The Obama administration admits that the exchange system is broken, and not just suffering under unexpectedly heavy load.
Democrats will surely claim (if they ever even get asked) that the failure is somehow the GOP’s fault. Megan McArdle prebuts that narrative. The real problem is that the Democrats who crafted the law thought that they could bring a working exchange system into being, on an extraordinarily aggressive timetable, simply by decreeing it would happen. In the real world, “you can’t just order, ‘Make it so!’”
Ah, the beauty of socialized medicine. When the government runs health care, health care failures become political problems to be covered up:
Internal emails from the Care Quality Commission show that Labour tried to stop the watchdog from informing the public about failings at Basildon University Hospital, where patients were dying needlessly on filthy wards.
The dossier of emails, released under Freedom of Information, state that Andy Burnham, the then Health Secretary, was “furious” when “graphic details” of the care failings became public. Separate emails suggest that Mike O’Brien, the former Labour minister of state for health, told the NHS watchdog that “anything you do is political” in the run up to the General Election.
Executives at the watchdog decided that “given the political environment” a report into standards of care across the country should be “largely positive”.
So the purpose of the healthcare “watchdog” is to protect the government by hiding its failures. Good to know.
The lion’s share of the blame here belongs to the old Labor government, which actually committed this atrocity, of course. But we should also recognize that the structure of the system makes this malfeasance likely. Government-run health care inevitably is politicized health care.
That’s our future, now. And it won’t take as long here.
Yet another Bush-era War on Terror policy that Obama pretended to abhor before adopting himself:
Instead of sending suspected terrorists to Guantanamo Bay or secret CIA “black” sites for interrogation, the Obama administration is questioning terrorists for as long as it takes aboard US naval vessels. . . Questioning suspected terrorists aboard US warships in international waters is President Barack Obama’s answer to the Bush administration detention policies that candidate Obama promised to end. . .
By holding people in secret prisons, known as black sites, the CIA was able to question them over long periods, using the harshest interrogation tactics, without giving them access to lawyers. Obama came to office without a ready replacement for those secret prisons. . . With the black sites closed and Obama refusing to send more people to the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, it wasn’t obvious where the US would hold people for interrogation.
And that’s where the warships came in.
I’m sure the Obama administration would say that questioning terrorists on ships is completely different than doing it on land. They would probably even say it with a straight face. They’re good at that.
The federal goverment is (17%) shut down, and Barack Obama is going to make sure that the people pay. The State of Arizona asked to reopen the Grand Canyon itself, at state expense. The Obama administration refused to allow it.
Meanwhile, the Park Service — which is supposedly doing all this shutdown theater because it has no money to operate — somehow is able to pay armed guards to stand watch outside a hotel to make sure none of the visiting senior citizens slip out and see something:
The bus stopped along a road when a large herd of bison passed nearby, and seniors filed out to take photos. Almost immediately, an armed ranger came by and ordered them to get back in, saying they couldn’t “recreate.” The tour guide, who had paid a $300 fee the day before to bring the group into the park, argued that the seniors weren’t “recreating,” just taking photos.
“She responded and said, ‘Sir, you are recreating,’ and her tone became very aggressive,” Vaillancourt said.
The seniors quickly filed back onboard and the bus went to the Old Faithful Inn, the park’s premier lodge located adjacent to the park’s most famous site, Old Faithful geyser. That was as close as they could get to the famous site — barricades were erected around Old Faithful, and the seniors were locked inside the hotel, where armed rangers stayed at the door.
“They looked like Hulk Hogans, armed. They told us you can’t go outside,” she said. “Some of the Asians who were on the tour said, ‘Oh my God, are we under arrest?’ They felt like they were criminals.”
What kind of “shutdown” is this? They are spending money they supposedly don’t have, just to make sure that public is harmed!
Meanwhile, the Barack Obama holds a press conference, and the lapdog press asks not one question about any of this. Not a single question! It’s absolutely astonishing, even for them.
I’m not expecting them to ask, “Mr. President, why is the Park Service being complete assholes?” (Although if it were a Republican doing this, that — minus the profanity — is exactly what they would ask.) But how about asking about what legal opinions justify the shutdown theater?
POSTSCRIPT: Jonathan Last has a nice summary of what’s happening, although he leaves out several instances.
More from President Obama’s “make life as difficult as possible” strategy:
The National Park Service also closed the Foothills Parkway, a major thoroughfare in the county. The closure came without warning and left the local school district scrambling to get children back to their homes.
The children live in the eastern Tennessee community of Top of the World – serviced by School Bus 49. Normally, the bus travels along the Foothills Parkway. Other roads leading to the isolated mountain community are impassible by bus.
“It’s dangerous,” said Nancy Kemp, the spokesperson for Blount County Schools.”It’s very curvy and straight up the mountain. It’s just not a safe route.” . . .
Until the partial government shutdown ends, school buses will not run. That means parents will have to transport their children to and from school using treacherous “white knuckle routes.”
This has gone beyond a fight over spending and a quixotic effort to defund Obamacare. This is much bigger now. The president has maliciously decided to shut down things that don’t need to be shut down, purely to hurt people. He must not get away with it.
I know the media doesn’t ask Obvious Questions but can the we see the Office of WH Council’s memorandum that this [shutdown theater] is legally required?
If not, why not? No administration has believed it was legally required to boot people out of their leased homes before.
May citizens actually view the work-product that we paid for? That lawyers in the government claim this is now necessary?
I doubt such a memo exists at all. But if it does, I’d like to see how they came to the opposite conclusions of every other president.
Where is the legal opinion claiming they suddenly are 1) legally required to do this and 2) have the legal power to do this?
The Obama administration quietly changed its furlough guidance Friday to allow government employees who are also union representatives to return to work and receive a regular paycheck during the government shutdown.
And while people are being physically ejected from the National Mall, the Park Service is allowing an immigration pressure group to rally on the National Mall:
A planned immigration reform rally will take place on the National Mall on Tuesday even though the site is closed due to the government shutdown. . . The event is hosted by several immigration activist groups, together with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the AFL-CIO.
In short, if you’re inconvenienced by the shutdown, it’s because the Obama administration doesn’t care about you. They’re happy to carve out exceptions for the people they care about.
The Amber alert website, the national missing-child warning program, has been shut off due to the government shutdown, according to the Department of Justice.
“Due to the lapse in federal funding, this Office of Justice Programs website is unavailable,” it says on amberalert.gov.
The administration claimed that it had no choice but to shut down the AMBER site, but this was clearly a lie because (1) it makes no sense at all:
The Justice Department official explained the website’s page appearing as if Amber Alert is down by saying, “The Office of Justice Programs (OJP) ran out of funds on Friday so all of the sites they maintain about the work they do went offline.”
It was not clear as to why it would cost less to change the website’s appearance than to just keep it the way it was.
They later argued that it was somehow a security risk to have content on a page that wasn’t being supervised. Aside from making no sense, this fails to explain why the AMBER Alert site was singled out. Nearly every other page on the DOJ’s Juvenile Justice page is still in operation.
POSTSCRIPT: Just to be clear, the AMBER Alert system itself was unaffected. This is the page that gives information about the AMBER Alert system.
UPDATE: Ace has been finding countless .gov sites left up all day.
The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration weakened the rules governing the NSA, greatly extending the NSA’s ability to spy on Americans:
The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material.
In addition, the court extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years — and more under special circumstances, according to the documents, which include a recently released 2011 opinion by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, then chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
What had not been previously acknowledged is that the court in 2008 imposed an explicit ban — at the government’s request — on those kinds of searches, that officials in 2011 got the court to lift the bar and that the search authority has been used.
Together the permission to search and to keep data longer expanded the NSA’s authority in significant ways without public debate or any specific authority from Congress.
There is a persistent mythology that the Democrats are somehow the party of civil liberties. It’s quite bizarre that the party of Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and now Obama could develop such a reputation. As this story shows, it is the Bush administration — undeservedly vilified for its surveillance for foreign terrorists — that carefully balanced national security with privacy.
The Bush administration went to court in 2008 to request that the court limit NSA surveillance of Americans. The Obama administration went to court in 2011 to get those limits removed. Right there is all you need to know about how the NSA scandal happened.
The Obama administration’s “dense pack” of scandals, together with my busy schedule of late, has kept me from keeping up-to-date on the NSA scandal. I’ve been meaning to comment on all of these, but I think it’s time just to dump all the links:
The NSA keeps everything it collects for some time, whether it is foreign or domestic. Also, they are permitted to listen to your calls to find out whether they are permitted to listen to your calls. (Link)
Thus, when Obama said “no one is listening to your calls,” that was a lie. (Link)
The NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year. (Link)
The NSA “accidentally” collected telephone call data on the entire 202 area code (Washington, DC), and then decided that it need not report the error to its oversight staff. (Link)
The chief on the FISA court admits that he does not have the means to police the NSA’s actions, and he has to assume they are telling him the truth. (Link)
Nevertheless, the FISA court did rule that the NSA broke the law in collecting communications of innocent Americans from 2008 to 2011. The opinion also reprimanded the NSA for a “substantial misrepresentation” of its activities. (Link)
The White House tried to interfere with the Washington Post’s reporting on the NSA. (Link)
The NSA doesn’t have any idea how much damage Snowden did, and because it doesn’t audit its employees activities (surveillance is for us, not them!) they have no way to find out. (Link)
The NSA review panel consists of four insiders. (Link)
Of the 18 thousand domestic telephone numbers the NSA monitored, just 11% met the necessary legal standard to be monitored. (Link)
NSA employees use the NSA’s surveillance powers to spy on love interests so often, they have a term for it: LOVEINT. (A play on intelligence terms such as HUMINT and SIGINT.) (Link)
No one has ever been prosecuted for LOVEINT. (Link)
The ATF agent who blew the whistle on Operation Fast and Furious has been denied permission to write a book on the botched anti-gun trafficking sting “because it would have a negative impact on morale,” according to the very agency responsible for the scandal.
After first trying to stop the operation internally, ATF Agent John Dodson went to Congress and eventually the media following the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in December 2010. Two guns found at the murder scene were sold through the ATF operation.
It’s not the fact that they trafficked weapons to Mexican drug cartels and made no effort to track them that hurts morale, it would be the book.
POSTSCRIPT: Dodson is the same agent that the Department of Justice and the US Attorney conspired to smear, according to the DOJ Inspector General.
As part of its vindictive shutdown theater, the Park Service is evicting people from their own homes:
National Park Service officials cited the government shutdown as the reason for ordering an elderly Nevada couple out of their home, which sits on federal land.
“Unfortunately overnight stays are not permitted until a budget is passed and the park can reopen,” an NPS spokesman explained to KTNV.
Ralph and Joyce Spencer, aged 80 and 77, respectively, own their home, but the government owns the land on which it sits.
Just to be clear, they own the home and pay rent on the land. The federal government has no right to evict them, and doing so actually costs the government money. Is it really possible that Obama and the Democrats can get away with this?
More explanation of why the Obamacare exchanges melted down. As I speculated, it doesn’t appear to be excessive load:
One possible cause of the problems is that hitting “apply” on HealthCare.gov causes 92 separate files, plug-ins and other mammoth swarms of data to stream between the user’s computer and the servers powering the government website, said Matthew Hancock, an independent expert in website design. . .
“They set up the website in such a way that too many requests to the server arrived at the same time,” Hancock said.
He said because so much traffic was going back and forth between the users’ computers and the server hosting the government website, it was as if the system was attacking itself.
Hancock described the situation as similar to what happens when hackers conduct a distributed denial of service, or DDOS, attack on a website: they get large numbers of computers to simultaneously request information from the server that runs a website, overwhelming it and causing it to crash or otherwise stumble. “The site basically DDOS’d itself,” he said.
If this is true, the problem isn’t going to go away quickly as load lessens. It’s going to need a reimplementation, which will take time.
If you calculate what percentage of federal spending is actually halted by the federal government “shutdown”, it’s just 17%. The vast majority is exempted from the shutdown for one reason or another.
Yet another example of the Obama administration shutting down something the federal government doesn’t even control:
The rangers even closed the parking lot at Mount Vernon, where the plantation home of George Washington is a favorite tourist destination. . . But the government does not own Mount Vernon; it is privately owned by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association.
But the real scoop is this one:
The Park Service appears to be closing streets on mere whim and caprice. . .
“It’s a cheap way to deal with the situation,” an angry Park Service ranger in Washington says of the harassment. “We’ve been told to make life as difficult for people as we can. It’s disgusting.”
The Obama administration clearly is supremely confident that they won’t be blamed for anything that happens, but should they be? Their behavior is so inexcusable, the story is bound to get out, even with the media’s wall of silence.
The awesome pettiness of the Obama administration is truly a sight to behold. Alas, that’s the only sight they’ll let you behold:
Blocking access to trails and programs at South Dakota’s most popular attraction was one thing, but state officials didn’t expect Congress’ budget stalemate to shut down a view of Mount Rushmore.
The National Park Service placed cones along highway viewing areas outside Mount Rushmore this week, barring visitors from pulling over and taking pictures of the famed monument.
They actually closed the places where you could pull off the highway. This isn’t the government shutting down; this is the government going into full screw-the-people mode. Amazing. And horrifying.
Today is the centennial of America’s second-worst mistake: the federal income tax. It wasn’t always as onerous as it is today; take a look at the original 1040 form from 1913. Keep it in mind whenever the government imposes a new program that seems not so bad at first.
It’s not load that’s causing the Obamcare exchanges not to work, it’s bad design:
Load problems could explain servers hanging in California and New York … but the drop-downs? The standard explanation for this is “high load,” but high server loads don’t cause your security dropboxes to empty out.
“The drop-down thing is mystifying,” he told me. If federal exchanges decided to populate the security question fields by calling up a list of possible questions from another server — one that didn’t have a lot of capacity — then that might be causing the sign-up process to stall at that step. For an application that expects a lot of traffic, this is a very bad idea. . .
Why would they use such a seemingly obvious poor design?
“It can be easier to make a call to another server to get something when you need it than to implement a cache that you prepopulate either from static files or from the database on startup. Making a call to another server is also something you’d naturally think to do if you hadn’t had to focus on scalability before. The security question page is probably not the thing you’re most concerned about, so you give it to the new hire to do as their starter project. They don’t know what they’re doing, so they implement it the straightforward way … and since you’re under unbelievable deadline pressure to get something working now nobody reviews it in detail.”
(Emphasis mine.)
The load they are getting isn’t all that much. Just one order of magnitude more than a prominent blog.
If even one child’s life can be saved, then we need to act. Now is the time to do the right thing for our children, our communities, and the country we love.
But that argument only applies when they’re talking about banning guns, which they want to do anyway. It certainly doesn’t apply when their own sacred cows are at stake. Propose exempting the NIH from the government shutdown, and you get this:
CNN: “If you can help one child who has cancer, why wouldn’t you do it?”
Sen. Reid: “Why would we want to do that?”
Democrats like to cry “think of the children!”, but it’s all crocodile tears. They don’t mean a word of it.
Because of the federal government “shutdown”, the federal government is spending extra money to close facilities that cost the government nothing to operate. The instance that is getting a lot of attention is the World War 2 memorial, an unstaffed, open-air monument that is open 24/7, except when the Obama administration barricades it to make a point.
An even better example is the Claude Moore Colonial Farm, in McLean, Virginia. The Farm has been operated by entirely by volunteers for 30 years since its budget was zeroed in 1980:
Visitors unaware of how the farm is run are apt to conclude that the government shutdown, now two days old, is directly responsible for the farm’s closing. But Eberly sent a note Wednesday morning to the park’s email list. In the email, Eberly says, “For the first time in 40 years, the National Park Service (NPS) has finally succeeded in closing the Farm down to the public. In previous budget dramas, the Farm has always been exempted since the NPS provides no staff or resources to operate the Farm.”
The Claude Moore Colonial Farm, Eberly says, has thrived even as the federal government has treated it with “benign neglect” for decades. That benign neglect would serve it better than the barricades now surrounding it. . .
[Eberly adds:] “You do have to wonder about the wisdom of an organization that would use staff they don’t have the money to pay to evict visitors from a park site that operates without costing them any money.”
In fact, the Park Service is actually renting the barricades it is using to close the Farm. A strange “shutdown” indeed.
It is obvious that the Park Service intends to block access to these trailheads, even though it literally costs them nothing to leave them open and by closing them they actually increase the possibility of serious problems for drivers on the road and hikers still in the park. In fact, it is costing them money they don’t have trying to block access.
To block access is thus a deliberate, senseless, and mean-spirited act that demonstrates quite clearly the political goals of the Obama administration during this shutdown.
Indeed. Glenn Reynolds adds, “I’m surprised they didn’t put a bag over the Washington Monument.”
Clearly the Obama administration is supremely confident that the public will hold Republicans responsible for everything, no matter what. If they had any worry about blowback at all, they wouldn’t dare indulge in such mean-spirited behavior.
The campgrounds are self-sufficient and receive no federal funding. No government employees staff or manage the parks. The management companies pay the National Park Service out of the funds they generate from operating the thousands of campgrounds. . .
Notice that last part. The parks not only do not cost the taxpayers any money, they pay funds into the Treasury out of the fees park users pay. Shutting them down will cost the taxpayers money.
Will Baude has some interesting thoughts on presidential fidelity to the law that relate to my Scofflaw Principle. I think I come down with theory #3:
Government officials are special. Civilians may have no moral obligation to obey the law (see #1), but government officials are empowered by the law, so they are specially obligated to take the bitter with the sweet. The oath of office operates to convert law into a personal promise.
By government officials, I mean specifically executive-branch officials, in regard to the law they are tasked with administering. For the president that’s everything (or, more precisely, all Constitutional federal law). For other executive-branch officials it depends on their portfolio: if you work at the IRS, you might not be morally obliged to obey speed limits, but you had better obey every jot and tittle of tax law.
The Obamacare spin this morning was about how the new exchanges melted down because of intense consumer interest. But when the statistics become known (if they ever do), I think we will learn that the traffic was well within the range that a competently constructed system can handle.
The exchanges don’t work because their designers entirely neglected the problem of their implementation. They thought it was sufficient simply to decree that the exchanges would exist.
Last week, our family received notice from Anthem BlueCross BlueShield of Colorado that we can no longer keep the plan we like because of “changes from health care reform (also called the Affordable Care Act or ACA).” The letter informed us that “(t)o meet the requirements of the new laws, your current plan can no longer be continued beyond your 2014 renewal date.”
Yes, we knew this was going to happen, but this is worth quoting for its bluntness.
Put politicians in charge of health care, and this is what you get:
The federal government wants to reduce the number of Americans diagnosed each year with cancer. But not by better preventive care or healthier living. Instead, the government wants to redefine the term “cancer” so that fewer conditions qualify as a true cancer.
Now that Obamacare has launched, we can evaluate how well Barack Obama has fulfilled his promise to cut everyone’s health care rates by $2500 per year. It may surprise low-information voters, but will be no surprise to those who have followed this disaster closely, that most people will not see a reduction at all, much less a reduction of $2500 per year. Among younger men (the group probably being screwed most badly by Obamacare) we are seeing this:
The blue states are the ones in which premiums are dropping at all. In most states, premiums are not only rising, but skyrocketing. For other groups the picture looks similar; only the magnitude of the disaster is different. You can find all the maps here. The article also shows that most people will not get subsidies enough to break even.
In a tacit acknowledgement that the numbers are terrible, the Obama administration released very little information, and tried to keep even that data from Obamacare’s critics:
The report was issued to news organizations on Tuesday under a strict embargo, with specific instructions not to share the information with anyone else, like outside health insurance experts who might be able to provide more analysis of the numbers. Apparently, though, the word still leaked out.
A federal judge has rejected the Obama administration’s efforts to withhold any documents it likes from Congressional scrutiny on nothing more than its say-so:
In a ruling Monday night, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson turned down the Justice Department’s request to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee after President Barack Obama asserted executive privilege to prevent some records about the administration’s response to the “Operation Fast and Furious” gunrunning scandal from being turned over to Congress.
“This case presents the sort of question that the courts are traditionally called upon to resolve,” Jackson said in her 44-page decision, issued more than five months after lawyers argued the issue in her packed courtroom and more than a year after the House committee filed suit. “Dismissing the case without hearing it would in effect place the court’s finger on the scale, designating the executive as the victor based solely on his untested assertion that the privilege applies,” she wrote.
The decision does not immediately grant Congress access to the documents; it merely means that the administration must now defend it’s claim of executive privilege in court. Put another way: the Obama administration’s position was not just that it can cast executive privilege over any document it likes (presidential or not), but that the courts have no power to review that decision. It was as astonishingly broad claim of authority, so the only surprise is it took so long to issue a decision.
Moreover, the House of Representatives is likely to prevail on the merits as well, as John Hinderaker explains.
The New Republic thinks that Obama should send the army against the House of Representatives.
Of course, they can’t really think that (can they?), so why talk that way?
UPDATE: As Ed Driscoll points out, a few years Democrats were pretending that they believed that merely putting a crosshair on a map was enough to drive people to violence. Now they are broadcasting an explicit call to violence.
Under certain circumstances, you won’t have to make the individual responsibility payment [i.e., the individual mandate’s penalty]. This is called an “exemption.”
Yet another case of hysterical anti-gun schools punishing kids for non-guns vaguely reminiscent of guns: this time a two-inch keychain shaped like a gun.
When asked about the House’s continuing resolution which would repeal the highly unpopular tax on medical devices, White House spokesman Jay Carney compared the effort to birtherism.
It’s one thing for Democrats to obstruct Rep. Darrell Issa’s (R-CA) efforts to get to the bottom of the administration’s myriad scandals. It’s quite another for them to try to get him killed:
CBS News has learned that a “general threat” was made against a member of Congress who made a fact-finding trip to Libya this week. The chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., traveled to Tripoli as part of the Republican’s ongoing investigation into the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on Americans in Benghazi. . .
Issa planned the trip to Libya in secret, but Democrats on the Oversight Committee revealed the plans in a press release last Friday when they obtained a copy of his itinerary.
(Emphasis mine.)
The Democrats’ purported complaint was that Issa didn’t invite anyone else along with him, but that’s a complaint they easily could have made after he was safely home. I suppose their defense will be that they were too stupid to consider the security implications.
POSTSCRIPT: As to the substance of the Democrats’ complaint, it should be self-evident that a secret fact-finding trip with one Congressman is much more likely to learn something of use than a big “fact-finding” circus. (Of course, they don’t want him to learn anything.) Moreover, they would hardly have gone if they had been invited; they won’t even stay for testimony offered in Congressional chambers.
The Canadian government has given itself the power to deny entrance into the country for the reason that a person might give a speech that the government doesn’t like:
“Several factors are used in determining admissibility into Canada, including: involvement in criminal activity, in human rights violations, in organized crime, security, health or financial reasons,” spokeswoman Vanessa Barrasa said in an email.
But recent changes to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act also allow the immigration minister to deny entry over “public policy considerations,” a standard some experts say has been ill-defined.
Under the previous rules, “it was very clear that the offence in question had to be equivalent to a criminal offence in Canada,” said Sharryn Aiken, a law professor at Queen’s University in Kingston.
“The whole problem with the public policy grounds is it vests an enormous amount of discretion in the minister to define what are these exceptional circumstances that warrant the exercise of this power,” she said.
A government backgrounder issued earlier this year said the minister could use his authority to bar anyone “who has a history of promoting violence against a particular religious group.”
The National Counsel of Canadian Muslims (that’s Canada’s CAIR) wants the government to deny Pamela Gellar a visa in order to stop her from giving a scheduled speech on the danger of militant Islam.
I guess it’s really true that free speech is an “American concept”, without value in Canada.
Two seventh-grade boys in Virginia have been suspended from school for a year, for playing with an airsoft gun at home, outside of school hours. It is very important that the families sue the school district — anti-gun educrats can’t be allowed to think they can get away with this crap.
UPDATE: There is an important detail that was not initially reported. The kids were not just shooting targets in their own yard with the airsoft gun; they were also shooting bystanders. That obviously changes the entire matter. It’s not a harmless behavior on private property; it’s simple assault.
I suppose the case could be made that school should not have taken action because the incident didn’t involve the school, but I don’t think I agree. In any case, the kids are much better off with it with it being a school matter than a criminal justice matter, which is the other alternative.
To the extent to which Obamacare is cutting health insurance premiums (mostly premiums are going up), it’s cutting them by cutting back providers:
Lower Health Insurance Premiums to Come at Cost of Fewer Choices
WASHINGTON — Federal officials often say that health insurance will cost consumers less than expected under President Obama’s health care law. But they rarely mention one big reason: many insurers are significantly limiting the choices of doctors and hospitals available to consumers.
From California to Illinois to New Hampshire, and in many states in between, insurers are driving down premiums by restricting the number of providers who will treat patients in their new health plans. . .
Some consumer advocates and health care providers are increasingly concerned. Decades of experience with Medicaid, the program for low-income people, show that having an insurance card does not guarantee access to specialists or other providers.
Indeed, studies have shown that Medicaid is so bad, patients are often better off with no insurance at all. And that’s the kind of health care that, in many states, will be offered on the Obamacare exchanges.
As Dan McLaughlin puts it, this is the most Obama thing ever. Barack Obama decided to support health care nationalization just so he could have something to say in a speech:
The most important red line of Barack Obama’s presidency was scrawled hastily in January 2007, a few weeks before he even announced he was running for president.
Soon-to-be-candidate Obama, then an Illinois senator, was thinking about turning down an invitation to speak at a big health care conference sponsored by the progressive group Families USA, when two aides, Robert Gibbs and Jon Favreau, hit on an idea that would make him appear more prepared and committed than he actually was at the moment.
Why not just announce his intention to pass universal health care by the end of his first term?
Thus was born Obamacare, a check-the-box, news-cycle expedient that would ultimately define a president.
“We needed something to say,” recalled one of the advisers involved in the discussion. “I can’t tell you how little thought was given to that thought other than it sounded good. So they just kind of hatched it on their own. It just happened. It wasn’t like a deep strategic conversation.” . . .
He probably wasn’t going to get elected anyway, the team concluded. Why not go big?
(Emphasis mine.)
He didn’t develop anything in support of that pledge until months later when he was savaged in a debate with Hillary Clinton:
Even after his pledge, though, it took months for Obama to buy in. In March 2007, he found himself on the same stage with a highly confident Clinton at another health care forum, this one sponsored by the Service Employees International Union in Las Vegas.
Obama staggered through a discussion that left policy wonks convinced that he was out of his league, particularly when compared to Clinton, arguably the nation’s premier expert on health care after her unsuccessful attempt to enact reform in the 1990s.
While she dominated, he was confronted by an audience member who asked why he didn’t have a health care plan yet. He responded that his campaign was only eight weeks old and promised to come up with one soon.
A House hearing has exposed how shallow the State Department’s “investigation” of the Benghazi debacle truly was:
*Secretary of State Hillary Clinton handpicked the two leaders of the ARB who were given the job of investigating her department.
*Cheryl Mills, the chief of staff and senior counselor to Secretary Clinton, was intimately involved with the ARB [accountability review board] panel from the beginning. She called the leaders at Clinton’s behest to ask them to serve, she was briefed regularly on the investigation as it unfolded and she received a draft copy of the report before it was finalized. . .
*The chairman of the panel acknowledged at least one instance in which language in the report was softened after an early draft was sent to Clinton and her top aides. . .
*The ARB did not speak with nine key military officials on the ground in Libya or Germany who were deeply involved in the US response to the attacks. Among those who was never interviewed: Lt. Colonel Steven Gibson, who was on the ground in Tripoli and whom State Department official Greg Hicks has testified was on the receiving end of the “stand-down” order that Obama officials have repeatedly disclaimed. . .
*None of the interviews the ARB conducted were recorded in any fashion. . . The only record of those sessions is in notes taken by a staff member. . . (Those summaries and the notes that produced them have not been provided to Congress).
*The ARB did not investigate the Obama administration’s public response to the attack or the role that senior State Department officials played in shaping that narrative. That response included the highly misleading claim that the attacks had come as a reaction to an anti-Islam video and many other claims that were later shown to be false.
The purpose of the probe was not to investigate anything, but to protect Hillary Clinton from damage. Their choice not to investigate the stand-down order is particularly appalling.
In May, the IRS acknowledged subjecting conservative groups to intrusive scrutiny and delaying applications for far too long before approving them. Some applications are still awaiting approval after three years.
The newly revealed surveillance, however, applied to applications that had been approved, but where the IRS apparently wanted to determine whether the groups strayed too far into political activity to keep their tax-exempt status.
Mr. Werfel quibbled with calling the continued “surveillance” and said he didn’t see any evidence that groups on the list for scrutiny was improperly influenced by any IRS employees.
But he said the program was troubling enough that he shut it down two weeks ago.
You have never seen in the history of the United States the debt ceiling or the threat of not raising the debt being used to extort a president or a governing party and trying to force issues that have nothing to do with the budget and nothing to do with the debt.
As is nearly always the case when the Democrats claim that Republican tactics are unprecedented (such as this), not only is that claim false, but the tactic was actually pioneered by Democrats:
In 1973, when Richard Nixon was president, Democrats in the Senate, including Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sen. Walter Mondale (D-Minn.), sought to attach a campaign finance reform bill to the debt ceiling after the Watergate-era revelations about Nixon’s fundraising during the 1972 election. . .
Indeed, Linda K. Kowalcky and Lance T. LeLoup wrote in a comprehensive study of the politics of the debt limit, for Public Administration Review, that “during this period, the genesis of a pattern developed that would eventually become full blown in the mid-1970s and 1980s: the use of the debt ceiling vote as a vehicle for other legislative matters.”
Previously, they noted, the debt limit bill had been linked to the mechanics of debt management, but now anything was fair game. Major changes in Social Security were attached to the debt bill; another controversial amendment sought to end the bombing in Cambodia. Kowalcky and LeLoup list 25 nongermane amendments that were attached to debt-limit bills between 1978 and 1987, including allowing voluntary school prayer, banning busing to achieve integration and proposing a nuclear freeze.
In 1982, Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker unleashed a free-for-all by allowing 1,400 nongermane amendments to the debt ceiling legislation, which resulted in five weeks of raucous debate that mostly focused on limiting federal court jurisdiction over school payer and busing.
Yes, lies and hypocrisy, but there’s also Barone’s first rule: all process arguments are insincere.
If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.
As we know well by now, that was a lie. Yesterday, Walgreens dumped 160,000 employees from its health care plan. Today, Home Depot dumped 20,000 employees from its health care plan.
Obama also promised that his plan would cut your health insurance premium by $2,500 per year. Think about that when you see your premium soar.
If there’s nothing to the Benghazi scandal, why is the CIA disciplining employees who won’t sign an agreement not to talk to Congress, and conducting polygraphs to make sure that no one is talking to Congress?
CIA director John Brennan denies all of it, but he’s learned from Eric Holder and James Clapper that there are no consequences for lying to Congress.
Think Progress says that employers cutting off health care proves that Obamacare is working exactly as it’s supposed to:
Trader Joe’s Is Dropping Coverage For Some Part Time Workers — And That Means Obamacare Is Working
Awesome. I can’t decide which of these clips is a better analogy:
POSTSCRIPT: Of course, in a sense they’re right. Notwithstanding what the public was told, the purpose of Obamacare is to destroy the current system and put the government in charge of health care. When we see people moving from private coverage to the government “exchanges”, the system is indeed working as intended.
So there was an awful shooting rampage Monday at the Navy Yard in Washington, DC. And, as always happens after a gun-related incident in the United States, the anti-gun crowd says we need a “national dialogue” on gun control, by which they really mean that gun-rights supporters should shut up and do what they say. But yes, let’s have a dialogue. Three main points:
First, the anti-gun movement is a bunch of liars. A number of legacy media outlets, including the New York Times and the AP, reported that the Aaron Alexis, the murderer, used an AR-15. This is false, he did not. Sure, it’s easy to report erroneous facts in a developing story (particularly when you’re not too concerned to get the story right), so it may be little harsh to call them liars on that basis.
But when you’re still getting the story wrong after the facts are known, then you’re lying. The NYT has finally corrected its story some time yesterday afternoon or evening, but does not have a correction noted. The AP still has the story wrong. The NYT is now reporting (still, at this hour) that Alexis tried to buy an AR-15 but was prohibited from buying one by state law, which is also false.
The New York Daily News made the involvement of an AR-15’s its cover story yesterday, including a photograph of an unrelated medical emergency and a stock photo of an AR-15. Not having a photograph of Alexis brandishing an AR-15 (since no such photo exists), MSNBC just mocked up a graphic, which they were using long after the facts were known.
ASIDE: MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow aimed higher (perhaps we should say, leaned further forward) than a particular weapon. Mass shootings, she claimed, were on the rise. Her claim is narrowly true, based on a definition of mass shootings as one with 12 or more deaths. But the number 12 was carefully selected to exploit a statistical blip. If you choose a higher or a lower number the pattern goes away, and mass shooting are down dramatically. (And, by the way, why the focus on mass shootings rather than mass killings? Is murder only bad when it’s committed with a gun?)
But the grand prize for misinformation has to go to CNN. Unable to let go of the AR-15 meme, even when it was known that Alexis used a shotgun, CNN reported that Alexis had used an “AR-15 shotgun”. That makes about as much sense as an “iPod piano”. (But these are the same people who invented the “white hispanic” category to make George Zimmerman white.)
Second, the whole premise of the argument is stupid. Suppose he had used an AR-15; so what? The AR-15 is a good weapon. That’s why it is the most popular rifle in America today. The same features that make it attractive to law-abiding citizens can also make it attractive to criminals.
Third, and more importantly, it’s high time we stopped focusing on stopping gun control and took the rhetorical offensive. (You say you want a dialog, let’s have one!) Banning guns isn’t going keep them out of the hands of criminals, who are criminals anyway after all. If you want to stop mass shootings, we should let law-abiding citizens go armed.
Nearly all mass shootings take place in gun-free zones; there is only one exception since 1950. Research shows that active killers seek out gun-free zones. Gun-free zones kill; it’s time to get rid of them.
When the University of Texas sniper struck in 1966, it wasn’t the police who stopped him. It was ordinary armed citizens who pinned him down with rifle fire until the police (with help from other ordinary citizens) could take him down. BuzzFeed has an article about nine potential mass shootings averted by armed citizens. The sailors and Marines at the Navy Yard could have dealt with Alexis quickly, but they were disarmed.
It is absolutely astonishing that members of our armed services are kept utterly defenseless at home. In the wake of the Fort Hood terror attack, it’s not just astonishing but inexcusable. People have a right to keep guns off their private property (although it’s not as though we respect any other private property rights any more), but on public property gun-free zones should go away today. They serve no purpose but to get people killed.
. . . like ticketing Pittsburghers for parking in their own driveways. As much as $2400. For parking in your own driveway. Tar and feathers are too good for these people.
Pittsburgh isn’t the first to try to squeeze a little extra revenue from its beleaguered residents, either; Washington, DC tried it a few years ago. DC wanted to sell parking permits for driveways, but Pittsburgh appears to be more interested in the fines, since they are keeping quiet the option to buy a permit.
After the British House of Commons refused to support President Obama’s ill-considered action in Syria, the US military is shutting out the British from US military planning.
I guess these fools really don’t understand that this sort of pettiness can have long-term geopolitical consequences. I just hope that the British government is more grown-up than we are.
This, sadly, will always be the three-fold legacy of Benghazi: An awful terrorist attack. In the heart of a presidential campaign, a desperate cover-up. And shamefulwater-carrying by the media, without which the cover-up never could have succeeded.
For the record, I generally tend to support military action against our enemies abroad, provided that it is feasible and serves our interests to do so. But before we can say whether the action is feasible and serves our interests, we need to know the objective. What is the objective in military action against Syria? No one seems to know!
John McCain thinks that regime change should be the objective, and actually got that objective written into the resolution that passed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. (Strangely, the Democrats didn’t seem to care much what the resolution actually said.) But seeking regime change seems foolish now, since the only rebels still in action against Assad are Islamists who are more dangerous to us than Assad. Regime change would have been a good policy a year ago, when there were still elements in the Syrian civil war who were secular and friendly to the west. But thanks to President Obama’s inaction, those people are all dead or scattered now. Regime change now would serve only to replace an enemy with a worse enemy. (We could effect regime change by occupying the country and installing a new regime ourselves, but that’s obviously not in the cards.)
In any case, regime change is categorically not the aim of the Obama administration, who are pledging to wage an “unbelievably small” campaign. Yes, John Kerry, the Secretary of State (God help us), really did say that. Or, even more bizarrely:
A second senior official, who has seen the most recent planning, offered this metaphor to describe such a strike: If Assad is eating Cheerios, we’re going to take away his spoon and give him a fork. Will that degrade his ability to eat Cheerios? Yes. Will it deter him? Maybe. But he’ll still be able to eat Cheerios.
I won’t pretend to understand the Cheerios-with-a-fork analogy, but one thing is certain, if they had an actual objective (e.g., reverse the communist coup in Grenada, destroy Al Qaeda’s safe haven in Afghanistan, end Saddam Hussein’s regime), they would express it, and wouldn’t need to resort to this drivel.
Even a very limited objective such as “punish Bashar Assad” might serve, if the attack were to be directed at him personally, but that too is clearly not what they are planning. And, moreover, now that Assad has had weeks of advance warning, it can’t be done anyway. (As Mitch McConnell put it, you don’t send out a “save the date” card to the enemy!)
The bottom line of all of this is that we should not launch an attack against Syria, unless and until we figure out what the purpose for such an attack would be.
However, what Congress should do in regard to authorization is a different question. President Obama did not need to seek and should not have sought Congressional authorization for the kind of action he is contemplating. A limited strike is well within the powers of the commander-in-chief, even under the War Powers Act, which is a dead letter anyway.
But we are where we are. Obama did seek authorization, and Congress ought to grant it. We have only one president at a time, and we need that president’s words to have credibility abroad. We can’t do anything about the problem of President Obama damaging his own credibility with ill-considered, off-the-cuff threats, but we can make sure that he is not further undermined by his own government. (Yes, it’s true, when Democrats controlled Congress they did everything they could to undermine President Bush abroad, but the fact that Democrats did it first would make it no less irresponsible.)
This is not to say that Congress should pass a resolution in favor of an attack against Syria. As above, an attack is a terrible idea at this juncture, and Congress should not pretend otherwise. Instead, Congress should pass a resolution affirming the commander-in-chief’s constitutional authority to take necessary steps to protect US interests in regard to Syria. Basically, Congress should say, “you’re the president, do what you need to do.”
Such a resolution would maintain the president’s credibility abroad (so far as that’s possible) and also side-step the trap that Obama is trying to lay to Republicans. He knows that his policy is desperately unpopular, and he is trying to pass the buck. (Or, as NBC puts it, he is trying to “unilaterally widen the circle of responsibility.”) By affirming the president’s authority without approving of his policy, Congress passes the buck back to the president, where it belongs.
Unfortunately, it’s clear that that’s not going to happen. Feckless in all aspects of this crisis, Obama has done nothing to rally Congress to support him. The word from Capitol Hill is that he doesn’t have the votes either in the House, or even in the Democrat-controlled Senate. That, and not the ridiculous Russian peace proposal, is the reason Obama asked Congress to postpone voting on authorization.
Voters tossed out both of the anti-gun Colorado state senators up for recall last night, including the senate president. This, despite a massive spending advantage in favor of the anti-gun/anti-recall side.
It’s one thing for a deliberately polarizing legislator like Morse to lose a close race in a swing district. It’s quite another for Giron to lose by 12 points in a district that is 47% Democratic and 23% Republican. One reason is that in blue collar districts like Pueblo, there are plenty of Democrats who cling to their Second Amendment rights. As the Denver Post noted, 20% of the voters who signed the Giron recall petitions were Democrats.
The municipal government of Williston, North Dakota has determined that homeless people are better off sleeping on the street (in North Dakota, mind you!), than inside a church without an automatic sprinkler system.
As Democrats like to say, government is just what we call the things we choose to do together, like throwing homeless out on the streets of North Dakota.
Inspired by the “Toy Gun” buyback program recently initiated by Hayward California’s Strobridge Elementary School principal Charles Hill, Vice President Joe Biden is scheduled to announce today White House backing of a new “Imaginary Gun” buyback program.
“We have been plagued by a recent rash of imaginary gun incidents in our nation’s schools,” said Biden spokesman Aldous Orwell. “Children live in terror because of rampant imagination.”
Step One of the program would entail registration of imaginary weapons in a National Imaginary Terror Weapon Information Tracking System (NITWITS). Educators will help students fill out a form from NITWITS to see if their imaginations are producing unacceptable thoughts involving a weapon of any kind. . .
Step Two will involve conditioning the “At Risk” students to “trade-in” their unacceptable actions, like pointing their fingers and saying “bang,” or pretending to hold a sword while making “schwing” or “ting! tang!” sounds, for more correct thoughts – like rejecting gender stereotypes, or performing community service activities.
Read the whole thing. What’s so brilliant about this is that it is so very nearly true. When schools are disciplining children for imaginary guns or symbolic representations of guns, it’s not about keeping children safe, it’s about thought police.
Today, after five years of Obama restoring our image in the world, the British no longer think the “special relationship” is worth preserving. All this stuff, and particularlyallthisstuff, matters.
Remember in 2003, when President Bush took us to war “unilaterally”, with nothing more than a coalition of 40 nations, Congressional approval, and the support of 75% of the American people?
Today our president is contemplating war without a coalition, without Congressional approval, and with disapproval of 50% of the American people. I’m so glad the we got rid of the cowboy unilateralist.
But wait, there’s more. Remember our dear multi-lateralist president’s position on military action?
The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.
And the vice-president’s courageous stand against a unilateral attack?
I want to make it clear. And I made it clear to the President that if he takes this nation to war in Iran without Congressional approval, I will make it my business to impeach him. That’s a fact. That is a fact.
One measure would close a loophole under which felons, those convicted of domestic violence and others banned from having guns can evade required background checks for machine guns or other weapons by registering the gun to a trust or corporation. The ATF received more than 39,000 requests last year for transfers of restricted firearms to trusts or corporations, Biden said, calling it “a very artful dodge to get around people who are not capable legally of owning weapons to be able to gain access.”
The White House adds that “felons, domestic abusers, and others prohibited from having guns can easily evade the required background check . . . by registering the weapon to a trust or corporation.”
Yes, when registered to a corporation any officer is allowed to posses the machine gun, but the point that the transfer occurs still requires a NICS check for the person actually picking up the gun.
So registering a gun to a corporation does not allow you to evade the background check. That is a lie.
The effect of this rule is that a corporation cannot register a weapon unless all of its officers are permitted to possess it, even those officers who never will. One domestic abuse charge is enough to blackball an entire company.
And why do companies need to register weapons anyway? Because the government has made them prohibitively expensive for individuals.
The second order is also dishonest:
The other measure will end a government practice that allows military weapons, sold or donated by the United States to allies, to be re-imported into the United States by private groups. The White House said the United States has approved the re-importation of 250,000 such guns since 2005; under the new policy, only museums and a few other groups such as the government will be allowed to re-import these weapons.
The weapon at issue here, what the White House calls “military grade”, is the obsolete M-1 Garand, which the United States produced in enormous quantities during World War 2. Lott explains that the M-1 is just like any civilian .30-06 hunting rifle, except that it is too heavy by modern standards. It is “military grade” in the exact same sense as a 17th-century blunderbuss: it was once used by the military. Today it is mainly sought after by collectors.
POSTSCRIPT: The media, alas, has been typically credulous in reporting the president’s anti-gun orders, taking the White House’s claims at face value. For example, NPR simply quoted the White House “fact sheet”, without doing the minimal reporting that would have shown that it wasn’t true. The Washington Post did note the bogosity of the reimportation rule, but not the registration rule.
An IRS letter sent to the group last week and obtained by The Washington Times contains a laundry list of requests related to virtually all the group’s activities, including its involvement in the 2012 election cycle and its get-out-the-vote efforts, fundraising activities, all radio and TV advertising, and other information. The IRS also is asking for detailed financial records, including “the amounts and percentages of your total expenses that were for fundraising activities in the tax year 2011, 2012 and 2013.”
The Aug. 20 request came as a shock to Tea Party Patriots, which said it already has provided to the IRS extensive information on all of its activities and thinks it is long past time to receive a “yes” or “no” answer.
The letter also is proof that, while President Obama and other liberals have referred to the situation as a “phony scandal,” conservative organizations still are targets, said Cleta Mitchell, a Washington, D.C., lawyer representing the Tea Party Patriots and several other conservative groups.
IRS chief counsel William Wilkins, who was named in House Oversight testimony by retiring IRS agent Carter Hull as one of his supervisors in the improper targeting of conservative groups, met with Obama in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on April 23, 2012. Wilkins’ boss, then-IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman, visited the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on April 24, 2012, according to White House visitor logs.
On April 25, 2012, Wilkins’ office sent the exempt organizations determinations unit “additional comments on the draft guidance” for approving or denying tea party tax-exempt applications, according to the IRS inspector general’s report.
In a potentially important case, a federal appeals court has ruled that the First Amendment does not give labor unions the right to engage in a pattern of bad-faith litigation:
The case is Waugh Chapel South, LLC v. United Food and Commercial Workers. In it, the developer of a shopping center whose tenants included a Wegmans, a non-union grocery store, was sued 14 times by UFCW. Most of the cases involved challenges to permitting decisions and were dismissed or rendered moot. In one instance, the case was withdrawn after the developer subpoenaed the union’s financial records.
Waugh Chapel South alleged the cases reflected a pattern of harassment. In their complaint, the company said a union official promised to “fight every project you develop where Wegmans is a tenant.” UFCW countered that it had a First Amendment to make such complaints right under a 1965 Supreme Court case, United Mine Workers v. Pennington.
A three- judge panel rejected that argument. “In light of the poor litigation record and the signs of bad-faith petitioning, a factfinder could reasonably conclude that the unions have abused their right to petition the courts and, as a result, have forfeited the protection of the First Amendment,” they wrote.
Because we subsidize the US cotton industry, we apparently must also subsidize the Brazilian cotton industry. It’s not clear whether US agricultural policy could get any more stupid.
A U.S. official briefed on the military options being considered by President Obama told the Los Angeles Times that the White House is seeking a strike on Syria “just muscular enough not to get mocked.”
“They are looking at what is just enough to mean something, just enough to be more than symbolic,” the official told the paper, giving credence to similar reports describing a limited military strike in the aftermath of last week’s alleged chemical weapons attack.
“Just enough to be more than symbolic”? What does that even mean?
If it’s not symbolic, which is to say substantive, that means that we have an objective and allocate sufficient force to achieve it. You can’t just say your objective is “not to be symbolic,” that’s just circular reasoning.
Attempting to quell criticism of his proposal for a limited military mission in Syria, President Obama floated a more modest strategy today, saying that any U.S. action in Syria would have “no objective whatsoever.”
For the vast majority of Americans, premium prices will be higher in the individual exchange than what they’re currently paying for employer-sponsored benefits, according to a National Journal analysis of new coverage and cost data. Adding even more out-of-pocket expenses to consumers’ monthly insurance bills is a swell in deductibles under the Affordable Care Act.
Health law proponents have excused the rate hikes by saying the prices in the exchange won’t apply to the millions receiving coverage from their employers. But that’s only if employers continue to offer that coverage–something that’s looking increasingly uncertain. Already, UPS, for example, cited Obamacare as its reason for nixing spousal coverage. And while a Kaiser Family Foundation report found that 49 percent of the U.S. population now receives employer-sponsored coverage, more companies are debating whether they will continue to be in the business of providing such benefits at all.
This Slate piece (apparently Slate still exists!) really quite amazing:
If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person
A manifesto.
You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad.
I am not an education policy wonk: I’m just judgmental. But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good.
Wow. She says that I should give my kids a “mediocre” education, and indeed that people should do so for generations, and she calls me a bad person?
Not only is she a bad person, she is also an ignorant person. Apparently she believes that if everyone buys a product irrespective of its quality, then its quality will improve. Oh, I see:
I went K–12 to a terrible public school. My high school didn’t offer AP classes, and in four years, I only had to read one book.
Whatever book she read, it clearly wasn’t economics.
Benedikt’s entire argument is that non-participants in an organization ruin it by their non-participation. It’s not the actual participants who are to blame for the institution’s failures – not the teachers, not the administrators, and not the policy-makers — but the people who avoid the failure that should be blamed.
Mayors Against Illegal Guns is a cleverly named organization. The name is intended to give the impression that they aren’t looking to ban guns, just to keep them out of the hands of criminals. But the name is a lie. While they work vigorously to ban guns and accessories, they seem to have no interest at all in actually enforcing the gun laws that exist:
The districts that contain Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City ranked last in terms of federal gun law enforcement in 2012, according to a new report from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which tracks federal data. . .
The districts of Eastern New York, Central California, and Northern Illinois ranked 88th, 89th and 90th, respectively, out of 90 districts, in prosecutions of federal weapons crimes per capita last year, but it wasn’t always this way. All three districts fell lower on the list than they had been in years past. In 2010, for example, Chicago was 78th in federal weapons prosecutions.
These cities also have some of the nation’s most restrictive gun laws, as well as the most active mayors in championing gun control. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa are all members of the national Mayors Against Illegal Guns campaign.
Megan McArdle has an interesting article about how Treasury Secretary Jack Lew’s history of lying to Republicans about budget numbers, and then crowing about it, will make it difficult for the White House to strike a budget deal with Republicans. The Republicans, justifiably, simply don’t believe his numbers.
Without denigrating James O’Keefe’s work at all — I think it’s great — he’s not doing anything that other enterprising investigative journalists couldn’t do. The fact that he’s the only one doing this stuff is an indictment of the entire field.
Surprise, surprise. GreenTech’s denials that it lobbied for green cards for its “investors” aren’t true:
Government documents contradict claims made by GreenTech Automotive officials that they did nothing to press federal officials to approve the visa application of Zhenjun Zhang, a foreign investor with ties to a Chinese company on a U.S. spy list.
Documents show that attorney Simone Williams and CEO Anthony Rodham, executives at GreenTech’s investor relations arm, wrote on Jan. 29 to USCIS Director Alejandro Mayorkas seeking to fast track stalled petitions for foreign investors under the government’s EB-5 program. One of those that had been languishing was Zhang’s, according to government documents.
For an explanation of the GreenTech scandal, see here. In essence, they were selling green cards. GreenTech’s founder is Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia and the former chair of the Democratic party.
Anthony Rodham has no experience in the automotive industry (at least, not according to Wikipedia), but his sister is Hillary Clinton, until recently the Secretary of State. That should give an indication of whether GreenTech’s real business was green cars or green cards.
Remember the LightSquared affair? That was the telecom startup owned by Philip Falcone, a major Democratic donor who tried to parley his political connections into profit by getting the FCC to allow him to build a wireless service on top of a spectrum used by GPS and plane avionics. After the White House’s corruptintervention on his behalf came public, the effort collapsed and the company went bankrupt.
Cheap shot? Yeah, probably. But after watching his cronies and the media (but I repeat myself) go after Republicans for comparable gaffes — or for things they never even said — I have no inclination to be charitable left.
Samantha Power, who never should have been appointed or confirmed as the ambassador to the UN, doesn’t seem to care much about the job herself. With less than a month on the job, she skipped the UN’s emergency meeting on Syria’s latest use of chemical weapons:
Samantha Power, America’s new ambassador to the United Nations, skipped a major Security Council meeting Wednesday on the alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria, a move that drew sharp criticism considering her past comments denouncing the council’s inaction on the violence.
The strike early Wednesday could stand as the deadliest such incident since the country’s civil war began, with reports of hundreds dying. The U.N. Security Council called an emergency meeting Wednesday afternoon to debate the allegations, but ended up issuing a statement that fell far short of what the U.S. and its allies wanted.
Yet Power herself did not attend the emergency meeting. She was instead represented by career diplomat Ambassador Rosemary DiCarlo. . .
“Samantha Power has been on the job exactly 19 days. In that time, she’s already traveled from New York to Los Angeles to deliver a speech. Her absence from the UN on Wednesday sends a terrible message at a time when U.S. credibility in the region is suffering,” Richard Grenell, a former U.N. spokesman under the George W. Bush administration, wrote in an online column.
The UN, being what it is, probably wouldn’t have taken satisfactory action even with our ambassador present, but it might have helped. I guess she had other priorities than representing the United States at the UN.
I noted last week that arguments for a uniform [public school curriculum] standard seem rather weak. Nevertheless, Bill Keller of the New York Times devoted some column space this week to one such argument:
The Core does call for schools across the states to deliver their lessons in the same sequence. Does it really matter if children in Alabama and New Jersey start algebra in the same grade? It matters a lot to a kid who moves from Alabama to New Jersey. . .
This argument for national standards is an illustration of how politicians recommend more centralization as a way to fix problems caused by centralization. The public-school monopoly is what limits choice and creates the potential curriculum conflict. If parents had adequate choices in the first place, then interstate migration would not pose a major problem — parents could likely just choose a school in New Jersey whose curriculum is most similar to the child’s previous school in Alabama.
(Emphasis mine.)
It’s not about education, it’s about control of education. Richmond’s rule applies.
The White House was given advance notice of the British government’s plans to detain the partner of the Guardian reporter who has written a series of high-profile stories about U.S. surveillance practices, a spokesman said Monday.
In the daily White House briefing, spokesman Josh Earnest declined to condemn the detainment and didn’t directly answer questions about whether U.S. officials expressed any concern to their British counterparts about the U.K.’s plans. . .
David Miranda, the partner of Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, was held Sunday at London’s Heathrow airport for nine hours. Authorities said he was detained under a U.K. terrorism law, and they confiscated a number of his electronics, including a cellphone and laptop.
Presumably the White House wouldn’t answer whether they expressed concern because they haven’t decided yet.
“The president may not decline to follow a statutory mandate or prohibition simply because of policy objections,” Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote in a majority opinion, which was joined Judge A. Raymond Randolph. Chief Judge Merrick B. Garland dissented.
The case regarded the nuclear waste storage site in Nevada, not his higher-profile flouting of the law over Obamacare and immigration, but this still seems noteworthy.
A [federal court in Maryland] has dismissed a lawsuit against an events-services company accused by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of discriminatory hiring practices, a setback for a federal agency that increasingly argues the use of credit reports and criminal background checks can disproportionately impact minorities.
Yes, the administration really was arguing that it should be illegal for employers to prefer law-abiding persons over criminals.
UPDATE (9/3): More here on the shoddy research the administration tried to put forward:
The meat of the ruling, however, is the court’s blistering takedown of the government’s “expert” report, authored by an outside statistician who attempted to establish that Freeman’s criminal-background checks disproportionately harmed black job-seekers. Judge Titus described the report as “an egregious example of scientific dishonesty,” its analysis “laughable,” “skewed” and full of “cherry-picked data.” He concluded that the “mind-boggling-number of errors” rendered the EEOC’s “disparate impact conclusions worthless.”
In fact, the truth appears to be quite the opposite:
An October 2006 study in the Journal of Law and Economics, “Perceived Criminality, Criminal Background Checks, and the Racial Hiring Practices of Employers,” found that “employers that check criminal backgrounds are in general more likely to hire African Americans,” according to Harry Holzer of Georgetown University and his two co-authors. “[T]he adverse consequence of employer-initiated background checks on the likelihood of hiring African Americans is more than offset by the positive effect of eliminating statistical discrimination.” These researchers surmise that employers who can screen for prison records are less likely to rely on prejudice when hiring.
The saga of Lavabit founder Ladar Levison is getting even more ridiculous, as he explains that the government has threatened him with criminal charges for his decision to shut down the business, rather than agree to some mysterious court order. The feds are apparently arguing that the act of shutting down the business, itself, was a violation of the order . . .
Levison stressed that he has complied with “upwards of two dozen court orders” for information in the past that were targeted at “specific users” and that “I never had a problem with that.” But without disclosing details, he suggested that the order he received more recently was markedly different, requiring him to cooperate in broadly based surveillance that would scoop up information about all the users of his service.
After the Newtown massacre, President Obama ordered the CDC “to research the causes and prevention of gun violence”. He evidently thought that it would come back with a report supporting gun control, making him a fool but a true believer. In fact:
On the contrary, that study refuted nearly all the standard anti-gun narrative and instead supported many of the positions taken by gun ownership supporters.
For example, the majority of gun-related deaths between 2000 and 2010 were due to suicide and not criminal violence . . .
In addition, defensive use of guns “is a common occurrence,” according to the study . . .
Accidental deaths due to firearms has continued to fall as well, with “the number of unintentional deaths due to firearm-related incidents account[ing] for less than 1 percent of all unintentional fatalities in 2010.”
Furthermore, the key finding the president was no doubt seeking — that more laws would result in less crime — was missing. The study said that “interventions,” such as background checks and restrictions on firearms and increased penalties for illegal gun use, showed “mixed” results, while “turn-in” programs “are ineffective” in reducing crime. The study noted that most criminals obtained their guns in the underground economy — from friends, family members, or gang members — well outside any influence from gun controls on legitimate gun owners.
And:
There was one startling conclusion which, taken at face value, seemed to give the president what he was looking for. The study reported that “the U.S. rate of firearm-related homicide is higher than that of any other industrialized country: 19.5 times higher than the rates in other high-income countries.” . . . [However:] “If one were to exclude figures for Illinois, California, New Jersey and Washington, DC, the homicide rate in the United States would be in line with any other country.” These areas, of course, are noted for the most restrictive gun laws in the country, thus negating any opportunity for the president to celebrate the report’s findings.
In another setback for President Obama’s health care initiative, the administration has delayed until 2015 a significant consumer protection in the law that limits how much people may have to spend on their own health care.
The limit on out-of-pocket costs, including deductibles and co-payments, was not supposed to exceed $6,350 for an individual and $12,700 for a family. But under a little-noticed ruling, federal officials have granted a one-year grace period to some insurers, allowing them to set higher limits, or no limit at all on some costs, in 2014.
The grace period has been outlined on the Labor Department’s Web site since February, but was obscured in a maze of legal and bureaucratic language that went largely unnoticed.
Be sure to notice the last bit (emphasis mine). The Obama administration set aside a major portion of the law, and didn’t even tell anyone.
The Justice Department and FBI have quietly acknowledged they grossly overstated the scope of a mortgage fraud crackdown, which the administration heralded with much fanfare a few weeks before last year’s presidential election.
According to a memo circulated by the FBI and a correction posted online by the Justice Department, the number of defendants, the number of victims and the size of the losses are, in reality, a fraction of what officials claimed last October.
In the long run, I think that the Democrats are making a big mistake by identifying the Justice Department with political chicanery. Some day the DOJ might need that reputation they’re ruining.
Two things about the Million Muslim March on Washington, scheduled for September 11: First, they have a legal right to do it. Second, doing it on that particular day is crass, unseemly, and will inflame the anti-Muslim sentiment that they claim to be marching against — much like the Ground Zero Mosque built on the footprint of a building damaged beyond repair by an airplane impact on 9/11.
POSTSCRIPT: Actually, a third thing: they’re expecting a thousand people.
There is a pernicious notion that the essential quality of the American system of government is democracy. This is a very basic misunderstanding, and one that seems to be ingrained early. In my case I picked it up as a child, so early than I’m not even sure when.
But it’s nonsense. Democracy, also sometimes called more forthrightly “majority rule”, is the idea that 51% of the people have the right to impose their will on the other 49%. We know instinctively that this is wrong.
ASIDE: I’m considering democracy under its narrow meaning here. It’s true that democracy (or “liberal democracy”) sometimes is used to refer to whole collection of ideas, not just majority rule. But in that case I am arguing that using “democracy” as an umbrella term is inapt.
The essence of the American system is liberty. Democracy is but a means to an end. As Heinlein’s Jubal Harshaw put it (paraphrasing): democracy is a poor system; the only thing to be said in its favor is the other systems are worse. Since haven’t figured out a realistic way for society to survive without government, putting its management into as broad hands as possible impedes it becoming a tyranny.
Impedes, but does not prevent. Democracy is just one mechanism we use to protect our liberty; others are the rule of law, separation of powers, checks and balances, and a bill of rights. Democracy is probably the least important of these.
The most important is the rule of law. Friedrich Hayek explains it this way (in his brilliant sixth chapter of the Road to Serfdom):
Nothing distinguishes more clearly conditions in a free country from those in a country under arbitrary government than the observance in the former of the great principles known as the Rule of Law. Stripped of all technicalities, this means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand — rules which make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers in given circumstances and to plan one’s individual affairs on the basis of this knowledge. . .
While every law restricts individual freedom to some extent by altering the means which people may use in the pursuit of their aims, under the Rule of Law the government is prevented from stultifying individual efforts by ad hoc action.
The rule of law says that people can live their lives, run their businesses, raise their families, in a system whose rules are known to them in advance. The government will not interfere capriciously.
In the American system of government, laws are made, interpreted, and carried out by three distinct branches. The laws are changed only with difficulty (by the legislature), they are interpreted consistently (by a judicial system bound by precedent), and they are “faithfully executed” (by the executive).
Alas, this system has gone off the rails. When the legislative and executive powers are in the same hands, the potential for capricious interference increases dramatically. Once the Constitution was interpreted under the nondelegation doctrine (which dates back at least to 1689), which provided that the legislative power could not be delegated. However, in 1928 the Supreme Court ruled in Hampton v. United States that legislative power could be delegated, provided the law provided an “intelligible principle” to guide the executive branch.
The intelligible principle needn’t be particularly detailed either. Laws have almost never been struck down due to unconstitutional delegation, and in 1989 the Supreme Court made the low standard explicit in Mistretta v. United States, stating:
Congress simply cannot do its job absent an ability to delegate power under broad general directives. Accordingly, this Court has deemed it “constitutionally sufficient” if Congress clearly delineates the general policy, the public agency which is to apply it, and the boundaries of this delegated authority.
Today, Congress “delineates the general policy”, while executive-branch bureaucrats make all the rules that govern our lives. That it does so capriciously cannot be denied. For example, when the EPA decides that carbon dioxide is dangerous, it gains the power to shut down coal-fired power plants, and anyone who invested money under the old rules is simply out of luck. And the EPA did so on its own; there was no legislative action, indeed, Congress considered the question and chose not to act.
Very recently, however, the problem has gotten much worse. President Obama has now arrogated for himself the power to decline to carry out portions of the law he doesn’t want to carry out, even in the absence of any delegation of power to do so. This is in direct violation of the Constitution’s provision that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”
He has done so by refusing to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act (justified by his claim that it was unconstitutional, which the Supreme Court later backed), refusing to enforce immigration law for certain classes of illegal immigrants (justified by prosecutorial discretion), and declining to carry out certain provisions of Obamacare (justified by nothing whatsoever).
To be clear: some or all of these may well be good policy. That is entirely beside the point; they are not the law. Under the rule of law, the government is “bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand,” regardless of how the executive might judge their wisdom from moment to moment.
Today we have democracy (mostly), but without the rule of law, democracy merely gives us an elected tyrant.
POSTSCRIPT: A number of people have written elegantly on the dangerous implications of Obama’s arrogation of the power to ignore the law: Michael McConnell, John Yoo, and George Will. Andrew Klavan has recently written about the problems with democracy in another context.
UPDATE: Another example, Obama is unilaterally changing drug laws. Again, I agree as a matter of policy, but that’s not the point. He should push for the law to be changed, but he won’t do that. Respecting the rule of law would require political effort.
Mock the president at the Missouri State Fair, and receive a lifetime ban. Just to cover the bases: Yes, the Missouri State Fair is a government operation (and its board is appointed by the governor) so the First Amendment does apply. Yes, presidential masks have been used this way before, without inspiring outrage. Yes, the same people who are now oh-so-offended had no problem with mockery and assassination fantasies directed toward George W Bush.
And yes, the NAACP is demanding a federal investigation. Of a rodeo clown.
Glenn Reynolds is right. We have a weak president who can’t bear the criticism that is routinely directed at the president. The rodeo clown is guilty of lese majeste.
UPDATE: “Obama were a classy guy, he’d ask the folks that run the rodeo to un-fire the clown. He’d say, Hey, I can take a joke.” Indeed he would. And since he hasn’t, we may apply the contrapositive.
Employers around the country, from fast-food franchises to colleges, have told NBC News that they will be cutting workers’ hours below 30 a week because they can’t afford to offer the health insurance mandated by the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. . .
NBC News spoke with almost 20 small businesses and other entities from Maine to California, and almost all said that because of the new law they’d be cutting back hours for some employees – an unintended consequence of the new law.
Obamacare may succeed in a sweeping change, but a different one than the one he intended. He may be making a 30-hour work week standard.
Nakoula Basseley Nakoula has been released from prison. Nakoula spent a year in prison after having been scapegoated for responsibility for the Benghazi attack on the basis of a film he made attacking Islam.
Some will claim that Nakoula was jailed for probation violations, not for making the film. It’s been a year, so let’s debunk that yet again:
Nakoula committed minor probation violations that no one would have cared about had he not been chosen as the scapegoat for Benghazi.
The only reason those probation violations even came to light is because the federal government investigated the film looking for a scapegoat.
Hillary Clinton pledged that the maker of the film would be arrested and prosecuted. This was before his identity or probation status were known.
The Environmental Protection Agency may have intentionally skirted public disclosure requirements under the Freedom of Information Act, a federal judge ruled Thursday. . .
“The possibility that unsearched personal email accounts may have been used for official business raises the possibility that leaders in the EPA may have purposefully attempted to skirt disclosure under the FOIA,” Lambert wrote. “The possibility that the agency purposefully excluded the top leaders of the EPA from the search, at least initially, suggests an unreasonable and bad faith reading of Landmark’s FOIA request and subsequent agreement to narrow its scope.”
Lambert also said the EPA’s statements concerning its search for records were incomplete and “contain numerous inconsistencies and reversals which undermine confidence in their truthfulness.”
President Obama’s brobdingnagian stimulus package was a massive waste of money that accomplished nothing, but at least we got some improved infrastructure out of it, right? I mean, the idea was to “invest” in rebuilding our “crumbling infrastructure”, wasn’t it?
Nope. It turns out that building infrastructure is unfairly slanted toward jobs for “burly men”. Once the radical feminists got their claws into it, infrastructure became “human infastructure”, which means stuff other than infrastructure.
So in the end, we paid for Hoover Dam and we didn’t even get Hoover Dam. Remember this the next time the Democrats plead that we need to rebuild our infrastructure.
A white paper released by the White House on Friday argues that Congress knew exactly what it was approving [viz a viz NSA collection of telephone records] when it reauthorized the Patriot Act in 2011.
“Information concerning the use of Section 215 to . . . collect telephony metadata in bulk was made available to all Members of Congress,” the paper says. “Congress reauthorized Section 215 without change after this information was provided.”
But a leading administration critic has disputed that claim. Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) said he never saw a 2011 letter to Congress disclosing the existence of the phone records program. And neither did dozens of his colleagues.
The Justice Department sent the letter to the top Republican and the top Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. . . But in a Sunday Facebook post, Amash charged that “the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence did NOT, in fact, make the 2011 document available to Representatives in Congress.”
If that isn’t true, it should be easy for the White House to refute.
GreenTech, the electric car company founded by Terry McAuliffe (Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia, and erstwhile chair of the Democratic party) is under investigation by the SEC. One of the charges is that GreenTech was offering a bogus investment vehicle that basically amounted to selling EB-5 visas, which can be converted to green cards.
How can a private company be selling green cards, you wonder? Apparently there is a provision in the immigration code whereby you can get an EB-5 visa for starting or investing in a business that creates jobs in “targeted employment areas.” (I’m sure there’s no cronyism in how those are chosen. . .) GreenTech (allegedly) was certifying people as EB-5 investors who weren’t really making any investment at all.
To investigate the NSA’s spying on Americans, President Obama appointed the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper. Clapper, of course, is best known for heading the intelligence apparatus as its misconduct was ongoing, and for lying about it to Congress. More precisely, Clapper was directed to name the investigating panel’s members, who would then report to him.
Perhaps seeing how absurd it is for Clapper to head the investigation of himself, the White House has already reversed itself. (See update here.) They now say the White House will name the members, and the panel will not report to Clapper, both of which are changes from the original mandate:
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, I am directing you to establish a Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies … Within 60 days of its establishment, the Review Group will brief their interim findings to me through the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and the Review Group will provide a final report and recommendations to me through the DNI no later than December 15, 2013.
In the full light of history, with the monstrosity of the Nazi regime clear in retrospect, everyone wants to pretend that they were against the Nazis all along. The left even likes to pretend that national socialism was actually somehow a right-wing ideology. Jonah Goldberg wrote an entire book on what nonsense that is, but new examples are dribbling out all the time. Let’s look at a few:
In 1934, Cornelius Vanderbilt released Hitler’s Reign of Terror, the first anti-Nazi film in America, which told the truth about Hitler when the American elites were still fawning over Hitler’s regime. The film was banned by the Roosevelt Administration. (Via Instapundit.)
Franklin Roosevelt declined to take simple, quiet measures that could have saved hundreds of thousands of Jews from the holocaust.
Posted by K. Crary 
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