Internet Scofflaw

One can debate whether disaster relief (such as in the wake of Hurricane Sandy) is an appropriate use of federal money. But if we’re going to do it, it ought really to be disaster relief. For Congress to take a steaming pile of pork-barrel spending and call it hurricane relief is simply disgusting.

I demurred when White House press flack Jay Carney reportedly linked the Newtown massacre to the need for tax hikes. It may well have been his intent, but his remark was sufficiently oblique as to be deniable.

On the other hand, President Obama’s statement today was really quite explicit:

If this past week has done anything it should give us some perspective. I-I-I-If there’s one thing we should have, after this week, it should be a sense of perspective about what’s important. And I would like to think that members of that caucus would say to themselves “You know what, I disagree with the president on some things. . . But right now, what the country needs is for us to compromise, get a deficit reduction deal in place, [etc.], allow ourselves time to focus on things like preventing the tragedy in Newtown from happening again, [etc.], and if we could just pull back from the immediate political battles, if ya peel off the partisan war paint, then we should be able to get something done.”

I think, I think the Speaker would like to get that done. But an environment needs to be created not just among House Republicans but among Senate Republicans that says the campaign is over and let’s see if we can do what’s right for the country, at least for the next month!

There you have it: Because of Newtown, Republicans need to stop fighting Obama’s agenda. The man has no decency whatsoever.

(Via PJ Tatler.)

A note to gullible West Virginia voters: this is what happens when you elect a supposedly pro-gun Democrat.

UPDATE: Manchin is walking this back now. He has evidently heard from his constituents.

Here is a phrase we’re going to start seeing a lot of:

The hospital informed us that this is a fairly new operation perfected over just the last five years. However: this surgery will “cease to be available in two years for insurance patients due to ObamaCare.”

The Washington Post reports that the White House is following a plan to avoid negotiating over the “fiscal cliff”:

Two senior White House officials said that David Plouffe, Obama’s top political adviser, crafted a plan to keep the president from getting sucked into a long, public negotiation like the one that unfolded over the debt ceiling. They said that Obama’s lowest moments in his first term came in a six-month stretch of 2011 when he acted as negotiator-in-chief on the annual federal spending bills and the effort to lift the Treasury’s borrowing authority, becoming part of the image a dysfunctional Washington.

“The last thing we want is another month of images of the two of them negotiating,” one senior official said. The White House is determined that Obama “not be drawn to that level.”

This president never learned to cut deals (he never had any occasion to learn) but he knows how to campaign, so they decided to do that instead.

(Via Power Line.)

One predictable consequence of putting the government in charge of health care is everyone wants to wet their beak. And so marginal medical industries (e.g., chiropractors, acupuncturists) are lobbying to have their services included in the mandatory slate of services, and they are meeting with some success.

Remember, Obamacare was supposed to make health coverage cheaper. . .

Since exit polls suggest that Hurricane Sandy may well have given Barack Obama his narrow victory in the 2012 election, it is worth noting that the federal recovery effort — despite what was reported at the time — was a complete disaster.

One can debate the impact of the Laffer curve at the national level. A lot of entrepreneurs are reluctant to leave the country, so — at the national level — the impact of high taxes and a hostile business environment may be less than you otherwise might expect. But entrepreneurs are much more willing to change states or municipalities, so that impact is much greater at the local level.

The resulting migration statistics are very embarrassing for the progressives. Not too long ago, the Economist ran its cover story about how business is leaving California for Texas in droves.

So when the IRS announced that it will no longer report statistics on taxpayer migration, it’s not hard to guess why.

This story of how Michigan’s labor unions were hoisted by their own petard simply warms the heart. Jillian Kay Melchior tells the story at the Corner:

It seems that some Michigan Republicans — controlling the legislature and the governorship — wanted to make Michigan a right-to-work state. But Governor Rick Snyder, again a Republican, was against it. Not that he was against it in principle, but he felt that it was a divisive issue and it wasn’t the time for that debate. However, the labor unions felt differently; they introduced a ballot measure that would have prohibited right-to-work (and also given themselves various other goodies). This forced Republicans to take up the debate they had not planned to have. And the labor unions lost at the polls.

Having won the argument at the polls, Republicans has no reason not to go ahead with right-to-work legislation. Michigan’s unions now face the catastrophe (for them) of worker freedom, and it is entirely of their own making. It’s a heart-warming holiday story.

Anyway, the unions were left screaming about how right-to-work gave non-members workers the ability to freeload on the bargaining conducted by the union. In fact, just 11% of union dues go to contract bargaining (the majority goes to union administration). But numbers aside, the whole argument is a lie.

The truth is, unions are permitted to exclude non-members from the contracts they negotiate. However, the unions don’t want to do that. The unions want everyone on their contract so they can control seniority and whatnot. If they allowed workers to stay off the contract, those workers disadvantaged by the union’s rules would opt out of the union.

If the unions’ concern over freeloading were genuine, they would keep non-members out of the contract, but not a single union will do that, because they want to maintain control over everyone. Right-to-work says the union can choose to control all the workers (lamentably, Federal law gives them that power), but at least disadvantaged workers won’t be forced to sanction that control, or pay for it. (UPDATE: And if you ignore both of those points, there’s still this one.)

POSTSCRIPT: Of course, in the end, labor unions are always about brute force. Basic economics shows that (absent a monopsony situation, which are very rare today) there are always replacement workers to be had. For unions to exercise monopoly power, they need to exclude those replacement workers somehow. Scandalously, labor law helps them to do that, to a large degree, but not in the case of strikes, which are labor’s main bargaining chip. Unions then fall back on force to exclude replacement workers.

Since labor unions are ultimately all about force, we shouldn’t be surprised that their response to right-to-work has been violence, and the threat of more violence.

UPDATE: Rep. Douglas Geiss’s threat (“there will be blood”) went out over the Michigan House Democrats’ official Twitter account.

Barack Obama on December 4, 2012:

When you look at how much revenue you can actually raise by closing loopholes and deductions, it’s probably in the range of $300 billion to $400 billion. That’s not enough to come up with a balanced plan that actually reduces the deficit and puts us on the path of long-term stability.

Barack Obama on July 22, 2011:

What we said was give us $1.2 trillion in additional revenues, which could be accomplished without hiking taxes — tax rates — but could simply be accomplished by eliminating loopholes, eliminating some deductions and engaging in a tax-reform process that could have lowered rates generally while broadening the base.

For some reason, no one other than ABC’s Jake Tapper wants to call him on this.

UPDATE: Obama is being disingenuous in another way, completely apart from this. He says that we need to raise taxes, because closing loopholes won’t generate enough revenue. Whether or not that’s true, he’s not being honest about his goals:

Obama wants higher taxes in their own right, regardless of their revenue implications. He has specifically said that taxes should be higher, even if the higher taxes actually reduce revenue! And he has made clear that revenue is not the purpose for hiking taxes. Yes, that is completely insane, but that’s Barack Obama’s agenda.

According to post-election polls, Americans (and even Obama voters) want to see the Federal government address the budget deficit with spending cuts, not tax hikes. Also, Americans still hate Obamacare.

Which kind of makes you wonder what the voters were thinking. . .

Short of criminalizing hard work, could you come up with a more effective policy to suppress the work ethic among the middle class than this?

Unless you make nearly $70k per year, you’re better off (financially speaking) earning just $29k. And right around $70k is the move to the next higher tax bracket.

More horrifying stories of government-run health care from the British NHS, where sick children are being put to death to save money:

One doctor has admitted starving and dehydrating ten babies to death in the neonatal unit of one hospital alone.

Writing in a leading medical journal, the physician revealed the process can take an average of ten days during which a baby becomes ‘smaller and shrunken’.

The LCP – on which 130,000 elderly and terminally-ill adult patients die each year – is now the subject of an independent inquiry ordered by ministers.

Medical critics of the LCP insist it is impossible to say when a patient will die and as a result the LCP death becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They say it is a form of euthanasia, used to clear hospital beds and save the NHS money.

We’re told, over and over again, that these are isolated incidents. With the sheer volume of these incidents, it is clear the NHS has (or, more properly, is) a systemic problem. In each “isolated incident”, the medical staff (I won’t call them doctors) are responding to the incentives they are given. Perhaps they weren’t supposed to respond by killing or abusing their patients, but that’s what keeps happening.

And that’s what’s going to happen here, too. The difference is, here, under Obamacare, the thin veneer of private control will make it easier for the advocates of nationalized health care to blame someone else.

(Via International Liberty.)

Three things that happened the day after the election:

1. FEMA shut down relief centers on Staten Island.
2. A court sentenced Nakoula Basseley Nakoula to one year in prison for probation violations no one would have cared about if he hasn’t made an anti-Mohammed video.
3. The US mission to the UN helped advance a gun-control treaty.

Barack Obama, 2004:

Maybe peace would have broken out with a different kind of White House, one less committed to waging a perpetual campaign–a White House that would see a 51-48 victory as a call to humility and compromise rather than an irrefutable mandate.

Any hope that Obama might approach his second term non-hypocritically has already been dispelled by his position on the “fiscal cliff”. And any such hope was foolishness anyway: after what he did in his first term, which would he be any less aggressive in his second, when he has “more flexibility”?

But what should be the Republican response? Many Republicans say that tax hikes will hurt the economy. On the contrary, I tend to think that overspending is more dangerous than overtaxation, in part because of Ricardian Equivalence, and in part because we are rapidly reaching insolvency. If we could strike a deal in which we can fix the spending problem at the cost of some tax hikes, we should take it. But such a deal is not likely to be on the table. Instead, what will be on the table is the usual bargain: tax hikes now in exchange for future spending cuts that will never actually happen. I’ve read that (can’t find the link now) while such deals typically promise a 3-to-1 ratio of spending cuts to tax hikes, on average they actually deliver a minus-2-to-1 ratio.

If fixing the problem isn’t on the table, should Republicans focus on holding the line on taxes? I don’t think so. On the contrary, two factors suggest that we should give President Obama the tax hikes on the (so-called) rich that he says he wants.

The first consideration is the sequester, which will bring dangerous cuts to defense spending. At the third presidential debate, Obama pledged that the sequester “will not happen”. But that was a lie: the very next day he was touting the sequester in an off-the-record interview, and now the administration proclaims openly that they are happy to go ahead with it if they don’t get the tax hikes they want.

The idea behind the sequester, as I understand it, was to include big cuts to defense and domestic spending, to give both sides an incentive to come to a different agreement. But that supposed more honesty from the Democratic side than actually exists. While they love to attack Republicans over any proposed cuts to domestic spending (killing Big Bird and whatnot), they are perfectly willing to see cuts to discretionary spending if such cuts advance their higher priorities, as this whole fight illustrates. Moreover, since the White House proposed the sequester (Obama’s lies to the contrary notwithstanding), one ought to expect that it serves their purposes. Republicans were foolish to agree to it.

The second consideration is broader. Our economy is screwed: Obamacare is kicking in. The EPA is regulating CO2. Dodd-Frank puts the government in control of the financial industry. And entitlement spending is quickly driving the Federal government to insolvency. (The EPA’s action is illegal, and most of the Dodd-Frank apparatus can’t legally operate until the Senate confirms the new bureau’s director, but I wouldn’t count on the courts to enforce the law.) If fixing the problem is off-the-table, it is imperative that we make sure that blame for the upcoming disaster is assigned correctly.

What Democrats are demanding — tax hikes for the “rich” — are reversible, and ultimately not within Republicans’ power to prevent anyway. Republicans can try to moderate them, but that won’t save the economy (as above, spending is the main problem), and doing so will give Democrats and their compliant media allies a way to blame the upcoming disaster on Republicans. What is essential is when the economy tanks, America knows who is at fault.

This is not to say that we should give Democrats anything they want. We should not allow them to nationalize any more industries or create any new entitlements, and we should vigorously fight Dodd-Frank and the EPA in the courts. Generally, we should not grant them anything irreversible. But tax rates are different; excessive taxes can be scaled back, and have been many times.

UPDATE: Were the Republicans to take this advice, here’s a way they should considering doing it.

I’m still on my post-election vacation, but I have to interrupt it to note an astonishing editorial from the Washington Post. Not so long ago I found the Post to be worth reading despite its liberalism, not so much for being a voice of reason among the left, but for making an effort at least to be fair to their opponents. Those days are now truly past.

The Post editorializes that Republicans are opposing the rumored nomination of Susan Rice, not because of the rampant dishonesty and/or incompetence exposed by Rice’s absurd public statements on the Benghazi attack, but because they are racist:

Could it be, as members of the Congressional Black Caucus are charging, that the signatories of the letter are targeting Ms. Rice because she is an African American woman? The signatories deny that, and we can’t know their hearts. What we do know is that more than 80 of the signatories are white males, and nearly half are from states of the former Confederacy.

This is really quite astonishing. Could it really be that the Washington Post has no memory of our last Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, another black woman who even happens to share the same last name? If they could remember Condoleeza Rice, they might recall a historical parallel: Her nomination also faced opposition, and although we can’t know her opponents’ hearts, most of them were white males, and every single one of them belonged to the party that historically supported slavery and segregration.

In fact, that’s too kind to the Democrats. Although I believe that most of Condoleeza Rice’s opposition was simple partisanship, there also was an explicitly racist campaign waged against her by prominent liberals. There is nothing remotely of that sort in the opposition to Susan Rice.

No joke:

In Staten Island, a printed paper sign taped to the front door of on the center at 6581 Hylan Blvd. at 10:30 a.m. read “FEMA Center Closed Due to Weather.”

The front doors of the disaster recovery center, which is housed inside the Mount Lorretto Catholic Youth Organization, were unlocked, but there was no staff anywhere in sight for at least a half an hour.

And a set of buses which served as a pair of warming centers at the site for the past several days were missing, according to non-FEMA volunteers who continued to hand out supplies from a nearby building despite the storm. Volunteers at a nearby donation distribution center said the buses vanished on Wednesday.

“FEMA packed up and left,” said Louis Giraldi, 47, a volunteer handing out cleaning supplies to victims. “We don’t know where they are, so there’s nothing here but us.”

Obama’s been re-elected, so I guess their work is done.

(Via Instapundit.)

I caught the end of Barack Obama’s victory speech. Incredibly, he’s doing his unity bit again. It’s as if the last six months never happened. Hell, it’s as if the last four years never happened.

In 2008, I was somewhat taken in by the pledge in his victory speech to unify the country. But an acquaintance of mine, a hard leftist, explained that Obama didn’t mean it. “Dream on” were his exact words. He was right. From his very first acts, Obama proceeded to chart the most extreme course that he could, limited only by the residual conscience of a Democratic Congress. He did it in the teeth of public opposition, proclaiming not unity, but “I won.” When people stood up in opposition, he didn’t try to find common ground. No, he vilified them as racists, and even as terrorists.

Months of slander, sarcasm, and demagoguery have done their work, and Obama convinced just enough Americans that a second term for Obama is less risky than taking a chance on Romney. Fine. But America shouldn’t be fooled by the unity bit again. I certainly won’t.

Health care nationalization and financial ruin are now probably irreversible. After tonight, America will survive in some form, but we will never again be the nation we once were.

Even as they run us into the ground, the left will never admit their policies don’t work. I wonder whose fault the next four years will be.

Jerry Pournelle:

We have always known that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. It’s worse now, because capture of government is so much more important than it once was. There was a time when there was enough freedom that it hardly mattered which brand of crooks ran government. That has not been true for a long time — not during most of your lifetimes, and for much of mine — and it will probably never be true again.

A New York man drives to Connecticut to buy gasoline and bring it back to his neighborhood in New York City, but he wasn’t using government-approved containers, the police cited him and confiscated the gasoline. He and his neighbors are out their money, and still don’t have gas.

Because that’s the main problem New York City is facing right now: gas transported in unapproved containers.

The New York Times says that disasters call for big government; this is big government at work.

Obama’s apologists have seized on the fact that Obama’s used the word “terror” in a speech on September 12 as proof that he acknowledged the truth from the beginning. This is nonsense, and moreover, if he did acknowledge the truth on September 12, why did he spend the next month lying to us?

Now CBS has released a video that answers the question conclusively. In an interview later that day, Steve Kroft observed that in Obama’s speech that morning, he “went out of [his] way to avoid the use of the word terrorism”, and asked Obama point-blank if the attack was terrorism. Obama wouldn’t answer:

QED.

(Previous post.) (Via the Corner.)

The Sandy recovery effort in New York City’s worst-hit borough, Staten Island, is an absolute mess. This might be part of the reason why:

The [Office of Emergency Management], created by Mayor Rudy Giuliani was intended to do just that [i.e., collect reports and dispatch needed assistance], said a former Giuliani administration official, who asked not to be named criticizing the current mayor. “The real question is why OEM—which was built to manage the battle of the badges in a disaster, that’s why it exists—doesn’t have an evident lead role” in the Sandy response, the former official said. He speculated that Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who served under Mayor David Dinkins before returning when Bloomberg took office, “never accepted the legitimacy of OEM,” which was created by the mayor who’d effectively let him go.

A senior administration official asked for comment late Sunday evening contested the Giuliani official’s categorization, but was unable to immediately explain what OEM’s role in the post-Sandy response operation was, or how exactly the chain of command between various city and outside agencies, like FEMA, was constructed.

(In any event, we had only two FEMA sightings over the day while driving over much of the island—a phone number for them written in marker on the back of an OEM trailer at Midland, and eight people wearing FEMA Corps light blue jackets huddled outside a Hess Express, seeming oblivious to or disinterested in the huge line of cars on the road beside them.)

I’m confused! Paul Krugman says FEMA is doing a great job.

Anyway, the piece tells the story of a businessman who was trying to deliver relief supplies, and spent hours driving around Staten Island trying to find a place to take them. Eventually they just went to a suffering neighborhood and handed stuff out.

POSTSCRIPT: This isn’t a conservative piece at all, either. It’s in the Daily Beast, and at one point it goes out of its way gratuitously to insult Fox News.

UPDATE: Giuliani calls the recovery effort “disgraceful”. One of his allegations is that FEMA failed to pre-position supplies of water as they said they would.

Frank J Fleming takes on the erroneous notion that the president is our country’s leader. This is my favorite part:

We have it in our heads that the president of the United States is like the CEO of our country, when in reality his job is more akin to head janitor. Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m not trying to say that politicians work as hard or are as essential to society as the average janitor. But it’s our job as private citizens to do the main work, and the government is supposed to operate in the background doing minor things that support that work — cleaning up the messes we’re too busy to handle. If the head janitor and his staff do their jobs well, we should barely even notice them.

Yet right now in America we think that this janitor is in charge of everything, and that’s how we ended up with this Obama mess. Everyone went on about how inspiring Obama was — like that matters — and how he was going to solve all our problems — like that was his job. But no one asked the essential question: Can he clean and stay out of our way? Thus we come back four years later and find that the office building we asked him to clean has been burned down, and when we ask him what happened, he gets mad at us and says, “It’s not my fault; it was messy when I started. But don’t worry, I have great plans to really get the company growing these next four years. First off, I went ahead and significantly increased the janitorial budget.”

It’s humor writing, of course, but it really struck a chord with me nevertheless. America’s government is not America, and it drives me crazy when people (like our current president) conflate the two. In the best of times the government is symbiotic with America; today it’s mostly a parasite.

Mike Bloomberg puts his anti-gun ideology ahead of disaster relief and common sense:

Mayor Bloomberg has snubbed Borough President Markowitz’s impassioned plea to bring the National Guard to Hurricane Sandy-scarred Brooklyn. . .

“We don’t need it,” Mayor Bloomberg said on Wednesday during a press update on the city’s ongoing Hurricane Sandy cleanup. “The NYPD is the only people we want on the street with guns.”

(Emphasis mine.)

This is bizarre, even from an anti-gun ideologue like Bloomberg. He doesn’t even think the National Guard can be trusted with weapons?

(Via Hot Air.)

The Democrats claim to be concerned about voter suppression, as that is their excuse for vehemently opposing any measure to fight voter fraud, but when faced with bona fide illegal voter suppression, they aren’t interested. I refer, of course, to the administration’s scandalous indifference, if not open hostility, to the voting rights of deployed servicemen.

One of the most puzzling things about the Obama’s administration’s Benghazi story is how it could have taken them so long to realize what was clear on the very first day: that it was a deliberate terrorist attack. Well, we now know that they knew it on the first day as well.

The CIA linked the 9/11/2012 attack to terrorists in the first 24 hours, and conveyed that information  to Congress on September 13. In fact, they knew that an Al Qaeda affiliate had taken responsibility for the attack after just two hours, while the battle was still ongoing.

But the administration changed its story on September 14, and spent most of the next month blaming a video. Why?

(Previous post.)

At the third presidential debate, Barack Obama said the upcoming sequester was a bad idea and he would make sure it doesn’t happen. But the very next morning, in an off-the-record interview with the Des Moines Register, he touted the sequester as central to his deficit reduction plans.

So Obama lied; the only question is to whom.

UPDATE: Obama also lied about whose idea the sequester was. He said Republicans insisted on it, when it fact it originated with the Obama administration and with Harry Reid.

The Obama administration denies that any political pressure was brought to bear in the awarding of loans by Obama’s disastrous green energy program. It would be surprising if that denial were true, and newly released emails confirm that it’s not.

How is Obamacare working? Avik Roy has been collecting the consequences from around the country:

• In Ohio, premiums will rise 55-85%, and 30% of doctors will cut service for Medicare patients.
• In Wisconsin, premiums will rise 30%, and 27% of doctors will cut service for Medicare patients.
• In Colorado, premiums will rise 19%, and 29% of doctors will cut service for Medicare patients.
• In Minnesota, premiums will rise 29%, and 25% of doctors will cut service for Medicare patients.
• In Nevada, premiums will rise 11-30%, and 44% of doctors will cut service for Medicare patients.
• In Florida, 30% of doctors will cut service for Medicare patients.
• In Virginia, 28% of doctors will cut service for Medicare patients.
• In New Hampshire, 25% of doctors will cut service for Medicare patients.
• In Iowa, 31% of doctors will cut service for Medicare patients.
• In Pennsylvania, 31% of doctors will cut service for Medicare patients.
• In Michigan, 31% of doctors will cut service for Medicare patients.

This thing is an atrocity.

Remember that 2004 speech that launched Barack Obama as a national political figure?

It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family: “E pluribus unum,” out of many, one. . . There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America. . . There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. . . We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

He didn’t mean a word of it. Sure, he could talk the talk during his meteoric ascent, but now, facing the end of his political career, we see how he really is:

The Romney campaign ripped President Obama after the president suggested Friday that supporters take “revenge” by voting against the Republican nominee.

During a speech in Springfield, Ohio, . . . he mentioned Mitt Romney, drawing boos from the crowd. “No, no, no — don’t boo, vote,” Obama said. “Vote. Voting is the best revenge.”

When his own future is as stake, all that unity stuff is out the window. Now it’s time for revenge.

Of course, it’s not just this year. In 2010, when facing the first political reverses of his political career, he struck a similar tone, calling for Latinos to “punish our enemies”.

UPDATE:

UPDATE: “Obama campaign struggles to explain ‘revenge’ remark.”

On NPR yesterday morning, they reported that areas hit by Hurricane Sandy had buses running again, but it would be a while before rail service resumed. After a disaster, being able to drive around obstacles (which cars can, but trains cannot) is a significant advantage.

They also reported that on Long Island many people were staying in their homes, despite having no power or water, so they could protect them from looters. It’s a pity that New York law has made sure that most of those people protecting their homes are unarmed. Natural disasters show the folly of relying completely on the government to protect your property.

Fisker Automotive is one of the Obama’s green boondoggles, having collected half a billion dollars in Federal largess. They make overpriced, unreliable electric cars that reportedly can catch fire while being recharged.

Also, they explode when submerged by a flood.

POSTSCRIPT: Fisker’s press release is inadvertently hilarious, containing this line:

We can report that there were no injuries and none of the cars were being charged at the time.

So you don’t even have to be charging them for them to catch fire, and that’s a good thing?

This is pretty funny.

One of the remarkable things about Barack Obama is his ability to be offended by suggestions that he would do the things that he does:

The president said that he took offense “to some suggestion that, you know, in any way we haven’t tried to make sure the American people knew as information was coming in what we believed happened.”

He spent a month blaming a video for the Benghazi attack when he knew that wasn’t true, but he takes offense at the suggestion that he would do that.

(Previous post.)

Barack Obama urges people in Hurricane Sandy’s path to get information from the internet, which is just great advice for those thousands of people without power.

Mary Katharine Ham has a very interesting piece on natural disasters, the effectiveness of local aid, the ineffectiveness of FEMA, and the cluelessness of the New York Times. It’s well worth reading.

Last month’s jobs data according to the household survey was thoroughly implausible. It found that the economy created 873 thousand new jobs in a single month, driving unemployment from 8.1% to 7.8%. That number was wildly at odds with the establishment survey (114 thousand), and its like had not been seen since the height of the Reagan-era boom. (Does it feel like the Reagan boom right now?)

The Obama campaign made the most of this, but not to worry. If the number was a statistical error, which seems likely, it will be balanced out by the October report.

Or perhaps not. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is talking about delaying the October jobs report until after the election. Their excuse is Hurricane Sandy.

UPDATE: The numbers came out on schedule after all, and the unemployment rate did increase from 7.8 to 7.9. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics calls that “essentially unchanged”.)

This somehow got left out of the Olympics’ paean to the National Health Service:

A 29-year-old woman will die without a new drug that the NHS is refusing to provide despite the manufacturer offering it to her for free, it emerged today. Caroline Cassin, 29, who suffers from Cystic Fibrosis (CF) has been offered a new drug free of charge for a limited period by the makers but her NHS hospital is refusing.

The drug, effectively allows sufferers to lead a normal life, and has been available in America since January, and is successfully trialled and licenced in this country. However it has not yet been approved for use on the NHS and an expert specialist group is due to make recommendations to health service funding organisations by December.

Procedures take precedence over people’s lives. That’s government-run health care in a nutshell. And that’s what Obamacare is bringing to this country.

(Via Instapundit.)

In case you were wondering, yes, Obama is still collecting illegal campaign contributions. As in 2008, he has disabled the standard checks that would prevent foreigners from contributing to his campaign. And, if that weren’t enough of an indication of mens rea, foreigners are being encouraged to give the strange amount of $198. This makes sense when you learn that contributions of $200 or more must be reported to the FEC.

Barack Obama has some troubling ideas on fighting crime:

And so what can we do to intervene, to make sure that young people have opportunity; that our schools are working; that if there’s violence on the streets, that working with faith groups and law enforcement, we can catch it before it gets out of control.

And so what I want is a — is a comprehensive strategy. Part of it is seeing if we can get automatic weapons that kill folks in amazing numbers out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill. But part of it is also going deeper and seeing if we can get into these communities and making sure we catch violent impulses before they occur.

(Emphasis mine.)

Much of this is standard pablum. I can’t help observing that Obama has been president for four years; if he has ideas for using outreach to fight crime, why isn’t he doing it already? And then there’s the ignorant/dishonest call for gun control. But what this about “catch[ing] violent impulses before they occur”?

It’s hard not to see this as sinister. Barring time travel, how is this to be accomplished? Gossip? Pervasive real-time surveillance? Psychological profiling? Is there any interpretation of this that is consistent with a free society?

Remember this guy?

If you were looking for a bunch of partisan rhetoric, I’m probably not your guy.

Or this one?

If you can’t beat your opponent’s ideas, you distort those ideas — maybe you just make some up. If you don’t have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as somebody people should run away from. You make big elections about small things.

Or this one?

We have to get to the point where we can have a conversation about big important issues that matter to the American people without vitriol, without name calling. . .

Me either.

Taking their cue from the Obama campaign and the legacy media (but I repeat myself), Obama’s supporters are now saying that Obama called the 9/11/2012 attack terrorism from day one. That’s nonsense, of course, but what’s even more odd is how they seem to think somehow that exonerates him in the Benghazi cover-up.

Quite the contrary, it makes it much worse. They spent a month blaming a YouTube video for the attack. If he now claims that he knew it was terrorism all along, he is admitting that he spent a month lying to the American people.

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One of the scourges the environmental movement has inflicted on us is the low-flow toilet, which reduce flushing power to conserve water. (ASIDE: Of course, at the same time, they have inflicted other policies — such as mandatory washing of garbage for recycling purposes — that waste water. The important thing, I guess, is to lower living standards.) Since 1994, all new residential toilets have been required to use no more than 1.6 gallons per flush. The law was extended to commercial buildings in 1997.

As everyone who has used them knows, low-flow toilets are often ineffective. One strategy to improve their performance is to release the water under high pressure.

Problem: high-pressure toilets can explode.

We need some sort of mandatory civics class for Congress:

Rep. Rubén Hinojosa (D-Texas) on Wednesday forgot what the Second Amendment was when asked about it during a debate in McAllen, Texas.

“I’m drawing a blank on the Second Amendment, but I think it’s the weapons, isn’t it? The NRA?” he said, according to The Monitor.

The head of the Democratic party has never heard of President Obama’s kill list. When asked about it, she clearly thinks the questioner is a wacko:

Of course, if you’re not paying attention, the idea does sound rather outlandish. If you’re not paying attention.

Barack Obama:

When Tunisians began to protest, this nation, me, my administration, stood with them earlier than just about any other country.

POSTSCRIPT: Also, it’s not remotely true.

And if that weren’t bad enough, the same idea was the basis of an ad earlier this year, for Vladimir Putin.

Joe Biden reaches out — twice! — to the families of those who have served in the war in Iran. But hey, Joe Biden always says what he means.

POSTSCRIPT: I’m just old enough to remember the last time we had troops in Iran.

CNN admits that Candy Crowley deliberately gave Obama more time than Romney in the last debate:

On why Obama got more time to speak, it should be noted that Candy and her commission producers tried to keep it even but that Obama went on longer largely because he speaks more slowly.

Since Romney made better use of his time, Crowley gave Obama more time to compensate. This violated the rules of the debate (indeed, any debate), since the rules allot time, not words, but Crowley didn’t care about that.

Could Mitt Romney possibly be leading among Jews? Wow. If so, stuff like this probably has something to do with it.

(Via Instapundit.)

President Obama entertains celebrity guests in the White House Situation Room.

I never watch debates any more, and last night’s debate perfectly illustrates why not. In a worthwhile debate, the participants would make comprehensive arguments buttressed by facts. Nothing remotely like that happens in the dreadful political shows that we put on today and call debates.

The very format of political debates prevents any kind of sophisticated argument. The participants are typically given about two minutes to respond to a question, with no chance to prepare in advance, and no time even to consider their answer unless they happen to go second. No notes are permitted, so participants can use only the facts and arguments that they can commit to memory. All this leads to a mere exchange of soundbites, not the clash of reasoned arguments.

Plus, the questions are often stupid. And, worst of all, the moderators — who no one cares about at all — often insist on inserting themselves into the middle of the debate.

And then there’s the whole matter of bias in procedure. Obama and Biden have been given more time in every single debate this year, nine extra minutes in all. The moderators have interrupted Romney/Ryan more times than Obama/Biden in every single debate this year, by a total margin of 74 to 33, when they ought not ever interrupt except to enforce time. Last night Obama got the last word eight times, and Romney only three.

Here’s what they should do instead:

1. The questions should be determined in advance. Both sides are thereby given the opportunity to prepare an argument.
2. Notes are permitted. Candidates can bring an entire briefing book if they want, although they may well find that counterproductive. The candidates are thereby empowered to present their best arguments, not just the arguments that they can best commit to memory. The most beneficial ability would be critical thought, rather than memorization, which would align much better with the traits needed to govern effectively.
3. Each candidate is given the time to make a comprehensive argument. I would suggest that the debate consist of six questions, with 14 minutes per question. (Fewer for longer would be even better, but I suppose the viewing public no longer has the attention span for that.) Each question would be a miniature Lincoln-Douglas debate (by which I refer to the 1858 debates, not the elaborately structured debates that go by that name today). One candidate would make an initial statement for 4 minutes. The second would then get 6 minutes to make his case. Finally the first candidate would get 2 minutes for rebuttal. The remaining two minutes would be spent on 30 seconds of applause after each segment, and 30 minutes for the moderator to read the question.
4. The candidates would alternate giving the first answer. The first to go first would be determined by a coin flip, which would take place after the order of questions is determined.
5. Time would be enforced automatically, with each candidate’s microphone active only when it is his turn to speak. A clock showing the time remaining for the current speaker would be visible to each candidate.
6. The moderator would do nothing other than introduce the candidate, explain the rules, and read the questions. At other times the moderator’s microphone would be inactive.
7. No applause is permitted other than during the designed times.

The winner in this format would be the candidate who could produce and deliver the best argument, rather than the candidate who can memorize and deliver the best sound bites. I believe it would therefore benefit conservative and libertarian candidates, who have the best arguments. But surely liberals believe otherwise. (It would be interesting to see them develop their class warfare themes into six-minute arguments.)

We would learn a lot about the confidence that politicians have in their ideas by their response to such a proposal. It is telling that Jim Lehrer, who largely let the candidate debate, and only intervened on Obama’s behalf a little bit, has been the target of such vitriol from the left, while the much more interventionist Raddatz and Crowley have been highly praised. Do liberals need a vapid format and interventionist moderator to win debates? We would see.

Jim Geraghty has some interesting observations about Barack Obama and taking responsibility.

Before last night’s presidential debate, Candy Crowley, the moderator, made it clear that she intended to inject herself into the debate, despite the rules clearly prohibiting that. And so she did.

In the egregious intervention everyone is talking about today, Crowley took it upon herself to insert some in-line fact checking, contradicting Mitt Romney to say that Barack Obama had called the Benghazi attack a terrorist attack the day after it took place.

The moderator should not be putting herself between the two candidates this way (particularly since the rules clearly prohibit it), but what makes Crowley’s intervention so egregious is she was wrong.

In Obama’s speech on September 12, he used the word terror one time:

No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation, alter that character, or eclipse the light of the values that we stand for

Note that he did not say “these acts of terror”, which is what Candy Crowley apparently thought he said. That would have been a clear statement that the Benghazi attack was a terrorist attack.

One can argue that making that statement in a speech about the Benghazi attack implies that it was a terrorist attack. But that is debatable. He made the statement about acts of terror after mentioning the 9/11/2001 attacks, so he need not have been referring to Benghazi for the statement to be germane.

Moreover, still earlier in the speech, Obama said “We reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others,” clearly indicating that (in his view) the attack resulted from the anti-Mohammed YouTube video. This contradicts the notion that it was a terrorist attack, as a terrorist attack — by definition — must be premeditated. And, moreover, the protest-gone-bad theory was clearly the administration’s position for weeks after the attack, as Crowley herself admits.

There’s more. Obama’s remarks were not taken at the time to imply that the attack was terrorism. Both the Associated Press and New York Times made no mention of any such implication in their reports on the speech. (Via Brendan Buck.) The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler says “there is a world of difference” between what Obama said and acknowledging Benghazi as an act of terror. (Via Mickey Kaus.)

On September 20, White House spokesman Jay Carney agreed that the administration had never called the attack terrorism:

Q No, I just hadn’t heard the White House say that this was an act of terrorism or a terrorist attack. And I just —

MR. CARNEY: I don’t think the fact that we hadn’t is not —

(Via American Crossroads.)

Carney refers to “the fact” that the White House hadn’t said that it was an act of terrorism.

Finally, on September 21, Crowley’s own network, CNN, reported:

The White House, for the first time Thursday, declared the attack that killed Stevens and three other people a terrorist attack.

That Thursday, on which the White House declared the attack terrorism “for the first time”, was eight days after the Obama remarks in question.

All in all, the interpretation of Obama’s September 12 remarks as calling the 9/11/2012 attack terrorism is quite debatable. And, wouldn’t you know it, there was actually a debate going on! She should have let the debate happen, rather than dragging it to a halt with her own misinformation.

UPDATE: Added some additional points observed by Mickey Kaus, who comments:

You could say that Obama was calling this attack an “act of terror.” Or you could say that Obama was using the phrase “act of terror” in the vicinity of discussing the “attack” to come close to labeling it an act of terror without actually, logically doing so, preserving his freedom to not do so in the future.

I think that’s probably right; this was a deliberate obfuscation, intended to provide opportunities for future spin. The candidate, not the moderator, should be delivering that spin.

UPDATE: Michael Ramirez nails it, as usual.

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During the 2008 Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton argued that America would be safer if she were the one making security decisions.

And apparently she is:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the bucks stops with her when it comes to who is blame for a deadly assault on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi.

“I take responsibility” for what happened on September 11, Clinton said in an interview. . . President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are not involved in security decisions, Clinton said.

Is Clinton falling on her sword here (which would be very, very atypical for a Clinton) or are they playing some sort of devious political game? As much as Obama would like to be out from under the Benghazi debacle, being seen as completely out of the loop probably isn’t good either.

(Via Instapundit.)

UPDATE: Contrast with this:

Reagan takes blame for Beirut bombing

President Reagan said today he as chief executive accepts full responsibility for the terrorist bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. servicemen. In a hurriedly scheduled press appearance in the White House press room, Reagan said the local Marine commanders “should not be punished” for the lack of proper security in the suicide attack.

“If there is to be blame, it properly rests here in this office, with this president,” Reagan said.

Reagan also never claimed that the attack was a protest against Flashdance that spun out of control.

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What? There could be consequences for abandoning hydrocarbon and nuclear power? Who ever could have predicted such a thing?

Philipp Rosler said Germany is faced with a repeat of the power shortages experienced last year that threatened to plunge parts of the country into darkness.

“Last winter we had a pretty tense situation, and this year we could see the same again, and perhaps even next year as well,” he said in an interview with the newspaper Passauer Neue Presse.

The move away from old forms of energy production has become one of Chancellor Angel Merkel’s key policies, and the government wants four fifths of German energy produced by renewable sources by 2050.

I’m sure that people suffering in the cold and the dark will take comfort from their low carbon footprint.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has the distressing headline:

Investigation continues after 3 shot at football field at old Peabody High

Distressing, but also strange. Why refer to a school by its old name?

Answer: The current name is the “Barack Obama Academy”.

After the 9/11/2012 attack, President Obama apparently jetted off to Las Vegas for a campaign stop without first meeting with his national security team. (I say “apparently” because David Axelrod refused to answer the question, which he surely would have if he had been able to answer yes.)

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James O’Keefe catches Obama campaign staffers assisting in voter fraud.

Tom Maguire observes that Obama wants to have it both ways: When intelligence succeeds, as by locating Osama Bin Laden, that’s an administration success. “Obama killed Osama Bin Laden!” But when intelligence fails, as in the Benghazi debacle, it has nothing to do with the Obama administration.

Except it’s worse than that. The intelligence that located Bin Laden used methods vehemently opposed by Obama. And, Benghazi wasn’t a failure of intelligence, but a failure to listen to intelligence.

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