for mid-July – has been put off until the middle of next month, giving rise to speculation the White House is delaying the bad news at least until Congress leaves town on its August 7 summer recess.
Politico reports that Obama is dropping his August deadline for health care reform (Via Instapundit.)
And if that’s not enough evidence that he doesn’t have the votes, Democrats are talking about using a variant of the nuclear option to prevent a filibuster. Fox News reports that Democrats are talking about using reconciliation to pass health care reform. Reconciliation is a parliamentary maneuver that allows a budget to pass the Senate with only a majority vote. Under the Byrd Rule, reconciliation does not apply to non-budget legislation. The Byrd Rule barred it from being used to pass health care reform in 1993, and it still bars it today. Nevertheless, Democrats may try, and with control of the chamber, they can do whatever they want.
Why do I liken this to the nuclear option? Here’s how I see this playing out. To satisfy the Byrd Rule, Democrats would have to strip out all non-budget items, including individual and employer mandates, and the government insurance scheme. The bill that would be left over isn’t what the Democrats want. So, the chair (Harry Reid) rules that the full bill is permitted under reconciliation, Byrd Rule notwithstanding. After a point of order, the chair’s ruling is sustained by a majority vote (without the support of Republicans, moderate Democrats, or Robert Byrd). That’s precisely the nuclear option.
Democrats would be making a huge mistake to carry out this strategy. The spectacle of the Democrats breaking the Senate rules to pass a controversial bill the the public doesn’t even want will cost them dearly at the polls. But with so many true-believers in the Democratic caucus, they may decide it’s worth it.
The illegal Honduran referendum to allow presidential re-election never took place, but investigators searching the presidential palace after Manuel Zelaya’s ouster have found what would have been its official results. Unsurprisingly, the referendum passed by a wide margin, at least in the one polling place that is being reported. This is popping up in multiple press outlets now, so the story sounds legit.
One common argument among those who would like to see the would-be tyrant restored to office is that he is unpopular, so restoring him to power would be temporary and not make much difference. That argument is inoperative now; Zelaya’s preparations for election fraud make his unpopularity moot. (Setting aside the fact that Zelaya cannot constitutionally be restored to office.)
A recent article by Sam Kazman in National Review on CAFE fuel-economy standards made a point I hadn’t seen before. It’s obvious in retrospect, so I’m sure it was already out there and I just missed it. In any case, it’s worthy of notice.
Because of the law of demand, it’s not clear whether CAFE standards actually reduce fuel consumption. Improving fuel economy makes driving cheaper, and making a commodity cheaper causes people to consume more of it. More driving means more fuel used.
So fuel economy has an indeterminate effect on fuel usage. The direct effect reduces usage, but the indirect effect (by encouraging driving) increases it. Which effect is greater depends on the shape of the demand curve. For some people (like me), fuel costs have little effect on driving habits, but for others it has a great effect. Without empirical data, there’s no way to say which dominates.
POSTSCRIPT: An additional knock against CAFE standards is they regulate average fuel economy, when it’s the numerator that policymakers care about. One way that automakers can (and do) meet CAFE standards is by selling cheap, light cars at a loss in order to counterbalance the less fuel-efficient vehicles that are their main business. This improves the average fuel economy, but it does so by putting more cars on the road, which increases fuel usage. When you combine this effect with the previous one, it seems very likely indeed that CAFE standards do nothing to conserve fuel.
Posted by K. Crary 
