During the past administration, we were frequently told that our foreign policy was losing us friends and influence. In the end, however, there was no real evidence of that. Certainly no one stopped taking our calls!
On the geopolitical stage, nations look out for number one. If they disagree with our policy toward a third party or the environment or whatever, they might issue a communique or try to obstruct us at the UN, but that’s usually where it ends. They don’t risk their relationship with the United States over something like that.
We lose friends when we screw them directly. Sadly, after just eight months of the Obama administration, the list of nations we have screwed is already pretty long: Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Honduras, Israel, Mexico, Poland, and the UK.
The Baucus health care bill contains a big new tax on medical devices and diagnostic instruments, equal to half the industry’s R&D budget. The Wall Street Journal tells the story of how it happened:
This tax also offers an instructive lesson in the perils of industry dealmaking in President Obama’s Washington. Convinced by the White House that legislation was inevitable, most of the health-care lobbies decided to negotiate and pay ransoms so Democrats would spare their industries greater harm. Sure enough, the device maker lobby, AdvaMed, was among the “stakeholders” that joined with Mr. Obama in a Rose Garden ceremony in May and pledged to “save” $2 trillion over 10 years to fund his program. . .
But the word on Capitol Hill is that AdvaMed’s tribute wasn’t handsome enough for Mr. Baucus’s tastes. The massive new tax—which wasn’t a part of any of his policy blueprints released earlier this year—is in part retaliation. Partly, too, the device makers simply don’t have the same political clout as the other big players, making them an easier mark. Old Washington hands are saying the device lobby made a “strategic mistake” by not offering Mr. Baucus more protection money, but the real mistake was trying to buy into the ObamaCare process, instead of trying to defeat its worst ideas outright.
(Emphasis mine.)
Our government is being run like the mob. “Nice industry; it’d be a shame if something happened to it.”
Honestly, I’m not too concerned about the proliferation of new czars in the Obama administration. But many people are, including an increasing number of Democrats. Now the White House is firing back at its critics, calling them liars:
Last week, when the President addressed the Joint Session of Congress in a speech on health reform, he referred to some of the untruths – okay, lies – that have been spread about the plan and sent a clear message to those who seek to undermine his agenda and his presidency with these tactics: “We will call you out.” So consider this one of those calls.
Over the past several weeks, we’ve seen with increasing frequency and volume issues raised around the use of “czars” by this Administration. Although some Members have asked serious questions around the makeup of the White House staff, the bulk of the noise you hear began first with partisan commentators, suggesting that this is somehow a new and sinister development that threatens our democracy. This is, of course, ridiculous. Just to be clear, the job title “czar” doesn’t exist in the Obama Administration. Many of the officials cited by conservative commentators have been confirmed by the Senate. Many hold policy jobs that have existed in previous Administrations. And some hold jobs that involved coordinating the work of agencies on President Obama’s key policy priorities: health insurance reform, energy and green jobs, and building a new foundation for long-lasting economic growth.
As usually seems to be the case, it is the White House that is being dishonest. The crux of its defense is three arguments:
Many czars are confirmed by the Senate.
Many czars existed in previous administrations.
Some czars are really important.
The third isn’t germane to the complaints, so let’s set it aside. As for the first two, a handy guide from the Washington Post lays out the true distribution of czars:
So according to the Washington Post, President Obama has more than doubled the number of czars, and just one of the new czars faces Senate confirmation.
As I said, I don’t care all that much. But I do care that the White House calls people liars when they are the ones being dishonest. That’s just despicable.
It’s a typical these-voters-are-such-rubes stunt; the House and Senate voted to defund ACORN on different bills.
The Senate bill is a housing bill, the House bill the federal takeover of student loans. Each bill will wind up in conference committee where the ACORN ban can be quietly stripped out, behind closed doors and secure from prying eyes.
“On Thursday, we surprised the House Democrats by offering the ‘Defund ACORN Act’ as the motion to recommit on the government takeover of the student-loan-industry legislation,” the aide says. “Frankly, the motion was not germane, and we expected Democratic leaders to raise a point of order against it. But, in the face of the overwhelming public outcry against ACORN, they decided not to fight it. Now comes the hard part — though the House has effectively passed the ‘Defund ACORN Act,’ it is on a bill that has not passed the Senate, and there’s no guarantee that it would survive a Democrat-controlled conference committee. We’re going to have to continue to work to keep the pressure on, while Democrats try to make this issue go away. We’ve won a battle, but the war goes on.”
Experts at the world’s top atomic watchdog are in agreement that Tehran has the ability to make a nuclear bomb and is on the way to developing a missile system able to carry an atomic warhead, according to a secret report seen by The Associated Press. . . It appears to be the so-called “secret annex” on Iran’s nuclear program that Washington says is being withheld by the IAEA’s chief.
Dioceses seeking to leave the Episcopal Church have scored a major victory:
In a hearing today in the 141st District Court, Judge John Chupp granted the Diocese partial relief under Rule 12 of the Texas Rules of Civil Procedure. He ruled that attorneys Jonathan Nelson and Kathleen Wells do not represent the diocese or the corporation which have realigned under the Province of the Southern Cone. He denied a second aspect of Rule 12 relief which would have removed the plaintiffs’ diocese and corporation from the lawsuit filed April 14, 2009.
The judge also ruled that neither the Constitution and Canons of The Episcopal Church nor the Constitution and Canons of this diocese prohibit withdrawal from TEC and realignment under another province. Further, he found that the Diocese had done so at its November 2008 annual convention, saying that “they [the members] took the diocese with them.” The action of the November convention was not, he said, ultra vires and void, as the suit’s plaintiffs have argued. He declared, too, that the Diocese had taken its property with it in realignment. He said he did not consider any court ruling concerning a realigning parish to be applicable in the present case, and he said that he considered it “self-serving on [the part of TEC] to say that [Bishop Iker] abandoned his job.” . . .
Commenting on today’s ruling, Bishop Iker said, “We are pleased that Judge Chupp has recognized the legitimacy of the vote of our Diocesan Convention in November 2008 to withdraw from the General Convention of The Episcopal Church and has ruled that we had the legal right to amend our Constitution in order to do so.”
The Obama administration has privately concluded that a cap and trade law would cost American taxpayers up to $200 billion a year, the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15 percent.
A previously unreleased analysis prepared by the U.S. Department of Treasury says the total in new taxes would be between $100 billion to $200 billion a year. At the upper end of the administration’s estimate, the cost per American household would be an extra $1,761 a year.
A second memorandum, which was prepared for Obama’s transition team after the November election, says this about climate change policies: “Economic costs will likely be on the order of 1 percent of GDP, making them equal in scale to all existing environmental regulation.”
The documents (PDF) were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute and released on Tuesday.
A 15% tax hike. I can see why they didn’t want the analysis to become public. The White House’s public estimate, $175 per year, was an order of magnitude too small.
I also suspect that even the secret analysis severely lowballs the cost, since government analyses usually rely on static assumptions about the economy’s behavior.
UPDATE: Jonathan Adler says the facts are a little more complicated than this might suggest. The $100-$200 billion estimate doesn’t really apply to the bill being considered now in Congress. The figures that would apply to the current bill are still being kept secret and were redacted in the document. So the Treasury Department’s secret analysis is still secret.
Adler goes on to point out that the redaction of part of the document is not consistent with the Freedom of Information act, much less the president’s announced policy on FOIA requests.
Adler’s explanation also shows that my speculation above was accurate, but didn’t go far enough. The cost figure does not include any effects on the economy, whether under static or dynamic assumptions.
UPDATE: The document is now unredacted. A key portion reads (with underlining to mark the formerly redacted portion):
While such a program can yield environmental benefits that justify its costs, it will raise energy prices and impose annual costs on the order of tens (and potentially hundreds) of billions of dollars.
Another reads:
Domestic policies to address climate change and the related issues of energy security and affordability will involve significant costs and potential revenues, possibly up to several percentage points of annual GDP (i.e. equal in size to the corporate income tax).
It’s no surprise to see Maxine Waters playing the race card; that and the crazy card are the only cards in her hand. Her latest is a call for an investigation of Tea Party racism.
It’s now official; another enemy appeased, several more friends betrayed. The sheer folly of it infuriates me, even though it’s been obvious for some time that this was coming.
I wonder if President Obama is turning up efforts to appease Russia (so far failing dismally), or he is just acting on his own antipathy toward missile defense. Whether or not Russia was his motivation, missile defense at least could have been a major bargaining chip, but Obama is giving it up for nothing at all.
Certainly no one will be fooled by the Pentagon’s threadbare justification: that new intelligence shows that Iran is focusing on short-range weapons now, so we’re adjusting to the threat. (Intelligence on Iran has been oh so terrific, hasn’t it.) If that were the real reason, we would be arranging to set up missile defense in the Middle East.
The former Czech prime minister, Mirek Topolanek, said: “This is not good news for the Czech state, for Czech freedom and independence. It puts us in a position wherein we are not firmly anchored in terms of partnership, security and alliance, and that’s a certain threat.”
The latest ACORN video is from San Diego. In it, the ACORN staffer actually gives advice for how to smuggle underage prostitutes across the Mexican border. This time, O’Keefe and Giles’s are unusually blatant about their imaginary criminal plans, perhaps because they wanted to test the limits of what ACORN would involve themselves in. Indeed, the staffer in this one seemed to be a little uncomfortable with the conversation, not that it stopped him from helping.
It’s also worthy of note that San Diego, like New York, was on ACORN’s list of cities in which O’Keefe and Giles supposedly failed:
This recent scam, which was attempted in San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia to name a few places, had failed for months before the results we’ve all recently seen.
Last year, when the Executive branch set aside the law, that was evidence of incipient dictatorship. What a difference an election can make:
The Justice Department has declared that President Obama can disregard a law forbidding State Department officials from attending United Nations meetings led by representatives of nations considered to be sponsors of terrorism.
Based on that decision, which echoes Bush administration policy, the Obama administration sent State Department officials to the board meetings of the United Nations’ Development Program and Population Fund in late spring and this month, a department spokesman said. The bodies are presided over by Iran, which is on the department’s terror list. . .
Justice Department officials pointed out that when Mr. Obama signed the legislation containing the provision in March, he issued a signing statement reserving a right to bypass any portions of the bill that restricted his power to conduct diplomacy.
The president has every right to do this; the constitution has separation of powers for a reason. (Whether it’s wise in this case is another matter.) But I do have to take a short trip down memory lane:
President Obama tried to overturn his predecessor again on Monday, saying he will not use bill signing statements to tell his aides to ignore provisions of laws passed by Congress that he doesn’t like. . .
Obama sent a two-page memo to department heads saying he would only raise constitutional issues in his signing statements and do so in “limited circumstances.” . . . In his memo, Obama asked aides to work out constitutional problems before Congress acts.
Michelle Boardman, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Bush administration, said the Bush White House tried to do just that. She said it is the executive branch’s responsibility to point out conflicts between newly passed laws and the Constitution.
Obama “will discover for himself just how infrequently Congress shows any interest in removing unconstitutional provisions,” she said.
I guess we’ve learned where the line is. Voter fraud is one thing, but abetting traffickers in child prostitutes was just too much.
UPDATE: The “council” that will do ACORN’s audit is, er, decidedly friendly. Bottom line:
Presumably the point of this absurd whitewash-slash-“audit” is to create enough cover for Democrats to say they deserve a second chance, which is all the more reason why it’s important for Big Government to keep the clips coming. The more there are, the more systemic this is, the more pathetic the idea of some investigative panacea becomes.
The bounce from the president’s speech has now completely evaporated and opponents of health care nationalization have regained the momentum, according to the latest Rasmussen poll. At 55%, disapproval is at a new high, while approval matches its previous low at 42%.
The president is responding with an unprecedented media blitz. I think we’re already seeing diminishing marginal returns.
A new Rasmussen poll asks whether opponents of the president’s health care reform plan are racist. Just 12% said yes, while 67% said no. The party breakdown is interesting. While 88% of Republicans and 78% of independents said opposing the president is not racist, only 39% of Democrats agreed. An equal number of Democrats weren’t sure, while nearly a quarter (22%) of Democrats said opposing the president is racist.
The Baucus health care bill ditches the public option, but contains “co-ops”, which are pretty much the same thing. We’ll see if anyone is taken in by them.
When President Obama announced his plan to give a speech to school students, many people were concerned. This is a president who observes no distinction between campaigning and governing, and whose administration has already shown a willingness to use the organs of government for propaganda. Moreover, the lesson plan issued by the Education Department explicitly used the speech as an opportunity for political indoctrination.
But, under public pressure, the Education Department rescinded the lesson plan and the speech itself ultimately proved innocuous. Democrats pounced, saying that conservatives’ concerns were unjustified and frankly a bit crazy.
As I (and others) pointed out at the time, we had no way of knowing what the speech would have said if not for the public uproar. For all we knew, the public uproar may well have been the reason the speech was innocuous.
Now we do know. The Washington Post reports that the president’s speech was cleaned of controversial content, exactly as we speculated:
When critics lashed out at President Obama for scheduling a speech to public school students this month, accusing him of wanting to indoctrinate children to his politics, his advisers quickly scrubbed his planned comments for potentially problematic wording. They then reached out to progressive Web sites such as the Huffington Post, liberal bloggers and Democratic pundits to make their case to a friendly audience.
The New York Times has broken its silence on the ACORN scandal, and they pretty much tell the story straight. I suppose they deserve a little credit for that, even if the story ran on page A14.
Nevertheless, there is one paragraph that is worthy of note:
In a statement over the weekend, Bertha Lewis, the chief organizer for Acorn, said the bogus prostitute and pimp had spent months visiting numerous Acorn offices, including those in San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami and Philadelphia, before getting the responses they were looking for.
You’ll notice that the NYT does not use a direct quote. The full statement is here, and this is the relevant part:
This recent scam, which was attempted in San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia to name a few places, had failed for months before the results we’ve all recently seen.
(Emphasis mine.) You’ll notice New York on ACORN’s list of places where the sting had failed, but it was left off of the NYT’s version of the list. Why? Because New York is the one that proves ACORN’s statement was a lie. Immediately after ACORN released its statement, O’Keefe released the video of his visit to a New York office.
Leaving New York in the list eliminates the value of ACORN’s statement as a rebuttal, so the NYT struck it. Most organizations don’t get such a favor.
ACORN, by the way, has removed the entire statement from its web site.
POSTSCRIPT: The NYT article also contains this gem:
Robert L. Borosage, co-director of the liberal Campaign for America’s Future, called the tactics used to go after Mr. Jones and Acorn “McCarthyite,” and said the critics were harping on minor failings and distorting records that over all were admirable. “This is dangerous stuff,” Mr. Borosage said. “I don’t think progressives will sit back and let this gain momentum.”
Hmm. Abetting the importation of child sex slaves from Central America is a “minor failing”?
A new poll out from IBD/TIPP contradicts the White House’s claim that doctors support health care nationalization. It found, to the contrary, that:
65% of practicing doctors oppose the plan.
71% disagreed with the proposition that “the government can cover 47 million more people and that it will cost less money and the quality of care will be better.”
45% would even consider quitting if the plan passes!
Another interesting tidbit that I didn’t know: the American Medical Association represents just 18% of physicians.
Olympia Snowe (R-ME) says she will not support the health care bill. This leaves Democrats with no Republican support at all, and also leaves them short of 60 votes even if they get every Democratic vote.
Also, Reid makes it clear that he will use reconciliation to pass the bill. Under the Senate’s rules, reconciliation cannot be used for non-budget items — such as the public option, individual mandates, and employer mandates that make up the heart of the bill — but I’m sure we can expect Democrats to ignore the rules.
James O’Keefe has released yet another video of ACORN criminal behavior. That makes four now: Baltimore, DC, Brooklyn, and now San Bernadino, California. I’d say he has pretty well demolished ACORN’s claim that this is just a few bad apples.
Ask A Question: What if a “prostitute” and her alleged law school boyfriend walk into ACORN seeking housing for an underage brothel to fund his future congressional campaign?
Do Background Research:
Learn as much about ACORN housing procedures and protocol as possible.
History of ACORN and their effect on the United States
Construct a Hypothesis: ACORN is corrupt and it is in their nature to promote and disguise illegal behavior.
Experiment: Baltimore, DC, Brooklyn, San Bernardino, and…
I’ve long been uncomfortable with the idea of registering sex offenders who have served their full sentence. Whatever the courts may have ruled, it doesn’t seem constitutional to impose penalties on criminals beyond what the criminal courts impose.
The Economist points out another problem: existing laws go much further than can be justified on public safety grounds, registering people who are no threat to society. Not only do they needlessly ruin lives, but they also make sex-offender registries ineffective, because it’s impossible to tell who the real dangers are.
The way that the president has presented it is really remarkable. He doesn’t lie. He is too smart. He deceives.
This is incredibly deceptive. He said, as we just heard, he says — all I’m doing here is enforcing trade agreements. That would make you think that the Chinese have done something wrong, that they had dumped a product or they had undercut or subsidized. In fact, not.
This provision in the tariffs on tires are treated entirely by the U.S. Trade Act section 425 which allows the slapping on of a tariff simply in response to a surge of imports, even if it’s not illegal or done underhandedly — simply a surge. We have had a surge of imports. So it is not as if the Chinese are in violation of anything.
What is the effect of it [the tariff]? It is only done in the name of unions. The tire companies are against the tariffs.
Not the worst aspect of the Obama presidency, but easily the most tedious, is how any opposition to President Obama is called racist:
Rep. Joe Wilson’s outburst last week is drawing new recriminations from his colleagues, with a member of the Congressional Black Caucus suggesting that a failure to rebuke the South Carolina Republican is tantamount to supporting the most blatant form of organized racism in American history.
In an obvious reference to the Ku Klux Klan, Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., said Tuesday that people will put on “white hoods and ride through the countryside” if emerging racist attitudes, which he says were subtly supported by Wilson, are not rebuked. . .
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote in her column Sunday that Wilson’s outburst convinced her that racial angst is the underlying motive among Obama critics like Wilson.
“I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer … had much to do with race,” she wrote. “But Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted ‘liar’ at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.”
Wilson didn’t use any racial language; he merely said (accurately) that President Obama was lying. The only thing wrong with it was he was interrupting the president’s speech.
Conservatives and libertarians that oppose the president don’t care about his race; we care about his policies and the damage they will do to our country. It’s people like Johnson and Dowd that see him primarily as a black president. If they want to see racism, they need to look in a mirror.
The age-old question regarding media failure is its cause: incompetence or malice? Charles Gibson, the ABC anchor, made the case for incompetence when he said this morning he didn’t even know about the ACORN scandal, or the Senate’s vote to cut off ACORN’s funding.
STATE OF MARYLAND
Department of Assessments and Taxation . . .
I FURTHER CERTIFY THAT ASSOCIATION OF COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS FOR REFORM NOW, INC., A ARKANSAS CORPORATION, IS NOT IN GOOD STANDING WITH THIS DEPARTMENT FOR THE FOLLOWING REASONS:
THE AUTHORITY OF THIS CORPORATION TO DO BUSINESS IN MARYLAND WAS FORFEITED BY THIS DEPARTMENT ON NOVEMBER 16, 2006.
(I’m late in reporting this story, because I didn’t have the time to give it the treatment it deserves. And my how the story has grown in the meantime.)
ACORN, the community-organizing and voter-fraud organization, has long been savaged for its various criminal activities. On September 9, they hoped they had gotten in front of their bad reputation when they turned in eleven of their workers for forging voter registrations. This, they argued, was proof that ACORN could police itself:
“Over the last five years thousands of dedicated people have worked or volunteered with Florida ACORN. . . Fortunately, our quality control managers and the systems we developed ensured their ability to spot the isolated wrongdoing by these 11 workers who tried to pass off phony forms instead of doing their work.”
The very next day, James O’Keefe went public with the results of his hidden camera investigation. (Transcript here.) O’Keefe went to an ACORN office in Baltimore posing as a pimp. He brought along Hannah Giles who posed as a prostitute. They spun a tail of various criminal activities, including fraud, child prostitution, and human trafficking. ACORN was all too happy to help. For example, the ACORN consultant suggested that Hannah list her occupation as “performance artist”, she recommended that they understate their income to the IRS, and she gave them advice on how to conceal their underage prostitutes (imported from El Salvador) from the authorities.
A spokesman for ACORN, Scott Levenson, when asked to comment on the videotape, said: “The portrayal is false and defamatory and an attempt at gotcha journalism. This film crew tried to pull this sham at other offices and failed. ACORN wants to see the full video before commenting further.”
ACORN’s denial proved premature. First, it rang hollow when ACORN quickly fired the staffers. Then, O’Keefe released his second hidden camera investigation, in which he and Giles told the same story at an ACORN office in DC. (Transcript here.) Again, the staffers were happy to help. ACORN quickly fired those staffers as well.
Desperate to get in front of the scandal, ACORN issued a statement accusing Fox News of racism. (ACORN erroneously gave Fox credit/blame for O’Keefe’s work, presumably because Fox News is unpopular among its base of support.) That’s right, ACORN abets trafficking in underage prostitutes, and Fox News is somehow racist for reporting the scandal. The small consolation for ACORN is that most of the media was not so “racist”, and ignored the whole affair. At first.
ACORN still had its supporters. The state attorney in Baltimore issued an amazing statement indicating that it had no plans to prosecute ACORN, but it would investigate criminal wrongdoing by O’Keefe! (It seems that hidden microphones are illegal under Maryland law, but the state attorney had not previously prosecuted journalists for hidden camera investigations.) It’s not surprising to learn that Patricia Jessamy, the state attorney in question, is a Democrat who served on a steering committee for the Obama campaign.
But the Census Bureau, which had a controversial deal with ACORN to assist in the census, had heard enough. Citing “worsening negative perceptions” (I’d say so!), it cancelled its deal with ACORN.
ACORN continued to try to defend itself. It issued a statement threatening legal action against Fox News. That is almost certainly a bluff (and a clumsy one), because — aside from having no case — the last thing ACORN wants is for someone to have the opportunity for discovery. The statement also said:
“This recent scam, which was attempted in San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia to name a few places, had failed for months before the results we’ve all recently seen.”
This turned out to be a lie, at the very least in regards to New York, as we learned when O’Keefe released his third video. In the third video, O’Keefe and Giles told the same story (fraud, underage prostitution, human trafficking) at an ACORN office in New York, and again received their assistance.
That was finally too much for Congress. The Senate voted 83-7 to cut off funding for ACORN and the House is due to consider similar action shortly. (Among the seven who voted with ACORN was Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey. His father must be rolling in his grave. Roland Burris (D-IL), who is only in the Senate because Democratic leaders quashed proposals for a special election, is another.) Meanwhile, the Brooklyn DA’s office says they will be taking a look, and ACORN may be vulnerable under RICO as well. (It’s hard to imagine Eric Holder approving an investigation of ACORN though.)
Democrats are ready to rebuke Joe Wilson (R-SC) for his (accurate but out-of-order) outburst during the president’s speech:
House Democratic leaders have decided to formally discipline Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., on Tuesday for his jeer last week at President Obama during a joint session of Congress. . .
Wilson bellowed “You lie!” at Obama during his address. It’s against House rules to call the president a “liar” or accuse him of “lying” when the House is in session.
It’s against the rules to call the president a liar, is it? I’ll be interested to see how Pete Stark (D-CA) votes on the resolution. The Democrats never rebuked him for repeatedly calling President Bush a liar from the House floor.
Navy Seals from US Special Operations Forces conducted a raid in southern Somalia on Monday that killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, one of 4 co-conspirators wanted in the 2002 bombing of an Israel owned hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, two senior U.S. military officials told Fox News.
Ten days ago President Obama signed the Execute Order for Nabhan, who since 2006 was on the FBI’s list of most wanted terrorists. He was also wanted for the attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Kenya in 1998.
In June, the US Civil Rights Commission indicated its intention to investigate the dismissal of charges in the Black Panther voter-intimidation incident, and requested the Department of Justice’s cooperation. After ignoring the commission’s letter for weeks, the DOJ has written back indicating that it will not cooperate. (Unbelievably, they claim that they couldn’t possibly cooperate until they complete their internal investigation.)
Naturally, the response infuriated the commission (which has subpoena power), and may prompt it to designate the affair as the subject for a year-long study and special report. Given that, what on earth could the DOJ be thinking? Everyone knows it’s not the offense but the cover-up that does real damage.
The UK’s government (in office since 1997) is even more incompetent than I ever dreamed. Great Britain is facing a looming shortage of power-generating capacity and will probably begin seeing brownouts as soon as 2013.
Most of Britain’s nuclear plants will have reached the end of their service life and be shut down without being replaced. About half of Britain’s coal-fired plants will be shut down because of pollution controls. Nuclear and coal together account for 45% of Britain’s electricity.
I’m not sure if this constitutes news any more, but Venezuela is continuing to tighten its suppression of the media. Some lowlights:
On August 1st, 34 radio stations were taken off the air for allegedly failing to submit the proper paperwork to the broadcasting regulator. In all, more than half the country’s 656 privately owned radio stations face fines and possible closure on this ground. Their owners say they have tried for years to update their paperwork, with no response from the authorities.
and:
The attorney-general, Luisa Ortega, unveiled a draft law against “media crimes” which proposes jail terms of up to four years for vaguely worded offences such as “prejudicing state security” or the “mental health” of the public. Not just reporters and media owners, but anyone expressing himself in the media (or failing to report news the authorities consider essential) may face prosecution. The right to free speech must be “regulated”, Ms Ortega said.
The White House Council of Economic Advisers said Thursday the $787 billion stimulus plan kept one million people working who would otherwise not have had jobs. . . The report, which had been delayed for a month, is the first estimate from the Council of Economic Advisers on the issue of whether stimulus spending has saved jobs that otherwise would have been lost. . .
The council said it compared current economic indicators to projections of the direction they were headed before the stimulus plan was passed.
What an unadulterated load of crap. Here is a comparison of where the economy was headed before the stimulus (by the Obama administration’s own analysis) with where it went:
A WSJ piece says that wind power plants are killing between tens and hundreds of thousands of birds yearly. I don’t necessarily care all that much, but it’s very strange that wind power gets a pass, while other power technologies get prosecuted for killing birds on a scale several orders of magnitude smaller.
A New York federal court has rejected a truly odious separation-of-church-and-state lawsuit. In Incantalupo v. Lawrence Free School District, the plaintiffs sought to bar a school board from enacting a policy (tax cuts) that were generally favored by Orthodox Jews and generally opposed by others. They alleged that cutting taxes would give Orthodox Jews more money to spend on private religious schooling, and therefore the tax cuts violate the separation of church and state.
The court rightly rejected this appalling argument:
Indeed, by objecting to lower taxes because they might help some people afford yeshiva education, Plaintiffs’ Complaint, on its clear face, seeks to create , not cure, a First Amendment Equal Protection violations. Plaintiffs do not claim, nor could they, that supporting lower taxes and less school spending by itself violates the First or Fourteenth Amendment. Thus, under Plaintiffs’ reasoning, no claim would lie against political conservatives who ideologically disfavor spending on public schools, or retirees who have no children in the public school system and want lower taxes to boost their discretionary income.
Rather, Plaintiffs believe that the School Board’s actions are problematic entirely because the School Board members are Orthodox Jews who are motivated, in part, to help other Orthodox Jews pay yeshiva tuition by lowering their tax burden. In short, Plaintiffs seek to deny Orthodox Jews political rights possessed by every other group in the United States: the right to mobilize in support of religiously neutral government policies, and then have those policies enacted through normal democratic processes.
I’m glad to see that the court made the right decision in this case, but it’s not the only such case in the pipeline, or even the worst. In this case the plaintiffs were just a bunch of bigoted yahoos, but there’s a similar case filed by the ACLU against the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. In that case, the ACLU seemed to argue that an organization receiving government money could not refuse to spend that money on abortion, if its refusal would be for religious reasons.
For the past six months Britain’s elite troops have been schooling soldiers working for Col Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, which for years provided Republican terrorists with the Semtex explosive, machine-guns and anti-aircraft missiles used against British troops during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Sources within the SAS have expressed distaste at the agreement, which they believe could be connected to the release of the Lockerbie bomber. . .
Gordon Brown has faced claims that his Government helped engineer Megrahi’s release to promote Britain’s commercial interests, particularly energy, in Libya.
Downing Street has denied the allegations, but Jack Straw, the Justice Minister, has admitted that trade was a factor in deciding to include Megrahi in an earlier prisoner transfer agreement with Libya.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made it clear Thursday that Moscow wouldn’t back any new rounds of tough sanctions against Iran in the United Nations Security Council, and he dismissed a U.S. timetable for securing progress from Iran on ending its nuclear-fuel program.
Mr. Lavrov’s comments in Moscow led U.S. officials to acknowledge that new U.N. sanctions against Iran were now unlikely in the near term — endangering a major element of President Barack Obama’s high-profile strategy for diplomacy in the Middle East. “We’re pretty disappointed with the Russian position so far,” a senior U.S. official said.
The development also appeared a blow to hopes that the Obama administration’s “reset” of relations with Russia would lead to Moscow supporting a top U.S. foreign-policy priority.
There are real reasons why Russia is hostile to the west; it’s not just a personality conflict with President Bush that a new administration can “reset”. The sooner President Obama understands this, the sooner we’ll stop making asses of ourselves.
The insurance companies and their allies don’t like this idea. They argue that these private companies can’t fairly compete with the government. And they’d be right if taxpayers were subsidizing this public insurance option. But they won’t be. I’ve insisted that like any private insurance company, the public insurance option would have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects. But by avoiding some of the overhead that gets eaten up at private companies by profits and excessive administrative costs and executive salaries, it could provide a good deal for consumers, and would also keep pressure on private insurers to keep their policies affordable and treat their customers better, the same way public colleges and universities provide additional choice and competition to students without in any way inhibiting a vibrant system of private colleges and universities.
If this were true, the public option would be no big deal. Of course, there are other factors that would give the government an unfair advantage (notably exemption from regulations, and the fact that the government can’t be sued without its permission), but those would be fairly minor. Moreover, they would be more than balanced by the monstrous inefficiency that government management would bring.
ASIDE: The president thinks that the government would save money by reducing excessive administrative costs, et cetera? What planet is he from? As someone who has had the job of filling out government forms to show compliance with the Paperwork Reduction Act, I can say that the very idea is laughable. But for present purposes, that is all to the good.
An unsubsidized public option would not only be acceptable, it would almost certainly be irrelevant. Like every other government enterprise, it would be expensive and poorly run, and consumers would quickly learn to have nothing to do with it.
Alas, it isn’t true. Of course the public option will be subsidized by the taxpayer. Even if we suppose that this promise is kept in the ultimate bill (which I see as vanishingly unlikely), here’s what will happen:
The public option will offer low prices and generous benefits to attract customers, causing it to run a large deficit.
The politicians who set this thing up will not allow it to fail, so they will bail it out with an influx of taxpayer funds. It will probably be termed a loan at first, but the loan will never be paid back.
The public option will continue to lose money for as long as it takes to drive the private players out of business.
At some point after that, the system will be “reformed” again. The loans will be forgiven and public financing made explicit.
Liberals will tell us that the government has saved us from the failure of the private health insurance system.
ASIDE: If the final bill goes with co-ops, rather than a public option, exactly the same thing will happen, with the addition that the co-ops will be officially nationalized at some point (like Fannie and Freddie), probably at stage 4.
ANOTHER ASIDE: Mind you, this is assuming good faith! Sadly, that is an unjustified assumption, since a variety of Democrats have already made clear that the public option is a trojan horse intended to bring about single-payer. Most likely, the pledge will simply be dropped on the floor. But even if not, the bill will take other steps to ensure that the public option prevails, such as giving it a large initial endowment, and burying private insurers in new regulation.
What President Obama claims he will do, produce a plan with better benefits and lower prices than existing plans without running a deficit, simply can’t be done. If by any chance this isn’t obvious, health care researchers say so:
Health care policy researchers are contradicting President Obama’s claim that a government-run health insurance program would be self-sufficient and could rely on premiums, saying it’s not possible to insure up to 30 million people with better coverage and reduce costs at the same time.
“The numbers don’t hold up,” Grace Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, a think tank devoted to health policy, said Thursday.
Furthermore, Obama’s own example proves the point. He cites public colleges and universities as public institutions that do a good job. Indeed they do, but they do so by relying on enormous public subsidies! In fact, we have recently seen what happens when those subsidies are cut. The University of California, being left to subsist on a smaller-than-usual subsidy, is furloughing staff and faculty, prompting talk of a walkout.
POSTSCRIPT: As usual, the president is very impressed with his own supposed consistency. Is there any instance in the past in which the president has publicly “insisted” that the public option would be unsubsidized?
The latest Rasmussen poll shows that opposition to the president’s health care program weakened slightly after his speech. Before, the public opposed the plan by a 53-44 margin; now opposition is at 51-46.
The shift came from a substantial jump in support by Democrats (from 72% to 80%). Opinion among Republicans (-2%) and independents (+1%) was largely unchanged. Unlike CNN’s poll, which showed a large bounce among speech watchers (a predominantly Democratic audience), Rasmussen polled likely voters.
So there’s no game changer here in terms of public opinion, but it may not have been intended that way. As Larry Sabato points out, the speech appears to have been more intended to unify Democrats by attacking Republicans.
UPDATE: Rasmussen does show some continued movement in the president’s favor in the days following the speech.
Andrew Sullivan, after being caught possessing marijuana in a national park, got the charges dropped while similar cases were prosecuted. The judge is not happy:
In the Court’s view, in seeking leave to dismiss the charge against Mr. Sullivan, the United States Attorney is not being faithful to a cardinal principle of our legal system, i.e., that all persons stand equal before the law and are to be treated equally in a court of justice once judicial processes are invoked. It is quite apparent that Mr. Sullivan is being treated differently from others who have been charged with the same crime in similar circumstances.
If there were a legitimate reason for the disparate treatment, the Court would view the matter differently. But the United States Attorney refused to allow the Court to inquire into why, in the circumstances of this case where Mr. Sullivan had already been charged with the crime, either a forfeiture of collateral or an adjudication would make a difference in the immigration application.
But there is more. If, in fact, a determination that Mr. Sullivan had possessed marijuana is a factor which, under immigration law, the immigration authorities are legally charged with taking into account when deciding Mr. Sullivan’s application, why should the United States Attorney make a judgment that, despite the immigration law, the charge should be dismissed because it would “adversely affect” his application? If other applicants for a certain immigration status have had their applications “adversely affected” by a conviction or a forfeiture of collateral for possession of marijuana, then why should Mr. Sullivan, who is in the same position, not have to deal with the same consequences?
In short, the Court sees no legitimate reason why Mr. Sullivan should be treated differently, or why the Violation Notice issued to him should be dismissed. The only reasons given for the dismissal flout the bedrock principle of our legal system that all persons stand equal before the law.
My view is that no one is above the law, and that when a society based on law prosecutes the powerless and excuses the powerful, it is corroding its own soul.
Indeed.
POSTSCRIPT: I stopped paying attention to Andrew Sullivan long before last April, but Sullivan being who he is, I knew he must have said something like this at some point. It wasn’t hard to google up this instance. There’s probably more.
UPDATE: Patterico offers another stunning hypocrisy on Sullivan’s part. (Warning: link quotes a vulgar advertisement).
For the record, I think Rep. Joe Wilson’s outburst during President Obama’s speech was inappropriate, because that’s just not the way things are done over here. Not that there’s anything fundamentally wrong with British-style debate, but for some reason our Congress likes to pretend that everyone gets along.
But there are a few things to observe:
It’s awfully rich for Democrats to pretend that Wilson’s breach of decorum is somehow unprecedented. For example, Rahm Emanuel said “No president has ever been treated like that. Ever.” Really? What about our last president?
Obama was, in fact, lying. Worse, in so doing, he was calling other members of Congress liars.
In the Senate, Democrats in the so called “Gang of Six,” a group of bipartisan senators on the Senate Finance Committee which is the last panel yet to release its bill, began moving quickly to close the loophole that Wilson helped bring greater attention to.
In light of the above, I think Democrats are overplaying their hand by making a big deal out of this. Ultimately, it will serve to draw attention to a matter that is not at all favorable to Democrats, and away from the president’s speech. Already Wilson has become the main story, and I really don’t think that helps them. So, by all means, let’s have a full investigation and a vote to censure Wilson.
In the Supreme Court’s rehearing of Citizens United v. FEC, the Obama administration stuck by its guns, arguing that a government power to ban political books is consistent with the First Amendment. Beyond that, the administration argued that the power to ban electronically transmitted books (such as Kindle books) is already present in the statute in question.
Got that? The government says that, under existing law, it has the power to ban political e-books in some circumstances.
The administration argues that we can trust them not to do so, to which Chief Justice Roberts replied, “we don’t put our First Amendment rights in the hands of FEC bureaucrats.” And well we don’t, because in the administration lawyer’s very next breath, she said that pamphlets are different; they might very well ban a pamphlet.
To summarize: under the Obama administration’s argument, our right to publish books is not absolute. It depends on a variety of factors including (1) content, (2) length, (3) means of transmission, and (4) means of financing. I think I like the First Amendment better.
How these people can call themselves liberals is beyond me.
Gosh, it’s been months since the last time the president nominated a tax cheat. The latest is Lael Brainard, nominated to be Undersecretary for International Affairs.
The Supreme Court has taken oral arguments on Citizens United v. FEC (again) and it seems that two egregious precedents in campaign finance law are likely to fall. (Via Volokh.) I certainly hope so.
This is the infamous case in which the Obama adminstration argued that it has the power, in some cases, to ban political books, signs, and YouTube videos.
UPDATE: In light of this, there’s good reason to worry that the DOJ’s internal investigation isn’t real, and is merely intended to run interference against the Commission on Civil Rights’s investigation. Hans van Spakovsky agrees.
The discovery of a weapons cache in western Afghanistan has raised concerns that Iran is interfering in the war-torn country, much like it did in Iraq, by supplying weapons used to attack and kill U.S. and coalition troops, U.S. officials tell FOX News.
Afghan and NATO forces uncovered the weapons cache on Aug. 29 in Herat. It included a small number of Iranian-made “explosively formed penetrators,” hyper-powerful roadside bombs similar to the weapons used to kill U.S. forces in Iraq, a senior U.S. Defense Official told FOX News. Also seized during the raid were 107 Iranian-made BM-1 rockets and dozens of blocks of Iranian C4 plastic explosives.
There are questions about when these weapons entered Afghanistan, but a top U.S. military official tells FOX News that an Iranian rocket was recently fired at a base in Herat. Additional intelligence suggests that Iranians have been providing support directly to the Taliban.
Senior executive Tim Nicholson claimed he was unfairly dismissed by a property investment company because his views on the environment conflicted with other managers’ “contempt for the need to cut carbon emissions”.
In the first case of its kind, an employment tribunal decided that Nicholson, 41, had views amounting to a “philosophical belief in climate change”, allowing him the same legal protection against discrimination as religious beliefs.
The makers of various wireless gadgets (the Kindle, Sirius XM radio, the iPhone) could track down those gadgets when they are stolen, or at least make them useless, but they won’t do it. Apparently they would rather sell content to the new possessor.
Patrick Courrielche is continuing to advance the NEA propaganda story. Another instance has surfaced of the National Endowment for the Arts working to coordinate political activity. Also, the cover-up is underway.
Thomas Friedman’s latest column is the most appalling I have ever read in the pages of the New York Times. (Yes, I know that’s saying a lot.) Let me summarize:
“One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks.”
But China’s autocracy is run by “a reasonably enlightened group of people.”
That gives China an advantage because Chinese autocrats can impose (his word) critically important policies.
Our system is worse than China’s.
Because we have Republicans.
I cannot believe I am not making this up. Friedman is ready to abandon democracy because it is failing to bring about the policies he favors. He prefers autocracy, if it is run by the right people.
Anyway, now that Friedman is officially a fascist, I believe we have license to dismiss anything he says in the future.
One imagines that if a senior Bush administration adviser had been revealed as a raving lunatic, the NYT would have found a way to free up someone to cover the story.
UPDATE: A New York Post column takes a look at the stories the NYT was able to cover while it was ignoring Van Jones. (Via Instapundit.)
France and Israel have led the charge against [IAEA head] Dr ElBaradei, saying that his latest report on Iran’s nuclear programme omitted evidence that the agency had been given about an alleged covert weaponisation plan.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry said that the report did not reflect all that the agency knew about Iran’s “efforts to continue to pursue its military programme”.
France went farther, alleging the existence of an unpublished annexe that addresses the evidence that Iran may be building an atom bomb.
Bernard Kouchner, the French Foreign Minister, said that France had attended a technical briefing that covered the material, so was surprised to find it missing from the report.
“In the annexes there are specifically elements which enable us to ask about the reality of an atomic bomb,” he said “There are issues of warheads, of transport.”
The published section of the report focused more on the positive, noting that Iran had slowed its production of enriched uranium and had agreed to closer monitoring of its plant.
Interview enough people, and you can find someone to say anything, such as:
For some of the jobless, the experience has triggered a profound reassessment.
Yukyong Choi, 36, a former litigator who has not worked in a year, is now an unpaid volunteer for P.J. Kim, a City Council candidate in Lower Manhattan.
“One thing that I’ve discovered through this process is I don’t really want to go back to that life,” Mr. Choi said. “That was a life filled with 18-hour days, and having to work with people you may not enjoy. It’s not the money anymore; I want to do things that will have a real effect on people’s lives, as opposed to just trying to get a company out of a situation.”
So the president’s school speech turned out to be unobjectionable. That’s no surprise. All the scrutiny made it impossible for them to get away with political content. And once the text was announced, I agree with Arne Duncan (Secretary of Education) that keeping kids home from the speech would be silly.
On the other hand, that doesn’t mean that Robert Gibbs was right that the controversy was unjustified. The American people have good reason not to trust this president. He observes no distinction between campaigning and governing, and he has already demonstrated a willingness to use the organs of government for propaganda purposes.
But what really gave people reason for concern was the Department of Education’s lesson plan, which made the indoctrination aspect of the affair explicit. (Gibbs did not see fit to address that in his remarks.) The department backpedaled on the lesson plan, which they certainly would not have done without the controversy.
So I would say that the whole controversy had a good outcome. The speech turned out to be unobjectionable (we have no way of knowing what it would have been otherwise), and the lesson plan went away. Gibbs had it exactly wrong: the public scrutiny, far from being unjustified, worked exactly as it should, keeping the administration honest.
What happens now? I don’t think the controversy is entirely over. Certainly there will not be a Congressional investigation as there was after President Bush (41) spoke to students in 1991. But I do think two more things will happen to prolong the controversy:
First, it will be revealed that some teachers used the original indoctrination plan, despite its withdrawal.
Second, Democrats will use this affair to try to paint the opponents of President Obama’s agenda as somehow irrational. “Remember when Republicans got all worked up over the school speech, which turned out to be fine?” they will cry. To that, we will respond that we had every reason for concern, and it turned out to be fine because we got worked up over it.
In an interview with some lefty group, Van Jones (formerly White House “green jobs czar”) explains why he chose Yale over Harvard:
I had a professor who encouraged me to apply to Harvard and Yale [for law school], which was almost unheard of for students coming from the kind of public schools that I was coming from in the rural South. I was accepted to both places, and decided to go to Yale because Yale didn’t have any grades and was smaller than Harvard. I figured, once I enroll I’m guaranteed to graduate, so I can just go and be a radical hellraiser student, and they can’t do anything about it. Which is pretty much what happened.
Since the revelation that Van Jones (formerly the White House “green jobs czar”) is a wacko, people have wondering how his appointment passed the vetting process. Now we have the answer; the White House doesn’t vet its czars:
Van Jones, the Obama green jobs czar who resigned shortly after midnight Sunday, did not fill out the exhaustive questionnaire White House officials required of every Cabinet-level secretary and deputy-secretary position.
An administration official said special advisers to the president, or czars, are not required to fill out the questionnaire that runs 7 pages and contains 63 questions.
The entire questionnaire, the official said, is reserved for appointees who must win Senate confirmation.
This is pretty amazing. I would have thought that vetting would be an essential part of the process of filling the executive branch, to make sure that its staff are honest and non-crazy. Apparently, the White House does not see it that way. They only vet appointments that will face Senate scrutiny.
I only see two explanations for this. The administration either (1) doesn’t care whether its staff are honest and non-crazy, or (2) is incompetent. Is there a #3 that I’m missing?
UPDATE: Okay, option #3 is they are lying. I should have thought of that.
UPDATE: The American Spectator is reporting that Jones was hired despite objections from the White House Counsel’s office. I’d take that with a grain of salt until it’s confirmed somewhere else. (Via Hot Air.)
There’s an interesting kerfuffle going on in Mac-land:
David Pogue, the New York Times technology columnist, writes a review of Apple’s new Snow Leopard operating system. He gives it a glowing endorsement, saying that “paying the $30 for Snow Leopard is a no-brainer.” In passing that he mentions that he experienced a few “frustrating glitches” in various non-Apple programs. No big deal.
Pogue expands on the “frustrating glitches” to Venture Beat. It turns out they are serious, of the you-can’t-do-your-work variety.
People wonder why Pogue would write such a glowing review for a product that doesn’t work right.
It turns out that Pogue has a book deal to write a how-to for Snow Leopard, so he has a financial incentive to encourage people to get it.
At this point Clark Hoyt, the NYT “public editor”, enters the story. As usual, Hoyt defends the column. But here’s the interesting part: he doesn’t let on what the controversy is about. He mentions that Pogue has a conflict-of-interest between his column for the NYT and the book deal, but frames it as a hypothetical issue rather than a real one. He does not mention that the controversy arose because Pogue found serious issues with the product and failed to mention them in his column. If one only read the NYT, one would never know that there’s a real issue here.
Once again, Cosh’s Law of Newspaper Ombudsmen holds true: we are supposed to believe they exist to defend the interests of the reader against those of the newspaper, but their actual job is precisely the opposite.
Speculation that President Obama would use his upcoming health care address to issue clear requirements for a bill seems to be premature:
White House political adviser David Axelrod said Obama is “not walking away” from a public plan. But asked if the president would veto a bill that came to him without the option, Axelrod declined to answer.
The president “believes it should be in the plan, and he expects to be in the plan, and that’s our position,” Axelrod told The Associated Press.
Asked if that means a public plan has to be in the bill for Obama to sign it, Axelrod responded: “I’m not going to deal in hypotheticals. … He believes it’s important.”
I don’t see any way the president can take charge of the health care debate without a clear position on the public option. If his address just gives us more of the same, it won’t do him any good. Is he expecting to change the tide of public opinion with nothing but charisma? I would enjoy seeing him try.
Downing Street is firing back at President Obama and Secretary Clinton, calling their complaints over the Lockerbie bomber’s release “disingenuous”:
Downing Street has hit back at Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for attacking the decision to release the Lockerbie bomber.
President Obama and the US Secretary of State fuelled a fierce American backlash against Britain, claiming Abdelbaset Al Megrahi should have been forced to serve out his jail sentence in Scotland – but a senior Whitehall aide said their reaction was ‘disingenuous’.
British officials claim Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton were kept informed at all stages of discussions concerning Megrahi’s return.
The officials say the Americans spoke out because they were taken aback by the row over Megrahi’s release, not because they did not know it was about to happen.
‘The US was kept fully in touch about everything that was going on with regard to Britain’s discussions with Libya in recent years and about Megrahi,’ said the Whitehall aide.
‘We would never do anything about Lockerbie without discussing it with the US. It is disingenuous of them to act as though Megrahi’s return was out of the blue.
Two tax provisions in the health-care bill voted on by the House Ways and Means Committee earlier this summer have gained significant attention. . . But there are other “revenue provisions” in the bill that also deserve a close look.
One would change the law to mandate that the Internal Revenue Service slap penalties on honest but errant taxpayers.
Under current law, taxpayers who lose an argument with the IRS can generally avoid penalties by showing they tried in good faith to comply with the tax law. In a broad range of circumstances, the health-care bill would change the law to impose strict liability penalties for income-tax underpayments, meaning that taxpayers will no longer have the luxury of making an honest mistake. The ability of even the IRS to waive penalties in sympathetic cases would be sharply curtailed.
Democrats think that that IRS should be harsher on honest mistakes. Good thinking, guys.
POSTSCRIPT: As an additional irony, the chairman of the committee that produced this travesty is a tax cheat.
Keith Ellison (D-MN) admits the public option is a trojan horse, intended to bring about single payer:
REP. ELLISON: Most of us are co-authors of HR676, which is a single-payer bill so we feel like we’ve already compromised. I think that the reality is the public option has been scored by the Congressional Budget Office as saving $150 billion, so this actually helps deal with the fiscal responsibility issues…It offers choice, which is a good thing…
ESKOLA: Isn’t the public option really just a step towards the single payer that you want so much?
REP. ELLISON: Yes but the reality is that for many people that’s not what it is.
Mickey Kaus thinks the NYT is still obscuring the reason Van Jones resigned. In its story on the resignation, the NYT offers:
Van Jones . . . signed a petition in 2004 questioning whether the Bush administration had allowed the terrorist attacks of September 2001 to provide a pretext for war in the Middle East.
Kaus adds:
Reading that, would you realize the petition was a Truther petition? You might think Jones simply made the standard argument that Bush shouldn’t have used 9/11 to help gin up the Iraq War–as opposed to suggesting that Bush “may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war,” which is what the petition actually said.
I think this may just be shoddy writing, rather than misinformation. After all, “allow” can be used without the secondary “to provide”, to mean “allow to happen”. Let’s observe how the same sentence reads with a comma:
. . . whether the Bush administration had allowed the terrorist attacks of September 2001, to provide a pretext for war in the Middle East.
Advantage: punctuation!
This time I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, and dismiss this as merely bad writing and editing.
The Telegraph has a new revelation about the Lockerbie bomber’s shameful release:
Medical evidence that helped Megrahi, 57, to be released was paid for by the Libyan government, which encouraged three doctors to say he had only three months to live.
The life expectancy of Megrahi was crucial because, under Scottish rules, prisoners can be freed on compassionate grounds only if they are considered to have this amount of time, or less, to live.
Megrahi is suffering from terminal prostate cancer. Two of the three doctors commissioned by the Libyans provided the required three-month estimates, while the third also indicated that the prisoner had a short time to live. This contrasted with findings of doctors in June and July who had concluded that Megrahi had up to 10 months to live, which would have prevented his release.
Professor Karol Sikora, one of the examining doctors and the medical director of CancerPartnersUK in London, told The Sunday Telegraph: “The figure of three months was suggested as being helpful [by the Libyans]. . .
The Scottish and British governments actively assisted Megrahi and his legal team to seek a release on compassionate grounds even though the thrust of talks before July this year had been over his release as part of a Prisoner Transfer Agreement (PTA) between Britain and Libya.
Senior business sources have told The Sunday Telegraph that Britain was desperate that Megrahi should not die in jail after warnings by Libya in May that if this happened trade deals between the two countries – worth billions of pounds – would be cancelled. British businessmen were also told that plans to open a London office of the Libyan Investment Authority, a sovereign fund with $136billion (£83billion) to invest, would be jeopardised if Megrahi died in jail.
Secretary Clinton acknowledges there was no coup in Honduras, but she’s pressing ahead with sanctions anyway:
Clinton made the decision [to cut off aid] even though she did not determine that Zelaya’s ouster met the U.S. legal definition of a military coup d’etat. . . Clinton did not make that finding because Zelaya’s ouster involved “the participation of both the legislative and judicial branches of government as well as the military,” [State Department spokesman Ian] Kelly said.
Robert Lucas, the legendary Nobel-Prize-winning economist and erstwhile CMU professor, has written a great column rebutting a collection of pieces in the Economist on the supposed failure of economics to anticipate the financial crisis. To their credit, the Economist ran the column, which is much better (and shorter) than the pieces it rebuts. Much of it is relevant only as rebuttal, but this point stands on its own:
One thing we are not going to have, now or ever, is a set of models that forecasts sudden falls in the value of financial assets, like the declines that followed the failure of Lehman Brothers in September. This is nothing new. It has been known for more than 40 years and is one of the main implications of Eugene Fama’s “efficient-market hypothesis” (EMH), which states that the price of a financial asset reflects all relevant, generally available information. If an economist had a formula that could reliably forecast crises a week in advance, say, then that formula would become part of generally available information and prices would fall a week earlier. (The term “efficient” as used here means that individuals use information in their own private interest. It has nothing to do with socially desirable pricing; people often confuse the two.) . . .
Over the years exceptions and “anomalies” have been discovered (even tiny departures are interesting if you are managing enough money) but for the purposes of macroeconomic analysis and forecasting these departures are too small to matter. The main lesson we should take away from the EMH for policymaking purposes is the futility of trying to deal with crises and recessions by finding central bankers and regulators who can identify and puncture bubbles. If these people exist, we will not be able to afford them.
With Ted Kennedy’s funeral a week in the past, I hope it’s not too early to note something that seems a bit relevant as Democrats seek to exploit his sainted memory to enact health care nationalization: Ted Kennedy was not a very good person.
There’s Chappaquiddick, of course, and there’s also Kennedy’s bizarre affinity for Chappaquiddick jokes. There’s his boorish/criminal behavior towards women. Perhaps most appallingly, there’s Kennedy’s unsuccessful effort to collaborate with the Soviet Union in order to undermine President Reagan. (Although the incident has been public since Boris Yeltsin briefly opened the Soviet Central Committee archives in 1992, it wasn’t well known until this story hit.)
Somehow, the left idolized this man (even the feminist left!) and the media now calls him “the lion of the Senate.” He was reelected seven times after Chappaquiddick. This all proves that the left will forgive anything at all, if only you promote their causes.
According to today’s job report, the overall unemployment rate (the percentage of people in the labor force not working but looking for work) in August rose to 9.7 percent, its highest level in 26 years. The teenage unemployment rate, however, is at 25.5 percent, its highest level since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began keeping track of such data in 1948.
IBD points out that the United States is virtually alone in continuing to pressure Honduras:
[The United States] thinks it’s part of a group: “This is a regional and international effort,” a senior administration official told IBD Thursday. “We’ve talked to the Europeans . . . so if anything, we’ll be redoubling efforts moving forward on this. And no, we’re not isolated at all.”
But as Honduras remains firm, the rest of the world, sees this and has started to restore normal ties. If this continues, the U.S. will be left holding the bag as the world’s bad cop bully.
Even Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, by whose influence Zelaya tried to make himself dictator, announced on Sept. 1 that he’d given up hope Zelaya would ever return to office. “Regardless of whether Zelaya returns or not . . . Honduras will keep up the fight,” Chavez said. The Venezuelan strongman can read the obvious: game over.
Meanwhile, the European Union announced it wouldn’t initiate trade sanctions on Honduras as it had threatened earlier. It knew the deal and knew its interests.
Thursday, the International Monetary Fund announced it would extend a $150 million loan to Honduras, a sharp shift from the lending cutoff announced by the World Bank after the June 28 ouster of Zelaya. Again, game over, back to business.
The Organization of American States, which egged on Zelaya’s illegal referendum and helped create the crisis, announced it would now focus on avoiding future “coups” — something that, if they were serious, would mean challenging dictators in democracy’s clothing, an unlikely thing. But they, too, are moving on.
Mark Steyn, a Canadian author and political commentator, speaking on the Rush Limbaugh show on Wednesday, accused Mr. Obama of trying to create a cult of personality, comparing him to Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader.
Media Matters gets it right (setting aside the spin of calling it Obama’s “stay-in-school speech.”), and the NYT links to them, which makes it hard to understand how they got this wrong. Unless they weren’t really trying.
UPDATE: Once the error is in the New York Times, lazy reporters around the world pick it up.
UPDATE: Not only has the NYT not corrected yet, they’ve repeated the error.
UPDATE: The NYT has now issued a correction. (It took them five days; only three days longer than it took them to correct the name of a quoted parent from Curtis to Curtiss.) The correction itself has pretty much the complete truth, but the corrected story still gives the erroneous impression that Steyn was comparing Obama to Kim and Saddam. I guess that is as close as the NYT is willing to come to the truth.
Of course, the NYT wire is halfway around the world while the correction is lacing up its shoes, as minor papers repeat the NYT’s faulty reporting.
The only surprise is that it took so long. (Via Instapundit.)
The question remains, though. How did the vetters miss the fact that this guy was a wacko? One possibility: they were too incompetent. Even worse possibility: they knew about him, but didn’t think he was wacko.
Remember Chas Freeman? This is actually the second time an Obama appointee has been sunk due to a protracted controversy over past statements and the NYT didn’t write a single word about the controversy until after the fact. (Of course, Freeman had merely been nominated when he took himself out of the running for Director of National Intelligence — he wasn’t actually in the administration, unlike Van Jones.)
Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana, says the finances of the states are going to get worse, not better. By overspending even when times were good, the states have built up unsustainable public burdens that ultimately will have to be dismantled. Indiana is fiscally sound today, but Daniels still worries about its future. He concludes:
Unlike the federal government, states cannot deny reality by borrowing without limit. The Obama administration’s “stimulus” package in effect shared the use of Uncle Sam’s printing press for two years. But after that money runs out, the states will be back where they were. Even if Congress goes for a second round of stimulus funding, driven by the political panic of bankrupt Democratic governors, it would only postpone the reckoning.
The time to plan and debate is now. This is a test of our adulthood as a democracy. Washington, as long as our Chinese lenders enable it, can practice denial for a while longer. But for states the real world is about to arrive.
POSTSCRIPT: In a related story, many states are trying to save money by nibbling around the edges. This isn’t going to work.
Was it card check? Being given two auto companies? The proposed pension bailout in the health care bill? The lobbying (and violence) for health care nationalization? You can take your pick, but it seems that people have been paying attention to the antics of the labor unions.
Public approval of labor unions has hit an all-time low at 48%, and public disapproval has hit an all-time high at 45%. With the 4% margin of error, public opinion on labor unions is at parity for the first time since Gallup starting measuring it in 1936.
The results on more specific questions show that labor unions are fortunate to be viewed as well as they are. By a 51-39 margin, the public believes that labor unions hurt the economy. By a 62-29 margin, they believe that labor unions hurt non-union workers. By a 46-45 margin they believe that labor unions hurt unionized companies.
John Hinderaker is calling Pete Stark (D-CA) the most appalling member of Congress, based on this clip. Well, I don’t know about that. But he certainly earns a dishonorable mention:
What is amazing about this clip is the condescension he is able to muster while preaching absolute nonsense: if you had studied at a good school, you would know that debt makes us richer.
ASIDE: Gee, I hope I have the credentials to criticize him. I majored in economics at a good school, but I stopped with just a bachelor’s degree. Perhaps in graduate school they take it all back and teach that debt makes us richer.
The sad thing is that, jackassery aside, Pete Stark is not alone. What I think he’s getting at is an extremist version of Keynesianism that says that all government spending grows the economy. (ASIDE: Keynes’s model predicts that government spending grows the economy under certain conditions that maybe existed during the Great Depression, but that certainly do not exist now.) Unfortunately, the president agrees.
The Obama administration on Thursday cut all non-humanitarian aid to Honduras over the ouster of President Manuel Zelaya, making permanent a temporary suspension of U.S. aid imposed after he was deposed in June.
The State Department made the announcement as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was meeting with Zelaya. Spokesman Ian Kelly did not say how much assistance would be cut but officials have said previously that more than $200 million is at stake. Kelly said it affected “a broad range of assistance to the government of Honduras.”
“The Secretary of State has made the decision, consistent with U.S. legislation, recognizing the need for strong measures in light of the continued resistance to the adoption of the San Jose Accord by the de facto regime and continuing failure to restore democratic, constitutional rule to Honduras,” Kelly said in a statement.
I’ve written enough on this in the past, so I won’t comment further on how appalling this is, except to say this: Isn’t it a bit much to call it the “San Jose Accord”? Usually an accord is an agreement between the interested parties. This is not an accord, it’s a proposal that was agreed on by one interested party and rejected by the other.
I’ve been ignoring the controversy over Van Jones, the White House “green jobs czar” (whatever that means), being a former communist (the “former” part is assumed) and publicly calling Republicans “a**holes“. I figured he’s just one more crazy in the White House, and his position doesn’t seem particularly important. Nevertheless, this is a bit much:
President Obama’s “green jobs czar” Van Jones has been targeted again and again by conservatives for his controversial views and now they’ll have another item to use as fodder.
Mr. Jones signed a statement for 911Truth.org in 2004 demanding an investigation into what the Bush Administration may have done that “deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.” . . .
9/11Truth.org spokesman Mike Berger told the Washington Times over the phone that all of the signers had been verified by their group. He said 9/11Truth.org board members “spoke with each person on the list by phone or through email or individually confirm they hae added their name to that list.”
“I think in most cases they spoke to them personally,” he added. “No one’s name was put on that list without them knowing it.”
In a statement issued Thursday evening Jones said of “the petition that was circulated today, I do not agree with this statement and it certainly does not reflect my views now or ever.”
He did not explain how his name came to be on the petition. An administration source said Jones says he did not carefully review the language in the petition before agreeing to add his name.
He didn’t “carefully review the language”?! It’s a truther petition, for crying out loud! What did he think it said?
UPDATE: He’s not just a former communist and a truther, but also a supporter of Mumia Abu-Jamal, cop killer and darling of the lunatic left. Geez. (Via Instapundit.)
Is Van Jones a real Truther or a faux Truther? The White House position is that he’s the latter – hey, he just glanced at it, saw it was some routine impeach-Bush-for-killing-thousands-of-his-fellow-Americans thing, and signed it without reading it; we’ve all been there, right?
Van Jones Trutherism, like Van Jones Communism and Van Jones Eco-Racism Theory, is a kind of decadence: If you really believed 9/11 was an inside job, you’d be in fear of your life. Instead, for a cutting-edge poseur like Jones, it’s a marketing niche, one that gives you a certain cachet with the right kind of people – like, apparently, Barack Obama.
UPDATE (9/6): Jones also says the state of Israel is illegitimate. In an album he produced in 2002, he says:
What we want to see at this point is the rights of the Palestinian people being respected. And at this point, the end of the occupation, the right of return of the Palestinian people. These are the critical dividing lines, global dividing lines, questions of human rights. We have to be here. No American would put up with an Israeli-style occupation of their hometown for 53 days, let alone 54 years.
You have to do some arithmetic to get what Jones is saying. Subtracting 54 years from 2002 gives us 1948, the year Israel declared independence. Jones is opposing Israel’s very existence.
By the way, the album is full of anti-American sentiment as well, but it’s too vulgar to repeat here.
Japan’s recent elections have ushered in a period of political change, and the new government is likely to revise its relationship with the United States. The Obama administration’s new ambassador to Japan is not an expert on the region, but rather a Silicon Valley lawyer and political fundraiser.
This is just one sign of how President Obama is continuing a time-honored tradition of rewarding donors with plum assignments abroad.
When Obama came into office talking about change, he raised some expectations that he would alter the way he would choose new ambassadors.
“My general inclination is to have civil service, wherever possible, serve in these posts,” he said in January.
At the time, he told reporters that there would be some political appointees to ambassadorships, but that he wanted to reward the rank and file, too. . .
But so far, more than half of the ambassadors he has named are political appointees — including several so-called bundlers, or superfundraisers who organize and collect campaign contributions, according to Dave Levinthal of the Center for Responsive Politics.
Reform always looks better when you’re out than when you’re in.
Charlie Rangel’s “forgetfulness” is apparently contagious.
Two of his top aides are among about a dozen highly paid staffers on the powerful tax-writing Ways and Means Committee who have filed a flurry of amendments correcting their financial-disclosure statements since 2002.
Jim Capel, chief of staff for Rangel’s personal office, failed to file any such statements for six years.
On the afternoon of July 14, Capel filed five years’ worth of delinquent reports.
In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death.
Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away.
But this approach can also mask the signs that their condition is improving, the experts warn.
As a result the scheme is causing a “national crisis” in patient care, the letter states. It has been signed palliative care experts including Professor Peter Millard, Emeritus Professor of Geriatrics, University of London, Dr Peter Hargreaves, a consultant in Palliative Medicine at St Luke’s cancer centre in Guildford, and four others.
“Forecasting death is an inexact science,”they say. Patients are being diagnosed as being close to death “without regard to the fact that the diagnosis could be wrong.
“As a result a national wave of discontent is building up, as family and friends witness the denial of fluids and food to patients.”
The warning comes just a week after a report by the Patients Association estimated that up to one million patients had received poor or cruel care on the NHS. . .
[Dr Hargreaves] added that some patients were being “wrongly” put on the pathway, which created a “self-fulfilling prophecy” that they would die.
The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal on Wednesday ruled that Section 13, Canada’s much maligned human rights hate speech law, violates the Charter right to free expression because it carries the threat of punitive fines.
The shocking decision by Tribunal member Athanasios Hadjis leaves several hate speech cases in limbo, and appears to strip the Canadian Human Rights Commission of its controversial legal mandate to pursue hate on the Internet, which it has strenuously defended against complaints of censorship.
It also marks the first major failure of Section 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act, an anti-hate law that was conceived in the 1960s to target racist telephone hotlines, then expanded in 2001 to the include the entire Internet, and for the last decade used almost exclusively by one complainant, activist Ottawa lawyer Richard Warman.
A suggested lesson plan that calls on school kids to write letters to themselves about what they can do to help President Obama is troubling some education experts, who say it establishes the president as a “superintendent in chief” and may indoctrinate children to support him politically.
Obama will deliver a national address directly to students on Tuesday, which will be the first day of classes for many children across the country. The address, to be broadcast live on the White House’s Web site, was announced in a letter to school principals last week by Education Secretary Arne Duncan. . .
But in advance of the address, the Department of Education has offered educators “classroom activities” to coincide with Obama’s message.
Students in grades pre-K-6, for example, are encouraged to “write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president. These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals.”
(Emphasis mine.) This is surprisingly explicit.
UPDATE: The Department of Education is backpedaling:
Today, after Republicans accused the White House of trying to indoctrinate school children with liberal propaganda the White House and the Department of Education changed the section to now read, “Write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short‐term and long‐term education goals.”
“We changed it to clarify the language so the intent is clear,” said White House Spokesman Tommy Vietor.
It has become popular in certain circles of late to allege, particularly in reference to health care, that “the free market rations too.” Well, that depends on your definition of “ration”. If by rationing you simply mean allocation of resources, then anything is rationing, and the word is robbed of its meaning. (ASIDE: Economists do sometimes use the word in such a general sense, but accompanied by an adjective as in: “non-price rationing scheme.”)
But the dictionary defines ration this way:
2a: to distribute as rations — often used with out. b: to distribute equitably.
Thus the word “ration” refers to a resource allocation scheme in which each person is assigned a share by some authority. This, of course, is absolutely not what the free market does. The free market is based on the idea that people own the fruits of their labor, and are entitled to make transactions or not as they choose.
With this in mind, Paul Hsieh makes an important point regarding the moral high ground in the freedom vs. rationing debate:
Too often, conservatives then concede this moral high ground to the liberals and defend the free market on purely economic grounds — e.g., a free market would lower costs for everyone. This is a serious mistake. Supporters of the free market should not allow opponents to characterize the marketplace as a form of rationing, let alone an unjust one. Instead, supporters should defend the free market as morally just because it respects individual rights. . .
Examples [of rationing] include sugar rationing during World War II and gasoline rationing during the 1973 oil crisis, when the government dictated the terms and conditions of sugar or gasoline sales.
But in a free society, the government should not be regulating such sales at all. Producers — not the government — created the sugar (or gasoline) in the first place. Hence, they have the moral right to sell it to willing consumers on any mutually acceptable terms. There is no “just” distribution of sugar or gasoline apart from the voluntary exchanges between producers and consumers in a free market.
The same principle applies to health care. Health care does not magically grow on trees. Instead, it is a service that must be created by hard work and rational thought. The producers thus have the moral right to sell it to willing consumers on any mutually acceptable terms. There is no “just” distribution of medical services apart from the voluntary exchanges between producers and consumers in a free market.
Hsieh makes a very good point that is too often missed. The free market is not just about better economic outcomes; it’s about freedom.
The Ecuadorean lawsuit against Chevron was already a travesty. Now it’s been shown to be a complete sham. A series of videos show that the judge has been bribed and has promised to rule against Chevron. The Ecuador’s execrable president, Rafael Correa, also stands to profit personally from the scheme.
I don’t know if the revelation will be enough to save Chevron in Ecuador, but I assume it should make it impossible for Ecuador to collect in US court.
A Health Care for America Now organizer (none dare call him an astroturfer) trains people on how to shout down health care nationalization dissidents. Plus: “It’s your meeting. Hold on to your meeting.”
Someone tell Pelosi and Hoyer about this clearly “un-American” behavior!
After hovering around parity since mid-July, President Obama’s approval has taken a new dip. Voters now disapprove of the president by a 45-53 margin. Those who feel strongly disapprove by a largely unchanged 30-41 margin.
As I suspected might be the case, Tom Ridge’s publisher appears to have oversold the allegations in Ridge’s new book:
Ridge says he did not mean to suggest he was pressured to raise the threat level, and he is not accusing anyone of trying to boost Bush in the polls. “I was never pressured,” Ridge said.
We still don’t know what the book actually says, but apparently what happened is that Rumsfeld and Ashcroft urged that the alert level be raised in response to a videotape from Osama bin Laden. Noting that bin Laden’s tapes never amounted to anything, Ridge’s staff declined to do so, and Ridge wondered what they were thinking. (This is pretty much Ace’s case two.)
On the other hand, Ridge reportedly makes other allegations in his book that I’m pretty sure will stand up. Basically, the Bush administration never took homeland security seriously:
In the book, Ridge portrays his fledgling department as playing second fiddle to other Cabinet-level heavyweights. As secretary, he says he was never invited to participate in National Security Council meetings, he was left out of the information loop by the FBI and his proposal to establish Homeland Security offices in major cities such as New Orleans were rejected.
This seems pretty much inarguable. By now it’s clear that the function of Homeland Security is largely to make people feel safe, not be safe. And the neglect continues:
He is “dumbfounded” that the government still has no way to track foreign visitors who don’t leave the country when their visas expire, noting that two of the 9/11 hijackers were in the country on expired visas.
Government officials and members of Congress rarely discuss homeland security issues and have “lost the sense of urgency” about protecting the nation from terrorist attacks. Because of the economy and growing budget deficits, he also is worried about funding for future efforts to tighten security.
Posted by K. Crary 
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