It is obvious that The IRS and The Justice Department were in cahoots when it came to barring Conservative groups. Just more evidence of how corrupt this administration is. (See 1 below.)
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I have posted this before so being so close to April 15, I thought it worth reposting. (See 2 below.)
Food for thought about the potential of our nation imploding. (See 2a below.)
I also posted this several years ago but it is worth reposting as well: Dennis Prager Q & A At University of Denver - YouTube
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Brandeis University succumbs to pressure and this ultra liberal University deserves contempt for their action. (See 3 below.)
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We are about to relive Hitler! (See 4 below.)
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This from a dear friend and fellow memo reader who is having a "gall' attack. (See 5 and 5a below.)
On the assumption that 32 million Americans were uninsured it would have been cheaper if the government had issued them a basic health insurance policy with $1000 limit.
This would have cost the potential of $32 billion and the health care system we had before Obama set about to destroy it in order to bring 16% of government under Government control, which was his ultimate goal, would have remained as it was. Just an inside the box thought!
In the final analysis, before the disastrous Obama years are behind us, I suspect it will be courageous and independent federal judges and our court system which will become our best hope to rid us of this tragic period in our history.
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One professor, who worked with GW, offers some insights to his students in an attempt to dispel the lies and distortions about his competence. (See 6 below.)
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What I have suspected all along, marijuana, is a harmful substance.
The fact that Atty. General Holder and Obama are indifferent to the latest report suggests this is simply one more way in which to weaken our nation.
The acceptance and encouragement of a nation of brain dead citizens is symptomatic of the hypocrisy of liberal thinking. (See 7 below.)
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Dick
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1)
| New Emails Show Lois Lerner Was in Contact With DOJ About Prosecuting Tax Exempt Groups |
| By Katie Pavlich |
According to new IRS emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request from Judicial Watch, former head of tax exempt groups at the IRS Lois Lerner was in contact with the Department of Justice in May 2013 about whether tax exempt groups could be criminally prosecuted for "lying" about political activity.
"I got a call today from Richard Pilger Director Elections Crimes Branch at DOJ ... He wanted to know who at IRS the DOJ folk s [sic] could talk to about Sen. Whitehouse idea at the hearing that DOJ could piece together false statement cases about applicants who "lied" on their 1024s --saying they weren't planning on doing political activity, and then turning around and making large visible political expenditures. DOJ is feeling like it needs to respond, but want to talk to the right folks at IRS to see whether there are impediments from our side and what, if any damage this might do to IRS programs. I told him that sounded like we might need several folks from IRS," Lerner wrote in a May 8, 2013 email to former Nikole C. Flax, who was former-Acting IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller's chief of staff.
"I think we should do it – also need to include CI [Criminal Investigation Division], which we can help coordinate. Also, we need to reach out to FEC. Does it make sense to consider including them in this or keep it separate?" Flaxresponded on May 9, 2013.
After this email exchange, Lerner handed things off to Senior Technical Adviser and Attorney Nancy Marks, who was in charge of setting up a meeting with DOJ.
Just a few short days later on May 10, 2013, Lerner admitted and apologized for the inappropriate targeting of conservative tea party groups during an American Bar Association Conference after answering a planted question. Further according to Judicial Watch, "In an email to an aide responding to a request for information from a Washington Post reporter, Lerner admits that she “can’t confirm that there was anyone on the other side of the political spectrum” who had been targeted by the IRS. She then adds that “The one with the names used were only know [sic] because they have been very loud in the press.”
In other words, only conservative groups were being looked at for criminal prosecution.
Last week news broke that Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings' staff was in contact with Lerner about the conservative group True the Vote, despite denying any contact occurred. In this specific instance of Lerner discussing possible criminal prosecution of tax-exempt groups through DOJ, Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse seems to have been the person to get the ball rolling.
On April 9, 2013 during a Senate Judiciary Hearing, just one month before the targeting scandal broke, Whitehouse asked witnesses from DOJ and the IRS why groups that had possibly "made false statements" about their political activities had not been prosecuted. On March 27, 2013, just days before the hearing took place, Lerner described the purpose for the hearing to IRS staff in an email.
"As I mentioned yesterday -- there are several groups of folks from the FEC world that are pushing tax fraud prosecution for c4s who report they are not conducting political activity when they are (or these folks think they are). One is my ex-boss Larry Noble (former General Counsel at the FEC), who is now president of Americans for Campaign Reform. This is their latest push to shut these down. One IRS prosecution would make an impact and they wouldn't feel so comfortable doing the stuff," she wrote. "So, don't be fooled about how this is being articulated – it is ALL about 501(c)(4) orgs and political activity."
"As I mentioned yesterday -- there are several groups of folks from the FEC world that are pushing tax fraud prosecution for c4s who report they are not conducting political activity when they are (or these folks think they are). One is my ex-boss Larry Noble (former General Counsel at the FEC), who is now president of Americans for Campaign Reform. This is their latest push to shut these down. One IRS prosecution would make an impact and they wouldn't feel so comfortable doing the stuff," she wrote. "So, don't be fooled about how this is being articulated – it is ALL about 501(c)(4) orgs and political activity."
Lerner later acknowledged pursuing prosecutions of these groups would not fit well with the law.
“These new emails show that the day before she broke the news of the IRS scandal, Lois Lerner was talking to a top Obama Justice Department official about whether the DOJ could prosecute the very same organizations that the IRS had already improperly targeted,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement. “The IRS emails show Eric Holder’s Department of Justice is now implicated and conflicted in the IRS scandal. No wonder we had to sue in federal court to get these documents.”
This post has been updated.
Editors note/correction: A previous version of this post stated and implied Lois Lerner contacted the DOJ about criminal prosecution when the emails state she in fact got a phone call from DOJ about the issue. While she was clearly in contact with DOJ about criminal prosecution for tax exempt groups, DOJ initiated the contact in this specific instance. Emails also show Lerner and Flax responded to both recommendations by Senator Whitehouse and DOJ to look into criminal prosecution. The headline to this post has also been updated.
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2) Here is what happened on January 1st 2014:
Top Income Tax bracket went from 35% to 39.6%Top Income Payroll Tax went from 37.4% to 52.2%Capital Gains Tax went from 15 % to 28%Dividend Tax went from 15% to 39.6%Estate Tax went from 0% to 55%Remember this 'fact:' If you have any money, the Democrats want it! All these taxes were passed with only Democrat votes. Not one Republican voted for these taxes. Remember this come election time. And make sure your friends and neighbors have this info too!These taxes were all passed under the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare.And under ‘entitlements’ {I paid in for Fifty-seven years} I received $1,280.00 a month, and had to pay $1,955.in income tax. And I pay $980+ dollars a month for healthcare not covered by Medicare.
2a)
 (Washington, D.C.) -- As readers of this blog know, I generally write about trends in Israel, the Middle East and Russia. But because I love the United States, I feel compelled to write today about how much trouble we are in economically and one set of changes we urgently need to make.
Today is Tax Day, the day all Americans are required to send in our federal income tax forms to the IRS and pray to God we didn't make a mistake. What an utter disaster our current federal tax code is. As one Congressman put it, our tax code is ten times longer than the Bible with none of the good news. It's long, complex, confusing, and a magnet for lobbyists all trying to carve out a deal for themselves. It forces Americans to spend six billion hours a year -- that's right, six billion hours -- filling out tax forms, and to stay up worrying at night that they'll get dragged into an audit, or worse.
We can do better. Indeed, we must. It's time for our nation to come together around bold, sweeping tax reform that will unleash the great potential of the American people, get this economy roaring again, severely reduce the power of the IRS, and drain the cesspool of corruption in Washington.
Ultimately, tax reform is not primarily an economic issue but a moral one. The current system is creating a terrible drag on our economy and suffocating the creation of millions of good, high-paying jobs. But it is also punishing marriage, children, work and savings.
Tax reform should be a bipartisan issue. The vast majority of Americans want to scrap the toxic IRS code and replace with a new system that is pro-family and pro-growth. So let's get to it.
After all, the stakes are high. If we don't pass serious tax reform soon, we won't be able to get our economy growing at full strength. Millions of people will remain unemployed or under-employed. Real wages will stay stagnant or fall. We won't be able to afford a military strong enough to protect ourselves, our allies or our vital national interests around the world. We won't be able to honor our promises to the Greatest Generation via Social Security or Medicare. We won't be able to balance our budget or stop borrowing from the Chinese.
That's the bad news. The good news is that there are good ideas from good leaders on the table that could help us turn things around.
· A new poll commissioned by the National Association of Manufacturers show overwhelming bipartisan support for bold tax reform.
· Steve Forbes -- for whom I used to work as the director of policy and communications -- continues to make a solid case for the Flat Tax.
· Former Senator Rick Santorum -- who won eleven states and four million votes in 2012 -- has an excellent op-ed out today on the need for bold tax reform and the principles that should drive the debate.
· Many other serious leaders -- including Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin -- are making the case for serious reform, as well.
In the end, America needs a Third Great Awakening -- a sweeping moral and spiritual revival -- not just economic growth. But we need growth and opportunity, too.
Here are excerpts from the non-fiction book I wrote in 2012, Implosion: Can America Recover From Its Economic & Spiritual Challenges In Time?
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The Road to Reform . . . ?
Some experts and think tanks believe there is still time to turn things around. At least two have laid out detailed reform plans worth considering.
Congressman Paul Ryan has developed his “Roadmap for America’s Future.” This detailed legislative proposal cuts tax rates and simplifies the tax code to reignite economic growth. It cuts and restrains federal spending. It reforms Social Security and Medicare in ways that protect the existing system for current retirees and those close to retirement while also improving the system for younger workers. For example, Ryan proposes the retirement age be gradually and incrementally increased from sixty-five years old to seventy years old, since people are living and working longer. He also proposes that younger workers can invest some of their current payroll taxes into tax-free personal retirement accounts that permit low-risk investments in mutual funds and annuities. The Ryan plan also includes specific details to balance the budget and reduce federal debt—all, presumably, before an implosion of the American economy occurs.[i]
The Heritage Foundation has also released a very detailed reform plan. It’s called, “Saving the American Dream: The Heritage Plan to Fix the Debt, Cut Spending, and Restore Prosperity.” While the principles are similar to Congressman Ryan’s plan, some of the specifics are different. Both plans call for fully repealing “ObamaCare,” and both create personal retirement accounts within the Social Security system for younger workers. However, while the Ryan plan calls for simplifying the federal tax code from its current six marginal tax brackets [NOTE: at the time I wrote Implosion, there were 6 rates; now there are 7] down to just two (a 10 percent rate and a 25 percent rate), the Heritage plan calls for a single flat tax (the rate is not yet determined). Whereas the Ryan plan would hold spending at 19 percent of GDP, the Heritage plan would restrain spending to 18.5 percent of GDP.
The Heritage plan was designed to balance the federal budget by 2021 and reduce the national debt to 30 percent of GDP by 2035. By contrast, because the Ryan plan phases in some of the reforms more gradually than the Heritage plan does, the “Roadmap” does not bring the federal budget into balance until after 2055. That may seem like a long time—and it is—but the Ryan plan should be compared not only with the Heritage plan but more importantly with the fact that President Obama has not laid out a reform plan of his own. Under the current trajectory, the Congressional Budget Office projects deficits as far as the eye can see through the twenty-first century. Without significant changes, the budget will never be balanced in our lifetimes. Worse, the CBO indicates that the national debt will hit a horrifying 185 percent of GDP by 2035.[ii]
Overall, the Heritage plan is much bolder than the Ryan plan, but there are various policy and political challenges to both. What remains to be seen is whether the American people have the stomach for either plan or a variation of one of them. The point is not that one plan is necessarily better than the other. The point I want to make here is that there are at least two serious, credible plans on the table right now that show us in specific ways how we can boost economic growth, create more jobs, reform our entitlement systems, and get ourselves back on the road to fiscal sanity before we implode. Perhaps others will develop bold, creative, and compassionate plans that will improve upon what Congressman Ryan and the Heritage Foundation have offered. I hope so. The more serious ideas in the mix, the better. There is still a way out of this mess, and that is good news, but the window to get started on such reforms is rapidly closing.
. . . Or the Road to Ruin?
If we don’t make desperately needed reforms, then we are most certainly on the path to ruin. Indeed, we could be on the road to Greece.
“America is on the road to re-creating Greece’s recent debt crisis,” noted business magazine Barron’s in a 2011 issue. “If a country as small and removed as Greece could generate the tremors that it did in the past year, how much worse would a national debt crisis be in the world’s largest economy?”[iii]
The article notes that “Greece, the world’s 27th-largest economy, is a minor player, even in the European Union. Yet a budget deficit of 13.6 percent of gross domestic product spiked its overall debt to 115 percent of GDP. Its debt fell to junk status, and it stood on the edge of bankruptcy. Only the massive May 2010 bailout by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund pulled it back from the brink.”[iv]
Citing sobering data from the Congressional Budget Office, Barron’s warned, “If you think debt problems like Greece’s can’t happen here, think again. . . . [Soon], U.S. debt will hit 132 percent of GDP—well above Greece’s 115 percent. Government spending will consume almost one-third of everything America produces—a level only reached at the height of World War II. Even raising taxes to their greatest ratio to the economy in America’s history wouldn’t offset the automatic spending machine. . . . Washington is on the road to Greece.”[v]
Bottom Line
America in 2012 owes more than $15 trillion to a range of creditors, many in foreign countries, including Communist China.
[NOTE: That was true when I wrote Implosion; but today our national debt is over $17 trillion.]
That’s bad enough, but it gets worse.
Most Americans don’t even realize that we owe another $57 trillion to cover a range of “unfunded liabilities,” including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits. America’s most respected financial experts—both Republicans and Democrats—are warning us that such staggering levels of current and coming debt could trigger an economic implosion unless we rapidly and courageously make fundamental and sweeping reforms. The good news is that at least two detailed and compelling reforms have been proposed.
Two key questions emerge. First, does Washington have the courage to follow those plans or variations on them? And second, will Americans reward or punish political leaders in Washington for pursuing such reforms?
As important as those questions are, however, there is another even more important question: Will the Lord give us the time we need to make these changes—however difficult and painful they would be—or will he simply choose in his sovereignty to let America implode financially?
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[i] Ryan, “A Roadmap for America’s Future,” http://www.roadmap.
[ii] See Butler et al, “Saving the American Dream.” The Heritage plan quotes CBO projections extensively.
[iii] J. T. Young, “The Road to Greece,” Barron’s, January 22, 2011,http://online.barrons.com/
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3) Brandeis and the Real War on Women
By Jonathan S. Tobin
Our Tom Wilson and John Podhoretzhave already ably dissected the craven decision of Brandeis University to bow to pressure from extremist Muslim groups and to rescind its offer of an honorary degree on Ayaan Hirsi Ali. But now we are beginning to hear some defenses of the university’s decision that tell us more about what is wrong at Brandeis and the left than anything else. Up until now those who are rightly outraged by Brandeis’s cowardice have focused on the way the school’s administration was buffaloed into insulting Hirsi Ali by groups like CAIR and other apologists for radical and violent Islamists. But at this point it’s important to point out that perhaps the most important element of the story is not who is speaking up but who isn’t.
We have heard a great deal in the last couple of years from liberals about a “war on women” that was supposedly being waged by American conservatives. That meme played a crucial part in President Obama’s reelection and Democrats hope to repeat that success in this year’s midterms. Liberals have tried to mobilize American women to go to the polls to register outrage over the debate about forcing employers to pay for free contraception, a Paycheck Fairness Act that is more of a gift to trial lawyers than women, and attempts to limit abortions after 20 weeks. These are issues on which reasonable people may disagree, but what most liberals seem to have missed is the fact that there is a real war on women that is being waged elsewhere around the globe where Islamist forces are brutalizing and oppressing women in ways that make these Democratic talking points look trivial. It is that point that Hirsi Ali is trying to make in her public appearances.
But instead of rising in support of Hirsi Ali’s efforts to draw attention to these outrages, leading American feminists are silent. The only voices we’re hearing from the left are from men who are determined to justify Brandeis.
At the Forward, Ali Gharib ignores the key issue of women’s rights and Hirsi Ali’s personal experiences. He merely repeats the smears of Hirsi Ali as a purveyor of hate speech against Muslims while doubling down on that meme by broadening the attack to the entire “hard line pro-Israel community” in which he includes not only COMMENTARY and the Weekly Standard but also the reliably liberal Anti-Defamation League. He also attacks her for being a talking head in films which critique radical Islamists because they were produced by the Clarion Group, whose principle sin according to the radicals at CAIR (which was begun as a political front for Hamas fundraisers) was that many of those involved were Jews. Gharib is more circumspect and merely says they have ties to “the pro-Israel right.”
A more thoughtful response in defense of Brandeis comes from Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the former head of the Union of Reform Judaism, in the Huffington Post. Yoffie acknowledges that Ali Hirsi has a powerful story to tell about her experiences but says her “prejudicial and deeply offensive views on Islam as a violent and fascistic religious tradition” should disqualify her from being honored at Brandeis. The rabbi argues that if any person had made “broadly condemnatory terms about Jews, the Jewish community would be outraged — and rightly so.” While he acknowledges the point made by Lori Lowenthal Marcus that Brandeis has also honored anti-Zionists who shouldn’t have been given honorary degrees, he writes that this is “beside the point now.”
But the problem here is that Rabbi Yoffie takes the smears thrown about by disreputable figures such as Gharib and CAIR as truthful rather than reading them in context. The principal charge against her is an interview she gave in Reason magazine in which she spoke of the need for the West to wage war on and defeat Islam. That sounds like she is attacking all Muslims rather than just the radicals. But her point is that in many contexts, principally in the Third World—something she knows a lot more about than even a distinguished Jewish scholar like Yoffie—the radicals have seized control of mainstream Islam. As she said, “right now, the political side of Islam, the power-hungry expansionist side of Islam, has become superior to the Sufis and the Ismailis and the peace-seeking Muslims.” That analysis of the situation in Iran and her native Somalia—not to mention a host of other Muslim countries—is inarguable.
It is true, as Gharib argues, that Brandeis isn’t silencing Hirsi Ali. No one has a constitutional right to an honorary degree. The problem is that by wrongly tarring her as a hatemonger, what Brandeis’s defenders are doing is to marginalize the issue of the war on women being waged by Islamists.
The issue at stake here goes beyond the vilification of one courageous woman. The refusal of the West to confront the truth about Islamism is the crux of this debate. It may be easy to pretend that Islamists are only a small minority of global Islam in the United States where even radicals like CAIR like to pretend to be liberals. But throughout the world it is increasingly clear that the radicals—“military Islam” as Hirsi Ali calls them—are on the march and have become the voice of mainstream Muslims rather than only a radical fringe.
It is on this dilemma that the fate of hundreds of millions of women hangs. And yet American liberals and feminists feel no compulsion to speak up about this threat. As Hirsi Ali wrote yesterday in the Wall Street Journal:
I stand before you as someone who is fighting for women’s and girls’ basic rights globally. And I stand before you as someone who is not afraid to ask difficult questions about the role of religion in that fight.The connection between violence, particularly violence against women, and Islam is too clear to be ignored. We do no favors to students, faculty, nonbelievers and people of faith when we shut our eyes to this link, when we excuse rather than reflect.
Seen in that context, the shame of this controversy doesn’t belong only to Brandeis and its leadership but to a broad cross-section of Americans who should be on Hirsi Ali’s side in this fight rather than listening to her opponents.
Jonathan S. Tobin is senior online editor of COMMENTARY magazine and chief political blogger atwww.commentarymagazine.com.
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4) Report: Separatists in east Ukraine town of Donetsk order Jews to register
Measure due to the alleged support of Jews for Kiev and their hostility "to the Orthodox Donetsk republic and its citizens."
By Haaretz
A notice ordering all Jews in the eastern Ukraine city of Donetsk to register with the pro-Russian separatists or face deportation has been pasted near the local synagogue, according to the Novosti Donbassa news agency.
According to the report, the notice was distributed by "three unidentified men wearing balaclavas and carrying the flag of the Russian Federation." The notice was reported by members of the Jewish community of Donetsk.
Novosti Donbassa speculated that the men involved were provocateurs who "tried to provoke a conflict, then to blame the attack on separatists."
The notice apparently bore the stamps of the self-proclaimed People's Republic of Donetsk and was signed by its self-styled people's governor Denis Pushilin.
It orders all Jews over the age of 16 to register at the government building, which has been occupied by pro-Russian insurgents in defiance of Kiev rule. Jews would also have to pay a registration fee of $50 before May 3 and list all real estate and vehicles owned.
The notice explained the measure as being due to the alleged support of Jewish leaders for the "nationalist junta of [Stepan] Bandera in Kiev" and their hostility "to the Orthodox Donetsk republic and its citizens."
Failure to register, the notice said, would result in people being "stripped of their citizenship and deported forcibly outside the country with confiscation of property."
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5) It galls me when learned scholars and authors talk of Medicare and Social Security as “entitlements.”
Following is a section excerpted from a normally sane, right-leaning website and blog, the Patriot Post:
‘Just shy of half of all federal tax revenue goes to major entitlements -- Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other health care programs. Another 20% goes to various other wealth transfer programs like unemployment benefits and food stamps. That's more than two-thirds of the federal budget that goes from your pocket to someone else's. See why we call it "Income Redistribution Day"?’
Any of us who now benefit from Social Security or even from Medicare will recall the thousands of dollars (or even more) that we contributed to these non-voluntary plans. By any stretch of anybody’s imagination, investing that cash flow into reasonably safe investments would have returned far higher benefits than we now enjoy.
The South American country of Chile enjoyed a 20th century rebirth when, in 1981, led by some economists from the University of Chicago, they changed their Social Security system, which was rapidly leading the country into bankruptcy by privatizing it. In essence they developed a forced savings system wherein former contributions to the “social-security lock-box” were privately invested instead.
The result has been significant. Chile is relatively healthy financially, and retirement benefits for workers have been significantly improved. Chile’s principles of limited government through prudent financial management have kept public debt and deficits under control.
So let’s stop categorizing them as “entitlements.” Entitlements are such things as welfare, the greatly expanded food stamp program and continuous unemployment payments.
But, more importantly, let’s change the programs so that our children are not exposed to the same limitations we are and have been.
Privatize social security. Do it in a way that no harm will come to people over the age of 50. A quick analysis of my situation reveals that a minimal return on what I “invested” in the “lock-box” would return approximately three times what I now receive. And I receive the maximum. Fortunately, for me that is not a problem as I scrimped and saved throughout the years.
Repeal Obamacare. Government is not efficient and has no place in our health-care system. Eliminate Medicare. Establish a stipend for each individual usable by him to purchase his choice of health-care insurance. Let the free markets define cost of the insurance and reimbursement rates of the providers.
5a) Let HHS nominee Sylvia Burwell explain Obamacare lie
By Marc A. Thiessen
Senate Democrats have been desperately trying to move the national conversation away from Obamacare to just about anything else before the midterm elections — “paycheck fairness,” the minimum wage, even the Koch brothers.
But President Obama’s choice of Sylvia Burwell to replace Kathleen Sebelius as secretary of Health and Human Services thrusts Obamacare right back into the national spotlight — and with it Obama’s false promise that “if you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan.”
The agency Burwell heads, the Office of Management and Budget, is responsible for the president’s budget. But OMB also has another, lesser-known responsibility: fact-checking presidential speeches. Every proposed presidential utterance is scrubbed for accuracy by OMB.
When speechwriters finish a draft presidential address, it is circulated to the White House senior staff and top cabinet officials in what is known as the “staffing process.” As part of that process, nonpartisan career policy experts at OMB review the speech and are responsible for attesting to the factual accuracy of everything the president says.
So thanks to Burwell’s nomination, Americans may finally get to the bottom of how the biggest presidential lie in recent memory made it though OMB’s fact-checking process — not once but dozens of times.
The first time the lie surfaced — when Obama told the American Medical Association on June 15, 2009, “If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what” — it wasn’t on Burwell’s watch.
But Burwell was OMB director when Obama declared on Sept. 26, 2013: “Now, let’s start with the fact that even before the Affordable Care Act fully takes effect, about 85 percent of Americans already have health insurance — either through their job, or through Medicare, or through the individual market. So if you’re one of these folks, it’s reasonable that you might worry whether health-care reform is going to create changes that are a problem for you — especially when you’re bombarded with all sorts of fear-mongering. So the first thing you need to know is this: If you already have health care, you don’t have to do anything.”
Burwell should explain to Congress and the American people how her office allowed blatant falsehoods to get into presidential speeches, including whether political aides overruled career policy advisers who warned that the president’s claims were untrue.
This isn’t just a rehashing of ancient history, because the worst impacts of Obama’s lie are still to come. While some 6 million Americans lost their individual market plans last fall, tens of millions of Americans will see their employer-based health plans canceled or changed dramatically when the employer mandate kicks in. Obama has delayed the mandate for a year in an effort to prevent cancellations before the midterm elections. But on Burwell’s watch, he has also falsely promised that those with employer-based plans have nothing to worry about.
In October 2013, Obama declared: “Keep in mind that the individual market accounts for 5 percent of the population. So when I said you can keep your health care, I’m looking at folks who’ve got employer-based health care.” But “folks who’ve got employer-based health care” are going to lose their coverage, too — in fact, some businesses like Target, Trader Joe’s and Home Depot are already canceling plans and scaling back health benefits before the mandate kicks in. Burwell should be forced to explain how that Obama lie made it thought the OMB fact-checking process.
If Senate Democrats are smart, they will be the ones pushing hardest for this information — especially the 12 up for reelection this year who repeated the Obama lie. Sen. Mary Landrieu (La.) pledged, “If you like the insurance that you have, you’ll be able to keep it.” Sen. Mark Pryor (Ark.) said Arkansans want to know “are we gonna be able to stick with our plan? The answer is yes.” Sen. Kay Hagan (N.C.) promised, “If you like your insurance and your doctors, you keep them.” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.) swore, “Everyone will have the freedom to keep their health plan if they like it.” Sen. Mark Begich (Alaska) vowed, “Alaskans who have health insurance now, and are happy with it, can keep it.” Sen. Mark Warner (Va.) declared, “I’m not going to support a health-care reform plan that’s going to take away the health care you’ve got right now or a health-care plan that you like.” The rest made similar pledges.
Burwell should not be confirmed until she explains how OMB allowed the president of the United States to lie — repeatedly — to the American people. If Democrats don’t demand answers, they can be sure that Republicans will. Since avoiding the subject is not an option, her hearings will be a fascinating insight into the Democrats’ 2014 strategy on Obamacare. Vulnerable Senate Democrats have two choices: Come to Obama’s defense, or use the Burwell hearings to separate themselves from the president and blame him for misleading them like he misled the rest of America.
We’ll soon see which one they choose.
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6)President George W. Bush wasn’t unintelligent. In fact, he was brilliant…
Keith Hennessey, professor at Stanford Business School, wanted to set the record straight about President Bush’s intellect. He writes:
I teach a class at Stanford Business School titled “Financial Crises in the U.S. and Europe.” During one class session while explaining the events of September 2008, I kept referring to the efforts of the threesome of Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Tim Geithner, who were joined at the hip in dealing with firm-specific problems as they arose.
One of my students asked “How involved was President Bush with what was going on?” I smiled and responded, “What you really mean is, ‘Was President Bush smart enough to understand what was going on,’ right?”
The class went dead silent. Everyone knew that this was the true meaning of the question. Kudos to that student for asking the hard question and for framing it so politely. I had stripped away that decorum and exposed the raw nerve.
I looked hard at the 60 MBA students and said “President Bush is smarter than almost every one of you.”
More silence.
I could tell they were waiting for me to break the tension, laugh, and admit I was joking.
I did not. A few shifted in their seats, then I launched into a longer answer. While it was a while ago, here is an amalgam of that answer and others I have given in similar contexts.
I am not kidding. You are quite an intelligent group. Don’t take it personally, but President Bush is smarter than almost every one of you. Were he a student here today, he would consistently get “HP” (High Pass) grades without having to work hard, and he’d get an “H” (High, the top grade) in any class where he wanted to put in the effort.
For more than six years it was my job to help educate President Bush about complex economic policy issues and to get decisions from him on impossibly hard policy choices. In meetings and in the briefing materials we gave him in advance we covered issues in far more depth than I have been discussing with you this quarter because we needed to do so for him to make decisions.
President Bush is extremely smart by any traditional standard. He’s highly analytical and was incredibly quick to be able to discern the core question he needed to answer. It was occasionally a little embarrassing when he would jump ahead of one of his Cabinet secretaries in a policy discussion and the advisor would struggle to catch up. He would sometimes force us to accelerate through policy presentations because he so quickly grasped what we were presenting.
I use words like briefing and presentation
We treat Presidential speeches as if they are written by speechwriters, then handed to the President for delivery. If I could show you one experience from my time working for President Bush, it would be an editing session in the Oval with him and his speechwriters. You think that me cold-calling you is nerve-wracking? Try defending a sentence you inserted into a draft speech, with President Bush pouncing on the slightest weakness in your argument or your word choice.
In addition to his analytical speed, what most impressed me were his memory and his substantive breadth. We would sometimes have to brief him on an issue that we had last discussed with him weeks or even months before. He would remember small facts and arguments from the prior briefing and get impatient with us when we were rehashing things we had told him long ago.
And while my job involved juggling a lot of balls, I only had to worry about economic issues. In addition to all of those, at any given point in time he was making enormous decisions on Iraq and Afghanistan, on hunting al Qaeda and keeping America safe. He was making choices not just on taxes and spending and trade and energy and climate and health care and agriculture and Social Security and Medicare, but also on education and immigration, on crime and justice issues, on environmental policy and social policy and politics. Being able to handle such substantive breadth and depth, on such huge decisions, in parallel, requires not just enormous
strength of character but tremendous intellectual power. President Bush has both.
On one particularly thorny policy issue on which his advisors had strong and deep disagreements, over the course of two weeks we (his senior advisors) held a series of three 90-minute meetings with the President. Shortly after the third meeting we asked for his OK to do a fourth. He said, “How about rather than doing another meeting on this, I instead tell you now what each person will say.” He then ran through half a dozen of his advisors by name and precisely detailed each one’s arguments and pointed out their flaws. (Needless to say there was no fourth meeting.)
Every prominent politician has a public caricature, one drawn initially by late-night comedy joke writers and shaped heavily by the press and one’s political opponents. The caricature of President Bush is that of a good ol’ boy from Texas who is principled and tough, but just not that bright.
That caricature was reinforced by several factors:
· The press and his opponents highlighted President Bush’s occasional stumbles when giving a speech. President Obama’s similar verbal miscues are ignored. Ask yourself: if every public statement you made were recorded and all your verbal fumbles were tweeted, how smart would you sound? Do you ever use the wrong word or phrase, or just botch a sentence for no good reason? I know I do.
· President Bush intentionally aimed his public image at average Americans rather than at Cambridge or Upper East Side elites. Mitt Romney’s campaign was predicated on “I am smart enough to fix a broken economy,” while George W. Bush’s campaigns stressed his values, character, and principles rather than boasting about his intellect. He never talked about graduating from Yale and Harvard Business School, and he liked to lower expectations by pretending he was just an average guy. Example: “My National Security Advisor Condi Rice is a Stanford professor, while I’m a C student. And look who’s President. ”
· There is a bias in much of the mainstream press and commentariat that people from outside of NY-BOS-WAS-CHI-SEA-SF-LA are less intelligent, or at least well educated. Many public commenters harbor an anti-Texas (and anti-Southern, and anti-Midwestern) intellectual bias. They mistakenly treat John Kerry as smarter than George Bush because John Kerry talks like an Ivy League professor while George Bush talks like a Texan.
· President Bush enjoys interacting with the men and women of our armed forces and with elite athletes. He loves to clear brush on his ranch. He loved interacting with the U.S. Olympic Team. He doesn’t windsurf off Nantucket, he rides a 100K mountain bike ride outside of Waco with wounded warriors. He is an intense, competitive athlete and a “guy’s guy.” His hobbies and habits reinforce a caricature of a [dumb] jock, in contrast to cultural sophisticates who enjoy antiquing and opera. This reinforces the other biases against him.
I assume that some who read this will react automatically with disbelief and sarcasm. They think they know that President Bush is unintelligent because, after all, everyone knows that. They will assume that I am wrong, or blinded by loyalty, or lying. They are certain that they are smarter than George Bush.
I ask you simply to consider the possibility that I’m right, that he is smarter than you.
If you can, find someone who has interacted directly with him outside the public spotlight. Ask that person about President Bush’s intellect. I am confident you will hear what I heard dozens of times from CEOs after they met with him: “Gosh, I had no idea he was that smart.”
At a minimum I hope you will test your own assumptions and thinking about our former President. I offer a few questions to help that process.
· Upon what do you base your view of President Bush’s intellect? How much is it shaped by the conventional wisdom about him? How much by verbal miscues highlighted by the press?
· Do you discount your estimate of his intellect because he’s from Texas or because of his accent? Because he’s an athlete and a ranch owner? Because he never advertises that he went to Yale and Harvard?
· This is a hard one, for liberals only. Do you assume that he is unintelligent because he made policy choices with which you disagree? If so, your logic may be backwards. “I disagree with choice X that President Bush made. No intelligent person could conclude X, therefore President Bush is unintelligent.” Might it be possible that an intelligent, thoughtful conservative with different values and priorities than your own might have reached a different conclusion than you? Do you really think your policy views derive only from your intellect?
And finally, if you base your view of President Bush’s intellect on a public image and caricature shaped by late night comedians, op-ed writers, TV pundits, and Twitter, is that a smart thing for you to do?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------7) Don't Go to Pot
The 50 states are sometimes called “laboratories of democracy.” Although the expression is intended to highlight in flattering terms how innovative they can be, it also suggests that the states’ political experiments can and do fail. In the event of failure, the hope must be that damage can be stopped at the state line. Today, the experiment of state-by-state marijuana legalization is failing before our eyes—and failing most signally where the experiment has been tried most boldly. The failure is accelerating even as the forces pushing legalization are on what appears to be an inexorable march.
In November 2012, the states of Colorado and Washington voted to legalize the sale of marijuana to any adult consumer. Advocates of legalization carried the vote with a substantial campaign budget, a few million dollars, and a brilliant slogan: “Drug dealers don’t ask for ID.” The implied promise: Marijuana legalization would be joined to tough enforcement to keep marijuana away from minors. After all, persistent and heavy marijuana use among adolescents has been shown to reduce their IQ as adults by 6 to 8 points. An Australian study of identical twins found that a twin who started using cannabis before age 17 was 3 times more likely to attempt suicide than the twin who did not.People in Colorado had good reason to worry about teen drug use. Colorado voters had approved a limited experiment with medical marijuana in 2000. A complex series of judicial and administrative decisions in the mid-2000s overthrew most restrictions on the dispensing of marijuana. Between 2009 and 2012, the number of dispensaries jumped past 500, and the number of medical cardholders multiplied from roughly 1,000 to more than 108,000.
With so many medical-marijuana card-holders walking about, it was simply inevitable that some would re-sell their marijuana to underage users. A 2013 study of Colorado teens in drug treatment found that 74 percent had shared somebody else’s medical marijuana. The number of occasions on which they had shared averaged over 50 times. According to a report by the Rocky Mountain High-Intensy Drug Trafficking Area, Colorado teens, by 2012, were 50 percent more likely to use marijuana than their peers in the rest of the country.
Debates about marijuana tend to travel pretty fast into the domain of libertarian ideology: I’m a consenting adult, why can’t I do what I want? Yet the best customers for the marijuana industry are not adults at all. The majority of people who try marijuana quit by age 30. Adults in their twenties are significantly less likely than high school students to smoke; 14 percent of twentysomethings say they smoke marijuana, while22.7 percent of 12th-graders smoke at least once a month, and 6.5 percent say they smoke every day.
Why do people quit using marijuana as they mature? Your guess is as good as anybody else’s, but whatever the reason, the trend presents marijuana sellers with a marketing problem. Yet there is promising news from the emerging marijuana industry’s point of view: People who start smoking in their teens are significantly more likely to become dependent than people who start smoking later: about 1 in 6, as opposed to 1 in 10. Start them young; keep them longer. Very rationally, then, the marijuana industry is rolling out products designed to appeal to the youngest consumers: cannabis-infused soda, cannabis-infused chocolate taffy, cannabis-infused jujubes.
The promise that legalization will actually protect teenagers from marijuana is false. So, too, are the other promises of the legalizers. It is false to claim that marijuana legalization will break drug cartels. Those cartels will continue to traffic in harder and more lucrative drugs, such as heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine. Criminal cartels may well stay in the marijuana business, too, marketing directly to underage users. Public policy is about trade-offs, and marijuana users need to face up to the trade-off they are urging on American society. Legal marijuana use means more marijuana use, and more marijuana use means above all more teen marijuana use.
Proponents of marijuana legalization often question why the law bans marijuana but not alcohol or tobacco. One important difference is that alcohol and tobacco are drugs on the decline. Since 1980, per capita consumption of alcohol has dropped almost 20 percent. One-third of Americans smoked tobacco in 1980; fewer than one-fifth smoke today. The progress against drunk driving is even more remarkable: Fatalities caused by drunk drivers have decreased by more than half since 1982.
The reduction in tobacco and alcohol use has been hastened by increasingly restrictive laws that govern where and how these products may be consumed. Tobacco-smoking has been banned on planes, in restaurants, and in almost all public places. The drinking age, reduced in the 1970s from 21 to 18 in most states, was restored to 21 by federal action in the 1980s. Tobacco taxes have been steeply hiked. Bars that served intoxicated patrons face rising tort risk.
With marijuana, however, the law is heading in the opposite direction, and has been for some time. Since 1996, 20 states and the District of Columbia have approved “medical marijuana” laws, whereby people who obtain a prescription from a doctor can legally use or purchase marijuana. As in Colorado, many of these supposed medical regimes are degenerating into legalization by another name. Oregon, for example: At the end of 2012, it was home to 56,531 medical-marijuana patients. The majority of these 56,000-plus permissions were approved by only nine doctors. One doctor—an 80-year-old retired heart surgeon in Yakima—approved 4,180 medical-marijuana applications in a span of 12 months. Only 4 percent of Oregon’s medical-marijuana patients, as of the end of 2012, suffered from cancer. Only 1 percent were diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. The large majority, 57 percent, cited unspecified “pain” as the ailment for which treatment was sought. Yet none of the nine doctors who wrote the majority of the marijuana prescriptions was a pain specialist.
Fewer than 2 percent of California card holders have HIV, glaucoma, multiple sclerosis, or cancer: One survey found that the typical California medical-marijuana patient was a healthy 32-year-old man with a history of drug and alcohol abuse. Here, too, some doctors are signing thousands of recommendations after only the scantiest examination—or none at all. An NBC news investigator in Los Angeles visited one dispensary, was examined by a man who later proved to be an acupuncturist and massage therapist, and then received a prescription signed by a doctor who lived 67 miles away.
In the words of Los Angeles police chief Charlie Beck, most dispensaries are “for-profit businesses engaged in the sale of recreational marijuana to healthy young adults.” By early 2012, Los Angeles contained almost eight times as many dispensaries as Starbucks coffee shops. The city became alarmed that the customers who congregated at these dispensaries were active in crimes from robbery to murder. By July, the City Councilvoted unanimously to shut down all of the nearly 800 known dispensaries in the city. The marijuana lobby succeeded in preventing that ban from going into effect, so the next year, the city government tried a different approach: a local referendum called Proposition D to cap the number of dispensaries at 135, raise taxes on marijuana sales, and forbid dispensaries to locate near primary, middle, and high schools.
The proposition was approved, but this approach also proved ineffective. In the words of Medical Marijuana Business Daily (yes, it exists):
Officials have actually only forced about 70 dispensaries to close so far. While some other dispensaries shut down on their own to avoid legal troubles, most did not. That means at least 700—possibly more—illegal shops are still open.“What happened is that we’re really trying to put a Band-Aid on some crazy open wound, and it’s not big enough to stop the bleeding,” said Adam Bierman, who runs the consultancy MedMen. “Prop D as a concept is half decent, but there’s really no way to enforce it.”
Marijuana does possess certain medicinal properties. So does opium. But we don’t allow unscrupulous quacks to write raw opium prescriptions for anyone willing to pay $65. And if we did, would anybody be surprised that the vast majority of opium buyers were not recovering from surgery—and that many of them shared or resold some of their opium to underage users?
Some older adults have a hard time crediting the dangers of marijuana use because they imagine the marijuana on sale today is the same low-grade stuff they smoked in college. The marijuana sold in the 1980s averaged between 3 and 4 percent THC, the psychoactive ingredient. Today’s selectively bred marijuana averages over 12 percent THC, with some strains reaching 30 percent. Hundreds of YouTube videos will show you how to combust a marijuana wax with butane, to boost the THC content to 90 percent. As marijuana consumers shift from smoking to ingesting marijuana, they can ingest larger and larger doses of THC at a time. Since 2006, Colorado emergency roomshave seen a steep rise in the number of patients arriving panicked and disoriented from excess THC, including a near doubling of patients ages 13 and 14.
It’s said that nobody ever died from a marijuana overdose. Nobody ever died from a tobacco overdose either, but that doesn’t prove tobacco safe. Of all the dangers connected to marijuana, the most lethal is the risk of automobile accident. Marijuana-related fatal car crashes have nearly tripled across the United States in the past decade.Marijuana legalizers may counter: Can’t we just extend laws against drunk driving to stoned driving?
Unfortunately, it’s not so easy. What exactly defines marijuana impairment remains fiercely contested by an increasingly assertive marijuana industry. It took Colorado four tries to enact a legal definition of marijuana impairment: five nanograms of THC per milliliter of blood. Yet even once enacted, the standard remains very difficult to enforce. Alcohol impairment can be detected with a Breathalyzer. Marijuana impairment is revealed only by a blood test, and long-established law requires police to obtain a search warrant before a blood test is administered.
More important than catching impaired drivers after the fact is deterring them before they get behind the wheel. In the absence of a blood-testing kit, marijuana users themselves will find it difficult to know how much is too much. Time recently quoted a spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Transportation: “It’s not like alcohol. People metabolize it differently. There are different potencies,” the official said. “So there’s really no solution in terms of saying ‘you’re now at the limit.’ I just don’t think there’s enough research that we can say, ‘Wait x amount of hours before getting on the road.’ I don’t know whether it’s five hours or 10 hours or the next day. We just don’t know.”
Back in 2007, a survey by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that on any given Saturday night, about 12 percent of drivers tested positive for alcohol; about 6 percent for marijuana. Since then, 10 more states and the District of Columbia have adopted medical-marijuana regimes, which surely means even more buzzed drivers on the roads.
Yet the most pervasive harm of marijuana may be psychic rather than physical. A battery of studies have found regular marijuana use to be associated with worse outcomes at school, social life, and work. I use the cautious phrase “associated with,” because it’s far from clear whether marijuana use is a cause or an effect of other problems—or (most likely) both cause and effect. An isolated, underachieving kid starts smoking marijuana. That kid then descends deeper into isolation and underachievement. Marijuana may not have been the “cause” of the kid’s malaise, but it intensifies the malaise and may inhibit or even prevent his emergence from it.
The negative spiral of despondency leading to marijuana use, leading to deeper and more protracted despondency, makes the present moment a particularly unpropitious one for marijuana legalization. The United States is currently recovering feebly from the gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Prospects for young people especially have narrowed. Are we really going to say to them: “Look, we haven’t got jobs for you, your chances at marriage are dwindling, you may be 30 before you can move out of your parents’ place into a home of your own, but we’ll make it up to you with pot, video games, and online porn”? They want to start life, but they are being offered instead only narcotic dreams.
As human beings, our judgment is not only imperfect, but is prone to fail in highly predictable ways. Insert a recurring charge onto our phone bill, and we will soon cease to notice it. We evolved under conditions where sugars and salt were scarce, and so we will eat far more than we need if given the chance. We overestimate our luck and will gamble our money in ways that make no mathematical sense. Our brains are wired for addictions. If a substance can trigger that addiction, it can overthrow all the reasoning and moral faculties of the mind.
Lucrative industries have arisen to exploit these weaknesses in ways highly harmful to their customers. And the bold irony is that when their practices are challenged, they’ll invoke the very principles of individual choice and self-mastery that their industry is based on negating and defeating. So it was with tobacco. So it is with casino gambling. So it will be with marijuana.
Proponents of marijuana legalization do make a valid point when they worry that marijuana laws are enforced too punitively—and that this too punitive approach inflicts disparate punishment on minority users as compared with white users. Ordinary marijuana users should receive civil penalties; repeat users belong in treatment, not prison; communities should experience law enforcement as an ally and supporter of local norms, not an outside force stamping young people with indelible criminal records for mistakes that carry fewer consequences for the more affluent and the better connected. It’s also true, however, that these alternative methods can succeed only if the background rule is that marijuana is illegal. It’s very often the threat of criminal sanction that impels users to seek the treatment they need, while still young enough to turn their lives around.
The illegal U.S. market for marijuana is already twice as big as the market for coffee. As that market is legalized, it will expand, and the industry that serves the market will be emboldened to hire lobbyists to promote its continued expansion. The vision offered by some academics of a legal but noncommercial marijuana market shows little realism about American government. American legislatures exhibit notoriously poor resistance against checkbook-wielding special interests.
The resistance will be all the weaker since the costs of marijuana legalization will be borne by people to whom American legislatures pay scant attention anyway. Marijuana retailers will be located most densely in America’s poorest neighborhoods, just as liquor and cigarette retailing is now. Out of whose pockets will the marijuana taxes of the future be paid? Whose addiction and recovery services will be least well funded? In a society in which it is already sufficiently difficult for people to rise from the bottom, who’ll find that their rise has become harder still?
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