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Saturday, April 25, 2009
More Magic Money from Washington
Posted by on 4.25.09 @ 3:29PM
The International Monetary Fund has amassed an unenviable record: subsidizing virtually every collectivist and authoritarian regime around the world while greatly increasing international indebtedness. Third World states got hooked on IMF money and spent years on Fund programs, hopeless financial dependents rather like the proverbial heroin addict. But now the IMF is supposed to save the world from the international recession.
How? By lending even more money. And where will that money come from? Us! Reports the Associated Press:
As protesters clashed with police on Washington's streets, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner urged world finance officials meeting near the White House on Saturday to ante up more to help countries wrung by the recession.
Geithner said major progress toward bolstering the International Monetary Fund "must be an important outcome of these meetings. The international community should act quickly."
More than 100 demonstrators angered by how world leaders have handled the economic crisis took on police outside the headquarters of the IMF and World Bank, which are holding their spring meetings this weekend.
Authorities used batons and pepper spray when activists tried to march onto a prohibited street, and several people were pushed to the ground by police. The protesters swarmed officers unexpectedly, and police had to respond, said D.C. police Capt. Jeffrey Harold.
In early April, leaders from the Group of 20 developed and emerging nations pledged to provide $1.1 trillion in new resources to international lending institutions, including $500 billion for the IMF. President Barack Obama is seeking congressional approval for up to $100 billion, matching commitments for the same amount made by Japan and the European Union. But the full $500 billion hasn't yet been pledged.
Where, pray tell, will the U.S. get $100 billion? Don't ask! It will be magic money--more U.S. borrowing, more IMF borrowing, more pledges of even more U.S. borrowing to back IMF borrowing, Other countries will do the same. Governments borrowing from the Fund will use this money better than they've used it in the past, resulting in endless growth and prosperity. And American taxpayers will live happily ever after.
Skeptical? Just close your eyes, click your heels together three times, and say "I believe!" You will feel a lot better. I promise.
Napolitano "Contrite"
Posted by on 4.25.09 @ 11:40AM
Ain't that sweet. Janet Napolitano is "very contrite" over her department's warning that returning vets might join right-wing militias. Reports the Washington Post:
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano apologized directly today to Commander Dave Rehbein, head of the American Legion, after a recently leaked DHS intelligence report suggested that right-wing extremist groups might recruit military veterans returning from overseas deployments. The 45-minute meeting occurred at DHS headquarters in Washington this afternoon.
A detailed account of the meeting from the American Legion states that "Hunched forward with head bowed, the Secretary of Homeland Security looked the National Commander of The American Legion straight in the eye and said, very quietly, 'I'm sorry, Dave.'"
"The report was not worthy of this department, or of veterans," Napolitano said to Rehbein, according Legion spokesman Craig Roberts, who attended the meeting. "It was very badly written and should never have been released," she said.
The secretary "was very contrite" and that both her words and body language reflected her sincerity, Roberts said in an interview.
In her own written statement after the meeting Napolitano said, "We connected meaningfully about the important issues that have emerged over recent days, and I offered him my sincere apologies for any offense to our veterans caused by this report."
At one level it is good that the usual Washington game still plays out even when the slur is made against the Right. Whatever Napolitano's personal feelings, politics forced her to make the pilgrimage to the American Legion.
But the fact that she allegedly "connected meaningfully," whatever that means, with Legion officials cannot disguise the fact that the department report reflects what some on the Left really imagine--if you don't believe in the Leviathan state taxing and spending all your money, and you have some connection to guns (whether in or out of the military), you are a threat to a liberal social order. We saw the same mindset with the TSA's grilling of the employee of Ron Paul's Campaign for Liberty because he was carrying cash from a conference he had organized.
Napolitano contrite. We'll see. How long do you think before the Department of Homeland Security launches its next attack on individual liberty?
Friday, April 24, 2009
Congressman Scott Murphy (D-N.Y.)
Posted by on 4.24.09 @ 6:03PM
Republican Jim Tedisco concedes, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is declaring victory in New York's 20th congressional district.
Scandal! Obama Does NOT (Heart) Bush--Appointed Lawyers!
Posted by on 4.24.09 @ 4:52PM
It seems a safe bet that the media and Democrats' Bush-era cries of They're politicizing of the Justice Department! will shift to something less histrionic under President Obama--like, maybe, Um, yeah, duh, of course they have to go?--but at least John Ashcroft is there to cushion the fall for four Bush appointees.
Not that any of this shows any sign of halting the endless crybabbying of the last batch to get shown the door, which is pretty pathetic even if Dan Bogden was forced to endure the most blatant campaign of anti-bachelor bias in history--pre-Jason Mesnick, anyway.
You Got It, Pontiac
Posted by on 4.24.09 @ 3:05PM
A classic American car brand dies as GM eliminates the 83-year-old Pontiac line.
It's sad but at least the demise of the Pontiac has something to do with the market, rather than government fiat.
"You got it, Pontiac," was an oft-used phrase in Pontiac commercials in the 1970s and 1980s.
Specter vs. Toomey Update
Posted by on 4.24.09 @ 2:29PM
The latest Rasmussen poll, e-mailed to me by a reader, shows Pat Toomey up 21 points over Sen. Arlen Specter. Specter would win just 30 percent of Pennsylvania Republican primary voters to Toomey's 51 percent. Specter only leads by eight points among the remaining moderate Republicans. If these numbers are right, Specter has a tough road to renomination ahead of him.
Tough Talk on Health Care Fight
Posted by on 4.24.09 @ 2:13PM
Senate Republicans say they will use every parliamentary tactics in the book to really punish the Dems if the Dems push through health care nationalization via "reconciliation" that unfairly limits debate, etc., utterly against all Senate tradition on what the reconciliation process is for. I won't believe it until I see it. They (GOP senators) have made such pledges many times before, but they always capitulate like emasculated chihuahuas when the time comes to really act. That's what they did in mulitiple failed battles (or non-battles, because they didn't really fight on judges. And, considering that it is dififficult for invertebrates to find spines, that's what i fully expect again: Craven capitulation without having achieved much of anything. I sure hope I'm wrong.
Kent Conrad Holds the Key Vote on Reconciliation
Posted by on 4.24.09 @ 1:54PM
Senate Republicans are pointing out that the deciding vote in whether Democrats use the fast-track budget process to push through a partisan health care bill belongs to Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.). The Senate Finance Committee chairman has repeatedly says he opposes dealing with health care reform in this manner, at least in part because reconciliation wasn't intended for such sweeping, non-budgetary legislation. (Though he has wiggled a bit on this point.) Now it is within his power to stop it.
Reconciliation bills are not subject to filibusters. Under this process, the Senate could pass a health care reform bill with just 50 Democrats plus Vice President Joe Biden's tie-breaking vote -- the exact same way the Clinton tax increase passed over unanimous Republican opposition in 1993. Robert Byrd kept the Clintons from using reconciliation to pass their health plan. Will Kent Conrad rise to the challenge this time?
UPDATE: This New York Times report makes it sound like the answer is, "No."
UPDATE II: The New Republic is reporting that Conrad and other concerned Democrats might have gotten a firmer Obama commitment on PAYGO budget rules in exchange for fast-tracking health care reform.
An Evil and Un-American Proposal
Posted by on 4.24.09 @ 1:06PM
Now, after President Obama has shown a willingness to pursue vindictive probes of Bush administration officials for the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, the preeminent funder of America's left, George Soros, is calling for the establishment of a kind of star chamber to help the left pay back the previous administration for launching the War on Terror.
According to a report from Byron York of the Washington Examiner, Soros has joined with MoveOn, which he funds generously, to urge the creation of "a commission of inquiry to examine and report publicly on America's use of torture in the period since September 11, 2001."
Soros's proposal was included in an email sent out by his Open Society Institute. The email refers the reader to the "Commission on Accountability," whose website makes the incredible claim that "[t]he report issued by the commission will strengthen U.S. national security and help to re-establish America's standing in the world."
No, it won't. It will poison America's politics for decades to come, as former Solicitor General Ted Olson told York. It is the kind of thing a Third World banana republic does.
After being disappointed time and time again by the pseudo-conservative Bush administration, which among other things, started the country down the road to Mussolini-style corporatism, I have no affection for the ancien regime, but in America we resolve policy differences through elections. We don't use the legal system after officials have left office to turn their lives upside down in pursuit of a nakedly partisan political agenda.
Launching an American Inquisition is pure madness. It's a slow kind of national suicide by investigation and litigation.
Sebelius's Key Constituency: Abortionists
Posted by on 4.24.09 @ 11:06AM
Last night, Kansas Governor and HHS secretary nominee Kathleen Sebelius vetoed a bill that would have placed more stringent restrictions on late-term abortions in Kansas. The timing of her veto is not good. The vast majority of Americans and Kansans do not approve of late-term abortion, and conservatives had hoped that she wouldn't take the politically bold move of vetoing the bill during her confirmation process. Her confirmation has taken longer than expected because of revelations about her extreme pro-abortion stance and the close ties she has with notorious Kansas late term abortion provider George Tiller. Most notably, she failed to disclose donations she received from Dr. Tiller, first reporting only $12,450 in contributions and then admitting to an additional $23,000 after pro-life groups exposed the ties.
In fact, just yesterday RNC chief Michael Steele took the step of releasing a statement on Sebelius's abortion industry ties: "Significant questions remain about Gov. Kathleen Sebelius' evolving relationship with a late-term abortion doctor as well as about her position on the practice of late-term abortions...If Gov. Sebelius and the Obama administration are unwilling to answer these questions, President Obama should withdraw her nomination."
Prior to yesterday, Sebelius's history of vetoing abortion restrictions and her history of close association with Tiller showed that abortion was one of her priorities. She was close enough to the abortion industry for the Washington Times to suggest that nominating her to the bureacracy that would regulate that industry constitutes a conflict of interest, much like nominating the head of an investment bank to regulate his competitors.
By casting an unpopular veto during a closely-watched nomination, though, Sebelius has shown that her stance on abortion is not just one item on the agenda -- she prioritizes abortion even above her own political future. Access to late-term abortions in Kansas is apparently something she is willing to sacrifice for.
Obama's Gracious Words
Posted by on 4.24.09 @ 10:44AM
When this president does well, I will praise him. His speech yesterday re Holocaust remembrance was eloquent, thoughtful, and on point. I had only one tiny quibble with it, not worth detailing. Rather than any extended comments from me, the best testimony to what Obama said is in his own words at the link above, so please read it. Good stuff. And may we ever admire the people who survived the Holocaust but kept their faith, and their religious and relational kinsmen.
Vote! MSNBC Poll
Posted by on 4.24.09 @ 10:30AM
Liberal "news" network MSNBC recently launched an online poll to grade Obama. From email:
They know we don't watch their network, and the votes will pile up from misguided liberals with high grades.
EVERYONE, click on the link below and give Obama the "F" he deserves. As of now he has 30% "A" grade from the liberals. We can drive this down.
A quick perusal of Google shows that this email is not only making the blog rounds on the right, but the "outrage" rounds on the left. Click, vote, and as the email suggests, make sure Obama gets the grade he deserves.
Daily Must-Reads
Posted by on 4.24.09 @ 10:24AM
- "Additional adjustments" -- a lot more important than they sound (Washington Post)
- The Muslim chaplain at Harvard is allowed to advocate killing apostates, but whatever you do don't suggest there could be a biological basis for the lack of women in hard sciences (Washington Times)
- A plan to bring Pockeestan back from the brink of failure (Christian Science Monitor)
- From 65% approval to a disaster for everyone, left and right: Obama's first 4 years (Daily Beast)
- Obama's dictators strategy: don't feed the trolls (The Week)
183 Sessions vs. 183 Pours
Posted by on 4.24.09 @ 10:12AM
Cliff May writes:
A Corner exclusive: How many times have you read and heard in the mainstream media that terrorists were waterboarded more than 180 times?
It turns out that’s not true. What is?
According to two sources, both of them very well-informed and reliable (but preferring to remain anonymous), the 180-plus times refers not to sessions of waterboarding, but to “pours” — that is, to instances of water being poured on the subject.
Under a strict set of rules, every pour of water had to be counted — and the number of pours was limited.
Also: Waterboarding interrogation sessions were permitted on no more than five days within any 30-day period.
No more than two sessions were permitted in any 24-hour period.
A session could last no longer than two hours.
There could be at most six pours of water lasting ten seconds or longer — and never longer than 40 seconds — during any individual session.
Water could be poured on a subject for a combined total of no more than 12 minutes during any 24 hour period.
You do the math.
Even if true, I see this as a distinction without a difference. For years, the operating assumption was that KSM was waterboarded in one 90-second session, and then broke down. This conveyed a sense that the practice was used in a singular, last ditch effort to get him to talk, and lended credence to the idea that this kind of thing would only be used to prevent an imminent attack -- the so-called "ticking time bomb" scenario. Now the argument is that it wasn't 183 sessions, but 183 pours, and that the session could last no longer than two hours and it couldn't be performed for more than five days in a month. Whatever the case, we now know that the technique was employed more often than we originally thought, and the fact that it was done over the course of a month undermines the idea of a "ticking time bomb." Since we're now operating with a different set of facts, at least in my case, it's forced me to reexamine my own stance on this issue, even though abstractly I think that waterboarding is morally justifiable if using the technique is the only way to save thousands of innocent lives.
Obamanoms, Chapter 2
Posted by on 4.24.09 @ 10:12AM
There must be something in the water in Seattle. First, Obama nominates the incompetent Seattle chief of police to be his drug czar, then he nominates King County executive (of which Seattle is a part) Ron Sims to serve as his deputy secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Sims' political and management career has been riddled with scandal and mismanagement, yet Republicans in the Senate don't seem interested in holding Sims -- or the administration that nominated him -- accountable.
According to numerous press reports, Sims gave a low-interest-rate HUD loan to build a four-star hotel at the Seattle Tacoma International Airport. The hotel was owned by a union pension fund manager and one of the world's largest hotel and casino operators. These loans are intended to clean up blighted areas and usually go to nonprofits, low-income housing developers, and social service agencies. So this explains Sims' "experience" for the HUD job, I suppose.
But, wait…there's more. Sims' hand-picked chief medical examiner, Richard Harruff, never lost his job despite losing a body, selling organs, a lawsuit about an involuntary organ donation, gross photo contests, lawsuits over sexual harassment, employees being paid to provide semen samples, an investigator stealing and consuming drugs from the dead, bodies left on the floor, and chemicals being poured down the drain illegally. Bet HUD is getting excited about having Sims for a boss?
Perhaps another aspect of Sims' career that is attractive to Obama: in 2004 Sims' head of elections oversaw an Election Day that featured: felons voting, dead people voting, hundreds of ballots discarded only to be discovered after the vote, provisional ballots were counted without eligibility verification, a number of people were able to vote twice, and unregistered voters' ballots were counted. But then again, this is a Democrat we're talking about.
It's not like any of this isn't on the public record. Yet during Sims' Senate confirmation hearing, only two Republican Senators weighed in on Sims, and judging by the transcript, neither laid a glove on the left coaster. Heck, they didn't even try to get into the ring.
Sen. Richard Shelby: "I'm here to support you all and as Republicans we look to getting you confirmed."
Sen. Mike Johanns: "I can't imagine any problems with any of your confirmations."
Maybe things in the Senate have changed a bit over the years, but last time I checked, being the party of opposition meant you actually opposed something. And in the cases of the Obanoms, we're not just talking about saying "no" for no other reason than to oppose. These are men and women who are not worthy of serving our nation in positions of power and influence.
The Green Scare
Posted by on 4.24.09 @ 10:05AM
In homage to a "Day" and movement the related hysteria about which has been, as Chico Escuela would say, Berry Berry Good to Government Agencies!, "The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today released a new user-friendly internet tool that allows the public to view simulations of sea level rise. Released in honor of Earth Day, this program is designed to help people understand the potential impacts of climate change on sea levels."
It's called The Sea Level Affecting Marshes Model (SLAMM)-View.
What a sonorous if rather stilted, thoughtful yet of course at the same time purely coincidental acronym they have chosen. Oh to have been in the breakout committee meetings on that one.
Now, this has no grounding in science or probabilities, let alone feasibility, and therefore really offers nothing in the way of "helping people understand" anything but, yes, it is "potential", as in not impossible given that little to nothing is. It's "potential" like, say, those porcine hordes threatening to go airborne out of my tucchus.
What's going on these days makes the old Red-scare look quite tame -- what's the difference between these PlayStation stunts and "I have here in my hand a list of 205 -- a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party..."? -- but particularly given their relative groundings in reality. Sadly, no, at long last they have left no sense of decency.
Pelosi's Credibility Problem
Posted by on 4.24.09 @ 9:41AM
Nancy Pelosi's position that she wasn't informed about waterbaording doesn't hold up to much scrutiny.
In 2005, the Washington Post reported:
In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.
The Politico reports:
Pelosi says she was briefed by Bush administration officials on the legal justification for using waterboarding — but that they never followed through on promises to inform her when they actually began using "enhanced" interrogation techniques.
Whatever your view of the waterboarding issue is, her explanation sounds lawerly and fishy.
Finally, Some Good Economic News
Posted by on 4.24.09 @ 5:09AM
This is the kind of Change We Can Believe In: Ted Rall, the world's worst cartoonist, has been laid off by United Media Syndicate.
(Hat tip: The Jawa Report.)
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Nice Credit Card Company There. Shame If Something Happened To It.
Posted by on 4.23.09 @ 8:33PM
President Obama "invited" credit card company executives to the White House and threatened them today.
Egged on by market-hating liberal activist groups, Obama implied if lenders don't play ball, there's going to be trouble. Meanwhile, lawmakers are tripping over each other in a competition to see who's best at denouncing the evil capitalist money lenders.
So, on the one hand the government is giving money to banks to help keep them afloat, and then with the other hand it wants to kneecap them by hindering their ability to make a profit.
And we recently learned that perpetual bumbler Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is refusing to allow banks to pay back emergency aid because letting them do so would reduce the administration's leverage over them. If banks pay the money back, then the government can't squeeze them any more for the vig.
Is the Obama administration serious about economic recovery or is this approach inspired by the Cloward-Piven Strategy of orchestrated crisis? Making the banks the bad guys for decades to come would certainly serve the left's political purposes.
MoveOn Pushing Payback for the War on Terror
Posted by on 4.23.09 @ 7:26PM
Without taking a position here on whether waterboarding is moral or tantamount to torture or whether torture, however it may be defined, is a useful means of intelligence-gathering, the rush to investigate and possibly indict former Bush administration officials for doing their jobs is beyond disturbing.
This vindictive, malicious push to pay back the architects of the War on Terror for making a good faith effort to defend America is being driven by pundits such as the increasingly nutty Andrew Sullivan, law professor Jonathan Turley, the George Soros-funded real-life subversives at the Center for Constitutional Rights (which is headed by Che Guevara apologist Michael Ratner), and the left-wing pressure group MoveOn.org. They all want Bush administration officials investigated in connection with the advice they offered with respect to enhanced interrogation techniques.
Not only is this wrong as David Frum points out, it's incredibly dangerous. In America, we resolve policy differences through elections. We don't use the legal system after officials have left office to prosecute them for doing their jobs.
That's un-American.
The Wall Street Journal summed up the situation well:
Mark down the date. Tuesday, April 21, 2009, is the moment that any chance of a new era of bipartisan respect in Washington ended. By inviting the prosecution of Bush officials for their antiterror legal advice, President Obama has injected a poison into our politics that he and the country will live to regret.
Policy disputes, often bitter, are the stuff of democratic politics. Elections settle those battles, at least for a time, and Mr. Obama's victory in November has given him the right to change policies on interrogations, Guantanamo, or anything on which he can muster enough support. But at least until now, the U.S. political system has avoided the spectacle of a new Administration prosecuting its predecessor for policy disagreements. This is what happens in Argentina, Malaysia or Peru, countries where the law is treated merely as an extension of political power.
If this analogy seems excessive, consider how Mr. Obama has framed the issue. He has absolved CIA operatives of any legal jeopardy, no doubt because his intelligence advisers told him how damaging that would be to CIA morale when Mr. Obama needs the agency to protect the country. But he has pointedly invited investigations against Republican legal advisers who offered their best advice at the request of CIA officials. [...]
Going after Bush-era lawyers is madness. If these witch trials come to America, the country will never be the same again.
Me on Focus Washington
Posted by on 4.23.09 @ 5:58PM
A bit belatedly, those of you who want to see me trying to present conservative principles in the tones of pure reason can watch me here at FocusWashington, a web videocast hosted by my friend Chuck Conconi. Chuck asks thoughtful questions. I try to make the point that conservatives should stop trying to figure out the political angles and just stand by what they believe in -- and then figure out how best to EXPLAIN those beliefs, rather than shifting beliefs to fit an easier explanation.
Anyway, thanks to Chuck for being such a gracious host.
Poll Finds Americans' Health Care Views are Malleable
Posted by on 4.23.09 @ 5:25PM
The Kaiser Family Foundation is out with a helpful new tracking poll demonstrating that public attitudes on the health care are very susceptible to how the issue is framed. At first glance, the numbers would seem to be great news for liberals. For instance, by a 59 percent to 37 percent margin, Americans surveyed believe that the economic crisis makes it more important than ever to reform health care now, and majorities of Americans support at least some tax increases to pay for health care, mandates on employers to provide coverage, and a government plan option. Yet when the questions are asked a different way to incorporate criticisms of the various proposals, support for them drops dramatically.
For instance, when asked "Would you favor or oppose requiring employers to offer health insurance to their workers or pay money into a government fund that will pay to cover those without insurance?" 71 percent say they favor such an approach compared with just 25 percent who oppose it. Yet when Kaiser followed up by asking, "What if you heard that paying for this may cause some employers to lay off some workers?" 65 percent of those who initially said they supported the proposal decided they were opposed, while just 27 percent said they'd still support it.
When asked, "Would you favor or oppose creating a (government-administered) public health insurance option similar to Medicare to compete with private health insurance plans?" respondents supported the measure by a 67 percent to 29 percent margin. Yet if they were told that this would "give the government an unfair advantage over private insurance companies," 59 percent of those initially inclined toward a government plan flipped, while just 32 percent were still in favor.
Also, as far as taxes are concerned, large majorities said they would strongly or somewhat favor some form of tax increases to subsidize health care for the uninsured, including increasing the cigarette tax (65% support) and raising taxes on those making over $250,000 a year (71% support). Yet, when it came to broad-based tax hikes, only 28 percent said they would support increasing income tax.
Taken together, what these numbers mean is that there is an opening for Republicans to erode public support for Democratic health care reforms if -- and granted this is a big if -- they can effectively articulate the consequences of the proposals being touted by Democrats. The reality is that a mandate on businesses is effectively a tax on employment that would cost jobs, having the government "compete" for business with insurers it regulates on a national insurance exchange will be unfair, and the massive cost of national health care (on top of all of the other spending Obama is proposing) will necessitate far broader tax increases than the ones currently being proposed for wealthier Americans.
'Shrill, Hyperbolic, Divisive and Intemperate'
Posted by on 4.23.09 @ 5:02PM
Andrew Sullivan, who waged a one-man campaign of unfounded speculation about the parentage of Trig Palin, has once again nominated me for "The Malkin Award," for which I am appropriately grateful.
If you think allowjing over-the-counter sales of the abortifacient Plan B to 17-year-olds is irresponsible -- "What next? Over-the-counter roofies?" -- you, too, might be tempted to resort to "shrill, hyperbolic, divisive and intemperate right-wing rhetoric."
If you want to win the Malkin, you don't resist that temptation. And I'm thinking that describing Planned Parenthood ally Kathleen Sebelius as an agent of "Murder Inc." might do it for the Washington Times.
Government Enhancement Techniques
Posted by on 4.23.09 @ 1:14PM
In his column today, E.J. Dionne comes about as close as he can to conceding that the ultimate goal of passing some kind of comprehensive health care reform this year is to put America on the pathway to government-run health care.
He writes:
Many liberals believe our entire health-care system should be scrapped in favor a government-run single-payer plan along Canadian or British lines. The problem is that single-payer is not only politically impossible; it would also cause significant disruptions in the existing system. The public-option idea is a clever halfway house. It would allow the United States to move gradually toward a government-run system if -- and only if -- a substantial number of consumers freely chose to join such a plan. The market would test the idea's strength.
Private insurers hate the idea because they think the public plan would undercut them in the marketplace. This argument is, in some ways, self-refuting. If the private insurers are right that the government would actually provide health coverage more cheaply than the private companies, why shouldn't that option be available? Since the government would be ponying up to help people buy insurance, wouldn't this save taxpayers money in the long run?
This is precisely how the ideas being kicked around by Obama and Democrats will lead to the type of rationing of care we see in single-payer systems. Once they can make taxpayers "pony up" for something, it creates the opening for them to argue that additional government control is required to save taxpayer money. And the only way that government can save real money is to ration care.
Furthermore, as I wrote at greater length earlier this month, the government-run option doesn't represent free choice, as Dionne and its other proponents argue, it represents a false choice. Government would be setting the regulations on private insurance and running the national health care exchange from which Americans would be purchasing coverage. While private insurance companies have to either turn a profit or go out of business, the government does not face such a choice, because it has access to taxpayer funds.
Dionne goes on to discuss some of the compromise versions of a public option being floated around, before concluding, "If a bill passes this year, enhancements in the program down the road will not be seen as controversial but as inevitable."
He may be a liberal, but Dionne is an astute political analyst who understands that once a national health-care program is on the books, there is no turning back, and America will be on the path to government control of our entire health care system.
Obama’s New Gaffe Czar
Posted by on 4.23.09 @ 12:50PM
Canada’s National Post asked in a recent editorial: "Can someone please tell us how U. S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano got her job?" Napolitano had equated the threat at our Canadian border with the threat at our Mexican border because (she wrongly claimed) 9/11 terrorists had come through Canada.
Napolitano: Obama’s New Gaffe
Czar
By Asher Embry
O, Canada! It's earned a reputation for aplomb,
But what Napolitano did sent billows through its calm.
She said she'd treat our borders -- north and south -- about the
same;
For border threats we face, both neighbors share an
equal blame.
Though Mexico has kidnaps, murder, violence and drugs;
Canada, she wrongly claimed, let through al-Qaeda thugs.
It's sadly not the first time that her comments were
bizarre.
She may in fact unseat Joe Biden as our new gaffe czar.
She said: illicit border crossing's "not a crime per
se."
So why do we keep calling them "illegals" anyway?
And since her diatribe about conservatives and vets,
A wave of disbelief that she's the best our safety gets.
With our homeland security at stake, nobody laughs,
When "woman-caused" disasters keep resulting from her gaffes.
(You can read more of Asher Embry's Political Verse at www.politicalverse.com.)
A "We Really Mean It" Amendment
Posted by on 4.23.09 @ 12:25PM
Randy Barnett takes to the Wall Street Journal's op-ed page to argue for a "federalism amendment" to the Constitution. A noble idea, but it seems that the only component that would have any teeth is the repeal of the 16th Amendment. As the Restoring the Lost Constitution author well knows, the elected branches of the federal government already ignore the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. The political class mostly rejects the doctrine of enumerated powers, reducing the Constitution to a set of procedural constraints like Robert's Rules of Order.
The other problem is that state governments are just as apt to beg for federal money as they are to assert their constitutional prerogatives against an overweening federal government. So I'd be skeptical that a constitutional convention would produce anything so bold as a 16th Amendment repeal or direct prohibition on Congress regulating an activity that takes place wholly within a single state, except in cases of war, treason, or insurrection.
Morality and the Torture Debate
Posted by on 4.23.09 @ 11:07AM
In a series of earlier posts, I delved into the pragmatic debate over whether interrogation techniques such as waterboarding were effective at extracting actionable intelligence from terrorists who otherwise would not be willing to talk. But, clearly, for many people, this is not the determining issue in the debate.
Citing a video in which Shep Smith used colorful language to describe his stance that America should not use torture under any circumstances, Andrew Sullivan, added, "for Americans to be discussing if torture worked - if it worked - is staggering." Now, a lot of people whose moral judgment I respect have more or less expressed this view to me, so I have no desire to belittle it.
But for me personally, I believe it is morally justifiable to waterboard a terrorist such as KSM if doing so is necessary to save the lives of thousands of innocent Americans. When I think of all of the lives that were shattered on 9/11, all of the fathers and sons and brothers and sisters who perished because of a deranged ideology that celebrates death, there's no way in good conscience I could say that it's worth suffering a repeat of that attack in order to protect a terrorist from waterboarding, sleep deprivation, or some of the other techniques that were employed. Now, some people may respond that such a scenario never plays out in real life and that we didn't gain useful intelligence that we didn't already learn through other means. As I've noted previously, I'm open to persuasion on that point. But that brings us back to the debate over whether or not using such techniques worked, and moves us away from the narrower moral question as to whether it would be justifiable to use those techniques if they were effective.
One way in which Sullivan, and other absolutists, try to convey the immorality of waterboarding is to note that it was a technique used by the Chinese communists and the Khemer Rouge. However, even if we concede that waterboarding is torture, it's important to note that not all forms of torture are created equal, and we have to take into account the reasons why such techniques were employed. After all, the Nazis, like Americans, used guns, but they were used in different ways to achieve different ends.
The website of Cambodia's Killing Fields Memorial Museum describes Toul Sleng prison (aka S-21):
The families of offenders were often brought to the prison as well in order to keep the deaths of their loved one from being avenged. Almost all of the prisoners had worked in the armed forces, factories, or administration. Upon arrival at S-21, the prisoners were photographed, tortured until they confessed to whatever crimes their captors charged them with, and then executed in Choeung Ek or the Killing Fields.
A recent AFP story on a the confession of the regime's prison chief explained:
Only a handful of people are known to have survived their time at Tuol Sleng prison, which is now a genocide museum lined with photographs of some of the more than 15,000 men, women and children who died there….
"From the day it claimed its first victim, the policy was that no one could leave S21 alive," [prosecutor Robert] Petit told the court.
Waterboarding may have been one technique used against the prisoners in Cambodia, but it was far from the harshest technique:
"Victims were beaten with rattan sticks and whips, electrocuted, had toenails and finger nails pulled out, were suffocated with plastic bags forcibly tied over their heads and were stripped naked and had their genitals electrocuted," Petit said.
While Sullivan likens the Bush administration to other authoritarian regimes based on very narrow factors, it's important to draw a distinction. Bush wasn't routinely rounding up political opponents like members of MoveOn.org, Code Pink or, say, Sullivan, beating them until they confessed to being traitors, and then executing them. The idea was to employ techniques such as waterboarding and sleep deprivation to prevent future attacks against innocent civilians, and Bush made his decisions in the wake of the worst attack on U.S. soil in the nation's history. If somebody wants to argue that the interrogation program was an utter failure and that it damaged our reputation while producing little value, that's one thing. But calling it "staggering" to think that Americans would be open to the idea of waterboarding terrorists to prevent attacks on innocent civilians is another.
Democrats Inching Toward Excluding Republicans from Health Care Debate
Posted by on 4.23.09 @ 10:54AM
The New York Times is reporting that Senate Democrats are considering using reconciliation to expedite the passage of health care reform. In effect, that would mean any health care legislation would be treated as part of the budget process and not subject to filibusters. For all practical purposes, this would mean that Republicans would have little input on the final product and no ability to block or reshape the legislation. The Democratic legislation would probably then lack the support of even sympathetic Republicans like Orrin Hatch.
As Times says in its story:
A health care bill written mainly or entirely by Democrats would almost surely create a new public health insurance program, to compete with private insurers. It would require employers to provide insurance to employees or contribute to its cost. Employers who already offer insurance could be required to provide more or different benefits, and Congress could limit the tax breaks now available for such employer-provided insurance."If Democrats push a health bill through the Senate using budget reconciliation procedures, the bill would lack Republican support and would lack the support of key constituencies - certainly the business community," said E. Neil Trautwein, a vice president of the National Retail Federation, a trade group. "Health care reform would crater for this year.
That second paragraph strikes me as an empty threat, because once the House and Senate settle on a budget blueprint, Senate Democrats could pass legislation over the unanimous opposition of Republicans while losing as many as eight of their own members (assuming Al Franken is eventually seated). But it would give the Democrats ownership of the legislation and put some legislators under a great deal of pressure from business groups. That's why key Democrats have reluctant to go this route.
If the Democrats resort reconciliation as a way of hammering out health care reform, Republicans would still be able to invoke the Byrd Rule, raising points of order that challenge elements of the bill as extraneous to the budget process. Changes in regulations on insurance companies, for example, would be challenged if they don't change federal spending or revenues. Those challenges are subject to a parliamentarian's ruling, but if sustained they would require a filibuster-like 60-vote supermajority to waive.
What's the Matter with California That Isn't the Matter with Texas?
Posted by on 4.23.09 @ 10:48AM
Over at TPMCafe, Steve Sailer lays out a theory as to why California has turned blue while Texas has turned red: abundant land and high wages promote affordable family formation, while overcrowding and income stagnation promote dependence on the generosity of liberals. Personally, I'd like to see him update his findings on the "marriage gap" for the 2008 presidential election, since Barack Obama eked out a narrow victory among married women this time out.
NY-20 Congressional Race Update
Posted by on 4.23.09 @ 10:27AM
The seesawing congressional race to replace Kirsten Gillibrand continues, with Democrat Scott Murphy and Republican Jim Tedisco having exchanged leads at various points during the vote-counting. Murphy currently leads by 365 votes with about 1,800 challenged ballots still outstanding.
Daily Must-Reads
Posted by on 4.23.09 @ 9:55AM
- George Will isn't too thrilled with Arne Duncan and co. either (Washington Post)
- Is the Office of Legal Counsel even worth having? (Slate)
- Don Boudreaux celebrates Earth Day (Cafe Hayek)
- The American way of volunteering -- for money (Reason)
When and For How Long To Care
Posted by on 4.23.09 @ 9:33AM
One young Philadelphia woman navigates the complexities of observing Earth Day.
Uproar at Chapel Hill
Posted by on 4.23.09 @ 5:59AM
A new self-described "right-wing" student group, Youth for Western Civilization, has caused controversy at the University of North Carolina by bringing to campus two Republican congressmen, Tom Tancredo of Colorado and Virgil Goode of Virginia, to talk about illegal immigration. In both cases, liberal student protesters disrupted the events.
Meanwhile, however, Crystal Mangum -- the woman whose false accusation of rape defamed Duke University lacrosse players -- gave a speech at Chapel Hill without incident.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
ACORN Covering Up SEIU Ties?
Posted by on 4.22.09 @ 8:50PM
A photo retrieved from SEIU Local 100's website today. The original photo caption reads: "Organizers from Local 100, ACORN, and SEIU, supporters and attorneys celebrate our victory on February 3, 2002." The man with the sandy hair to the right of the microphones is Wade Rathke, founder and then-chief organizer of ACORN.
ACORN did a strange thing today.
It scrubbed its website of references to two of its key affiliates, Locals 100 and 880 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), an event reported by Kevin Mooney of the Washington Examiner.
Why would the radical left-wing ACORN do that? An observer I spoke with earlier today speculated that organized labor doesn't want to be associated with ACORN, which is pure PR poison, right now as it presses for the most important item on its legislative agenda: the misnamed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) also known as "card check."
Is the labor movement actually taking political heat for its ties to ACORN? It seems like a reasonable hypothesis but I don't have proof right now. Perhaps in time we'll find out. In any event, erasing the listings is weird.
What is ACORN afraid of?
In detail, here's what went down:
ACORN, which until recently proudly listed Locals 100 and 880 of SEIU as affiliates, removed the short blurbs and logos of the two entities from its allied organizations page.
As of April 20, one day before Mooney's article on ACORN and its ties to unions ran in the Washington Examiner, the ACORN website page looked like this. (The link leads to a PDF of the page I made on Oct. 30, 2008.)
From the same website, here is a copy that I made on Oct. 24, 2008 of an official list of ACORN's affiliates, a document called "ACORN, ACORN Affiliate, and COUNCIL Offices."
Moreover, SEIU Local 100's most recent publicly available IRS Form 990 shows ACORN founder Wade Rathke as that local's chief organizer (see page 5 of above linked PDF file).
(For background information on ACORN, please see the November 2008 issues of Foundation Watch and Labor Watch, two monthly newsletters I edit at Capital Research Center.)
More on Obama's Big Government Gamble
Posted by on 4.22.09 @ 4:56PM
Further to my column last week, a new Rasmussen poll finds that 59 percent of Americans agree with Reagan's statement that, "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."
As always, Rasmussen polls need to be taken with a grain of salt. However, there is now a body of evidence supporting my overall point -- that Obama remains popular, that Americans want to give him a chance, but that his actual policies will expand the role of government beyond the size that the public is comfortable with, creating a big political liability down the road.
"Our Lead Is Vanishing At A Rate Of *AWESOME*"
Posted by on 4.22.09 @ 4:53PM
On February 2nd, Steve Lonegan, former mayor of Bogota, and contender for the GOP nomination for the New Jersey governor's race, was looking at numbers from Quinnipiac like this:
Christie: 44%
Lonegan: 17%
At that point, Chris Christie was asserting he had no ethics problems at all, and that if something smelled unethical, he wouldn't do it. That, I said, was some Orwellian verve.
So little surprise comes that when we're looking at the new numbers, Christie's campaign can still claim: "We're winning."
Christie: 46%
Lonegan: 37%
Chris Christie's bumbling campaign has gone from a 22 point lead (March 9th) down to a 9 point lead (April 21st).
The pollster writes:
“Christopher Christie’s lead over Steve Lonegan in the Republican primary shrinks as we shift from registered voters to likely voters. These Republican loyalists are less impressed by a political newcomer than a party veteran,” Richards said.
To which Christie's campaign responds:
Chris Christie campaign manager Bill Stepien said that polls released this morning confirm that Christie remains the frontrunner not just in the gubernatorial primary, but for the general election.
"Two new polls continue to show encouraging news for Chris Christie. The bottom line is that I'd rather be Chris than any other candidate right now,” he said. “Chris has a substantial lead in both the primary and general election polls, a significant fundraising advantage in the primary and grassroots support in all corners of the state, as evidenced by him winning every single county convention.”
Okay. Christie does deserve congratulations for winning every single county convention. Except that happened in February, back when he was said to be the only viable candidate. Things have changed. The poll showing his lead cut in half is today. While I'm sure Bill Stepien is sincere in thinking that he'd "rather be Chris than any other candidate right now," it does make me worry about Bill Stepien's stock portfolio/NCAA brackets/horserace betting record. You're supposed to look at change over time.
If we could revisit those poll numbers, the term "buzz saw" comes to mind.
More on the Los Angeles Plot
Posted by on 4.22.09 @ 2:13PM
In response to my post below about the chronology surrounding the Library Tower plot, a reader notes a 2005 LA Times article, which reported:
Federal counter-terrorism officials on Friday disclosed for the first time that during his interrogations, Mohammed said he hadn't completely abandoned the prospect of a second wave of attacks, but had turned the idea over to a trusted aide named Hambali, the chief of operations for an Al Qaeda affiliate group in South Asia, Jemaah Islamiyah.
Hambali, also known as Riduan Isamuddin, in turn is believed to have chosen several men to launch the attacks, including a pilot, and had set aside some money to pay for them, according to one senior counter-terrorism official.
Those men were soon captured, however, and the plot never progressed past the planning stages, according to several counter-terrorism officials.
"To take that and make it into a disrupted plot is just ludicrous," said one senior FBI official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in accordance with departmental guidelines.
So, that explains the CIA version of the timeline -- that there was one plot on the building broken up in 2002, and a new plot underway in 2003, and it was the latter one that was thwarted by information provided by KSM. But then the we're still left with a debate over how far along the plot was, and more abstractly, how far along a terrorist plot has to be before a government gets credit for thwarting it.
This is, I think, one of the most difficult aspects of evaluating counterterrorism policy -- that we see the reality of the controversial actions taken in the name of preventing attacks, but the prospect of an attack always remains theoretical. Thus, anybody opposed to a given policy can claim that the plot would have never actually materialized, while those in favor of a given policy can claim that the policy saved lives. If a few men of modest resources discuss a plan to destroy the Empire State Building that they're unlikely to pull off, how far do we go to disrupt them? On the other hand if we're able to disrupt such plots in the early stages, isn't that a good thing? Isn't that precisely what successful counterterrorism looks like? Isn't that the kind of detective work that we failed to do on Sept. 11? In the early stages, if you had read that a group of terrorists was planning on sending men to hijack airplanes with box-cutters and fly them into buildings, destroying the Twin Towers and damaging the Pentagon, and killing 3,000 people, it probably would have sounded far fetched to most people.
Taken together, this is all the more reason why the government has to release more information about what actually went on so that we can have an informed debate. This shouldn't be ideological. On an issue like health care, before opposing sides get into practical policy disputes, there is a basic philosophical difference as to whether it is a proper function of government to provide everybody with health care. But there's no reason why conservatives, as a matter of ideology, should be committed to defending the interrogation techniques used during the Bush administration. All that should matter is whether or not they made us safer relative to the damage those practices did to our image around the world, as well as to undermine American resolve in the War on Terror. And we simply do not have enough information at this point to honestly assess this question.
Blame Pat Toomey First
Posted by on 4.22.09 @ 11:16AM
Republican environmentalist David Jenkins repeats the claim that the Club for Growth cost Republicans their congressional majorities. I've dealt with the Rhode Island Senate race at length before. The only thing I'll add is that Sheldon Whitehouse didn't exactly "eke out" a victory over Lincoln Chafee -- he beat him 53 percent to 47 percent, a 6-point margin that isn't exactly a landslide but is comparable to Barack Obama's popular-vote margin over John McCain. George Allen, Conrad Burns, and even Jim Talent all came much closer to holding on to their seats.
I've also previously written a column and a piece for the May issue of the magazine arguing that the anti-Club revisionism is overstated at best. But let's return to the subject one more time, since it doesn't seem to get old for some people: The Club has unseated exactly two moderate Republican incumbents in its history, only one of them in a blue state and both of them -- by Jenkins' own admission -- in heavily Republican congressional districts.
Tim Walberg beat Joe Schwarz in Michigan in a 2006 primary. Walberg went on to victory in November, but failed to win reelection in 2008. Andy Harris beat Wayne Gilchrest in a three-way primary in Maryland in 2008 but lost the November election. In both cases where the Club-backed candidate lost the general, the defeated Republican incumbent actively supported the Democrat during a peak Democratic year. The third example is Bill Sali of Idaho, who won an open primary and the general election in 2006 but lost a reelection bid in 2008.
This means that you can blame the Club for exactly three of the 51 House seats the Republicans have lost since 2006. Two of the three Club-backed Republicans managed to win general elections in one very Democratic cycle, though they lost in the second Democratic cycle (Jenkins' comparisons of winning percentages between the conservatives and the moderates they beat doesn't take into account how political conditions changed between 2004 and 2006). Who wants to bet that at least two of these three districts will be back in Republican hands after 2010?
Maryland's First Congressional District is a case in point. It can certainly elect a more conservative congressman than Wayne Gilchrest. At some point, possibly as soon as 2010, it probably will. So in the long term, the Club's support for Harris made sense if you view politics with a longer-term perspective than the next election. (By the way: one of the issues Gilchrest's primary opponents used against him was his opposition to the Iraq war. Didn't some New Majority types back a similar primary challenge against the much more conservative Walter Jones?)
Jenkins' final example is the Club for Growth's support for Steve Pearce over Heather Wilson in the 2008 New Mexico Senate race. He hints Wilson could have done as well as Pete Domenici traditionally did holding that seat for the Republicans. As I've said before, there is no evidence for this point of view. Wilson had trouble holding onto her House seat in 2006. She polled no better than Pearce in head-to-head matchups with the Democratic nominee.
The Club's ideological approach to choosing which candidates to support doesn't always take into account the temperament of a candidate or the nuances of a particular district. Nevertheless, the claim that the Club is particularly high on the list of people to blame for the Democratic Congress is just false. But then, they always blame Pat Toomey first.
Gun Control Battle Erupts in PA
Posted by on 4.22.09 @ 10:51AM
Second Amendment supporters by the hundreds flooded the rotunda of the Pennsylvania State Capitol building in Harrisburg yesterday. The packed, standing-room-only crowd, driving in from across the state in the middle of a torrential rain, listened to state lawmakers and gun owners denounce Governor Edward G. Rendell's call for a ban on assault weapons.
Rendell, who is term-limited and cannot seek re-election, recently called for a ban on assault rifles and a limit of handgun purchases in the state to one a month. His demand followed the recent shooting deaths of three Pittsburgh police officers who were murdered by 22-year-old Richard Poplawski.
One gun advocate took direct aim at Rendell's use of the Pittsburgh shootings, charging the Governor with playing politics. He noted that two of the three officers killed were shot not by an assault rifle but a pump-action shotgun and .357 revolver. He further noted that Poplawski, already the subject of several protection-from-abuse court orders, should have automatically been prevented from purchasing or owning guns under current Pennsylvania law. The laws, it was said, don't work, and Rendell wants more of them. Through a spokesman, Rendell disagreed, citing what he called a rising level of gun violence in the state.
The speakers, according to Harrisburg Patriot-News reporter John Luciew, included the Republican State Senate Whip, Senator Jane Orie of Allegheny County -- Pittsburgh. Also participating was John Sigler, the president of the National Rifle Association.
Gun control has long been a "third rail" issue in Pennsylvania. While outsiders view the state in terms of its two largest cities, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the state in fact has a large rural component that has focused repeatedly on Second Amendment rights. The pattern began when gun control first emerged as an issue following the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, and Senator Robert F. Kennedy in the 1960s. In a surprise upset in 1968, then-Republican Congressman Richard Schweiker defeated former Philadelphia mayor and then-U.S. Senator Joseph Clark, who was running for re-election. Clark, a longtime liberal, had become a strong supporter of gun control. From that campaign forward Pennsylvania candidates have been leery of being depicted as anti-Second Amendment.
Rendell has no plans to run for office again in the state and was accused by gun owners at the State Capitol rally of seeking to burnish his credentials for a future job in the Obama administration.
The LA Tower Plot
Posted by on 4.22.09 @ 10:29AM
Yesterday, I noted Marc Thiessen's op-ed in which he asserted that the interrogation of KSM helped thwart an attack on the Library Tower in Los Angeles. Thiessen was citing a freshly declassified May 2005 memo (PDF), which states (referencing a CIA "effectiveness memo") that, "the interrogation of KSM -- once enhanced techniques were employed--led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the 'Second Wave,' 'to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into a building in Los Angeles.'" Yesterday, CNSNews reported that the CIA was standing by this claim.
But in Slate, Timothy Noah explains that the timeline doesn't add up:
In a White House press briefing, Bush's counterterrorism chief, Frances Fragos Townsend, told reporters that the cell leader was arrested in February 2002, and "at that point, the other members of the cell" (later arrested) "believed that the West Coast plot has been canceled, was not going forward" [italics mine]. A subsequent fact sheet released by the Bush White House states, "In 2002, we broke up [italics mine] a plot by KSM to hijack an airplane and fly it into the tallest building on the West Coast." These two statements make clear that however far the plot to attack the Library Tower ever got—an unnamed senior FBI official would later tell the Los Angeles Times that Bush's characterization of it as a "disrupted plot" was "ludicrous"—that plot was foiled in 2002. But Sheikh Mohammed wasn't captured until March 2003.
This does raise legitimate questions about the validity of the claim that waterboarding KSM thwarted the LA attack. What still doesn't make sense to me is why the CIA, in a top secret memo, would make a claim to the administration that could so easily be shot down. Remember, this isn't a politician going on TV, but one group of government officials informing another group in a document that they didn't believe was going to be made public. There may be more to this story -- perhaps there were multiple plots, which wouldn't be unheard of -- but until I hear a credible explanation for this discrepancy, I'm going to have to be skeptical about this particular claim.
UPDATE: More here.
Rudy Giuliani: Defender of Marriage?
Posted by on 4.22.09 @ 10:10AM
According to the Politico, some religious conservatives are applauding Rudy Giuliani for his strong opposition to New York Gov. David Paterson's gay marriage bill. They especially like his prediction that this will produce a strong backlash against the Democrats.
Given the polling on gay marriage in New York, I'm skeptical. But let's look at the larger question: Is Rudy Giuliani the best spokesman for traditional marriage? Not only is he twice-divorced, but he publicly humiliated his second wife and the mother of his children while serving as mayor of New York City. He announced the breakup of their marriage in a press conference. His third marriage began essentially as an extramarital affair. And while these are all private matters, they were conducted in an extremely public manner.
Bill Clinton has stronger family man credentials than Giuliani, since despite his extramaritial affairs he has stayed married to the same woman his whole life. I understand the importance of accepting political allies wherever you can get them, and also being encouraged that a seasoned pol like Giuliani sees the marriage issue as a boon to Republicans. But the approach to marriage personified by Giuliani is precisely why our society has gone from viewing gay marriage as a defintional impossibility to a more or less mainstream social crusade.
Social conservatives need to stop making people think they're called "values voters" because Republican politicians can buy them so cheaply.
UPDATE: No, I'm not defending Bill Clinton -- I favored his impeachment and removal from office. But let's take the Clinton analogy a step further. I was certainly pleased, and so were most social conservatives, when Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act. But no social conservative leaders pretended it was anything more than a fortunate act of political opportunism and a good talking point: "Even Bill Clinton opposes gay marriage..." Why can't we have that kind of judgment when somebody has an "R" next to his name? That's all I'm saying, folks.
UPDATE II: Okay, maybe "stronger family man credentials than Giuliani" was an overstatement. But the main point still stands.
Obama's Costco Cabinet
Posted by on 4.22.09 @ 10:08AM
"You may fool some of the people all of the time, you may
even fool all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool
all of the people all of the time."
-- folk wisdom attributed to Obama hero Abraham Lincoln
Obama's Costco
Cabinet
By Asher
Embry
Obama's "Team of Rivals" finally met.
Of course less four or five who didn't vet.
As always with Obama, cameras rolled,
And captured the assignment they were told.
It wasn't stopping nuclear Iran.
Or working to support the Pentagon.
Instead, bulk-buying Post-its was their charge.
And: Online visa programs should enlarge.
They're told to cut $100 mil. in waste;
A pittance with the deficits they faced.
This posturing of saving's just for show;
A Trillion more in costs will have to go.
With budgets of $4 Trillion, it's a joke,
Which an every-day example may evoke:
If you're purchasing a brand new Ford Explorer,
It's a discount of twelve Nickels and a Quarter.
Remember how Dems sneered two months before?
Chuck Schumer said it on the Senate floor:
Billions were "yes -- porky" but were "tiny";
Those of us objecting were just "whine-y."
So now Gibbs says $100 mil.'s a lot,
When earmarks 80 times that much was not?
With empty gestures, "O" may some beguile.
But Honest Abe knew: Only for a while.
(You can read more of Asher Embry's Political Verse at www.politicalverse.com.)
Daily Must-Reads: Arne Duncan Is a Failure Edition
Posted by on 4.22.09 @ 10:00AM
Instead of the usual variety of topics, today I would like to direct your attention to one story: Education Secretary Arne Duncan's (and Barack Obama's) unconscionable betrayal of poor, voiceless, and defenseless schoolchildren in Washington, DC.
Today Duncan published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled "School Reform Means Doing What's Best for the Kids." Among other claims, Duncan states that
We need a culture of accountability in America's education system if we want to be the best in the world. No more false choices about money versus reform, or traditional public schools versus charters. No more blaming parents or teachers. We need solid, unimpeachable information that identifies what's working and what's not working in our schools. Our children deserve no less.
Here's the problem. Obama and Duncan deserve credit for embracing charter schools. But Duncan himself asserts a false choice by painting the issue as a discussion over increased public school funding or charter schools. He conveniently leaves out the third option of vouchers. We now know, despite what seems to be Duncan's best efforts to sweep the information under the rug, that we have "solid, unimpeachable information" that identifies [giant pdf] that the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program worked, at a fraction of the cost of public school. We also know that the DC public schools are not working, despite having "more money than God," by Duncan's own admission.
And yet the funding for the DC voucher program was cut out of the omnibus spending bill as Duncan and Obama stood silently by.
In other words, Duncan and the Obama administration are throwing impoverished DC youth under the bus to satisfy their political needs. Poor inner-city youth have little clout relative to the Democratic Party, and so 1,700 of them must leave the schools where they were given a chance and return to failed DC public schools and a bleaker future.
Another quote from Duncan's op-ed:
For the first time in decades we have the funding, the committed leadership at the White House and on Capitol Hill, and proven success strategies across the country.
Well we certainly have the funding, thanks to the stimulus. And we have the proven success strategies, thanks to the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program. The only thing the leadership is committed to, however, is the Democratic Party.
UPDATE: Adam Schaeffer doesn't want Duncan to get away with it either.
Conservative Leaders Continue to Oppose Sebelius
4.22.09 @ 9:56AM
A day after the Senate Finance Committee advanced Kathleen Sebelius' nomination to become secretary of health and human services, a group of leading conservatives call for her rejection by the full Senate:
Tony Perkins, President, Family Research Council
Wendy Wright, President, Concerned Women for America
James Dobson, Focus on the Family
Grover Norquist, President, Americans for Tax Reform
Brent Bozell, President, Media Research Center
Alfred Regnery, Publisher, American Spectator
Don Wildmon, President, American Family Association
Majorie Dannenfelser, President, Susan B. Anthony List
Richard Viguerie
David McIntosh, former U.S, Representative, Indiana
To Members of the United States Senate:
We, as concerned Americans and leaders of a citizen based conservative movement, call on you to oppose the nomination of Kathleen Sebelius for Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Gov. Kathleen Sebelius's lack of integrity during the nomination process, together with her extreme pro-abortion record clearly demonstrate that she is unfit to serve as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Americans want and deserve better than a health care system run by a politician with serious lapses of conscience and integrity. We call on all senators who claim to uphold the sanctity of life and the responsibility of the office of HHS to oppose her confirmation.
Twice during her nomination Governor Sebelius has had to change her testimony to conform to the facts. First, it was disclosed that she had to correct three years worth of her personal tax returns, and second it was disclosed that she had received large sums – much more than she had initially told the Senate – from late-term abortion providers. Both of these unfortunate incidents have cast serious doubts on her integrity.
Governor Sebelius is also an abortion radical. She is one of the most fervent advocates for taxpayer-funded and late-term abortions in American politics. Americans do not want an uncompromising and anti-life partisan politicizing one of the most important offices in the United States government.
- Failed to pay taxes. Governor Sebelius found it necessary to correct three years worth of tax returns, inform the Senate of this serious financial oversight and subsequently paid, some $7000 in back taxes.
- Failed to disclose campaign contributions. Gov. Sebelius initially failed to disclose to senators the $35,000 in personal and PAC contributions she received from notorious late-term abortion provider Dr. George Tiller and another $200,000 that Tiller donated to ProKanDo, a political action committee (PAC) dedicated to defeating her pro-life gubernatorial opponent.
- Built her political career on abortion money. Not only did Governor Sebelius receive significant money from Kansas abortion and late-term abortion clinics, but she also vetoed every piece of legislation that would have provided even the most minimal oversight over these providers, putting the health of thousands of Kansas women at risk.
- Advocates taxpayer funded abortions. Gov. Sebelius favors publicly-funded abortion at home and abroad -- a stance that places her far outside the mainstream. In doing so she also makes a mockery of the millions of struggling working families who will scrape and save to pay their taxes during this recession, only to see their hard-earned dollars pay for abortions on demand.
- Takes a position far outside the mainstream in support of late-term abortions. Although 80% of Americans disapprove of late-term abortion, Gov. Sebelius advocates it relentlessly. Wichita is known as the late-term abortion capital of the Midwest despite its fairly restrictive laws, thanks to Gov. Sebelius's refusal to enforce the will of the people. With such an utter disregard for the position of an overwhelming majority of Americans, Gov. Sebelius is clearly too ideological and partisan to oversee the health care of 300 million people.
If confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services, Governor Sebelius would be in charge of one of the largest government cabinet departments, with one of the largest budgets, and which affects virtually every American citizen. Given her propensity for abortion radicalism, her failure to pay her own taxes and her demonstrated lack of integrity, she will be a divisive force in this important office.
We call on Senators of both parties to oppose the nomination of Gov. Sebelius.
Leave Matt Drudge Alone!
Posted by on 4.22.09 @ 9:20AM
The New Republic has a gossipy article about Internet newshound Matt Drudge's penchant for privacy:
What is driving Drudge to seclusion? Those who know him say that part of the reason he has disappeared from public view is that he is so bothered by the media's prurient interest in his personal life. "He wants no part of a lot of this," the friend told me. "He sees it as nonsense. He doesn't have respect for the way people have tried to write about him."
(Via Gawker and Memeorandum.) The New Republic expends a lot of lurid speculation on the "is Drudge gay?" angle, which also excites New York magazine. But this completely misses what I believe is the real explanation for his reclusiveness: He values his editorial independence, which he fears would be compromised if he spent too much time schmoozing with journalists and politicos.
If you're not in the news business, you've got no idea how important Drudge has become. Getting your story linked at The Drudge Report is more important to a reporter's reputation nowadays than getting a Pulitzer Prize. If Drudge spent his evenings and weekends on the cocktail-party circuit in Georgetown, Manhattan or Brentwood, his media "friends" who invited him to those parties would expect favorable treatment, and he doesn't want to be compromised by such obligations.
Drudge has always seen himself as an outsider, and clearly became uncomfortable with his sudden celebrity after he broke the Lewinsky scandal story in 1998. Being perceived as conservative made him a target of vicious gossip, as Ann Althouse says: "Lefties love to think the righties they can't tolerate are intolerant."
Drudge has had all the personal publicity anyone could ever want, and more. He has no interest in becoming just another bold-faced name in the gossip columns like Donald Trump or Lindsay Lohan. His resistance of the temptations offered by the celebrity culture is quite admirable, even if it is unfathomable to the shallow hacks at The New Republic.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Obama's Intel. Director Says Bush-Era Interrogation Yielded "High-Value" Info
Posted by on 4.21.09 @ 10:20PM
The New York Times reports:
“High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country,” Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the intelligence director, wrote in a memo to his staff last Thursday.
This would seem to be an important part of the overall torture debate, but somehow this portion of the memo was conveniently left out by the Obama administration when it released the Bush-era interrogation memos last Thursday:
Admiral Blair’s assessment that the interrogation methods did produce important information was deleted from a condensed version of his memo released to the media last Thursday. Also deleted was a line in which he empathized with his predecessors who originally approved some of the harsh tactics after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
“I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past,” he wrote, “but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given.”
Blair later clarified:
"The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means,” Admiral Blair said in a written statement issued last night. “The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security."
As I wrote earlier , this is a very complex issue that often produces plenty of heated accusations on both sides despite limited access to the facts. Now that the cat is out of the bag, it's imperative that we're given a full account not only about what techniques were employed, but what information was gained as a result of those interrogations.
Obaminations
Posted by on 4.21.09 @ 9:42PM
Don Todd, head researcher for Americans for Limited Government, has the scoop on a number of Obamanoms, administration appointments pending approval in the Senate. That some presidential nominations will run into trouble with their backgrounds is nowadays a given, but it's truly remarkable how many of Obama's nominees for senior government positions have been dinged, disqualified, and ditched due to serious issues related to ethics, finances, or some combination. Worse, the drive-by media isn't even attempting to create the appearance of covering these nomination Obaminations, and we haven't even scratched the surface with confirmations for underesecretaries, deputy assistant secretaries, and the like.
Take current Seattle, Wash., police chief Gil Kerlikowske, he of the "Don't Ask" policy for illegal immigrants, who suffered an 80% no-confidence vote from his rank-and-file police officers after a $1.75 million wrongful death settlement, who has been nominated to be Obama's "Drug Czar." Based on Chief Kerlikowske's record, the nomination is kind of a good-news, bad-news situation. It's good news for Seattle, because without Kerlikowske out there, the crime rate is certain to go down. It's bad news for us, because now the rest of the country is stuck with this light-on-crime, anti-gun-rights, no-harm-no-foul-on-pot nominee. Frankly, I'm surprised Chief Kerlikowske's name wasn't mentioned as a possible nominee for Attorney General.
Sebelius Moves Closer to Cabinet
Posted by on 4.21.09 @ 5:14PM
The 15 to 8 Senate Finance Committee vote, which saw two Republicans siding with all Democrats, is probably a prelude to the Kansas governor's ultimate confirmation as secretary of health and human services.
UPDATE: Matt Lewis makes the case for why this is bad.
Shakespeare, Kick in the Rear
Posted by on 4.21.09 @ 4:55PM
Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has come around to the Joe Sobran position on the Shakespeare authorship question.
Obama at ND Update
Posted by on 4.21.09 @ 4:39PM
For those who have been following the uproar the University of Notre Dame's decision to honor Pres. Obama by giving him the commencement podium and an honorary degree despite his extreme anti-life record, here's new information. At Off the Record, Phil Lawler (my dad) is passing along a report that he has from a reliable source: ND President Fr. John Jenkins is in Washington, D.C. today for an unannounced meeting at the White House. This is still merely a rumor, but indeed FlightAware shows the ND jet flying to Dulles this morning.
What could they be talking about? We can only speculate. Last weekend Bishop Robert W. Finn of Kansas City joined 42 American bishops who have spoken out against Obama's invitation by claiming "I suspect that, since Notre Dame will need a scapegoat for this debacle, and Fr. Jenkins will probably lose his job, at this point perhaps he ought to determine to lose it for doing something right instead of something wrong. He ought to disinvite the President, who I believe would graciously accept the decision..."
That Fr. Jenkins would rescind the invitation seems unlikely given that on Saturday Fr. Jenkins reaffirmed his invitation to a crowd celebrating black student-athletes at Notre Dame that "shook down the thunder" with applause. But then what could they be talking about? If there is any change in the status of Obama's invitation, it's big news.
The Nixon Lesson
Posted by on 4.21.09 @ 3:48PM
In light of Jeffrey Lord's piece on the main site arguing that in dealing with Chavez, Obama could have taken a page from Nixon's confrontation with Khrushchev, I thought it would be worth posting this newsreel account of the famous 1959 exchange.
“Life After People”: Save the Planet, Kill Yourself
Posted by on 4.21.09 @ 3:18PM
Inspiration for the new TV series?
* * * * *
The History Channel's new series "Life After People," which premieres tonight, could become a new rallying point for today's environmentalists.
Set in a world after the human race has become extinct, it details how the things that people built will gradually turn to dust. From the History Channel's website:
In every episode, viewers will witness the epic destruction of iconic structures and buildings, from the Sears Tower, Astrodome, and Chrysler Building to the Sistine Chapel - - allowing viewers to learn how they were built and why they were so significant. Big Ben will stop ticking within days; the International Space Station will plummet to earth within a few short years, while historic objects, like the Declaration of Independence and the mummified remains of King Tutankhamen will remain for decades.
The series will also explore the creatures that might take our place. With humans gone, animals will inherit the places where we once lived. Elephants that escape from the LA zoo will thrive in a region once dominated by their ancestors, the wooly mammoth. Alligators will move into sub-tropical cities like Houston feeding off household pets. Tens of thousands of hogs, domesticated for food, will flourish. In a world without people, new stories of predators, survival and evolution will emerge.
Humans won't be around forever, and now we can see in detail, for the very first time, the world that will be left behind in Life After People: The Series.
There's no reason the green movement shouldn't embrace this death-affirming TV series.
Humans, after all, are a blight on the pristine beauty of the Earth, according to plenty of environmentalists.
Perhaps Al Gore or his spiritual mentor Theodore Kaczynski should have been brought on as technical consultants.
Paul: Secession is American
Posted by on 4.21.09 @ 1:59PM
Some interesting thoughts (as you'd might expect) from Ron Paul on Texas secession hysteria (at least on the part of the media), in an interview with CNN Sucks:
The biggest surprise to me was the outrage expressed over an individual who thinks along these lines, because I heard people say, well, this is treasonous and this was un-American. But don’t they remember how we came in to our being? We used secession, we seceded from England. So it’s a very good principle. It’s a principle of a free society. It’s a shame we don’t have it anymore. I argue that if you had the principle of secession, our federal government wouldn’t be as intrusive into state affairs and to me that would be very good.
We as a nation have endorsed secession all along. Think of all of the secession of the countries and the republics from the Soviet system. We were delighted. We love it. And yet we get hysterical over this just because people want to debate and defend the principle of secession, that doesn’t mean they’re calling for secession. I think it’s that restraining element of secession that would keep the federal government from doing so much. In our early history, they accepted the principles of secession all along.
Paul also addresses the question of whether some banks now making money demonstrates that the bailouts were a "success" ("If a gangster steals money and he’s successful, you don’t celebrate.").
Minutemen Founder to Challenge McCain
Posted by on 4.21.09 @ 1:29PM
Chris Simcox of the anti-illegal-immigration Minutemen Civilian Defense Corps has announced he will challenge John McCain in Arizona's Republican primary in 2010. Both Jim Kolbe and Jeff Flake have beaten back serious primary challenges from restrictionist Republicans in recent election cycles, and Simcox comes with his own controversies. But the Minuteman also has a national fundraising base and a hot-button issue on which McCain is very vulnerable with the Republican base.
Now Bob Shrum Whines About the Tea Parties
Posted by on 4.21.09 @ 12:18PM
Yet another liberal whiner has taken time out from his busy schedule destroying the Constitution and wrecking America to condescend about the recent tea party protests.
This time it's Democratic strategist Robert Shrum who for reasons only he knows, finds it necessary to beat up the Americans who protested President Obama's massive expansion of federal spending. Shrum, of course, is the cursed adviser who has helped Democrats lose the White House eight times, including John Kerry's run in 2004.
Conservatives are the real kooks Shrum argues in The Week, echoing the theme of the dubious DHS report last week that found that all conservatives, libertarians, and returning veterans are potential terrorists:
In 1964, historian Richard Hofstadter described "the paranoid style" as a periodic recurrence in American national life, characterized by "the use of paranoid modes of expressions by more or less normal people . . . heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy."
Teagate, the overhyped, underattended events of last week, closely tracks this taxonomy.
What were the protests supposedly about? Taxes and government spending. But in fact, the president's economic program has already cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans-and state and local tax increases would be far steeper without the protestors' other target, the Obama stimulus package, which provides recession-fighting funds to state and local governments.
Incoherent as a program, Teagate was relatively insubstantial as a protest. The usual suspects-from Fox News to Karl Rove-dutifully, at times desperately, hyped it as an outpouring of public dissatisfaction. A writer for the right-wing Manhattan Institute managed to see "the tidal wave of the future" in the tea leaves. But truth confounds belief. Nate Silver, the master of political statistics who predicted the 2008 election results almost precisely, compiled a crowd count from "reasonably nonpartisan and credible sources." He calculated a total of just over 300,000 protestors at hundreds of sites. [...]
Shrum, who has managed to pull out a few wins in non-presidential races, also poisons the minds of young people as a senior fellow at New York University's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.
What motivates this anger among liberals, who ought to be ecstatic that they control Congress and the White House?
Byron York of the Washington Examiner wonders why so many on the left are "so apparently troubled by a virtually powerless opposition[.]"
His source, a psychiatrist, put the anger down to narcissism:
I asked William Anderson, a friend who is a political conservative, a medical doctor, and a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard. "They are angry, but I think they are also scared, and I think it's because they have a sense that their triumph is a precarious one," Anderson told me. Democrats won in 2008 in some part because of the cycles of American politics; Republicans were exhausted and it was the other party's turn. Now, having won, they are unsure of how long victory will last.
"They see that they have a very small window of opportunity to do all the things they want," Anderson continued. "They see the window of opportunity as small because they know in their deepest hearts that the vast majority of the American people wouldn't go for all of the things they want to do." So they are frantic to do as much as possible before the opposition coalesces. And the tea parties might be the beginning of that coalescence.
Then there is the question of self-image. Watching Garofalo and Olbermann discuss the tea parties, it was impossible to avoid the sense that they saw themselves as two good people talking about many bad people. "One of the things about narcissism is that it looks like people who are just proud of themselves and smug, but in fact narcissism is a very brittle and unstable state," Anderson told me. "People who are deeply invested in narcissism spend an awful lot of energy trying to maintain the illusion they have of themselves as being powerful and good, and they are exquisitely sensitive to anything that might prick that balloon."
A Note on Torture
Posted by on 4.21.09 @ 12:02PM
One of the reasons why the torture debate has been has been difficult for me over the past few years is that is that so much of it has been argued in the theoretical realm. On one side, you have those who believe that techniques such as waterboarding are torture and should not be used under any circumstances, while on the other side you have people who may or may not say that waterboarding is torture, but either way don't have a problem using such techniques to extract information from terror suspects to prevent future attacks. I fall somewhere in between in the sense that I'd prefer that we never used waterboarding, sleep deprivation, or other techniques that I do believe are torture, but if waterboarding a high-level terrorist such as KSM, who was the mastermind behind 9/11, could save thousands of innocent lives, I'm for it.
The question for me then becomes, does such a situation exist in real life, or is it just a cartoonish scenario that only plays out on '24'? Do we get actionable intelligence from using such techniques, or will a detainee eventually say anything just to get his interrogator to stop, resulting in intelligence that isn't credible? Since my judgment ultimately hinges on the practical aspects of the debate, it's been difficult for me to form an opinion when I only have access to a small amount of the information that those in charge of our national security had when making the decisions they did.
However, mounting evidence now shows that these techniques were used much more widely over a much longer period than we were led to believe. If waterboarding needed to be used on KSM 183 times in a month – a far cry from the lone 90-second session previously reported – the technique wasn't as instantly effective as it has been made out to be, and clearly it wasn't being performed in a single use, last resort type of way.
Even putting the moral debate aside, in practical terms, the torture issue has been a public relations disaster for the U.S. It has also helped undermine support for the "War on Terror" by tarnishing it in many people's minds as an unnecessarily dirty enterprise. While I don't think that America should ever sacrifice its national security purely for PR reasons, perception is certainly worth taking into account, especially if it's true that using these techniques doesn’t actually make us any safer.
Yesterday, Dick Cheney, called for the release of documents showing that the government obtained good information from the sessions. And in the Washington Post today, former Bush aide Marc Thiessen argues, citing the recently released memos, that the efforts yielded actionable intelligence that prevented terrorist attacks. Specifically, the intelligence helped stop an a potential attack on the Library Tower in Los Angeles (the tallest building on the West Coast).
At this point, since one part of the story is out there already, I agree that it's necessary to release the rest. Then, instead of having a debate in which opponents of the interrogation policies accuse the other side of being callous, and proponents of using these techniques accuse the other side of being pansies, we can have an informed discussion about the practical impact of those policies on our national security.
Ask A Controversial Question...
Posted by on 4.21.09 @ 11:28AM
Why bother to ask beauty pageant contestants their views on same-sex marriage if there is only one acceptable answer? And the Miss USA contestant who raised Perez Hilton's hackles offered only a very mild, apologetic, and almost equivocal defense of traditional marriage. If you want to treat people who believe that marriage is between a man and a woman -- what marriage has always meant in our society -- the same way we treat opponents of interracial marriage, you have to try to marginalize a large group of religious believers, many of whom would not otherwise particuarly care about this issue.
Virgil Goode: Tancredo, Take Two
Posted by on 4.21.09 @ 11:19AM
Liberal thugs shouted down former Congressman Tom Tancredo's speech at the University of North Carolina last week. But the students who brought Tancredo to campus are undaunted: they have responded by bringing the even more politically incorrect former Congressman Virgil Goode to campus.
Wall Street Journal Lies About Blogging
Posted by on 4.21.09 @ 11:13AM
If this is the kind of basic economic data provided by the nation's leading business newspaper, no wonder the market tanked:
It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year. Bloggers can get $75 to $200 for a good post, and some even serve as "spokesbloggers" -- paid by advertisers to blog about products.
Ri-iiight. But I'm merely an unofficial "spokesblogger" for Corona Beer, which may explain why the moolah's not rolling in.
Ramming Rahm
Posted by on 4.21.09 @ 10:08AM
If Rahm Emanuel wants to fight over ideas, we'll fight over ideas and grind his tough-guy act into the ground. Emanuel said on Sunday that conservatives have no ideas, and that we just say no. Here's my answer to this two-bit bully.
Daily Must-Reads
Posted by on 4.21.09 @ 9:41AM
- Moldovan hijincks with Twittter (Washington Post)
- Obama takes on a tone of cultural conservatism that he can't live up to (NY Times)
- A matter of trust for the U.S. economy (Bloomberg)
- The most ethical presidency ever seems to have hit a snag with the DC schoolchildren (Reason)
- Public transit is a boondoggle, the trains plan doubly so. Conservatives should point this out (New Majority)
- Why does the right love Amity Shlaes's book? Maybe because it makes the left look foolish (Politico)
Left-Wing Domestic Terrorist Added to FBI Most Wanted List
Posted by on 4.21.09 @ 7:39AM
Maybe the FBI didn't get the memo from DHS.
The FBI has placed left-wing domestic terrorist Daniel Andreas San Diego on its "Most Wanted" list of terrorism suspects.
The FBI is offering a $250,000 reward for Mr. San Diego, who was --surprise, surprise-- born in Berkeley, California.
'Soylent Green Is (Fat) People!'
Posted by on 4.21.09 @ 12:34AM
Now that British scientists are blaming fat people for global warming, I've never been so proud to be skinny. Allahpundit has a Swiftian modest proposal:
If we can figure out a recipe for soylent green, we can solve this whole problem. Dibs on the 200-pounders.
Note the "if" that begins that quote. It's another hypothetical, folks, so don't be upset. We're not actually planning on eating fat people. At least not in the short term. By the way, have you noticed that Al Gore's looking kind of pudgy lately?
Monday, April 20, 2009
Shut Up and Pay Your Taxes, Traitor, Implies Paul Begala
Posted by on 4.20.09 @ 5:20PM
Clintonista Paul Begala says all you unpatriotic, wimpy, whiney Americans out there should just shut up and pay your taxes.
"Why are they out there whining with this Tea Party thing? Just a bunch of wimpy, whiney, weasels who don't love their country and don't want to support - there are guys at Walter Reed who gave their legs for my country, and they're whining because they have to write a check?" the political consultant who worked in Bill Clinton's White House told Don Imus.
Begala's rant came after the Center for American Progress Action Fund blog, Think Progress, trashed the tea parties, calling them political "astroturf." The Center, of course, is run by another Clintonista, John Podesta, who was Bill Clinton's White House chief of staff.
The rant also came after the Department of Homeland Security labeled all conservatives, libertarians, and veterans as potential terrorists.
(Hat tip: Brad Wilmouth of NewsBusters)
Jim Webb Wobbles on Card Check
Posted by on 4.20.09 @ 4:54PM
In another setback for the labor legislation, a spokeswoman for the Virgina Democrat tells Greg Sargeant:
"He doesn't believe this is the appropriate time to introduce this legislation or to be debating it," Webb spokesperson Jessica Smith confirms to me. "He's always been a strong supporter of the right to collective bargaining, but as written, he would look towards improving the legislation in a way to make it more fair and equitable."
In another blow, Webb's also won't say whether he'll support bringing it to the floor for debate. "He's not publicly going to say at this point," his spokesperson said.
Hugo's Book Club
Posted by on 4.20.09 @ 4:42PM
Sometimes a gift is not a gift:
Hugo’s Book Club
By Asher Embry
Not even Oprah can compete,
With Hugo’s latest PR feat.
The Venezuelan used our Prez,
And pulled a classic “Stunt Chavez.”
Not since he duped Joe Kennedy,
To give away his oil for “free,”
Has there been such a promo coup,
(The use of “coup” I shouldn’t do.)
To get attention for his stunt,
He chose Obama to confront.
Then gave a book reviling us,
To justify his animus.
At Amazon, it climbs the charts,
Up almost to the top it darts.
It came so close but didn’t win,
Let’s give three cheers for Mark Levin.
Still Chavez dominates the news,
To propagate his lefty views.
While yet again Obama’s “charm,”
This enmity did not disarm.
So did Barack a lesson learn?
Apologies on us can turn.
A thug like Chavez only hears,
The worst when using hate-filled ears.
(You can read more of Asher Embry's Political Verse at www.politicalverse.com.)
Even Greater Disbelief of Alarmists
Posted by on 4.20.09 @ 2:45PM
Rasmussen has done another poll of registered voters about their views on global warming, just three months after a surprise revelation that more believe that natural causes drive climate than humans. Here are the findings reported Friday:
Climate change caused by planetary trends: 48%
Climate changed caused by human activity: 34%
Other reason: 7%
Aren’t sure: 11%
Compare that to responses reported on January 19:
Climate change caused by planetary trends: 44%
Climate changed caused by human activity: 41%
Other reason: 7%
Aren’t sure: 9%
So in the space of just three months, the percentage of those polled who believe humans drive climate change dropped seven percentage points from an already low 41 percent, while those who are confident that natural causes influence climate more increased by four percentage points.
If this represented an actual election it would be called a landslide of historic proportions. I mean really — only one-third of people believe humans are the chief cause of climate change?
Anyone ready to cave in to EPA, Waxman or the president on this issue ought to have his head examined.
Hat tip: Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters.
Cross-posted at Globalwarming.org.
'If': The Biggest Two-Letter Word in the English Language
Posted by on 4.20.09 @ 1:29PM
If I were named to succeed Bob Tyrrell as editor of The American Spectator, my first order would be, "J.P., fetch me a cup of coffee. With cream."
That is a hypothetical so far-fetched that anything following the introductory clause cannot be understood as a genuine proposal of policy.
Attempting to make a point by a hypothetical, however jocular, is not a mode of discourse one should attempt with the Left: "If I were president…"
Chicago Tea Partiers Confirm My Column Today
Posted by on 4.20.09 @ 1:12PM
As I write about in today's column for AmSpec, and a couple of us tracked last week in this space, Chicago tea partiers chanted the theme of last week: "CNN Sucks." Newsbusters' Noel Sheppard took note from yet another YouTube video of CNN Sucks reporter Susan Roesgen stirring up trouble:
After Susan Roesgen unprofessionally attacked attendees of Wednesday's Chicago Tea Party, she and the network she represents were summarily booed and chided by those in the crowd.
This eventually resulted in Party goers chanting "Liberal Bias," "CNN Sucks," and "CNN Go Home!"
Newsbusters (and others) report that Roesgen is taking a break from work all of a sudden.
Bull in the Tea Party's China Shop
Posted by on 4.20.09 @ 11:11AM
A.C. Kleinheider warns against letting the compassionate conservatives and other big-government types who've run the GOP into the ground hijack the sentiment behind the Tea Parties as a ticket back to power. But he's not betting anyone will listen:
So be enthusiastic about this "new" Rightist phenomenon if you want to, but if history is any guide, the professional conservatives will use and abuse these grassroots conservatives to get back into power, promptly sellout the principles of the movement, and then convince half of those they sold out that their betrayal is better than the alternative.
Perhaps this time will be different and authentic conservatives will throw off their professional conservative masters and show the country what true Old Right conservatism really is. However, if past is prelude, one should not hold their breath.
We'll have to wait and see if this is something new or just the same old song and dance.
He's Baaaaack
Posted by on 4.20.09 @ 11:08AM
Dave Weigel on the reemergence of Alan Keyes. In a way, it's not surprising: whatever Keyes' limitations in winning votes, he's great at riling up a crowd.
Obama Shows Us His Scalpel
Posted by on 4.20.09 @ 10:33AM
During last year's second presidental debate, Obama dismissed McCain's proposal to institute an across-the-board spending freeze. "That's using a hatchet to cut the federal budget," Obama said. "I want to use a scalpel..."
Though some of us had our suspicions, at the time Obama wasn't saying what it would mean to cut government spending with a scalpel. But now we have a much better idea, as the Washington Post reports that President Obama will order his cabinet members to slash his $3.5 trillion budget by scalpel-riffic $100 million! Ed Morrissey notes, this represents a cut of .0029%.
As I wrote during the campaign, I prefer McCain's hatchet, though a chainsaw would be ideal.
Abolish The Vice Presidency!
Posted by on 4.20.09 @ 9:58AM
So argues AmSpec frequent contributor Jeremy Lott in the Washington Post.
Conservatives and Marriage
Posted by on 4.20.09 @ 9:52AM
In the speech Phil linked to late last week, former McCain adviser Steve Schmidt is certainly respectful toward social conservatives -- whose views on marriage are, for now at least, shared by a majority of Americans -- unlike many proponents of his point of view. But ultimately I don't think Schmidt follows his own advice to guard against changes in marriage's definition being "lightly undertaken."
Phil says he doesn't see how Schmidt's proposed redefinition of marriage would harm a third party. And in at least one sense he's surely right: a relationship between two people generally doesn't affect a third party. So why does government care about marriage at all? In large part because a sexual relationship between a man and a woman frequently creates third parties in the form of children. It is because of this fact, not some desire to punish same-sex couples, that marriage acquired its definition as a union between a man and a woman.
Marriage is only partly about the freedom to form a relationship with a Good Housekeeping seal of approval in the form of a government-issued license. It is also about imposing an intricate network of legal obligations, to one another and various third parties, on a group of people -- husbands and wives, parents and children -- who are going to have very different needs from one another. Some of these differences in need between men and women are based on social conventions. Others are at least as biologically rooted as sexual orientation. And some, like the variations in lifetime work patterns between women (who have babies) and men (who don't), probably reflect a little of both. None of them, for the overwhelming majority of people among the 90-97 percent of our population that is heterosexual, are going away anytime soon.
It is for these reasons that government doesn't just hand out marriage licenses, but also supplies (an admittedly diminishing) set of incentives to stay together. It is why government orders alimony and palimony payments, divvies up shared property, and usually dictates the terms of child custody when marriages fail. Marriage imposes these obligations because it is designed for couples who frequently intend and are overwhelmingly able to have children. And even those childless, elderly or infertile couples reinforce the principle of man and wife by their type of union. As David Frum once quipped, the fact that some corporations don't turn a profit doesn't alter the basic assumption in corporate law that corporations exist to make profits; the fact that some married couples are childless doesn't alter the basic assumption in marriage law that marriages exist to form families.
The obvious response to all this: same-sex couples often have children too, and their families deserve the same kind of recognition. But same-sex couples don't come by their children the same way a man and a woman do. To define marriage as totally unisex is to rewrite the basic assumptions of marriage to include anonymous sperm donors, rented wombs, sex with men or women outside of the marriage, multiple parenting arrangements by design, parental abandonment not in response to a tragic set of circumstances but by design, intentionally fatherless families, intentionally motherless families, and a system of adoption that prioritizes adult desires over the needs of children and proven stability of mother-father families. This isn't inviting two men or two women to emulate Ozzie and Harriet; this is practically begging the institution of marriage to emulate the Octomom, at least in certain childbearing practices.
Maybe we as a culture don't really give a damn about any of this. At the very least, we haven't thought about it very carefully if the phrase "changing [marriage] to admit same sex unions" doesn't sound to our ears a bit like "changing the NBA to admit football teams." And since heterosexuals constitute the vast majority of people who don't give a damn, with many of them already taking full advantage of all the revolutions in family life mentioned in the previous paragraph, we might reach the point where existing marriage law does more to offend our gay and lesbian fellow citizens than it does to uphold the traditional understanding of marriage.
We might be close to that point now. The only conservative case for same-sex marriage worth the name is a conservative case for acknowledging that there is nothing more government policy can do for the idea of traditional marriage.
Up Is Down. It's Just Easier That Way.
Posted by on 4.20.09 @ 9:46AM
Mean Martin Manning author Scott Stein today envisions a statist's utopia wherein a "Linguislature" is charged with rebranding words that make the populace feel blue. It would be funnier, of course, if we weren't in the era of "save or create" and "fake but accurate", but pretty darn clever stuff nonetheless.
Daily Must-Reads
Posted by on 4.20.09 @ 9:46AM
- Don't get carried away with Great Depression history -- we have our own unique problems (Washington Post)
- The Obama railroad plan is pure, unadulterated fantasy (NRO)
- Obamanomics leaves a lot to be desired (New Majority)
- The EPA takes aim at America (The Foundry)
- Hong Kong fades into the Chinese background (The American Scene)
Collins on Columbine
4.20.09 @ 6:01AM
Today is the tenth anniversary of the Columbine shootings, and it's worth re-asking the questions our Reid Collins posed on April 7 in the wake of the Binghamton murders. His American Spectator column of that date, "Columbine Plus," contained much information not known to the public. Who was aware of the police chiefs pre-Columbine "IARD" program of instruction or their recommendation of a small force for rapid deployment in each force? Or the federal program ASTITP on dealing with "active shooters"? Did the Binghamton police? The cops at Virginia Tech? Why not? There's still every reason to learn from Columbine and its successors. Here's Reid Collins again:
Columbine Plus
It was ten years ago. April 20, 1999, two students walked into the school they attended, Columbine High School, in Jefferson County, Colorado, and proceeded to kill 12 students, a teacher and finally, themselves. They had plenty of time in which to do it.
Scores of law enforcement officers surrounded the school. Apache-like, they stalked around the building as some surviving students made it out of the place on their own. They were employing an age-old police method: "time, talk, and tactics." Trouble is, the killers used the time to finish their deadly work.
The International Association of Chiefs of Police had initiated a new training program in the mid-nineties, dubbed "IARD" -- Immediate Action Rapid Deployment. Under its regimen there'd be no time for talk: well-armed officers would burst into a hostage site prepared to dispatch what had become known as an "Active Shooter." There even evolved a federal corollary known of course by a longer title, "Active Shooter Threat Instructor Training Program," or ASTITP.
The gist of the new tactic, to heavily arm and heavily protect lawmen who would not wait to assess the threat situation, but would act immediately to enter premises and stop murder. The Police Chiefs said up-front this would be costly: arming an officer with an automatic weapon, an AR-15 preferred, suitable protective armor, and a bag of ammo and assorted implements, would cost an estimated $5,000. Perhaps that is why "active shooters" still have leisure time ticking away at their deadly sites.
Authorities in Binghamton, New York, insist a couple of hours was not too long to discover the thanatoid scene in the Immigrant Ed Building. Little has been said of the responsiveness to the Virginia Tech massacre (after all, the killer had chained a door shut, hadn't he?).
And there are of course situations where police are ambushed on what seemed to be a routine domestic trouble call -- Pittsburgh.
But the rash of recent multiple slayings calls to mind the grim anniversary of Columbine and the question for every precinct in the nation: are you ready? Can you answer an active shooter threat with immediate action deployment? Do you have a swift swat capacity of trained and equipped officers?
Never mind how many. It's how fast.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Like a Cross to a Vampire
Posted by on 4.19.09 @ 10:25PM
We've already seen that Pres. Obama is reluctant to have religious images displayed near him. So what is he going to do on May 17th, when Notre Dame requires him to wear doctoral robes prominently featuring a cross and a prayer to Mary in Latin meaning "Our life, our sweetness, and our hope"?
Obama Unbowed
Posted by on 4.19.09 @ 9:27PM
We saw President Obama shake hands with a lot of short people in Mexico and at the Summit of the Americas. Not once did we see the bow-like, waist-high bend of the patented Obama short-person handshake.
Short Shakes
by Asher Embry
We saw Obama bow before the King with our own eyes.
The White House gave a lame excuse which clearly no one
buys.
The essence, after several tries; their laughable retort:
Obama had to do it ‘cause Abdullah was so short.
And so we watched quite carefully Barack in Mexico.
We studied with precision just how low his head would
go.
Felipe Calderon is really brave but hardly tall.
Obama met el Presidente with no bow at all.
In Trinidad all weekend long the same result held true.
With scads of compact leaders, not a bow appeared in view.
(By that we mean the bow itself, specifically
that act;
Of course, verbal prostrations, Barack’s
speeches never lacked.)
He’s caught up in this silly lie, he now must disavow.
The lesson learned from Nixon: it’s the cover-up, not the bow.
(You can read more of Asher Embry's Political Verse at www.politicalverse.com.)
