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"Obamascare" is heading to the Supreme Court as his administration decides to skip Circuit Court appeal. Gutsy move. If 'Obamascare" is deemed legal it could propel Obama into second term or possibly the backlash could ruin his chances and cause a revolt nationwide as passage would further impact the nation's already deteriorating fiscal health.
Obama must be betting on Sottomayer not recusing herself or is fearful the full 11th Circuit Court might uphold an earlier decision. Obama's action has nothing to do with the health of the nation just pure political maneuvering. (See 2 below.)
Yesterday, there was an article in the Wall Street Journal about the IRS going after small business hiring practices. The IRS believes too many businesses classify employees as contract workers to avoid the governments amoebic bureaucratic rules, regulations and implied costs. (Section D11 of Journal)
Recently, Peter Schiff was interviewed and told of the miseries and legal costs he endured because he over hired, if you can believe that. In the financial sector the government has even more restrictive rules and red tape if you want to hire because you have to make sure you do not exceed certain human resource ratios.
Government has become a true threat because of the corruption and bad practices of some in the private sector. Government is strangling us in its zeal to correct errant behaviour it helped cause because many powerful politicians overlooked what was happening. Why? Because these corrupt politicians were benefiting from their own culpable behaviour., ie Barney and Chris, Rangel, staff members of the SEC, and the list is almost endless etc.
Madoff was a crook, as were many executives in the housing, banking and Wall Street sectors. The typical government's response is to pass legislation that makes everyone crooks. It's the 'gotcha' method of how to grow government. It is the slick tool used by those who believe government can protect us when in fact we wind up being victims of government's stifling rules and regulations. The more bureaucrats enforce restrictive and ambiguous legislation the more likely honest citizens are going to run afoul. Criminalizing behaviour is the fertilizer that helps government grow and feed progressive loony ideas.
And by the way, Democrats are prone to criminalize political action as well. That is why they call for an independent counsel at the drop of a hat. Liberals have an insatiable appetite for government to expand and any method of accomplishing this goal is deemed worthy .
Gerald Seib also points out a factor going for Obama in the forthcoming election. It is the color blue. As more Americans believe they have no future and are told by Obama they are being held down and/or being taken advantage of by other Americans the more votes he believes he will garner and/or solidify in already Democrat leaning and/or safe states. It is the politics of envy, race baiting ,divide and conquer one up manship, populism - yes, dishonesty.
But then there is that cliff to worry about.
Call it what you will Obama is engaged in the venomous act of a desperate snake oil politician for he is the consummate chameleon. (See 2a, 2b and 2c below.)
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A public school teacher was arrested today at John F Kennedy International airport as he attempted to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a compass, a slide-rule and a calculator.
At a morning press conference, Attorney General Eric Holder said he
believes the man is a member of the notorious Al-Gebra movement.
He was read his Miranda rights and offered a shovel ready job.
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These two sites have a lot in common. The first exposes the abysmal ignorance of our youth generation which lacks knowledge of history and most particularly that of the '40's and '50's. The second video is about the hatred that still remains and will lead to the next world conflagration which will engulf the same ignorant youth displayed in the first video.
It is one thing not to know history. If onedoes there is a high probability you will live to repeat its mistakes. But it is an even bigger sin to know history and do nothing to avoid repeating it.
See: "180 Movie By The Way of the Master" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y2KsU_dhwI&feature=player_embedded
and
Dr. Salah Sultan: 'Every Zionist Who Enters Egypt.Should Be Killed' http://www.theblaze.com/stories/egyptian-cleric-every-zionist-who-enters-egypt-should-be-killed/
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Dennis Prager makes the point that Palestinians want peace but not with a Jewish state. Ironically most Jewish Israelis are not necessarily religious. I would venture to say most Arab Israelis are more religious.(See 3 below)
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Figuring out Obama may be a 24/7 game for some but most already know who and what he is.
What Peter Wehner has discovered is that Obama is the black political equivalent of Jekyll and Hyde or the male equivalent of The Two Faces of Eve. (See 4 below.)
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Is Ahmadinejad on his last leg? (See 5 below.)
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America shrinks its navy, China expands its navy, and now Turkey plans on becoming a regional naval power.
Rest assured, if Obama is re-elected he will shrink the military. That's generally the Democrat fall back as they re-distribute Pentagon funds to the downtrodden little people! Helps to lock in votes because there are a lot more little people than military people. Then when Republicans return to office they rebuild the military skeleton they inherit. Happened with Carter, happened with Clinton and is happening with Obama. (See 6 below.)
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I warned about the same thing several memos ago - don't let the media choose the Republican candidate. Then, Tom Sowell. (See 7 and 7a below)
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Dick
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1)Melanie Phillips:Some 1941 years ago, the Romans conquered the ancient Jewish kingdom of Judea by force and attempted to expunge all memory of the Jews' claim to the land by renaming the area Palestine. Two days ago, Mahmoud Abbas attempted to do the same thing by diplomatic force at the UN.
The whole thing was of course a grotesque charade, outdone in its surrealism only by the reaction of the western world. For the UK and US governments and others said that such a unilateral declaration of independence was a setback for peace and a Palestinian state, which could only be achieved through negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel.
Not so. Negotiations do not have to be re-started in order to achieve this. If Abbas really wanted a state of Palestine to live in peace alongside Israel, he could have said a handful of words in New York which would have ended the conflict there and then and brought such a state into actual being.
For all that is needed is for Abbas to say, in Arabic as well as English, that he accepts the right of Israel to exist as the nation state of the Jewish people, and that his own people will no longer wage war against it. If he were to say that, and to match those words by deeds to show he meant them - for example, by ending the incitement in the educational materials and media under his command to hatred and murder of Jews and Israelis - there would be peace and a state of Palestine.
But this will never happen. For the dominant assumption in the west, the assumption that underpins virtually every political utterance on the subject and every interview on the BBC and the reporting even in notionally pro-Israel papers such as the Times or Telegraph that a state of Palestine would end the Middle East conflict, is not only wholly mistaken but is to mis-state that conflict.
For peace to be achieved, the belligerent has to stop making war. The Arabs have made war on the Jews in their ancient homeland since Israel became a state and indeed for three decades before that. For a solution to be arrived at, it's necessary correctly to state the problem. The problem is not the absence of a state of Palestine. The problem is that the Arabs want to get rid of Israel.
For anyone paying attention to the actual words used, the evidence was there in Abbas's own speech. His people, he declared, had been suffering for 63 years. What happened 63 years ago? The state of Israel came into being. So what Abbas was saying was not that the absence of a state of Palestine was the problem. The problem for him was the very existence of the state of Israel.
He also said:
'...we agreed to establish the State of Palestine on only 22 per cent of the territory of historical Palestine - on all the Palestinian Territory occupied by Israel in 1967.'
But the West Bank and Gaza were not 22 per cent of historical; Palestine; they were far, far less. It was Israel that was established on a fraction of 'historical Palestine', having settled for that fraction as better than nothing at all. And if the Palestinians truly had accepted a state merely in the West Bank and Gaza, why then did they refuse the offer of precisely such a state on more than 90 per cent of that territory which was made to them in 2000 and 2008? Why does the very Palestinian logo on their flags and insignia show a map of this state of Palestine to which they aspire as having swallowed up Israel altogether?
In Ramallah on September 16, Abbas made his position even plainer. 'The Palestinian people', he stated, 'have been abused for 63 years, generation after generation, under occupation'.
No, it is the existence of Israel itself that is the problem which Abbas believes UN recognition of a state of Palestine would help resolve. It is Israel itself that Abbas wants to subsume into Palestine. In other words, as he himself has previously said, declaring UDI at the UN was a way of internationalising the conflict with Israel. UN recognition of a state of Palestine is therefore not a move towards peace but a signal for genocidal war.
The truly incredible bone-headedness (or worse) of the western response was encapsulated by a BBC Today programme interview on Friday morning with the UK's former ambassador to the UN, Sir Jeremy Greenstock. Sir Jeremy declared that a state of Palestine was 'not a threat to Israel', and that the Palestinians were 'desperate' to end the 'injustice' done to them and to restart negotiations.
Eh? What 'injustice'? The Palestinians are the ones waging war on Israel, not the other way round. What desperation, when they have repeatedly turned down the offer of a state? What keenness to re-start negotiations, when Israel repeatedly offers them negotiations and they repeatedly refuse?
Even worse, Sir Jeremy also said that what was much more important for Israel than a state of Palestine was not to imperil any further its relationship with other countries in the region such as Egypt, Turkey or Iran.
What?? Doesn't Sir Jeremy realise that the Palestinians are despised by every country in the region? Hasn't Sir Jeremy noticed that Turkey is now pursuing an Islamist agenda, with appalling implications not just for Israel but for the interests of the UK and the west, and that Egypt may well fall to the Islamists too? And as for Israel not upsetting Iran by its attitude to the Palestinians, hasn't Sir Jeremy Greenstock understood that Iran is threatening Israel with nuclear extinction because it is a Jewish state? On what planet is Sir Jeremy Greenstock living?
To anyone with a scintilla of knowledge of the nine-decade Arab and Islamic war against the Jews in the Middle East, Abbas's speech at the UN consisted of lie after lie after lie. He claimed that Israeli settlements in the West Bank were illegal and in breach of international law (untrue); he claimed that the settlements were in breach of the terms of negotiation (untrue; it is Abbas's own unilateral declaration which tears up successive bilateral treaties); he claimed that Israel was targeting Palestinian civilians in Gaza (untrue; Israeli attacks, which carefully avoid hitting civilians wherever possible, are only in defence of its civilians against Hamas attacks --with which Abbas has now publicly lined himself up, not least by hailing as 'martyrs' those in Gaza who murder Israelis).
As for his claim that the settlements were the reason there was no peace, this was demonstrably ridiculous. As Netanyahu said in his own fine speech at the UN:
'President Abbas ... said that the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the settlements. Well, that's odd. Our conflict has been raging for -- was raging for nearly half a century before there was a single Israeli settlement in the West Bank. So if what President Abbas is saying was true, then the -- I guess that the settlements he's talking about are Tel Aviv, Haifa, Jaffa, Be'er Sheva. Maybe that's what he meant the other day when he said that Israel has been occupying Palestinian land for 63 years. He didn't say from 1967; he said from 1948. I hope somebody will bother to ask him this question because it illustrates a simple truth: The core of the conflict is not the settlements. The settlements are a result of the conflict.'
History records that, from the 1930s onwards, the Jews have never stood in the way of a Palestinian state if that would end the war of annihilation the Arabs have continuously waged against them. A Palestine state has been on repeated offer. The Arab response has always been to refuse and instead to attempt to destroy the Jews' presence in their own ancient homeland. As certain Palestinian spokesmen themselves have acknowledged, Palestinian identity was itself constructed purely to destroy Israel. The reason for the objection to a state of Palestine is that it would be used to bring about the final destruction of Israel as a Jewish state, an aspiration which Abbas never ceases to proclaim.
As Netanyahu said in his speech:
'We believe that the Palestinians should be neither the citizens of Israel nor its subjects. They should live in a free state of their own. But they should be ready, like us, for compromise. And we will know that they're ready for compromise and for peace when they start taking Israel's security requirements seriously and when they stop denying our historical connection to our ancient homeland.
I often hear them accuse Israel of Judaizing Jerusalem. That's like accusing America of Americanizing Washington, or the British of Anglicizing London. You know why we're called "Jews"? Because we come from Judea."'
What Israel should be stating explicitly and repeatedly is that it is the Jews who are the indigenous people of what are now Israel and the West Bank - and indeed beyond. Commentators often refer to Judea and Samaria as 'Biblical' names as if they can therefore be disregarded today. Not so. Judea and Samara were the true historical names for Israel and the West Bank, used in international treaties and official documents of the Palestine Mandate period, and throughout which land the Jews were given the legal right to settle. Only now as the west mimics the Arab attempt to airbrush the Jews out of their own history have these names become synonymous with Jewish extremism.
What really illustrates the west's moral bankruptcy over Israel and the Palestinians is that the day before the Abbas charade, the very same UN gave the stage to Iran's Ahmadinejad from where he spouted his murderous lies and hatred of the west, including his implication that 9/11 was a US conspiracy. This is the leader of a regime which executes teenagers for homosexuality and which is developing nuclear weapons to commit genocide against Israel and hold the western world hostage.
Yet far from expressing outrage at this use of the UN by such a man, far from drawing attention indeed to the utter suicidal madness of having the UN as a global policeman when its own Security Council is now chaired by Lebanon, a country in thrall to Iran through Hezbollah, the appearance of Ahmadinejad elicited barely a shrug by western media which instead worked themselves into a frenzy over Abbas and the 'plight' of the Palestinians.
Netanyahu again called it right. He said the world was menaced by a malignancy.
'That malignancy is militant Islam. It cloaks itself in the mantle of a great faith, yet it murders Jews, Christians and Muslims alike with unforgiving impartiality. On September 11th it killed thousands of Americans, and it left the twin towers in smouldering ruins. Last night I laid a wreath on the 9/11 memorial. It was deeply moving. But as I was going there, one thing echoed in my mind: the outrageous words of the president of Iran on this podium yesterday. He implied that 9/11 was an American conspiracy. Some of you left this hall. All of you should have.'
Netanyahu called the UN a 'theatre of the absurd' and the 'house of lies'. The western media mostly didn't bother to report that, just as they didn't bother to report much of his speech. What they are really waiting for is for the Palestinians to resume attacking Israelis as a sign of their 'desperation'. They won't report those attacks either. But they will report the Israelis' response and call that 'aggression'. That's the prospect over which the western media, sensing a final kill, are now slavering.
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2)Obama Healthcare Law Cleared for US Supreme Court
The Obama administration Monday cleared the way for the Supreme Court to decide in its 2011-12 term the president's signature healthcare law that requires Americans to buy insurance or face a penalty.
A Justice Department spokeswoman said it decided against asking the full U.S. Appeals Court for the 11th Circuit to review the August ruling by a three-judge panel of the court that found the requirement unconstitutional.
The decision not to seek review by the full appeals court will likely speed up consideration of the matter by the high court in its 2011-12 term that begins next week. A ruling could come by late June, in the middle of the presidential campaign.
The Supreme Court has long been expected to have the final word on the legality of the individual mandate, a cornerstone of President Barack Obama's healthcare law. A big uncertainty has been over when the court would decide the issue.
The law's fate before the nine-member court, closely divided with a conservative majority and four liberals, could come down to two Republican appointees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy, legal experts have said.
The law, adopted by Congress in 2010 after a bruising battle, is expected to be a major political issue in the 2012 elections as Obama seeks another four-year term. All the major Republican presidential candidates oppose it.
Obama, a Democrat, has championed the individual mandate as a major accomplishment of his presidency and as a way to try to slow soaring healthcare costs while expanding coverage to the more than 30 million Americans without it.
The 11th Circuit appeals court, based in Atlanta, ruled by a 2-1 vote last month in favor of 26 states and others who challenged the mandate for exceeding the power of Congress.
The Obama administration could have asked the full U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider its decision. But that could have pushed back any Supreme Court ruling to its 2012-13 term.
The 2-1 ruling ruling conflicted with other appeals courts that have upheld the law or have rejected legal challenges, including a lawsuit by the state of Virginia which was dismissed on procedural grounds.
A U.S. appeals court based in Cincinnati ruled Congress had the power to adopt the individual mandate, which takes effect in 2014. The losing side in that case, the Thomas More Law Center, already appealed to the Supreme Court in July.
The administration has steadfastly maintained its belief that the law will survive judicial scrutiny and be upheld by the Supreme Court. The states that have challenged the law have argued it went beyond Congress' authority to require coverage.
According to experts in a story on Politico, the Supreme Court has several reasons to take up the case. It's a high-profile case with the request coming from the government; there have been split decisions between appeals courts, specificically, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the mandate, while the 11th Circuit ruled it unconstitutional and the 4th Circuit ruled it could not issue a decision until 2014.
A decision in the middel of the 2012 presidential campaign has huge risks for the president, with a ruling either way galavanizing both parties.
The Justice Department did not explain its decision to go straight to the high court, but the 11th Circuit has only five of 11 judges appointed by Democrats and one them has already ruled to strike down the mandate.
2a)As Federal Crime List Grows, Threshold of Guilt Declines
By GARY FIELDS And JOHN R. EMSHWILLER
For centuries, a bedrock principle of criminal law has held that people must know they are doing something wrong before they can be found guilty. The concept is known as mens rea, Latin for a "guilty mind."
Addiotnal WSJ articles pertainng to explosion in Federal Offenses:
Animal Terrorism Law Sets Unusual Standard for Crime
Earlier in the Series: Federal Asset Seizures Rise, Netting Innocent With Guilty (Aug. 22)
Earlier in the Series: County Sheriff Enjoys Fruits of Forfeitures (Aug. 22)
Earlier in the Series: As Criminal Laws Proliferate, More Are Ensared (July 23)
Earlier in the Series: Many Failed Efforts to Count Nation's Federal Crimes (July 23)
This legal protection is now being eroded as the U.S. federal criminal code dramatically swells. In recent decades, Congress has repeatedly crafted laws that weaken or disregard the notion of criminal intent. Today not only are there thousands more criminal laws than before, but it is easier to fall afoul of them.
As a result, what once might have been considered simply a mistake is now sometimes punishable by jail time. When the police came to Wade Martin's home in Sitka, Alaska, in 2003, he says he had no idea why. Under an exemption to the Marine Mammal Protection Act, coastal Native Alaskans such as Mr. Martin are allowed to trap and hunt species that others can't. That included the 10 sea otters he had recently sold for $50 apiece.
Growth in Federal Criminal Sentences
See a breakdown of the rise in federal sentences by the type of offense.
Mr. Martin, 50 years old, readily admitted making the sale. "Then, they told me the buyer wasn't a native," he recalls.
The law requires that animals sold to non-Native Alaskans be converted into handicrafts. He knew the law, Mr. Martin said, and he had thought the buyer was Native Alaskan.
He pleaded guilty in 2008. The government didn't have to prove he knew his conduct was illegal, his lawyer told him. They merely had to show he had made the sale.
"I was thinking, damn, my life's over," Mr. Martin says.
Federal magistrate Judge John Roberts gave him two years' probation and a $1,000 fine. He told the trapper: "You're responsible for the actions that you take."
Mr. Martin now asks customers to prove their heritage and residency. "You get real smart after they come to your house and arrest you and make you feel like Charles Manson," he says.
The U.S. Attorney's office in Alaska didn't respond to requests for comment.
Back in 1790, the first federal criminal law passed by Congress listed fewer than 20 federal crimes. Today there are an estimated 4,500 crimes in federal statutes, plus thousands more embedded in federal regulations, many of which have been added to the penal code since the 1970s.
One controversial new law can hold animal-rights activists criminally responsible for protests that cause the target of their attention to be fearful, regardless of the protesters' intentions. Congress passed the law in 2006 with only about a half-dozen of the 535 members voting on it.
Under English common law principles, most U.S. criminal statutes traditionally required prosecutors not only to prove that defendants committed a bad act, but also that they also had bad intentions. In a theft, don't merely show that the accused took someone's property, but also show that he or she knew it belonged to someone else.
Over time, lawmakers have devised a sliding scale for different crimes. For instance, a "willful" violation is among the toughest to prove.
Requiring the government to prove a willful violation is "a big protection for all of us," says Andrew Weissmann, a New York attorney who for a time ran the Justice Department's criminal investigation of Enron Corp. Generally speaking in criminal law, he says, willful means "you have the specific intent to violate the law."
A lower threshold, attorneys say, involves proving that someone "knowingly" violated the law. It can be easier to fall afoul of the law under these terms.
In one case, Gary Hancock of Flagstaff, Ariz., was found guilty in 1999 of violating a federal law prohibiting people with a misdemeanor domestic violence record from gun ownership. At the time of his domestic-violence convictions in the early 1990s, the statute didn't exist—but later it was applied to him. He hadn't been told of the new law, and he still owned guns. Mr. Hancock was convicted and sentenced to five years' probation.
His lawyer, Jane McClellan, says prosecutors "did not have to prove he knew about the law. They only had to prove that he knew he had guns."
Upholding the conviction, a federal appellate court said that "the requirement of 'knowing' conduct refers to knowledge of possession, rather than knowledge of the legal consequences of possession."
In 1998, Dane A. Yirkovsky, a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, man with an extensive criminal record, was back in school pursuing a high-school diploma and working as a drywall installer. While doing some remodeling work, Mr. Yirkovsky found a .22 caliber bullet underneath a carpet, according to court documents. He put it in a box in his room, the records show.
A few months later, local police found the bullet during a search of his apartment. State officials didn't charge him with wrongdoing, but federal officials contended that possessing even one bullet violated a federal law prohibiting felons from having firearms.
Mr. Yirkovsky pleaded guilty to having the bullet. He received a congressionally mandated 15-year prison sentence, which a federal appeals court upheld but called "an extreme penalty under the facts as presented to this court." Mr. Yirkovsky is due to be released in May 2013.
Changing laws mean it's easier for a mistake to be treated as a federal crime. Mr. Martin says he learned that firsthand.
Overall, more than 40% of nonviolent offenses created or amended during two recent Congresses—the 109th and the 111th, the latter of which ran through last year—had "weak" mens rea requirements at best, according to a study conducted by the conservative Heritage Foundation and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. The study, one of the few to examine mens rea, was extended to include the most recent Congress at the request of The Wall Street Journal.
Earlier this year, Justice Antonin Scalia, in a dissent from a Supreme Court decision upholding a firearms-related conviction, wrote that Congress "puts forth an ever-increasing volume" of imprecise criminal laws and criticized lawmakers for passing too much "fuzzy, leave-the-details-to-be-sorted-out-by-the-courts" legislation.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle worry about the weakening of mens rea. "Over my six years in Congress there have been many times when in discussions with members of Congress I say, 'Look, I know you want to show people how serious you are about crime, but don't put anything on the books that doesn't require criminal intent,'" says Rep. Louie Gohmert, (R., Tex.) a former state judge who wants the federal system reworked.
In a 2009 Judiciary subcommittee hearing on the growth of federal criminal law, Rep. Bobby Scott (D., Va.)., said that mens rea had long served "an important role in protecting those who do not intend to commit wrongful or criminal acts from prosecution and conviction."
The growing number of federal laws with weakened mens rea safeguards is making the venerable legal principle that ignorance of the law is no defense a much riskier proposition for people. That principle made sense, says University of Virginia law professor Anne Coughlin, when there were fewer criminal laws, like murder, and most people could be expected to know them.
But when legislators "criminalize everything under the sun," Ms. Coughlin says, it's unrealistic to expect citizens to be fully informed about the penal code." With reduced intent requirements "suddenly it opens a whole lot of people to being potential violators."
F. James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican and chairman of the House crime subcommittee, said he wants to clean up the definition of criminal intent as part of a broader revamp of the criminal-justice system. There are crimes scattered among 42 of the 51 titles of the federal code, with varying standards of criminal intent. Still others are set by court decisions.
"How the definition of mens rea is applied is going to be one of the more difficult areas to figure out a way to fix," he said.
When a humpback whale got tangled in his fishing-boat net in 2008, Robert Eldridge Jr., a commercial fisherman, says he had one overriding thought: free it. He freed the whale, although it swam away with 30 feet of his net still attached.
A few weeks later, he was charged with harassing an endangered species and a marine mammal. Under federal law, Mr. Eldridge was supposed to contact authorities who would send someone trained to rescue the animal. The law is designed to prevent unskilled people from accidentally injuring or killing a whale while trying to release it.
Mr. Eldridge says he was fully aware of the federal Marine Animal Disentanglement Hotline for summoning a rescuer. But "it didn't cross my mind to do anything but keep it alive. I thought I was doing the right thing," the Massachusetts fisherman said.
There were two federal observers aboard his boat that day, performing routine checks, who reported the incident, according to court documents. Mr. Eldridge's potential sentence was one year in jail and a $100,000 fine.
Mr. Eldridge, 42, pleaded guilty and has a misdemeanor on his record. He was fined $500 and ordered to write a warning letter to other fishermen to look out for whales.
"I'm just glad it's done," he said of the case.
Asked for comment, a Justice spokeswoman referred to Mr. Eldridge's guilty plea, in which he admitted knowing the procedure and having the hotline number posted on his boat at the time of the incident.
The erosion of mens rea is partly due to the "hit or miss" way American legislation gets written today, says Jay Apperson, a former Chief Counsel to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security. Some lawmakers simply omit criminal-intent provisions when they draft legislation. "Lots of members don't think about it, not out of a malevolent motive," he says. "They just don't think about it."
Other times they do. In 1994, Congress rewrote part of the anti-money-laundering law that requires any cash transaction above $10,000 to be reported. The Supreme Court had just vacated a conviction, saying the "willful" provision required the government to show that someone knew he was violating the law when not reporting a transaction. In response, Congress took the "willful" provision out of the law.
An incident from 2002 illustrates the sometimes messy process of drafting legislation. That year, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which set new punishments for white-collar crime following the scandals at Enron, WorldCom and other companies. Several legal experts were about to testify on key provisions of Sarbanes-Oxley before a Senate subcommittee when the chairman called a break in the meeting. The reason: The senators needed to vote on the very provisions the panelists were there to discuss.
The hearing resumed two hours later, after the provisions were approved 97-0. The witnesses went on to testify about the dangers of weakening criminal-intent standards, as Sarbanes-Oxley did.
"That slapdash approach to drafting was pretty rife throughout the period," said Frank Bowman, a University of Missouri law-school professor who advised the Senate Judiciary Committee during the bill's creation.
Among other things, the new law made it easier for prosecutors to bring obstruction-of-justice cases related to destruction of evidence. Under earlier law, prosecutors had to show the defendant's destruction of evidence was impeding an active investigation. Sarbanes-Oxley broadened that, prohibiting the destruction of material that might be part of any future investigation.
One of the witnesses that day, former deputy attorney Gen. George Terwilliger, says that, "In retrospect, the hearing must have been about: Is what we just voted on a good idea?"
2b)Blue-State Math Is Boon to Obama, Target for GOP
By GERALD F SEIB.
Amid those dark political clouds overhead right now, President Barack Obama can console himself with this silver lining: The electoral map remains stacked in favor of him and his Democrats.
In a close presidential election—and there is every reason to believe that 2012's will be—that is an important and often overlooked fundamental. It will affect the strategic decisions both parties make as the campaign unfolds. Indeed, the shape of the electoral map already appears to be driving some moves this year, and offers signposts indicating which states will be pivotal next year.
President Obama can console himself with the fact that the electoral map remains stacked in favor of him and his Democrats. Jerry Seib explains why on The News Hub.
.The important thing to remember about a presidential election is that it isn't a contest to win the popular vote nationwide. It is a contest to win in a combination of states that will produce the 270 votes in the electoral college that give a candidate the majority there.
Therein lies the Democrats' built-in advantage. They happen to start with a bloc of reliably blue states that is larger, and much richer in electoral votes, than the reliably red bloc Republicans have on their side. If a Democratic presidential candidate merely hangs on to this trove of deep-blue states, he or she is a long way down the road to victory.
Specifically, there are 18 states plus the District of Columbia that have voted Democratic in all five presidential elections since 1992. Combined, they carry 242 electoral votes—90% of the votes needed for victory.
Republicans have a much smaller bloc of highly reliable electoral college votes. There are just 13 states that have gone red in each of the last five elections, and they deliver 102 electoral votes, less than half of the number needed.
Electoral Advantage
That means the key to victory for President Obama is holding this blue line. Doing so will be significantly harder this year, because he is running amid economic distress of a magnitude unseen in any of those five previous elections. But if he manages to hold his party's blue base, he would need to pick off only a few more less-friendly states.The most likely additional states for the Democrats are the five—Iowa, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada and Ohio—that have gone Democratic in either three or four of the last five elections. If President Obama carries all of these light-blue states, while hanging on to all the deepest-blue states, he will have 281 electoral votes, 11 more than he needs.
And that, it should be noted, would be without having to win the giant swing state of Florida, or needing to hold on to the normally red states of Virginia and North Carolina that Mr. Obama won in 2008.
So the question for Republicans is pretty simple: Which of the deep-blue or blue-leaning states can they pick off? Know the answer to that question and you'll know where the 2012 action will be.
Indeed, the president faces problems in some of those deep-blue states, which suggests that the wall can be breached. "Recent history aside, Obama will have to work hard to keep the Democratic base intact in 2012," political analyst Rhodes Cook wrote in a recent newsletter examining the electoral map. "Not only does it include states on the two coasts, but also industrial battlegrounds such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin."
The president's job-approval rating was below 50% in both California and Pennsylvania in recent polls, for example.
Another state that jumps out as a particular trouble spot is Wisconsin. Republican Gov. Scott Walker won the governor's seat there in 2010, and his blunt confrontation with public-employee unions has energized conservatives—and aroused liberals. How that translates into presidential politics is crucial.
Among the light-blue states, Iowa and New Hampshire both offer GOP opportunities. But big Ohio, with 18 electoral votes, is the juiciest target for Republicans among the light-blue states. Notably, the president's job-approval rating in Ohio stood just below 50% in a summertime Quinnipiac University poll.
Even if the president keeps all of the dark-blue states and all of the other light-blue states, take Ohio out of his column and he comes up seven electoral votes short.
Where could he make up those votes? Here's a good guess: Colorado, a swing state Mr. Obama won in 2008 after it went Republican in three of the previous four elections. It just happens to have nine electoral votes. Take out Ohio and plug in Colorado, and the president just squeaks by.
It's easy to see how these electoral calculations already are playing out, by watching where Democrats are focusing their energies and where President Obama is spending his time. It's no coincidence that both Mr. Obama and Vice President Joe Biden were in light-blue Ohio in the past week. On Tuesday, the president arrives in Colorado, trying to shore up his standing in that potentially crucial swing state.
2c)What Are Democrats Thinking?
By Christopher Chantrill
At this moment in the political cycle Republicans are wondering if they are about to demolish the Democrats. And the Democrats are waking up to the possibility that President Obama might be leading them off a cliff.
So what are Democrats thinking at this critical moment? Let's take a look at a couple of recent efforts as both Jared Bernstein and Paul Krugman dutifully toe the president's class warfare line.
Jared Bernstein at Huffington Post wants the election to be about the fundamentals: the "role and size of government," fairness, and supply-side, deregulatory economics. But there's a problem. Voters are tuning out Democrats, as Stan Greenberg wrote back in July. They agree with progressive ideas, apparently; they just don't trust Democrats to deliver. So Bernstein announces that he'll rail at special interests, talk about fairness, and insist that Republicans "wrecked the car in the 2000s" as his contribution to the fight for progressive values in 2012.
Somehow, I have a feeling that voters in 2012 are going to be interested in three different issues. How about: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs?
The inimitable Paul Krugman has picked up President Obama's tax-the-rich message. He writes that "wealthy Americans, many of whom pay remarkably little in taxes," should be paying more to reduce the long-term deficit. While middle-income Americans have seen their income go up by 21 percent in the last 30 years, "the top 100th of 1 percent of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent," he writes.
Krugman uses data from the Tax Policy Center to amplify Warren Buffet's argument, that
one-fourth of those with incomes of more than $1 million a year pay income and payroll tax of 12.6 percent of their income or less, putting their tax burden below that of many in the middle class.
Of course, it's possible that these rich tax scofflaws are trustafarians, like the late Ted Kennedy, living off tax-exempt income from municipal bonds, dodging in and out of the AMT. On the other hand, given that the IRS SOI stats(xls) says that the top 0.1 percent of tax returns paid 22.7 percent of income in 2008 in individual income tax, that means that one-fourth of the very rich must be paying a lot more than 22.7 percent if Krugman's one-fourth is paying only 12.6 percent or less. By the way, you had to have an income of $1.8 million to qualify for the top 0.1 percent in 2008.
Maybe what we should be doing, before we whack the trustafarians and the Kennedy family with higher taxes, is figure out how to lower the tax rates on the rest of the very rich. Maybe if we do that the poor dears would free up some cash to create a few jobs for the folks laid off from crony capitalist Solyndra.
You get the impression, from reading Dr. Krugman on tax-the-rich, that Republicans are merely the bribed apologists of the rich.
Would it surprise you to learn that the voters aren't quite so sure about that? John Steele Gordon reports that in the 2008 election,
Obama won the votes of 60 percent of those with a family income under $50,000 and 52 percent of those earning more than $200,000. McCain carried the middle class.
The rich, at 52 percent, voted for Obama only slightly under Obama's winning 53 percent of the popular vote. Why would that be? Why wouldn't they be voting their pocket-books for the party of the rich, the Republicans?
Nobody doubts why the poor vote for Democrats. They are voting for their benefits. They know that the Democratic Party is the party of the little guy and the traditionally marginalized.
Maybe the rich are just like the poor, and vote their pocket-books too. If you figure that your average Millionaire Next Door owning a couple of small businesses votes for the Republicans, then that leaves the crony capitalists, the green energy promoters, the high-level government administrators, the academic grant recipients, and the trustafarians all voting for the Democrats and bigger government. Otherwise you wouldn't get to 52 percent voting for Obama.
That makes the Democratic Party the party of the poor and the crony capitalist rich.
What does that make the Republican Party? It is at least the party of the middle class. We know that because John McCain won the middle class vote in the middle of an economic meltdown. The middle class stands for limited government and low tax rates, in part on the principle that it cramps the style of class warriors and crony capitalists. That's because the middle class is nothing if it does not aspire to a better life for itself and its children.
Here's an idea. The Republican Party is the party of all those who must have freedom, rich, poor, and everyone in between.
What do you think about that, Messrs. Bernstein and Krugman?
Christopher Chantrill is a frequent contributor to American Thinker.
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3)The Palestinians Want Peace --- Just Not With a Jewish State
By Dennis Prager
About five years ago, I was invited by the Hoover Institution to lecture at Stanford University over the course of a week. Coincidentally, Israel's Independence Day fell during that week, so I was invited to speak at the celebration held by pro-Israel students. In my talk, I noted that the crux of the problem in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was that most Palestinians wanted Israel to cease to exist.
After my talk, a woman walked over to me and introduced herself as a peace activist. She told me that she could not agree with me because Palestinians, in her view, were quite willing to accept Israel's existence.
As it happened, about 50 feet behind the pro-Israel celebration was an anti-Israel demonstration led by Palestinian students. So I told the woman to go over and introduce herself to the Palestinian students as a peace activist — that way they would immediately trust her — and ask them if they were willing to acknowledge the right of the Jewish state of Israel to exist. I told her that I would bet her $5 that they would not answer in the affirmative.
She accepted the bet and walked over the Palestinian students.
After about 10 minutes, she returned.
"So," I asked her, "who won the bet?"
"I don't know," she responded.
"I don't understand," I replied. "Didn't they answer you?"
"They asked me, 'What do you mean?'" she answered.
I told her she owed me $5 but that I wouldn't collect.
Earlier this month in Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinian Authority, I interviewed Ghassan Khatib, director of government media for the Palestinian Authority and the spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. I asked him the same question: Do the Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish state?
He was more direct than the Palestinians students at Stanford.
His long answer amounted to: "No."
There is no Jewish people, he told me, so how could there be a Jewish country? The Palestinian position is that there is a religion called Judaism, but there is no such thing as a Jewish people. (Interestingly, the Jews are referred to belonging to a religion only once in the entire Hebrew Bible — in the Book of Esther, by the anti-Semite Haman.)
In other words, Palestinians — people in a national group that never existed by the name "Palestine" until well into the 20th century — deny the existence of the oldest continuous nation in the world, dating back over 3,000 years. Now, that's real chutzpah.
Indeed, the Palestinians deny that the Jews ever lived in Israel. That is why Yasser Arafat could not even admit that Jesus was a Jew; rather, according to Arafat, "Jesus was a Palestinian." To acknowledge that Jesus was a Jew would mean that Jews lived in Israel thousands of years ago, in a Jewish state, moreover — long before Muslims existed, long before Arabs moved there, and millennia before anyone called himself a Palestinian.
In the Palestinian president's speech to the United Nations last week, this denial of Jewish history was reaffirmed. Thus, in a speech about Israel and the Palestinians, he never once uttered the word "Jew" or "Jewish."
Here is an example of Abbas's Jew-free view of the history of Israel/Palestine:
"I come before you today from the Holy Land, the land of Palestine, the land of divine messages, ascension of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) and the birthplace of Jesus Christ (peace be upon him) …"
No mention of Jews. Apparently, only Christians (Does Abbas know that Jesus was a Jew?) and Muslims have lived in "the Holy Land." And for Abbas, the Holy Land is not Israel, it is Palestine. That it was the Jews who made that land Holy is a fact of history denied by the Palestinians.
Israel, in the Palestinian view, is an Israeli state, not a Jewish state.
As Israel's ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, wrote in The Washington Post this past Friday:
"Two Israeli peace proposals, in 2000 and 2008 … met virtually all of the Palestinians' demands for a sovereign state in the areas won by Israel in the 1967 war — in the West Bank, Gaza and even East Jerusalem. But Palestinian President Yasser Arafat rejected the first offer and Abbas ignored the second, for the very same reason their predecessors spurned the 1947 Partition Plan.
Each time, accepting a Palestinian State meant accepting the Jewish State, a concession the Palestinians were unwilling to make.
That is the issue. Not settlements. Not boundaries. The Palestinians, like most of their fellow Arabs and like many Muslims elsewhere, have never acknowledged that the Jews came home to Israel because they have never acknowledged that the Jews ever had a national home there. And they don't even acknowledge that the Jews are a people.
Do the Palestinians want peace? I have no doubt that they do. Just not with the Jewish state.
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4) Obama’s Disquieting Heroic Fantasies
By Peter Wehner
At a speech before the Congressional Black Caucus this weekend, President Obama told the crowd, “I don’t have time to feel sorry for myself. I don’t have time to complain.” He also told the CBC to “take off your bedroom slippers” and “put on your marching shoes.” And he scolded them to “stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying.”
I have written before about Obama’s deep, almost desperate, need to portray himself as the opposite of what he is, to conceive of himself in a way that is at odds with reality. We have seen it in all sorts of areas, including claiming himself to be a voice of civility, portraying himself as a champion of bi-partisanship, lecturing others about profligate spending, and saying he is the only responsible “adult” in Washington. Now we see this habit in a new arena – this time, the president as Obama the Stoic, a man so committed to “pressing on” for the cause of social justice he just doesn’t have time to feel sorry for himself. Indeed, he has now decided to sermonize to others not to complain, not to grumble, and to “stop crying.”
This is akin to John Edwards hosting a weekend seminar on the importance of marital fidelity.
If there has been a president in my lifetime who has felt more sorry for himself – who has laid the blame for his failures on more people (George W. Bush, the Congressional GOP, the Tea Party, conservative talk radio hosts, millionaires and billionaires) and more things (ATMs, Japanese tsunamis, the Arab Spring, Fox News, Wall Street, et cetera) – I can’t think of who that might be. As the wheels on the Obama presidency come off, as his record of ineptness becomes more indisputable, Obama is becoming more intemperate, more aggrieved, more prickly, and more detached from reality.
What we are seeing is a president attempt to create, almost out of whole cloth, his own character, his own narrative, his own truth. That might work in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel; it works less well in an American presidential campaign.
To watch a young child indulge in heroic fantasies of himself can be charming. To watch a president indulge in heroic fantasies of himself is disquieting.
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5)The end of Ahmadinejad. His cronies barred from election
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the driving force behind Iran's nuclear program and the most vocal of Israel's enemies, is on his last legs as president. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has stripped him of most of his powers and shut the door against his having any political future.
Iranian sources report Ahmadinejad's loyalists are deserting him in droves since he went to New York to deliver an address to the UN General Assembly on Sept. 23. The Supreme Leader used his absence for the coup de grace: The removal of the president's loyalists from the list of 4,000 contenders running for seats in parliament (the Majlis) next March.
That was easily arranged: Khameini handed his orders to Ayatollah Mohammad Kani, head of the Assembly of Experts, which In the Islamic Republic of Iran is responsible for screening all contenders for office. He was told to disqualify all the president's associates. So, in the next Majlis, Ahmadinejad will be shorn of a loyal faction and any buddies sticking to him when his second presidential term runs out in May 2013 will be out of a job.
The Supreme Ruler degraded the president very publicly with one humiliation after another.
He waited for Ahmadinejad to go on the air in a US NBC interview on Sept. 13 to promise the release of Josh Fattal and Shane Bauer, the two American hikers convicted of spying, before cutting him down by suspending their release until the Iranian president was being booed by protesters in New York for reneging on his promise.
Tehran's political, religious and military insiders were not surprised by his downfall. For some time he had been getting too big for his boots, accumulating more powers than any president before him and only getting away with it so long as he was Khamenei's fair-haired boy.
But then, the favorite, whose election in 2005 and reelection in 2009, Khamenei engineered at the cost of violent anti-government protests in Tehran, rewarded him with ingratitude. He increasingly flouted the master and in some cases began chipping away at his authority - until Khamenei had had enough and decided to reel him in.
At the last minute, he cancelled a live Ahmadinejad interview on Iran's second television network wide publicized for the eve of his departure to the United Nations.
The affronts followed him home to Tehran, where waiting for him were serious criminal charges linking his name to the disappearance of three billion dollars from Iranian banks. The name of the embezzler has not been released but sources in Tehran reveal him as Amir Mansour Arya, an entrepreneur who started a business five years ago with Ahmadinejad’s encouragement and whose fortune grew a thousand fold within a suspiciously short time.
Arya is accused of using his presidential connections to secure multi-billion dollar loans from Iranian banks and then spiriting large sums out of the country.
Ahmadinejad denies any complicity in the crime. He tried fighting back by threatening to publish within 15 days "dozens of names" of rivals he claims are guilty of financial crimes. The deadline came and went without publication.
Betting in Tehran is that the Supreme Leader will not actually sack Ahmadinejad but let him last out his term as yesterday's man, lame duck in political isolation.
Two frontrunners for future president most mentioned recently are two hardliners, Majils (legislature) Speaker, Ali Larijani, a former senior nuclear negotiator with the West, and ex-foreign minister Ali Akhbar Veliyati, who is a member of Khamenei's kitchen cabinet as senior adviser on international relations
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------6)Turkey introduces first self-produced warship
Turkish PM Erdogan inaugurates domestically produced 'Heybeliada'; says Turkey has 'taken its place among 10 countries that can design and construct warships'
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's aggressive rhetoric towards Israel seems to be gaining momentum and as tensions between Ankara and Jerusalem grow, the former introduced its first domestically produced warship.
According to the Turkish newspaper Today's Zaman, the "Heybeliada" was unveiled Tuesday in Istanbul's Naval Shipyard Command.
Speaking at the unveiling ceremony, Prime Minister Erdogan said that "Turkey has taken its place among 10 countries that can design and construct warships."
The Heybeliada is classified as a patrol and anti-submarine warship. The Turkish Navy has been developing the vessel for the past three years, as part of the National Ship (MILGEM) project.
The Heybeliada has become operational amid Turkey's efforts to position itself as a greater power in the waters of the Eastern Mediterranean.
Turkey is in the midst of a dispute with the Greek Cypriot government over maritime resources in the region.
Turkey has said in the past that it seeks to boost its military presence in the region, to fend off what it perceives as Cyprus' "hogging" of gas rights, and what it claims is Israel's overreach in the East Mediterranean waters.
Turkey said its naval ships could escort Turkish energy exploration ships in the Mediterranean, raising the possibility of a naval confrontation. “We will try all channels of peace but we will also protect our country's interests until the end,” Erdogan said during the ceremony, commenting on the gas row.
Turkey has also stated that it may choose to dispatch warships to escort future Gaza-bound flotillas, in wake of the 2010 deadly raid on the Marmara, and Israel's refusal to apologize for the incident.
The flotilla raid, which left nine Turkish citizens dead, has propelled into a full-fledged diplomatic crisis between the once-close Israel and Turkey.
Today's Zaman also reported that Tuesday's ceremony also marked the first test-sail of the MILGEM project's second warship, "Buyukada."
The warships' prototype cost close to $260 million to develop.
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7)Conservatives Mustn't Let Media Pick The Candidate
By DOUGLAS MACKINNON
Leaving aside the televised, overly scripted, predictable and marginally useful "debates" now taking place between the Republican candidates for president, there are much more important discussions going on between conservatives and independents who are unified in their belief that for the good of the nation, Barack Obama must be defeated.
Those discussions — taking place across kitchen tables, in lunchrooms, or in neighborhood bars after a week of hard work — are trying to determine which path to follow in the approaching political fork in the road.
One of those paths will most likely lead to the defeat of Mr. Obama. The other could very well ensure his re-election.
It is critical for Republicans, conservatives, and independents to remember that from the 2008 GOP field, John McCain had the stamp of approval from the mainstream media.
In fact, the liberal media worked overtime to resurrect his then all but comatose campaign. Why?
That same liberal media told us that independents and a good number of Democrats just loved McCain.
Maybe some did, but exponentially more conservatives and Americans who cherish our vanishing traditional values could not stand him. So much so, they simply declined to vote.
That fact is one of the most purposefully underreported or flat-out ignored reasons why Mr. Obama won the White House in 2008.
Well over 2 million fewer people voted for the GOP ticket in 2008 compared to 2004. Did some of those votes go to Mr. Obama? For sure. Did many just stay home? Absolutely.
Again, a critically important fact when you stop to realize that Mr. Obama won North Carolina by only 14,000 votes. That he won Indiana by only 28,000 votes. Or that he won Florida by only 236,000 out of well over 8 million cast.
In creating the myth of the "Obama miracle" of 2008, the mainstream media went out of their way not to mention that hundreds of thousands of conservative and Republican voters were plain disgusted with McCain because he was anything but a conservative and could not bring themselves to vote for him.
To be sure, thanks in large part to the unprofessional and unethical cheerleading by most in the media, Mr. Obama did grow the Democrat vote total substantially from 2004.
But how many principled conservatives stayed home and why? That has to be part of an honest analysis of the Obama victory.
Flashback to 2011 and Republicans are being asked to choose between the liberal-media-approved Mitt Romney — who they insist will appeal to those independent and moderate Democrats in November of 2012 — or the more conservative, less-polished Rick Perry of Texas.
Anyone who has met Mitt Romney knows he is an incredibly decent person who loves his country.
That has never been in question. What is in question — is Romney the McCain of 2012? Shouldn't Republican primary voters really drill down deeper to understand why so many in the liberal media believe Mr. Romney — as they said about McCain in 2008 — will appeal to independents and Democrats?
While Governor Perry may not quite be ready for prime time — lack of real debate time and overcramming surely contributing — there is no doubt that he is the more conservative between himself and Mr. Romney.
In the future, he might do well to ignore hypothetical questions, ignore Mr. Romney, and simply speak to his vision for the nation.
No matter. For the moment, as the front-runners, Perry and Romney do represent that political fork in the road for GOP primary voters.
As such, if come election day, principled conservatives don't believe the GOP nominee speaks to their hopes and fears, there is no doubt a percentage will choose not to vote.
As we witnessed in 2008, nominees, numbers, and results matter.
MacKinnon is a former White House and Pentagon official and author of the forthcoming memoir entitled "Rolling Pennies in the Dark.
7a)Superman vs. Warm Body
By Thomas Sowell
One of the problems in trying to select a leader for any large organization or institution is the tendency to start out looking for Superman, passing up many good people who fail to meet that standard, and eventually ending up settling for a warm body.
Some Republicans seem to be longing for another Ronald Reagan. Good luck on that one, unless you are prepared to wait for several generations. Moreover, even Ronald Reagan himself did not always act like Ronald Reagan.
The current outbreak of "gotcha" attacks on Texas Governor Rick Perry show one of the other pitfalls for those who are trying to pick a national leader. The three big sound-bite issues used against him during the TV "debates" have involved Social Security, immigration and a vaccine against cervical cancer.
Where these three issues have been discussed at length, whether in a few media accounts or in Governor Perry's own more extended discussions in an interview on Sean Hannity's program, his position was far more reasonable than it appeared to be in either his opponents' sound bites or even in his own abbreviated accounts during the limited time available in the TV "debate" format.
On Social Security, Governor Perry was not only right to call it a "Ponzi scheme," but was also right to point out that this did not mean welshing on the government's obligation to continue paying retirees what they had been promised.
Even those of us who still disagree with particular decisions made by Governor Perry can see some of those decisions as simply the errors of a decent man who realized that he was faced not with a theory but with a situation.
For example, the ability to save young people from cervical cancer with a stroke of a pen was a temptation that any decent and humane individual would find hard to resist, even if Governor Perry himself now admits to second thoughts about how it was done.
Many of us can agree with Congresswoman Michele Bachmann's contention that it should have been done differently. But it reflects no credit on her to have tried to scare people with claims about the dangers of vaccination. Such scares have already cost the lives of children who have died on both sides of the Atlantic from diseases that vaccination would have prevented.
The biggest mischaracterization of Governor Perry's position has been on immigration. The fact that he has more confidence in putting "boots on the ground" along the border, instead of relying on a fence that can be climbed over or tunneled under where there is no one around, is a logistical judgment, not a question of being against border control.
Texas Rangers have already been put along the border to guard the border where the federal government has failed to guard it. Former Senator Rick Santorum's sound-bite attempts to paint Governor Perry as soft on border control have apparently been politically successful, judging by polls. But his repeated interrupting of Perry's presentation of his case during the recent debate is the kind of cheap political trick that contributes nothing to public understanding and much to public misunderstanding.
Those of us who disagree with Governor Perry's decision to allow the children of illegal immigrants to attend the state colleges and universities, under the same terms as Texas citizens, need at least to understand what his options were. These were children who were here only because of their parents' decisions and who had graduated from a Texas high school.
Governor Perry saw the issue as whether these children should now be allowed to continue their education, and become self-supporting taxpayers, or whether Texas would be better off with a higher risk of those young people becoming dependents or worse. I still see Governor Perry's decision as an error, but the kind of error that a decent and humane individual would be tempted to make.
I have far more questions about those who would blow this error up into something that it is not. Error-free leaders don't exist -- and we don't want to end up settling for a warm body.
Ultimately, this is not about Governor Perry. It is about a process that can destroy any potential leader, even when the country needs a new leader with a character that the "gotcha" attackers demonstrate they do not have.
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