Geert Wilder is being tried as are our Navy Seals, who put their lives on the line, for defending our nation. Scott Brown is 'scott right' - spend tax money for weapons to eliminate these vermin not on legal fees to defend them. (See 1 and below.)
This was sent to me by a friend and fellow memo reader. I have often maintained Californians are not real people and when it comes to 'reality math' they live on a different planet.
Let's walk down the yellow brick road of logic. Obama is concerned about financial institutions being too big to fail and thus his administration decided which should fail and which should be bailed. Consequently, the U.S government and its taxpayers took on the burden of propping up the 'too big to fail' entities. In doing so Obama burdened our nation with a vast amount of new debt.
In other words, the government has become the arbiter of whether a financial entity should live or die and in order to 'insure' financial institutions do not get too large to fail Obama has decided to curb these institutions from engaging in excessively risk behaviour.
In doing so, has the U.S. now become too big to fail and if so who bails us out? The Chinese? The American tax payer? Does the American tax payer have any say in the matter?
When you backstop something with another person's money you can be assured you will get more of it. That is how we got more welfare recipients, that is why Palestinians still practice victim hood, that is why Haiti is a failed state. Unending aid is 'udderly' stupid!(See 2 below.)
Randall Hoven should write Obama's State of The Union Speech. A breath of reality would be a nice 'change.' (See 2a and 2b below.)
Another read on Obama's risk prevention. To the extent that it says to financial institutions you can't become casinos with government money that seems a rational proposal. That is what Glass Steagall sought to prevent but financial lobbyists bought off politicians and Glass Steagall was shattered!(See 2c below.)
The Debt Reduction Commission is a ruse to get Republican politicians to give cover to more spenders - as if Republicans are not capable of spending on their own.
As for David Gergen, he is a retread. Listen to him and you will be in a 'pickle!' (See 3 below.)
When I was a young kid growing up the kooks said putting fluoride on your teeth was a Communist plot to weaken our society and there were scientists who validated the argument.
So its goes - what goes around, even if tainted science, still comes around. (See 4 below.)
Judicial Watch just published a list of the ten most corrupt politicians - some are 'too big to fail.' (See 5 below.)
The United Nations Secretary General 'Ban ki-Moon' says Mid East talks worsen. What did he expect and what planet does he live on? (See 6 below.)
Was Obama never exposed to the "Tar Baby" story as a child? Arrogance and naivety are a poor mixture for success.(See 6a and 6b below.)
Let the delusional sleep according to Krauthammer. (See 7 below.)
I have had the pleasure of meeting Larry Sabato - one smart dude! (See 7a below.)
Mort won't stop! (See 7b below.)
Jonathan Tobin champions free speech. I, like Justice Hugo Black, also champion free speech. My concern, however, is that of Justice Holmes - neither can you yell fire in a crowded theatre.(See 8 below.)
Dick
1)Geert Wilders: 'I want Muslim fanatic to speak in my defence'
Geert Wilders, the Dutch far-Right MP, has demanded that his race hate trial should hear evidence from the fanatic who used the Koran to justify killing the director of an anti-Islamic film.
It marked an incendiary opening to the landmark case that has divided the Netherlands over the limits of freedom. Mr Wilders, 46, who is accused of incitement and discrimination, asked for 18 witnesses to be called in his defence, including Mohammed Bouyeri, the man who stabbed and shot Theo Van Gogh in an Amsterdam street in 2004.
The Van Gogh murder left a deep scar on the national conscience. It helped to change the mood of tolerance of Islam, and boosted Mr Wilders’s popularity.
Mr Wilders, whose Party for Freedom came second in the European elections last summer, faces a 70-page charge sheet covering five counts of breaking Dutch law in more than 100 public statements — for example, by likening the Koran to Hitler’s Mein Kampf and calling for an end to the “Islamic invasion”. He could be fined or jailed if convicted.
The alleged offences include Mr Wilders’s film Fitna, which shows images of 9/11 and beheadings interspersed with verses from the Koran. It ends with a clip of the controversial Danish cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad.
At the opening day of the trial the prosecution objected to the request to hear from Bouyeri, and the panel of four judges adjourned until February 3 to consider which witnesses to call. “This case is about more than Mr Wilders,” Bram Moszkowicz, his lawyer, told the court. “It touches us all. It is such an important and principled question that could have far-reaching consequences.”
Mr Moszkowicz argued that the witnesses Mr Wilders wanted to call would prove that what he said was not simply inoffensive but true. He suggested that Bouyeri, a dual Moroccan-Dutch national, would be key to the case because he was a fervent Muslim who carried a Koran during his trial and defended his crime by claiming that Islam permitted violence against unbelievers.
The prosecution countered that, unlike the other witnesses — mostly academics and theologians — Bouyeri was not an authority and should not be called.
About 200 supporters of Mr Wilders travelled to Amsterdam District Court from as far as Germany to hold up placards declaring that free speech was under attack by Islam and political correctness. Eighty packed into the public gallery, applauding Mr Wilders and his lawyer.
Ulrich Rosendahl, 46, an engineer who took the day off work to travel from Cologne to support Mr Wilders, held up a banner outside the court which read: “Wilders does as \ Chaplin did. He attacks fascism — Islamo.”
Mr Rosendahl said: “I support what he says and I know he has lived under police protection for many years and I think that he pays a high price to fight for freedom of speech.”
Mr Moszkowicz said that Mr Wilders had a mandate as an MP to speak out against what he saw as the Islamisation of the Netherlands. Birgit van Roessel, for the prosecution, said that “expressing his opinion in the media or through other channels is not part of an MP’s duties.” She said that MPs had immunity for only what they said inside parliament.
2)Liberal Democrats are out of touch with the People
News of the Week:
Local politicians listen to community’s concerns
Hundreds of Port of Oakland truckers who followed rules still rejected at the gates
SB County helping small businesses
Boston Tea Party
Canyon Boys Basketball Team Looks To Keep Perfect League Record Intact
The Liberal Democrats who control California’s Legislature just don’t get it.
Today, on a party-line 6-3 vote, a universal healthcare plan was passed in the Senate Appropriations Committee – never mind the fact that the plan would cost California taxpayers $100 billion in the first six months and $222 billion-a-year thereafter (more than double the annual state budget).
The universal healthcare plan (Senate Bill 810) promises medical access to all. But in reality, the bill will only create a shortage of doctors, nurses and other health providers who might choose to work in other states or a different field altogether for fear of working in the labyrinth of government bureaucracy, or when they realize the financial compensation provided by the private market vanishes.
A shortage of medical professionals will have a contrary effect on SB 810’s goal of creating access for all. Instead California would become the new poster child for sick people suffering through inappropriately long waits for routine care while also limiting provider choices for patients.
It’s also important to note that SB 810 does not specify a means of generating revenue to pay for the new health system, but instead it hopes to establish a commission that would identify a premium structure. In other words, this bill would make government more bloated than ever while bankrupting the state.
It’s amazing to me that just days after Massachusetts voters (whose government operates a universal health care system) rejected a candidate who supported Obama-care, California liberal Democrats have the temerity to ram a similar proposal down the throats of every Californian.
Are my colleagues on the other side of the aisle ignoring the voice of the people who are hungry for more jobs and less government intrusion? Do the liberals fail to understand that Californians are losing jobs by the thousands every month and struggling to care for their families?
The last thing people want is more government bureaucracy. This message has been made clear not only in Massachusetts, but in New Jersey and Virginia. I have a feeling California voters are going to send the same strong message to liberals in November.
I will keep you posted on any further SB 810 developments.
= = = = =
State legislators to conduct legislative hearing in Thousand Oaks on over-regulation of business
WHO: State Sens. George Runner (R- Antelope Valley) and Tony Strickland (R-Simi Valley) and Assemblywoman Audra Strickland (R-Thousand Oaks). Special guest Sen. Sam Aanestad (R-Grass Valley).
WHEN: Friday, Jan. 22.
TIME: 8 a.m. to 9 a.m.
WHERE: City of Thousand Oaks Board Room, 2100 East Thousand Oaks Blvd.
WHAT: A legislative hearing in response to the impact of government’s over-regulation on small businesses.
Below is a list of Ventura County business owners who are scheduled to testify before lawmakers regarding the bureaucratic red tape that is hindering business and job growth:
•Susan Murata, Silver Star Automotive
•Gary Cushing, Marie Callenders
•Louis Masry, Millennium Settlement Consulting
•Valerie Draeger, Triliad Development, LLC
•Peter Zierhut, Haas Automation
•Glenn A. Fuller, Jackson DeMarco Tidus and Peckenpaugh
•Mike Rolls, Rolls Scaffold and High Reach
HOME PAGE BIOGRAPHY CONTACT ME Senate Republicans
2a)The Real State of the Union, 2010
By Randall Hoven
It is State of the Union time again. Like every president before him, Barack Obama will declare that the state of our union is fundamentally sound, but it needs some tuning up. (In his case, a tune-up costs about $2 trillion and nine czars.) But in my opinion, the state of our union is, to use the word of the day, "unsustainable." That means "dying" in everyday language.
Almost a year ago, I wrote of the "real" state of our union.
We have less than 10 years to get our mess straightened out. In that time we need to do something drastic with health care, meaning getting its costs under control. We also need to keep a lid on discretionary spending and even cut it. Social Security payroll taxes might need to be raised a bit by 2020, or benefits cut.
In short, to avoid financial catastrophes such as government default and bankruptcy that would otherwise come in the 2020-2030 time-frame if not before, President Obama must make some bold moves. And in the opposite direction of his fan base.
Since I wrote that, the Congressional Budget Office and the General Accounting Office have validated my basic budget analysis.
I summarized three possible paths Obama might take. After a year, we now know that he took the worst path: "More spending and taxing, as well as massive public works projects, single-payer health care, the 'Employee Free Choice' act, global warming hysteria, weakened defense, the return of the 'Fairness Doctrine', etc."
In short, President Obama is pushing the agenda of the Communist Party. That is not just me talking, but Sam Webb, National Chair of the Communist Party USA.
The new conditions of struggle are possible only -- and I want to emphasize only -- because we elected President Obama and a Congress with pronounced progressive and center currents.
So President Obama is not only not our savior, but he is getting us to hell even faster.
Below is what I consider the state of our union today. (With liberal use of embedded links to back up my claims.)
We are already heavily in debt, at levels unprecedented in peacetime and soon to be unprecedented even for wartime. Yet all policies enacted or proposed by our current government are putting us deeper into debt. Obama and the Democrats are doing absolutely everything wrong concerning government spending and handling entitlements.
Entitlements are eating us up. Discretionary federal spending (including defense) is already lower (as percent of total spending and percent of GDP) than it was a few years ago. The Government Accounting Office projects that entitlements and interest on the debt will consume 100% of federal revenues in about a decade. Yet rather than cutting entitlements, we are adding to them.
How can "unsustainable" debt be cured? One way: by not paying it off. But there are multiple ways to not pay it off.
The value of money could be inflated away. Creditors would be "paid back," but in dollars worth less.
"Old age" benefits could be cut, one way or another, just as the baby boom reaches old age. Social Security, Medicare, and pensions are all in trouble. Investments of all kinds (stock market, bonds, real estate) could lose value.
Our government could try "fixes" like tax increases that would only make economic growth suffer -- a jobless recovery at best, a double-dip recession or depression at worst.
I expect all of the above in varying doses.
The U.S. has been eating its seed corn. We are the country that invented the bomb, put man on the moon, and started the Green Revolution in agriculture, which came close to wiping out world hunger. The bomb was developed sixty-five years ago. Man first walked on the moon over forty years ago. And the Green Revolution happened in between.
Since then, "science" has entered one cul-de-sac after another: string theory, dark matter and energy, climate change, you-name-it. Big pharma and modern medicine, two of the few successes in science in recent years and responsible for my daughter being alive today, are under constant attack by politicians and are on the verge of being dismantled by disincentive.
We are now a hollow country: reduced manufacturing, outsourcing, generally doing each other's laundry. People employed in construction, natural resources, and mining combined make up just 5% of our workforce. People who actually produce goods make up just 14%. On the other hand, government workers are 17% of our workforce, and better paid for it.
Our populace and our education institutions have been dumbed down. We have fewer engineers and scientists and more people writing memos to each other. (We're lucky if the foreign students we educate do not use their new knowledge to kill us. Al-Qaeda seems to have an inordinate amount of western-educated members and sympathizers.)
In short, what does the U.S. have to sell that anyone would want to buy? Even the movie industry is steadily moving out of the U.S. and into Canada, India, and even Romania.
I expect the U.S. to lose its lead role. It is already "just another European country" by many measures. I said that almost two years ago, and Mark Steyn quickly agreed with me. But it is so obvious now that even college professors are starting to agree with me. As the recognition sinks in, it will hurt us more. Even though Europe has its own debt problems, I think the U.S. will suffer more than Europe. We have farther to fall.
I'm not sure if Republican wins will fix things, even if we get genuine conservatives in office, because the necessary actions are also unpopular. We need to cut entitlements -- even get the federal government out of Medicare/Medicaid. If Republicans try that, they will be tossed out. In the current debate, it was Republicans saying "don't cut my Medicare."
Short of Republicans stopping themselves, Democrats will halt everything in the Senate anyway. Either party now needs sixty solid votes in the Senate to make anything happen.
Our politics are polarized and nonsensical because our voters are. The "moderate" middle wants the impossible: all gain, no pain, and no sense of reality. What we have is incoherence -- neither a free market nor a competently managed public sector.
All of the above is about economics and the budget. On national defense, we are also hollow -- not because our military is weak or incompetent, but because our civilian leaders are, and because the country at large now demands immaculate wars. These are wars without ambiguity in purpose or execution, wars in which no one dies and every enemy is greeted with Miranda rights, wars that don't cost anything, wars that end before Christmas-shopping season.
The trouble is that no other country is ready to replace us. When we fall, it will be like Rome falling. The new age will be a Dark Age, with constant warfare among smaller nations and tribes. And now more of us have nukes.
I know...that state of the union is way too gloomy. But our hope does not lie with this or that policy. It lies in a population that genuinely believes in itself rather than the government Wizard of Oz. Show me evidence that a majority of our population believes in itself, and I'll write a whole different State of the Union.
2b)Progressives and Their Fallacies
By Chuck Rogér
Ideology knows no cultural, political, or economic boundaries. Adherents to doctrinaire belief systems -- left, right, religious, anti-religious -- brush aside evidence that might tempt them to question their beliefs. Yet one critter inhabits a class unto itself: the "progressive," a creature who drags muddled thought to unexplored depths.
An Adam Smith Institute blog by Tim Worstall addresses the left's persistent denial of the Laffer Curve, which shows how government gains no revenues by implementing either zero- or one-hundred-percent tax rates, but maximizes revenues by keeping rates just below levels intolerable to taxpayers. Despite the Laffer Curve's reflection of reality, progressives reject the established fact that revenues dwindle when rates climb too high. One response to Worstall's blog is especially thought-provoking.
It's bad enough having to accept that the collectivists and assorted liberals and lefties are just plain stupid, but at least if this were true they might be open to enlightenment. That they are merely disingenuous, knowing full well the implications of their actions but pressing on regardless, suggests that any dialogue or debate with them is pointless.
Refusal to acknowledge fact tends to kill off productive dialogue.
If Christian, Jewish, or Buddhist zealotry were to jeopardize our way of life, then Americans would be justified in resisting with all the force we could muster. Islamism fails to make this list because there is no "if" to Islamism -- radical Muslims threaten our freedom, period. The totalitarian brand of progressivism practiced with religious zeal by President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Reid, and Representative Barney Frank also threatens our freedom and therefore must be defeated.
Heartland Institute's Paul Chesser finds a stunning case of progressive denial. Well after it came to light that "scientists" fabricated human-caused global warming and suppressed studies that expose the hoax, the Burlington Free Press still touts a scientific "consensus" on human causation. Chesser points out that on the same day that BFP whined about its imaginary consensus, it also acknowledged a frigid weekend deluge as "easily the largest snowstorm ever witnessed in Burlington in more than 120 years of record keeping."
Two-thirds of America gripped by arctic cold and vast swaths covered in snow following the coldest summer in a century for parts of the country -- these are reasonable bases for challenging the Burlington Free Press. But first we'd have to pry them away from using organic detergent to wash their Priuses, which run on freeze-dried, free-range rat droppings. Warmists will push the lie that humankind is baking the planet even as glaciers ring the warmists' doorbells.
In the social arena, progressives in government, media, and academia continue to feed Americans the myth that income inequality and "social injustice" cause crime. Manhattan Institute's Heather MacDonald observes:
As the economy started shedding jobs in 2008, criminologists and pundits predicted that crime would shoot up, since poverty, as the "root causes" theory holds, begets criminals. Instead, the opposite happened. Over seven million lost jobs later, crime has plummeted to its lowest level since the early 1960s. The consequences of this drop for how we think about social order are significant.
Lower crime might be related to Americans buying guns and ammunition at record levels since Obama's ascent to the throne. Back to MacDonald's argument:
The 1960s themselves offered a challenge to the poverty-causes-crime thesis. Homicides rose 43%, despite an expanding economy and a surge in government jobs for inner-city residents. The Great Depression also contradicted the idea that need breeds predation, since crime rates dropped during that prolonged crisis. ... In 2009, the city of L.A. saw a 17% drop in homicides, an 8% drop in property crimes, and a 10% drop in violent crimes. In New York, homicides fell 19%, to their lowest level since reliable records were first kept in 1963.
Despite such problematic reality, capitalism-haters will persist in spreading tall tales to bolster their belief that socioeconomic injustice causes crime. They will push confiscatory taxes to spread wealth to those who've produced none so that said non-producers won't feel victimized, and they hurt actual producers who did nothing to harm the non-producers because the former were too busy creating jobs -- jobs which the non-producers summarily ignore in order to free up time to hold out their hands and grab producers' redistributed wealth. Confusing? Smile. This makes sense to progressives.
A common thread in "progressive" approaches was stitched as long ago as 1899 by education theorist John Dewey.
All that society has accomplished for itself is put, through the agency of the school, at the disposal of its future members. All its better thoughts of itself it hopes to realize through the new possibilities thus opened to its future self. Here individualism and socialism are at one. Only by being true to the full growth of all the individuals who make it up, can society by any chance be true to itself [1].
Clear thinkers recognize the foolishness of Dewey's assertion that society owns the "full growth of all the individuals who make it up." His sermonizing did not marry individualism to socialism, but instead forged a contrived, contentious partnership that made "progressive" educators a century ago feel good about anti-individual tactics which were destined to create the morally relativistic swamp now stinking up our schools. Today's educators will not likely wake up and smell their students' rotting synapses. They will preach multiculturalism, moral relativism, and "diversity" until the price per gallon of biofuel in their Smart Cars exceeds students' test scores.
Let's condense. Progressives endlessly hype disproved fallacies, among them:
Human-caused "climate change."
More guns, more crime.
Handouts improve the plight of the poor.
Raising taxes in a down economy doesn't impede recovery.
More government, better government
Incarcerating criminals doesn't decrease crime; rehabilitation does.
Playing nice-nice with violent scumbags pacifies them.
Raising self-esteem begets achievement, not the other way around.
Life should be fair.
Progressivism is about embracing silliness to make a person feel good -- reality be damned.
Classicist Victor Davis Hanson observes that because of Obama's naïve approach on terrorism, "Plenty of our chickens will be coming home to roost this year." Americans will pay for what the Democrats have done and undone to overexpose us to a resurgent al-Qaeda, because action and inaction have consequences. Tell this to a staunch progressive, and you'll stare into the glazed eyes of someone searching inside for feel-goodisms to counteract the disgusting notion that anyone should suffer consequences for anything.
If we listen to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and rename Muslim terrorism "man-caused disasters," then perhaps disaster-causers will go extinct. We must relabel high taxes as low taxes, traditional Americans as extremists, cold as hot, falling crime as proof that guns kill, logic as judgmentalism, and finally, right as wrong, wrong as right, and refusal to acknowledge either as "thoughtful."
Progressive politicians are not unintelligent, not as a rule. They are in denial, terminally zealous, and fundamentally dishonest with themselves.
A physicist and former high tech executive, Chuck Rogér was a columnist for a Phoenix newspaper and now blogs at chuckroger.com. Email: swampcactus@chuckroger.com.
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[1] John Dewey, The School and Society & The Child and the Curriculum, BN Publishing, 2008, p. 5.
2c)The End of Moral Hazard?
By Megan McArdle
The financial Twitterverse has been abuzz this morning with speculation as to what the administration was going to propose? Yes, yes . . . they're going to sweat down Too Big to Fail banks. But how? Some commentators thought the gist would be HULK SMASH BANKS!!! Others predicted it would be a minor tweak on the measures already proposed.
Now we know. The administration's new proposal has two core pieces, both of which are at least somewhat novel. First, banks that have access to the discount window will not be able to trade for their own account. That means no prop trading desk. No owning hedge funds or private equity funds. No investments of any kind to make profits for your shareholders. Financial institutions can make profits by servicing clients, or they can make profits by investing for their own book. But they can't do both.
Senior administration officials I spoke to made it clear that this would not include market making activity, which the administration views as something you do for your clients. But while that may partially reassure banks, that seems to mean that market makers--i.e. Goldman Sachs--are very definitely included. That impression was reinforced by the way Indeed, if they pass this thing, they should probably call it the Hey Goldman Sachs! You're Not Going to Be So Profitable Any More Act of 2010.
The second proposal is to extend something like the caps that already prohibit banks from holding more than 10% of federally insured deposits, to other kinds of liabilities. I asked, but got no clarity, on what exactly this means. Are regulators going to swoop in whenever a diversified financial institution has too big a share of the total liabilities in all US debt markets? Or are they going to intervene when a bank becomes dangerous to one particular debt market, the way Lehman turned out to be in commercial paper?
One thing is clear, though: the banks screwed up. As I've been saying for months now, it was a simply gigantic mistake to seek huge profits and big bonus pools. Yes, I know that they were competing for talent with foreign banks. Well, they kept the talent, and now it looks like they may well lose the profitable lines of business that they needed the talent for. Last time I looked, Goldman's proprietary investments made up something like 90% of its profits. Do they give up their profits, or their implied government guarantee? Either move is going to hurt, which is why, despite reporting record profits today, Goldman's stock is down 4% at this writing.
Now, as to the merits of the policy: is it a good idea? On first pass, I'm going to say tenatively yes. The government is recognizing that banks "paying back" the funds they were given is essentially meaningless, because they've still got a very, very valuable implied government guarantee. One could argue that they've had it since 1991 when the Federal Reserve got the power to loan money to investment banks in extremis. But since last fall, it's the next best thing to explicit. That means the government needs to take steps to mitigate its own risk.
The way you do that is to decouple the key operation the government insures--the funneling of credit from those with money to those who want to borrow it--from making bets on market outcomes that can go badly wrong. And to ensure that no institution has enough liabilities to take down the system if it fails.
That said, I'm not necessarily confident that this is going to work. I'm not even sure that I understand how it will work at this point. I have only a hazy understanding of how the liability limits will be enforced, and after talking to administration officials, I'm not sure that they really know either; they seem to be waiting to see what the legislators and regulators say. And while splitting off proprietary investment seems like it might mitigate systemic risk, it may be very hard to enforce. Would "eating your own toxic waste" be prop trading, or client service, for example? It's possible that this thing will end up with loopholes you could drive a truck through, and if so, it will probably be worse than nothing.
Too, I haven't talked to any prop traders or investment banking executives this morning. They might be able to offer a convincing reason we shouldn't do this.
But even if it's not the best idea in the world, there are definitely many worse rules that we could think up. And after a stunning defeat on health care, the administration needs to score big points against the bankers quickly. If "Don't just stand there, do something!" is the order of the day, there are clearly worse somethings we can do.
If we do choose this "something", Americans should probably be clear that this is going to deal a major setback to New York as a world financial capital. Many of the rules that were undone in the last two decades were got rid of because they were making it too hard for American banks to cope with foreign competition. If we do this, America's financial sector will shrink, and our banks will lose a lot of business to foreign firms. That means, among other things, that we are going to lose big chunks of tax revenue, because bankers are very disproportionate contributors to federal coffers. It also means that New York's renaissance will probably slack off--and the people who complain about the bankers will discover how many city services those banker salaries paid for.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. I think finance has taken on an outsized role in our country, and as we've seen over the past year and a half, that hasn't been a healthy state of affairs. But this means a substantial change to the American financial system, and as with all change, we won't like every single thing that follows.
3)The Debt Reduction Commission: Another Gergen-Shields Show
By Ken Blackwell
Whenever the Establishment in Washington gets a Big Idea about the need to get beyond partisanship, reach for your wallet. The latest Big Idea is President Obama's proposal for an Executive Commission on Debt Reduction. The idea is modeled on the Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC). That commission had as its task closing military bases we thought we did not need in the post-Cold War era. The reason we needed BRAC, we were told, is that too many local congressmen were protecting the bases in their own districts, and none of the excess bases could be closed. It was blowing out the Pentagon budget, they said.
President Obama wants a commission to help him stop excess spending. Even if we do not pass his health care proposals, the rising costs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are projected to grow so vast that they will reach 300% of the Gross Domestic Product by the year 2050. This would require tax hikes of $12,072 per family in the U.S.
Clearly, we can't continue on this glide path.
The president offered this proposal for an eighteen-member Executive Commission. That ought to be cheap to run. Just imagine the staff and travel to research sites for that! Six of the members would be named by Democrats in Congress, six by Republicans, and the remaining six would be named by Mr. Obama himself (except that of his share, at least two would have to be Republicans, and no more than four could be Democrats).
I already know what this adventure in Bi-Partisanship would look like. It would look like the famous Gergen-Shield matchup on PBS. When the publicly-funded Jim Lehrer Newshour reached out for a Republican and a Democrat to give a thin veneer of bipartisanship, they recruited David Gergen and Mark Shields. This duo was left and lefter.
Republican in Name Only David Gergen was the classic trimmer in the Reagan White House. He went on serve in the Bill Clinton White House. He was most recently seen moderating the Martha Coakley-Scott Brown-(Not that) Joe Kennedy debate in Massachusetts.
Gergen asked Scott Brown if he really intended to "overturn" Roe v. Wade. Pro-choice Gergen knows that framing a question on abortion that includes the word "overturn" is the best way to assure a strong majority against. Americans don't want to overturn anything. Sounds radical. Sounds dangerous. Think of an SUV in a ditch.
Gergen then opened up on Scott Brown. Would you really sit in "Ted Kennedy's seat" and vote against the cause to which he devoted his life? How about that for a blow below the belt? And this is PBS's idea of a Republican!
Not intentionally, Gergen gave Brown an opening for the greatest line of the night: "With all due respect, it's not the Kennedy seat, it's not the Democrats' seat, it's the People's Seat." That line may have won the election for Scott Brown. "People's Seat" was the slogan that glittered on stage when Scott Brown claimed victory...but surely no thanks to David RINO Gergen.
And that's what the Obama Executive Commission on Debt Reduction will look like. Gergens galore. Their job will be to rope Republicans into voting for huge new tax increases.
They'll be famous "deficit hawks." But they'll know nothing about job creation and small business promotion. Some of those congressionally appointed commissioners could include the very members voters want to oust this fall. Deficit hawks could soon change their feather and become lame ducks.
Harry Truman kept a sign on his desk. It said, "The Buck Stops Here." This debt reduction commission just passes the buck. Don't fall for another Gergen-Shields fiasco of a debt reduction commission.
Ken Blackwell is a senior fellow at the Family Research Council. He is on the board of directors of the Club for Growth, National Taxpayers Union, and National Rifle Association.
4)Climategate: CRU Was But the Tip of the Iceberg
By Marc Sheppard
Not surprisingly, the blatant corruption exposed at Britain’s premiere climate institute was not contained within the nation’s borders. Just months after the Climategate scandal broke, a new study has uncovered compelling evidence that our government's principal climate centers have also been manipulating worldwide temperature data in order to fraudulently advance the global warming political agenda.
Not only does the preliminary report [PDF] indict a broader network of conspirators, it challenges the very mechanism by which global temperatures are measured, published, and historically ranked.
Last Thursday, Certified Consulting Meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo and computer expert E. Michael Smith appeared together on KUSI TV [Video] to discuss the Climategate -- American Style scandal they had discovered. This time out, the alleged perpetrators are the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).
NOAA stands accused by the two researchers of strategically deleting cherry-picked cooler-reporting weather observation stations from the temperature data it provides the world through its National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). D’Aleo explained to show host and Weather Channel founder John Coleman that while the Hadley Center in the U.K. has been the subject of recent scrutiny:
“We think NOAA is complicit if not the real ground zero for the issue”
And their primary accomplices are the scientists at GISS, who put the altered data through an even more biased regimen of alterations, including intentionally replacing the dropped NOAA readings with those of stations located in much warmer locales.
As you’ll soon see – the ultimate effects of these statistical transgressions on the reports which influence climate alarm and subsequently world energy policy are nothing short of staggering.
NOAA – Data In / Garbage Out
Although satellite temperature measurements have been available since 1978, most global temperature analyses still rely on data captured from land-based thermometers, scattered more-or-less about the planet. It is that data which NOAA receives and disseminates – although not before performing some sleight-of-hand on it.
Smith has done much of the heavy lifting involved in analyzing the NOAA/GISS data and software, and he chronicles his often frustrating experiences at his fascinating website. There, detail-seekers will find plenty of them, divided into easily-navigated sections -- some designed specifically for us “geeks,” but most readily approachable to readers at all technical strata.
Perhaps the key point discovered by Smith was that by 1990, NOAA had deleted from its datasets all but 1500 of the 6000 thermometers in service around the globe.
Now, 75% represents quite a drop in sampling population, particularly considering that these stations provide the readings used to compile both the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) and United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) datasets. The same datasets, incidentally, which serve as primary sources of temperature data not only for climate researchers and universities worldwide, but also for the many international agencies using the data to create analytical temperature anomaly maps and charts.
Yet, as disturbing as the number of dropped stations was, it was the nature of NOAA’s “selection bias” that Smith found infinitely more troubling.
It seems that stations placed in historically cooler, rural areas of higher latitude and elevation were scrapped from the data series in favor of more urban locales at lower latitudes and elevations. Consequently, post-1990 readings have been biased to the warm side not only by selective geographic location, but also the anthropogenic heating influence of a phenomenon known as the Urban Heat Island Effect (UHI).
For example, Canada’s reporting stations dropped from 496 in 1989 to 44 in 1991 with the percentage of stations at lower elevations tripling while the numbers of those at higher elevations dropped to 1. That’s right, as Smith wrote in his blog, they left “one thermometer for everything north of LAT 65. “ And that one resides in a place called Eureka, which has been described as “The Garden Spot of the Arctic,” due to its unusually moderate summers.
Smith also discovered that in California, only 4 stations remain – 1 in San Francisco and 3 in Southern LA near the beach, and rightly observed that:
“It is certainly impossible to compare it with the past record that had thermometers in the snowy mountains. So we can have no idea if California is warming or cooling by looking at the USHCN data set or the GHCN data set.”
That’s because the baseline temperatures to which current readings are compared were a true averaging of both warmer and cooler locations. And comparing these historic true averages to contemporary false averages -- which have had the lower end of their numbers intentionally stripped out – will always yield a warming trend, even when temperatures have actually dropped.
Overall, U.S. on-line stations have dropped from a peak of 1,850 in 1963 to a low of 136 as of 2007. In his blog, Smith wittily observed that “the Thermometer Langoliers have eaten 9/10 of the thermometers in the USA; including all the cold ones in California.” But he was deadly serious after comparing current to previous versions of USHCN data and discovering that this “selection bias” creates a +0.6°C warming in U.S. temperature history.
And no wonder -- imagine the accuracy of campaign tracking polls were Gallup to include only the replies of Democrats in their statistics. But it gets worse.
Prior to publication, NOAA effects a number of “adjustments” to the cherry-picked stations’ data, supposedly to eliminate flagrant outliers, adjust for Time of Day heat variance, and “homogenize” stations with their neighbors in order to compensate for discontinuities. The latter, they state, is accomplished by essentially adjusting each to jive closely with the mean of its five closest “neighbors.” But given the plummeting number of stations, and the likely disregard for the latitude, elevation or UHI of such neighbors, it’s no surprise that such “homogenizing” seems to always result in warmer readings.
The chart below is from Willis Eschenbach’s WUWT essay, The smoking gun at Darwin Zero, and plots GHCN Raw vs. homogeneity adjusted temperature data at Darwin International Airport in Australia. The “adjustments” actually reversed the 20th century trend from temperatures falling at 0.7°C per century to temperatures rising at 1.2°C per century. Eschenbach isolated a single station and found it was adjusted to the positive by 6.0°C per century, and with no apparent reason as all five stations at the airport more or less aligned for each period. His conclusion was that he had uncovered “indisputable evidence that the ‘homogenized’ data has been changed to fit someone’s preconceptions about whether the earth is warming.”
WUWT’s editor, Anthony Watts, has calculated the overall U.S. homogeneity bias to be 0.5°F to the positive, which alone accounts for almost one half of the 1.2°F warming over the last century. Add Smith’s selection bias to the mix and poof – actual warming completely disappears!
Yet -- believe it or not, the manipulation does not stop there.
GISS – Garbage In / Globaloney Out
The scientists at NASA’s GISS are widely considered to be the world’s leading researchers into atmospheric and climate changes. And their Surface Temperature (GISTemp) analysis system is undoubtedly the premiere source for global surface temperature anomaly reports.
In creating its widely disseminated maps and charts, the program merges station readings collected from the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) with GHCN and USHCN data from NOAA.
It then puts the merged data through a few “adjustments” of its own.
First, it further “homogenizes” stations, supposedly adjusting for UHI by – according to NASA -- changing “the long term trend of any non-rural station to match the long term trend of their rural neighbors, while retaining the short term monthly and annual variations.” Of course, the reduced number of stations will have the same effect on GISS’s UHI correction as it did on NOAA’s discontinuity homogenization – the creation of artificial warming.
Furthermore, in his communications with me, Smith cited boatloads of problems and errors he found in the Fortran code written to accomplish this task, ranging from hot airport stations being mismarked as “rural” to the “correction” having the wrong sign (+/-) and therefore increasing when it meant to decrease or vice versa.
And according to NASA, “If no such neighbors exist or the overlap of the rural combination and the non-rural record is less than 20 years, the station is completely dropped; if the rural records are shorter, part of the non-rural record is dropped.”
However, Smith points out that a dropped record may be “from a location that has existed for 100 years.” For instance, if an aging piece of equipment gets swapped out, thereby changing its identification number, the time horizon reinitializes to zero years. Even having a large enough temporal gap (e.g during a world war) might cause the data to “just get tossed out.”
But the real chicanery begins in the next phase, wherein the planet is flattened and stretched onto an 8000 box grid, into which the time series are converted to a series of anomalies (degree variances from the baseline). Now, you might wonder just how one manages to fill 8000 boxes from 1500 stations.
Here’s NASA’s solution:
“For each grid box, the stations within that grid box and also any station within 1200km of the center of that box are combined using the reference station method.”
Even on paper the design flaws inherent in such a process should be glaringly obvious.
So it’s no surprise that Smith found many examples of problems surfacing in actual practice, and offered me Hawaii for starters. It seems that all of the Aloha State’s surviving stations reside in major airports. Nonetheless, this unrepresentative hot data is what’s used to “infill” the surrounding “empty” Grid Boxes up to 1200km out to sea. So, in effect, you have “jet airport tarmacs ‘standing in’ for temperature over water 1200 km closer to the North Pole.”
An isolated problem? Hardly, reports Smith.
From KUSI’s Global Warming: The Other Side:
“There’s a wonderful baseline for Bolivia -- a very high mountainous country -- right up until 1990 when the data ends. And if you look on the [GISS] November 2009 anomaly map, you’ll see a very red rosy hot Bolivia [boxed in blue]. But how do you get a hot Bolivia when you haven’t measured the temperature for 20 years?”
Of course, you already know the answer: GISS simply fills in the missing numbers – originally cool as Bolivia contains proportionately more land above 10,000 feet than any other country in the world -- with hot ones available in neighboring stations on a beach in Peru or somewhere in the Amazon jungle.
Remember that single station north of 65° latitude which they located in a warm section of northern Canada? Joe D’Aleo explained its purpose:
“To estimate temperatures in the Northwest Territory [boxed in green above], they either have to rely on that location or look further south.”
Pretty slick, huh?
And those are but a few examples. In fact, throughout the entire grid, cooler station data are dropped and “filled in” by temperatures extrapolated from warmer stations in a manner obviously designed to overestimate warming.
And convince you it’s your fault.
Government and Intergovernmental Agencies -- Globaloney In / Green Gospel Out
Smith attributes up to 3°F (more in some places) of added “warming trend” between NOAA’s data adjustment and GIStemp processing.
That’s over twice last century’s reported warming.
And yet, not only are NOAA’s bogus data accepted as green gospel – so are its equally bogus hysterical claims, like this one from the 2006 annual State of the Climate in 2005 [PDF]:
“Globally averaged mean annual air temperature in 2005 slightly exceeded the previous record heat of 1998, making 2005 the warmest year on record.”
And as D’Aleo points out in the preliminary report, the recent NOAA proclamation that June 2009 was the second warmest June in 130 years will go down in the history books, despite multiple satellite assessments ranking it as the 15th coldest in 31 years.
Even when our own National Weather Service (NWS) makes its frequent announcements that a certain month or year was the hottest ever, or that five of the warmest years on record occurred last decade, they’re basing such hyperbole entirely on NOAA’s warm-biased data.
And how can anyone possibly read GISS chief James Hansen’s Sunday claim that 2009 was tied with 2007 for second warmest year overall and the Southern Hemisphere’s absolute warmest in 130 years of global instrumental temperature records without laughing hysterically? Especially considering that NOAA had just released a statement claiming that very same year – 2009 -- to be tied with 2006 for the fifth warmest year on record.
So, how do alarmists reconcile one government center reporting 2009 as tied for second while another had it tied for fifth? If you’re WaPo’s Andrew Freedman, you simply chalk it up to “different data analysis methods” before adjudicating both NASA and NOAA innocent of any impropriety based solely on their pointless assertions that they didn’t do it.
Earth to Andrew: “Different data analysis methods?” Try replacing “analysis” with “manipulation” and ye shall find enlightenment. More importantly, does the explicit fact that since the drastically divergent results of both “methods” can’t be right both are immediately suspect somehow elude you?
But by far the most significant impact of this data fraud is that it ultimately bubbles up to the pages of the climate alarmists’ bible: The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Report.
And wrong data begets wrong reports which -- particularly in this case -- begets dreadfully wrong policy.
It’s High Time We Investigated the Investigators
The final report will be made public shortly, and available at the websites of both report-supporter Science and Public Policy Institute and Joe D’Aleo’s own ICECAP. As they’ve both been tremendously helpful over the past few days, I’ll trust in the opinions I’ve received from the report’s architects to sum up.
This from the meteorologist:
The biggest gaps and greatest uncertainties are in high latitude areas where the data centers say they 'find' the greatest warming (and thus which contribute the most to their global anomalies). Add to that no adjustment for urban growth and land use changes (even as the world's population increased from 1.5 to 6.7 billion people) [in the NOAA data] and questionable methodology for computing the historical record that very often cools off the early record and you have surface based data sets so seriously flawed, they can no longer be trusted for climate trend or model forecast assessment or decision making by the administration, congress or the EPA.
Roger Pielke Sr. has suggested: “...that we move forward with an inclusive assessment of the surface temperature record of CRU, GISS and NCDC. We need to focus on the science issues. This necessarily should involve all research investigators who are working on this topic, with formal assessments chaired and paneled by mutually agreed to climate scientists who do not have a vested interest in the outcome of the evaluations.” I endorse that suggestion
Certainly, all rational thinkers agree. Perhaps even the mainstream media, most of whom have hitherto mistakenly dismissed Climategate as a uniquely British problem, will now wake up and demand such an investigation.
And this from the computer expert:
That the bias exists is not denied. That the data are too sparse and with too many holes over time in not denied. Temperature series programs, like NASA GISS GIStemp try, but fail, to fix the holes and the bias. What is claimed is that "the anomaly will fix it." But it cannot. Comparison of a cold baseline set to a hot present set must create a biased anomaly. It is simply overwhelmed by the task of taking out that much bias. And yet there is more. A whole zoo of adjustments are made to the data. These might be valid in some cases, but the end result is to put in a warming trend of up to several degrees. We are supposed to panic over a 1/10 degree change of "anomaly" but accept 3 degrees of "adjustment" with no worries at all. To accept that GISTemp is "a perfect filter". That is, simply, "nuts". It was a good enough answer at Bastogne, and applies here too.
Smith, who had a family member attached to the 101st Airborne at the time, refers to the famous line from the 101st commander, U.S. Army General Anthony Clement McAuliffe, who replied to a German ultimatum to surrender the December, 1944 Battle of Bastogne, Belgium with a single word: “Nuts.”
And that’s exactly what we’d be were we to surrender our freedoms, our economic growth, and even our simplest comforts, to duplicitous zealots before checking and double checking the work of the prophets predicting our doom should we refuse.
Marc Sheppard is environment editor of American Thinker and editor of the forthcoming Environment Thinker.
5)Judicial Watch Announces List of Washington 's "Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians" for 2009
Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, today released its 2009 list of Washington 's "Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians." The list, in alphabetical order, includes:
1.Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT): This marks two years in a row for Senator Dodd, who made the 2008 "Ten Most Corrupt" list for his corrupt relationship with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and for accepting preferential treatment and loan terms from Countrywide Financial, a scandal which still dogs him. In 2009, the scandals kept coming for the Connecticut Democrat. In 2009, Judicial Watch filed a Senate ethics complaint against Dodd for undervaluing a property he owns in Ireland on his Senate Financial Disclosure forms. Judicial Watch's complaint forced Dodd to amend the forms. However, press reports suggest the property to this day remains undervalued. Judicial Watch also alleges in the complaint that Dodd obtained a sweetheart deal for the property in exchange for his assistance in obtaining a presidential pardon (during the Clinton administration) and other favors for a long-time friend and business associate. The false financial disclosure forms were part of the cover-up. Dodd remains the head the Senate Banking Committee.
2.Senator John Ensign (R-NV): A number of scandals popped up in 2009 involving public officials who conducted illicit affairs, and then attempted to cover them up with hush payments and favors, an obvious abuse of power. The year's worst offender might just be Nevada Republican Senator John Ensign. Ensign admitted in June to an extramarital affair with the wife of one of his staff members, who then allegedly obtained special favors from the Nevada Republican in exchange for his silence. According to The New York Times: "The Justice Department and the Senate Ethics Committee are expected to conduct preliminary inquiries into whether Senator John Ensign violated federal law or ethics rules as part of an effort to conceal an affair with the wife of an aide…" The former staffer, Douglas Hampton, began to lobby Mr. Ensign's office immediately upon leaving his congressional job, despite the fact that he was subject to a one-year lobbying ban. Ensign seems to have ignored the law and allowed Hampton lobbying access to his office as a payment for his silence a bo ut the affair. (These are potentially criminal offenses.) It looks as if Ensign misused his public office (and taxpayer resources) to cover up his sexual shenanigans.
3.Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA): Judicial Watch is investigating a $12 million TARP cash injection provided to the Boston-based OneUnited Bank at the urging of Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank. As reported in the January 22, 2009, edition of the Wall Street Journal, the Treasury Department indicated it would only provide funds to healthy banks to jump-start lending. Not only was OneUnited Bank in massive financial turmoil, but it was also "under attack from its regulators for allegations of poor lending practices and executive-pay abuses, including owning a Porsche for its executives' use." Rep. Frank admitted he spoke to a "federal regulator," and Treasury granted the funds. (The bank continues to flounder despite Frank's intervention for federal dollars.) Moreover, Judicial Watch uncovered documents in 2009 that showed that members of Congress for years were aware that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were playing fast and loose with accounting issues, risk assessment issues and executive compensation issues, even as liberals led by Rep. Frank continued to block attempts to rein in the two Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs). For example, during a hearing on September 10, 2003, before the House Committee on Financial Services considering a Bush administration proposal to further regulate Fannie and Freddie, Rep. Frank stated: "I want to begin by saying that I am glad to consider the legislation, but I do not think we are facing any kind of a crisis. That is, in my view, the two Government Sponsored Enterprises we are talking a bo ut here, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are not in a crisis. We have recently had an accounting problem with Freddie Mac that has led to people being dismissed, as appears to be appropriate. I do not think at this point there is a problem with a threat to the Treasury." Frank received $42,350 in campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac between 1989 and 2008. Frank also engaged in a relationship with a Fannie Mae Executive while serving on the House Banking Committee, which has jurisdiction over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
4.Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner: In 2009, Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner admitted that he failed to pay $34,000 in Social Security and Medicare taxes from 2001-2004 on his lucrative salary at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), an organization with 185 member countries that oversees the global financial system. (Did we mention Geithner now runs the IRS?) It wasn't until President Obama tapped Geithner to head the Treasury Department that he paid back most of the money, although the IRS kindly waived the hefty penalties. In March 2009, Geithner also came under fire for his handling of the AIG bo nus scandal, where the company used $165 million of its bailout funds to pay out executive bo nuses, resulting in a massive public backlash. Of course as head of the New York Federal Reserve, Geithner helped craft the AIG deal in September 2008. However, when the AIG scandal broke, Geithner claimed he knew nothing of the bo nuses until March 10, 2009. The timing is important. According to CNN: "Although Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told congressional leaders on Tuesday that he learned of AIG's impending $160 million bo nus payments to members of its troubled financial-products unit on March 10, sources tell TIME that the New York Federal Reserve informed Treasury staff that the payments were imminent on Feb. 28. That is ten days before Treasury staffers say they first learned 'full details' of the bo nus plan, and three days before the [Obama] Administration launched a new $30 billion infusion of cash for AIG." Throw in another embarrassing disclosure in 2009 that Geithner employed "household help" ineligible to work in the United States, and it becomes clear why the Treasury Secretary has earned a spot on the "Ten Most Corrupt Politicians in Washington" list.
5.Attorney General Eric Holder: Tim Geithner can be sure he won't be hounded a bo ut his tax-dodging by his colleague Eric Holder, US Attorney General. Judicial Watch strongly opposed Holder because of his terrible ethics record, which includes: obstructing an FBI investigation of the theft of nuclear secrets from Los Alamos Nuclear La bo ratory; rejecting multiple requests for an independent counsel to investigate alleged fundraising abuses by then-Vice President Al Gore in the Clinton White House; undermining the criminal investigation of President Clinton by Kenneth Starr in the midst of the Lewinsky investigation; and planning the violent raid to seize then-six-year-old Elian Gonzalez at gunpoint in order to return him to Castro's Cuba. Moreover, there is his soft record on terrorism. Holder bypassed Justice Department procedures to push through Bill Clinton's scandalous presidential pardons and commutations, including for 16 members of FALN, a violent Puerto Rican terrorist group that orchestrated approximately 120 bo mbings in the United States, killing at least six people and permanently maiming dozens of others, including law enforcement officers. His record in the current administration is no better. As he did during the Clinton administration, Holder continues to ignore serious incidents of corruption that could impact his political bo sses at the White House. For example, Holder has refused to investigate charges that the Obama political machine traded VIP access to the White House in exchange for campaign contributions – a scheme eerily similar to one hatched by Holder's former bo ss, Bill Clinton in the 1990s. The Holder Justice Department also came under fire for dropping a voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party. On Election Day 2008, Black Panthers dressed in paramilitary garb threatened voters as they approached polling stations. Holder has also failed to initiate a comprehensive Justice investigation of the notorious organization ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), which is closely tied to President Obama. There were allegedly more than 400,000 fraudulent ACORN voter registrations in the 2008 campaign. And then there were the journalist videos catching ACORN Housing workers advising undercover reporters on how to evade tax, immigration, and child prostitution laws. Holder's controversial decisions on new rights for terrorists and his attacks on previous efforts to combat terrorism remind many of the fact that his former law firm has provided and continues to provide pro bo no representation to terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. Holder's politicization of the Justice Department makes one long for the days of Alberto Gonzales.
6.Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL)/ Senator Roland Burris (D-IL): One of the most serious scandals of 2009 involved a scheme by former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich to sell President Obama's then-vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder. Two men caught smack dab in the middle of the scandal: Senator Roland Burris, who ultimately got the job, and Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, emissaries for Jesse Jackson Jr., named "Senate Candidate A" in the Blagojevich indictment, reportedly offered $1.5 million to Blagojevich during a fundraiser if he named Jackson Jr. to Obama's seat. Three days later federal authorities arrested Blagojevich. Burris, for his part, apparently lied a bo ut his contacts with Blagojevich, who was arrested in December 2008 for trying to sell Obama's Senate seat. According to Reuters: "Roland Burris came under fresh scrutiny…after disclosing he tried to raise money for the disgraced former Illinois governor who named him to the U.S. Senate seat once held by President Barack Obama…In the latest of those admissions, Burris said he looked into mounting a fundraiser for Rod Blagojevich -- later charged with trying to sell Obama's Senate seat -- at the same time he was expressing interest to the then-governor's aides a bo ut his desire to be appointed." Burris changed his story five times regarding his contacts with Blagojevich prior to the Illinois governor appointing him to the U.S. Senate. Three of those changing explanations came under oath.
7.President Barack Obama: During his presidential campaign, President Obama promised to run an ethical and transparent administration. However, in his first year in office, the President has delivered corruption and secrecy, bringing Chicago-style political corruption to the White House. Consider just a few Obama administration "lowlights" from year one: Even before President Obama was sworn into office, he was interviewed by the FBI for a criminal investigation of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich's scheme to sell the President's former Senate seat to the highest bidder. (Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and slumlord Valerie Jarrett, bo th from Chicago, are also tangled up in the Blagojevich scandal.) Moreover, the Obama administration made the startling claim that the Privacy Act does not apply to the White House. The Obama White House believes it can violate the privacy rights of American citizens without any legal consequences or accountability. President Obama bo ldly proclaimed that "transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency," but his administration is addicted to secrecy, stonewalling far too many of Judicial Watch's Freedom of Information Act requests and is refusing to make public White House visitor logs as federal law requires. The Obama administration turned the National Endowment of the Arts (as well as the agency that runs the AmeriCorps program) into propaganda machines, using tax dollars to persuade "artists" to promote the Obama agenda. According to documents uncovered by Judicial Watch, the idea emerged as a direct result of the Obama campaign and enjoyed White House approval and participation. President Obama has installed a record number of "czars" in positions of power. Too many of these individuals are leftist radicals who answer to no one but the president. And too many of the czars are not subject to Senate confirmation (which raises serious constitutional questions). Under the President's bailout schemes, the federal government continues to appropriate or control -- through fiat and threats -- large sectors of the private economy, prompting conservative columnist George Will to write: "The administration's central activity -- the political allocation of wealth and opportunity -- is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption." Government-run healthcare and car companies, White House coercion, uninvestigated ACORN corruption, debasing his office to help Chicago cronies, attacks on conservative media and the private sector, unprecedented and dangerous new rights for terrorists, perks for campaign donors – this is Obama's "ethics" record -- and we haven't even gotten through the first year of his presidency.
8.Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA): At the heart of the corruption problem in Washington is a sense of entitlement. Politicians believe laws and rules (even the U.S. Constitution) apply to the rest of us but not to them. Case in point: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her excessive and boorish demands for military travel. Judicial Watch obtained documents from the Pentagon in 2008 that suggest Pelosi has been treating the Air Force like her own personal airline. These documents, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, include internal Pentagon email correspondence detailing attempts by Pentagon staff to accommodate Pelosi's numerous requests for military escorts and military aircraft as well as the speaker's 11th hour cancellations and changes. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also came under fire in April 2009, when she claimed she was never briefed a bo ut the CIA's use of the water bo arding technique during terrorism investigations. The CIA produced a report documenting a briefing with Pelosi on September 4, 2002, that suggests otherwise. Judicial Watch also obtained documents, including a CIA Inspector General report, which further confirmed that Congress was fully briefed on the enhanced interrogation techniques. Aside from her own personal transgressions, Nancy Pelosi has ignored serious incidents of corruption within her own party, including many of the individuals on this list. (See Rangel, Murtha, Jesse Jackson, Jr., etc.)
9.Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) and the rest of the PMA Seven: Rep. John Murtha made headlines in 2009 for all the wrong reasons. The Pennsylvania congressman is under federal investigation for his corrupt relationship with the now-defunct defense lobbyist PMA Group. PMA, founded by a former Murtha associate, has been the congressman's largest campaign contributor. Since 2002, Murtha has raised $1.7 million from PMA and its clients. And what did PMA and its clients receive from Murtha in return for their generosity? Earmarks -- tens of millions of dollars in earmarks. In fact, even with all of the attention surrounding his alleged influence peddling, Murtha kept at it. Following an FBI raid of PMA's offices earlier in 2009, Murtha continued to seek congressional earmarks for PMA clients, while also hitting them up for campaign contributions. According to The Hill, in April, "Murtha reported receiving contributions from three former PMA clients for whom he requested earmarks in the pending appropriations bills." When it comes to the PMA scandal, Murtha is not alone. As many as six other Members of Congress are currently under scrutiny according to The Washington Post. They include: Peter J. Visclosky (D-IN.), James P. Moran Jr. (D-VA), Norm Dicks (D-WA.), Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), C.W. Bill Young (R-FL.) and Todd Tiahrt (R-KS.). Of course rather than investigate this serious scandal, according to Roll Call House Democrats circled the wagons, "cobbling together a defense to offer political cover to their rank and file." The Washington Post also reported in 2009 that Murtha's nephew received $4 million in Defense Department no-bid contracts: "Newly obtained documents…show Robert Murtha mentioning his influential family connection as leverage in his business dealings and holding unusual power with the military."
10.Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY): Rangel, the man in charge of writing tax policy for the entire country, has yet to adequately explain how he could possibly "forget" to pay taxes on $75,000 in rental income he earned from his off-shore rental property. He also faces allegations that he improperly used his influence to maintain ownership of highly coveted rent-controlled apartments in Harlem, and misused his congressional office to fundraise for his private Rangel Center by preserving a tax loophole for an oil drilling company in exchange for funding. On top of all that, Rangel recently amended his financial disclosure reports, which doubled his reported wealth. (He somehow "forgot" a bo ut $1 million in assets.) And what did he do when the House Ethics Committee started looking into all of this? He apparently resorted to making "campaign contributions" to dig his way out of trouble. According to WCBS TV, a New York CBS affiliate: "The reigning member of Congress' top tax committee is apparently 'wrangling' other politicos to get him out of his own financial and tax troubles...Since ethics probes began last year the 79-year-old congressman has given campaign donations to 119 members of Congress, including three of the five Democrats on the House Ethics Committee who are charged with investigating him." Charlie Rangel should not be allowed to remain in Congress, let alone serve as Chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, and he knows it. That's why he felt the need to disburse campaign contributions to Ethics Committee members and other congressional colleagues.
6)UN Chief: Mideast conflict worsening amid stalled talks
United Nations Secretary General Ban ki-Moon on Thursday urged Palestinians and Israelis to resume peace negotiations, declaring that failure to do so could destroy any chances of progress.
"In the absence of talks, confidence between the parties has diminished," the UN chief said at a meeting of the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People in New York.
"Tensions have risen in East Jerusalem. People in Gaza and southern Israel continue to suffer from violence," he added. "If we do not move forward on the political process soon, we risk sliding backwards."
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Ban reiterated that the international community opposed Israel's continued construction and presence in Arab East Jerusalem, and warned that settlement activity would prevent the achievement of a viable two-state solution.
"This is in no one's interest, least of all Israel's," he said. "Settlement activity undermines trust between the two parties, seems to pre-judge the outcome of the future permanent status negotiations, and imperils the basis for the two-State solution."
He added that Israel's activity in East Jerusalem - including demolitions of Arab houses, revocation of Palestinian identity cards, and construction - have not only "stoked tensions in the city, but also has the potential to endanger stability in the region."
"It bears repeating that the international community does not recognize Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem, which remains part of the occupied Palestinian territory," said Ban. "A way must be found, through negotiations, for Jerusalem to emerge as the capital of two states living side-by-side in peace and security, with arrangements for the holy sites acceptable to all."
Officials in Jerusalem slammed Ban's comments as one-sided, saying it was time the international body reevaluate its own approach and ask why it has failed to follow through with its own resolutions.
In particular, the officials were referring to the continued flow of arms between Hezbollah, Iran and Hamas.
Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said Ban has misread the obstacles preventing a resumption of peace talks, adding that the failure was a result of conditions set by the Palestinians and Arab states.
U.S. launches new Mideast effort
Meanwhile, the U.S.' special Middle East envoy has launched a new effort aimed at restarting Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, just as President Barack Obama expressed pessimism about the prospects.
Already complicating envoy George Mitchell's mission was a new demand by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for an Israeli military presence in the West Bank to stop weapons smuggling, even after formation of a Palestinian state.
Mitchell met late Thursday with Netanyahu, whose office released a brief statement saying they discussed ways to move the peace process forward and that contacts would continue.
As Mitchell began his mission, Obama admitted that he overreached in the Middle East.
In an interview with Time Magazine published Thursday, Obama said "internal conflicts made it hard for the Israelis and Palestinians to restart talks, and I think that we overestimated our ability to persuade them to do so when their politics ran contrary to that."
He said Israel found it very hard to move with any bold gestures, while
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had Hamas looking over his shoulder.
"I think it is absolutely true that what we did this year didn't produce the kind of breakthrough that we wanted and if we had anticipated some of these political problems on both sides earlier, we might not have raised expectations as high," Obama concluded.
Before meeting President Shimon Peres earlier on Thursday, Mitchell pledged to soldier on. He said Obama's vision is a Palestinian state alongside Israel in peace. "We will pursue [that] until we achieve that objective," Mitchell said.
The envoy is set to meet with Palestinian officials in the West Bank on Friday.
Mitchell has been laboring without success for a year to get both sides back to the negotiating table, and Netanyahu's new demand made his mission even tougher.
Netanyahu said Israel must maintain a presence on the eastern side of a prospective Palestinian state to keep militants from using the territory to launch rockets at Israel's heartland.
The eastern side of such a state would be the part of the Jordan Valley that lies in the West Bank.
Abbas aide Nabil Abu Rdeneh rejected the demand. "The Palestinian leadership will not accept a single Israeli soldier on Palestinian land after ending the Israeli occupation," he told The Associated Press.
The Palestinians have refused to sit down with Israel until it stops all construction in the West Bank and east Jerusalem, saying it is eating up lands they claim for their future state. Israel, which captured both areas in the 1967 Six-Day War, has slowed settlement construction in the West Bank, but has applied no restrictions in east Jerusalem, which Netanyahu hopes to retain.
Israel also says negotiations should begin immediately with no conditions, but the Palestinians accuse Israel of heaping plenty of conditions of its own, including the demilitarization of a future Palestinian state, the retention of East Jerusalem and now, a military presence along Jordan's border.
The Israeli leader heads a coalition largely opposed to the sweeping territorial concessions that would be necessary to clinch a peace deal with the Palestinians. He himself had long refused to endorse the concept of Palestinian statehood, doing so only in June under intense U.S. pressure.
6a) TIME: Q&A: Obama on His First Year in Office (indicates his Mideast team was dangerously clueless)
"if we had anticipated some of these political problems on both sides
earlier, we might not have raised expectations as high"
The real question is - when anyone who had at least one eye in their heads
and was at least partially following the situation was aware of the
"political problems" (there was polling data, thousands of column inches of
articles, etc) how did it happen that his team was clueless?
More important: will Mr. Obama recognize that they were, indeed, clueless,
and that they had better open their eyes instead of pushing their own ideas.
And of course: if the team was clueless in our neighborhood where our
politics is out in the open for everyone to observe, how is the Obama team
doing in places where it actually takes some effort to learn about the
situation?]
Q&A: Obama on His First Year in Office
By Joe Klein Time Magazine Thursday, Jan. 21, 2010
www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1955072,00.html
TIME's Joe Klein sat down for an interview with President Barack Obama in
the Oval Office on Jan. 15, 2010.
...
A: I mentioned North Korea — everybody was skeptical at the beginning of
this year that we could get serious sanctions. Not only have we gotten
serious sanctions, but they've actually been implemented. And finally —
because this has been the area of most immediate concern — when it comes to
counterterrorism, this Administration has taken out more al-Qaeda high-level
operatives, has been more aggressive in pinning them down, not just in the
border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, but also working with our
international partners in places like Yemen and Somalia, than a lot of
what's taken place previously.
Having said that, there's no doubt, as I said, that I think our intelligence
failures in picking up [Nigerian terrorism suspect Umar Farouk]
Abdulmutallab shows how much more has to be done. I think everybody
understands that this is an area where we have to be relentless regardless
of what else is on our plate. The other area which I think is worth noting
is that the Middle East peace process has not moved forward. And I think
it's fair to say that for all our efforts at early engagement, it is not
where I want it to be.
Q: Why is that? My sense of it is that [U.S. special envoy to the Middle
East George] Mitchell spent a number of months negotiating a settlement deal
and saw some progress from the Israelis and kind of got blinded by that,
because he didn't see that it wasn't sufficient progress for the
Palestinians.
A: I'll be honest with you. A) This is just really hard. Even for a guy like
George Mitchell, who helped bring about the peace in Northern Ireland. This
is as intractable a problem as you get. B) Both sides — the Israelis and the
Palestinians — have found that the political environment, the nature of
their coalitions or the divisions within their societies, were such that it
was very hard for them to start engaging in a meaningful conversation. And I
think that we overestimated our ability to persuade them to do so when their
politics ran contrary to that. From [Palestinian Authority President
Mahmoud] Abbas' perspective, he's got Hamas looking over his shoulder and, I
think, an environment generally within the Arab world that feels impatient
with any process.
And on the Israeli front — although the Israelis, I think, after a lot of
time showed a willingness to make some modifications in their policies, they
still found it very hard to move with any bold gestures. And so what we're
going to have to do — I think it is absolutely true that what we did this
year didn't produce the kind of breakthrough that we wanted, and if we had
anticipated some of these political problems on both sides earlier, we might
not have raised expectations as high.
Moving forward, though, we are going to continue to work with both parties
to recognize what I think is ultimately their deep-seated interest in a
two-state solution in which Israel is secure and the Palestinians have
sovereignty and can start focusing on developing their economy and improving
the lives of their children and grandchildren.
6b)Mitchell holds talks with Abbas as hopes for ME peace fade
By Herb Keinon
The US envoy to the Middle East was holding talks with the Palestinian leader on Friday afternoon, even as hopes are fading that Washington could restart Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations anytime soon.
US President Barack Obama voiced that pessimism in comments in a Time Magazine interview on Thursday, indicating he may have overreached in his Mideast efforts.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas says he will not resume negotiations without an internationally mandated West Bank settlement freeze.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has agreed only to a slowdown in construction, and that has left the sides at an impasse.
Envoy George Mitchell met Abbas on Friday. He held talks with Netanyahu on Thursday.
A senior official tried to lower any expectations that Mitchell's current regional trip - the US envoy arrived in Israel Wednesday night from Lebanon and Syria - would lead to any dramatic progress, saying that it was not clear whether the Palestinian Authority had made the strategic decision to re-enter the talks.
The official said Netanyahu had no intention of giving Mitchell any more gestures to take to the Palestinians, saying that the Palestinians have climbed up a "eucalyptus tree," and every time a gesture is given as a ladder, they climb even higher.
Meanwhile, during a press conference in Washington with British Foreign Secretary David Miliband on Thursday night, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that while the US would continue to work for Middle East peace, it was ultimately up to Israel and the Palestinians.
"This issue is between Israel and the Palestinians," she said. "The US, UK, EU and the Arab League, everybody can work together to create a positive atmosphere, we will continue to do whatever we can, and we urge both parties to return to the negotiations table."
7)The Meaning of Brown
By Charles Krauthammer
WASHINGTON -- On Jan. 14, five days before the Massachusetts special election, President Obama was in full bring-it-on mode as he rallied House Democrats behind his health care reform. "If Republicans want to campaign against what we've done by standing up for the status quo and for insurance companies over American families and businesses, that is a fight I want to have."
The bravado lasted three days. When Obama campaigned in Boston on Jan. 17 for Obamacare supporter Martha Coakley, not once did he mention the health care bill. When your candidate is sinking, you don't throw her a millstone.
After Coakley's defeat, Obama pretended that the real cause was a generalized anger and frustration "not just because of what's happened in the last year or two years, but what's happened over the last eight years."
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.
And the Democrats are delusional: Scott Brown won by running against Obama not 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.
These deals -- the Louisiana purchase, the Cornhusker kickback -- had engendered a national disgust with the corruption and arrogance of one-party rule. The final straw was the union payoff -- in which labor bosses smugly walked out of the White House with a five-year exemption from a ("Cadillac") health insurance tax Democrats were imposing on the 92 percent of private-sector workers who are not unionized.
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.
You would think lefties could discern a proletarian vanguard when they see one. Yet they kept denying the reality of the rising opposition to Obama's social democratic agenda when summer turned to fall and Virginia and New Jersey turned Republican in the year's two gubernatorial elections.
The evidence was unmistakable: Independents, who in 2008 had elected Obama, swung massively against the Democrats: dropping 16 points in Virginia, 21 in New Jersey. On Tuesday, it was even worse: Independents, who had gone 2-to-1 Republican in Virginia and New Jersey, now went 3-to-1 Republican in hyper-blue Massachusetts. Nor was this an expression of the more agitated elements who vote in obscure low-turnout elections. The turnout on Tuesday was the highest for any nonpresidential Massachusetts election in 20 years.
Democratic cocooners will tell themselves that Coakley was a terrible candidate who even managed to diss Curt Schilling. True, Brown had Schilling. But Coakley had Obama. When the bloody sock beats the presidential seal -- of a man who had them swooning only a year ago -- something is going on beyond personality.
That something is substance -- political ideas and legislative agendas. Democrats, if they wish, can write off their Massachusetts humiliation to high unemployment, to Coakley or, the current favorite among sophisticates, to generalized anger. That implies an inchoate, unthinking lashing-out at whoever happens to be in power -- even at your liberal betters who are forcing on you an agenda that you can't even see is in your own interest.
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?
"If you lose Massachusetts and that's not a wake-up call," said moderate -- and sentient -- Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, "there's no hope of waking up."
I say: Let them sleep.
7a)Senate 2010: More Shocks on the Way?
By Larry Sabato
With Tuesday night's upset by Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts, the GOP gained more than just a 41st vote to disrupt the Obama agenda. As attention turns to the midterm elections in November, the Republican Party has strong momentum. A few months ago, even GOP leaders said that taking over the Senate was a pipe dream, and it is still not probable. But as some independents sour on the Democratic Party, the possibility for a GOP majority can no longer be dismissed out of hand. More likely, next year's Senate will still have a Democratic majority but be much more closely balanced between Democrats and Republicans.
In fact, it is likely that the Republicans will gain at least 3 to 5 Senate seats in November. Even more startling, in the aftermath of the Massachusetts special election, Republicans would do even better IF the general election were being held today. The Crystal Ball projects that the Democratic majority in the Senate would be reduced to just 52 seats if November's contests were somehow moved to January.
Luckily for the Democrats, the election is not today. By November the economy may be in much better shape, and some of the current controversies may appear less significant. Contests that would tip to the GOP today could easily wobble back to the Democrats (such as Missouri and Pennsylvania). That is why we still classify them as toss-ups overall.
At the same time, given Tuesday's Bay State results, the Republican Party will search for, and possibly find, credible challengers for some Democratic senators believed to be safe until now. Imagining themselves as Scott Brown (on the victory stage, not in a Cosmo photo spread), a few "A" list Republicans might take a second look at the Senate and decide to jump in.
Among the senators who could be endangered by a new wave of Republican entries are Evan Bayh (Indiana), Kirsten Gillibrand (New York), Patty Murray (Washington), and Russ Feingold (Wisconsin).
An early example is Indiana, where Republican Congressman Mike Pence is reportedly weighing a challenge to Evan Bayh. The Hoosier State gave Obama its electoral votes in 2008 by a razor-thin margin. If Democrats could lose a Senate seat in Massachusetts, which Obama carried with 62 percent, it is theoretically possible that Indiana could be in play come November. The same is true for the other states. In politics you cannot beat somebody with nobody, but as Scott Brown proved, a nobody can become a somebody rather quickly in the right environment.
Post-Brown, the magic number for Republicans is 10 if the GOP is to take control of the Senate. (Vice President Joe Biden would cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of Democratic control should there be a 50-50 split.)
One wonders whether a 9-seat gain would be sufficient for the GOP, however. We all recall the May 2001 party switch of Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords from R to I-D. Might the Republicans lure Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who sits in the Democratic caucus but is officially an independent? Lieberman is already persona non grata to liberal Democrats as well as a solid vote for the GOP on national security issues-and was nearly named the Republican vice presidential nominee by John McCain in 2008.
A lot can happen in a short time, as Tuesday showed anew. Democrats have plenty of chances to ward off this "Nightmare on November Street" if the economy and Obama's approval ratings rebound over the next nine and a half months. For the moment, though, the Democrats' nightmare is the Republican dream scenario, as our Senate rankings suggest.
Dr. Sabato, the Robert Kent Gooch Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia, founded the Center for Politics in 1998.
7b)The Incredible Deflation of Barack Obama
By Mortimer B. Zuckerman
The air is seeping out of the Obama balloon. He has fallen to below 50 percent in the poll approval ratings, a decline punctuated by his party's shocking loss in the Massachusetts special election.
Why?
Barack Obama was undoubtedly sincere in what he promised, even if his promises were within the normal range of political exaggeration. The first trouble is that his gift for inspiration aroused expectations, stoked to unprecedented heights by his own staff, that he would solve the climate crisis on Monday, the jobs crisis on Tuesday, the financial crisis on Wednesday, the education crisis on Thursday, Afghanistan on Friday, Iraq on Saturday, and rest on Sunday. His oratorical skills were highlighted by the contrast with President Bush, who mangled words so much that his incoherence became, as Tina Brown wrote, "a metaphor for incompetence." Expectations were spurred, too, by Obama's recognition that Americans yearned for a new kind of politics, a rejection, as he put it, of "politics as usual."
Perhaps the inevitable outcome was disappointment—and on this Obama has not disappointed. Alas, he has accelerated the deflation of hope with his extraordinary volume of public appearances. In his first six months, he gave three times as many interviews as George W. Bush, four times as many prime-time news conferences as Bill Clinton, and more interviews than both combined: 93 for Obama and 61 for his two immediate predecessors. He appeared on five Sunday talk shows on the same morning, followed the next day by David Letterman, the first-ever presidential appearance on a nighttime comedy show. In another week, he squeezed in addresses to the U.S. Climate Change Summit, the U.N. General Assembly, the U.N. Security Council, and a variety of press conferences.
His promiscuity on TV has made him seem as if he is still a candidate instead of president and commander in chief. He—and his advisers—have failed to appreciate that national TV speeches are best reserved for those moments when the country faces a major crisis or a war. Now he faces the iron law of diminishing novelty.
Despite this apparent accessibility, Obama's reliance on a teleprompter for flawless delivery made for boring and unemotional TV, compounding his cerebral and unemotional style. He has seemed not close but distant, not engaged but detached. Is it any wonder that the mystique of his presidency has eroded so that fewer people have listened to each successive foray? The columnist Richard Cohen wryly observed that he won the Pulitzer Prize for being the only syndicated columnist who did not have an exclusive interview with the president.
Poor results. But Obama's problems are more than a question of style. There is doubt aroused on substance. He sets deadlines and then lets too many pass. He announces a strategic review of Afghanistan, describing it as "a war of necessity," only to become less sure to the point that he didn't even seem committed to the policy that he finally announced. As for changing politics in Washington, he assigned the drafting of central legislative programs not to cabinet departments or White House staff but to the Democratic congressional leadership of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, the very people so mistrusted by the public. Who could be surprised that the critical bills—the stimulus program and healthcare—degenerated under a welter of pork and earmarks that had so outraged the American public in the past?
Pelosi benefited from $54 million to relocate a Bay Area wine train, not to speak of a secret deal with the drug industry lobby to preclude negotiations on Medicaid drug prices and exclude drug imports from Canada, concessions that had previously been strongly rejected by Obama. Reid favored the gambling industry by arranging an earmark for a Los Angeles-to-Las Vegas high-speed monorail, even though it won't be built for years. Some components of the stimulus did help soften the recession, yet only roughly a third of the $787 billion stimulus has been spent, and too much was spent on programs supported by liberal Democrats, which explains why so much of the stimulus money went toward education, health, energy conservation, and other activities, mostly worthy but not geared to achieving recovery and getting people back to work.
Taxpayers have thus come to see politics as usual masquerading as economic recovery. Indeed, both the stimulus and healthcare plans were voted on so quickly that the lawmakers had no time to read the bills. In both cases, the White House created the impression it was interested in passing anything, no matter how ineffectual. This was epitomized by Obama's chief of staff essentially asserting that a healthcare bill would be passed even if all it consisted of was two Band-Aids and an aspirin.
Most critically, Obama misjudged the locus of the country's anxiety: the economy. Instead of concentrating on jobs, jobs, jobs, he made the decision to "boil the ocean" and go for everything, from comprehensive health reform to global warming to a world without nuclear weapons ... and the beat goes on.
This was more than the Congress could absorb and more than the country could understand. Obama, the theoretician in a hurry, made no allowance for the normal resistance to dramatic change and the public's distaste for big government, big spending, and big deficits. He didn't seem to realize that Americans understand in the most personal terms that excessive debt has real consequences, given how many have mortgages that exceed the value of a home and credit lines that are too much to carry. Yet this was what the president seemed to be getting us into. Over 60 percent of the country believes that government spending is excessive; Obama's lowest approval ratings come from his mishandling of the present and future deficits.
Delayed stimulus. It is not as if the limited stimulus program has done the job either, since unemployment rates soared over 10 percent (compared with the 8 percent ceiling that was promised). Shelby Steele asked a good question in the Wall Street Journal: "Where is the economic logic behind a stimu?lus package that doesn't fully click in for a number of years?" Yes, we might have just escaped a depression, but as the Econo?mist magazine observes, voters will not thank the president for averting a depression that did not come but are "more likely to blame him for the recession that did." On top of all this, and not all Obama's fault, a financial crisis usually produces weak recoveries in jobs, so a good number of Americans are likely to remain furious at the spectacle of the financial world doing well while so many ordinary folks lose their jobs and their savings. This anger will not subside while households see net worth slump to where it was 20 years ago and debt reach close to record highs at about 130 percent of disposable income, and while the residential real estate crisis continues unabated and the official jobless rate doesn't come close to reflecting the true extent of unemployment and ... and ... and ....
The White House might have at least demonstrated that it cares about fiscal restraint and independence from the leadership in Congress, but consistently Obama has failed to veto spending while centralizing power. A majority of Americans think it a mistake at this time of economic distress to embark on a costly healthcare program. As it was, the program's apparently stalled trip through Congress turned out to be another fiasco of political corruption, with millions of dollars allocated to buy votes, such as those of Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu and Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson. Anger with that process and the bill it produced helped fuel the stunning election of Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts.
The result is a widespread concern that progressive taxation to pay for the "nanny state" will snuff out future opportunities that Americans believe they deserve for themselves and their children. Obama misjudged the public's appetite for taxpayer-funded solutions; most people believe all the government does is waste money. In a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, only 23 percent said they "trusted the government just about always or most of the time"—the smallest proportion in 12 years, and the all-important independent swing voters who decide elections now favor Republicans by 52 percent, up from 30 percent.
Unfortunately, there is not much solace in international affairs either, where, again, expectations were so pumped up. America's image is better, no doubt, but uncertainty and procrastination prevail. One major international political leader recently put it well: "Not only does the leadership of this region not think that Obama is strong enough to confront his enemies; they aren't sure he is strong enough to support his friends." The administration seems "hopelessly naive," according to one Arab foreign minister, and unable to face the full truth about Islamic terrorism. The public frustration over the administration's mismanagement of the latest jihadist attempt to blow up a plane with all its innocent travelers (on Christmas Day) was captured in the New York Daily News headline "Mr. President, it's time to get a grip!"
The consequence is that there isn't a single critical problem on which the president has a positive public rating. Only a minority of Americans now believe the president will make the right decisions for the country. Nor can he any longer take refuge in the rejoinder that "we inherited a terrible situation." Or blame it on fat-cat bankers and insurance companies. Blaming others, including Bush, for the country's predicament is less and less persuasive. "At some point you own your presidency," wrote Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal. "At some point the American people tell you it's yours."
More worrying for the administration is that while Obama gets the approval of 76 percent of non-whites, his approval among whites is down to 41 percent, according to Gallup. This is a huge change that literally puts the Democratic control of Congress at risk. The Republicans have hardly been stellar either, but there is now a renewed openness in the country to hear what they have to say. Obama's political realignment of America is over. We no longer believe that he will "change the world" and "transform the country."
This brings to mind why an adviser to President Roosevelt in the 1930s, Bernard Baruch, told electors to vote for the person who promised them less. In this way, he said, "you would be less disappointed." There is still time for Obama to change and turn things around. But the first year is the critical year, one in which the public defines the president, and it has to be said that broad swaths of the country are deeply disappointed.
8)Free Speech, Not the GOP, Is the Winner in Court Campaign-Finance Ruling
By Jonathan Tobin
Today’s Supreme Court ruling striking down provisions of the McCain-Feingold federal campaign-finance law is a tremendous victory for free speech in the United States. The 5-4 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission upholds the principle that that 2002 law and other similar attempts to regulate campaign finance flouted, namely, that the government should not regulate political speech.
The case grew out of a 2008 federal ban on the showing of a documentary film, Hillary: The Movie, during the presidential primaries in which Hillary Clinton, the object of the movie’s criticism, was a candidate. McCain-Feingold allowed the Federal Election Commission to stop the showing of the film because a corporation produced it, even though the corporation in question was a nonprofit. This case aptly illustrated the way this law did not so much protect the electoral process from the corrupting influence of money as it protected politicians from the effects of political speech that they did not like. Far from bolstering the democratic process, McCain-Feingold suppressed it. Like just about every other campaign-finance law that has been passed since the 1970s, when the Watergate scandal gave impetus to a drive to “reform” election spending, this law did not eliminate the influence of money on politics, but it did play favorites as to which sort of speech may or may not be legal. While efforts to bring transparency into campaign finance remain laudable, the process by which money began to be shunted first into political action committees and then, in the wake of McCain-Feingold, into new classes of unaccountable groups did nothing to make the system fairer or cleaner. Instead, it granted a government agency the power to regulate or suppress the one kind of speech that the founders of our republic would have agreed was inviolate: political speech. The court has now chipped away at this expansion of federal power to allow corporations and other groups the freedom to advocate on elections as they please.
The responses to this ruling from some in the political class are predictable. President Obama has issued a call to Congress to pass legislation to overturn the will of the courts, something that we trust the new absence of a filibuster-proof majority for the Democrats will render impossible.
Interestingly, among the first reactions was a blog post by New York Times reporter Jeff Zeleny, who claimed that, “at first blush, Republican candidates would seem to benefit from this seismic change in how political campaigns are conducted in America.” To back this assertion up, he quoted the president’s demagogic statement that claimed the “Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans.”
As Zeleny also noted, labor unions and a host of Left-leaning groups are now also free to spend money to publicize their views, as they like. It should also be pointed out that the notion that big business is a dependable backer of the GOP is a myth. The crony capitalism that the bank bailouts have highlighted in the past two years has aptly illustrated the fact that many industries, including the denizens of Wall Street, have a stronger loyalty to corporate welfare that benefits them than they do to the principles of free enterprise. The steady flow of money from firms such as Goldman, Sachs (the principal survivor and beneficiary of the latest shakedowns) to Democratic candidates like Obama is proof of this.
The point here is that more political speech is not a danger to the republic; it is instead the lifeblood of democracy. The only ones to gain from the suppression of views via campaign-spending laws are those politicians who are the subject of critical scrutiny. Acting in the name of “reform,” campaign-finance-restriction advocates have sought to restrict political speech, effectively empowering the politicians and the mainstream media at the expense of the electorate. In a democracy, the people must be free to sort out the views of a host of disparate elements. The free flow of critical advertisements and independent documentaries such as Hillary: The Movie challenge the monopoly of public expression that such a system breeds. Let’s hope this ruling marks the beginning of the end of an era in which the political class used its legislative power to silence their critics.
1 comment:
I read half-way through the article,then I realised where it was heading,USA,Canada and UK will be forced to become provinces of China.The 3 ex- 1st world countries are being run by a bunch of Morons and have lost the plot completely.
What can I say start learning your Chinese
smarock10@yahoo.com
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