Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Sometimes it's better not to know

 

Here's a bizarre story about a man searching for information about his natural parents. And search leads to the extremely unwelcome news about who his natural father was...Charles Manson.

A Gandhi-following, peace-loving, free-spirited vegetarian who was adopted at birth has discovered the worst possible thing a son could find out about his father – his dad is Charles Manson.

"It’s like finding out that Adolf Hitler is your father," said Matthew Roberts, a Los Angeles disc jockey.

A curious Roberts, 41, began investigating his poisoned family tree about 12 years ago, when he contacted a social services agency, which located his mother, Terry, in Wisconsin, according to the London Sun.

His reluctant natural mom fed him bits and pieces, like his first and middle name — Lawrence Alexander — withholding his infamous surname until she could summon the courage to tell him the truth.

But Roberts pressed her for more details until she finally revealed the shocking secret, that his dad was one of the most infamous serial killers the world has ever known.

"I didn’t want to believe it," Roberts said. "I was frightened and angry. I’m a peaceful person -- trapped in the face of a monster."

Terry told Roberts he was born after Manson raped her in a drug-fueled orgy in 1967. She gave the baby up for adoption.

One thing I wouldn't do is go public with that information. It would be hard enough to come to terms with that knowledge, but how much harder would it be with everyone you know looking at you and searching for a resemblance to Manson? Ugh!

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 7:45 AM 1 comments

American universities whoring themselves for Iranian money

 

Remember when Columbia University invited Ahmadinejad to come talk to students. Well, they got a nice payoff from that.

Anti-Israel, pro-Iran university professors are being funded by a shadowy multimillion-dollar Islamic charity based in Manhattan that the feds charge is an illegal front for the repressive Iranian regime.

The deep-pocketed Alavi Foundation has aggressively given away hundreds of thousands of dollars to Columbia University and Rutgers University for Middle Eastern and Persian studies programs that employ professors sympathetic to the Iranian dictatorship.

"We found evidence that the government of Iran really controlled everything about the foundation," said Adam Kaufmann, investigations chief at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office.

Federal law-enforcement authorities are in the midst of seizing up to $650 million in assets from the Alavi Foundation, which they charge funnels money to Iran-supported Islamic schools in the United States and to a syndicate of Iranian spies based in Europe.

In one of the biggest handouts, the controversial charity donated $100,000 to Columbia University after the Ivy League school agreed to host Iranian leader and Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, according to the foundation's 2007 tax filings obtained by The Post.

Rutgers professor Hooshang Amirahmadi, former head of the school's Center for Middle Eastern Studies and president of the American-Iranian Council, a nonprofit advocacy group, unabashedly has touted Hezbollah and Hamas as legitimate organizations and not terrorists.

Between 2005 and 2007, the Alavi Foundation donated $351,600 to the Rutgers Persian language program, a spokesman for the school acknowledged. The university would not comment further.

Alavi's Web site says its mission is the "promotion of Islamic culture and Persian language."

"This is all about Iran laundering their policies through academe," said Michael Rubin, an Iran expert at the American Enterprise Institute think tank. "And the ivory tower is prostituting itself for money."

Whores for Iran. Just whom you want to be teachers for your children.

Labels: Education, Iran

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:10 AM 1 comments

The cynical time bomb in Reid's bill

 

e21 has a very perceptive post about the Medicare payroll tax that Harry Reid has inserted into his bill to pay for his health care proposal.

The Democrats are double-counting the money raised from the tax. They're counting it to reduce the coming deficit in Medicare and they're also counting it to help pay for the present bill.

Revenues from the HI tax are “deposited” in the Medicare Part A Trust Fund, which is running a $20.5 billion deficit (p. 56 of pdf) in 2009. The Trust Fund is expected to continue to hemorrhage money for the next seven years until 2017 when it is expected to be bankrupt. Should Congress elect to keep the program running beyond this date (a safe assumption), the cost to the rest of the budget is estimated to be over $13 trillion in present value. This is the money Congress would need to invest today to keep Medicare Part A solvent over the 75 year window. And this figure does not include the additional funds that would be necessary to close the even more gaping holes in the other parts of Medicare, principally Part B (doctors’ visits) and Part D (prescription drug coverage), which are actually several times larger than the Part A deficit.

Senate Democrats propose raising the HI tax rate by 0.5% to 3.4% on wages in excess of $200,000 ($250,000 for joint filers) beginning in 2013. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates this tax increase will raise $54 billion over ten years. Given the scale of the Medicare funding deficit, some might argue that these additional HI revenues are necessary. But this is not what Democrats propose; this $54 billion would be used to finance entirely new health insurance subsidies for non-Medicare beneficiaries. The money just gets counted as though it’s deposited in the Medicare Trust Fund because the tax is deducted as part of the FICA line item on a worker’s paycheck.

This is the kind of devious trick that only government planners can get away with.

While the person who devised this scheme has no doubt received hearty congratulations from the rest of the Senate Democratic caucus, the cynicism embedded in this strategy is breathtaking. Each dollar raised from the tax increase gets counted by the Joint Committee on Taxation as offsetting new health spending at the same time that very same dollar is treated by the Medicare Actuaries as being deposited in the Medicare Trust Fund. But if this sort of double counting is such a good idea, why stop at $54 billion? Why not pay for the entire health care reform bill through HI tax increases that also extend the solvency of the HI trust fund?

This is coming to be called the Medicare AMT because the Democrats have deliberately not indexed it to inflation so more and more people will be sucked into paying the tax every year. There is no way that the Democrats don't understand what they're doing - they've had years of trying to find ways to ameliorate the burden of the AMT as it sucks in more and more middle class taxpayers.

The proposed HI tax increase is not indexed for inflation. This means that as inflation pushes up household income, more and more families will be subjected to the tax even though their standard of living remains the same. If you don’t think this is a problem, consider the lengths Congress must go each year to extend the so-called “patch” that ensures more households are not subjected to the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT).

Originally designed for the same households now targeted by the Democrats’ HI tax increase, the AMT was never indexed to inflation because the costs of doing so were too high given all of the revenue it was expected to generate from “bracket creep.” As a result, exemption levels that once seemed sufficiently high to exclude all but the richest households would now ensnare over 21 million middle class households absent the annual inflation patch. The same would be true of the new HI tax increase, as families living in high-cost states, struggling to pay their bills, suddenly find themselves subjected to another tax ostensibly designed for someone in a far different circumstance. And, once enacted, repealing the tax would be “too expensive” given that it would be expected to apply to most of the population over the long-run projection window.

Health care reform is a serious topic that deserves serious attention. Yet, when the time came to rise to this occasion, Senate Democrats respond with a bill that exploits a trust fund accounting loophole and creates a “new AMT” imbroglio that future Congresses will have to sort out. Needless to say, this is an inauspicious start to the formal consideration of such a monumental piece of legislation.

Add in the sorts of gimmicks that have been used in this bill so that Reid can sanctimoniously get up on the Senate floor and say with a straight face how this plan is budget-neutral. He just hopes that people don't understand about how the bill has ten years of taxes for five years of benefits and how it just assumes that billions of dollars of cuts will be made in Medicare by some anonymously courageous legislators some time in the future. Of course, that will never happen. And just as people today look back on the framers of the AMT and wonder what they were thinking, people will look back on this bill and wonder what they thought they were doing. But by then it will be too late and we'll be stuck with all that happens when these gimmicks are exposed for the empty tricks they are and we have to actually pay the bills.

Labels: Harry Reid, Health

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 5:57 AM 0 comments

What does Hugo Chavez's fan club say about his latest craziness?

 

Over the years, quite a few of leftist celebrities such as Naomi Campbell, Danny Glover, Sean Penn, and Kevin Spacey have trooped down to Venezuela to express their admiration of Hugo Chavez. Maybe the next time that they're having a softball interview by the entertainment press, some reporter could ask them what they think of this latest bit of craziness from Chavez. He's expressed his admiration for Ilich Ramirez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal who was responsible for a wave of terrorist murders in the 1970s.

President Hugo Chávez has risked international ire by lauding Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan terrorist notorious for a series of bombings, kidnappings and hijackings across Europe, as a "revolutionary fighter" unjustly imprisoned for trying to defend the Palestinian people.

The leftist Venezuelan leader praised Carlos — whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sánchez — as "one of the great fighters of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation", denying he was a terrorist and claiming his lifetime imprisonment in France was unfair.

"I defend him," he said during a speech on Friday night. "It doesn’t matter to me what they say tomorrow in Europe."

Ramirez was incarcerated for life in France in 1997 for the 1975 murders of two French secret agents and an alleged informant, after being captured in Sudan three years earlier by French agents acting on a CIA tip and whisked to Paris in a sack. Mr Chávez said that this amounted to "kidnap".

He has admitted to leading a 1975 attack on the Opec headquarters in Vienna that killed 3 people, and has been linked to the 1976 hijacking of an Air France jet en route to Uganda. He is also blamed for a series of bomb attacks in Paris and a grenade attack on the English headquarters of an Israeli bank.

Most famously, it is believed that he was the "godfather" behind the murders of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972.

Ramirez has also expressed support for al-Qaeda and spoken of his "relief" at the 9/11 attacks. It is not the first time that Mr Chávez has waded into controversy over Carlos the Jackal, who retains a small but ardent following in socialist Venezuela.

Add in his admiration for almost every murderous dictator of our time.

He drew the wrath of Ugandans after casting doubt on the crimes of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. "We thought he was a cannibal," said Mr Chávez of Amin, whose regime was notorious for torturing and killing suspected opponents in the 1970s. "I have doubts ... Maybe he was a great nationalist, a patriot."

....He recently hosted Mr Mugabe at a summit on Margarita Island in Venezuela and invited the Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir to Caracas after claiming that the international warrant for his arrest over the genocide in Darfur was based on racism.

He has also forged ties with President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, often said to be Europe’s last dictator, and has built a military alliance with Moscow, visiting both countries as part of a recent tour that also included Iran, Syria, Algeria and Libya.

And, of course, there is closeness to the Castros and to Ahmadinejad.

So what is there about this crackpot that so many celebrities find appealing? Is it just his anti-Americanism and populist rhetoric? Is that all it takes for them to join the fan club?

Labels: Foreign news

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 5:07 AM 1 comments

Top Conservative Blogs

 

Thanks to Bombs and Dollars for including me on its list of the top 133 conservative blogs. Click on over to search out new blogs you might enjoy reading.

Labels: Blogging

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 4:59 AM 0 comments

Monday, November 23, 2009

The sanctimonious hypocrisy of the New York Times

 

Michael Goldfarb notes this little tidbit of hypocrisy from the New York Times. While so much of the blogosphere is buzzing about the emails from British and American researchers on global warming discussing how they can best combat arguments from skeptics of human-caused global warming, the NYT is struggling with whether or not they should publish the emails that seem to show a willingness to deceive the public and perhaps even distort or delete the data to support their arguments. And, as Goldfarb notes, the NYT's environmental blog refuses to post the content of the emails.

The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye, so they won’t be posted here.

Oh, so now the New York Times suddenly gets all prim and proper about publishing what wasn't meant for the public eye. What about all those top secret information that they happily published when George W. Bush was president. As Goldfarb writes,

This is the position of the New York Times when given the chance to publish sensitive information that might hinder the liberal agenda. Of course, when the choice is between publishing classified information that might endanger the lives of U.S. troops in the field or intelligence programs vital to national security, that information is published without hesitation by the nation's paper of record. But in this case -- the documents were "never intended for the public eye," so the New York Times will take a pass. (links in the original)

I guess that policy wasn't in place when the New York Times was pursuing the right to publish the Pentagon Papers. But now, when global warming is the issue, they suddenly get all sanctimonious about what they're willing to publish. How typical

Labels: Environment, Media

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 7:20 AM 3 comments

Which party really doesn't want a post-racial America

 

A WSJ editorial notes which party can't seem to move into a post-racial world and continually plays the race card. The WSJ builds on Jesse Jackson's slapdown of Alabama Representative Artur Davis's vote against the health care bill as showing he can't call himself a black man.

Liberals insist that America still isn't "post-racial," notwithstanding the election of President Obama. But when a politician's skin color is gratuitously invoked in a debate about whether the government should have more control of health care, you have to wonder if the political left has any serious interest in a color-blind society. Former President Jimmy Carter suggests that whites who oppose the President's policies are racists; Mr. Jackson says blacks who oppose them are betraying their race.

Even in the age of a black President, too many liberals still believe they have more to gain from identity politics than from a post-racial America.

Labels: Race in America

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 7:12 AM 1 comments

Stealing from the young

 

Young people trying to make it in the world today have every reason to be depressed. They're graduating into one of the worst economies in several lifetimes. They may get jobs, but research shows that their lifetime earnings will be depressed due to the lower salaries they can expect for whatever jobs they find. They're facing an unfunded debt on all the entitlement spending in our budget that goes for the elderly generations. And now they're going to be stuck with this health care bill that plans to pay for health care for the older generations on the backs of the young. Robert Samuelson outlines the assault on the young in the Democrats' health care plans.

Comes now the House-passed health care "reform" bill that, amazingly, would extract more subsidies from the young. It mandates that health insurance premiums for older Americans be no more than twice the level of younger Americans. That's much less than the actual health spending gap between young and old. Spending for those aged 60-64 is four to five times greater than those 18-24. So, the young would overpay for insurance which -- under the House bill -- people must buy: 20- and 30-somethings would subsidize premiums for 50- and 60-somethings. (Those 65 and over receive Medicare.)

Not surprisingly, the 40-million member AARP, the major lobby for Americans over 50, was a big force behind this provision. AARP's cynicism is breathtaking. On the one hand, it sponsors a high-minded campaign called "Divided We Fail" and runs sentimental TV ads featuring children pleading for a better tomorrow. "Join us in championing your future and the future of every generation," ended one AARP ad.

Meanwhile, AARP lobbyists scramble to shift their members' costs onto younger generations. For example, the House health legislation improves Medicare's drug benefit. That would help the half of AARP members who are over 65. The other half, those between 50 and 64, could benefit from the skewed insurance premiums.

Although premium changes would apply mainly to people using insurance "exchanges," the differences would be substantial. A single person 55-64 might save $3,490, estimates an Urban Institute study. By contrast, single people in their 20s and early 30s might pay from about $600 to $1,100 more. For the young, the extra cost might be larger, says economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Hudson Institute, because the House bill would require them to purchase fairly generous insurance plans rather than cheaper catastrophic coverage that might better suit their needs.

Whatever the added burden, it would darken the young's already poor economic prospects. Unemployment among 16- to 24-year-olds is 19 percent. Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, notes on his blog that high joblessness depresses young workers' wages and that the adverse effect -- though diminishing -- "is still statistically significant 15 years later." Lost wages over 20 years could total $100,000. Orszag doesn't mention that health care "reform" might compound the loss.

AARP might talk piously about ending age discrimination. But shouldn't a 50 or 60-year-old pay more for health insurance than a twenty-something?

This is unconvincing. All insurance aims to protect against risk -- but within groups facing similar risks. Put differently, most insurance is risk-adjusted. Auto insurance premiums vary by age; younger drivers pay higher rates because they have more accidents. Homeowners' policies for similar houses cost more in high-crime areas. This is not "discrimination"; it's a reflection of risk and cost differences. Insurers that ignored these differences would soon vanish, because they'd suffer heavy losses and lose customers.

On health insurance, we may choose to override some risk adjustments (say, for pre-existing medical conditions) for public policy reasons. But the case for making age one of these exceptions is weak. Working Americans -- the young and middle-aged -- already pay a huge part of the health costs of the elderly through Medicare and Medicaid. These will grow with an aging population and surging health spending. Either taxes will rise or other public services will fall. Already, all governments spend 2.4 times as much per capita on the elderly as on children, reports Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution. Why increase the imbalance?

If only young voters understood how these bills going through Congress will affect them for the rest of their lives. They might have thought a bit more carefully about the change that they were voting for.

Labels: Health, The Budget

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:55 AM 1 comments

Just haggling about the price of the Blue Dogs

 

It's amusing, and somewhat indicative, that when Senator Mary Landrieu was derided for selling her vote in what came to be called the Louisiana Purchase of $100 million dollars, she went to the floor to proudly declare that she had sold herself for $300 million, not a measly $100 million.

As George Bernard Shaw once said, "we've already established what you are, ma'am. Now we're just haggling over the price."

The truly amazing thing about how the Senate works is why anyone would have committed to how they would vote when there was so much money in payoffs circulating around. As WSJ writes, all the so-called Blue Dogs have their price and are just haggling about the deal.

Note that Senator Landrieu's price included no substantive change in the $25 billion in Medicaid burdens that this legislation will impose on other states, or any reduction in its huge new tax burden on Louisiana small businesses, or any change in the rationing commission it will establish for Medicare. Mrs. Landrieu was voting to enable all of those provisions to take one more giant step toward enactment.

Senator Landrieu did also say she will not vote for the bill on final passage unless its provision for a public insurance plan would only be imposed with a "trigger" if certain measures of coverage aren't met. But as long as the architecture of a "public option" is included in the bill, it will be triggered sooner rather than later. The bill's new rules and costs for private insurance are so onerous that the public option is bound to be cheaper. This is why Barney Frank says the public option is a stepping stone to a government-run system, and Henry Waxman says the left will build on any form of public option once it is in place. Mrs. Landrieu is merely reciting her political lines.

Then there is Arkansas's Blanche Lincoln, who is up for re-election next year and is doing her best to sound as if she is both for and against the legislation. "We simply cannot ignore the growth in the federal government since the year 2000. I can assure you that the American people have not ignored it," Mrs. Lincoln declared in her Senate floor speech—moments before she said she would vote to proceed with the biggest expansion of government in living memory.

Voters can expect more such faux drama as the debate proceeds on the Senate floor. Nebraska's Ben Nelson will insist on some compromise on abortion coverage, and the National Right to Life Committee will declare a great victory—never mind the rationing the bill will guarantee for the sick and aged. Evan Bayh of Indiana will fight to reduce taxes on medical devices, even as the overall bill guarantees a far higher tax burden on the entire U.S. economy.

So I don't believe all this mock drama about how these Blue Dogs will vote or how liberals will vote if the public option or abortion language doesn't please them. Harry Reid will find their price and they'll cave.

And we'll be left with living with the mess that they will have made of our health care system and the future debts.

Labels: Senate

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:19 AM 2 comments

Sunday, November 22, 2009

SNL goes after Obama ... hard

 

Apparently, at SNL they don't believe the President's protestations that the economy is getting better and all the Democrats' spending has fixed everything.

Gee, who would have thought that in the week when Sarah Palin's book comes out and she's all over the place, that SNL would have chosen to ridicule Obama? Perhaps he's jumped the shark in their eyes.

Labels: Humor

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 8:22 AM 17 comments

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Off to a quiz bowl tournament

 

We're traveling to SW Virginia today to a tournament so there will be no blogging today. This is the third tournament this month which explains my very light weekend blogging.

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 4:43 AM 1 comments

Friday, November 20, 2009

Reality bites, doesn't it?

 

Politico points to all the hard decisions that Congress is facing. Besides spending all their efforts now to craft their massive health care bill, there is still the pesky problem of unemployment. And all the other spending that the government must do. Remember all the appropriations bills to fund the government? Those haven't been passed yet.

But just around the corner next month, Reid’s Democrats face immediate new challenges, including a $925 billion debt ceiling increase and a social safety net that’s unraveling even as unemployment has topped 10 percent.

Expanded federal jobless benefits — hastily authorized under the economic recovery bill last February — are due to expire in January and will cost $85 billion to renew for the coming year. And this says nothing about a backlog of year-end spending bills and President Barack Obama’s decision on the Afghanistan war, which threatens to eat up whatever savings are coming from the troop withdrawals from Iraq.

For the first time, Democrats are talking seriously about going back and rechanneling portions of their $787 billion stimulus bill to help jump-start job-creation initiatives — such as a long-delayed highway bill.

Oops! You mean that the original stimulus bill wasn't all about job-creation? Duh!

If you think that the states had problems passing budgets this past year, imagine how tough it will be next year when they don't have that cushion from the so-called stimulus to fall back on to help them keep on state employees and teachers. How soon before we start to hear proposals to repeat those federal handouts to the states so that they can keep their teachers employed? All very nice, but there is no money.

By any measure, the numbers are staggering. The debt ceiling increase will bring the new limit to about $13 trillion, yet with unemployment at 10.2 percent, Democrats see no choice but to push ahead with jobless benefits. Down the road, the same math faces lawmakers as state governments prepare their 2011 budgets next summer and see a drop-off in the emergency funds — to help pay teachers or Medicaid bills — provided under the recovery bill last winter.

The debate over highway funding illustrates this problem. Washington has its own set of fiscal problems given the drop in gas tax revenues for federal trust funds. But states are in such bad shape that many governors can’t make their 20 percent match to get the construction funds — and generate the jobs that Democrats need.

It's all so very depressing. We have this terrible economic situation and no money in the till. And Congress wants to add this mammoth debt on top of all the spending shortfalls we already have.

Oh, and here is another tidbit of how Reid got that nice CBO analysis. There is a program in the bill that is purely voluntary, but they're estimating that they'll get $72 million from people voluntarily enrolling in the program. But eventually, the program will have to payout the promised care. Once again, they're counting payments up front and benefits on the back end of their decade-long projections.

For the first 10 years, CBO credits the Senate bill with reducing the deficit by $130 billion, but over half of this is because of added premiums collected from a new voluntary program for long-term-care insurance.

The “savings” of $72 billion will be short lived, since the money is being collected in anticipation of future payments to provide the promised care.

Exactly the kind of math that — after so many years — makes December such a challenge.

You betcha! It's a mess, and they just want to make it worse. Unbelievable.

Labels: The Budget

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 7:32 AM 4 comments

Watch out for non-indexed taxes

 

Remember all the agony that Congress has gone through every year because of the Alternative Minimum Tax that wasn't indexed to inflation. Every year they have to twist themselves into nots to find the money to make sure that people aren't suddenly thrown into having to pay the AMT. Originally, when it was introduced in 1970, it was meant to include only the very, very rich. It only applied to 20,000 people, But as a report by Tax Policy Center of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institute demonstrated, this small little tax on the very rich has expanded to the point where it could well encompass almost a third of all taxpayers.

Absent a change in law, more than 33 million taxpayers will be subject to the AMT by
2010. If Congress allows the tax cuts to expire at the end of 2010, the number of AMT taxpayers
will fall dramatically in 2011, but will then trend back upward over time. By 2018, about 43
million taxpayers will be subject to the AMT under current law; that number will swell to almost
57 million if the tax cuts are extended. Although most lower- and middle-income taxpayers will
remain unaffected by the tax, policymakers will need to deal with the explosive growth of the
AMT from an obscure tax affecting only 20,000 filers in 1970 to one affecting more than a third
of all taxpayers by 2010.

And why is that? Because the geniuses writing this provision in 1970 did not index the tax to inflation. And it is high cost of living states such as New York, Massachusetts, and California where this hits the most because people might receive what seems like a high salary, but it doesn't really count as such a high salary once you figure in the cost of living. so it is senators from those states, always Democrats, who are always in the lead to pass some sort of temporary fix every year to make sure that the AMT doesn't hit their constituents. You would think that our legislators would have learned their mistakes.

But nooooo. They've slapped an additional tax into Harry Reid's version of the bill. As Keith Hennessey points out, that surcharge on Medicare payroll taxes is not indexed to inflation. You might not worry about an additional tax on people earning over $200,000 a year now. But wait a decade or so as inflation kicks in, more and more people will be subject to that additional tax. If we then see those blue state Democrats replicating their role on the AMT to postpone the tax falling on their constituents? And what will that do those CBO projections of cost neutrality?

Cute, eh?

Labels: Health

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:46 AM 1 comments

According to Jesse Jackson, race is an ideological construct

 

It's long been clear that liberals do not regard someone to be of the designated minority group if that person doesn't fall in line ideologically with their demands. Clarence Thomas isn't a real black man because he doesn't vote like a liberal. Democrats opposed Miguel Estrada's nomination to the Appellate Court because he was not a Hispanic of the appropriate ideology. I remember when feminists said that Jeanne Kirkpatrick wasn't a real woman because of her support of Ronald Reagan's foreign policy.

And now we have Jesse Jackson weighing in a black congressman who voted against PelosiCare.

The Rev. Jackson attended a reception on Capitol Hill last night for the Congressional Black Caucus. During his remarks he railed against opponents of health care reform. "We even have blacks voting against the health care bill," The Hill newspaper reports him saying. "You can't vote against health care and call yourself a black man."

Mr. Jackson's comments can only have been directed at Rep. Artur Davis of Alabama, the sole member of the CBC to have voted against the health care bill this month in the House.

For his part, Mr. Davis declined to get into a spitting contest. "One of the reasons that I like and admire Rev. Jesse Jackson is that 21 years ago he inspired the idea that a black politician would not be judged simply as a black leader," he said in a statement. "The best way to honor Rev. Jackson's legacy is to decline to engage in an argument with him that begins and ends with race."

Sadly, no members of the Congressional Black Caucus have stepped forward to deplore Rev. Jackson's words. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri said the criticism of his CBC colleague was "accurate," although he claimed not to have heard Rev. Jackson say: "You can't vote against health care and call yourself a black man." The veteran civil rights leader, he added, "is expected by his constituency to call balls and strikes."

Representative Davis is from a conservative Alabama district and he wants to run for governor. Jackson would prefer that he represent his race rather than his constituents. And Jackson gets to determine what his race demands. Apparently, independence of thought is not something that Jackson wants to see among black leaders. What if white voters said that they didn't want to vote for a black candidate because they suspected that the politician would vote his race rather than his constituents' interest? They would be responding to the logic of Jackson's approach to representation. Such demands for ideological loyalty by race are pernicious and demeaning.

Labels: Race in America

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:36 AM 3 comments

The lack of logic in Holder's choice

 

Charles Krauthammer takes on the logical holes in Eric Holder's choice to try KSM in civilian court while trying other terrorists in military courts.

Finally, there's the moral logic. It's not as if Holder opposes military commissions on principle. On the same day he sent KSM to a civilian trial in New York, Holder announced he was sending Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, (accused) mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole, to a military tribunal.

By what logic? In his congressional testimony Wednesday, Holder was utterly incoherent in trying to explain. In his Nov. 13 news conference, he seemed to be saying that if you attack a civilian target, as in 9/11, you get a civilian trial; a military target like the Cole, and you get a military tribunal.

What a perverse moral calculus. Which is the war crime -- an attack on defenseless civilians or an attack on a military target such as a warship, an accepted act of war that the United States itself has engaged in countless times?

By what possible moral reasoning, then, does KSM, who perpetrates the obvious and egregious war crime, receive the special protections and constitutional niceties of a civilian courtroom, while he who attacked a warship is relegated to a military tribunal?

Moreover, the incentive offered any jihadist is as irresistible as it is perverse: Kill as many civilians as possible on American soil and Holder will give you Miranda rights, a lawyer, a propaganda platform -- everything but your own blog.

Alternatively, Holder tried to make the case that he chose a civilian New York trial as a more likely venue for securing a conviction. An absurdity: By the time Barack Obama came to office, KSM was ready to go before a military commission, plead guilty and be executed. It's Obama who blocked a process that would have yielded the swiftest and most certain justice.

Indeed, the perfect justice. Whenever a jihadist volunteers for martyrdom, we should grant his wish. Instead, this one, the most murderous and unrepentant of all, gets to dance and declaim at the scene of his crime.

Holder himself told The Post that the coming New York trial will be "the trial of the century." The last such was the trial of O.J. Simpson.

If Holder truly believed that civilian trials were the best of all possible choices, why not use them for the bombers of the Cole? Eric Holder's explanations of his decision were pitiful. He couldn't answer the simple question as to why he made the choices he did.

Labels: War on Terror

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:32 AM 21 comments

Will Evan Bayh put his vote where his mouth is?

 

Evan Bayh has a column at CNN's site begging for a bipartisan approach to reducing the nation's debt. He's right that this is a problem that needs to be faced and it's a bipartisan problem.

Last week, I was joined by a handful of my colleagues at a Senate Budget Committee hearing on strategies for reining in our exploding debt. United in our concern that Congress lacks the will to get our fiscal house in order, we mounted what I termed an "institutional insurrection."

Our unsustainable debt is neither a Democratic nor a Republican problem. It is rooted in the DNA of both political parties. Some in Congress like to spend more than we can afford, and some like to cut taxes more than we can afford. The easy path is simply to borrow until the credit markets will no longer allow it.

This approach violates something fundamental in the American character. Every generation before us has been willing to make the tough decisions and hard sacrifices required to ensure our children and grandchildren inherit a better way of life and stronger country. Now, it is our turn.

The path of least resistance that we have trod for so long is the path to national weakness. If you have the same people and the same process, you are going to get the same results.

For this reason, I will vote "no" on raising the debt ceiling unless Congress adopts a credible process to balance our books and eliminate the red ink.

The proposal I am supporting with Sens. Kent Conrad, D-North Dakota, and Judd Gregg, R-New Hampshire, would create a new debt-fighting commission. Conventional wisdom in Washington is that commissions are something politicians create to defer hard decisions. But our bipartisan panel would put all options on the table, including spending cuts and revenue raisers. Congress would then be compelled by law to debate the recommendations and take an up-or-down vote on the entire plan.

That's all well and good. Though I find it increasingly amusing that our elected legislators can't reach an agreement themselves and so need to outsource the really tough votes such as closing down military bases. I'm glad that Bayh and Conrad and Gregg want to change the typical operating procedure on Capitol Hill.

However, will Evan Bayh and Kent Conrad vote for Harry Reid's mammoth health care bill? Or will they just pretend to accept the deceptive gimmicks in the bill that pretend that the bill won't bust the budget?

UPDATE: If Evan Bayh is so interested in the glories of bipartisanship, he should pay attention to Richard Benedetto's column in Politico yesterday. Benedetto pointed out that massive bills have never, until this year, been passed on a strict party-line vote.

In an interview shortly before his retirement in 2001, the late Sen. Pat Moynihan (D-N.Y.) issued a warning:

“Never pass major legislation that affects most Americans without real bipartisan support. It opens the door to all kinds of political trouble.”

He said not only will the party that didn’t vote for it feel free to take shots at the resulting program whenever things go wrong, but also a large segment of the public will never accept it unless it is an overwhelming success. Every glitch will be magnified by a loud chorus of partisan opponents saying, “I told you so,” Moynihan said.

So what are Democrats planning to do? Ignore Moynihan’s warning and ram through health care reform as a basically one-party bill, which, under Moynihan’s thesis, is a prescription for trouble — big trouble — even if Democrats get one or two moderate Senate Republicans to go along. A lone Republican, Rep. Anh “Joseph” Cao, who represents a heavily Democratic district in New Orleans, voted for the measure in the House. So on the outside, health care reform could conceivably pass Congress with as few as one Republican vote, maybe two if someone from the Senate gets on board.

President Barack Obama likes to refer to many things he is doing in his first year in office as “unprecedented.” And while legislation passed on a party-line vote is not unprecedented, one would be hard-pressed to cite one piece of major legislation affecting most Americans that passed that way over the past half-century. Except for one: Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus plan, approved in February.

The Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid, votes to go to war in Iraq both in the First Gulf War and the Second, plus No Child Left Behind: all those votes had bipartisan support. Not today.

The sweeping health care reform bill as now drafted would, in practice, be an uncertainty at best, a debacle at worst. Democrats are trying to paint Republican refusal to get on board as obstructionism. Compromise, however, never appeared to be on the table. Therefore, success or failure, health care reform passed only by Democrats will forever be identified as a Democratic program, for better or for worse.

Given the political risks, it appears this is a gamble Democrats are willing to take. They see its success as cementing a Democratic majority of voters for decades to come. Failure could have the opposite effect. Republicans would be free to echo Moynihan and say, “We told you so.”

Labels: The Budget

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:19 AM 4 comments

What a yes vote in the Senate costs these days

 

ABC reveals how much Mary Landrieu seems willing to sell her vote for the Reid health bill. The going rate seems to be $100 million. In Reid's view, that's cheap at the price, especially since it's all just coming out of the taxpayers' pockets.

What does it take to get a wavering senator to vote for health care reform?

Here’s a case study.

On page 432 of the Reid bill, there is a section increasing federal Medicaid subsidies for “certain states recovering from a major disaster.”

The section spends two pages defining which “states” would qualify, saying, among other things, that it would be states that “during the preceding 7 fiscal years” have been declared a “major disaster area.”

I am told the section applies to exactly one state: Louisiana, the home of moderate Democrat Mary Landrieu, who has been playing hard to get on the health care bill.

In other words, the bill spends two pages describing would could be written with a single world: Louisiana. (This may also help explain why the bill is long.)

Senator Harry Reid, who drafted the bill, cannot pass it without the support of Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu.

How much does it cost? According to the Congressional Budget Office: $100 million.

I wonder if the rest of Louisianans who oppose the bill will think that she negotiated a good deal for her vote.

The funny thing is that, in the old days, they could insert these couple of pages into a big bill and be confident that no one would figure it out, at least until it was too late. In these days of the internet, they can't hide things like this anymore.

Labels: Senate

posted by Betsy Newmark permalink 6:12 AM 3 comments