Is it Too Soon to Say "I Told You So?"

By Ann Coulter

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Back in September, The New York Times promoted Bill de Blasio's mayoral candidacy with an editorial titled, "Don't Fear the Squeegee Man." The editorial informed readers that crime wouldn't get worse under de Blasio because "policing is far better than it used to be, thanks to innovations by Mayor David Dinkins." (Emphasis added -- the Times was not being sarcastic.)

Under the policing "innovations" of Mayor Dinkins, the annual murder rate in New York City rose to an all-time high of 2,245 in Dinkins' first year in office. After four years of hard work, the murder rate had dropped by about 10 percent, to a merely astronomical 1,995 per year.

In Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's very first year in office, the murder rate fell 20 percent. The Times acknowledged the dramatic drop in crime with an article titled, "New York City Crime Falls But Just Why Is a Mystery." By Giuliani's last year in office, there were only 714 murders in the entire city, a drop of 64 percent from Dinkins' personal best. By continuing Giuliani's aggressive crime policies, Mayor Michael Bloomberg got the murder rate for 2012 down to 419 in a city of 8 million people.

But at the Times, they think we've been living in hell since Giuliani's election, and the most urgent priority for the next mayor is to get back to Dinkins' New York.

They're not alone. (Thus de Blasio's election.) In 2001, Richard Goldstein of The Village Voice announced on MSNBC'S "Hardball," "I feel less safe today in New York City than I did 20 years ago." This was a position Goldstein developed after taking a vow to never leave his apartment, allow visitors, read a newspaper, watch TV or listen to the radio.

A couple of weeks ago, the Times ran another item downplaying the coming crime surge under Mayor de Blasio. Former hedge fund manager Neil Barsky wrote a column mocking his fellow 1-percenters for fretting about the new mayor with this advice: "Calm down." (I find few balms as soothing as being told to "calm down.")

Reluctantly, Barsky admitted (17 times) that he is a very rich man. As he explained, he, too, enjoys the city having been turned into a "a millionaires' playground" and having a mayor who is "one of us." (Bloomberg's not one of me, buster.) He sniffed that he found "this affluent angst more than a bit overwrought."

They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

Liberal zealots view de Blasio as a breath of fresh air because he's stuck in policies of the 1960s. That's when Americans were assured by brain-dead liberals that if we could just improve criminals' self-esteem, crime would disappear. You'll see!

The result? The violent crime rate quadrupled.

We never got an apology on behalf of the tens of thousands of Americans who were murdered, maimed, raped and robbed as a direct result of liberal law enforcement strategies -- much less the show trials these people deserved.

Liberal activists just waited out Giuliani and Bloomberg. Now they're ready to retry all the old ideas. Mayor-elect de Blasio recently met with convicted criminals to get their views on policing policies. Wow! Look at de Blasio's new ideas!

The ex-cons actually complained to de Blasio that they don't like being watched so much.

The left simply refuses to believe that locking up criminals has any effect on crime and insists we just need to explain to them that committing violent felonies is wrong. (New York Times headline from Aug. 10, 2000: "Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction.") It's strange because liberals totally understand cause-and-effect when it comes to ... well, um, nothing.

Suggesting that the "1 percent" – such as himself -- are the most terrified of a de Blasio mayoralty, Barsky claimed that the massively rich have been the primary beneficiaries of record-low crime rates in New York -- "those who can actually afford its housing, attend concerts in Lincoln Center, eat in its fancy restaurants and pay for parking to boot."

That could be said only by someone who has never been the victim of a violent crime. Could someone please mug this guy?

The rich in New York are always the last to experience a spike in crime. They might not even notice when the murder, rape and robbery rates go through the roof under de Blasio -- for the very reasons Barsky names: They can afford expensive neighborhoods, paid parking and concerts at Lincoln Center.

It's the poor and middle-class New Yorkers, unprotected by doormen, chauffeurs and ticket-takers, who will be the first victims of de Blasio's innovative new ideas on policing.

The non-1 percent live in neighborhoods that aren't the province of multimillionaires, with doormen standing guard every 15 yards. They park their cars on the street, eat lunch in public parks and attend free concerts -- all of which are also open to criminals. New-wave Brooklyn is about to become crime-wave Brooklyn.

For a newspaper that claims not to be worried about rising crime rates under de Blasio, the Times sure dedicates a lot of ink to assuring us that it's not going to happen – and if it does, it won’t be de Blasio’s fault. In anticipation of a return to the glory days of David Dinkins, let me be the first to say, I told you so.

Obama Blames The GOP for The Mess He Has Created (and It's Getting Worse)

By Donald Lambro

Friday, November 29, 2013

Soon after President Obama told the White House press corps he was solely responsible for the botched Obamacare rollout, he decided to shift part of the blame on Republicans.

A mea culpa can be hard to deliver in public when you are the kind of politician who thinks he never mistakes and rarely if ever apologizes for anything that went wrong. But Obama's apologies have a brief shelf life, and a few days later they had reached their expiration date.

So at a gathering of business executives on Tuesday, Nov. 19, the president concluded that he had done enough groveling over his utterly false claim that "if you like your health insurance policy, you can keep it" and went on the political attack.

Somehow he decided that the Republicans in Congress were partly to blame for the bungled mess that he and his administration had created. That it wasn't all his fault.

He also said the broken, online, sign-up system was in the process of being fixed and would be up and running at full throttle by the end of November. That doesn't seem to be the case entirely, but more on that in a moment.

Then he turned on the Republicans with a vengeance. He suggested that their intransigent political opposition had inhibited the law's implementation.

"One of the problems we've had is one side of Capitol Hill is invested in its failure," he told the chief financial officers at the Wall Street Journal's CEO Council meeting in Washington last week.

And he also suggested the Republicans' "ideological resistance to the idea of dealing with the uninsured and people with preexisting conditions" was also a factor in what went wrong.

Republicans had their own ideas about how to provide wider access to lower cost health care, but it was not the costly, government-run, top-down bureaucracy Obama wanted and got from the Democrats.

The larger organizational problems that presumably led to the mess the government is still trying to fix stemmed from the political bickering in Washington that threatened to damage his presidency's signature achievement, he further suggested.

Both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue needed to "break through the stubborn cycle of crisis politics and start working together," he said.

Well, I did a little checking with Constitutional scholars, and no one can find any provision in the Constitution that gives lawmakers any role in the executive branch to help implement and/or administer laws passed by Congress.

Obama has made bombastic claims over the course of his presidency that have not proven true. But to blame the Republicans for any part this debacle -- who control only one half of Congress -- is a huge reach, to say the least.

By the way, he also blamed the government's archaic, information- retrieval, computer system, saying the federal government's IT system is "not very efficient."

Well, whose fault is that? He's the chief executive who is in charge of seeing that the laws are carried out in a fair and efficient way and insuring that they work and meet all deadlines.

Judging from the mountain of government audits that have exposed waste, inefficiencies and other skullduggery in his administration, he's not the least bit interested in the details and process of running anything -- least of all his health care mess.

Now, about his claim that Obamacare's online computer system would be fixed and ready for business by Nov. 30. Well, not all of it.

His promise to the CFOs came immediately after an administration official who oversees the technical side of the federal health insurance marketplace told Congress that 30 to 40 percent of the overall system was unfinished and not ready to go.

Henry Chao, deputy chief information officer for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said major parts of Obama's program, including its accounting and payments to insurance companies, were still incomplete.

"If the business functions are not in place on time, it could create havoc with a system through which billions of dollars in federal tax money will flow to subsidize coverage for consumers who otherwise could not afford it, insurance industry officials said," Reuters news agency reported.

"The upshot is that the (financial management).... appears to be way off track and getting worse," a CMS official said in a July 8 e- mail, obtained by Reuters.

The first payments were due by mid-to-late January, but now we learn that the accounting system is far from ready to process the most critical part of Obamacare.

But bigger financial problems loom on the horizon that could bring Obamacare crashing down before it even gets started.

One is the need to get very large numbers of younger, healthier people to sign up for insurance to pay for older, and poorer beneficiaries. The administration promised the insurance industry this would happen, but now that is very much in doubt.

"I now think there is little hope we are going to get enough younger, healthy people to sign up, and that means that this law is in grave danger of financial collapse," Robert Laszewski, president of Health Policy and Strategy Associates, a health care industry consultant, told the Washington Post.

The number of people who have signed up thus far are relatively small, far from the tens of millions of applicants needed to make it work.

There are also troubling questions about whether the Internal Revenue Service will be ready to carry out nearly four dozen new tasks under the law.

The IRS must figure out who has insurance and who does not, and thus who they will fine for being uninsured, plus begin to distribute trillions of dollars in insurance subsidies.

Meanwhile, five million Americans have had their private insurance policies cancelled, and businesses are laying off employes or reducing hours worked to avoid Obama's unpopular and unworkable insurance mandates.

And Obama has started to blame the Republicans who warned this would happen and voted against it.

U.N. climate change talks: it’s really all about the money

By Marita Noon

Sunday, December 01, 2013

“Rich countries are still not pledging enough money to begin financing a shift to a cleaner global economy,” reports the Financial Times (FT) in its coverage of the United Nations climate talks in Warsaw that ended with little more than a “vague road map on how to prepare for a global climate pact they’re supposed to adopt in two years.”

Leading into what has now been called an “unsatisfactory summit,” predictions suggested the “talks could collapse because of a lack of financial support from rich nations.” Delegates from developing countries, such as Ecuador’s lead negotiator Daniel Ortega, believe “an effective 2015 emissions reduction agreement has to be based on a clear financial package.”

Ortega stated: “I’m not personally expecting any commitment by Warsaw. What we need to have is a clear roadmap of how the discussions of financing will allow us to have a clear idea of commitments by 2015.”

Even low expectations like Ortega’s were dashed when, on the opening day of the climate talks, November 11, Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s government produced a document, outlining its position at the Warsaw conference, which boldly stated: “Federal cabinet has ruled that Australia will not sign up to any new contributions, taxes or charges at this week’s global summit on climate change.” The Australian points out: “This rules out Australia playing any role in a wealth transfer from rich countries to developing nations to pay them to decrease their carbon emissions.” But, perhaps, the most dramatic line in the government document is: Australia “will not support any measures which are socialism masquerading as environmentalism.”

A few days later, November 15, Japan announced that “its emissions would increase slightly rather than fall 25 per cent as promised in 2009.” Japan was struggling to meet its previous emissions promises—which were the most aggressive of any big developed country—even before the Fukushima accident prompted the shutdown of its 50 still-operable nuclear reactors and its corresponding rise in the supplemental use of fossil fuels.

Then on November 20, news came out of England stating that Prime Minister Cameron is telling everyone: “We’ve got to get rid of all this green crap.”

All of this is on the foundation of Todd Stern, the Obama Administration’s chief climate diplomat, dialing back expectations when, during an October 22 speech in London, he addressed U.S. involvement: “an international agreement is by no means the whole answer.” He pointed out “the need to be creative and flexible” and acknowledged the “hard reality” that “no step change in overall levels of public funding from developed countries is likely to come anytime soon.” Stern added: “The fiscal reality of the United States and other developed countries is not going to allow it.”

Toward the end of the conference, “six environment and development groups walked out, saying the annual round of talks had delivered little more than hot air.” A statement from Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Oxfam, ActionAid, the International Trade Union Confederation and Friends of the Earth said: “The Warsaw climate conference, which should have been an important step in the just transition to a sustainable future, is on track to deliver virtually nothing.” Samantha Smith, leader of the WWF’s climate and energy initiative called the meeting a “farce.” She told the FT: “Finance is one of the big reasons we walked out. Expectations were that developed countries were going to put money on the table, but what happened when we got here was exactly the opposite.”

In a statement, Smith blamed: “Japan's announcement that it would not reduce emissions as promised, Australia’s decision to end its carbon tax and Canada’s congratulating the latter on its new climate policy.”

Just as it looked like predictions of collapse would come true, a last-minute compromise came through in overtime: the Warsaw international mechanism for loss and damage (IMLD). Stern led the 36 straight hours of “bad-tempered negotiations”—including a standoff between the US and developing nations—in which “countries of the South … finally won.”

Addressing the IMLD, the Associated Press (AP) reports: “agreements were watered down to a point where no country was promising anything concrete.” While the IMLD was agreed upon, according to The Hindu, “deciding how this mechanism would get the funds in future” remained unresolved. And, BusinessGreen.com bemoans: “the vague wording fell short of the kind of detailed commitments on additional funding and avoided a commitment to compensation that many developing nations had been seeking.”

So, while a deal was reached that allows “just enough to keep things moving,” little is really expected. The AP states: “In two-decades, the U.N. talks have failed to provide a cure to the world’s fever.” Even Connie Hedegaard, European climate commissioner, acknowledges: “the process needs to provide a ‘substantive answer’ to global warming in two years to remain relevant.”

Fortunately, Mother Nature can’t be bought. Despite the billions the world’s wealthy nations have provided to poorer countries, global CO2 emissions have continued to rise. As the Washington Post reports, from 2010-2012 only about $5 billion of the $35 billion actually went toward helping poor countries prepare for actual climate change impacts. $100 billion per year is expected by 2020 but “most developed countries are failing to demonstrate promised increases.”

Britain was one of the “wealthier nations” to promise billions in aid, but it is balking, too. Ed Davey, energy and climate secretary, believes that paying additional compensation to poorer nations is “not fair or sensible.” The Telegraph states: “Growing numbers of Tory backbenchers are now calling for the government to withdraw from expensive climate change and carbon commitments.”

Douglas Carswell, Tory MP, sums up the so-called climate compensations: “We’re spending money that we don’t have to solve a problem that doesn’t exist at the behest of people we didn’t elect.”

Canada, Australia, Britain, and even Japan—home of the landmark Kyoto climate talks two decades ago—are coming to their senses. The US held out until the very last minute—and then capitulated by agreeing to the IMLD.

It really is all about the money. The Abbott Administration has stated: Australia’s efforts on greenhouse gases will be conditioned by “fiscal circumstances.” Japan, acknowledges its need for energy: “Although Japan’s economy is one of the world’s most energy efficient, the country is still the fifth-biggest CO2 emitter, owing to its large-scale concentration of manufacturing industries.” Britain’s Carswell says: “The rethinks that have happened in Japan and Australia and elsewhere desperately need to happen here as well.” Ditto for America. After all, they’ve had their way for twenty years—CO2 emissions have gone up, the economy has gone down, and global warming has stalled.

The Ugly End of the Duke Lacrosse Story

By Brent Bozell

Friday, November 29, 2013

On Nov. 22, with the national media focused on the 50th anniversary of former President John F. Kennedy's death, few noticed the story of a jury in North Carolina convicting Crystal Mangum of murder in the 2011 kitchen stabbing death of her boyfriend Reginald Daye. Why should that fact fixate the national media?

On its own, it shouldn't. But in 2006 and 2007, Mangum's false charges of rape against three Duke University lacrosse players caused a national tsunami of media sensation, an angry wave of prejudiced coverage presuming the guilt of rich white college boys when being accused by an African-American stripper.

More than any other media outlet, The New York Times trumpeted Mangum's rape accusations, even after they fell apart. As other liberal media were backing away, the Times published a notorious, error-riddled 5,700-word lead story on Aug. 25, 2006, by Duff Wilson, who argued there was enough evidence against the players for Michael Nifong, the atrocious local prosecutor (who would later be jailed and disbarred), to bring the case to trial.

Within the Times, perhaps the most aggressive accuser was then-sports columnist Selena Roberts, who made a habit of comparing the accused Duke lacrosse players to drug dealers and gang members.

Roberts continued to lob charges of white privilege in her last column on the subject in 2007: "Don't mess with Duke, though. To shine a light on its integrity has been treated by the irrational mighty as a threat to white privilege. Feel free to excoriate the African-American basketball stars and football behemoths for the misdeeds of all athletes, but lay off the lacrosse pipeline to Wall Street, excuse the khaki-pants crowd of SAT wonder kids." She lamented, "some news media jackknifed as they moved from victim's advocate to angel-tinting the lacrosse team."

To Roberts, the false accuser never stopped being the victim. Roberts never wrote a retraction for her columns that relentlessly championed a false narrative. She is the Al Sharpton of sports columnists.

The coverage ended. Well, there was one small trickle of news. In December 2010, The New York Times ran a tiny wire item in the sports section about the Duke lacrosse "victim" being found guilty of "misdemeanor child abuse and damaging property. A Durham County jury convicted Crystal Mangum, 32, of contributing to child abuse or neglect, injury to personal property and resisting a public officer after a February confrontation with her live-in boyfriend."

Then, in 2011, Mangum was indicted for murdering her boyfriend. Again, it was a tiny item in the Times -- a brief at the bottom of page B-14 of the sports section, under "Lacrosse": "Crystal Mangum, who falsely accused three Duke players of raping her in 2006, was charged with murder in the death of her boyfriend."

So when Mangum was convicted of murder on Nov. 22, now would it garner serious attention? The Times ran a tiny, 98-word wire story. There were no burning columns from the successors of Roberts.

Now remember that the entire time Mangum was ruining the reputations of three young men, the media kept her identity a secret. But now that her secret of lying and even murder is out, the secret remains, at least on the media's radar screen.

There were no Duke-accuser updates on ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS, USA Today or The Washington Post.

Like Roberts, ABC legal reporter Terry Moran didn't easily let go of the blame-the-rich-whites game in the spring of 2007, writing for his ABC blog: "Perhaps the outpouring of sympathy for (the falsely arrested Duke lacrosse players) is just a bit misplaced ... As students of Duke University or other elite institutions, these young men will get on with their privileged lives ... They are very differently situated in life from, say, the young women of the Rutgers University women's basketball team."

Those women were briefly, unfairly smeared one day in a bad Don Imus joke at 6 a.m., as "nappy-headed hos." Few would have heard it if liberals hadn't flagged it. Just as liberals flagged some falsely accused lacrosse players who were only guilty of being rich and white.

On Saturday, Nov. 23, CNN offered two segments on Mangum's conviction. Defense attorney Mark Geragos offered a strong post-trial verdict: "I thought at the time that that (Duke lacrosse) prosecution was not only ill-advised but that prosecutor and we were vindicated to some degree was -- ended up being disbarred."

"Now you have a woman, and, you know, somebody had remarked to me this morning, karma is a bitch," he said. "You've got a situation where, you know, she had at least arguably a decent defense in this case, but has absolutely no credibility."

The national media also lost credibility in this Mangum mess. Their coverage at the start was outrageous, as was their suppression at the end.