Eight reasons why KSM will be tried by military commission.
Bill Burck and Dana Perino
Saturday, January 30, 2010
The end is near for the Obama administration’s plan to try KSM and four other 9/11 conspirators in federal court in downtown Manhattan. The handwriting was on the wall for weeks as the extraordinary costs of the trial — as much as $1 billion in security expenses alone over four or five years — became apparent and the Underwear Bomber reintroduced the American public to domestic terrorism. Then, Mayor Bloomberg told the administration that it should find someplace else to hold the trial. Now, me-toos have come from New York senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, both of whom had previously supported the NYC trial.
It is a remarkable turn of events for Attorney General Eric Holder, who, the White House has said for months, made the decision alone and was running the show. The White House tired, far more quickly than many expected, of the AG’s bungled plan and realized that public opinion had turned decisively against the trial. Maybe the White House grew frustrated with the AG’s mistakes on national-security matters, from releasing the CIA interrogation memoranda last spring over the vociferous protests of former CIA directors who served under Presidents Bush and Clinton, to commencing a criminal investigation of CIA interrogators who had previously been informed by career prosecutors that they would not be subject to prosecution, to deciding to Mirandize the Underwear Bomber without consulting the intelligence services and charge him as a criminal defendant with all the rights of an American citizen.
The attorney general assured the White House that releasing the CIA memoranda would result in popular condemnation of Bush-era interrogation practices; instead, the American public met the memos with a collective shrug. Polls show that a majority of Americans support even the most aggressive enhanced interrogation techniques that the CIA uses. Investigating the interrogators thoroughly undermined the intelligence services’ trust in the administration, being as it was a betrayal of the president’s promise to our intelligence professionals to look forward, not backward. The decision exposed the new Justice Department leadership as nakedly partisan and more than willing to overrule the prosecutorial decisions of career prosecutors as a sop to the Far Left.
The White House realized it was staring another self-created disaster in the face and decided to pull the plug on the KSM trial before it was too late. The Justice Department is now scrambling to find an “alternative” venue; the administration continues to say that the president supports a civilian, not military, trial.
But the “alternative” venue won’t be in the United States. It will be Guantanamo Bay. And the trial will be by military commission, not civilian trial. After the jump are the top eight reasons for this, in no particular order:
1. Attorney General Holder, not President Obama, will take the fall. The White House hid behind the attorney general when the KSM trial was announced last November. The president said the decision was the attorney general’s alone, and the attorney general asserted he didn’t even consult the president before making it. It was hard to imagine the White House playing virtually no role in such an important policy (and political) decision, but it’s more plausible in light of the Justice Department’s unilateral decision to Mirandize the Underwear Bomber and charge him as a criminal defendant.
Now, President Obama can simply overrule the Attorney General and leave it to the media to chatter about the president’s displeasure with Holder. Remember that, according to press accounts, Greg Craig was pressured to resign as White House counsel in large part because he took the blame for misjudging the difficulty of closing Guatanamo. Is it worse to misjudge the bipartisan opposition to trying KSM by civilian trial?
2. The Martha Stewart Factor. Many observers noted that a civilian trial would provide KSM a platform on which to spout his views and justify his acts. Shortly after the decision was announced, the media reported that KSM and his co-conspirators were planning to plead not guilty and use the trial as a forum in which to attack U.S. foreign policy. The decision’s defenders pooh-poohed these concerns, mentioning among other things that there are no cameras in federal courtrooms. Any lawyer who has tried a case in a New York federal court, and anyone who has read a New York tabloid, knows that the absence of cameras in the courtroom will not do much to tamp down intense media coverage of the trial.
Look no farther than the trial of Martha Stewart, in which one of us participated as a prosecutor. Remember the spectacle of reporters running out of the courtroom waving red scarves to TV cameras as signals that Ms. Stewart had been convicted. The media scrutinized every aspect of that trial, which dominated the news for its entire six weeks. The KSM trial would dwarf all prior trials held in New York, in terms of not just the seriousness of the charges but also the size of the media circus that would accompany it. And the KSM trial would last months and maybe even years — it would almost certainly run right into the 2012 presidential campaign.
By contrast, at Guantanamo, it is not even clear there would be a trial, as KSM and his cohorts were previously willing to plead guilty and receive the death penalty rather than go through such a proceeding. In the event of a trial, the press would have access, but we doubt that Anderson Cooper would take up residence outside the base’s front gates.
3. KSM is more likely to be convicted and sentenced to death in a military commission. The attorney general and the president have confidently stated that KSM will be convicted. They are probably right, but civilian juries are notoriously unpredictable — Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, escaped the death penalty because one juror out of 12 voted against it. Add to this that Holder himself has testified to Congress that, in his view, KSM was tortured by the CIA, an admission that defense lawyers will put front and center — both before the jury and in efforts to get the judge to exclude evidence. Evidence obtained by torture is not admissible in a military commission, either, but the government has greater flexibility in that forum as compared to a civilian trial.
This greater flexibility has ramifications beyond torture. Certain types of hearsay evidence would be admissible in a military commission but not in a civilian trial. The Obama administration very much appreciates the benefits to the prosecution of using a military commission — after all, they are using military commissions, not civilian trials, to try the terrorists against whom they believe they have weaker evidence, such as the men who plotted the attack on the USS Cole.
4. Guantanamo Bay is not closing any time soon. KSM’s civilian trial was always meant to be paired with the closure of Guantanamo Bay. The administration’s self-imposed one-year deadline was abandoned as unrealistic, but the wisdom of setting any time frame at all has been thrown into doubt by revelations that Abdulmutallab was trained by al-Qaeda in Yemen. Yemeni nationals make up the largest group of detainees still held at Guantanamo, and the Obama administration, at least for the time being, has ruled out repatriating them given the high risk that many of them would return to the fight. Bringing the most notorious terrorists to the U.S. for trial while the facility remains open is a lose-lose proposition for the administration. The American public will wonder why we are incurring the enormous costs and risks to public safety of trying KSM and the other 9/11 plotters in the U.S., when Guantanamo remains open for business and is indisputably a less expensive and far more secure location.
5. “Not In My Backyard.” The country is in full NIMBY mode. New York was the most logical place to hold a civilian trial because it is where most of the victims were murdered. With every major politician in the state now opposed to the idea, however, the administration is faced with the prospect of convincing political leaders in another state to host the trial. The options are further limited because the law requires that the crimes have some direct connection to the venue in which the trial would occur. Of course, there are isolated opportunists who would volunteer, but good luck getting a consensus from the entire political leadership of another state.
6. Congress will give the administration cover. Republicans in Congress have introduced bills that would bar the use of federal funds to try KSM and other terrorist detainees in federal civilian courts. These bills are getting significant bipartisan traction from Sens. Jim Webb and Joe Lieberman, among others. The administration will publicly oppose these bills, but will privately welcome them because their passage, or even the prospect of their passage, provides a ready excuse for them to throw up their hands and blame Congress for forcing it to backtrack on trying KSM in civilian court.
We’ve already seen this strategy in action with Guantanamo. The administration has conveniently pinned the blame for the abandonment of its goal to close Guantanamo by the end of January on Congress’s threats to block funds for the alternative holding facility in rural Illinois. Very little mention is made of the real causes of this failure — the administration’s miscalculations about the willingness or ability of other countries to take the detainees, and the opposition by most Americans to bringing terrorists to the United States for indefinite detention and possible release.
7. Trying some terrorists detained at Guantanamo in military commissions and others in civilian trials never made any sense. The attorney general sowed the seeds of the civilian trial’s demise by creating a two-track system in which terrorists who targeted civilians in the United States would receive more constitutional protections and rights than terrorists who targeted our troops overseas in active battle zones. This was the principal reason Holder gave for sending KSM to civilian court while the men who plotted the USS Cole attack went to a military commission. This distinction made no sense, created incentives for terrorists to attack civilians rather than troops, and now has proved too clever by half.
It is impossible for the Obama administration to provide a coherent explanation as to why KSM needs to be tried in civilian court. They can’t say they believe civilian courts are more legitimate than military commissions, because that would undermine military commissions. They can hint, through unnamed sources, that they are sending the “slam dunk” cases to civilian court and the weaker ones to military commissions with their more flexible evidentiary standards, but they can’t say that in the open without appearing to acknowledge what many critics have charged — the civilian trials will serve little purpose other than as show trials of the obviously guilty, while the real work of determining guilt or innocence will happen in the military commissions. If they had the courage of their purported convictions that terrorists who wage war on the United States are entitled to the same protections as common criminals, the administration would abandon military commissions altogether, rather than channel the more difficult cases to them. Unwilling to take this step, and in the face of bipartisan opposition to civilian trials, the administration will be left with no choice but to fully embrace military commissions for all Guantanamo detainees whom they wish to put on trial, including KSM.
8. Trying KSM in a military commission will kill the story before the midterm elections. The election of Scott Brown, who made his advocacy of enhanced interrogation techniques and opposition to trying KSM in civilian court central parts of his campaign, was a wake-up call that national security remains an important issue, particularly after Abdulmutallab’s failed attack, and one that does not favor the Democrats. The administration has begun to backtrack by signaling that the trial will not be held in New York City. Their next step will be to kill the controversy entirely by announcing that charges against KSM and his co-conspirators will be reinstated before a military commission. These charges were recently dismissed, but without prejudice, meaning the charges can be reinstated by the military more or less whenever it wants to.
Voila! Face saved.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
More Washington
As Obama sees it, whatever the problem, the solution is more Washington.
Mark Steyn
Saturday, January 30, 2010
The world turns.
In Indonesia, the principal of a Muslim boarding school in Tangerang who is accused of impregnating a 15-year-old student says the DNA test will prove that a malevolent genie is the real father.
In New Zealand, a German tourist, Herr Hans Kurt Kubus, has been jailed for attempting to board a plane at Christchurch with 44 live lizards in his underpants.
In Britain, a research team at King’s College, London, has declared that the female “G-spot” does not, in fact, exist.
In France a group of top gynecologists led by M. Sylvain Mimoun has dismissed the findings, and said what do you expect if you ask a group of Englishmen to try to find a woman’s erogenous zone.
But in America Barack Obama is talking.
Talking, talking, talking. He talked for 70 minutes at the State of the Union. No matter how many geckos you shoveled down your briefs, you still lost all feeling in your legs. And still he talked. If you had an erogenous zone before he started, by the end it was undetectable even to Frenchmen. But on he talked. As respected poverty advocate Sen. John Edwards commented, “After the first hour, even my malevolent genie was back in the bottle.”
Like any gifted orator, the president knows how to vary the talk with a little light and shade. Sometimes he hectors, sometimes he whines, sometimes he demands. He hectored the Supreme Court. He whined about all the problems he inherited. He demanded Congress put a jobs bill on his desk. Or was it a desk job on his bill? No matter. He does Nixon impressions, too: “We do not quit,” he said.
Boy, you can say that again!
So he did: “We don’t quit. I don’t quit,” he said. Throughout the chamber, Democrats were quitting. “I quit,” says Rep. Marion Berry of Arkanas, declining to run this November. “I quit,” says Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, doing likewise. “I quit,” says Beau Biden of Delaware, son of Vice President Joe Biden, choosing not to succeed to his father’s seat in America’s House of Lords.
But not Barack Obama: “I don’t quit.” So on he went. As my colleague Rich Lowry put it after the Massachusetts vote, the public thinks Obama doesn’t get it, and Obama thinks the public doesn’t get it. And as he’s got the microphone, he’s gonna keep talking at you until you do get it.
The ever tinnier, more perfunctory sophomoric uplift at the start and finish can’t conceal the hope-killing, jobs-slaying, soul-sapping message in between, which is perfectly consistent, and has been for two years. As President Obama sees it, whatever the problem — from health care to education, banking to the environment — the solution is more Washington.
Simply as a matter of internal logic, this is somewhat perplexing. After all, when he isn’t blaming Bush, Obama blames “Washington” — a Washington mired in “partisanship” and “pettiness” and “the same tired battles” and “Washington gimmicks” that do nothing but ensure that our “problems have grown worse.” Washington, Obama tells us, is “unable or unwilling to solve any of our problems.”
So let’s have more Washington! In our schools, in our hospitals, in our cars, in everything!
Which raises the question: Does even Obama listen to Obama’s speeches? The public does — at least to this extent: They understand that, when he’s attacking the tired old Washington games, he’s just playing the tired old Washington games. But, when he’s proposing the tired old Washington solutions, he means it; that’s the real Obama, the only Obama on offer. And everything the president proposes means more debt, which at the level this guy’s spending means, at some point down the road, either higher taxes or total societal collapse.
Functioning societies depend on agreed rules. If you want to open a business, you do it in Singapore or Ireland, because the rules are known to all parties. You don’t go to Sudan or Zimbabwe, where the rules are whatever the state’s whims happen to be that morning.
That’s why Obama is such a job-killer. Why would a small business take on a new employee? The president’s proposing a soak-the-banks tax that could impact your access to credit. The House has passed a cap-and-trade bill that could impose potentially unlimited regulatory costs. The Senate is in favor of “health” “care” “reform” that will allow the IRS to seize your assets if you and your employees’ health arrangements do not meet the approval of the federal government. Some of these things will pass into law, some of them won’t. But all of them send a consistent, cumulative message: that there are no rules, that they’re being made up as they go along — and that some of them might even be retroactive, as happened this week with Oregon’s new corporate tax.
In such an environment, would you hire anyone? Or would you hunker down and sit things out? Obama can bury it in half a ton of leaden telepromptered sludge but the world has got the message: More Washington, more micro-regulation of every aspect of your life, more multi-trillion-dollar spending, and no agreed rules in a game ever more rigged against you.
Obama and the Democrats have decided, in the current cliché, to “double down.” That hardly does justice to what the president’s doing. In effect, he’s told embattled congressmen and senators to strap on the old suicide-bomber belt and self-detonate for the team this November.
That’s a lot of virgins to pass out, but with this administration, budget restraints aren’t exactly a problem: Untold pleasures will await every sacrificial incumbent in paradise, or at any rate the coming liberal utopia. What’s the end game here? President Obama gave it away in his student-loan “reform” proposals: If you choose to go into “public service,” any college-loan debts will be forgiven after ten years.
Because “public service” is more noble than the selfish, money-grubbing private sector. C’mon, everybody knows that. So we need to encourage more people to go into “public service.”
Why?
In the last 60 years, the size of America’s state and local workforce has increased five times faster than the general population. But the president says it’s still not enough: We have to incentivize even further the diversion of our human capital into the government machine. Like most lifelong politicians, Barack Obama has never created, manufactured, or marketed any product other than himself. So quite reasonably he sees government dependency as the natural order of things. And in his college-loan plan he’s explicitly telling you: If you start a business, invent something, provide a service, you’re a schmuck and a loser. In the America he’s building, you’ll be working 24/7 till you drop dead to fund an ever-swollen bureaucracy that takes six weeks off a year and retires at 53 on a pension you could never dream of. Obama’s proposals are bold only insofar as few men would offer such a transparent guarantee of disaster: It’s the audacity of hopelessness.
In Massachusetts, enough voters got the message. And the more speeches this one-note politician inflicts on the nation, the louder they’ll hear it.
Mark Steyn
Saturday, January 30, 2010
The world turns.
In Indonesia, the principal of a Muslim boarding school in Tangerang who is accused of impregnating a 15-year-old student says the DNA test will prove that a malevolent genie is the real father.
In New Zealand, a German tourist, Herr Hans Kurt Kubus, has been jailed for attempting to board a plane at Christchurch with 44 live lizards in his underpants.
In Britain, a research team at King’s College, London, has declared that the female “G-spot” does not, in fact, exist.
In France a group of top gynecologists led by M. Sylvain Mimoun has dismissed the findings, and said what do you expect if you ask a group of Englishmen to try to find a woman’s erogenous zone.
But in America Barack Obama is talking.
Talking, talking, talking. He talked for 70 minutes at the State of the Union. No matter how many geckos you shoveled down your briefs, you still lost all feeling in your legs. And still he talked. If you had an erogenous zone before he started, by the end it was undetectable even to Frenchmen. But on he talked. As respected poverty advocate Sen. John Edwards commented, “After the first hour, even my malevolent genie was back in the bottle.”
Like any gifted orator, the president knows how to vary the talk with a little light and shade. Sometimes he hectors, sometimes he whines, sometimes he demands. He hectored the Supreme Court. He whined about all the problems he inherited. He demanded Congress put a jobs bill on his desk. Or was it a desk job on his bill? No matter. He does Nixon impressions, too: “We do not quit,” he said.
Boy, you can say that again!
So he did: “We don’t quit. I don’t quit,” he said. Throughout the chamber, Democrats were quitting. “I quit,” says Rep. Marion Berry of Arkanas, declining to run this November. “I quit,” says Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, doing likewise. “I quit,” says Beau Biden of Delaware, son of Vice President Joe Biden, choosing not to succeed to his father’s seat in America’s House of Lords.
But not Barack Obama: “I don’t quit.” So on he went. As my colleague Rich Lowry put it after the Massachusetts vote, the public thinks Obama doesn’t get it, and Obama thinks the public doesn’t get it. And as he’s got the microphone, he’s gonna keep talking at you until you do get it.
The ever tinnier, more perfunctory sophomoric uplift at the start and finish can’t conceal the hope-killing, jobs-slaying, soul-sapping message in between, which is perfectly consistent, and has been for two years. As President Obama sees it, whatever the problem — from health care to education, banking to the environment — the solution is more Washington.
Simply as a matter of internal logic, this is somewhat perplexing. After all, when he isn’t blaming Bush, Obama blames “Washington” — a Washington mired in “partisanship” and “pettiness” and “the same tired battles” and “Washington gimmicks” that do nothing but ensure that our “problems have grown worse.” Washington, Obama tells us, is “unable or unwilling to solve any of our problems.”
So let’s have more Washington! In our schools, in our hospitals, in our cars, in everything!
Which raises the question: Does even Obama listen to Obama’s speeches? The public does — at least to this extent: They understand that, when he’s attacking the tired old Washington games, he’s just playing the tired old Washington games. But, when he’s proposing the tired old Washington solutions, he means it; that’s the real Obama, the only Obama on offer. And everything the president proposes means more debt, which at the level this guy’s spending means, at some point down the road, either higher taxes or total societal collapse.
Functioning societies depend on agreed rules. If you want to open a business, you do it in Singapore or Ireland, because the rules are known to all parties. You don’t go to Sudan or Zimbabwe, where the rules are whatever the state’s whims happen to be that morning.
That’s why Obama is such a job-killer. Why would a small business take on a new employee? The president’s proposing a soak-the-banks tax that could impact your access to credit. The House has passed a cap-and-trade bill that could impose potentially unlimited regulatory costs. The Senate is in favor of “health” “care” “reform” that will allow the IRS to seize your assets if you and your employees’ health arrangements do not meet the approval of the federal government. Some of these things will pass into law, some of them won’t. But all of them send a consistent, cumulative message: that there are no rules, that they’re being made up as they go along — and that some of them might even be retroactive, as happened this week with Oregon’s new corporate tax.
In such an environment, would you hire anyone? Or would you hunker down and sit things out? Obama can bury it in half a ton of leaden telepromptered sludge but the world has got the message: More Washington, more micro-regulation of every aspect of your life, more multi-trillion-dollar spending, and no agreed rules in a game ever more rigged against you.
Obama and the Democrats have decided, in the current cliché, to “double down.” That hardly does justice to what the president’s doing. In effect, he’s told embattled congressmen and senators to strap on the old suicide-bomber belt and self-detonate for the team this November.
That’s a lot of virgins to pass out, but with this administration, budget restraints aren’t exactly a problem: Untold pleasures will await every sacrificial incumbent in paradise, or at any rate the coming liberal utopia. What’s the end game here? President Obama gave it away in his student-loan “reform” proposals: If you choose to go into “public service,” any college-loan debts will be forgiven after ten years.
Because “public service” is more noble than the selfish, money-grubbing private sector. C’mon, everybody knows that. So we need to encourage more people to go into “public service.”
Why?
In the last 60 years, the size of America’s state and local workforce has increased five times faster than the general population. But the president says it’s still not enough: We have to incentivize even further the diversion of our human capital into the government machine. Like most lifelong politicians, Barack Obama has never created, manufactured, or marketed any product other than himself. So quite reasonably he sees government dependency as the natural order of things. And in his college-loan plan he’s explicitly telling you: If you start a business, invent something, provide a service, you’re a schmuck and a loser. In the America he’s building, you’ll be working 24/7 till you drop dead to fund an ever-swollen bureaucracy that takes six weeks off a year and retires at 53 on a pension you could never dream of. Obama’s proposals are bold only insofar as few men would offer such a transparent guarantee of disaster: It’s the audacity of hopelessness.
In Massachusetts, enough voters got the message. And the more speeches this one-note politician inflicts on the nation, the louder they’ll hear it.
So Much Wasted Green for Climate Change Talks
Debra J. Saunders
Sunday, January 31, 2010
It was bad enough last month watching Washington politicians merrily flying off to the U.N. climate change Conference of Parties in Copenhagen (or COP-15 for short), ostensibly to draft a global warming treaty, when all the players knew that no meaningful pact would result and that the only sure outcome was that much energy would be squandered.
Now comes the sticker shock.
When CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson dug into the latest House expenses filing for the climate confab, she found that the cost for a hotel room for the congressional delegation of 15 Democratic and six Republican members of Congress and 38 staffers was $2,200 per person per day -- more than most Americans spend on their monthly mortgages. In addition, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other members flew on three military planes, at an estimated cost of $168,000. Many staffers, however, flew on commercial airlines, at fares ranging from $4,163 to $10,038.
The tab for the House delegation -- not including the military planes -- was $553,564. We still do not know the price tag for the 60-plus administration officials who, like President Barack Obama, attended the summit. Ditto the unknown bill for the two senators -- John Kerry, D-Mass., and James Inhofe, R-Okla. -- and 30-plus Senate aides.
I asked Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill about the $2,200-a-day tab. "We don't get to pick the hotel we stay in," he answered; the State Department picks hotels for congressional delegations, and it chose a five-star Marriott with a six-night minimum during the summit -- hence the $4,406-per-room tab for a 48-hour stay. My journalist pal Ola Tedin of Ystad, Sweden, suggested, "They would have found a better deal in Malmo, Sweden," where many attendees stayed. No, I am told, the delegation worked nonstop and didn't have time for the 35-minute train ride.
As for the airfares, Hammill explained they are "government rate." Government rate means that taxpayers fork over as much as $10,000 for a flight that could be purchased online for $800. "Government rate," then, is D.C.-speak for "money is no object."
No worries on the greenhouse gases spewed to fuel the trek. The House bought "offsets" for the journey's emissions. Of course, that very act explains why so many Americans have come to doubt global warming true believers: Their great crusade is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, yet they globe-trot to be seen with one another and produce meaningless pieces of paper. Then they tell others that their exhaust fumes don't stink because, like sinners purchasing indulgences, they offset their vapor trails -- with other people's money.
Surely the best "offset" would have been for more Democrats to stay home. And what were all those Republicans doing in Denmark? I get Inhofe's parachuting into enviro territory to serve, as he likes to style himself, as a one-senator "truth squad." Spokesman Matt Dempsey noted that Inhofe "would prefer not to go" to an event he has dismissed as "the biggest party of the year," but someone had to counter COP-15's cap-and-trade agenda.
Surely some (or, better yet, all) of the six GOP House members -- James Sensenbrenner, Joe Barton, Fred Upton, Shelley Moore Capito, John Sullivan and Marsha Blackburn -- and their 10 committee staffers could have stayed home.
It would have been a great photo op -- in contrast to all those global warming enthusiasts ducking from the blizzard that they flew thousands of miles to experience -- if House Republicans had held a low-carbon, low-cost Skeptics Summit in D.C. at which they announced their refusal to participate in a process that, if somehow magically successful, would be harmful to the U.S. economy.
So you have two sets of big spenders. There are the U.S. officials who were so busy being important at COP-15 that they couldn't be expected to think about saving taxpayer dollars, and there are the Republicans who generally opposed COP-15, but not enough to skip it.
The disconnect in this story doesn't end. Participants could have put together a nonbinding treaty to try to halve emissions in 40 years by phone or the Internet. But the circus always was more important than the cause.
And you paid for it.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
It was bad enough last month watching Washington politicians merrily flying off to the U.N. climate change Conference of Parties in Copenhagen (or COP-15 for short), ostensibly to draft a global warming treaty, when all the players knew that no meaningful pact would result and that the only sure outcome was that much energy would be squandered.
Now comes the sticker shock.
When CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson dug into the latest House expenses filing for the climate confab, she found that the cost for a hotel room for the congressional delegation of 15 Democratic and six Republican members of Congress and 38 staffers was $2,200 per person per day -- more than most Americans spend on their monthly mortgages. In addition, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other members flew on three military planes, at an estimated cost of $168,000. Many staffers, however, flew on commercial airlines, at fares ranging from $4,163 to $10,038.
The tab for the House delegation -- not including the military planes -- was $553,564. We still do not know the price tag for the 60-plus administration officials who, like President Barack Obama, attended the summit. Ditto the unknown bill for the two senators -- John Kerry, D-Mass., and James Inhofe, R-Okla. -- and 30-plus Senate aides.
I asked Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill about the $2,200-a-day tab. "We don't get to pick the hotel we stay in," he answered; the State Department picks hotels for congressional delegations, and it chose a five-star Marriott with a six-night minimum during the summit -- hence the $4,406-per-room tab for a 48-hour stay. My journalist pal Ola Tedin of Ystad, Sweden, suggested, "They would have found a better deal in Malmo, Sweden," where many attendees stayed. No, I am told, the delegation worked nonstop and didn't have time for the 35-minute train ride.
As for the airfares, Hammill explained they are "government rate." Government rate means that taxpayers fork over as much as $10,000 for a flight that could be purchased online for $800. "Government rate," then, is D.C.-speak for "money is no object."
No worries on the greenhouse gases spewed to fuel the trek. The House bought "offsets" for the journey's emissions. Of course, that very act explains why so many Americans have come to doubt global warming true believers: Their great crusade is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, yet they globe-trot to be seen with one another and produce meaningless pieces of paper. Then they tell others that their exhaust fumes don't stink because, like sinners purchasing indulgences, they offset their vapor trails -- with other people's money.
Surely the best "offset" would have been for more Democrats to stay home. And what were all those Republicans doing in Denmark? I get Inhofe's parachuting into enviro territory to serve, as he likes to style himself, as a one-senator "truth squad." Spokesman Matt Dempsey noted that Inhofe "would prefer not to go" to an event he has dismissed as "the biggest party of the year," but someone had to counter COP-15's cap-and-trade agenda.
Surely some (or, better yet, all) of the six GOP House members -- James Sensenbrenner, Joe Barton, Fred Upton, Shelley Moore Capito, John Sullivan and Marsha Blackburn -- and their 10 committee staffers could have stayed home.
It would have been a great photo op -- in contrast to all those global warming enthusiasts ducking from the blizzard that they flew thousands of miles to experience -- if House Republicans had held a low-carbon, low-cost Skeptics Summit in D.C. at which they announced their refusal to participate in a process that, if somehow magically successful, would be harmful to the U.S. economy.
So you have two sets of big spenders. There are the U.S. officials who were so busy being important at COP-15 that they couldn't be expected to think about saving taxpayer dollars, and there are the Republicans who generally opposed COP-15, but not enough to skip it.
The disconnect in this story doesn't end. Participants could have put together a nonbinding treaty to try to halve emissions in 40 years by phone or the Internet. But the circus always was more important than the cause.
And you paid for it.
Thune in 2012?
Nathan Tabor
Sunday, January 31, 2010
If someone asks me to briefly describe the philosophical difference between the liberal-left Democrats and the conservative Republicans, I simply point out that the Dems believe in the politics of envy while the GOP believes in the politics of true hope.
A conservative and liberal are standing on the street corner and they both see driving by them a chauffeured limo with an obviously wealthy man sitting in the backseat reading the Wall Street Journal. The liberal will comment, "Why should that man have a chauffeured limousine? Who does he think he is? Does he think he's better than me?" That is an example of the politics of envy.
Meanwhile, the conservative will comment, "Someday, God willing, I will have a chauffeured limo and an important job." That's an example of the politics of true hope.
And that's what many Americans seek in a leader, as well. Someone who believes in the politics of true hope. With many comparing the late President Ronald Reagan with our current White House occupant, President Barack Obama, there really is no comparison. I cannot recall President Reagan ever denigrating an American, even one with whom he disagreed. Whereas, President Obama attempts to demonize people whenever he wishes to sway people to his way of thinking.
Which brings me to South Dakota's Senator John Thune, the young and energetic Republican who defeated the deeply entrenched Senate Majority Leader and liberal-left stalwart Tom Daschle. While the next presidential election cycle may seem a distant event, Thune's name is already being bandied about as a potential 2012 presidential contender.
Just this past week, Senator Thune garnered national attention when he introduced an amendment that would end the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, which was passed to bailout banks, automobile manufacturers and financial firms.
Thune's amendment would stop the government handouts while using the money paid-back by the banks and other recipients to help reduce the national debt.
While the Thune's bill was defeated, his defeat showed he possessed the leadership to garner a majority of Senate votes. His amendment failed, but it received a majority of the votes. With 60 votes needed for passage, only 53 voted Thursday in favor of the bill, while 45 voted against it.
The 48-year old Republican senator said that Congress needs to start taking on the issue of spending and debt, and ending TARP would be a significant step forward. He lamented the fact that the Senate "missed a golden opportunity."
Senator Thune also voiced his disgust with what he saw during the health care debacle before it became fashionable in the Senate. He wrote a biting letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) calling for transparency in the health care negotiations. Thune's letter was signed by all 40 Republican Senators.
"Closed door negotiations and unprecedented special provisions in exchange for votes do not meet the expectations of the American people," wrote Thune.
"To ensure that the American people have the ability to witness the on-going negotiations between the House and Senate, we ask that any negotiations regarding a final health care reform bill be conducted in the light of day."
Thune rejects the politics of envy and adheres to a politics of TRUE hope.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
If someone asks me to briefly describe the philosophical difference between the liberal-left Democrats and the conservative Republicans, I simply point out that the Dems believe in the politics of envy while the GOP believes in the politics of true hope.
A conservative and liberal are standing on the street corner and they both see driving by them a chauffeured limo with an obviously wealthy man sitting in the backseat reading the Wall Street Journal. The liberal will comment, "Why should that man have a chauffeured limousine? Who does he think he is? Does he think he's better than me?" That is an example of the politics of envy.
Meanwhile, the conservative will comment, "Someday, God willing, I will have a chauffeured limo and an important job." That's an example of the politics of true hope.
And that's what many Americans seek in a leader, as well. Someone who believes in the politics of true hope. With many comparing the late President Ronald Reagan with our current White House occupant, President Barack Obama, there really is no comparison. I cannot recall President Reagan ever denigrating an American, even one with whom he disagreed. Whereas, President Obama attempts to demonize people whenever he wishes to sway people to his way of thinking.
Which brings me to South Dakota's Senator John Thune, the young and energetic Republican who defeated the deeply entrenched Senate Majority Leader and liberal-left stalwart Tom Daschle. While the next presidential election cycle may seem a distant event, Thune's name is already being bandied about as a potential 2012 presidential contender.
Just this past week, Senator Thune garnered national attention when he introduced an amendment that would end the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, which was passed to bailout banks, automobile manufacturers and financial firms.
Thune's amendment would stop the government handouts while using the money paid-back by the banks and other recipients to help reduce the national debt.
While the Thune's bill was defeated, his defeat showed he possessed the leadership to garner a majority of Senate votes. His amendment failed, but it received a majority of the votes. With 60 votes needed for passage, only 53 voted Thursday in favor of the bill, while 45 voted against it.
The 48-year old Republican senator said that Congress needs to start taking on the issue of spending and debt, and ending TARP would be a significant step forward. He lamented the fact that the Senate "missed a golden opportunity."
Senator Thune also voiced his disgust with what he saw during the health care debacle before it became fashionable in the Senate. He wrote a biting letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) calling for transparency in the health care negotiations. Thune's letter was signed by all 40 Republican Senators.
"Closed door negotiations and unprecedented special provisions in exchange for votes do not meet the expectations of the American people," wrote Thune.
"To ensure that the American people have the ability to witness the on-going negotiations between the House and Senate, we ask that any negotiations regarding a final health care reform bill be conducted in the light of day."
Thune rejects the politics of envy and adheres to a politics of TRUE hope.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Trusting Fox
Another poll confirms that Americans trust it more than other media outlets.
Ramesh Ponnuru
Friday, January 29, 2010
Fox News is Americans’ most trusted source of news: That’s what Public Policy Polling reported earlier this week. ABC’s director of polling disputed the poll’s findings largely because of its use of “robopolling.” But now a second poll using a different methodology — and human callers — has reached a similar conclusion.
In a poll commissioned by National Review Institute, McLaughlin & Associates found that Fox News was the top response from likely voters who were asked what source of news about politics and government they most trusted. Thirty-six percent of respondents picked Fox News, compared to 20 percent who picked CNN and 6 percent who picked MSNBC. NBC and ABC each got 6 percent, too, and CBS 5.
Since McLaughlin was polling likely voters and Republicans are more enthusiastic about the coming elections than Democrats are, his sample is more Republican than the population at large. But McLaughlin finds that it’s not just Republicans who trust Fox. It was also the top response from independent voters, 31 percent of whom listed it as the news source they most trust. Fifteen percent of independents listed CNN. (MSNBC, ABC, NBC, and CBS got 6, 6, 6, and 4 percent respectively.)
Democrats were more likely to say that they trusted CNN than Fox News (30 vs. 18 percent). But even among Democrats, twice as many people trusted Fox News as MSNBC (18 vs. 9 percent).
Earlier this week, I reported on other findings from the poll — such as the electorate’s strongly positive views toward conservative alternatives on health care. Some other results from McLaughlin & Associates:
- 67 percent of voters favor expanding the tax credit for children to $3,000, while only 24 percent disapprove.
- 64 percent of voters want to cut corporate taxes; 26 percent disapprove.
- 83 percent favor cutting taxes on small business; only 11 percent disagree.
- 72 percent say that gas-tax revenues should be returned to the states so that they can decide which road projects to fund.
-Upon being informed that the Department of Education has 100,000 employees who make an average $100,000 per year, 65 percent of voters favor abolishing the department and sending the money to the states to spend on schools.
One reform that conservatives have been discussing over the last year does not fare so well. A payroll-tax holiday is opposed by a 47 percent plurality of voters and supported by 39 percent; even a Republican-leaning electorate is not willing to risk threatening funding for Social Security and Medicare.
Ramesh Ponnuru
Friday, January 29, 2010
Fox News is Americans’ most trusted source of news: That’s what Public Policy Polling reported earlier this week. ABC’s director of polling disputed the poll’s findings largely because of its use of “robopolling.” But now a second poll using a different methodology — and human callers — has reached a similar conclusion.
In a poll commissioned by National Review Institute, McLaughlin & Associates found that Fox News was the top response from likely voters who were asked what source of news about politics and government they most trusted. Thirty-six percent of respondents picked Fox News, compared to 20 percent who picked CNN and 6 percent who picked MSNBC. NBC and ABC each got 6 percent, too, and CBS 5.
Since McLaughlin was polling likely voters and Republicans are more enthusiastic about the coming elections than Democrats are, his sample is more Republican than the population at large. But McLaughlin finds that it’s not just Republicans who trust Fox. It was also the top response from independent voters, 31 percent of whom listed it as the news source they most trust. Fifteen percent of independents listed CNN. (MSNBC, ABC, NBC, and CBS got 6, 6, 6, and 4 percent respectively.)
Democrats were more likely to say that they trusted CNN than Fox News (30 vs. 18 percent). But even among Democrats, twice as many people trusted Fox News as MSNBC (18 vs. 9 percent).
Earlier this week, I reported on other findings from the poll — such as the electorate’s strongly positive views toward conservative alternatives on health care. Some other results from McLaughlin & Associates:
- 67 percent of voters favor expanding the tax credit for children to $3,000, while only 24 percent disapprove.
- 64 percent of voters want to cut corporate taxes; 26 percent disapprove.
- 83 percent favor cutting taxes on small business; only 11 percent disagree.
- 72 percent say that gas-tax revenues should be returned to the states so that they can decide which road projects to fund.
-
One reform that conservatives have been discussing over the last year does not fare so well. A payroll-tax holiday is opposed by a 47 percent plurality of voters and supported by 39 percent; even a Republican-leaning electorate is not willing to risk threatening funding for Social Security and Medicare.
Obama Fails to Learn
Kathryn Lopez
Friday, January 29, 2010
They called it a "miracle." Maybe it wasn't the Spirit of 1776, but something like it was in the air as Republican Scott Brown was elected to the U.S. Senate seat held by Edward M. Kennedy for six decades. Running on resetting health-care reform in Washington, tax cuts and fiscal responsibility, Brown did what was considered utterly impossible: he flipped a long-held Democratic seat in Massachusetts. But one of the messages the Brown victory sent was that there are no safe seats. There is no inevitability in politics. Even the memory of Teddy Kennedy, a liberal icon, with all the weight of his family's romance, and his widow on the campaign trail, couldn't get this election away from issues.
It was a powerful, inspiring statement. From around the country that special-election day in Massachusetts, I received e-mails from Americans who felt a newfound connection to what happens in Washington, who, in some cases, even wondered, for the first time in their lives, whether they should run for political office.
But there was an entirely different spirit emanating from the teleprompter during President Barack Obama's first State of the Union address. Obama seemed determined to squash the Brown fervor like a bug. Without using the senator-elect's name, the president dismissed growing frustrations with himself, his party and its policies -- the indisputable sources of Brown's victory -- as a "campaign fever," a sort of sickness that impedes reasonable government.
Characteristically, the president swatted his critics like pests. He chided them as if they had no plans of their own to offer -- especially on health care. But it's not that they have no plans: it's that Obama has no interest in the views of opponents, seeing them merely as annoying obstacles to be overcome in the face of his grand agenda.
This is the wrong attitude. These are the wrong lessons.
Obama also functions as the worst kind of leader of his party -- one who is willing to let it fall on its sword, rather than compromise. The president's bullheaded attachment to his misguided policies will take its toll in the voting booth. In New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts, the White House has lost dramatically. And the outlook for this November doesn't get better for Dems.
And so when Obama talks about "a stubborn resilience in the face of adversity" that Americans share, one gets the impression he's really talking about himself. Opponents of the president's agenda are many, and the numbers are growing. But he will not take a deep breath and start again, will not listen to his critics or negotiate.
As he said during the speech, regarding health care: "I take my share of the blame for not explaining it more clearly to the American people. And I know that with all the lobbying and horse-trading, the process left most Americans wondering, 'What's in it for me?'"
But Americans are not only asking, "What's in it for me?" They are wondering: "Why does the federal government have to do it?" They can legitimately wonder: "Don't we have a limited government that serves a natural law, based on a moral law?" Why then has the president watched as the U.S. Senate passed a health-care bill that includes federal taxpayer funding of abortions, that violates the moral consciences of millions of Americans?
In a new poll of likely voters, the National Review Institute found that, by 65 to 25 percent, people worry about big government more than big business. As board member Ramesh Ponnuru puts it: "Likely voters do not believe that this administration knows how business works or how to help it succeed, by 53 to 42 percent; independents and people who own small businesses were even more skeptical. Seventy-nine percent of voters agree that Congress has lost sight of its constitutional limits; 53 percent of them 'strongly' agree."
Americans are not victims who need handouts. Americans need the freedom to flourish. And until our president realizes this, he, and America, will lose out.
Friday, January 29, 2010
They called it a "miracle." Maybe it wasn't the Spirit of 1776, but something like it was in the air as Republican Scott Brown was elected to the U.S. Senate seat held by Edward M. Kennedy for six decades. Running on resetting health-care reform in Washington, tax cuts and fiscal responsibility, Brown did what was considered utterly impossible: he flipped a long-held Democratic seat in Massachusetts. But one of the messages the Brown victory sent was that there are no safe seats. There is no inevitability in politics. Even the memory of Teddy Kennedy, a liberal icon, with all the weight of his family's romance, and his widow on the campaign trail, couldn't get this election away from issues.
It was a powerful, inspiring statement. From around the country that special-election day in Massachusetts, I received e-mails from Americans who felt a newfound connection to what happens in Washington, who, in some cases, even wondered, for the first time in their lives, whether they should run for political office.
But there was an entirely different spirit emanating from the teleprompter during President Barack Obama's first State of the Union address. Obama seemed determined to squash the Brown fervor like a bug. Without using the senator-elect's name, the president dismissed growing frustrations with himself, his party and its policies -- the indisputable sources of Brown's victory -- as a "campaign fever," a sort of sickness that impedes reasonable government.
Characteristically, the president swatted his critics like pests. He chided them as if they had no plans of their own to offer -- especially on health care. But it's not that they have no plans: it's that Obama has no interest in the views of opponents, seeing them merely as annoying obstacles to be overcome in the face of his grand agenda.
This is the wrong attitude. These are the wrong lessons.
Obama also functions as the worst kind of leader of his party -- one who is willing to let it fall on its sword, rather than compromise. The president's bullheaded attachment to his misguided policies will take its toll in the voting booth. In New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts, the White House has lost dramatically. And the outlook for this November doesn't get better for Dems.
And so when Obama talks about "a stubborn resilience in the face of adversity" that Americans share, one gets the impression he's really talking about himself. Opponents of the president's agenda are many, and the numbers are growing. But he will not take a deep breath and start again, will not listen to his critics or negotiate.
As he said during the speech, regarding health care: "I take my share of the blame for not explaining it more clearly to the American people. And I know that with all the lobbying and horse-trading, the process left most Americans wondering, 'What's in it for me?'"
But Americans are not only asking, "What's in it for me?" They are wondering: "Why does the federal government have to do it?" They can legitimately wonder: "Don't we have a limited government that serves a natural law, based on a moral law?" Why then has the president watched as the U.S. Senate passed a health-care bill that includes federal taxpayer funding of abortions, that violates the moral consciences of millions of Americans?
In a new poll of likely voters, the National Review Institute found that, by 65 to 25 percent, people worry about big government more than big business. As board member Ramesh Ponnuru puts it: "Likely voters do not believe that this administration knows how business works or how to help it succeed, by 53 to 42 percent; independents and people who own small businesses were even more skeptical. Seventy-nine percent of voters agree that Congress has lost sight of its constitutional limits; 53 percent of them 'strongly' agree."
Americans are not victims who need handouts. Americans need the freedom to flourish. And until our president realizes this, he, and America, will lose out.
Craig Becker’s Nomination: A “Threat To Freedom”
Katie Packer
Friday, January 29, 2010
As Big Labor becomes more and more desperate to force unionization on small businesses, they will say and do anything in an effort to achieve that end. That means using backdoor tactics in the Congress and, if that doesn’t work, going outside the legislative process and forcing unions on employers through administration action in the executive branch.
Senate Majority Leader Reid’s staff has already conceded they would jam the Employee ‘Forced’ Choice Act (EFCA) through the legislative process making deals behind closed doors and silencing dissenting voices. And even that probably wouldn’t be enough to secure passage as Senators understand EFCA would result in higher unemployment and lost jobs.
The Employee ‘Forced’ Choice Act would allow Big Labor to eliminate the secret ballot and pressure workers into signing cards in favor of workplace unionization. And that’s not even the most egregious portion of the legislation.
If enacted, EFCA would allow government arbitrators to enter a workplace and mandate contracts on employers and employees alike. The people who created and sustained the business would have zero say in their own wages, hours, or anything else.
It’s been estimated that EFCA would cause 600,000 jobs to be lost in the first year alone. More and more job losses would follow as businesses would close or move overseas. But Big Labor bosses are less concerned about job losses than they are in the potential for increased union membership.
And now that Senator-elect Scott Brown of Massachusetts will block their pathway for Senate passage of EFCA, labor bosses are frantically searching for a Plan B, a way to bypass the legislative process and obtain the “payback” they believe they are owed. That vehicle to forced unionization outside of Congress has a name. That name is Craig Becker.
Currently, Becker serves as Associate General Counsel to both the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the American Federation of Labor & Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO).
Most Americans have probably never heard of Mr. Becker and he may be a perfectly nice human being, but his views on the absolute and autocratic power labor should wield over small businesses is enough to make one shudder.
Becker has written that, “employers should be stripped of any legally cognizable interest in their employees’ election of representatives.” Simply stated, Becker believes small businesses should have no say whatsoever over their own future, while union bosses have complete control.
In Craig Becker’s perfect world, every worker in America would be in a union, whether they choose to be there or not.
Becker is a nominee for one of the three vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). According to its Web site, the NLRB is an “independent federal agency created by Congress in 1935 to administer the National Labor Relations Act, the primary law governing relations between unions and employers in the private sector.”
As a member of the board, Becker would have significant authority to enact the SEIU and AFL-CIO’s agenda by fiat meaning the executive branch would do via administrative action what they have been unable to get enacted through elected representatives in the legislature who are directly accountable to voters.
And there should be absolutely no doubt what Big Labor’s agenda is… the forced unionization of small businesses so that billions in additional dollars from union member dues can flow into their coffers and they can continue to play kingmaker funneling massive amounts of money to the politicians who do their bidding.
Craig Becker’s nomination is a threat to freedom and must not be allowed to go forward. The Senate will hold a hearing on Becker’s nomination this coming week.
U.S. Senators must understand union bosses are counting on them to install their crony – Craig Becker – into the NLRB to move forward with an anti-business and undemocratic agenda that will greatly diminish our freedoms and result in more Americans looking for work.
Friday, January 29, 2010
As Big Labor becomes more and more desperate to force unionization on small businesses, they will say and do anything in an effort to achieve that end. That means using backdoor tactics in the Congress and, if that doesn’t work, going outside the legislative process and forcing unions on employers through administration action in the executive branch.
Senate Majority Leader Reid’s staff has already conceded they would jam the Employee ‘Forced’ Choice Act (EFCA) through the legislative process making deals behind closed doors and silencing dissenting voices. And even that probably wouldn’t be enough to secure passage as Senators understand EFCA would result in higher unemployment and lost jobs.
The Employee ‘Forced’ Choice Act would allow Big Labor to eliminate the secret ballot and pressure workers into signing cards in favor of workplace unionization. And that’s not even the most egregious portion of the legislation.
If enacted, EFCA would allow government arbitrators to enter a workplace and mandate contracts on employers and employees alike. The people who created and sustained the business would have zero say in their own wages, hours, or anything else.
It’s been estimated that EFCA would cause 600,000 jobs to be lost in the first year alone. More and more job losses would follow as businesses would close or move overseas. But Big Labor bosses are less concerned about job losses than they are in the potential for increased union membership.
And now that Senator-elect Scott Brown of Massachusetts will block their pathway for Senate passage of EFCA, labor bosses are frantically searching for a Plan B, a way to bypass the legislative process and obtain the “payback” they believe they are owed. That vehicle to forced unionization outside of Congress has a name. That name is Craig Becker.
Currently, Becker serves as Associate General Counsel to both the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the American Federation of Labor & Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO).
Most Americans have probably never heard of Mr. Becker and he may be a perfectly nice human being, but his views on the absolute and autocratic power labor should wield over small businesses is enough to make one shudder.
Becker has written that, “employers should be stripped of any legally cognizable interest in their employees’ election of representatives.” Simply stated, Becker believes small businesses should have no say whatsoever over their own future, while union bosses have complete control.
In Craig Becker’s perfect world, every worker in America would be in a union, whether they choose to be there or not.
Becker is a nominee for one of the three vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). According to its Web site, the NLRB is an “independent federal agency created by Congress in 1935 to administer the National Labor Relations Act, the primary law governing relations between unions and employers in the private sector.”
As a member of the board, Becker would have significant authority to enact the SEIU and AFL-CIO’s agenda by fiat meaning the executive branch would do via administrative action what they have been unable to get enacted through elected representatives in the legislature who are directly accountable to voters.
And there should be absolutely no doubt what Big Labor’s agenda is… the forced unionization of small businesses so that billions in additional dollars from union member dues can flow into their coffers and they can continue to play kingmaker funneling massive amounts of money to the politicians who do their bidding.
Craig Becker’s nomination is a threat to freedom and must not be allowed to go forward. The Senate will hold a hearing on Becker’s nomination this coming week.
U.S. Senators must understand union bosses are counting on them to install their crony – Craig Becker – into the NLRB to move forward with an anti-business and undemocratic agenda that will greatly diminish our freedoms and result in more Americans looking for work.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Soft on Terror
Charles Krauthammer
Friday, January 29, 2010
WASHINGTON -- The real scandal surrounding the failed Christmas Day airline bombing was not the fact that a terrorist got on a plane -- that can happen to any administration, as it surely did to the Bush administration -- but what happened afterward when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was captured and came under the full control of the U.S. government.
After 50 minutes of questioning him, the Obama administration chose, reflexively and mindlessly, to give the chatty terrorist the right to remain silent. Which he immediately did, undoubtedly denying us crucial information about al-Qaeda in Yemen, which had trained, armed and dispatched him.
We have since learned that the decision to Mirandize Abdulmutallab had been made without the knowledge of or consultation with (1) the secretary of defense, (2) the secretary of homeland security, (3) the director of the FBI, (4) the director of the National Counterterrorism Center or (5) the director of national intelligence (DNI).
The Justice Department acted not just unilaterally but unaccountably. Obama's own DNI said that Abdulmutallab should have been interrogated by the HIG, the administration's new High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group.
Perhaps you hadn't heard the term. Well, in the very first week of his presidency, Obama abolished by executive order the Bush-Cheney interrogation procedures and pledged to study a substitute mechanism. In August, the administration announced the establishment of the HIG, housed in the FBI but overseen by the National Security Council.
Where was it during the Abdulmutallab case? Not available, admitted National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair, because it had only been conceived for use abroad. Had not one person in this vast administration of highly nuanced sophisticates considered the possibility of a terror attack on American soil?
It gets worse. Blair later had to explain that the HIG was not deployed because it does not yet exist After a year! I suppose this administration was so busy deploying scores of the country's best lawyerly minds on finding the most rapid way to release Gitmo miscreants that it could not be bothered to establish a single operational HIG team to interrogate at-large miscreants with actionable intelligence that might save American lives.
Travesties of this magnitude are not lost on the American people. One of the reasons Scott Brown won in Massachusetts was his focus on the Mirandizing of Abdulmutallab.
Of course, this case is just a reflection of a larger problem: an administration that insists on treating Islamist terrorism as a law-enforcement issue. Which is why the Justice Department's other egregious terror decision, granting Khalid Sheik Mohammed a civilian trial in New York, is now the subject of a letter from six senators -- three Republicans, two Democrats and Joe Lieberman -- asking Attorney General Eric Holder to reverse the decision.
Lieberman and Sen. Susan Collins had written an earlier letter asking for Abdulmutallab to be turned over to the military for renewed interrogation. The problem is, it's hard to see how that decision gets reversed. Once you've read a man Miranda rights, what do you say? We are idiots? On second thought ...
Hence the agitation over the KSM trial. This one can be reversed and it's a good surrogate for this administration's insistence upon criminalizing -- and therefore trivializing -- a war on terror that has now struck three times in one year within the United States, twice with effect (the Arkansas killer and the Fort Hood shooter) and once with a shockingly near miss (Abdulmutallab).
On the KSM civilian trial, sentiment is widespread that it is quite insane to spend $200 million a year to give the killer of 3,000 innocents the largest propaganda platform on earth, while at the same time granting civilian rights of cross-examination and discovery that risk betraying U.S. intelligence sources and methods.
Accordingly, Sen. Lindsey Graham and Rep. Frank Wolf have gone beyond appeals to the administration and are planning to introduce a bill to block funding for the trial. It's an important measure. It makes flesh an otherwise abstract issue -- should terrorists be treated as enemy combatants or criminal defendants? The vote will force members of Congress to declare themselves. There will be no hiding from the question.
Congress may not be able to roll back the Abdulmutallab travesty. But there will be future Abdulmutallabs. By cutting off funding for the KSM trial, Congress can send Obama a clear message: The Constitution is neither a safety net for illegal enemy combatants nor a suicide pact for us.
Friday, January 29, 2010
WASHINGTON -- The real scandal surrounding the failed Christmas Day airline bombing was not the fact that a terrorist got on a plane -- that can happen to any administration, as it surely did to the Bush administration -- but what happened afterward when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was captured and came under the full control of the U.S. government.
After 50 minutes of questioning him, the Obama administration chose, reflexively and mindlessly, to give the chatty terrorist the right to remain silent. Which he immediately did, undoubtedly denying us crucial information about al-Qaeda in Yemen, which had trained, armed and dispatched him.
We have since learned that the decision to Mirandize Abdulmutallab had been made without the knowledge of or consultation with (1) the secretary of defense, (2) the secretary of homeland security, (3) the director of the FBI, (4) the director of the National Counterterrorism Center or (5) the director of national intelligence (DNI).
The Justice Department acted not just unilaterally but unaccountably. Obama's own DNI said that Abdulmutallab should have been interrogated by the HIG, the administration's new High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group.
Perhaps you hadn't heard the term. Well, in the very first week of his presidency, Obama abolished by executive order the Bush-Cheney interrogation procedures and pledged to study a substitute mechanism. In August, the administration announced the establishment of the HIG, housed in the FBI but overseen by the National Security Council.
Where was it during the Abdulmutallab case? Not available, admitted National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair, because it had only been conceived for use abroad. Had not one person in this vast administration of highly nuanced sophisticates considered the possibility of a terror attack on American soil?
It gets worse. Blair later had to explain that the HIG was not deployed because it does not yet exist After a year! I suppose this administration was so busy deploying scores of the country's best lawyerly minds on finding the most rapid way to release Gitmo miscreants that it could not be bothered to establish a single operational HIG team to interrogate at-large miscreants with actionable intelligence that might save American lives.
Travesties of this magnitude are not lost on the American people. One of the reasons Scott Brown won in Massachusetts was his focus on the Mirandizing of Abdulmutallab.
Of course, this case is just a reflection of a larger problem: an administration that insists on treating Islamist terrorism as a law-enforcement issue. Which is why the Justice Department's other egregious terror decision, granting Khalid Sheik Mohammed a civilian trial in New York, is now the subject of a letter from six senators -- three Republicans, two Democrats and Joe Lieberman -- asking Attorney General Eric Holder to reverse the decision.
Lieberman and Sen. Susan Collins had written an earlier letter asking for Abdulmutallab to be turned over to the military for renewed interrogation. The problem is, it's hard to see how that decision gets reversed. Once you've read a man Miranda rights, what do you say? We are idiots? On second thought ...
Hence the agitation over the KSM trial. This one can be reversed and it's a good surrogate for this administration's insistence upon criminalizing -- and therefore trivializing -- a war on terror that has now struck three times in one year within the United States, twice with effect (the Arkansas killer and the Fort Hood shooter) and once with a shockingly near miss (Abdulmutallab).
On the KSM civilian trial, sentiment is widespread that it is quite insane to spend $200 million a year to give the killer of 3,000 innocents the largest propaganda platform on earth, while at the same time granting civilian rights of cross-examination and discovery that risk betraying U.S. intelligence sources and methods.
Accordingly, Sen. Lindsey Graham and Rep. Frank Wolf have gone beyond appeals to the administration and are planning to introduce a bill to block funding for the trial. It's an important measure. It makes flesh an otherwise abstract issue -- should terrorists be treated as enemy combatants or criminal defendants? The vote will force members of Congress to declare themselves. There will be no hiding from the question.
Congress may not be able to roll back the Abdulmutallab travesty. But there will be future Abdulmutallabs. By cutting off funding for the KSM trial, Congress can send Obama a clear message: The Constitution is neither a safety net for illegal enemy combatants nor a suicide pact for us.
Obama Letting It Ride on a Bad Bet
Jonah Goldberg
Friday, January 29, 2010
In 1964, Barry Goldwater gave an uncompromisingly conservative and liberty-loving speech to the Republican Convention. A reporter in the audience couldn't believe his ears. "My God! He's going to run as Barry Goldwater!"
I had a similar reaction to President Obama's State of the Union address.
For all the talk of how he needed to "pivot" to the center, the Obama we saw was the same Obama who ran for president and the same Obama we've seen over the last year. His White House is so deep in their own bunker, they could sustain a Dresden-style carpet bombing without even hearing the dishware rattle. For instance, leading social scientists with the most sophisticated statistical tools concluded that Scott Brown's election was like a slap in the face with a wet, semi-frozen flounder. Yet the White House's response is to claim that a vote for Brown, who promised to derail ObamaCare, was really a vote for ... ObamaCare.
But it's not just that Obama has dug in or "doubled down" on his unpopular agenda that reminded me of the Goldwater story. It's the fact that Obama is running as Obama.
Since taking office, Obama has continued to see the presidency as the perfect perch from which to campaign for a job he already has. The solution to every problem the White House runs into is "more Obama." Much of this stems from Obama's own arrogance. When people disagree with his health-care proposals, it is because they don't really understand them or because they are misdirecting their anger at him. When Rep. Marion Berry, D-Ark., warned the president that the 2010 midterms were shaping up to be a replay of the 1994 Republican tsunami, Obama reportedly told him that there was one important difference between then and now: "Me."
In his State of the Union, the president waxed eloquent about the baleful climate of what is commonly called "permanent campaign" mind-set in Washington. This was an interesting line of attack from a man who has never disbanded his campaign operation "Organizing for America" and who responded to the Scott Brown election by bringing his campaign manager into the White House.
"Doubling down" is a popular phrase in Washington these days to describe Obama's insistence to stick to his guns -- on health care, cap-and-trade and incontinent "stimulus" spending. But doubling down is the wrong term. In blackjack, you can only double down once. What Obama is doing is letting it ride. The self-proclaimed pragmatist refuses to adjust a bet he made long before the financial crisis or his presidency even began.
Obama campaigned on an agenda that he believed made sense before the financial crisis and the onset of a steep recession. When circumstances changed, Obama did not. The financial crisis "proved" that we needed the same policy prescriptions. And so, for the last year the president has pushed health-care reform when Americans were interested in jobs and economic growth. He's pushed a Keynesian spending binge that has had little to no effect on economic health but has been a bracing tonic for Democratic constituencies.
Obama came into office with stratospheric poll numbers and nominally unstoppable majorities in both houses of Congress. The press has given him every benefit of the doubt, quickly propping him up after every stumble. The Beltway bureaucracy and intelligentsia have swooned like teenagers for the man. He has given more speeches, lectures, press conferences and tutorials on his policies than any president in modern memory. In response, independents have abandoned him, conservatives have steeled their resolve against him, and liberals have lost faith. And yet, like a drunk in a bowling shirt at the craps table who insists his losses don't disprove his "system" for winning, Obama stands behind his bet.
So what was Obama's bet? He believed that he was elected to usher in a new progressive era, a new New Deal. Unfortunately for his wager, every significant election since November 2008 has refuted the sagacity of this gamble. In New Jersey, in Virginia and even in Massachusetts, voters have said that is not the change they were looking for. The rosy scenario for Democrats is that they will "only" lose 20 to 30 seats in the coming midterm elections. If we were at the dawn of a new New Deal, you would expect voters to be ratifying Obama's actions. That's what they did for FDR. Not so for BHO.
And yet there the president stands, mocking his opponents and the ignorant rubes who don't understand his system as he says in word and deed, "let it ride."
Friday, January 29, 2010
In 1964, Barry Goldwater gave an uncompromisingly conservative and liberty-loving speech to the Republican Convention. A reporter in the audience couldn't believe his ears. "My God! He's going to run as Barry Goldwater!"
I had a similar reaction to President Obama's State of the Union address.
For all the talk of how he needed to "pivot" to the center, the Obama we saw was the same Obama who ran for president and the same Obama we've seen over the last year. His White House is so deep in their own bunker, they could sustain a Dresden-style carpet bombing without even hearing the dishware rattle. For instance, leading social scientists with the most sophisticated statistical tools concluded that Scott Brown's election was like a slap in the face with a wet, semi-frozen flounder. Yet the White House's response is to claim that a vote for Brown, who promised to derail ObamaCare, was really a vote for ... ObamaCare.
But it's not just that Obama has dug in or "doubled down" on his unpopular agenda that reminded me of the Goldwater story. It's the fact that Obama is running as Obama.
Since taking office, Obama has continued to see the presidency as the perfect perch from which to campaign for a job he already has. The solution to every problem the White House runs into is "more Obama." Much of this stems from Obama's own arrogance. When people disagree with his health-care proposals, it is because they don't really understand them or because they are misdirecting their anger at him. When Rep. Marion Berry, D-Ark., warned the president that the 2010 midterms were shaping up to be a replay of the 1994 Republican tsunami, Obama reportedly told him that there was one important difference between then and now: "Me."
In his State of the Union, the president waxed eloquent about the baleful climate of what is commonly called "permanent campaign" mind-set in Washington. This was an interesting line of attack from a man who has never disbanded his campaign operation "Organizing for America" and who responded to the Scott Brown election by bringing his campaign manager into the White House.
"Doubling down" is a popular phrase in Washington these days to describe Obama's insistence to stick to his guns -- on health care, cap-and-trade and incontinent "stimulus" spending. But doubling down is the wrong term. In blackjack, you can only double down once. What Obama is doing is letting it ride. The self-proclaimed pragmatist refuses to adjust a bet he made long before the financial crisis or his presidency even began.
Obama campaigned on an agenda that he believed made sense before the financial crisis and the onset of a steep recession. When circumstances changed, Obama did not. The financial crisis "proved" that we needed the same policy prescriptions. And so, for the last year the president has pushed health-care reform when Americans were interested in jobs and economic growth. He's pushed a Keynesian spending binge that has had little to no effect on economic health but has been a bracing tonic for Democratic constituencies.
Obama came into office with stratospheric poll numbers and nominally unstoppable majorities in both houses of Congress. The press has given him every benefit of the doubt, quickly propping him up after every stumble. The Beltway bureaucracy and intelligentsia have swooned like teenagers for the man. He has given more speeches, lectures, press conferences and tutorials on his policies than any president in modern memory. In response, independents have abandoned him, conservatives have steeled their resolve against him, and liberals have lost faith. And yet, like a drunk in a bowling shirt at the craps table who insists his losses don't disprove his "system" for winning, Obama stands behind his bet.
So what was Obama's bet? He believed that he was elected to usher in a new progressive era, a new New Deal. Unfortunately for his wager, every significant election since November 2008 has refuted the sagacity of this gamble. In New Jersey, in Virginia and even in Massachusetts, voters have said that is not the change they were looking for. The rosy scenario for Democrats is that they will "only" lose 20 to 30 seats in the coming midterm elections. If we were at the dawn of a new New Deal, you would expect voters to be ratifying Obama's actions. That's what they did for FDR. Not so for BHO.
And yet there the president stands, mocking his opponents and the ignorant rubes who don't understand his system as he says in word and deed, "let it ride."
Obamanomics: "A Fiscal Catastrophe in the Making"
Donald Lambro
Thursday, January 28, 2010
WASHINGTON -- If President Obama thinks the political disaster that hit his party last month in Massachusetts was bad, he had better brace himself for the Congressional Budget Office's latest economic forecasts for the next two years. In testimony before the House Budget Committee last week, which got scant news media attention, CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf painted a bleak forecast for the nation's economy under the White House's no-jobs, no-growth tax-and-spend policies. It spells even deeper political losses for the Democrats in Congress than are presently forecast.
Elmendorf, who was appointed by Democratic congressional leaders, told the committee that economic growth will be painfully slow over the next several years, which will keep the national unemployment rate at an average of 10 percent throughout fiscal 2011, which ends in September of that year.
Contrary to Obama's Herbert Hoover mantra that economic recovery and more jobs are just around the corner, the CBO budget chief said the economy will grow by a weak 1.6 percent this fiscal year and the jobless rate will average 10.2 percent.
CBO's outlook for 2011 is just as bleak. The nation's gross domestic product (GDP), the measure of its economic growth, is expected to barely reach 1.8 percent, while unemployment will show little or no improvement: averaging 9.8 percent for that fiscal year.
The administration's unprecedented budget deficits are expected to be more than $1 trillion this year and the next, and stay at very high levels for years to come.
Deficits such as these mean that the government's massive debt burden will be at historically dangerous levels that will imperil our country's future and our economy's solvency, he said.
"It is true that as we push (public debt levels) in this country to 60 percent of GDP at the end of this year and beyond that over the next few years, we're moving into (debt) territory that most developed countries stay out of," he told the committee.
If we continue this profligate level of spending, "that raises the risk" of serious economic consequences for our country, he warned.
But Elmendorf isn't the only one sounding the alarm over the Obama administration's binge spending and no-growth economic policies.
"We are presently in a dangerously risky economic environment, more risky than any in memory and that includes the 1970s," Stanford economist John Cogan told me.
"The primary sources of that risk come from uncertainty about U.S. government economic policy. In the area of taxation, personal income taxes -- especially those on savings and capital formation -- are set to rise substantially in a year (when the Bush income tax cuts are due to expire)," Cogan said.
"How high tax rates will rise and what activities will be hit hardest creates a sizable risk this year for investors and businesses," he said.
But perhaps the most ominous forecast of what we can expect from Obamanomics comes from famed economist Arthur Laffer, whose supply-side, tax-cut proposals under President Reagan put the economy on a nearly 25-year economic-growth trajectory that pounded unemployment to its lowest level in decades.
The famed creator of the Laffer Curve -- which showed how lower tax rates boost economic growth (and ultimately tax revenues) -- said the economy is now heading toward "a train wreck" in 2011.
"It will make the decline in U.S. output from 2010 to 2011 worse than the decline in output in 2008 and 2009, which will be catastrophic," he told me.
Don't be fooled into thinking the economy is coming out of the woods this year, he said. Unlike most of Obama's economic critics, he thinks we will have modest growth this year, but a sharp decline in 2011.
The chief reason: "In anticipation of known tax increases, the economy will shift income and output from 2011 -- the higher tax year -- into 2010 -- the lower tax year. As a result of this income shift, 2010 will look a lot better than it should, and 2011 will be a train wreck," he predicted.
Despite Obama's State of the Union declaration that he has not raised taxes on anyone, Laffer pointed out that we are on track for a lot of tax hikes this year: "In 2010, the U.S. will have a payroll tax rate increase, an estate tax increase and income tax increases. There's also a tax increase in 2010 on carried interest" that will rise from 15 percent to 35 percent and rise still more in 2011, he said.
"Whenever a country is in the throes of spending too much and raising taxes, it's a fiscal catastrophe in the making, and this is what is happening now," Laffer said.
All of this makes Obama's tax-cuts claim in Wednesday address before a joint session of Congress sound disingenuous at best: "We cut taxes. We cut taxes for 95 percent of working families," he said.
If you do not remember those lower- to middle-income tax cuts in your paycheck last year, it's because they were so minuscule and so spread out over the course of the year "that many are unaware they received it," the Washington Post correctly pointed out last week.
Meantime, Obama's spending freeze proposal is a sham, affecting only a tiny sliver of the budget, and, by the way, it wouldn't take place until 2011 after the midterm elections. That is, if Congress adopts it. Lawmakers say that under his plan, spending will still rise by 44.3 percent instead of 45 percent over the next 10 years.
That's why the recent GOP victory in Massachusetts was barely a tremor for the Democrats compared to the real disaster that's coming in November.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
WASHINGTON -- If President Obama thinks the political disaster that hit his party last month in Massachusetts was bad, he had better brace himself for the Congressional Budget Office's latest economic forecasts for the next two years. In testimony before the House Budget Committee last week, which got scant news media attention, CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf painted a bleak forecast for the nation's economy under the White House's no-jobs, no-growth tax-and-spend policies. It spells even deeper political losses for the Democrats in Congress than are presently forecast.
Elmendorf, who was appointed by Democratic congressional leaders, told the committee that economic growth will be painfully slow over the next several years, which will keep the national unemployment rate at an average of 10 percent throughout fiscal 2011, which ends in September of that year.
Contrary to Obama's Herbert Hoover mantra that economic recovery and more jobs are just around the corner, the CBO budget chief said the economy will grow by a weak 1.6 percent this fiscal year and the jobless rate will average 10.2 percent.
CBO's outlook for 2011 is just as bleak. The nation's gross domestic product (GDP), the measure of its economic growth, is expected to barely reach 1.8 percent, while unemployment will show little or no improvement: averaging 9.8 percent for that fiscal year.
The administration's unprecedented budget deficits are expected to be more than $1 trillion this year and the next, and stay at very high levels for years to come.
Deficits such as these mean that the government's massive debt burden will be at historically dangerous levels that will imperil our country's future and our economy's solvency, he said.
"It is true that as we push (public debt levels) in this country to 60 percent of GDP at the end of this year and beyond that over the next few years, we're moving into (debt) territory that most developed countries stay out of," he told the committee.
If we continue this profligate level of spending, "that raises the risk" of serious economic consequences for our country, he warned.
But Elmendorf isn't the only one sounding the alarm over the Obama administration's binge spending and no-growth economic policies.
"We are presently in a dangerously risky economic environment, more risky than any in memory and that includes the 1970s," Stanford economist John Cogan told me.
"The primary sources of that risk come from uncertainty about U.S. government economic policy. In the area of taxation, personal income taxes -- especially those on savings and capital formation -- are set to rise substantially in a year (when the Bush income tax cuts are due to expire)," Cogan said.
"How high tax rates will rise and what activities will be hit hardest creates a sizable risk this year for investors and businesses," he said.
But perhaps the most ominous forecast of what we can expect from Obamanomics comes from famed economist Arthur Laffer, whose supply-side, tax-cut proposals under President Reagan put the economy on a nearly 25-year economic-growth trajectory that pounded unemployment to its lowest level in decades.
The famed creator of the Laffer Curve -- which showed how lower tax rates boost economic growth (and ultimately tax revenues) -- said the economy is now heading toward "a train wreck" in 2011.
"It will make the decline in U.S. output from 2010 to 2011 worse than the decline in output in 2008 and 2009, which will be catastrophic," he told me.
Don't be fooled into thinking the economy is coming out of the woods this year, he said. Unlike most of Obama's economic critics, he thinks we will have modest growth this year, but a sharp decline in 2011.
The chief reason: "In anticipation of known tax increases, the economy will shift income and output from 2011 -- the higher tax year -- into 2010 -- the lower tax year. As a result of this income shift, 2010 will look a lot better than it should, and 2011 will be a train wreck," he predicted.
Despite Obama's State of the Union declaration that he has not raised taxes on anyone, Laffer pointed out that we are on track for a lot of tax hikes this year: "In 2010, the U.S. will have a payroll tax rate increase, an estate tax increase and income tax increases. There's also a tax increase in 2010 on carried interest" that will rise from 15 percent to 35 percent and rise still more in 2011, he said.
"Whenever a country is in the throes of spending too much and raising taxes, it's a fiscal catastrophe in the making, and this is what is happening now," Laffer said.
All of this makes Obama's tax-cuts claim in Wednesday address before a joint session of Congress sound disingenuous at best: "We cut taxes. We cut taxes for 95 percent of working families," he said.
If you do not remember those lower- to middle-income tax cuts in your paycheck last year, it's because they were so minuscule and so spread out over the course of the year "that many are unaware they received it," the Washington Post correctly pointed out last week.
Meantime, Obama's spending freeze proposal is a sham, affecting only a tiny sliver of the budget, and, by the way, it wouldn't take place until 2011 after the midterm elections. That is, if Congress adopts it. Lawmakers say that under his plan, spending will still rise by 44.3 percent instead of 45 percent over the next 10 years.
That's why the recent GOP victory in Massachusetts was barely a tremor for the Democrats compared to the real disaster that's coming in November.
Leftwingers Outraged by Being Associated with Leftwingers
Humberto Fontova
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Nazis (and by implication all “right- wingers,” past and present) were inherently wicked. Their agenda was evil from A to Z, their methods along with their goals.
Communists (and by implication left-wingers) at least mean well. Oh, they might get a tad overzealous at times (killing more people than the Nazis and the Bubonic Plague combined, as documented in the Black Book of Communism, for instance) but at least their hearts were in the right place. Even Barry Goldwater might get it. “Extremism in the defense of socialism is no vice!”
In a one hour special titled “Revolutionary Holocaust; Live Free or Die” run on January 22nd Glenn Beck mounted a full-frontal attack against the above notion—and left it a smoking cinder. First off, by sourcing Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, Beck swept aside a premise that often handicaps conservatives from the get-go: the premise that Nazis belong on the right. Bombarded by relentless documentation to the contrary, this liberal bromide quickly blew up, and the program proceeded to report on the notoriously under-reported Communist holocaust.
As a participant in the program, I’ll go on the record and report that the care given by the producers to proper documentation for all Communist crimes and Communist quotes amounted to a fetish. This care, of course, accounts for the program’s devastating effectiveness—and thus the anguished reaction by liberals.
“The Liberal cannot strike wholeheartedly at the communist for fear of wounding himself in the process," wrote James Burnham in his classic Suicide of the West. This little gem did much to explain the theme in the opening lines of this article. But so vividly did Revolutionary Holocaust document Communist butcheries—from Stalin’s to Mao’s to Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s-- that now some liberals are trying to weasel away from their years of alibis and rationalizations for the mass-murder.
The Glenn Beck special is now catching heat from “mainstream” liberal sources who claim no “mainstream” media or academic sources in fact herald the Communist icons as claimed on the special To this end an article in Politico quotes Clemson professor and Harvard PHD, Steven Marks: "No one in their right mind is going to defend Stalin or Mao or Che Guevara,"
Oh?
Exhibit A: Time Magazine honors Che Guevara among "The 100 Most Important People of the Century." Not satisfied with such a paltry accolade they list him in the "Heroes and Icons" section, alongside Anne Frank, Andrei Sakharov, Rosa Parks and Mother Theresa. .
Exhibit B: “Innocent people were not executed in significant numbers, (by Che and Castro.) Che presented a Christlike image, with his mortuary gaze it is as if Guevara looks upon his killers and forgives them." (Jorge Castaneda. Global Distinguished Professor of Politics and Latin American Studies. Visiting professor at Princeton and Berkeley,columnist for The Los Angeles Times, and Newsweek.)
Exhibit C: the cover of this very month’s GQ magazine (not exactly a “fringe” publication) features Che Guevara iconography on a smiling Johnny Depp.
Exhibit D: During last year’s presidential campaign, Obama campaign offices prominently displayed Che Guevara posters.
(Note: Che Guevara’s butcheries and Stalinist schemes were all orders from above, namely from his Stalinist boss, Fidel Castro, who appointed Guevara as his regime’s chief hangman.)
Exhibit E: “Fidel Castro is very shy and sensitive, a man I regard as a friend." Democratic Senator and Presidential Candidate, George Mc Govern:
* “Viva Fidel! Viva Che!” bellowed while arm in arm with Fidel Castro himself. (Democratic Presidential candidate, Jesse Jackson.)
* “Fidel Castro first and foremost is and always has been a committed egalitarian. He wanted a system that provided the basic needs to all -- enough to eat, health care, adequate housing and education. Cuba has superb systems of health care and universal education” (Democratic President James Earl Carter)
* “Fidel Castro is Cuba’s Elvis!” (former ABC anchorman Dan Rather)
* “Fidel Castro is an absolutely fascinating figure!” (NBC’s Andrea Mitchell)
* “Fidel Castro is one helluva guy!” (Ted Turner)
* “Fidel Castro has done good things for Cuba.” (Colin Powell)
Time and space restraints do not allow a listing of accolades to Castro/Stalinism from Hollywood folks.
The Toast of Manhattan!" crowed Time magazine about Fidel Castro's reception by Manhattan's Beautiful People on his visit to address the U.N. General assembly in 1996, upon the U.N.'s 50th anniversary celebrations.
"The Hottest Ticket in Manhattan!" read a Newsweek story that week, referring to the social swirl that engulfed Castro. After Fidel's whooping, hollering, foot-stomping ovation in the General Assembly, he was fêted by New York's best and brightest, hobnobbing with dozens of Manhattan's glitterati, pundits and power brokers.
First, there was dinner at the Council on Foreign Relations. After holding court there for a rapt David Rockefeller, along with Robert McNamara, Dwayne Andreas and Random House's Harold Evans, Castro flashed over to Mort Zuckerman's Fifth Avenue pad, where a throng of Beltway glitterati, including a breathless Mike Wallace, Peter Jennings, Tina Brown, Bernard Shaw and Barbara Walters, all jostled for a brief tryst, cooing and gurgling to Castro's every comment.
All clamored for autographs and photo ops. Diane Sawyer was so overcome in the mass killer's presence that she rushed up, broke into that toothy smile of hers, wrapped her arms around Castro and smooched him warmly on the cheek.
"You people are the cream of the crop!" beamed the mass-murdererr to the smiling throng that surrounded him.
"Hear, hear!" chirped the delighted guests while tinkling their wine glasses in appreciation and glee.
But the mass-murderer had barely scratched the surface of his fan club. According to the U.S. Cuba Trade and Economic Council, on that visit Castro received 250 dinner invitations from Manhattan celebrities and power brokers.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Nazis (and by implication all “right- wingers,” past and present) were inherently wicked. Their agenda was evil from A to Z, their methods along with their goals.
Communists (and by implication left-wingers) at least mean well. Oh, they might get a tad overzealous at times (killing more people than the Nazis and the Bubonic Plague combined, as documented in the Black Book of Communism, for instance) but at least their hearts were in the right place. Even Barry Goldwater might get it. “Extremism in the defense of socialism is no vice!”
In a one hour special titled “Revolutionary Holocaust; Live Free or Die” run on January 22nd Glenn Beck mounted a full-frontal attack against the above notion—and left it a smoking cinder. First off, by sourcing Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, Beck swept aside a premise that often handicaps conservatives from the get-go: the premise that Nazis belong on the right. Bombarded by relentless documentation to the contrary, this liberal bromide quickly blew up, and the program proceeded to report on the notoriously under-reported Communist holocaust.
As a participant in the program, I’ll go on the record and report that the care given by the producers to proper documentation for all Communist crimes and Communist quotes amounted to a fetish. This care, of course, accounts for the program’s devastating effectiveness—and thus the anguished reaction by liberals.
“The Liberal cannot strike wholeheartedly at the communist for fear of wounding himself in the process," wrote James Burnham in his classic Suicide of the West. This little gem did much to explain the theme in the opening lines of this article. But so vividly did Revolutionary Holocaust document Communist butcheries—from Stalin’s to Mao’s to Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s-- that now some liberals are trying to weasel away from their years of alibis and rationalizations for the mass-murder.
The Glenn Beck special is now catching heat from “mainstream” liberal sources who claim no “mainstream” media or academic sources in fact herald the Communist icons as claimed on the special To this end an article in Politico quotes Clemson professor and Harvard PHD, Steven Marks: "No one in their right mind is going to defend Stalin or Mao or Che Guevara,"
Oh?
Exhibit A: Time Magazine honors Che Guevara among "The 100 Most Important People of the Century." Not satisfied with such a paltry accolade they list him in the "Heroes and Icons" section, alongside Anne Frank, Andrei Sakharov, Rosa Parks and Mother Theresa. .
Exhibit B: “Innocent people were not executed in significant numbers, (by Che and Castro.) Che presented a Christlike image, with his mortuary gaze it is as if Guevara looks upon his killers and forgives them." (Jorge Castaneda. Global Distinguished Professor of Politics and Latin American Studies. Visiting professor at Princeton and Berkeley,columnist for The Los Angeles Times, and Newsweek.)
Exhibit C: the cover of this very month’s GQ magazine (not exactly a “fringe” publication) features Che Guevara iconography on a smiling Johnny Depp.
Exhibit D: During last year’s presidential campaign, Obama campaign offices prominently displayed Che Guevara posters.
(Note: Che Guevara’s butcheries and Stalinist schemes were all orders from above, namely from his Stalinist boss, Fidel Castro, who appointed Guevara as his regime’s chief hangman.)
Exhibit E: “Fidel Castro is very shy and sensitive, a man I regard as a friend." Democratic Senator and Presidential Candidate, George Mc Govern:
* “Viva Fidel! Viva Che!” bellowed while arm in arm with Fidel Castro himself. (Democratic Presidential candidate, Jesse Jackson.)
* “Fidel Castro first and foremost is and always has been a committed egalitarian. He wanted a system that provided the basic needs to all -- enough to eat, health care, adequate housing and education. Cuba has superb systems of health care and universal education” (Democratic President James Earl Carter)
* “Fidel Castro is Cuba’s Elvis!” (former ABC anchorman Dan Rather)
* “Fidel Castro is an absolutely fascinating figure!” (NBC’s Andrea Mitchell)
* “Fidel Castro is one helluva guy!” (Ted Turner)
* “Fidel Castro has done good things for Cuba.” (Colin Powell)
Time and space restraints do not allow a listing of accolades to Castro/Stalinism from Hollywood folks.
The Toast of Manhattan!" crowed Time magazine about Fidel Castro's reception by Manhattan's Beautiful People on his visit to address the U.N. General assembly in 1996, upon the U.N.'s 50th anniversary celebrations.
"The Hottest Ticket in Manhattan!" read a Newsweek story that week, referring to the social swirl that engulfed Castro. After Fidel's whooping, hollering, foot-stomping ovation in the General Assembly, he was fêted by New York's best and brightest, hobnobbing with dozens of Manhattan's glitterati, pundits and power brokers.
First, there was dinner at the Council on Foreign Relations. After holding court there for a rapt David Rockefeller, along with Robert McNamara, Dwayne Andreas and Random House's Harold Evans, Castro flashed over to Mort Zuckerman's Fifth Avenue pad, where a throng of Beltway glitterati, including a breathless Mike Wallace, Peter Jennings, Tina Brown, Bernard Shaw and Barbara Walters, all jostled for a brief tryst, cooing and gurgling to Castro's every comment.
All clamored for autographs and photo ops. Diane Sawyer was so overcome in the mass killer's presence that she rushed up, broke into that toothy smile of hers, wrapped her arms around Castro and smooched him warmly on the cheek.
"You people are the cream of the crop!" beamed the mass-murdererr to the smiling throng that surrounded him.
"Hear, hear!" chirped the delighted guests while tinkling their wine glasses in appreciation and glee.
But the mass-murderer had barely scratched the surface of his fan club. According to the U.S. Cuba Trade and Economic Council, on that visit Castro received 250 dinner invitations from Manhattan celebrities and power brokers.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Trashing the Job Makers
Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, January 28, 2010
A year ago Barack Obama inherited a recession brought on by financial panic following the collapse of the housing bubble. The market crash was made worse by Wall Street shenanigans and recklessness at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Job losses followed.
In response, Obama pushed through a stimulus bill that went well beyond the borrowing done by George W. Bush in his last months in office. In fact, Obama and the Congress borrowed an additional $787 billion to infuse the economy with fresh job-creating cash.
The president warned us that without this borrowing, unemployment might reach double digits. Yet with the stimulus, unemployment has soared from 7.6 percent to 10 percent. That translates into over 4 million jobs lost in 2009 alone.
In reaction, an embarrassed administration continues to cite hypothetical jobs saved, rather than the actual number of jobs lost this year. Just this week senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett, press secretary Robert Gibbs and senior White House adviser David Axelrod variously claimed "thousands and thousands," "1.5 million" and "2 million" jobs saved. If the White House insiders can't get their theoretical numbers straight, how can anyone else?
Why the continual job losses?
First, the government can create only so many jobs by borrowing and spending. It is less efficient than private enterprise in reacting to market needs -- new products, new services and new consumer tastes. Higher federal budgets eventually translate into more bureaucrats to shackle the private sector with more regulations that discourage innovation and experimentation.
In contrast, the U.S. Small Business Administration claims that small businesses employ about half of all working Americans. Yet building contractors, orthodontists, local real-estate agents and small software companies (to name just a few types of small businesses) in the last year have not been convinced that it is time to start buying new equipment and hiring more employees to gear up for increased consumer demand.
Why the continued depression among employers?
Many may suspect that the administration does not appreciate how hard it is to be self-employed -- an understandable conjecture when neither the president nor many in his Cabinet have had careers outside government or academia. Tenure and near-automatic annual pay raises do not exist in the world of the insurance agent, farmer or trucker.
Instead, when employers listen to the president's grand ideas for health-care reform, they must quietly cringe at increased costs per worker. When they hear soaring rhetoric about cap-and-trade energy policy, they must silently fear higher power costs.
Worse still has been the promiscuous talk this past year about all sorts of higher taxes.
During the 2008 campaign and the president's first year, we heard Obama promise new income taxes that would revert to the higher rates of the Clinton administration. But that would now come on top of recent new tax hikes by the states that have often upped their own income and sales taxes by considerable margins since 2000.
During the health-care debate, there were also promises of a special surcharge on "Cadillac health plans," as well as making the upper brackets pay a surcharge to fund the care of others.
And don't forget Obama's inheritance-tax proposals that would have reversed the scheduled one-year repeal (with what many expected would become permanent) of the inheritance tax to a 45 percent tax rate on anything that an individual leaves to his heirs beyond $3.5 million in value -- capital that was already taxed during its acquisition.
As a result of all this tax-talking frenzy, business owners have no idea what their new aggregate tax obligations will be or when they will kick in. They can only sense that the Obama administration wants to go after successful entrepreneurs to fund more federal entitlement for others -- as if the 5 percent of Americans who fork over 55 percent of the aggregate income tax revenue don't pay enough already.
If President Obama really wants to foster job growth, he needs to get specific. Stop the borrowing and instead tell the business community exactly what income, payroll and surcharge taxes he proposes, when they will begin -- and how much he appreciates those who will pay them.
When it comes to creating a psychological climate to encourage employers to start hiring again, a little certainty and a little praise are lot better than uncertainty and talk of taxing even more those who now already pay the most.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
A year ago Barack Obama inherited a recession brought on by financial panic following the collapse of the housing bubble. The market crash was made worse by Wall Street shenanigans and recklessness at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Job losses followed.
In response, Obama pushed through a stimulus bill that went well beyond the borrowing done by George W. Bush in his last months in office. In fact, Obama and the Congress borrowed an additional $787 billion to infuse the economy with fresh job-creating cash.
The president warned us that without this borrowing, unemployment might reach double digits. Yet with the stimulus, unemployment has soared from 7.6 percent to 10 percent. That translates into over 4 million jobs lost in 2009 alone.
In reaction, an embarrassed administration continues to cite hypothetical jobs saved, rather than the actual number of jobs lost this year. Just this week senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett, press secretary Robert Gibbs and senior White House adviser David Axelrod variously claimed "thousands and thousands," "1.5 million" and "2 million" jobs saved. If the White House insiders can't get their theoretical numbers straight, how can anyone else?
Why the continual job losses?
First, the government can create only so many jobs by borrowing and spending. It is less efficient than private enterprise in reacting to market needs -- new products, new services and new consumer tastes. Higher federal budgets eventually translate into more bureaucrats to shackle the private sector with more regulations that discourage innovation and experimentation.
In contrast, the U.S. Small Business Administration claims that small businesses employ about half of all working Americans. Yet building contractors, orthodontists, local real-estate agents and small software companies (to name just a few types of small businesses) in the last year have not been convinced that it is time to start buying new equipment and hiring more employees to gear up for increased consumer demand.
Why the continued depression among employers?
Many may suspect that the administration does not appreciate how hard it is to be self-employed -- an understandable conjecture when neither the president nor many in his Cabinet have had careers outside government or academia. Tenure and near-automatic annual pay raises do not exist in the world of the insurance agent, farmer or trucker.
Instead, when employers listen to the president's grand ideas for health-care reform, they must quietly cringe at increased costs per worker. When they hear soaring rhetoric about cap-and-trade energy policy, they must silently fear higher power costs.
Worse still has been the promiscuous talk this past year about all sorts of higher taxes.
During the 2008 campaign and the president's first year, we heard Obama promise new income taxes that would revert to the higher rates of the Clinton administration. But that would now come on top of recent new tax hikes by the states that have often upped their own income and sales taxes by considerable margins since 2000.
During the health-care debate, there were also promises of a special surcharge on "Cadillac health plans," as well as making the upper brackets pay a surcharge to fund the care of others.
And don't forget Obama's inheritance-tax proposals that would have reversed the scheduled one-year repeal (with what many expected would become permanent) of the inheritance tax to a 45 percent tax rate on anything that an individual leaves to his heirs beyond $3.5 million in value -- capital that was already taxed during its acquisition.
As a result of all this tax-talking frenzy, business owners have no idea what their new aggregate tax obligations will be or when they will kick in. They can only sense that the Obama administration wants to go after successful entrepreneurs to fund more federal entitlement for others -- as if the 5 percent of Americans who fork over 55 percent of the aggregate income tax revenue don't pay enough already.
If President Obama really wants to foster job growth, he needs to get specific. Stop the borrowing and instead tell the business community exactly what income, payroll and surcharge taxes he proposes, when they will begin -- and how much he appreciates those who will pay them.
When it comes to creating a psychological climate to encourage employers to start hiring again, a little certainty and a little praise are lot better than uncertainty and talk of taxing even more those who now already pay the most.
State of the Union: Right-Leaning
Voters are skeptical of big government and hostile to the current health-care legislation.
Ramesh Ponnuru
Wednesday, January 27, 2009
President Obama will be delivering his State of the Union address tonight to an increasingly conservative electorate. A new poll of 1,000 likely voters, done by John McLaughlin and Associates for the National Review Institute, finds voters skeptical of big government, hostile to the health-care legislation being considered on Capitol Hill, and interested in conservative alternatives.
The poll finds that 50 percent of voters approve of Obama’s job performance and 46 percent disapprove — but there the good news for Democrats ends. Republicans lead Democrats by five points on the generic congressional ballot, and are behind by only four among Hispanics.
On ideological questions this electorate leans right. Self-identified liberals have more confidence that government spending and intervention will improve the economy than that free enterprise and individual initiative will. The electorate disagrees, 65 to 25 percent. Self-identified liberals worry more about big business than big government; again the electorate disagrees, 57 to 25 percent. Likely voters do not believe that this administration knows how business works or how to help it succeed by 53 to 42 percent; independents and people who own small businesses were even more skeptical. Seventy-nine percent of voters agree that Congress has lost sight of its constitutional limits; 53 percent of them “strongly” agree.
The health-care polling spells disaster from start to finish for liberals. Likely 2010 voters believe that the health-care legislation being considered will make health care worse rather than better (56 to 29 percent) and that it will increase costs rather than lower them (62 to 24 percent). These worries are not confined to typically Republican demographic groups. A majority of Hispanics thinks that the bill will make health care worse, as do 56 percent of those who are undecided about their congressional vote and 27 percent of those who approve of Obama’s job performance. Eighty-one percent of voters say they are concerned about the bill’s effect on the deficit, with 54 percent characterizing themselves as “very” concerned.
Likely voters were asked whether Congress should consider the current bill or an alternative that took “a few more modest steps” such as “allowing the purchase of insurance across state lines to improve competition, creating a risk pool to help people with pre-existing conditions afford coverage, and curbing lawsuits against doctors.” Given these alternatives, 61 percent favored them and only 21 percent the current bill.
This conservative health-care reform attracts bipartisan support. Democrats favor the alternative over the current bill by 47 to 34 percent, liberals by 44 to 39 percent, and Obama approvers by 46 to 33 percent. Independents favor it by 61 to 21 percent.
The poll holds out little hope that an anti–Wall Street “populist” turn by the Democrats will help them. Likely voters were asked which statement came closest to their own opinion, that “we should impose a new tax on banks because they have benefited so much from bailouts and need to be reined in” or that “bank customers would end up paying the tax and the economy would suffer.” The pro-bank-tax line got 38 percent agreement while the anti-bank-tax line got 52 percent. Independents broke 50 to 33 percent against the bank tax. Perhaps surprisingly, union households, which are supposed to be a stronghold for this sort of populism, were almost exactly in line with the electorate as a whole in opposition. In this poll, the popular form of populism is conservative: 88 percent of voters want to make it easier to fire government workers for substandard performance.
This conservatism has its limits: Voters are still averse to cutbacks in Social Security and Medicare. Voters also believe that the deficit makes tax cuts unaffordable, although particular tax-cut proposals often draw high support, and voters strongly oppose tax increases.
The likely voters of 2010 are not in the market for business bashing, for big government, or for Obamacare, and they favor conservative policies to address their concerns. They do not hate the president — again, more of them approve of his job performance than disapprove of it — but they are not interested in what he is selling.
Ramesh Ponnuru
Wednesday, January 27, 2009
President Obama will be delivering his State of the Union address tonight to an increasingly conservative electorate. A new poll of 1,000 likely voters, done by John McLaughlin and Associates for the National Review Institute, finds voters skeptical of big government, hostile to the health-care legislation being considered on Capitol Hill, and interested in conservative alternatives.
The poll finds that 50 percent of voters approve of Obama’s job performance and 46 percent disapprove — but there the good news for Democrats ends. Republicans lead Democrats by five points on the generic congressional ballot, and are behind by only four among Hispanics.
On ideological questions this electorate leans right. Self-identified liberals have more confidence that government spending and intervention will improve the economy than that free enterprise and individual initiative will. The electorate disagrees, 65 to 25 percent. Self-identified liberals worry more about big business than big government; again the electorate disagrees, 57 to 25 percent. Likely voters do not believe that this administration knows how business works or how to help it succeed by 53 to 42 percent; independents and people who own small businesses were even more skeptical. Seventy-nine percent of voters agree that Congress has lost sight of its constitutional limits; 53 percent of them “strongly” agree.
The health-care polling spells disaster from start to finish for liberals. Likely 2010 voters believe that the health-care legislation being considered will make health care worse rather than better (56 to 29 percent) and that it will increase costs rather than lower them (62 to 24 percent). These worries are not confined to typically Republican demographic groups. A majority of Hispanics thinks that the bill will make health care worse, as do 56 percent of those who are undecided about their congressional vote and 27 percent of those who approve of Obama’s job performance. Eighty-one percent of voters say they are concerned about the bill’s effect on the deficit, with 54 percent characterizing themselves as “very” concerned.
Likely voters were asked whether Congress should consider the current bill or an alternative that took “a few more modest steps” such as “allowing the purchase of insurance across state lines to improve competition, creating a risk pool to help people with pre-existing conditions afford coverage, and curbing lawsuits against doctors.” Given these alternatives, 61 percent favored them and only 21 percent the current bill.
This conservative health-care reform attracts bipartisan support. Democrats favor the alternative over the current bill by 47 to 34 percent, liberals by 44 to 39 percent, and Obama approvers by 46 to 33 percent. Independents favor it by 61 to 21 percent.
The poll holds out little hope that an anti–Wall Street “populist” turn by the Democrats will help them. Likely voters were asked which statement came closest to their own opinion, that “we should impose a new tax on banks because they have benefited so much from bailouts and need to be reined in” or that “bank customers would end up paying the tax and the economy would suffer.” The pro-bank-tax line got 38 percent agreement while the anti-bank-tax line got 52 percent. Independents broke 50 to 33 percent against the bank tax. Perhaps surprisingly, union households, which are supposed to be a stronghold for this sort of populism, were almost exactly in line with the electorate as a whole in opposition. In this poll, the popular form of populism is conservative: 88 percent of voters want to make it easier to fire government workers for substandard performance.
This conservatism has its limits: Voters are still averse to cutbacks in Social Security and Medicare. Voters also believe that the deficit makes tax cuts unaffordable, although particular tax-cut proposals often draw high support, and voters strongly oppose tax increases.
The likely voters of 2010 are not in the market for business bashing, for big government, or for Obamacare, and they favor conservative policies to address their concerns. They do not hate the president — again, more of them approve of his job performance than disapprove of it — but they are not interested in what he is selling.
The Joke Ban
Mike Adams
Thursday, January 28, 2010
The University of Northern Colorado (UNCO) has decided it’s time to prohibit "Bias Motivated Incidents." When you hear about a “bias motivated incident,” maybe you’re thinking about a cross burning, or something of that nature. But at UNCO the “bias motivated incident” could simply be an "inappropriate joke" that is motivated by some form of bias.
The UNCO policy also says that “Any discriminatory act is a violation of the Housing & Residence Life Student Code of Conduct.” Well, what do they mean by “any discriminatory act”? According to the UNCO handbook this includes, but is not limited to, “racism, ageism, sexism, and/or homophobia.” And (get ready for this!) included in the definition is “intentionally, recklessly or negligently causing physical, emotional, or mental harm to any person.”
In my view, there are at least three fundamental dangers associated with the UNCO speech code.
First, and perhaps most obviously, it empowers people to trump the speech of others by simply becoming offended. So it really protects and defends the speech of those least able to protect and defend their own speech through reasoned discourse. It is not often that the speech of the emotionally frail has much merit. People who fall apart emotionally in response to protected speech are unlikely to have the intellectual firepower needed to articulate ideas from which the rest of us can benefit. They are simply being empowered to trump the speech of their emotional and intellectual superiors.
Second, it empowers people to trump the speech of others by pretending to be offended. When this occurs, the speech code is rewarding more than just the intellectually inferior – it is rewarding the morally inferior. It is using faux outrage to cancel honest opinion.
Finally, as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) points out, laws must "give a person of ordinary intelligence a reasonable opportunity to know what is prohibited, so that he may act accordingly." Grayned v. City of Rockford, 408 U.S. 104, 108-09 (1972). If people do not know what is prohibited there will be a dramatic chilling effect on free speech.
Those who must live under UNCO's policy cannot know what could cause another person "emotional" or "mental" harm. That is because the policy does not require that the speaker intends to cause the alleged harm. The fact that someone subjectively feels "emotionally harmed" by the speech is enough for UNCO. So the speaker who correctly imagines that just about any idea is bound to offend someone, somewhere, is deterred from speaking on any potentially controversial topic.
This reminds me of a university, which formerly had a speech code banning “challenging” speech. That university apparently wanted students to go off to school for four years without ever being challenged. Does UNCO want an educational environment characterized by, and only by, discourse that could never be deemed controversial by anyone?
College administrators often fail to distinguish between speech that is severe and persistent enough to constitute harassment and simple isolated expressions of protected speech. It appears as if they are utterly unable to write a code that could pass constitutional muster. More likely, they are fully aware that they can sustain the code through the twin threat of internal formal sanction and social stigmatization. Many would like to defeat such a patently illegal policy. Few wish to be dubbed racist, sexist, or homophobic in the process.
There are many things that can be done to defeat such a policy. I intend to start by sending the following “inappropriate joke” to the Dean of Students at UNCO.
Q: How many UNCO administrators does it take to unravel a logically coherent and constitutionally permissible Code of Student conduct?
A: Ten. You need nine to write the code and one to take offense at logical coherence and constitutional orthodoxy.
But there is something serious that students at UNCO can do about this policy. They can begin to bombard the Dean of Students with all kinds of inappropriate jokes. For example:
Q: What do you call an Irish communist?
A: O’Bama.
Hopefully, someone in the UNCO Dean of Students Office will be Irish, communist, or will simply have made a public profession of faith in Barack Obama as his Lord and Savior. In other words, hopefully someone will be offended. And, hopefully, UNCO will decide to bring charges against the offender!
When that happens, you can just email me at adams_mike@hotmail.com. I’ll make sure you get a lawyer. And for those who believe your college or university should be publicly chastised for an unconstitutional speech code, please e-mail speechcodes@thefire.org with a link to the policy and a brief description of why you think attention should be drawn to the code.
After FIRE is done critiquing the code, I will, if necessary, seek a plaintiff to have it overturned in a court of law. We need both humiliation and litigation to solve the speech code issue. Otherwise, our college campuses will continue to be crude and inappropriate jokes.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
The University of Northern Colorado (UNCO) has decided it’s time to prohibit "Bias Motivated Incidents." When you hear about a “bias motivated incident,” maybe you’re thinking about a cross burning, or something of that nature. But at UNCO the “bias motivated incident” could simply be an "inappropriate joke" that is motivated by some form of bias.
The UNCO policy also says that “Any discriminatory act is a violation of the Housing & Residence Life Student Code of Conduct.” Well, what do they mean by “any discriminatory act”? According to the UNCO handbook this includes, but is not limited to, “racism, ageism, sexism, and/or homophobia.” And (get ready for this!) included in the definition is “intentionally, recklessly or negligently causing physical, emotional, or mental harm to any person.”
In my view, there are at least three fundamental dangers associated with the UNCO speech code.
First, and perhaps most obviously, it empowers people to trump the speech of others by simply becoming offended. So it really protects and defends the speech of those least able to protect and defend their own speech through reasoned discourse. It is not often that the speech of the emotionally frail has much merit. People who fall apart emotionally in response to protected speech are unlikely to have the intellectual firepower needed to articulate ideas from which the rest of us can benefit. They are simply being empowered to trump the speech of their emotional and intellectual superiors.
Second, it empowers people to trump the speech of others by pretending to be offended. When this occurs, the speech code is rewarding more than just the intellectually inferior – it is rewarding the morally inferior. It is using faux outrage to cancel honest opinion.
Finally, as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) points out, laws must "give a person of ordinary intelligence a reasonable opportunity to know what is prohibited, so that he may act accordingly." Grayned v. City of Rockford, 408 U.S. 104, 108-09 (1972). If people do not know what is prohibited there will be a dramatic chilling effect on free speech.
Those who must live under UNCO's policy cannot know what could cause another person "emotional" or "mental" harm. That is because the policy does not require that the speaker intends to cause the alleged harm. The fact that someone subjectively feels "emotionally harmed" by the speech is enough for UNCO. So the speaker who correctly imagines that just about any idea is bound to offend someone, somewhere, is deterred from speaking on any potentially controversial topic.
This reminds me of a university, which formerly had a speech code banning “challenging” speech. That university apparently wanted students to go off to school for four years without ever being challenged. Does UNCO want an educational environment characterized by, and only by, discourse that could never be deemed controversial by anyone?
College administrators often fail to distinguish between speech that is severe and persistent enough to constitute harassment and simple isolated expressions of protected speech. It appears as if they are utterly unable to write a code that could pass constitutional muster. More likely, they are fully aware that they can sustain the code through the twin threat of internal formal sanction and social stigmatization. Many would like to defeat such a patently illegal policy. Few wish to be dubbed racist, sexist, or homophobic in the process.
There are many things that can be done to defeat such a policy. I intend to start by sending the following “inappropriate joke” to the Dean of Students at UNCO.
Q: How many UNCO administrators does it take to unravel a logically coherent and constitutionally permissible Code of Student conduct?
A: Ten. You need nine to write the code and one to take offense at logical coherence and constitutional orthodoxy.
But there is something serious that students at UNCO can do about this policy. They can begin to bombard the Dean of Students with all kinds of inappropriate jokes. For example:
Q: What do you call an Irish communist?
A: O’Bama.
Hopefully, someone in the UNCO Dean of Students Office will be Irish, communist, or will simply have made a public profession of faith in Barack Obama as his Lord and Savior. In other words, hopefully someone will be offended. And, hopefully, UNCO will decide to bring charges against the offender!
When that happens, you can just email me at adams_mike@hotmail.com. I’ll make sure you get a lawyer. And for those who believe your college or university should be publicly chastised for an unconstitutional speech code, please e-mail speechcodes@thefire.org with a link to the policy and a brief description of why you think attention should be drawn to the code.
After FIRE is done critiquing the code, I will, if necessary, seek a plaintiff to have it overturned in a court of law. We need both humiliation and litigation to solve the speech code issue. Otherwise, our college campuses will continue to be crude and inappropriate jokes.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Obama versus Obama
Will the real Barack Obama (if there is one) please stand up?
Victor Davis Hanson
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
There is little need any more to offer consistent opposition to Barack Obama, since he himself is already running hard against the many previous incarnations of Barack Obama.
The first one we met was Barack the radical progressive, in his primary campaign against Hillary. Then in the general election we were introduced to the centrist Obama, who promised to invade Pakistan if need be, called for an end to partisanship, and lectured about fiscal sobriety.
Then with congressional majorities, soaring public support, and obsequious media attention came the leftist ideologue President Obama, who tried to ram through a statist health-care regime, gobbled up private enterprises, and gave us Anita Dunn and Van Jones.
Now we are back to sorta centrist Obama, who is going to fight terror, not apologize any more to the Muslim world, and freeze spending rather than give us another $2 trillion in debt.
These serial reset Obamas are quite astonishing even for a politician.
Take the examples of public advocate Obama’s once idealistic promotion of C-SPAN broadcasts of the health-care debate, and Obama’s current fiery lamentations over the Supreme Court decision overturning elements of the McCain-Feingold limitations on corporate campaign donations.
But Obama, the current reformer, seems to be railing at Obama, the cynical backroom organizer, who would never dare televise anything about his thousand-page health-care mess. Yet Obama II not only nixed Obama I’s repeated promises of C-SPAN debates, but outsourced his health-care bill to congressional insiders, who did more backroom-dealing, vote-buying, and quid-pro-quoing than at any other time in recent memory.
So there is no consistency even in the flip-flopping. Obama III as the sudden guardian of campaign-financing curbs is antithetical to Obama I, the rejectionist of any government interference. In 2008 Obama I destroyed the idea of public campaign financing of presidential elections. Indeed, in his efforts to raise a billion dollars of private money, Obama became the first presidential candidate in the general election in over 30 years to back out of public financing, an idea which is now more or less kaput.
So what is the present-day Obama III? Nothing and everything. We have no idea whether he is against corporate campaign contributions, given Obama I/II’s voracious appetite for them. Will he accept public campaign financing in the future? Only if his money machine stalls? Is C-SPAN necessary for or irrelevant to public debate?
Take also terrorism. Obama 1.0, the champion of civil liberties, based the entire foreign-policy side of his 2007–08 campaign on the notion of George W. Bush’s shredding the Constitution in his unnecessary War on Terror and his venture into Iraq. Obama at one time or another attacked almost every Bush protocol — e.g., renditions (“shipping away prisoners in the dead of night”), military tribunals (“flawed military commission system”), preventive detention (“detaining thousands without charge or trial”), the surge of troops into Iraq (“not working”), the Patriot Act (“shoddy and dangerous”). We were to have all combat troops out of Iraq by August 2010, and Guantanamo (“a legal black hole,” “a sad chapter in American history,” “a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus”) closed last week. Predator strikes, according to candidate Obama, recklessly terrorized civilians.
But Obama 2.0 seemed to be ignoring Obama 1.0. Our realist president embraced renditions and tribunals, still held terrorists in preventive detention, kept troops in Iraq, championed the Patriot Act, and apparently counted on Guantanamo to stay open. Three days after he took office Obama ordered our first reported Hellfire missile attacks inside Pakistan itself.
And Obama 3.0? His team renamed the War on Terror “overseas contingency operations” and “man-caused disasters,” dithered on troop escalations in Afghanistan, allowed his attorney general to go after CIA interrogators, gave the Christmas Day al-Qaeda would-be mass murderer his Miranda rights, and plans to try in a civilian court the architect of 9/11 a few blocks from where his evil genius led to the incineration of 3,000 Americans. But wait — Obama 3.0 has also belatedly expanded the war in Afghanistan, has vastly increased the controversial judge/jury/executioner Predator attacks, and is talking more about terror and less about the mythical achievements of the Muslim world. That’s quite an abyss to bridge — insisting that a known mass murderer like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gets his Miranda rights while blasting to smithereens suspected terrorists and their families in their living rooms in Pakistan.
Obama versus Obama versus Obama could be played out in almost any venue. In 2008 he was the candidate who, in response to the McCain-Palin “Drill, baby, drill” mantra during the energy-price spike, supported more drilling, expansion of nuclear power, and using all our energy resources. Then, in the euphoria of early 2009, it was to be cap-and-trade and the solar/wind vision of Van Jones. Now there is a nothing-and-everything energy policy, apparently depending on the polls and the price of energy at any given moment.
Candidate Obama warned that the “Bush deficits” would cripple his imaginative spending agenda. Yet President Obama damned the red-ink torpedoes and went full speed ahead into far greater deficits, resulting in an addition to the national debt of nearly $2 trillion in his first year alone. Yet reset-button Obama is already calling for a national commission to freeze (some) spending and “address” the spiraling deficit.
Two observations. First, there is a hazy pattern to the Obama tri-step: soar with progressive platitudes when there is no responsibility of governance; then as president slowly learn that a center-right country is not ready to blame itself for radical Islam or destroy the private-sector entrepreneurship that made America wealthy beyond imagination; and end up with an ad hoc, poll-driven policy of everything and nothing.
The problem with Obama 1-2-3 is that progressives rightly feel betrayed and now see their once-in-a-century savior exposed as an inept triangulator, without the Machiavellian savvy of Bill Clinton or the input of Dick Morris.
Conservatives, however, who should appreciate that Obama is still fighting in Afghanistan and has kept the Bush anti-terrorism protocols, are enraged about the KSM trial, the Abdulmutallab mess, and the demagoguing about the CIA and Guantanamo.
Second, this absence of consistency, of identity even, was entirely predictable — given what the nation knew of newcomer candidate Barack Obama in the brief two-year period we were introduced to him.
He sermonized on purple-state America after compiling the most partisan record in the Senate. He talked of political and racial reconciliation, while assembling the most radically divisive cast of intimates imaginable — Bill Ayers, Rashid Khalidi, the Rev. James Meeks, Father Michael Pfleger, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. He soared about a new transparency, but unlike rival McCain never fully released his medical records, his college transcripts, or the details of his Senate race.
If we do not know who Barack Obama is, that may be because Barack Obama does not know who Barack Obama is. Barry Dunham? Barry Soetoro? Barack Soetoro? Barry Obama? Barack Obama?
Is he the racial healer who called his own ailing grandmother a “typical white person”? The white middle-class prep-schooler, or the authentically African-American community organizer?
The hip, yuppie multicultural agnostic — or the devotee of the them/us wacky old-time religion of Trinity Church?
The working-class populist who ridiculed the culture of rural Pennsylvania?
The modern-day Cicero who needs a teleprompter?
The Harvard Law graduate and Chicago law professor who gets confused about everything from Cinco de Mayo to the number of states? The Chicago progressive who regularly voted present? The reformist Senate candidate whose rivals in both the primary and general elections mysteriously found their divorce records leaked?
By pleasing his immediate audience with his mellifluous rhetoric and clichés about his racial transcendence, Obama has always charmed his way up his cursus honorum. Why worry about the nonexistent record, broken promises, empty platitudes, and self-contradictions when his mesmerized audiences believed that he believed in them, and lapped up the inexpensive absolutions for their assorted past sins?
The only catch is that Barack Obama no longer navigates among gullible Ivy League deans, naïve philanthropists, and inept organizers and bureaucrats. No, he is running a country that still has millions of no-nonsense truckers, teachers, small-business owners, and general skeptics who don’t give a damn about either Harvard or Chicago. And in their eyes, after a year, the game is about up.
Yet in a weird sort of consistency, Obama remains what he always was. Whatever we choose to see in this glass mirror, he will sorta, kinda reflect our vision.
Obama is our first everything-and-nothing president.
Victor Davis Hanson
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
There is little need any more to offer consistent opposition to Barack Obama, since he himself is already running hard against the many previous incarnations of Barack Obama.
The first one we met was Barack the radical progressive, in his primary campaign against Hillary. Then in the general election we were introduced to the centrist Obama, who promised to invade Pakistan if need be, called for an end to partisanship, and lectured about fiscal sobriety.
Then with congressional majorities, soaring public support, and obsequious media attention came the leftist ideologue President Obama, who tried to ram through a statist health-care regime, gobbled up private enterprises, and gave us Anita Dunn and Van Jones.
Now we are back to sorta centrist Obama, who is going to fight terror, not apologize any more to the Muslim world, and freeze spending rather than give us another $2 trillion in debt.
These serial reset Obamas are quite astonishing even for a politician.
Take the examples of public advocate Obama’s once idealistic promotion of C-SPAN broadcasts of the health-care debate, and Obama’s current fiery lamentations over the Supreme Court decision overturning elements of the McCain-Feingold limitations on corporate campaign donations.
But Obama, the current reformer, seems to be railing at Obama, the cynical backroom organizer, who would never dare televise anything about his thousand-page health-care mess. Yet Obama II not only nixed Obama I’s repeated promises of C-SPAN debates, but outsourced his health-care bill to congressional insiders, who did more backroom-dealing, vote-buying, and quid-pro-quoing than at any other time in recent memory.
So there is no consistency even in the flip-flopping. Obama III as the sudden guardian of campaign-financing curbs is antithetical to Obama I, the rejectionist of any government interference. In 2008 Obama I destroyed the idea of public campaign financing of presidential elections. Indeed, in his efforts to raise a billion dollars of private money, Obama became the first presidential candidate in the general election in over 30 years to back out of public financing, an idea which is now more or less kaput.
So what is the present-day Obama III? Nothing and everything. We have no idea whether he is against corporate campaign contributions, given Obama I/II’s voracious appetite for them. Will he accept public campaign financing in the future? Only if his money machine stalls? Is C-SPAN necessary for or irrelevant to public debate?
Take also terrorism. Obama 1.0, the champion of civil liberties, based the entire foreign-policy side of his 2007–08 campaign on the notion of George W. Bush’s shredding the Constitution in his unnecessary War on Terror and his venture into Iraq. Obama at one time or another attacked almost every Bush protocol — e.g., renditions (“shipping away prisoners in the dead of night”), military tribunals (“flawed military commission system”), preventive detention (“detaining thousands without charge or trial”), the surge of troops into Iraq (“not working”), the Patriot Act (“shoddy and dangerous”). We were to have all combat troops out of Iraq by August 2010, and Guantanamo (“a legal black hole,” “a sad chapter in American history,” “a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus”) closed last week. Predator strikes, according to candidate Obama, recklessly terrorized civilians.
But Obama 2.0 seemed to be ignoring Obama 1.0. Our realist president embraced renditions and tribunals, still held terrorists in preventive detention, kept troops in Iraq, championed the Patriot Act, and apparently counted on Guantanamo to stay open. Three days after he took office Obama ordered our first reported Hellfire missile attacks inside Pakistan itself.
And Obama 3.0? His team renamed the War on Terror “overseas contingency operations” and “man-caused disasters,” dithered on troop escalations in Afghanistan, allowed his attorney general to go after CIA interrogators, gave the Christmas Day al-Qaeda would-be mass murderer his Miranda rights, and plans to try in a civilian court the architect of 9/11 a few blocks from where his evil genius led to the incineration of 3,000 Americans. But wait — Obama 3.0 has also belatedly expanded the war in Afghanistan, has vastly increased the controversial judge/jury/executioner Predator attacks, and is talking more about terror and less about the mythical achievements of the Muslim world. That’s quite an abyss to bridge — insisting that a known mass murderer like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gets his Miranda rights while blasting to smithereens suspected terrorists and their families in their living rooms in Pakistan.
Obama versus Obama versus Obama could be played out in almost any venue. In 2008 he was the candidate who, in response to the McCain-Palin “Drill, baby, drill” mantra during the energy-price spike, supported more drilling, expansion of nuclear power, and using all our energy resources. Then, in the euphoria of early 2009, it was to be cap-and-trade and the solar/wind vision of Van Jones. Now there is a nothing-and-everything energy policy, apparently depending on the polls and the price of energy at any given moment.
Candidate Obama warned that the “Bush deficits” would cripple his imaginative spending agenda. Yet President Obama damned the red-ink torpedoes and went full speed ahead into far greater deficits, resulting in an addition to the national debt of nearly $2 trillion in his first year alone. Yet reset-button Obama is already calling for a national commission to freeze (some) spending and “address” the spiraling deficit.
Two observations. First, there is a hazy pattern to the Obama tri-step: soar with progressive platitudes when there is no responsibility of governance; then as president slowly learn that a center-right country is not ready to blame itself for radical Islam or destroy the private-sector entrepreneurship that made America wealthy beyond imagination; and end up with an ad hoc, poll-driven policy of everything and nothing.
The problem with Obama 1-2-3 is that progressives rightly feel betrayed and now see their once-in-a-century savior exposed as an inept triangulator, without the Machiavellian savvy of Bill Clinton or the input of Dick Morris.
Conservatives, however, who should appreciate that Obama is still fighting in Afghanistan and has kept the Bush anti-terrorism protocols, are enraged about the KSM trial, the Abdulmutallab mess, and the demagoguing about the CIA and Guantanamo.
Second, this absence of consistency, of identity even, was entirely predictable — given what the nation knew of newcomer candidate Barack Obama in the brief two-year period we were introduced to him.
He sermonized on purple-state America after compiling the most partisan record in the Senate. He talked of political and racial reconciliation, while assembling the most radically divisive cast of intimates imaginable — Bill Ayers, Rashid Khalidi, the Rev. James Meeks, Father Michael Pfleger, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. He soared about a new transparency, but unlike rival McCain never fully released his medical records, his college transcripts, or the details of his Senate race.
If we do not know who Barack Obama is, that may be because Barack Obama does not know who Barack Obama is. Barry Dunham? Barry Soetoro? Barack Soetoro? Barry Obama? Barack Obama?
Is he the racial healer who called his own ailing grandmother a “typical white person”? The white middle-class prep-schooler, or the authentically African-American community organizer?
The hip, yuppie multicultural agnostic — or the devotee of the them/us wacky old-time religion of Trinity Church?
The working-class populist who ridiculed the culture of rural Pennsylvania?
The modern-day Cicero who needs a teleprompter?
The Harvard Law graduate and Chicago law professor who gets confused about everything from Cinco de Mayo to the number of states? The Chicago progressive who regularly voted present? The reformist Senate candidate whose rivals in both the primary and general elections mysteriously found their divorce records leaked?
By pleasing his immediate audience with his mellifluous rhetoric and clichés about his racial transcendence, Obama has always charmed his way up his cursus honorum. Why worry about the nonexistent record, broken promises, empty platitudes, and self-contradictions when his mesmerized audiences believed that he believed in them, and lapped up the inexpensive absolutions for their assorted past sins?
The only catch is that Barack Obama no longer navigates among gullible Ivy League deans, naïve philanthropists, and inept organizers and bureaucrats. No, he is running a country that still has millions of no-nonsense truckers, teachers, small-business owners, and general skeptics who don’t give a damn about either Harvard or Chicago. And in their eyes, after a year, the game is about up.
Yet in a weird sort of consistency, Obama remains what he always was. Whatever we choose to see in this glass mirror, he will sorta, kinda reflect our vision.
Obama is our first everything-and-nothing president.
It's Time for Obama to Look At Terrorism Differently
Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
It is always dangerous to mistake your ideological preferences for shrewd political strategy, but that is precisely what President Obama and his advisors have done with the war on terror.
On the right, the prevailing critique of the president's approach to the war on terror is that it is both deeply ideological and unserious. Obama remains fixated on the idea of closing Guantanamo, even if it means keeping irredeemable terrorists in U.S. prisons indefinitely. The administration initially banned the use of the term "war on terror," preferring the ridiculous bureaucratese "overseas contingency operations." Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano favors "man-caused disasters" to describe 9/11-style terrorism. Attorney General Eric Holder has decided to send self-professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four others to a civilian trial in New York City, allegedly without consulting anyone save his wife and brother.
Immediately after the Fort Hood shootings and again after the foiled Christmas Day attack by suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the president's initial response was to look at the incidents through the now-familiar ideological prism. These were "isolated" attacks from individual "extremists."
Admirably, Obama was quick to correct the record about Abdulmutallab, contradicting Napolitano's initial contention that "the system worked." Rather, Obama admitted there was "systemic failure." Since then, the media have reported that Abdulmutallab's arrest and interrogation were as flawed as the system that let him on the plane. FBI agents interviewed the jihadist for 50 minutes, according to the Associated Press, before he was read his Miranda rights and lawyered up, and no one even bothered to consult with Obama's national security team.
Meanwhile, pro-Obama pundits have been rolling out a revealing argument: Terrorism happens; get over it. For instance, Time's Peter Beinart and Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria argue that the American response to the Christmas Day bomber was "hysteria" or "panic." Both say that the threat from al-Qaida is overblown and distracts us from smart policies and more important priorities.
Whatever the merits of these arguments and Obama's responses, one thing is becoming clear: They amount to awful politics. One of Scott Brown's biggest applause lines leading up to the Massachusetts special election last week to fill Ted Kennedy's Senate seat was that "in dealing with terrorists, our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them, not lawyers to defend them."
"People talk about the potency of the health-care issue," Brown's political strategist, Eric Fehrnstrom, told National Review, "but from our own internal polling, the more potent issue here in Massachusetts was terrorism and the treatment of enemy combatants."
Indeed, after years of debate over the tactic, a Rasmussen poll found that 58 percent of Americans favored waterboarding Abdulmutallab to get intelligence.
Of course, if the Obama administration's reluctance to treat terrorists like enemies is derived entirely from deep-seated ideological principle, then it should stick to its guns. But couldn't some of the reluctance be a holdover from the politics of the George W. Bush years? The Democrats came into power believing that downplaying and downgrading the war on terror was both right and politically smart. The former is debatable, the latter unsupportable.
Overseas, Obama doubled down in Afghanistan and has lobbed more Predator drones at al-Qaida than Bush did. His base didn't like it, but it was nonetheless both right and politically shrewd. The White House insists that it is not ideological but pragmatic, and yet it clings to an ideological nostrum that hawkishness on terrorism is not only atavistic but at odds with a progressive agenda at home.
The British empire destroyed Thuggee terrorism in India in the 1830s. (The Thuggees may have killed 1 million people.) But the war on Thuggeeism hardly dominated British politics. Bill Clinton initiated "extraordinary rendition" without any serious political blowback or distraction (in part because it was largely kept secret). LBJ's Great Society and civil rights victories coincided with escalation in Vietnam. And let us not forget that domestic spending skyrocketed under Bush even as he prosecuted the war on terror.
Question: Would Obama's domestic prospects look better or worse right now if he'd correctly treated the Fort Hood and Christmas Day attacks as terrorism from the outset?
Purely partisan conservatives should hope that Obama continues to see the war on terror through the same lens he's used for the last year. But it would be better for America -- and Obama -- if he saw the light.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
It is always dangerous to mistake your ideological preferences for shrewd political strategy, but that is precisely what President Obama and his advisors have done with the war on terror.
On the right, the prevailing critique of the president's approach to the war on terror is that it is both deeply ideological and unserious. Obama remains fixated on the idea of closing Guantanamo, even if it means keeping irredeemable terrorists in U.S. prisons indefinitely. The administration initially banned the use of the term "war on terror," preferring the ridiculous bureaucratese "overseas contingency operations." Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano favors "man-caused disasters" to describe 9/11-style terrorism. Attorney General Eric Holder has decided to send self-professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four others to a civilian trial in New York City, allegedly without consulting anyone save his wife and brother.
Immediately after the Fort Hood shootings and again after the foiled Christmas Day attack by suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the president's initial response was to look at the incidents through the now-familiar ideological prism. These were "isolated" attacks from individual "extremists."
Admirably, Obama was quick to correct the record about Abdulmutallab, contradicting Napolitano's initial contention that "the system worked." Rather, Obama admitted there was "systemic failure." Since then, the media have reported that Abdulmutallab's arrest and interrogation were as flawed as the system that let him on the plane. FBI agents interviewed the jihadist for 50 minutes, according to the Associated Press, before he was read his Miranda rights and lawyered up, and no one even bothered to consult with Obama's national security team.
Meanwhile, pro-Obama pundits have been rolling out a revealing argument: Terrorism happens; get over it. For instance, Time's Peter Beinart and Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria argue that the American response to the Christmas Day bomber was "hysteria" or "panic." Both say that the threat from al-Qaida is overblown and distracts us from smart policies and more important priorities.
Whatever the merits of these arguments and Obama's responses, one thing is becoming clear: They amount to awful politics. One of Scott Brown's biggest applause lines leading up to the Massachusetts special election last week to fill Ted Kennedy's Senate seat was that "in dealing with terrorists, our tax dollars should pay for weapons to stop them, not lawyers to defend them."
"People talk about the potency of the health-care issue," Brown's political strategist, Eric Fehrnstrom, told National Review, "but from our own internal polling, the more potent issue here in Massachusetts was terrorism and the treatment of enemy combatants."
Indeed, after years of debate over the tactic, a Rasmussen poll found that 58 percent of Americans favored waterboarding Abdulmutallab to get intelligence.
Of course, if the Obama administration's reluctance to treat terrorists like enemies is derived entirely from deep-seated ideological principle, then it should stick to its guns. But couldn't some of the reluctance be a holdover from the politics of the George W. Bush years? The Democrats came into power believing that downplaying and downgrading the war on terror was both right and politically smart. The former is debatable, the latter unsupportable.
Overseas, Obama doubled down in Afghanistan and has lobbed more Predator drones at al-Qaida than Bush did. His base didn't like it, but it was nonetheless both right and politically shrewd. The White House insists that it is not ideological but pragmatic, and yet it clings to an ideological nostrum that hawkishness on terrorism is not only atavistic but at odds with a progressive agenda at home.
The British empire destroyed Thuggee terrorism in India in the 1830s. (The Thuggees may have killed 1 million people.) But the war on Thuggeeism hardly dominated British politics. Bill Clinton initiated "extraordinary rendition" without any serious political blowback or distraction (in part because it was largely kept secret). LBJ's Great Society and civil rights victories coincided with escalation in Vietnam. And let us not forget that domestic spending skyrocketed under Bush even as he prosecuted the war on terror.
Question: Would Obama's domestic prospects look better or worse right now if he'd correctly treated the Fort Hood and Christmas Day attacks as terrorism from the outset?
Purely partisan conservatives should hope that Obama continues to see the war on terror through the same lens he's used for the last year. But it would be better for America -- and Obama -- if he saw the light.
Blacks Held to Lower Standards in Perpetuity
La Shawn Barber
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
One idea that transcends political lines is that blacks are inferior and should be held to lower standards in perpetuity.
In 2007, the Department of Justice (DOJ) under George W. Bush filed suit against the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) for violating the Civil Rights Act. The Vulcan Society, a fraternal organization of black firefighters, joined the lawsuit. Did the department hire and fire based on race? Did it deny promotions based on race? No. The department requires all candidates seeking employment, regardless of race, to take an exam that assesses "reading comprehension, problem solving, spatial recognition and applying rules to general concepts." For reasons that will be discussed and debated until the end of time, blacks as a group don't score as well as whites on such tests.
Last summer, a federal judge ruled that FDNY discriminated against blacks and Hispanics with an exam used in 1999 and 2002. Two weeks ago, the same judge ruled that New York City intentionally discriminated against minorities by continuing to use the exam.
Earlier this month, Barack Obama's DOJ filed suit against New Jersey and its Civil Service Commission for using an exam that "discriminates" against blacks and Hispanics, because these groups scored "statistically significantly lower" than whites.
"This complaint should send a clear message to all public employers that employment practices with unlawful discriminatory impact on account of race or national origin will not be tolerated," Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez told The Star-Ledger. "The Justice Department will take all necessary action to ensure that such discriminatory practices are eliminated and that the victims of such practices are made whole."
As head of DOJ's Civil Rights Division, Perez is only getting started. He's promised to bring more disparate impact lawsuits. In December, he told a left-leaning audience at the leftist American Constitution Society (oh, the irony!) that his department has "dusted off the disparate impact theory. If the fact support the use of disparate impact theory, whether it’s in the housing context, the voting context, the employment context, we will use the disparate impact theory because every court that has ruled on this has said that it is permissible to do so."
The disparate impact theory of liability was articulated in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971). The Supreme Court held that for purposes of hiring, an employer's use of a high school diploma requirement and aptitude tests violated the Civil Rights Act. Black applicants disproportionately lacked diplomas and/or scored low on the tests. Under the disparate impact analysis, discrimination need not be intentional. Even if an employment practice is "facially neutral," it's suspect if it has an adverse impact on members of a protected class. To avoid liability, businesses would have to demonstrate that such tests are a business necessity or related to job performance.
Racial minorities, especially blacks, should feel highly insulted by the entrenched assumption that they should not be expected to compete against whites on pencil-and-paper multiple choice civil service tests. Not only should they speak out against such condescending assumptions, they should refuse any and all special treatment, and demand to be treated as capable and responsible individuals. Such attitudes may be the impetus needed to put an end to these ridiculous and embarrassing lawsuits.
Remember the whole point of the civil rights movement: to be treated equally as individuals by the government, without regard to race. Every lawsuit and complaint that cites "disparate impact" confirms that our government believes blacks and other preferred minorities should be held to lower standards in perpetuity.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
One idea that transcends political lines is that blacks are inferior and should be held to lower standards in perpetuity.
In 2007, the Department of Justice (DOJ) under George W. Bush filed suit against the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) for violating the Civil Rights Act. The Vulcan Society, a fraternal organization of black firefighters, joined the lawsuit. Did the department hire and fire based on race? Did it deny promotions based on race? No. The department requires all candidates seeking employment, regardless of race, to take an exam that assesses "reading comprehension, problem solving, spatial recognition and applying rules to general concepts." For reasons that will be discussed and debated until the end of time, blacks as a group don't score as well as whites on such tests.
Last summer, a federal judge ruled that FDNY discriminated against blacks and Hispanics with an exam used in 1999 and 2002. Two weeks ago, the same judge ruled that New York City intentionally discriminated against minorities by continuing to use the exam.
Earlier this month, Barack Obama's DOJ filed suit against New Jersey and its Civil Service Commission for using an exam that "discriminates" against blacks and Hispanics, because these groups scored "statistically significantly lower" than whites.
"This complaint should send a clear message to all public employers that employment practices with unlawful discriminatory impact on account of race or national origin will not be tolerated," Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez told The Star-Ledger. "The Justice Department will take all necessary action to ensure that such discriminatory practices are eliminated and that the victims of such practices are made whole."
As head of DOJ's Civil Rights Division, Perez is only getting started. He's promised to bring more disparate impact lawsuits. In December, he told a left-leaning audience at the leftist American Constitution Society (oh, the irony!) that his department has "dusted off the disparate impact theory. If the fact support the use of disparate impact theory, whether it’s in the housing context, the voting context, the employment context, we will use the disparate impact theory because every court that has ruled on this has said that it is permissible to do so."
The disparate impact theory of liability was articulated in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971). The Supreme Court held that for purposes of hiring, an employer's use of a high school diploma requirement and aptitude tests violated the Civil Rights Act. Black applicants disproportionately lacked diplomas and/or scored low on the tests. Under the disparate impact analysis, discrimination need not be intentional. Even if an employment practice is "facially neutral," it's suspect if it has an adverse impact on members of a protected class. To avoid liability, businesses would have to demonstrate that such tests are a business necessity or related to job performance.
Racial minorities, especially blacks, should feel highly insulted by the entrenched assumption that they should not be expected to compete against whites on pencil-and-paper multiple choice civil service tests. Not only should they speak out against such condescending assumptions, they should refuse any and all special treatment, and demand to be treated as capable and responsible individuals. Such attitudes may be the impetus needed to put an end to these ridiculous and embarrassing lawsuits.
Remember the whole point of the civil rights movement: to be treated equally as individuals by the government, without regard to race. Every lawsuit and complaint that cites "disparate impact" confirms that our government believes blacks and other preferred minorities should be held to lower standards in perpetuity.
The Newest Cliché
Paul Greenberg
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
These days you don't have to believe anything in particular about race to be called a racist, for it's now used as just a general term of invective. Much as "Fascist!" or "Communist!" used to be all-purpose epithets for separate but equally uncreative types. To render a word meaningless, it is necessary only to use it promiscuously. It will soon lose its power.
When such terms lose their sting, others are needed to take their place. So another had to be invented to carry the opprobrium that Racist once did: Culturally Incompetent.
Here in Arkansas, a judge who doubles as a demagogue when he tires of his day job -- the Hon. Wendell Griffen -- used the phrase not long ago to criticize the state's governor, Mike Beebe. It seems the governor had appointed a white instead of a black candidate to the state Supreme Court, and a white male at that. What a brazen violation of political correctness.
This was proof he was "culturally incompetent," according to Judge Griffen. Cultural Incompetence is the new, upgraded Racism; it has the advantage of sounding so much more scientific than mere racism.
So now those who do not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, class or sex, but just pick the appointee they consider best qualified regardless of race are called Culturally Incompetent. The phrase has an almost medical sound about it -- as if it were a diagnosis rather than an insult.
It is a rare moment when you're present at the creation of a new political slur. Catch phrases in politics tend to multiply in such numbers, like barnacles, that no one may be able to identify the precise moment when the first one attached itself to the ship of state. It's all you can do to just try to scrape them off.
A new pseudo-science dubbed Cultural Competence is springing up on the nation's campuses, especially in its departments and schools of education, where an inflated vocabulary long has been used to cover a multitude of ills -- from Social Promotion to Self-Esteem. This concept will soon enough filter down to state departments of education and local school districts. The way Diversity did. And like Diversity, it will soon enough become an industry complete with experts, consultants and subsidies from government and the larger corporations.
Racism is just back under a different name, and a different race is to benefit. But the essence of the swindle remains the same: Individual merit doesn't matter. Group identity is all. In the grand tradition of Affirmative Action, racial discrimination is now to be practiced under a sanitized name.
Here is how it's done at the University of Minnesota, where a Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Group has been organized. (The longer and more pretentious the names of these outfits, the easier it is to hide discrimination on behalf of the favored race, culture, class or gender.)
In keeping with current bureaucratic usage, committees are now dubbed Task Forces or something equally grandiose. This one acknowledges that "cultural competence remains hard to define and that current definitions lack consensus," but that may be an advantage. The wispier the ends, the easier to justify unsavory means. Like discrimination on the basis of race, sex or class. That's not simple prejudice any more; it's Cultural Competence.
An excerpt or two from this Task Group's communique sums up the flavor of the whole, dubious enterprise: "Our future teachers will be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression. ... Future teachers will recognize and demonstrate understanding of white privilege. ... Future teachers will understand the importance of cultural identity and develop a positive sense of racial/cultural identity." At least with those races and cultures now to be privileged.
The more racism changes, the more it remains the same underneath. Teaching "cultural competence" isn't education at all, of course, but indoctrination. As with any totalitarian program, the very meaning of words becomes expendable, even reversible. George Orwell would understand.
Discrimination on the basis of race or class or sex now becomes a good thing, a sign of enlightenment and Social Justice. A fog of multisyllabic words is spread over the whole agenda, the better to make it sound avant-garde. Nothing hides bad ideas like covering them with pretentious phrases out of a bad sociology textbook -- like white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, internalized oppression ... and now cultural incompetence.
Whoever dreams up these phrases must have a lot of time on his hands, and probably a state job. Ever since Marxism went out of fashion, the fabricators of such industrial-strength phraseology have had to find new realms to confuse with their mumbo-jumbo, and the field of education was a natural, having already been confused beyond belief.
What we have here is a kind of intellectualized Ponzi scheme: The suckers are baited by a quick payoff in the form of the cheap, transient satisfaction that goes with despising those of another class, race or political persuasion. Only those who run this indoctrination program may profit by it, perhaps as the holder of an endowed chair at one of the more prestigious universities. Or maybe as a nationally known pulpiteer in the mode of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of a Chicago megachurch. Mouthing the cliches of Cultural Competence can add up to big bucks.
As for those who resist this kind of doubletalk, and hold fast to the once plain meaning of words like culture and competence, they're sure to be denounced as Culturally Incompetent. Which is what the Hon. Wendell Griffen called the Arkansas governor. This isn't political discourse so much as name-calling. Using two-dollar names.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
These days you don't have to believe anything in particular about race to be called a racist, for it's now used as just a general term of invective. Much as "Fascist!" or "Communist!" used to be all-purpose epithets for separate but equally uncreative types. To render a word meaningless, it is necessary only to use it promiscuously. It will soon lose its power.
When such terms lose their sting, others are needed to take their place. So another had to be invented to carry the opprobrium that Racist once did: Culturally Incompetent.
Here in Arkansas, a judge who doubles as a demagogue when he tires of his day job -- the Hon. Wendell Griffen -- used the phrase not long ago to criticize the state's governor, Mike Beebe. It seems the governor had appointed a white instead of a black candidate to the state Supreme Court, and a white male at that. What a brazen violation of political correctness.
This was proof he was "culturally incompetent," according to Judge Griffen. Cultural Incompetence is the new, upgraded Racism; it has the advantage of sounding so much more scientific than mere racism.
So now those who do not discriminate on the basis of race, creed, class or sex, but just pick the appointee they consider best qualified regardless of race are called Culturally Incompetent. The phrase has an almost medical sound about it -- as if it were a diagnosis rather than an insult.
It is a rare moment when you're present at the creation of a new political slur. Catch phrases in politics tend to multiply in such numbers, like barnacles, that no one may be able to identify the precise moment when the first one attached itself to the ship of state. It's all you can do to just try to scrape them off.
A new pseudo-science dubbed Cultural Competence is springing up on the nation's campuses, especially in its departments and schools of education, where an inflated vocabulary long has been used to cover a multitude of ills -- from Social Promotion to Self-Esteem. This concept will soon enough filter down to state departments of education and local school districts. The way Diversity did. And like Diversity, it will soon enough become an industry complete with experts, consultants and subsidies from government and the larger corporations.
Racism is just back under a different name, and a different race is to benefit. But the essence of the swindle remains the same: Individual merit doesn't matter. Group identity is all. In the grand tradition of Affirmative Action, racial discrimination is now to be practiced under a sanitized name.
Here is how it's done at the University of Minnesota, where a Race, Culture, Class, and Gender Task Group has been organized. (The longer and more pretentious the names of these outfits, the easier it is to hide discrimination on behalf of the favored race, culture, class or gender.)
In keeping with current bureaucratic usage, committees are now dubbed Task Forces or something equally grandiose. This one acknowledges that "cultural competence remains hard to define and that current definitions lack consensus," but that may be an advantage. The wispier the ends, the easier to justify unsavory means. Like discrimination on the basis of race, sex or class. That's not simple prejudice any more; it's Cultural Competence.
An excerpt or two from this Task Group's communique sums up the flavor of the whole, dubious enterprise: "Our future teachers will be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression. ... Future teachers will recognize and demonstrate understanding of white privilege. ... Future teachers will understand the importance of cultural identity and develop a positive sense of racial/cultural identity." At least with those races and cultures now to be privileged.
The more racism changes, the more it remains the same underneath. Teaching "cultural competence" isn't education at all, of course, but indoctrination. As with any totalitarian program, the very meaning of words becomes expendable, even reversible. George Orwell would understand.
Discrimination on the basis of race or class or sex now becomes a good thing, a sign of enlightenment and Social Justice. A fog of multisyllabic words is spread over the whole agenda, the better to make it sound avant-garde. Nothing hides bad ideas like covering them with pretentious phrases out of a bad sociology textbook -- like white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, internalized oppression ... and now cultural incompetence.
Whoever dreams up these phrases must have a lot of time on his hands, and probably a state job. Ever since Marxism went out of fashion, the fabricators of such industrial-strength phraseology have had to find new realms to confuse with their mumbo-jumbo, and the field of education was a natural, having already been confused beyond belief.
What we have here is a kind of intellectualized Ponzi scheme: The suckers are baited by a quick payoff in the form of the cheap, transient satisfaction that goes with despising those of another class, race or political persuasion. Only those who run this indoctrination program may profit by it, perhaps as the holder of an endowed chair at one of the more prestigious universities. Or maybe as a nationally known pulpiteer in the mode of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of a Chicago megachurch. Mouthing the cliches of Cultural Competence can add up to big bucks.
As for those who resist this kind of doubletalk, and hold fast to the once plain meaning of words like culture and competence, they're sure to be denounced as Culturally Incompetent. Which is what the Hon. Wendell Griffen called the Arkansas governor. This isn't political discourse so much as name-calling. Using two-dollar names.
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