Politics

Twenty-three years ago today, President Reagan delivered a powerful speech at the Berlin Wall. No pessimism about America and the West; no apologies; no appeasement. Appreciation for strength, freedom, capitalism.

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. Rather than delve into her impact on the recent elections or her work goading the thin-skinned occupant of the White House, certain media have suddenly developed a strong investigative curiosity about whether Sarah Palin has had some “work” done. Since they also routinely dismiss her as a non-entity about which no one cares and who has no influence (a fog that lifts only occasionally), one would expect even more interest in media investigations of the “work” done on much more prominent and influential Democratic women, such as Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, and Hillary Clinton, to name a few. Or of male Democrats, such as John Kerry. Oddly, there seems to be much less curiosity about their medical operations. Given Andrew Sullivan’s interest in Palin’s anatomy during the 2008 election whole on his resolute quest for the definitive answer about whether Trig Palin was really hers rather than Bristol’s, one can conclude that he will once again be America’s gay blade most interested in female physical attributes. One commenter who is convinced that Palin has artificially bloomed believes that her program at Fox News has been a bust, and she is trying to gain a bigger reception at Fox News. Here is Sarahcuda with the assets that she supposedly has acquired as a result of her successful book sales. Just for the record, I do not care what means, if any, Sarah Palin uses to boost her appearance.

In a related matter, a life-long Democrat retires from the news business:

Wait, that picture may not be fair, as she is not smiling. Let me try again.

No word about whether Ms. Thomas has had “work” done to achieve this kind of appearance or whether she will now return to her native Lebanon to become press secretary of Hizb’Ullah.

Continuing my review of insults and threats of violence by liberals against conservatives, there are some more entries. Liberal talk show host calls for the deaths of various conservative talk show hosts.

Threats by same-sex marriage supporters against people whom they perceive to have voted in favor of Proposition 8, whether or not in fact those people did so. Notice the prevalence of the “N-word” in these bigoted outbusts by those who most demand tolerance.

One of the allegations indicting King George III for tyranny in the Declaration of Independence is that, “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.” That sounds very much like the condition taxpayers are in as a result of the growth of government bureaucrats and the explosion in the cost of salaries and pensions to the point where these placeholders are compensated far better than comparable workers in the private sector.

In one sense we are, of course, in a formally different position than the colonists. We (in the collective sense, since I usually vote against government programs and for representatives who are against most programs) vote for politicians who then, in the figurative darkness of the cloakroom or alcove make deals that end up supporting their campaign contributors and associated interest groups. Public choice theory tells us that these motivated minority factions will work much harder, and thus be far more effective, at promoting their agendas than will be the diffuse public trying to meet their private obligations and life’s challenges. The politicians naturally will go with the vocal and intense minority, rather than the silent and disorganized majority. This well-trod public policy path produces greater and greater expansion of government, as these groups’ desire for money and power meshes well with the politicians’ desire for money and power—money that comes from taxpayers and power that ebbs from the individual and flows to the government and the rent-seeking courtiers.

Government regulations increase. More bureaucrats are hired. Staff increases. More funding is needed, funding that is never enough and outpaces the growth of population and the influence of inflation. More taxes are needed. As 17th century English Whigs opposing the Stuart monarchs and 18th century Americans opposing the British well understood, taxes were a direct threat to freedom. The more of one’s productivity the government appropriated, the less autonomy one had and the more dependent on the state one was. We have become much more pliant in our acceptance of state control over our pocketbooks and our persons. The private interests that develop around these programs help deliver votes from the beneficiaries of the programs to keep the politicians in office. Once again, their intensity of commitment and focus on self-interest outcompetes the more complex voting decisions—and the decision whether to vote at all—made by the general public.

Full-time legislatures, interventionist judges who see their roles as policy-makers, expanding bureaucracies, public employee unions exacerbate the problem. A critical mass is reached that effectively prevents a relatively painless retrenchment or dismantling of the bureaucratic state. There now exists not only the corporatist state of big government, big labor, and big business (the operative feature of fascism) opposing taxpayers and initiative-driven productive entrepreneurs. The same system is replicated within government, with legislators and administrative agency heads the role of government, government bureaucrats and workers the role of big labor, and the ideological interest groups the role of big business. All of them, as well, oppose taxpayers and initiative-driven productive entrepreneurs.

Once a critical mass is reached the system, lacking effective controls, enters the stage of run-away chain reaction. But eventually it runs out of fuel, that is, money extracted from increasingly unwilling taxpayers. At first, those in control will demonize the rich for not “paying their fair share,” even though they are paying most of the taxes. When the rich leave or change their activities, the rest have to pay. Eventually those funds run out or the taxpayers become increasingly hostile to further taxes. At that point, those in charge have several choices. The most likely is to run a deficit and to borrow against the future. That can work for a time, but since the borrowing is not for productive innovation, it does not create the economic means to repay the loans. Therefore, eventually the borrowing eats further into the people’s wealth, requiring more taxes or more borrowing in an accelerating cycle.

At some point borrowing becomes infeasible. At that point, if taxes are no longer a practical option under existing democratic processes, the government has several choices. It can undergo the evolution from democracy to tyranny to exact the taxes and force people into poverty. That was Plato’s prediction in The Republic. It is the typical reaction. Or, it can repudiate the debts, thereby forcing people into poverty and pitting the rent-seeking classes against the producers in a political struggle likely to end in social turmoil—and, quite possibly, autocracy. That is the stage Greece is approaching.

The way out is to cut the size of government in all phases except to insure common defense and domestic tranquility, in the language of the Constitution’s preamble. The sooner that is done, the sooner less treasure is taken from the productive classes and given to the political drones. More important, the fewer government restrictions, the more people’s productive spirits are released and more wealth created for everyone who wants to participate. Unfortunately, the messages from Sacramento and Washington D.C. show that the old order has not been shaken enough for a fundamental change in approach. Rather, more regulations, more taxes, more borrowing, more give-aways to politically connected rent-seekers, and more growth of the inefficient crony capitalism of the corporatist state. And, therefore, less productivity, less wealth, less freedom, less personal autonomy, and a lower standard of living.

Here is some evidence of the problem: One-third of San Francisco’s city workers earned more than $100,000 last year (in a recession). That includes clerks and custodians, not just department heads. It gets better, or worse. The amount doesn’t include benefits, which are particularly generous for government workers.
California public pensions are driving the state into insolvency. These pensions are “defined benefit” plans, which private businesses have mostly abandoned in favor of “defined contribution” systems. The auto companies’ financial problems are significantly due to their obligations under old pension plans.
Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard lays out some gruesome facts. Talking just about California: “In California, 9,111 retired government workers have pensions of more than $100,000. One retiree draws an annual pension of $509,664. Among retired teachers, 3,065 receive more than $100,000. One gets $285,460. Pensions for retired state workers and teachers will rise 2 percent this year, though Social Security recipients aren’t getting any cost-of-living increase. The hike in California isn’t tied to inflation.”

This raises an interesting issue of sex discrimination in sports. Must girls be allowed to compete for spots on boys teams when there is a girls team in the sport? The Canadians seem to think so. In fact, they appear to believe that failure to allow girls to compete for spots on boys teams is a human rights violation, thereby continuing the institutional Canadian practice of cheapening and perverting the meaning of human rights.

While females will be permitted to compete for boys teams, males will not be permitted to compete for girls teams. This is the typical modern feminist approach to marginalize males. We deserve equality and then some. The sex discrimination here is blatant. Though it is unlikely that there will be many females who will be able to break into boys teams at the high school level or above, every girl who does so takes away a spot that otherwise would go to a talented and eager boy. But since the girl is not competing for a spot on a girls team, another girl will get the spot she would have got if she were not on the boys team. Put another way, if there are equal spots on the boys and girls teams, every girl gets to compete for every spot. Boys only get to compete for half the spots.

In the U.S., there is Title IX, which also ignores the preferences, predelictions, and capabilities of the sexes and distorts their relative interest in athletics by imposing a forced formal equality of teams. Can the U.S. be far behind Canada in its continuing efforts to denigrate the importance of opportunities for males? My solution is for the government to get off the athletic field altogether and let private clubs and leagues form as they wish. But, if officious government know-it-alls are going to inject themselves into the matter, I think we should do away with “separate-but-equal” and require females to compete with males for spots on the same teams.

Does this mean that the Lakers will forfeit their games to “Los Suns”?

California has budget problems that are reminiscent of Greece’s. The governor has warned that the structural deficit that amounts to about 20% of general fund spending would require “terrible cuts” to basic entitlement programs. There will be much wrangling over how to close the deficit and avoid default on the state’s debt. When the “solution” proves inadequate yet again, there will need to be a federal bailout that other states that are in as bad shape as California will also demand for themselves. Worse, the federal government cannot afford to play EU to California’s Greece, Michigan’s Portugal, and New York’s Spain, among others.

Meanwhile, California’s rotten tax, labor, and regulatory strictures cause more and more companies to land on the “Leaving California” list.

Then there is the City of Los Angeles. As noted yesterday, L.A. is, for all intents and purposes, broke. The betting in the office pool no longer should be whether, but rather when, the city will file for bankruptcy. Whatever efforts at solvency by budget-cutting the mayor is belatedly trying to initiate (after adding 5000 workers to the city payroll in his first term) is frustrated by the city council pols that operate cocooned from reality while drawing generous pay and operating (legal) unaudited slush funds.

So, rather than deal with the unfolding economic disaster, what did the L.A. City Council do? They voted, 13-1, to boycott Arizona.  Led by two staggeringly stupid posers, Janice Hahn and Ed Reyes (who obviously have not read the law), the herd of ignoramuses (ignorami?) in the council drew repugnant comparisons to Nazis and the Holocaust over the anti-illegal alien law that Eric Holder (!) has declared is not racist. The clown show at city hall decided to withdraw from connections to Arizona through contracts or city employee travel. They have also (unofficially) urged private residents not to do business with Arizona.

The posers suggest that $7 or $8m of contracts might be involved, because they don’t want to alienate real revenue producers based in Arizona, such as US Airways. As some have urged, Arizona should reciprocate. For example, refuse to supply power to L.A., demand all the Colorado River water to which Arizona is entitled, decline to send firefighters and equipment next time California has wildfires, and so on.

Los Angeles follows the example of San Francisco, Boulder, and Berkeley, at least two of which have the excuse that they are university towns where the alternative reality of students and professors reigns. But if the confederation of dunces at city hall believes that they will lead the American people in a glorious march against Nazism and a neo-Holocaust in Arizona, they might want to rethink their strategy. As happens so often, the leftists that run L.A. (and, presumably, the electorate they represent) are out of touch with the mainstream if this Pew poll is to be believed.

There is a reaction brewing against California. Some want to boycott California (see comments to the link). Others have suggested that Arizona pay the bus fare for any illegal aliens to go to California. Californians are generally unpopular with the residents of neighboring states, so L.A.’s lunacy will create further resentments, especially when the state tries to get financial help from other states for the problems its profligacy has caused. Then, there is this message to L.A.

Rasmussen: By a margin of two-to-one (60%-31%), voters favor laws of the type Arizona has adopted. In Arizona, 70% support the law.

UPI: Over 70% of Americans support the policies of the Arizona law.

That is why, even though the usual suspects among the identity group lawyers will file lawsuits that will take a long time and ultimately mostly fail, the U.S. Justice Department may consider litigation,but probably will not sue, at least not before the election.

I’ve been posting about sundry items about the upcoming American elections. Great Britain just had an election that saw the Conservative (Tory) Party surge to first place, but fail to gain a majority of seats in the House of Commons. Under the British parliamentary system of government, such a majority is needed to form the Cabinet of the Queen’s ministers. In Britain, the constitutional separation of legislative from executive function is different than in the U.S. and, as a formal political matter, non-existent. As a functional matter, however, there can be considerable separation between the Cabinet and the House of Commons.

This is an excellent article by the BBC that provides an overview of the election result and the possible ways to form a government. This is the first time in a long while that there has not been a majority government. Coalitions are inherently unstable, and this political instability does not come at a good time for the UK. Its economy is in difficulty after years of Labour mismanagement of increased social entitlements and worsening societal dysfunctions produced by a race-to-the-bottom moral relativism and pervasive and paralyzing multicultural political correctness. The UK’s deficit is as bad as that of the U.S., but the country has less economic resiliency in part because the state controls more of the economy (though the Obama administration appears hell-bent on “Europeanizing” our economy into similar torpor). At the same time, the Tories did not present a strongly viable alternative to Labour, preferring a vapid “me, too”-ism to ideological clarity. Cameron tried to follow the Obama playbook and promise vague “change,” but no policy meat. Merely saying, “We can re-arrange the chairs on the economic Titanic better than the other guys,” is not a way to instill confidence that the Tories ought to be given the job of doing something about the iceberg. The Liberal Democrats have turned so far left they are not the “Liberals” (in the classic European meaning of the term) of old; they’d favor figuring out a way how to hit the iceberg so that the maximum amount of damage is done to the truly productive and the wealthy.

The unusual nature of the election may be a sign of what is coming in the U.S. What worries me more is that the British economy is a sign of what is to come for the U.S. within the next couple of decades if we adopt Obamanomics.

This is a hard-hitting and accurately pessimistic look at the difficulties facing the next British prime minister (probably David Cameron), as well as many other Western leaders as they try to deal with structural economic problems.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn pulls no punches in his criticism of the focus-group driven pandering and vapid rhetoric that the “metrosexual” Cameron undertook without reaping the benefit of an electoral victory a la Tony Blair or Barack Obama. The UK Spectator’s Melanie Phillips is similarly disenchanted with Cameron and the rest of the non-entities running for P.M.: “So now all is murk. And no, the likely political paralysis is not good at all. But then, no party was offering any prospect of getting to grips properly with anything important anyway. It is the condition of British politics, and beyond that the state of British society, which is not good at all and of which this election result is an accurate reflection.”

Why didn’t the Tories run Boris Johnson, the mayor of London? That might have shown they were serious about running on ideas.

The U.S. continues to be extremely lucky, a condition that, sooner or later, will end. The latest terrorist attack on U.S. residents was a failure due, once again, to a faulty bomb. One reason the plot was foiled, it is said, is because a nearby t-shirt vendor became suspicious about the vehicle and called police. Lucky he wasn’t in Arizona, or calling the cops due to reasonable suspicion of a crime would be deemed racist. In fact, to hear liberals tell it, the police cannot investigate based on reasonable suspicion, since the same standard is used in the Arizona law they decry as unconstitutional.

Some other, unfortunately rather predictable, results have emerged. First, the mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, speculated that the bomber was someone “home grown” and unhappy about Obama/Reid/PelosiCare. These are the characteristics he singled out. Given the Left’s rhetoric over the past couple of months, the clear intent here is to tar conservatives. It fits the meme put out by the Obama administration, the Congressional Democrats, their media enablers, and, most recently, Bill Clinton and his connecting the dots between the criticism of Obama and the Oklahoma City bomber. And, of course, those protesters have been vilified by a chorus of well-placed liberals as being racist Whites coming either from trailer park country or from their McMansions, depending on the liberal theme-of-the-week about the socio-economic standing of the tea party protesters. So, Mayor Bloomberg who would surely be shocked at (non-evident) racial profiling in Arizona, forthrightly engages in—racial profiling.

Then, when the far likelier group affiliation of the would-be bomber as a radical Muslim turns out to be true, what does Hizzoner do? Meets with Muslim groups and thunders that a [non-existent] backlash and discrimination against Muslims will not be tolerated. He declares that a few bad apples in a group should not lead us to condemn the rest. Somehow, that firm principle against bigotry and guilt-by-association does not apply to how the mayor treats anti-Obama protesters.

Third, following examples set by Chris Matthews and, previously, by Evan Thomas of Newsweek, another media non-brain confesses that she hoped the would-be bomber would have no connection to an Islamic country. Brewer then proceeds desperately to shift focus away from the obvious problem by setting up various straw-man arguments that always somehow imply blame to conservatives.

Powerlineblog recalls the violence directed at delegates to the Republican convention in 2008: “I attended the convention and remember the terrorist acts that were carried out by anti-Republican protesters very well. They threw bricks through the windows of buses, sending elderly convention delegates to the hospital. They dropped bags of sand off highway overpasses onto vehicles below. Fortunately, no one was killed….Is it a stretch to think that some of them, at least, may have been inspired by over-the-top, hateful attacks on the Bush administration by Democratic Congressmen, DNC Chairman Howard Dean, Michael Moore, who was a guest of honor at the Democrats’ own convention, various show business personalities, and many other leading liberal figures?…For some reason, political violence was not a concern less than two years ago. Yet today, we can hardly imagine what would happen if a group of tea partiers were to drop sandbags off a highway overpass, trying to kill motorists below. Liberal reporters’ heads would explode. But this is exactly what anti-Republican Party protesters did in 2008, and no one cared. To my knowledge, not a single Democratic politician condemned this anti-Republican violence or attempted in any way to distance the Democratic Party from it.”

Then there are the numerous uses of violent imagery by the President and members of his administration against opponents of Mr. Obama or his program. If they claim that words will lead to violence, will they take responsibility for their own words?

It has been over a month of even more overheated rhetoric than usual from liberals about supposed “racist” taunts, “racist” protesters with American flags and lawn chairs, and “racist” laws copied from federal laws and Supreme Court cases. All of this was supposed evidence of the connection between peaceful, but noisy, protesters, and incipient bombings and other violence. After all, in the liberal mind, Timothy McVeigh and the “tea parties” are so alike, though the only thing they in fact have in common is that they both start with the letter “t.”

When Bill Clinton decided to join the fun, it was time to recall Clinton’s connection to the massacre of men, women, and children at Waco, Texas, during the tenure of Mr. Bill and his hand-picked crony at Justice, Janet Reno. “An independent report on Waco written by the Harvard Professor of Law and Psychiatry, Alan A. Stone, for the then Deputy Attorney General Philip Heymann, says it ‘is difficult to believe that the US government would deliberately plan to expose twenty-five children, most of them infants and toddlers, to CS gas for forty-eight hours.’ Unfortunately, however, that appears to have been exactly the plan.” These were “activities which if conducted in wartime would constitute war crimes. Because exposing the children to CS gas was the point of the FBI exercise….” We know that McVeigh was directly prodded to his violence by the events at Waco. There is a reason why the Oklahoma City bombing happened on the anniversary of the Waco murders. Still waiting for Mr. Bill to receive his reckoning. At the least, he should be reluctant to lead with his chin when it comes to the connection between events and Timothy McVeigh’s terrorism.

On the way home last week, I listened to excerpts from a press conference by the genius mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa (or, as he was known before his first marriage, Tony Villar). This is the guy who, after going to an unaccredited law school, flunked several attempts to pass the bar exam. But I digress. Hizzoner was addressing the recently-passed Arizona anti-illegal alien law. After showing his ignorance of constitutional law by dramatically claiming that the law was an outrage because it would allow police to arrest people without a warrant (most arrests by far are made on probable cause without a warrant), he proceeded to urge a boycott of Arizona and a cancellation of city business with Arizona. In this matter, he was acting on the urging of the loopy city council member Janice Hahn (who is a candidate for Lieutenant Governor this year) and was following the example of the equally loopy mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom (who is a candidate for Lieutenant Governor this year). Villaraigosa also called support of the law “unpatriotic,” the umpteenth time I’ve heard Democrats smear their opponents with the term after complaining (without evidence) for years about the GOP calling Democrats seeking to undermine the military effort in Iraq “unpatriotic.” Talk about psychological projection.

Now, we all know that it’s just for show. The city will ”investigate” and conclude that, lo and behold, they can’t breach any contracts they have with Arizona without, you know, being liable for breach of contract! So the politicians will express their regret (if they even say anything) and do nothing. In a month the whole thing will blow over. Besides, with CA having among the highest unemployment in the nation and bleeding jobs to Arizona due to California’s stupid tax, labor, and environmental laws, a boycott is really the ticket. Or not.

Then there are the “sanctuary” cities, such as San Fran and L.A., where the police chief made a great show of telling demonstrators they should feel free to take to the streets on May 1 to protest restrictions on illegal aliens because LAPD will not check their status. Interestingly, he said “solely due to their race.” That’s also the language of the “terrible” Arizona law, though that law is being made less objectionable than the LAPD policy. Hmmm. I have a modest proposal for the critics in these sanctuary cities. Arizona should not turn any illegal aliens over to the feds or jail them on state charges. Instead, give them bus fare and send them to San Fran, L.A., and similar “sanctuary cities,” especially if they have MS-13 tattoos. I’m sure the people of those cities will generously put their money where their mouths are and welcome all 460,000 AZ illegal aliens with open arms. It’s the least these sanctimonious critics can do. Hot Air’s Allahpundit has similar ideas and provides this link that shows liberals are not ready to back their preaching with action. 

Moreover, AZ should encourage their citizens to boycott certain CA cities, though diffuse boycotts like this do not work well. If I take a vacation this year, I think I’ll visit the Grand Canyon and the Indian Country in Arizona. I haven’t been there in a number of years. One place I won’t be going is San Francisco.

I also love how liberals fret about the civil rights of illegal aliens but not about the victims of crimes by illegal aliens. Officials in sanctuary cities should be liable in damages to these victims when they officially seek to use the old Southern segregationists’ doctrines of nullification and interposition to thwart enforcement of federal immigration laws.

Good for Arizona for forcing the Democrats off their game plan of using “comprehensive immigration reform” to demonize the GOP. Now the focus is on border security, a basic obligation of the feds, and an area where the Dems are politically weak. Even O’s people are changing their tune to bemoaning that the lack of security forced Arizona to act. The Democrats are going to want the issue to disappear as it becomes a political loser for them. No comprehensive immigration law this year.

Here’s my approach. Secure the border. Then talk about a limited guest worker program. Then consider a partial normalization of those with proof of long-term residency here, subject to various conditions of tax payments and registration. But no cutting in line for illegal aliens over law-abiding applicants.

After hearing claims that anti-Obama/Reid/PelosiCare protesters were shouting racial insults at Black Congressmen who were provocatively marching through the crowd into the Capitol and out again while carrying video cameras, Andrew Breitbart reviewed the available evidence and deemed it unlikely that the story was true. With the media uncritically reporting this on the front page and in top-of-the-hour news stories, and with the Congressmen repeating and embellishing the story, Breitbart offered a reward of $10,000 to anyone who produced audio or video proof of these insults. Proof should have been easy, given the presence of cameras. When none was forthcoming, Breitbart raised the reward to $100,000. It has not been claimed. The accusers have gone silent, and the poodle media that did their bidding have, as well. With neither the accusers nor the media providing proof, Breitbart has undertaken his own efforts to find evidence. None apparently exists.

Breitbart is now demanding an apology from the accusers. Indeed, one of the main accusers, Representative Andre Carson, implies that Breitbart is a racist for demanding proof. Breitbart asks, “How many more “Duke Lacrosse” faked events should America endure? The list from Madonna Constantine at Columbia University all the way back to Al Sharpton’s unforgivably grotesque Tawana Brawley case, the media plays its role to divide this country on its most sensitive schism: race.”

National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez on what she saw of the rally against Obama/Reid/PelosiCare on the Saturday before the vote. A serious, but festive gathering. Doesn’t look like a particularly racist crowd. No references to Obama as Hitler or to death wishes for the President. Here is one man’s impression of the Saturday and Sunday rallies. Not the tone one got from the mainstream media’s single-minded focus on the alleged anger.

Here are pictures of a tea party rally in Quincy, while President Obama was speaking at a nearby convention center. So, what happens? Though there is no violence or threat thereof (unless such subversive activities as singing “God Bless America” and the national anthem count), officials call in riot police and a SWAT team.

On the other hand, here is what happens at a rally by liberals, complete with the ubiquitous Nazi references (though some appear to be public school products historically ignorant of the Nazi swastika’s direction), foreign and communist flags, covered faces, anti-American slogans, and violence and vandalism. There also seems to be a distinct predominance of one racial/ethnic group.

I have previously posted about the Arizona law regarding illegal aliens. Byron York at the Washington Examiner believes that the law is carefully crafted to withstand constitutional challenges. I think he is mostly correct. The New York Times is more optimistic—that the law will be struck down. Their reporting is a bit disjointed. They are overlapping different issues.

One of the points that has been raised is whether this will result in unconstitutional racial profiling in stops. It is certainly to be expected that every gang-banger with MS 13 tattooed on his forehead will claim that. But even if correct that would only make that particular stop invalid, not the whole law. Arizona is taking great pains, both in the law’s text, and per further instructions from the governor, to avoid racial profiling. Moreover, the furore over the law will make Arizona law enforcement very careful in this regard—too careful, perhaps, for the law to do any good. Still, there will be the inevitable foul-up that will get blown out of proportion. As if police don’t regularly contrive reasons for stopping people that just aren’t acting or looking right under the circumstances.

The specific constitutional question of what constitutes reasonable suspicion (without considering race) that the person is not in the U.S. legally has to follow once a lawful contact is initiated between the individual and the government. That could happen if the individual applies for government benefits, government jobs, tries to vote, etc., or if some cause exists, consistent with Fourth Amendment search-and-seizure principles to stop the individual for further investigation. That might include driving at certain times and places and in certain vehicles favored by smugglers. Or it could include any other activity that creates probable cause for arrest or reasonable suspicion for an investigative stop. That would not allow stopping someone peacefully pruning roses in front of one’s home or walking home from the corner store. Once such a contact is made, Fourth Amendment principles only require that the search/seizure be “reasonable.” Less evidence is needed for further brief investigation than for an arrest. But only if that exists in regard to lack of legal presence can the officer proceed. It is just those particulars that the state is now considering. Race cannot be the sole basis, but some have objected that it might be part of the equation. Perhaps, along with other factors. After all, assuming there to be other bits of evidence that suggest suspicion, one factor to be added to the mix certainly might be the fact that the target is Spanish-speaking Mexican, rather than English-speaking Black, given that Arizona abuts Mexico, and English-speaking Blacks are likely to be American citizens.

If one has what appears to be a valid driver’s license or other i.d., the law says that one is presumed to be here legally. Some are complaining that this could result in people being stopped just to check i.d.’s (as is done in Mexico and other countries). First, even if that were true, the intrusion is hardly momentous. It requires production of an i.d. that has to be used whenever someone wants to use a credit card, get on an airplane or other forms of transport, open a bank account, or engage in a myriad of other transactions. But even if these examples are not the same as being stopped on the street, the second point is that, again, the law requires an otherwise lawful contact to have been initiated before an i.d. is required. So, if one does not have a driver’s license, and does not use credit cards or have bank accounts (hmm, sounds rather suspicious), one may have to go through the minor inconvenience of getting a state i.d., or instead carry a copy of a birth certificate, naturalization certificate, or similar document.

Whether the Arizona law is an effective law or is politically well-timed is another question altogether. Given the circus surrounding this law, it may not be particularly effective, as the state either will fear to use it or use it only when someone has already been arrested. Actually, the latter may be somewhat helpful, as a main concern of the state is to catch and punish criminals here illegally and to increase security in the border region. Some, such as Hugh Hewitt, also think that the law is politically ill-timed, as it allows the Democrats to demonize the issue and detract from their political liabilities resulting from the economy and health care reform. I disagree. I suspect that the issue will disappear from the front pages within a month, though the U.S. Justice Department and interest groups will take the matter to court, where it will get occasional publicity good for headlines and fund-raising letters until the Supreme Court upholds (most of) it. The other effect will be that Arizona has highlighted the need for border security in a manner that gets the attention of the Obama administration and the “human rights” groups in a manner that mere murder and other deprivation of the civil rights of ordinary Americans in Arizona would not.

There is one other alternative. Perhaps the best way to deal with this problem is to copy Mexico’s laws regarding illegal aliens, legal visitors’ rights, and citizens’ duty to carry identification. Mexico has some very interesting provisions in there. The Mexican government is seeking to make political hay out of this, and Mexicans in the U.S. (American citizens, even?) are carrying Mexican flags in demonstrations to express their true solidarity. “Immigrant rights” groups defending illegal aliens denounce the Arizona approach in the vilest of terms. So none of them can possibly complain if Arizona (and the U.S.) were to adopt just the system they have. Moreover, our judges that like to look to foreign law to define the content of the U.S. Constitution can prove their bona fides by looking to the way Mexico and other countries treat their own citizens, legal aliens, and illegal aliens in determining the rights of folks in the U.S.

This issue has nothing to do with disliking Hispanics. There is a large number of Hispanics of different backgrounds who are citizens or permanent resident aliens. They are not the issue and are entitled to the same rights as everyone else. The problem, pure and simple, is illegal border crashers, most, but certainly not all, of whom are Hispanic because of our proximity to a near-failed Hispanic society (Mexico) that has not been able to get its own house in order for the last couple of centuries and is fast turning into a narco-state. Rather than malign racism, perhaps these crime statistics motivated Arizona lawmakers to adopt the law in question.

There is a fiscal cancer eating at California. It’s the same cancer that threatens many other states and municipalities, the same one that threatened (and still threatens) the American auto companies. In a slightly different form, it threatens the U.S. The cancer is unfunded pension liability. The primary culprit in California and other states and municipalities are the pension liabilities owed to public employees. Those obligations, in turn, are just one aspect of the crippling injury that teachers, law enforcement, and other public employees acting through their unions have inflicted on the Tarnished State.

That injury is first, economic. The state cannot afford those pensions. California is faced with crushing tax hikes, deficits that threaten it with junk bond rating, an unpopular federal bail-out, or debt default. But they cannot repudiate those pension obligations under existing constitutional tests through the contracts clause of Article I, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution. The alternative is a reconfiguration of the retirement system more in line with what private businesses are doing or at least a partial repudiation of its pension obligations. California can hardly impose more taxes on top of its 11% top income tax liability (including 1% for bone-headed voter-approved “mental health” funding), its 10% sales tax in many counties, and its property tax and high gasoline tax. In light of the 12.5% unemployment rate, and the terrible regulatory climate regarding labor law and environmental law and the prohibitive taxes (except for subsidies for pet industries such as the entertainment industry) that are driving jobs out of the state, the golden goose of tax revenues may not have been killed, but it has serious axe and knife wounds.

Counties and cities are in similarly dire straights, but they have one tool available to them that the state doesn’t. They can declare bankruptcy. The state, then, is worse off than the municipalities that are its creatures. The state also is worse off than the federal government that can inflate its way out of debt by printing money (though that will affect the feds’ future ability to borrow).

But the problem caused by the public employee unions is also political, in the sense that public employees have insinuated themselves so completely into the political process that they have merged into the class of the political elite. Current popular discontent, mainly through fed-up taxpayers, against the out-of-touch political elite is fed by reports of sweetheart collective bargaining agreements, generous pay, easy hours, incompetent performance, and lavish pensions that are the inevitable outcome of collaboration between big government (also performing the role of big business in this context) and big labor. Inevitably the consumer (here, the taxpayers as well as the direct consumers of certain government services) is expected to pay for these boondoggles, once the pie-in-the-sky economic growth projections stall. If private businesses engaged in the kind of irresponsible actuarial, accounting, and financial gimmicks as government does with its pet unions, the perpetrators would be in prison. Probably guarded by the six-figure-salaried correctional employees.

In his article, “The Beholden State,” author Steven Malanga chronicles the descent of California driven by the toxic presence of public employee unions. The only malevolent factors I would add to his tale are the change of the legislature in the late 50s from part-time to full-time and the invasion of so many transplanted East Coast residents who brought with them not only their entrenched attitude of superiority about the places they fled, but their political left-liberalism that they were able to foist on the rest through political action in the geographic areas they came to dominate. As a long-time California resident (heck, I’ve lived here long enough to be a de facto native), I have witnessed many of these changes, though they were not sufficiently pressing problems at the time.

There were warnings years ago about the impending decline.  I remember seeing articles as a teenager when we returned to Germany for a year about the problems of California. That was 1968! But the inertia of progress from California’s golden age of investment, initiative, and constructive creativity, and the economic boom from defense spending and a youngish population, followed by another spurt through the IT revolution in Silicon Valley and its counterparts elsewhere in the state kept the economic wolves from the door.

But now the economic winter has arrived. The gales of overbearing regulation, environmentalist fundamentalism, and dysfunctional taxation have put the economy in a freeze. There is no longer enough money to feed the maw of the voracious public employee entitlement beast. The wolves are at the door, and the taxpayers resist being thrown to them to save the pampered public employee caste.

An inevitable result of any action is the potential activation of the “law of unintended consequences.” The more complex the action, the more likely, far-reaching, and unpredictable those unintended consequences. Hence, the oft-cited lesson about the fog of war that quickly lays waste even the best plans. On the political scene, this is often manifested in tax schemes that produce undesirable changes in behavior completely unexpected by the politicians. Recently, there has been reporting about emerging unplanned ramifications from the Obama/Reid/PelosiCare law.

Next on the administration’s smorgasbord of bad ideas is “financial industry reform.” This is basically a classic pseudo-populist retread from the Democrats’ class-warfare playbook intended to melt the political iceberg towards which they are headed, rather than change course. Unfortunately for them, due to an aroused electorate and decentralized system of information distribution, it is too late and their efforts will be unavailing. Still, the law will have many consequences, many of them bad. Under the control of Christopher Dodd, Chuck Schumer, and Barney Frank, it is unlikely that this law will do much other than further entrench favored large financial institutions of the type that have been so adept at financing the afore-mentioned politicos. Them and, to the tune of nearly $1 million, Barack Obama. Consistent with the corporatist Democratic economic program, one can look forward to further cartelization in the European manner.

As still-fresh experience with the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act tells anyone willing to look, the political classes react, and overreact, to real or imagined business crises. Many times the problem is simply a failure to enforce existing laws. Other times the problem is that existing regulations are so destructive that, like water blocked in its natural flow by some obstacle that eventually finds a new course, entrepreneurs find new—and sometimes more complex and opaque—ways to meet their business and financing needs. New regulations just add further layers of expense and administrative hurdles that foster institutional sclerosis while often adding little in the way of benefit. Instead, they stymie innovation and risk-taking. Add to that natural propensity of politicians the fact that trillions of dollars are involved in the industry, and the urge to interfere (with suitable benefits to one’s cronies) becomes overwhelming.

That experience is repeating itself. As this very enlightening article explains, the financial reform bill—like much of the Obama administration agenda—threatens entrepreneurship. That entrepreneurship is the principal job engine for the American economy and depends for its own vitality on flexible and decentralized financing options. By requiring enhanced (and expensive) registration procedures and making it more difficult to attract private financing (not through the big funds and banks), the article estimates a potential impact of 500,000 jobs. Per year.

As this legislative monstrosity comes closer into view, it will be easier to see some of its more glaring defects, though the eventual effects will not be immediately apparent, any more than the decision of some companies to list on foreign exchanges rather than U.S. exchanges after Sarbanes-Oxley’s draconian changes was immediately apparent. The bill may well contain a few common sense regulatory adjustments. It’s hard to say. But it is likely to be regulatory overkill, especially when, once again, the bill will have over a thousand pages. Many of the harmful parts may be hidden and will, like landmines, explode unexpectedly. For example, in targeting the perceived evil of “derivatives,” one can confidently expect that the law will go beyond resolving basic bureaucratic turf disputes among the SEC, the CFTC, and the FDIC, and undermine the very valuable functions of providing a rapid flow of information and of risk-hedging that these instruments perform. Moreover, it is also quite possible that the rules will cause investors who have need for such instruments to move to other markets or to try to find (more opaque) ways to get around those new restrictions. After all, some say that the need of business for such functions and the current regulatory hurdles for traditional ways to meet that need (e.g., short sales, basic options, insider trading, insurance contracts) was what at least in part caused resort to these much more complex and multi-layered securitized debt obligations and derivatives based on debt obligations.

For my SCALE Business Organization students, the link, above, provides great reading of securities law issues we discussed. H/T Overlawyered.

What is it with the compulsion that liberals have to control other people’s behavior in minute detail? Last year, I wrote a final exam hypothetical that built on the Obama/Reid/PelosiCare take-over of health insurance. The exam question addressed a take-over by the federal government of the food industry. Part of the reason for this “take-over” was that the government was concerned about the obesity rate in the country as it impacted on health care costs and wanted to make sure that people ate healthier fruits and vegetables.

Life imitates art (or at least my exam hypothetical). Here is the first step, courtesy of N.Y. Senator Gillibrand: “Gillibrand said, ‘Millions of New Yorkers do not have access to fresh, healthy food.  By building new grocery stores in under served areas across the state we can give people the opportunity to live longer, healthier lives, save billions in health care costs, and create tens of thousands of good-paying jobs.  I am proud to work with President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama on their efforts to combat obesity in America….’”

Then there is the proposed ban in New York on the use of salt in restaurant food. More on the same. Comments are a bit salty, at times, though.

Now we have the government targeting salt in the food industry. The purpose seems to be two-fold. One is the health care cost of eating too much salt. Salt, while necessary for life, can become unhealthy if consumed in too large quantities.  As, of course, can everything from sugar to meat to carrots to water. I suppose the idea here is to reduce the taste tolerance for too much salt. As less salt is used gradually in these foods, Americans’ tastes will adjust. The government will retrain Americans’ taste buds by making it illegal for foods to contain more than some prescribed limit of salt. Presumably this will make Americans healthier and bend down the cost curve of Obama/Reid/PelosiCare to the point that it will eliminate the federal deficit. Or some such tale.

The other purpose is the related point of making processed foods so bland and tasteless, even unpalatable, that people will abandon comfort foods and other processed delicacies in favor of munching on celery (oh, wait, there is a high sodium content there), lettuce (oh wait, the celery problem here, too), carrots (within legally-prescribed harmless limits), spinach (the carrots problem), rhubarb (ditto), and so on. Well, maybe we can all just eat aubergines and arugula, in keeping with the tastes of our liberal betters.

Or not. One problem is that humans, willful creatures that they are, are not quite as malleable as liberals would like. The political tea parties of people who are not enthusiastic about the smothering embrace of nanny government are just one example. People will simply find ways around the system, from adding salt on their own, where feasible, to getting “homemade” alternatives, to moving to other, still-legal tastier processed foods. Moreover, the food producers will not remain static but employ humans’ innate enterpreneurial creativity to find ways around the bureaucracy. For example, “low-sodium” often substitutes potassium chloride for sodium chloride. If anything, that’s probably worse overall. Moreover, salt acts as a preservative for meat. The alternatives may be other preservatives such as sodium nitrite, or more expensive food with less freshness and higher spoilage rates. Or less consumption of preserved meat products.

Obviously, the government is not going to stop with this. Meat, butter (but also margarine), eggs, coffee, tea, alcohol, corn syrup, sugar, simple starches, all have been deemed unhealthy in varying amounts in one study or another. Salt is just an initial marker in the move from control over tobacco into control over food. There is never a shortage of those who want to reform other people’s habits, only for the latter’s own good, of course.

In that direction, I have the suspicion that the vegetarian do-gooders are at least partly behind this, and that these efforts are intended ultimately to keep us from eating meat. Yes, I know I shouldn’t bring up a certain individual when discussing incipient totalitarian tendencies in some to make the rest of us “better.” But I can’t resist: Hitler was a vegetarian and loved animals.

In view of Democrats’ constant need for taxes to feed the government maw, perhaps they can tax salt, as the French once did in the “gabelle.” Note that the gabelle was an extremely unpopular tax that started as a “temporary” measure but was still “temporarily” around 500 years later. It even produced a tax revolt. All of that sounds strangely familiar.

As an aside, I try to limit my salt intake and to be moderate in eating fats and meat and other “unhealthy” foods. But I really resent do-gooders, usually of liberal political inclination, telling me how to run my life, especially since these folks often have personal issues and engage in a lifestyle that I would find problematic. I have found, if I may generalize, that those who feel “comfortable in their skin” and are busy trying to live a fulfilled and examined life have neither the time nor the desire to tell others what to do in their everyday lives. But it is certainly no surprise that government health nuts would move in this direction. Expect much more of this, especially if Obama/Reid/PelosiCare moves in the inevitable direction of greater government management and control over personal health decisions.

With the U.S. insisting on further dismantling the free enterprise system and locking the economy increasingly into a fascistic model of corporatism, we are set for the inevitable descent into crony capitalism with its attendant loss of productivity and innovation. We have seen that with the government move into the automobile industry that has benefitted unions and politically-connected financial interests, the take-over of health care through the incipient cartelization of the health insurance industry, and the pending attempts to do the same for the banking business. Combine that with huge expansion of the money supply, unsustainable deficits, more heavy-duty micro-regulation of everything from energy producers and consumers to the food industry, and an attempt to avert disaster by raising income taxes on the most successful and consumption taxes (the VAT) on everyone, and we are in for a world of hurt. There will be years of stagflation reminiscent of the economy of the 1970s. And, given the aforementioned automobile and energy industry regulations, cars with that 70s style and quality. I hope that we are spared a revival of 70s clothes and music, at least.

That’s the optimistic scenario. If things don’t go so well even after we do what every European welfare state does to sustain its social addiction, namely, cannibalize our military defense, we could become Argentina. “A century ago, if you had told typical citizens of Argentina (which at that time was enjoying the fourth-highest per capita income in the world) that it would decline to become just the 76th richest nation on a per capita basis in 2010, they probably would not have found it believable.” That was before they made all those terrible economic decisions the article summarizes at the end, and which we are well on the way to emulating.

I have not commented about the spate of insults, character-assassination, and calumny heaped by the liberal political and media elites on conservative and libertarian protesters against Obama/Reid/PelosiCare. I have not responded to sanctimonious expressions of shock at how “disrespectfully” Democrats were treated by protesters and to accompanying pleas for “civil discourse.” I have not—yet—addressed the inevitable liberal cries of racism and even, odd coming from liberals, charges of lack of patriotism directed at the protesters. I decided, instead, to collect images and commentary that refutes these charges and directs them right back at those same liberals who, once again are busy projecting their own psychological issues onto others.

Now, a disclaimer. I recognize that there are fringe elements in every movement. On both sides of the political spectrum. Unless they have been given pride of place by the organizers or are joined by the corwd, their unplanned antics do not amount to an endorsement of their views by either the organizers or the mass of the participants. Moreover, the presence of isolated agents provocateurs, especially where the other side has much to gain by provocations, is a common occurrance. Needless to say, the talking points of the Democrats do not make those basic distinctions, though they take great offense when someone says that the President’s policies and tactics remind one of various respected Leftists like, say, Karl Marx. Neither do their media allies have such discernment. They prefer just breathlessly to publish those talking points as soon as they come through the fax machine. Yes, Paul Krugman, Frank Rich, Keith Olbermann, Chris Matthews, and the entire CNN staff, I’m talking about you.

I am going to pass along some of those images and articles in a series of posts, starting with this one.

Contrast the imagery of this series of pictures the photographer titled “March of the Moonbats,” in Hollywood, California, with the pictures taken by the same photographer of the Tea Party Express, in Los Angeles. In light of the, by turn, inflammatory and condescending remarks by our elites about conservatives, it is educational to see which group treats President Obama personally in a more disrespectful manner; which group resorts to Nazi symbols to characterize their opponents; which group uses racial/ethnic bigotry as a manner of describing others; and which group uses symbols of violence and mimicry of terrorists. Oh, and it is also interesting to see which group seems to be cheerful and having a good time.

One of the persistent concerns that conservatives have about the Democrat/media allegations of tea party and Republican threats, insult, and violence is that there will be provocations by liberals to help get their message out by “framing” conervatives. As the election season heats up, the media, already credulous where Obama and his detractors are concerned, are even less likely than usual to observe proper journalistic techniques before printing reports that fit their preconceptions.

Some provocations may be subtle. The suspected set-up by the Black Congressmen before the health care vote comes to mind. Others may be more blatant. The perpetrator gets caught and is identified as a Democrat. That is precisely what happened in the tale of the brick thrown through the window of the Colorado State Democratic Party office in Denver last summer. The Democratic chairwoman blamed it on rhetoric of health care opponents. It turns out that the vandal is a Democrat active in “progressive” causes.

One of the persistent memes of the media and other Obama defenders, before they resort to their ultimate refuge of calling opponents “racist,” is to declare that no one treated George W. Bush with the disrespect that their champion has endured. Even during the 2008 campaign there was a constant refrain that Obama was being labelled in ways never before heard, such as by comparisons to Hitler, Stalin, Castro, Mao, and Lenin. There were the outraged charges that conservatives were inciting violence against Obama and other Democrats, again something that supposedly was never done by the other side. The fact that there have been extremely few substantiated public instances of such incendiary comparisons or incitements to violence against Obama (at least by conservatives) does not deter people from making these charges and, abetted by Obama’s handlers, plaintively calling for more civil discourse.

By contrast, judging from the Left’s discourse from 2001 to 2009, Adolf Hitler was George W. Bush’s twin. Or Dick Cheney’s. Or Donald Rumsfeld’s. Bush Derangement Syndrome often morphed into Bush Assassination Chic, with free rein given to many and varied proposals to kill Bush. To liberals, including the media, history began on January 20, 2009. Before, there was a void. But to bring those folks back to reality, here are some reminders.

From Evan Coyne Maloney, a “Trip Down Memory Lane”:

Lots of pictures urging the killing of President Bush, usually presented by the peace-loving anti-war crowd. But there are also the folks at the Obama campaign rally who would like to see George W. Bush beheaded.

In light of the media and Democratic Party theme of tarring conservatives as racist whenever an opportunity to libel presents itself, and in light of the alleged, but likely fanciful, shouting of the “N-word” at members of Congress during an anti-health care bill rally, it is enlightening to recall a different event, from last year’s anti-health care law townhall protests. Evan Coyne Maloney reports on the beating of Kenneth Gladney by Democratic Party-affiliated union thugs:
“During his presidential campaign, Barack Obama didn’t shy away from confrontation. In fact, he encouraged it by telling supporters to ‘argue with’ opponents and to ‘get in their face[s].’ The Obama Administration’s confrontational tone included some violent imagery last August, when one White House official encouraged Obama supporters to punch back twice as hard’ against opponents. Later that day, at an anti-ObamaCare rally in St. Louis, a black man named Kenneth Gladney was handing out ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flags when he was approached by pro-ObamaCare SEIU union members. One of the men asked Gladney, ‘What kind of nigger are you to be giving out this kind of stuff?’ The union thugs then beat him so bad he required overnight hospitalization. Obama’s supporters got the message. They were getting in people’s faces, and they were punching. And kicking. Repeatedly. Yet despite the fact that the Kenneth Gladney beating occurred the same day that the Obama Administration recommended supporters ‘punch back twice as hard,’ there was no hyperventilating in the media about political violence or the veiled threats that encouraged it.”

Notice also the use of the “N-word” that goes by without media (or Congressional Black Caucus) condemnation when used by Democrats.

The media uncritically reported earlier in the week that the Obama administration was planning to open vast off-shore areas to drilling for oil and gas. Environmentalists made a suitable showing of being aghast. Pundits crowed about Obama’s “moderation.” Color me unimpressed.

While I am very much for drilling off-shore and on, this is a ruse. First, unlike the President, I am very much in favor of drilling now, not at some unspecified point in the dim and distant future. For example, there are areas that have been explored, but where oil drilling is prohibited under various state and federal regulations. Large parts of off-shore California come to mind. Although it is better to start now than not, it would have been better to start thirty, twenty, or ten years ago. I have never credited the environmentalists’ argument that there is no sense in exploring for oil, as nothing would come on-line for ten years. Still, the administration’s plan is unnecessarily incremental and drawn-out. Moreover, I would also like to see some legislative movement to clip the wings of litigious environmentalists to speed things along. I don’t see the administration moving in that direction.

Second, I am intrigued by what the plan does not cover. It is interesting that the West Coast is excluded from Obama’s plan, though I, as a non-expert, cannot say if that is due to political considerations or because the California continental shelf is already sufficiently explored. However, I suspect that, at least in part, there is a political angle here. Looking at the map, one sees that the West Coast of the Lower 48, as well as the East Coast from New Jersey northward, are excluded from exploration. Perhaps, again, there is a scientific reason. Perhaps the geology of the area north of New Jersey’s southern boundary simply holds out little expectation of oil and gas deposits. But it is also true that every state north of that line, as well as the excluded Pacific Coast states, trends Democratic, whereas every state south of that line, save Delaware and Maryland, as well as Alaska in the West trend Republican. Perhaps Obama is counting on Republican support from those more southern states and relieved quiet from the Northern and West Coast Democratic elites.

Third, there seems to be some implied connection between the oil exploration initiative and the increased use of biofuels by the military. I am very skeptical of biofuels at least because the source of those fuels overwhelmingly is farmland currently under production. We need such farmland and its crops (often corn) to grow food. Increasing the price of food so we can get cheaper fuel for our motor vehicles makes me shudder. I would have less problem with biofuels is they used biomass that has no food value from otherwise difficult-to-cultivate land. I understand that there is research in that area. If so, and leaving aside other issues (expense, environmental considerations) that might make biofuels undesirable, I would welcome their use as alternatives. I am just not convinced that their use makes sense.

Fourth, andmost important, the President’s move is a tactic in a larger bid for support for his destructive cap-and-tax bill that meshes nicely with discredited moves to integrate U.S. energy and environmental policies with transnational bodies. That agenda, which still focuses on the hackneyed “anthropogenic global warming” morality tale, ought to be a thing of the past. At least, there should be no move in that direction until and unless much more convincing evidence appears that there is such a thing as AGW, and that we can—and ought—to do something about it through cap-and-tax legislation. Otherwise, we are just depressing our economy and standard of living, which then wastes both money and human lives. The best way to save human lives is to raise the level of wealth. I hope that the Senate, which must consider the House-passed bill, resists the President’s cap-and-tax folly.

There are even Republicans who are willing to play the President’s game, and I suspect that the President’s move is a gambit to give political cover to GOP squishes such as South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham. Republican support would put pressure on Democrats who might be opposed to the bill to go along, lest they be seen as less loyal to another “signature Obama issue” than those Republicans. Such “bi-partisanship” would give Obama political cover, as well, in a public debate that is sure to be as acrimonious as that over the health care law. If anything, cap-and-tax is likely to even less popular with the public than Obama/Reid/PelosiCare.

It is fine for the GOP to support this proposal, but necessary to push for more. A recent Gallup poll shows that Americans support the drilling, but want it extended to California and the New England coastal area, as well. Most important, the Republicans must remain staunchly opposed to the economic killers that environmentalist legislation becomes. The administration must be kept from doing to the U.S. what the Schwarzenegger-supported “greenhouse gas/climate change” final solution law is doing to California.

I am reminded of the past several elections, when the Democrats and the media alternated between making military service a non-issue to making it a defining characteristic of a presidential candidate to making it a nin-issue and, indeed, in the case of Democratic Senator Tom Harkin, a sign of dangerousness. In 1992 and 1996, when the military service-challenged Bill Clinton’s dodgy dealings with his draft board did not match up against two decorated veterans in George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole, it was considered by the media and the Democrats the height of political chicanery to mention military records. In 2000, there were already rumblings in the media about George W. Bush’s service in the National Guard, whereas Al Gore had “gone to Vietnam.” While the snide remarks about Bush continued, Gore’s “service” became a non-topic when it was determined that his Vietnam posting was as a weed-smoking military journalist hanging out in Saigon.

In 2004, the attacks on George W. Bush’s service in the National Guard resumed with unrestrained fury and contempt. The media, well, mainly C-BS, was so eager to destroy Bush that it blindly fell for forged “records.” On the other hand, John Kerry’s military service became the defining characteristic of ability to lead. Kerry frequently reminded people of his military service, to the point that he became known among conservative wags as “Senator John Kerry, who, by the way, served in Vietnam.” While most people weren’t fooled and the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth dismantled the substance of Kerry’s resume (which Kerry had to alter as a aresult), Kerry’s emphasis on his Vietnam service became a big selling point for a liberal elite that had suddenly discovered the virtues of warriorhood, if only by proxy. Bush remained respectful of Kerry’s military experience, including the latter’s record-setting pace of three decorations (including for getting hit by rice shrapnel caused by his own gun) that also qualified him for an early exit from the war zone. But Kerry and his associates mocked Bush’s service, a point not lost on members of the national guard.

By 2008, with a Democratic community organizer running against a Republican war hero, the Democrats and the media reverted to form. Mention of military service became a distraction from the real qualifying characteristic, the ability to inspire “hope” and satisfy the yearning for “change.” Military service no longer was a desirable characteristic for a war-time president, as the Democrats had urged in 2004 to excuse their political positions in 1992 and 1996. In fact, as the afore-mentioned Senator Harkin would have it, military service might make one insufficiently flexible and innovative in one’s thinking about war. So, prior military service conveniently became a disqualification.

All of the posturing of the last couple of decades aside, voting patterns show again and again that the Democrats have trouble with the military and with veterans. That was particularly true when the GOP ran George W. Bush, whose high scores on military leadership tests were vindicated by his ability to come across to the soldiers (though not to university professors and journalism school-graduates) as a leader. Hence, the documented efforts by Democrats in the elections to find ways to frustrate voting by active-duty military and to challenge absentee ballots from the military. It is highly unlikely that Barack Obama, whose leftist leanings and arrogant behavior to military officers are interpreted (correctly, in my mind) as at least skeptical of the American military, will be able to overcome that trust deficit.

Two photos tell the tale. By the way, there are photos from other events that tell the same story.

While preparing a collection of posts about verbal venom and death threats delivered by liberals against conservatives and the media’s double standard of credulously accepting any claim of conservative threats against liberals but ignoring the reverse, I have been reviewing articles and videos of the alleged racially motivated taunts and attacks on Democratic members of Congress before the vote on Obama/Reid/PelosiCare a couple of weeks ago. Rick Moran writes at The American Thinker that “in all the reports in the MSM on the story involving racial epithets being shouted at black Congressmen, very few mention that the only evidence for these racial slurs comes from the Congressmen themselves.” Moran raises the important point that has bothered me since this whole matter was blown into a, to quote Joe Biden, a “Big F***ing Deal” by the Democrats and their media allies.

First, why is it that the Democrats, in two contingents, went from the Cannon Office Building to vote on the bill at the Capitol by walking triumphantly through a large and hostile crowd? They could just as easily have used the usual underground passageways between the buildings. Their processions were deliberately provocative and undoubtedly intended to incite a crowd reaction that the Democrats could then use to enlist their media friends in further trying to discredit the protesters, as well as the tea parties, the Republicans, and all opponents of Obama’s policies. After all, the Democrats came well-armed with their own cameras to record the event, just in case the media were not conveniently present.

Second, why did no one, other than certain Congressmen, hear the slurs? Third, why were there no videos where such slurs could be heard, though the Congressmen, the media, and assorted bystanders all had video cameras going? Fourth, why were there no charges filed, and not even any arrests, if there were threats made? Certainly there were plenty of police present. Fifth, if there was such a charged atmosphere, why did a second contingent of the Democratic leadership take the same route a few minutes later, and why did the Black Congressmen take the same route in reverse after the vote if there were these dangerous elements present? Once again, they could easily have taken the usual underground route between the buildings.

Here is the video of the Black Congressmen seeking to recreate their own “March to Selma” on the cheap. Just so they could get that media video-bite:

Dan Riehl explains what happens in the video: “[I]t would appear [Congressman] Cleaver was simply walking close by in front of a protester. The protester’s hands were cupped as he was shouting. While it appears Cleaver may have experienced a spraying of sorts as a result of the yelling, it does not support a conclusion that he was intentionally spat upon, as claimed.” The Congressman opted not to press charges. That would appear to be the wise choice.

Instapundit provides more links. Note the responses by Black conservative Kevin Jackson that obviously did not fit MSNBC’s theme.

Andrew Breitbart of the Big Government website has two other videos, neither of which shows any evidence of racial slurs. As Breitbart points out, Speaker Pelosi and her cohort passed through the same area a brief time later. It strains credulity to believe that the plentiful law enforcement there would have allowed the Congressional leadership to go through a crowd that was threatening other members of Congress. Incidentally, Breitbart offered $10,000 reward to anyone who could produce taped evidence of the racial slurs. With no takers coming forward, he raised the reward to $100,000. Still no takers.

At the center of promoting these charges as part of a broader tea party-GOP connection is South Carolina Congressman James Clyburn, the Democratic Whip in the House. As Powerline explains, Clyburn is also the guy who racialized the 2008 primary campaign in South Carolina by bringing up alleged racist remarks by Bill and Hillary Clinton. Bill complained bitterly that Obama, through Clyburn, had played the race card on him. Clyburn’s assistance came at a time when Obama had just lost the New Hampshire primary to Hillary and needed a win.

After reviewing the videos, the pictures, and the descriptions of these events, I am convinced that the Democratic leadership tried to concoct a confrontation. Whether the entire reaction was part of a plan or, more likely, a few among the leadership and the media got the avalanche moving and then sat back and let matters proceed under their own momentum, is hard to say. But it is clear to me that they hoped to precipitate something. When it didn’t come, they went ahead with the smear anyway. All it took was for one to tell the others that he heard an insult. The others could be counted on eagerly to perpetuate the smear.  And the media were only too willing to republish the libel because, as with so much about Obama and his opponents, it fit into their bigoted preconceptions about the protesters and Republicans. The story served as a convenient distraction to the unpopularity of the health care law and had the added benefit of tarring the law’s opponents as motivated by primitive racism rather than serious and warranted substantive opposition to an unprecedented governmental intrusion into personal welfare. One can count on more such contrived events before November. Likely, next time there will be actual shouts and threats that will be recorded. Likely, too, though those who utter them will conveniently remain unidentified, as that could expose them as Democratic plants, as I will discuss in other posts.

I am not the only one who uses common sense to parse the situation as a set-up that fit oh-so-neatly into the Democrats’ strategy of demonizing their opposition. Mark Steyn weighs in: “But that’s what the Democratic Party has been reduced to - faking hate crimes as pathetically as any lonely, mentally ill college student. Congressmen Carson, Lewis, Cleaver and the rest have turned themselves into the Congressional equivalent of the Duke University stripper. Except that they’re not some penniless loser but a group of important, influential lifetime legislators enjoying all the privileges and perquisites of power, and in all probability acting at the behest of the Democrat leadership.”

I have heard many times that there is hyperinflation in our future because the Fed will keep interest rates too low too long and also prove unable to withdraw the oceans of dollars lapping around, and eventually over, the economy. Usually these alarmists are bloggers or commenters on blogs. I rarely read similar concerns coming from economic experts. That doesn’t mean the experts are right, and the bloggers are wrong. I, too, share doubts that the Fed’s timing on such matters will have the finesse to thread the needle between inflation and double-dip recession as it seeks to extract huge amounts of dollars. All easy joking aside, unless the government purposely tries to monetize the debt through inflation, I don’t see Zimbabwe in our future, though.

However, as I have written before, I see a decent likelihood of a repeat of the 1970s era of stagflation. Moderately significant inflation combined with low economic growth and stagnating standards of living. The Obama brand of moderate socialism impedes risk-taking and depresses investment for two reasons. One is the uncertainty of what tax and regulatory burdens the administration will impose next. After health care, cap-and-tax is on the list along with increased rigidification and bureaucratic oversight of financial institutions. But the contours of regulation and taxation have not been drawn. Nor is it clear that there will not be further socialist projects coming down the road, as long as this furthest-left ideological faction controls the national government and becomes increasingly unmoored from traditional process to get its program adopted. Uncertainty reigns.

The only thing as bad as the uncertainty of what lies ahead with Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and their shock troops is the substance of what they have produced. As the lines on legal and open risk-taking and personal initiative are drawn tighter and the entitlement mentality clasps people more forcefully, success becomes defined more through political maneuvering and less through economic creativity. In effect, there is a whole new class of unproductive drones whose whims must be satisfied through allocations of time and money. That, in turn, increases the cost of innovation, and riskier projects and potential innovations will be delayed until they become less risky through incremental intermediate advances or never undertaken at all. It is possible that innovations will be made “under the table” or through a black market, but the lack of transparency of those transactions impairs their economic efficiency. That will increase their expense and, once again, stultify innovation.

So, stagflation, not hyperinflation. Twentieth-century (and current) Argentina, not 1920s Germany. Venezuela, not Zimbabwe. This article on Obama and America’s coming two-decade economic hibernation makes much the same point, with Obama cast in the role of Jimmy Carter. In Carter’s defense, once he saw the problems his regulatory and tax policies were causing, he was able to pivot towards capitalism and deregulation enough to begin to nudge the economic ship out of the doldrums. Though he also kept nagging Americans in his annoying fashion. I am not at all persuaded that Obama has even the political flexibility and pro-capitalism sentiments that Carter displayed.

What lies ahead? “The U.S. standard of living, says superstar Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon in a new paper, is about to experience its slowest growth ‘over any two-decade interval recorded since the inauguration of George Washington.’ That’s right, get ready for twenty years of major-league economic suckage. It is an event that would change America’s material expectations, self-identity and political landscape.  Change in the worst way.”

What can be done? “Since the 2008 election, American economic policy has been about wealth preservation (keeping the economy from sliding into a depression) and wealth redistribution (healthcare reform.) Wealth creation? Not so much.  That needs to change….Preserve wealth, redistribute wealth or create wealth.  Hopefully, President Barack Obama will choose door #3. Investing more in basic research (not just healthcare) would be a start, as would slashing the corporate tax rate. A new consumption tax would be better for growth, but only if it replaced the current wage and investment income taxes.” Quite so.

The reaction of thirty-seven states has been to pass or consider legislation to exempt their citizens from portions of Obama/Reid/PelosiCare, mainly through rejection of the individual mandate to purchase insurance. That is an unconstitutional nullification of federal law, if the federal law itself is constitutional. If the federal law is unconstitutional, such state laws are superfluous grand-standing.

More intriguing, however, is what those votes signify. The broad and deep popular dissatisfaction with the nationalization of health care taps into a stronger current of alarm at the aggrandizement of government, especially of the federal government and its bureaucracy. It is that broader issue—the role of government bureaucrats in the increasing regimentation of life—into which the health care debate taps. That, not necessarily the particulars of Obama/Reid/PelosiCare, will be the ground over which the November election, and others to follow, will be fought.

That popular reaction also ties into a brewing class-warfare storm, but one that blows in a different direction than the one fanned by traditional Democratic Party class-warfare rhetoric. The popular element is the productive class, not the dependency class that Democrats and their subsidiaries such as ACORN like to “community-organize.” The targeted elite is not the “evil businessmen,” but the elitist mandarin class of the media, the academy, the entrenched bureaucrats, and various other groups of the political elite and their rent-seeking auxiliaries.

Such a broad political movement can have the legitimacy to open the door to constitutional expression of its principles. While prodding states to pass anti-individual mandate laws does not translate flawlessly into constitutional-level action, it establishes a wedge through which such action may be pushed into the political process. I am raising here the possibility of a constitutional amendment, not just against the particulars of Obama/Reid/PelosiCare, but against the entire relationship between the federal government and the states, and between government and individuals.

Article V of the Constitution provides two methods of proposing constitutional amendments and, separately, two methods of approving them. One way to propose such amendments is by a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress. Although the language is not entirely clear, for reasons that I might discuss in the future, there is no need for presidential approval of such amendments. That has been the adhered-to practice since the Founding. The Supreme Court has given it at least tacit approval since the 1798 decision Hollingsworth v. Virginia over the constitutionality of the Eleventh Amendment. This method is the way all amendments to the Constitution have been adopted so far. Historically, it represents the Founding Era’s Federalist conception of republican government best controlled through the deliberative process in legislatures rather than too-frequent recourse to popular voting. Moreover, this approach reflects the Federalists’ concern that the national government be pre-eminent against the strongly-entrenched state interests in decisions whether to change the Constitution.

The other method for proposing amendments is to have two-thirds of the states (34, currently) petition the Congress to call a convention to amend the Constitution. This option represents the Whig conception of republicanism during the early years of the Republic. That approach prefers conventions over legislation in matters of profound societal significance. There is no direct popular mechanism to amend the Constitution. Conventions, having more participants and being selected for only a limited objective, are more precise images of the popular will and could identify the common good as understood by the people better than legislatures could. While that last sentiment may be significantly in doubt today, given the size of the population of the United States, it explains the continuing popularity of conventions. Conventions selected by the people or their representatives are a compromise between purely legislative action and the direct popular action through petition (signature-gathering) and voting available to amend many state constitutions. This approach under Article V also reflects the Whigs’ preference for “community,” a concept more likely to be realized at the local and state level than at the level of a national government.

The method for approving a constitutional amendment is determined by Congress. Approval must be by either three-fourths of state legislatures or by conventions in three-fourths of the states. That, too, is a compromise between the Federalist view of very difficult amendment and the Whig view of easier amendment. Both groups realized that the Articles of Confederation suffered a weakness from the requirement of unanimous consent by the states for amendment. Indeed, there had been moves to change that requirement that failed—because of the unanimous consent requirement. In all but the Twenty-first Amendment (the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment that produced national prohibition of alcohol sales), Congress has called for approval by the state legislatures.

It would be entirely possible, then, to have the unhappy states call for a constitutional convention to meet to prohibit the adoption of an individual health insurance mandate or some other aspect of Obama/Reid/PelosiCare. Indeed, it was precisely to allow the states to counteract Congressional aggrandizement that the states were given that role by the Framers. If such a call is made, Congress in theory cannot ignore it. But it seems a waste to limit the exercise to such narrow a focus. In fact, making the objective too technical and narrow might be less likely to excite supporters and more likely to doom the effort. Instead, this provides an opportunity to clip the wings of federal power by redefining the scope of what Congress may do, especially under the commerce clause.

Or, federal power might be blunted through the adoption of a new constitutional mechanism to override federal government action. It might be fruitful in that regard to revisit the theories of nullification that the more anodyne, but essentially useless, state statutory attempts to withdraw their people from nationalized health care raise. Having been used by Jefferson and Madison, but also by John C. Calhoun and the framers of the Confederate States’ constitution, such theories have a checkered ideological pedigree that big government opponents are sure to raise. But that does not negate their intrinsic merit, and the current overreaching by the federal government presents a solid opportunity to recast that image.

As noted before, there is no way for direct popular initiative to amend the Constitution or to propose or repeal federal laws. This is quite unlike the case of many state constitutions, including California’s, that allow for all of those means of popular participation. The popular initiative process is the result of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century influence of Progressivism and represents a “democratic” streak that is inconsistent with the unabashedly “republican” national constitution. There are certainly arguments against a democratization of the process as a check on Congress. The state of California is often cited as a laboratory case of what can go wrong. But there is no reason to avoid that discussion, and a constitutional convention called by the states under Article V would be an appropriate forum.

Constitutional change is often more far-reaching and unpredictable than political change. Constitutional change is simply political change on a more profound and more broadly-accepted plane. For that reason, our system by design makes constitutional innovation more difficult than political innovation. If there is a built-in inertia for the political status quo, that applies in droves to the constitutional status quo, absent some intrusion by a politically-suspect interloper such as the judiciary. Of course, that also makes constitutional change more difficult to reverse than political change. Therefore, those who benefit from the existing constitutional structure defend it even more fiercely than they do the political status quo.

As happens with any political structure, the elites seek to control it to their advantage. Over time, they become successful at doing so, as they enrich and empower themselves and favor-seeking associates at the expense of the productive elements of society through symbiotic interaction between the political and other elites. At some point, they push too far, which produces a popular upheaval. The more entrenched the elites, the longer the political dissent has become dammed behind the barrier those elites represent, and the more violent the eventual reaction.

Democratic republics have an advantage over other political systems in the extent to which they allow for dissent to manifest itself. It is more like a cresting free-flowing stream than one blocked by a dam. As political disaffection finds channels for outlet, a republic can avoid the catastrophe of a dam that eventually fails. The early American republic (and its Western European antecedents) had a strong tradition of “popular constitutionalism.” This is a way of defining the acceptable norms of conduct and appropriate policies for the community. It goes beyond the formal methods of legislating or making constitutions.

Popular constitutionalism includes peaceful mass movements, political agitation, and petitioning for a redress of grievances. Historically, it also includes more confrontational political action, such as destruction of property and symbolic threats such as hanging politicians in effigy. Operating within broad informal customs, a certain amount of violence and level of threats was permitted. Though they sometimes exceeded the accepted limits, the Sons of Liberty (with their Boston Tea Party and other events) were well-known practitioners of this form of “authentic” disobedience that resulted in constitutional change that had been choked off through the formal political channels. Others were the opposing political clubs that supported Hamilton and Jefferson, the organized and armed rural opponents of the federal excise tax on whiskey, and the agitators against the Sedition Act in the 1790s. Indeed, reading histories of that era, such as David McCoullough’s book about John Adams, one gets a good impression of the pervasiveness of such popular militancy. More recent historical examples abound, from the Dorrites in the Rhode Island constitutional crisis of the 1840s to the Bonus Army of the 1930s to the civil rights movement of the 1960s in the South.

Looked at through this historical prism and the tradition of popular constitutionalism as a counterweight to those who control the formal levers of political power, the vocal opposition to Obama/Reid/PelosiCare led by the current tea party movement is part of the American heritage. That is so, even if the charges of a brick thrown here or a threatening insult yelled at a congressman there turn out not ot be staged. By comparison to the robust popular constitutionalism of the early Republic and the Age of Jackson, especially, these tea party protesters are remarkably polite and well-mannered. But, like their ancestors, they have tapped into a rich vein of discontent about the scope and nature of government in people’s lives. If maintained long enough, this popular sentiment can provide the force necessary for political reform and, perhaps, constitutional reform.

In the interest of providing information about Obama/Reid/PelosiCare that the legacy media probably failed to disclose, and that the members of Congress probably did not know was included when they voted on the bill, Token Conservative will strive to link to useful articles. This link is to some finds not advertised by the law’s backers. The writer is a doctor. Who happens to be President Obama’s second cousin. Example: “A scheme in this bill actually penalizes your primary care physician if he is in the top 10 percent of doctors who refer patients to specialists, no matter how valid the reason. This ignores the expert opinion of the family care physician. It does not consider the need of the patient. It simply establishes an arbitrary percentage of doctors who will be penalized. It’s a preview of things to come from the Medicare ‘rationing’ commission. ‘Mr. Moore, how will you explain to the parents in Leavenworth or Lawrence that your vote forces family doctors to choose between avoiding a penalty and sending their injured sons or daughters to the orthopedic surgeon?’” 

This is what happens when no one reads a bill before it is passed, especially one that is more than 2000 pages long. The Democrats touted the bill’s provision that would cover pre-existing conditions for children and let “children” up to 26 years of age stay on their parents’ insurance. Except that those provisions were somehow left out of the bill. So, now, there may have to be another legislative fix.

Having addressed the substantive constitutional arguments over Obama/Reid/PelosiCare, I want to consider some institutional factors that might influence the outcome of the challenge by the state attorneys-general or by anyone else who hopes to derail this “road to serfdom” through litigation. It is difficult to predict how the courts will react to these suits. There is a general aversion on the part of courts to intervene in matters of complex social policy. The courts are institutionally and politically ill-equipped to second-guess the political branches on responses to this type of question. They do not have the requisite ability to gather and evaluate evidence and to decide the best way to balance competing societal interests. Such issues are also generally seen as involving matters of public policy, not constitutional law. Involvement by the courts in such policy disputes is likely to trigger a hostile political reaction against the judiciary as constituting a serious breach of the separation of powers.

One can add to that the particular hostility that would arise if a Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority were to overturn a law adopted by a Democratic administration without Republican support, especially when that law has become the standard around which, for better or worse (hopefully, worse), the Democrats have made their stand. Just recall the Democrats’ over-the-top reaction against the Citizens United case, where the Supreme Court finally struck down restrictions on political speech by people organized into corporations. That reaction carried over to the President’s unprecedented and pointed attack on the justices sitting in front of him as guests of Congress during the State of the Union speech. It would be Bush v. Gore again, but now with the Democrats in control of the political branches. The President and the howling mob of Congressional Democrats may have intended to intimidate the justices with their display, and the Court may have that scene in mind when they rule.

That said, this case is not Citizens United. I have not seen evidence that the Chief Justice has been particularly intimidated by the State of the Union theatrics. I suspect that Justices Scalia and Thomas would be even more inclined than usual to be pugnacious. Moreover, striking down portions of Obama/Reid/PelosiCare might be divisive, but, given the continuing unpopularity of the law, the Supreme Court likely would get significant public support. As for a Bush v. Gore redux, liberals might still be smarting over that case, but there was no negative fall-out among Americans at large over the Court’s role in that case.

But if any part of the judiciary is likely to stand up to Congress, it is the Supreme Court, not the lower courts. It is likely that the lower courts will uphold the legislation. There are currently two suits by attorneys-general. It might have been better for them to file suits in several different federal circuits, in order to hope that at least one of them might rule in their favor. Aside from the intrinsic importance of any particular issue, the best way to be one of the eighty or so cases to get review out of the six thousand filed each year, is to show a split on the issue in the federal circuits that needs to be resolved by a final decision of the Supreme Court. If none of the lower federal appellate courts hold for the attorneys-general , the Supreme Court can avoid the issue simply by denying the states’ petition for review. Of course, conversely, if the states lose in all federal circuit courts, any decision by the Supreme Court to grant their petition for review would be a sign that the Court is favorably disposed to at least some of the arguments of the states.

One factor that might weigh on the minds of the conservative justices and incline them in favor of the states’ position is that this is an opportunity for them to reaffirm the Lopez decision from 1995. In that case, the Court for the first time since the New Deal declared a federal law unconstitutional under the commerce clause and ended nearly sixty years of relentless expansion of Congress’s powers. The Court affirmed that it was willing to enforce constitutional limits on Congress under the commerce clause in U.S. v. Morrison in 2000. But then, in 2005, the Court slid back in Gonzales v. Raich and threw in doubt the tentative steps taken in the two prior cases. The suit by the state attorneys-general is perhaps the best opportunity to reinforce the limits of the commerce clause and to constrain Raich.

Another institutional consideration here is the timing of the suits. On the one hand, some provisions of this law go into effect soon. As the law involves a massive restructuring of health care funding and delivery, a quick resolution is desirable before too many people have changed their position to accommodate themselves to the new reality. Usually, cases take a long time to get to the Court. On the other hand, these suits mostly involve challenges to the statute itself, though at least one of the theories might depend ultimately on a factual resolution of the law’s impact on the various states’ budgets and relevant administrative bodies. To the extent the factual issues can be resolved quickly, there are procedures available to expedite review, and the Court has shown that it can move a case along quickly if it is so inclined.

Another potential institutional (and constitutional) issue is who has standing to sue. The state attorneys-general are filing the suit on behalf of their states and on behalf of their states’ residents. The constitutional boundaries of standing are ambiguous and ill-defined, and their interpretation and application may depend on the Court’s considerations of institutional competence and prudential wisdom to decide the case. States generally cannot sue under the parens patriae theory on behalf of their residents for harm suffered by those residents, especially some economic harm that affects them individually. An exception might be for harm, such as environmental harm, that affects the citizenry in a collective and indivisible fashion. Moreover, the states cannot sue the United States under parens patriae. The states can sue even the United States if the harm from federal action affects them as state entities, apart from harm to their residents, such as in the enforcement of their laws. However, the states cannot sue the United States merely for economic harm resulting from some federal action, lest the states be able to turn every federal policy that affects the states into a judicial contest.

It is difficult to know how this would work here. Some of the challenged provisions, such as those dealing with the individual mandate and the fine, would appear to be actions by the state in parens patriae. Certainly those individuals can sue for themselves, but those mandates do not apply yet, so it is unknown who might qualify as an affected plaintiff. On the other hand, by the time their specific identities could be known, the system would be so entrenched that a judicial decision would cause such disruption that the Court would be especially reluctant to intervene.

Other provisions, like the challenge based on the federal government’s takeover of the states’ political and administrative machinery and on the unfunded mandate theory regarding federal changes to the states’ Medicaid programs do involve the states’ interests directly. However, these challenges still sound like claims based on economic effects, especially as the states are emphasizing budgetary concerns. On the other hand, the suits try to phrase this in terms of fundamental structural issues at the core of federalism. It is also unclear whether there is a difference between suing the United States directly and suing federal agencies and officials.

The main obstacle that I see is that the suit asks the justices to reinterpret so much existing precedent and to push so much received constitutional law in a different direction that the Court becomes unwilling to act as boldly as necessary to get the job done. This law is so broad and operates on so many levels, constitutionally and politically, that it requires action on many fronts. On the other hand, perhaps, the very scope of the law may induce the Court to act. This law is not overwhelmingly popular, so that there will be defenders of a decision to scrap the system. This is particularly true if the Republicans make significant gains in November. It would be difficult thereafter for the Democrats to replicate their success, so that Congressional defiance of the Court by adopting a similar law and having the President run against the Court in 2012 is unlikely. It is said that hard cases make bad law. It is also true that bad laws may make hard cases to ignore, and it is certainly possible that the Court will undertake the constitutional adjustments necessary at least for this case. It is too difficult to predict, which is why this suit is a long-shot, but not a fool’s errand. 

If the states’ lawsuit fails, there remain other alternatives. There is, of course, the political remedy through the states’ representation in Congress. It has long been taken as given that there is no real need for the courts to intervene as the states and their officials have plenty of influence on federal policy through their members of Congress. The politics of Obama/Reid/PelosiCare have exposed that canard. But a change in the partisan composition of Congress will have an effect on the future of the health care law, though it is not likely that the political process will accommodate the near-wholesale repeal that is needed.

Going in a different direction altogether, a number of states have passed, or are considering, laws that exempt people from the mandates or purport to opt out of the system. Those laws are fruitless. If the federal law is constitutional, state laws cannot nullify a federal law.

There is one intriguing possibility. If thirty-seven states have enacted such exemption laws, or are considering them, that political energy might be re-directed to petitioning Congress for a constitutional amendment to curb the federal government’s powers in health care and otherwise. It is that last possibility that I will address in a separate post.

One more in a lengthening line of far-out judicial nominees by President Obama. This time it’s Edward Chen, nominated to the Northern District of California in San Francisco, already a hive of typical left-liberal judicial drones.

“As a federal magistrate in San Francisco, Mr. Chen objected to the singing of ‘America the Beautiful’ at a funeral because of his ‘feelings of ambivalence and cynicism when confronted by appeals to patriotism.’ His first major public response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was to worry that Americans would succumb to the ’seemingly irresistible forces of racism, nativism and scapegoating.’ And he embraced the idea that a judge should decide on the believability of testimony by ‘draw[ing] on the breadth and depth of their own life experiences … [including] one’s ethnic and racial background.’
“And that’s the moderate version of Mr. Chen.”

Sounds like the speechifying of a professor. Or of a “wise Asian man,” to paraphrase Justice Sotomayor. No, wait. He was a leading attorney for the ACLU. That explains it.

I was frequently critical of Republican Party excesses on domestic spending when the Republicans were in power. I like President Bush, but I still object to his Medicare Drug benefit (which has been reported to be, surprisingly, less expensive than anticipated) and to “No Child Left Behind.” I also strongly believe that he did not wield his veto pen often enough to control budgetary excess by Republican members of Congress seeking to stay in power. Actually, he did not wield it at all. I was extremely uncomfortable with the, probably inevitable, abuse of earmarks and spending by the Republicans when they controlled Congress. To conclude, as one surely must, that the Republicans are rank amateurs in profligacy with other people’s money compared to the Democratic pros, is to damn the latter but not excuse the former.

That said, when the Republican members of Congress do the right thing, as they have done in regard to Obama/Reid/PelosiCare, they deserve respect and support. They have played a poor hand remarkably well. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has been seen as insufficiently charismatic to stand up to the President in a public relations contest or to be the face of the Republican Party in an election cycle. Aside from the fact that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid did not hurt the Democrats as their party’s faces in 2006, the pressing need for the Republicans in 2009 and 2010 has been for someone to slow down the Democrats. An insider with knowledge of the procedures that could be used to frustrate a 60-40 majority that is also in control of the White House and the House of Representatives is more important for the immediate task at hand than is a charismatic or programmatic faction leader. McConnell has performed his role almost flawlessly. (The dust-up with Senator Bunning over the latter’s insistence that the Democrats comply with their own “Pay-Go” rules to fund unemployment benefits by making them revenue-neutral could have been handled better.) Marshaling all 40 Republicans, including Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, George Voinovich, and Lindsey Graham, to unanimous opposition to Obama/Reid/PelosiCare is an incredible political feat. It failed to prevent passage, but the leadership was able to tie the Democrats in knots until the cavalry could arrive in the form of new Massachusetts Senator Larry Brown. Notice that the Democrats have been forced to change their entire approach to legislation (to their political detriment) in anticipation that McConnell will be able to continue to work that magic.

Things are similar in the House. I am not an enthusiastic supporter of Minority Leader John Boehner. Though he is telegenic enough, his tan and his manner of speaking remind me too much of the archetype of the slippery politician. He is too tied to the Republican excesses during the Bush years. I was pleased to see him get forceful during the final stages of the health care debate, but his passion seemed too forced and “acted.” All of that said, he has assembled a team that managed to outperform the President (to the latter’s most evident displeasure, judging by his expression and tone) at the contrived “health care summit” and to have the Democrats in the fight of their political lives despite their 253-178 (after resignations and deaths)advantage. Republican Whip Eric Cantor produced party discipline that kept even one Republican from leaving the fold and, together with the support of dissident Democrats, made opposition to the health care bill bipartisan, while support became a blatantly partisan cram-down. Meanwhile, Cantor, Paul Ryan, and some counterparts in the Senate produced credible Republican alternatives to prepare for the fall campaign.

To an impressive and surprising degree, the Republicans have informally shaped the debate on this issue, starting with Sarah Palin’s broadsides that the President and Press Secretary “Dilbert” Gibbs just could not bring themselves to ignore. The Democrats were forced down a path that, surely, none of them saw when they decided to take the health care “reform” journey early last spring. With their control of the government, the Democrats figured to make short shrift of the Republican minority and enact a bill that would include, if not single-payer, at least a “government option,” as well as all sorts of other anti-business, anti-profit, anti-liberty, anti-individual restrictions, mandates, and regulations. They would then bask in their success and the continued adulation by the media O-bots to adopt the rest of the “progressive” agenda, such as cap-and-tax environmentalist throttling of the energy market, card-check for labor, financial support for ACORN and other Obama pals from the community-organizing sector of rent-seekers, and so on.

Then came the tea parties, the disastrous “mingling with the commoners” town halls, the exposure of deception after deception about the President’s plan, the increasingly week-kneed Democratic legislators feeling political heat, the sequence of missed and postponed artificial deadlines, the Reid bill written in secret, the partisan divide in Senate approval of a bill no one had read, the President’s overexposure as he was in full campaign mode clogging the airwaves trying to sell the bill, the increasing rancor between the House and the Senate over how to proceed, and the leaks of spats and conflict among White House advisers.

By continuing to push on and refusing to walk the issue back from the brink among disastrous polling, the Congressional Democrats put themselves in the position of having to approve a bill that was defended not on its merits, but as a way to save the Obama presidency, as the President himself described it in his appeals to House Democrats whose support was crucial. The bill no longer was about what was good intrinsically, either for the people’s health or for fiscal stability, but about what was good for Mr. Obama personally.

Ultimately, the Democratic leadership’s pitch to press on for a vote shows their precarious position. They had to make a massive and politically painful push for a vote that would get them punished politically by the voters, or accede to the Republican call to “start over” and get punished politically by their base. They chose the former. Rather than be seen as ineffective, they believed that succeeding shows they can govern. They would have suffered politically, in any event, but, in their calculation, they would suffer less having passed the bill.

I profoundly disagree, and I believe that the Republicans played the game perfectly. I have long thought that the GOP’s best strategy is to keep Democrats proposing things and to drag out the debate in very open and public fashion. Force the Democrats to talk, force their positions into the open, and, inevitably, force them to go behind closed doors to produce some legislative monstrosity without transparency. Then force them into painful political machinations to get enough votes. If the proposal fails, the country immediately benefits a lot from that defeat, and the Republicans benefit moderately, but later. If the proposal passes, the country immediately is hurt, and the Republicans later benefit a lot. But then the country also benefits eventually from Republican gains.

In the health care debate that worked. The Democrats may say that they showed that they can govern and that President Obama can get things done. Come on. It took over a year (since it’s not finished yet). Despite a 60-40 majority in the Senate, they had to produce a bill hatched in Harry Reid’s office, filled with odious backroom deals that have come to exemplify political corruption in the “Louisiana Purchase,” the “Cornhusker Kickback,” “Gator-Aid,” and various other special deals (such as the Connecticut pay-off that President Obama could not identify in his interview with FOX’s Bret Baier).

They then had to pass this in the House following a publicized process whose fascinatingly repellent nature will forever identify the legislation and, in the eyes of many, brand it as illegitimate. Even then, they had to bargain and deal until almost the last minute to get a 219-212 victory, though the margin probably would have been bigger, except that the Speaker gave free hall passes to some endangered Democrats to vote against the proposal, given its unpopularity with Americans.

The Democrats have won this battle. They are far from winning even this war, and, in any event, their victory would make King Pyrrhus wince. As polls confirm, they have managed to make the Republicans a respectable and increasingly-trusted political force, though the GOP still has to work hard to cement the deal. The Democrats have solidified the public image of them as elitist and deaf to public wishes. Examples abound. There was Nancy Pelosi’s, “But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.” There was the provocative and conscious decision of the Democrat House leadership to march through the protesters, with Pelosi carrying a huge gavel, rather than take the tunnel that they usually take when walking from their office building to the Capitol. This was done presumably to provoke the protesters into saying something stupid that could be exploited for political gain and to show the peasants who possessed all the power. Then there was impeached (for bribery) and convicted former federal judge and now Congressman Alcee Hastings informing everyone that there were no rules when Democrats want to get something done, and that the rules were made up as they went along.

They are also exposed as having the radical agenda about which so many conservatives warned. They have smashed any notions of bi-partisanship and assured long and bitter memories that even profound changes in the relationship between citizens and the state can be passed, contrary to the President’s own previous declarations, by a bare majority formed exclusively by one party. This has changed the political calculus profoundly. The use of procedures designed for limited purposes in a manner that shows complete disregard of any sense of self-restraint will be long remembered. In any institution or association, there are formal rules that help constrain behavior. But, ultimately, much depends on informal customs and on a sense of political propriety and self-restraint that keeps one from doing what theoretically one might be able to do. It is the “spirit” or “character” of the institution or the association. Or of the society. It is the extent to which success of the political system still depends on the virtue, in the classical sense, of its participants. Observance of its constraints becomes most important when the temptation to ignore those constraints is the greatest. These boundaries were breached in an ugly and disturbing orgy of partisanship run amok, for the sake of Mr. Obama’s “success.”

Politics is a contact sport, and the Democrats cannot be faulted for using the power they were unwisely given by an electorate tired of political incompetence and excesses resulting from Republican complacency and deafness while in power. Moreover, Democrats cannot be faulted for bending the rules or for clever evasiveness and even some deceptiveness. It comes with the job. They are politicians and, out of character or circumstances, no different from their Republican counterparts. But there is a difference. They have just gone too far and stepped over the line. They became overconfident, entitled, and arrogant, and their ideological blinders failed to attune them to acceptable limits. In short, they got greedy for power and overreached. A political bridge too far. 

That brings up the President. Mr. Obama’s image has taken a hit. Whether that hit is above the waterline and causes merely serious damage, or whether it is below the waterline and sinks him, we will not soon know. He and his acolytes in the press may profess to think that he comes out of this as a strong leader. But he has had to grovel before members of Congress and personalize the vote as a favor to him. Reluctant Democratic members of Congress, even if they survive the election, will not forget this. He owes them.

Obama’s image as a cool, post-partisan healer is gone. Gone the way that his image as a post-racial President died with Obama’s knee-jerk reaction to the arrest of Harvard Professor Gates and through the addiction of his supporters, in the administration or out, to claim or imply at every turn that his critics are racist. As a student of radical organizer Saul Alinsky, Obama is, and (unlike George W. Bush) always has intended to be, a divider. His talk of bipartisanship or nonpartisanship will only fool the most gullible. His future policy initiatives will only reinforce that image of pitting one group in society against another, and he will be judged accordingly. Polls already tell the story of that fall. Having fallen faster and farther in his approval numbers after inauguration than any President, his “strongly disapprove” ratings now match George W. Bush’s (though his overall negative ratings are still lower). However, it took Bush six years and relentless personal attacks from the Democrats, the media, and the elites. It took Obama fourteen months.

There is an air of popular discontent with which the Republicans can connect. The Democrats are in trouble, though how much is still in the air. Some of the outcome in November no doubt will be influenced by the economy.  But something more profound has been let loose through the Democrats’ health care reform miscalculation. I hope that the Republicans continue to play the game as well as they have over the past year. If they do, they may convince enough people not only that they are the only game in town as an alternative to Democratic overreach, but that, in 2010 and 2012, they deserve to be handed another chance at governing.

In addition to the main constitutional Achilles heel of the health care law, the individual mandate to purchase insurance, there are several other potential soft spots. I will address first some residual issues raised by the brief for 13 of the 14 state attorneys-general who have challenged Obama/Reid/PelosiCare so far. I have read that brief. I have not yet read the brief of the Virginia attorney general, who filed separately. Thereafter, I will address some more general constitutional issues.

Direct versus indirect taxes
On the residual issues, one argument that the attorneys-general make is a highly technical one. They claim that the penalty, even if it is considered an ordinary tax, is a “direct tax,” rather than an “indirect tax,” and has been apportioned incorrectly under Article I, Sections 2 and 9 of the Constitution. Essentially, those sections require that direct taxes be apportioned among the states on the basis of population. This is a very arcane concept that preoccupied the Supreme Court on a few occasions before the twentieth century. A “direct tax” is best described as a capitation (head) tax assessed directly on all persons or, before the adoption of the 16th Amendment, as a tax on certain kinds of income, especially from real or personal property (sources of wealth). The apportionment approach would benefit wealthier states whose people could better afford to pay the same per capita tax than people in the poorer states.

The health care penalty applies to all, and it applies without depending on any particular activity of the person. Thus, it has the qualities of a capitation tax. It is not likely, though, that the Court will accept a constitutional theory that has not been used successfully in over a century. Assuming that the individual mandate is constitutional, the Court might hold, instead, that the tax is an indirect excise tax, in that it applies not to an individual as such, but to his or her decision to forgo the insurance purchase. In that case, there is no requirement under Article I, Sections 2 and 9 for apportionment among the states.

State sovereignty, federal coercion and the spending power
The attorneys-general also argue that Congress’s significant expansion of Medicaid programs operates as an unfunded mandate that is unconstitutional as a violation of cooperative dual federalism embraced in the 10th Amendment. The states argue that this expansion requires them to raise significant taxes to fund and administer the program. It also forces them to adopt numerous new regulations and to use the state’s administrative machinery to administer these federal requirements. Though their brief is devoid of precedents, the attorneys-general here are relying on the 1992 case New York v. U.S. and the 1997 case Printz v. U.S. They are claiming that these requirements fail to treat them as sovereigns in accordance with our constitutional framework of dual sovereignty. Rather, Congress is coercing them to become federal agents in their legislative and executive capacities. 

On the other hand, states are not required to be in Medicaid and, to the extent they are, Congress helps pay for the cost under its spending power. This is, then, not an unfunded mandate that commandeers the states’ sovereign political institutions, but merely a conditional grant that involves a voluntary decision on the part of the states to participate on the terms (including at least some funding) that the federal government establishes. In reality, though, the political pressure to participate in such “voluntary” programs is overwhelming, especially if much money is at stake. Still, at some point states may decide (as Arizona has been reported to have done) to jettison the program if it becomes too underfunded by Congress.

However, the attorneys-general argue that the usual rule of conditional grant/spending power cases as being voluntary arrangements to which states consent, does not apply here. The health care law creates massive changes in numbers and qualifications of participants and in the scope of coverage required, while federal contributions will diminish. It requires states to set up and administer new insurance exchanges or, if they choose to opt out of that, to dump even more people into a pool of uninsured and provide them with coverage. Moreover, the attorneys-general assert, changes of such magnitude were entirely unforeseen and unforeseeable when the states became voluntary partners with the federal government in Medicaid. Those changes would fatally harm state budgets that already groan under the weight of Medicaid spending and that have to be balanced because states cannot print money. Because of the long and intricate Medicaid partnership between the federal government and the states, the latter cannot extricate themselves from the relationship because that would throw millions of people into the ranks of the uninsured that have come to depend on that partnership.

While the argument has merit because the scope of the federal changes goes well beyond anything the Court has addressed in the past, this is likely not a winning argument. The Court in the 1987 case South Dakota v. Dole was unmoved by the coercion argument when it upheld the constitutionality of a conditional grant of federal highway funds. The Court concluded that the state had chosen to accept the funds and was not coerced. Though the Court left open the possibility of a different result if better evidence of coercion were shown, there are no cases of which I am aware in which the Court has accepted the argument that a federal grant under the spending power was unconstitutionally coercive of the states.

The current case is a more sympathetic fact pattern for the states than Dole, and there is more of the disconnect between financing and accountability to the public that is common for unconstitutional unfunded mandates. But the Court still is likely to tell the states that they have the choice to withdraw from Medicaid, however difficult that may be as a practical political matter. If the Court treats this case as an ordinary conditional grant case, the arguments that Congress is commandeering the states’ legislative and executive processes in violation of the 10th Amendment will fail.

Spending for the “general welfare”
There are also constitutional arguments not raised by the states. For example, the legislation contains pay-offs to various states to get the necessary votes for passage. These pay-offs have been given colorful names that will resonate with voters, such as “Louisiana Purchase,” “Cornhusker Kickback,” “Gator-Aid” (not, strictly speaking, a pay-off, but an exemption), and “Bismarck Bank Job.” While some of these have since been deleted, there are still others that, separately, benefit residents of only Connecticut, Montana, and Tennessee.

These pay-offs may violate Congress’s spending power that, under the Constitution, must be used for the general welfare. Under the 1936 case United States v. Butler, the Court gave that term very broad meaning and left to Congress the principal responsibility to define it. Usually, Congress readily meets that test by making formal “findings” about how some give-away to a favored individual, company, or group of people nevertheless benefits the American people generally. That is how Congressional funding earmarks survive. This type of pork-barrel spending is a well-established tradition by now, as spending on this or that agricultural or industrial support payment, bridge to nowhere, recreation center, race-defined college, or (in my institution’s case) moot court room attests.

It is highly unlikely, then, to be a successful line of attack. However, it is not impossible. In this particular instance, the local favoritism is so pronounced that it will require a conscious disregard of the facts for the Court to ignore the brazen lack of general welfare. Why should the citizens of 49 states pay to give a benefit for which only residents of, say, a town in Montana qualify? Still, the Court has studiously ignored the parochial nature of past spending measures.

State nullification laws
Another constitutional argument arises out of the laws that a number of states have passed that purport to allow their citizens to opt out of the individual mandate. If those laws run counter to what is constitutionally in the federal law, they are unconstitutional under the Supremacy Clause of Article VI. Section 2. Despite grandstanding symbolic efforts by “anti-war” cities such as Berserkeley, California, to declare themselves “nuclear-free” zones, active nullification by states of federal laws has been rejected as a constitutional doctrine at least since Appomattox in 1865. To the extent they comply with the toothless and unworkable Senator Ron Wyden-sponsored provision in the health care law that allows states to opt out, these state laws are constitutional. But they are also toothless and unworkable.

Non-delegation doctrine
In addition, there are some provisions that give much discretion to various bureaucrats, including the Secretary of Health and Human Services to adopt regulations. One of these is to decide what kinds of items are not to be subject to the new excise tax on medical devices. Under current definition, such devices could include tampons and breast pumps. However, the Secretary is given authority to exempt “any other medical device determined by the Secretary to be of a type which is generally purchased by the general public at retail for individual use.”

This is a question under the “non-delegation” doctrine. To delegate this type of legislative authority to others, Congress must show that it has the power to regulate in this field (which it does) and that it has set adequate boundaries to the agent’s discretion. Those boundaries might consist of clear objectives to be attained or standards of performance by which the agent’s conduct could be judged. There has been no successful constitutional challenge under a direct application of the non-delegation doctrine since the 1935 case Schechter Poultry Co. v. U.S. In light of the broad deference the Supreme Court gives Congress in this area, it is unlikely that a challenge under the non-delegation doctrine would succeed.

The “Slaughter Rule”
With the “Slaughter Rule” (also known as “deem and pass”) having been abandoned, there is no longer any proper constitutional challenge under Article I, Sections 5 and 7, to the process under which the law was adopted.

Origin of revenue bills to be in House
Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution also requires that all bills for raising revenue must originate in the House of Representatives (a historical throwback to English and American practice and theories on taxation and its connection with the consent of the people). The Senate, however, may provide amendments. Since the health care law purports to raise revenue through various taxes, it has to originate in the House. But wasn’t it the Senate (specifically Senator Harry Reid and a few of his companions) that wrote the bill eventually passed by the House last weekend? Yes, it was, but Reid took the completely different House bill passed last fall and had the Senate gut it by “amendment” that inserted his own bill. The formality of House origination was met, though the bill became the Senate’s version.

In the next post, I will address some institutional considerations that might affect a judicial resolution of the health care law’s constitutionality.

I have received requests from the media and my students to discuss the constitutional issues raised in the suits by various state attorneys-general that challenge the recently passed Obama/Reid/PelosiCare. There are two dimensions to the inquiry. One is the strictly constitutional problem. The other is the question of institutional response.

Regarding the substantive constitutional dimension, there are, again, several issues, the most salient of which is the individual mandate that requires the public to purchase insurance and, in the alternative, fines those who refuse. The Congress purports to be acting under the power to ”regulate commerce among the several states” (the “commerce clause”). The relevant precedents here are the 1942 case Wickard v. Filburn and the 1995 case U.S. v. Lopez. In Filburn, a holding reinvigorated in the 2005 case Gonzales v. Raich, the Supreme Court gave the commerce clause a very expansive reading and upheld the application of crop restrictions and fines under the second Agricultural Adjustment Act to a farmer whose wheat production for interstate commerce was trivial and who used a portion of his wheat for home consumption. The Court held that Congress’s regulation of the national wheat market fell under the commerce clause, and that the law could be applied even to a trivial participant in the overall wheat market as long as that regulation was needed to address the evil of national overproduction of wheat that Congress was trying to address. Farmer Filburn’s production, when aggregated with the production of other wheat farmers, had a substantial effect on the national commerce in wheat. A similar result was reached in the Raich case in regard to the home growing of marijuana when considered in light of the Congress’s attempt to control the national market of marijuana.

Under that reasoning, Congress might well be able to impose the insurance mandate. The mandate is necessary to effectuate the regulation of the national market in health insurance, especially the prohibition against denying coverage for pre-existing conditions. Even if an individual’s failure to purchase insurance would have no effect on the national health insurance market, the failure of large numbers of people in the aggregate would have a tremendous effect, ultimately destroying the ability of insurance companies to issue policies that cover pre-existing conditions. People would simply wait until the condition occurred and buy insurance then, sort of like buying fire insurance to cover the house while it is burning.

However, the health insurance mandate is different from the farmer or even the person growing marijuana under artificial light in the basement. The Court has always required under the commerce clause that Congress be regulating some identified activity. That activity has to be commercial or, if it is non-commercial, it has to be part of a regulation of an identified national market. In Lopez, for example, the law targeted the possession of a firearm that the defendant must have acted to acquire. In the health insurance scenario, the person has not engaged in any identified activity, commercial or otherwise. For the first time, Congress is regulating non-activity and is forcing someone under the commerce clause to engage in an activity, rather than seeking to restrain him in an activity he has already chosen to undertake.

Even so, the Supreme Court struck down the law in Lopez on the ground that the regulated local activity was non-commercial and not tied to broader regulation of a national market. A major concern of the Court in that case was to identify a limit beyond which the Congress could not go under the commerce clause, the principal regulatory power of Congress. Our system of government is a “federal” system of dual sovereignty in the states and the federal governments. Under that system, formally the Congress is a legislature of limited and delegated powers, though that theoretical position is sorely tested under this health care monstrosity. The powers not delegated to the national government, nor prohibited to the states under the Constitution, are reserved to the states or the people. That sentiment is “codified” in the Tenth Amendment, so when the attorneys-general declare that Obama/Reid/PelosiCare violates the Tenth Amendment, this is the theory they are espousing. If the legislation does not come within the commerce power, it falls within the power of the states to regulate.

In Lopez, the Court held that there had to be some limit to Congress’s power under the Framers’ design, both in the specific language of the Constitution and in its history. The dissent in that case would have upheld the law on the ground that gun possession near a school (the object of regulation in the challenged law) might lead to violence, that violence disrupts the educational process, that the disruption leads to uneducated children, that this lack of education leads to less capable workers, and that the lower capabilities of workers will lead to lower productivity. The majority rejected that connection to the economy (rather than to a specific market activity) as too remote and speculative. It was telling, according to the majority, that the dissent could not come up with an example that, under the latter’s approach, would be beyond Congress’s power to regulate.

But here the connection to interstate commerce is even more remote than in Lopez. In the latter case, the individual had opted to acquire a gun. Here, again, the person is passive. Merely living has only a remote and speculative effect on any specific commercial market. To hold that a person affects interstate commerce simply by living would mean that there are no limits whatever to Congress’s reach under the commerce power. It would turn the commerce power into a general legislative power previously always understood to belong to the states. Not even at the height of World War II did the federal government require the people to buy something, not even war bonds.

Alternatively, Congress could argue that the mandate to buy insurance is really a tax. Congress has the power under the Constitution to raise taxes to spend, among other things, on the common defense and the general welfare. This “general welfare” provision represents one of the limits of Congress’s spending power. It is not an authority just to regulate for the general welfare. That power is reserved to the states. Just as the spending power is limited to items that, say, advance the general welfare, the spending power itself is a limit on the reasons for which Congress may raise taxes.

The Court has spoken in this area. In two cases in 1937, Helvering v. Davis and Stewart Machine Co. v. Davis, the Court upheld the constitutionality of the retirement pension and unemployment insurance provisions of the Social Security Act under the taxing and spending powers. The Roosevelt administration had marketed these programs to the public as insurance plans, but, when the cases went to the Court, the government’s attorneys shifted tactics. Rather than being merely insurance payments, they were taxes because the funds could be borrowed by the government and transferred to the general fund for expenditures.

That approach avoided the commerce clause problem, but also made this type of payment a “tax.” Under the current health care law, the insurance mandate is not paid to the government or into any government-directed fund. It would be unlike any other taxes that I can recall. Congress might be able under the taxing power to effectuate the same policy by giving a tax deduction to those who buy such insurance, but creating a tax incentive is not the same as compelling someone to buy something from another person.

The portion of the law that imposes a penalty in lieu of buying insurance looks more like a tax, but that runs into another problem. Recall that the power to tax under Article 1, Section 8, clause 1 is limited to spending for various purposes. A tax under that provision must be a revenue-raising tax, not a penalty. While the Court has been very generous in calling taxes “revenue-raising,” as long as they have that purpose or there is a clear revenue-raising effect, this law pushes the constitutional envelope. It is forthrightly described by all involved as a penalty.

If it is a penalty, that part of the health care law might still be constitutional, but not under the taxing/spending powers. It would have to be justified as a reasonable means to accomplish one of Congress’s other delegated powers, here, the commerce clause. But that would run into the problem discussed earlier, that the penalty is to assure compliance with the purchase of an insurance policy, which, in turn, might not be a constitutional use of the commerce power. The Court has long declared that Congress may not achieve indirectly under the taxing power what it could not achieve directly under the commerce power.

The challenge to the constitutionality of the individual mandate is the core of the attorneys’-general constitutional attack. It is an uphill fight, but not impossible. Tomorrow I will address some additional constitutional problems. Thereafter, I will address some institutional considerations and conclude that, though the constitutional arguments against the individual mandate have more merit than the supporters of government health care would grant, they are still likely to fail.

The GOP is stretching the reconciliation process by forcing the Democrats to vote on proposals that, if adopted, would change the text of the House-passed “sidecar” reconciliation bill. If the Senate changes that text, the bill has to go back to the house for another vote. The Democrats, much less certain of the popularity of their bill than their recent bravado for public consumption would make it appear, don’t want that. So the Republicans are presenting amendments that force the Democrats to vote for politically unpalatable propositions. This is a list of amendments that the Republicans have proposed. These are the votes so far. Democrats have already had to walk the plank on several politically damaging items:
1. In favor of cutting Medicare – 56-42
2. In favor of keeping the special deals for Louisiana, Montana and other states - 54-43
3. Against an amendment to exempt anyone making less than $250,000 from having to pay any taxes associated with the legislation – 56-43.
4. Against an amendment to reduce the cost of providing federally funded prescription drugs by eliminating fraudulent payments and prohibiting coverage of Viagra for child molesters and rapists and for drugs intended to induce abortion - 57-42.
Keep ‘em coming! I can see the election campaign commercials writing themselves.

An article from last fall by Daniel Henninger of The Wall Street Journal about Obama/Reid/PelosiCare that, amazingly, six months later is just as relevant. Henninger describes a paper by a liberal Stanford University economist, Victor Fuchs, written in 1976 that addressed decades of failed Democratic Party efforts to force universal government health care on the American people. Some points:

“[Fuchs] notes, for instance, that the national health insurance movement rose alongside a larger transfer of responsibility from the family to the state: ‘Every time the state assumes an additional function such as health insurance, child care or benefits for the aged, the need for close family ties becomes weaker.’
But even the state must bond: ‘It may be that one of the most effective ways of increasing allegiance to the state is through national health insurance.’”

Henninger’s conclusion, written six months ago, well before the most recent Democratic attempt to circumvent every iota of open and regular democratic procedure, including, most likely, the language of the Constitution? “For liberals, ObamaCare is the Gunfight at the OK Corral, the last battle for universal insurance. After 70 years and the Obama media blitz, the public once and for all either wants this, or doesn’t. If it doesn’t, the Baucus bill will be crammed down via reconciliation. If so, the post-partisan president may make worse, if that’s imaginable, one of the most partisan periods in our history.”

Listening to radio and reading blogs and other opinion pieces, I was struck by the range of responses among conservatives on Monday, the day after the Democrat-controlled federal government voted to foist Obama/Reid/PelosiCare on an unsupportive popular majority. As might be expected, there was a certain amount of hand-wringing and defeatism. Those are the exact reactions that the Democrats and their media wing among the newspapers and networks are hoping to promote. It is also the very sense of inevitability and acceptance of defeat that the Democrats are trying to instill with their message that the people will just go home and sit out the election or even come to like their Democrat overlords in a version of Stockholm Syndrome.

Then there was the opposite reaction, coming from the never-enders ready to take to the woods figuratively (and, one suspects, literally in some cases) to launch political guerilla attacks on the Democrats. Fulminating to an impressive degree, they convey the impression of suddenly-unchained animals that are thrashing about with a lot of bellowing but little appreciation of how to deal with the problem rationally. Those folks’ passion is commendable, but it runs the risk of burning itself out in frustration or of precipitating some politically undesirable consequence.

There were other voices, as well, and their prominence increased as the day wore on until they emphatically drowned out the nervous nellies as well as the chest thumpers. Those were voices of controlled rage and of fierce, but measured, determination. It is determination to do what is necessary to clean out the Augean Stables of Democrat overreaching and corruption. Of political special deals and exemptions for favored states and groups. Of industry subventions and anti-competitive restrictions. Of an inevitable march towards crony capitalism that points to a full-blown socialism through a single-payer government take-over of the health industry.

I was particularly impressed by the Hugh Hewitt program. The host and his guests and callers were enthusiastic but clear and focused about the task ahead. That task is political, not judicial. I will post more about the constitutional arguments that are being made. But the judicial route is a likely dead-end and cannot substitute for the work needed for a political solution, that is, a sound drubbing of the Democrats in November.

The administration, the Democratic Congressional leadership, and the liberal chattering class on TV and in the newspapers are mistaken if they believe that the issue will disappear. First, there will still have to be additional steps in the Senate through “reconciliation” to pass the “sidecar” bill that the House adopted in addition to the principal earlier Senate health care “reform” bill in order to cobble together the House majority. There are numerous potential hurdles for the Democrats to overcome in that process, as I and others have pointed out. Leaving aside the political magnitude of the health care bill, only provisions that relate to the previous-approved budget resolution can be “reconciled” through 51 votes, and then only if they do not relate to Social Security. There may well be several provisions that will need to go through regular votes, a process that includes the potential for unlimited debate (filibustering) unless cut off by a 60-vote cloture motion. Those parts of the bill that do not qualify for reconciliation will have to be excised, resulting in a different bill than the one passed by the House. That modified “sidecar” bill will have to return to the House for a further vote. Even if the House eventually approves, that maneuver will have produced more debate and more controversy, including the inevitable cries and crocodile’s tears from supporters of Obama/Reid/PelosiCare that they were misled by the Senate and/or the House leadership. Moreover, the Senate reconciliation process itself can take a long time, allowing the GOP to score debating points and continue to stick knives into the Democrats, all while keeping the issue in the news (or at least the news that people still watch).

Then there is Easter recess. Members of Congress go back to their districts, where their constituents, including, one suspects, the tea party protesters, await to challenge them. Thereafter, there is summer, which may produce temporary political doldrums, though last summer was anything but calm. In the fall, the run for the election starts.

The Democrats will act as if health care is a closed chapter and try to move to different issues. They have already said that they will focus on the economy and jobs. In doing so, they will try to portray Republicans as thwarting such efforts by reliving the past. This is where the Congressional Republicans will need to display political savvy and do their job of not appearing to obstruct. The local activists, on the other hand, can continue to rally vigorously against health care.

Democrats think that by shifting the focus in such manner, they will blunt the GOP’s activism and enthusiasm. Hardly. The best thing that Democrats can do to ensure their defeat is to come up with new issues to debate. Their ideological drive and make-up has not changed, and their low-hanging political fruit, such as a “jobs” bill, has been shown to be barely edible. The “stimulus” now has a bad brand, and the Democrats know it. Recasting it as a “jobs bill,” as the Democrats did, has not changed the brand. Indeed, Harry Reid’s Senate drastically cut back the scope of the bill. If Democrats want to get into a debate over deficit-spurring spending proposals, it is a wish the Republicans should fulfill. A bill to extend jobless benefits yet again won’t come before the election, but, even if it does, it won’t be a Democrat talking point because the GOP will vote for that extension and won’t play the Democrats’ game of letting themselves be characterized as “heartless.”

Beyond that, there is energy regulation through “cap-and-tax.” Pelosi and Obama see their whisker-thin health care win as a grand endorsement that will break the political logjam and let them proceed with their “progressive agenda.” I don’t think that is true, but I hope to see them try. Please, Democrats, bring up the huge tax increase and job-killer of “cap-and-tax” in your pursuit of the mirage of curbing the transnational elite’s discredited “global warming agenda.” Please also bring up the card-check bill, that labor union-endorsed end to the secret ballot in union elections, at a time when the threat to fiscal solvency posed by public employee pensions and the goon tactics of the public employee union SEIU in elections and in stifling protest have entered the public debate. Then, please begin a debate about tax increases that will happen when the Bush tax cuts expire and the unemployment rate remains high.

These public debates will only sharpen the differences between Republicans and Democrats. They will allow the former to demonstrate again and again the fiscal irresponsibility and ideological extremism of the faction that currently controls the Democratic Party. The GOP will also be able to reprise the health care debate about regulations, taxes, and deficits. To the extent the Democrats sense defeat in the fall, they will accelerate the discussion of these issues as their best chance to get them adopted while they still have significant majorities. So one must not be fooled by their confident words about having the green light for change. The more frantic the pace of change, the more obviously it is an outgrowth of their political pessimism and the more it will accelerate their demise. They are caught in an electoral downward spiral.

Although one can never overestimate the ability of the Republican Party to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, they are lucky that the Democrats are seized of a fever that they cannot seem to shake and which intensifies their insane extremism and their anti-democratic elitism. Presumably, the Republicans will keep the political pot simmering, not boiling, by reminding the voters judiciously of the substantive and procedural disaster of Obama/Reid/PelosiCare.

The Democrats think that most voters will forget this policy disaster by the election. After all, some pundits tell them that they are safe because they passed this seven months before the election. People have short memories, it is said. That, in fact, often has been the case in the past. Moreover, events such as a terrorist attack can happen that can conveniently help the voters project their current passion onto other matters.

But I do not think so. This feels different. Unlike Social Security and Medicare, which had considerable political support at enactment, and which were supported by at least substantial minorities of Republican legislators, Obama/Reid/PelosiCare is opposed by significant portions of the electorate. Intensely so. Significant majorities believe that government is too involved in the economy in general and in health care in particular. Support for the President has taken a dive, and, in a popular preference poll between Nancy Pelosi and a murderer of children, I am not sure who would win. One can be sure that, if Nancy Pelosi had a copyright to her image, she could become an even wealthier multi-millionaire lecturing those with less money about their duty to pay taxes for the uninsured, based on the royalties she could get from her appearance in Republican campaign ads in the fall.

I have never seen such voter intensity and bottom-up mass organization. These protesters represent a large segment of the public. One must remember that it was less than a year ago that the media tried to portray them as a lunatic fringe few, until the numbers and the visual evidence made that impossible. Then, in the media’s eyes, they quickly morphed into dangerous mobs of racists. The protesters involve more participants and represent a far larger portion of Americans than the anti-war movement of the 1960s (and certainly the Code Pinkos and the anti-WTO anarchists of the 2000s) did. This is a mild and civilized exercise of all-American popular sovereingty that will not dissipate quickly. Their concerns remain, and so will they.

These protesters remind me of the civil rights movement in intensity and public support. In some ways they remind me also of the spontaneous emergence of the anti-compulsory school busing and tax limit movements in California in the 1970s. Those resulted from overreach by the unresponsive elites that controlled Sacramento (and, in the anti-busing movement’s case, the Los Angeles Unified School District). While those movements did abate eventually, they did so not in a matter of weeks or months, but only when their political objectives were met. In the meantime, they were potent popular political movements that elected candidates and affected policy, even causing the adoption of a state constitutional amendment.

It is also easier to run against something, and to get opponents more intensely involved, than it is to rally the troops when a proposal is rejected. Democrats believe that they are better off having passed health care “reform” than if they had backed off. I strongly disagree. If you lose a political fight, you are likely to be more motivated to come back than you are to get involved if you win. Had Republicans won this, it is likely that more of them would have become complacent about the Democrats’ apparent inability to do damage. They would have let their guard down more. I doubt that will now happen, given the importance of the issue and the intensity of the opposition.

It is more important than ever to keep focused on the immediate goal, which is to score big gains against the Democratic Party in the fall elections. The Republicans are the best chance for conservatives. I sometimes vote Libertarian, and may do so again in local races, but this is not an affordable luxury this year for races at the state and federal levels. No third party temper tantrum voting. It is also not an affordable luxury to engage in intramural ideological purification ceremonies. One must vote for the most conservative candidate who can win the general election. That will mean that different Republican candidates will run in California than in Utah. So be it. Rahm Emanuel directed the Democrats to victory in 2006 and 2008 in significant part by selecting “Blue Dogs.” Yes, they bark a lot at th Democratic leadership but, in the end, they mostly still come when their party masters whistle.

Though the Republicans cannot win the Senate, the more seats they win, the more of a message is sent to Senators up for re-election in 2012. (Are you listening, Ben Nelson of “Cornhusker Kickback” notoriety?) It will also force more meaningful negotiation in the chamber and will block or slow down radical bills coming from the House.

The Republicans may or may not win the House. I still don’t think they will, but that is not necessarily a bad thing for reasons of political accountability in 2012 about which I’ve written and will do so in the future. Indeed, it is a good idea for Republicans to do what all coaches of sports teams do in public and drop all talk of a take-over of the House. Lower expectations a bit. But even gaining 30 or so seats puts them within striking distance in the future. Moreover, it will scare the remaining Democrats in swing districts. The cornered House leadership may try to push through additional radical proposals. That will only increase the likelihood of Democratic defectors joining Republicans or of the Senate refusing to go along with the House leadership.

Of even more importance are the state races. The road to end Obama/Reid/PelosiCare is a long and winding one. To maximize Republican chances, they need to be in control of the drawing of Congressional district lines after the 2010 census. That control will be determined by success in electing governors and state legislators. So far in 2009 and 2010, the GOP has done well. It is a trend they must continue.

Whether or not the Republicans retake the House, there is simply no way to roll back Obama/Reid/PelosiCare before 2013 at the earliest. Whatever the Republican margin of victory in November, they will not have the White House, and they will be nowhere near a veto-proof supermajority. The Democrats don’t have those numbers even now. However, there are ways for the Republicans (by themselves or with the help of disaffected Democrats) to block further changes in the direction of single-payer health insurance and even to starve the system financially in ways that will make it unworkable. They’ll have to take care not to appear “mean,” but it can be done.

Most significantly, the larger the Republican victory, even short of a majority, the more disheartening this is to the Democrats for 2012. It will make President Obama vulnerable, and the Democratic infighting will increase in proportion to the Republican victory. President Clinton recovered politically from a Democratic debacle in the 1994 mid-term elections. President Carter, on the other hand, did not recover from a much smaller Republican victory in the 1978 mid-term elections that previewed his 1980 loss (after a primary challenge from Ted Kennedy). Depending on whether Obama is more like Clinton or like Carter will significantly influence how he does in 2012. So far, his ideology, his inflexible belief in the righteousness of himself, and his rigid political personality that is averse to compromise, look much more like Carter than Clinton. Here’s hoping.

In the meantime, it is crucial to keep the focus on the ultimate objective. To have patience and determination to take one step at a time. And to look with relief and optimism at how far Obama and the Democrats have fallen in fifteen months due to their political recklessness and stubbornness. Conservatives have learned a painful, but valuable, lesson: Elections have consequences. It must be the turn of the Democrats to learn that lesson in 2010. And beyond. Repeal the bill.

The Obama/Reid/PelosiCare cramdown that is yet another symptom of the liberal mindset that free people cannot make decisions about matters that intimately affect them brings to mind the response given by another free man nearly 50 years ago. Which will it be? Individual freedom or the ant heap of (soft) totalitarianism?

Another “strange” Obama judicial nominee. This time it’s Robert Chatigny, nominated to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. This modern-day Justinian’s rulings display an odd soft spot for sexual predators, especially those who also murder:

“Judge Chatigny’s strange take on sex offenders has shadowed his time on the bench….In the case involving Connecticut’s version of Megan’s Law, Judge Chatigny relied not on the actual words of the ’sex-offender registry’ warning, but on the ‘implied allegation’ that everybody listed was dangerous in order to rule that the law somehow violated the offender’s constitutional rights. So wrongheaded was Judge Chatigny’s ruling that the U.S. Supreme Court eventually reversed it, not by a split vote, but unanimously.”

“The worst case, though, was that of serial murderer Michael Ross, who abducted, sexually tortured and then killed women or girls ages 25, 23, 19, 16, 17 (two that age) and 14 (two victims). Shortly before Ross was to be executed with his own acquiescence in the punishment, Judge Chatigny held a phone conference, during which he berated Ross’ attorney for failing to appeal the death penalty. The judge even threatened, ‘I’ll have your law license’ if the lawyer failed in this supposed duty.
“The judge said he had been convinced that ’sexual sadism’ was a mental disorder that made Ross as much victim as criminal. Said the judge about Ross: ‘He’s at Cornell, he had this classmate, this petite Asian girl who is sweet, and he likes her, and he winds up killing her because he has this affliction, this terrible disease … this awful, uncontrollable impulse to sexually brutalize this person he liked and then kill her. … Michael Ross may be the least culpable, the least, of the people on death row.’
“The Supreme Court eventually overruled Judge Chatigny on the Ross case, too, and Ross finally was put to death. As for the judge’s nomination for a federal appeals court, Ross’ eight victims have no comment.”

Secret back-room bills written by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi that are inserted into the shell of another bill that has been vacuumed of its language like a cell that is stripped of its DNA and has another’s injected. Back room deals that involve huge give-aways to unions and to the states and friends of favored Senators. Passing bills, no, “deeming bills passed” on a huge and unprecedented project of socialism. “Reconciliation,” previously just a process to adjust taxing and spending measures to conform to properly-passed budget resolutions, is used to evade long-standing rules and practices in order to ram through an immensely unpopular 2,200-page-and-rising government take-over of one of the most personal of choices. Declarations by the legislation’s sponsors that the bill must be passed so that everyone can find out what is in it. Lies and deception about abortion language that the bill’s supporters promised was not in the bill—but which they then removed. Same thing for provisions about health care for illegal aliens and about “death panels.”

Now even the last vestiges of parliamentary decorum are being jettisoned. The promise, made over and over again, by the President and Congressional leaders that the bill would be posted at least 72 hours before the vote, so that supporters, opponents, and the public would be able to read the provisions (all thousands of pages), is worth the same as the other promises made by the Leftists in the administration and Congress. The Left loves to talk about how “democratic” it is. It is elitist and authoritarian through and through, and shows its colors constantly. The Democratic argument that everyone knew what would be in the bill is nonsense, as the Congressional Budget Office pointed out that it could not make an authoritative determination because it did not know what was in the final bill.

This is how banana republics operate.

The President’s decision to sit down with Bret Baier of FOX News—you know, that network that the White House previously told its people to boycott—was an obvious attempt to try to neutralize opposition and, perhaps, gain some support among the network’s viewers. It’s also an admission that the network has the largest news audience, one that consists not just of Republicans, but independents and many Democrats.

Unfortunately for the President, he has failed to impress conservatives. For example, from Riehl World View: “Barack Obama was just one mindless platitude after another. He can’t, or won’t answer the real questions, and, as always, can’t deal with being challenged without getting snippy. Obama’s bad policies, poor temperament and willingness to mislead, avoid, distract and demagogue when he can take center stage in his interview with Bret Baier.” Exactly. When Obama did not know about the special “Connecticut deal,” Baier helped him out. I wonder whether Obama will get the same contemptuous reaction from the media and other elites that Sarah Palin got when she asked Charlie Gibson about which version of the Bush Doctrine he was asking. Nah, I’m not really wondering.

While the interview was calm, it was obvious that the President was not happy to have a non-fawning media acolyte doing what journalists claim they do, except during the Obama presidency. Obama was avoiding answering the questions, and he tried to filibuster. Baier interrupted the President repeatedly to bring the conversation back to the question asked. The media have reported this as a “contentious” interview. (Rush Limbaugh had a great audio compilation of the media talking points about this, all of them using the same or nearly the same phrasing.) The Left thought it outrageous that Baier would interrupt the President. They seem to have forgotten how well it was received when Dan Rather would interrupt President Nixon, Sam Donaldson would interrupt President Reagan, and reporters would repeatedly interrupt and seek to badger President George W. Bush.

As his fortunes have dimmed on the government take-over of the health care system, the President has resorted increasingly to more overt personal appeals. Passing anything becomes the goal, no matter how expensive or injurious, as long as it saves him and “his” presidency. Despite his pious disclaimers in the interview with Baier, as usual, it’s all about Obama.

Here is a transcript of the interview.

Here is video of the interview:

A quick and fairly current analysis of the “whip count” of votes in the House on Obama/Reid/PelosiCare. The good news, according to this estimate from The Hill: 178 Republicans against; 37 Democrats firmly, likely, or leaning against for a total of 215; 146 Democrats firmly, likely, or leaning for; 70 Democrats undecided. If the numbers are right and the leaners all break the way they lean, the Democrats will need to get all 70 undecideds for the bill to pass. If even one of those undecideds breaks against the bill, it is dead.

But even if the bill passes, and especially if it passes by one vote, the writer believes that it can be reversed in a later Congress. Unlike other government entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare, this bill is tremendously unpopular with the voters.

“Diversity” is an omnipresent mantra in the “dialogue” at universities. It has infused the intellectual atmosphere and the administrative policies for at least three decades. From the universities, it has spread, like a debilitating social virus, to places of employment, most commonly public employers and those private employers, such as large corporations and “public interest groups,” whose bureaucratic, rent-seeking, and risk-avoiding mindset most closely approximates the public employer culture.

Readers of this blog and my personal acquaintances know that I am a diversity skeptic. My basic objections about diversity, insofar as my doubts target the academy, are that it results in policies that are morally wrong because they take from the innocent and give to the undeserving; it is contrary to the general constitutional command that race is an “irrelevant” criterion for government classification between individuals; and, as practiced by the academy through a limited physical dimension (race, sex, etc.), it ignores the one aspect of diversity, intellectual diversity, that is indisputably relevant to the academy’s mission.

There is another, bigger cost to official identity group diversity (and “multiculturalism” and “bilingualism”) that plays itself out not just in the academy, but in broader society. That cost is the rending of the social fabric and the corrosion of civic community. Diversity is brandished by politicians, academics, business leaders, journalists, and other elites as a torch that shows the way to ever-greater enlightenment, harmony, and material and social well-being. More marvelous, it is a “free good” that, at most, requires one to shed morally and spiritually unhealthy habits of intolerance (racism, Eurocentrism, sexism, ageism, speciesm, homophobia, etc,. etc.) and self-absorption. This unquestioning and reflexive attitude has raised “diversity” as a concept to become an undifferentiated ”good thing,” just as, in the converse, ”discrimination” is an undifferentiated “bad thing” in today’s (lack of) thinking.

But there are those who are demonstrating that diversity is not a free and unqualified social good. Quite the opposite. This modern empirical research merely confirms what philosophers, political scientists and others applying reason and common sense (two qualities often in astonishingly scarce supply among academics and administrators) to observed behavior have long known. Homogeneity allows for structure and more readily-shared burdens. Heterogeneity fosters mistrust and a stronger focus on the self. This is so for a multitude of social and individual reasons, from atavistic concerns about survival, to the ability more readily to see oneself in the other that is physically and socially familiar (such as biological relations). There is also the effect of more subtle cultural conditioning with shared communal values that, in turn, are nurtured by being accepted by the broad mass of the community.

Plato viewed the main drawback of the democratic polity as its lack of form, and likewise saw the problem of the ”democratic mind” as its lack of focus, a sort of individual and collective acute attention deficit disorder. That lack of form produced by the democracy’s emphasis on individual freedom and diversity eventually makes it easy prey for a tyrant who initially exploits those democratic tendencies to eliminate rivals and then turns the lack of structure against the democracy. When there is no tradition of boundaries to protect the existing order, it is easy enough to set oneself up as a tyrant as long as one can keep in power by force. Tyranny, after all, is the ultimate anti-Burkean form of rule in its social formlessness and lack of boundaries. The only form and boundaries exist in and through the will of the ruler, who can avoid and transgress them with considerable freedom.

Plato was interweaving and juxtaposing the personal and the political in The Republic as an analytical device to prove a point (or many points). He could be seen as limiting himself to the diversity and formlessness of political, social, and religious beliefs and habits. But in The Republic, he also referred disapprovingly to the formlessness of social orders through the equal position enjoyed by citizens and “metics” (a manner of permanent resident alien), the old and the young, the teacher and the student, and humans and animals.

Aristotle, too, emphasized the need for balance and order in the polis, the highest form of communal structure, and one necessary for full human thriving. The concept of the polis rested on certain universal preconditions for such thriving, preconditions that the Greek city states, especially Athens, just happened to possess: Agriculture and commerce for wealth beyond subsistence, leisure time, a civic religion with public festivals that affirmed common bonds, a popular assembly balanced by a de facto leadership class, and a moderate size that allowed practical participation in civic affairs at least for free adult male citizens.

The Roman Republican ideal, especially as reflected in the more developed Stoic republican ”state philosophy,” also stressed, for Roman citizens, a communitarian ethic. The later Roman Republic and, more so, the Roman Empire controlled a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic realm that survived in part because the Romans allowed a lot of local customs and religions to flourish on the side. But the Romans also insisted on certain incidents of unity, such as language (Greek in certain contexts, Latin in others), a state religion with ceremonies to be observed even by other believers, a universal practical law in certain basic areas of human enterprise, and various official coins and measures. Roman “diversity” was practical, and it was tolerated, not fostered as official policy in the modern American fashion.

Medieval and more modern republican governments such as Venice, the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and 18th century Britain (and, it has to be admitted, early modern national states) similarly stressed communitarian institutions, even as religious and, eventually, political diversity gradually became tolerated. But much emphasis was placed on symbols and institutions of unity, from the monarch to the “common law” to national “character” to a formally and nominally established church to coins, language, and “constitutions.” At the same time, other differences, such as ethnic identities were suppressed, often ruthlessly. Diversity was tolerable, multiculturalism was not.

When unifying symbols, such as the monarchy, were removed, something else had to be found. In the early American Republic, there was considerable anxiety about whether a republic could survive without such a potent symbol that provides unity across society and, as the embodiment of tradition, through time. The alleged rejoinder by Benjamin Franklin to a woman’s question after the Philadelphia Convention that the new government was “A Republic, if you can keep it,” expresses that mixture of hope and concern. That is also why the framers were so worried about “faction” and why the most self-consciously “republican” in the founding generation expressed the most concern about the corrupting and divisive effects of the developing “party spirit.” Jefferson and the more radical Virginian agricultural republicans, such as John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke, seethed with contempt for political partisans. Some would say that Jefferson’s anti-Hamilton collaborations with Madison in the 1790s made him more a hypocrite than a principled republican.

The geographical isolation of communities and the distances within the new nation were leading to distinct local dialects, which might lead to difficulty of communication without some alternative common language. This worried nationalist republicans such as Noah Webster, who travelled around the country and compiled an American lexicon for proper use of a language that could unify the disparate areas. With no established national religion, but only a handful of officially established state churches, there was, nevertheless, a cultural unity around (mainly Protestant) Christianity. While political and religious diversity was tolerated officially, there was always a strong cultural inclination to suppress these currents through a civic Christianity that was acknowledged in proclamations and civic rituals.

As the informal religious unity of the civic Christianity in the U.S. weakened in the 19th and 20th centuries, and as increasingly large numbers of varied ethnic groups poured into the land, other unifying structures emerged, such as the “cult of the Constitution,” or were built, such as public school systems. A significant goal of such government schools was to suppress diversity and promote assimilation into American culture and standardization of an “American character.” Once more, certain types of diversity, such as political and, more skeptically, religious, could be tolerated. To an extent. Like the old classical republicans, the Progressives, then and now, were very suspicious of political diversity and partisanship. They set about trying to promote “non-partisan good government” and limit the power of political parties. But, it was generally agreed, preservation of ethnic diversity could not be tolerated, if the survival of republican forms in the United States was to be assured. Many a politician, especially among the Progressives, in the first half of the 20th century snarled disdainfully, as did President Woodrow Wilson, at “hyphenated Americans.”

Today, of course, the classic republican enterprise of promoting civic unity through common cultural bonds and of diminishing forces that encourage individual diversity to the least needed to maintain the system’s legitimacy in a more robust democratic and individualistic ethos, is turned inside out. Modern liberals are the ideological heirs of Progressivism, but a special variant thereof. They are also children of the 1960s. From the latter, they insist on an individualistic diversity in matters of sex, abortion, and drug use. But beyond that, with one exception, they disparage diversity and choice.

The current administration has waged a relentless campaign for feigned bipartisanship on its terms. It has threatened to criminalize political differences. Its ideological fellow travellers over the years have promulgated campus speech codes and look vigilantly for utterers of casual politically incorrect remark to vilify and shame. The government is ever more intrusive into private decisions, a trend that the administration has made it its top priority to accelerate. That trend fosters dependency on government handouts and services and saps individual initiative, all in a massive movement of social standardization. While it might appear that religious diversity is tolerated, the opposite is true. Indeed, whereas sexuality is encouraged to be outed and displayed promiscuously, religion is to be shoved into the private domain. Civic religious displays are to be muted or be turned into alloys of various groups’ ceremonies. Better still, the new state is developing a standardized and public secularism to replace the civic religious ceremonies. And, to paraphrase Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, there is the brooding omnipresence of the law, an ever-growing and more-constricting body of regulations enforced by the state and its institutions that invades every nook and cranny of life.

Whereas there is an increasing standardization today in many matters that republics traditionally left alone, the one area that diversity is most emphasized is in identity issues. Most dangerous of those is racial/ethnic identity. And the modern elite culture goes all in on race, ethnicity, sex and sexuality-based diversity. As research is showing, however, ethnic and racial diversity are precisely those versions that are most corrosive of civic bonds and diminish social capital.

The main benefit of diversity is that it can lead to innovation. But that is diversity based on intellect, not on race or ethnicity. To the extent that such intellectual diversity stems from cultural differences of problem solving, it is strongest in immigrant populations. Once those immigrants stay here for a generation or two, the other forces of assimilation (education, etc.) drown out the remnants of such culture-based intellectual diversity. Certainly there is no lingering benefit that outweighs the social costs of policies that promote identity group-based diversity.

A polity is most stable when it reflects broadly-shared significant cultural values. Diversity between cultures that have their own discrete political entities based on shared internal values, can benefit the members of each culture as they interact. Within a culture, it is also beneficial to welcome, not just tolerate, differences in talents and intellectual views. Larger cities more than small towns, and commercial trading societies more than land-locked agricultural ones, have a history of innovation fostered by closer and more frequent contact with other ideas. But, as has long been known to political observers, within a culture or component of a culture, ethnic and racial diversity is a problem to be managed, not a social good to be fostered. Tribalism is centripetal and undermines social harmony. The racial spoils system into which ”diversity” and “multiculturalism” policies inevitably degenerate are harmful and breed jealousy and mistrust.

That is an argument against officially-endorsed racial and ethnic diversity programs, not against integration and assimilation. The latter are social goods, but even they are best achieved not by some program of coercion. Instead, social cost is likely to be minimized by a gradual process to develop the social trust and bonds necessary to achieve a balance between the cultural unity that leads to maximum social engagement and the individual diversity and freedom that lead to maximum creativity and initiative.

What is the problem with California’s economy, with its 12.5% unemployment and a gaping budget deficit, conditions that make California, along with Michigan and Nevada, the Greece of the United States?

Well, there is the problem of the public employees unions, with their expenditures of taxpayer-supplied funds for their political gain. Of the top five political spenders, who spent more than a billion dollars over the last decade on influencing politicians, two are the teacher’s union and the public employees’ union:

“Fifteen special interest groups including casino operators, drug firms and unions for teachers and public employees spent more than $1 billion during the last decade trying to influence California public officials and voters, the state’s watchdog agency reported today….Five special interests were responsible for more than half of the billion dollars spent since 2000, including:

–The California Teachers Assoc., which spent $211.8 million.
–The California State Council of Service Employees, $107.4 million.
–The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, $104.9 million.
-The Morongo Band of Mission Indians, which operates a casino under a state-approved compact, $83.6 million.
–The Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians, which also operates a casino, $69.2 million.”

Liberals are feverish about the idea that corporations might be able to spend to money on advertisements during political campaigns. They might unduly influence the political process, it is said. Looks like the government workers’ unions and the California Indian tribes are doing the job corporations can only hope to do.

On a related matter, though these are federal, not state, numbers, the federal stimulus funds primarily helped teachers, by far. Assuming, that is, that the stimulus really helped save those jobs. More likely, government budgets are set a year in advance, so that teachers and other government workers were protected from significant job losses by budget decisions made before the brunt of the recession was felt. Judging by the political outcry, this year might be quite a different matter. Via Instapundit.

Meanwhile, the dysfunctional California state government, led by the Governator, makes the situation worse with a regulatory powergrab through its “climate change law” that will increase joblessness and cause more businesses to flee the state.

Not long ago, former Vice President Dick Cheney opined off-hand that Barack Obama would be a one-term wonder. Since then, I have heard a similar point made on occasion by other speakers. It just so happened that I was wondering the same not long before I read of Cheney’s remark.

Mr. Obama as a one-termer has been, of course, a hope of the more fevered denizens of the swamps of the conservative hinterland since November 5, 2008, the day after the election. I was scornful of the likelihood that their hope would be realized, and, on balance, I continue to believe that the President will be re-elected. But what shook my previous confidence in having to prepare myself for eight years of an Obama White House was the increasingly obvious combination of toxic ideology, incompetent administration, and personal detachment that emanates from Mr. Obama and his minions.

Looked at historically, it is very difficult to dislodge an incumbent who chooses to run for re-election. The task becomes almost impossible if that incumbent succeeded a President from the opposing party. In the twentieth century, only four incumbent Presidents were defeated for re-election. Three of those defeats, involving William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, and George H. W. Bush were cases where they had gained the White House after Presidents from their own party. Party fatigue had set in after twelve years or more of the same party in the White House. In both Taft’s and Bush’s defeats, there were strong third party challenges that affected the outcomes. In those races, the winner received substantially less than 50% of the vote. Of the three, only Herbert Hoover, running in the political gale of the Depression, lost decisively after one term.

There has been only one instance in well more than a century of an incumbent president losing a re-election bid when that incumbent had taken over the White House from the opposite party. That loser was Jimmy Carter in 1980. Leaving aside the odd sequence (and diversion of popular and electoral votes) of the Grover Cleveland-Benjamin Harrison contests in 1888 and 1892, there arguably has not been another case where an incumbent President of a major party lost re-election after succeeding someone from the opposing party. (President John Tyler lost his re-election bid in 1844, but he ran as a third-party candidate and abandoned his campaign before the election.)

The standard for losing as an incumbent, then, is set by the inept Jimmy Carter. Short of sinking to that level, Mr. Obama should be assured of re-election. How close to the Carter standard an incumbent can safely get depends also on the quality of the opposition. Carter was faced with Ronald Reagan, a powerful campaigner and Teflon candidate. There is no Republican of similar political potency on the scene. Sarah Palin comes close, and a comparison of the dismissive treatment she receives with that directed at Reagan yields remarkable similarities. However, Palin is on balance a more polarizing figure than Reagan, which would make it more difficult for her to make the same kind of pitch to close the deal with independents and Democrats that Reagan made in his debates against Carter. In addition, Obama is a much better campaigner and presents a more likable persona than Carter was able to do in a side-by-side comparison with Reagan.

That said, Mr. Obama is doing his remarkable best to imitate Jimmy Carter. The drip, drip, drip of news about botched anti-terror efforts (The ludicrous “The system worked” declaration by Janet Incompetano as a response to the Crotchbomber), missteps in trials for accused terrorists such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the cluelessness of reaction to the Honduran constitutional dispute, the continuing debacle of healthcare “reform” in which the administrations comes up with patently absurd claims, all undermine the public’s confidence in Obama’s administrative competence. His weakness in foreign relations, complete with bowing before sundry monarchs and dictators; his failure to constrain Iran; his apparent appeasement of Russia; his coziness with Latin American leftists; his nuclear disarmament and anti-missile technology decisions; his decisions of interrogations of terrorists; his (and Eric Holder’s) attempted or threatened moves against Bush administration officials and against CIA interrogators, and his 2009 Obama World Apology Tour all show a profound weakness, stemming from personality and ideology, in protecting American interests. If they have not hurt the President yet, and I think they have hurt in the public’s perception of him, they present catastrophic political danger to him, should there be an attack on the U.S.. They at least present persistent, if not catastrophic, political danger through their cumulative negative effect.

Every administration has periods of good luck and bad. So, timing means a lot. Assuming that Mr. Obama has had neither extraordinary good nor bad luck overall as measured by “events” so far, he is early on showing a lot of Carteresque tendencies. Assuming also that those tendencies continue in approximately similar manner, Mr. Obama could be in trouble in 2012, something that seemed to exist only in the realm of fantasy a year or even six months ago.

But being as bad as Carter will not defeat Obama. There is one thing that Obama has that Carter did not, and which will give him 10% of the vote that Carter could not get. That thing is Obama’s race. The additional turn-out among Blacks, along with an even more heavily pro-Democrat tilt than usual among that group, will account for some of the boost. Similar increases, though perhaps less significant, will manifest themselves among other racial minorities. But many Whites, too, will refuse to vote against the first, at least partially, African-ancestry President. Riddled with racial guilt, these liberals will not vote to confirm Obama’s political failure and their own failure to recognize their candidate’s lack of experience and qualification for the office that was so glaringly apparent to less partial observers. As already has been made clear by various journalists, well, by Chris Matthews, immediately after Obama’s inauguration, for them, Obama the “Black President” is too important and big to fail.

If I recognize this, Mr. Obama’s savvy political advisers will know it at least as well. They will make sure that the racial undercurrent remains in full flow in 2012. Opposition to, or criticism of, the President will once again be slammed as racist by Obama, his minions, and the newspapers, TV networks, and other parts of the media wing of the Democratic Party. This will serve to drive such doubting liberals and weak-kneed moderates back into the party line. In short, then, Mr. Obama can be as bad as Jimmy Carter, and not worry about re-election. To vote Mr. Obama out of office would require disasters far worse than the economic malaise and the national security weaknesses that characterized the Carter years. What might suffice as a big enough disaster is hard to say. But an unemployment rate even of 10%, a high inflation rate, an Iranian nuke, an Iranian attack on its neighbors, a new 9/11, or a Russian, North Korean, or Chinese invasion of their neighbors probably won’t pry loose enough Obama disciples to turn him out of office. Some of his former supporters will turn against him or not show up to vote, but, as the religious imagery associated with support of the “Black Jesus” demonstrates, for too many (including, perhaps, the President himself) Obama is not merely a politician, but a movement or cause.

For those reasons, primarily the reason of his race, I do not believe that Obama can be defeated in 2012. The Republicans will not be facing Jimmy Carter, but a Jimmy Carter simulacrum that benefits from affirmative action. That said, I think that there is a 10% chance that Mr. Obama will not be President in 2013. The reason is Mr. Obama himself. He may opt not to run again.

It has become abundantly clear already that he does not enjoy being President. For all the idle comparisons between Obama and FDR or John Kennedy, those others enjoyed the job itself, not just the perks. They brought a “vigah” (in Kennedy’s phrasing) to the position that the incumbent does not. Even before the election, Obama had a reputation of not wanting to work at the hard stuff. He produced no significant legislation in the Senate. His absenteeism was legendary. He made a habit of voting “present” in the Illinois legislature. Earlier in his life, he did not like the temporary jobs working in finance and law. On a more benign level, he appears to be genuinely committed to his family. He enjoys more leisurely intellectual contemplation.

That explains why he likes to get out of D.C. so much and why just two weeks into his term he explained his visits to local schools by confessing that he did not like being in the White House. That explains also his incessant campaign mode, his campaign-style political speeches with their hard edges and political platitudes and generalities (see, for example, the State of the Union address), and the meetings and “summits” where Obama presides like a professor in a seminar.

The there is the outward appearance of lack of passion to the job. His supporters initially saw this as a surfeit of “cool.” We more skeptical types considered it aloofness, even coldness, that was a reification of his psychological elitism. By now, I have read of even some of his supporters active in the media and in politics grousing about this detachment and “above the fray” approach and comparing Mr. Obama unfavorably in that regard to George W. Bush. In political whispers behind cupped hands, such people point with reluctant respect to Bush’s leadership, his emotional commitment to his work that allowed people to know where he stood, and, despite some notable failures, his ability to get things done even with a Democratic Congress. Mr. Obama, they say, lacks these qualities. His coolness has become a liability.

Being President is hard work, and Presidents age visibly. Pictures of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush in the first and eighth years of their Presidencies show remarkable physical changes far greater than can be attributed merely to the lapse of seven years. Bush was battered politically and fanatically for eight years by his opponents and had to deal with serious challenges to the country’s national security. I am not sure that Obama has either the, shall one say, “flexible” personality and the ability to lose himself in personal “diversions” of Bill Clinton, or the orneriness and strong sense of self of W.

Obama has made his name in American history as the first “non-White” President. If he is faced with four more years of a sour economic mood, and if he has either completed his ideological agenda that will (negatively) transform the U.S. domestically and internationally, or he has found that the agenda cannot be completed, he may decide that there are better ways to spend his time. Given the likelihood that, after 2012, he will face a Republican Congress or at least a Congress composed of Republicans and enough unhappy Democrats that his political agenda is a dead letter, he may not want to continue. He does not have the political inclinations toward true compromise (”bipartisanship” not being the same as compromise) or the political skills of triangulation that Mr. Clinton possessed. Nor is it likely that his “A” team would continue with him into a second term; subsequent hirees often do not possess the personal loyalties to the President, the political skills, or the calibrated ideological commitment of the initial group.

Presidents almost universally get frustrated in their second term, for some combination of various reasons, such as public fatigue, their quasi-lame duck status, the accumulation of unfinished projects and the passage of time, the departure of trusted individuals, the inevitable scandals involving present or former associates or acquaintances, media feeding frenzy for stories, economic cycles, rivalries and conflicting interests with Congressional barons eager to share your successes and distance themselves from your failures, the constant baying from the opposing party, and on and on. Perhaps President Obama decides that the journey was more enjoyable and personally satisfying than the destination. A second term, then, would be an unnecessary punishment.

Would it not be much better, he might say, to seek an appointment to the Supreme Court rather than re-election to the White House? He could make history as only the second President to be a Supreme Court justice. He could enjoy a lifestyle much more suited to his temperament. He could seek to have his agenda of a transformed “positive” Constitution adopted just by persuading four other justices. That would allow him to seek to impose on the American people various elements of his vision of socialized health care, environmental restrictions, expanded constitutional protections for unlawful enemy combatants, and racial spoils systems that he might not be able to attain democratically. He would be, for the most part, among other academically-inclined intellectuals. He would rejoin, and interact with, for the rest of his life, members of the legal elites and adoring laws students. True, he could still do that after a second term as President. But why wait if, as appears, he really does not like his current job?

It is unlikely to happen. But if Barack Obama is not the President after January, 2013, it is more likely due to his decision not to seek re-election than to having suffered a defeat in an active campaign for the office.

California attorney general Jerry Brown has thrown his hat into the political ring in the race for governor in November. With plenty of name recognition, he should have an easy time of it in a state that has an unpopular incumbent Republican governor and a 3-2 Democratic registration advantage. Yet the polls show Brown tied with the likely Republican nominee, former Ebay CEO Meg Whitman. Why? Brown has a reputation, not entirely fairly, as, shall we say, “idiosyncratic.” He has tried to shed his old “Governor Moonbeam” persona, a project that has been generally successful due to his stints as a no-nonsense mayor of Oakland and as attorney general.

But Brown is a symbol of the past. He is much older, and, like it or not, as a former governor is seen as an insider. While Schwarzenegger is a Republican, he is perceived as a weak-tea RINO, who has stressed his bipartisan approach and surrounded himself with Democrats. That, combined with the Democratic dominance of the extremely unpopular state legislature and general dissatisfaction with Democrats (due to their control of Congress), allows a calm- and sensible-sounding Republican candidate like Meg Whitman to have a decent chance at winning.

There has been much talk of the Democrats using “reconciliation” to pass Obama/Reid/PelosiCare if they cannot get the 60 votes needed to “invoke cloture” (conclude debate) and end a filibuster. The problem arises from a tradition in the Senate as a deliberative body that allows relaxed rules of debate. Unlike the “democratic” House, where the leadership acting in conjunction with the Rules Committee strictly defines the terms of debate on a bill, the Senate is more of a club of equals where courtesy and independence dictate fewer restrictions on the opportunity for members to rise and speak.

Reconciliation has traditionally been used in very limited circumstances, usually to reconcile appropriations- and tax-related bills in the Senate to budget measures already passed by both houses. But that process is regarded as a distinct exception to the Senate tradition of debate. Therefore, there are many criteria and specifications for when, why, and how reconciliation may be used. The Senate parliamentarian, a scrupulously non-partisan individual, is often called on to make rulings to limit the scope of reconciliation. Those rulings themselves are binding on the Senate, though only by tradition. The parliamentarian’s rulings can be overridden by unanimous consent, not a likely option if the process is used for anything other than the routine and fairly innocuous matters for which reconciliation traditionally was used. Alternatively, the Vice President can overrule the parliamentarian absent unanimous consent, an option fraught with political danger, a figuratively nuclear political option.

This is an overview of the reconciliation process. Read it if you dare. If Congress and the President need to resort to anything that complicated to get a bill passed over opposition, there is something wrong with the bill. It’s worse than seeing sausage made. Here is an overview of reconciliation applied to Obama/Reid/PelosiCare.

Obviously, reconciliation in the Senate is far from a sure thing. Therefore, the result-oriented ideologues in the White House and Congress might decide that they will find a way to proceed without reconciliation. A bill already has passed the Senate. The House can vote on that bill, with promises that there will be changes through follow-up amendments in a reconciliation bill. But if the House passes the Senate bill, that one can go to the President’s desk, as it has met the Constitution’s bicameralism requirement, namely, that a bill must pass both houses in identical language before being presented to the President. Once Mr. Obama signs the bill, it becomes law. There is no legal compulsion for the Senate then to live up to its word and pass the amendments it promised. They might give it a try, and, finding that they don’t have the 51 votes to go forward, abandon the effort. That would be a tremendous breach of trust toward the House, but Pelosi and the leadership might go along with it, just so they can have some health care “reform” adopted. The real losers would be those House members in swing districts who were opposed to the earlier bill and who voted for something that can prove to be toxic for their re-election in November.

This is a risky procedure for the Congressional Democrats, and the possible use of such a tactic presumably is known to the Democratic fence-sitters. Thet do not trust either the House and Senate leadership or the administration and would push for another alternative. That alternative is to have the Senate pass amendments (which would require the cumbersome reconciliation described above) and the House to approve that amending bill before the House votes on the underlying health care bill. As long as the President then signs the health care bill before he signs the amending bill, everything is in proper order.

All of these procedural gyrations are done to get around the Senate tradition of the filibuster and to engineer an eventual government take-over of one-sixth of the economy against the wishes of a majority of the American people. But don’t hold your breath that this will happen. Reconciliation and adoption of the Senate bill are far from assured. Right now, the votes are not there, and the odds appear to be getting longer.

One sign of an administration running into political headwinds is the leaking of information critical of this or that insider. The higher the position of the target, the more significant the leak, as it is likely that people close to this person and of similar prominence are leaking the information to gain an advantage in the jockeying for political influence that occurs in the White House. That is the playground of major league political egos, after all. When those targets of criticism are high level associates of the President and, indeed, the President himself, and when the criticism occurs early in the second year of the administration, this is a sign of serious discord and of an administration stuck in a morass.

Therefore, when an article appears in The Washington Post that extols the virtues of President Obama’s chief of staff, the tiny, Tourette’s-tending terpsichorean Rahm Emanuel, eyebrows are raised. The skeptic’s interest is particularly piqued when that article appears in the middle of (leaked) rumors and increased demands from the moon-baying Left that the President must fire Emanuel because the latter is responsible for the political stalemate of the Obama agenda despite overwhelming Democratic Party advantages in the Congress. According to this article, the President’s other advisers are responsible for this debacle, a result that would not have occurred, had the President only listened to “Rahmbo.” Sample graph that conveys the tone:

“Obama’s problem is that his other confidants — particularly Valerie Jarrett and Robert Gibbs, and, to a lesser extent, David Axelrod — are part of the Cult of Obama. In love with the president, they believe he is a transformational figure who needn’t dirty his hands in politics.

The president would have been better off heeding Emanuel’s counsel. For example, Emanuel bitterly opposed former White House counsel Greg Craig’s effort to close the Guantanamo Bay prison within a year, arguing that it wasn’t politically feasible. Obama overruled Emanuel, the deadline wasn’t met, and Republicans pounced on the president and the Democrats for trying to bring terrorists to U.S. prisons. Likewise, Emanuel fought fiercely against Attorney General Eric Holder’s plan to send Khalid Sheik Mohammed to New York for a trial. Emanuel lost, and the result was another political fiasco.

“Obama’s greatest mistake was failing to listen to Emanuel on health care. Early on, Emanuel argued for a smaller bill with popular items, such as expanding health coverage for children and young adults, that could win some Republican support. He opposed the public option as a needless distraction.”

This protrayal of Emanuel as the omniscient sage lays it on so thick that the inevitable suspicion is that Emanuel himself is the source of these leaks against his own President. As expected, Emanuel denies any complicity, and the very ham-handedness of the leaks ironically gives credence to his denials. Emanuel, after all, is known for his skill at political infighting and his (fiercely partisan) pragmatism. But then, if one were truly Macchiavellian, one might suggest that this apparent overkill is exactly what Rahm needs to hide his fingerprints.

The episode is also useful to try to insulate Obama from political fall-out if his health care take-over collapses. He (through Rahm and these leaks) can lay the blame at the feet of the left-liberal Congressional leadership and the besotted Obama lovers Gibbs, Axelrod, and Jarrett. Of course, that still exposes some political flaws in the President for having had the lack of political acumen and the inexperience not to listen to Emanuel but to defer to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and his own sycophants. The article also concedes what those of us who have declined to become The One’s disciples have long known, namely, that those on the other side too often are the O-bots we’ve characterized them as being.

Needless to say, this hagiography of Emanuel has not gone unnoticed and uncriticized by his (many) enemies in and out of the administration.  At the Huffington Post, one particularly huffy Huffster huffed, “The fact is that after a campaign that appealed so successfully to idealism, Obama hired a bunch of saboteurs of hope and change. Rahm was simply their chief of staff. And now, this hypercompetitive bantam rooster is attempting to blame others for what went wrong. That’s evidently so important to him that he’s trying to take a victory lap around the wreckage of what was once such a promising presidency.

President Obama has declared the time for talking about health care reform to be over. He is, however, still calling on those who support his program to make their voices heard, an endeavor for which his advocacy group’s website has prepared a handy-dandy list to guide “seminar callers” to talk shows. Those who oppose his program, the majority of those responding in many different polls, should sit down and be quiet, presumably.

Once upon a time, i.e., in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, then-Senator Obama was not only against reconciliation, but rejected the idea that something as huge as health care reform could be done by a bare majority:

“[Health care reform] is an area where we’re going to have to have a 60% majority in the Senate and the House in order to actually get a bill to my desk. We’re going to have to have a majority to get a bill to my desk that is not just a 50-plus-one majority.”

Mark Steyn, on our “Greek” future: A growing and unsustainable welfare state, with the predictable results. Actually, Steyn is not entirely correct in his analogy, as the U.S. is not suffering from the demographic collapse of the Greeks that inverts the entitlement pyramid even more. With, again, the exception of population growth, Greece is less like the U.S. than is Europe as a whole. Greece is more like California, as Steyn correctly notes:

“Think of Greece as California: Every year an irresponsible and corrupt bureaucracy awards itself higher pay and better benefits paid for by an ever-shrinking wealth-generating class. And think of Germany as one of the less-profligate, still-just-about-functioning corners of America such as my own state of New Hampshire: Responsibility doesn’t pay. You’ll wind up bailing out, anyway. The problem is there are never enough of ‘the rich’ to fund the entitlement state, because in the end it disincentivizes everything from wealth creation to self-reliance to the basic survival instinct, as represented by the fertility rate. In Greece, they’ve run out Greeks, so they’ll stick it to the Germans, like French farmers do. In Germany, the Germans have only been able to afford to subsidize French farming because they stick Americans with their defense tab. And, in America, Obama, Pelosi and Reid are saying we need to paddle faster to catch up with the Greeks and Germans. What could go wrong?

An earlier Greek had an insightful discussion of the weakness of democracy, a weakness that inevitably leads into collapse and tyranny. I am speaking of Plato and his work The Republic. This is a good summary of his Book 8:

“Now they begin speaking about how democracy leads to tyranny: the insatiable good that democracy defines as freedom. However, should the city fall into misfortune, the people will blame the rulers and call them oligarchs. Should anyone then obey the rulers, they will be denounced as voluntary slaves; they honor rulers who act like subjects and subjects who act like rulers. This extends to homes, so that parents must act like children and children like parents. Similarly, teachers are terrified of pupils, and children fight with adults about everything. There is also complete freedom and equal rights between the sexes, and slaves are as free as their owners. This makes the citizen’s soul too sensitive to endure any slavery, and eventually they will disregard the laws, as they must have no master over them. In democracy, there are three classes: the drones [politicians and rent-seeking members of various elites that are part of the political class], who speak and transact; the rich, from whom the drones can get money; and the people, the peaceful, self-employed, workers and farmers who form the largest class. The revolution starts because the majority sees what the rich have and believe that they are oligarchs. The drones incite this even further, and there is a main advocate for the people [a demagogic leader]. Inevitably, the advocate becomes the tyrant and fights in a civil war against the property-holders. When they get this far, they are often scared that the rich will try to kill them, and so ask for bodyguards to defend the ‘defender of democracy.’ The people provide this because they trust the tyrant.

In the beginning, when a tyrant walks around he will greet everyone, deny being a tyrant, and make promises to individuals and the state. He will also cancel debts, distribute land to the people, and pretend to be kind and gracious to everyone. [I.e., he promotes a welfare state.] However, after exiling his enemies, and befriending the others, there will be no need for him as a leader, and therefore he will keep starting new wars so that the people keep thinking that they need him. He will also need to raise war taxes and the like, and people will begin to hate him, even the people who put him there in the first place will start to speak against him. Therefore, if he wants to survive as a tyrant, he must eliminate everything until he is left without a single friend or enemy, and he must always beware of everyone around him. Ultimately, he is either to live with worthless people, or die.”

In the book itself, Plato is even blunter, at times. He describes how the people will not support the politician unless “they get a little honey” from the politicians. Plato describes the polity as analogous to a beehive. He also describes how the “orderly class,” the productive wealthy will be squeezed by the political class, the “drones.” The incipient tyrant props himself up as the “protector of the people,” only to turn on them and upon any in the political class who dare to oppose him. “And therefore he must look about him and see who is valiant, who is high-minded, who is wise, who is wealthy…he is the enemy of them all,….”

It is becoming more and more obvious that President Obama and the Congressional Democrats are going to pass something, anything, concerning health care. Bad as passing something that the American people reject is better for them politically than passing nothing at all. Their political calculus is that they are going to lose seats in November, no matter what, but that they will lose more if they are perceived to be political failures than if they can point to something that they have done and declare victory. Moreover, they are not going to walk away from an issue that their President has made his signature policy since he began running for the office.

Towards that end, their strategy is to do the most radical that they can persuade enough of their waivering members to accept, and, at the same time, bring in as many Republican-connected ideas to put forth an image of bipartisanship. The latter is doubly beneficial in that it might get some Republicans to sign on, depending on how radical the rest of the proposal is. But even if no Republican signs on, the calculus is that the Democrats can portray the result as a “bipartisan” bill. As Nancy Pelosi proclaimed, a bill can be bipartisan if it includes Republican ideas, even if no Republican ends up voting for it. That also allows the Democrats to portray the GOP as simply obstructionist, with the upshot that it buys the Democrats come political cover and may reduce their losses in November. So, while the Pelosi approach is conceptual nonsense, it makes political sense.

Another advantage to the Democrats of adopting some bill, is that, whatever the bill contains, they can declare victory and then claim to be focusing on other issues. It moves the discussion, at least temporarily, to other matters and allows the Democrats to claim that they are addressing “jobs” and other economic issues. Moreover, there will be a cushion of time, perhaps seven months, before the election, including the three months of summer during which political issues normally recede into the background of voters’ minds. Come fall, the Democrats can try to blunt Republican efforts to raise the health care issue by accusing the GOP of bringing up issues that have been decided rather than addressing ongoing issues.

The bill that will emerge will be sufficiently ambiguous that the Congressional Budget Office will not be able to have enough specific figures to challenge whatever absurd claims of low costs the White House produces. Moreover, the bill can be rather small, as long as it contains the seeds for the eventual government take-over of health care. Then, there can be incremental increases over time, as this feature is added or that program is expanded. The same pattern has occurred historically with all taxpayer-funded entitlement programs. This has always been the advice of Mr. Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, regarding this issue. The Democrats understand that the Republicans, even if they retake Congress and the White House, will be too weak-willed to undo sush entitlements, as the issue will be demagogued effectively by the Democratic opposition.

Moreover, all the talk about the difficulty of getting a majority of Congress to vote for the bill is hot air. Even when the earlier version passed by only 220-215, I pointed out that the Democratic leadership had enough possible votes in reserve. They simply allowed as many endangered Democrats as possible to vote against the bill, so as to give them political cover with their constituents. Even if some anti-abortion Democrats who previously voted “yes” now balk, there will be some former “nay” votes who will switch. As I said, they will tweak the language until they get enough votes.

The Senate will, if necessary, avoid the likely filibuster by invoking the “reconciliation” process. That only requires a majority vote as there is no unlimited debate (absent a 60-vote cloture motion) permitted. Reconciliation has been used for budgetary matters and never for such a broad substantive issue. As such, the Democrats’ moves would be subject to being rules out of order by the Senate parliamentarian, a historically scrupulously non-partisan officer. However, the Democrats have already whispered that, is necessary, they will vote to overrule any decisions of the parliamentarian that would frustrate their political goals. Though it would normally take unanimous consent for such overruling, the Democrats have threatened to jettison even that rule. It is clear that any such moves would destroy the Senate’s rules for the future, once the GOP regains control of that body. But the Democrats figure that the ends justify the means, and that there will always be time in the future to engage in hypocrisy about the sanctity of the Senate’s rules that foster deliberation and give voice to the minority. After all, as I have written before, the Democrats were very much in favor of the inviolability of the filibuster (in 2005) before they were against it now.

While that is the Democratic calculus, and probably is the best of bad alternatives for them, it is not without costs. By the time the process is finished, it will be some time in April. That is only six months before the election. Any “reform” that emerges over Republican opposition will not be seen as bipartisan, regardless of Madame Speaker’s pronouncements. The issue has been such a hot topic for too long. It is too indelibly etched into the political consciousness of the voters. The process has been too messy, with too much back room dealing. The eventual bill will do nothing to change the concerns about costs that have been raised successfully, as well as the taint that the government will make these health care decisions. Six months, especially with the issue coming front and center for a large and motivated portion of the voters, is not long, given the fact that the issue has been on the front burner for over a year. The public has simply got too engaged on the issue for the usual stupor to return in time to save the Democrats this November. This is not an obscure bill or a matter of only marginal concern for voters.

Moreover, the health care issue cannot be divorced from the rest of the Democratic agenda. The deficit, cap-and-trade (coming as it does during a time when the global warmongers have seen their arguments suffer grievous erosion of public support), tax increases, and unemployment all will continue to be issues that hurt the Democrats for various, though interrelated reasons. In the end, passing a health care bill may save a few Democratic House seats, but it will not avert the political tide that is threatening to overtake them. There are simply too many causes for that tide. But saving even a few seats may preserve Democratic control of the House, and that is enough to cause the leadership to urge the politically-vulnerable members of its caucus to commit political suicide by voting for a bill that the majority of the American public does not want.

During the Bush administration, Senate Democrats filibustered lower court judicial nominations. When they began to threaten filibusters for Supreme Court nominees in 2005, with openings on the Supreme Court looming, the Republicans had enough. They moved to suspend the filibuster for judicial appointments on a point of order, a “nuclear option” by invoking the unconstitutionality of the filibuster for that purpose.

The argument for unconstitutionality in that circumstance is that a filibuster of pending legislation is within the Senate’s control over its own legislative function. But when the President nominates officers of the United States, he is entitled to have the Senate vote on them by the usual majority vote, since the Constitution does not specifically authorize a super-majority requirement. There are other Senate rules and procedures that allow individual Senators to frustrate the appointment process. But those do not apply to Supreme Court appointments. A filibuster in such nomination battles carries with it a serious invasion of the checks and balance system envisioned in the constitutional separation of powers that does not apply when the Senate is deciding how legislation is to be brought to a floor vote as a matter of internal procedure.

Although I was not in favor of this nuclear (or “constitutional”) option, it had some constitutional grounding and even had been legitimated in a procedural opinion 50 years ago. The Republicans were not trying to change or avoid the filibuster in purely legislative matters. Even then, the Republicans in the end did not use the nuclear option in appointment votes.

Still, the Democrats screamed (literally, in the case of the New York Senator sometimes caustically referred to as “Shrillary”) about what they saw as this unprecedented attack on the Senate’s traditions. Here is a collection of their objections to the nuclear option, led by that great supporter of the filibuster, Barack Obama, who extolled its virtues as the bedrock of the Senate’s constitutional role. Today, of course, the Democrats and their sycophants in the press decry the filibuster twelve ways from Sunday as undemocratic and, therefore, unconstitutional. Hardly a week passes without yet another demand that the filibuster be ended, or another threat to use the budget device of “reconciliation” to shove Obama/Reid/PelosiCare down the throats of the American people.

That was then, and this is now. I’m sure that, when the Senate turns Republicans, those same Democrats and their media wing will once again recognize the filibuster to be the bulwark against the same majority rule that they decried in this video.

George Will chimes in.

My favorite atheist/lesbian/feminist/Democrat (yes, I have one), Camille Paglia, speaks truth to power about the Obama administration, its political acumen, and its health care fiasco. Though the article is nearly six months old, its message is still fresh and hot. She gets in some excellent points about the Democratic Party:

“Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem.”

In similar vein, universities come under truly “critical” review of the type that I have put forth many times over the years:

“Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it’s invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote ‘critical thinking,’ which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms (’racism, sexism, homophobia’) when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it’s positively pickled.”

These observations lead to the only reasonable conclusion. “It was as if Democrats live in a utopian dream world, divorced from the daily demands and realities of organization and management.” Indeed. The self-proclaimed “reality community” really isn’t.

Her take on the Republican Party is at least partially justified, though in the personalities she mentions she is tilting at windmills from the past. Also, her hackneyed characterization of Afghanistan as the graveyeard of empires is not up to par for her usual efforts. The history of Afghanistan is a lot more complicated than that, whether or not one agrees with her conclusion.

September, 2008: Candidate Barack Obama ridicules John McCain’s proposal for a commission to study the  country’s economic problems in the recession. Says Mr. Obama, “Just today, Senator McCain offered up the oldest Washington stunt in the book – you pass the buck to a commission to study the problem. But here’s the thing – this isn’t 9/11. We know how we got into this mess. What we need now is leadership that gets us out. I’ll provide it, John McCain won’t, and that’s the choice for the American people in this election.”

Here’s another version, extolling the need for presidential leadership rather than commissions. Starts at about 0:40: 

February, 2010: President Obama signs an executive order to form a commission to suggest steps to solve the debt and deficit problems.

Whatever happened to presidential leadership? I agree with candidate Obama’s assessment that these issues ultimately depend on political will and leadership, qualities in scarce supply in this administration. I also agree with his self-indictment that commissions are old Washington stunts to “pass the buck.”

This commission is just showboating. The commission’s recommendations aren’t due until December, after the election. That way, the inevitable tax increases (including on the middle class) needed to fund the massive spending increases the administration’s programs envision, won’t be a hot topic during the election. The Democrats can try to fool the American people about how serious they are about the deficit and cut their electoral losses. They can talk “responsibility” and “deficit reduction,” when everyone knows they won’t act that way, except to raise taxes.

The tax increases won’t be voted on until 2011, the maximum possible time before the 2012 election. Moreover, the Obama and the rest of the Democrats can hide behind the “bipartisan” nature of the commission to blunt the Republicans’ message in 2012. If the Democrats raise taxes and the Republicans balk, Obama can say that the GOP is irresponsible because the (Democrat-dominated) commission found such tax increases necessary. If some members of the Congressional GOP go along, Obama again can portray the tax increases as “bipartisan” and ridicule any GOP dissenters. Either way, he and the Democrats can shun responsibility. That’s not leadership. Why not just elect functionaries in the form of commissions to decide issues?

Meanwhile, there won’t be spending cuts. Quite the opposite. The matter will take on catastrophic shape if the government increases its meddling in health care, its regulation of business, and its environmentalist cap-and-trade and anti-energy policies. The charade is illustrated by the President’s statement that he has ordered a freeze on discretionary spending. That amount is a very small portion of federal expenditures. It won’t start until next year. And it has recently been raised substantially.

The “PayGo” legislation that Obama mentions towards the end is more such empty symbolism. Within days of Obama’s announcement that any new programs would have to show how they will be financed, the Congressional Democrats were funding programs under an “emergency exception” and trying to find other ways around the PayGo law.

Once again, this decision demonstrates the utter lack of seriousness of the President and his cohorts. Moreover, it is yet another campaign promise with an expiration date. See also, no middle class tax increase (”No one making under $250,000 will have to pay a dime in additional taxes”). “Guantanamo will be closed within a year.” “Unemployment will not go above 8% with the stimulus law.” “We have a plan.”

President Obama has pledged federal loan support for construction of two nuclear power plants. While I am not supportive of federal subsidies (including tax breaks) for any energy sources (oil and gas, “green,” or nuclear) or of corporate welfare generally, I support the building of nuclear power plants on the grounds of reducing both pollution and dependence on (foreign) fossil fuels. In light of his past statements and the administration’s decision to kill the proposed storage site for spent fuel at Yucca Mountain, Nevada (reversing the policies of four previous administrations), I do not trust the President on this. I see it as a cheap political way to deflect from his opposition to the further development of domestic sources of fossil fuels. He knows that his environmentalist allies and state regulators will delay these projects, for the half-life of uranium, if possible. So, I am a skeptic until I see the projects built.

Roger Sowell of Sowell’s Law Blog discusses some downsides of nuclear power. He correctly points out the expense and the contribution to global warming from nuclear power through the release of hot water vapor due to the necessary reactor cooling process. As is well-known, water vapor is far more of a greenhouse gas than is CO2, and there is far more of it. I am not sure that Roger is ultimately against nuclear power (though he is an oil-and-gas man at heart), and his observations are valid. As a supporter of all types of efficient energy, including fossil fuels and nuclear, I place a significant part of the blame for expense at the irrational fears of environmentalists who have captured the regulatory apparati of, especially, the states. The licensing hurdles and delays tend to make such projects too cumbersome. Efforts need to be directed to lessen the pwoer of these environmentalist apparatchiks.

Regarding global warming from water vapor, I have two responses. One, I do not believe that these emissions will produce any more than some local warming. There are many heat island effects from human activity that do not translate into global warming. Second, and related, human activity is generally so insignificant compared to natural forces and planetary environmental balances that I would want to see much clearer evidence that the increase of water vapor discounted by the correlative decrease in production of other greenhouse gases will overload the system before restricting nuclear power on that basis. I would also want to see how the production of water vapor will not be cleared from the ecosystem fairly quickly through precipitation.

The President has been making the rounds preaching the virtues of spending within one’s income and saving for the future. If that sounds schizophrenic, it is, coming on the heels of his reckless budget. In making his point, Mr. Obama in effect dismissively refers to Las Vegas as a frivolous and wasteful use of money. This being his second such dismissive remark about Sin City, the reaction came forcefully. Even Harry Reid told Obama to knock it off. But it was Las Vegas mayor, Oscar Goodman, who was most forceful. Accusing Obama of having a psychological problem and being a slow learner, Goodman told Obama that he was not welcome in Las Vegas unless he straightened this matter put quickly. Ouch! And Goodman is not a Republican. Republicans don’t win political races in Vegas. The President caved quickly.

As the furor around the President’s nigh-on $4 trillion FY 2011 federal budget with its $1.5+ trillion deficit continues, it is important to keep in mind what is Mr. Obama’s fault and what is not. It is not Mr. Obama’s fault that the country is in a recession. Nor is it Mr. Obama’s fault that unemployment has gone up, or even that it has reached 10%, according to one measure (17%, according to another), different numbers according to yet others. Nor is it Mr. Obama’s fault that there is a broad asset devaluation that is eliminating froth, a devaluation that has both a short-term and a long-term component. Nor is this year’s (FY 2010) or next year’s (FY 2011) deficit entirely, or even mainly, the fault of Mr. Obama. Nor was last year’s (FY 2009).

With the disclaimers in favor of the President out of the way, let me be clear (to borrow a phrase from the press-anointed great orator) that I am not joining him in saying that those conditions therefore are the fault of his predecessor. Indeed, one aspect of Mr. Obama’s responsibility for the degree of current economic problems is his habit of blaming his predecessor rather than getting on with it. More about that later.

Still, Mr. Bush is to blame for some of the current misery. The increased federal funding for education and the drug prescription programs, along with other non-defense and non-national security items, enlarged the size of the federal budget significantly during his tenure. The tax cuts were not the problem, as they, predictably, increased federal revenue. Federal revenue, adjusted for inflation, did not go down; federal expenditures went up. Even the wars were essentially funded, with the FY 2007 deficit (pre-recession) dropping to around $160 billion. Many of us on the Right opposed Bush’s spending programs (even though the prescription plan ended up costing less than we had feared). As an aside, it is entirely unconvincing for Mr. Obama to rail about the fiscal irresponsibility of Bush’s prescription drug benefit when his own proposal is to expand it and to pay for that expansion in some undisclosed fashion. Adding to the budgetary strain of Bush’s compassionate conservatism was Congress’s profligate spending, including during 6 years of Republican hands on the spigot. Bush’s unwillingness, as a bargain for Congress’s support of his foreign and national security policies, to exercise his veto until the Democrats took over Congress in 2006 exacerbated the fiscal irresponsibility.

With the recession swinging into full force in 2008, deficits went up towards the end of FY 2008. Revenues dropped due to the slow down in economic activity and the financial panic, while federal spending increased, including the first portion of TARP loans to the banks. Still, the deficit at the end of FY 2008 was under $500 billion. With the economic inertia moving in the direction of recession, those deficits clearly would have increased, no matter whether Bush or McCain had been President in 2009, rather than Obama.

Looking at the recession itself, rather than the deficit, to the extent we are seeing the result of an unsustainable asset bubble, Bush is also partly to blame. So are Greenspan, Clinton, both Congressional delegations, and various bureaucracies, such as the SEC. On the deficit front once more, Bush, to his credit, tried to reform Social Security to bring its future costs under control, only to be demagogued by the Democrats and the media to the point where these people plus enough politically spineless Republicans (who typically lost their seats in 2006 and 2008 anyway—Chris Shays, are you listening?) derailed his proposals.

On the asset front, Bush and members of his administration many times warned about the problem of sub-prime loans, especially those under laws to pressure banks into lending to increase home ownership among poor and certain racial minority home buyers to purchase houses. His administration also warned about murky derivatives and the banks’ purchases of such investments. His proposal to curb these practices did not make it out of committee in the Senate due to loud wailing by Congressman Barney Frank (who, contrary to more recent posturing, was oblivious at the time to the dangers of over-leveraging) and officers of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (including well-paid Democrats). Then there was the filibuster threat from the Democrats (who controlled well more than 40 votes) against legislation to curb these practices that Frank and others described as “not broken.” Perhaps Bush should have used more political capital to push this matter along, but his eyes were on national security and the obstructions and attacks from the Democrats and the media on that front. Still, he does bear some responsibility for the failure to address these excesses more resolutely and successfully.

Greenspan’s role in artificially keeping interest rates too low, opening the spigots, cheapening the dollar, and driving investors to more and more speculative risk-taking (fueled by government participation through programs that reduced the risk of failure) is well-known. Plentiful dollars were looking for safety in commodities, starting with real estate, including investments in riskier and riskier loans. The bundling and securitization of these loans, together with the opacity of these bundles that might contain mixes of solid and risky loans in unknown ratios, contributed to the uncertainty about bank holdings that helped trigger and sustain the panic of 2007-2009. Eventually the limits of plausible real estate investments were passed and capital looked for other commodity havens, from gold to oil to rice. Commodity prices soared, with speculation in oil contracts fueling a huge spike in energy costs. That asset bubble, too, contributed both to the dollar inflation and the self-reinforcing cycle of commodity fever, and eventually helped cause the economic bust as many of those speculative positions had to be liquidated and the froth wrung out.

These economic trends are well beyond the power of any President to control and direct. To blame Bush or Obama is ridiculous. If any single institution were blameworthy, it would be the Congress, which, after all, is constitutionally and politically responsible for taxing and spending decisions. But even Congress by itself did not cause these conditions. Nor can Congress control them.

However, the President and the Congress can mitigate or exacerbate these conditions. For that, Mr. Obama and the current Congress bear much blame. Although I was inclined against the TARP law, I could see the argument for it. Obama likes to portray the cost of TARP as a Bush-caused deficit issue. But, first, the TARP was a loan program, much of which has been repaid during Obama’s administration. So, this should help his current deficit numbers. The problem is that Obama wants to spend these funds on other programs, so they contribute to the deficit once more. Second, Bush only signed off on the first half of the authorized TARP funds; Obama signed off on the second half. He did not have to do this. That decision is his responsibility and, to the extent that he argues the entire FY 2009 deficit should be assigned to Bush, this is deceptive.

Moreover, the “stimulus” that supposedly has saved and created so many jobs (but in fact has done so mainly for government jobs) was an Obama decision. As were the 2009 bail-outs of automakers. These aspects of the deficit clearly belong to Obama. Since the government no longer tries to figure out the impossible task of computing the number of jobs saved/created by the stimulus, but says that any jobs for which such money went automatically were saved/created, it is difficult to say what real impact the stimulus had on joblessness. The broader consensus outside the White House is that it has had little or no impact. As well, there is a negative effect of the stimulus on jobs. The need to borrow the funds for the stimulus crowds out private access to credit that might have saved those jobs. If the government is simply monetizing these costs, the bill will come due through inflation or taxes, the latter of which especially are job killers.

That brings me to the crux of the blame Obama must take. His radical programs reduce incentive for private capital to come in and take risks for job-creating expansion rather than sit on the sideline and invest in safety (gold prices have shot up) or by bidding up stocks to dubious price-earnings levels. His class-warfare tax rhetoric, the massive and radical collection of entitlement spending proposals (health care, student loans), the looming cap-and-tax regulations, the radical bureaucrats he has appointed (such the head of the off-the-rails EPA), the take-over of—and meddling in—car companies, the faux-populist attacks on banks and Wall Street, all spook investors and discourage risk-taking.

If I am a truly wealthy person, and I am threatened with higher taxes, I park my wealth in low- or no-tax investments (e.g., municipal bonds) or figure out tax avoidance devices. If I have to work because I own a business, I will squeeze my employees for at least some of the additional cost, by lowering their compensation/benefits, by firing some and having the others work more, or by moving more of my business out of the U.S. If the workers don’t like it, they can quit, and I will replace them with unemployed workers at the lower price. None of these things will increase jobs or, in the aggregate, help the economy. People are not passive, and history shows this to be the expected reaction. It happened in the late-1930s in response to FDR’s class warfare rhetoric and his tax and regulatory policies. Unemployment actually increased and did not come down significantly until the labor shortages created by WW II took care of it.

With lower economic activity induced by Mr. Obama’s rhetoric and proposals, and with the cost of these programs, no wonder that the deficits stretch out as far as projections are made. His spending proposals, unlike the temporary expenditures on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that Mr. Obama likes to blame, create structural deficits. They impose continuing and increasing costs. Worse, those expenditures, and his regulatory proposals, suppress economic growth, the very thing that might allow him to finance at least some of the anticipated growth in the cost of existing programs, such as Medicare. They do that by requiring government either to raise taxes, thereby reducing investment, if taxes are targeted at the rich, or depressing consumption, if taxes are targeted at the middle class. Alternatively, the government can borrow, thereby raising the cost of credit for private institutions competing with the government for loans and again reducing investment. Finally, the government can print money and create inflation, thereby creating great uncertainty about the value and stability of investments made now and also raising the cost of credit.

So, while Mr. Obama cannot be blamed for the recession and for all of the deficit, he (and the equally radical leadership in Congress) can be held accountable for the lingering joblessness and for increasing proportions of the deficits. Those are, even now, exacerbated by the economic fear and uncertainty created by his own radical agenda and his destructive and partisan class warfare rhetoric and tax proposals. It is ridiculous to blame his predecessor when his own projected deficits, in its best years, exceed his predecessor’s deficits in his worst year. With each passing month, his excuses become more laughable. Voters are getting that message better than, apparently, he is. His whining and attempts to deflect from his responsibility arising from his own proposals are backfiring.

Mr. Obama did inherit a recession; he did inherit a deficit, just as Mr. Bush inherited the collapsing NASDAQ and, to a lesser extent, Dow Jones, with the economic slow-down of 2001. Obama’s advisers and supporters are right in saying that the deficits and the recession would have been here no matter who was President. But they are wrong in not accepting that it is Mr. Obama who is prolonging and exacerbating the condition.

From Investor’s Business Daily comes Michael Ramirez’s impression of Mr. Obama:

I realize that federal hiring is booming. I also realize that the new administration has to replace lots of Bush administration officials with hires who reflect the composition of the Obama administration’s political coalition. Still, it is at least a bit odd that the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division would be making special efforts to hire these previously underrepresented groups: “The Civil Rights Division encourages qualified applicants with targeted disabilities to apply. Targeted disabilities are deafness, blindness, missing extremities, partial or complete paralysis, convulsive disorder, mental retardation, mental illness, severe distortion of limbs and/or spine.”

“Mental retardation?” “Mental illness?” That does explain many of the recent decisions of Attorney General Holder regarding national security issues. Why is the Civil Rights Division allowed to use the “r”-word, while Rahm Emanuel is not?

In the SOTU speech, President Obama touted the wonders that the stimulus package has done to create or save jobs. Never mind that such estimates, especially of jobs “saved,” are difficult to make. Never mind also that the great majority of such jobs went to public employees with powerful unions that contribute to Democrats, such as teachers, police officers, and fire fighters. Never mind also that, once the stimulus ends, such jobs presumably will disappear, as well, unless the government plans on many years of subsidized jobs. Never mind also that each such artificially maintained job has to be paid for by taxes (thereby reducing investment and capital formation and, ultimately, inhibiting job creation) or by borrowing (thereby crowding out private borrowers and inhibiting job creation).

Focus instead on the sheer waste of funds for the number of private jobs supposedly created. Focus also on the political corruption and cronyism that attends government hand-outs. Gateway Pundit links to a story about the company to which Obama was referring. According to the story, based on publicly available information, they created 15 jobs in 2009 and plan to create 27 more in 2010. For a price tag of “only” $100 million. The money may not all be for this company’s jobs; the story is a bit hazy on that point. But even if the company only gets some of the money and its subsidiaries get the rest, 42 jobs even for a small fraction of $100 million is ridiculous. But the reason for this extravagance is easy to uncover. The company’s owner is a heavy contributor to Democrats and sat with Michelle Obama at the SOTU. Just another average Joe trying to make a living and having his failing business and despondent workers rescued by the taxpayers beneficent federal government.

This is Sarah Palin’s tremendous response to the SOTU speech. Again and again she lays bare the empty rhetoric and the generally meaningless content of the speech. The GOP should have let her give the response. An excerpt:

“Everything seems to be ‘unexpected’ to this administration: unexpected job losses; unexpected housing numbers; unexpected political losses in Massachusetts, Virginia, and New Jersey. True leaders lead best when confronted with the unexpected. But instead of leading us, the president lectured us. He lectured Wall Street; he lectured Main Street; he lectured Congress; he even lectured our Supreme Court Justices.
“He criticized politicians who ‘wage a perpetual campaign,’ but he gave a campaign speech instead of a state of the union address. The campaign is over, and President Obama now has something that candidate Obama never had: an actual track record in office. We now can see the failed policies behind the flowery words. If Americans feel as cynical as the president suggests, perhaps it’s because the audacity of his recycled rhetoric no longer inspires hope.”

Via Gateway Pundit comes Rush Limbaugh’s speech to Mr. Obama.

Here is the Republican response by Virginia governor Bob McDonnell. On health care:
“All Americans agree, we need a health care system that is affordable, accessible, and high quality. But most Americans do not want to turn over the best medical care system in the world to the federal government. Republicans in Congress have offered legislation to reform healthcare, without shifting Medicaid costs to the states, without cutting Medicare, and without raising your taxes. We will do that by implementing common sense reforms, like letting families and businesses buy health insurance policies across state lines, and ending frivolous lawsuits against doctors and hospitals that drive up the cost of your healthcare. And our solutions aren’t thousand-page bills that no one has fully read, after being crafted behind closed doors with special interests.”

On the role of government:
“Many Americans are concerned about this Administration’s efforts to exert greater control over car companies, banks, energy and health care. Over-regulating employers won’t create more employment; overtaxing investors won’t foster more investment. Top-down one-size fits all decision making should not replace the personal choices of free people in a free market, nor undermine the proper role of state and local governments in our system of federalism. As our Founders clearly stated, and we Governors understand, government closest to the people governs best.”

Re: the SOTU speech, here is Victor Davis Hanson with a spot-on dissection of this trite and infuriating performance.

Alex Castellanos on the lack of substance beyond the platitudes.

Former intelligence agent and speech writer Marc Thiessen goes beyond the same criticisms others have made. Excerpt:

“He scolded Scott Brown (without mentioning his name) and all those who have criticized his handling of the Christmas Day bomber, declaring that ‘all of us love this country’ and warning critics to ‘put aside the schoolyard taunts about who is tough.’ If you disagree with Obama’s policies, you are questioning his patriotism. Imagine what the reaction would have been if Bush had tried that in a State of the Union with those who criticized the surge in Iraq. The howls of the liberal media would have been deafening.
“His one moment of ‘humility’ came when he acknowledged his biggest mistake of the past year: his failure to adequately explain his policies to all of us. This was a State of the Union for the slow learners. His message to all of us was: ‘Let me speak slowly for you.’”

I must say that I am taken aback by Obama’s State of the Union speech. With rare exceptions, this has to be the most classless, arrogant, petulant, nasty, partisan, hypocritical, defensive, unpresidential pile of, ahem, words ever uttered in this context. When combined with the trademark aloofness and upturned chin, its arrogance is at once more pronounced and more chilling. Leaving aside the substance of proposals, there is no way that any of his four predecessors would have delivered that kind of speech. There were, as expected, the more than 100 self-reverential references to “I,” “me,” or “my.” Fine. There were the usual repeated castings of blame on the Bush administration, with only one brief and unconvincing admission of any responsibility of his own. Some of these came just about the time he was declaring that he was uninterested in relitigating the past. We’ve come to expect that kind of buck-passing, as well, and it is less and less politically effective.

But then there were the more outrageous aspects of the speech, spoken by someone who seemed quite annoyed that his wishes had not been heeded. There were the false appeals to bi-partisanship, as he vigorously attacked the previous administration and conservatives, and as he told Democrats to stay the course and follow him, while Republicans should join them or, with their Congressional minorities, present their own proposals (which, of course, they have and plan to do again soon, according to Senator Tom Coburn and Representative Paul Ryan).

Then there were the lies and deceptions about spending and the deficit, as the CBO reports make clear. The bald-faced deceptions about the administration’s so-called transparency and restrictions on lobbyists. The calls for more government spending. The tax incentives for college students to do “public interest” work, i.e., community organizing and such, rather than productive work that really provides a public service (such as providing someone a job). The deceptive tax proposals that will continue to stifle economic growth.

Then there was the unprecedented and gratuitous rhetorical drive-by attack on the Supreme Court, while six of the justices were sitting there, an attack applauded by the Democratic legislators and bureaucratic hacks sitting nearby. Obama attacked the justices over the campaign finance decision, and managed to make two misstatements in just one sentence. He was wrong about the age of the precedent (20 years, not 100) and about the foreign corporations campaign contributions (though Obama got a lot of eyebrow-raising contributions from Nigerians in 2008). Since he was touted as a constitutional law expert, he must know these accusations to be false. Ergo, he lied. Justice Alito mouthed that Obama’s statements weren’t true. Good for him. I suspect there will be far fewer, if any, Supreme Court Justices at the next SOTU speech. BTW, Obama ignored the McCain-Feingold public funding/campaign spending limits in his run for the Presidency.

His discussion of national security issues was by turns off-base (Iraq), perfunctory (domestic security), deceptive (”torture”), non-existent (KSM, interrogations), insulting (moral equivalency of U.S. and Iran re: possession of nuclear weapons), and delusional (isolation of North Korea and Iran).

His condescension at times was palpable, as when he chided himself for not having explained his programs adequately (and slowly enough) for the American people. This after an unprecedented number of televised speeches, speeches before Congress, speeches around the country, and media interviews. We’re just too dumb to get it.

The only redeeming moments were his surprising calls for nuclear energy and offshore drilling and his uplifting closing. The former was probably made under the safe assumption that Pelosi and Co. are in the back pockets of the enviros and will never accede to that. The latter is diminished by the rest of the speech.

Here is a text of the speech released by the White House.

The speech went in excess of an hour. Why do Democrats talk so much?

For those of us who tend to be cautiously optimistic about the human condition and about the future, reading this article is a rather bracing experience, like a bucket of cold water. Just about every paragraph contains an item of bad news. Politically speaking, the bad news falls mainly on the Democrats, which may mean good news in the longer run for the country. But, however much Schadenfreude one might enjoy over the predicament of the Obama/Reid/Pelosi gang, they’re just politicians who are (other than the potential ego-deflating electoral defeat) rather insulated from the plague they visit on the rest of us. And therein lies the problem. To produce political misery for the Democrats, the rest of us have to suffer economically and in the ways we run our everyday lives. After all, the disaster that is Obama/Reid/PelosiCare will affect us in a concrete way, to the detriment of our economic and personal well-being. I’d rather the country be spared this misery, even if it meant that the political reckoning for the inevitable overreaching by the Democrats is postponed a few years.

I found Barack Obama’s evasive response to Diane Sawyer’s question about being a one-term president rather telling. I don’t think that he will forego another run, and I still think he will be re-elected, though the odds have come down from 90% to about 60% in the last several months. But I think that he is not enjoying the job. Being President is different from running for the position. With his agenda in disarray, he appears more detached than ever.

Democrats have tried to take solace in odd explanations for the Massachusetts Miracle. Usually, it’s Coakley as the bad candidate, voter “anger” at government, or the bad economy. President Obama opted for the second, even throwing in his usual tired theme of blaming President Bush. In this article, Charles Krauthammer, analyzing polling results, focuses on the most direct cause in voters’ minds, Obama/Reid/PelosiCare. Krauthammer cleverly punctures the President’s illusions: “Let’s get this straight: The antipathy to George W. Bush is so enduring and powerful that . . . it just elected a Republican senator in Massachusetts? Why, the man is omnipotent.”

On the topic of the voters’ discontent, Krauthammer correctly fixes the target, or, rather, targets, all explicitly raised by Scott Brown in the campaign, led by opposition to Obama/Reid/PelosiCare.

“And the Democrats are delusional: Scott Brown won by running against Obama, not against Bush. He won by brilliantly nationalizing the race, running hard against the Obama agenda, most notably Obamacare. Killing it was his No. 1 campaign promise.
Bull’s-eye. An astonishing 56 percent of Massachusetts voters, according to Rasmussen, called health care their top issue. In a Fabrizio, McLaughlin, & Associates poll, 78 percent of Brown voters said their vote was intended to stop Obamacare. Only a quarter of all voters in the Rasmussen poll cited the economy as their top issue, nicely refuting the Democratic view that Massachusetts was just the usual anti-incumbent resentment you expect in bad economic times.
Brown ran on a very specific, very clear agenda. Stop health care. Don’t Mirandize terrorists. Don’t raise taxes; cut them. And no more secret backroom deals with special interests.”

Why were the Democrats surprised by the result in Massachusetts after the losses in Virginia and New Jersey? “The reason both wings of American liberalism — congressional and mainstream media — were so surprised at the force of anti-Democratic sentiment is that they’d spent Obama’s first year either ignoring or disdaining the clear early signs of resistance: the tea-party movement of the spring and the town-hall meetings of the summer. With characteristic condescension, they contemptuously dismissed the protests as the mere excrescences of a redneck, retrograde, probably racist rabble.”

Why, then, do they continue to make the same mistakes? Until November, 2010, one hopes? “Democrats must so rationalize, otherwise they must take democracy seriously, and ask themselves: If the people really don’t want it, could they possibly have a point?”

Fortunately for conservatives, based on the people I know, most liberals are not truly “liberal” and most Democrats are far from democratic.

Via Rich Lowry at National Review Online’s “The Corner” comes this bit of Obama nostalgia from a year ago: “Obama hopes to avoid Clinton health care missteps.” Hah!

Some excellent parts that sound like parodies: “The strategy begins with giving people the chance to highlight their concerns and experiences….By asking anybody and everybody to share their health care experiences, Daschle is confronting one of the major criticisms of 15 years ago: that the effort to craft former President Bill Clinton’s plan for universal coverage was too secretive. ‘We have to make this as inclusive a process as possible,’ Daschle…said in a speech in Denver.”

“He cited other lessons, too. This time around, lawmakers cannot try to address every detail when it comes to legislation. ‘Details kill,’ Daschle said. ‘If we get too far into the weeds, if we produce a 1,500- or 1,600-page bill, we’re going to get hung up on all the details and we’re never going to get to the principles.’ [Note: They listened to Daschle; they didn’t produce a 1500-page bill; it was a 2000-page bill.] Once Congress does take up a health plan, it also can’t divert attention to other subjects, he said.”

“But the insurers want to require that people buy insurance, while Obama only supports a coverage mandate for children.”

Does it seem to anyone else that they did not follow that plan?

Meanwhile, from Nancy Pelosi: “I don’t have the votes for it at this time.”

Not clear whether this headline is an endorsement or just an expert’s opinion: Barney Frank: Martha Coakley is not Barack Obama in drag. Either way, if I were Barney I’d be less casual about throwing around the phrase “in drag.”

I previously mentioned the desperation that has engulfed Massachusetts Democrats as they now appear to be in real danger of losing the Massachusetts Senate election. Republican Scott Brown has now taken the lead (60-40 at the latest) on the usually very accurate Intrade political handicapping site. The numbers are not vote percentages, but reflect the likelihood of victory or defeat. Evidence for that desperation is concern in the White House that has prompted the last-minute visit of President Obama to Massachusetts. There, Obama attacked Scott Brown, but then admitted he knew nothing about Brown’s policy positions. No longer the careful concern about facts before making charges about the suspects that the President exhibited when responding to the Fort Hood shooting and the attempted airliner attack by the crotchbomber. The President appears to be attacking Brown repeatedly for driving an older truck. That is politically tone-deaf, as it confirms the elitism that Obama, Martha Coakley, and the Democratic Party increasingly represent to many voters.

A further sign of the desperation is this Democratic Party ad accusing Scott Brown of wanting hospitals to turn away all rape victims. The reason? He supports freedom of conscience provisions for health personnel regarding birth control and abortions. That would be the same protections that Ted Kennedy assured the Pope in a letter would be provided for Catholics: “I believe in a conscience protection for Catholics in the health field and I’ll continue to advocate for it as my colleagues in the Senate and I work to develop an overall national health policy that guarantees health care for everyone.” Coakley appears to be more radical than Ted Kennedy, if one can imagine such a thing within a supposedly mainstream political party.

That also would be the same kind of protection that President Obama claims he supports and has guaranteed would be available in any federal support for abortion. That also would be the same kind of protection supporters of same-sex marriage claim would be available for religious institutions that don’t want to perform same-sex marriages. Conservatives have scoffed at those assurances. I have thought that those assurances were in good faith. I seem to have been mistaken in that belief.

Meanwhile, according to the N.Y. Times, former Democratic Senator and presidential candidate Bob Kerrey (no relation to the Massachusetts Senator and 2004 presidential nominee John F. Kerry) has made the bizarre accusation that Brown does not believe in evolution. Brown’s spokesman responded with a classic: “Scott Brown believes in evolution but in the case of Bob Kerrey he’s willing to make an exception.”

Then there is more demonstration of the out-of-touch political ineptness of Martha Coakley. Calling Boston Red Sox All-Star pitching legend Curt Schilling a “[New York] Yankees fan”? That remark came after taking a swipe at ice hockey fans lined up to see a Boston Bruins game. If her other inept comments don’t doom her campaign, rabid Boston sports fans are not going to look past these statements as further evidence of Coakley’s elitism. 

Charlie Cook came out with a special edition of his report that confirms the Intrade movement in Brown’s direction. The report summarizes the dramatic movement in the race as voters began to focus on the candidates and as the health care debate simmered in Washington. As an aside, the L.A. Times today speculated about the Massachusetts voters voicing a referendum on President Obama and his health care (and other domestic) policies. Cook’s report moved the race from solid Democratic in December to leaning Democratic on January 7 to toss-up on January 14. Today, he considers it toss-up in the sense that there are many variables that make state races, especially in special elections, difficult to call. But he says that it is a toss-up with a finger on the scale in favor of Brown that he believes will hold up on election day.

UPDATE: Intrade is now at 65-35 Brown over Coakley.

UPDATE #2: Rothenberg Political Reports (a Democratic polling firm) has moved the race from Toss-up to Leaning Take-over.

UPDATE #3: Pro-Brown trends based on an average of polls, including Democratic polls.

Massachusetts state attorney general Martha Coakley is the Democratic nominee to fill the Senate seat left open when Ted Kennedy died. The governor appointed an interim placeholder, who is not running for the seat. Coakley’s Republican opponent is state senator Scott Brown. Massachusetts has not elected a Republican Senator since Edward Brooke in 1972. Brooke, incidentally, was the first popularly-elected Senator of African ancestry.

Massachusetts, it is safe to say, is an exceedingly Democratic state, where Democrats outnumber Republicans three-to-one, though there also are independents. Coakley, who has the full backing of the Democratic establishment, should be able to win in a cake-walk. That may have been her thinking, as well, so she tried to avoid debating her opponent. Initial polls showed her ahead comfortably, as would be expected in a state where the Democrat typically starts with a 20-30 point advantage.

That has changed, and dramatically so. The polls are very close, with one of the most recent showing a 4-point Brown lead, barely still within the margin of error. The response of the Democrats has been panic. They have launched a series of bizarre attack ads, such as this gem from New York’s ever-classy Senator Chuckie Schumer. They have tried to seize the high ground of bathos by making this a race about keeping “Teddy’s seat” in Democratic hands. This tactic was aided and abetted by a question posed to Scott Brown by David Gergen at a debate. Brown hit the pitch out of the park by reminding viewers that the seat was not the Kennedys’ nor the Democrats’, but the people’s. While it may have been a bit over-dramatic, the retort gained Brown a lot of press and torpedoed the Democrats’ tactic.

Coakley has tried to go on the offensive, but has only succeeded in shooting herself in the foot. She has run an inept campaign and shown herself to be an empty suit to a degree that is impressive even for Massachusetts Democrats. She seems to have learned the art of the gaffe from the genre’s master, Vice-President Biden. Powerlineblog has begun a feature, Quotations from Chairman Martha. One of Coakley’s TV ads misspelled the state’s name. She said that Catholics opposed to birth control can exercise their freedom of religion by not working in emergency rooms. In an answer to a question about her foreign policy experience, she said that she has a sister who lives overseas and even has travelled to the Middle East, and that she (Martha) , too, has travelled abroad. On the last, I seem to recall the press and pundits, not to mention the “comedians,” having a field day with Sarah Palin’s statement that one can see Russia from Alaska (not the Tina Fey version). Though there is considerable interest in the Massachusetts race, there has been no similar coverage of Coakley’s response. Odd thing, that.

Having finally deigned to debate Brown (as her lead began to shrink), she said that she wanted all troops home from Afghanistan because there were no longer any terrorists in that country. That was particularly bizarre, given that ten days earlier eight CIA agents were killed in Afghanistan by a terrorist homicide bomber. And if, by her remark, she was claiming instead that the Taliban were gone from Afghanistan, she obviously hasn’t listened to President Obama or read the newspapers in the last six months. Say, maybe the press could ask her what newspapers she reads, as they did Sarah Palin. No, I’m not holding my breath, either. Now, the Democrats likely will hold the seat, despite Coakley’s incompetence and ignorance. But the mere fact that there is a credible opponent and that the Democrats have to work so hard to retain the seat, speaks volumes.

The over-the-top attacks on Scott Brown have one benefit. They have given rise to good politically conservative satire. Such as this: The next Martha Coakley attack ad. One word that one never utters in polite company around the many college campuses in the state is featured prominently. The very utterance of it causes women to scream, children to huddle fearfully, and dogs that don’t fit in purses to snarl. That word is “Republican.”

And there is the ever dependable Iowahawk who has decided to join the fun and prepare his own anti-Brown ad. He has also succeeded in getting his alcohol-fueled readers to come up with their own creations, a couple or so of which actually are funny. Iowahawk predicts, “If — God forbid — Brown wins, he will be the first Republican elected in the state since Cotton Mather, and America will soon descend into a post-apocalyptic fundamentalist hellscape of witch trials and cross-burnings, interrupted only by the ritual mass bulldozing of corpses killed by lack of access to affordable health care. Not to mention relaxed federal fuel efficiency standards!” He means this reaction among Democrats as a joke. I know better; I work at a (redundancy alert) liberal law school.

The one quote from Martha Coakley that actually has some heft comes from one of her fundraising appeals: “If I don’t win, 2010 is going to be hell for Democrats….Every Democrat will have a competitive race.” From your lips to God’s ear, Martha.

I can’t believe it myself. After mulling this over driving to work the morning I heard about it, I concluded that I just do not understand the fuss about Senator Reid’s description of candidate Barack Obama and his electability, as reported from the book “Game Change.” According to the book,

He (Reid) was wowed by Obama’s oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama - a “light-skinned” African American “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,” as he later put it privately.

Reid has been raked over the coals for this remark and has apologized repeatedly to Obama and to whoever else would listen. Some excitable conservative commentators and politicians, sensing an opportunity for political payback for past hysterical claims of racism by cynical and sanctimonious Democrats over the slightest misstep by a conservative figure, piled on.

Now, to establish some bona fides: I fully agree that, in general, anything that embarrasses Harry Reid is good. As is payback for the hypocrisy of Democrats for their absurd theatrical claims of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc., against conservatives. I also understand the desire to teach liberals a lesson for their habit of playing six degrees of separation from racism for perfectly innocuous remarks by conservatives that get twisted in bizarre Orwellian ways to mean something entirely different from anything a rational person would have understood them to mean. I, too, find contemptible the liberal penchant to equate criticism of President Obama and his policies and ideological stands with racism. And then there is the not-so-small matter of the double standard under which conservatives toil. Conservative remarks, even if distorted, send the media and the racial grievance peddlers into a frenzy of feigned outrage and hurt that even abject apologies by the speaker, bewildered about the racism attributed to him for an off-hand innocent comment, cannot abate. Not so for liberals. Their remarks usually pass, barely reported. If they are sufficiently blatant to trigger a response, a perfunctory apology for “carelessly-worded remarks that, taken out of context, might be misinterpreted and cause hurt” will bring prompt absolution. Not for them the wearing of the hair shirt.

All of that is understood as facts of life in the United States of the past quarter century. Still I cannot for the life of me see any racism in Harry Reid’s remarks. Perhaps it is that I am not of the referenced racial identity, but I don’t even see the words as objectionable, just descriptive. His choice of the word “Negro” may be out-dated. But the remark is no more super-annuated than the speaker himself. He was using a term that was used in Reid’s formative years as the then-appropriate appellation in a long line of ever-changing “proper” terms to describe Americans of African ancestry. Perhaps he might have updated his language to comport with current fashion, but that failure to do so hardly makes Reid (or his remarks) racist.

Maybe the problem here is the supernova of the word “racism” over the past four decades. According to the dictionary (well, one from twenty years ago), “racism” means a belief in the superiority of one’s ethnic or racial group over others. But for some, racism has taken on a politicized all-encompassing meaning reserved for the conscious or subconscious states of mind of Whites. This approach is particularly to be found among the hypersensitive members of certain identity groups who see life through the lens of race and ethnicity and their White enablers, with both collections of culprits often found in university environs and in educational bureaucracies. The term is also useful for liberals as an all-purpose emotional response in any disputation with a conservative to characterize the latter’s thoughts and words when liberal talking points have failed to silence that conservative.

But hewing to the accepted meaning of the word, Harry Reid is not racist. At least not based on those remarks. He is supporting Obama and believes that the American voters are ready to accept a Black candidate. Of course, Reid turned out to be correct. His reasons are also astute. People as a whole would not vote for Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson as readily because of their heavier “Black” accents. Actually, Sharpton’s accent is rather light; but voters see him for what he is, an unsavory race hustler. For that matter, liberals made fun of Sarah Palin’s nasal Midwestern-style twang, yet another way in which she managed to annoy them, you betcha.

Voters likely would also consider a heavy New York accent as a detriment (see Al Smith in 1928) or, less negatively, a heavy Southern accent. National candidates try to adopt a rather bland American speech tone in general, though they may revert to their regional patois when the political occasion demands. Hillary Clinton was ridiculed for that in the primaries, when she rediscovered her Southern voice during forays across the Mason-Dixon line. Of course, being a Clinton, Hill overplayed her hand and tried to affect Black speech patterns during appearances before Black audiences.

The “Sage of South Central,” columnist and radio commentator Larry Elder has expressed similar bewilderment:

“‘Light-skinned’? Didn’t black director Spike Lee do a film, ‘School Daze,’ about how light-skinned fraternity students considered themselves more appealing than their dark-skinned counterparts?
“‘Negro’? The term is on this year’s census. What about the United Negro College Fund?
“‘No Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one’? Last January, National Public Radio interviewed black Obama supporter and linguistics professor John McWhorter. He said: ‘(Obama) is a very bidialectal person. … He can talk in a way where you would not know that he was black over the phone. … But then, especially when he talks to a black audience, he can sound quite a bit like (Martin Luther King colleague) Rev. Lowry sounded at the inauguration.’”

Poet and playwright Stanley Crouch provides some historical context for his own embrace of the word “Negro.”

By all means, Republicans should pay a lot of attention to Reid’s seat and select a strong candidate to retire Reid by exploiting his political weakness in his home state. Hammer away at Reid’s corrupt real estate deals. Bring in a passionate speaker and engaging personality to contrast with Reid’s bland speech patterns and his dour and shifty-eyed demeanor. Tie Reid to Obama/Reid/PelosiCare so tightly they look like one. Reid should never be mentioned without a reference to Pelosi. But don’t undercut the force of the bigger issue by transparently bogus claims of racism that can only gain Reid sympathy and detract from the substance of the political message about what a shambles the Democrats under his leadership are making of this country.

Americans were witness last year to President Obama’s cult-like status among his acolytes. News stories of women fainting during his speeches, the sale of religious icons in the likeness of Mr. Obama, and the YouTube videos of children singing hymns (some with distinct religious imagery) to The One and of older youngsters doing marching/drill team routines with distinct military cadences in support to him were all-too-frequent occurrences. The observers seamlessly became one with the observed, as “journalists” who prided themselves (undeservedly, it turned out) on “speaking truth to power” turned into giddy school girls experiencing their first celebrity crushes.

Nor was this mania restricted to the U.S., as candidate Obama’s European tour showed. Indeed, those foreigners who see in the President a kindred spirit in their shared views of the United States are probably more infatuated with a persona whose concrete policy manifestations they need not endure as do Americans. And none are as likely to go 110% as the Germans, with their stereotypical thoroughness and their near-fanatical enthusiasm for those things American that they like.

So, it comes as no surprise that the Germans are staging “Hope,” a musical honoring Obama. Usually, personal musical tributes celebrate accomplishments, real (the opera “Nixon in China” comes to mind) or mythical (Wagner’s works, for example). But the American writer/composer and his German collaborators did not want to wait for something as pedestrian as a real accomplishment. With the Nobel Peace Prize committee setting a high bar of sycophancy and mindless adulation with its award based on a nomination at most ten days into Mr. Obama’s presidency, the musical’s creators had a tough act to follow. Worse, this is not the first Obama musical. That “honor” belongs to an English production, “Obama On My Mind.” As Mark Steyn notes in a nod to the musical Oklahoma, “Oooooo-bama, where the thrills come tingling down your leg.”

A good gauge of the political tenor of the piece is the description of Sarah Palin’s part: “Sarah Palin also has her own solo, surrounded by a troop of scantily clad dancers.” Doesn’t that just capture the essence of Sarah Palin’s values and policy positions and her appeal to the Republican base?

Don’t worry if you cannot get to Frankfurt to see this artistic masterpiece. There is talk of a future U.S. tour for “Hope.” The cynic suspects that this tour will happen sometime in 2012. By that time three years of the Obama administration will be in the books and, judging by the events of the first year, for many of us, that musical may be the only aspect of “Hope” left.

On a curiously coincidental matter of socialist realist “art,” there is news from Caracas, Venezuela, that Obama’s book club pal Hugo Chavez has “asked” Venezuelans to follow the example of his good friend and abrazo partner Fidel Castro’s Cuban workers’ paradise and make “socialist” soap operas. He has offered the assistance of the government’s own propaganda film-making center. No word whether Michael Moore is creative adviser.

I’m sure hordes of Venezuelans are eagerly awaiting programs about heroic socialist workers happily toiling with ideological commitment and without pay, braving capitalist-created storms, capitalist tarantulas, capitalist drug dealers, capitalist prostitutes, capitalist bosses who insist on paying you only for what you’ve earned, capitalist subversives spreading anti-revolutionary ideas such as freedom and personal initiative, all to bring in that record-breaking sugar crop to fund the export of Chavez’s and el lider’s glorious revolution to Latin America through the narco-terrorist FARC. But, since there is a distinct likelihood that government-approved socialist soap operas will lack the popular appeal of decadent capitalist-themed soap operas, Oogo has also offered government funding for the endeavor. Sounds like PBS, NPR, liberal talk radio and liberal cable TV shows. In funding and lack of market success, not just leftist ideology. Indeed, it describes the liberal vision of health care and all other human enterprise. Since that vision can’t compete on its own merits, it requires government funding. Only as an “option,” of course.

As was entirely predictable, last fiscal year’s political fix, with its paltry spending cuts, its tax increases, and its accounting gimmicks did nothing to address the real problems of the structural disaster that is the California budget. As was also entirely predictable, the deficits that are the inevitable product of California’s Democrat-dominated dysfunctional political system are, once more, making their annual appearance.

Many politicians, intellectuals, members of the scribblariate, and representatives from “good government” elites blame the current state of disrepair on the use of the popular initiative. These folks, who prefer a less robust democracy left in the hands of the supposedly more reflective legislators or, better yet, the unelected judiciary, believe that the fiscal mess is due to the voters’ approval over the years of initiatives that require various spending obligations without provisions for financing. For example, a certain percentage of the budget must go to education and to highways. There are numerous bonds and expenditures for pet projects such as stem cell research.

These are problems, to be sure. I vote against most bond indebtedness, especially if it does not directly contribute to infrastructure construction. For example, while I appreciate the service of veterans, I don’t believe that they or various public employees, such as law enforcement, fire fighters, or teachers should get tax breaks or loan benefits for life’s expenses. The critics have a point that such special interest group protections burden the California budget and prevent flexibility needed especially during economic downturns.

But those are not the only problems in California. Heavy reliance on a sales tax that is just shy of 10%, as well as a similar income tax rate in a system that relies heavily on taxing the upper middle and upper classes, make the California treasury especially vulnerable during economic downturns. Extremely generously paid public employees, especially those in law enforcement, prison guards, teachers, and fire fighters, put a strain on the budget. The pension obligations owed to many among those, usually as a result of the past political efforts of strong unions, are a particular drag as people retire early and draw on the system.

Those obligations are the result of political bargaining and influence, not popular initiatives. Of those that were approved through popular initiatives, such as the fiscally unconscionable feel-good protection of education spending, many were strongly supported by Democratic politicians and their public sector union allies. Complaints about voter profligacy and the call for restraints on popular initiatives, especially constitutional initiatives, sound hollow. One suspects that the elites are bothered less by popular votes that put spending mandates in place than by those, such as Proposition 8, that rein in radical judicial fantasies such as the sudden discovery by the California Supreme Court that the state constitution contains a right to same-sex marriage.

That suspicion is heightened when, in the teeth of a projected $20 billion deficit, the nominally Republican governor in his state-of-the-state speech addresses California’s fiscal woes by calling for a specific guarantee of spending for the state’s universities. Spending on universities must never be less than for prisons, he says. The plan envisions a minimum of 10% spending on universities, with prison spending eventually capped at 7%. That latter number will not hold, as the government will regularly scare the voters into voting more funds for prisons. But this gives the universities political cover for a safe-haven of funding that, once again locks the state into funding that diminishes budgetary flexibility. To add to the irony, Schwarzenegger proposes to add this fiscal millstone through a constitutional initiative to be placed before the voters.

The solution to California’s budgetary crisis is to cut spending on social welfare programs, flatten out the tax base to broaden taxpayer participation, eliminate the budgetary protections for education, radically revamp the delivery of education (including state-wide funding) that costs among the highest in the country yet delivers among the worst results, break the power of public sector employee unions, put the governor’s “green jobs” fantasies on ice, reduce taxes and business regulations (especially environmental) that hamper capital formation and job creation. In other words, what is needed is to take California out of the fantasy world of liberal ideology that blankets California politics. And that, I regret to say, will not happen until that corrosive world view turns California into much more of a failed economic state than it is even now.

I have posted several times over the past month or so about the political omens for the 2010 Congressional elections. Two strong measures of the political winds are switches in party affiliation by politicians and decisions of incumbents not to run for re-election. In 2006 and, to a lesser extent, in 2008, these measures fell heavily on Republicans, which foretold the electoral difficulties for the GOP. In 2009 and 2010, the winds have shifted and are threatening to swamp the Democrats. Following the Democratic losses in the 2009 off-year state and local elections (which, looked at broadly rather than at an individual race, also are a barometer of approaching political storms), there have been one Democrat who has switched to the GOP and several Democratic Representatives who have declined to run for re-election.

Now comes further such news. North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan has said that he will not seek re-election. Dorgan once was a left-leaning “prairie populist” in the tradition of many state politicians from the politically-schizophrenic Upper Midwest farm states that usually lean Republican, especially in national elections. He has tacked more to the political center and been consistently hailed in the press as a “moderate.” It is unclear, however, to what extent that shift is real and to what extent Dorgan has not changed but the ground has shifted under him through the Pelosi-Reid-Boxer-Obama lurch into leftist la-la-land.

Dorgan is 67 years old, which is not retirement age for Senators who are playing leading roles in the Senate as chairmen of committees involved in crafting major legislation. But he was facing a tough re-election fight, with polls showing him trailing in a contest against the popular governor of North Dakota, John Hoeven, who has won his last two elections with more than 70% of the vote. Moreover, Dorgan’s prominent role in crafting the Senate version of Obama/Reid/PelosiCare will make him an even more inviting target for Republican campaign ad barrages.

It is also likely, in that connection, that Dorgan has looked at the poll numbers of Nebraska’s Senator Ben Nelson, whom the media held up as a conservative, blue-dog Democrat. But, while the media and some conservative wishful thinkers emphasize the “blue-dog,” I prefer to emphasize the “Democrat,” especially when it comes to signature campaign promises by the Democratic standard bearer, President Obama, and the Democratic Congressional leadership. ”Blue dogs” will still vote as Democrats in sufficient numbers not to embarrass their leaders, especially this early in the President’s term. Nelson, predictably, caved after trying to cover himself with Nebraska voters by pulling a [Louisiana Senator] Mary Landrieu and getting a provision that taxpayers in other states will be subsidizing the increased Medicare costs for Nebraskans under the Senate health plan.

Still, Nelson’s poll numbers took a dive. They took such a dive, in fact, that Nelson bought airtime during the Holiday Bowl football game, in which the University of Nebraska was playing, to defend his vote on the bill. Polls showed him losing badly in a hypothetical match-up with the state’s Republican governor. The good news for Nelson is that he does not have to run until 2012, which is a long time in political terms, and will bring out more pro-Obama voters likely to vote for him than would the mid-terms. That said, it is difficult for a politician to recover from the low standing in which Nelson finds himself in a deeply Republican state. Moreover, the message here could not have been lost on Dorgan, who does have to run in 2010 in an only slightly less deep Republican state.

Then came the announcement by Connecticut’s Senator Christopher Dodd that he would not seek re-election. Dodd has been plagued by allegations of financial irregularities and suffers from a public perception of lack of honesty and trustworthiness. He was trailing his most likely Republican opponent, a former Congressman.

Having Dodd retire is a very smart move by the Democrats. Connecticut is a Democratic state. Not at the level of Massachusetts, California, or Maryland, but still solidly so. The Democrats have recruited the popular state attorney general to run, which, despite brave Republican talk to the contrary, likely means the Democrats will hold the seat. The Republicans made a similarly smart move by persuading Kentucky’s Republican Senator Jim Bunning not to run for re-election. Bunning, a strong conservative but not one of the sharpest blades in the drawer, was in serious danger of losing in a normally Republican-trending state even in a Republican year. With Bunning’s departure, the Republicans can fall back on the dynamics of recruiting an acceptable candidate (probably 37-year-old Secretary of State Trey Grayson, not Ron Paul’s son Rand) and the natural political leanings of the Kentucky voters combined with the anti-Democratic tides of the mid-term election to retain the seat even against relatively strong potential Democratic candidates such as a the lieutenant governor or the attorney general.

Then came news that Colorado’s Governor Bill Ritter will not seek re-election after just one term in office. Colorado is a swing state that had been trending more Democrat over the last several election cycles. Ritter is a telegenic politician and was considered a rising star in the Democratic Party. But he, too, was done in by low poll numbers and public antipathy to the Democrats. I see this, too, as a smart—and coordinated—political move by the Democrats. The Democrats also have a Senate seat to defend, with a weak incumbent, Michael Bennet, who was just appointed (by Ritter) to serve out the term of Ken Salazar, who, in turn, was appointed Interior Secretary by President Obama. By removing Ritter and replacing him with a better candidate, the Democrats remove the mutually reinforcing political drag of a governor with low poll numbers and a Senator with equally low numbers. Perhaps, from the Democrats’ perspective, the governorship can be saved. With some luck, this will energize enough Democrats to save the Senate seat, as well, although that is unlikely. Polls have consistently shown the likely Republican candidate, former Lt. Gov. Jane Norton, beating the Democrat.

But in this election, the governors’ races are probably more important that Senate races. The reason is the re-drawing of legislative district lines after the 2010 census. In most states, this is a political process, so the party in control of the state legislatures and governorships can use their political advantage to help entrench themselves over the next decade. With the success of the Republicans in state legislative and gubernatorial races in the 2009 off-year election, the warning flags are flying for the Democrats.

There are at least a couple of successful Democratic politicians who might be recruited to run for the Colorado governorship, the politically ambitious Denver mayor John Hickenlooper, and Ken Salazar. I would bet on the former, who is more likely to scheme to get the nomination, rather than the latter, who gave up a Senate seat for an executive position he’d have to surrender early in the President’s term. Hickenlooper’s main advantage is his position as mayor of the biggest city, with the media exposure and name recognition that brings. His main disadvantage is that he is the mayor of Denver, a place about which many Coloradans feel the same way as many Californians feel about San Francisco and Los Angeles. Combined. The Democrats are in serious trouble with the Senate seat in Colorado, but the Ritter announcement increases their chance of holding the governorship from likely loss to toss-up.

I think there will be more such announcements, either due to personal decisions by the Democratic incumbents or because of a concerted culling of the herd by Democratic Party operatives. The Obama administration can certainly do its part by promising to reward decisions by weak Democratic incumbents to step aside. A cushy executive branch appointment or diplomatic assignment can do wonders to salve the wounds suffered by political egos when they are pushed aside for the greater good of the party.

From rightwingnews.com comes this collection of the 40 best political quotes of 2009. Obviously, these are not selected by the usual media and entertainment pundits, whose fare tends to the more grandiloquent but substantively empty effusions from those of a decidedly more leftish tendency (though the master of empty grandiloquence in the White House merits a quote in the collection).

While it is difficult to choose, among my favorites are:

The ever dependable Charles Krauthammer:
“It’s hard to appreciate an entity’s leading role in the world when it’s been sucking on your tit for 60 years as Europe has with regard to the United States, parasitically.”

The cerebral Thomas Sowell, who has several stellar entries:
“Since this is an era when many people are concerned about ‘fairness’ and ’social justice,’ what is your ‘fair share’ of what someone else has worked for?”

The acerbic Ann Coulter, on what plagues much of U.S. culture:
“‘Diversity’ is a difficulty to be overcome, not an advantage to be sought. True, America does a better job than most at accommodating a diverse population. We also do a better job at curing cancer and containing pollution. But no one goes around mindlessly exclaiming: ‘Cancer is a strength!’ ‘Pollution is our greatest asset!’”

The semi-anonymous Robyn of Berkeley, who reflects on a fundamental truth known to Token Conservative:
“The Left has declared war on Palin because she threatens their existence. Liberals need women dependent and scared so that women, like blacks, will vote Democrat. ”

Even the “reach-across-the-aisle-to-my-Democratic-friends” John McCain:
“It seems to me that President Carter has earned his place as if not the worst president in history, the worst president of the 20th Century.”

Read ‘em and agree.

Last week, I posted about the drip-drip-drip of retirements of Democrats in vulnerable House districts in advance of the 2010 elections. Such retirements of members of the majority party from competitive districts, when otherwise unprompted by a decision to run for another office or advanced age, are usually a sign of political danger for that party and portray electoral vulnerability. I noted that the only clearer sign of electoral danger is when members of the majority party switch sides. That had not happened when I wrote those remarks.

Now it has. A vulnerable Democrat from an Alabama district has switched to the GOP. John McCain carried that district in 2008, and the Congressman won by a small percentage. It is highly likely that the district will go Republican next year. Freshman Congessmen typically are the most vulnerable of incumbents, for several reasons, such as electoral tides, fluke candidate pairings, and temporary local issues. Congressman Griffith has read the political tea leaves and decided, in inverse of an old advertising slogan, he’d rather switch than fight.

Posting has been a little slow lately due to a couple of things. For one, I have a stack of 120 essay exams that I have to grade within four weeks right around Christmas, but that is another story. The other is the planning for Christmas, a holiday that our family traditionally tries to make into a particularly occasion. Again, a topic for another day. I have graded about half the exams so I hope to be able to post with more frequency.

One topic that recently came up in Commentary magazine was why American Jews are so liberal, politically. Why Are Jews Liberals is also the title of a book by the late Norman Podhoretz, a conservative Jewish intellectual. Most of my Jewish acquaintances are rather conservative, but that may simply reflect sympathies born of broadly shared views among us, not the make-up of the greater collection of American Jews. Many of the older among my Jewish acquaintances, though sharing conservative values, long voted Democratic (if they don’t continue to do so). That paradox was captured in a sardonic comment made by a Jewish political observer years back that, every time Jews enter the polling station, they think Franklin Roosevelt is on the ballot. The point of the question is to ask why, when one might expect cultural and religious traditions to point Jews in a conservative direction at least to the same extent as with other mainstream successful groups within society, so many are liberal.

I hasten to note that to talk about Jews as a monolithic liberal political bloc misses the cultural texture of, and the fractures within, American Judaism. One would expect the Orthodox to behave differently than the Conservatives (a creation of American Judaism) and they than the Reform (steeped in Western European Social Democracy). Those latter two groups are much more politically liberal than are the Orthodox. Moreover, there is an unusually large percentage of atheists and religious agnostics among Jews compared to other people of other cultural and religious heritage. That, too, is likely to affect the overall pro-liberal bent, yet also underscore the internal variation of political beliefs among Jews.

Another explanation for Jews’ overall political liberalism is their historical position as outsiders, a self-perception that continues even as Jews have flourished and become an important and integral part of the social, cultural, political, and economic fabric of the most tolerant society in which they have dwelt. The sense of being outsiders may simply be the product of ingrained cultural attitudes that have resulted from centuries of at most grudging acceptance by those around them in the “old countries.” Or, it may be a kind of badge of identity that no longer reflects reality and has outlived its usefulness, yet still provides a kind of tribal cohesiveness for a minority whose identity is threatened by the very success it has achieved in the broader American society.

And other explanations abound. The afore-mentioned Commentary article collects the views of several well-known American Jewish commentators, generally of conservative political view. I find them all intriguing but none more so than Michael Medved’s disturbing view that American Jewish liberalism mostly reflects a suspicion of, and intolerance towards, Christianity. The more Christian a politician is viewed, the more Jews are suspicious of him or her. The fact that Christians are the most reliable supporters of Israel matters not. As Medved points out,

“This political pattern reflects the fact that opposition to Christianity—not love for Judaism, Jews, or Israel—remains the sole unifying element in an increasingly fractious and secularized community. The old (and never fully realized) dream that Zionist fervor could weave together all the various ideological and cultural strands of American Jewry looks increasingly irrelevant and simplistic. In an era of budget plane flights and elegantly organized tours, more than 75 percent of American Jews have never bothered to visit Israel. The majority give nothing to Israel-related charities and shun synagogue or temple membership. The contrasting components of the American Jewish population connect only through a point of common denial, not through any acts of affirmation.”

Medved points out the greater hostility among Jews towards Christianity than towards any other group, some of whom pose an existential threat to Jews (or at least to Israel) today. “Anyone who doubts that rejection of Jesus has replaced acceptance of Torah (or commitment to Israel) as the eekur sach—the essential element—of American Jewish identity should pause to consider an uncomfortable question. What is the one political or religious position that makes a Jew utterly unwelcome in the organized community? We accept atheist Jews, Buddhist Jews, pro-Palestinian Jews, Communist Jews, homosexual Jews, and even sanction Hindu-Jewish meditation societies. ‘Jews for Jesus,’ however, or ‘Messianic Jews’ face resistance and exclusion everywhere. In Left-leaning congregations, many rabbis welcome stridently anti-Israel speakers and even Palestinian apologists for Islamo-Nazi terror. But if they invited a ‘Messianic Jewish’ missionary, they’d face indignant denunciation from their boards and, very probably, condemnation by their national denominational leadership.”

Mark Steyn, were he asked, would concur. He has often pointed out how mainline Jewish organizations, such as the ADL and the Canadian Jewish Congress, carry on about marginalized neo-Nazis in Canada and about conservative Christians in the United States, while going out of their way to preach tolerance regarding radical hate-spouting Islamic extremists. Medved presents as the cause of American Jews’ political liberalism a disturbing and socially destructive paranoia among them towards their Christian countrymen.

More optimistic than Medved (and, ultimately, than Podhoretz himself) is Jonathan Sarna, who sees American Jews as not condemned to perpetual liberalism. Rather, he sees conservatism as much more consistent with fundamental Jewish cultural attitudes:

“But then one looks at the growing number of -Orthodox Jews in America, who do not bow down before the ‘Torah of liberalism’; and at the growing political maturity of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, the most politically conservative voting bloc within the American Jewish community; and at the Democrats, who, with their powerful majority, are recklessly challenging and criticizing the state of Israel, potentially alienating American Jewish voters; and at all the other major Jewish communities in the world that vote for conservative candidates in significant numbers—and then one wonders at Podhoretz’s pessimism.

“’The natural Jewish political attitude’ may reassert itself sooner than he imagines.”

Let’s hope so.

President Obama’s speech today at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, Norway, was a pleasant surprise. There was still far too much self-reverence, judged by the number of “I”s. There was too much meandering sermonizing, and the speech was too long. And there was this unforgivable descent into megalomaniacal self-glory: “I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war.” As well, the history of war was too simplistic and at times too close to historical fiction (the reference to the Crusades was unnecessary and distorted). There was no need for, yet again, the old Obama bad war (Iraq)/good war (Afghanistan) false dichotomy and implied criticism of his predecessor.

Still, the tone was a much needed corrective to the Nobel Peace Committee’s self-delusional decision to grant him the prize based on a nomination that had to be made when he was less than two weeks in office. I believe that the speech is entirely motivated by political self-calculation, as the President had taken much criticism and ridicule for the choice. He clearly believed, judging from the content such as the declared humility, that there had to be a figurative rebuke to the Nobel Prize committee for popular consumption by voters back home.

That said, by comparison to his prior efforts, the speech was powerful and appears to have taken aback the Euro elites that came to hear it. Little applause interrupted the speech except when he promised to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center, albeit without a time commitment. The President generally avoided his past habit of bowing to foreigners either physically or figuratively through apologies for this or that real or imagined American failing, though he could not escape it entirely. He emphasized the need to use power, even military power, rather than “sitting down and talking without preconditions.” Better yet, he did so without the usual degree of equivocations and rhetorical bobbing and weaving that signified his preference for moral equivalence between the U.S. and various oppressive enemy regimes. There wasn’t to the same extent the mostly flat delivery and internal contradictions that characterized his Afghanistan War speech at West Point recently.

Now it remains to be seen whether the President will follow up this speech with actual resolve in dealing with other countries, both in military confrontation and diplomatic engagement. Or will it just be business as usual, which will define the speech as pure political opportunism that other countries can ignore? There is much evidence from the President’s past, his circle of advisers, and his conduct of foreign affairs and national security matters so far that gives cause for alarm. But for now, the President struck the right notes.

Some other reactions: Judith Miller of the Manhattan Institute agrees. As does Sarah Palin. Mark Steyn casts a “nay” vote.

President Obama has been plagued by falling poll numbers. This first appeared in regards to particular issues, such as national security. There, as early as last spring, his proposals regarding the closing of Guantanamo Bay, restrictions on interrogations of terrorists, investigation and prosecution of Bush officials and/or CIA agents, publication of records of interrogations, etc., were decidedly unpopular. More people sided with Dick Cheney’s views than with Obama’s. By summer, his health care proposals were taking a beating. Indeed, the more he pushed for them, the more public support declined. His handling of the economy and the looming deficits hurt him next. Support for Obama/Reid/PelosiCare is now below 40%. There are now polls showing that Republicans are trusted more on health care than Democrats. On the generic party preference ballot, Republicans are now up by 9% in one poll.

The erosion of Democratic support is also occurring on the state level, which is an important matter, as the states will reapportion their state and Congressional districts after the 2010 census. Republicans have won 33 of 50 special elections for state legislative districts since November, 2008. Three Congressional Democrats who represent Republican-majority or competitive districts (won by W in 2000 and/or 2004 and by Obama in 2008) already have announced their retirement before the 2010 election.

While his standing with the public on particular issues has cratered, people still tended to give him majority support on his overall job performance. This is due to his personal standing, as there is no way that people can disapprove of his position on issue after issue, believe that the country is on the wrong track, yet still approve of his overall job performance. Recently, however, poll after poll has begun to show his overall job approval sinking below 50% into a statistical tie between those who approve and those who don’t.

Now comes the killer. In a Public Policy Polling survey of whom they preferred to see as President, Mr. Obama or George W. Bush, Mr. Obama won. By 6%. Six percent separates the supposedly worst President ever from The One who would cause the world’s sea levels to lower and the planet to heal. And this is in a poll by a liberal, but credible polling firm. Those numbers are likely to improve for W and decline for O the longer the latter is in office. Indeed, among Whites Obama is already significantly in the negative against Bush, while Blacks and, to a lesser extent Hispanics, still strongly support Obama. There is a gender gap, in that men now prefer Bush while women support Obama. There is an age gap, with Obama being preferred by those under 45, and Bush and Obama tied among those over 45. The Northeast and the West, with its bicoastal elites in large urban centers, strongly favors Obama, while flyover country in the Midwest and South strongly supports Bush.

At the very least, this shows two things. One, nothing cures popular dissatisfaction with a President more than do the follies of his successor. Two, while Democrats will try to use the Bush card for the foreseeable future, and President Obama will continue to blame his predecessor for his own failings, this will be an increasingly feeble and, indeed, risky strategy.

On a side note, I do not agree with the 20% of respondents who want to see Obama impeached. There are no bases for such a move right now, and this would just be a distraction from dealing with the more pressing issues of defeating Obamaism politically. A move towards impeachment right now would simply give the Democrats political cover and hurt conservatives politically with the great majority of the people. Political disagreement is not ground for impeachment, and Obama’s political decisions do not evidence criminality or the degree of craven corruption that impeachment requires.

Obama’s flailing internationally and his radicalism domestically, combined with his penchant for fingerpointing and blame-shifting, have produced vigorous blow-back from Dick Cheney. Ol’ Vice has emerged as the principal defender of the Bush administration and point man in the attack on Obama’s mischaracterizations and ideological demonization of Bush’s national security policies on which Cheney had a not inconsiderable influence. Some Republicans, such as the former leader of the Log Cabin Republicans, want Cheney to assume a more prominent political role. This has led to the start of a “Draft Cheney” movement to get him to challenge Obama for the Presidency in 2012. Cheney would be the anti-Obama candidate temperamentally, politically, intellectually, and ideologically. That might be a potent combination by 2012. I’d certainly vote for Darth. But I do not see it happening, due to Cheney’s health and age and his own emphatic rejection of the idea,

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently compared Republicans who want to slow down the railroad to Obama/Reid/PelosiCare to the supporters of slavery and to the opponents of the civil rights acts of the 1960s. Reid delivered the remarks in that lugubrious tone that he affects so easily. Yesterday, rather than apologize as GOP Senators have demanded, Reid doubled down.

There is, of course, the sleaziness of the comparison itself. Opposition to an eventual government takeover of health care is the same as supporting the buying and selling of human beings? If anything, those who want the government to control people’s health care decisions and to seize taxpayer’s money to pay for that control, thereby impoverishing them and making them dependent on government largesse, are the ones supporting a form of bondage. The same would be said regarding the civil rights acts. Supporting those acts meant supporting individual freedom against state deprivation. The Republicans, in opposing government control over health care, are supporting individual choice and freedom, while Reid and his ilk are the ones seeking to deprive people of that freedom.

Morever, Reid is displaying his historical ignorance. Just as with the Democrats’ relentless efforts now to implement a command-and-control society through the President’s agenda, it was members of Reid’s party who supported slavery and overwhelmingly constituted the opposition to passage of the civil rights laws. If Reid is going to engage in a cheap political smear campaign by vituperation and calumny, he ought to take care to display his ignorance less blatantly.

Via Allahpundit at Hot Air comes definitive evidence, courtesy of the liberal Pew polling organization, that former Vice President Dick Cheney has won the debate against President Obama over enhanced interrogation. For the first time since Pew began such polling, a majority of the American public believes that torture is often or sometimes justified. Only 25% of Americans believe it is never justified, which would be those who identify themselves as liberal in other polls (21%) plus a small fraction of independents. These folks are usually called professors. Since carefully controlled and circumscribed enhanced interrogations of the type conducted by the CIA are not torture by definition or in practice, public support for those procedures likely is even higher. This distinction between waterboarding or rude interrogations and real torture is not lost on the American people (or al Qaeda), though it seems not to register with members of, especially, the legal academy.

Support for torture is up by 9% since Obama took office, most of that since he and his administration began the publicized debate with ol’ Vice. All one has to do is watch the two and hear their arguments. In matters of national security, whom would one rather see in charge, Barack Obama or Dick Cheney? For most Americans the choice is clear. It’s one thing to listen to Obama’s feel-good rhetoric when the serious adults are still in charge. It’s quite another when the Candyman is actually in charge. Obama is an inspiring head of state figure. A war chief? Not at all.

More interesting is that support for torture has risen most dramatically among Democrats (+18%) and independents (+9%). This change in attitude parallels an increased public perception that Mr. Obama is not tough enough in foreign relations. Again, most of that change is due to Democrats and Independents souring on the President. Mr. Obama’s apology tours, his softness towards Iran, and his delay in formulating an Afghanistan policy are beginning to cement an impression of the President in the mind of the public.

Perhaps the President’s deflationary polling and the perception of weakness is related to his Afghanistan policy. The timetable for withdrawal of forces announced by the President is seen overwhelmingly negatively by the American public.

The story at this link is almost unbelievable. I say “almost” because I am becoming progressively less shocked by the extent to which political correctness and the toxins of mindless multiculturalism have infected the body politic in even its military incarnation. In 2004, four Blackwater security contractors were brutally murdered in Fallujah, Iraq. Their bodies were mutilated, burned and dragged through the streets. Two of them were hung from a bridge in a ghastly display for the amusement of the demented onlookers. The ringleader of this brutal escapade, Ahmed Hashim Abed, for years was one of the most wanted terrorists. He was eventually hunted down by U.S. Navy Seals in September of this year. He was turned over to the Iraqis. Once in their custody he claimed that the Seals had punched him, causing a bloody lip. When the Iraqis saw the lip and heard the claim, the story is, they returned Abed to American custody. His story caused an investigation that resulted in three Seals being charged with assault and other transgressions. They have rejected a non-judicial proceeding and demanded a court martial to have the charges aired. It seems to me that an informal reprimand should have been the end of the matter. Mr. Abed, on the other hand, should have been shot “trying to flee,” rather than captured.

As best as I can tell, there has not been the same rush from the law professoriate and other paragons of due process to come to the aid of the accused Seals, as they rush to defend, by word and deed, accused terrorists. In fact, there has been not a peep. There is only the sound of crickets chirping. Nor would I expect them to do so. After all, defending someone in the American military would be defending a denizen of a culture entirely alien to the ideology and world view of most law professors and eager elite attorneys seeking to make a name for themselves. Defending a terrosist enemy combatant, on the other hand…. More than likely, there will be no shortage of members of the legal elite who will push to represent Abed.

Then there is the compensation issue. The government of Kuwait and others of that ilk may stand ready to pay the handsome fees of Attorney General Eric Holder’s old law firm to defend accused terrorists, but they are hardly inclined to defend a member of the American military who gave a bruised lip to the ringleader of a murdering, body-mutilating, exhibitionist killer mob. The Seals will just have to rely on their appointed military lawyer.

As predicted, President Obama managed to disparage and blame his predecessor for the situation in Afghanistan, just as he had blamed Mr. Bush for the problems in Iraq while he was still a Senator, all while opposing the change in military strategy and tactics that defeated the al Qaeda-sponsored terrorists in that country. In his latest speech, Mr. Obama then adopted a version of the Bush policies to address the military situation in Afghanistan. But his heart was not in it. As I’ve noted before, O is not W. The latter loved and respected the military. The former does not.

The line by the television reporter at the end is priceless, talking about the tepid reception given to Mr. Obama by the Marines.

Last night, President Obama delivered further proof of his leadership style. His speech about Afghanistan was 4,582 words long. He mentioned himself 44 times. He mentioned “victory”—well, not at all. This is hardly the kind of speech that will rouse the spirit of sacrifice among the troops, inspire the American people, frighten the Taliban, or reassure the increasingly skeptical Afghanis and Pakistanis about the American commitment. I’ll have more to say later, after some more reflection. Would Bush or Cheney have given this kind of speech?

In anticipation of President Obama’s loooong-awaited decision about troops in Afghanistan, I have some thoughts. As noted before, Mr. Obama has tried to sell his delay as intellectual reflection and cautious pragmatism. It is neither. One must recall that Mr. Obama during his campaign pronounced Afghanistan the “necessary war” to contrast it for himself and his base from the “optional war” in Iraq. He pledged to pursue that war vigorously and consequentially, even threatening to expand operations into Pakistan unilaterally, if necessary, to destroy the Taliban and capture bin Laden. Any number of liberals liked to taunt the Bush administration and conservatives with the fact that bin Laden was not captured as a way to demonstrate the incompetence of the administration. When those liberals were not fretting that Bush was hiding bin Laden somewhere to spring him as an October surprise before the election of 2004. And then 2006. And then 2008.

Mr. Obama also crowed during the campaign that Afghanistan was so important that his team had been working on an Afghanistan strategy. Later, he and his media supporters confidently asserted that they were the best-prepared transition team ever and were ready to hit the ground running. Though that wasn’t the case, and only an expanded use of drones to attack suspects in Pakistan resulted, the President in March reemphasized the importance of Afghanistan and declared that, in accordance with his view that failure was not an option, a thorough strategy had been developed that would be in place shortly. Later that spring, he fired the commander in Afghanistan and placed his own choice, General Stanley McChrystal, in charge of operations there.

McChrystal was given the task of developing a new strategy, in light of supposedly suddenly changed circumstances on which no one elaborated. When the general came up with a new plan within a few weeks, he found himself unable to get the President’s attention to discuss it. Only once that state of affairs leaked out to the public did Mr. Obama find the time in late summer/early fall for some well-publicized brief encounters with his general. Now, finally, a decision has been made, one-and-a-half years after candidate Obama’s revelation about his preparations for a plan for Afghanistan, more than 10 months since the inauguration, more than eight months since Mr. Obama’s grand speech on Afghanistan in March, more than six months since General McChrystal was appointed, four months since the general completed his assessment, and nearly three months since the report was submitted.

And to do what? To build on the existing presence and increase the American commitment there by 30,000 or so troops. Not to initiate a military offensive. Now, for one thing General McChrystal requested up to 80,000 troops (and a minimum compromise strategy number of 40,000) and warned that the lower the number, the higher the likelihood of failure. Thus, 30,000 or so is below that minimum threshold. The President is apparently hoping that the allies will make up the difference, a hope that is not based on anything the allies have said and done. Indeed, all indications from the allies are just the opposite.

The greater problem here, though, is the psychological one, something that will inevitably affect the morale of American troops and the American people negatively and the Taliban and other terrorist elements around the world positively. That problem comes from the dithering that has accompanied the decision. Dress it up as he might, this no longer comes across as a careful and deliberative process. It might have done so in February, March, April.Perhaps even May and June. But not now. It reeks of indecision and of being driven purely by political calibration and stands as a stark contrast to the stubborn politics-be-damned defense of American interests by George W. Bush.

Combined with the second manifestation, the much-heralded “exit strategy,” complete with benchmarks and, soon to come, timetables, this also looks like defeatism. It is a biding of time, like someone who cannot wait to leave a gathering but will stay the shortest time possible to meet social obligations. That atmosphere of defeatism, of looking for a way out, and the perception of a war based only on domestic political calculations rather than on an existential need cannot but corrode the effort. Everything the administration has done here, both in the delayed process and in the unsatisfactory substance, underscores that. Better then to bring the troops home than to let them get bogged down in a Vietnam-style struggle for stalemate and defeat.

Turning back to the still-hot topic of Obama/Reid/PelosiCare, via Hot Air come some enlightening, but entirely unsurprising updates. Liberals have been fond of saying that the government option will leave you with the same choices and not increase your cost. In fact, they’ve claimed that the government option will likely cause people’s premiums to go down, through increased competition as insurance companies cut into their “massive” 3% profits and through generous initial government subsidies. Of course, they’ve also said that they will have a sizable excise tax on so-called “Cadillac” plans to help keep everything “revenue-neutral.” As an aside, that’s a truly ironic name, given that Cadillac is made by G(overnment) M(otors). Since there is no indexing for inflation for that tax, it won’t be long before even Subaru plans will be considered Cadillacs.

I have always agreed with the contrary position that increased mandates to insurance companies to insure the uninsured and uninsurable combined with increased insurance company administration of medical choices determined by government directives will increase costs. Now comes word that insurance premiums will go up for the great majority of Americans, according to the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation. Moreover, taxpayers will have to pay for the subsidies to those whose premiums will decrease. Either that, or the deficit will go up. Worse for the plan, but as expected, most taxpayers will try to avoid the Cadillac tax by opting for less expensive policies. That, in turn, will lessen receipts from the excise tax on which the administration is counting to fund its program. The resulting funding gap has to be plugged by further taxes or by deficit spending. People are rational and act dynamically, whereas government planners are fixed on the concept that people are robots and act statically.

Entirely unsurprising, too, at least to conservatives, is the Washington Post’s astonished recognition that the plan will do nothing for the deficit. Even the Senate bill claims to reduce the deficit only by a rounding error in a deficit projected to reach 14% of GDP by 2035. Those numbers won’t happen of course, because they are unsustainable and the country will be bankrupt long before then. But the point remains. Obama/Reid/PelosiCare won’t “bend the cost-curve downward” and help solve the deficit. Significantly, the government’s calculations assume that the massive cuts in Medicare benefit and doctor compensation come to pass along with significant planned tax increases. In reality, those are already being modified or jettisoned. Medicare cuts promised in the past have never materialized, as Congress lacks the political will to do so. Rather, benefits have always been expanded. The House is also planning to change doctor compensation for Medicare services, but change it upward. The Senate will surely follow suit.

In a further display of their ingrained elitism on display during summer’s townhall meetings, Democrats plan to push this health care “reform” law through soon anyway, even though these government health plans are more unpopular than ever, with a 10% overall negative rating that threatens Democratic majorities in 2010. They are hoping to put this political hot potato behind them well before the 2010 election and hope for a rebound of the President’s political fortunes. That threat won’t be avoided by rushed passage of a huge bill like the nearly 2100-page Senate version or the nearly 2000-page House version, according to this analysis of the impact that the passage of high-profile pet legislation has had on the public approval ratings of prior Presidents.

I am perfectly happy to have the Democrats throw themselves onto the shoals of political ruin. But the long-term cost to the country if the government takes over a huge swath of the economy and proceeds to mandate and administer in the usual excessive command-and-control mode of liberals, is simply too high. I would rather see a failure of Obama/Reid/PelosiCare and have a weakened Democratic majority retain control of Congress than to see passage of such a law and have the Republicans take over Congress in 2010.

Columnist Mark Steyn reaches into his archives to unearth a column he wrote several years ago about one of the economic and personal costs of the socialized Canadian health care system, the cost of waiting. The time wasted waiting for medical services under such an inefficient system lowers economic productivity in the aggregate and imposes suffering and death on the ill and afflicted. These costs are never figured into the equation when liberals complain about the costs of American health care. But one of Steyn’s sources has it right. In the U.S., doctors want to provide necessary services as quickly as possible. The insurance may not want to pay for the service as readily as the doctor wants to provide it or you want it done, but, among the parties a rough efficiency and judgment of necessity of treatment are worked out. The procedure, done quickly, puts money into the doctor’s pocket quickly, as well. In a socialized system, there is no such profit motive. There is no incentive on the part of doctors to provide the service quickly and efficiently. Yet, the government (the ultimate insurance company) wants to save money, which it can do best by denying service. The rough efficiency and judgment of necessity of treatment do not materialize. And the cost of waiting, once the expectation of delay insinuates itself into all aspects of the system, manifests itself in other repulsive ways, judging by Canadian experience.

In his first State of the Union speech, President Bill Clinton outlined his domestic agenda. A part of that agenda a call for fundamental change in the health care system. That plan was later dubbed HillaryCare, as Hillary Clinton was put in charge of a task force to develop a reform proposal. One interesting aspect of the Clinton speech is how he emphasized that the economy would suffer severely if his proposals for health care “reform” were not adopted. As history has shown, the economy did not collapse from the rejection of HillaryCare. In fact, it grew tremendously, assisted no doubt by the unfolding of the computer tech revolution, the peace dividend, and fiscal discipline imposed by the partisan self-interest of the post-1994 Republican-controlled Congress. It grew despite the 1993 tax increases that temporarily stifled growth and underscored for the public the reflexive tax-and-spend orientation of the Democratic Party. The voters’ perception of the Democrats’ overreaching from the HillaryCare threat and from the middle class-targeted tax increases, combined with Newt Gingrich’s and Dick Armey’s dynamic leadership that produced the GOP “Contract With America” led to the Republican take-over of the House after 40 years of Democratic control.

According to the historically very accurate Rasmussen poll, support for Obama/Reid/PelosiCare has dropped to its lowest level yet, with only 38% approving while 56% oppose the plan. Among those whose views are most intense and who therefore are likely to be the most committed voters, twice as many strongly oppose as strongly approve (43% to 21%). An interesting warning to Obama and the Democrats is that at this time in the electoral cycle before the political earthquake of the 1994 election, more people supported HillaryCare than now support the administration on health insurance/care.

Another warning from Rasmussen concerns Obama’s own job approval rating, which has dropped to its lowest number in the poll, 45%. Again significant is the strong approval/strong disapproval rating, which has a significant difference between those most likely to vote, with a 27%/42% split. Among independents, only 16% strongly approve, while 51% strongly disapprove. The generic party preference poll also continues to favor the Republicans, considerably more so than it did before the Republican mid-term election success in 1994.

The President has done a trifecta, bowing to the King of Saudi Arabia, the Emperor of Japan, and, now, the head of Communist China. There’s something special about authority figures that makes our leader swoon.

On Wednesday of this past week, Rush Limbaugh interviewed Sarah Palin. The transcript and the audio are both available. While there is no earth-shaking news from that interview, Mrs. Palin seems to put to rest the idea that she would lead her supporters into the political desert of a third-party movement. Better to influence the direction of the suddenly resuscitated Republican Party. Leave third-partyism to Ron Paul’s followers.

On a slightly different note, one wonders whether popular media perceptions of Sarah Palin might be different, had the McCain campaign had her do a series of interviews in friendlier venues before throwing her to Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric. Had she gone on the air with Limbaugh, Hannity, Hewitt, and any number of other interviewers less vested in furthering the cause of their party nominee, Barack Obama, Palin could have got her sea legs for national campaign interviews that are qualitatively different from interviews during a campaign for mayor or governor. Once she had gained some sense of her skills in answering those types of questions, she could have adjusted her style of trying to cram answers as if she were taking an exam. That was the eventual atmosphere of her Gibson/Kouric experiences. Even though the two “journalists” had no better understanding of the questions they were told to ask than did Palin, she came off worse because she tried to represent herself as knowing those answers. Asking the player to play a style to which she is not suited or accustomed was simply bad coaching by the McCain team.

On the other hand, one doubts that there is anything Palin could have done to avoid the media’s stereotyping. After all, Mr. Obama’s inexperience and lack of preparation that was no less painfully obvious then than it is now, yet these deficencies were not held against him. Indeed, to mention such matters was another reason for the Democrats and the media to brand the critic a “racist.”

When the elite punditry and the talking heads of the “mainstream” media commentabout Sarah Palin, their contempt for her is palpable. They subject her to the most grotesque speculations about herself and her family, down to questioning her motherhood of her youngest son (see, e.g., Andrew Sullivan) and his very right to live. She and her family are the targets of crude “jokes” that range from her participation in beauty contests decades ago to false assertions about slutty behavior by her young daughters (see, e.g., David Letterman). Her private and public past is put under a microscope of critical review. Every new public comment and appearance is scrutinized for the slightest misstep, and when one finally appears, is ridiculed massively and mercilessly and then given great significance as evidence of her unfitness for, well, pretty much everything.

And yet, those same media “guardians” protecting the public against the political temptations from the siren Palin time and again announce her political demise. They laugh her off as someone who cannot possibly, without a doubt, ever be a viable national political candidate. They dismiss her alternately as a simpleton and as an evil force of hate-mongering. Her supporters are ridiculed as a narrow and intolerant fringe.

These media elites, mainly left-wing, but with a sizable cohort of conservative toffs added to the mix, do not see the paradox of their condescending certitude about the ex-governor’s lack of a political future set off against their slavish addiction to reporting everything Palin. Or, perhaps, they just cannot help themselves. Drawn to her like moths to a flame, yet trapped by their ideological and cultural boundaries, they respond in a way that comes across to the observer as, alternately, professional schizophrenia and hapless ignorance.

With those habits, it comes as no surprise that the release of Sarah Palin’s new book, Going Rogue, has triggered a new spasm of media attention. After all, when her mere Facebook postings drive the health care discussion for weeks on end and trigger White House responses (see, e.g., “death panels”), a Palin book is a figurative ICBM exploding in the midst of the political and chattering classes. No wonder, then, that the Associated Press assigned eleven “fact-checkers” to scour Palin’s book. That is the same AP that is firing a lot of their reporters due to lack of funds. This phalanx of truth-seekers managed to uncover what? Six “errors,” the prime example of which is this shocker:

PALIN: Says she made frugality a point when traveling on state business as Alaska governor, asking “only” for reasonably priced rooms and not “often” going for the “high-end, robe-and-slippers” hotels.

THE FACTS: Although she usually opted for less-pricey hotels while governor, Palin and daughter Bristol stayed five days and four nights at the $707.29-per-night Essex House luxury hotel (robes and slippers come standard) for a five-hour women’s leadership conference in New York in October 2007. With air fare, the cost to Alaska was well over $3,000.

So, as Mark Steyn points out, Palin said that she “not often” stayed at luxury hotels, while the AP says she usually did not stay at luxury hotels and uncovered one instance where she did. The AP report, if anything, makes Palin sound as if she overstated her stay at luxury hotels. The rest of the six ”errors” found by the AP’s journalistic Clousseaus add up to a collection of their own mischaracterizations, tendentious assertions, and self-contradictions. I do agree with one of the AP’s conclusions, namely, that Palin’s book is a step towards a future presidential candidacy. In view of the current political landscape, I would hope and expect that future to be in 2016, not in 2012.

That same media knee-jerk anti-Palinism is also why MSNBC, stuck with perpetual low ratings despite (or, perhaps, because of) their decision to become the Obama network, assigns one of their starsto check whether Palin supporters at a book signing know about Palin’s political positions. Never mind that the reporterette, Norah O’Donnell, mischaracterizes Palin’s position. Palin in fact was opposed to the TARP and other bailouts, as even the AP concedes, until John McCain in October, 2008, swung behind them. At that point, Palin, as the V-P candidate, supported McCain’s position. The Palin supporter actually has Palin’s position pegged more accurately than does O’Donnell. Moreover, O’Donnell is then caught in some fibs about her own role.

One would expect that these assiduous efforts to fact-check the book by a supposed political has-been, at most a zombie that appears periodically to raise havoc among the populace and terrorize the elites, would be replicated regarding the writings and statements of actual politicians. The President, let’s say. Or, the leaders of the Democratic Party that run Congress, such as Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, and John Kerry. Or, in the past, actual Democratic candidates for President, such as John Edwards. Or, prominent Democrats who are also point men on other hot-button political issues. Al Gore, say. But one would expect wrongly. The only fact checking done by “mainstream” media of the President’s effusions was by CNN. Of course, they “fact-checked” a Saturday Night Live comedic skit that lampooned the President. The goal there was to defend Mr. Obama and demonstrate to the world the error of SNL’s ways. It was one more piece in a pattern of indirect intimidation of those who utter anything even slightly critical of The One that has become all too familiar with this administration and its courtesans.

In contrast with the thoroughness and frenzy with which the media and its associates in the Democratic Party vetted Sarah Palin—and continues to do so—no such investigations occurred by them regarding Mr. Obama’s writings. Indeed, while Palin’s academic records, like Bush’s, were dissected and laughed at, there has been a curious lack of interest in Mr. Obama’s performance. No release of the academic transcripts, no records of any “thesis/seminar papers,” no swift and public investigation into the Harvard Law Review’s selection process. Yet this about a man who has been praised as the greatest intellect in the White House, ever.

Nor will there be similar fact-checking about Al Gore’s new photo-shopped book. Or any of the President’s speeches, like the whoppers he told about the health care bill that caused Representative Joe Wilson’s “You lie” outburst.

In the end, that’s fine. Even while they minimize her importance as a force in American politics, the media will say that they react to her because her book is a best seller. Or because the administration is reacting to her statements. Or because so many Americans pay attention to her. On Facebook. The administration pronounces its determination to ignore her, even as they respond to her to the point of having the Congressional leadership change what is, by their own claim, the most important piece of social legislation in decades. They have let it become obvious that she is inside their OODA loop.

The media, along with the administration, are just admitting by their actions what they seek to deny by their words. Sarah Palin, using Facebook and a book tour, is dominating the American political scene to a degree exceeded only by the President himself aided by his corps of minders, press liaisons, and most of the media functionaries. How it must gall MSNBC and CNN not only to be dwarfed by FOX news, but by a Facebook account.

Palin may or may not run in 2012. I have said many times that, barring an even greater collapse of the Democratic Party Left, I hope that she waits until 2016. Either way, she may not win the election, or even the nomination. She may be the latest incarnation of Barry Goldwater. Or she may not even get that far and be nothing more than the head of an insurgency that exhausts itself after two or three campaigns. That would have been Ronald Reagan, had he not succeeded in 1980.

She is not Ronald Reagan. Not the fallible human, and certainly not the myth. But she is following the Reagan (and Nixon) playbook perfectly after a failed national campaign. She is also saying the words. I would hope that she would end up also learning to sing the tune in a better Reaganesque pitch. But that is another topic. 

During his trip to China, Obama was pressured on the American deficits and the decline of the American dollar. Very specifically, he was quizzed about Obama/Reid/PelosiCare and its cost. Obviously, the Chinese are not too impressed by the bogus figures the administration has put out there to make it seem as if a government take-over of health insurance/care will actually lessen the deficit. When the tea party attendees questioned the government’s numbers and protested the plan, they were branded racist. Are the Chinese racist, too?

Many supporters of same-sex marriage view those who support the age-old and universal definition of marriage as simple-minded bigots and/or religious simpletons. They view themselves as persecuted victims and gentle and misunderstood souls. By now, enough contrary evidence has appeared that it should be apparent to anyone who looks that these stereotypes are baseless caricatures. While those who hew to the traditional definition of marriage as between one man and one woman have in their midst some whose position on the matter is part of a broader animus against homosexuals, they are a small minority, especially among mainstream religious groups such as Catholics and Latter Day Saints. I specifically mention those religious groups because their members were active in the campaign against the California Supreme Court’s aggressive judicial imperialism of imposing on Californians a heretofore alien concept of marriage. By and large, opponents of same-sex marriage have no animus against homosexuals, and Christian teaching has long distinguished between the nature of the act and the nature of the actor.

Thus, one finds that opponents of same-sex marriage, the broad middle class of Americans hard at work to support their families and maintain inherited cultural traditions that cement social bonds, are far less likely than excitable, and often disproportionately younger and unattached, supporters of same-sex marriage to engage in abusive efforts to embarrass and intimidate the opposition through thinly-veiled threats of violence or acts of vandalism. I have posted about my own thoughts and impressions about this before. Columnist Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe courageously opines about this intolerance, contempt, and hatred that is so jarringly obvious in many actions taken by the supposed powerless victims who support same-sex marriage.

Aside from matters of simple decency and the tone of civility the Left allegedly wants now that a Democrat occupies the White House, after going 0 for 31 when the matter is put to a public vote (including in the liberal Democratic states of California, Maine, Oregon, and Wisconsin), one would suppose that same-sex marriage supporters would be less tone-deaf politically. Jacoby quotes Barney Frank on that point:

“After 31 losses in 31 states, it’s time for same-sex marriage activists to seriously consider a piece of advice Barney Frank offered a few years ago. ‘There’s something to be said for cultural respect,’ the nation’s most prominent gay political figure said in 2004. ‘Showing a bit of respect for cultural values with which you disagree is not a bad thing. Don’t call people bigots and fools just because you disagree with them.’’’

But perhaps it isn’t their fault, and Jacoby is too harsh in his judgment. Perhaps this kind of intolerance and boorishness, like other forms of aggressiveness, is hard-wired and not a matter of personal choice. But if such conduct is at least partly based on free will, supporters of same-sex marriage should control their baser impulses and extend to their opponents the respect that they wish extended to themselves. While they are at it, they might also want to think about the image their confreres present in the nationwide “Gay Pride” parades and various celebrations in San Francisco’s Castro district. I have known a number of homosexuals who are horrified by those parades. But, as the name indicates, such grotesque displays of hedonism are still an integral part of that group’s proffered identity. Fair or not, it is hardly surprising that an image of domesticity and stability is not what comes to mind for most people.

Once upon a time, a Senator lauded military trials as designed under American law as giving Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a fair trial “with all the bells and whistles.” That Senator was Barack Obama, now attempting to distance himself from the removal of KSM to the ordinary federal court. The video of Senator Obama’s comments demonstrates again that the current civilian trial strategy is a solution in search of a problem. Relevant segment at about 1:30.

The national debt reached $11 trillion about eight months ago. It has just reached $12 trillion. Given the projected deficit over this fiscal year, it is possible that the deficit will reach $14 trillion within a year. Under Obama’s spending plans, it is expected to reach $24.5 trillion by the end of the coming decade, more than the annual GDP. That puts the country in failed economy league. And, of course, this does not include government spending from Obama/PelosiCare.

I’m not sure deficits actually will be that high. The projections are based on projections from current expenditures. But some of those, like the Iraq war spending, are likely to decrease, as are various “stimulus” payments. Still, the danger is that Obama’s proposed programs are going to be permanent federal commitments and, therefore, contribute structurally to the deficit. Annual $800 billion deficits, far more than anything George W. Bush had in even one year, are simply unsustainable.

One tactic that appears superficially to be a solution. Let all the Bush tax cuts expire. Some commentators already perceive the administration to be floating trial balloons of this type for a $3 trillion tax hike over ten years. I have been wondering about this for some time. But I think that the timing would be politically risky for Obama. The tax cuts expire at the end of 2010, which would precipitate considerable discussion about the matter shortly before the midterm elections. The Democrats could vote a one-year extension to put the matter over until 2011, but that still would not avoid the acrimony in 2010 entirely. It would also threaten Obama’s 2012 campaign. More likely, the matter would be extended through 2013, although they might be permitted to expire on schedule as to certain higher-income earners. After that, all bets are off, and everyone will be hit hard of the cuts expire, especially if they are not phased in.

Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats are also looking to impose a huge European-style value-added tax that is hidden in the price of goods. That will make goods much more expensive for Americans even as their wallets are emptied by other higher taxes. Moreover, tax collections never meet government projections, because people change their economic behavior in response to changes in tax laws. Taxes on income and on capital formation (e.g., through taxes on dividends and capital gains) reduce job formation, thereby depressing GDP growth. Economic growth is the only way to provide effectively for tax revenues because rates can be kept low while still producing significant amounts.

Another alternative, actually to reduce government spending, seems not to be on the table.

My prediction: A weak currency, weak job growth, and high taxes. A lost decade or more of growth, with stagflation eroding people’s living standards and depressing American initiative and creativity.

Odd tales from the Porkulus. Apparently, the government has published numbers of “jobs saved or created” by the stimulus—in New Hampshire Congressional districts that do not exist. Stranger still, the same thing happened to the tune of $750,000 in a fictional Arizona Congressional district. When the administration spins about the millions of jobs saved or created by the Porkulus, they may be counting those jobs in non-existent jurisdictions. In real jurisdictions, the jobs tend to be measured by the thousands and, if one excludes public sector jobs such as teachers, the numbers are measured in the single digits.

As expected, liberals are jumping in to defend President Obama’s goofy bow to Japan’s Emperor Akihito. The defense, predictably, is “cultural sensitivity.” Ed Morrissey at Hot Air dismantles that excuse in light of the tradition, unbroken for more than two centuries of American leaders not bowing to foreign leaders. Moreover, as I pointed out yesterday, bowing to other heads of state definitely is not a tradition of international relations. Morrissey embeds this video by the University of Connecticut’s College Republicans that juxtaposes Mr. Obama’s greeting with that of many other dignitaries.

Morrissey also points out that, when President Clinton in 1994 almost bowed to Akihito, the New York Times lambasted him for almost doing something “unthinkable” and looking “obsequent.” So far, the Timeshas kept its counsel about Obama, who is after all, more than “Bubba” Clinton, one of their own class. If Obama does it, one certainly must not chide him on etiquette.

The President raised lots of eyebrows earlier this year when he bowed deeply and unexpectedly to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia at the G20 London economic gathering before kissing his hand. I wrote about the matter at the time. While the legacy media generally ignored the spectacle, conservatives had some fun at the President’s expense. Now come photos and videotape of Mr. Obama bowing deeply to the Emperor of Japan.

The gesture was so stark that even the Los Angeles Times, well, at least its blog, courtesy of Andrew Malcolm, took notice. Obama bending himself in half might be seen as just meeting the custom of the place where he is or the person whom he is greeting. George W. Bush, after all, was photographed walking with King Abdullah at the Texas ranch holding the monarch’s hand. That elicited lots of comments and mirth among journalists.

But any comparison between the two based on custom only redounds to Mr. Obama’s disadvantage. While the sight of two leaders walking hand-in-hand may seem odd to modern American eyes, much as the French bi-cheeky air kiss, or the Russian hug-and-smooch do, in many parts of the world, and in the West in the past, this is seen as a sign of a relationship of friendship and equality. Bowing deeply, on the other hand, and kissing another leader’s hand is everywhere an expression of deference. Indeed, in regards to Japanese custom, the deeper the bow, the greater the submission. Obama’s bow so reeked of an inferior’s homage to his superior, it is what used to be called “bowing and scraping.”

The Emperor did not reciprocate the bow. Neither did King Abdullah in the earlier scenario. As the pictures show, when Dick Cheney met the Emperor of Japan, he shook the latter’s hand. No bowing for Darth Cheney. It may be that this is yet another faux-pas by an inexperienced and unqualified naif, as many conservatives saw Obama during the campaign. Perhaps, especially when this happens more than once, it has a more sinister meaning for the U.S. Foreign leaders of whatever stripe pay attention to these matters of etiquette. To them, such expressions of submission are of a kind with Obama’s World Apology Tour 2009 and project an air of weakness and docility that may, no, will cause the U.S. much trouble in the future to correct. At the very least, these signals can cause the kind of miscalculation that lets a foe take a bellicose position that draws the U.S. into unwanted confrontation. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait is said to have been such a misstep based on miscues from words to the dictator by President George H.W. Bush’s ambassador in Iraq.

Given the White House’s current occupant’s penchant for gestures of supplication to foreign leaders, especially ones not popularly elected, one wonders what to expect from him when he meets the Chinese leadership. After all, their importance in helping Obama finance his record deficits far outweighs that of either King Abdullah or Emperor Akihito.

* Mark Steyn’s phrase

This is a long list of detailed and documented instances of various forms of intolerance, bigotry, abuse, intimidation, and violence by supporters of same-sex marriage against their opponents. Since the “lame-stream” media cartel is not likely to give a thorough airing to such matters, it is useful to have the information collected in one spot. Now, some of the incidents are much worse than others. Some, in fact, seem rather mild and any culpability seems nebulous. But for all of them, one should ask how the incident would be treated if the action had been taken against a racial/ethnic minority, female, homosexual, or liberal by someone not of that class. How many “soul-searching” journalistic plaints about the evils of our “dominant culture” would there be? Or about the religious institution or faith with which the attacker was affiliated, if any? How many “hate speech/crimes” laws and prosecutions would be proposed and undertaken? How quickly and how broadly would the guilt for such acts be extended to all who do not belong to the victim group? How soon would it be before politicians, up to the President, would jump to politically correct conclusions before the evidence is in? Through long and grating experience with elite reactions to such events (which often turn out to be hoaxes), we know the answers. As typified by the reaction by the members of the elite institutions among the press, the military brass, and politicians, we also know the answers when the actions are done by a member of an officially protected minority.

With elements of the Left in control of the U.S. government in a manner not seen in a couple of generations, if ever, discredited socialist policies of central planning and government intrusion into, and absorption of previously private economic endeavors have escaped from the padded lecture halls and professors’ offices at universities. Policies of government intervention into the economy spurred by amisguided attempt to combat the “evils” of capitalist profits inevitably lead to government intervention in other domains of individuals and groups. When people refuse to go along with such suffocating government intervention, there will be threats and, if necessary, draconian action taken against them for their deviation from the “true path.” A limited version of this is the provision in PelosiCare that requires people to buy health insurance or bay a tax equal to two-and-a-half percent of their adjusted gross income to the government. The failure to comply would result in a fine up to $250,000 and/or five years in federal prison.

A former resident of Czechoslovakia describes the economic privation in the socialist/communist workers’ paradises of Eastern Europe. What is worse still, as the writer so vividly portrays, is the destruction of the human spirit that such all-enveloping states engender. Much is written, correctly, about how government nanny-statism stifles human initiative. Anecdotal evidence and broader studies show that people defer looking for jobs until the unemployment benefits are about to run out. Extending unemployment benefits just pushes that day of reckoning and responsibility into the future. And that is a mild case.

As the line between the political and the non-political in all its aspects, but most crucially in the economic, is blurred, so is the line between the public and the private. Private groups cannot compete with the state, which subsidizes its own success through enforced financial exactions from the people and changes the rules in its favor until competing private associations disappear. An example would be favored labored unions affiliated politically with the government. Those private associations that cannot be made to disappear in this manner are dealt with more directly. The abolition of churches or young people’s groups such as the Boy Scouts will occur in the name of separation of church and state or of goals of non-discrimination against favored groups. In any case, the public option ends up to be the only option. The state more and more assumes the form of a penetrating fog, a Leviathan from which there is never escape for the increasingly isolated individual.

The result is a destruction initially of human initiative. To the extent it continues, it is focused not on innovation and improvement of people’s lives, but on getting ahead in the world of politics, which is the world of rationing of increasingly scarce goods. Survival in a political order that becomes more and more cut-throat is the only way to participate in the only thing that politics does, that is, create an order within which winners and losers for such scarce resources are picked. It hardly makes sense for most to strive in a game that very few will win and then not on the merits of their contribution to society’s or individuals’ welfare.

Over time, the destruction of initiative so enervates human existence that the participants become mere shadows or simulacrums of full humans, never able to attain human flourishing. Even if their basic needs are taken care of (a big “if”), they cannot look forward to an improvement in their lives or in the lives of their children. They do not control their future. Rather, their reward is the satisfaction that their neighbors’ misery equals their own. That fosters minding their neighbors’ affairs to assure that they are not getting an advantage. Such envy and paranoia is thin glue for social cohesion and, sooner or later, will lead to an explosion of discontent from those who have not yet been lost entirely to abject submission to the state.

If such an explosion comes, and the socialist nightmare finally ends, many of the same people will be too far destroyed psychologically to cope with the new reality. The demands of freedom with its foundation of free will and personal responsibility are simply too much. It is like asking someone who has been forcibly addicted all his life to a powerful narcotic suddenly to pick himself up and fend for himself cold turkey.

That describes the people of the old Soviet bloc countries, as those people lived then within a system that deprived them of material comfort and, worse, of their soul. It also describes many of them today, especially the elderly and those who grew up in the most oppressive regimes, such as in the Soviet Union itself. It is a ghastly system that today can only be defended by those, such as academics, who spend their lives in the realm of theory and ideology, and by other members of the “out-of-touch” elites, rather than in the domain of the ”lived life.” Given the influence of such academics on an American administration whose leaders have their roots in the academic and social world of the Left elite, one has cause for concern about the growth of government.

HT: Byron Stier

I like New York Times columnist E.J. Dionne. He is a basically decent fellow and certainly does not lack intelligence. But, with the exception of former theater critic Frank Rich, he has to be the worst political analyst in the paper’s amply-populated stable of left-liberal and center-left scribblers. If he just wrote for the HuffPo or on some Markos Moulitsas forum, this would be expected. But, then, the Times is not what it once was, even twenty years ago. Following the recent electoral smack-down of the Democratic Party, Dionne wrote a column focusing on, of course, the special election in New York’s 23rd Congressional District, an area that, though it had been held by Republicans for well over a century, was carried by Mr. Obama by 5% in 2008. The lesson Dionne takes from the election in general and the New York district in particular is that the Democrats were given a warning (to make people feel better), while the voters actually rebuked the GOP’s conservatives’ message. Riighht.

Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey takes some time to fillet Mr. Dionne’s argument. It’s an easy, but time-consuming task, given the amount of nonsense Dionne wrote. So I’m glad Morrissey did the work for us, even providing links to a couple of Dionne’s old columns where he celebrated as an act of principle the Left’s 2006 primary challenge to incumbent Senator Lieberman, a challenge that many on the Left openly billed as political revenge. Today, the same Dionne is horrified at the fact that a Conservative Party candidate could run because of voter dissatisfaction with the pseudo-Republican nominee selected in a back room by 11 local party bosses.

Of course, the same Left in the Democratic Party wants the Senate leadership to strip Lieberman of his committee chairmanship (though officially an “Independent,” he caucuses with the Democrats) for Lieberman’s support of John McCain in 2008 and for pledging to vote against ending a potential filibuster of a Senate government health care bill. From a political viewpoint, I understand the Left’s sentiment in Lieberman’s case. They are also consistent in that various Lefties have openly threatened with left-liberal primary challenges any Democratic legislator who votes against a government health care plan. One is left waiting for Dionne’s response to these plans.

The L.A. Times published a disheartening poll this weekend that showed 80% of California voters believe the state to be on the wrong track. According to the Times’s interpretation of the poll, voters also believe that the best years of the state are over. Those sentiments may well be colored by current economic conditions. Moreover, one really cannot project into the future. I remember hearing from people in Germany in the mid-1970s about a flood of articles over there that quoted California politicians and other members of the civic elite that the state’s best years were over.

The poll also showed a deep political divide between the more heavily populated liberal coastal counties and the conservative interior. Therein lies the problem, as I see it. The poll claims that President Obama still has a 60% approval rating, considerably higher than what he enjoys in the nation as a whole. More striking is that California’s left-wing, do-nothing (fortunately, one supposes), ditzy “Senator” Barbara Boxer, enjoys solid support that likely will get her elected to yet another term.

Obviously, not enough Californians have yet suffered vigorously enough the consequences of a dysfunctional and rabidly liberal political and social culture. California’s liberals, ranging from moderate (Gov. Schwarzenegger) to radical (the Legislature’s leadership) control all aspects of state government. Their public employee and correctional officers union allies dictate the financial direction by which the California state government’s growth has far outstripped inflation and population increases. The entire government apparatus, the vocal entertainment industry, and the academic-media complex are in thrall to radical environmentalism. The economic poison of home-made environmentalism is supplemented by doses from the federal government. The Central Valley’s agricultural sector is laid waste by some federal district judge’s decision that starves Central and Southern California of water to help a small baitfish in the Delta, with nary a squeak from our public servants. The state’s notoriously business-hostile (except for movie-making) climate has not improved. Taxes are high and getting higher, with nothing to show for that, except business flight. More and more laws and regulations intrude into business operations and personal life. But the left-liberal elite continues to believe that people, especially those who produce eceonomic wealth, will not be affected by these laws but will continue to be the good tax slaves to be exploited for the elite’s social schemes. Such fairy-tale faith leads them to be surprised at a nearly 13% state unemployment rate, one that, if underemployed and discouraged workers are taken into account, more likely approaches 20%.

Until the self-described “reality-based community” on the Left (who are blissfully unaware of the irony of their description), or at least enough among the population at large, come to grips with the unsustainability of their governing model, California will continue to take on more and more characteristics of a third-world country. There may be pristine beaches for the few, and plenty of water for the Delta smelt. But the middle class will shrink by impoverishment or flight, and there will be a larger and larger cohort of a poor and handout-addicted underclass.

No mention was made of President Ronald Reagan in the speeches at the celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall that the current President was unable to attend. While German Chancellor Angela Merkel talked about Reagan’s contribution to that historic and generally unexpected event at a speech last week, there is a broader effort among the transnational elite to scrub the record of Reagan’s contribution and lay the cause entirely at the feet of Mikhail Gorbachev. Certainly Gorby had a big role to play, but the Russians themselves earlier conceded Reagan’s vision and steadfastness of purpose as forcing them into an untenable economic, military, and, eventually, political position.

Peter Robinson was then a speech writer for Reagan. Indeed, Robinson was the one who put to more complete words Reagan’s sentiment about the USSR and its oppressive domination of various political satellites in that classic 1987 speech near the Brandenburg Gate: “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Robinson recollects Reagan’s determination, over the objections of the timid naysayers in the State Department and on his own National Security Council, to see that wall come down. So the speech was one tactic, albeit a very powerfully symbolic one, in the President’s overall strategy to topple the “Evil Empire.”

Peter Robinson does an interview with Steven Hayward, the author of authoritative accounts of Reagan’s early years in national politics, The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order, and of Reagan’s presidency, The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution.

They develop a fascinating portrait of an engaged President with a clear agenda on specific domestic and foregin relations issues. Hayward also describes Reagan as having to fight his own advisers and the Congressional Republicans almost as much as the Democrats and the media. Again and again, Reagan ignores his advisers on crucial questions, the great majority of which result in vindication for him. 

This is a transcript of the interview. [Caution: The transcript is done from the video, so that words are often transcribed according to how the sounds register, rather than what the actual words are.]

While the President managed an increasingly criticized “shout-out” and some rambling remarks about a conference held by an ethnic identity group before delivering himself of a rather bloodless and detached brief statement about the Fort Hood attack by the would-be suicide shooter, former President Bush and his wife went to the base to meet with soldiers and their families. And he did it in secret and unannounced, a trip not known until FOX News broke the story the next day. Oh, Mr. Obama will appear later this coming week at a major press-saturated ceremony.

Lest some say that this was an aberration, or that Bush was able to do this in secret because he is now just a private citizen whose movements no one follows, there are a few responses. For one, the press is able to cover the former President’s movements just fine when he goes to make a speech or two in Canada. More important, Mr. Bush is just continuing what he and former Vice President Dick Cheney did with thousands of troops while they were in office, secretly and without fanfare visiting with them and/or their families or writing personal letters.

The majority of American voters who elected Mr. Obama fancied his detached cool, yet one more aspect of the voters’ tendency to elect the opposite of the outgoing incumbent. They got what they wanted, and then some. The telepromptered Mr. Obama can speak the words, but he has yet to master the tune. With his emotional tonedeafness, I doubt that he ever will. He is no Ronald Reagan. Nor is he a Bill Clinton. Or, obviously, a George W. Bush.

This is rich, coming from an organization whose incompetence and institutional political correctness failed to prevent a real threat to civil rights, namely, the right not to be murdered by a U.S. officer-terrorist. As I’ve said before, maybe the government should deal with real threats to life before concerning itself with hypothetical bigotry.

Not to be outdone, the hapless Homeland Security Secretary declares that she is intently working to prevent outbreaks of anti-Muslim violence in the U.S. over the Fort Hood terror attack. And she says this anti-American nonsense in a conservative Arab country, the UAE, to boot. Great job.

Mark Steyn has more about the reckless political correctness that threatens the U.S. in so many ways. The Army was warned about Hasan by his fellow students, who “complained to the faculty about Hasan’s ‘anti-American propaganda,’ but said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim student kept officers from filing a formal written complaint.” There is also his participation in 2008 to 2009 in a George Washington University-affiliated task force for the Homeland Security Policy Institute on “Security Priorities for the Next Administration.” Unbelievable.

An allegory of government health care, put in a quick tale that most Americans can understand.

HT: Matthew Cohen

Karl Rove has put together a summary of the Republican proposals for health care/insurance reform. While this is long on platitudes and short on specifics (which have been presented by various Republican Congressmen), it does set forth several good ideas. I have my doubts about some of them (the proposal to allow employers, or anyone else, to promote employees’ healthy lifestyles is particularly suspicious). Overall, though, to the extent they actually are substantive, these proposals are sound. They rely on private markets and more individual choice, rather than on the notoriously incompetent public servants, to make medical decisions.

The fall of the Berlin Wall happened twenty years ago. Unlike other world leaders, past and present, President Obama could not attend. He claims to be too busy. So, while even Mikhail Gorbachev and current Russian president Dmitry Medvedev attend the fall of that Communist symbol, Mr. Obama sends his regrets. Though this is the celebration of a great victory, both symbolic and concrete (no pun intended), for freedom and self-determination, he cannot take time from what, exactly? His Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech? When the occasional pundit likens Obama to Ronald Reagan, it is imperative to keep in mind Obama’s conduct here. Reagan stood for the spread of freedom fostered by a strong and confident United States. Obama? Not so much. I shall be charitable here and not endorse the comments that I have read on other sites that Obama would have gladly attended the construction of that wall. But one wonders just a little, given Obama’s fondness for appearing in the company of world leaders, why he would absent himself. Perhaps it is exactly the presence of so many, with festivities focusing on this event, that made Obama feel diminished.  He would be just one of the crowd. After all, it would not be like an adulatory campaign appearance at a Berlin rock concert, a venue much more to the liking and in the comfort zone of a man who has yet to make fully the transition from campaigning to governing.

Over the past several weeks there has been a lot of back-and-forth over the Obama administration’s attacks on FOX News. There has been much speculation about the reasons for the actions by the President and his advisers. One must look at this on several levels to gain a proper appreciation for this puzzling behavior.

Most obvious, and clearly significant, is the distaste, if not outright enmity that Obama and his minions have for FOX News. Unlike the purring and obsequious “journalists” at CNN, NBC, and MSNBC, FOX actually challenges the administration’s claims. Those claims often are risible and violate fundamental perceptions of common sense, but the non-FOX media willingly suspend the disbelief they so profusely lavished on every word George W. Bush uttered. On the other hand, while FOX fact-checks Obama’s health care claims, CNN does fact-check an SNL skit that is a mild parody of Obama’s lack of accomplishments.

That, what is it called? Oh yes, journalism. That journalism is foreign to the President’s experience of receiving, with few mild exceptions, adulation and uncritical acceptance. And to matters foreign to one’s experience, one is likely to react with suspicion.

The President’s campaign seems quixotic, in that FOX News not only has a huge following among Democrats and Independents, as well as among Republicans, and is actually gaining readership and sympathy from this contest. The President is seen as unsympathetic towards free speech and as a vindictive whiner.

Another partial explanation is that Obama simply has certain personal shortcomings. He is a small man, psychologically, one who, despite his carefully-staged public persona, is not comfortable in his own skin. He is the opposite of George W. Bush, who, in that regard, always gave off a “don’t give a damn” vibe through that smirk that drove liberals crazy. Obama shows all the characteristics of someone with an inferiority complex and a fear that, at any moment, someone is going to draw back the curtain and discover the charade. It is the uncertainty about his lack of accomplishments and qualification for the Presidency that lurks within him.

The upwards-tilted gaze and projecting jaw that Obama likes to present, the messianic speeches and images, the snide attacks on critics when the mask slips, the bullying attacks on Americans who oppose his policies while figuratively prostrating himself before America’s enemies abroad who push back, his attacks on Rush Limbaugh, his minions’ proposals to curtail free speech through the “fairness doctrine,” “hate speech” laws, “diversity mandates,” and threats of criminal action during the 2008 campaign, all present someone who is not comfortable with notions of dissent. His followers often are similarly afflicted, as the frequent references by Democratic polticians and administration spokesmen and supporters to the protests by “tea party” attendees and the questions from town hall participants as “unpatriotic” and “un-American” vividly illustrate. Dissent suddenly is no longer the highest form of patriotism, but an attack on Obama and, thereby, on the U.S. itself. One recalls in vain George W. Bush attacking or seeking to marginalize the media and liberal commentators who savaged him for eight years. Obama has far more profoundly legitimized undermining of constitutionally-protected free speech rights of dissenters than anything that Bush can be accused of with any conceivable basis in fact.

Why is Obama pursuing what appears to be a rather stupid tactic? Part of the explanation lies in his vanity. He is accustomed to surrounding himself with political acolytes. In his earlier elected positions, no one criticized him, as he operated within thoroughly liberal environments. Those that opposed him, such as other primary or general election candidates had a habit of suddenly withdrawing from races as pressure was brought through revived old news, suddenly leaked “sealed” records, and such. It was the election equivalent of turning up floating lifelessly in the Hudson, or Chicago, River. Obama had a remarkable run of lucky political coincidences at critical junctures.

With FOX challenging his exaggerations, attacks on political opponents, prevarications, and ideology, he strikes back. Rather than ignoring these people that dare to oppose him, he is only too eager to put them in their place. Even if he is “lowering” himself to the level of mere scribblers.

But that isn’t the only explanation. After all, FOX only benefits from the controversy by having its