Internet Scofflaw

The Obama administration sees the attempting bombing of flight 253 as a political problem, not a national security problem. The White House’s thin-skinned response to Dick Cheney’s continued criticism of President Obama’s national security decisions is just the tip of the iceberg, if this report from the American Spectator is accurate:

On December 26, two days after Nigerian Omar Abdulmutallab allegedly attempted to use underwear packed with plastic explosives to blow up the Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight he was on, and as it became clear internally that the Administration had suffered perhaps its most embarrassing failure in the area of national security, senior Obama White House aides, including chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod and new White House counsel Robert Bauer, ordered staff to begin researching similar breakdowns — if any — from the Bush Administration.

“The idea was that we’d show that the Bush Administration had had far worse missteps than we ever could,” says a staffer in the counsel’s office. “We were told that classified material involving anything related to al Qaeda operating in Yemen or Nigeria was fair game and that we’d declassify it if necessary.”

The White House, according to the source, is in full defensive spin mode. . . “This White House doesn’t view the Northwest [Airlines] failure as one of national security, it’s a political issue,” says the White House source. “That’s why Axelrod and Emanuel are driving the issue.”

Axelrod, who has no foreign policy or national security experience beyond occasionally consulting with liberal or progressive candidates running for political office in foreign countries, has been actively participating in national security briefings from the beginning of the administration. He has also sat in on Obama’s “war council” meetings, providing Obama with suggestions in both venues based on what he knows about polling and public opinion data, say several White House sources. . .

Axelrod’s presence in the meetings has raised some eyebrows, as previous political advisers in the White House have typically not participated in such meetings. Bush Administration sources, for example, say that political adviser Karl Rove was not present at national security meetings.

(Via Hot Air.)

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, but I still am, by the idea that the White House would respond to an attack on the United States by doing opposition research against a past administration.

Another auto bailout:

The federal government said Wednesday that it will take majority control of troubled auto lender GMAC and provide an additional $3.8 billion in aid to the company, which has been unable to raise from private investors the money it needs to staunch its losses.

The Treasury Department has said for months that GMAC would need more federal money, but the decision to increase the government’s ownership stake came as a surprise, cutting against the grain of the Obama administration’s recent efforts to wind down its bailout of large banks.

(Via the Corner.)

The Heritage Foundation has prepared a summary of the Senate health care bill. (Via Instapundit.)

Since selling out on the health care bill, Ben Nelson (D-NE) has taken a dive in the polls. According to Rasmussen, he now trails by 31 points in his re-election bid. (Unfortunately, he is not up for re-election until 2012.) His disapproval rating is at 62%, and interestingly there is no statistical difference between insured and uninsured.

Just 17% of Nebraska voters approve of his “cash-for-cloture” deal. Two-thirds of Nebraskan voters disapprove of the bill, and a majority strongly disapprove.

(Via Hot Air.)

Specifically, they cut funding for explosives detection systems.

If you want to see what happens when progressives are given an unfettered hand, you look to Berkeley, California. Here’s what happens when progressives run the schools:

Berkeley High School is considering a controversial proposal to eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them to free up more resources to help struggling students.

The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High’s School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley’s dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse.

Paul Gibson, an alternate parent representative on the School Governance Council, said that information presented at council meetings suggests that the science labs were largely classes for white students. He said the decision to consider cutting the labs in order to redirect resources to underperforming students was virtually unanimous.

If there were a prize for the year’s worst letter to the editor, this letter to the Boston Globe would surely win:

I AM a math teacher at Brockton High School, the site of a school shooting earlier this month.

Current school security procedures lock down school populations in the event of armed assault. Some advocate abandoning this practice as it holds everyone in place, allowing a shooter easily to find victims.

An alternative to lockdown is immediate exodus via announcement. Although this removes potential hostages and makes it nearly impossible for the shooter to acquire preselected targets, it unfairly rewards resourceful children who move to safety off-site more shrewdly and efficiently than others.

Schools should level playing fields, not intrinsically reward those more resourceful. A level barrel is fair to all fish.

Some propose overturning laws that made schools gun-free zones even for teachers who may be licensed to securely carry concealed firearms elsewhere. They argue that barring licensed-carry only ensures a defenseless, target-rich environment.

But as a progressive, I would sooner lay my child to rest than succumb to the belief that the use of a gun for self-defense is somehow not in itself a gun crime.

(Emphasis mine.)

For some time a majority has believed that the Democratic stimulus plan has not helped the economy (i.e., that it either hurt or had no impact). Now a plurality believes that the stimulus plan actually hurt: 38% say it did, while 30% say it helped and 28% say it had no impact. (Other than spending a whole ton of money we don’t have.) Among independents, 52% say that the stimulus plan has hurt. That’s actually higher than the Republican number (47%).

Unsurprisingly, a majority opposes a new stimulus plan. In fact, a majority also says that we would be better off if we cancelled the unspent portion of the old stimulus plan. Much of it has not been spent yet; we should absolutely do that. But we won’t. Here’s why.

(Via Power Line.)

Arlen Specter opines:

Sen. Arlen Specter, a Republican turned Democrat, said the bill could’ve been better if Republicans had participated in the process.

“If some of the Republicans would come forward with suggestions, offer a vote or two, or three or four, to take away the need to have every last one of the 60 Democrats, you’d have a much better bill in accordance with the tradition of the Congress, especially the Senate, on bipartisanship,” Specter said, adding that Republicans are more interested in “plotting ways to beat President Obama in 2012.”

Republicans did offer suggestions (here’s mine), but Democrats weren’t interested in liberty-preserving, free-market reforms. The Democratic leadership was dead set on a government takeover of the health care system, or as close to one as they could get. So Republicans participated in the process in the appropriate manner, by doing everything they could to stop it. They weren’t able to stop the bill, but GOP “obstructionism” did make it a much better bill, by enabling a Democratic holdout to strip out the public option and the medicare expansion. And GOP “obstructionism” may still stop the bill from funding abortion.

And let’s compare with when Republicans wanted to reform social security. Did the Democrats behave the way Specter says they should? Did the Democrats offer suggestions and a few votes? Of course not. They obstructed the process with all their strength, and they cheered (literally) when reform went down.

The Homeland Security secretary says that the system worked because “everyone played an important role” and within an hour DHS was instituting additional useless precautions everywhere. She also takes credit somehow for the actions of the passenger who saved the day.

The system didn’t work; we got lucky. If not for an incompetent bomber and an alert passenger, flight 253 would have gone down. The bomber was on the terror watch list. If the system had worked, he wouldn’t have been on the plane in the first place. None of the myriad inconveniences we face at the airport stopped him. Now DHS is patting itself on the back for promptly introducing a new legion of ineffective inconveniences after the fact.

Napolitano sees her job as closing the barn door after the cows escape. She needs to be fired. But she won’t.

(Via the Corner.)

When Arlen Specter switched parties, he said he would “not be an automatic 60th vote” for the Democratic agenda, but that’s pretty much what he has been:

In nearly 30 years as a Senate Republican, Arlen Specter was tough to pin down, frequently breaking ranks with his party and giving its leadership fits. Yet in the half-year since he crossed the aisle, Mr. Specter has become a remarkably reliable Democratic vote.

According to a Congressional votes database compiled by The Washington Post, Mr. Specter has voted with the Democrats 94.2 percent of the time since switching parties — an identical figure to his fellow Pennsylvania Democrat Bob Casey Jr. and in the middle range of his party’s caucus.

Since Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Delaware County, joined the race in late May, Mr. Specter has voted even more consistently with his party: a 96.4 percent rate, excluding a handful of votes on which he abstained. . .

When he was a Republican, Mr. Specter was a frequent objector. A tally of divisive votes by Congressional Quarterly showed that, as of mid-August, Mr. Specter had a “party unity” score of 90.5 percent with the Democrats — far higher than he ever had with the Republicans. The Washington-based publication calculated that Mr. Specter averaged a 58 percent party unity score from 1981 through 2008.

The story goes on to note that Specter has reversed his position on the “public option” and on the card-check bill.

There’s a lesson here for the rest of us. Specter has his seat today because Republicans were persuaded to support him over Pat Toomey in the 2004 primary. At the time, it seemed that it was better to keep a nominal Republican in that seat than to risk losing it to a Democrat. Oops.

The Washington Post reports:

The Obama administration pledged Thursday to provide unlimited financial assistance to mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. . . But even as the administration was making this open-ended financial commitment, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac disclosed that they had received approval from their federal regulator to pay $42 million in Wall Street-style compensation packages to 12 top executives for 2009.

The compensation packages, including up to $6 million each to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s chief executives, come amid an ongoing public debate about lavish payments to executives at banks and other financial firms that have received taxpayer aid. But while many firms on Wall Street have repaid the assistance, there is no prospect that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will do so.

You wouldn’t expect the pay caps to apply to Fannie and Freddie. Fannie and Freddie are run by Democrats.

(Via Volokh.) (Related story.)

President Obama is consistent about one thing: his own purported consistency. He frequently claims to have always been consistent, and he is consistently lying. To wit:

Every single criteria for reform I put forward is in this bill.

and

I didn’t campaign on the public option.

It’s not true. At all. Matt Welch and Jake Tapper deconstruct this brazen revisionism. Welch looks at a variety of elements on which Obama campaigned that are not in the bill; Tapper focuses specifically on the public option.

(Via Instapundit and Hot Air.)

Megan McArdle says the CBO’s scores aren’t much good any more, now that Congress has learned how to game its formula. (Via Instapundit.)

. . . for two-thirds of the provisions:

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration today publicly released its review of the IRS’s ability to verify taxpayer eligibility for tax benefits and credits provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The Recovery Act contains 56 tax provisions with a potential cost of more than $325 billion that are intended to provide tax relief for individuals and businesses. . .

TIGTA found that the IRS is unable to verify taxpayer eligibility for the majority of Recovery Act tax benefits and credits at the time a tax return is processed. This includes 13 of the 20 benefits and credits for individual taxpayers and 26 of the [36] tax provisions benefiting businesses.

So two-thirds of the stimulus bill’s tax provisions are invitations for fraud. But why should Congress worry about this? It’s not as though it’s their money being wasted. . .

(Via Instapundit.)

UPDATE: In a related item, the IRS has a 70% error rate issuing taxpayer ID numbers. (Via Instapundit.)

If Harry Reid is right in saying that 45 thousand people die each year due to lack of health insurance, then why does his plan wait until 2014 to do anything? A four-year delay will kill 180 thousand people, right?

ASIDE: Okay, that’s not fair. The Reid bill doesn’t get to universal coverage; according to the CBO it would only cut the number of uninsured in half. So the delay is only killing 90 thousand people.

The answer, of course, is budget gimmickry. In order to make the 10-year budget forecast come out in the black, the bills needs to balance 10 years of taxes against just 6 years of spending. The left even admits this.

POSTSCRIPT: Reid alludes to a study just published in the American Journal of Public Health. It’s on-line here. The article is behind a pay wall unfortunately. A press release summarizes the article here. Since the uninsured can get treatment at nearly any hospital emergency room, I’m dubious about the result. I strongly suspect that uninsured status is serving as a proxy for something else, but not having read the study, I can’t hazard a guess what that might be.

POST-POSTSCRIPT: But let’s put this in perspective. The Reid bill subsidizes abortion. (Thank you, Ben Nelson!) Lower prices mean increased consumption, but by how much? It’s hard to know exactly what effective price cut will result from the subsidy; let’s say 2.5%. (That seems low, but it makes the numbers come out neatly.) The price elasticity for abortion is about -0.81, so that means a 2% increase in abortions, which works out to about 24 thousand more abortions per year. That’s about the same as the number of people Reid claims his bill would save.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports:

Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl has asked city council to shelve his proposed tuition tax, saying instead that a broad-based “New Pittsburgh Coalition” will work to solve the city’s pension problem.

The mayor is willing to cancel the tuition tax vote that could have occurred today in spite of the fact that he can’t claim to have landed the $15 million-a-year needed to right the pension fund, nor the $5 million compromise demand he made earlier this month. . . The University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University and insurer Highmark have pledged to make larger voluntary donations to the city than they did in the years 2005 through 2007, but neither they nor city officials would not say how much they will give, nor for how many years. . .

Mr. Ravenstahl introduced the 1 percent tuition tax proposal in his Nov. 9 budget address. . . But the state-picked Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority forced him to remove revenue from the tax from the 2010 budget, saying it was too speculative. State Rep. Paul Costa, D-Wilkins, introduced legislation to preempt the levy. And the bare majority of council members who said they’d vote for the tax showed signs of instability, with two members, Theresa Smith and Tonya Payne, embarking on a desperate attempt to find a middle ground and avoid a vote.

I think the whole thing was an attempted shakedown. It failed because Ravenstahl’s hand was just too weak.

“The statesman, who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would not only load himself with a most unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and which would no-where be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.”

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

“Cash for cloture.”

The health care bill contains a $100 million earmark for:

A health care facility that provides research, inpatient tertiary care, or outpatient clinical services. Such facility shall be affiliated with an academic health center at a public research university in the United States that contains a State’s sole public academic medical and dental school.

Somebody’s being bribed, and we don’t even know who. One Republican quipped, “If taxpayers are going to be expected to sign the check, Democrats should at least let them know who to make it out to.”

Could this process be any more corrupt? I suppose it could, but it’s hard to picture.

(Via Power Line.)

A report from the American Medical Association reveals that Medicare denies insurance claims more than any private insurer, and more than twice as often as the average private insurer.

That’s a useful statistic to use when someone asserts that we need government-run health care to protect us from evil insurance companies denying our claims. But we shouldn’t be surprised; private firms need to satisfy their customers (generally at least) or they lose business. The government does not.

(Via Hot Air.)

Ben Nelson, the supposedly pro-life Democrat, okays a health care bill that allows federal funding for abortions, in exchange for a package of deals for his home state (paid for by the taxpayer).

Politics disgusts me.

But I can’t say I’m surprised.

UPDATE: The bill’s sham provision against abortion funding doesn’t satisfy Bart Stupak (D-MI). Hopefully he can bring it down when the bill returns from conference. I wouldn’t count on it. We need not only Stupak but also a few of his Democratic colleagues to stand on principle, against all the pressure the Democratic leadership can bring and all the bribes money can buy.

We won the military victory last year, but that victory has finally trickled into public sentiment. A new NBC/WSJ poll finds that a strong majority now sees Iraq as a success.

(Via Instapundit.)

The US Commission on Civil Rights has written a letter to Senate leaders complaining about the health care bill’s use of “racially discriminatory provisions”.

A provision has been added to the health care bill, at the behest of Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL), to exempt three Florida counties from cuts to Medicare Advantage.

First thought: I find it astonishing, even taking into account the low ethical standards of Democrats, that they would craft a bill that would, as matter of law, treat a few influential (and strongly Democratic) counties differently from the rest of the nation.

Second thought: We’ve been told that cutting Medicare Advantage wouldn’t hurt anyone. Why then would Palm Beach, Dade, and Broward counties need an exemption?

The Senate has rejected a proposal to allow drug reimportation as part of the health care bill. Appallingly, 51 senators voted for this idiocy, but 60 votes were required.

I explained here why drug reimportation makes no sense whatsoever. Supporting it is an indication of economic illiteracy.

The Washington Times reports:

The Justice Department has told the federal attorneys who filed a civil complaint against the New Black Panther Party for disrupting a Philadelphia polling place last year not to cooperate with an investigation of the incident by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

The commission last week subpoenaed at least two Justice Department lawyers and sought documents from the department to explain why the complaint was dismissed just as a federal judge was about to punish the New Black Panther Party and three of its members for intimidating voters.

Joseph H. Hunt, director of the Justice Department’s Federal Programs Branch, ordered the lawyers’ silence in a letter to the attorney for J. Christian Adams, the lead attorney for the department in the New Black Panther case. . . In the letter, Mr. Hunt said the Civil Rights Commission “possesses no authority to initiate criminal prosecution of anyone” and has the ability only to make referrals to the Justice Department recommending that a criminal case be opened. The commission does not have the authority to enforce subpoenas, he added.

(Previous post.)

CBS reports:

The latest calculation of the National Debt as posted by the Treasury Department has – at least numerically – exceeded the statutory Debt Limit approved by Congress last February as part of the Recovery Act stimulus bill.

The ceiling was set at $12.104 trillion dollars. The latest posting by Treasury shows the National Debt at nearly $12.135 trillion.

A senior Treasury official told CBS News that the department has some “extraordinary accounting tools” it can use to give the government breathing room in the range of $150-billion when the Debt exceeds the Debt Ceiling.

Ooh, extraordinary accounting tools! Sounds great.

(Via Instapundit.)

Democrats set the Senate’s rules aside in order to speed the health care bill along.

A chart of public opinion on health care “reform” over time:

(Via Instapundit.)

With numbers like that, I’m starting to be hopeful that this atrocity can be stopped.

In related news, Joe Lieberman (ID-CT) and Ben Nelson (D-NE) have come out against the Reid compromise:

Two key senators criticized the most recent healthcare compromise Sunday, saying the policies replacing the public option are still unacceptable.

Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) both said a Medicare “buy-in” option for those aged 55-64 was a deal breaker.

“I’m concerned that it’s the forerunner of single payer, the ultimate single-payer plan, maybe even more directly than the public option,” Nelson said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

Lieberman said Democrats should stop looking for a public option “compromise” and simply scrap the idea altogether.

“You’ve got to take out the Medicare buy-in. You’ve got to forget about the public option,” he said.

And Claire McCaskill (D-MO) is indicating she has reservations as well:

Speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said she would not vote for any bill that doesn’t reduce the deficit and bring down healthcare costs.

If those two criteria aren’t met, “we’ll have to go back to the drawing board,” she said.

(Via Instapundit.)

If she means it, then they’ve lost her vote as well, because there’s no way on God’s green earth that the bill will bring down healthcare costs. Consider this statement today from Christina Romer, chairwoman of the president’s council of economic advisers:

“Absolutely, we are going to be expanding coverage to some 30 million Americans. Of course, that is going to up the level of health-care spending,” Romer said.’

(Via Commentary.)

What? Covering more people costs more money? Who knew?!

Going back to the chart at the top, it’s clear that most Americans have now figured out that the idea that we can save money by extending coverage is merely a fairy tale.

President Obama, in his Nobel acceptance speech, said:

Likewise, the world recognized the need to confront Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait — a consensus that sent a clear message to all about the cost of aggression.

Ah yes, the consensus. I remember it well.

The 1991 resolution to authorize military action in Iraq passed 52-47 in the Senate, and 250-183 in the House. Senate Democrats voted 45-10 against the resolution, including Joe Biden, John Kerry, Tom Daschle (then majority leader), Robert Byrd (then and now president pro-tem of the Senate), and Edward Kennedy. Alan Cranston (then majority whip) did not vote. House Democrats voted 179-86 against the resolution, including Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer (now majority leader), Dick Durbin (now Senate majority whip), Tom Foley (then speaker), Dick Gephardt (then majority leader), and David Bonior (then majority whip).

But that war went well, so everyone is for it in retrospect. Just like the Cold War. Some day soon there will have been a consensus over the second Gulf War as well.

(Via Power Line.)

Fox News reports:

The last person to know that Sen. Max Baucus wanted a divorce may have been his wife of 25 years.

It appears that Wanda Baucus was in the dark even as a member of Baucus’ staff — Melodee Hanes, the woman who is now his live-in girlfriend — was plotting out the senator’s life without a wife.

Hanes, Baucus’ former state director, reportedly met at least twice with the Montana Democrat’s divorce attorney eight months before the senator and his wife separated.

This demolishes the idea that Baucus was separated before he started seeing Hanes. True, this doesn’t have any real bearing on the main story, that Baucus nominated a mistress with flimsy qualifications to be US Attorney. But I do think the fact that Baucus’s relationship with the mistress was already sleazy does cast the scandal in an even worse light.

(Previous post.)

The British government wants to mark goods from Jewish settlements in the West Bank:

The British government has issued an official recommendation urging business owners to mark Israeli products produced in West Bank settlements so that consumers who want to boycott such items will find it easy to identify them. . .

According to European Union law, many types of products, especially food products, that are imported from outside the Union, by law must be labeled with the country of their origin. The British government issued its recommendation after several NGOs and marketing chains asked for guidelines regarding the differentiation between settler products and Palestinian products from the West Bank. According to the new guidelines, the British government recommends indicating whether the product was made by Palestinians or Israeli settlers on the label of every product originating from the West Bank.

The government recommendation goes further to say that labeling a product from a settlement as having been manufactured in Israel would be considered a criminal offense as it is misleading to the consumer public. . .

The British embassy in Israel issued a statement clarifying that this move was not a boycott. “This is a recommendation, not a binding order,” the embassy stressed. “The British government is opposed to any kind of boycott of Israel.”

First things first: the claim that the British government is opposed to a boycott is bullshit. If they were opposed to a boycott, they wouldn’t be taking steps to enable one.

Once again, Israel is being held to an entirely different standard than every other country in the world. As one Israeli official remarks:

Another government official said that . . . the British were “singling Israel out for this type of treatment, something that is very, very problematic.”

Why was it less important, he asked, for the British consumer to know that products they were buying were coming from other areas of dispute, such as Tibet, Kashmir, northern Cyprus, Chechnya, Kosovo, parts of Bosnia or even places like Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands and Northern Ireland?

Why is it less important? That’s what we call a rhetorical question; we all know what’s special about Israel. Since 1948, anti-Semites have tried — in the shadow of the holocaust — to give themselves a thin veneer of respectability by arguing that they are only against Israel, not Jews in general.

Also note that there will be criminal sanctions on anyone who labels goods from the West Bank as Israeli. Note that the West Bank includes East Jerusalem (which incidentally contains the entire Old City), which has been part of the Israeli capital since 1980. So any British subject who takes the position that Israel’s capital is part of Israel, and marks his goods accordingly, can go to jail.

But worst is the appalling lack of any sense of history this displays. The British government, facing a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe, is directing shops to mark (some) Jewish goods. Do they really have no idea what this looks like?

(Via the Corner.)

A National Review source says there is no deal on health care yet. According to the source, Harry Reid is running a “psych-ops campaign”.

UPDATE: This story (“Senate Dems May Change Health Compromise”) seems to support the source.

A new Public Policy poll finds President Obama barely above water, with 49% approval and 47% disapproval. This is generally consistent with other polls of registered voters. (Rasmussen’s poll of likely voters has Obama underwater at 46/53.)

I also have to note that Public Policy agrees with nearly all other polling in finding that a majority disapproves of Obama health care reform scheme. Of those who disapprove, 90% say there is too much government involvement. Only 6% said too little.

Most interestingly, Public Policy asked another question I haven’t seen polled before: They found that only 50% prefer President Obama to President Bush, against 44% who would prefer Bush to Obama. Considering Bush’s radioactive ratings when he left office, this is a remarkable result.

(Via the Corner.)

The Senate has voted to fund abortion in its health care bill:

By a vote of 54-45, the Senate sidetracked an amendment by Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah that would ban any insurance plan getting taxpayer dollars from offering abortion coverage. The restrictions mirrored provisions in the House-passed health care bill.

The Senate bill currently allows insurance plans to cover abortions, but requires that they can only be paid for with private money. The legislation calls for insurance plans that would receive federal subsidies in a new insurance marketplace to strictly separate public funds from private dollars that would be used to pay for abortion.

“As our bill currently reads, no insurance plan in the new marketplace, whether private or public, would be allowed to use public funds for abortion,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

Reid is lying. He is hoping that people are taken in by an accounting trick that pretends that the federal dollars are somehow different from the private ones. He may be right in hoping so; United Way has been playing this same trick successfully for years.

Here’s what is going on: Let’s suppose that WXYZ  is a charity that buys widgets for needy children. Widgets come in various colors, but some people disapprove of red widgets (let’s say they release lots of greenhouse gases). When WXYZ looks for funding, they promise to keep two separate accounts: Account A is unrestricted, and account B can be spent on anything but red-widgets. When fundraising among the anti-red community, WXYZ suggests contributing to account B. That way, WXYZ argues, you know that you’re not funding red widgets.

But it’s not true, because money in the two accounts are fungible. When I contribute money to account B, WXYZ can shift costs, freeing up funds in account A for red widgets. That is, contributing to account B allows WXYZ to spend more on red widgets from account A. All the separation of accounts accomplishes is to cap red-widget spending at the entire balance of account A (which is much higher than would ever be contemplated anyway).

United Way has been doing this for years. They allow you to designate that a contribution is not to be given to Planned Parenthood, but, as explained above, that designation has no effect whatsoever. When you contribute to United Way, you are funding abortion.

Now the Senate wants to employ the same fiction. Private money goes into account A, and government subsidies go into account B. Sure, account B cannot be spent on abortion directly, but every dollar in account B frees up a dollar in account A to be spent on abortion.

So the Senate bill would fund abortion.

In fact, it’s worse than this. A similar argument to the one we make about separate accounts for a single plan could be made about separate plans offered by the same insurer. The insurer could shift costs from one plan to another. (Hospitals already do this, shifting costs from Medicare patients to others.) If the insurer is for-profit, we can probably rely on the profit motive to keep them from doing so; any plan that can’t stand on its own would be cut. But most health insurers are non-profit, and they very well might decide to shift costs from a plan that supports abortion to another government-subsidized plan that does not.

The point is this: the Stupak amendment is already a compromise position. Stupak rules out the utterly transparent accounting fiction described above, but it still allows a company that accepts subsidies to offer other plans that cover abortion, even though the company might shift costs between them. The robust pro-life position would prohibit subsidies to any insurer that covers abortion in any of its plans.

Will people be fooled by Reid’s chicanery? The pro-life movement tends to be pretty savvy to these tricks, so I’m hopeful they won’t. On the other hand, the United Way example suggest that many might well be taken in.

The recent controversy over Max Baucus (D-MT) nominating his mistress as US Attorney is not his first. Baucus was previously charged with sexual harassment by his former chief of staff, Christine Niedermeier, who alleged he fired her for refusing her advances. Baucus was married at the time.

Niedermeier’s case was thrown out because of a special provision in the law that makes it hard to pursue sexual harassment charges against members of Congress. Yep, Congress was thinking ahead.

(Previous post.)

A liberal group is advertising for anyone with information to support criminal charges (of any kind) against Tom Donohue, the CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce:

A network of liberal groups known as Velvet Revolution started an ad campaign offering $200,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the man whose trade organization has become a thorn in the side of the Obama administration and congressional Democrats.

The group is not leveling any specific charges of criminal behavior. Rather, it is casting a wide net, fishing for any whistleblowers from Donohue’s past who might come forward with allegations of wrongdoing. The campaign against the Chamber was launched in response to the group’s opposition to climate change legislation and health care reform, and its plan to spend $100 million lobbying against these and other initiatives.

This is a new low for the politics of personal destruction. If you oppose the progressive agenda effectively, you can now expect a fishing expedition to target you.

This is particularly troubling given the legal climate today, where criminal statutes have proliferated and it can be hard to avoid being guilty of some sort of crime. But I doubt that the goal is actually to put Donohue in jail. Rather, I think that they’re really just looking for any dirt they can find to embarrass the man and his organization.

Democrats trying to work out a compromise (among themselves) on health care reform have a new proposal:

They may still call it a “public plan,” but private insurers — not the government — would offer coverage under a compromise Democrats are considering to win Senate passage of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.

The latest idea bears little resemblance to the original vision outlined by liberals, and embraced by Obama, during the 2008 presidential campaign. That called for the government to sell insurance to workers and their families in competition with industry giants like UnitedHealthcare.

But instead of Medicare-for-the-masses, it would be Blue Cross Blue Shield or Kaiser Permanente, albeit with a government seal of approval from the department that handles the health plan for federal employees, including members of Congress. . .

Five moderates and five liberals tapped by Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., planned to work on the compromise Tuesday as the Senate debated the 10-year, nearly $1 trillion bill.

One is tempted to call this a victory. If the “public option” is limited to placing a stamp of approval on some private plan, it probably can’t do much harm.

But let’s not be hasty. These people cannot be trusted, so we need to wait and see what the proposal actually says. There will likely be some fine print that makes this just as bad as the public option. Here’s a hint what the fine print might be:

Liberals are trying to extract a price for any compromise. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., has proposed allowing people 55 and over to buy into Medicare. Others would further expand the Medicaid health program for low-income people. Finally, if private insurers don’t step up to submit bids to OPM, some liberals want to authorize the federal agency itself to set up a plan.

So there are at least two gotchas. First, they want to drastically expand Medicare/Medicaid. Medicare enrollment would expand 69% (according to the 2000 census) and Medicaid by an undetermined amount. This would be a concrete step toward the socialists’ goal of putting everyone on Medicare.

But the second is the kicker. If private insurers want nothing to do with the scheme, the government would go ahead and create a government plan. Thus, the socialists can obtain their government plan simply by setting the standards for government endorsement unacceptably high. Considering the bad faith with which they have acted at every step in this debate, this has to be their plan.

UPDATE: An agreement has been reached:

Officials said Democrats had tentatively settled on a private insurance arrangement to be supervised by the federal agency that oversees the system through which lawmakers purchase coverage, with the possibility of greater government involvement if needed to ensure consumers of sufficient choices in coverage.

Additionally, the emerging agreement calls for Medicare to be opened to uninsured Americans beginning at age 55, a significant expansion of the large government health care program that currently serves the 65-and-over population.

(Emphasis mine.)

They’re trying to bring the public option in the back door. I hope people see through this.

Of course.

The Wall Street Journal observes:

Here’s a poser: Suppose a public official is accused of recommending his girlfriend for a promotion, though he was the one who first flagged the potential conflict of interest and officials had refused to let him recuse himself from decisions about the woman. Should he lose his job?

That’s precisely what happened in 2007 to Paul Wolfowitz, who was run out of the World Bank on the pretext that he had given his girlfriend a raise. In fact, Mr. Wolfowitz had made bank officials aware that his girlfriend already worked at the bank before he accepted the job as president, and bank officials had raised no objection to the job change that removed his girlfriend from any direct reporting to Mr. Wolfowitz. The ethical uproar was a politically convenient excuse, fanned by the media, to oust Mr. Wolfowitz when his real offense was that he was too hard on corruption.

So it’s going to be fascinating to see how the press corps and political class react to the news that Montana Senator Max Baucus recommended a staff member who was his girlfriend for the plum job of U.S. Attorney. Mr. Baucus disclosed the attempted sweetheart deal early Saturday after media inquiries made clear the story was breaking.

(Via Instapundit.)

I wouldn’t expect consistency from these folks. After all, Wolfowitz was fighting corruption, which made him the enemy. Baucus is promoting corruption.

(Previous post.)

UPDATE: Jon Tester (D-MT) denies any knowledge:

Sen. Jon Tester said Sunday he had limited involvement with fellow Montana Democrat Max Baucus’s decision to float his girlfriend as a possible nominee for a top prosecutor position in Montana.

In an interview with POLITICO, Tester said “no” when asked if he was aware that Melodee Hanes and Baucus were engaged in a romantic relationship when he interviewed Hanes for the position of U.S. attorney in Montana earlier this year.

Tester called Hanes “well-qualified” but said “it was Max’s call” to include her name with two others on a list for the White House to consider before choosing a nominee for the position.

(Via Instapundit.)

The North Dakota legislature is looking to punish a company for urging its customers to oppose health care nationalization.

After years of unfounded wailing about the crushing of dissent during the Bush years, we’re seeing quite a lot of it for real now.

(Via Instapundit.)

Is this New York Times op-ed saying what I think it’s saying?

Anti-tax zealots denounce all taxation as theft, as depriving citizens of their right to spend their hard-earned incomes as they see fit. Yet nowhere does the Constitution grant us the right not to be taxed. Nor does it grant us the right to harm others with impunity. No one is permitted to steal our cars or vandalize our homes. Why should opponents of taxation be allowed to harm us in less direct ways?

He seems to be saying that opposing taxes is like theft or vandalism, but surely no one would say something so stupid.

(Via the Corner.)

To be sure, the press corps are due a lot of mockery, but calling a member of the White House press corps a child to her face doesn’t seem like good politics. (Via Instapundit.)

Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT), chairman of the Senate finance committee, nominated his mistress to be a US Attorney. (Via Instapundit.)

UPDATE: The mistress’s vita looks decidedly thin. When nominated, she had been out of the practice of law for six years.

We last heard of Kevin Jennings, the president’s “safe schools czar” when it was revealed that, years before as a teacher, he was informed by a student of an incident of statutory rape and he failed to report it. This was not only unconscionable, but apparently illegal under Massachusetts law. Yet Jennings did not lose his job as safe schools czar.

Now Jennings is in the news again. It seems that the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, the organization that Jennings founded and led for many years until last year, has a recommended reading list for students K-12. That list is full of obscene material, including explicit depictions of sex acts performed on children.

Will Jennings repudiate his own organization? If, as seems likely, he does not, this is material that the safe schools czar would recommend that students read.

The stimulus package didn’t work, so let’s do another one! The administration is prepared to use $265 billion in unspent and repaid TARP money to fund a new stimulus package. Even the president’s treasury secretary is against it, but Nancy Pelosi is for it, so I guess that settles it.

Apart from the main point (wasting more money), another thing that is frustrating about this is the way it is being discussed. Secretary Geithner and the GOP favor “[dedicating] much of the unspent TARP money to reduce the national debt”. Yes, in other words, they favor not spending it! But the media seems to talk about it as though “debt reduction” is just another way to spend the money.

An interesting comment on the White House’s decision to invoke executive privilege for the White House social secretary:

I love this story.

Of course, every time you are in power, you invoke executive power if you don’t want to be embarrassed. And the opposition declares itself shocked and outraged at the hiding of information and obstruction of justice.

What is comical about this is it’s being invoked for a social secretary in a circumstance where, in the original Supreme Court rulings, it was intended for high officials with important state secrets. What was the state secret here — the nature of the flower arrangements at the head table? You know, it is as if somebody is invoking the Fifth Amendment in a dispute over a parking ticket.

But there was one real piece of news in this hearing, and that was that the head of the Secret Service was asked if there has been an increased level of threats against President Obama – [important] because, you know, there was a rumor in the summer that [with Obama, the threats] had increased by a large percent, perhaps doubled or even worse. Mark Sullivan said that the level of threat against President Obama is the same as against Bush and Clinton, which I think is heartening. It refutes a lot of the rumors and the insinuations that we heard this summer when there was a lot of opposition to Obama policies.

UPDATE: More on the non-increased threat level here.

It’s not just Rasmussen any more. The latest CNN poll finds that 48% approve of the president’s job performance, against 50% disapproving. Unlike Rasmussen, who polls likely voters, CNN’s poll is of registered voters.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) is a little confused about Afghanistan:

We took our eye off the ball. Instead of moving in on [Bin Laden] at Tora Bora, the previous administration decided to move its forces to Iraq.

I know “we took our eye off the ball” has been the favorite Democratic talking point since John Kerry’s presidential campaign, but this doesn’t even make sense. The invasion of Iraq was in March 2003. The battle of Tora Bora was in December 2001. In December 2001 we were moving forces into Afghanistan, not out. (Remember that we defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan largely with special forces and air power.)

Is it too much to expect the chairman of the armed services committee to know something of the war we’re currently fighting? Tora Bora was just eight years ago; it’s not like we’re talking about the Punic Wars here.

(Via PJTV.)

Wasn’t health care reform supposed to make health insurance more accessible to those who don’t get it from their employer? The CBO’s analysis of the Reid bill finds that it would increase the pre-subsidy premiums of such people 10 to 13 percent. It’s only the government subsidy that would do them any good.

So here’s a thought. If the subsidy is the only aspect of the bill with a positive effect (if you want to call it that), why not just scrap the rest of the bill? You’ll still be blowing an enormous hole in the budget, but at least you won’t be screwing up the health care system in the bargain.

(Via the Corner.)