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Saturday, May 23, 2009
Free Gao Zhisheng
Posted by on 5.23.09 @ 4:26AM
Christian human rights attorney Gao Zhisheng has been tortured and imprisoned. China Aid and Voice of the Martyrs have released a new video providing a reenactment of his travails. He describes his previous "kidnapping" and prolonged torture session. Unfortunately, he has been arrested again.
His best hope is for Americans to publicize his case and protest to the Chinese government.
Friday, May 22, 2009
You-Won't-Get-A-Credit-Card-Unless-You're-Rich Bill is Now Law
Posted by on 5.22.09 @ 11:21PM
Amidst the anti-market frenzy in Washington, D.C., President Obama today signed into law a bill that will drive up interest rates on credit cards and force people with good credit to pay more to subsidize people with bad credit.
The bill, which extends a big, fat middle finger to credit card companies by limiting their ability to price their products according to risk, swept through Congress this week at breakneck speed.
According to Edward L. Yingling, CEO of the American Bankers Association, provisions in the legisation "will undermine the availability of credit." Credit cards are "a strong economic driver and are relied upon by consumers and small businesses to make payments and to bridge short-term financial gaps," he said.
Yingling said the legislation "fundamentally changes the entire business model of credit cards by restricting the ability to price credit for risk."
As John Berlau of the Competitive Enterprise Institute noted, limiting consumers' choices and interfering with sensible risk-based pricing practices "will result in less availability of credit and actually force card holders to pay higher rates in many instances."
The attack on the credit card industry was funded in part by left-wing philanthropist George Soros through his foundation, the Open Society Institute, as shown in "Consumers and Credit Cards: Leftist Watchdogs Attack An American Success Story," by Sara Wille, Foundation Watch, September 2006. (A related article is "Demonizing Subprime Lenders: Liberal Groups Oppose Consumer Choice," by Melanie Sans and Matthew Vadum, Organization Trends, October 2007.)
Glenn Beck Video About ACORN, Tides Foundation, Embezzlement
Posted by on 5.22.09 @ 6:35PM
The "Glenn Beck Program" had a segment yesterday on Fox News about the connection between ACORN and the Tides Foundation, as I noted at AmSpecBlog yesterday.
The video clip of the segment wasn't available yesterday but it's available now. I have embedded the video below at the bottom of this post.
Meanwhile, from the useful idiots file, comedian Roseanne Barr, a longtime ally of ACORN who gave the ACORN Institute $50,000 through her foundation in 2005, has leapt to the defense of the embattled leftist group.
Barr lent her name to ACORN's fundraising efforts. The full letter is available here, but immediately below is the top of the letter:
Dear Friend,
They just can't help themselves. Turn on Fox News this week and all you hear the right wing talk about is ACORN, ACORN, ACORN.
On Tuesday, right-wing nutjob Representative Michelle Bachmann accused ACORN of getting billions of dollars in stimulus money to carry out voter fraud.
She knows it's a lie -- but these guys just really can't stop. They're so scared of ACORN they're willing to try every lie in the book. [...]
Of course Bachmann said no such thing. Bachmann told Lou Dobbs Tonight that ACORN is eligible for a lot of federal money, a point lost on ACORN's direct mail department.
Barr explained why she supports ACORN in a Huffington Post article. Michael Moore introduced her to ACORN on the campaign trail in 2004, she said.
Returning to the Beck story, the TV host said that Drummond Pike, head of the Tides Foundation, wrote a personal check for about $700,000 to ACORN to cover the bulk of the $948,000 that Dale Rathke, brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke, embezzled from the ACORN network.
The Tides Foundation is a pass-through entity. Wealthy liberals give the charity money, take the tax deduction, and then tell Tides which causes to give their money to. The money is then given in the name of Tides and the real donor's name is withheld. Pike has said that keeping the identity of Tides donors secret is very important and that's why he covered Dale Rathke's debt. Pike is also treasurer of George Soros's Democracy Alliance, which funds ACORN and plenty of other left-wing causes.
Wade Rathke, who was expelled by ACORN's national board last summer for his role in covering up the embezzlement, is a member of the Tides board. Suspicious? You betcha.
Meanwhile, ACORN stands accused of election fraud, extortion, and racketeering, yet congressional leaders have no interest in investigating the group. House Financial Services Committee Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts) and House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers (D-Michigan) refuse to probe ACORN.
Why?
In the clip shown on Beck's show yesterday, Fox News reporter Griff Jenkins asked Frank about ACORN. Frank, who claims ACORN is not eligible for $8.5 billion in federal funding, tried to blame ACORN on the out-of-office Bush administration.
The congressman probably won't do anything about ACORN. Why would he? ACORN supporters are his power base.
President Obama Takes Marching Order from Unions
Posted by on 5.22.09 @ 6:26PM
Well, we know who really runs this administration. Obama & Co. have backed away from their professed support for the Free Trade Agreement with Panama. Reports Bloomberg News:
U.S. officials said they will delay seeking congressional approval for a pending free-trade deal with Panama until President Barack Obama offers a new "framework" for trade.
The administration, which in March said it would move quickly to pass the trade agreement with Panama, wants to outline how trade fits with other priorities such as assistance for unemployed workers and health care, Assistant U.S. Trade Representative Everett Eissenstat said today.
"It's clear that trade agreements in the last few years have been much too divisive," Eissenstat told the Senate Finance Committee. "We want to make sure that Panama doesn't contribute to that divisiveness."
Panama is the first of the three pending free-trade agreements the Obama administration has said it wants Congress to consider. Trade between the U.S. and Panama was $5.5 billion in 2008, and the U.S. is Panama's largest trading partner. A delay for Panama may also postpone accords with Colombia and South Korea.
Eissenstat's comments follow remarks by John Sweeney, the head of the AFL-CIO labor federation, that unions would oppose a rush to ratify the deal. The Panama accord was signed in 2007 and was viewed as the least controversial of three trade agreements reached by President George W. Bush and pending congressional approval.
If the "least controversial" agreement isn't going anywhere, forget the pacts with Colombia and South Korea. China already is trading more with the South than is the U.S. But Congress apparently doesn't care if Beijing further entrenches itself in East Asia while American influence wanes.
Organized labor certainly isn't hesitant about telling everyone who is calling the shots. Exults the AFL-CIO:
BREAKING: President Obama has delayed moving the Panama trade deal because of union objections. Read more here.
Congress should not consider the U.S.-Panama trade agreement until Panama implements labor law and tax reforms and the Obama administration lays out a comprehensive, principled trade strategy for the United States.
Testifying before the U.S. Senate Finance Committee today, AFL-CIO Policy Director Thea Lee said the union movement will oppose the Panama deal unless these issues are resolved.
Of course, even if Panamanian law was up to international standards, whatever that means for an impoverished developing nation, labor would oppose the FTA. Unions oppose competition irrespective of other nations's labor laws.
We have just entered month five of the administration. Wait till the president's popularity starts to droop. He will have to embrace the Democratic special interests even more tightly, irrespective of the public interest.
Two More Great Columns on Obama vs. Cheney
Posted by on 5.22.09 @ 6:05PM
These columns are more about Obama's speech than about Cheney's, but both are absolutely on target, with great insights. My hat is off to my friend Jed Babbin of Human Events for this one,
Key lines:
President Obama wants to de-legitimize criticism of his ideas. He insists that those who disagree with the closure of Gitmo -- or say that thousands of lives were saved because three terrorists out of the hundreds we captured were waterboarded -- are betrayers of our Constitution.
Several times, he referenced the “fear-mongering” and climate of fear he says propels the debate on closing the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He says we are ill-served by words that are “calculated to scare people rather than educate them.”
Perhaps he was thinking of the words spoken by FBI Director Robert Mueller on Wednesday. Pushed to agree that Gitmo detainees could be kept safely in U.S. prisons, Mueller demurred.
Mueller said that the FBI had grave concerns about Gitmo detainees being brought into the US: “The concerns we have about individuals who may support terrorism being in the United States run from concerns about providing financing, radicalizing others," as well as "the potential for individuals undertaking attacks in the United States."
And my hat is off to Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics for this one.
Key lines are that Obama's habit of "ad hominem" attacks on those who disagree with him "obliterates any notion that the President is treating his interlocutors with the presumption of good faith. He says he is, but the rest of his speech doesn't follow through - which makes the initial assertion sound like haughty, hypocritical moralizing."
Read both columns in full. Good stuff.
Congratulations, Sarah Palin
Posted by on 5.22.09 @ 2:28PM
Clark Stooksbury at The American Conservative suggests me (tongue-in-cheek) as ghost-writer for Sarah Palin's $11 million book. Actually, I'd think my Donkey Cons co-author Lynn Vincent might be ideal for the job, since she's already co-authored the bestseller Same Kind of Different As Me.
The Associated Press reported yesterday:
Sarah Palin has picked a collaborator for her memoir.
A spokeswoman for SarahPAC, the Alaska governor's political action committee, says that Palin has selected Lynn Vincent, an author and features editor for World magazine, a conservative Christian publication. Palin's book, currently untitled, is scheduled for release next year by HarperCollins.
You can read more about Lynn Vincent at World. She is a very experienced writer and editor who is also an exceptional manager. Donkey Cons was Lynn's idea. She recruited me to the project and then we suffered through "publishing hell," as the proposal was accepted, then delayed, and then approved with an ultra-tight deadline.
The book was a difficult project in part because Lynn lives in San Diego and I live in the D.C. area, so that all our collaboration had to be conducted via e-mail and phone. Lynn has praised the contributions of my "encyclopedic knowledge" of political history to Donkey Cons, but it was her really aptitude for planning and organization that made it possible.
Sarah Palin has picked the perfect collaborator for this project. She and Lynn are almost the same age, for example. Both of them are evangelical Christians, and both are very down-to-earth people. Here's some video of Lynn speaking to students at a Young America's Foundation conference:
Congratulations, Governor. If you didn't hire the best writer in the business, at least Lynn is very close to the best writer in the business. She's also got an excellent sense of humor
Not exactly the Trilateral Commission...
Posted by on 5.22.09 @ 2:05PM
...but, heck, it's a sart. I see that my organization, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, was just named by the Columbia Journalism Review as a member of "the Big 12 ideological marketing organizations of the business-right" which, somehow, are really responsible for the job losses throughout discredited old media -- quite a surprise, really; we felt so alone in our struggle...who knew there was a Big 12? -- so I feel I must do some ideological marketing.
Hence, please spread the word about this panel on Counterterrorism and the Obama Administration -- it won't be as brief as the title suggests, really. It is being put on by another group with which I'm associated, the Federalist Society's International and National Security Law Practice Group and, er, co-sponsored with the only other named Big 12 entity, the Heritage Foundation (oh, dear, that ought to set their little job-threatened fingers tapping).
And, CJR, just because you're paranoid should by no means be taken as a sign that we aren't out to get you.
Pelosi Should Step Down
5.22.09 @ 1:26PM
This call for Speaker Pelosi to step down has just been released:
Edwin Meese, former Attorney General
David Keene, Chairman, American Conservative Union
Frank J. Gaffney, President, Center for Security Policy
Wendy Wright, President, Concerned Women of America
Alfred Regnery, Publisher, American Spectator
Tony Perkins, President, Family Research Council
Grover Norquist, President, Americans for Tax Reform
Brent Bozell, President, Media Research Center
Richard Viguerie, Chairman, ConservativeHQ.com
Becky Norton Dunlop, President, Council for National Policy
William Wilson, President, Americans for Limited Government
Ken Blackwell, former U.S. Ambassador, U.N. Human Rights CommissionNATIONAL LEADERS CALL ON SPEAKER PELOSI TO STEP DOWN: CONGRESS SHOULD INVESTIGATE
When Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi accuses the intelligence community of lying, more is at stake than what she was told, who briefed her, or even the substance of the briefings she had with the CIA. Speaker Pelosi is endangering the national security of the United States.
Speaker Pelosi has chosen to politicize the CIA and to demoralize its employees in order to take one more parting shot at the Bush administration, and to try to distract the public from her potentially career-ending exercise of bad judgment. By politicizing the intelligence community, Speaker Pelosi is reviving one of Washington's most tired and ugly old ways.
SPEAKER PELOSI IS SECOND IN LINE TO SUCCEED TO THE PRESIDENCY
Were Pelosi simply another member of the House of Representatives the problem would be less serious. But as Speaker of the House, she is second in line to succeed to the presidency and thus at the peak of government power. In accusing the CIA officers who briefed her on sensitive intelligence issues of lying, Speaker Pelosi has damaged the Agency's morale and denigrated its reputation in the eyes of our allies and of the American people.
CIA Director Leon Panetta, a former member of Congress who also served on the House Intelligence Committee with Pelosi, and a Democrat, has emphasized that “It is not our policy to mislead Congress. That is against our laws and our values.”
SPEAKER PELOSI SHOULD STEP ASIDE & CONGRESS SHOULD INVESTIGATE
The national security of the United States is more important than politics. It is time that Congressional Democrats and the Obama Administration stop trying to protect Pelosi at the expense of national security.
We ask that Speaker Pelosi voluntarily step aside from her duties, and that the Congress appoint a bi-partisan Select Intelligence Committee to investigate and determine what Speaker Pelosi knew and when she knew it.
When is Memorial Day No Longer Meaningful?
Posted by on 5.22.09 @ 1:24PM
When you follow Raleigh-area public schools protocol.
Haley to the Chief?
Posted by on 5.22.09 @ 12:18PM
One day before his visit to Iowa, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour will be traveling to New Hampshire. Despite denials, this looks suspiciously like the itinerary of a presidential candidate. Barbour is well regarded in Republican circles for his handling of Katrina and his highly successful record as Republican National Committe chairman during the 1994 "revolution." But he also has extensive K Street connections, middling to poor Cato Institute rankings on fiscal policy, and -- as I reported on the main site -- he has now raised taxes on a less-than-affluent group of Mississippians.
Mixing Milk with Kool-Aid
Posted by on 5.22.09 @ 12:11PM
Be sure to read Dan Flynn's City Journal expose on the real Harvey Milk.
Deft and Amusing
Posted by on 5.22.09 @ 10:39AM
We're not talking about Barack Obama. We're talking one of my favorite Governors, Tim Pawlenty. That's how the Wall Street Journal describes the Minnesota conservative's behavior at the close of this legislative session.
It goes like this: Minnesota is in the hole big time. The Democrats there, surprise, surprise, thought they could spend their way out of it. Through these ridiculous, proposed tax hikes, Pawlenty maintained some sound, conservative principles: Balance the budget, live within means, no new taxes!
Finally.
Right before session ended though, the Dems started sending Pawlenty spending bills thinking he'd veto them, call a special session and, like a spineless moderate, negotiate.
He didn't.
Upon receiving the last spending bill, he announced that he would exercise the power of "unallotment," which has been on the books since 1939 and which has been used four times. Under it, the governor is allowed to "unallot" (take away) any state spending for which there is no money to pay. Panicked, the DFL passed tax legislation to cover its blowout spending bills, 10 minutes before the session's end. Too late. The governor said he'd veto the bill and would not be calling back the legislature to do any more mischief.
Mr. Pawlenty is now free to strip $2.7 billion from state spending to balance the budget. Tax hikes are dead. He tells me this will be one of the first times in modern Minnesota history that the state will reduce the size of government in real terms, not just slow its rate of growth. "The correlation in recent history has been between job growth and states that have reasonable government cost structures," he says. These cuts, he says, will position Minnesota to take advantage of the recovery when it comes.
That's what I call Minnesota Nice. And if you think Pawlenty's disappeared from the national stage, think again. Tactics like this are not only good for the state and good for businesses, but good for giving conservatives hope for the future.
Lowry Nails Obama
Posted by on 5.22.09 @ 10:33AM
And here, in a wonderful column, Rich Lowry nails the real Obama: a speechifying poseur.
WashTimes on Cheney
Posted by on 5.22.09 @ 10:28AM
Here's what we at the Washington Times had to say today about Cheney. The question is, why can't our cowering congressmen who supposedly hail from the right make the case even half as effectively as a (wrongly) unpopular former vice president?
What? You Expect Us to Read Bills Before We Vote on Them?
Posted by on 5.22.09 @ 10:04AM
This is now apparently regarded as an absurdity. (Hat tip: Mary Katherine Ham at the Weekly Standard.)
"I Don't Believe In Excessive Veneration of the President"
Posted by on 5.22.09 @ 9:43AM
Kelly Jane Torrance's interview with recently Obama-endorsed novelist Joseph O'Neill and rumination on presidents' ostentatious reading habits is well worth your time.
On Second Thought
Posted by on 5.22.09 @ 9:04AM
Maybe I'm not such a fan of the Washington Times' reporting any more. Just look at how they intro their story today about the passage of Waxman-Markey Cap n' Tax bill out of committee yesterday:
President Obama's plan to arrest U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions took a historic step Thursday as the House Energy and Commerce Committee passed a plan to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions and establish a marketplace that would allow companies to buy and sell the right to pollute.
A "right to pollute"? If that's the case then just wipe all humans and mammals from the planet since we "pollute" every time we exhale (CO2). Talk about adopting the talking points of the environoiacs.
Another Opinion on Cheney
Posted by on 5.22.09 @ 5:17AM
Quin thinks highly of former Vice President Richard Cheney's talk yesterday. Unfortunately, I think the former veep talks a much better game than he gave us while in office, when he talked always authoritatively but not always accurately about the threat facing us.
My Cato Institue colleague David Rittgers, a Special Forces officer who served three tours in Afghanistan, brings a different perspective from the field, which Richard Cheney never had:
In case you missed it, President Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney spoke separately today on terrorism and national security. Like two boxers at a pre-fight press conference, they each touted their strength over their opponent. They espoused deep differences in their views on national counterterrorism strategy.
The Thrilla in Manilla it ain't. As Gene Healy has pointed out, they agree on a lot more than they admit to. Harvard Law professor and former Bush Office of Legal Counsel head Jack Goldsmith makes the same point at the New Republic. Glenn Greenwald made a similar observation.
However, the areas where they differ are important: torture, closing Guantanamo, criminal prosecution, and messaging. In these key areas, Obama edges out Cheney.
On the issue of torture Rittgers says simply:
Torture is incompatible with our values and our national security interests. When we break our own rules (read: laws) against torture, we erode everyone's faith that America is the good guy in this global fight.
Torture has been embraced by politicians, but the people who are fighting terrorists on the ground want none of it. As former FBI agent Ali Soufan made clear in Senate hearings last week, it is not an effective interrogation technique. Senior military leaders such as General Petraeus, former CENTCOM commanders Joseph Hoar and Anthony Zinni, and former Commandant of the Marine Corps Charles Krulak all denounce the use of torture.
If we captured Al Qaeda operatives who had tortured one of our soldiers in pursuit of information, we would be prosecuting them. Torture is no different and no more justifiable because we are doing it.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Glenn Beck on ACORN and Drummond Pike’s Tides Foundation
Posted by on 5.21.09 @ 7:23PM
The "Glenn Beck Program" had a segment today on Fox News about the connection between ACORN and the Tides Foundation. (I can't find a video clip of the segment online yet.)
He said that Drummond Pike, head of the Tides Foundation, wrote a personal check for about $700,000 to ACORN to cover the bulk of the $948,000 that Dale Rathke, brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke, embezzled from the ACORN network.
The Tides Foundation is a pass-through entity. Wealthy liberals give the charity money, take the tax deduction, and then tell Tides which causes to give their money to. The money is then given in the name of Tides and the real donor's name is withheld. Pike has said that keeping the identity of Tides donors secret is very important.
Wade Rathke, who was expelled by ACORN's national board last summer for his role in covering up the embezzlement, is a member of the Tides board. Suspicious? You betcha.
Meanwhile, ACORN stands accused of election fraud, extortion, and racketeering, yet congressional leaders have no interest in investigating the group. House Financial Services Committee Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts) and House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers (D-Michigan) refuse to probe ACORN.
Why?
In a clip shown on Beck's show today, reporter Griff Jenkins asked Frank about ACORN. Frank, who claims ACORN is not eligible for $8.5 billion in federal funding, tried to blame ACORN on the out-of-office Bush administration.
The congressman probably won't do anything about ACORN. Why would he? ACORN supporters are his power base.
Great Reuters Analysis
Posted by on 5.21.09 @ 6:15PM
The always-excellent Steve Holland at Reuters really captured the flavor the Cheney event today. Read it here.
I was sitting next to Steve during the speech. I endorse every word of his description of the event.
Cheney was terrific
Posted by on 5.21.09 @ 6:04PM
In the past I have made quite clear my admiration for former Vice President Dick Cheney. So it will come as no surprise that I think his speech today at the American Enterprise Institute was pitch perfect. But I will say something stronger: I think that if somebody came to the subject fresh, with no preconceived notions, and watched (as so many of us did) President Barack Obama and Cheney back to back today, dueling across town, that open-minded person would believe that Cheney made a far stronger case. And oddly enough, Cheney's very lack of "style points" served only to emphasize rather than detract from the simple, straightforward weight of his message.
Obama looked and sounded like a politician posing for cameras while self-consciously striving for the loftiest rhetoric and the most subtle but hurtful denigrations of those who disagreed with him. His "moral preening" factor, though, was patently obvious, and a bit offensive.
Cheney looked and sounded like a man who is all business, all seriousness -- and wise. He did not pause to emphasize applause lines. He did not pose for the cameras. He did not raise or lower his voice for effect. He just gave us his message straight and unvarnished, and almost in a monotone. But the words were powerful enough to overcome all that, and the meaning of the words more powerful still.
Listen to Obama's speech, and you come away empty, as if you just were given the intellectual equivalent of meringue. Listen to Cheney, and you come away thinking you have just had the intellectual equivalent of a full, stick-to-your-ribs, meat-and-potatoes meal.
It really was a remarkable thing to be there at AEI. There was palpable tension int eh room as Obama failed, and failed, and failed for 28 whole minutes after his scheduled time to start his comments -- clearly trying to upstage Cheney by waiting to speak all the way until just beore Cheney himself was scheduled to start. There was a sense of something momentous, of a real challenge-and-response sort of situation. It was, if an AEI event can be so described, exciting. And it became even more of a mano-a-mano thing when Obama went on not for the pre-advertised 35 minutes, but for 50 whole minutes, as if deliberately trying to squeeze all life out of Cheney's own address.
Obama's gambit didn't work. It merely served to ratchet up the anticipation for Cheney's response. (Cheney was sort of funny when he opened by quipping that Obama never would have survived being in the House subject to its "five minute rule" for floor speeches.) And it became all the more remarkable when Cheney seemed to answer OBama point for point for point, often responding to the exact language Obama used -- even though Cheney's speech was handed out BEFORE Obama began talking, so it clearly was not a spur-of-the-moment tit for tat. In sum, the fact that Cheney so well anticipated Obama's screed served to emphaszie how well Cheney had thought through what he wanted to say.
And what Cheney wanted to say, and did say, was utterly superb. Watch the whole speech for yourself, here. (Do NOT read the speech if you can watch it. The text on the page is as prepared, not as delivered. Cheney cut out one gag paragraph at the beginning about heading a search for a new trustee, but inserted an EXTREMLY important paragraph later. In fact, here is his insertion, about the CIA people who did the interrogations: They were "“especially prepared to apply techniques within the boundaries of their training and the limits of the law. Torture was never permitted, and the methods were given careful, legal review before they were approved. Interrogators had authoritative guidance on the line between toughness and torture, and they knew to stay on the right side of it.”
Finally, as an aside, I loved Cheney's shot at the NY Times, here:
Our government prevented attacks and saved lives through the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which let us intercept calls and track contacts between al-Qaeda operatives and persons inside the United States. The program was top secret, and for good reason, until the editors of the New York Times got it and put it on the front page. After 9/11, the Times had spent months publishing the pictures and the stories of everyone killed by al-Qaeda on 9/11. Now here was that same newspaper publishing secrets in a way that could only help al-Qaeda. It impressed the Pulitzer committee, but it damn sure didn't serve the interests of our country, or the safety of our people.
Okay, that's enough for now. Hail to Richard Cheney, a great American.
What Hersh Actually Said
Posted by on 5.21.09 @ 3:53PM
On Monday, I posted an report from a Pakistani news site claiming that Seymour Hersh went on Arab TV and accused Dick Cheney of ordering the asassination of Benazir Bhutto. I updated it soon after when Hersh denied he made those comments. This afternoon, I was able to take a look at the actual interview he gave, and it's now clear he never made the accusation, or even mentioned Bhutto.
Here's part of the exchange with Hersh had with Gulf News:
GULF NEWS: You have spoken about an assassination unit that reported to Cheney called the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). There have been allegations that this unit was responsible for former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri's assassination.
SEYMOUR HERSH: I can't verify [that]. What I said was, and what I have written more than once, is that there's a special unit that does high-value targeting of men that we believe are known to be involved in anti-American activities, or are believed to be planning such activities.
In Cheney's view this isn't murder, but carrying out the "war on terror". And in the view of me and my friends, including people in government, this is crazy. The vice president is committing a crime. You can't authorise the murder of people. And it's not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, it's in a lot of other countries, in the Middle East and in South Asia and North Africa and even central America.
In the early days, many of the names were cleared through Cheney's office. One of his aides, John Hanna, went on TV and acknowledged that the programme exists, and said killing these people is not murder but an act of war that is justified legally.
The former head of JSOC has just been named the new commander in charge of the war in Afghanistan, which is very interesting to me.
About Hariri, what I've always maintained - I was in the position of seeing and interviewing President Bashar Al Assad on the day Hariri was killed in February 2005 - it seemed clear to me that he knew nothing about it. But I never wrote anything about it, even the fact that I was there, because I had no empirical or factual basis for knowing whether he was involved or not, and I never did. And I decided to wait for the investigations and they have come up with no concrete evidence that Syria did it. Despite the fact that one of the earlier investigators speculated that he did, he didn't know.
Could JSOC have been responsible?
No. Hariri, America. No. Impossible. There was no reason. JSOC's responsibility was to go after what they call high-value targets.
You can read a transcript of the whole interview here.
I picked up the original item because it seemed plausible given that Hersh had already publicly claimed that Cheney had run an "executive assassination ring." But obviously, I should have treated the Pakistani report with more skepticism.
GE's Terrible Jeff Immelt Self-Servingly Lauds Cap-and-Tax
Posted by on 5.21.09 @ 2:30PM
General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, a left-wing panderer who has presided over his company's decline in recent years, says the economy-killing cap-and-trade system of trading emission permits is the best way to crack down on carbon emissions, Jeff Poor of NewsBusters writes.
And Immelt seems to be using his company's media conglomerate NBC Universal, which owns media outlets NBC, MSNBC and CNBC, to promote GE's financial interest in regulating carbon.
GE is also a major player in the United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), which Timothy P. Carney profiled for Capital Research Center last year in the June 2008 Organization Trends. USCAP is also pushing for cap-and-trade.
So is Goldman Sachs , which along with Al Gore, will rake in incomprehensibly huge sums of money from carbon trading.
Obama-Proof Senate?
Posted by on 5.21.09 @ 2:20PM
After the Senate voted 90-6 to deny funds for closing Gitmo, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs conceded that “the Congress deserves more detail in a plan.” A plan before a vote? What a novel idea.
Obama-Proof
Senate?
By Asher Embry
They passed Obama’s Stimulus in something like a minute;
They clearly didn’t care to know exactly what was in it.
They also spent a fortune when the Senate passed his
budget;
With little explanation, Orzag easily could fudge it.
In days of old, the Senate needed 50 votes to act.
Next, only legislation passed which 60 members backed.
But with its Gitmo vote perhaps a different day began:
It takes 90 votes against him to force “O” to have a
plan?
They’re tackling education, health care, energy and more;
Fundamentally they’ve changed our lives; sent Trillions out the
door.
All Spring they’ve legislated without caring why or how.
Suddenly they want a plan? What’s happened up ‘til now?
They need a plan for everything before they
pass a bill!
If they don’t take this seriously, then voters surely will.
(You can read more of Asher Embry's Political Verse at www.politicalverse.com.)
RNC Members Should Look in the Mirror
Posted by on 5.21.09 @ 2:17PM
The Republican National Committee had its fun, tossing the "S" word at the Democrats. Reports the Washington Times:
The Republican National Committee passed a resolution at a special session Wednesday condemning President Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress for leading the United States toward socialism, a victory for the party's beleaguered chairman who sought the toned-down language in the measure.
RNC Chairman Michael S. Steele adamantly had opposed the initial version of the resolution that had - presumptuously, some Republicans thought - called on the Democrats to rename themselves "the Democratic Socialist Party."
Jim is a bit more forgiving than me about this slightly bizarre exercise. Adopting a formal resolution for the sole purpose of name-calling seems a waste of time. After all, the Democrats are preparing to rule and ruin while the Republican Party looks like little more than a collection of road kill.
There's also the point made by Cato Institute President Ed Crane that President Obama is more statist than socialist. Obama might be the most statist president ever. Still, there is a difference.
But my biggest beef is: who are the RNC members calling socialists? President George W. Bush and the Republican Congress engaged in an orgy of spending and added the biggest expansion of the welfare state in four decades. They centralized more power in Washington. The Bush administration pushed the financial bail-out by threatening doom otherwise. The Bush administration tossed billions at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to bail them out without proposing any limits on their money-losing activities. The Bush administration chose to bail out the auto industry, lemon socialism at its most sour. The Republican Party's presidential nominee, John McCain, came up with one of the dumbest ideas all year--having Uncle Sam buy every bad mortgage in America at face value. He also was a great fan of cap and trade environmental controls, the centerpiece of the Democratic environmental program.
Yes, the Democrats are worse. They are thorough-going, big-spending statists. But the RNC can't very well toss around the word socialist unless its members look in the mirror while doing so.
Internationalizing National Law
Posted by on 5.21.09 @ 1:48PM
President Barack Obama's upcoming Supreme Court nomination is likely to be his most important pick so far. But that doesn't mean he hasn't made some dubious choices--even among Democrats who had paid their taxes--along the way.
One is Harold Koh, the Yale Law School dean tapped to be the State Department's top lawyer. Koh is a talented lawyer and perfectly reasonable, if liberal fellow. But he seems far too willing to let international law subsume American law.
Reports the Cybercast News Service:
Harold Koh, nominated by President Barack Obama to be the State Department's top legal adviser, once argued that U.S. federal court judges - including the Supreme Court - are the "critical link" between international and domestic law and play a critical role in bringing international norms into force as domestic law.
Koh, currently dean of the Yale Law School, explained that his concept of "transnationalism" was the "downloading" of international laws and customs into domestic law, whether through the legislative process or through federal courts' use of international law in interpreting the Constitution of the United States.
Transnational law, according to Koh is "(1) law that is ‘downloaded' from international law: for example, a law that is domesticated or internalized into municipal law ... 2) law that is ‘uploaded then downloaded': for example, a rule that originates in a domestic legal system ... which then becomes part of international law ... and from there becomes internalized into nearly every legal system in the world; and 3) law that is borrowed or ‘horizontally transplanted' from one national system to another."
Writing in the Penn State International Law Review (Vol. 24, No. 4, 2006), Koh argued that federal judges were the linchpin in transnational law due to their ability to unilaterally read international or foreign legal standards into their interpretations of the U.S. Constitution.
"[F]ederal judges have become an increasingly critical link between the international and the domestic legal spheres," Koh wrote. "Over the decades, American judges have helped internalize international legal norms into U.S. domestic law through a range of interpretive techniques."
Being aware of how other nations order themselves is one thing. Substituting foreign standards for American jurisprudence is quite another.
Well, at least he isn't likely to sit on the Supreme Court, where he could turn his whims into law.
God Hates Elections
Posted by on 5.21.09 @ 1:40PM
At least, that's what more liberal clergy apparently think. They are backing so-called "card check," which would allow union organizers to mislead and intimidate their way to victory.
Reports Cybercast News Service:
Union leaders, clergy and liberal members of Congress gathered in the mostly empty U.S. Capitol Visitors Center early Tuesday morning to hear multicultural choir music, speeches from religious leaders--and to pray for the passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).
The event was a prayer breakfast sponsored by Faith Leaders for Workplace Fairness--a coalition of liberal religious groups that was formed for the sole purpose of promoting EFCA, commonly known as the "card-check" bill.
Under this bill, union organizers could compel an employer to recognize a union as representing the employer's workers any time more than 50 percent of workers in a workplace publicly signed cards saying they wanted the union. When that happened, there would be no secret ballot among the workers on whether to unionize, and the workers who had not signed the public cards would have no say in the matter.
As I've written for the Spectator, the fairest way to decide on a union organizing drive is to hold a vote. Why why hold a Soviet-style ballot where the commissar gets to look at your vote when the Soviet Union is gone?
Cheney vs. Obama
Posted by on 5.21.09 @ 1:15PM
President Obama and Dick Cheney continue to be the strongest advocates for their vision of how to fight the War on Terror. The text of Obama's speech is here and Cheney's speech is here. Obama gave a characteristically nuanced speech, explaining how his administration has sought to fight terrorism in a way that is consistent with our values, and said "we went off course" during the Bush administration.
I thought this was the strongest section of Cheney's speech:
The administration seems to pride itself on searching for some kind of middle ground in policies addressing terrorism. They may take comfort in hearing disagreement from opposite ends of the spectrum. If liberals are unhappy about some decisions, and conservatives are unhappy about other decisions, then it may seem to them that the President is on the path of sensible compromise. But in the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half exposed. You cannot keep just some nuclear-armed terrorists out of the United States, you must keep every nuclear-armed terrorist out of the United States. Triangulation is a political strategy, not a national security strategy. When just a single clue that goes unlearned … one lead that goes unpursued … can bring on catastrophe – it’s no time for splitting differences. There is never a good time to compromise when the lives and safety of the American people are in the balance.
Cheney also reminded the audience that there weren't any attacks on U.S. soil in the seven and a half years since 9/11, which he attributed to the administration's effective policies that Obama is unraveling.
While I think this is a very important debate, there is a sense in which it doesn't really matter. Obama is running the show now, and he's going to decide what he thinks will make America safe -- no president wants to see thousands of American civilians killed. He says that the Bush administration's policies not only violated our ideals, but they made us less safe, fine. Now he's changing those policies, so we'll be able to judge him based on his performance.
That's why I thought this statement by Obama, toward the end of his speech, was interesting:
Neither I nor anyone else can standing here today can say that there will not be another terrorist attack that takes American lives. But I can say with certainty that my Administration – along with our extraordinary troops and the patriotic men and women who defend our national security – will do everything in our power to keep the American people safe.
Obama campaigned for nearly two years on the premise that Bush was utterly incompetent and as president, Obama has displayed confidence that his own way of doing things is superior. I hope Obama is correct. But if there's a major terrorist attack on his watch, it won't be satisfactory to simply say "we tried our best." It's hard to argue that national security policies that kept us safe for seven and a half years were wrongheaded, if you change those policies and there's another attack on the homeland.
4th Judge Could Have Made a Difference
Posted by on 5.21.09 @ 12:37PM
Kris Allen won American Idol last night in what many considered an upset, and much of this morning's analysis ponders what could have caused it. Much of it surrounds speculation that the wholesome Christian vote for Allen far surpassed the support for the "controversial, theatrical and incredibly 'out there'" Adam Lambert:
So was it the Christian vote that prevailed in Allen's favor?
The 23-year-old UCA student has been on the worship team at New Life Church for years and helps with their outreach programs, but unlike previous winners such as Jordin Sparks and Carrie Underwood who made their faith very well known, Allen consciously refrained from making mention of his virtuous values throughout the competition.
"This is a singing competition, not a church thing," Allen told Tarts earlier this week while Lambert added that the "vote is based on talent and performing, not religion."
With Allen having shied away from the sectarian spotlight, his local church made up for it. The New Life Church in Greater Little Rock, Arkansas urged churchgoers to prayer and vote for the 'Idol' finalist, created a Facebook link on the church Web site in support of their hometown hero and his proud Pastor, Rick Bezet, flew to Los Angeles for the momentous finale.
A blogger for the Examiner in Little Rock, Arkansas, wondered:
Did Adam Lambert lose because he was just a bit too flamboyant, too gay or misunderstood?
And the Gay & Lesbian Issues Examiner blogger adds:
Bill O'Reilly said that the final vote probably came down to religion, and as much as I hate to agree with him, I think he makes a good point. Kris is practically a poster boy for heterosexual, white-bread Christianity, while Adam is an in-your-face Jewish gay man. That could very well have played a significant role in the final voting among red state voters with texting capability.
From my perspective, although I align myself ideologically with the Christians, I thought Lambert was far more talented. Perhaps only one difference in the show this year could have changed the outcome: adding Perez Hilton as the fourth judge instead of Kara DioGuardi. He could have asked the question of all questions of Kris, and still could have penned a song that wouldn't have been any worse than "No Boundaries."
What's Basic?
Posted by on 5.21.09 @ 11:36AM
I'm a fan of the Washington Times reporting, but in a story about state budget deficits and how many are raising taxes to cope, what appears to be a throwaway line really bugged me:
States from New York to Hawaii are proposing tax increases to fund basic state services.
This is absolute crapola. States have plenty of money to "fund basic services." They are in a fix largely because they've gone far beyond "basic."
A Lesson In Strategic Surprise
Posted by on 5.21.09 @ 11:31AM
Timing, they say, is everything. At the moment, no one knows that better than the EastWest Institute. On Tuesday, with much fanfare, the New York-based think tank released what it billed as the "first-ever U.S.-Russian joint threat assessment" on Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities. The report is a study in threat minimization, with every possible technological impediment to Iran's emergence as a nuclear power highlighted and stressed. Of particular note, however, is its take on Iran's burgeoning ballistic missile arsenal. Despite official pronouncements from Tehran on the subject, the report concludes, there is currently no evidence that Iran has a ballistic missile with a range of 2,000 kilometers. So imagine the Institute's surprise and chagrin when, less than twenty-four hours later, the Islamic Republic successfully tested just such a capability: the 2,000 kilometer range solid fuel Sajjil-2, capable of striking southeastern Europe and U.S. bases throughout the Middle East.
All of this bears more than a passing resemblance to what happened a decade ago, when the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, better known as the Rumsfeld Commission, issued a similar warning. The Commission's report, released publicly on July 15, 1998, warned in part that the threat posed by the "emerging capabilities" of aspiring weapons states like North Korea and Iran, as well as strategic competitors like Russia and China, "is broader, more mature and evolving more rapidly than has been reported in estimates and reports by the Intelligence Community." That assessment was roundly ridiculed by a confident CIA - that is, until North Korea suddenly launched its Taepo-Dong intercontinental ballistic missile over Japan some four weeks later, surprising U.S. policymakers and the sages in the intelligence community alike.
The enduring lesson from that incident, and from the EastWest Institute's embarrassment this week, is that "strategic surprise" - what the preeminent strategist Colin Gray terms "the possibility of achieving decisive results from attacks launched on short, or zero, warning" - has a way of upsetting the best-laid predictions, and that our adversaries are investing heavily in precisely those types of technologies. It is also a timely reminder that, when it comes to thinking about such threats, assuming that our enemies have more (rather than less) sophistication is the only way that one can be surprised pleasantly.
Sloppy Social Conservatives
Posted by on 5.21.09 @ 10:45AM
Maggie Gallagher is on the money in explaining why social conservatives are so ineffective politically. While I blame the Republican Party more than she does, in politics you have to make your own success -- and too often social conservatives don't. Their only leverage, as Gallagher says, is to threaten to withold their votes.
In my experience, social conservative organizations are less professional and polished than other organizations even within the conservative movement. They tend to lack effective spokesmen. And many of their spokesmen, I have found, are unable to call a friendly reporter back by the time of his deadline. As a social conservative myself, it doesn't suprise me that such organizations are so often and easily outmaneuvered by gay-rights groups and other social liberals.
Here Comes the Pension Bail-Out
Posted by on 5.21.09 @ 10:34AM
We've already spent about $13 trillion on bail-outs. You'd think that would be enough. But no. Uncle Sam is like the drunken uncle who cosigned loans for everyone who asked. Now it's the federal guarantee fund for private pensions that is essentially bankrupt.
The federal agency that guarantees corporate pensions was $33.5 billion in the red at the end of March, triple its deficit six months earlier, the agency's head told a Senate committee yesterday.
The recession threatens to add to the strain on the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. by pushing more companies into bankruptcy and leaving the struggling agency responsible for their pensions. For example, the agency faces a potential tidal wave of claims from Chrysler and General Motors, whose pension plans are underfunded by an estimated $29 billion, the Government Accountability Office said.
If the PBGC's condition continues to deteriorate, the government could come under pressure to shore it up with taxpayer funds, the GAO said in testimony to the Senate's Special Committee on Aging.
"The committee has grave concerns about the agency's viability," said the panel's chairman, Herb Kohl (D-Wis.).
Remember, it's only money! Even if the government takes everything you own to pay off its debts, you can still be happy, right?
Texas, Florida Rumbling About Cornyn's NRSC Move
Posted by on 5.21.09 @ 12:17AM
Key Republicans in Texas are alarmed by Sen. John Cornyn's decision, as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, to endorse Florida Gov. Charlie Crist in a contested Senate race 15 months before the GOP primary.
"If they're going to do it in Florida, what's to stop them from doing it everywhere?" a Texas Republican source told me late Wednesday. "It's absurd that the NRSC is doing this. It's an insult to the base."
Texas GOP chairwoman Tina Benkiser has not yet commented on the NRSC controversy. However, heat from conservatives in Florida -- including bloggers Doug Hagin and Andrea Shea King -- has caused that state's Republican Party chairman to rescind his previous endorsement of Crist, the St. Petersburg Times reported Wednesday night:
Republican Party of Florida Chairman Jim Greer, facing intense and growing backlash over meddling in the U.S. Senate primary, is backing off.
In a letter to party supporters tonight, Greer defends his actions but said the party is now "neutral" in the contest between Charlie Crist and Marco Rubio.
John Mercurio of NewsMax reports that Rubio "plans to run an anti-establishment, low-dollar primary campaign":
Minutes after Crist announced his bid, Rubio released a Web ad highlighting Crist’s support for President Obama's economic stimulus package, a position that doesn’t sit well with many GOP primary voters. "True bipartisanship is not 'if you can't beat them, join them,'" the candidate told more than 150 people last week at the Republican Club of South Sarasota. But while Rubio offers a contrast to Crist politically, he said he doesn't plan to run a negative campaign. "I don't have anything against him personally. I don't believe in order for me to win the debate I have to convince you the other guy is a bad person," he said.
Meanwhile, the Broward-Palm Beach New Times reports, the NRSC's endorsement "may have galvanized the party's conservative wing against Crist," sparking an online backlash led by Erick Erickson and John Hawkins. The stakes in this battle between the grassroots and the "Republican Establishment" are clear, as The American Spectator's Larry Thornberry reported from Tampa:
You'll never hear an encouraging word from Crist on any conservative social issue. He's pro-abortion and thinks marriage-like legal arrangements between homosexuals are fine. He recently put a liberal Democrat on the Florida Supreme Court. In Crist's speeches, conservatives will wait in vain to hear any of their principles promoted. What they hear are endless lullabies about "bipartisanship," "diversity," and other warm-sounding, non-sequiturs from the Democratic hymn book. These are just the most actionable of Crist's sins against conservative principles.
Further developments are likely today. Stay tuned.
UPDATE 5:20 a.m.: Things are happening so fast it's hard to keep up, and the Lakeland (Fla.) Ledger missed the news about Crist rescinding the state GOP's endorsement of Crist. But the Ledger does capture the essence of the grassroots complaint:
"I thought the idea is for real Republicans to vote on primary day, not for so-called party leaders to tell people who to vote for," said Sid Dinerstein, chairman of the Palm Beach Republican Party, one of several local clubs asking the state party to stay out of primaries.
The question at stake, according to Republican activist Aaron Marks of The Next Right, is "Who ultimately controls the GOP, the grassroots or the machine?"
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
James Bond versus Nancy Pelosi
Posted by on 5.20.09 @ 11:00PM
A new ad from the Republican Party makes fun of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) for her claim that the CIA lied to her about the use of waterboarding on accused terrorists:
Another Senate Seat, Another Kennedy
Posted by on 5.20.09 @ 8:46PM
For those longing to be transported back to the magical days of Camelot, but left heartbroken by Caroline Kennedy's unsuccessful "campaign" for Hillary Clinton's Senate seat, there is a new hope...
Behold Christopher Kennedy.
Distressingly, there seems to be a never drying well of Kennedys waiting for their chance to join the family business. Dispatch one and another pops up. It's like a political version of Whack-A- Mole.
Well, give this member of the clan credit where credit is due: he will actually face voters in his quest for office, as opposed to his more famous cousin, who attempted to avoid that part of the process.
Democratic Socialists of America
Posted by on 5.20.09 @ 7:05PM
The Republican National Committee passed a resolution decrying the Democrats' "march toward socialism." I don't really have a problem with it -- modern American liberalism really is just a moderate form of democratic socialism, it is becoming less moderate under President Obama, and both the Republican Party and the broader Right have a long, distinguished history of criticizing the Democrats for "creeping socialism."
I'm just glad they didn't adopt a resolution renaming the Democrats the "Democrat Socialist Party." Why? Because there's a fine line between ideological labeling and childish-sounding name-calling, and that proposed resolution seemed to be on that wrong side of that line. Sort of like insisting on calling the Democrats the "Democrat Party" instead of the "Democratic Party."
Specter Sides With Pelosi on CIA
Posted by on 5.20.09 @ 4:59PM
The Politico reports:
Sen. Arlen Specter appeared to side with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Wednesday in her spat with the CIA over harsh interrogation methods, saying the agency has a history of being less than forthright with Congress.
“The CIA has a very bad record when it comes ... to honesty. It goes back a long time,” Specter said in a speech before the American Law Institute at a Washington hotel.
Ranking Intelligence Committee Republican: Nancy Pelosi "Incompetent"
Posted by on 5.20.09 @ 4:15PM
Congressman Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the ranking Republican on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, declared House Speaker Nancy Pelosi an "incompetent" leader in a conference call this afternoon. Despite prodding from several bloggers on the call, he declined to call for Pelosi to step down.
"If she really believes that the CIA has lied to her systematically for seven years, what does that say about her leadership?" Hoekstra asked. He repeated House Minority Leader John Boehner's call for Pelosi to supply evidence for her allegations or retract them. He said that while he disagreed with the House speaker and viewed her as "from my perspective, incompetent," she should be given the opportunity to present any proof she has before anyone should call on her to resign.
Hoekstra argued that Pelosi wanted the Bush administration held accountable for its interrogation techniques. "When it comes to her being held accountable," he continued, "she kind of sits there and wrings her hands." Hoekstra then listed her criticisms of the CIA, the Bush administration, and others before saying "in typical Democrat fashion" with Pelosi "it's always everyone else's fault."
The congressman was somewhat less critical of President Obama, suggesting that he might be open to evidence about what works in interrogating terror detainees as he gains experience protecting the country. "When he said he was going to get rid of military tribunals and then he looked at the evidence, what did he do" Hoekstra asked. "He kept the tribunals." Hoekstra noted that Obama also changed his mind of the release of abuse photos and "took the surge policy from Iraq and moved it to Afghanistan." He said he was hopeful Obama might also change his mind about interrogation and Guantanamo Bay.
Republicans on the call also hit the Democrats hard over cap and trade, with Congressman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) warning that "[Henry] Waxman probably has the votes to narrowly pass this thing in committee" and that "we need to get all the Blue Dogs" to be able to stop it in the full House. "This cap and trade stuff just reeks," Upton said of Waxman-Markey.
Buried in Waxman-Markey
Posted by on 5.20.09 @ 2:25PM
Discovered by our friends at American Energy Alliance, on Page 781:
Title IV, Subtitle B, Part 2, Section 426, of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, states: An eligible worker (specifically, workers who lose their jobs as a result of this measure) may receive a climate change adjustment allowance under this subsection for a period of not longer than 156 weeks…80 percent of the monthly premium of any health insurance coverage…up to a maximum payment of $1,500 in relocation allowance…and job search expenses not exceed[ing] $1,500.
What -- no Jobs Bank?!
Forgitmo that Transfer
Posted by on 5.20.09 @ 12:33PM
The Senate has voted to block President Obama from transferring prisoners detained at Guantanamo Bay to the United States.
Sen. Hagan: Keep Bush's U.S. Attorney
Posted by on 5.20.09 @ 12:27PM
A story in Sunday's News & Observer of Raleigh reported that Democrat Sen. Kay Hagan of Raleigh was moving expeditiously in her responsibilities to recommend to President Obama a replacement for U.S. Attorney George Holding, a holdover from the Bush administration:
"We're definitely working on those right now," Hagan said in an interview (last) Wednesday. "And hopefully within the next few weeks we can go forward."
The newspaper reported that the senator had formed a search committee for the task. Meanwhile Holding has been vigorously investigating former Democrat Sen. John Edwards over potential payments to his mistress from campaign funds, and he's also looking into several allegations against recently departed Democrat Gov. Mike Easley. The N&O continued:
Gary Pearce, a Democratic strategist, said Hagan must tread carefully in a situation without precedent in the state.
"We've never had this kind of run of scandals in North Carolina, and we've never had them occur at this cusp of time, when the parties are changing and the U.S. attorneys are going to change," he said. "It's a sensitive issue, a political hot potato. Does she replace Holding when he's on these cases? Then you look like you are trying to protect Edwards and Easley."
Today brings another dramatic turn of events, in which Hagan has suddenly announced she believes Holding should stay on the job until his investigations are complete. While that may appear on its face to represent a burst of common sense from the senator, there may be another contributing factor: a member of her search committee was spotted at Easley's residence yesterday.
(Hagan's) comments today came a day after the resignation of one member of the three-person screening panel that Hagan established to winnow candidates for the top prosecutors' positions in North Carolina.
Locke Clifford, a criminal defense lawyer from Greensboro, stepped down on Tuesday but did not cite a reason. Hagan said he has not been involved in screening for a replacement of Holding, but was involved in assessing judicial appointments.
The panel had been expecting to interview candidates last week and this one, according to the panel's chairman, Burley Mitchell. Mitchell is a former chief justice of the N.C. Supreme Court....
Clifford has not returned calls or made comments. But Clifford's vehicle was spotted at the Easley home on Tuesday.
That sure put Hagan and state Democrats in a bind. Now the investigation will continue unimpeded.
Republican Lawmakers Introduce Alternative Health Care Plan
Posted by on 5.20.09 @ 11:50AM
On the main site, Peter Ferarra has the details of an alternate health care plan being introduced today by four Republicans (Tom Coburn and Richard Burr in the Senate; Paul Ryan and Devin Nunes in the House). It's worth looking at this development both from a policy and political standpoint.
Let's start with policy. One central aspect of the plan would end the discriminatation in the tax code against people who don't obtain their insurance through their employers. The subsidy, which is estimated at $300 billion a year by some, can instead be offered to individuals in the form of $2,300 tax credits (or $5,7000 for families). This is a key step to true health care reform, because it will help to expand coverage, broaden consumer choice, promote competition among insurers, and allow people to take their insurance with them from job to job. When John McCain proposed this during the campaign, it was savaged by the Obama campaign as a new tax on employer-based health care, but since that time both Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee have talked about the idea of at least capping the tax subsidy given that it represents such a large amount of money. So, the political environment is much more receptive, or at least less hostile, to the idea than it was last fall.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Grace-Marie Turner and Joseph R. Antos describe another feature of the Republican plan:
Low-income Americans would get a supplemental debit card of up to $5,000 to help them purchase insurance and pay out-of-pocket costs. They would have an incentive to spend wisely since up to one-fourth of any unspent money in the accounts could be rolled over to the next year. The combination of the refundable tax credit and debit card gives lower-income Americans a way out of the Medicaid ghetto so they can have the dignity of private insurance.
This would represent a new subsidy, and I'd like to learn more about what levels of income it would be phased in at and how much it would cost. Philosophically speaking, I'm opposed to the idea of subsidizing health care, because I don't think it's one of the proper functions of the federal government even before taking into acount the costs involved. And I do believe that you can greatly expand coverage purely by changing the tax code and getting rid of costly mandates requiring insurers to offer certain benefits, because some consumers want higher-deductible policies with less generous benefits but lower monthly premiums. Even if such reforms were implemented, however, it's undeniable that there would still be millions of low-income Americans who would slip through the cracks and still not be able to afford health care coverage. So, if we're going to inevitably have some form of subsidies, then this debit card approach, at first blush, seems like a better way to go than some of the other ideas I've seen considered. But again, I'd have questions. Yes, maybe the responsible beneficiaries will budget themselves and avoid unneccessary care so that they can roll over money to the next year. But what happens to those people who aren't as responsible, who blow through money in 6 months? In the face of news accounts of poor Americans who can't get the health care they need because they already maxed out their debit card for the year, is the government going to say, "Sorry, tough luck"? I think we all know the answer.
Ferarra writes:
Under the bill, each state would set up their own Health Insurance Exchange, where insurers could compete to offer coverage to everyone in the state. All insurance offered on the Exchange would have to provide coverage meeting the same standards as the insurance offered to federal employees and members of Congress under the Federal Employee Health Benefits System. This would ensure comprehensive coverage. But insurers could offer, and consumers could choose to buy, insurance coverage outside the Exchange.
This also makes me skittish, because it envolves the states running exchanges in which only government-regulated policies are offered, and it creates the infastructure for the eventual introduction of a government-run plan within the exchanges. Also, the fact that each state exchange would have to meet federal guidelines anyway, undermines the purpose of having 50 different exchanges throughout the country.
That's the policy element. Politically, I think this was a masterful move by this group of Republicans. Keep in mind that an alternative never has any chance of being passed, but it's a statement by the minority party about their approach to an issue. Agree or disagree with the components of the plan, these Republicans have released an undeniably serious health care proposal, and they have done so months before the Democrats have come up with theirs.
The big question now is how many other Republicans will get behind it. In other words, will this simply be a Republican alternative, or will it become the Republican alternative? When I saw Republican Sen. Mike Enzi (the ranking member of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee) speak last week, he was dismissive of the idea of presenting a GOP alternative. He argued that such a plan would be voted down easily, and then Republicans would be shut out of the process. It's better, he said, for Republicans to work with Democrats so they can see some of their ideas reflected in the final legislation that actually has a chance of passage. Other influential Senate Republicans on health care, such as Charles Grassley and Orrin Hatch, have also been speaking about the need for a bipartisan solution. But by releasing this alternative so early in the process, it squeezes those Republicans who are engaged in an ultimately futile effort to bridge differences with Democrats over health care. This offers a way to oppose the Democratic approach to health care while pushing back against charges that the GOP is "the party of no."
Papering over the California Tax Revolt
Posted by on 5.20.09 @ 11:39AM
California voters yesterday flipped their political class a well deserved bird, rejecting several ballot initiatives that would have increased their taxing and borrowing power -- with the possible exception of a measure that would keep legislators from getting pay raises while the state is running a deficit. But the politicians weren't the only establishment hands on the receiving end of this obscene gesture. Over at Reason, Matt Welch takes a look at how the state's newspaper editorial boards stacked up against the will of the people. You can see (complete with a handy-dandy chart) the answer is: not very well.
The San Diego Union Tribue and the heroic Orange County Register were the only major newspapers in the entire state too editorially oppose all the government goodie-grabs on the ballot box. And people wonder why newspapers are going out of business?
Daily Must-Reads
Posted by on 5.20.09 @ 10:35AM
- Obama's "art of the possible" (WSJ
- California is hosed (Asymmetrical Information)
- A close-up of Dr. Doom (The New Republic)
- Introducing a little economics to the Waxman-Markey Boondoggle-to-be (The American Scene)
- Obama designates himself the greatest automotive entrepreneur of all time (Cafe Hayek)
- Two prominent Chicago intellectuals who don't have a very intellectual grasp of political philosophy (Becker-Posner Blog)
- Krauthammer prepares to get shrill on Obama (Politico)
Jeb Bush 2012 Bandwagon Begins Rolling?
Posted by on 5.20.09 @ 10:14AM
The missing candidate, then, is Jeb Bush, a successful two-term governor of a big swing state with sterling conservative credentials, a record of appealing to Latino voters, and the raw brainpower and rhetorical skill to match Barack Obama. . . [F]or Republicans there really is no better candidate.
Short of your own column in the New York Times or a regular stint on the Jim Lehrer show, there is nothing like being published by Tina Brown's Daily Beast to certify your status as one of The Republicans Who Really Matter.
Read my lips: NO MORE BUSHES!
Wrecking the Credit Card Market to Win Votes
Posted by on 5.20.09 @ 9:59AM
Let's stipulate that credit card companies wouldn't win any popularity contests these days. But let's also stipulate that this is chiefly the fault of cardholders: no corporation forced anyone to take or use a card, run up a balance, or keep on spending after higher rates were raised or extra charges imposed. People like their credit cards, despite the high cost.
But the facts never get in the way of Congress. Legislators, as usual, are coming to the rescue. Reports the Washington Post:
Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said the bill "will help create a more fair, transparent and simple consumer credit market."
Card executives said the changes will force them to charge higher rates and annual fees to delinquent customers and those in good standing.
"This bill fundamentally changes the entire business model of credit cards by restricting the ability to price credit for risk," said Edward L. Yingling, the chief executive of the American Bankers Association. He said that lending would become more risky and that, "It is a fundamental rule of lending that an increase in risk means that less credit will be available and that the credit that is available will often have a higher interest rate."
Scott Talbott, senior vice president of government affairs for the Financial Services Roundtable, an industry group, said available credit could be reduced by as much as $2 billion. Those with the weakest credit histories would be hardest hit.
When credit cards were introduced about 50 years ago, issuers practiced a one-size-fits-all approach of charging an annual fee and roughly the same interest rate of about 18 percent to everyone. As the industry became more deregulated in the 1980s, around the time that credit scores were introduced, issuers were able to separate the risky from the not-so-risky borrower and tailor the terms of card contracts.
Better disclosure makes sense. Micro-managing credit terms does not.
Consider: we have an economic crisis largely caused by too many people being too irresponsible with credit. Congress believes the solution is to restart consumer spending. So Congress plans to:
1) cut consumer credit;
2) reduce the ability of companies to sort customers by credit risk; and
3) punish people who carefully manage their accounts
Yup. That's right. As if we didn't need further evidence, Congress is full of idiots.
Feds Cracking Down on 'Blogola'
Posted by on 5.20.09 @ 9:47AM
Because some people are so stupid that they might be misled by a blogger's endorsement of a product -- drink delicious Corona Extra beer! -- the Federal Trade Commission is cracking down:
[B]ack-scratching endorsements could become tougher under a coming set of Federal Trade Commission guidelines designed to clarify how companies can court bloggers to write about their products. This summer, the government agency is expected to issue new advertising guidelines that will require bloggers to disclose when they're writing about a sponsor's product and voicing opinions that aren't their own. The new FTC guidelines say that blog authors should disclose when they're being compensated by an advertiser to discuss a product.
Maybe some other bloggers are just going to roll over for the FTC like a bunch of wussies, but I'm not going to accept this unconstitutional infringement of my First Amendment rights. They can have my delicious Corona Extra beer when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
Where was Sandy Berger?
Posted by on 5.20.09 @ 9:46AM
Government files are missing. It's time to round up the usual suspects. I wonder where Sandy Berger was that night?
A massive amount of sensitive, national security-related information from the Clinton administration has gone missing from the national archives.
The Inspector General of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) told congressional committee staffers Tuesday that a hard drive containing over a terabyte of information -- the equivalent of millions of books--went missing from the NARA facility in College Park, Md., sometime between October 2008 and March 2009.
Department of Justice and the Secret Service are conducting an investigation, but it's so far unclear whether the drive was lost as the result of a crime or an accident.
That hard drive includes information on Secret Service operating procedures, event logs, and other "highly sensitive information," according to the office of Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the ranking member on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The data also includes 100,000 Social Security numbers, including the number of one of Al Gore's daughters.
Someone should check what papers Berger has been cramming into his pants these days!
I Want A New Drug
Posted by on 5.20.09 @ 9:36AM
I recently asked what long-term benefit conservatives derived from Medicare Part D. Ramesh Ponnuru, who believes (with good reason) that the program helped President Bush win re-election in 2004, replies: "If my previous posts are right, two answers suggest themselves: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito." Roberts and Alito are indeed among the highlights of the second Bush term, even measured against the damage that was done to the Republican Party during that period. Someday reading their dissenting opinions will make it easier to swallow the bitter, federally subsidized, rationed, reimported pills supplied by the Democrats who now control every elected branch of the federal government.
More seriously, just because the Bush administration's failures were often in response to real political circumstances doesn't make those failures inevitable. Imagine if Republicans tried to popularize a real, relatively free-market alternative on health care rather than the Obamacare light favored by some senior Republicans. Imagine that they tried something similar with the Medicare prescription drug benefit instead of supporting the version that is now in place. While their success would be no more inevitable than Bush's failure, if they had succeeded both the party's fortunes and many conservative causes -- including the cause of conservative judges like Roberts and Alito -- would be in much better shape.
Another Dem Recruiting Challenge in NC
Posted by on 5.20.09 @ 9:29AM
In North Carolina, Democrats thought they had the perfect challenger for 2010 to Sen. Richard Burr in Attorney General Roy Cooper -- until he announced last week that he would not run. Now the party's Senatorial Campaign Committee is going through an exercise which looks eerily similar to 2008 when leaders sought in vain to recruit a "brand name" candidate, and had to settle for no-namer Kay Hagan. We all know what happened next.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Bill Ayers Should Avoid "Drinking the Kool-Aid"
Posted by on 5.19.09 @ 11:30PM
Retired terrorist Bill Ayers, a kind of folk hero among today's left, had a run-in with Washington Times editorial staffer Kerry Picket.
Picket's encounter with the would-be mass murderer who plotted to bomb a crowded dance hall at Fort Dix, New Jersey, in 1970, was captured on video.
The newspaper reported this about the brief interview with the former associate of President Obama:
When questioned by The Washington Times during a lecture on racism, Mr. Ayers went ballistic. "Did you drink the kool-aid over at The Times or are you okay?" he asked. "What I'm saying is ... do you actually have a mind of your own?"
Drinking the kool-aid.
That's an odd choice of words for Ayers. The expression came from the mass murder-suicide carried out by Jim Jones at Jonestown, Guyana in 1978 when Jones forced his congregation to drink poisoned flavored liquid.
Like Ayers, Jones was an America-hating revolutionary Communist. Jones left the U.S. and created what he hoped would be a socialist paradise in the Guyanese jungle. When things went awry, Jones decided it would be better to slaughter his followers than allow them to leave. More than 900 people died.
Jones remained a revolutionary Communist to the end. On an audio recording of the mass murder in progress, he can be heard attempting to reassure his followers: "We didn't commit suicide, we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world." (transcript here)
Jones used religion to advance Marxism; Ayers uses the academy to advance Marxism.
Two different homicidal activists sharing a common ideal.
Maybe Ayers's choice of words wasn't so odd after all.
Empowering Labor with Bail-Out Money
Posted by on 5.19.09 @ 6:02PM
Every taxpayer bail-out gives organized labor another excuse to meddle. Now the AFL-CIO is calling on the president to stop General Motors from shifting jobs overseas. The hook? Federal subsidies, naturally!
General Motors Corp.-which has received some $15.6 billion in federal bailout funds and is asking for another $11.6 billion-plans to use some of that taxpayer money to close 16 U.S. manufacturing plants and increase the number of vehicles made in Mexico, China, Korea and Japan for sale in the United States.
The UAW is asking its members and supporters to send a message to President Obama and to the auto task force that will have to approve GM's restructuring plan, asking both to stand up for the interests of American workers and retirees.
It's ridiculous to let politicians micromanage business decisions. But when those politicians are handing over boatloads of taxpayer funds, it's hard to tell them no. Welcome to the new "mixed" economy--tilted far more in government's direction.
First They Take Manhattan
Posted by on 5.19.09 @ 4:25PM
A pro-Palestinian group called the Coalition for Justice in the Middle East staged a protest outside of a Leonard Cohen concert at New York's Radio City Music Hall on Sunday. What was the famed musician and poet's crime, you ask? Did he declare that Palestinians should be wiped off the map? No. Did he write a pro-Israel song? No. Did he make a statement reaffirming Israel's right to self-defense (God forbid!)? No.
Actually, Cohen's crime was to schedule a concert in Tel Aviv in September as part of his current world tour, which the protesters are demanding he cancel.
According to the organization's own account:
Protestors chanted “Leonard, Leonard Have A Heart, Don’t Help Apartheid With Your Art” and sang “Ain’t Gonna Let Occupation Turn Me Round, Gonna Keep On Walkin’, Keep Boycottin’” to the tune of “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round”. A particular crowd favorite was, to the tune of Frere Jacques,
Are you sleeping, Are you sleeping,
Leonard Cohen, Leonard Cohen
While your songs are so fine
Israel’s taking Palestine
Don’t go there, Don’t go there
A friend of mine who attended the concert confirmed the presence of the protesters, who also circulated a drawing of a guitar turning into barbed wire. More photos of the protest here.
As an aside, I attended a Cohen concert at the Merriweather Post Pavillion in Maryland last week, and he was fantastic. See him if you get the chance.
Biden's Disclosed Location
Posted by on 5.19.09 @ 3:50PM
Perhaps we all should have expected “Gaffing” Joe Biden’s
braggadocio disclosure (at a Gridiron Club dinner) of the
infamous “undisclosed location” established to protect our
next-in-line Vice President. What with Speaker Pelosi’s
charging that the CIA lied to Congress, and Intelligence
Committee Chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s publicly disclosing the
(classified) basing of Predator drones inside Pakistan, we
wondered if this was part of a pattern of insensitive treatment
of sensitive information by Democrats. In any event, Democrats
sure seem to be living up to their reputation of being weak on
national security. And strong on gaffes.
Biden’s Disclosed
Location
By Asher Embry
Obama’s droning on and on, his points he does repeat;
And with him’s Netanyahu growing antsy in his seat.
The President’s in lecture mode; it’s more than we can
bear;
He seldom speaks concisely when no teleprompter’s near.
They praise his oratory, but a tad of free advice:
Ix-nay on the prattling; you make Biden seem
concise.
They’ve kept the VP quiet but each time his
lips do flap,
He rapidly reminds us why they keep him under wrap.
He tries, no doubt sincerely, just to keep his yapper shut,
But thankfully each week or so he takes a verbal
strut!
We all were “Bidened” recently when swine flu
fears rose high.
Joe warned his kin off Amtrak trains and told them not to
fly.
He dinged the travel industry, already on its knees;
It seems he lives in abject fear of passengers who sneeze.
Not long ago, with tablemates, while supping at the Club,
(Just maybe he imbibed a bit, to complement the grub)
While telling tales replete with his unique exaggeration,
Joe seemingly revealed the famous “undisclosed location.”
Now often Joe’s preposterous gaffes elicit only groans,
But Nancy’s trashed the CIA; Diane’s exposing drones;
A Democratic pattern, not just careless Biden quips;
Did they forget the World War II decree? Loose lips sink
ships.
So, Secret Service, don’t delay your careful preparation;
Biden quickly needs another undisclosed location.
It’s really quite important given everything we know;
Remember Nancy’s next in line if Biden were to
go.
(You can read more of Asher Embry's Political Verse at www.politicalverse.com.)
Debating "Lawfare"
Posted by on 5.19.09 @ 3:44PM
This morning, I attended the opening panel of the conference I mentioned earlier on the global efforts to use the legal system to silence speech critical of Islam.
Much of the early discussion focused on the practice of "libel tourism," a trend under which American authors are being sued in foreign courts with less free speech protections. While such lawsuits are typically unsuccessful, they have the ability to create an environment in which publishers are afraid to print works critical of Islam because they simply don't want to go through the ordeal or expense of lawsuits.
Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz called the threat "the invisible killer of the legal system," noting that its "silent nature" has a chilling effect on free speech before it even takes place. He said it's an issue that "transcends politics," and reminded the audience that he was a liberal.
James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal argued that the free speech protections in the U.S. are strong enough that American authors shouldn't have anything to fear.
Another panelist, John J. Walsh, a lawyer at Carter Ledyard & Milburn, disagreed with the need for a law addressing libel tourism, noting that none of the foreign judgments have proven enforceable in the U.S. "If the Constitution works, why do we need a statute?" he asked.
Dershowitz responded that the legislative approach didn't go far enough, because even if certain judgments are unenforceable, authors still can't visit foreign countries where they are facing suits, and thus have to live like fugitives even though they haven't done anything wrong. He said the U.S. had to make a concerted effort to spread its view of free speech.
"We have to export our theory," he said. "We shouldn't be satisfied simply that it isn't enforceable in the United States.
He suggested that the U.S. should add itself as a party to lawsuits when authors are sued to defend the free speech principle. He also talked about how he himself was indicted in Italy for statements made in his Cambridge, Massachusetts office criticizing the opinion of a judge who he said freed 5 terrorists. He was charged with defaming a member of the judiciary, which carries as much as a 7-year prison sentence. Instead of avoiding Italy, Dershowitz visited the country, and said he plans to fight the charges in Italy and in the European human rights courts to set a precedent.
But Frank Gaffney, who heads the Center for Security Policy, said while he applauds what Dershowitz is attempting, foreign courts are a "rigged game." On a broader level, he said too many people aren't worried enough about where everything is headed because things are okay for the moment – he compared it to somebody who is falling from a 50 story building saying he's fine at the point at which he's only fallen 30 stories.
Gaffney also highlighted efforts to establish Sharia-based financing in the U.S. and President Obama's pledge to speak "respectfully" of Islam as a forerunner to conforming our nation's traditions to its stringent religious code.
But Dershowitz, while pleading ignorance on the nuances of Sharia banking, suggested that allowing such accommodation was no different than making certain legal accommodations for Jewish Kosher laws.
Taranto also said he would disassociate himself with Gaffney's comments on respecting Islam, and said he doesn't see Obama's comments as a precursor to restrictions on speech.
UPDATE: Not surprisingly, liberal blogger Matt Duss tries to dismiss the conference as a display of neocon paranoia by highlighting some comments while ignoring what other panelists had to say in response. As is clear from my report above, the conference did not present a monolithic view of this issue and there was a vibrant debate among the participants. Gaffney, in particular, received a lot of pushback. This is precisely why it's important to preserve Western values of free speech, so such disagreements can be hashed out in an open forum, Duss can write a snarky post about it, and I can set the record straight.
Specter Cancels Appearance at Free Speech Conference, CAIR Claims Credit
Posted by on 5.19.09 @ 1:33PM
Sen. Arlen Specter backed out of speaking at a Tuesday conference on the global effort to silence speech critical of Islam, citing a scheduling conflict, but the Council on American-Islamic Relations has taken credit for his decision.
In February Specter introduced legislation in the U.S. Senate aimed at protecting American authors who have been sued under plaintiff-friendly libel laws overseas. He was scheduled to speak about the trend, known as "libel tourism," at a Washington conference being sponsored by the Legal Project of the Middle East Forum, the Federalist Society Center for National Security Law, and the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression.
CAIR branded it an "anti-Islam" conference and launched a petition drive last Friday protesting Specter's appearance, and on Monday the pressure group took credit for getting him to cancel.
But Brooke Goldstein*, who organized the conference in her role as director of the Middle East Forum's Legal Project, said that Specter had canceled his scheduled appearance two days before CAIR launched its online petition. The group issued a press release responding to CAIR this morning, noting that Specter has not changed his support for the legislation he co-sponsored with Sens. Chuck Schumer and Joe Lieberman.
Specter's office wrote in an email to TAS that "he had several hearings and constituent meetings scheduled for this morning."
One of the speakers at the conference, James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal, noted:
We do not have a strong opinion as to whether, as CAIR puts it, "American Muslims are involved in a concerted effort to suppress free speech on Islam." Running a petition to pressure an elected official not to participate in a conference on the subject would seem, however, to fit that description.
Other speakers included Daniel Pipes, Alan Dershowitz, Frank Gaffney, and Andrew McCarthy. More on the conference itself to come.
*Brooke Goldstein is an occasional contributor to The American Spectator.
Norman Hsu Convicted
Posted by on 5.19.09 @ 1:13PM
Hillary Clinton contributor Norman Hsu has been found guilty of campaign finance violations. This follows on the heels of his being convicted for swindling investors in a $20 million Ponzi scheme.
Harry Reid in Trouble
Posted by on 5.19.09 @ 12:33PM
The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza highlights another poll showing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to be no shoo-in for re-election in 2010:
Just 38 percent of voters had a favorable opinion of Reid as compared to 50 percent who had an unfavorable opinion in a Mason-Dixon poll conducted for the Las Vegas Review Journal.
Asked whether they were planning to vote to reelect Reid next fall or would vote to replace him, 35 percent said they would cast a vote for Reid while 45 percent said they planned to replace him. Another 17 percent said they would consider replacing Reid.
Of course, for these numbers to mean anything the Republicans first must recruit a credible challenger capable of beating Reid. Rep. Dean Heller is a possibility, but he is not well known statewide. Reid was nearly defeated in 1998 by John Ensign, the Republican who now holds Nevada's other Senate seat, and Republicans sore about the strong 2008 Democratic challenge to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wouldn't mind having Reid join the ranks of Tom Daschle.
Ruh-Roh: Steele Faces Cronyism Charge in RNC Hiring
Posted by on 5.19.09 @ 11:21AM
Forget every other criticism of Michael Steele's chairmanship of the Republican National Committee. Ralph Z. Hallow digs up the dynamite:
When Michael S. Steele took over as chairman of the Republican National Committee earlier this year, he brought along longtime personal assistant Belinda Cook and gave her a salary nearly three times what her predecessor made.
Mrs. Cook's son, Lee, also landed an RNC job.
Mr. Steele hired another family friend, Angela Sailor, to be the party's outreach director at a salary of $180,000, more than double her predecessor's compensation, though new responsibilities have been added to the job, according to a high-ranking RNC official and Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings.
This is potentially devastating. There are too many out-of-work Republican operatives for the RNC chief to be awarding six-figure salaries under circumstances that invite accusations of favoritism. I've been a Michael Steele fan for years, but he must keep in mind those 77 votes for Katon Dawson on the sixth ballot.
Daily Must-Reads
Posted by on 5.19.09 @ 10:44AM
- Google vs. free books for everyone (Washington Post)
- It is interesting to see someone comment on religion in the NY Times without making a fool of himself
- Investigative reporting guns for hire (Reason)
- Reappointing Bernanke sounds like a terrible, terrible idea... until you consider the alternatives (Forbes)
- "For Republicans there is really no better candidate" than Jeb Bush (Daily Beast)
- Obama does not have the intellectual wherewithal to distinguish between intended and unintended consequences (Mere Comments)
Gay Sex Ed for Kindergartners?
Posted by on 5.19.09 @ 9:46AM
Being a father of six, I'm a firm believer in sex-ed of the Old School variety. Our daughters were taught from an early age that boys have cooties. Our sons, of course, did not need to be told that girls are icky. California can't leave well enough alone:
The Alameda Unified School District announced it was considering a supplemental curriculum to eradicate "homophobia" in kindergarten children.
This curriculum would be mandatory, prompting a protest from blogger Pundette (herself a mother of seven):
Lost in the shuffle of bullying school boards and angry parents whose rights have been violated is the concept of childhood innocence. It's something worth preserving. Kindergarteners shouldn't have sexuality pushed on them, even in the form of good old plain-vanilla heterosexuality; homosexuality wouldn't enter the mind of an elementary school age child unless it was shoved in his face. And exposing children to transsexuality and other permutations beyond that is the equivalent of child abuse. Why is this something their innocent, developing minds and imaginations need to confront? This is clearly not being done for the benefit of the children.
You should read the whole thing.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Hersh Accuses Cheney of Ordering the Hit on Bhutto UPDATE: Hersh Denies Report
Posted by on 5.18.09 @ 6:08PM
The Pakistani newspaper the Nation reports that:
Former prime minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on the orders of the special death squad formed by former US vice-president Dick Cheney, which had already killed the Lebanese Prime Minister Rafique Al Hariri and the army chief of that country."
The squad was headed by General Stanley McChrystal, the newly-appointed commander of US army in Afghanistan. It was disclosed by reputed US journalist Seymour Hersh while talking to an Arab TV in an interview.
Hersh said former US vice-president Cheney was the chief of the Joint Special Operation Command and he clear the way for the US by exterminating opponents through the unit and the CIA. General Stanley was the in-charge of the unit.
I guess we should expect a forthcoming New Yorker article featuring anonymous high-ranking officials who deliver quotes that fit perfectly into Hersh's story. The problem is, while I can laugh at Hersh's claims, when he makes them to an Arab audience where he is billed as a "reputed US journalist," it can actually have a damaging effect and add fuel to anti-Americanism.
UPDATE: Seymour Hersh is denying he made this accusation:
LAHORE: US journalist Seymour Hersh on Monday contradicted news reports being published in South Asia that quote him as saying a “special death squad” made by former US vice president Dick Cheney had killed Benazir Bhutto. The award-winning journalist described as “complete madness” the reports that the squad headed by General Stanley McChrystal – the new commander of US army in Afghanistan – had also killed former Lebanese prime minister Rafique Al Hariri and a Lebanese army chief. “Vice president Cheney does not have a death squad. I have no idea who killed Mr Hariri or Mrs Bhutto,” Hersh said. “I have never said that I did have such information. I most certainly did not say anything remotely to that effect during an interview with an Arab media outlet.” He said Gen McChrystal had run a special forces unit that engaged in “high value target activity”, but “while I have been critical of some of that unit’s activities in the pages of the New Yorker and in interviews, I have never suggested that he was involved in political assassinations or death squads on behalf of Mr Cheney, as the published stories state.” He regretted that none of the publications had contacted him before carrying the report. “This is another example of blogs going bonkers with misleading and fabricated stories and professional journalists repeating such rumours without doing their job – and that is to verify such rumours.” staff report.
Though back in March, Keith Olberman ran a story that Hersh claimed Cheney was running a "covert executive assassination ring."
UPDATE II: Transcript corroborates Hersh; the Pakistani report was erroneous.
Bouquets for Huntsman from Progressives
Posted by on 5.18.09 @ 5:58PM
Public radio KCPW in Salt Lake City reports:
As Republican Governor Jon Huntsman prepares to depart from the state to become U.S. Ambassador to China, he leaves behind a legacy of outreach to progressive groups. Will Carlson with Equality Utah calls Huntsman an outstanding advocate for gay and transgendered residents.
"Jon Huntsman was a pioneer in saying that you can be a conservative Republican and still stand up for basic rights for all Utahns, and that's going to make it a lot easier for Gary Herbert or any other Republican to say, regardless of where I stand on the political spectrum, equal rights is something that I can stand behind," he said.
Huntsman recently announced his support of civil unions, calling it an issue of equal rights.
The governor will also be remembered for joining the Western Climate Initiative, a move that was opposed by more conservative Republicans in the state legislature, but praised by environmentalists. Wayne Hoskisson, chair of the Utah Sierra Club, is concerned the state may withdraw from the group once Huntsman is gone.
"That's a real possibility," he told KCPW. "We're hopeful that's not going to happen. We think that the science is there, we think that Governor Huntsman's environmental staff are well aware of what the problems are, and what kinds of things actually represent a solution, and we're hopeful that it will continue."
We think the science is there? Well we think the science is not! Are we imposing trillions of dollars of additional costs on the economy based on thoughts?
Meanwhile the New York Times wonders whether new Governor Gary Herbert will withdraw Utah from the WCI.
Gestalt Conservatism
Posted by on 5.18.09 @ 4:56PM
Since every pundit sooner or later takes turns peddling some boutique variety of conservatism -- "Crunchy Cons," "compassionate conservatism," "South Park conservatives" and so forth -- I figure I might as well buy a ticket the sweepstakes.
Gestalt is the mental process whereby we translate patterned data into coherent ideas. So: Obama at Notre Dame, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Carrie Prejean, Larry Summers, Joe the Plumber, George Orwell, David Brooks, Al Gore, Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, Ronald Reagan, Concord Bridge, salmon-and-risotto dinners at the Watergate.
Bad Medicine
Posted by on 5.18.09 @ 3:39PM
Not only do I agree with your post, Quin, but that was exactly my point: it shouldn't have been a choice between the terrible Medicare prescription drug benefit Bush signed into law and an even more expensive Democratic alternative. Republicans should have tried to address voter concerns on something much more like conservative terms. That they didn't was a failure of leadership that is all too typical of the GOP's wasted opportunities.
Throw Me In That Briar Patch
Posted by on 5.18.09 @ 3:06PM
Mark Sanford defends libertarianism from a Lindsey Graham snark attack.
Against Prescription Drug Bill
Posted by on 5.18.09 @ 2:37PM
Jim, I don't think the prescription drug bill was quite the either/or thing that Jerry Taylor and Ramesh Ponnuru make it out to be -- but I side more with Taylor than with my friend Ramesh on this one.
The bill was a monstrosity. Way too expensive, without nearly enough reform. And it was passed, of course, only through some serious cheating by DeLay, Hastert, the White House, and their allies during a vote from 2 a.m. to 5 a.m. -- almost 2 hours and 45 minutes longer than appropriate. No conservative should EVER have voted for it, no matter WHAT the political consequences.
But here's the deal: There WERE two good parts of it. One expanded the availability of health savings accounts. The second allowed for competition among insurance providers, rather than providing a government "option" which would soon have gobbled up the market at the expense both of higher total costs and serious rationing. One of the biggest wins of free-marketeers in the past few years was the successful effort to ward off the government option when congressional Dems tried to implement it several years later, in 2007. (Full disclosure: I was a paid consultant on getting the message out against the Democrats' efforts on that front.) The market approach to providing the drug insurance has saved well over a hundred billion taxpayer dollars while helping provide premiums WAY below (by as much as 40%) the premiums that the Dems themselves said would occur WITH the proposed government option.
But therein lies the rub: The market approach WORKS, and Republicans/Bush should have made market reform of Medicare AS A WHOLE (not just on pharmaceuticals) the price of ANY new entitlement to prescription drugs through Medicare. In other words, even if Ramesh (and Jim Antle) are right that voters would have punished Republicans at the polls if they failed to enact a prescription medicine plan within Medicare, that does NOT mean that it had to be THAT PARTICULAR PLAN.
Nobody can prove this, of course, but my political sense of what's possible has proved far more accurate than not in the past -- and I am convinced that if the GOP had voted down the package that passed, they could have then returned and included more market reforms for Medicare as a whole -- not just for prescription drugs -- in a second bite at the apple.
In other words, not only would the drug portion of it be designed to promote effective, cost-saving, consumer-friendly competition, but Medicare as a whole could have been made to include AT LEAST some pilot projects to let market forces operate more freely. Check out the Breaux-Thomas Commission's reform proposals in the late 1990s -- with Bobby Jindal acting as executive director of the commission, by the way -- and see what I mean. Combine those market reforms in the whole system with the market aspects of the drug benefit AND with the expanded HSAs that were a welcome side agreement of the drug benefit, and all of a sudden the entire health care landscape (and budgetary landscape) might have been changed very much for the better.
Skeptics will say this was not politically doable. I say that's only because the White House strategists and congressional strategists were so inept. The Reagan White House could have accomplished it. It's all in how you frame and sell the issue and all in how you play the itnernal politics (and the legitiimate horse-trading).
We'll never know whether I am right about the politics of it. But if the politics are uncertain, and the principle strongly argues against providing a new entitlement without broader systemic reforms, then you MUST go with principle and oppose the bill. Republicans who did otherwise were sell-outs, cowards, or asleep at the switch.
Bibi's Visit
Posted by on 5.18.09 @ 2:36PM
President Obama met with Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu today, but thus far nothing that has emerged from news reports is very surprising. Obama is pressuring Netanyahu on settlements and Palestinian statehood and Netanyahu is agreeing to immediate peace talks and pushing for a tougher line on Iran. But neither issue is easily resolved: the Palestinian leadership is fractured and there's no viable peace partner -- peace talks will go nowhere anytime soon, even with all of Obama's lofty rhetoric about Netanyahu's "historic oppourtunity." And talking with the Iranians, as Obama plans to, is not going to convince Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program.
Prescription for Failure
Posted by on 5.18.09 @ 1:51PM
Jerry Taylor and Ramesh Ponnuru have been going a few rounds on the Medicare prescription drug benefit. The basic claims both are making are obviously true: The public wanted Medicare coverage of prescription drugs badly enough it was unlikely a political party could resist and still win at the ballot box; the enactment of the prescription drug benefit coupled with the failure of Social Security reform increased the unfunded liabilities of the major federal entitlement programs. Republicans have occasionally tried and failed to take positive steps on entitlements. They have also taken some negative steps and succeeded.
But Medicare Part D is a good example of how shortsighted the Republican approach to these issues can be. The prescription drug benefit didn't change the long-term political calculus of which party held the advantage on health care and government spending on seniors, even if it yielded some short-term gains in 2002 and 2004. And while conservatives are deluding themselves when they pretend GOP fiscal irresponsibility was the main reason Republicans lost their majorities, GOP fiscal responsibility has undermined Republican arguments against Democratic spending.
It's easy to see why Republicans made the Medicare Part D bet they did during George W. Bush's first term. But it's much harder to see how the party as a whole benefited over the long term. On health care and entitlements, Republicans too often seem to vacilate between ignoring political reality and being enslaved by it.
New Development on Easley Story
Posted by on 5.18.09 @ 1:44PM
In a new development (they have come fast and furious lately) to my Spectator story today about former North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley, N.C. State Chancellor James Oblinger and UNC system President Erskine Bowles have stated publicly that they want the governor's wife, Mary, to resign her position. She had been given a job (five year contract worth $850,000) at State created especially for her, under suspicions of patronage and corruption.
Huntsman the Big-Tenter Eliminated
Posted by on 5.18.09 @ 10:52AM
Following up my post from over the weekend about Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr.'s nomination as President Obama's ambassador to China, the Washington Examiner's Byron York today further examines:
The Republican strategist who helped Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman prepare for a possible presidential run says the Republican party is in for a devastating defeat if its guiding lights are Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney. "If it's 2012 and our party is defined by Palin and Limbaugh and Cheney, then we're headed for a blowout," says strategist John Weaver, who advised Huntsman and was for years a close adviser to Sen. John McCain. "That's just the truth."
...Now, Huntsman's decision to accept the president's invitation to serve as ambassador to China effectively means he is out of the 2012 contest....
In addition to being out of the 2012 presidential race, Huntsman is also out of the ongoing debate over the future of the Republican party. Quinn, who met with Huntsman during the visit to South Carolina, says the Utah governor "seemed to be highly motivated to try to re-brand the Republican party as an institution that can win elections all across the country." Now, Huntsman won't be doing that, not only because it would not be a proper role for an ambassador but also because he will be thousands of miles away in Beijing.
Refutes the complaint from at least one commenter that Huntsman only strayed from conservatism on one issue. See also Graham, Lindsey below.
Dowd Gets the Talking Points Memo
Posted by on 5.18.09 @ 10:21AM
In her column yesterday, Maureen Dowd offered the following observation:
"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."
The thing is, it bears an uncanny similarity to this passage that liberal blogger Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo wrote last Thursday:
"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."
When confronted, Dowd offered the school girl excuse that:
josh is right. I didn't read his blog last week, and didn't have any idea he had made that point until you informed me just now. i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent -- and I assumed spontaneous -- way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column. but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me. we're fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.
So, somehow, she was talking to her friend, and she managed to casually jot down --not just the general thoughts -- but the word for word language, with commas.
NOTE: The column has been update online to credit Marshall, but
the print edition did not.
Cheney Unchained
Posted by on 5.18.09 @ 10:21AM
For the last eight years, many conservative defenders of President Bush bemoaned his administration's communications strategy. They found the White House woefully inept at making its own case -- the Bushies were said to be too quick to concede arguments, too willing to put forth ineffective spokesmen (despite high marks for Tony Snow), and too slow to explain or defend its positions, often allowing the conventional wisdom to harden against them before even bothering to try. Former Vice President Dick Cheney has put this theory to the test.
Whatever you think about the substance of his arguments, Cheney is a far more skilled defender of Bush policies than virtually anyone in the administration. He is a sober television presence who marshals facts quickly, summarizes arguments easily, and seems unflappable in the face of hostile questioning. While Bush struggled in the campaign debates, Cheney mopped up the floor with Joe Lieberman and John Edwards. Cheney often takes the maximalist positions on issues like interrogation and Iraq. And Cheney's office was skilled at leaking things to friendly reporters like Stephen Hayes, who is part of a push to claim that Cheney is winning the debate.
Cheney's prominence is giving a lot of Republicans indigestion because of his low approval ratings. But for commentators like Bill Kristol are cheering, because Cheney is joining them in making the arguments that they've been making without much Bush administration support. Now, if Cheney fails to persuade the American people, it might simply be because it's too late -- they've turned the page and made their minds up already. A concerted effort earlier on still might have had some effect. But this is as close as we are going to get to seeing what kind of results more effective Bushite messaging might have gotten.
Sen. Graham Takes Heat at SC Convention
Posted by on 5.18.09 @ 10:10AM
The South Carolina Republican Party held its convention Saturday, where it elected its next leader with an eye towards the 2010 elections. The State reports that the current intraparty debate over big-tent vs. conservative principle burst forth, as illustrated in speeches by Sens. Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint:
But U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham followed with a fiery speech that drew jeers from the crowd.
Graham told the crowd there was nothing wrong with any conservative, and he wanted to build an open party that could win in Pennsylvania and Connecticut, as well as South Carolina.
“You’re a hypocrite!” one man yelled.
“I’m a winner, pal,” Graham shot back. “Winning matters to me. If it doesn’t matter to you, there’s the exit sign.”
“Ron Paul is not the leader of this party,” Graham said, prompting a few jeers. Some people yelled, “Yes, he is!”
“I’m not going to give this party over to people who can’t win,” Graham finished, drawing most of the crowd to its feet.
But U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint, who followed Graham, said he’d rather have 30 senators who stand on principle than 60 who have none.
Hat tip to Jeff Taylor, who asks, "Who else thinks Lindsey just painted a huge, national bulls-eye on his back?"
Webb Watch
Posted by on 5.18.09 @ 10:09AM
Virginia Sen. Jim Webb is starting to position himself to the right of President Obama on national security issues. He now opposes a timeline for closing Guantanamo Bay, opposes trying terror detainees in the United States, and opposes releasing the 17 Chinese Muslims in Virginia. The administration position he defended -- continuing military commissions for trying detainees -- was considered a departure by its more liberal supporters.
Webb is up for re-election in 2012, but given his record there may be more going on than political considerations. Although he became a darling of the netroots for opposing the Iraq war, he has always been more hawkish than the average Democrat and left the party the first time on national-security grounds. He has continued to defend both the Vietnam War and the honor of Confederate war dead. Webb's opposition to the Iraq invasion was always more on realist than Michael Moore-ish grounds, including his concern that regime change in Iraq would make it more difficult to contain Iran.
Incidentally, Webb's Gitmo comments on "This Week" struck me as quite reasonable: the focus has been on the facility, but the real area of concern ought to be how inmates are processed and what procedures we are using to determine guilt or innocence. It's never terribly bothered me that potential terrorists are incarcerated somewhere that isn't the United States. But we should have an effective process that possesses international legitimacy to keep us from indefinitely holding innocent people.
Daily Must-Reads
Posted by on 5.18.09 @ 10:06AM
- United States banana republic watch (Washington Post)
- The way the world really works (Cafe Hayek)
- Niall Ferguson looks at deregulation and historical financial crises (NY Times)
- Sinise 2012 -- jump on the bandwagon now or be out of fashion later (Red State)
- If Obama really wanted what was best for the country he would just never wear a shirt (Cato@Liberty)
- There are 4,700 words on the new Warren Buffett biography by Michael Lewis, if you want them (The New Republic)
New York Times Finally Admits It Spiked Obama/ACORN Corruption Story
Posted by on 5.18.09 @ 1:50AM
Acknowledging what the blogosphere has known for weeks, the New York Times finally went on record to admit that just before last Election Day it killed a politically sensitive news story involving corruption allegations that might have made the Obama campaign look bad.
But the admission on Sunday, which came seven months after NYT staff reporter Stephanie Strom's reporting about possibly illegal coordination between the Obama campaign and ACORN last year, took the form of a snarky column from Clark Hoyt, the Old Gray Lady's "public editor." Hoyt used the word "nonsense" to describe the allegations of impropriety leveled against ACORN and the Obama campaign.
Hoyt writes in the Sunday New York Times
On March 17, a Republican lawyer, quoting a confidential source for a Times reporter, testified to Congress that the newspaper killed a story last fall because it would have been "a game-changer" in the presidential election.
The charge, amplified by Bill O'Reilly on Fox News in April and reverberating around the conservative blogosphere, is about the most damning allegation that can be made against a news organization. If true, it would mean that Times editors, whose job is to report the facts without fear or favor, were so lacking in integrity that they withheld an important story in order to influence the election.
I have spent several weeks looking into this issue - interviewing and e-mailing those involved, reading transcripts, looking at campaign finance records and conferring with legal experts. In a nutshell, I think the charge is nonsense.
In his very first sentence Hoyt makes a careless mistake: it was March 19, not March 17 (St. Patrick's Day), that the "Republican lawyer," Heather Heidelbaugh, testified before the House Judiciary Committee.
Then Hoyt gets caught up in minutiae, agonizing about whether the story would have been "a game-changer in the presidential election." He downplays the illegalities, calling them "technical violations of campaign finance law."
Hoyt writes
The story involved allegations that Barack Obama's campaign, in league with Acorn, a left-leaning community activist group, was guilty of technical violations of campaign finance law. Evidence supplied by the source could not be verified. Even if the story had panned out, it is hard to see how any editor could have regarded it as momentous enough to change an election in which the Republicans were saddled with an unpopular war and an economic meltdown.
On the surface if one doesn't think through Hoyt's explanation carefully, it may seem quite reasonable. But spend a few minutes thinking about it and holes begin to appear in the house ombudsman's reasoning.
A quick digression: Of course, we can only wonder what the New York Times would have done if it had gained information that John McCain's campaign had committed technical violations of campaign finance law. The NYT did publish a blog item about the DNC's allegation that McCain's campaign had illegally procured a loan and the paper was only too willing to imply in a Feb. 21, 2008 story that McCain was having a romantic affair with a female lobbyist three decades his junior. The charge, which was based on information provided by anonymous sources supposedly working for McCain, ultimately proved groundless and the newspaper retracted it a year later. The NYT disingenuously claims that it had never intended to suggest that the lobbyist "had engaged in a romantic affair with Senator McCain."
The aborted story that gave rise to the Obama/ACORN controversy centers around information provided by Anita MonCrief, a former ACORN employee whom Hoyt acknowledges "fed information to Stephanie Strom of The Times for several articles on troubles within the group." Apparently the information MonCrief provided was good.
We know this because Strom broke a number of important stories about ACORN and surely much of the information she used came from her trusted source Anita MonCrief. In July she reported that Dale Rathke, brother of ACORN founder Wade Rathke, embezzled nearly $1 million from the group. She also reported that ACORN management covered up the embezzlement for eight years, withholding information even from ACORN's national board.
The next month Strom reported that Tides Foundation founder Drummond Pike, a comrade-in-arms of liberal philanthropist George Soros, had personally covered what remained of Wade Rathke's debt (the embezzler had agreed to a slow-as-molasses repayment plan that would have kept him in debt well into old age).
In September Strom reported on two ACORN national board members' lawsuit aimed at forcing ACORN to provide financial documents regarding the embezzlement.
She followed up the next month with a story on ACORN's efforts to sever its remaining ties with its founder. (Strom reported that Wade Rathke resigned as chief organizer of ACORN. In fact, Rathke was fired, as shown in the ACORN national board's minutes of June 20, 2008, available at page 11 of the linked PDF file.)
The same month Strom wrote about an internal memo written by ACORN's lawyer that alerted the group to potential legal problems related to its organizational structure.
But apparently MonCrief's information was suddenly no good when it might have embarrassed the Obama campaign.
Heidelbaugh testified before a congressional committee in March that the nonprofit group violated a host of tax, campaign finance, and other laws. She said the Obama campaign sent ACORN its "maxed out donor list" and asked two of the avowedly nonpartisan group's employees "to reach out to the maxed out donors and solicit donations from them for Get Out the Vote efforts to be run by ACORN."
Hoyt describes the interactions between ACORN and Democratic campaigns this way:
On Sept. 7, Moncrief wrote to Strom that she had donor lists from the campaigns of Obama and Hillary Clinton and that there had been "constant contact" between the campaigns and Project Vote, an Acorn affiliate whose tax-exempt status forbids it to engage in partisan politics. Moncrief said she had withheld that information earlier but was disclosing it now that the conservative columnist Michelle Malkin was "all over it."
Hoyt writes that Strom received from MonCrief "a spreadsheet purporting to be the Obama donor list, but there was no on-the-record source or other way to verify that the list came from the Obama campaign." MonCrief agreed to go on the record but the NYT suddenly discovered that she had "a credibility problem" because she "had been fired by Acorn for using an official credit card for personal expenses."
To repeat, although the newspaper knew of the supposed credibility problem, it found MonCrief's information highly reliable in previous ACORN articles. All of sudden MonCrief was deemed not credible on a story that might have an adverse impact on Obama's candidacy.
Hoyt wrote that Suzanne Daley, the national editor, "called a halt to Strom's pursuit of the Obama angle."
Hoyt then presents an expert opinion about how, even if true, MonCrief's allegations would not have been a game-changer for the election.
But PowerLine's John Hinderaker skillfully dissects Hoyt's sophistry, writing:
Hoyt also argues that the story about Obama and ACORN would not have been a "game-changer" in that it would not have swung the election to John McCain. I agree. But since when is that the standard? Is Hoyt telling us that the Times' policy is only to print stories that have the potential to change the result of a Presidential election? Of course, if the story did have the potential to change the outcome of the election, that, too, would have been offered as a reason not to print it.
Hinderaker also argues that "the facts as related by Hoyt don't rebut the charge; they support it."
Read Hinderaker's commentary on the case and decide for yourself if the New York Times was right to end its probe.
(crossposted at NewsBusters)
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Notre Dame and President Obama
Posted by on 5.17.09 @ 9:39AM
Today is commencement day at Notre Dame, and you know what that means: the long-awaited/apprehended moment of President Obama's address and award of a honorary doctorate is finally at hand.
I will be participating in a group live-blog for USA Today. Here is the page on the Faith & Reason blog introducing the participants. I will update this post once I have the link we'll be using.
I'll note that I'm not sure how much we'll be able to fit into a live-blog, because everything will happen so quickly. Part of the reason I am skeptical of Notre Dame's suggestion that the commencement will be an opportunity for dialogue is that time and security restraints make it impossible. One 2001 Notre Dame grad told me about the experience of George W. Bush's commencement appearance. He mentioned that Bush didn't even arrive in South Bend until all the undergraduates had been seated, and he was scooted out the door before anyone else at the end of the event. According to this 2001 grad, by the time the undergrads exited the venue, they could see Air Force One already winging its way back to D.C. overhead.
UPDATE: Here is the link.
DNC Organizing to Destroy U.S. Healthcare
Posted by on 5.17.09 @ 1:00AM
Organizing for America, a propaganda arm of the Democratic National Committee, is lying to Americans about leftists' proposed so-called reforms of the healthcare system.
As the Politico reports, a new fundraising email from the group (full email here) claims TV ads from Conservatives for Patients' Rights are distorting President Obama's Big Government healthcare proposals:
We knew healthcare reform would face fierce opposition -- and it's begun. As we speak, the same people behind the notorious "swiftboat" ads of 2004 are already pumping millions of dollars into deceptive television ads. Their plan is simple: torpedo healthcare reform before it sees the light of day by scaring the public and distorting the President's approach.
We need the resources to take them head on with an urgent, grassroots campaign to pass real healthcare reform in 2009.
When the swiftboaters flood the airwaves with distortions, we'll flood the streets with volunteers armed with facts. When they send lobbyists to tell Congress to back down, we'll send millions of calls, letters, and stories from real Americans asking them to stand up.
That ObamaCare, like HillaryCare before it, would destroy the nation's healthcare system, is beyond dispute. It would turn hospitals and doctors' offices into the DMV. Patients would receive treatment --even in life-and-death cases-- at the whim of bureaucrats, and would be forced to line up to get it.
This is not hyperbole. To make matters worse, Canada is being bankrupted by its universal healthcare scheme and Canadians, including politicians who routinely mouth platitudes in support of the government-run system (e.g. billionaire MP Belinda Stronach, former Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa), routinely flee to the U.S. to receive treatment they can't get in their own country.
Quebec, incidentally, doesn't even have an air ambulance system to bring patients to emergency rooms, a fact that may have cost British actress Natasha Richardson her life. (Wild animals take priority over people in Quebec. The provincial government does use helicopters to air-drop rabies vaccine to skunks).
Conservatives for Patients' Rights is trying to save Americans from this socialist healthcare Hell by sharing the real-life horror stories of physicians and patients in Britain and Canada.
How is this a distortion?
On the contrary: it's deadly accurate.
