True or false: there is nothing that Republicans want more than to drive Barack Obama out of the White House. That’s what we’ve been told by the politicians and the polls, the pundits and the spinners, from all across the political spectrum. So we should be seeing the G.O.P. leadership and voters fiercely united and single-mindedly motivated in this Presidential primary season by a ruthlessly pragmatic effort to identify and fortify the candidate who is the most irresistible and effective instrument of Obama-eviction possible. But what we have instead is a whack-a-mole primary campaign, with a new frontrunner popping up every few weeks, only to be beaten back by the public recognition of his or her own haplessness: It’s Bachmann! No, its Perry! Sorry, it’s Cain! Wait a minute—what?!—it’s Gingrich!?! Disgraced, discredited, distrusted, despised by his party’s establishment, Newt Gingrich is now the frontrunner, while the only non-preposterous Republican prospect for the general election, Mitt Romney, is shunned. Never mind that Gingrich was running behind Ron Paul in national polls from May to October, hanging back like the bad punchline to a shaggy-dog story. Except, or unless—wait again, yes, here are the latest poll numbers, showing Newt levelling out, maybe slipping a bit, and, rising hot on his heels in pre-Iowa caucus polls and New Hampshire town-hall rallies, here comes Paul!
A new poll, out yesterday, shows Paul running almost neck-and-neck with Gingrich in Iowa. To be sure, in the relentless program of Republican debates this year, Paul—the Ayn Rand-loving, federal-government hating, practically (if not, as I earlier wrote, rabidly) isolationist Texas congressman—often seemed like the only candidate who was making any sense. That was not a measure of Paul’s reasonableness or appeal, however, but of the disarray of the rest of the field. Paul wants to abolish the Federal Reserve, return to the gold standard, and do away with Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, which he considers unconstitutional. He advocates the sort of states-rights policy that was effectively discredited in the mid-twentieth century as the last refuge of Jim Crow racial politics. And he extends ideological shelter to 9/11 truthers.
But Paul calls the other candidates out on their serial hypocrisies, inconsistencies, and incoherencies. This appeals to elements of the Republican base. While Gingrich deftly took a pole-axe to Romney (and Romney did himself even more harm by his own blundering) during the most recent Republican debate, on ABC last Saturday night, Paul went after Gingrich, depicting him as a hothead, who thrives on stirring up trouble; and Paul has since released two elegantly produced and utterly damning attackads, in which leading conservatives expose and denounce Gingrich as a sham.
Paul’s critique of the control of politics by corporate interests, and of America’s imperial foreign policy and permanent war-footing around the world, strikes a chord more broadly with disaffected voters on both the political right and the left. Noam Chomsky agrees with much of Paul’s analysis of American foreign policy, while Andrew Sullivan, who is no Chomskian, blogs fondly about Paul’s anti-imperialist harangues (“I love this guy”). Although Sullivan is an Obama supporter and has rightly and repeatedly depicted Paul as a demagogue, he has now endorsed Paul as the best candidate in the Republican field, writing, “I see in Paul none of the resentment that burns in Gingrich or the fakeness that defines Romney or the fascistic strains in Perry’s buffoonery.” Faint praise, but Sullivan’s huzzah was one more sign that this is Paul’s moment.
Because it’s pretty nearly inconceivable that he could win the Presidency, the conventional wisdom is that a vote for Paul is a protest vote. But many of his supporters are not merely disaffected from the alternatives, but steadfast in their devotion to some or all of Paul’s wilder convictions. They love that he’s not owned by and not for sale to any corporate interests—and for this reason, as well as his isolationist repudiation of America’s post-9/11 wars, he draws followers from the ranks of Occupy Wall Street protesters as well as from the Tea Party. And the conspicuous (and, frankly, inexcusable) extent to which he’s been ignored by the national press has only confirmed the conviction of his supporters that he is speaking truth to power.
Lately, for instance, he has been on a tear against the legalization by Congress (with Obama Administration support) of indefinite detention without charge of suspects in terrorism cases under the National Defense Authorization Act. “This should be the biggest news going right now—literally legalizing martial law,” Paul says. A good point: we should leave it to our enemies to announce and define themselves by such laws, and the fact that Paul is the only Presidential candidate to call attention to the outrage makes it an even greater cause for despair.
Then again, it’s hard to find many laws, beyond the text of the Constitution, and Biblical scripture, that Paul does like. During a debate a few months ago, he said that if there’s one book that every American should read it’s Frédéric Bastiat’s “The Law”—a mid-nineteenth century tract that is often cited as a founding document of libertarian thought, but reads more like an anarchist manifesto. Its opening lines have some of the high squeaking pitch of one of Paul’s cheerful bursts of indignation: “The law perverted! The law—and, in its wake, all the collective forces of the nation—the law, I say, not only diverted from its proper direction, but made to pursue one entirely contrary! The law becomes the tool of every kind of avarice, instead of being its check! The law guilty of that very iniquity which it was its mission to punish! Truly, this is a serious fact, if it exists, and one to which I feel bound to call the attention of my fellow citizens.”
To Bastiat, “Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” It’s easy to see how supporters of a party that puts forth Newt Gingrich as its fourth frontrunner in three months would be wary of giving government any power. The general public, however, is simply wary of Gingrich. Yes, Gingrich is now crushing Romney in the pre-primary polls, but the same polls show that if Gingrich is the G.O.P. nominee, Obama would crush him in November. That’s how it looks today, anyway, even as Obama’s unfavorability rating has hit an all time high: far from routing Obama, the Republican Party (in its ugly disarray) could hardly be serving his bid for reëlection better.
Of course, as Nate Silver, the political statistics wizard, cautions, the promiscuity of the Republicans this fall means that the race for the nomination remains too wide open to call, with only a few weeks until the contests begin in Iowa and New Hampshire. It is hard to see how the party faithful, who recoil from Romney because he feels phony and alien to them, will be able to stomach Gingrich for long enough to make him their candidate.
That is why Paul’s star is suddenly flickering a bit more brightly. Nobody can question that he walks the walk as surely as he talks the talk. During a debate in September Wolf Blitzer asked him whether he thought a sick and uninsured person should just be left to die. “That’s what freedom is all about: taking your own risks,” Paul said before being drowned out by applause. That’s conviction, that’s commitment, no flip-flopping, no double speak, no compromise. You get what you get and you don’t get upset in Ron Paul’s America—coming to a voting booth near you.
For you Mitt Romney fans out there, I've got some bad news.
Maybe you thought that Romney's kicking a little Rick Perry butt in
the last two Republican debates was going to help. If you trust the
polls — and what else is there at this point? — it hasn't at all. Perry
still leads in nearly every poll I've seen.
Maybe you figured Perry's admission that he's not all that swift when
it comes to book learnin' — Politico once flat-out asked: "Is Rick
Perry Dumb?" — would give one pause. But the polls tell a different
story. No one is pausing. And I'm not sure which Republican adviser
would say today that Romney's Harvard law degree is a selling point.
Maybe you hoped Perry's chest- puffing Ponzi scheme attack — which he
continues to make — on America's favorite entitlement would be a
self-inflicted disaster, but guess what. Actually, you don't have to
guess. It hasn't.
And here's my guess: It won't help. And not just because the latest
Bloomberg poll shows that two- thirds of Republicans agree that Social
Security is, yes, a Ponzi scheme — and that we're all in danger of being
Bernie Madoffed. And not just because even in the latest Florida poll,
where Social Security should matter, Perry is leading.
I can give you the reason for my guess on Perry and Romney in two words: Hillary and Clinton.
I was just looking back at the early Democratic debate coverage in 2007 when Clinton was clobbering Barack Obama in the debates. She was well ahead in the polls at the time. And it didn't help.
After Obama's second debate, his team gave him a "B" for his effort —
which, as I wrote then, was the spin-room equivalent of a D-. And yet,
it didn't matter. He got better in the debates, if never as good as
Clinton. Perry will get better, too.
At last count, there have been four Republican debates. Romney has,
by almost any measure, won them all. The last two debates might as well
have been two-person affairs, Romney vs. Perry. And, again, Romney
clearly won both on debating points.
He was quicker on his feet than Perry. He was better prepared. He
showed a deeper knowledge of most of the issues. There were even moments
when Romney didn't appear altogether robotic, which is not the Romney I
remember. It was, in fact, Romney at his best.
And yet, the polls have barely budged.
This is not hard to understand. Obama beat Clinton in the Democratic
primary campaign for two basic reasons: He had opposed the Iraq war
early and she had voted for it late. But, more important, he was the
candidate most Democrats saw most clearly as being the anti-Bush.
Now Perry is the candidate that many Republicans have begun to see as
the anti-Obama. Some Democrats are confused by this and wonder how
Republicans, in 2011, could possibly consider someone who sounds so much
like George W. Bush. But that's easy enough, too. Perry simply has to
make the case that he's what Bush would have been like if he hadn't been
quite so George W. Bush.
The truth is, Perry won the debates for all practical purposes. He
had high expectations coming in, and he met the most important one —
which was to show he belonged on the stage. He may have slipped a few
times, but he slipped confidently. As one pundit pointed out, even when
Perry is losing on a point, he looks like he thinks he's winning.
Most people don't watch debates anyway. They watch the debate
coverage. And following the latest debate, the coverage was mostly about
how Michele Bachmann
had turned a potential Perry weakness on HPV vaccines into a Bachmann
pratfall. And how some in the crowd seemed to favor of letting a
hypothetical uninsured guy in a coma actually die.
Perry and Romney were both standing at the end. Perry was just standing a little bit in front.
It's way too soon to guess how this well turn out, except that none of the other candidates seem likely to win. (Here's where Ron Paul fans can start writing their e-mails. Always love to hear from you guys.) But front-runners often back up.
And Bachmann is still hoping to make this a three-person race. If
Sarah Palin were to get in, it would presumably change everything.
But right now Perry seems quite happy where he is. You might want to check out his interview in Time magazine.
Perry defended in-state tuition for innocent illegal-immigrant kids.
He said he didn't think ensuring that young girls get vaccinated against
a virus that can lead to cervical cancer was a bad thing.
These are not positions that test well with Tea Party America. But
Perry is hard to attack from the right. In the same interview, he stuck
with "Ponzi scheme" and didn't back down at all on calling the Obama
administration socialist. And if you can say those things and also
convince Republican voters you're electable, that's how you win the
nomination debate.
Jay Cost argues convincingly that “No serious Democratic official would dare challenge Obama for the nomination.” But Ralph Nader says that “I would guess that the chances of there being a challenge to Obama in the primary are almost 100 percent.” Nader says that challenger could be “an ex-senator or an ex-governor” or “an intellectual leader or an environmental leader.”
Both Cost and Nader can be right. There could be a challenger to Obama, but he (or she) wouldn’t be a “serious” opponent of the caliber of Robert Kennedy (1968) or Ronald Reagan (1976) or Ted Kennedy (1980). He would be more like John Ashbrook (1972) or Pat Buchanan (1992). But that’s not nothing. Ashbrook arguably helped keep the conservative flame alive in the age of Nixon, a flame that Reagan re-lit in 1976 and brought across the finish line in 1980. Buchanan’s campaign in 1992 was distorted by his own peculiar brand of conservatism. But his exposure of George H. W. Bush’s weakness probably helped induce Ross Perot into the general election contest, and both to some degree laid the groundwork for the Gingrich takeover and renewal of 1994. And of course the Tea Party challenges of 2010 were crucial to the liberation of the GOP from the legacy of the doldrums of George W. Bush’s second term.
So what of the Democrats? Surely they’ll produce a primary challenger to their Wall Street coddling, Afghan war prosecuting, drone assassination ordering, and debt ceiling deal-signing occupant of the Oval Office! That opponent might perhaps not be “serious,” but his effort could be attention getting, issue raising, and meaningful for the future. Far be it from me to give advice to the professional left. But it has been a sign of the health and vitality of the right over the last forty years that it could at least produce primary challengers to moderate and establishment Republican officeholders. For the left to roll over totally for Obama, after giving Clinton a pass in 1996, would be a sign of a massive failure of conviction and imagination and nerve.
So, Russ Feingold or Dennis Kucinich, Robert Reich or Paul Krugman: Won’t one of you be willing to raise the progressive banner high? Across the ideological chasm, THE WEEKLY STANDARD will salute you!
Op-Ed
For blacks, a rift over Obama
Two Princeton scholars clash over the president's record, but the real divide is between assimilation and racial unity.
By Erin Aubry Kaplan
June 19, 2011
It was the kind of insular, issue-driven, black-on-black debate that ordinarily doesn't attract the media spotlight, even on the slowest news day. But thanks to the unprecedented profile of Barack Obama, the most famous black person in modern history, this one got hot.
Last month, in an interview with Chris Hedges on Truthdig.com, Princeton professor Cornel West gave a scathing assessment of Obama's presidential performance so far. West let it rip with a kind of racially tinged dissatisfaction with Obama that's been brewing for months. Specifically, he called the black president out for what he sees as his complicity with the agenda of white, moneyed elites. He called Obama a "black mascot" for Wall Street, and at one point accused him of not acting like a "free black man."
The outburst prompted a swift and contemptuous rebuttal from West's fellow Princeton scholar and Nation columnist Melissa Harris-Perry, who described West's complaints as chiefly personal, not political, sparked by such things as Obama not returning the prof's phone calls promptly or giving him choice tickets to the inauguration. She went further, characterizing West's attack as "a self-aggrandizing, victimology sermon deceptively wrapped in the discourse of prophetic witness," and questioned whether his life of privilege (like her own) as a professor at an Ivy League university was any more authentic than Obama's.
Black folks on the blogosphere and elsewhere who were alarmed by the airing of dirty laundry between two of the best-known black scholars in the country weighed in, generally on one side or the other.
But the real divide is not between West and Obama or West and Harris-Perry, it's between two age-old, unresolved strategies black leaders have adopted throughout history to ensure black survival in America: nationalism and assimilation. Assimilation holds that blacks must claim their place in the mainstream to be successful; nationalism maintains that black success starts — and perhaps ends — with building and sustaining group unity. Fueling the latest image anxiety is a taboo question that animated the comments of an increasingly irate West: What good is Obama to us? By 'us' I mean black masses who are a crucial and historical part of the American working class and poor for whom West has always advocated.
Though she blasted West for his diatribe last month, Harris-Perry doesn't actually disagree with his view of the social landscape. Her defense of Obama also includes a view many blacks share — that the president, while hardly perfect, has been hampered by organized right-wing movements whose reflexive opposition to him is partly rooted in racism.
West is correct about Obama's lack of urgency about black issues. Perry is correct about the depth of resistance to Obama himself. But the combination of these two truths is hard to grasp: Obama is both the man in charge and the black politician stymied by the system he oversees. Broadly speaking, he is both the oppressor and the oppressed. This strange new fact feels like matter colliding with anti-matter, something that was never supposed to happen; black people, to say nothing of the media, don't quite know how to make sense of it.
But at least West and Harris-Perry are forcing into public consciousness a complex racial reality. After the collapse of the Black Panthers and black power in the '70s, assimilation became the black success strategy by default. The result was that assimilation — more precisely, financial and educational success — has happened for some blacks, but is beyond the reach of a vast number of others. The now numbing statistics about incarceration rates, inferior schools, entrenched poverty and the rest describe a population that, far from being integrated, still lives as a separate nation. That's all the more reason that blacks long to see President Obama as at least a sympathizer and fellow traveler rather than part of the institutional indifference that has proved as detrimental to black welfare as Jim Crow.
But Obama is a product of institutions. He is a fortunate middle-class son of the post-'60s, pro-integration era whose own success was due less to black empowerment than adherence to mainstream mores and values. Black nationalism or any clear support of black unity or racial justice is an anathema to those values; it certainly would have doomed Obama politically. This is true even though politically speaking, the president owes blacks as much as he owes Jews or any other constituency that voted for him in significant numbers.
The real problem with the assimilation-versus-nationalism battle is that it isn't really a battle anymore because black leaders, whatever philosophy they espouse these days, rarely put black interests first. Harold Cruse warned about this in his classic 1967 book, "The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual." In Cruse's view, the crisis then was a direct result of the black intelligentsia repeatedly abdicating its responsibility to assess black social conditions and craft action agendas entirely unique to America's racial history. As long as it deferred to integrationist approaches that didn't primarily have blacks' interests in mind, Cruse said, black people would always be reduced to reacting and protesting crises in the future. West's broadside of Obama is such a protest, though in it is a hope that a black man who is in a historic position to address the latest crisis will find it in his conscience to do so.
But putting aside the question of whether Obama is in a position to do much of anything, can principles of assimilation and black unity coexist at the top? Can they coexist at all? The big unstated fear among many blacks, including West, is that Obama will turn out to be yet another disappointing black politician, one who readily articulates the needs of those at the bottom but doesn't ultimately address them. That's a crisis of another color. Erin Aubry Kaplan is a contributing editor to the Times Opinion pages. Her collected essays will be published in October.
Obama's 2012 Re-election Chances: Why He Could Lose
By JOE KLEIN
Thu May 12, 5:30 pm ET
The most telling moment in Barack Obama's 60 Minutes
interview came when Steve Kroft asked for his reaction after he saw the
photo of Osama bin Laden, shot in the head. "It was him," the President
said. And that was all he said. Now, this was a classic TV
how-did-you-feel question, and Obama had a range of possible options. He
could have gone all political, "I thought of the families who had lost
loved ones ..." Or graphic, "Well, it was pretty ugly, but ..." Or
excited, "Oh. My. God." Or religious, "Thank God." Or triumphal, "My
first thought, actually, Steve, was 'Hasta la vista, baby.' " But, of
course, this is Barack Obama, more Gregory Peck than John Wayne. And the
same taciturn, hyperdisciplined quality that is so frustrating when he
seems unable to connect with the economic anguish of the American people
came across as just right, perfectly Midwestern - Kansas, not Hawaii,
much less Kenya.
A few days earlier, five of the Republican
candidates for President gathered in South Carolina for their first
official debate. It was a weird show, newsworthy only because
Congressman Ron Paul came out in favor of legalizing heroin, cocaine and
prostitution. Many of the more serious (Mitt Romney, Mitch Daniels,
Newt Gingrich) and less serious (Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, Newt
Gingrich) Republican candidates weren't there - and so it would be
unfair to compare the Republican punytude with the massive
presidentiality of Obama during his strongest week. (See pictures from inside Obama's Situation Room.)
Three relevant observations can be made,
however. First, Paul's willingness to go off the libertarian deep end,
without a blink, says something about the ideological extremism that has
overwhelmed the Republicans in recent years. Paul is certainly further
out than most, but all sorts of loony notions have become accepted
wisdom in the Republican Party - about taxation, about the science of
climate change, about the utter perfection of markets. Which leads to
the second observation: even the serious Republican candidates aren't
very. Romney refuses to take credit for his greatest accomplishment as
governor of Massachusetts - a universal health care plan that works.
There are grounds to hope that Indiana's Governor Daniels and former
Utah governor Jon Huntsman will not make fools of themselves, but it is
hard to imagine either of them prospering by challenging the
conventional Limbaugh wisdom of the party, and Daniels has already
gotten into trouble by proposing that there should be a truce on "social
issues" like abortion and homosexuality. (See TIME's photo-essay "President Obama Visits Ground Zero.")
But my third reaction to the Republican
debate cuts in the opposite direction. By depriving the Republicans of
the birth-certificate and tough-on-terrorism issues in a single week,
Obama may ultimately force them to spend most of their time discussing
the weakest point of his presidency: the economy. My colleague Mark
Halperin has observed that when Trump talks about something other than
the President's birth certificate (or himself), he strikes some very
resonant chords. He wants to slap tariffs on the Chinese, and he's mad
as hell about gasoline prices (and wants to seize the Iraqi oil fields).
This is the other side of the President's reserve: he won't demagogue
those issues, or even talk about them very much. (See "The Awkward Republican Coalition.")
I came into presidential politics with Jimmy
Carter, and I'll never forget his staff's derision of a certain
washed-up actor-extremist from California named Ronald Reagan.
Similarly, I remember the Democratic Party's despair in 1992, especially
after Bill Clinton was linked, lubriciously, to a lounge singer named
Gennifer Flowers. Carter had brought Israel and Egypt together. George
H.W. Bush had beaten Saddam Hussein and retaken Kuwait; his popularity
rating stood at 90%. But both Carter and Bush were beaten by a bum
economy.
Obama could lose too, even to someone who
seems silly to fusty opinionators like me. He could lose if he keeps
playing on the Republican field - deficits - rather than in the arena
preferred by most Americans: the sputtering economy. He needs some big,
new, easy-to-understand economic initiatives. He could lose if he
doesn't remind the public that he cut their taxes, as promised, and
their Medicare drug bills. He also has to prove that, despite the
bailouts, he's not Wall Street's sucker. (See "Bin Laden Is Dead. Now It's Time to Fix the Economy.")
There is a grand history of populist
loudmouths like Trump making an early impression in presidential
campaigns: Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson and Howard Dean all had their
moments. And so did John McCain, who lost his shot in 2008 when the
financial crisis came and he didn't know how to react. Obama was calm
under fire then, and ever since. It is why he's likely to be re-elected:
we prefer Presidents who are adults over those who are angry. But he is
certainly not a lock.
Op-Ed Contributor
Bundle Up, It’s Global Warming
By JUDAH COHEN
Published: December 25, 2010
THE earth continues to get warmer, yet it’s feeling a lot colder outside. Over the past few weeks, subzero temperatures in Poland claimed 66 lives; snow arrived in Seattle well before the winter solstice, and fell heavily enough in Minneapolis to make the roof of the Metrodome collapse; and last week blizzards closed Europe’s busiest airports in London and Frankfurt for days, stranding holiday travelers. The snow and record cold have invaded the Eastern United States, with more bad weather predicted. All of this cold was met with perfect comic timing by the release of a World Meteorological Organization report showing that 2010 will probably be among the three warmest years on record, and 2001 through 2010 the warmest decade on record.
How can we reconcile this?
The not-so-obvious short answer is that the overall warming of the atmosphere is actually creating cold-weather extremes. Last winter, too, was exceptionally snowy and cold across the Eastern United States and Eurasia, as were seven of the previous nine winters.
For a more detailed explanation, we must turn our attention to the snow in Siberia.
Annual cycles like El Niño/Southern Oscillation, solar variability and global ocean currents cannot account for recent winter cooling. And though it is well documented that the earth’s frozen areas are in retreat, evidence of thinning Arctic sea ice does not explain why the world’s major cities are having colder winters.
But one phenomenon that may be significant is the way in which seasonal snow cover has continued to increase even as other frozen areas are shrinking. In the past two decades, snow cover has expanded across the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, especially in Siberia, just north of a series of exceptionally high mountain ranges, including the Himalayas, the Tien Shan and the Altai.
The high topography of Asia influences the atmosphere in profound ways. The jet stream, a river of fast-flowing air five to seven miles above sea level, bends around Asia’s mountains in a wavelike pattern, much as water in a stream flows around a rock or boulder. The energy from these atmospheric waves, like the energy from a sound wave, propagates both horizontally and vertically.
As global temperatures have warmed and as Arctic sea ice has melted over the past two and a half decades, more moisture has become available to fall as snow over the continents. So the snow cover across Siberia in the fall has steadily increased.
The sun’s energy reflects off the bright white snow and escapes back out to space. As a result, the temperature cools. When snow cover is more abundant in Siberia, it creates an unusually large dome of cold air next to the mountains, and this amplifies the standing waves in the atmosphere, just as a bigger rock in a stream increases the size of the waves of water flowing by.
The increased wave energy in the air spreads both horizontally, around the Northern Hemisphere, and vertically, up into the stratosphere and down toward the earth’s surface. In response, the jet stream, instead of flowing predominantly west to east as usual, meanders more north and south. In winter, this change in flow sends warm air north from the subtropical oceans into Alaska and Greenland, but it also pushes cold air south from the Arctic on the east side of the Rockies. Meanwhile, across Eurasia, cold air from Siberia spills south into East Asia and even southwestward into Europe.
That is why the Eastern United States, Northern Europe and East Asia have experienced extraordinarily snowy and cold winters since the turn of this century. Most forecasts have failed to predict these colder winters, however, because the primary drivers in their models are the oceans, which have been warming even as winters have grown chillier. They have ignored the snow in Siberia.
Last week, the British government asked its chief science adviser for an explanation. My advice to him is to look to the east.
It’s all a snow job by nature. The reality is, we’re freezing not in spite of climate change but because of it.
Judah Cohen is the director of seasonal forecasting at an atmospheric and environmental research firm.
A WikiLeaks wake-up call
Jonah Goldberg
Jonah Goldberg
December 1, 2010
Washington is reeling from the latest WikiLeaks document dump. The foreign policy wonks insist that there are few, if any, major surprises. "Much of what we've seen thus far," opined Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, "confirms more than it informs." And, in the end, what these documents confirm is that President Barack Obama's foreign policy is a mess.
Even if you're supportive of Obama's foreign policy efforts, the WikiLeaks dump is a bigger deal than the know-it-alls are suggesting. It's one thing to believe something as a generality; it's another to dispel plausible deniability for all concerned.
Everyone may know that the Saudis are worried about the Iranian bomb. But knowing that isn't quite the same as learning that the Saudi monarchy has implored the U.S. to attack Iran and "cut off the head of the snake," in the words of a Saudi envoy. Egypt and other Arab states have called the Iranian nuclear program an "existential threat" and have begged the U.S. to use military force to stop it. (Of course, if the U.S. did take out the program, these same regimes, not to mention countless domestic critics of Israel, would insist that the U.S. was doing the bidding of the Israel lobby.)
Around the globe, diplomats, dignitaries and potentates feel betrayed and exposed. Certainly, the news that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered American diplomats at the United Nations to spy on other delegations will make lunchtime at the commissary a bit awkward.
Politically, the one advantage for the White House is the sheer volume of the leaks. If these stories came out one by one, there'd be room for them to flare up as full-fledged controversies, but with a quarter of a million documents, each story robs oxygen from the next.
The (relative) lack of surprises is hardly an exoneration for anybody — not for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has declared himself an enemy of the United States, nor for the Obama administration, which seems utterly lost about how to deal with him.
The administration's formal response to the revelations was to have State Department attorney Harold Koh pen a tersely worded cease-and-desist letter to Assange, asking him to pretty please stop publishing thousands of state secrets. When lawyers run your foreign policy, this is what passes for a blistering counterattack.
Indeed, with the important and complicated exception of Afghanistan, such high-minded legalism is par for the course.
Ever since his bizarre campaign stop in Berlin and his primary debate promise to meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "without preconditions," Obama has consistently stressed his preference for soft diplomacy and gauzy platitudes about international cooperation. For instance, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of Germany proved, according to then-candidate Obama, that "there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one" — an incomprehensible claim that would earn an F from any high school history teacher.
Since then, on issue after issue, Obama's rhetorical globaloney has met the grinder. Perversely, his best moment was when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize and felt compelled to explain why he didn't deserve it — yet — and give a legitimately stirring defense of military action.
It is certainly true that Obama inherited many of his foreign policy challenges. Iran was pursuing nukes back when he was in the Illinois state Senate, and North Korea has been crazy since before he was born. But Obama insisted that his would be the better way. Engagement, dialogue, kumbaya would all win the day.
And yet they keep losing. A month after his inauguration, the North Koreans tested a ballistic missile. Since then, they've revealed yet another nuclear program and attacked South Korea just weeks after Obama's embarrassing failure to win a trade deal from Seoul during an official visit. Meanwhile, according to WikiLeaks and other sources, the North Koreans have been selling ballistic missiles to the Iranians.
And what are Obama's global priorities? The START treaty, Israeli settlements and climate change.
The irony is that Assange represents a purer form of Obama's own idealism. According to Assange's dangerous utopianism, in governance purity must define means, not just ends. He is convinced that he has revealed the hypocrisy and corruption of U.S. foreign policy, when in reality all he has revealed is that pursuing foreign policy ideals is messier and more complicated in a world where bad people pursue bad ends. We can hope that Obama has been learning that lesson. Assange, meanwhile, is simply blind to it.
Tribune Media Services
Jonah Goldberg is an editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Earlier this month, I offended a number of readers with a column suggesting that if you want to see rapacious income inequality, you no longer need to visit a banana republic. You can just look around.
Nicholas D. Kristof
My point was that the wealthiest plutocrats now actually control a greater share of the pie in the United States than in historically unstable countries like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana. But readers protested that this was glib and unfair, and after reviewing the evidence I regretfully confess that they have a point.
That’s right: I may have wronged the banana republics.
You see, some Latin Americans were indignant at what they saw as an invidious and hurtful comparison. The truth is that Latin America has matured and become more equal in recent decades, even as the distribution in the United States has become steadily more unequal.
The best data series I could find is for Argentina. In the 1940s, the top 1 percent there controlled more than 20 percent of incomes. That was roughly double the share at that time in the United States.
Since then, we’ve reversed places. The share controlled by the top 1 percent in Argentina has fallen to a bit more than 15 percent. Meanwhile, inequality in the United States has soared to levels comparable to those in Argentina six decades ago — with 1 percent controlling 24 percent of American income in 2007.
At a time of such stunning inequality, should Congress put priority on spending $700 billion on extending the Bush tax cuts to those with incomes above $250,000 a year? Or should it extend unemployment benefits for Americans who otherwise will lose them beginning next month?
One way to examine that decision is to put aside all ethical considerations and simply look at where tax dollars will do more to stimulate the economy. There the conclusion is clear: You get much more bang for the buck putting money in the hands of unemployed people because they will promptly spend it.
In contrast, tax cuts for the wealthy are partly saved — that’s both basic economic theory and recent history — so they are much less effective in creating jobs. For example, Republicans would give the richest 0.1 percent of Americans an average tax cut of $370,000. Does anybody really think that those taxpayers are going to rush out and buy Porsches and yachts, start new businesses, and hire more groundskeepers and chauffeurs?
In contrast, a study commissioned by the Labor Department during the Bush administration makes clear the job-creation power of unemployment benefits because that money is immediately spent. The study suggested that the current recession would have been 18 percent worse without unemployment insurance and that this spending preserved 1.6 million jobs in each quarter.
But there is also a larger question: What kind of a country do we aspire to be? Would we really want to be the kind of plutocracy where the richest 1 percent possesses more net worth than the bottom 90 percent?
Oops! That’s already us. The top 1 percent of Americans owns 34 percent of America’s private net worth, according to figures compiled by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. The bottom 90 percent owns just 29 percent.
That also means that the top 10 percent controls more than 70 percent of Americans’ total net worth.
Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley who is one of the world’s leading experts on inequality, notes that for most of American history, income distribution was significantly more equal than today. And other capitalist countries do not suffer disparities as great as ours.
“There has been an increase in inequality in most industrialized countries, but not as extreme as in the U.S.,” Professor Saez said.
One of America’s greatest features has been its economic mobility, in contrast to Europe’s class system. This mobility may explain why many working-class Americans oppose inheritance taxes and high marginal tax rates. But researchers find that today this rags-to-riches intergenerational mobility is no more common in America than in Europe — and possibly less common.
I’m appalled by our growing wealth gaps because in my travels I see what happens in dysfunctional countries where the rich just don’t care about those below the decks. The result is nations without a social fabric or sense of national unity. Huge concentrations of wealth corrode the soul of any nation.
And then I see members of Congress in my own country who argue that it would be financially reckless to extend unemployment benefits during a terrible recession, yet they insist on granting $370,000 tax breaks to the richest Americans. I don’t know if that makes us a banana republic or a hedge fund republic, but it’s not healthy in any republic.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on November 18, 2010, on page A37 of the New York edition.
One and done: To be a great president, Obama should not seek reelection in 2012
By Douglas E. Schoen and Patrick H. Caddell Sunday, November 14, 2010;
President Obama must decide now how he wants to govern in the two years leading up to the 2012 presidential election.
In recent days, he has offered differing visions of how he might approach the country's problems. At one point, he spoke of the need for "mid-course corrections." At another, he expressed a desire to take ideas from both sides of the aisle. And before this month's midterm elections, he said he believed that the next two years would involve "hand-to-hand combat" with Republicans, whom he also referred to as "enemies."
It is clear that the president is still trying to reach a resolution in his own mind as to what he should do and how he should do it.
This is a critical moment for the country. From the faltering economy to the burdensome deficit to our foreign policy struggles, America is suffering a widespread sense of crisis and anxiety about the future. Under these circumstances, Obama has the opportunity to seize the high ground and the imagination of the nation once again, and to galvanize the public for the hard decisions that must be made. The only way he can do so, though, is by putting national interests ahead of personal or political ones.
To that end, we believe Obama should announce immediately that he will not be a candidate for reelection in 2012.
If the president goes down the reelection road, we are guaranteed two years of political gridlock at a time when we can ill afford it. But by explicitly saying he will be a one-term president, Obama can deliver on his central campaign promise of 2008, draining the poison from our culture of polarization and ending the resentment and division that have eroded our national identity and common purpose.
We do not come to this conclusion lightly. But it is clear, we believe, that the president has largely lost the consent of the governed. The midterm elections were effectively a referendum on the Obama presidency. And even if it was not an endorsement of a Republican vision for America, the drubbing the Democrats took was certainly a vote of no confidence in Obama and his party. The president has almost no credibility left with Republicans and little with independents.
The best way for him to address both our national challenges and the serious threats to his credibility and stature is to make clear that, for the next two years, he will focus exclusively on the problems we face as Americans, rather than the politics of the moment - or of the 2012 campaign.
Quite simply, given our political divisions and economic problems, governing and campaigning have become incompatible. Obama can and should dispense with the pollsters, the advisers, the consultants and the strategists who dissect all decisions and judgments in terms of their impact on the president's political prospects.
Obama himself once said to Diane Sawyer: "I'd rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president." He now has the chance to deliver on that idea.
In the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama spoke repeatedly of his desire to end the red-state-blue-state divisions in America and to change the way Washington works. This was a central reason he was elected; such aspirations struck a deep chord with the polarized electorate.
Obama can restore the promise of the election by forging a government of national unity, welcoming business leaders, Republicans and independents into the fold. But if he is to bring Democrats and Republicans together, the president cannot be seen as an advocate of a particular party, but as somebody who stands above politics, seeking to forge consensus. And yes, the United States will need nothing short of consensus if we are to reduce the deficit and get spending under control, to name but one issue.
Forgoing another term would not render Obama a lame duck. Paradoxically, it would grant him much greater leverage with Republicans and would make it harder for opponents such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) - who has flatly asserted that his highest priority is to make Obama a one-term president - to be uncooperative.
And for Democrats such as current Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) - who has said that entitlement reform is dead on arrival - the president's new posture would make it much harder to be inflexible. Given the influence of special interests on the Democratic Party, Obama would be much more effective as a figure who could remain above the political fray. Challenges such as boosting economic growth and reducing the deficit are easier to tackle if you're not constantly worrying about the reactions of senior citizens, lobbyists and unions.
Moreover, if the president were to demonstrate a clear degree of bipartisanship, it would force the Republicans to meet him halfway. If they didn't, they would look intransigent, as the GOP did in 1995 and 1996, when Bill Clinton first advocated a balanced budget. Obama could then go to the Democrats for tough cuts to entitlements and look to the Republicans for difficult cuts on defense.
On foreign policy, Obama could better make hard decisions about Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan based on what is reasonable and responsible for the United States, without the political constraints of a looming election. He would be able to deal with a Democratic constituency that wants to get out of Afghanistan immediately and a Republican constituency that is committed to the war, forging a course that responds not to the electoral calendar but to the facts on the ground.
If the president adopts our suggestion, both sides will be forced to compromise. The alternative, we fear, will put the nation at greater risk. While we believe that Obama can be reelected, to do so he will have to embark on a scorched-earth campaign of the type that President George W. Bush ran in the 2002 midterms and the 2004 presidential election, which divided Americans in ways that still plague us.
Obama owes his election in large measure to the fact that he rejected this approach during his historic campaign. Indeed, we were among those millions of Democrats, Republicans and independents who were genuinely moved by his rhetoric and purpose. Now, the only way he can make real progress is to return to those values and to say that for the good of the country, he will not be a candidate in 2012.
Should the president do that, he - and the country - would face virtually no bad outcomes. The worst-case scenario for Obama? In January 2013, he walks away from the White House having been transformative in two ways: as the first black president, yes, but also as a man who governed in a manner unmatched by any modern leader. He will have reconciled the nation, continued the economic recovery, gained a measure of control over the fiscal problems that threaten our future, and forged critical solutions to our international challenges. He will, at last, be the figure globally he has sought to be, and will almost certainly leave a better regarded president than he is today. History will look upon him kindly - and so will the public.
It is no secret that we have been openly critical of the president in recent days, but we make this proposal with the deepest sincerity and hope for him and for the country.
We have both advised presidents facing great national crises and have seen challenges from inside the Oval Office. We are convinced that if Obama immediately declares his intention not to run for reelection, he will be able to unite the country, provide national and international leadership, escape the hold of the left, isolate the right and achieve results that would be otherwise unachievable.
Patrick H. Caddell, who was a pollster and senior adviser to President Jimmy Carter, is a political commentator. Douglas E. Schoen, a pollster who worked for President Bill Clinton, is the author of "Mad as Hell: How the Tea Party Movement Is Fundamentally Remaking Our Two-Party System." They will be online Monday, Nov. 15, at 11 a.m. ET to chat. Submit your questions before or during the discussion.
Mark Hemingway: Soros uses his billions to undermine democracy
The Washington Examainer By: Mark Hemingway Commentary Staff Writer November 14, 2010
Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros is sometimes caricatured by his opponents as a left-wing Bond villain, but cut through the hyperbole and there are good reasons why Soros truly is far more threatening than just another wealthy liberal.
Soros isn't merely content with spending money to work within the system to elect Democrats, promote liberal policies, and otherwise shape the public debate.
He has spent millions of dollars to change the very machinery of our democracy. In a center-right country, it's very hard to elect liberal leaders and enact left-wing policies. So Soros wants less democracy and in some cases wants to do away with elections altogether.
According to an American Justice Partnership report, Soros' Open Society Institute has "funneled at least $45.4 million into a highly coordinated campaign to reshape the judiciary and fundamentally change the way judges are chosen in many American states."
Soros' millions are funding Justice at Stake, whose explicit goal is to do away with the election of state judges. JAS wants a "merit system" that would empower "nonpartisan" panels selected by state officials to make judicial appointments.
These panels would likely be dominated by the state's bar association and legal interests. A similar system for appointing judges is already in place in Missouri, where the judicial selection panel consists of the state Supreme Court's chief justice, three lawyers chosen by the Missouri Bar and three gubernatorial appointees.
Soros' OSI argues such a system is necessary because "in recent years big money and special interest political pressure have become a staple of judicial campaigns, raising questions about the integrity of U.S. courts."
The newly funded Soros program "seeks to counter the influence of political and special interest groups."
Of course, if you're worried about special interests dominating judicial elections, the OSI/JAS alternative is even worse. That's because state bar associations and legal groups are dominated by trial lawyers. Lawyers and law firms are the seventh biggest political donors of "all time," according to Opensecrets.org, and dominate state politics in parts of the country.
The judicial system should maintain a necessary degree of impartiality, but America's founders certainly didn't intend for judges to be unmoored from democracy. About 95 percent of America's civil disputes end up in state courts. That's an enormous amount of power, which needs checks and balances. There's a reason why 87 percent of America's judges are elected.
There are many signs that Americans are increasingly wary of activist judges imposing liberal policies against the public will. On Nov. 2, voters in Iowa for the first time ever ousted three sitting state Supreme Court judges. All three had voted to legalize gay marriage. And Nevada voters rejected a statewide initiative to implement a judicial selection system like that sought by Soros' JAS.
It also turns out Missouri's vaunted "merit system," which was the template for the OSI's initiative, actually increases politicization. For 70 years, the Show Me State's judicial selection process was conducted behind closed doors.
The result? A 2009 Missouri Law Review article found 87 percent of judicial nominees in Missouri had donated money primarily to Democrats, in a state where the electorate is near evenly divided between the two parties.
After a grass-roots backlash, Missouri changed the rules in October. Residents can now observe the state panel's interviews of prospective judges, nominate potential candidates and determine the panel's votes.
Soros is lobbying to preserve the courts as an avenue for enacting liberal policies that won't be supported by popular will. If Soros really cared about corrupt judicial elections, he would lobby for more transparency and more democracy, not less.
In my reporting, I regularly travel to banana republics notorious for their inequality. In some of these plutocracies, the richest 1 percent of the population gobbles up 20 percent of the national pie.
Nicholas D. Kristof
But guess what? You no longer need to travel to distant and dangerous countries to observe such rapacious inequality. We now have it right here at home — and in the aftermath of Tuesday’s election, it may get worse.
The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.
C.E.O.’s of the largest American companies earned an average of 42 times as much as the average worker in 1980, but 531 times as much in 2001. Perhaps the most astounding statistic is this: From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.
That’s the backdrop for one of the first big postelection fights in Washington — how far to extend the Bush tax cuts to the most affluent 2 percent of Americans. Both parties agree on extending tax cuts on the first $250,000 of incomes, even for billionaires. Republicans would also cut taxes above that.
The richest 0.1 percent of taxpayers would get a tax cut of $61,000 from President Obama. They would get $370,000 from Republicans, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. And that provides only a modest economic stimulus, because the rich are less likely to spend their tax savings.
At a time of 9.6 percent unemployment, wouldn’t it make more sense to finance a jobs program? For example, the money could be used to avoid laying off teachers and undermining American schools.
Likewise, an obvious priority in the worst economic downturn in 70 years should be to extend unemployment insurance benefits, some of which will be curtailed soon unless Congress renews them. Or there’s the Trade Adjustment Assistance program, which helps train and support workers who have lost their jobs because of foreign trade. It will no longer apply to service workers after Jan. 1, unless Congress intervenes.
So we face a choice. Is our economic priority the jobless, or is it zillionaires?
And if Republicans are worried about long-term budget deficits, a reasonable concern, why are they insistent on two steps that nonpartisan economists say would worsen the deficits by more than $800 billion over a decade — cutting taxes for the most opulent, and repealing health care reform? What other programs would they cut to make up the lost $800 billion in revenue?
In weighing these issues, let’s remember that backdrop of America’s rising inequality.
In the past, many of us acquiesced in discomfiting levels of inequality because we perceived a tradeoff between equity and economic growth. But there’s evidence that the levels of inequality we’ve now reached may actually suppress growth. A drop of inequality lubricates economic growth, but too much may gum it up.
Robert H. Frank of Cornell University, Adam Seth Levine of Vanderbilt University, and Oege Dijk of the European University Institute recently wrote a fascinating paper suggesting that inequality leads to more financial distress. They looked at census data for the 50 states and the 100 most populous counties in America, and found that places where inequality increased the most also endured the greatest surges in bankruptcies.
Here’s their explanation: When inequality rises, the richest rake in their winnings and buy even bigger mansions and fancier cars. Those a notch below then try to catch up, and end up depleting their savings or taking on more debt, making a financial crisis more likely.
Another consequence the scholars found: Rising inequality also led to more divorces, presumably a byproduct of the strains of financial distress. Maybe I’m overly sentimental or romantic, but that pierces me. It’s a reminder that inequality isn’t just an economic issue but also a question of human dignity and happiness.
Mounting evidence suggests that losing a job or a home can rock our identity and savage our self-esteem. Forced moves wrench families from their schools and support networks.
In short, inequality leaves people on the lower rungs feeling like hamsters on a wheel spinning ever faster, without hope or escape.
Economic polarization also shatters our sense of national union and common purpose, fostering political polarization as well.
So in this postelection landscape, let’s not aggravate income gaps that already would make a Latin American caudillo proud. To me, we’ve reached a banana republic point where our inequality has become both economically unhealthy and morally repugnant.
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on November 7, 2010, on page WK10 of the New York edition.
Obliterating a generation of Democrats
By Dick Morris - 09/28/10 06:57 PM ET
Thanks to the leadership of President Obama, Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid, the Democratic Party is facing the biggest defeat in midterm elections in the past 110 years, perhaps surpassing the modern record of a 74-seat gain set in 1922. They will also lose control of the Senate.
Republicans are now leading in 54 Democratic House districts. In 19 more, the incumbent congressman is under 50 percent and his GOP challenger is within five points. That makes 73 seats where victory is within easy grasp for the Republican Party. The only reason the list is not longer is that there are 160 Democratic House districts that were considered so strongly blue that there is no recent polling available.
There is no Democratic message. President Obama is heralding education — an issue never mentioned on the campaign trail. Secretary of State Clinton is trying to restart the peace talks in the Middle East. Attorney General Holder is re-evaluating online national-security taps. And a hundred Democrats are scrambling about on their own trying to get reelected!
The Democratic campaigns they are waging are formulaic. They make no attempt to defend the administration, but run away from it where possible. They never mention the words stimulus, healthcare reform, card-check, GM takeover or cap-and-trade.
Instead, they are running almost exclusively negative ads. They base their campaigns on tax liens, failed marriages, DWIs and the like. Where there is a paucity of dirt, they resort to three prefab negatives: that their opponent favors a 23 percent national sales tax, that he wants to privatize Social Security and that he is shipping jobs overseas.
The Republican answers are simple. Republicans want a 23 percent value-added tax (VAT) only as part of eliminating the income tax. Some Republicans do back letting people under 55 divert one-third of their FICA taxes to approved investment alternatives, and most voters agree with them. But, on the campaign trail, simply saying — accurately — that “I oppose any change at all in Social Security for our seniors” takes care of it. And Republicans rebut the jobs overseas charge by citing how the incumbent backed cash-for-clunkers, where 40 percent of the cars bought were foreign; the TARP bailout, which paid billions to overseas banks; and the GM bailout, where two-thirds of the jobs were overseas.
It is a pathetic defense, easily pierced and defeated.
Now the field of battle will increasingly shift. The marginal Democrats — the freshmen and sophomores — are mostly gone. The seats of Southern conservative Democrats largely already lost. Now the combat shifts to the previously safe seats occupied by many in the House leadership, including, perhaps, the seats of Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (Md.) and Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (Mass.).
This new attack will force the Democrats to spend their resources defending their base and make it even easier to pick off marginal members. And while Republican resources shift to the previously solidly Democratic districts, eager donors anxious to develop relationships with the new Republican majority will fill their shoes.
In the Senate, Republicans lead in eight Democratic seats: North Dakota, Indiana, Arkansas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, West Virginia and Illinois. In Nevada, the ninth, Harry Reid has been stuck at 44 percent of the vote since Aug. 1, when his Social Security/Medicare attack was rebutted. He is dead in the water. His negatives flood the airwaves but are not working, and the ads run by Karl Rove’s American Crossroads have him pinned down.
For the 10th seat, the GOP has five options: New York, where Joe DioGuardi is only one point behind Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand in the latest published poll; California, where Sen. Barbara Boxer is stubbornly below 50; Washington state, where the lead has seesawed back and forth between Dino Rossi and Sen. Patty Murray; Connecticut, where Linda McMahon has closed to 50-45; and Delaware, where Christine O’Donnell may yet come back and has closed the gap to nine points.
And where is Obama while all this is happening? Proposing new initiatives on education!
Morris, a former adviser to Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and President Bill Clinton, is the author of Outrage, Fleeced and Catastrophe. To get all of his and Eileen McGann’s columns for free by e-mail or to order a signed copy of their latest book, 2010: Take Back America — A Battle Plan, go to dickmorris.com. In August, Morris became a strategist for the League of American Voters, which is running ads opposing the president’s healthcare reforms.
Nile Gardiner is a Washington-based foreign affairs analyst and political commentator. He appears frequently on American and British television and radio, including Fox News Channel, CNN, BBC, Sky News, and NPR.
Barack Obama has bowed before the UN over Arizona immigration law
There can be few sights more humiliating for the American people than that of a US president kowtowing to a foreign leader or to supranational institutions. Continental Europeans are used to this sort of thing after decades of dominance by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, and have grudgingly accepted over time the gradual and undemocratic erosion of their freedoms. But most Americans fiercely defend their national sovereignty, and find the idea of giving international organisations a say over their laws and lives completely unacceptable.
The Obama administration however has submitted a report to the UN Commissioner on Human Rights, South African judge Navanethem Pillay, which makes direct reference to a popular Arizona immigration law aimed at tackling illegal immigration, which is fiercely opposed by the White House, and is the subject of legal action by the Justice Department. The report references
A recent Arizona law, S.B. 1070, (which) has generated significant attention and debate at home and around the world. The issue is being addressed in a court action that argues that the federal government has the authority to set and enforce immigration law. That action is ongoing; parts of the law are currently enjoined.
The highly controversial reference to the Arizona law serves only one purpose – to gain UN and international support for the Obama administration’s position in the face of mounting opposition from Arizona legislators and a majority of the American people. A recent Rasmussen poll showed 61 percent of Americans backing Arizona-style laws for their own states, and just 28 percent supporting a Justice Department challenge .
By doing so, Obama officials undoubtedly hope to stir up international condemnation of the Arizona policy in advance of the UN General Assembly meetings in September, which they believe will increase pressure on Arizona to back down. It is a highly cynical move that speaks volumes about the Obama team’s willingness to undercut American sovereignty and popular will on the world stage.
This approach has rightly been strongly condemned by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, who described the Arizona reference in the government report as “downright offensive”, and called on it to be removed. The State Department has just announced that it will stand by its decision to include Arizona in its UN submission, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton strongly in favour of it.
It is important to note that the Obama administration’s report to the United Nations will go before the UN Human Rights Council, which includes in its current membership some of the world’s worst human rights abusers. The likes of China, Cuba, Libya, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, will have a right to pass judgment over the Arizona immigration law, a humiliation for a great superpower before some of the most brutal regimes on the face of the earth.
Over the course of the last 19 months, Barack Obama has bowed before Emperors and Kings, and apologised for his country on numerous occasions, from Cairo to Strasbourg. By deliberately placing the immigration policy of a US state before the Human Rights Council, he is now bowing before the United Nations, and undercutting the sovereignty of his own nation. This is not leadership but a surrender of US interests before a declining world body that is a hotbed of anti-Americanism, and a bully pulpit for many of the world’s most odious tyrants. It is also yet another example of an imperial-style presidency that is increasingly out of touch with the American people and public opinion.
The New York Times Editorial Staff
August 28, 2010
Waiting for Mr. Obama
If President Obama has a big economic initiative up his sleeve, as he hinted recently, now would be a good time to let the rest of us in on it.
News on Friday confirmed that the economy was far weaker in the second quarter than originally believed, growing at 1.6 percent versus an initial reading of 2.4 percent. Grim reports on housing sales indicate that the slowdown has continued. In a normal recession, housing would lead the way up from the depths. Today, it appears to be leading the way back down.
Which brings us back to Mr. Obama. The fiscal stimulus of 2009, coupled with low interest rates and other Federal Reserve interventions, kept the recession from being much worse. But it has not been enough to revive hiring, without which a real recovery is impossible. In the meantime and even more ominously, economic policy making has all but ground to a halt.
Congress is gridlocked. For nearly two months, Republicans blocked an extension of unemployment benefits, a basic recovery measure. They are still holding up a bill to spur more lending to small businesses.
In a much-anticipated speech on Friday, Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, reiterated his vow to do more to boost the economy if conditions worsened. He did not seem particularly convinced that anything the Fed could do would be enough.
The question then is whether Mr. Obama will lead. He cannot force Congress to act, but he could pre-empt Republicans’ diatribes — on the deficit, on small business, on taxes — with tough truths and a big mission that would tie together the strategies and the sacrifices that will be needed to put the economy right.
First, he needs to keep driving home that he is committed to addressing the deficit, and that he will call for widespread sacrifice to do so — starting with letting the Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans expire at year end. Mr. Obama must tell Americans that claims from Republican leaders that the country can both cut taxes and tackle the deficit are absurd and cynical.
Next, he needs to explain why too much sacrifice, too soon, especially from the middle class, would do more harm than good while the economy is weak. More government support is needed until conditions improve.
Mr. Obama also needs to inspire Americans who have been ground down by the economic crisis and Washington’s small-bore sniping. He needs to rally the nation around a big idea — a project that is worth sacrificing for, worth paying for, worth working for. One that lets them know that there is more ahead than just a return to a status quo of lopsided growth in which corporate profits surge while jobs and incomes lag.
That mission could be the “21st century infrastructure,” that Mr. Obama mentioned on a multi-city trip this month, “not just roads and bridges, but faster Internet access and high-speed rail.” It could be energy independence, with high-tech green jobs and a real chance for addressing global warming. Either of the above would make sense, economically and politically.
Mr. Obama and his economic team had clearly hoped for an economic rebound in time for the midterm elections. They are not going to get it. The economic damage they inherited was too deep, and the economic stimulus they pushed through Congress, for all of the fight, was too small. Standing back is not doing the country or his party any good. We believe Americans are ready for hard truths and big ideas.
The Shop Talk on Martha’s Vineyard: The Obamas
Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times
A woman wearing a T-shirt that reads "Relax It's All About the Vineyard" in the town of Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard.
WINDOW DRESSING The Locker Room in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard.
Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times
THINGS for President Obama
to do when on vacation next week: shoot some hoops, view the majestic
Aquinnah Cliffs, peruse the Featherstone Flea Market and, if the owner
of C’est la Vie, a clothing store here, has his way, buy the T-shirt
that lays out all these options.
The Obamas are vacationing on
Martha’s Vineyard, and the only ones working harder than Secret Service
agents to get ready are the souvenir shop, restaurant and other store
owners scrambling to stock and sell T-shirts, posters and muffins
commemorating the Obamas’ first vacation as first family.
“Look
at that, an ‘Obamarita,’ ” said Kathy Santaniello, a tourist from
Wilbraham, Mass. as she walked past Sharky’s Cantina here, which
advertised the drink — a margarita made with crushed mandarin oranges
(rumored to be Mr. Obama’s favorite fruit), pineapple juice (a nod to
his Hawaiian heritage), triple sec and tequila.
Eric Godbout, a
bartender, said the drink had been selling briskly ever since the White
House announced the president will arrive here Aug. 23. Michelle Obama and their daughters are expected to arrive earlier.
The island is no stranger to celebrities, who like the Vineyard because people leave them alone, or to presidential visits — Bill Clinton
vacationed here almost every year while in office. The Obamas are
familiar with the island, having vacationed and campaigned here before,
and local residents expect to see the family hitting the beach and
eating ice cream. Regardless, islanders say that Mr. Obama’s visit has a different feel now that he is president.
“I
think there might be even more excitement” than when Mr. Clinton came,
said Nancy Gardella, the executive director of the Martha’s Vineyard
Chamber of Commerce. “I think President Obama represents so much that
people are excited about.”
And retailers are trying to capitalize
on this mood on an island where 75 percent of voters cast ballots for
Mr. Obama and countless numbers of tourists ask when the president is
expected to arrive. T-shirts with slogans like “Summer White House ’09”
and “Barackin’ the Vineyard Summer ’09” hang in stores, posters
welcoming the family are selling for $3.99 and an oil painting called
“Yes We Can — Fist Bump” is on sale in a local gallery for $1,100.
“Everyone
who comes in asks ‘When is he coming?’ ” said Saurabh Chhibber, owner
of Island Authentics in Oak Bluffs. “Some people are planning to come
back.”
Mr. Chhibber and other merchants are hoping sales
generated by the excitement and extra visitors, like people from Cape
Cod coming over for the day to catch a glimpse of the Obamas, will help
make up for a summer made dismal by the economy and poor weather.
“We
got 25 days of rain in June,” Mr. Chhibber said. “With Obama’s visit we
can make up for all of June. With the economy the way it is we need to
get as much as we can right now.”
Espresso Love, a coffee
shop in Edgartown, is making a special muffin packed with oats and
pineapple, playing to the president’s fitness obsession and Hawaiian
heritage. On Saturday the Offshore Ale Company in Oak Bluffs will unveil
its latest brew, “Ale to the Chief,” a pale ale made entirely with
American ingredients. It will be on tap at three Oak Bluffs restaurants.
“We thought it would be fun to do something celebrating that
he’s here,” said Phil McAndrews, the brew pub’s owner. It used to be a
hangout for Secret Service agents when Mr. Clinton vacationed here, Mr.
McAndrews said. And while many are on the island, he said he hadn’t seen
any — that he recognized — in the brew pub.
Retailers are even taking advantage of the first dog, Bo.
Good Dog Goods is selling a “Bobama” T-shirt for $18, with a picture of
a Portuguese water dog on the front and the slogan “The New Dog in
Town” on the back.
Kerry Scott, the store’s owner, is organizing
the island’s first dog parade in honor of Bo. And he is also getting
his own snack: a Beefy Bobama Dog Treat from Vin-Yips, a dog treat
company.
“It’s a very dog-friendly island,” Ms. Gardella said.
Others
are not as thrilled with the hoopla the Obamas’ visit will create.
“There’s a mixed reaction,” said Robert Kosienski, manager of Mad
Martha’s Ice Cream in Vineyard Haven and a teacher. “Some people are
thinking, ‘Oh my goodness, it’s going to be a traffic nightmare.’ ”
But
Lou Iacoviello, whose wife’s family has run Mary’s Linen Store here
for 61 years, said the store almost sold out of presidential Vineyard
T-shirts.
“People buying T-shirts the other day were calling New
York to see what size people wanted,” he said. “I also heard some people
calling Hawaii for sizes.”
Mr. Iacoviello and others said that
the president’s vacation in Oak Bluffs, traditionally an
African-American enclave, is stirring pride in the community.
“I
look up to him as an inspiration,” said Felicia King, 17, of Hamden,
Conn., who was buying a “presidential retreat” T-shirt at Mr. Chhibber’s
store. “It’s really cool he’s coming here.”
Obama, the one-term president By: Roger Simon August 17, 2010 04:29 AM EDT
Honest to goodness, the man just does not get it. He might be forced to pull a Palin and resign before his first term is over. He could go off and write his memoirs and build his presidential library. (Both would be half-size, of course.)
I am not saying Obama is not smart; he is as smart as a whip. I am just saying he does not understand what savvy first-term presidents need to understand:
You have to stay on message, follow the polls, listen to your advisers (who are writing the message and taking the polls) and realize that when it comes to doing what is right versus doing what is expedient, you do what is expedient so that you can get reelected and do what is right in the second term. If at all possible. And it will help your legacy. And not endanger the election of others in your party. And not hurt the brand. Or upset people too much.
Recently, President Obama decided he had to weigh in on the controversy surrounding the proposed construction of a Muslim community center and mosque near ground zero in New York.
It is a controversy Obama could have ducked (he had been doing so for weeks), but he finally decided he needed to lend his voice and the weight of the presidency to speaking out for what is right.
So on Friday night, he said: “As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan in accordance with local laws and ordinances.”
See what I mean about not getting it?
John Feehery, a Republican consultant, told Sheryl Gay Stolberg of The New York Times, “This is not a unifying decision on his part; he chose a side. I understand why he did this, but politically I think it’s a blunder.”
You could not put the conventional wisdom more clearly: It is far better for a president to do nothing than to choose a side. Even if the side he chooses is the right one from an ethical or moral perspective, it is a “blunder” politically because inevitably it will upset some people.
The problem for Obama is that he appears to have taken seriously all the “change” stuff he promised during his campaign. And he has been unable to make the transition from candidate to president.
A candidate says, as Bobby Kennedy did, “Some men look at things the way they are and ask why? I dream of things that are not and ask why not?”
A president says: “What do the polls say?”
A recent CNN poll found that 68 percent of Americans do not want a mosque built close to ground zero. Which should mean: End of story. That’s all she wrote. Let’s move on to the next crisis.
It appears, however, that at least on this occasion, Obama does not care what the polls say.
And his political opponents have been quick to take advantage of it. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who is chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said on "Fox News Sunday" that Obama demonstrated how “Washington, the White House, the administration, the president himself seems to be disconnected from the mainstream of America. ... This is sort of the dichotomy that people sense, that they’re being lectured to — not listened to — and I think that’s the reason why a lot of people are very upset with Washington.”
Which may be true. You can go back to the mid-1800s and find a lot of legislators saying that Abe Lincoln should stop lecturing people about ending slavery and listen to them about keeping it.
And there were plenty of lawmakers who said President Dwight D. Eisenhower was “disconnected from the mainstream of America” when he ordered the 101st Airborne Division to go down to Little Rock, Ark., to make sure some black kids could go to school with white kids.
Both decisions may have been “off message,” which is about the worst sin you can commit in Washington. But what’s so wrong about being off message if you are right about the issue?
This: An unidentified chief of staff to a “politically vulnerable House Democrat” told James Hohmann and Maggie Haberman of POLITICO that Obama’s statement “probably alienates a lot of independent voters” and “there are a lot of [Democrats] who are spooked in tough districts today” and “a lot of Republicans licking their chops right now.”
And what’s the point of doing the right thing if your party is going to lose seats because of it?
Maybe Obama is disconnected. After all, as a former professor of constitutional law, he actually knows what the Constitution says.
His opponents have no such fetters. They know what they want the Constitution to say: yes to guns, no to gay marriage and never to mosques close to hallowed ground, though churches and synagogues are OK.
What’s so wrong with that? I’ll bet they poll great.
Roger Simon is POLITICO’s chief political columnist.
For a couple of years, it was the love that dared not speak his name. In 2008, Republican candidates hardly ever mentioned the president still sitting in the White House. After the election, the G.O.P. did its best to shout down all talk about how we got into the mess we’re in, insisting that we needed to look forward, not back. And many in the news media played along, acting as if it was somehow uncouth for Democrats even to mention the Bush era and its legacy.
Paul Krugman
The truth, however, is that the only problem Republicans ever had with George W. Bush was his low approval rating. They always loved his policies and his governing style — and they want them back. In recent weeks, G.O.P. leaders have come out for a complete return to the Bush agenda, including tax breaks for the rich and financial deregulation. They’ve even resurrected the plan to cut future Social Security benefits.
But they have a problem: how can they embrace President Bush’s policies, given his record? After all, Mr. Bush’s two signature initiatives were tax cuts and the invasion of Iraq; both, in the eyes of the public, were abject failures. Tax cuts never yielded the promised prosperity, but along with other policies — especially the unfunded war in Iraq — they converted a budget surplus into a persistent deficit. Meanwhile, the W.M.D. we invaded Iraq to eliminate turned out not to exist, and by 2008 a majority of the public believed not just that the invasion was a mistake but that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into war. What’s a Republican to do?
You know the answer. There’s now a concerted effort under way to rehabilitate Mr. Bush’s image on at least three fronts: the economy, the deficit and the war.
On the economy: Last week Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, declared that “there’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy.” So now the word is that the Bush-era economy was characterized by “vibrancy.”
I guess it depends on the meaning of the word “vibrant.” The actual record of the Bush years was (i) two and half years of declining employment, followed by (ii) four and a half years of modest job growth, at a pace significantly below the eight-year average under Bill Clinton, followed by (iii) a year of economic catastrophe. In 2007, at the height of the “Bush boom,” such as it was, median household income, adjusted for inflation, was still lower than it had been in 2000.
But the Bush apologists hope that you won’t remember all that. And they also have a theory, which I’ve been hearing more and more — namely, that President Obama, though not yet in office or even elected, caused the 2008 slump. You see, people were worried in advance about his future policies, and that’s what caused the economy to tank. Seriously.
On the deficit: Republicans are now claiming that the Bush administration was actually a paragon of fiscal responsibility, and that the deficit is Mr. Obama’s fault. “The last year of the Bush administration,” said Mr. McConnell recently, “the deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product was 3.2 percent, well within the range of what most economists think is manageable. A year and a half later, it’s almost 10 percent.”
But that 3.2 percent figure, it turns out, is for fiscal 2008 — which wasn’t the last year of the Bush administration, because it ended in September of 2008. In other words, it ended just as the failure of Lehman Brothers — on Mr. Bush’s watch — was triggering a broad financial and economic collapse. This collapse caused the deficit to soar: By the first quarter of 2009 — with only a trickle of stimulus funds flowing — federal borrowing had already reached almost 9 percent of G.D.P. To some of us, this says that the economic crisis that began under Mr. Bush is responsible for the great bulk of our current deficit. But the Republican Party is having none of it.
Finally, on the war: For most Americans, the whole debate about the war is old if painful news — but not for those obsessed with refurbishing the Bush image. Karl Rove now claims that his biggest mistake was letting Democrats get away with the “shameful” claim that the Bush administration hyped the case for invading Iraq. Let the whitewashing begin!
Again, Republicans aren’t trying to rescue George W. Bush’s reputation for sentimental reasons; they’re trying to clear the way for a return to Bush policies. And this carries a message for anyone hoping that the next time Republicans are in power, they’ll behave differently. If you believe that they’ve learned something — say, about fiscal prudence or the importance of effective regulation — you’re kidding yourself. You might as well face it: they’re addicted to Bush.
Black racism: a real problem, or pure
politics?
AP – In this image from video provided by the NAACP, Shirley
Sherrod is shown speaking in March, 2010, at …
By JESSE WASHINGTON, AP National Writer Jesse Washington, Ap National Writer
–
Wed Jul 21,
6:56 pm ET
Is black racism a real problem? Or is it pure
politics?
Shirley Sherrod was dismissed from her
Agriculture Department job because remarks she made almost a quarter
century ago about her dealings with a white farmer were perceived as
racist. She was offered her job back Wednesday because a full viewing of
that speech showed it to be a tale of racial reconciliation.
But put aside the furor and confusion over the
employment of the black woman who headed the USDA's rural development
office in Georgia. The Sherrod affair brings to the fore a simmering
debate over whether black racism is cause for concern in America under
its first black president.
During the campaign, Barack Obama was forced to
address the blistering racial remarks of his former pastor. Since then,
there have been complaints that Barack Obama presides over an
administration that is racial, not post-racial — when he supported a
black Harvard professor who was arrested by a white police officer, or when the Justice
Department dismissed most charges against a group of black militants
accused of intimidating voters.
"If the Justice Department is really not interested
in pursuing cases against blacks who violate whites' civil rights and
only go after whites who violate blacks' rights, that is a major
problem," says William Stogner, a 46-year-old telecommunications
technician who lives in St. Louis.
Growing up in the 1970s, Stogner was often called
"cracker" by black kids in his grandparents' East St. Louis
neighborhood. Last April, while walking to his car after a tea party
rally, he says he heard the same epithet from a group of young black men. To Stogner, black and white
racism are equivalent: "To me it's bad no matter where it originates."
But to some conservatives, there is something special
about black racism: It is invisible in the liberal media, and
perpetrated by the Obama administration. While white racism is highly
publicized, they say, black racism gets a pass.
"The sheer hypocrisy is maddening to me, and is a
terrible, terrible double standard," said conservative radio host Mike
Gallagher.
Andrew Breitbart clearly sees black racism as an
issue. He's the conservative blogger who posted the clip from Sherrod's
1986 speech to an NAACP meeting that set off the
contretemps. He said the NAACP, in accusing the tea party movement of
racism, was glossing over its own bigotry.
In the video, he wrote, "Sherrod's racist tale is
received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of
recognition and agreement. Hardly the behavior of the group now holding
itself up as the supreme judge of another group's racial tolerance."
To Sherrod, Breitbart was just playing his own racist
card: He created "a racist thing that could unite even more the racist
people out there," she told the liberal website Media Matters.
Imani Perry, a professor at Princeton's Center for African American Studies, said some conservatives
are manipulating white fears for political advantage.
"I think many white Americans are fearful that with
Obama in the White House, and the diversity in his appointments, that
the racial balance of power is shifting. And that's frightening both
because people always are afraid to give up privilege, and because of
the prospect of a black-and-brown backlash against a very ugly history,"
Perry said.
Some liberals have long maintained that racism
requires power, and so black people can't be racist. Obama's election
undercut the first argument and made the specter of black racism appear
more threatening.
Of course, the black power movement of the 1960s and
1970s — "We must wage guerrilla warfare on the honky white man," said H.
Rap Brown — was plenty threatening.
Joe Hicks was a black nationalist and proudly
demonized whites back then. Now a conservative Republican and vice
president of Community Advocates Inc. in Los Angeles, which works to
improve race relations,
Hicks says today that black racism is not widespread: "The average
black person doesn't dislike white people."
But he does believe it has become more prevalent than
white racism. "Bigotry among white Americans has been driven to the
margins of society. White people fear being called a racist more than
anything else. But as white people have slowly moved away from viewing
themselves in a racialized way, black people have maintained their sense
of racial consciousness," which sometimes leads to bias, he said.
Gallagher, the radio host, says the appearance of
anti-white bias at the Agriculture or Justice Department "creates white
racists."
"White people sit around, and they get angry and they think this is the
world they live in, and it's not fair. I hear it in the frustration of
my callers," he said.
"White America understands by now, you'd better be very careful in the
way you treat people of color. In this history of this country that's
great advice. That's as it should be. We've had a shameful past," he
said. "Now the fear is that the pendulum has swung so far the other way,
that white people mind their P's and Q's and don't say anything that
can be perceived as racist, but blacks can talk about hurting people."
Perry, the Princeton professor, pointed out that blacks have 10 cents of
wealth for every dollar possessed by whites.
"We can hardly say whites as a group are suffering under the weight of
racial discrimination. That said, we do have to find ways of talking
about race with more openness but also with greater sensitivity," she
said.
"There is a lot of work for everyone to do in this regard, and people of
color are no exception."
___
Jesse Washington covers race and ethnicity for The Associated Press. He
is reachable at jwashington(at)ap.org.
Politics
and commentary, coast to coast, from the Los Angeles Times
Republican remarks
by Sen. Pat Roberts, as provided by Republican congressional leadership
I’m Pat Roberts – and I am very proud to represent Kansas in the U.S.
Senate. I’ve had the privilege of serving the people of my state as
both a senator and a congressman.
And much of my work in Congress
has focused on healthcare, and especially the needs and concerns of
patients -- whether in a rural hospital in my hometown of Dodge City or
in a major metropolitan area like Kansas City.
And no matter
where I go, patients tell me they are very worried that the new
healthcare law – Obamacare -- will cost more, hurt their quality of
care, and keep them from seeing their doctor that they know and trust.
Now
as you know, Republicans fought against holding the healthcare debate
behind closed doors. We fought against the parliamentary gimmicks used
to pass the bill against the wishes of a majority of Kansans and
Americans. Now, as we all return to work after our Independence Day
celebrations, we learn President Obama – again – has gone behind closed
doors to appoint a healthcare czar without public debate.
President
Obama gave a recess appointment – avoiding a public hearing and a....
...vote in the Senate – to Dr. Donald Berwick, making him the
administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
It
is ironic that the president chose Independence Day for this action,
avoiding the Senate’s constitutional check on executive power, to
appoint Dr. Berwick.
Now, upon learning of this move, the
chairman of the Finance Committee, Sen. Max Baucus, a Democrat from
Montana, said, "I’m troubled that, rather than going through the
standard nomination process, Dr. Berwick was recess appointed."
I
could not agree more with my Democrat colleague.
Without a
public confirmation hearing on Dr. Berwick’s nomination, the Senate and
the American people do not have the opportunity to learn about the man
who will control one-third of all healthcare spending in America.
So
a lot is at stake.
His influence will extend beyond Medicare and
Medicaid, affecting nearly every American’s care, because Medicare sets
the course for private insurers.
As part of the new healthcare
law, Dr. Berwick will have to a cut half a trillion dollars from
Medicare, obviously limiting seniors’ choices.
Now, as a result
of the recess appointment, Dr. Berwick will take office through the back
door without any formal public vetting as prescribed by the
Constitution.
Now this flies in the face of what was promised to
be the most transparent administration in our nation's history.
So
– what do we know about how Dr. Berwick will administer your
healthcare? Lets look at his own statements. He said, "Any healthcare funding plan...must—must—redistribute
wealth from the richer among us to the poorer and less fortunate."
Well,
the obvious fear is Dr. Berwick will in fact use this position to
redistribute the wealth in our country, cementing Obamacare as a giant,
but stealthy, income transfer machine.
Dr. Berwick has spoken
very favorably about the British national health service, calling it
‘not just a national treasure, [but] a global treasure’ as well.
Unfortunately,
the British system rations care to contain costs.
The following
disturbing statement of Dr. Berwick speaks for itself: "Most people who
have serious pain do not need advanced methods; they just need the
morphine and counseling that has been around for centuries."
Now
is this the person we want making healthcare decisions for us, for our
parents, our grandparents, our children, grandchildren?
Dr.
Berwick has proposed similar rationing ideas for the American healthcare
system, saying, "The decision is not whether or not we will ration
care– the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open."
Clearly
the president’s plan is to have Dr. Berwick’s use of rationing cut that
half a trillion dollars from Medicare.
Americans will not know
how much saving a life is worth until Dr. Berwick is calling the shots.
There should be a public forum where he must address who should make
medical decisions-- your doctor? The patient? The family? Or the
government?
We urge the president to reconsider his recess
appointment of Dr. Berwick and encourage the Finance Committee to at
least hold a public hearing now.
The president’s healthcare plan –
the most sweeping overhaul of healthcare in our lifetime – cannot be
implemented behind closed doors. This is a warning! Your healthcare and
the care of your loved ones now hangs in the balance. Americans deserve
answers. ####
Weekly remarks by
President Obama, as provided by the White House
This
week, many of our largest corporations reported robust earnings – a
positive sign of growth.
But too many of our small-business owners
and those who aspire to start their own small businesses continue to
struggle, in part because they can’t get the credit they need to start
up, grow, and hire. And too many Americans whose livelihoods have fallen
prey to the worst recession in our lifetimes – a recession that cost
our economy 8 million jobs – still wonder how they’ll make ends meet.
That’s
why we need to take new, common-sense steps to help small businesses,
grow our economy, and create jobs – and we need to take them now.
For
months, that’s what we’ve been trying to do. But too often, the
Republican leadership in the United States Senate chooses to filibuster
our recovery and obstruct our progress. And that has very real
consequences.
Consider what that obstruction means for our small
businesses – the growth engines that create two of every three new jobs
in this country. A lot of small businesses still have trouble getting
the loans and capital they need to keep their doors open and hire new
workers. So we proposed steps to get them that help: Eliminating capital
gains taxes on investments. Establishing a fund for small lenders to
help small businesses. Enhancing successful SBA programs that help them
access the capital they need.
But again and again, a partisan
minority in the Senate said “no,” and used procedural tactics to block a
simple, up-or-down vote.
Think about what these stalling tactics
mean for the millions of Americans who’ve lost their jobs since the
recession began. Over the past several weeks, more than 2 million of
them have seen their unemployment insurance expire. For many, it was the
only way to make ends meet while searching for work – the only way to
cover rent, utilities, even food.
Three times, the Senate has
tried to temporarily extend that emergency assistance. And three times, a
minority of senators – basically the same crowd who said “no” to small
businesses – said “no” to folks looking for work, and blocked a straight
up-or-down vote.
Some Republican leaders actually treat this
unemployment insurance as if it’s a form of welfare. They say it
discourages folks from looking for work. Well, I’ve met a lot of folks
looking for work these past few years, and I can tell you, I haven’t met
any Americans who would rather have an unemployment check than a
meaningful job that lets you provide for your family. And we all have
friends, neighbors, or family members who already know how hard it is to
land a job when five workers are competing for every opening.
Now
in the past, presidents and Congresses of both parties have treated
unemployment insurance for what it is – an emergency expenditure. That’s
because an economic disaster can devastate families and communities
just as surely as a flood or tornado.
Suddenly, Republican
leaders want to change that. They say we shouldn’t provide unemployment
insurance because it costs money. So after years of championing
policies that turned a record surplus into a massive deficit, including a
tax cut for the wealthiest Americans, they’ve finally decided to make
their stand on the backs of the unemployed. They’ve got no problem
spending money on tax breaks for folks at the top who don’t need them
and didn’t even ask for them; but they object to helping folks laid off
in this recession who really do need help. And every day this goes on,
another 50,000 Americans lose that badly needed lifeline.
Well, I
think these senators are wrong. We can’t afford to go back to the same
misguided policies that led us into this mess. We need to move forward
with the policies that are leading us out of this mess.
The fact
is, most economists agree that extending unemployment insurance is one
of the single most cost-effective ways to help jump-start the economy.
It puts money into the pockets of folks who not only need it most, but
who also are most likely to spend it quickly. That boosts local
economies. And that means jobs.
Increasing loans to small
business. Renewing unemployment insurance. These steps aren’t just the
right thing to do for those hardest hit by the recession – they’re the
right thing to do for all of us. And I’m calling on Congress once more
to take these steps on behalf of America’s workers, and families, and
small-business owners – the people we were sent here to serve.
Because
when storms strike Main Street, we don’t play politics with emergency
aid. We don’t desert our fellow Americans when they fall on hard times.
We come together. We do what we can to help. We rebuild stronger, and we
move forward. That’s what we’re doing today. And I’m absolutely
convinced that’s how we’re going to come through this storm to better
days ahead. Thanks.
The Obama-Pelosi Lame Duck Strategy
Union 'card-check,' cap and trade, and so much more.
Democratic House members are so worried about the fall elections they're leaving Washington on July 30, a full week earlier than normal—and they won't return until mid-September. Members gulped when National Journal's Charlie Cook, the Beltway's leading political handicapper, predicted last month "the House is gone," meaning a GOP takeover. He thinks Democrats will hold the Senate, but with a significantly reduced majority.
The rush to recess gives Democrats little time to pass any major laws. That's why there have been signs in recent weeks that party leaders are planning an ambitious, lame-duck session to muscle through bills in December they don't want to defend before November. Retiring or defeated members of Congress would then be able to vote for sweeping legislation without any fear of voter retaliation.
"I've got lots of things I want to do" in a lame duck, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D., W. Va.) told reporters in mid June. North Dakota's Kent Conrad, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, wants a lame-duck session to act on the recommendations of President Obama's deficit commission, which is due to report on Dec. 1. "It could be a huge deal," he told Roll Call last month. "We could get the country on a sound long-term fiscal path." By which he undoubtedly means new taxes in exchange for extending some, but not all, of the Bush-era tax reductions that will expire at the end of the year.
In the House, Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva, co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told reporters last month that for bills like "card check"—the measure to curb secret-ballot union elections—"the lame duck would be the last chance, quite honestly, for the foreseeable future."
Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, chair of the Senate committee overseeing labor issues, told the Bill Press radio show in June that "to those who think [card check] is dead, I say think again." He told Mr. Press "we're still trying to maneuver" a way to pass some parts of the bill before the next Congress is sworn in.
Other lame-duck possibilities? Senate ratification of the New Start nuclear treaty, a federally mandated universal voter registration system to override state laws, and a budget resolution to lock in increased agency spending.
Then there is pork. A Senate aide told me that "some of the biggest porkers on both sides of the aisle are leaving office this year, and a lame-duck session would be their last hurrah for spending." Likely suspects include key members of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Congress's "favor factory," such as Pennsylvania Democrat Arlen Specter and Utah Republican Bob Bennett.
Conservative groups such as FreedomWorks are alarmed at the potential damage, and they are demanding that everyone in Congress pledge not to take up substantive legislation in a post-election session. "Members of Congress are supposed to represent their constituents, not override them like sore losers in a lame-duck session," Rep. Tom Price, head of the Republican Study Committee, told me.
It's been almost 30 years since anything remotely contentious was handled in a lame-duck session, but that doesn't faze Democrats who have jammed through ObamaCare and are determined to bring the financial system under greater federal control.
Mike Allen of Politico.com reports one reason President Obama failed to mention climate change legislation during his recent, Oval Office speech on the Gulf oil spill was that he wants to pass a modest energy bill this summer, then add carbon taxes or regulations in a conference committee with the House, most likely during a lame-duck session. The result would be a climate bill vastly more ambitious, and costly for American consumers and taxpayers, than moderate "Blue Dogs" in the House would support on the campaign trail. "We have a lot of wiggle room in conference," a House Democratic aide told the trade publication Environment & Energy Daily last month.
Many Democrats insist there will be no dramatic lame-duck agenda. But a few months ago they also insisted the extraordinary maneuvers used to pass health care wouldn't be used. Desperate times may be seen as calling for desperate measures, and this November the election results may well make Democrats desperate.
Mr. Fund is a columnist for WSJ.com.
Mort Zuckerman: World Sees Obama as Incompetent and Amateur
The president is well-intentioned but can't walk the
walk on the world stage
President Obama came into
office as the heir to a great foreign policy legacy enjoyed by every
recent U.S. president. Why? Because the United States stands on top of
the power ladder, not necessarily as the dominant power, but certainly
as the leading one. As such we are the sole nation capable of exercising
global leadership on a whole range of international issues from
security, trade
, and climate to counterterrorism.
We also benefit from the fact that most countries distrust the United
States far less than they distrust one another, so we uniquely have the
power to build coalitions. As a result, most of the world still looks to
Washington for help in their region and protection against potential
regional threats.
Yet, the Iraq war lingers; Afghanistan continues to be immersed in an
endless cycle of tribalism, corruption, and Islamist resurgence;
Guantánamo remains open; Iran sees how North Korea toys with Obama and
continues its programs to develop nuclear weapons and missiles; Cuba
spurns America's offers of a greater opening; and the Palestinians and
Israelis find that it is U.S. policy positions that defer serious
negotiations, the direct opposite of what the Obama administration hoped
for.
The reviews of Obama's performance have been disappointing. He has
seemed uncomfortable in the role of leading other nations, and often
seems to suggest there is nothing special about America's role in the
world. The global community was puzzled over the pictures of Obama
bowing to some of the world's leaders and surprised by his gratuitous
criticisms of and apologies for America's foreign policy under the
previous administration of George W. Bush. One Middle East authority,
Fouad Ajami, pointed out that Obama seems unaware that it is bad form
and even a great moral lapse to speak ill of one's own tribe while in
the lands of others.
Even in Britain, for decades our closest ally, the talk in the
press—supported by polls—is about the end of the "special relationship"
with America. French President Nicolas Sarkozy openly criticized Obama
for months, including a direct attack on his policies at the United
Nations. Sarkozy cited the need to recognize the real world, not the
virtual world, a clear reference to Obama's speech on nuclear weapons.
When the French president is seen as tougher than the American
president, you have to know that something is awry. Vladimir Putin of
Russia has publicly scorned a number of Obama's visions. Relations with
the Chinese leadership got off to a bad start with the president's
poorly-organized visit to China, where his hosts treated him
disdainfully and prevented him from speaking to a national television
audience of the Chinese people. The Chinese behavior was unprecedented
when compared to visits by other U.S. presidents.
Obama's policy on Afghanistan—supporting a surge in troops, but
setting a date next year when they will begin to withdraw—not only gave a
mixed signal, but provided an incentive for the Taliban just to wait us
out. The withdrawal part of the policy was meant to satisfy a domestic
constituency, but succeeded in upsetting all of our allies in the
region. Further anxiety was provoked by Obama's severe public criticism
of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his coterie of family and friends
for their lackluster leadership, followed by a reversal of sorts
regarding the same leaders.
Obama clearly wishes to do good and means well. But he is one of
those people who believe that the world was born with the word and
exists by means of persuasion, such that there is no person or country
that you cannot, by means of logical and moral argument, bring around to
your side. He speaks as a teacher, as someone imparting values and
generalities appropriate for a Sunday morning sermon, not as a
tough-minded leader. He urges that things "must be done" and "should be
done" and that "it is time" to do them. As the former president of the
Council on Foreign Relations, Les Gelb, put it, there is "the impression
that Obama might confuse speeches with policy." Another journalist put
it differently when he described Obama as an "NPR [National Public
Radio] president who gives wonderful speeches." In other words, he talks
the talk but doesn't know how to walk the walk. The Obama presidency
has so far been characterized by a well-intentioned but excessive belief
in the power of rhetoric with too little appreciation of reality and
loyalty.
In his Cairo speech about America and the Muslim world, Obama managed
to sway Arab public opinion but was unable to budge any Arab leader.
Even the king of Saudi Arabia, a country that depends on America for its
survival, reacted with disappointment and dismay. Obama's meeting with
the king was widely described as a disaster. This is but one example of
an absence of the personal chemistry that characterized the
relationships that Presidents Clinton and Bush had with world leaders.
This is a serious matter because foreign policy entails an understanding
of the personal and political circumstances of the leaders as well as
the cultural and historical factors of the countries we deal with.
Les Gelb wrote of Obama, "He is so self-confident that he believes he
can make decisions on the most complicated of issues after only hours
of discussion." Strategic decisions go well beyond being smart, which
Obama certainly is. They must be based on experience that discerns what
works, what doesn't—and why. This requires experienced staffing, which
Obama and his top appointees simply do not seem to have. Or as one
Middle East commentator put it, "There are always two chess games going
on. One is on the top of the table, the other is below the table. The
latter is the one that counts, but the Americans don't know how to play
that game."
Recent U.S. attempts to introduce more meaningful sanctions against
Iran produced a U.N. resolution that is way less than the "crippling"
sanctions the administration promised. The United States even failed to
achieve the political benefit of a unanimous Security Council vote.
Turkey, the Muslim anchor of NATO for almost 60 years, and Brazil, our
largest ally in Latin America, voted against our resolution. Could it be
that these long-standing U.S. allies, who gave cover to Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad and Iran's nuclear ambitions, have decided that there is no
cost in lining up with America's most serious enemies and no gain in
lining up with this administration?
The end result is that a critical mass of influential people in world
affairs who once held high hopes for the president have begun to wonder
whether they misjudged the man. They are no longer dazzled by his rock
star personality and there is a sense that there is something amateurish
and even incompetent about how Obama is managing U.S. power. For
example, Obama has asserted that America is not at war with the Muslim
world. The problem is that parts of the Muslim world are at war with
America and the West. Obama feels, fairly enough, that America must be
contrite in its dealings with the Muslim world. But he has failed to
address the religious intolerance, failing economies,
tribalism, and gender apartheid that together contribute to jihadist
extremism. This was startling and clear when he chose not to publicly
support the Iranians who went to the streets in opposition to their
oppressive government, based on a judgment that our support might be
counterproductive. Yet, he reaches out instead to the likes of Bashar
Assad of Syria, Iran's agent in the Arab world, sending our ambassador
back to Syria even as it continues to rearm Hezbollah in Lebanon and
expands its role in the Iran-Hezbollah-Hamas alliance.
The underlying issue is that the Arab world has different estimates
on how to deal with an aggressive, expansionist Iran. The Arabs believe
you do not deal with Iran with the open hand of a handshake but with the
clenched fist of power. Arab leaders fear an Iran proceeding full steam
with its nuclear weapons program on top of its programs to develop
intermediate-range ballistic missiles. All the while centrifuges keep
spinning in Iran, and Arab leaders ask whether Iran will be emboldened
by what they interpret as American weakness and faltering willpower.
They did not see Obama or his administration as understanding the
region, where naiveté is interpreted as a weakness of character, as
amateurism, and as proof of the absence of the tough stuff of which
leaders are made. (That's why many Arab leaders were appalled at the
decision to have a civilian trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York.
After 9/11, many of them had engaged in secret counterterrorism
activities under the umbrella of an American promise that these
activities would never be made public; now they feared that this would
be the exact consequence of an open trial.)
America right now appears to be unreliable to traditional friends,
compliant to rivals, and weak to enemies. One renowned Asian leader
stated recently at a private dinner in the United States, "We in Asia
are convinced that Obama is not strong enough to confront his opponents,
but we fear that he is not strong enough to support his friends."
The United States for 60 years has met its responsibilities as the
leader and the defender of the democracies of the free world. We have
policed the sea lanes, protected the air and space domains, countered
terrorism, responded to genocide, and been the bulwark against rogue
states engaging in aggression. The world now senses, in the context of
the erosion of America's economic power and the pressures of our budget deficits,
that we will compress our commitments. But the world needs the vision,
idealism, and strong leadership that America brings to international
affairs. This can be done and must be done. But we are the only ones who
can do it
JUNE 18, 2010
A Snakebit President
Americans want leaders on whom the sun shines.
By PEGGY NOONAN
The president is starting to look snakebit. He's starting to look unlucky, like Jimmy Carter. It wasn't Mr. Carter's fault that the American diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran, but he handled it badly, and suffered. He defied the rule of the King in "Pippin," the Broadway show of Carter's era, who spoke of "the rule that every general knows by heart, that it's smarter to be lucky than it's lucky to be smart." Mr. Carter's opposite was Bill Clinton, on whom fortune smiled with eight years of relative peace and a worldwide economic boom. What misfortune Mr. Clinton experienced he mostly created himself. History didn't impose it.
But Mr. Obama is starting to look unlucky, and–file this under Mysteries of Leadership–that is dangerous for him because Americans get nervous when they have a snakebit president. They want presidents on whom the sun shines.
It isn't Mr. Obama's fault that an oil rig blew in the Gulf and a gusher resulted. He already had two wars and the great recession. But the lack of adequate federal government response appropriately redounds on him. In a Wall Street Journal investigation published Thursday, reporters Jeffrey Ball and Jonathan Weisman wrote the federal government at first moved quickly, but soon "faltered." "The federal government, which under the law is in charge of fighting large spills, had to make things up as it went along." It hadn't anticipated a spill this big. The first weekend in May, when water was rough, contractors hired by BP to lay boom "mostly stayed ashore," according to a local official. "Shrimpers took matters into their own hands, laying 18,000 feet of boom," compared to about 4,000 feet by BP's contractors.
The administration's failure to take impressive action after the spill dinged its reputation for competence. The president's failure to turn things around Tuesday night with a speech damaged his reputation as a man whose rhetorical powers are such that he can turn things around with a speech. He lessened his own mystique. Reaction among his usual supporters was, in the words of Time's Mark Halperin, "fierce, unforeseen disappointment." Dan Froomkin of the Huffington Post called the speech "profoundly underwhelming," a "feeble call to action." Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich called the speech "vapid." Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times said the president looked "awkward and robotic." MSNBC's Keith Olbermann famously said "It was a great speech if you were on another planet for the last 57 days." Chris Matthews scored "a lot of meritocracy, a lot of blue ribbon talk." Mr. Olbermann, on Mr. Obama's well-written peroration: "It's nice but, again, how? Where was the 'how' in this speech when the nation is crying out for 'how'?"
The right didn't like the speech either.
As for the center, Nielsen reported that 32 million people watched the speech, as compared to 48 million viewers that watched the State of the Union. Ronald Reagan once said you should never confuse the reviews with the box office. This was the box office voting with its clickers.
No reason to join the pile on, but some small points. Two growing weaknesses showed up in small phrases. The president said he had consulted among others "experts in academia" on what to do about the calamity. This while noting, again, that his energy secretary has a Nobel Prize. There is a growing meme that Mr. Obama is too impressed by credentialism, by the meritocracy, by those who hold forth in the faculty lounge, and too strongly identifies with them. He should be more impressed by those with real-world experience. It was the "small people" in the shrimp boats who laid the boom.
And when speaking of why proper precautions and safety measures were not in place, the president sternly declared, "I want to know why." But two months in he should know. And he should be telling us. Such empty sternness is . . . empty.
Throughout the speech the president gestured showily, distractingly, with his hands. Politicians do this now because they're told by media specialists that it helps them look natural. They don't look natural, they look like Ann Bancroft gesticulating to Patty Duke in "The Miracle Worker."
The president could move his hands because he was not holding a hard copy of his speech. Normally presidents have had a printed copy of the speech in their hands or on the desk, in case the teleprompter freezes or fails. Mr. Obama's desk was shiny and empty. A White House aide says the director of Oval Office operations had a hard copy just off camera, and was following along as the president spoke so that if the prompter broke he'd be able to give it to the president at the spot he left off.
But that would look a little startling, an arm suddenly darting into the frame to hand the president a script. And the pages could fall. If one were in the mood for a cheap metaphor one would say this is an example of the White House's tendency not to anticipate trouble.
There is still a sense about Mr. Obama that he needs George W. Bush in order to give his presidency full shape and meaning. In this he is like Jimmy Carter, who needed Richard Nixon, or rather the Watergate scandal, which made him president. Mr. Carter needed Richard Nixon standing in the corner looking like he'd spent the night sleeping in his suit as it hangs in the closet. The image is from Joe McGinnis's "The Selling of the President, 1968." Mr. Carter needed to be able to point at Nixon and say, "I'm not him. He dirty, me clean. You hate him, like me." Carter's presidency was given coherence and meaning by Nixon, Watergate, and without it that presidency seemed formless. Mr. Obama, in the same way, needs Mr. Bush standing in the corner like Boo Radley, saying "Let's invade something!" But Mr. Bush is wisely back home in Texas finishing a book, and the president never sounds weaker than when he suggests his predicament is all his predecessor's fault.
Mr. Obama needs Mr. Bush in the corner and doesn't have him. That's part of why he looks so alone out there.
And seems so snakebit, so at the mercy of forces. When you're snakebit you get some sympathy, and some will come. With all the president's woe there will be some counter-reaction among commentators, journalists and others. There will likely be among the Democratic leadership, too. "Love him or not he's what we've got, and he's what we have for the next two years. Help the guy, cool the criticism, punch back for him." But it's also true that among Democrats—and others—when the talk turns to the presidency it turns more and more to Hillary Clinton. "We may have made a mistake. She would have been better." Sooner or later the secretary of state is going to come under fairly consistent pressure to begin to consider 2012. A hunch: She won't really want to. Because she has enjoyed being loyal. She didn't only prove to others she could be loyal, a team player. She proved it to herself. And it has only added to her luster.
As for the president, the great question is what you do when you start to feel snakebit. Maybe he'll start to doubt his own moves and instincts. Maybe not. Jimmy Carter didn't. He fought hard for re-election in 1980, and until near the end thought he'd win. He trusted the American people, and in an odd way he trusted his luck.
Once upon a time we could count on lawyers and law school professors to defend the First Amendment, the most important 46 words in the Constitution. Those 46 words make everything else possible. Shut up the people and the government can shut down every other freedom.
The genius of the Founding Fathers was their ability to write the Constitution in the plain English that everybody could understand. Lawyers, who can employ entire boring paragraphs to say "good morning" (many young women have dozed off while their lawyer swains were on their knees with a proposal of marriage) would inflict damage later.
A good lawyer, or even a bad one, can put loopholes in any proposal. To wit, Elena Kagans explanation of the First Amendment. It's perfectly OK, she wrote in the University of Chicago Law Review, for the government to restrict free speech as long as it means well and calls it something else. The word "restrictions" sounds bad, like a leather restraint, but Mzz Kagan's "redistribution of speech" can sound benign, like free cheese. Who doesn't like cheese? She argued that the government can employ Orwellian restrictions on speech if it thinks such speech might "harm" others, either by direct action or inciting someone else to take direct action. Who gets to decide when such restrictions are imposed for the greater good? Why, the government, of course.
Here's how the Founding Fathers, ever suspicious of ambitious Lilliputians, wrote the guarantee of free speech: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances." Note that the First Amendment does not say that Congress "should" make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or that it would be nice if it didn't. The operative words are "shall make no law."
The Constitution has "evolved" since then, of course, and now the liberal left, led by the Warren Court and its bastard progeny, has discovered all manner of "emanations" and "penumbra," like an embedded Da Vinci code, that the Constitution doesn't really mean what the words say it means. What part of "shall" can Mzz Kagan not understand?
She does not identify, exactly, what speech the government could regard as inflicting such "harm" as to justify suspending the Constitution, but she offers as examples incitement to violence, "hate speech" and "fighting words." Since certain friends of the White House have suggested that "tea party" activists may have already been guilty of sedition, we can imagine what some of the violations might one day be.
President Obama's selection of Mzz Kagan is of a piece with what is emerging as his operating philosophy of government. The president's thin skin, his irritation with constructive criticism, is well known, and we can all be sympathetic. Who among us relishes criticism? But he's not content to retire to the cosseting comfort of the Oval Office to sulk. He complained to the Class of '10 at Hampton University the other day that Internet blogs, certain cable television networks and talk radio make life tough and inconvenient at the White House. Mzz Kagan's "redistribution of speech" could fix this.
Elena Kagan has no large body of work that makes it easy to see what kind of justice she might be. This is the most important reason the president selected her. The White House is trying to keep her away from even the most polite questions until she has to face softballs from sympathetic senators. He expects quick partisan confirmation. So he can't object to the despised pundits, bloggers, cable-TV commentators and radio talk-show hosts and guests speculating from whatever meager hints and clues they find in her past. Mr. Obama himself is the model for these speculators.
He was frustrated by the lack of a paper trail for Harriet Miers, the White House lawyer for George W. Bush and a Supreme Court nominee whom Elena Kagan, with her abundant inexperience, resembles in many ways. Mr. Obama, then a very junior U.S. senator, called Mzz Miers "a blank slate" and said that "in the absence of a judicial record" she would have to be more forthcoming, and the White House would have to be more forthcoming, in answering fundamental questions about who she really was. Mr. Bush, properly chastened by the uproar over the Miers nomination, much of it led by conservatives, summoned the grace to withdraw the nomination.
• Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
One fate the conservative commentator Daniel Pipes doesn’t have to worry about is drowning in conceptual complexity. He keeps his theories simple. His theory about why Faisal Shahzad tried to blow up a bomb in Times Square last week is “jihadi intent.”
Pipes writes dismissively of other explanations — that Shahzad is emotionally unstable, say, or that the bomb was payback for American military action in Pakistan. In Pipes’s universe, apparently, these explanations are rivals to the “jihadi intent” explanation, and couldn’t figure in an account of how Shahzad came to have jihadi intent in the first place.
Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic seems to agree that jihadism is a kind of prime mover of terrorism. After bloggers noted that Shahzad had lost his home to foreclosure, Goldberg rejected the idea that “the country’s financial crisis, and not, say, jihadist ideology, is at the root of Shahzad’s desire to commit murder in Times Square.”
I’d like to invite Pipes and Goldberg to imagine an alternative universe, a universe in which behaviors — such as planting a bomb — don’t have a single “root” cause. In this universe, bomb-planting behavior is kind of like the bombs themselves: a number of ingredients have to come together before things get explosive. If you figure out what those ingredients are, and which of them you can control, maybe you can make bomb-planting behavior less common.
In the universe I’m positing, the following scenario is conceivable:
A Pakistani guy moves to America, goes to college, gets a job, starts a family. He grows unhappy. Maybe he’s having financial problems (though I’m skeptical, for reasons outlined by Charles Lane here, that Shahzad’s home foreclosure actually signifies as much); or maybe the problem is just that he doesn’t find his social niche. And maybe he was a bit unstable to begin with — which would make it harder to find his niche and might intensify his reaction to not finding it.
Anyway, for whatever reason, he feels alienated in America. He stays in touch with people and events back home in Pakistan, and this gives him another reason to dislike America: American drones are firing missiles into Pakistan, sometimes killing women and children.
War-on-terror hawks need to seriously ask whether the policies they favor have created terrorists.
Thanks to the Internet, it doesn’t take him long to find like-minded folks, or to come under the influence of a radical imam operating out of Yemen. “Jihadi intent” is taking shape, and eventually he comes into the fold of actual jihadis, a faction of the Taliban in Pakistan. They give him what he hadn’t found in America: a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose. The basic ingredients of bomb-planting behavior are now in place.
I’m not sure this is the story of Faisal Shahzad; we don’t yet know enough to say. But this story is consistent with the facts disclosed about him so far — and, more to the point, stories like this do unfold in the world we inhabit. Various things fuel “jihadi intent,” and they may include the policy of firing missiles into Pakistan.
In fact, this policy does seem to have been part of Shahzad’s motivation. He reportedly told investigators he was upset about the drone strikes.
Obviously (I hope), to say that American policies may cause terrorism isn’t to say that America is to blame for terrorism. It’s just to say those policies may have downsides. And, obviously, those policies may have upsides as well; drone strikes disrupt terrorist logistics, for example.
Spelling out my reasons for thinking the downsides often outweigh the upsides is a subject for another column. For now my main point is that war-on-terror hawks need to confront the downsides, rather than act as if establishing the role of “jihadi intent” or “jihadist ideology” somehow ends the debate. They need to seriously ask whether the policies they favor have, while killing terrorists abroad, created terrorists both abroad and — more disturbingly — at home.
These possibly counterproductive hawkish policies go beyond drone strikes — a fact that is unwittingly underscored by the hawks themselves. They’re the first to highlight the role played by that imam in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, in inspiring Shahzad and other terrorists. But look at the jihadist recruiting narrative al-Awlaki’s peddling. He says America is at war with Islam, and to make this case he recites the greatest hits of hawkish policy: the invasion of Iraq, the troop escalation in Afghanistan, drone strikes in Pakistan, etc.
All of these policies — not just the last of them — may have helped incite Shahzad. Back in 2004, a real estate agent recalls, he was oddly outspoken about his opposition to the Iraq war. And last year he asked his father for permission to fight Americans in Afghanistan. Only when denied that opportunity did he turn toward Times Square. (This is evidence against the theory that he was from early on a “plant” in America.)
So too with the two other high-profile terrorist attacks against America over the past year: the Fort Hood shooting and the would-be underwear bombing. Both perpetrators had found in hawkish policies cause to buy into the jihadi recruiting narrative.
Major Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, was enraged by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the aspiring underwear bomber, before he became an aspiring underwear bomber, was giving glimpses of his inchoate “jihadi intent” as a student at University College London. There he sponsored a conference on the war on terror, and on the poster advertising the conference was a picture of a prisoner at Guantanamo — hooded, handcuffed and kneeling. A jihadist pinup, courtesy of Dick Cheney.
Unfortunately, President Obama isn’t discarding the Bush-Cheney playbook that has given jihadist recruiters such effective talking points. Quite the contrary: the White House thinks the moral of the Shahzad story may be that we should get more aggressive in Pakistan, possibly putting more boots on the ground. And already Obama has authorized the assassination of al-Awlaki.
Even leaving aside the constitutional questions (al-Awlaki is an American citizen), doesn’t Obama see what a gift the killing of this imam would be to his cause? Just ask the Romans how their anti-Jesus-movement strategy worked out. (And Jesus’s followers didn’t have their leader’s sermons saved in ready-to-go video and audio files; al-Awlaki’s resurrection would be vivid indeed.)
When you look at how much real-world evidence there is against the views of war-on-terror hawks, it’s not surprising that they would construct their own little universe, a place where “jihadi intent” is an uncaused cause, and our only hope is to kill or intimidate the people who, through some magical process that defies comprehension, have been possessed by it.
What is surprising is that Barack Obama, who became the Democratic nominee for president largely because he had opposed the Iraq war, seems increasingly to be taking his cues from the people who so disastrously supported it.
Friday, October 24, 2008
RAHN: You lose, Soros wins
Richard Rahn
COMMENTARY:
Have you ever wondered why billionaires like George Soros financially support politicians who say they will "increase taxes on the rich"?
The answer quite simply is that the tax increases are most often put on people trying to become rich, not those already rich. Hence, the rich, big government advocates can gain far more by "buying" the politicians. The "bought" politicians then provide them with confidential information about administrative decisions, which these donors then use to place big bets in the market, making themselves much richer. If you have deep financial pockets and inside information, you can make huge amounts of money when markets drop.
Mr. Soros, the Democrats' financial angel, is often referred to as the "man who broke the bank of England" in the 1992 Sterling crisis. During that episode, he made $1 billion in one day at the expense of British taxpayers. The relevant question is, did Mr. Soros bet a couple of billion dollars on mere guesses of what the German, French and British officials would do, or did he have inside information?
A member of the British Parliament, who was a close adviser to the British chancellor at the time, told me he believes "Soros was acting on insider information obtained from the French central bank and the German Bundesbank." The insider information was that they would not support the British pound, despite a pre-existing arrangement to do so. Others familiar with the situation have made similar charges.
Given that Mr. Soros is no fool, the British believe it is highly doubtful he would have made such a colossal bet without knowing with great certainty that the Germans would not reduce their interest rate.
Mr. Soros has a reputation for trading on confidential information obtained from political sources. For instance, he was convicted by a French court of having insider knowledge about a takeover attempt of a major French bank. His conviction was upheld in 2006, and he had to pay a multimillion-dollar fine.
The hypocrisy of George Soros is often noted. He is a man who voices many left-wing and even socialist ideas and has been a major critic of the United States for years. Yet, his actions in his own financial interest, using highly questionable tactics and insider information, have made him billions. His modus operandi is to do political favors for left-wing politicians and then use them for his own advantage.
For example, he gained influence with left-wing forces in the United Nations and with anti-U.S. groups by paying for a $10 million townhouse for Mark Malloch-Brown (now a lord and a U.K. Foreign Office minister) to use as the latter's home. Baron Malloch-Brown was former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's deputy and spent much time voicing Mr. Soros' anti-American statements. Capital Research Center has done extensive reporting on the activities of George Soros (www.capitalresearch.org).
Mr. Soros is often referred to as the man who owns the Democratic Party because of his huge contributions to party committees and individual politicians. It is known that many of his Wall Street friends have been major donors to key Democratic committee chairmen and members in the House and Senate.
As recently as this past spring, House Financial Services Committee chairman Barney Frank, Massachusetts Democrat, and Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee chairman Chris Dodd, Connecticut Democrat, were claiming both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (for which they had oversight responsibility) were fiscally sound and needed no additional regulation. At the same time, many independent financial experts were sounding the alarm about these two government-sponsored behemoths.
It would be in the public interest to know which members of the Democratic leadership, members of Congress, and their financial contributors were selling shares of (or shorting) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac this year, and of other financial institutions overseen by the congressional Democrats. (Note: In the private sector, if someone with insider knowledge - as Mr. Frank and Mr. Dodd had access to - makes misrepresentations about the health of a company, that person is subject to criminal penalties.) The press should demand full disclosure before Election Day, given the hundreds of billions of dollars the misrepresentations by Messrs. Frank, Dodd, etc. are costing taxpayers.
Note that the Bush administration's ill-thought-out "bailout" scheme was both greatly altered and then endorsed by the congressional Democrats, in part, it appears, because it will give even more opportunities for profit-making by Democratic financial supporters. The forced, partial (and probably unconstitutional) nationalization of the big banks by the seemingly unprincipled Bush Treasury will provide many opportunities for self-dealing politicians and their financial supporters when it comes time to sell the government stakes.
Those who bet against the foolish policies and actions of governments provide a public service by exposing the stupidity, provided they are not using inside information given them from politicians and other government officials. But when people like George Soros and other big financial backers of politicians use confidential inside information or their ability to manipulate the political class for their own ends, it hurts everyone else. The larger the government and the more discretion government officials have regarding issues that can damage or benefit private parties, the more opportunities there will be for abuse and corruption.
If Barack Obama wins with big Democrat majorities in the House and Senate, you know from their statements that they will increase capital gains and business taxes. But they have already said, there "will be exceptions," - which will be worth billions of dollars to those with prior knowledge of what the exceptions will be. Who do you think will have that prior knowledge?
Richard W. Rahn is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and chairman of the Institute for Global Economic Growth.
Why Arizona Drew a Line
By
KRIS W. KOBACH
Published: April 28, 2010
On Friday, Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona signed a law — SB 1070 — that prohibits the harboring of illegal aliens and makes it a state crime for an alien to commit certain federal immigration crimes. It also requires police officers who, in the course of a traffic stop or other law-enforcement action, come to a “reasonable suspicion” that a person is an illegal alien verify the person’s immigration status with the federal government.
Predictably, groups that favor relaxed enforcement of immigration laws, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, insist the law is unconstitutional. Less predictably, President Obama declared it “misguided” and said the Justice Department would take a look.
Presumably, the government lawyers who do so will actually read the law, something its critics don’t seem to have done. The arguments we’ve heard against it either misrepresent its text or are otherwise inaccurate. As someone who helped draft the statute, I will rebut the major criticisms individually:
It is unfair to demand that aliens carry their documents with them. It is true that the Arizona law makes it a misdemeanor for an alien to fail to carry certain documents. “Now, suddenly, if you don’t have your papers ... you’re going to be harassed,” the president said. “That’s not the right way to go.” But since 1940, it has been a federal crime for aliens to fail to keep such registration documents with them. The Arizona law simply adds a state penalty to what was already a federal crime. Moreover, as anyone who has traveled abroad knows, other nations have similar documentation requirements.
“Reasonable suspicion” is a meaningless term that will permit police misconduct. Over the past four decades, federal courts have issued hundreds of opinions defining those two words. The Arizona law didn’t invent the concept: Precedents list the factors that can contribute to reasonable suspicion; when several are combined, the “totality of circumstances” that results may create reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed.
For example, the Arizona law is most likely to come into play after a traffic stop. A police officer pulls a minivan over for speeding. A dozen passengers are crammed in. None has identification. The highway is a known alien-smuggling corridor. The driver is acting evasively. Those factors combine to create reasonable suspicion that the occupants are not in the country legally.
The law will allow police to engage in racial profiling. Actually, Section 2 provides that a law enforcement official “may not solely consider race, color or national origin” in making any stops or determining immigration status. In addition, all normal Fourth Amendment protections against profiling will continue to apply. In fact, the Arizona law actually reduces the likelihood of race-based harassment by compelling police officers to contact the federal government as soon as is practicable when they suspect a person is an illegal alien, as opposed to letting them make arrests on their own assessment.
It is unfair to demand that people carry a driver’s license. Arizona’s law does not require anyone, alien or otherwise, to carry a driver’s license. Rather, it gives any alien with a license a free pass if his immigration status is in doubt. Because Arizona allows only lawful residents to obtain licenses, an officer must presume that someone who produces one is legally in the country.
State governments aren’t allowed to get involved in immigration, which is a federal matter. While it is true that Washington holds primary authority in immigration, the Supreme Court since 1976 has recognized that states may enact laws to discourage illegal immigration without being pre-empted by federal law. As long as Congress hasn’t expressly forbidden the state law in question, the statute doesn’t conflict with federal law and Congress has not displaced all state laws from the field, it is permitted. That’s why Arizona’s 2007 law making it illegal to knowingly employ unauthorized aliens was sustained by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
In sum, the Arizona law hardly creates a police state. It takes a measured, reasonable step to give Arizona police officers another tool when they come into contact with illegal aliens during their normal law enforcement duties.
And it’s very necessary: Arizona is the ground zero of illegal immigration. Phoenix is the hub of human smuggling and the kidnapping capital of America, with more than 240 incidents reported in 2008. It’s no surprise that Arizona’s police associations favored the bill, along with 70 percent of Arizonans.
President Obama and the Beltway crowd feel these problems can be taken care of with “comprehensive immigration reform” — meaning amnesty and a few other new laws. But we already have plenty of federal immigration laws on the books, and the typical illegal alien is guilty of breaking many of them. What we need is for the executive branch to enforce the laws that we already have.
Unfortunately, the Obama administration has scaled back work-site enforcement and otherwise shown it does not consider immigration laws to be a high priority. Is it any wonder the Arizona Legislature, at the front line of the immigration issue, sees things differently?
Kris W. Kobach, a law professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, was Attorney General John Ashcroft’s chief adviser on immigration law and border security from 2001 to 2003.
The Big Alienation
Uncontrolled borders and Washington's lack of self-control.
By PEGGY NOONAN May 1, 2010.
We are at a remarkable moment. We have an open, 2,000-mile border to our south, and the entity with the power to enforce the law and impose safety and order will not do it. Wall Street collapsed, taking Main Street's money with it, and the government can't really figure out what to do about it because the government itself was deeply implicated in the crash, and both political parties are full of people whose political careers have been made possible by Wall Street contributions. Meanwhile we pass huge laws, bills so comprehensive, omnibus and transformative that no one knows what's in them and no one—literally, no one—knows how exactly they will be executed or interpreted. Citizens search for new laws online, pore over them at night, and come away knowing no more than they did before they typed "dot-gov."
It is not that no one's in control. Washington is full of people who insist they're in control and who go to great lengths to display their power. It's that no one takes responsibility and authority. Washington daily delivers to the people two stark and utterly conflicting messages: "We control everything" and "You're on your own."
All this contributes to a deep and growing alienation between the people of America and the government of America in Washington.
This is not the old, conservative and long-lampooned "I don't trust gummint" attitude of the 1950s, '60s and '70s. It's something new, or rather something so much more broadly and fully evolved that it constitutes something new. The right never trusted the government, but now the middle doesn't. I asked a campaigner for Hillary Clinton recently where her sturdy, pantsuited supporters had gone. They didn't seem part of the Obama brigades. "Some of them are at the tea party," she said.
None of this happened overnight. It is, most recently, the result of two wars that were supposed to be cakewalks, Katrina, the crash, and the phenomenon of a federal government that seemed less and less competent attempting to do more and more by passing bigger and bigger laws.
Add to this states on the verge of bankruptcy, the looming debt crisis of the federal government, the likelihood of ever-rising taxes. Shake it all together, and you have the makings of the big alienation. Alienation is often followed by full-blown antagonism, and antagonism by breakage.
Which brings us to Arizona and its much-criticized attempt to institute a law aimed at controlling its own border with Mexico. It is doing this because the federal government won't, and because Arizonans have a crisis on their hands, areas on the border where criminal behavior flourishes, where there have been kidnappings, murders and gang violence. If the law is abusive, it will be determined quickly enough, in the courts. In keeping with recent tradition, they were reading parts of the law aloud on cable the other night, with bright and sincere people completely disagreeing on the meaning of the words they were reading. No one knows how the law will be executed or interpreted.
Every state and region has its own facts and experience. In New York, legal and illegal immigrants keep the city running: They work hard jobs with brutal hours, rip off no one on Wall Street, and do not crash the economy. They are generally considered among the good guys. I'm not sure New Yorkers can fairly judge the situation in Arizona, nor Arizonans the situation in New York.
But the larger point is that Arizona is moving forward because the government in Washington has completely abdicated its responsibility. For 10 years—at least—through two administrations, Washington deliberately did nothing to ease the crisis on the borders because politicians calculated that an air of mounting crisis would spur mounting support for what Washington thought was appropriate reform—i.e., reform that would help the Democratic and Republican parties.
Both parties resemble Gordon Brown, who is about to lose the prime ministership of Britain. On the campaign trail this week, he was famously questioned by a party voter about his stand on immigration. He gave her the verbal runaround, all boilerplate and shrugs, and later complained to an aide, on an open mic, that he'd been forced into conversation with that "bigoted woman."
He really thought she was a bigot. Because she asked about immigration. Which is, to him, a sign of at least latent racism.
The establishments of the American political parties, and the media, are full of people who think concern about illegal immigration is a mark of racism. If you were Freud you might say, "How odd that's where their minds so quickly go, how strange they're so eager to point an accusing finger. Could they be projecting onto others their own, heavily defended-against inner emotions?" But let's not do Freud, he's too interesting. Maybe they're just smug and sanctimonious.
The American president has the power to control America's borders if he wants to, but George W. Bush and Barack Obama did not and do not want to, and for the same reason, and we all know what it is. The fastest-growing demographic in America is the Hispanic vote, and if either party cracks down on illegal immigration, it risks losing that vote for generations.
But while the Democrats worry about the prospects of the Democrats and the Republicans about the well-being of the Republicans, who worries about America?
No one. Which the American people have noticed, and which adds to the dangerous alienation—actually it's at the heart of the alienation—of the age.
In the past four years, I have argued in this space that nothing can or should be done, no new federal law passed, until the border itself is secure. That is the predicate, the commonsense first step. Once existing laws are enforced and the border made peaceful, everyone in the country will be able to breathe easier and consider, without an air of clamor and crisis, what should be done next. What might that be? How about relax, see where we are, and absorb. Pass a small, clear law—say, one granting citizenship to all who serve two years in the armed forces—and then go have a Coke. Not everything has to be settled right away. Only controlling the border has to be settled right away.
Instead, our national establishments deliberately allow the crisis to grow and fester, ignoring public unrest and amusing themselves by damning anyone's attempt to deal with the problem they fear to address.
Why does the federal government do this? Because so many within it are stupid and unimaginative and don't trust the American people. Which of course the American people have noticed.
If the federal government and our political parties were imaginative, they would understand that it is actually in their interests to restore peace and order to the border. It would be a way of demonstrating that our government is still capable of functioning, that it is still to some degree connected to the people's will, that it has the broader interests of the country in mind.
The American people fear they are losing their place and authority in the daily, unwinding drama of American history. They feel increasingly alienated from their government. And alienation, again, is often followed by deep animosity, and animosity by the breaking up of things. If our leaders were farsighted not only for themselves but for the country, they would fix the border.
Whose country is this?
By Pat Buchannon Posted: April 26, 2010 8:51 pm Eastern
With the support of 70 percent of its citizens, Arizona has ordered sheriffs and police to secure the border and remove illegal aliens, half a million of whom now reside there.
Arizona acted because the U.S. government has abdicated its constitutional duty to protect the states from invasion and refuses to enforce America's immigration laws.
"We in Arizona have been more than patient waiting for Washington to act," said Gov. Jan Brewer. "But decades of inaction and misguided policy have created an unacceptable situation."
We have a crisis in Arizona because we have a failed state in Washington.
What is the response of Barack Obama, who took an oath to see to it that federal laws are faithfully executed?
He is siding with the law-breakers. He is pandering to the ethnic lobbies. He is not berating a Mexican regime that aids and abets this invasion of the country of which he is commander in chief. Instead, he attacks the government of Arizona for trying to fill a gaping hole in law enforcement left by his own dereliction of duty.
He has denounced Arizona as "misguided." He has called on the Justice Department to ensure that Arizona's sheriffs and police do not violate anyone's civil rights. But he has said nothing about the rights of the people of Arizona who must deal with the costs of having hundreds of thousands of lawbreakers in their midst.
Obama has done everything but his duty to enforce the law.
Undeniably, making it a state as well as a federal crime to be in this country illegally, and requiring police to check the immigration status of anyone they have a "reasonable suspicion" is here illegally, is tough and burdensome. But what choice did Arizona have?
The state has a fiscal crisis caused in part by the burden of providing schooling and social welfare for illegals and their families, who consume far more in services than they pay in taxes and who continue to pour in. Even John McCain is now calling for 3,000 troops on the border.
Police officers and a prominent rancher have been murdered. There have been kidnappings believed to be tied to the Mexican drug cartels. There are nightly high-speed chases through the barrios where innocent people are constantly at risk.
If Arizona does not get control of the border and stop the invasion, U.S. citizens will stop coming to Arizona and will begin to depart, as they are already fleeing California.
What we are talking about here is the Balkanization and breakup of a nation into ethnic enclaves. A country that cannot control its borders isn't really a country anymore, Ronald Reagan reminded us.
The tasks that Arizonans are themselves undertaking are ones that belong by right, the Constitution and federal law to the Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Homeland Security.
Arizona has been compelled to assume the feds' role because the feds won't do their job. And for that dereliction of duty the buck stops on the desk of the president of the United States.
Why is Obama paralyzed? Why does he not enforce the law, even if he dislikes it, by punishing the businessmen who hire illegals and by sending the 12 million to 20 million illegals back home? President Eisenhower did it. Why won't he?
Because he is politically correct. Because he owes a big debt to the Hispanic lobby that helped deliver two-thirds of that vote in 2008. Though most citizens of Hispanic descent in Arizona want the border protected and the laws enforced, the Hispanic lobby demands that the law be changed.
Fair enough. But the nation rose up as one to reject the "path-to-citizenship" – i.e., amnesty – that the 2007 plan of George W. Bush, McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama envisioned.
Al Sharpton threatens to go to Phoenix and march in the streets against the new Arizona law. Let him go.
Let us see how many African-Americans, who are today frozen out of the 8 million jobs held by illegal aliens that might otherwise go to them or their children, will march to defend an invasion for which they are themselves paying the heaviest price.
Last year, while Americans were losing a net of 5 million jobs, the U.S. government – Bush and Obama both – issued 1,131,000 green cards to legal immigrants to come and take the jobs that did open up, a flood of immigrants equaled in only four other years in our history.
What are we doing to our own people?
Whose country is this, anyway?
America today has an establishment that, because it does not like the immigration laws, countenances and condones wholesale violation of those laws.
Nevertheless, under those laws, the U.S. government is obligated to deport illegal aliens and punish businesses that knowingly hire them.
This is not an option. It is an obligation.
Can anyone say Barack Obama is meeting that obligation?
Scientists have known for decades that when carbon dioxide mixes with
ocean water it creates an acid; this is textbook chemistry. But only
recently did they begin to realize what this growing quantity of acid
would mean for ocean life. This new understanding has some of the
world's leading ocean scientists deeply concerned.
What they say is this: the oceans are 30 percent more acidic today
than they were during pre-industrial times and, if we continue burning
fossil fuels as we are now, we will double the ocean's acidity by the
end of the century. Scientists fear many organisms may not survive so
radical a shift in chemistry. And some of those organisms form the
foundation of ocean food webs. If they perish, what happens to the tens
of thousands of species further up the chain? What happens to our
shellfish -- our oysters, clams, mussels -- that appear particularly
vulnerable to ocean acidification?
I first had the opportunity to address this issue in the Senate last
fall, when I screened a short documentary I narrated on this phenomenon
called Acid Test, made by my friends at the Natural Resources
Defense Council. And after my Senate testimony this Earth Day, I am
thrilled to show it to our nation's policymakers once again -- this time
for a group in the House of Representatives.
Like that other film I was in this year, Acid Test has had
an amazing run of its own. It aired on the Discovery Channel, has been
shown in film festivals nationwide, and was selected by the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Association to run in kiosks in major aquariums
and museums across the country. If you haven't seen it yet, catch it online
here.
More and more people -- at home and in the halls of Congress -- are
learning about ocean acidification and what we can do to stop it.
Thankfully, we have solutions that will not only fight ocean
acidification, but climate change at the same time.
Our policymakers have the power to add to the legacy of Earth Day by
taking action that will protect people and the planet. Along with
millions of other Americans, I will be urging them to put aside their
differences and begin America's transition to a clean energy economy
that will increase our energy efficiency and invest in renewable power,
while cutting carbon pollution. By passing strong clean energy and
climate legislation, Congress has the power to move us toward clean
energy, tackle climate change and protect our seas from acidification.
I hope you will join me in calling on our leaders in the Senate to
act.
A Scandal-Free White House: Is
Obama Very Ethical, or Very Lucky?
Posted:
03/5/10
The president's once sky-riding
approval ratings are below 50 percent in most polls; his skittish
political party publicly frets about losing control of Congress in the
mid-term elections; and major-media Web Sites ballyhoo melodramatic
headlines like: "The Presidency in the Balance."
Judging from White House history dating back to the 1970s, these dire
symptoms developing so early in a president's first term point to an
obvious diagnosis – the crippling virus of scandal.
Barack Obama has many political problems, but he is not brooding during
secret cigarette breaks about special prosecutors, congressional
investigators or relentless investigative reporters. In contrast to
Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and maybe even George H.W.
Bush, Obama so far has presided over an administration almost entirely
free from major public scandal.Needless to say, the Democratic Party
should be so lucky. Whether it is Charlie Rangel being forced to step
aside (temporarily for those who believe in leprechauns and other
magical creatures) as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee,
Eric Massa's sudden
resignation from the House or New York Gov. David Paterson becoming
a dead-man-walking definition of beleaguered, the Democrats are having a
spot of trouble this week qualifying as squeaky clean. (Before
Republicans start feeling too pious, does the name Mark Sanford ring any
bells?) But against this bipartisan backdrop of gubernatorial and
congressional embarrassments, the Obama record does seem unusual.
Sure, former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle flamed out more
than a year ago during the vetting process to become Obama's secretary
of health and human services because of tax problems, his work for a
Washington lobbying firm and his high-paid speeches to health-care
groups. And conservative opposition produced the ouster a few
fourth-tier Obama officials like Van Jones (the green jobs coordinator
at the Council on Environment Quality) from administration posts that
only Glenn Beck knew existed. But these minor personnel problems would
not even qualify Obama for the waiting list at Washington's school for
scandal.
It is always dangerous in journalism to write about things that
have not happened . . . . yet. And it is far too early to definitely
attribute the Obama administration's good fortune to its superior virtue
or its efforts to disqualify from government almost everyone who has
filled out a lobbyist registration form. But without getting too
Sherlock Holmes-y and invoking non-barking dogs, the absence of the word
subpoena from the White House lexicon should be noteworthy.
The reasons for a scandal-free White House may be as random as
Obama's luck (just ask presidential candidate Hillary Clinton) or may
reflect the partisan self-discipline of congressional Democrats
(something that has not easily been applied to health-care reform).
Obama also may be benefiting from the newspaper cutbacks that have
created a dwindling band of Washington investigative reporters. It is
even plausible that conservatives have less need to find real-life
ethical lapses by Obama officials because they are so enraptured with
weird obsessions like the legitimacy of the president's Hawaiian birth
certificate.
But other presidents – Democrats especially – have found the first
year in office to be a brutal introduction to the take-no-prisoners
culture of Washington. Many of the over-hyped scandals that brought down
prior top administration officials seem, in hindsight, to be the
equivalent of overdue library fines or not paying Social Security taxes
for a nanny. By way of comparison with Obama, here is a White House
low-lights reel from other recent presidents' first year in office:
Bert Lance – Carter's close friend and budget director – did not
survive long enough in Washington to see the autumn leaves because of
his permissive lending practices while running a small-town Georgia
bank. Reagan's national security adviser Richard Allen was forced out
after less than a year, in part because he accepted three watches from a
Japanese couple, and $1,000 in cash from a Japanese publication was
found in his White House safe. Clinton, in his first months in the White
House, was buffeted by the suicide of deputy White House counsel Vince
Foster, an out-of-control Whitewater investigation and brouhahas that
were given Watergate-like suffixes like "Travel-gate." Fairly or
unfairly, the Clinton administration sometimes seemed like a make-work
program for Washington white-collar defense lawyers.
(The Bush family, pere and fils, should not entirely
be forgotten here. Although his first year in office was comparatively
tranquil, George H.W. Bush did have to deal with lingering questions
about his role in the Iran-contra scandal as Reagan's vice president.
And the 1990 summer scandal – once a bored reporters' Washington ritual –
revolved around presidential son Neil Bush's involvement in a failed
Colorado savings-and-loan. As for that other Bush son, George W., the
first of year of his presidency will always be treated as a special case
because of the short interlude between the disputed 2000 election and
the September 11 attacks).
While no White House wants to be subjected to the daunting refrain of
"what did the president know and when did he know it," the Obama
administration should recognize the full implications of its near
scandal-free record. (Breaking a campaign promise to televise the
health-care negotiations on C-Span does not count). If the president is
treading water in the polls (thank you, American economy) at a time when
scandal-hungry investigative reporters are staking out governor's
mansions and not the White House, imagine how dicey things could get for
Obama if the winds ever shift.
Originally published 04:00 a.m., April 13, 2010, updated 08:20 a.m., April 13, 2010
President Obama probably isn't looking for another "wise Latina" to put on the Supreme Court to replace John Paul Stevens, but he's apparently looking for a rabble-rouser. He promised on his return from Prague that he will nominate someone who knows "that in a democracy powerful interests must not be allowed to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens."
Ordinarily, this sort of boiler-plate civics-lesson blah-blah is easily dismissed as a politician's instinctive blather, but this is community-activism writ large, reflecting what Barack Obama actually believes and wants to impose on the court if he means what he says.
The voices of ordinary citizens are important, and it's important to make sure their voices aren't "drowned out" by "powerful interests," but once upon a time that was not the job of judges. The job description for a Supreme Court justice was about allegiance and dedication to the Constitution, which would take care of the citizens, ordinary and otherwise. A justice of the Supreme Court understood that he was to look to the law and leave community organizing to someone like Barack Obama.
Alexander Hamilton thought "the judiciary will always be the least dangerous institution to the Constitution" because it has neither "the sword nor the purse." He never imagined that judges could, or would want to, steal from Congress the power and authority to write the nation's laws. Robert Yates, the chief justice of the New York Supreme Court, tried to warn the constitutional convention of 1787 of what the U.S. Supreme Court might come to because "a court of justice" had never been invested "with such immense powers, and yet placed in a situation so little responsible." The Supreme Court, he warned, could "extend the limits of the general government gradually … and melt down the states into one entire government for every purpose."
And so it came to pass. The states — with Congress going happily along — have been "melted down" so that presidents with a majority can now expect his senators, whose first allegiance is to party and partisanship, to rubber-stamp whomever he chooses. Some Republicans promise a rousing opposition to Mr. Obama's nominee if he (or more likely she) is a nominee outside the "mainstream." But more likely the Senate, a weak and skulking lot of badgers and hedgers, will indulge their usual appetite for debate and discussion, which is to say, none at all. Orrin Hatch of Utah, ever eager to argue that he and his fellows aren't quite as bad as everyone thinks they are, set the tone for the loyal opposition with his hint that he might endorse Hillary Clinton, if the president is tempted to use the court as the town dump, as presidents before him have done to rid themselves of ambitious allies.
With 59 sure votes, the Democrats could confirm a melancholy Dane, an imam or a Hottentot if the president insists, but with 41 votes, a spine and the threat of a filibuster the Republicans could make the debate over the nominee a teaching moment, particularly with the November elections casting a dark and deepening shadow over the proceedings. The nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, the "wise Latina," ultimately succeeded, but the debate unfolded as the teaching moment the conservatives intended. They can repeat this modest success again.
The Republicans in the Senate will be tempted to resign themselves to contributing polite argument and then polite applause, to sit back in the warm embrace of self-satisfaction for the job they imagine they have done on the president, his agenda and his party over the past year. The polls show the president's approval ratings continuing the slide; the passage of health care "reform" has only accelerated the slide. The Republican pols imagine they did it, that all they have to do now is coast toward November and reward.
But the unraveling of the Obama myth is the refining work of reality, which is a harsh teacher who grades on a steep curve. The Tea Party protests, much maligned by polite and prissy folk, have turned the nation's politics upside down and there's scant sign that anything will turn them aright again. The meek and mild Republican strategists have been neutered by the accusation that theirs has become "the party of No." Indeed it has, and for one brief, shining moment it has the old politics on the run. This is no time to go wobbly.
• Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
To Judge the News, Consider the Source — Especially the New York Times
Posted By Alicia Colon On April 9, 2010 @ 7:46 am In New York Times
Once upon a time, the New York Times was a credible source of information, and many educators demanded that their students use it for this purpose. I recall my senior year in a parochial high school being instructed how to fold the newspaper along the seams so as to read it without having to spread it out wide. That was a very long time ago. Now that once-esteemed broadsheet is agenda-driven, rather than journalistically driven, and one of the many sources to take with a large grain of salt.
Under the stewardship of Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger, the Old Gray Lady is now known for printing all the news that fits his liberal Baby Boomer agenda, even in the most innocuous sections. The gardening column will somehow toss global warming into the article and let’s forget any objectivity in its science reporting. Needless to say, the Obama administration has this paper solidly in its pocket.
So I’ve learned to decipher Times articles for any legitimate documented facts instead of innuendo and this was particularly essential when the Times, for reasons know only to itself, decided to tarnish the Pope during this Easter season. The paper tried to imply that while the Pope was cardinal prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith in Germany, he did not take steps to defrock a serial predator priest in Wisconsin.
Unfortunately for the Times and thanks to the World Wide Web, the Vatican was able to debunk the charges against the Pontiff pretty swiftly. The national religion correspondent who wrote the March 24th hit piece, Laurie Goodstein, and her editors omitted salient facts of the case, the most important being that the CDF was informed twenty years after the abuse took place. It then approved a local canonical trial, over which then-Cardinal Ratzinger had no jurisdiction over. In its anti-Catholic animus, the Times also failed to credit him for initiating the procedures that have helped the Church to take action in the face of the scandal of priestly sexual abuse — largely homosexual — of minors.
But why did they decide to do this now? Why bring up issues that occurred when Pope Benedict XVI was still Cardinal Ratzinger? More than likely it’s because the Catholic Church is the enemy of the liberal elite. Aside from some über-liberal and misguided nuns who supported Obamacare, the Catholic bishops are in lockstep in opposing the abortion funding in the so-called “health care” reform senate bill. So why not go after the man at the top of this enemy institution?
However, the Times is hardly the only one guilty of extreme liberal bias in the print media. I had regarded Vanity Fair as a quality publication when it was edited by Tina Brown. I found the articles fair and balanced and I would renew my subscription faithfully. Ironically, I had never heard of Rush Limbaugh until Vanity Fair ran a fascinating article about the conservative radio personality in 1992.
But fealty went out the window once Ms. Brown’s successors, Graydon Carter — a former lowly “People” section writer for Time Magazine, co-founder of Spy Magazine with fellow Time scribe Kurt Andersen, and full-time sufferer from Bush Derangement Syndrome, took possession of the magazine. Mr. Carter’s chronic Bush-bashing editorials and the onslaught of slanted pieces contributed not only to my cancelled subscription but to others as well.
Circulation figures for many liberal news publications have plummeted and yet this hasn’t stopped the continual demonizing of the conservative majority in this country. It’s as if their editorial boards live in a womb nourished by a placenta of left-wing dogma, totally oblivious of reality. They still haven’t a clue of what the Tea Party movement means and continue to portray it in a negative light.
Reports that come from the Times, the Associated Press, Newsday, Newsweek, Reuters, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post need to be read with a jaundiced eye. I certainly do not trust the photos distributed by Reuters covering the Middle East after it was exposed for fraud[1] in 2006.
Thanks to several Internet news sources, Reuters was found guilty of the following:
Digitally manipulating images after the photographs had been taken
Photographing scenes staged by Hezbollah and presenting the images as if they were of authentic spontaneous news events
Photographers staging scenes or moving objects, and presenting photos of the set-ups as if they were naturally occurring
Giving false or misleading captions to otherwise real photos that were taken at a different time or place.
I still find the Wall Street Journal reliable and the New York Daily News has a mix of ideological columnists, which is an encouraging change. The New York Post once had a solidly conservative op-ed page but the news reporting is too sensational to be taken seriously.
I rely on the pajamahadeen at Web sites such as lucianne.com and Andrew Breitbart’s Big sites to challenge the veracity of the lamestream media. Even my own submissions there are challenged and I welcome their opinions.
I surf back and forth between the major cable stations but I don’t watch the alphabet channels for anything but local news. Fox News can be just as biased on the conservative side but its straight news is, as advertised, generally fair and balanced. Although I’m not a fan of Bill O’Reilly or of his enormous ego, he does manage to have the key principals of major stories on his program to explain pertinent data. Occasionally, he even gives them time enough to speak.
One can also sometimes learn fascinating bits of history on Fox backed up by amazing footage and direct quotes by the subjects. In a recent broadcast detailing the origins of liberalism and eugenics, I was shocked to see and hear George Bernard Shaw uttering shocking ideas that many assume originated with Nazi Germany. In a 1910 lecture before a Eugenics Education Society he said:
We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living… A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time to look after them.
I hardly think this is a subject likely to be covered on ABC, CBS, or NBC. Nor can we expect them to be critical of the policies of the current administration, which they helped put into office.
We are living in a very difficult and complicated era with access to so much data that it’s crucial that we learn to uncover the skull of truth beneath the face of deceitful reporting. An educated electorate is the nation’s greatest hope.
Article printed from Big Journalism: http://bigjournalism.com
URL to article: http://bigjournalism.com/aliciacolon/2010/04/09/to-judge-the-news-consider-the-source-especially-the-new-york-times/
URLs in this post:
[1] exposed for fraud: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/22391_Fauxtography_Updates
American Capitalism Gone With A Whimper
It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American descent into Marxism is happening with breathtaking speed, against the back drop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people. True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing ground was conducted upon our Holy Russia, and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists. Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters. First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather than the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas than the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their "right" to choke down a McDonald's burger or a Burger King burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our "democracy". Pride blind the foolish. Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different "branches and denominations" were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top Protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the "winning" side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the "winning" side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power. Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America . The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama. His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive. His spending and money printing has been record setting, not just in America's short history, but in the world. If this keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not, America at best will resemble the Weimar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe. These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all. First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, losses, and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars. These make our Russian oligarchs look little more than ordinary street thugs, in comparison. Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes. Should we congratulate them? These men, of course, are not an elected panel but made up of appointees picked from the very financial oligarchs and their henchmen who are now gorging themselves on trillions of American dollars, in one bailout after another. They are also usurping the rights, duties, and powers of the American congress (parliament). Again, congress has put up little more than a whimper to their masters. Then came Barack Obama's command that GM's (General Motors) president step down from leadership of his company. That is correct, dear reader, in the land of "pure" free markets, the American president now has the power, the self-given power, to fire CEOs and we can assume other employees of private companies, at will. Come hither, go dither, the centurion commands his minions. So it should be no surprise, that the American president has followed this up with a "bold" move of declaring that he and another group of unelected, chosen stooges will now redesign the entire automotive industry and will even be the guarantee of automobile policies. I am sure that if given the chance, they would happily try and redesign it for the whole of the world, too. Prime Minister Putin, less then two months ago, warned Obama and UK's Blair, not to follow the path to Marxism, it only leads to disaster. Apparently, even though we suffered 70 years of this Western sponsored horror show, we know nothing, as foolish, drunken Russians, so let our "wise" Anglo-Saxon fools find out the folly of their own pride. Again, the American public has taken this with barely a whimper...but a "free man" whimper. So, should it be any surprise to discover that the Democratically controlled Congress of America is working on passing a new regulation that would give the American Treasury department the power to set "fair" maximum salaries, evaluate performance, and control how private companies give out pay raises and bonuses? Senator Barney Frank, a social pervert basking in his homosexuality (of course, amongst the modern, enlightened American societal norm, as well as that of the general West, homosexuality is not only not a looked down upon life choice, but is often praised as a virtue) and his Marxist enlightenment, has led this effort. He stresses that this only affects companies that receive government monies, but it is retroactive and taken to a logical extreme, this would include any company or industry that has ever received a tax break or incentive. The Russian owners of American companies and industries should look thoughtfully at this and the option of closing their facilities down and fleeing the land of the Red as fast as possible. In other words, divest while there is still value left.
A Washington Post columnist reports on a group of limousine liberals who are lobbying to pay more taxes. Of course, there’s no law that prevents them from writing big checks to the government and voluntarily paying more, so what they’re really lobbying for is higher taxes on the vast majority of investors and entrepreneurs who don’t want more of their income confiscated by the clowns in Washington and squandered on corrupt and inefficient programs.
I debated one of these guilt-ridden, silver-spoon, trust-fund rich people on CNN last year and never got an answer when I asked him why he wanted to pull up the ladder of opportunity for the rest of us who would like to become rich some day. Here’s what the Post reported on the issue:
A group of liberals got together Tuesday and proved that they, too, can have a tax rebellion. But theirs is a little bit different: They want to pay more taxes. “I’m in favor of higher taxes on people like me,” declared Eric Schoenberg, who is sitting on an investment banking fortune. He complained about “my absurdly low tax rates.” “We’re calling on other wealthy taxpayers to join us,” said paper-mill heir Mike Lapham, “to send the message to Congress and President Obama that it’s time to roll back the tax cuts on upper-income taxpayers.” …”The Obama plan we don’t think goes far enough,” Lapham protested. … They are among 50 families with net assets of more than $1 million to take a “tax fairness” pledge — donating the amount they saved from Bush tax cuts to organizations fighting for the repeal of the Bush tax cuts. According to a study by Spectrem Group, 7.8 million households in the United States have assets of more than $1 million — so that leaves 7,799,950 millionaire households yet to take the pledge. …Of course, if millionaires really want to pay higher taxes, there’s nothing stopping them. The Treasury Department Web site even accepts contributions by credit card to pay the public debt. …His donation will, however, ease the sense of guilt that comes with great wealth, described poignantly by the millionaires: “In 1865, my great-great-grandfather Samuel Pruyn founded a paper mill on the banks of the Hudson River in Glens Falls, New York,” Lapham explained. Judy Pigott, an industrial heiress on the call, added her wish that her income, “mostly unearned income, be taxed at a rate that returns to the common good that I have received by a privilege.” Confessed Hollender, who now runs the Seventh Generation natural products company: “I grew up in Manhattan on Park Avenue in a 10-room apartment.”
P.S. It’s also rather revealing that Massachusetts had (and maybe still has) a portion of the state tax form allowing people to pay extra tax, yet very rich statists like John Kerry decided not to pay that tax while urging higher taxes for mere peasants like you and me.
Parsing the Political Consequences of the Moscow
Bombings
Having vowed to flush Russia’s terrorists out
of the outhouse 11 years ago, Vladimir Putin is now promising to “scrape
them off the bottom of the sewer.” But this is no longer 1999: Russia
has changed (and Putin has changed it). After more than a decade of
rhetoric, people will eventually want results.
In Russia, as in
the United States after 9/11, there has been a certain willingness to
trade freedom and constitutionalism for security. Atrocities in Moscow
and elsewhere excused a war, the violation of civil rights of Russian
citizens, the evisceration of the independent media and the flattening
of political competition. But the violence in the North Caucasus waxes
rather than wanes and, as this week’s bombings of the Moscow metro
reminded us, the battlefield remains Russian territory – all of Russian
territory.
It is too early for there to be any fresh,
post-attack opinion polls, but there is no reason to believe that the
attacks will have significantly damaged the popularity of Putin or his
partner, President Dmitry Medvedev. Their popularity has never been
based strictly on their achievements. They are symbols, and very
fortunate symbols at that: to them much is given, but from them little
is expected.
In ordinary political life, low expectations are an
autocrat’s friend. But in a crisis, they can be a dilemma. The relative
calm with which Muscovites received news of the attacks, once they had
ascertained that their loved ones were unscathed, belies something more
than stoicism. Russians are afraid – just look at the numbers of people,
nowhere near the attacks at the time, who have called into
psychological help hotlines – but they are resigned. Just as they know
that their government has little interest in their economic well-being,
so have they come to believe that the state has little interest in their
safety. The raid of the school in Beslan in 2004, in which government
forces contributed to the deaths of 334 hostages, proved that beyond a
doubt.
While such attitudes have freed the government’s hands in
the past, making possible many of the anti-democratic changes the
country has seen over the past decade, they may paradoxically be
limiting the government’s room for maneuver now. Russia’s chattering
classes are immersed in speculation about what Putin and Medvedev have
up their sleeve. Further political repression? Strengthening (rather
than reforming) the security services? Sacking Moscow Mayor Yury
Luzhkov?
The possibilities are endless, but in the eyes of
ordinary Russians they are also mostly pointless. Eleven years of
tightening the screws has not made Russians safer. Citizens will easily
tolerate any number of shakeups within the ruling elite, but anything
that begins to impinge on their comfort – physical or psychological – is
likely to be resisted.
Any proposed tradeoff will have to carry
a convincing promise of results, but Russians are not in a mood to be
convinced. Suspicion that the security services, rather than Chechen
terrorists, were behind the apartment building bombings in 1999, has
never quite gone away. And now the talk on the streets – easily
overheard both by myself and by numerous journalists throughout the city
– is that, while it’s difficult to believe that the government planted
this week’s explosives, it seems plausible that the authorities knew
they were coming and allowed them to happen. Russians’ tolerance for
strong-handed leaders is topped only by their predilection for
conspiracy theories.
With little room or appetite for further
authoritarian “reform,” where does that leave Putin and Medvedev?
Returning to the angry rhetoric of 1999, as Putin did with his sewer
statement, will only remind people how utterly the Kremlin has failed to
root out terrorism. Medvedev was on a more productive track when he
pointed – as he has done repeatedly – to the social, economic and
political backwardness in the Caucasus that gives rise both to radical
sentiments and people willing to turn themselves into projectiles. But
it is unclear whether the government has the political, financial,
administrative, and intellectual wherewithal to create real change in
one of the most difficult regions of the world.
That leaves
Russia’s leaders with really only one easy option (and this is a bunch
that generally prefers easy options): make it go away. They control the
television and much of the print media, where the vast majority of
Russians get their news. They also control the streets, where extra
police presence – which, in other contexts, might serve to reassure
citizens, but also reminds them of the danger – has been kept to a
minimum. Even the planned memorials to the victims are being kept
underground, in the metro stations where the attacks occurred.
The
Kremlin has evidently decided that since it cannot benefit from a
conversation about what to do next, it’s best to avoid a conversation
altogether. That is probably correct, in the short term. But in the
longer run, if the terrorists strike again, if the danger remains real, a
public debate will begin anyway. When that happens, the Kremlin will no
longer be a participant in the conversation: rather, it will become the
object of debate, and no amount of rhetoric will help. That is what
happens when leaders fail to lead.
The vote is done and we have awakened to a new era. Under the guise of coverage for pre-existing conditions and the security of knowing that you can’t be kicked off your insurance when you really need it, the democrats have pushed through a bill which will lead to the end of health care as we know it.
Besides taxing us from everything from our unearned income, to payroll taxes to medical devices we can look forward to paying into a pot for the next four years. I only hope the money will be available for health care. As it stands now, it will be used to set up yet another government bureaucracy run by various task forces and yet another Czar to oversee the entire mess. If we’re lucky they will actually use the money for the intended purpose, but I have visions of the social security lock box. It is hard to believe that this will end up any better than Medicare, The Post Office or Social Security – big, bloated and bankrupt.
The bill sets up committees to study ways to deliver care. A committee to study what another committee is supposed to do? Sounds like bureaucracy at its finest. It is hard to believe that that money used to ‘study’ things will be used for patient care. By the time 2014 rolls around what money will be left to implement medical care?
The government sold health care reform with 5 basic talking points:
1. You won’t be able to be kicked off of your insurance when you really need it
Turns out that the insurance companies CAN kick you off if they pay a fine. It is not hard to imagine that an insurance company will figure out pretty quickly that it would be cheaper to pay the fine than to pay for coverage of a long term chronic illness.
2. You won’t be denied medical care for pre-existing conditions.
If the insurance company deems that you have lied on the application you will be denied coverage.
Sick children are no longer considered to have pre-existing conditions, but what about women who are pregnant?
3. You can keep the doctor you have if you are already covered.
With the cuts in Medicare reimbursements that have already happened (no more consultation fees) and the looming 21% cut at the end of October. Many more physicians than the current 30% are looking to opt out of Medicare. When the commercial insurance reimbursement rates drop (as they invariably will since they pay at a percentage of Medicare) there will be more doctors looking to leave commercial insurance as well.
4. Health care reform will lead to increased access
There is no way that there will be an increase in access when you take into account; 1) the physician shortage, 2) Those physicians who will leave medicine after the passage of this monstrosity (a recent poll of physicians states that 35% would leave the profession), and 3) those who will stop taking insurance all together because they are simply fed up.
Expanding Medicaid to those who are currently uninsured is not going to help since most doctors are not taking Medicaid now. Currently access to specialists is pretty poor, it will decline further.
5. Health care reform will cover 30 million more uninsured people
The bill will cover approximately 7 million more people over the next nine years and leave over 100 million people under insured.
6. The health care reform bill will decrease the deficit
The CBO numbers do not take into account the “doctor fix” and the government takeover of student loans was added to pad the numbers.
If you do real world accounting by adding in the “doctor fix” (over 230 million dollars) you actually wipe out the cost savings and you increase the deficit (anywhere from 400-700 million dollars.)
It is likely that the estimated costs will likely be much higher. How can anyone really know what is going to happen in the next 10 years. To say that these numbers are optimistic is being kind.
The Health care reform bill has done absolutely NOTHING that would really lower the cost of health care.
The pharmaceutical companies got three major cost raising concessions
- the government cannot go out of the country to shop for cheaper drugs
- the patent for biologics was extended to 12 years from 7 thereby locking out cheaper generic drugs. (For example a patient can continue to pay over $1000 a month for a drug like Embrel instead of getting some relief.
- patients will not be able to buy cheaper over the counter medications with their health savings account only more expensive prescription medication.
The health insurance companies may whine about their profit margin, but they get millions more people to add to their roles. Most of those people will only see a doctor 1-2 times a year for routine things, but will pay 14% higher premiums for the privilege.
The hospitals which account for the biggest piece of the Healthcare pie (31%) got a pass. Surgeons have had to deal with bundling of charges for over a decade. What about applying that to hospitals? That would have certainly lowered the cost. Since bankruptcy caused by medical costs are largely due to the hospital charges.
- There has been no legislation to change their habit of itemized billing where they stand to make a profit on everything from the single pill of Tylenol to the box of Kleenex in your hospital room.
I got a call from a fellow physician today who talked about picking up stakes and doing medical work overseas. I have a feeling I am going to get a lot more of those types of calls from fellow physicians in private practice. There are only so many physicians that the hospitals can employ and only so many more patients a physician can see.
It seems that the ultimate goal of this exercise is to eventually make all physicians government employees under a single payer system. As it stands the system created by health care reform is a give away to the pharmaceutical industry and the health insurance industry (you just need to look at the rise in their stocks today). It certainly can be seen as the first step on a slippery slope towards single payer. The powers that be are banking on physicians going along like lemmings, but I have no doubt that if we don’t they will institute some sort of draconian policy to make us do it like they have in Massachusetts (medical licensure is tied to taking the state insurance plan). If that happens, good luck finding a physician who will want to deal with this.
The Take: Historic win or not, Democrats could pay a price
By Dan Balz Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, March 21, 2010; A01
As the final round of the battle over health-care reform begins Sunday, President Obama and the Democrats are in reach of a historic legislative achievement that has eluded presidents dating back a century. The question is at what cost.
By almost any measure, enactment of comprehensive health-care legislation would rank as one of the most significant pieces of social welfare legislation in the country's history, a goal set as far back as the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt and pursued since by many other presidents. But unlike Social Security or Medicare, Obama's health-care bill would pass over the Republican Party's unanimous opposition.
Even Republicans agree on the magnitude of what Obama could pull off, while disagreeing on the substance of the legislation. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said: "Obviously, he will have achieved as president something nobody else has done. So in that sense, it's historic." But he added, "It doesn't end the health-care debate -- it just changes it. And if it does pass, it would be a historic mistake."
The lengthy and rancorous debate has inflicted considerable damage on the president and his party. It helped spark the grass-roots "tea party" movement and generated angry town hall meetings last summer that led to some opponents painting Obama as a socialist and a communist for advocating a greater government role in the health-care industry. The issue now is whether final passage of the legislation -- Senate leaders say they will take up the reconciliation bill this week -- will cause more harm or begin a turnaround in the Democrats' fortunes heading toward the November midterm elections.
This is not how the struggle over health care was supposed to unfold. When the president decided last year to push for comprehensive reform, there appeared to be the best opportunity in a generation to ensure that nearly all Americans have access to health insurance. There also seemed to be a consensus among business, labor and health-industry groups that government help was needed to rein in the escalating costs of health care.
A year later, Obama and Democratic congressional leaders are struggling to find the final votes in the House to push the bill through, against united Republican opposition and a country sharply polarized over whether and how health-care coverage should be extended to virtually all Americans. Liberals say the bill should have created a government alternative to private insurance; conservatives decry an increase in taxes and expensive new government programs.
The political stakes are enormous. Obama's approval ratings are below 50 percent in several recent polls, and more people disapprove of his handling of health care than approve. The outcome of the debate will stamp his presidency.
Democrats are afraid of failure and nervous about what success could bring. They fear substantial losses in November, with their majorities in the House and Senate possibly at risk if the country turns even more negative toward the administration and its policies. Republicans vow to continue challenging the program at the state and national levels.
Regardless of the political fallout, historians say health-care reform will take its place in the same category as the enactment of Social Security in 1935 and Medicare in 1965, and only a rung or two below passage of the major civil rights bills of the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to the bill's providing coverage for more than 32 million uninsured Americans, people would no longer be denied coverage because of preexisting conditions. The "doughnut hole" for Medicare prescriptions would eventually be eliminated, and young people could stay on their parents' insurance plan through age 26.
"I think this will be seen as a really major reform initiative," said presidential historian Robert Dallek. "How it plays out remains to be seen. But if Social Security and Medicare and civil rights are any preludes to this initiative, then I think it will become a fixed part of the national political/social/economic culture."
But there is a major difference between this health-care battle and the debates that preceded passage of Social Security and Medicare. Although there was opposition to those measures -- conservative opponents called Medicare socialized medicine -- in the end they passed with overwhelming, bipartisan majorities.
The House approved the Medicare bill on a vote of 313 to 115, including 65 Republicans -- nearly half the GOP caucus at the time. The Senate approved the measure by 68 to 21, including 13 of the 27 Republicans.
Social Security passed the House in 1935 by 372 to 77. On that vote, 77 Republicans joined the majority and 18 Republicans opposed it. In the Senate, the vote was 77 to 6, with five of 19 Republicans in opposition.
At the time, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's ambitions were even larger. Historian David Kennedy, a scholar of the New Deal era, said Roosevelt originally included universal health care as part of the Social Security legislation but pulled out those provisions before sending the bill to Capitol Hill.
"He thought it was such a significant political liability it could sink the whole bill," Kennedy said.
Today, Republicans and Democrats agree on the potential significance of what could happen over the next week in Washington. Where they disagree is on the question of whether it is necessary or wise to do it.
Former Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean has often been at odds with the White House over the health-care bill, but he said the current version is worthy of support as a significant first step toward real reform and because it could help Democrats politically. "Our team's got to win this one, and if they do I think they'll be rewarded. . . . A 'yes' vote hurts Democrats much less as a party than a 'no' vote," he said.
But former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich said Obama and the Democrats will regret their decision to push for comprehensive reform. Calling the bill "the most radical social experiment . . . in modern times," Gingrich said: "They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years" with the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s.
No one doubts that Johnson was right to push for those civil rights measures. And he was well aware of the potential damage they would do to a Democratic Party that was then a coalition including whites and African Americans, liberals from the North and conservative segregationists from the South.
Those battles over civil rights set off a political realignment that played out over decades and led eventually to a Republican domination of the South that continues to this day.
Still, the health-care battle has divided the country in ways that the Medicare debate of the 1960s did not. One reason is that partisanship and political polarization are measurably worse today. Another factor is that trust in government is far lower than in the 1960s. Finally, the political parties are far more homogenous, particularly the Republican Party, whose members decidedly identify themselves as conservative or very conservative.
Democrats are keenly aware of the risks ahead, which is why it has been so difficult for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to round up the votes. Many Democrats, recalling the debacle after their failure on health care in 1994, think that another failure will be equally costly. Others say there will be a price to be paid no matter what happens.
"The political consequences of 1994 took a full decade for the D Party to undo and reverse," said William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a domestic policy adviser in the Clinton White House. "If the political consequences of this effort turn out to be as long-lasting as 1994, that would be a very significant price that will have to be weighed in the historical balance."
But will Republicans regret their unanimous opposition? Historian Kennedy sees dangers for the GOP if a reformed health- care system turns out to be as popular as Social Security and Medicare.
"They confer real benefits on people that are palpable, and people believe in them," he said of those two programs. "What the political calculus is [among Republicans] that lets this come through a strictly Democratic proposal is a pretty high-stakes gamble."
Vin Weber, a former Republican House member from Minnesota, disagrees. He said this measure is different, not only because it has widened the ideological chasm in the country but also because the costs and benefits will fall unequally on different groups of people over the years.
"Medicare and Social Security immediately created a large group of beneficiaries who immediately understood what they were getting," he said. "That's not the case here."
Such differing interpretations guarantee that even if the bills pass, the fight over health care will continue long afterward. "The division we now have is not going to disappear," Dallek said. "It's going to be a continuing part of the national debate. This legislation is going to play out over the next four or five or six years."
Research director Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.
The end of the road for Barack Obama?
Barack Obama seems unable to face up to America's problems, writes Simon Heffer in New York.
By Simon Heffer Published: 8:16AM GMT 08 Mar 2010
The once mighty Detroit seems on the verge of being abandoned Photo: Jeffrey Sauger
It is a universal political truth that administrations do not begin to fragment when things are going well: it only happens when they go badly, and those who think they know better begin to attack those who manifestly do not. The descent of Barack Obama's regime, characterised now by factionalism in the Democratic Party and talk of his being set to emulate Jimmy Carter as a one-term president, has been swift and precipitate. It was just 16 months ago that weeping men and women celebrated his victory over John McCain in the American presidential election. If they weep now, a year and six weeks into his rule, it is for different reasons.
Despite the efforts of some sections of opinion to talk the place up, America is mired in unhappiness, all the worse for the height from which Obamania has fallen. The economy remains troublesome. There is growth – a good last quarter suggested an annual rate of as high as six per cent, but that figure is probably not reliable – and the latest unemployment figures, last Friday, showed a levelling off. Yet 15 million Americans, or 9.7 per cent of the workforce, have no job. Many millions more are reduced to working part-time. Whole areas of the country, notably in the north and on the eastern seaboard, are industrial wastelands. The once mighty motor city of Detroit appears slowly to be being abandoned, becoming a Jurassic Park of the mid-20th century; unemployment among black people in Mr Obama's own city of Chicago is estimated at between 20 and 25 per cent. One senior black politician – a Democrat and a supporter of the President – told me of the wrath in his community that a black president appeared to be unable to solve the economic problem among his own people. Cities in the east such as Newark and Baltimore now have drug-dealing as their principal commercial activity: The Wire is only just fictional.
Last Thursday the House of Representatives passed a jobs Bill, costing $15 billion, which would give tax breaks to firms hiring new staff and, through state sponsorship of construction projects, create thousands of jobs too. The Senate is trying to approve a Bill that would provide a further $150 billion of tax incentives to employers. Yet there is a sense of desperation in the Administration, a sense that nothing can be as efficacious at the moment as a sticking plaster. Edward B Montgomery, deputy labour secretary in the Clinton administration, now spends his time on day trips to decaying towns that used to have a car industry, not so much advising them on how to do something else as facilitating those communities' access to federal funds. For a land without a welfare state, America starts to do an effective impersonation of a country with one. This massive state spending gives rise to accusations by Republicans, and people too angry even to be Republicans, that America is now controlled by "Leftists" and being turned into a socialist state.
"Obama's big problem," a senior Democrat told me, "is that four times as many people watch Fox News as watch CNN." The Fox network is a remarkable cultural phenomenon which almost shocks those of us from a country where a technical rule of impartiality is applied in the broadcast media. With little rest, it pours out rage 24 hours a day: its message is of the construction of the socialist state, the hijacking of America by "progressives" who now dominate institutions, the indoctrination of children, the undermining of religion and the expropriation of public money for these nefarious projects. The public loves it, and it is manifestly stirring up political activism against Mr Obama, and also against those in the Republican Party who are not deemed conservatives. However, it is arguable whether the now-reorganising Right is half as effective in its assault on the President as some of Mr Obama's own party are.
Mr Obama benefited in his campaign from an idiotic level of idolatry, in which most of the media participated with an astonishing suspension of cynicism. The sound of the squealing of brakes is now audible all over the American press; but the attack is being directed not at the leader himself, but at those around him. There was much unconditional love a year or so ago of Rahm Emanuel, Mr Obama's Chief of Staff; oleaginous profiles of this Chicago political hack, a veteran of that unlovely team that polluted the Clinton White House, appeared in otherwise respectable journals, praising the combination of his religious devotion, his family-man image, his ruthless operating technique and his command of the vocabulary of profanity. Now, supporters of the President are blaming Mr Emanuel for the failure of the Obama project, not least for his inability to construct a deal on health care.
This went down badly with friends of Mr Emanuel, notably with Mr Emanuel himself. His partisans, apparently taking dictation from him, have filled newspaper columns and blogs with uplifting accounts of the Wonder of Rahm: as one of them put it, "Emanuel is the only person preventing Obama from becoming Jimmy Carter". They attack other Obama "sycophants", such as David Axelrod, his campaign guru, and Valerie Jarret, a long-time friend of Mrs Obama and a fixer from the office of Mayor Daley of Chicago who now manages – or tries to manage – the President's image. These "sycophants" have, they argue, tried to keep the President above politics, letting Congress run away with the agenda, and gainsaying Mr Emanuel's advice to Mr Obama to get tough with his internal opponents. This naïve act of manipulation has brought its own counter-counterattack, with an anti-Emanuel pundit drawing a comparison with our own Prime Minister and ridiculing the idea that Mr Obama should start bullying people too.
The root of the problem seems to be the management of expectations. The magnificent campaign created the notion that Mr Obama could walk on water. Oddly enough, he can't. That was more Mr Axelrod's fault than Mr Emanuel's. And, to be fair to Mr Emanuel, any advice he has been giving the President to impose his will on Congress is probably well founded. The $783 billion stimulus package of a year ago was used to further the re-election prospects of many congressmen, not to do good for the country. America's politics remain corrupt, populated by nonentities whose main concern once elected is to stay elected; it seems to be the same the whole world over. Even this self-interested use of the stimulus package appears to have failed, however. Every day, it seems, another Democrat congressman announces that he will not be fighting the mid-term elections scheduled for November 2. The health care Bill, apparently so humane in intent, is being "scrubbed" (to use the terminology of one Republican) by its opponents, to the joy of millions of middle Americans who see it as a means to waste more public money and entrench socialism. For the moment, this is a country vibrant with anger.
A thrashing of the Democrats in the mid-terms would not necessarily be the beginning of the end for Mr Obama: Bill Clinton was re-elected two years after the Republicans swept the House and the Senate in November 1994. But Mr Clinton was an operator in a way Mr Obama patently is not. His lack of experience, his dependence on rhetoric rather than action, his disconnection from the lives of many millions of Americans all handicap him heavily. It is not about whose advice he is taking: it is about him grasping what is wrong with America, and finding the will to put it right. That wasted first year, however, is another boulder hanging from his neck: what is wrong needs time to put right. The country's multi-trillion dollar debt is barely being addressed; and a country engaged in costly foreign wars has a President who seems obsessed with anything but foreign policy – as a disregarded Britain is beginning to realise.
There are lessons from the stumbling of Mr Obama for our own country as we approach a general election. Vacuous promises of change are hostages to fortune if they cannot be delivered upon to improve the living conditions of a people. The slickness of campaigning that comes from a combination of heavy funding and public relations expertise does not inevitably translate into an ability to govern. There is no point a nation's having the audacity of hope unless it also has the sophistication and the will to turn it into action. As things stand, Barack Obama and America under his leadership do not.
David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'
An election-season essay
By David Mamet
published: March 11, 2008
John Maynard Keynes was twitted with changing his mind. He replied, "When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?"
My favorite example of a change of mind was Norman Mailer atThe Village Voice.
Norman took on the role of drama critic, weighing in on the New York premiere ofWaiting for Godot.
Twentieth century's greatest play. Without bothering to go, Mailer called it a piece of garbage.
When he did get around to seeing it, he realized his mistake. He was no longer aVoicecolumnist, however, so he bought a page in the paper and wrote a retraction, praising the play as the masterpiece it is.
Every playwright's dream.
I once won one of Mary Ann Madden's "Competitions" inNew Yorkmagazine. The task was to name or create a "10" of anything, and mine was the World's Perfect Theatrical Review. It went like this: "I never understood the theater until last night. Please forgive everything I've ever written. When you read this I'll be dead." That, of course, is the only review anybody in the theater ever wants to get.
My prize, in a stunning example of irony, was a year's subscription toNew York, which rag (apart from Mary Ann's "Competition") I considered an open running sore on the body of world literacy—this due to the presence in its pages of John Simon, whose stunning amalgam of superciliousness and savagery, over the years, was appreciated by that readership searching for an endorsement of proactive mediocrity.
But I digress.
I wrote a play about politics (November, Barrymore Theater, Broadway, some seats still available). And as part of the "writing process," as I believe it's called, I started thinking about politics. This comment is not actually as jejune as it might seem.Porgy and Bessis a buncha good songs but has nothing to do with race relations, which is the flag of convenience under which it sailed.
But my play, it turned out, was actually about politics, which is to say, about the polemic between persons of two opposing views. The argument in my play is between a president who is self-interested, corrupt, suborned, and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter.
The play, while being a laugh a minute, is, when it's at home, a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is tostay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.
I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.
As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.
These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind:Shut the fuck up."?" she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."
This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.
But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part.
And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrongat the same timethat I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.
I'd observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.
For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.
To that end, the Constitution separates the power of the state into those three branches which are for most of us (I include myself) the only thing we remember from 12 years of schooling.
The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.
Rather brilliant. For, in the abstract, we may envision an Olympian perfection of perfect beings in Washington doing the business of their employers, the people, but any of us who has ever been at a zoning meeting with our property at stake is aware of the urge to cut through all the pernicious bullshit and go straight to firearms.
I found not only that I didn't trust the current government (that, to me, was no surprise), but that an impartial review revealed that the faults of this president—whom I, a good liberal, considered a monster—were little different from those of a president whom I revered.
Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.
And I began to question my hatred for "the Corporations"—the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live.
And I began to question my distrust of the "Bad, Bad Military" of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world. Is the military always right? No. Neither is government, nor are the corporations—they are just different signposts for the particular amalgamation of our country into separate working groups, if you will. Are these groups infallible, free from the possibility of mismanagement, corruption, or crime? No, and neither are you or I. So, taking the tragic view, the question was not "Is everything perfect?" but "How could it be better, at what cost, and according to whose definition?" Put into which form, things appeared to me to be unfolding pretty well.
Do I speak as a member of the "privileged class"? If you will—but classes in the United States are mobile, not static, which is the Marxist view. That is: Immigrants came and continue to come here penniless and can (and do) become rich; the nerd makes a trillion dollars; the single mother, penniless and ignorant of English, sends her two sons to college (my grandmother). On the other hand, the rich and the children of the rich can go belly-up; the hegemony of the railroads is appropriated by the airlines, that of the networks by the Internet; and the individual may and probably will change status more than once within his lifetime.
What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.
Butif the government is not to intervene, how will we, mere human beings, work it all out?
I wondered and read, and it occurred to me that I knew the answer, and here it is: We just seem to. How do I know? From experience. I referred to my own—take away the director from the staged play and what do you get? Usually a diminution of strife, a shorter rehearsal period, and a better production.
The director, generally, does notcausestrife, but his or her presence impels the actors to direct (and manufacture) claims designed to appeal to Authority—that is, to set aside the original goal (staging a play for the audience) and indulge in politics, the purpose of which may be to gain status and influence outside the ostensible goal of the endeavor.
Strand unacquainted bus travelers in the middle of the night, and what do you get? A lot of bad drama, and a shake-and-bake Mayflower Compact. Each, instantly, adds what he or she can to the solution. Why? Each wants, and in fact needs, to contribute—to throw into the pot what gifts each has in order to achieve the overall goal, as well as status in the new-formed community. And so they work it out.
See also that most magnificent of schools, the jury system, where, again, each brings nothing into the room save his or her own prejudices, and, through the course of deliberation, comes not to a perfect solution, but a solution acceptable to the community—a solution the community can live with.
Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack. The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a self-described independent (read "conservative"), and he was driving the flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first—that Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out.
And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. And in doing so, I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).
And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.
"Aha," you will say, and you are right. I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.
At the same time, I was writing my play about a president, corrupt, venal, cunning, and vengeful (as I assume all of them are), and two turkeys. And I gave this fictional president a speechwriter who, in his view, is a "brain-dead liberal," much like my earlier self; and in the course of the play, they have to work it out. And they eventually do come to a human understanding of the political process. As I believe I am trying to do, and in which I believe I may be succeeding, and I will try to summarize it in the words of William Allen White.
White was for 40 years the editor of theEmporia Gazettein rural Kansas, and a prominent and powerful political commentator. He was a great friend of Theodore Roosevelt and wrote the best book I've ever read about the presidency. It's calledMasks in a Pageant, and it profiles presidents from McKinley to Wilson, and I recommend it unreservedly.
White was a pretty clear-headed man, and he'd seen human nature as few can. (As Twain wrote, you want to understand men, run a country paper.) White knew that people need both to get ahead and to get along, and that they're always working at one or the other, and that government should most probably stay out of the way and let them get on with it. But, he added, there is such a thing as liberalism, and it may be reduced to these saddest of words: " . . . and yet . . . "
The right is mooing about faith, the left is mooing about change, and many are incensed about the fools on the other side—but, at the end of the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water cooler. Happy election season.
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The president's once sky-riding
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