In an attempt to regain the millions in funding it lost in the wake of a hidden-camera scandal, ACORN is suing the federal government over congressional legislation that cut off funding to the community organizing group.
Representatives for ACORN sued the federal government Thursday morning in an attempt to regain the millions of dollars in funding the community organizing group lost after filmmakers videotaped its workers offering advice on how to commit tax fraud and various other felonies.
The suit charges Congress with violating the Constitution when it passed legislation in September that specifically targeted ACORN to lose federal housing, education and transportation funds.
A case can be made that defunding ACORN specifically is an unconstitutional bill of attainder. I don’t buy it; I don’t believe that refusing funding is a form of punishment, but you never know what the courts will do. (Eugene Volokh explores the matter here.)
But there are a couple of remarks that must be made: Firstly, to the best of my knowledge, ACORN’s defunding has not yet become law, so this lawsuit seems premature. The courts can hardly entertain lawsuits over everything Congress ever contemplates. Secondly, if you want to be all constitutional about it, Congress has no power to fund ACORN in the first place.
An Instapundit reader makes an interesting observation: Kabul fell to allied forces on November 13, 2001, just 63 days after 9/11. General McChrystal delivered his report to President Obama on August 30. That was 74 days ago. And counting.
Officials said that no decision was expected from Mr. Obama on Wednesday, but that he would mull over the discussions at the meeting during a trip to Asia that begins Thursday. Mr. Obama is not due back in Washington until next Thursday. Officials said that it was possible that he could announce his decision in the three days before Thanksgiving, which is on Nov. 26, but that an announcement in the first week of December seemed more likely.
If you believed all the talk from Chrysler about how our tax dollars would help finance its fast-track electric-vehicle future, you’re in for a big disappointment.
Chrysler has disbanded the engineering team that was trying to bring three electric models to market as a rush job, Automotive News reports today. Chrysler cited its devotion to electric vehicles as one of the key reasons why the Obama administration and Congress needed to give it $12.5 billion in bailout money, the News points out.
If you take the money that Chrysler invested in electric car make-believe development and weigh it against the billions it got from the government, Chrysler made a handsome profit on the venture. That’s pretty much the only profit that Chrysler has made recently.
Is a whitewash underway in California Attorney General Jerry Brown’s investigation of ACORN? An ACORN spokesman told the East County (San Diego) Democrats Club that Brown is “a political animal” and has indicated that “the fault will be found with the people that did the video — not with ACORN”. Big Government has audio.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) questioned President Obama’s nominee to lead the nation’s airport security agency Tuesday about a censure he received from the FBI in 1988.
Erroll Southers, who was serving as an FBI special agent at the time of the censure, asked a co-worker’s husband who worked for the San Diego Police Department to run a background check on his ex-wife’s boyfriend.
There is no independent auditor overseeing the federal agency responsible for some $6 trillion in home mortgages, because the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel ruled that the agency’s inspector general didn’t have authority to operate, according to internal memos obtained by the Huffington Post.
The ruling came in response to a request from the Federal Housing Finance Agency itself — which means that a federal agency essentially succeeded in getting rid of its own inspector general.
The FHFA is home to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Home Loan Banks.
Obviously, Fannie and Freddie’s oversight was already too weak (thank you Barney Frank!). Now, thanks to the Justice Department, they have even less. What could go wrong?
The House Democratic Whip says the Stupak amendment is a ruse and it won’t be in the final bill:
The health bill approved by the House will likely see its abortion amendment stripped, the House’s third-ranking Democrat stressed Tuesday.
House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) said he believes that the amendment restricting federal funding for abortion will eventually be removed during conference with the Senate’s bill. . .
Clyburn said that he and many other House Democrats supported the amendment to pass the legislation in the House, with the expectation that it would eventually be removed.
“That’s certainly why I voted for it,” Clyburn explained. “I agree that the language approved by the House is unacceptable. We were doing what was necessary to do to put the bill on the floor in about 12 hours.”
Four years ago, the Supreme Court ruled in Kelo v. New London that the government can use eminent domain to take away your property and give it to another private party. Susette Kelo’s house has been torn down but the property remains undeveloped. The 3,169 new jobs and the $1.2 million annual tax revenue have not materialized.
And they never will. In an appropriate conclusion to the sordid story, Pfizer, the company that received the confiscated property, has announced it is pulling out of New London.
Well, I’ve got to give him credit for chutzpah. President Obama simultaneously says that the health care bill should not fund abortion, and calls for the removal of the Stupak amendment that keeps it from funding abortion:
President Obama said today that Congress needs to change abortion-related language in the health care bill passed by the House of Representatives this weekend.
“I laid out a very simple principle, which is this is a health care bill, not an abortion bill,” Obama said. “And we’re not looking to change what is the principle that has been in place for a very long time, which is federal dollars are not used to subsidize abortions.”
Without a provision like the Stupak amendment, the bill will cover abortion. The president says that the provision should be removed, and that he’s not looking to cover abortion. He also says a bill that covers abortion would be a “health care bill”, but one that does not cover abortion is an “abortion bill”. George Orwell would be impressed.
Right on the heels of the police report on the Gladney beating comes another story of SEIU violence:
A state worker is recovering after a bloody brawl at a union hall. He says members of the local SEIU 1000 beat him up and sent him to the hospital all because he wanted to expose alleged corruption within the union.
Big Government has obtained the police report from the incident at a Russ Carnahan (D-MO) town hall in which Kenneth Gladney was attacked by SEIU thugs. The report puts the lie to the spin put out by the SEIU and its enablers in the blogosphere left. It shows that Gladney was attacked viciously and without provocation:
As I walked up to the crowd, several people approached me and were saying the above suspects, McCowan and Molens, had just assaulted a black male who was still around the back side of the school. . . Suspect Molens had his back to me and I observed him yelling and pointing at several individuals. . .While waiting for additional units to make it to my location I attempted to detains Suspects Molens and McCowan for a further investigation into the incident. I had to tell Suspects Molens and McCowan to remain in front of me several times, as they tried numerous times to get lost in the crowd and get past me.
The three above listed witnesses contacted me and stated that they would wait until the scene was brought under control prior to providing me with witness information. . .
I then contacted Witness #1, Harris Himes. Witness H. Himes stated that as he was leaving the school gymnasium, he saw Suspect McCowan talking to Victim Gladney. He stated that he saw Suspect McCowan reach over the table and punch Victim Gladney in the face. This assault knocked the victim off balance. Suspect Molens then went around the table and pulled Victim Gladney over the table backwards by the back of his shirt collar. He began to punch and kick Victim Gladney. Witness H. Himes added that while Suspect Molens was kicking and punching Victim Gladney, Suspect McCowan then joined in on the assault.
Witness #2’s, Sandra Himes’, statement of the incident concurred with Harris’ account of the incident. She did add that Victim Gladney did nothing to provoke this assault.
At this time I was contacted by the victim, Kenneth E. Gladney. . . Victim Gladney appeared shaken and his clothes were in disarray. . .
Gladney stated that he was handing out pens and buttons outside the gym. He stated that is when Suspects Molens and McCowan, along with a third suspect who is unidentified at this time, walked by his table. Suspect McCowan picked up one of the buttons from Gladney’s table and said, “Who’s sellin this shit?” Victim Gladney stated, “I’m not selling anything. It’s free.” At this time Suspect McCowan said, “What kind of nigger are you?” Suspect McCowan then reached across the table and punched Victim Gladney in the face. Victim Gladney added that Suspect Molens grabbed him from behind, at which time he was struck several times and taken to the ground. At this time he was struck several more times. . .
I was then contacted by Witness #3, [redacted], gave a similar account of the original assault. I would like to add that when I originally walked up to the crowd, Witness [redacted] was one of the individuals being yelled at by Suspect Molens. . .
Suspects Molens and McCowan were arrested for the charges of Assault 3rd and Interfering with the Duties of a Police Officer. . .
This case will be presented to the St. Louis County Counselor’s Office for consideration reference the above noted criminal charges.
It’s clear from the report that these two men perpetrated a vicious and unprovoked assault. Why haven’t they been prosecuted? Unfortunately, the St. Louis district attorney, Bob McCulloch, has a history of abusing the power of his office for political purposes. During the 2008 presidential election campaign, Bob McCulloch joined the “Barack Obama Truth Squad“, a coalition of Missouri law enforcement formed “to target anyone who lies or runs a misleading television ad during the presidential campaign”. As we’ve seen clearly during the past year, “misleading” is very much in the eye of the beholder.
The Obama administration, attempting to salvage a faltering nuclear deal with Iran, has told Iran’s leaders in back-channel messages that it is willing to allow the country to send its stockpile of enriched uranium to any of several nations, including Turkey, for temporary safekeeping, according to administration officials and diplomats involved in the exchanges.
But the overtures, made through the International Atomic Energy Agency over the past two weeks, have all been ignored, the officials said. Instead, they said, the Iranians have revived an old counterproposal: that international arms inspectors take custody of much of Iran’s fuel, but keep it on Kish, a Persian Gulf resort island that is part of Iran.
A senior Obama administration official said that proposal had been rejected because leaving the nuclear material on Iranian territory would allow for the possibility that the Iranians could evict the international inspectors at any moment. That happened in North Korea in 2003, and within months the country had converted its fuel into the material for several nuclear weapons. . .
Members of the Obama administration, in interviews over the weekend, said that they had now all but lost hope that Iran would follow through with an agreement reached in Geneva on Oct. 1 to send its fuel out of the country temporarily — buying some time for negotiations over its nuclear program.
The naivete of our administration is positively painful. Iran never had the slightest intention of following through on the deal. The whole point, from Iran’s perspective, is to keep us talking and not acting while they run their centrifuges. And it’s working.
THE PRESIDENT: Tonight I want to address some of the key controversies that are still out there. Some of people’s concerns have grown out of bogus claims spread by those whose only agenda is to kill reform at any cost. . .
There are also those who claim that our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false. The reforms — the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.
Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus object to a provision in the Senate legislation — backed by the White House — that bars illegal immigrants from buying health insurance within a proposed new marketplace, or exchange, even if they use their own money to buy from private companies.
Illegal immigrants can buy private health insurance now, so some lawmakers say the White House position goes too far. The House bill doesn’t have that language, and several members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus met with Obama at the White House on Thursday to tell him that if that changed, he could lose as many as 20 votes.
“I think that he got our message,” Rep. Nydia Velazquez, D-N.Y., head of the Hispanic Caucus, said afterward.
House leaders said that, in keeping with the Hispanic Caucus’ demands, there was not likely to be any prohibition added to the House bill against illegal immigrants shopping in the exchange.
Note that the bill passed the House 220-215, so it only would have taken three of the threatened twenty votes to defeat the bill. In other words, the inclusion of illegal immigrants is an essential part of the bill.
Now, I haven’t read the bill (obviously, it’s two thousand pages long), so I concede it’s barely possible that it creates an option for illegal immigrants to shop in the exchange without receiving the subsidy that is the entire purpose for the exchange to exist. Perhaps it’s even possible that the bill contains an enforcement mechanism to ensure that illegal immigrants use that hypothetical no-subsidy option. I don’t believe it for an instant.
President Obama invoked the Fort Hood shootings in an emotional appeal to Democrats to pass health care reform today, contrasting the sacrifices of soldiers with political positioning.
The impassioned pitch to the entire Democratic caucus came hours before the House vote tonight on the signature issue of Obama’s presidency, with Democratic leaders struggling to keep members from conservative districts on board.
“He was absolutely inspiring. In a very moving way, he reminded us what sacrifice really is,” said New Jersey Rep. Rob Andrews, estimating the persuader-in-chief turned several votes.
Exploiting the Fort Hood shootings to pass health care. Wow.
I’m trying to imagine the political environment that Washington Democrats occupy. A President glibly lays out that analogy, and it is received — without any wincing or taint of disgust — as awesome inspiration.
This should be fun to watch; Latin American socialists are planning a common currency:
The leftist Latin American ALBA trade bloc is scheduled Friday to approve measures that would replace US dollars with a new virtual currency for regional commerce, an official said here. . .
The new monetary system was adopted in principle at an ALBA summit in April by organization members, which include Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Dominica, Saint Vincent, Antigua and Barbuda.
Initially the sucre system — the acronym comes from the Spanish name Sistema Unificado de Compensacion de Pagos Reciprocos — will be a virtual currency used in commercial exchanges between ALBA countries.
A common currency between a bunch of Latin American socialists and communists. Unlikely as this is to become reality, I nevertheless hope it does. It would be endlessly entertaining.
POSTSCRIPT: St. Vincent, Dominica, and Antigua and Barbuda have already said they won’t be joining the Sucre, and I’d be very surprised to see Honduras adopt it either (unless Zelaya somehow prevails and makes himself dictator). That leaves the effort with only the hardcore socialists.
At least one Democratic political strategist has gotten a blunt warning from the White House to never appear on Fox News Channel, an outlet that presidential aides have depicted as not so much a news-gathering operation as a political opponent bent on damaging the Obama administration. . .
One Democratic strategist said that shortly after an appearance on Fox he got a phone call from a White House official telling him not to be a guest on the show again. The call had an intimidating tone, he said.
The message was, “We better not see you on again,” said the strategist, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to run afoul of the White House. An implicit suggestion, he said, was that “clients might stop using you if you continue.”
In urging Democratic consultants to spurn Fox, White House officials might be trying to isolate the network and make it appear more partisan. A boycott by Democratic strategists could also help drive the White House narrative that Fox is a fundamentally different creature than the other TV news networks.
The White House is denying the story, but not very convincingly. They cite the fact that White House is now trying to scale back its war against Fox News as proof that this couldn’t have happened, which strikes me as a complete non sequitur.
Anderson Cooper’s sexual-innuendo-laden slur for the Tea Party movement has reached the Oval Office. The New York Times reports:
Mr. Obama, during his private pep talk to Democrats, recognized Mr. Owens election and then posed a question to the other lawmakers. According to Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, who supports the health care bill, the president asked, “Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care?
(Emphasis mine.)
In offensiveness, this is basically on a par with a hypothetical Republican president adopting Rush Limbaugh’s “feminazi” slur for extreme abortion supporters.
The more people, in my judgment, exaggerate a threat of safety and soundness, the more people conjure up the possibility of serious financial losses to the Treasury, which I do not see. I think we see entities that are fundamentally sound financially and withstand some of the disaster scenarios.
and:
I do think I do not want the same kind of focus on safety and soundness that we have in OCC and OTS. I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing.
and:
I believe there has been more alarm raised about potential unsafety and unsoundness than, in fact, exists.
and finally:
Rep. Frank: Let me ask [George] Gould and [Franklin] Raines on behalf of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, do you feel that over the past years you have been substantially under-regulated?
Mr. Raines?
Mr. Raines: No, sir.
Mr. Frank: Mr. Gould?
Mr. Gould: No, sir. . . .
Mr. Frank: OK. Then I am not entirely sure why we are here.
Oh, well, if Fannie and Freddie say they don’t need to be regulated, how could there be any argument?
If it’s a private company, Barney Frank wants to regulate it down to the shape of its paper clip holders. But if it’s a government-sponsored enterprise, with the taxpayer on the hook for its losses, Frank leaves them free to do whatever they like. For them, there ought not be a focus on safety and soundness.
Freddie Mac, the second largest provider of U.S. residential mortgage funding, on Friday posted a loss of $5 billion in the third quarter and predicted it would need more government support amid a “prolonged deterioration” in housing. . .
Including a $1.3 billion dividend payment on senior preferred stock bought by the Treasury in previous quarters, Freddie Mac’s third-quarter loss increases to $6.3 billion. . .
Its larger rival Fannie Mae on Thursday said it would need $15 billion from the U.S. Treasury after a whopping $18.9 billion third-quarter loss.
Under the arrangement, Democratic Reps. Bart Stupak of Michigan, Brad Ellsworth of Indiana and other abortion opponents were promised an opportunity to insert tougher restrictions into the legislation during debate on the House floor. . .
But the amendment drew criticism from Planned Parenthood.
“Planned Parenthood strongly opposes the Stupak/Pitts amendment which would result in women losing health benefits they have today,” the group’s president, Cecile Richards, said in a written statement.
What? How can anyone lose health benefits they have today? The president has promised that no one will lose her current coverage.
The answer is, like most people, Planned Parenthood doesn’t believe it. Most on the left find it useful to pretend they believe it, since they don’t mind single payer. Indeed, many actively want it. But a single-payer regime without abortion coverage is not in the interest of the abortion industry.
If the Stupak/Pitts amendment passes, it will be very interesting to see if the abortion lobby comes out against the entire bill. This might expose a seam in the liberal coalition.
Thirty years ago, in November 1979, Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote her famous essay Dictatorships & Double Standards, in which she wrote about how President Carter’s policy of undermining friendly dictators while appeasing hostile ones was catastrophic to US interests throughout the world.
Stephen Hayes sees the echoes of Carter’s folly in the Obama administration today:
At least four foreign journalists were detained during the [November 4 Iranian] protests, and members of government-backed militias appeared in riot gear beating protesters with heavy clubs and arresting others.
Back at the State Department, spokesman Ian Kelly prepared to open his daily briefing with an unusually harsh condemnation. The United States “deplores” the “unprecedented” actions of an unelected leadership that “have undermined any opportunity for progress toward reengagement and constructive dialogue.”
These would have been the strongest words issued by the Obama administration about the Iranian protests if they had been about the Iranian regime. But they were actually about Fiji. Kelly said absolutely nothing about Iran.
Beyond Fiji, Hayes could have cited Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel, or Honduras as friendly governments denounced by the State Department. We are branching out, though, because those aren’t even dictatorships.
Backed by some of the most powerful members of the Senate, a little-noticed provision in the healthcare overhaul bill would require insurers to consider covering Christian Science prayer treatments as medical expenses.
The provision was inserted by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) with the support of Democratic Sens. John F. Kerry and the late Edward M. Kennedy, both of Massachusetts, home to the headquarters of the Church of Christ, Scientist.
The measure would put Christian Science prayer treatments — which substitute for or supplement medical treatments — on the same footing as clinical medicine. While not mentioning the church by name, it would prohibit discrimination against “religious and spiritual healthcare.”
A violation of the separation of church and state? Quite possibly. Idiotic? Definitely.
Unfortunately, idiocy doesn’t stop legislation these days, particularly when the idiocy is bipartisan.
The Columbia Journalism Review calls Citizens Against Government Waste “an obscure tea-bagging operation”. Setting aside the offensive and biased nature of the description, CAGW is hardly obscure and it pre-dates the Tea Party movement by decades.
The UN’s nuclear watchdog has asked Iran to explain evidence suggesting that Iranian scientists have experimented with an advanced nuclear warhead design, the Guardian has learned.
The very existence of the technology, known as a “two-point implosion” device, is officially secret in both the US and Britain, but according to previously unpublished documentation in a dossier compiled by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iranian scientists may have tested high-explosive components of the design. The development was today described by nuclear experts as “breathtaking” and has added urgency to the effort to find a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis.
The sophisticated technology, once mastered, allows for the production of smaller and simpler warheads than older models. It reduces the diameter of a warhead and makes it easier to put a nuclear warhead on a missile. . .
The agency has in the past treated such reports with scepticism, particularly after the Iraq war. But its director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, has said the evidence of Iranian weaponisation “appears to have been derived from multiple sources over different periods of time, appears to be generally consistent, and is sufficiently comprehensive and detailed that it needs to be addressed by Iran”. . .
James Acton, a British nuclear weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said: “It’s remarkable that, before perfecting step one, they are going straight to step four or five … To start with more sophisticated designs speaks of level of technical ambition that is surprising.”
Asking Iran to explain this is a waste of time. They are developing nukes and everyone knows it. You can add this to the lengthening file of ever-more-preposterous Iranian denials:
Iran has rejected most of the IAEA material on weaponisation as forgeries, but has admitted carrying out tests on multiple high-explosive detonations synchronised to within a microsecond. Tehran has told the agency that there is a civilian application for such tests, but has so far not provided any evidence for them.
Western weapons experts say there are no such civilian applications, but the use of co-ordinated detonations in nuclear warheads is well known. They compress the fissile core, or pit, of the warhead until it reaches critical mass.
Unemployment soared in October to 10.2%, the highest rate in over 26 years. The 0.4% jump was much larger than the slight 0.1% increase expected by analysts. Non-farm payrolls shed 190k jobs, also larger than the 175k expected.
The Democratic stimulus plan is a complete and utter disaster. Here’s the update of the graph comparing reality to the Administration’s projections (light blue is the administration’s no-stimulus projection):
This no-stimulus scenario is looking pretty good now. Also, recall what President Obama himself said last January about the economy and his stimulus plan:
Economists from across the political spectrum agree that if we don’t act swiftly and boldly, we could see a much deeper economic downturn that could lead to double digit unemployment and the American Dream slipping further and further out of reach.
That’s why we need an American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan that not only creates jobs in the short-term but spurs economic growth and competitiveness in the long-term. And this plan must be designed in a new way—we can’t just fall into the old Washington habit of throwing money at the problem.
Of course, later the president embraced throwing money at the problem:
So then you get the argument, well, this is not a stimulus bill, this is a spending bill. What do you think a stimulus is? (Laughter and applause.) That’s the whole point. No, seriously. (Laughter.) That’s the point. (Applause.)
To get a picture of how badly the president’s policy has failed, let’s take a trip down memory lane. In 2004, President Bush was running for re-election and was being savaged for the “jobless recovery”. Tom Daschle made it the centerpiece of his response to Bush’s 2004 State of the Union address.
But what were the actual figures? Between January 2001 and November 2004, seasonally adjusted non-farm payrolls cut 274 thousand jobs. This is according to the establishment survey, which the media preferred because it made Bush look worse. According the more-complete household survey — which includes self-employment — the economy actually added 2.5 million jobs.
Between January 2009 and today, we have already lost 3.5 million non-farm jobs (3.8 million in the household survey). If we start the clock six months into Obama’s term (a courtesy generally not afforded to Bush), which happens to be when the recession ended, we have lost 867 thousand non-farm jobs. On the household survey, we have lost 1.9 million.
People are stillcriticizing the administration’s jobs-created-or-saved numbers, and justly so. But I think criticizing the numbers misses the point a bit. The very idea that we can count the jobs created or saved is nonsense, and undermines the entire theory supporting of the stimulus.
The stimulus is based on the idea of the Keynes multiplier. According to the theory, when workers get paid for their work on stimulus-sponsored projects, they turn around and spend that money on other things, generating more income for other workers, who spend the money on still other things, and so on. Thus, the economy grows by a multiple of the stimulus.
ASIDE: This is all bunk. The story above fails to account for the economic activity that is suppressed when the government taxes or borrows to fund the stimulus. (In fact, Keynes’s theory relies on a more complicated analysis that I won’t get into.) In all but very exceptional circumstances that certainly do not prevail today, the positive and negative effects cancel. All that happens is economic activity shifts from the private sector into the public sector. Robert Barro has estimated the multiplier to be “insignificantly different from zero”.
Anyway, there is obviously no way of tracking what happens to the stimulus money once workers get paid. Consequently there is no way to count any jobs that might be created after the first round. So when the White House claims that it can actually count the jobs created by the stimulus, it is tacitly conceding that there is no multiplier. Without the multiplier, there is no “stimulus”, only a massive spending boondoggle.
There’s been a lot confusion (at least on my part) about what the Honduras deal actually means, but the latest news makes it clear that the deal is a complete win for Honduras.
Honduras agrees to vote on whether to reinstate Zelaya, and the US State Department agrees to recognize Honduras’s upcoming elections regardless of the outcome of the reinstatement vote. In fact, Honduran congressional leaders are hinting that they may not even have the vote on reinstatement until after the elections.
Bottom line:
“We’ve made our position on President Zelaya and his restitution clear. We believe he should be restored to power,” [State Department spokesman Ian] Kelly said. “Our focus now is on implementing this process and creating an environment wherein Hondurans themselves can address the issue of restitution and resolve for themselves this Honduran problem.”
The deal left reinstatement in the hands of Congress, but hours after shaking hands, Zelaya and others indicated a behind-the-scenes arrangement had been made with Congress to reinstate him. . . His comments, and U.S. approval of the deal, left many believing Congress was ready to put him back in office. . .
Juan Carlos Hidalgo, project coordinator for Latin America at Washington-based Cato Institute, said he doesn’t expect Hondurans to be swayed by U.S. pressure.
“If Congress doesn’t reinstate Zelaya, it certainly will be a diplomatic embarrassment for the United States since they pressured so much for his reinstatement and even threatened to not recognize the election results,” said Hidalgo. “But not recognizing a popular vote was a dead-end road for the U.S. and they knew it.
The bottom line: the Obama team picked the wrong horse, found itself in a diplomatic dead end, found a mechanism to abandon its failed gambit, and now supports elections — the very position that the Honduran interim government and the administration’s critics have been urging from the beginning.
Sen. Roland Burris (D-IL) explains where the Constitution empowers Congress to impose health insurance mandates:
“Well, that’s under certainly the laws of the–protect the health, welfare of the country,” said Burris. “That’s under the Constitution. We’re not even dealing with any constitutionality here. Should we move in that direction? What does the Constitution say? To provide for the health, welfare and the defense of the country.”
The actual Constitution reads a little bit differently than Burris seems to think:
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States . . .
(Emphasis mine.) Note the lack of any mention of “health”. In fact, the word appears nowhere in the entire Constitution.
The State of Florida tried out a public option in property insurance. It was supposed to be an “insurer of last resort”, but it eventually began to compete with private insurance and quickly became the largest insurer in the state, insuring 30% of homeowners. Florida’s public option is backed by the government: it does not maintain sufficient reserves to cover its potential losses, and instead relies on the taxpayer in the event of a disaster. The state’s largest private insurer, State Farm, is now pulling out of the state. The government plan is not a monopoly yet, but these things take time.
In other words, the public option in property insurance has had exactly the same effect that critics say it would have in health insurance. It drives private insurers out of business.
A new Rasmussen poll find that more people still blame President Bush than President Obama for our current economic woes, but just barely. While 49% still blame Bush, 45% blame Obama. The difference falls within the margin of error. This is a significant shift since last month, when Bush-blame led Obama-blame 55-37.
The statute of limitations on blaming the predecessor is expiring. Before the month is out, Obama will own the mess he’s created.
Over a dozen videos of school children singing or reciting praises to Obama have now come to light. What previously might have been dismissed as a few bad apples is now a troubling phenomenon.
About two-thirds of the 14,506 jobs claimed to be saved under one federal office, the Administration for Children and Families at Health and Human Services, actually weren’t saved at all, according to a review of the latest data by The Associated Press. Instead, that figure includes more than 9,300 existing employees in hundreds of local agencies who received pay raises and benefits and whose jobs weren’t saved.
That type of accounting was found in an earlier AP review of stimulus jobs, which the Obama administration said was misleading because most of the government’s job-counting errors were being fixed in the new data.
The administration now acknowledges overcounting in the new numbers for the HHS program. Elizabeth Oxhorn, a spokeswoman for the White House recovery office, said the Obama administration was reviewing the Head Start data “to determine how and if it will be counted.”
But officials defended the practice of counting raises as saved jobs.
“If I give you a raise, it is going to save a portion of your job,” HHS spokesman Luis Rosero said.
It’s not so remarkable that they’re doing this. The remarkable thing is they’re actually defending doing so.
The LA Times corrects some of the errors in an op-ed on the ACORN scandal:
An Oct. 22 Op-Ed article about the community group ACORN stated that, in two ACORN offices, staff members offered advice to a pair of videographers posing as proprietors of a prostitution ring. While tapes of all the offices visited by the pair have not been released, it is clear from those that have been that ACORN offered advice in more than two offices. The article also said that the pair were “kicked out” of most ACORN offices. Because unedited versions of the tapes have not been released, it is unclear how the encounters ended, but it is unlikely they were ordered to leave most offices.
The thing is, these facts are common knowledge among anyone who followed the ACORN scandal. The editors should have caught these “errors” before the piece was ever printed in the first place. The fact that they did not indicates that the LA Times’s editors haven’t the slightest clue.
Moreover, Patterico points out additional “errors” in the piece that the LA Times chose not to correct.
Remember that Lockerbie bomber who was released on “compassionate” grounds because he was about to die?
The health of the Lockerbie bomber has “not deteriorated” since his release from prison three months ago – despite doctors’ assessments that he would have died by now, a senior source has told The Sunday Telegraph. . .
Megrahi, who is suffering terminal prostate cancer, was sent home to Libya to die after medical experts concluded in a report on July 30 he had just three months left to live. The time span was crucial because only prisoners with three months or less to survive are eligible for release on compassionate grounds.
Within three weeks of the medical examination by Professor Karol Sikora, one of Britain’s leading cancer specialists, Megrahi was put on a plane and sent home to Tripoli to die.
But three months on from Prof Sikora’s diagnosis, Megrahi is well enough to “walk and talk” and shows no sign of deterioration, according to a senior source involved in his release.
The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement has leaked, and it’s as bad as many have suspected. BoingBoing summarizes:
ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn’t infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.
ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet — and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living — if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.
The whole world must adopt US-style “notice-and-takedown” rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused — again, without evidence or trial — of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.
Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM).
This treaty is being negotiated in secret by the Obama administration, citing national security, if you can believe that:
Last September, the Bush administration defended the unusual secrecy over an anti-counterfeiting treaty being negotiated by the U.S. government, which some liberal groups worry could criminalize some peer-to-peer file sharing that infringes copyrights.
Now President Obama’s White House has tightened the cloak of government secrecy still further, saying in a letter this week that a discussion draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and related materials are “classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958.”
Got that? An international treaty is classified due to national security. If that weren’t already a load of crap, the negotiations aren’t so sensitive that they couldn’t invite comment from 42 outside lawyers.
Israeli defense officials say a ship the navy confiscated on Wednesday in waters off Cyprus was carrying more than 60 tons of weapons.
They say the cargo included missiles, antitank weapons and mortars. The officials said the weapons were coming from Iran and were bound for Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon.
UPDATE: This video gives a sense of the size of this shipment.
Here’s the best available indication of what the press thinks will happen at the polls today:
For Republicans, an election win of any size Tuesday would be a blessing. But victories in Virginia, New Jersey or elsewhere won’t erase enormous obstacles the party faces heading into a 2010 midterm election year when control of Congress and statehouses from coast to coast will be up for grabs.
If the AP were calling this a referendum on President Obama, you could be pretty sure they expected a good night for Democrats.
UPDATE: A pretty good night nationally, with big wins in Virginia and New Jersey and a near sweep in Pennsylvania judicial races. Still, the loss in NY-23 is sad, if meaningless in practical terms.
Nancy Pelosi’s release of the House Democrats health care reform bill has had a distinct impact on the debate. Last week, sentiment on the Democratic plan had closed to only a six-point gap (51% opposed, 45% in favor). Now, with the publication of the Pelosi plan, the gap is back to double-digits, 54-42. The twelve-point gap is close to the all-time low (15 points) at the end of September.
PPP’s polling on the closely watched races tomorrow is very promising for Republicans (McDonnell by 14, Christie by 6, Hoffman by 14), but some have questioned how reliable PPP is. So, for another estimate, here’s Intrade’s latest prices:
Virginia: McDonnell 98.5, Deeds 1.5
New Jersey: Christie 55, Corzine 45, Daggett 1.1
NY-23: Hoffman 70, Owens 33, Scozzafava 4.4
If the traders are right, and they almost always are, the only election in doubt is New Jersey, and Christie has the edge there.
I don’t know what impact this will have on the NY-23 race, but it does prove that we were right to oppose Scozzafava.
UPDATE: According to the PPP poll, the endorsement boosted Owens, but not nearly enough. It was 54-31 immediately before, and 52-38 after. A nine-point shift is nothing to sneeze at, but Hoffman is still left with a double-digit lead. (Via the Corner.)
Perhaps tapping a complete novice for Secretary of State based on her political connections wasn’t such a great idea after all:
It was supposed to be a charm offensive, but as the day wore on she put away her charm and went on the offensive. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s public dressing down of Pakistan during a three-day visit there, including virtually accusing the country of complicity with al-Qaida, has shaken Washington as much as it stunned her hosts.
“Her inner voice became her outer voice,” Martha Raddatz, a veteran NBC correspondent said on the network, explaining that while many in the administration believed what she said to be true (that Pakistan is coddling terrorists), it was rare for America’s top diplomat to say it publicly. Officials in Washington were trying to keep a straight face, but there were a few gasps, she added.
Posting its results late this afternoon at Recovery.gov, the White House claimed 640,329 jobs have been created or saved because of the $159 billion in stimulus funds allocated as of Sept. 30.
Officials acknowledged the numbers were not exact, saying that states and localities that reported the numbers have made mistakes. . .
The White House argues that the actual job number is actually larger than 640,000 — closer to 1 million jobs when one factors in stimulus jobs added in October and, more importantly, jobs created indirectly, such as “the waitress who’s still on the job,” Vice President Biden said today.
So let’s see. Assuming their number is right — 160 billion divided by 1 million. Does that mean the stimulus costs taxpayers $160,000 per job?
Jared Bernstein, chief economist and senior economic advisor to the vice president, called that “calculator abuse.”
“Calculator abuse”? That’s all they’ve got?
POSTSCRIPT: By the way, I’m reminded of an incident from 2003 in which Paul Krugman tried to do a similar calculation for President Bush’s tax cuts. But unlike ABC, Krugman didn’t do the calculation honestly. Krugman took a ten-year cost figure, divided it by the number of jobs that were projected to be created (none of this “jobs saved” nonsense) within the first year, and presented that meaningless quotient as if it were the annual cost per job.
A City Council hopeful won’t cough up documents related to whether the Working Families Party is scamming the campaign finance system — because the case could involve “criminal liability,” according to documents released yesterday.
The bombshell development was revealed at a court hearing where lawyers for the WFP and the campaign of Staten Island candidate Debi Rose tried to get a suit against them tossed. . .
The WFP and Rose had tried Thursday to buck a discovery request saying they had to produce documents and campaign finance records.
A lawyer for the campaign said Rose’s treasurer, David Thomas, wouldn’t produce them because they “may implicate criminal liability and his client would therefore have Fifth Amendment rights protecting him from having to make any such compelled disclosure,” according to the affidavit, which quoted a deputy clerk in the Appellate Division.
The “Working Families Party” is one of the organizations in the ACORN network.
The bad business environment in Washington State has pushed Boeing to put its second 787 assembly line in Charleston, South Carolina, rather than Everett, Washington.
Mark Steyn on Valerie Jarrett’s risible sloganeering:
You would think the most powerful man in the most powerful nation would find a hard job finding anyone on the planet to “speak truth to power” to. But I suppose if you’re as eager to do so as his Senior Advisor, there’s always somebody out there: The Supreme Leader of Iran. The Prime Minister of Belgium. The Deputy Tourism Minister of the Solomon Islands. But no. The Senior Advisor has selected targets closer to home: “I think that what the administration has said very clearly is that we’re going to speak truth to power. When we saw all of the distortions in the course of the summer, when people were coming down to town-hall meetings and putting up signs that were scaring seniors to death. . . . ”
Ah, right. People “putting up signs.” Can’t have that, can we?
In light of the Obama administration’s sponsorship of a UN “human rights” resolution that exempts criticism of religion from free speech protection, Eugene Volokh wonders what the Obama administration will say when foreign officials start citing the resolution to press for action against Americans who criticize Islam. I don’t know what the answer will be, but I’m sure it will be revealing.
The House Democratic health care plan would essentially make it illegal for health insurers to charge more for higher risk customers. So if you are young, healthy, and/or avoid risk behaviors, you get to subsidize those who do not. Plus, moral hazard will encourage risk behaviors, making coverage more expensive for everyone.
Frank Luntz, the famous Republican pollster/strategist, recommended last May that Republicans confine their attacks to Congressional Democrats. Attacking President Obama was politically dangerous. Five months later, matters have changed. Although Luntz says Congress is still a riper target than Obama, attacking Obama no longer carries any risk.
The White House on Friday released a small list of visitors to the White House since President Barack Obama took office in January, including lobbyists, business executives, activists and celebrities.
No previous administration has released such a list, though the information out so far is incomplete. Only about 110 names —and 481 visits —out of the tens of thousands who have visited the Obama White House were made public. Like the Bush administration before it, Obama is arguing that any release is voluntary, not required by law, despite two federal court rulings to the contrary.
Under the Obama White House’s policy, most names of visitors from Inauguration Day in January through the end of September will never be released. The White House says it plans to release most of the names of visitors from October on, and that release is due near the end of the year.
(Emphasis mine.)
Transparency to begin soon! I believe we’ve heard that one before.
Newly revealed emails prove that the White House was directly involved in the NEA conference call in which artists were asked to create propaganda for the Obama administration.
The New York Times originally made the following observation, as part of its story on President Obama’s trip to Dover:
The images and the sentiment of the president’s five-hour trip to Delaware were intended by the White House to convey to the nation that Mr. Obama was not making his Afghanistan decision lightly or in haste.
That sentence has now been removed, and people are wondering why.
I haven’t formed an opinion on the Honduras deal, because I don’t understand it yet. Honduras agrees that its congress will vote on whether to reinstate Zelaya. The question is: is the lifting of sanctions dependent on the congress voting yes? If the lifting of sanctions is part of the deal regardless of what the congress does, as the Wall Street Journal seems to think, this is very good for Honduras. If not, as most in the press seem to be assuming, it’s a bad deal.
UPDATE: Otto Reich understands it the same way as the Journal. Good news.
Again, the CBO points out that its analysis of the House Democrats’ health care plan is required to assume that the law remains exactly as written in the bill. As everyone ought to know, this is not even intended to be true. In order to get the desired mark from the CBO, various parts of health care reform (notably the Medicare fix) have been broken off into other bills that will be concerned separately.
That’s the cost of the House Democrats’ health care bill according to the CBO’s numbers. And that doesn’t even include a Medicare reimbursement fix, which would have to be added later.
The Medicare end-of-life planning provision that 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin said was tantamount to “death panels” for seniors is staying in the latest Democratic health care bill unveiled Thursday.
The end-of-life planning provision is a bit sinister, and it’s appallingly tone-deaf for House Democrats to include it, but it is not the provision that gives rise to concerns about “death panels”.
The provision that relates to “death panels” is the Independent Medicare Advisory Council (IMAC), which would have the power to enact cuts to Medicare. People are rightly concerned that the IMAC would either create or itself become a care-rationing board similar to the UK’s NICE. One reason people are concerned is that President Obama has said that an “independent group” will be giving “guidance” about cutting care for the elderly.
I wrote here about the reasons that concerns over “death panels” are not overblown.
Two scribes who work for The Breeze, the semi-weekly newspaper at James Madison University, have landed in hot water for doing what they are supposed to do: report campus news. The school has placed “judicial charges” against the pair because they supposedly trespassed a verboten dormitory while reporting a story. . .
The facts of the case are thus:
Two Saturdays ago, sophomore Katie Hibson went to Hillside Hall, a dormitory, to interview residents about a “peeping Tom.” After speaking with Hillside residents outside the building, young Hibson, with the permission of a resident, went inside to interview more students. This, apparently, upset the resident assistant at Hillside, who ordered Hibson to leave. The RA escorted her from the building.
Hibson called her editor, Tim Chapman, a former reporter for the Daily News-Record sports department, who showed up at Hillside. With an escort who lives in the building and works at The Breeze, Hibson and Chapman went to the RA’s room to assert Hibson’s rights as a journalist. He showed the RA the school policy on dorm visitors: Guests are allowed as long as a resident is with them. The journalists refused to leave, and the RA and her supervisor threatened to call campus police. The pair left the building before police arrived.
You’d think that would have been the end of it, particularly given Chapman’s correct explanation of school policy, but alas, the pair received an e-mail detailing the following infractions: trespassing, disorderly conduct and noncompliance with an official request. As of now, the Breeze has not received an adequate explanation of why the RA ordered Hibson out of the building or why the school filed charges. Remember, the reporter followed the rules for visiting the building.
More than 40% of President Obama’s top-level fundraisers have secured posts in his administration, from key executive branch jobs to diplomatic postings in countries such as France, Spain and the Bahamas, a USA TODAY analysis finds.
Twenty of the 47 fundraisers that Obama’s campaign identified as collecting more than $500,000 have been named to government positions, the analysis found. . .
Nearly a year after he was elected on a pledge to change business-as-usual in Washington, Obama also has taken a cue from his predecessors and appointed fundraisers to coveted ambassadorships, drawing protests from groups representing career diplomats.
A separate analysis by the American Foreign Service Association, the diplomats’ union, found that more than half of the ambassadors named by Obama so far are political appointees. . . That’s a rate higher than any president in more than four decades, the group’s data show, although that could change as the White House fills more openings. Traditionally about 30% of top diplomatic jobs go to political appointees, and roughly 70% to veteran State Department employees.
More political payoffs than any president in 40 years. That goes back to Lyndon Johnson.
President Obama isn’t taking kindly to a television ad that criticizes his opposition to a popular scholarship program for poor children, and his administration wants the ad pulled.
Former D.C. Councilmember Kevin Chavous of D.C. Children First said October 16 that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder had recently approached him and told him to kill the ad.
Does anyone still think that these guys are defenders of civil rights? To them, civil rights are for liberals, and possibly terrorists, but not conservatives and libertarians. We’re supposed to keep our mouths shut.
New Jersey Democrats are asking that absentee ballots be sent out to the 2,300 applicants who were rejected because their signature didn’t match the voter registration.
News flash! Becoming president disrupts your personal life:
President Barack Obama says only once since Jan. 20 has White House life annoyed him.
It was the Saturday in May when, trying to be a good husband, he kept a campaign promise to take his wife, Michelle, to New York after the election for one of their “date nights” – dinner and a Broadway play. . .
“If I weren’t president, I would be happy to catch the shuttle with my wife to take her to a Broadway show, as I had promised her during the campaign, and there would be no fuss and no muss and no photographers,” [Obama] said. “That would please me greatly.”
Presidents, however, don’t travel by any means other than secure government aircraft or vehicles.
Obama added: “The notion that I just couldn’t take my wife out on a date without it being a political issue was not something I was happy with.”
A report from the non-partisan Law Library of Congress found that the Honduran government acted according to its constitution when it ousted Manuel Zelaya. Now, the Democratic chairmen of the foreign relations committees are demanding that the Library of Congress retract its analysis:
The chairmen of the House and Senate foreign relations committees are asking the Law Library of Congress to retract a report on the military-backed coup in Honduras that they charge is flawed and “has contributed to the political crisis that still wracks” the country.
The request, by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. and Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., has sparked cries of censorship from Republicans who say the Democrats don’t like what the August report said: that the government of Honduras had the authority to remove President Manuel Zelaya from office.
Some people are saying that President Obama cannot accept the Nobel prize without Congressional authorization. This isn’t true; he already is authorized under existing law, provided he turns the prize over to the government.
Apparently the ruling hinges on the fact that email is stored outside the home. But snail mail is protected when it’s sitting in a mailbox, or even en route. Why should email be different?
I’m also confused how to reconcile this decision with Warshak v. US, which says email is protected under the Fourth Amendment. Is this just a circuit split?
UPDATE (11/8): To muddy the waters a little bit more, see the correction here. As a non-lawyer it’s now not clear at all what this ruling means, although it still doesn’t sound good.
Rasmussen comments on that wierdo Washington Post poll that has the public option gaining while everyone else has it falling:
Polling on the health care topic by many firms has created some confusion. In particular, polls on the “public option” show a wide variety of results. A recent poll in The Washington Post found that 57% support a government-run health insurance company to compete with private insurers, but our polling shows that support is very soft. In fact, people are strongly opposed to a public option if they think it could lead employers to drop the existing coverage they provide employees.The fact that results are so subject to change based upon minor differences in question wording suggests that voters do not have firm opinions on the public option.
In fact, 63% say that we should not have a public option if people are forced to change their insurance, and 53% say it’s likely that would happen. (They’re right.)
During his first nine months in office, President Obama has quietly rewarded scores of top Democratic donors with VIP access to the White House, private briefings with administration advisers and invitations to important speeches and town-hall meetings.
High-dollar fundraisers have been promised access to senior White House officials in exchange for pledges to donate $30,400 personally or to bundle $300,000 in contributions ahead of the 2010 midterm elections, according to internal Democratic National Committee documents obtained by The Washington Times.
One top donor described in an interview with The Times being given a birthday visit to the Oval Office. Another was allowed use of a White House-complex bowling alley for his family. Bundlers closest to the president were invited to watch a movie in the red-walled theater in the basement of the presidential mansion.
Fox News has the White House’s rebuttal. (As far as I can tell, no one else has picked up the story.)
White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel told CNN last week:
[The mess in Afghanistan is all Bush’s fault. Blah blah blah.]
Hang on a second. It has now been 51 weeks since Obama was elected president, and more than nine months since he took office, and he’s just now getting around to asking the “questions . . . that have never been asked”?
But that’s not really fair to Obama. After all, he has a busy schedule, what with golf games and pitching the International Olympic Committee and date nights and Democratic fund-raisers and health care and the U.N. Security Council and Sunday morning talk shows and saving the planet from global warming and celebrating the dog’s birthday and defending himself against Fox News and all.
“I will never rush the solemn decision of sending you into harm’s way,” FoxNews.com quotes the president as telling servicemen. As for the servicemen who are already in harm’s way: Jeez, guys, be patient! He’ll figure out what to do about Afghanistan as soon as he gets around to it.
President Obama has priorities. Fighting the Taliban has to take a back seat to fighting Fox News. And golf:
President Obama has already caught up with predecessor George W. Bush in one area: Rounds of golf.
The Oval’s good friend Mark Knoller of CBS News reports that Obama on Sunday played his 24th round of golf since his inauguration Jan. 20 — matching Bush’s presidential total, which he racked up in two years and 10 months. Obama’s latest round also got attention because it included a woman, domestic policy adviser Melody Barnes.
President Bush played his last round in 2003, telling reporters he didn’t think it was appropriate to play the game with the U.S. at war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to the President of the United States of America, says that the White House — the most powerful office on face of the earth — is going “to speak truth to power” in its war with Fox News. I believe that the phrase is now officially meaningless.
POSTSCRIPT: As long as I’m picking apart Jarrett’s senseless sloganeering, here’s another: She says the American people are too smart for nonsense and distortions. What? That makes no sense. Smart people, after all, can identify nonsense and distortions. What she clearly means to say is the American people aren’t smart enough to distrust Fox News like they are supposed to.
I agree that Jarrett’s claim is ridiculous, but I think it has a history. Isn’t it a time-honored tradition for socialist governments, both national and Marxist, to continue to campaign against the “powerful” on behalf of the dispossessed, long after they have assumed control and have shot, imprisoned or cowed the supposedly “powerful?” It seems to me that Jarrett, knowingly or not, was placing the administration in a Peronist or Castroite tradition.
Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said Tuesday that he’d back a GOP filibuster of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s health care reform bill.
Lieberman, who caucuses with Democrats and is positioning himself as a fiscal hawk on the issue, said he opposes any health care bill that includes a government-run insurance program — even if it includes a provision allowing states to opt out of the program, as Reid has said the Senate bill will. . .
His comments confirmed that Reid is short of the 60 votes needed to advance the bill out of the Senate, even after Reid included the opt-out provision.
All this talk of an “opt-out” is a fraud. In any particular state, either legislative chamber or the governor could impose the public option by blocking the resolution to opt-out. Only in nine states are Republicans fully in control (Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Missouri, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, and Utah), and some of those are decidedly iffy. So at least 41 states, and probably more, would get stuck with the public option. Moreover, states couldn’t decide later to opt-out; the opportunity expires in 2014.
An opt-in would be much more serious, but still unacceptable. The federal government has powerful tools of coercion at its disposal. (There never was a national speed limit; the federal government coerced individual states into imposing it.) Beyond that, states that opt-out would still be paying the taxes, and would get the whole rest of the deal (mandates, Medicare cuts, etc.).
The whole point to the “opt-out” is as a political fig leaf. Joe Lieberman just blew the whistle on it.
POSTSCRIPT: The Intrade contract on a public option passing this year is trading at 8 (that is, an 8% likelihood), down from 20 yesterday. By the middle of 2010, the likelihood is between 12 and 15, down from 25 or so yesterday.
In the Nawa district of Afghanistan, Gen. McKiernan’s plan is working. Whether it can be made to work throughout Afghanistan with 40,000 additional troops remains to be seen, but it’s a good first indication.
Jytte Klausen’s book on the Muhammed cartoon controversy, after going through the usual peer-review process, was censored at the eleventh hour to remove the cartoons that were the subject of the book. It is now revealed that during Yale University Press’s last-minute, second review of the book, the reviewers did not even read the book. Furthermore, Klausen was not allowed to see the reviews without signing a non-disclosure agreement (which she refused).
This is not how academic publishing works. One does not conduct a second review of a book that has already passed peer review. One certainly does not ask those reviewers to render an opinion without reading the book. And one most definitely does not withhold the reviews from the author.
In today’s UK, if you express an unpopular opinion, you can expect a visit from the police:
After witnessing a gay pride march, committed Christian Pauline Howe wrote to the council to complain that the event had been allowed to go ahead.
But instead of a simple acknowledgement, she received a letter warning her she might be guilty of a hate crime and that the matter had been passed to police.
Two officers later turned up at the frightened grandmother’s home and lectured her about her choice of words before telling her she would not be prosecuted.
There’s no need to prosecute. I’m sure she learned her lesson.
Last week, President Ortega inadvertently provided the best defense yet of the Honduran decision this summer to remove Manuel Zelaya from the presidency. Nicaragua has a one-term limit for presidents, and Mr. Ortega’s term expires in 2011. However, the Nicaraguan doesn’t want to leave, and so he asked the Sandinista-controlled Supreme Court to overturn the constitutional ban on his re-election.
Last week the court’s constitutional panel obliged him. The Nicaraguan press reported that the vote was held before three opposition judges could reach the chamber in time for the session. Three alternative judges, all Sandinistas, took their place and the court gave Mr. Ortega the green light. Mr. Ortega has decreed that the ruling cannot be appealed.
This is classic strong-man stuff on Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela model. Mr. Ortega’s approval rating is in the low-30% range and he’d have a hard time winning a fair election against a united opposition. But he controls the nation’s electoral council, and in the 2008 municipal races—the most important elected checks on the president—the council refused to provide a transparent accounting of the vote tally. It also blocked international and local observers, and the vote was marred by claims of widespread fraud.
The “unapproved by Barack Obama” label is paying off big time for Fox News, with ratings up 9% (and 15% among the 25-54 demographic). That’s just from September 28 to October 11.
Also, CNN’s has tumbled over the last year, with ratings down a disastrous 52% (and 62% among 25-54 year olds). (Via Instapundit.) Anderson Cooper, the journalist who invented the “teabagger” insult for tea-party participants, is down an astounding 72% (79%).
The White House has told Congress it will reject calls for many of President Obama’s policy czars to testify before Congress – a decision senators said goes against the president’s promises of transparency and openness and treads on Congress’ constitutional mandate to investigate the administration’s actions.
Sen. Susan Collins, Maine Republican, said White House counsel Greg Craig told her in a meeting Wednesday that they will not make available any of the czars who work in the White House and don’t have to go through Senate confirmation. She said he was “murky” on whether other czars outside of the White House would be allowed to come before Congress. . .
In a letter last week to Miss Collins, though, Mr. Craig explained that the White House is not trying to circumvent Congress.
“We recognize that it is theoretically possible that a president could create new positions that inhibit transparency or undermine congressional oversight. That is simply not the case, however, in the current administration,” Mr. Craig wrote.
Mr. Craig said the new positions Mr. Obama has created within the White House “are solely advisory in nature” and have no independent authority.
That is a complete lie, at least in regards to some of the czars. Ken Feinberg, the pay czar, was recently all over the news for ordering cuts in executive pay, which he did without any higher approval. Senators also pointed to Carol Browner, the climate czar, and Nancy-Ann DeParle, the health czar, who they said seemed to be operating independently.
A new Gallup poll confirms an earlier result (that I didn’t notice at the time) that conservatives are now the most numerous group in American politics. Conservatives outnumber moderates 40% to 36%. Liberals lag far behind at 20%. The poll also shows the public moving right on a variety of issues. Moreover, a week ago a Rasmussen poll showed that Americans trust Republicans more than Democrats on every issue on which Rasmussen polls.
Nevertheless, Republicans continue to trail Democrats on party identification (33.4% to 39%). So despite that fact that most Americans “should” be Republicans, most are not.
Why is this? My guess is that it’s a combination of two factors. The first factor is a severe problem with the GOP brand. I think many voters have noticed that over the last decade the GOP did not govern according to a set of principles. Accordingly, they associate the Republican party with a group of people, rather than a set of principles. Since those people are a bunch of politicians, this reflects poorly on the brand.
The second factor is the strong individualist streak among conservatives, reinforced by the fact that Gallup’s poll doesn’t distinguish between conservatives and libertarians. Individualists often tend not to be joiners, so they might not identify as Republicans even while they tend to vote that way.
It’s voting patterns, rather than party identification, that determines the direction our government takes, so it’s the first factor that is important. The GOP needs to repair its brand, and that means they need to start governing by principle. The NY-23 debacle suggests that they aren’t serious yet.
The White House is continuing to push back against the allegation, leveled by Fox News and CBS, that the Obama administration tried to exclude Fox News from interviews with pay czar Ken Feinberg. The White House is pushing two stories, and I’m not sure which one (or both) is their current explanation.
One story says that the decision was made by a low-level Treasury staffer. Robert Gibbs reportedly admitted that doing so was a mistake. The White House now insists that Gibbs did not apologize, but that seems to be mere hair-splitting, since Gibbs does not deny the exchange but merely says that they have no reason to apologize.
The other story says that Fox wasn’t granted the interview because they never requested one. That’s not very plausible (why on earth wouldn’t they) and it’s flatly contradicted by Fox.
The second story sounds like a lie, but the first could be true. It’s also consistent with the Treasury Department’s statement that “there was no plot to exclude Fox News,” in which the word “plot” leaves open that this was one person acting on his own. The White House seems to feel that this excuses them, but the fact is, that staffer was doubtless doing what he thought he was supposed to do, given the White House’s official position on Fox News.
The other thing that is interesting is that I’ve seen in a few places (here and here, for example) that some of the other pool networks are privately saying that they stood up for Fox for their own reasons, and not out of journalistic integrity. Ooo-kay. Duly noted.
The Obama administration is moving toward a hybrid strategy in Afghanistan that would combine elements of both the troop-heavy approach sought by its top military commander and a narrower option backed by Vice President Joe Biden, a decision that could pave the way for thousands of new U.S. forces.
The emerging strategy would largely rebuff proposals to maintain current troop levels and rely on unmanned drone attacks and elite special-operations troops to hunt individual militants, an idea championed by Biden. It is opposed by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Kabul, and other military officials.
One scenario under consideration, according to an official familiar with the deliberations, calls for deploying 10,000 to 20,000 U.S. reinforcements primarily to ramp up the training of the Afghan security forces. But Gen. McChrystal’s request for 40,000 troops also remains on the table.
This “hybrid plan” sounds like the worst of both worlds, adopting McChrystal’s strategy but without the troop levels to carry it out. There’s no sense in escalating the conflict but not escalating enough to win. That’s a recipe for disaster.
Free golf carts, courtesy of the Democratic stimulus package:
Thanks to the federal tax credit to buy high-mileage cars that was part of President Obama’s stimulus plan, Uncle Sam is now paying Americans to buy that great necessity of modern life, the golf cart.
The federal credit provides from $4,200 to $5,500 for the purchase of an electric vehicle, and when it is combined with similar incentive plans in many states the tax credits can pay for nearly the entire cost of a golf cart. Even in states that don’t have their own tax rebate plans, the federal credit is generous enough to pay for half or even two-thirds of the average sticker price of a cart, which is typically in the range of $8,000 to $10,000. “The purchase of some models could be absolutely free,” Roger Gaddis of Ada Electric Cars in Oklahoma said earlier this year. “Is that about the coolest thing you’ve ever heard?” . . .
The IRS has also ruled that there’s no limit to how many electric cars an individual can buy, so some enterprising profiteers are stocking up on multiple carts while the federal credit lasts, in order to resell them at a profit later.
They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch, but with the Democrats in power, sometimes there is.
Now that the government owns these companies, one might have thought it would want them to succeed. Good thing our leaders are more sophisticated than that.
The Democratic National Committee and others on the left say that those who are critical of President Obama’s Nobel prize hate America, and in fact support terrorism. A new Gallup poll shows that our country is chock full of these America-hating wingnuts.
By a two-to-one margin (61-34), Americans say that the Obama did not deserve the prize. That’s not just Republicans and independents, but 36% of Democrats as well. Further, a slight plurality (47-46) are not happy that he won the award. That includes strong majorities of Republicans and independents, and even one-out-of-five Democrats.
If the DNC is to be believed, America hatred is surprisingly mainstream.
Google chief executive Eric Schmidt favors net neutrality, but only to a point: While the tech player wants to make sure that telecommunications giants don’t steer Internet traffic in a way that would favor some devices or services over others, he also believes that it would be a terrible idea for the government to involve itself as a regulator of the broader Internet.
“It is possible for the government to screw the Internet up, big-time,” he said. Google is strong enough as a company to weather any possible outcome on the issue, he said. But what he worries about “is the next start-up.”
In other words, Google is concerned about regulation (and rightly so, of course), but they do support regulation when it favors them.
It looks as though CNBC is trying to earn the White House seal of approval. In an interview with Charles Gasparino (whom I’ve never heard of before) on the market impact of the administration’s pay limits for bank executives, they interrupt Gasparino four times when he started making remarks critical of President Obama. (Cue to 2:10 for the first one.)
Posted by K. Crary 
Internet Scofflaw 
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