Internet Scofflaw

. . . is so incompetent, it defies belief. And dishonest too: the story only came to light because they refused to pay the rent they owed. The whole agency should be scrapped.

(Via Instapundit.)

Surprise, surprise:

The officials say the White House has lost confidence in Hagel to carry out his role at the Pentagon. According to one senior official, “He wasn’t up to the job.”

What? Hagel wasn’t up to the job? You could knock me over with a feather!

The fact that Hagel wasn’t up to the job was obvious, and was illustrated in full glory during his confirmation hearing. He was confirmed for the sole reason that he was thought to carry some political benefit: a Republican to sell Obama’s weak defense policies.

All we’re seeing here is the White House determining that he carries no political advantage commensurate with his incompetence.

UPDATE: This is really telling:

While aides described the departure as a mutual decision based on shifting priorities at the Department of Defense, there are signs that tensions between Hagel and the White House contributed to the personnel change. . . Ultimately Hagel believed the pivot to combating ISIS represented a dramatic change from the types of reforms he had hoped to accomplish during his tenure at the Pentagon, aides said.

White House and Defense officials said Hagel was tapped to spearhead efforts like combating sexual assault in the ranks and trimming the Pentagon’s budget to deal with sequestration.

Obama was okay with Hagel when Hagel’s job was to impose the president’s agenda on the military. But when the military actually had to do some national defense, Hagel had to go.

(Via Instapundit.)

The Constitution: He shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.

Barack Obama: Screw that!

The remarkable thing about Obama’s speech is the word that it did not contain: Constitution. Also: “separation of powers.”

POSTSCRIPT: He claims that he wants Congress to pass an immigration bill, but that’s a lie. Without this action, there was a chance for a bill. A lot of Republicans favored one. But no more. There will be no immigration bill. He has poisoned that well for the foreseeable future. On purpose. Obama doesn’t want an immigration bill, he wants a fight.

What? Obama outright lied about Obamacare? Astonishing:

At a town hall meeting where he campaigned for health care legislation in 2009, President Barack Obama pledged to voters that he did not want any tax on health insurance plans he perceived as wastefully generous to ever impact average Americans. But in recent comments by one of the men who helped draft the legislation, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, that is not only precisely what will happen — but that was the intention of the tax.

White House officials had no comment, despite repeated requests by CNN.

Here’s Jake Tapper explaining the controversy, with lots of clips of Obama and his people denying what they expressly intended to do:

Tapper’s video embeds a lot of good quotes, but he misses a very important one. Here’s Gruber explaining how Obama was personally involved in designing the tax on health care benefits (the so-called Cadillac tax):

He said ‘it’s just not going to happen politically.  The bill will not pass.  How do we manage to get there through phase-ins and other things?’ And we talked about it. He was just very interested in that topic.”

Just to be clear, people think the “Cadillac tax” is on high value health care plans. It’s not. The law is designed, deliberately, as Gruber is good enough to explain, to tax all health care benefits eventually.

Gruber says this is good economic policy. I think he’s right, for the most part. Employer-provided health care shouldn’t have a special tax status. It encourages obtaining health insurance from the employer, which insulates people from their health care costs, which results in higher costs. We should tax health care plans, in combination with a tax cut or tax credit so that it’s not a net tax hike.

That, of course, is exactly John McCain’s health care proposal from 2008. The one that was savagely demagogued by Barack Obama. Obama said he opposed taxing health care plans, and McCain was terrible for suggesting such a thing. The man is a liar.

(Via Hot Air.)

The prez speaks:

I still believe in what I said when I was first elected six years ago last night. All the maps plastered across our TV screens today and for all the cynics who say otherwise, I continue to believe we are simply more than just a collection of red and blue states. We are the United States.

Oh, good lord. You can’t seriously be going back to that now, after everything you’ve done for the last six years.

(Via Althouse.)

Conor Friedersdorf, a writer for the Atlantic and formerly a ghost-writer for Andrew Sullivan, tweets:

This is staggeringly naive. First of all, it’s untrue on the face of it. The Iraq War, by the most dramatic estimates, cost $2.2 trillion over 8.5 years. That’s $258 billion per year. In 2013, the federal government spent $851 billion on Medicare and Medicaid, $808 billion on Social Security, and $373 billion on “other mandatory spending”, which is mostly entitlements. Any one of those is larger than the Iraq War. Total them together and you’re spending the entire cost of the Iraq War every single year.

There’s nothing pricier than entitlements.

Moreover, that estimate doesn’t take into account opportunity cost. What does it cost not to go to war? England and France saved some money by not going to war in 1935, and 1936, and 1938, and 1939, but it cost them dearly from 1940 to 1945.

Naturally, anti-war people — including, presumably, Mr. Friedersdorf — think that there was no opportunity cost. They believe the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were unnecessary and no adverse effects could possibly have resulted from not fighting them. Fine, I know that’s an article of faith among that set, but we don’t agree. And, Mr. Friedersdorf, you’re the one addressing us.

Glad to see Republicans winning elections all across the country. Dismayed to see Pennsylvania bucking the trend.

The Blaze reports:

A Wisconsin mailman is under investigation for dumping hundreds of letters supporting Republican candidates in the trash, according to the Wisconsin Reporter. . .

Robert Rukes, a special agent with the U.S. Postal Service inspector general’s office in Chicago, told the Wisconsin Reporter the agency’s initial findings are that the mail carrier wasn’t trying to sabotage the GOP before Tuesday’s midterm elections, he was likely just “overwhelmed.”

No, I’m sure it wasn’t partisan. Just like it wasn’t partisan when CBS aired an attack story against President Bush based on fake documents, and coordinated the story it with John Kerry’s presidential campaign. Just like it wasn’t partisan when the IRS searched for “tea party” to find non-profit organizations to harass. Just like it wasn’t partisan when voting machines turned Republican votes to Democratic votes. Just like it wasn’t partisan when Obama’s justice department dismissed voter intimidation charges against the Black Panthers, after the case was already won.

Of course it wasn’t partisan; it never is.

(Via Instapundit.)

President Obama finally came out against stay-at-home moms:

Sometimes, someone, usually mom, leaves the workplace to stay home with the kids, which then leaves her earning a lower wage for the rest of her life as a result. And that’s not a choice we want Americans to make.

It’s safe to assume they will be walking this one back, but what he says off-the-cuff is a better guide to his gut than what they’ll put out today.

It seems that the left is puzzled by the fact that, although Republicans oppose President Obama, Republicans don’t seem to want Obama murdered. They are pretty sure than Republicans’ concern about Obama’s safety must be feigned. Together with their own years of fantasies about President Bush being assassinated, it tells us a lot about how they see the world.

(Via Instapundit.)