Have You No Shame Sir?

As I noted earlier since Obama cannot lead he rules. (See 1 below.)
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When Kim Strassel spoke for me a few weeks ago a tennis friend of mine, who happens to be a committed Liberal Democrat, was upset when someone asked about all those Obama czars without business experience. Kim concurred that Obama had appointed an outsized number but also pointed out fillibustering presidential appointments had, to some degree, led to this situation.

My testy friend noted Buffet and Gates were advisors and men with plenty of business experience. Kim responded that with respect to Buffet's view of the estate tax provision his outsized worth placed him in a different position than a farmer who, were he to have to sell half his farm to pay estate taxes, probably would not be able to retain the rest and make a living.

Furthermore, neither Buffet nor Gates are hands on advisors. I suspect they were campaign props for Obama and he corrals them when he believes it makes him look astute.

I would also note that Buffet has basically turned over his entire remaining wealth to Gates to be given away having already made arrangements for his family.

Meanwhile, Buffet just dumped on Obama's 2000 plug page health care program. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Rangel step down temporarily not because of his ethics but because he wants to unburden his fellow Democrats running for office. Were Mr. Welch alive he would repeat what he said about McCarthy; "Have you no shame sir?"

Rangel is toast!(See 3 below.)
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Let the words beget the thought. (See 4 below.)
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Who's fooling who? (See 5 below.)
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Only a matter of time before Rahm became a liability. (See 6 below.)
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George Will writes how current economic travail might impact male culture. (See 7 below.)

Dick
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1)Abuse of Power: 'An undemocratic disservice to our people and to the Senate's institutional role.'

.A string of electoral defeats and the great unpopularity of ObamaCare can't stop Democrats from their self-appointed rendezvous with liberal destiny—ramming a bill through Congress on a narrow partisan vote. What we are about to witness is an extraordinary abuse of traditional Senate rules to pass a bill merely because they think it's good for the rest of us, and because they fear their chance to build a European welfare state may never come again.

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The vehicle is "reconciliation," a parliamentary process that fast-tracks budget measures and was created in 1974 as a deficit-reduction tool. Limited to 20 hours of debate, reconciliation bills need a mere 50 votes in the Senate, with the Vice President as tie-breaker, thus circumventing the filibuster. Both Democrats and Republicans have frequently used reconciliation on budget bills, so Democrats are now claiming that using it to pass ObamaCare is no big deal.

Yet this shortcut has never been used for anything approaching the enormity of a national health-care entitlement. Democrats are only resorting to it now because their plan is in so much political trouble—within their own party, and even more among the general public—and because they've failed to make their case through persuasion.

"They know that this will take courage," Nancy Pelosi said in an interview over the weekend, speaking of the Members she'll try to strong-arm. "It took courage to pass Social Security. It took courage to pass Medicare," the Speaker continued. "But the American people need it, why are we here? We're not here just to self-perpetuate our service in Congress."

Leave aside the irony of invoking "the American people" on behalf of a bill that consistently has been 10 to 15 points underwater in every poll since the fall, and is getting more unpopular by the day, particularly among independents. As Maine Republican Olympia Snowe pointed out in a speech last December, Social Security passed when Democrats controlled both Congress and the White House, yet 64% of Senate Republicans and 79% of the House GOP voted for it. More than half of the Senate Republican caucus voted for Medicare in 1965. Historically, major social legislation has always been bipartisan, because it reflects a durable political consensus.

.Reconciliation is the last mathematical gasp for ObamaCare because Democrats can't sell their policy to Senator Snowe, any other Republican, or even dozens of Democrats. This raw exercise of political power is of a piece with the copious corruption and bribery—such as the Cornhusker kickbacks and special tax benefits for union members—that liberals had to use to get even this far.

Democrats often point to welfare reform in 1996 as a reconciliation precedent, yet that bill passed the Senate with 78 votes, including Joe Biden and half of the Democratic caucus. The children's health insurance program in 1997 was steered through Congress with reconciliation, but it, too, was built on strong (if misguided) bipartisan support. The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 that created Schip passed 85-15, including 43 Republicans. Even President Bush's 2001 tax cuts, another case in reconciliation point, were endorsed by 12 Senate Democrats.

.The only precedent within historical shouting distance is Ronald Reagan's 1981 budget, which was controversial because it reshaped dozens of programs. But the Senate wasn't the problem—it ultimately passed the budget 80 to 14. The real dogfight was in the Democratically controlled House, where majority rules have always obtained, yet Reagan convinced 29 Democrats to buck Speaker Tip O'Neill. Reconciliation, in other words, wasn't used to subvert the 60-vote Senate threshold, but rather to grease the way for deficit reduction.

The process was designed for items that cut spending or affect tax revenue, to meet targets in the annual budget resolution. Democrats want to convert it into a jerry-rigged amendment process: That is, reconciliation wouldn't actually be used to pass ObamaCare per se. Instead, it would be used only to muscle through substantive changes to the bill that passed the Senate on Christmas Eve, without which 216 House Democrats won't vote for it. So Democrats would be writing amendments to current law that isn't in fact law at all—and can't become law without those amendments.

President Clinton preferred to use reconciliation to pass HillaryCare in the 1990s, but he was dissuaded by West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, who argued that it would be an abuse of the process. Mr. Byrd, author of a four-volume history of Senate rules and procedures, told the Washington Post last March that "The misuse of the arcane process of reconciliation—a process intended for deficit reduction—to enact substantive policy changes is an undemocratic disservice to our people and to the Senate's institutional role," specifically citing health reform and cap and trade.

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Regrets, they've got a few. Yet these Democratic Sinatras will still do it their way. President Obama is expected to endorse reconciliation in remarks this morning.

The goal is to permanently expand the American entitlement state with a vast apparatus of subsidies and regulations while the political window is still (barely) open, regardless of the consequences or the overwhelming popular condemnation. As Mr. Obama fatalistically said after his health summit, if voters don't like it, "then that's what elections are for."

In other words, he's volunteering Democrats in Congress to march into the fixed bayonets so he can claim an LBJ-level legacy like the Great Society that will be nearly impossible to repeal. This would be an unprecedented act of partisan arrogance that would further mark Democrats as the party of liberal extremism. If they think political passions are bitter now, wait until they pass ObamaCare.
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2)The President vs. Health-Care Reform There's remarkable agreement among experts about the problem of skewed tax incentives.
By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR

Unnoticed at the summit was a diatribe in which President Obama showed he has no patience for any kind of health-care reform that most Republicans, most economists and many non-ultra left Democrats believe in—namely the kind that corrects the incentives that inflate costs.

Let us flip back to an epic series of Senate Finance hearings in 1992. They represented a remarkable meeting of minds across a broad swath of health-care wonks and economists (not interest groups) that the original sin was the exclusion of employer-provided health insurance from taxable income—imposed carelessly by the IRS in 1943 so defense contractors could compete for workers without transgressing Roosevelt-era wage and price controls.

Everybody knows this turned "insurance" into something else. Call it prepaid health care, as Milton Friedman did. Call it a giant tax Laundromat for the nation's private health spending.

It became a massive subsidy to third-party payment, an incentive to channel every ache and pain through an "insurance" bureaucracy. It became an incentive for the most economically competent Americans—the secure, high-earning employees of corporate America—to overspend on health care, treating it as a free good.

What a surprise that the medical-industrial complex reorganized itself in light of this central driver. Nobody was looking for price tags so price tags disappeared, as did any competition on price, and any clarity on price versus value. Voilà.

To Mr. Obama, however, such insurance is insurance—the way it's supposed to be, and anybody who doesn't agree must be smoking something.

Self-evidently idiotic, he indicated at the summit, is the idea that health insurance might go back to being "the equivalent of Acme Insurance that I had for my car. . . . It's basically not health insurance. It's house insurance. . . .

"I'm buying that to protect me from some catastrophic situation; otherwise, I'm just paying out of pocket. I don't go to the doctor. I don't get preventive care. There are a whole bunch of things I just do without. But if I get hit by a truck, maybe I don't go bankrupt."

We won't unpack the assumptions in this rant: That the affluent, educated beneficiaries of this tax loophole aren't capable of spending wisely on their own health care.

Mr. Obama hereby chucks over the side virtually all creative thinking about our health-care predicament, not to mention the single worthwhile policy innovation of the past two decades, the health savings account. In an unwisdom that he will probably come to understand only in his later years, Mr. Obama wastes the umpteen months his predecessor spent stumping the country for HSAs as a way to give consumers some financial "skin in the game." It was a theme voters could grasp because it made sense, unlike the Rube Goldbergism of Mr. Obama's health-care plan.

This week even Warren Buffett called the Obama plan "2,000 pages of . . . nonsense," adding, "The problem is incentives."

Here, Mr. Obama squanders the opportunity his presidency represented. For it's entirely possible to visualize incorporating this insight about the proper role of insurance with a system of guaranteed coverage and individual mandates à la ObamaCare, and indeed back when Mr. Obama was believed to be smart, we would have guessed this was the direction in which he would head.

Like any real reformer, he would have challenged both parties down to their ideological socks. Republicans would have had to swallow a universal mandate in return for an across-the-board tax cut to compensate workers for loss of the health insurance loophole.

Mr. Obama says he's content to be a single-term president. The soonest, then, we can hope for real progress on health care is three years.

His failure calls for some historical perspective. An enduring mystery is why Jimmy Carter insists on preaching about foreign policy when his real achievements were in the realm of domestic deregulation. OK, the ideas were hatching away in the back of the Nixon administration, brought forward by Ford and continued into Reagan's first term with the defeat of inflation and passage of the 1986 tax reform.

But altogether it was a period of the greatest domestic policy innovation, based on a profound bipartisan learning about the defects of what went before, namely 90 years of the "Progressive" regulatory urge.

Mr. Obama is turning out to be Jimmy Carter on foreign policy, but he's no Jimmy Carter on domestic economic policy.

In fact, he's turning out to be exactly what you fear getting when you elect a glossy unknown: a gift to the world (in his own eyes) with no real grit.

It's going to be a long three years.


2a)The Big Problem with Health Care Is Cost, Not Access
By Richard Baehr

Advocates for the passage of some variation of a comprehensive health care reform package -- whether the House Bill, the Senate bill, or the recently offered White House proposal -- like to argue that such a comprehensive bill is needed to make progress on a bunch of important needs, and that all the pieces are required for this to be done.


As Jonathan Cohn of the New Republic describes it:

However opaque the campaign for health care reform has seemed, it really does come down to those three goals: Making sure that everybody has insurance, making sure the coverage is good, and making sure, over time, that health care costs less. The fallback options, Democrat or Republican, don't accomplish those goals. Only comprehensive reform does.


The problem for the advocates of comprehensive reform is that the expansion of access to some but not all of the uninsured, through either employer or individual mandates (a bit less than two-thirds in the Senate and Obama versions of the bill), comes with a big price tag -- close to $2.5 trillion over the first ten years the program would be in effect. With annual federal deficits averaging $1.5 trillion a year for the fiscal years 2009, 2010, and 2011 -- caused both by a drop in tax revenue and (to a much larger extent) enormous increases in federal spending -- it should not be surprising that many Americans are wary of enacting a major new entitlement spending program. There is much greater concern among the public with creating new employment opportunities for the 10% who are unemployed, and the 17% unemployed or underemployed, than in "finishing" the health care reform effort.


The year the administration and Congress have spent on health care reform -- with all the backroom deals and bribes, the lack of transparency, and the 2,000-plus-page bills drafted by lobbyists and unread by House and Senate members -- have attached an unsavory smell to the process that has soured it for many former supporters of the reform effort. Now the decision to try a "jam it through" final push using the budget reconciliation process seems to demonstrate to the public a heightened arrogance by those in power, who seem to be ignoring the public's wish for a smaller, less partisan reform effort at this point.


Since 85% of the population is insured, the primary concern for most of the currently insured is cost control, not expansion of access. The great majority of the population do not believe that the various reform bills are "paid for" (with Medicare cuts, tax increases, and new fees), regardless of what the OMB says and what the bills' advocates claim.



The so-called "doctors fix" on Medicare physician payment rates will cost $250 billion over ten years, and double that in the following decade. This cost was excluded from the bill, to allow Democrats to claim the bill cut the overall deficit in the first ten years. Many are properly skeptical that a Congress which loves to spend will in fact allow half a trillion to be cut from Medicare in the next ten years, particularly since some of the savings are expected to come from the "waste, fraud, and abuse" category.


If there were hundreds of billions in low-hanging fruit in these categories, then it would be criminal for the administration and the Congress not to have spotted it and done something about it by now. After all, Medicare is facing a $38-trillion unfunded liability, assuming one is foolish enough to believe that there really is a Medicare trust fund, as opposed to the reality: a pay-as-you-go system, much like what exists with Social Security. Both of the entitlement programs for older Americans, along with the Medicaid program, are absorbing rapidly increasing percentages of the federal budget and GDP.


It is noteworthy that Obama-supporter Warren Buffet argued Monday that the administration and Democrats in Congress should scrap the current reform effort and focus on the cost issue. While The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn pays lip service to caring about bending the cost curve, it is not this goal that drives his passion for comprehensive reform. And Cohn is knowledgeable enough about the bills on the table to know that the cost control effort in these bills consists of little more than some new expert studies and funding for some experimentation on local or state levels, but nothing structural.


Buffet is right that the expansion of health care costs threatens both the financial future of the federal and state governments and the competitiveness of American business. In my opinion, real structural reform is needed to bring down the cost of health care. If this can be accomplished, it would be easier and less irresponsible to argue for access expansion. But expansion of access without structural reform on the spending side will only further overheat an already-raging fire.


Here are, I think, the structural issues that need to be addressed:


1. The fee-for-service system for paying providers creates an incentive for increased utilization. When Medicare or Medicaid squeezes providers on price per unit of service, providers can respond with increases in utilization. Those who try to argue that Medicare is efficient and that spending is better-controlled with this federal program than in the private market may want to read an Atul Gawande article from the New Yorker saying there is a problem here. But as Gawande points out, some of the highest-quality health care in America is delivered in settings that are less expensive -- with lower utilization, cooperative arrangements among providers, and greater attention by consumers to more healthy lifestyles. The models for improvement are out there, but the reform proponents are happy to kick the can down the road and study it some more while they provide very expensive comprehensive coverage to 30 million more Americans, including subsidies to purchase insurance for those earning as much as $90,000 a year.


2. The system of providing a tax-free benefit to employees for employer-provided health insurance provides an incentive for employees to choose more health care instead of more salary. If an additional $1,000 of salary results in $750 after tax, but an additional $1,000 of company-paid health insurance nets a full $1,000 in untaxed benefits to the employee, it is not surprising that wage growth has been stagnant the last decade while health insurance costs for companies have risen rapidly. Part of that increase in cost is pure inflation, but part results from expanded, more comprehensive coverage. If employees were taxed for their health insurance in the same way that they are taxed for salary, it would create huge incentives for employees to be much more cost-conscious about the coverage they select. The comprehensive packages provided by some employers are the model for the House, Senate, and Obama versions of comprehensive reform. It should not be surprising that GM and Chrysler employees and retirees have insurance packages costing nearly $30,000 a year. Unions have negotiated these tax-free benefits and are loath to see them cut back. But is it wise to add tens of millions of Americans into the same system? All of the current reform proposals call for comprehensive insurance packages, as opposed to much less expensive catastrophic insurance coverage, and would cover not only the big-ticket health care bills, but also provide coverage for a long list of mandated services that drive up the cost of insurance. Here, we see the ideological underpinnings of the reform effort: a redistributionist attempt to make sure that all who are newly covered get about the same coverage as those who already have coverage.


3. The voracious trial bar, an appendage of the Democratic Party (over a billion dollars in campaign contributions over the past few decades), has pumped up the cost of malpractice insurance and helped drive physicians in some specialty practices to abandon some states or locales. To protect themselves against the trial bar, physicians routinely practice defensive medicine, creating incentives for more tests and more procedures. No one has a good handle on the extent of the increment in utilization associated with defensive medicine, and estimates are all over the place. But when combined with the incentives which already exist in a fee-for-service system, it should not be surprising if the number runs annually over $100 billion.


4. Individuals too often behave as if health care is a free good if it is provided to them through the current insurance system, whether government or private. Consumers will spend days visiting electronic stores and checking online prices and features before buying a new big-screen HD TV, but they behave like sheep in the health care system, refusing to compare and contrast prices and quality. If some third party is paying, why should it matter? It seems beyond obvious that putting more of the health care dollar in the hands of consumers would be a worthwhile thing to do. Laser eye surgery is not covered by health insurance policies. Since the service was introduced, prices have dropped by 90%, more practitioners have entered the field, and quality has improved.


Democrats have fought the expansion of health savings accounts, which provide financial incentives for consumers to spend more wisely on health care services. But since this puts the individual, rather then the nanny state or insurers, in charge of determining what services are needed and should be paid for, it is anathema to the left. Again, the track record of companies that have offered such plans is that the rapid rise in health care costs has significantly slowed.


Bill Maher can call the public a bunch of morons (whenever they do not agree with him), but with regard to the current versions of health care reform, the public's skepticism is well-placed. The elephant in the room is rising costs. Bringing down the cost of health care and the cost of insurance (mainly through reduced utilization and more cost-conscious consumer behavior) makes expanding access a lot easier. Just as important, in many cases, it could make such access expansion voluntary -- with many of the uninsured making a different assessment on the cost/benefit of purchasing a health insurance policy than they do today.


Richard Baehr is chief political correspondent of American Thinker
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3).Rangel stepping down from tax-writing chairmanship
By LARRY MARGASAK

WASHINGTON – Rep. Charles Rangel announced Wednesday he will temporarily step down as chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, saying he didn't want his ethics controversy to jeopardize election prospects for fellow Democrats.

The 20-term Harlem congressman held a news conference on short notice, telling reporters, "My chairmanship is bringing so much attention to the press, and in order to avoid my colleagues having to defend me during their elections, I have this morning sent a letter" asking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi "to grant me a leave of absence until such time as the ethics committee completes its work."

The 79-year-old Rangel's decision was another jarring setback for President Barack Obama and majority Democrats in Congress, coming at a time when the party is scrambling to save sweeping health care overhaul legislation that has been pending on Capitol Hill for well over a year and still assessing a surging anti-incumbent fervor among the voters.

Republicans had been calling for Rangel to step aside since last year, when the House ethics panel expanded its investigation into his trips, assets and income, use of rent-controlled apartments in New York and his solicitation of contributions for university center to be named after him. After the panel released its findings last Friday on the Caribbean trips, Rangel started losing support among rank-and-file Democrats as well.

His departure from the Ways and Means chairmanship raised questions about succession.

Rep. Fortney "Pete" Stark of California is the most senior Democrat on Ways and Means, but there's no certainty that Pelosi would name him to fill in for Rangel. Stark chairs the panel's health subcommittee.

Other senior Democrats on the committee include Reps. Sander Levin of Michigan, Jim McDermott of Washington, John Lewis of Georgia and Richard Neal of Massachusetts.

Rangel is tied with Rep. Bill Young, a Florida Republican, for fourth place in congressional seniority.

The congressman made only a brief statement, telling reporters, "If you don't mind, I don't take questions." But he did say that'd told Pelosi "from the very, very beginning" that he was willing to step aside, at least temporarily.

Rangel, who met privately Tuesday with Pelosi, is accused by the House ethics panel of violating gift rules.

Party members want an untainted leader to be their chief negotiator in deciding the fate of billions of dollars in expiring tax breaks at year's end, including popular income tax deductions for sales and property taxes.

And Democratic incumbents facing tough races didn't want to fend off a Republican campaign focusing on Rangel's ethical cloud, especially after Pelosi, D-Calif., had promised to drain the swamp of ethical problems that plagued Republicans when they ran the House.

The ethics committee said Rangel violated standards of conduct by accepting 2007 and 2008 trips to Caribbean conferences that were financed by corporations. The committee said it could not prove whether Rangel knew of the corporate payments but concluded members of his staff knew about them — and the congressman was responsible for their actions.

Rangel said he didn't even have "constructive knowledge" of the corporate sponsorship of the trips and couldn't be held responsible for something staff members may have known but which he didn't.

In a separate case, the ethics committee is looking into Rangel's fundraising for a college center to be established in his name, in addition to other allegations — including belated financial disclosure filings that showed he previously failed to report hundreds of thousands of dollars in investments.
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4)How the Congressional Democrats Doom Obama to One Term
By Clarice Feldman

At a dinner party at my home, a Democrat friend (who is a Washington player with extensive experience as a congressional staffer and in the executive branch before he entered the private practice of law) and I were discussing those things on which we did agree: the overstaffing on the Hill; the fact that much of that staff is young and utterly inexperienced; how the dismantling of the seniority system -- which we'd all been for when the Southern committee chairs blocked civil rights legislation -- had not been an unmitigated good; and the failures of this administration, with the almost certain consequence that Obama will not be elected to a second term.


I had in the back of my mind been mulling over my estimation that Obama is failing because he allowed the congressional Democratic leaders to shape major legislative endeavors. I believed that this delegation to Congress had resulted in unpopular legislation which filled the coffers of the various interest groups behind the party without meeting critical national needs. Further, I thought that this had been done in a way that was so openly corrupt (like the Louisiana Purchase) that it weakened the president and makes it increasingly likely that he will achieve nothing of significance...and certainly will be denied a second term.


I had considered this collapse of the incumbent's power and popularity down to Obama's failure to focus and his laziness and inattention to detail -- not to mention his utter failure to master the executive skills he lacked when elected.


My friend had a very different take, and I think it so brilliant that I'd like to share it with you.


He believes that there is an interrelationship between the staffing situation on the Hill and the ineffectiveness of recent Democratic presidents like Carter and Obama -- a structural problem that, if it remains uncorrected, will doom most Democrat presidents to a single term in office.


He observes that where once legislative initiatives originated in the office of the Chief Executive, in recent decades, they are increasingly being written on the Hill (by those inexperienced twenty-something staffers). The problem is that once a Democrat is elected president, if he has a Democrat majority in the Congress, then the Committee chairmen believe and act on the assumption that they are in charge. (He didn't say this, as he remains a staunch Democrat, but I will -- many of these congressional leaders come from safe districts far to the left of the majority of Americans.) They craft bills which might be popular in, for example, San Francisco or Manhattan or Boston, but are wildly unpopular across the country. The White House is largely cut out of the process, except to sell the package or twist what arms can be twisted in a White House gathering to obtain needed votes.


This process, my friend continued, dooms the president to one term because he quickly loses national support.


He concedes that there were two exceptions: Clinton and LBJ. He explains that LBJ never allowed himself to be manipulated by Congress. He paid great attention to every move on the Hill. He personally called in each recalcitrant committee chair and member and ruthlessly employed threats -- such as promises to block all funds and assistance to their districts -- if they failed to support him. Clinton, as we all know, manipulated Congress by his outsized charm and ability to seduce the opposition inside and outside his party to work with him on acceptable compromises.


It's possible to nibble away a bit at my friend‘s thesis on some historic points. My friend didn't say this, but, of course, Clinton's charm offensive was more critical when the Republicans took over Congress. In fact, it may mean that Clinton was not an exception to the rule. One might argue, as well, that LBJ might not have been that exceptional either because the Democratic leadership in the 1960s was less extremely leftward than it presently is.


But without getting too far afield, I think my friend has made a valid point in general, and without a substantial change in the drift of the congressional Democratic leadership, his analysis will be applicable going forward.


That brings us to my friend's final point: No one should be elected to the presidency without having had a lot of executive experience -- either in business or at a government level outside of the Congress (governor, for example, or cabinet secretary).


Given the historic congressional overreach into executive functions and the disparity in the views of the safe Democratic districts from which so many congressional chairmen come compared to those of the American people, unless a president forcefully commands control of the process as LBJ did, or has the charm and skill of Clinton to woo his colleagues to his way of thinking, Obama and any other Democrat elected to the office can count on no more than one term.
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5) U.S. and EU: 'Provocative' Iran is inviting tough sanctions
By Reuters

The United States and European Union accused Iran on Wednesday of breaking nuclear transparency rules by escalating uranium enrichment without UN surveillance and said its "provocative" behavior invited tougher sanctions.

They spoke at a meeting of governors of the United Nations nuclear agency, a day after the UN Security Council said it was ready to tackle Western powers' proposals for new sanctions on Iran, which China has so far resisted.

A diplomat in the closed-door International Atomic Energy Agency meeting said China's ambassador reiterated that more negotiations, not sanctions against its major trade partner, must be pursued.

IAEA chief Yukiya Amano has reported to the agency's 35-nation governing board that intelligence indicates Iran may be trying to develop a nuclear warhead.

He also said Iran began higher-grade uranium enrichment last month before his inspectors could get to the scene and enhance monitoring. Diplomats said Iran was now blocking requests for more cameras and inspections with just minutes' advance warning.

Iran, which has branded Amano as incompetent and biased towards its Western critics since he succeeded Mohamed ElBaradei in December, says the IAEA received adequate notice before the enrichment boost for what it says are wholly peaceful purposes.

Spain's envoy to the IAEA, speaking as the EU's current president, noted Amano's complaint that Iran started refining uranium up to 20 percent last month without inspectors present, although the IAEA had asked Iran to wait until they were.

This violated Article 45 of Iran's safeguards agreement with the IAEA, "which calls for notice of major changes 'sufficiently in advance'," the unusually hard-hitting EU statement said. Washington's IAEA ambassador agreed in remarks to reporters.

The United States said Iran's "cat-and-mouse game" with inspectors, its plan for 10 more enrichment sites and snubbing of an IAEA-brokered deal to swap enriched uranium for fuel for a medical isotope reactor would pave the way to stiffer sanctions.

"We hope that Iran will change its current course and seek the path of negotiations. Not doing so leaves the international community no choice but to pursue further, deeper sanctions to hold Iran accountable," said U.S. Ambassador Glyn Davies.

Western delegates challenged Iran's assertion that enriching uranium to 20 percent purity was solely to make fuel for the reactor itself, rather than launching itself most of the way down the road to making bomb-grade nuclear fuel.

They said Iran lacked the fuel conversion technology and therefore could not hope to replenish the reactor's imported Argentine fuel stock before it runs out later this year.

Iran is "choosing provocation over confidence-building and rhetorical defiance over the medical needs of its people," Davies said, alluding to 850,000 Iranian cancer patients who Tehran says depend on isotopes made by the reactor.

The EU said Iran's stated aim to massively expand enrichment despite successive U.N. Security Council resolutions demanding a suspension was "a further provocation and defiance".

"Iran's ... apparent lack of interest in pursuing negotiations require a clear response, including through appropriate measures," it said, referring to further sanctions.

Amano, defending himself against attacks by Iran and a developing nation bloc to which Tehran belongs, told governors on Monday his findings were "factual and absolutely impartial", based on consistent, compelling intelligence from many sources.

He spelled out a blunter approach to Iran after what Western diplomats said was the reluctance of ElBaradei to confront Tehran due to doubts about the veracity of some intelligence.

In letters to the board, Iran and the Non-Aligned Movement of developing nations protested at Amano's omission - unlike in ElBaradei's reports - of references to Tehran's denials of wrongdoing and the fact the intelligence has not been verified
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------6)Unwelcome spotlight falls on Obama chief of staff
Jennifer Loven

No-drama Obama was bound to get fireworks when he chose the expletive-spewing, hotheaded, never-at-rest Rahm Emanuel to be his White House chief of staff. The only questions were when — and how big.

The answers are now — and pretty large, by inside-the-Beltway standards, anyway.

And they're happening at a particularly unpleasant time in Barack Obama's presidency, which is struggling with problems in terrorist policy, health care reform and other matters that have the president in political hot water and down in the polls.

The strange, only-in-Washington story began unfolding about two weeks ago when a column in The Washington Post asserted that Obama's "first year fell apart in large part because he didn't follow his chief of staff's advice on crucial matters."

The piece advised a 180-degree turn from the recent trend of blaming Emanuel for Obama's woes and of calling for the former congressman from Illinois to go. Instead, it said, blame others in Obama's orbit who are too "in love with the president" to advise him wisely on such things as health care strategy, the closing of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and how and where to try accused Sept. 11 terrorists. Blame Obama himself for not listening more to Emanuel, columnist Dana Milbank wrote.

Then this week came another Post story saying basically the same thing, based largely on interviews with Democrats on Capitol Hill. This was harder for the White House to shrug off, because it was not an opinion piece but in the news section — on the front page, no less.

Suddenly, the Obama White House had to deal with a narrative that some (though it's still unclear who) think Obama's chief of staff is smarter than the president, an awkward development in Washington's deeply ingrained tradition of aides staying behind the scenes and not upstaging the boss.

At the least, it creates an embarrassment and a distraction at a perilous time. And it belies Obama's own prized no-drama culture, where neither dirty laundry nor disagreements are aired and theatrics aren't tolerated. At worst, it sets in motion a dynamic that could lead to shakeups and further doubts about Obama's leadership.

So some angst behind the scenes at the White House was no surprise.

Publicly, however, the White House stood firmly behind Emanuel. White House press secretary Robert Gibbs on Tuesday dismissed as "parlor games" the talk of a White House divided into camps or of Emanuel facing the prospect of being ousted.

"Knowing most of what goes on here, I don't subscribe to all of it or a lot of it," he said. "He absolutely has the president's confidence."

Several current and former White House aides said Emanuel, despite his often passionately delivered opinions, is, once a decision is made, among the most loyal and energetic about making it happen. The president was said to view the spate of stories with a long view, that he and his team would rise — or fall — together and that Emanuel is too valued to cut loose.

Emanuel has been open about harboring political ambitions beyond the White House, specifically to run for Chicago mayor. But Gibbs deemed it unlikely that the chief of staff is feeding the stories himself to protect his reputation from its recent battering, particularly from the Democratic Party's liberal wing, which feels abandoned by Obama on many issues.

"We all give advice to the president on a daily basis," Gibbs said. "The president makes decisions and we move forward. When we move forward, nobody moves forward with more determination than the chief of staff."

Some indications point to the stories being driven by Emanuel loyalists, becoming increasingly upset at the criticism aimed at him lately over Obama's sputtering agenda, say those inside and outside the White House. A large number of Democratic lawmakers, particularly centrists and conservatives, feel a huge debt to Emanuel from his days as chairman of the Democratic campaign committee in 2006, when he played an instrumental role in restoring his party to power after 12 years in the minority.

Many of those same Democrats now fear for their chances in November's midterm congressional elections. As is common at this stage in an election cycle, they are looking for more help from Obama and someone to blame if they lose.

And yet, there is no doubt that Emanuel's own pugnacious, loquacious style is to blame, at least indirectly if not more.

Emanuel is known as a fierce competitor, who strikes back — hard — when hit.

He also fairly openly shares where he stands on issues, and where that has differed with the president.

For instance, it's well-documented that Emanuel argued internally against trying accused Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four of his alleged henchmen in civilian court in New York. That decision, by Attorney General Eric Holder, invited a firestorm of criticism for Obama, has now been put on hold and may be reconsidered.

Back when the cool-tempered Obama first offered him the job, Emanuel surprised many by publicly and repeatedly sharing his reluctance to do so — because it would require him to give up his goal of becoming House speaker and would cost him time with his wife and three children. Such admissions of doubt when a president comes calling, which Emanuel still talks about, are almost unheard of.

The man nicknamed "Rahmbo" has been no stranger to controversy, either. Recently, he apologized for using the word "retarded" to describe liberal activists whose tactics on health care he questioned.

Obama has not been shy about getting rid of aides; he doesn't employ loyalty just for the sake of it.

But Obama has welcomed disagreement within his staff and has shown he is willing to tolerate a lot to get the benefit of Emanuel's considerable legislative and political talents. So the word is that Emanuel isn't going anywhere. For one thing, he is regarded as essential to shepherd health care reform to a conclusion.

And that, said those close to the White House, is the way out of this mess.

If health care is passed, the bad stories and the finger-pointing stop and Obama moves on to other issues.

If health care fails, there will be more bad stories and finger-pointing — common in times of trouble for any president. And they're likely to be not just about Emanuel, but others in the White House as well.

Associated Press writer Laurie Kellman contributed to this story.
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7)The Basement Boys: The making of modern immaturity.
By George Will


Current economic hardships have had what is called in constitutional law a "disparate impact": The crisis has not afflicted everyone equally. Although women are a majority of the workforce, perhaps as many as 80 percent of jobs lost were held by men. This injury to men is particularly unfortunate because it may exacerbate, and be exacerbated by, a culture of immaturity among the many young men who are reluctant to grow up.

Increasingly, they are defecting from the meritocracy. Women now receive almost 58 percent of bachelor's degrees. This is why many colleges admit men with qualifications inferior to those of women applicants—which is one reason men have higher dropout rates. The Pew Research Center reports that 28 percent of wives between ages 30 and 44 have more education than their husbands, whereas only 19 percent of husbands in the same age group have more education than their wives. Twenty-three percent of men with some college education earn less than their wives. In law, medical, and doctoral programs, women are majorities or, if trends continue, will be.

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In 1956, the median age of men marrying was 22.5. But between 1980 and 2004, the percentage of men reaching age 40 without marrying increased from 6 to 16.5. A recent study found that 55 percent of men 18 to 24 are living in their parents' homes, as are 13 percent of men 25 to 34, compared to 8 percent of women.

Mike Stivic, a.k.a. Meathead, the liberal graduate student in All in the Family, reflected society's belief in the cultural superiority of youth, but he was a leading indicator of something else: He lived in his father-in-law Archie Bunker's home. What are today's "basement boys" doing down there? Perhaps watching Friends and Seinfeld reruns about a culture of extended youth utterly unlike the world of young adults in previous generations.

Gary Cross, a Penn State University historian, wonders, "Where have all the men gone?" His book, Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity, argues that "the culture of the boy-men today is less a life stage than a lifestyle." If you wonder what has become of manliness, he says, note the differences between Cary Grant and Hugh Grant, the former, dapper and debonair, the latter, a perpetually befuddled boy.

Permissive parenting, Cross says, made children less submissive, and the decline of deference coincided with the rise of consumer and media cultures celebrating the indefinite retention of the tastes and habits of childhood. The opening of careers to talented women has coincided with the attenuation of male role models in popular culture: In 1959, there were 27 Westerns on prime-time television glamorizing male responsibility.

Cross says the large-scale entry of women into the workforce made many men feel marginalized, especially when men were simultaneously bombarded by new parenting theories, which cast fathers as their children's pals, or worse: In 1945, Parents magazine said a father should "keep yourself huggable" but show a son the "respect" owed a "business associate."

All this led to "ambiguity and confusion about what fathers were to do in the postwar home and, even more, about what it meant to grow up male." Playboy magazine, a harbinger of perpetual adolescence, sold trinkets for would-be social dropouts: "Join the beat generation! Buy a beat generation tieclasp." Think about that.

Although Cross, an aging academic boomer, was a student leftist, he believes that 1960s radicalism became "a retreat into childish tantrums" symptomatic "of how permissive parents infantilized the boomer generation." And the boomers' children? Consider the television commercials for the restaurant chain called Dave & Buster's, which seems to be, ironically, a Chuck E. Cheese's for adults—a place for young adults, especially men, to drink beer and play electronic games and exemplify youth not as a stage of life but as a perpetual refuge from adulthood.

At the 2006 Super Bowl, the Rolling Stones sang "Satisfaction," a song older than the Super Bowl. At this year's game, another long-of-tooth act, the Who, continued the commerce of catering to baby boomers' limitless appetite for nostalgia. "My generation's obsession with youth and its memories," Cross writes, "stands out in the history of human vanity."

Last November, when Tiger Woods's misadventures became public, his agent said: "Let's please give the kid a break." The kid was then 33. He is now 34 but, no doubt, still a kid. The puerile anthem of a current Pepsi commercial is drearily prophetic: "Forever young."
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