Remember the left’s sanctimonious prattle during the Bush administration against its prosecution of the war on terror? Every bit of it was just naked political opportunism. Now that Democrats are in charge, they are doing everything either the same, or with fewer safeguards. For instance:
In a city full of them, Harold Koh is Washington’s biggest hypocrite. As the dean of Yale Law School, Koh was the most prominent critic of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies, deriding them as “executive muscle-flexing.” The former President, Koh said, was the “torturer-in-chief.” In a 2002 interview with The New York Times, he referred to the war on terror as “legally undeclared” and questioned the administration’s right to kill terrorists on the battlefield. “What factual showing will demonstrate that they had warlike intentions against us and who sees that evidence before any action is taken?” he asked.
In 2009, after the election of Barack Obama, Koh was awarded the job of State Department legal adviser. Since that time, he has defended a war waged in Libya without explicit congressional authorization, drone strikes targeting suspected terrorists and the extrajudicial assassination of an American citizen who had become a leading Al Qaeda ideologist.
During the Bush administration, Koh made the preposterous demand of a “factual showing” “before any action is taken.” Now:
As The New York Times described the administration’s rationale for drone strikes, “people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good.”
Also, the Obama administration, for political reasons, doesn’t want to send any new detainees to the professional, humanely-run prison at Guantanamo Bay. So instead they’re sending them to a secret prison in Somalia. Hypocrites.
Someday (hopefully soon) Republicans will be running the war or terror again. When that happens, these hypocrites will suddenly find their voice again. Pay no attention to them.
City officials decided not to renew a contract with American Traffic Systems Inc. for the city’s seven red-light cameras, citing a lack of enforcement from Los Angeles County courts, time wasted by Pasadena police officers and questions about the cameras’ effectiveness in improving traffic safety.
Unfortunately, Pennsylvania is going the opposite direction. James Walker of the National Motorists Association reviews many of the reasons why red-light cameras are a bad idea here, but it really comes down to this: Red-light cameras aren’t for safety, they are for revenue. In fact, they create a conflict of interest in which officials trade-off safety for revenue: the cameras only make money with short yellow lights, which make intersections more dangerous. Municipalities that keep longer yellows have found, like Pasadena, that the cameras lose money.
Remember when the Democrats were talking about the need for civility, and the danger of using violent metaphors in politics?
“Unless things change and Obama can run on accomplishments, he will have to kill Romney,” said a prominent Democratic strategist aligned with the White House.
The White House, having persuaded the Supreme Court to approve their health care takeover as a tax, are shamelessly pretending that they never called it a tax:
That’s the Obama campaign press secretary saying:
Review the court transcripts, Ryan. At no point did Verrilli or any of the government lawyers say that it was a tax.
Which, of course, is an out-and-out lie. It wasn’t just Verrilli in oral arguments; it was also in the briefs, not to mention countless Democratic statements.
Argentina is moving on to the next step in its financial collapse: commandeering bank assets. Specifically, the government is ordering banks to make loans at rates well below the market rate, or even the interest rate.
It’s amazing to watch these socialist fools imagine that they are immune to the laws of economics.
The Constitution, though it dates from the founding of the Republic, has powerful meaning and vital relevance to our own times. The constitutional protections that this case involves are protections of structure. Structural protections—notably, the restraints imposed by federalism and separation of powers—are less romantic and have less obvious a connection to personal freedom than the provisions of the Bill of Rights or the Civil War Amendments. Hence they tend to be undervalued or even forgotten by our citizens. It should be the responsibility of the Court to teach otherwise, to remind our people that the Framers considered structural protections of freedom the most important ones, for which reason they alone were embodied in the original Constitution and not left to later amendment. The fragmentation of power produced by the structure of our Government is central to liberty, and when we destroy it, we place liberty at peril. Today’s decision should have vindicated, should have taught, this truth; instead, our judgment today has disregarded it.
The short version of today’s ruling: Obamacare is unconstitutional as written, but as a courtesy, the Chief Justice has rewritten it into a different law that does the same thing and passes muster.
As part of the Obama administration’s furious spin of the president’s decision to withhold the documents regarding the Fast and Furious cover-up, Jay Carney dusted off the bogus claim that Gunwalker began during the Bush administration. Pressed on it, he admitted that the operations didn’t, but maintained that the “tactic” did:
As I’ve pointed out here several times before, there is no comparison between Operation Wide Receiver (which Carney is alluding to) and Fast and Furious. There are lots of important differences, but the only one you need to remember is this: The aim of Wide Receiver was to track gun trafficking, in order to stop it. The aim of Fast and Furious was to supply guns to Mexican drug cartels, for reasons the administration has never seen fit to reveal.
But don’t take my word for it, here’s Eric Holder admitting there’s no comparison between the two:
The Obama administration is getting serious about the leak investigation:
Officials at the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies will be given expanded polygraph tests under a new Obama administration directive aimed at stamping out national-security leaks.
Except it’s not, if this story is complete. There’s no indication here that White House officials will be getting the polygraph tests. Since we already know that the leaks are coming from the White House, this whole thing is a charade.
With the Gunwalker scandal getting prominent media attention for the first time, many people will be hearing about modern America’s worst political scandal for the first time. In light of that, I thought it might be useful to list the key facts:
No effort whatsoever was made to track the guns that the ATF trafficked to Mexican drug cartels. In fact, agents who wanted to track the guns were ordered not to.
The Justice Department has never explained what Fast and Furious was intended to accomplish. This has led many to assume that it served no legitimate purpose.
No one was ever fired or disciplined for Gunwalker. In fact, most of the principals were promoted. On the other hand, agents who blew the whistle on the operation were punished.
Justice Department officials have made numerous material false statements to Congressional investigators, some of them under oath.
White House officials were informed about gunwalking. The Justice Department in Washington not only was informed, but signed off on it, in writing, in wiretap applications submitted to federal courts. Eric Holder was personally notified in at least five memos; he says he never read them.
Neither the operation nor the “tactic” behind it began during the Bush administration. Operation Wide Receiver was completely different: It was conducted with the approval of the Mexican government, agents attempted to track the the weapons, and the operation was terminated when some weapons got away.
In addition to refusing to produce documents under subpoena, the White House has also refused to allow officials to testify before Congress.
Guns trafficked in the operation have been linked to over 200 murders, including a US Border Patrol agent.
There’s much more, but but those are the key points.
If a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, the New York Times’s editors must be great minds indeed. Yesterday:
A Pointless Partisan Fight
The political feud between the White House and Congressional Republicans has now culminated in a House oversight committee vote to cite Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. for criminal contempt. His supposed crime is failing to hand over some documents in an investigation of a botched gunrunning sting operation known as “Fast and Furious.” The Republicans shamelessly turned what should be a routine matter into a pointless constitutional confrontation.
The House Judiciary Committee did its duty yesterday, voting to cite Harriet Miers, the former White House counsel, and Joshua Bolten, the White House chief of staff, for contempt. The Bush administration has been acting lawlessly in refusing to hand over information that Congress needs to carry out its responsibility to oversee the executive branch and investigate its actions when needed. If the White House continues its obstruction, Congress should use all of the contempt powers at its disposal.
POSTSCRIPT: The Times is also being dishonest when it describes Fast and Furious as a “sting operation”. It wasn’t a sting, even a botched one, as there was never any intention to sting anyone. They were simply trafficking money and weapons to drug cartels, for reasons that have never been explained.
New York State Democrats are hard at work on the people’s business, making sure that teacher evaluations are never made public:
The state Legislature is likely to pass a last ditch bill that would prevent the release of teacher evaluations, while letting parents see the ratings only of their kids’ instructors. The measure, introduced by Gov. Cuomo just before midnight Monday, could pass before lawmakers head home for the year tomorrow, sources said yesterday.
This makes sense, because limiting accountability is always one of the best ways to improve performance. . .
The bill would allow parents to see the evaluations of their own children’s teachers, but — as the educrats are surely well aware — that’s essentially worthless without the ability to compare with other teachers.
The selective-memory practitioners across the left-wing are up in arms over the Daily Caller’s Neil Munro interrupting President Obama with a question at a no-questions event. They call it “unprecedented”. For example, here’s Julian Epstein (who writes for the extreme left The Nation) on MSNBC:
This is just so unprecedented and outrageous, that you have to ask the question, would the right-wing be doing this if we had a white president there? The fact that the first African-American president . . .
Bonus points for playing the race card! It always comes down to that with this bunch, doesn’t it? Well, we needn’t speculate on whether a white president would ever get interrupted (via Treacher):
And that’s just one incident. Sam Donaldson was notorious for this, but it wasn’t just him. In fact, the practice was so common that the Associated Press ran an article on it:
Grown men and women are shouting at President Reagan at the top of their lungs. They do it for a living.
Demonstrators? No, reporters.
It’s become the standard closing scene at Reagan’s infrequent news conferences.
The good-natured chief executive gets the official closing, “Thank you Mr. President.” from a wire service correspondent, but before he can retreat out the door of the East Room at the White House, the reporters are on their feet, shouting, badgering Reagan for one last word. It even takes place at ceremonies.
The explanation Monro offers (also this) for his interruption is nearly identical to the one offered by the reporters of yesteryear:
The reporters themselves wince at the negative image created by such scenes . . . but they say the blame rests with Reagan and his aides, who have sharply curtailed opportunities for the press corps to engage the president under more civil circumstances.
It’s not at all unprecedented for reporters to interrupt the president. What upsets the left is when it happens to a Democrat.
A graphic prepared by Mike Bloomberg in support of his proposed ban on large sodas lies about the sugar and calorie content of various sizes. The graphic doesn’t specify what the beverage is, but nevertheless the sugar/calories per unit volume ought to be constant among various sizes. Instead, Bloomberg’s numbers imply 12.2 calories per ounce in a large size, and 11.3 in a small size.
It’s not just rounding either, because 748 most naturally rounds to 750, not 780.
President Obama has decided to exert executive privilege over all the documents under subpoena by the House committee investigating the Gunwalker scandal. Eric Holder justifies his withholding of the documents thus:
They were not generated in the course of the conduct of Fast and Furious. Instead, they were created after the investigative tactics at issue in that operation had terminated and in the course of the Department’s deliberative process concerning how to respond to congressional and related media inquiries into that operation.
I believe Holder’s description is accurate. More to the point, the documents under subpoena are not about the original Gunwalker malfeasance, but about the Justice Department’s cover-up. Rep. Issa wants to know who decided to lie to Congress in the DOJ’s February 2011 letter denying that any gunwalking had taken place.
UPDATE: John Hinderaker looks at the case law on executive privilege and finds that Obama’s claim is unlikely to hold up.
By placing these documents under executive privilege, President Obama is essentially saying that lying to Congress is an executive prerogative.
At last, an Obama policy that actually creates jobs:
The protesters popping up at Mitt Romney’s rallies throughout Michigan Tuesday look like run-of-the-mill grassroots liberals — they wave signs about “the 99 percent,” they chant about the Republican’s greed, and they describe themselves as a loosely organized coalition of “concerned citizens.”
They’re also getting paid, two of the protesters and an Obama campaign official told BuzzFeed.
Politifact can’t bring themselves to write that Speaker John Boehner has kept his promise to fly commercial (in contrast to Nancy Pelosi’s extravagant abuse of military transportation), calling it “in the works”.
The House of Representatives has released a pile of documents detailing the back-room dealings by which Obamacare came to pass. Of particular interest is the bidding war between various interests to determine whom the bill would favor. (The pharmaceutical industry won, but got screwed anyway.)
It turns out President Obama and I have at least one thing in common, we are both bad at basketball:
We’ve assumed he’s good—biographer Jodi Kantor and NBA stars have said so—but an upcoming biography by David Maraniss begs to differ, Politico reports. As a prep school student in Hawaii, Obama made the team “more because of his intense passion for the game—his will—than anything else,” writes Maraniss in Barack Obama: The Story. “The reality was that Barry, as skilled and intelligent a player as he was, could not stand out in this group.”
“Decades later, a story emerged that his nickname was Barry O’Bomber, playing off his last name and a propensity to fire away from long range, but few team members recalled that nickname.”
Of course, I’ve never felt any need to hide it. . .
POSTSCRIPT: By the way, Maraniss’s biography is, by all accounts, relentlessly positive.
Remember when, after the Tucson shooting, the left thought we needed to be civil in politics? When they said that designating targeted districts with cross-hair-like symbols on a map was unacceptable violent imagery?
Immigration is not an issue I’m passionate about. To some degree my sympathies are with the open-borders folks. But I’m appalled by his recent announcement that he is going to disregard immigration law and implement his own policy instead. John Yoo gives the new policy a look that is all the more damning for his caution, but I think IBD sums it up well:
The chief executive who swore to faithfully execute the nation’s laws picks those he’ll ignore and makes up others through regulation and executive order. He sees no need for a Congress or Constitution.
The president is not king; he doesn’t get to make the rules by himself. This president (despite having sort of taught constitutional law) doesn’t seem to understand that.
On the day it closed, Solyndra said it was laying off 1,100 full-time and temporary employees.
But 1,861 workers lost their jobs as the solar panel manufacturer shut its doors, according to U.S. Labor Department documents provided to The Bay Citizen under the Freedom of Information Act.
The documents also show the Fremont-based company increased production in 2011, even though it failed to sell all the panels it made the previous year.
I’m not so exercised that Solyndra laid off 700 more people than they admitted. (Politicians often forget that it’s better to work for a year and get laid off than not to work at all.) It is interesting that they lied, though.
However, it telling that they increased production despite not selling their inventory. Whatever these people were doing, it wasn’t running a business.
The feminist-socialist party in Sweden (say what you want about Sweden, you’ve got to give them credit for their diverse niche parties) wants to require that men sit to urinate. They also want to ban single-sex lavatories.
Okay, I guess that’s nothing more than one should expect from a Swedish feminist-socialist party, but here’s the part that tickled me:
Viggo Hansen, a substitute council member who authored the motion, told Sveriges Television that that the move does not represent an attempt to meddle in the bathroom habits of citizens.
Oh good. If he hadn’t explained, I might have thought that was exactly what he’s doing.
MSNBC wants to make this Mitt Romney’s visit to Wawa (a convenience store chain) into his supermarket scanner moment (referring to the apocryphal incident in which President Bush Sr. was impressed by a supermarket scanner):
First of all, there’s nothing wrong with being impressed by a well-run business, and (from what I hear) they do run a good operation. In fact, I seem to recall Mitt Romney in particular having an affection for well-run businesses.
Second, this whole attack is a lie, Romney wasn’t amazed by the Wawa operation, as becomes clear when you watch his speech without the MSBNC edits (cue to 2:10):
Romney was contrasting the incompetence of the government (exemplified by a 33-page change of address form) with the effectiveness of the private sector (exemplified by Wawa). They actually cut him off mid-sentence: “Touch this, touch this, touch this, go pay the cashier, there’s your sandwich. It’s amazing: [MSNBC ends here] people in the private sector learn how to compete; it’s time to bring some competition to the federal government!” Then they glue that together with some other stuff about WaWa from elsewhere in his speech, and voila, you have an ode to Wawa that Romney never gave.
Third, Bush Sr. never had a supermarket-scanner moment either. No matter how vividly some journalists claim to remember it, it’s a myth. It never happened.
Don’t believe anything you see or hear from the legacy media. Any reporting they do anymore is incidental; their main job is to lie to you.
POSTSCRIPT: On a completely different note, there’s something I noticed in watching Romney’s stump speech: just how good-natured it is. This guy has a positive outlook on America. When was the last time President Obama delivered a positive speech about America. Has he ever? I haven’t seen it. Obama, at best, likes what he thinks America could be, not what America is.
Lauren Skowronski, a spokeswoman for NBC, which owns MSNBC, denied that any deceptive editing took place. “MSNBC did not edit anything out of order or out of sequence and at no time did we intend to deceive our viewers,” Skowronski said.
Oh, is that the standard now? You can edit however you want as long as you don’t take anything out of order? I guess this is fair, then:
“MSNBC did . . . intend to deceive our viewers,” Skowronski said.
In possibly the most impressive display of political chutzpah ever, President Obama is actually claiming to be the most fiscally responsible president in decades:
This absurd claim adopts an asinine line of argument invented in a post on the MarketWatch web site. How do they make the most fiscally reckless administration in history out as the most responsible? They simply disregard Obama’s first year in office. No, worse than that, they charge the entire year to President Bush.
So Obama’s entire Brobdingnagian stimulus package (about $800 billion) gets charged to Bush. Then they use the stimulus (which, as “stimulus”, was supposed to be a one-time expenditure) as the baseline for future spending, and that just shows up as continuing the [must maintain straight face!] Bush spending levels. And even after all that, he still increases spending in later years.
There’s also TARP, which, at $750 billion, was still considered an astonishing amount in 2008. That’s legitimately a Bush outlay, but recall that TARP was a loan program and was supposed to be repaid. In fact, most banks did repay their TARP loans. But Democrats turned that money around and respent those repayments. Measured against the baseline, all that TARP re-spending doesn’t appear at all, whereas a sane accounting would credit the repayments to 2008 and charge the re-spending to the Democrats in 2009.
But wait, merely charging all of Obama’s reckless first-year spending to Bush still doesn’t get to their number! They also have to include the projected drop in spending in 2013, which obviously hasn’t happened and probably won’t.
Bottom line: Sure, Obama is the most fiscally responsible president in decades, provided you discount about $1.5 trillion in new annual spending, and also credit him for 2013 budget cuts that won’t happen.
POSTSCRIPT: Both Bush and Obama submitted 2009 budgets to Congress. The Congress, Democratic at the time, never acted on Bush’s budget, but it’s still instructive to compare them. Bush’s budget proposed to overspend revenue by 15%. Of course, the economy took a dive; if enacted it would actually have overspent revenue by 46%. Ouch. Then there’s Obama’s budget, which — as proposed — overspent revenue by a staggering 80%.
Gawker laments the fact that a hacker who broke into Mitt Romney’s Hotmail account failed to release Romney’s emails.
POSTSCRIPT: As we’ve seen countless times before, the hacker guessed the answers to the “security questions”. Why do they still have those?! They should call them “insecurity questions”.
The Obama administration keeps talking about President Obama’s “gutsy” call to take out Osama Bin Laden. (Joe Biden even called it the most audacious operation in 500 years!) That is a strange perspective, since our last president would not have even hesitated to order the operation.
I’ve tended to view this as just politics, but a revelation in Ed Klein’s new book (I heard Klein interviewed on the Hinderaker-Ward show) casts the braggadocio in a different light: perhaps he thinks it really was gutsy! Klein reveals that Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s closest adviser, recommended against the operation, saying it would politically damaging if it failed. Obama disregarded her advice (possibly for the first time, Klein says) and ordered the operation anyway.
From Obama’s perspective, disregarding political advice from a key adviser probably is the height of gutsiness.
A very cursory review of Florida election records found dozens of non-citizens on the voter rolls, some of whom appear to have voted. Naturally, Florida is putting a stop to the review.
Democrats attempting to spin the results of the Wisconsin recall election have settled on three points: (1) Governor Walker outspent his opponents 8-to-1, (2) Citizens United v. FEC made it possible for him to do so, and (3) the exit polls showed a big lead for Obama in Wisconsin. Let’s debunk these, shall we:
Walker did not outspend his opponents 8-to-1. True, he raised $32 million to Barrett’s $4 million, but Barrett was just one of his opponents, and not even the leader of the effort. When you include the unions — the instigators of the recall — Walker’s opponents spent $25 million, six times the figure for Barrett alone. Walker did outspend his opponents, but only 1.28-to-1.
Citizens United was about speech; it said nothing at all about fundraising. Furthermore, Wisconsin law authorizes unlimited fundraising for recall elections anyway. Citizens United had no impact on the race whatsoever.
Michael Barone looked at the Wisconsin exit polls, and observed that if you adjust for Democrats’ historical overperformance in exit polls (about 4 points), Romney leads 49-47.
The New York Times has an article about an outfit called Nerd Wallet, which ranks colleges according to various criteria. It found that the top program in the country in terms of starting salary for graduates is my program, Carnegie Mellon computer science. MIT was third.
Joey Fishkin, an Obamacare supporter, wants to see the Supreme Court leave the entire thing in place except remove the “exhortation”, so that those who violate the mandate aren’t doing anything wrong, but still have to pay the same penalty. Basically, he wants to strike the word “mandate” but change nothing of consequence.
Fishkin is apparently a law professor (at least he’s writing on a law blog), but this is crazy. He seems to believe that the only issue here is whether the government is casting moral aspersions on people’s actions. I’m not a lawyer, but the oral arguments made clear that the Court was wrestling with weightier matters (such as limiting principles for government power) than whether the government thought well of people.
Moreover, this assumes that the mandate passes muster as a tax. Many are assuming that, but the Court didn’t even hear arguments on the subject. Some scholarship has suggested that it can’t stand as a tax either.
UPDATE (6/28): Well, I guess it’s not crazy after all.
President Obama says it’s offensive to suggest that his administration is leaking classified information for political purposes.
To be sure, we have no evidence that the administration is behind the series of leaks. Just because there’s been a never-ending series of leaks that cast the administration in a good light doesn’t mean that the administration is necessarily responsible for them.
But, is it really so outrageous to speculate? This is an administration that allowed the ATF to traffic guns to Mexican drug cartels in order to promote its domestic gun-control agenda. (Or, at least, that has never offered any alternative explanation.) It is not hard to believe that the same people might leak classified information for political purposes.
UPDATE: Alexander Kazam points out that the NYT story on Stuxnet includes a first-hand account from the White House situation room:
The culprit may not be a “White House official,” but the leaks came out of a White House meeting — directly from the president’s top national-security advisers. This is not some guy in the bowels of the State Department passing e-mails to Julian Assange; it is one degree removed from the president.
Perhaps not a White House official per se, but certainly a high administration official.
UPDATE: Andrew McCarthy points out that the same is true for other leaks:
The whole thing is a farce. . . TheTimes tells you who its sources are. At the very beginning of the 6300-word kill-list epic, it says: “In interviews with The New York Times, three dozen of [Obama’s] current and former advisers described Mr. Obama’s evolution since taking on the role, without precedent in presidential history, of personally overseeing the shadow war with Al Qaeda.” The account goes on to quote, for example, former White House chief-of-staff Bill Daley, who not only confirms the existence of a kill-list but describes the considerations behind adding names to it. Current and former national security officials are quoted, in many instances by name (e.g., national security adviser Thomas Donilon and former national intelligence director Dennis Blair). And when names are not given, the Times quotes, for example, “one participant” in the approximately weekly meetings — videoconferences run by the Pentagon but involving national security officials across the administration — who describes some of the criteria for adding or removing terrorists from the kill-list.
The NYT told us everything except the leakers’ actual names. All of them are high-ranking administration figures. Moreover, Michael Ledeen adds that you can nearly always find the leaker:
“We always found the leaker(s),” he said, “but then nothing happened.” Why? “Because most of the time the leaker was so high-ranking that there was no desire to prosecute or punish.”
Bottom line: if no one is punished (for the leak itself — Ledeen also adds that a scapegoat is often picked who committed some ancillary offense), we know that the President either authorized the leak or chose to let it slide.
Remember when it was very, very bad to reveal the identity of a covert agent?
Among the bombshells Judicial Watch found in the documents, and there are several, is the fact that Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers disclosed the true identity of SEAL Team 6′s commander to those Hollywood producers.
I’m sure that everyone who was exercised about the disclosure of Valerie Plame’s identity will be equally upset about this. Ha ha! Just kidding.
Okay, seriously, this is why I found it so hard to take the sanctimonious indignation from the left and the legacy press over the Plame-Armitage affair. As we’ve seen so many times, they don’t care one bit about leaking sensitive information, including the identities of covert agents. They just found a weapon — a hugely hypocritical weapon — to wield against the Bush administration.
Canada is dismantling its “human rights tribunals” whose primary purpose is to suppress politically incorrect speech. It’s a travesty that they existed so long. Their purpose was expressed perfectly by this passage in a 2008 decision imposing a lifetime speech ban:
The Attorney General argues that freedom of expression is subject to a limitation. Further, that if people were allowed to simply hide behind the rubric of political and religious opinion, they would defeat the entire purpose of the human rights legislation.
A new poll finds that 68% of Americans want the Supreme Court to overturn Obamacare, at least in part. (And that’s a NYT poll, so the real number is probably at least three-quarters.) Less than a quarter want it to stand.
Why Wisconsin’s public-sector unions are so desperate:
Already, there are signs Walker has succeeded in crippling Wisconsin’s unions, whose membership has sharply declined since his reforms made it easier for workers to opt out and harder for the groups to gain recognition. In just over a year, the union representing state workers has seen its membership drop by two-thirds, while the American Federation of Teachers has lost more than a third of the 17,000 members it formerly claimed in Wisconsin, according to the Wall Street Journal.
In addition to Wisconsin, the public sector unions were dealt another major defeat last night, as San Diego and San Jose voters passed pension reform by landslides.
Gary Taubes has an op-ed piece in the New York Times blasting the war on salt. As I’ve noted before, the anti-salt campaign is far out in front of the actual scientific evidence, and has been for decades. One key quote:
When I spent the better part of a year researching the state of the salt science back in 1998 — already a quarter century into the eat-less-salt recommendations — journal editors and public health administrators were still remarkably candid in their assessment of how flimsy the evidence was implicating salt as the cause of hypertension.
“You can say without any shadow of a doubt,” as I was told then by Drummond Rennie, an editor for The Journal of the American Medical Association, that the authorities pushing the eat-less-salt message had “made a commitment to salt education that goes way beyond the scientific facts.”
And another:
An N.I.H. administrator told me back in 1998 that to publicly question the science on salt was to play into the hands of the [food] industry. “As long as there are things in the media that say the salt controversy continues,” he said, “they win.”
I should add that the war on salt has been personally detrimental to me and my family. Some people (like me) need more salt than most, and the anti-salt warriors have sometimes made it difficult to obtain.
POSTSCRIPT: The anti-salt campaigners were happy to tell us that the science was settled, when it wasn’t remotely settled. That’s something to keep in mind when other campaigners tell us the same.
The US embassy and consulates in China are reporting air quality data, presumably providing more accurate information than official Chinese reports. Naturally, China wants them to stop.
Democrats are upset about the latest leak of sensitive classified information:
Senate Democrats on Tuesday blasted leaks to the press about a cyberattack against Iran and warned the disclosure of President Obama’s order could put the United States at risk of a retaliatory strike. . .
Feinstein and Kerry, however, rejected charges from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that the leaks were made deliberately in an attempt to boost President Obama’s reelection bid. . . The White House has denied that it was an authorized leak.
I don’t know if it was an “authorized leak”, but this keeps happening. We blow the identity of Shakil Afridi, the doctor who helped us identify Osama bin Laden, and he goes to prison for 33 years. We leak the fact that we’ve infiltrated al Qaeda, and it blows the agent’s cover. (Plus, it turned out that the leak, to the extent that it credited US intelligence, wasn’t even accurate!)
I’m tired of debating each time whether the White House authorized the leak, or whether the leak — which cast the administration in a good light — was a lone wolf. It doesn’t matter. The White House’s acquiescence sends the message that this is acceptable. They need to make a very public effort to get to the bottom of it.
Compare the full-court press when the Valerie Plame’s identity was leaked to the press. That information was not closely held, and its leak wasn’t damaging, and the White House still launched an investigation that dogged it for years. Here we have a series of leaks that are actually damaging, and aside from a few remarks from Senate Democrats, it’s crickets.
UPDATE: The White House says it takes the leaks “very seriously”, but they won’t authorize a special prosecutor, or — as far as they are willing to say — any action at all. Well then.
The chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Tuesday said new documents show that senior Justice Department officials in Washington, despite their previous denials, were given “specific information about reckless tactics” in the botched “Fast and Furious” gunrunning investigation. . .
“The wiretap applications show that immense detail about questionable investigative tactics was available to the senior officials who reviewed and authorized them. The close involvement of these officials — much greater than previously known — is shocking,” Mr. Issa wrote.
The wiretap applications are under seal and can’t be made the public, so we have to rely on Issa’s account for now. However, the applications have been forwarded to the minority party, so if he’s misrepresenting them, we will hear about it almost immediately.
But if his description is accurate, it proves that the DOJ was fully informed of Gunwalker and must have acknowledged that awareness to a judge. Andrew McCarthy explains that the wiretap applications must include:
a full and complete statement as to whether or not other investigative procedures have been tried and failed or why they reasonably appear to be unlikely to succeed if tried or to be too dangerous.
That, obviously, requires a more-than-superficial analysis of those procedures; gunwalking in this case.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has prevailed over the union temper tantrum (again) by winning the recall election. Republicans look likely to win the down-ballot recall races as well.
This despite huge, implausible turnout in Madison. Early projections of 119% turnout faded to the mathematically possible but still implausible figure of 96%.
Two similar stories: David Axelrod is “appalled” that Romney might raise more money than Obama. And Media Matters is upset about media bias against Obama.
I’m reminded of the gangster in Miller’s Crossing who exclaimed, “It’s gettin’ so a businessman can’t expect no return from a fixed fight. Now, if you can’t trust a fix, what can you trust?” (The situations aren’t exactly parallel, but it’s the indignation that tickles me.)
One of the many lies we were told about Barack Obama is that he would be good at diplomacy:
US President Barack Obama’s description of a Nazi German Holocaust site as a “Polish death camp” shocked Poland, whose leaders insist the record be set straight 67 years after World War II.
Obama on Tuesday labeled the Nazi facility used to process Jews for extermination as a “Polish death camp.” The White House later said the president “misspoke” and expressed “regret”.
President Obama isn’t stupid, but he might as well be. The kind of intelligence it takes to navigate the corridors of corrupt power in Chicago is entirely different from the kind it takes to conduct a competent foreign policy.
Two Department of Justice prosecutors have been suspended without pay and a Senate Democrat has scheduled a committee hearing following the release Thursday of a DOJ report that detailed the government’s misconduct in its botched case against the late Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska). . . The report found the attorneys “acted in reckless disregard” for their legal obligations by not disclosing exculpatory evidence to Stevens’s defense lawyers.
Remember, their misconduct changed the outcome of the election, giving Democrats the deciding vote for their stimulus boondoggles and for health care nationalization.
Officials in a Florida school confiscated a boy’s asthma inhaler because he didn’t have the right form for it. Then, when he had an asthma attack, they locked him in a room and left him to die. (Fortunately, he survived.)
Getting fired is too good for these people. They need to go to prison.
Not that anyone is getting fired. On the contrary:
Volusia County School officials stand by a Deltona High School nurse’s decision to refuse a student his inhaler during an asthma attack, citing a lack of a parent’s signature on a medical release form.
That’s the real outrage in this story. The school took his medicine and left him to die, and with the full benefit of hindsight, the district is standing by them.
We have a government so concerned by its own made-up procedures that they prefer to kill children than violate them.
I think that most Republicans going on MSNBC know what they are getting into. But when they buck the anti-Romney narrative, I don’t think they expect MSNBC to mute their mike and insult them on-air.
Fine; it’s their air to do with as they please. But they still shouldn’t lie. Host Tamron Hall said Carney went off the agreed topics:
You knew the topics we were going to discuss, you agreed to come on the show.
Indeed he did, and the topics were:
Panel: Tim Carney and Jimmy Williams
Romney’s haunted by high school memories
Does the story matter? Will it hurt Romney
(Emphasis mine.) The bogosity of the story is squarely in the range of topics he was invited to discuss. Hall lied.
BONUS: Hall’s parting shot was:
I greatly appreciate you [Williams] joining me. I would do the same for Tim but we have to be able to have conversations and not do hit jobs when we know we’re guests on the show.
That’s pretty amazing, since she cut off the conversation when he interfered with her hit job.
A Pakistani doctor who helped the U.S. track down Usama bin Laden was sentenced to 33 years in prison on Wednesday for conspiring against the state, officials said, a verdict that is likely to further strain the country’s relationship with Washington
Shakil Afridi ran a vaccination program for the CIA to collect DNA and verify bin Laden’s presence at the compound in the town of Abbottabad where U.S. commandos killed the Al Qaeda chief last May in a unilateral raid. The operation outraged Pakistani officials, who portrayed it as an act of treachery by a supposed ally. . .
“He was working for a foreign spy agency. We are looking after our national interests,” said a Pakistani intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with the agency’s policy.
This doesn’t make sense if Pakistani intelligence viewed Bin Laden as a hostile hiding out in Pakistan. This only sense if they saw his presence, free, in Pakistan as in line with their “national interests”.
Also, I can’t help wonder how Pakistani intelligence identified Afridi.
POSTSCRIPT: This article in the Pakistani press is the top Google completion for Shakil Afridi. If it’s as influential as the Google ranking suggests, I think it’s revealing. The author compares Afridi to Julius Rosenberg (the American traitor who gave the atomic bomb to the Soviets). The comparison only makes sense if they see Afridi’s actions as hostile to Pakistani interests.
After narrowly winning West Virginia over an imprisoned felon, President Obama has eked out two more victories: 52-42 in Tennessee and 58-42 in Kentucky. A named challenger would have given him a real fight.
When President Obama recess appointed Craig Becker to the NLRB, many worried that Becker would be too biased in favor of unions. Whatever could have given them that idea?
Craig Becker will become general counsel for the AFL-CIO, president Richard Trumka announced today. . .
HHS has written rules mandating that health insurers distribute propaganda for Obamacare, but they aren’t leaving the task to the private-sector mandate alone. They’re also funding their propaganda the old fashioned way, with tax money:
The Health and Human Services Department has signed a $20 million contract with a public-relations firm to highlight part of the Affordable Care Act. . . The campaign was mandated by the Affordable Care Act and must describe the importance of prevention while also explaining preventive benefits provided by the healthcare law.
In 2009, the Pittsburgh School District renamed one of its schools after President Obama, a sitting president who had been in office just a few months.
ASIDE: Apparently a Pittsburgh school can be named after a living person if no geographical location or historical person is available. The world has exhausted its supply of historical persons!
First, the students decided to pick a name. After debating between the Olympians, the Boas (Barack Obama Academy), the Eagles and the Spartans, the students voted that they would be the Barack Obama Eagles. . .
The colors were a lot easier; purple, black and silver, since purple represents royalty.
Remember in 2000 when the Democrats’ cry was to “count every vote”? Of course, they didn’t mean it; at the very same time they were suing to disenfranchise thousands of absentee voters in two Florida counties. But disenfranchising an entire state is a bold move, even for them:
After a poll released this week showed President Barack Obama only beating his Democratic primary opponent John Wolfe Jr. by seven points, 45 percent to 38 percent, in Arkansas’s Fourth Congressional District, state Democrats moved to practically disenfranchise Arkansas voters. “[D]elegates Wolfe might claim won’t be recognized at the national convention,” national party officials are telling state Democrats.
The people of Arkansas can vote, so long as they vote for Barack Obama. But any vote cast for the wrong person will not count.
The Obama administration has issued new rules requiring that health insurers distribute Obamacare propaganda to any customers who receive a rebate this summer:
Rules finalized by the Department of Health and Human Services on Friday instruct insurers to notify recipients of rebates in the first paragraph of the mailing by writing: “This letter is to inform you that you will receive a rebate of a portion of your health insurance premiums. This rebate is required by the Affordable Care Act—the health reform law.”
Obama administration officials may have pressured government contractors to change job loss estimates associated with coal regulations, audio recordings reveal.
The tapes show that unnamed officials with the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (OSM) asked government contractors to change their calculations of job losses associated with the Stream Protection Rule.
A preliminary draft of an environmental impact statement estimated that up to 7,000 coalminers could lose their jobs under the administration’s “preferred” regulation. After a leaked copy of the report went public, officials asked the contractors to compare job estimates to a model in which another regulation was enforced, rather than the real world numbers.
“It’s not the real world, this is rulemaking,” an OSM official tells a skeptical contractor on the recording.
They’ve been caught red-handed, cooking the books. This ought to be a political bombshell of the first order. If the press doesn’t hammer this, we’ll know they are well and truly in the tank.
In a globalized world, it is difficult to uphold international living standards when you are cut off from the rest of the globe. This is the situation facing Iceland following the collapse of the krona in 2008 and the resulting strict enforcement of capital controls.
Icelanders can no longer travel freely; we are restricted to roughly €2,000 ($2,570) for travel expenses on each trip. We are restricted in terms of how much support we can give relatives studying abroad and we are completely banned from investing internationally. With the exception of those over 40 who were born on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain, no European has ever experienced such a situation.
Wow. What a uniquely destructive policy.
Imagine a bank that decides to hold on to its capital by prohibiting withdrawals. Sure, it can hold on to the money it has, for a while, but it will never get another cent. If Iceland keeps this policy in place until its economy recovers, it will be permanent.
President Obama says his energy policy is “all of the above”. It’s clearly not true, if you watch his actions, but now you don’t need to. The Obama campaign inadvertently let the mask slip when it left coal out of his energy policy web page.
“No biographies have been altered,” a White House official told Fox News. “We simply added links at the bottom of each page to related whitehouse.gov content, which is a commonly used best practice to encourage people to browse more pages on a site.”
Lame. If you look at the pages, the Obama content is clearly represented as part of the biography. But beyond that, it’s not even true. For example, take a look at the new Calvin Coolidge page, and compare it to the original one. The original one ended with the paragraph:
The Obama material was inserted above that, so it was not at the bottom of the page. The best they can say honestly is their new material is near the bottom of the page.
Also, the new material itself is just lame:
On Feb. 22, 1924 Calvin Coolidge became the first president to make a public radio address to the American people. President Coolidge later helped create the Federal Radio Commission, which has now evolved to become the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). President Obama became the first president to hold virtual gatherings and town halls using Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.
I think there’s a grave danger for Obama in this sort of thing. Obama still somehow has good personal approval ratings, despite the terrible approval ratings for all his policies. Doing things that make him look simply pathetic undermine the only thing he still has going for him.
POSTSCRIPT: The RNC delivers some well-deserved mockery:
Here’s a story of political hypocrisy so stunning, it’s hard to wrap my head around it: In Australia, Julia Gillard’s Labor Party’s government is hanging by a thread. In order to secure an extra seat, she bought off one of the opposition’s representatives by making him speaker of the House of Commons. Now that representative, Peter Slipper, is charged with sexual harassment and might have to step down pending resolution of the charges.
We have a legal system so those complaints can be tested, so people are given the opportunity to defend them. We cannot live in a world – we might as well have no legal system if we just say as soon as the allegation is made, that then it’s proven true. That just feeds into the sort of muck-raking mentality that we have from Mr Abbott and says that any time an allegation’s been made, people are automatically sentenced to whatever he deems is right.
That’s not the way for us to run a country. It’s not the legal system that we have and it’s not the practice of what happened when Mr Howard was the prime minister.
She thinks that Slipper should have the presumption of innocence, and that he should be able to stay in his position (propping up the government) until proven guilty.
There is a notion that we should hold elected officials to a higher standard, at least when the charges are plausible, but as a general rule she’s right, of course. We should have the presumption of innocence.
That’s what is so outrageous about this story. Because in 2009 this very government changed the law to remove the presumption of innocence in sexual harassment cases. In fact, the new law was put into place by none other than Julia Gillard when she was Minister for Industrial Relations under Kevin Rudd, the previous Prime Minister.
Roxon says that’s not the way to run a country. She’s right. She says it was not the practice under PM Howard. Also right. But she’s wrong when she says it’s not the legal system they have, because they themselves changed the law:
If (a) in an application in relation to a contravention of this Part, it is alleged that a person took, or is taking, action for a particular reason or with a particular intent; and (b) taking that action for that reason or with that intent would constitute a contravention of this Part; it is presumed, in proceedings arising from the application, that the action was, or is being, taken for that reason or with that intent, unless the person proves otherwise.
These people remove the presumption of innocence, the most basic legal protection there is. Then, when one of their people is in the dock, they want him held to a lower standard than the one they imposed on everyone else.
The only comfort one can take from this is that in Australia, the leftists don’t have the temerity to call themselves liberals. So at least we don’t have the spectacle of “liberals” dismantlingcivilliberties.
President Obama says (cue to 1:46 here) that our armed forces “are out there fighting on [his] behalf”.
America is not a monarchy. Our armed forces swear to protect and defend the Constitution, they don’t swear fealty to the president. Given a moment to think about it, I’m sure Obama would get this right. But off-hand remarks can be revealing about how people really think about things.
Take Mitt Romney. He remarked off-hand that he likes being able to fire people. That showed that he wants to be able to hold his people accountable for their performance and replace them if they’re not measuring up. Somehow he took grief for that. Obama’s off-hand remark shows that he thinks he’s king.
It’s a fitting end for a classic example of crony capitalism. LightSquared’s entire business plan was to use its political connections to do what others aren’t allowed to do. The administration tried, but ultimately it was too much — even for them — to give its cronies permission to break the GPS system.
Anyone who still denies that Iran has a nuclear weapons program program probably won’t be convinced by anything, but the evidence keeps accumulating:
A drawing based on information from inside an Iranian military site shows an explosives containment chamber of the type needed for nuclear arms-related tests that U.N. inspectors suspect Tehran has conducted there. Iran denies such testing and has neither confirmed nor denied the existence of such a chamber.
The computer-generated drawing was provided to The Associated Press by an official of a country tracking Iran’s nuclear program who said it proves the structure exists, despite Tehran’s refusal to acknowledge it.
That official said the image is based on information from a person who had seen the chamber at the Parchin military site, adding that going into detail would endanger the life of that informant. The official comes from an IAEA member country that is severely critical of Iran’s assertions that its nuclear activities are peaceful and asserts they are a springboard for making atomic arms.
A former senior IAEA official said he believes the drawing is accurate. Olli Heinonen, until last year the U.N. nuclear agency’s deputy director general in charge of the Iran file, said it was “very similar” to a photo he recently saw that he believes to be the pressure chamber the IAEA suspects is at Parchin.
For some reason, Democrats and their enablers in the legacy media don’t want you to believe that light bulbs are banned, and engage in amazing hair-splitting to deny the fact. For example:
Opponents often describe the standards as a “lightbulb ban,” arguing that the rules would greatly restrict consumer choice by pushing out traditional incandescent bulbs in favor of more expensive, but more efficient, LED (light emitting diode) and CFL (compact fluorescent light) bulbs.
But the standards do not ban incandescent bulbs. They instead require them to be more efficient. While more efficient lightbulbs are often more expensive at the point of sale, experts note they save consumers money on their electricity bills over the long term.
Take that, straw man! No one contests the proposition that high-efficiency lighting saves money in the long run. People like incandescent bulbs because of the quality of their light. So, do high-efficiency incandescent bulbs generate the same quality light as traditional light bulbs?
If you’ve ever used a high-efficiency incandescent bulb, you know the answer is no. The light is colder and harsher, not so much as a fluorescent bulb, but visibly more so than a traditional bulb.
Moreover, this is what you would expect from the physics. Different physical processes tend to generate different spectra. Scientists often use those spectra to identify things that they cannot observe directly. We don’t know how to craft a made-to-order spectrum, at least not inexpensively. So if you change the process to generate less heat, you’re almost certainly going to change the spectrum.
We well know that the Obama administration will not grant a religious exemption for its contraception/abortion mandate, but, for some, it actually does provide an exemption to the entire mandate (124 Stat. 246, here):
[Applicable individual] shall not include any individual for any month if such individual has in effect an exemption under section 1311(d)(4)(H) of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act which certifies that such individual is a member of a recognized religious sect or division thereof described in section 1402(g)(1) and an adherent of established tenets or teachings of such sect or division as described in such section.
Section 1402(g)(1) is a provision of the tax code that governs groups exempt from paying Social Security tax. It applies, for example, to the Amish. Some have suggested that the exemption would apply to Muslims; Snopes says that’s not clear (although, for some reason, they rate the claim “false” rather than “undetermined”).
But I want to point out that, in any case, the exemption is drafted incorrectly. (Maybe it’s silly to point out flaws in the law when the entire thing is an atrocity, but never mind that.)
The Social Security provision prevents people claiming benefits after obtaining an exemption from paying the tax (1402(g)(1), here):
Such exemption may be granted only if the application contains or is accompanied by . . .
(B) his waiver of all benefits and other payments under titles II and XVIII of the Social Security Act on the basis of his wages and self-employment income as well as all such benefits and other payments to him on the basis of the wages and self-employment income of any other person . . .
But as far as I can determine, there is no such provision in Obamacare. The guaranteed availability provision applies to everyone, not only to “applicable individuals” (124 Stat. 156):
Subject to subsections (b) through (e), each health insurance issuer that offers health insurance coverage in the individual or group market in a State must accept every employer and individual in the State that applies for such coverage.
Thus, to claim a religious exemption to the mandate, one must forego claiming Social Security benefits, but one can still exploit guaranteed issue.
This is wrong in both directions. On the one side, it allows exactly the sort of free rider the mandate was supposed to prevent: a person belonging to an exempt sect can remain outside the mandate until he or she becomes sick, and then obtain insurance. On the other side, persons with a religious objection to health insurance cannot receive the exemption unless they also waive the Social Security benefits toward which they have been paying their entire lives.
This is a good example of why it’s a good idea to read a bill before you pass it.
House Democrats received training this week on how to address the issue of race to defend government programs, according to training materials obtained by The Washington Examiner.
The prepared content of a Tuesday presentation to the House Democratic Caucus and staff indicates that Democrats will seek to portray apparently neutral free-market rhetoric as being charged with racial bias, conscious or unconscious.
The United States has for several years been secretly releasing high-level detainees from a military prison in Afghanistan as part of negotiations with insurgent groups, a bold effort to quell violence but one that U.S. officials acknowledge poses substantial risks.
As the United States has unsuccessfully pursued a peace deal with the Taliban, the “strategic release” program has quietly served as a live diplomatic channel, allowing American officials to use prisoners as bargaining chips in restive provinces where military power has reached its limits.
But the releases are an inherent gamble: The freed detainees are often notorious fighters who would not be released under the traditional legal system for military prisoners in Afghanistan. They must promise to give up violence — and U.S. officials warn them that if they are caught attacking American troops, they will be detained once again.
So this is the plan: (1) We release dangerous Taliban fighters. (2) ??? (3) The Taliban abandons its quest to enslave Afghanistan to their brand of Islamism. Sounds brilliant, but could we get a little more detail on step 2?
But have no fear. If they attack us again, and are captured again, then they’ll be detained again. That’ll show them.
Step 1: Make nearly everyone dependent on the government for a basic necessity like health care. Step 2: Deny that necessity to people to don’t comply with the government’s demands.
With Obamacare, we’re setting out on step 1, but the UK is well ahead of us. They have finished step 1 and are setting out on step 2:
A majority of doctors support measures to deny treatment to smokers and the obese, according to a survey that has sparked a row over the NHS’s growing use of “lifestyle rationing”.
Some 54% of doctors who took part said the NHS should have the right to withhold non-emergency treatment from patients who do not lose weight or stop smoking. Some medics believe unhealthy behaviour can make procedures less likely to work, and that the service is not obliged to devote scarce resources to them. . .
Smokers and obese people are already being denied operations such as IVF, breast reconstructions and a new hip or knee in some parts of England. The medical magazine Pulse last month found that 25 of 91 primary care trusts (PCTs) had introduced treatment bans for those groups since April 2011.
Bedfordshire PCT, for example, decided to withhold hip and knee surgery from obese patients until they had slimmed down by 10% or had a body mass index of under 35. Similarly, North Essex PCT obliged obese people to lose 5% of their bodyweight and keep the pounds shed for at least six months before receiving treatment.
The way to prevent this is to put individuals in charge of their health care, which is exactly the opposite of Obamacare.
The Senate wants every car to contain a “black box” that records its driving “event data”. Even if you don’t see this as sinister, it certainly seems unwise, as the law would essentially require the black box to be accessible to hackers.
The Washington Free Beacon has done an analysis of President Obama’s speeches using the Flesch-Kincaid readability test (this is a standard, objective measure used to estimate the education level needed to comprehend the material):
Since taking office, Obama has routinely spoken to the American people in a more simplistic manner than his predecessor, George W. Bush.
Obama’s State of the Union addresses peaked at a 10th grade level in 2009 and declined to an eighth-grade level by 2012. Bush, on the other hand, scored consistently above the 10th grade level with his State of the Union addresses, including a high of 11.84 for his 2005 address.
Bush’s appeal for his signature tax cuts was delivered at a higher level of complexity than Obama’s argument for their repeal.
The former president’s June 2001 signing statement was at a 10th grade level, compared with the seventh grade level at which Obama spoke in 2010. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” State of the Union speech, given in 2002 and derided by academic critics as overly simplistic, was delivered a full grade level above Obama’s lauded 2002 “dumb war” oration.
Moreover, Obama’s rhetoric has been getting simpler over time:
Obama’s major campaign addresses and writings consistently came in above his presidential speeches. Obama’s rhetoric peaked in his 2008 speech on race relations during the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy; the speech was at a 12th grade level. The oratory matched Obama’s literary prowess. His second bestseller, The Audacity of Hope—a title borrowed from a Wright sermon—was written at an 11th grade level and fell slightly below the Flesch score of the Gettysburg Address.
Following his September 2009 health care address, delivered at a ninth grade level, Obama began using more and more simplistic language when addressing the American people.
In the past two years, Obama’s major national addresses have fluctuated between grade seven (Gabriel Giffords; September jobs speeches) and grade eight (his April 11, 2012 remarks on the Buffett Rule).
In his re-election campaign, Obama has not returned to the rhetoric of his first campaign. His recent speeches to college students were measured at a sixth-grade level.
POSTSCRIPT: During the Bush administration, there was a stream of academics who claimed to analyze President Bush’s writings or speeches and prove he was a moron. This differs in two ways. First, the analysis doesn’t claim to measure Obama’s intelligence, just the complexity of his discourse. Second, it’s a standard, objective measure dating to 1975, so it wasn’t rigged to deliver a desired outcome.
We already knew that the Nancy Pelosi lied about her knowledge of CIA waterboarding, but former CIA counterterrorism chief Jose Rodriguez gives us more details:
“We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.”
How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used. Indeed, he notes, when one member of his team described another technique that had been considered but not authorized or used, “Pelosi piped up immediately and said that in her view, use of that technique (which I will not describe) would have been ‘wrong.’ ” She raised no such concern about waterboarding, he writes. “Since she felt free to label one considered-and-rejected technique as wrong,” Rodriguez adds, “we went away with the clear impression that she harbored no such feelings about the ten tactics [including waterboarding] that we told her were in use.”
Although the detail is interesting, Rodriguez’s testimony doesn’t really change anything. Pelosi is already on record claiming that the CIA lied, so this is just one more CIA guy that she’ll say is lying. But there’s this:
Rodriguez writes that there’s contemporaneous evidence to back his account of the briefing. Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”
For decades, the central principle behind French foreign policy has been opposition to America. Arguably that’s been one of its central principles since the 1790s. Twice now I’ve been deluded to believe that the election of a conservative President in France might change that attitude. They even called Sarkozy “Sarko the American”. It all came to naught.
Hollande’s election will surely be a disaster for France. So what? I won’t quite say that’s a good thing, but I don’t much care. They’d just better not come to us looking for a bailout.
Barack Obama has already held more re-election fundraising events than every elected president since Richard Nixon combined, according to figures to be published in a new book. . .
The figures, contained a in a new book called The Rise of the President’s Permanent Campaign by Brendan J. Doherty, due to be published by University Press of Kansas in July, give statistical backing to the notion that Obama is more preoccupied with being re-elected than any other commander-in-chief of modern times.
The numbers are impressive: 124 fundraisers for Obama (through April) versus 94 for Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush.
Russia’s top military officer warned Thursday that Moscow would strike NATO missile-defense sites in Eastern Europe before they are ready for action, if the U.S. pushes ahead with deployment.
“A decision to use destructive force pre-emptively will be taken if the situation worsens,” Russian Chief of General Staff Nikolai Makarov said at an international missile-defense conference in Moscow attended by senior U.S. and NATO officials.
Gen. Makarov made the threat amid an apparent stalemate in talks between U.S. and Russian negotiators over the missile-defense system, part of President Obama’s policy to “reset” relations with Moscow. The threat also elicited shock and derision from Western missile-defense analysts.
DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-FL) says that Republicans want to redefine rape. It’s an out-an-out lie, and an old one at that. I debunked it thoroughly in February 2011.
President Obama says he wants a bipartisan compromise on the DREAM bill:
‘No’ is not an option. I want to sign the DREAM Act into law. I’ve got the pens all ready. I’m willing to work with anybody who is serious to get this done, and to achieve bipartisan, comprehensive immigration reform that solves this challenge once and for all.
He’d rather have a campaign issue than a compromise. Will it work for him to blast Republicans for blocking the bill when his own administration has become its main obstacle? We shall see.
Wow: A Quinnipiac poll finds that Hispanics are split almost evenly on Arizona’s SB 1070 (the controversial anti-illegal-immigration law), 49% against and 47% in favor.
I’ve heard people claim that most Hispanics oppose illegal immigration because illegal immigrants steal their jobs, but I had trouble believing it. It was too much at odds with the picture painted by the media. But it turns out to be true, or very nearly so.
It’s a valuable reminder not to believe what the media tells you.
The execrable “People’s Rights Amendment” proposed by so-called liberals such as Nancy Pelosi would not literally repeal the First Amendment rights to speech, religion, and the press. It would only repeal those rights for those people who organize their activities as a corporation — which is to say, nearly every church, newspaper, and activist group.
Eugene Volokh takes a look at what would happen to our press if the amendment were to be enacted:
First, any media organization that wants to be free would thus have to give up the benefits of the corporate form, and will have to organized as a partnership. This will make it much harder for those media organizations to raise operating capital, dealing with changes in ownership as partners die or leave, and the like.
Second, those media organizations that choose to organize as a corporation would have huge practical competitive benefits over organizations that choose to organize as partnerships. As a result, the normal competitive process will . . . give corporate-owned large media organizations the overwhelming majority of the market share.
In the end there would be a tiny free press, and nearly the entire media would be corporate. Thus, the government would be free to censor essentially the entire media.
And no one should doubt that it would, given the opportunity. Citizens United, the case the spawned this horrible idea, was specifically a case in which the government wanted to censor a movie for its political content. In arguing the case, the Obama administration specificallyclaimed also to have the power to ban other media, such as books and pamphlets.
More generally, what’s going on here is an effort to take the next big step toward totalitarianism. Our constitution limits the power of the federal government in two ways: First, there are positive restraints: the doctrine of enumerated powers says the government has only those powers that are explicitly granted to it. Second, there are negative restraints: some powers that are explicitly denied to it.
The framers of the Constitution originally thought that negative restraints were unnecessary given its system of positive restraints. For example, the Constitution didn’t grant the government the power to censor the press, so it couldn’t. However, they ultimately decided to include a set of negative restraints in the Bill of Rights as well.
It’s good that they did, because the positive restraints are now largely obsolete. Since Wickard v. Filburn, the power to regulate interstate commerce has been nearly all-inclusive. If the Supreme Court upholds Obamacare, there will remain no meaningful positive limitation on the government’s power. At the same time, other safeguards such as the separation of powers are breaking down. Even free elections (a flimsy defense for minority rights in any case) are threatened by the Democrats’ insistence on making fraud as easy as possible.
The negative restraints — which the framers considered nearly redundant — are virtually all we have left. So it’s not too surprising to see the totalitarians like Nancy Pelosi beginning to work on undermining them.
Once could be just happenstance. I mean, what county doesn’t elect a flagrantly unethical race-baiting DA on occasion? But two in a row? Durham has a problem.
Elizabeth Warren’s Senate campaign says it’s sexism to question whether she should have billed herself as a minority (she apparently is 1/32 Cherokee) during her time in academia:
Once again, the qualifications and ability of a woman are being called into question by Scott Brown who did the same thing with the Supreme Court nomination of Elena Kagan. It’s outrageous.
It’s not sexism to debate a candidate’s qualification for high public office. On the contrary, it is sexism to suggest that women, merely because they are women, may not have their qualifications questioned.
UPDATE: It seems they’re serious about it. Now the sexism charge is coming from Warren’s own lips, and with no more substance:
“The only one as I understand it who’s raising any question about whether or not I was qualified for my job is Scott Brown and I think I am qualified and frankly I’m a little shocked to hear anybody raise a question about whether or not I’m qualified to hold a job teaching,” she said, pushing to put Brown on defense. “What does he think it takes for a woman to be qualified?”
If you try to load a non-existent page on the Politifact web site, this is how it signals the 404:
In a political context, it’s hard to see an Etch-a-sketch as anything other than a thinly veiled jab at the Romney campaign.
Politifact’s pretense as a neutral arbiter of truth in politics is growing more threadbare with each new hatchet job, but this still seems awfully blatant.
When George W Bush launched his re-election campaign, his first commercial naturally highlighted his leadership in the aftermath of 9/11. The Democrats immediately attacked the commercial for supposedly politicizing 9/11, using an astroturf group of 9/11 victim’s families they had waiting for just that purpose. It was absurd. The response to 9/11 was President Bush’s finest hour and of course he was going to highlight it.
The operation that killed Bin Laden was President Obama’s finest hour (in the sense of being his only good hour). He too is entitled to highlight it in his re-election effort. And if his lack of accomplishment in any other area leads him to over-emphasize it, that’s fine too.
But no, Barack Obama can’t merely trumpet his achievement. No, this guy has to turn it into an attack ad against Mitt Romney.
Would George W Bush have run an attack ad against John Kerry, alleging that he wouldn’t have been a strong leader following 9/11? We needn’t speculate — history shows he didn’t, despite the likelihood that such an ad would have struck home. In fact, Bush didn’t even exploit Bin Laden’s endorsement of John Kerry.
The first thing that’s hard to take about the Bin Laden attack ad (here, if you want to see it) is the premise that it was even a hard decision. Of course you would go and get the guy. The striking thing is how this administration made an easy decision hard. (The hardest in “500 years”!)
The second thing that’s hard to take is Obama’s choice of messenger. In the entire world there is one man who really did fail to give the order to take out Bin Laden when he had the chance. That one guy, Bill Clinton, is the guy Obama selected to preach about decisive leadership in dealing with Bin Laden. Bizarre.
The third thing that’s hard to take about this is the fact that raid that took out Bin Laden exploited intelligence from terrorist detainees, the exact sort of intelligence that Obama hasensured we will not be able to gather any more. The next president (or — god forbid — Obama in a second term) is less likely to have such an opportunity, as a result of Obama’s policies.
Finally there’s the actual substance of the attack, and this I want to take a look at. The attack quoted two statements by Romney. The first was taken completely out of context:
Mitt Romney criticized Barack Obama for vowing to strike al-Qaeda targets inside Pakistan if necessary.
This statement was made in 2007 when presidential candidate Barack Obama was lurching around making jaw-droppingly bizarre foreign policy pronouncements. Obama was talking about launching a war against al Qaeda in Pakistan, not about a raid about Osama Bin Laden. This was at a time when the Pakistani regime was friendly but fragile, and there was concern that the regime could destabilize and leave us with something much worse. Obama was trying to look tough, but actually came off as simply unstable. All the other presidential candidates attacked him, not just Romney. For example, Hillary Clinton said:
[It was] a very big mistake to telegraph that and to destabilize the Musharraf regime, which is fighting for its life against the Islamist extremists who are in bed with al Qaeda and the Taliban.
The second quoted statement highlights an important policy difference between the Democrats and Republicans:
It’s not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.
This is exactly right. The war on terror is not about vengeance (although Democrats have often been confused on this point). It’s not even about dealing with al Qaeda, per se. It’s about making America safe. Al Qaeda is one of many threats, and the Obama administration is making a dangerous mistake by limiting its efforts to Al Qaeda alone.
Our efforts need to be allocated rationally, according to the seriousness of the threat. I believe that’s what Romney was saying. Billions spent on one man would be billions not spent on more serious threats.
The raid against Bin Laden was worthwhile because it didn’t involve moving heaven and earth. We had the intelligence (no thanks to Obama) so we sent in the SEALs. That’s an entirely different proposition.
Nothing that Romney has said suggests that he would have any difficulty in making the easy decision to take out Bin Laden. On the contrary, the very remarks that the ad quotes make it clear that Romney has a much better grasp of what should and should not be done than Obama.
Our federal government can be divided into two parts. One part is exemplified by activities like keeping terrorists from killing us. The other part is exemplified by activities like ensuring that Catholics buy contraceptives.
You can learn a lot about someone by asking which part of the government they think is the good part.
Posted by K. Crary 
Internet Scofflaw 
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