…are pretty worthless at this point, including those that compare them to Hillary.
But here’s the latest.
The only thing I take from the polls is that this will be a long hard slog among the myriad Republican candidates. But we already knew that.
Actually, there’s one more thing I take from the polls, and that’s that Hillary Clinton is doing way better than she should be. But we already knew that, as well.
Or rather, mouths.
As if things were not bad enough, we now have the appointment of one of our very favorite spokespeople to the Iran negotiations team:
Acting State Department Spokesperson Marie Harf is being promoted to Senior Advisor for Strategic Communications to Secretary of State John Kerry.
Harf will focus on negotiations between the U.S. and Iran on nuclear weapons.
Perhaps this is not as bad as it seems. Perhaps she will merely be relaying messages to Kerry (although I’m not sure she can even do that with accuracy). I’m not even sure this qualifies as a promotion, because it means we’ll be seeing less of her.
Harf certainly has shown the single trait that Obama cares about in his subordinates: enough dogged loyalty to be willing to take a lot of punishment and spew out a lot of garbage for Team Obama.
[NOTE: See this for previous posts of mine that feature Harf.]
Rand Paul is on the outs, say quite a few people, including Dana Milbank, Bobby Jindal, and Chris Christie, all for somewhat different reasons.
Well, I never thought Paul had a chance. He is a better version of his dad, but like him he still voices enough idiosyncratic positions that are too far to the extreme libertarian side of things for most voters to stomach.
I also think that both Jindal and Christie are toast in terms of election 2016. Jindal doesn’t have the “it” factor, although I think highly of him. I can’t define exactly what this “it” factor is, but I know it when I see it, and although I don’t think it should be so important I am realist enough to acknowledge that it is. Christie, unlike Jindal, has almost too much personality, and his doesn’t wear well over time, although it’s a type of personality that I, being from New York City, find very familiar and almost soothing, along with the accent (yeah, go figure). Christie also is too far to the left to please the Republican base, and Bridgegate has somehow managed to successfully taint him (just as the MSM intended) even though he was actually uninvolved. Continue reading →
About the current claims that, back when Obamacare was being drafted, that language about the necessity of state exchanges for subsidies just sort of snuck in there by accident and/or error, Megan Mcardle writes:
1. This is not new.
2. This is incomplete.
3. This is not legally relevant, for good reason.
4. If it were legally relevant, it would not be as helpful to the case as liberals think.
This is not the first time a media outlet has talked to folks who were involved in the process, and recorded them saying that they never, no way and no how, intended to deny subsidies to states–or reasoning, like Olympia Snowe in Pear’s article, that they couldn’t have set it up this way, because it would be crazy to choose a structure that threatened subsidies for people in states that didn’t set up exchanges.
These articles, however, often don’t provide important counterarguments. For example: Congress indisputably chose exactly that crazy, insane, totally inconceivable structure for the Medicaid expansion passed in the same law. In fact, it was considerably more coercive…
Or consider the “drafting error” interpretation that many politicians have offered. Here’s a puzzle about that…: At several points during the drafting process, people kept adding the phrase “established by the state” to the middle of “exchange established under Section 1311,”…This language survived the process of merging and reconciling bills, even while other sections were amended to ensure parity of requirements on federal and state exchanges…
Read the whole thing, it you’re interested in the legal niceties.
Betsy Newmark expands on some of the many reasons why “we didn’t really mean it” just doesn’t cut it in explaining why Obamacare was drafted the way it was vis a vis the states setting up their own exchanges:
The government has not made this “drafting error” argument in either its brief or oral argument; instead the defendants argue that “exchange established by the state” is a term of art that includes exchanges not established by the state. There’s good reason for this. The “drafting error” argument requires admitting that at some point “established by the state” was deliberately written into law to mean, well, exchanges established by individual states, something that the government has no interest in saying, because contrary to apparently popular belief, “drafting error” is not a magic word that forces the Supreme Court to give you a mulligan. As Adler points out, Elena Kagan recently wrote in another case that, “This Court has no roving license, in even ordinary cases of statutory interpretation, to disregard clear language simply on the view that (in [the IRS’s] words) Congress ‘must have intended’ something broader.”
However, even if this were accurate, and even if the court were inclined to broadly rewrite statutes to what the legislators wanted them to be, none of Pear’s interviews would carry any weight toward that end. The Supreme Court isn’t much interested in post-hoc statements of legislative intent….
Actually, this is not crazy, but very wise. Memory is incredibly fallible, especially about stuff you’re highly motivated to believe.
We now have two cases of wonks who were closely connected to the drafting process, who said at one point that the King interpretation of the statute is insane to anyone who followed the construction of the law … and can be found on tape at an earlier point (in one case, during the legislative process) advancing exactly the theory that they subsequently declared completely and obviously insane. Do I think that their later argument was a strategic lie? No, despite conservative shouts that I am being naive. Scout’s honor, cross my heart and hope to die, I think that they simply forgot what they’d earlier believed.
I’m not sure why that word “simply” is in there, because Newmark doesn’t appear to think that this “forgetting” is a simple act. After all, the forgetting isn’t random; it only goes in one direction, that which furthers what the party needs it to be at any given time. IMHO it is more akin to the “forgetting” that leads, as Winston Smith’s interlocutor O’Brien says in Nineteen Eighty-Four, to the conviction that 2 + 2 = 5 if the party needs it to.
I have explored this phenomenon before, and I think the following quote from Whittaker Chambers’ Witness describes it better than anything I’ve ever read:
When I first knew him, Harry Freeman [who later become the assistant US chief of Tass, the Soviet news service] was just out of Cornell University, where he had brilliantly majored in history”¦the best mind that I was to meet among the American Communist intellectuals. It was an entirely new type of mind to me. No matter how favorable his opinion had been to an individual or his political role, if that person fell from grace in the Communist Party, Harry Freeman changed his opinion about him instantly. That was not strange, that was a commonplace of Communist behavior. What was strange was that Harry seemed to change without any effort or embarrassment. There seemed to vanish from his mind any recollection that he had ever held any opinion other than the approved one. If you taxed him with his former views, he would show surprise, and that surprise would be authentic. He would then demonstrate to you, in a series of mental acrobatics so flexible that the shifts were all but untraceable, that he had never thought anything else.
In that same post, I go on to write:
Of course, rationalization and denial of facts that don’t fit a person’s previously held beliefs is not just a province of the Left. It’s a general human trait, and that is why a mind is a difficult thing to change. But the Left carefully nurtures, fosters, advocates, and even requires this sort of denial, whereas it is my observation that the Right (and this was something that was formative in my own change experience), while hardly immune, is much less demanding that its adherents dismiss and deny logic and inconvenient facts.
…get it right on blocking elements of Obama’s amnesty.
For now, anyway:
The decision means that a lower court ruling blocking millions of illegal immigrants from obtaining work permits and otherwise avoiding deportation will be allowed to stand, delaying the implementation until the court case is resolved.
Twenty-six states have joined the suit against the administration’s policy.
Now what?:
The Obama administration can now turn to the U.S. Supreme Court for a green light to proceed with the program, or Justice Department officials could wait until the 5th Circuit rules on the merits of U.S. District Court Judge Andrew Hanen’s legal rationale for the injunction he entered in February. A different panel of the appeals court is expected to hear arguments on those issues in early July.
The three 5th Circuit judges deciding the case were randomly selected. Two of the three judges selected were appointed by Republican presidents, while the other was appointed by Obama.
The vote today was 2-1. The breakdown of who voted for what was exactly as you would expect. That’s one of the reasons that electing Republicans is important—they get to appoint judges, and although it doesn’t always work out perfectly (i.e. Roberts and some others) it usually does make a difference in holding the line.
…who missed the link to this article posted by commenter “snopercod” yesterday, please read it.
Speaking of change, here’s a guy who underwent a rather large one:
[Hat tip: commenter “Artfldgr.”]
Columnist Dennis Prager is a changer, although his change happened many moons ago—he says that Carter is the last Democrat he voted for:
Obviously, I underwent an intellectual change. And it wasn’t easy. Becoming a Republican was emotionally and psychologically like converting to another religion.
In fact, when I first voted Republican I felt as if I had abandoned the Jewish people. To be a Jew meant being a Democrat. It was that simple. It was — and remains — that fundamental to many American Jews’ identity.
Therefore, it took a lot of thought to undergo this conversion. I had to understand both liberalism and conservatism. Indeed, I have spent a lifetime in a quest to do so.
Changers have the advantage of having looked at life (and politics, and history) from both sides now, as in the Joni Mitchell song. Prager is planning a series of columns explaining some of the fundamental differences between left and right as he sees them.
Should be worth reading.
I don’t have a definitive answer to the question posed by the title of this post. But I know that it’s an important question.
ISIS is a modern phenomenon. Violence and terrorism is an old, old one, but the internet has exponentially enhanced the ability of such evil to reach a huge number of people around the entire globe. Geography is no longer any barrier, and ISIS has been able to unite the most barbaric bloodthirstiness of times gone by with an up-to-date ability to excite and recruit people with it, to organize and spread the word, and to do it in ways that often protect the identity of the perpetrators. If the government wants to use its own ability to spy on ISIS supporters, it has to activate methods of surveillance that offend the sensibilities of a free people.
ISIS thus can use our own dedication to liberty to undermine that liberty. I suppose ’twas ever thus for groups that seek to undermine the US, but never before has there been such a combination of primitive blood lust, religious fanaticism, and sophisticated use of the most modern methods of reaching the public from which to draw supporters. “Worrisome” doesn’t even begin to describe it.
This Fox article [hat tip: Amy Miller at Legal Insurrection] indicates that there has been so much internet chatter from supporters of ISIS as well as actual members planning violence that US intelligence is having trouble separating out the more serious from the mere talkers:
“The large number of social media postings by US-based ISIL supporters is challenging for investigators in differentiating those supporters focused only on promoting pro-ISIL rhetoric, which may be protected speech, vice [versus] detecting those prepared to engage in violence on the group’s behalf,” the bulletin said.
The bulletin warned the “reach and popularity” of social media platforms has made it easier for U.S.-based extremists to “identify and connect” with foreign terrorist organizations, which can “potentially direct” them. It said the FBI estimates there are “hundreds, possibly thousands” of people in the U.S. getting “recruitment overtures or directives to attack the United States,” and ISIS is using social media in “unprecedented ways” to send messages advocating attacks in the U.S.
ISIS is not a group that is benign in any of its manifestations. It has no redeeming social importance, not even any social service front like many other terrorist organizations use to justify themselves to the naive. It doesn’t hide its intention to wreak havoc on the Middle Eastern countries in which it is most active, and in the west and this country too. It does not make a secret of the fact that it is marshaling its forces to do so through terrorist attacks of a greater ferocity than has been previously known.
So, what are the limits of protected speech? Is supporting an organization like ISIS okay as long as the government can’t find a smoking gun? When does speech cross over into what’s called a “true threat” or sedition, or giving “material support” to a terrorist group, none of which are protected speech?
John Carlin, assistant AG for national security, seems to think it would be a good idea to try ISIS supporters as terrorists:
He suggested the Justice Department could bring prosecutions under the law against providing material support to a terrorist organization. His remarks were believed to be the first time a U.S. official has ever said that people who assist ISIS with online media could face criminal prosecution.
Carlin was asked at the conference whether he would “consider criminal charges” against people who are “proliferating ISIS social media.”
His answer: “Yes. You need to look at the particular facts and evidence.” But Carlin noted that the United States could use the material support law to prosecute “technical expertise” to a designated terrorist organization. And spreading the word for ISIS online could count as such expertise.
That does seem to be a bit of a stretch. On the other hand, ISIS has such special and extreme characteristics that supporting that group is worse than supporting other terrorist groups—even Islamic terrorists such as Hamas, for example—because of ISIS’s extreme barbarity and global ambitions, including an imminent plan to attack the population of the US. Ignoring the fact that they are recruiting in this country would seem to be a good example of the Constitution as a suicide pact.
Of course, the most effective thing to do to blunt the appeal of ISIS would be to defeat and humiliate them in Syria and Iraq. But the Obama administration doesn’t seem to have the will to mount a serious attempt to do that now, before the “JV” has metastasized even further.
Here’s a photo I took yesterday with my cellphone, as the day was fading.
I have a few Memorial Day posts that I tend to put up every year. It’s the easy way out, and saves me some work, although I always look at them and revise them if necessary. It’s often necessary, because events and time move on.
But this year I wanted to add something new. This Memorial Day I can’t help but reflect on the family and friends of those who gave their lives in Iraq and how they must feel about what is happening there now, and the domination of ISIS in areas that were so hard-fought and hard-won by Allied forces.
Obama abandoned that country, and by doing so he abandoned not just the Iraqis who trusted us but the Americans who fought and died there. Some blame Bush for getting us in and argue about whether he was right or wrong to do so, and focus on all the errors made along the way—errors that are virtually inevitable in war. But those errors were mostly overcome by the time Obama “inherited” the war, and certainly by the time he pulled out entirely, declaring it a stable success.
It probably could have remained so with a relatively small amount of continuing presence, but he was not willing to make that investment, despite the fact that all his military advisers suggested it and said that not that big a presence would be necessary to continue to secure the peace. Obama—the smartest person in any room—knew better. And now we face the collapse of not just that country but the region.
If you go back and read many of my early posts about Iraq and the effort there, I always had imagined that in order to succeed we needed to be willing to stay for the long haul at some level, somewhat as in other countries such as South Korea. I was continually concerned that the propaganda of the left and the press would make that impossible—and it has, with Obama as one of the main proponents of our ultimate abandonment and thereby defeat. If I, a mere blogger, feel this way, how bad must it be for the families and friends of those who fought and died in Iraq?
The story “The Man Without a Country” used to be standard reading matter for seventh graders. In fact, it was the first “real” book—as opposed to those tedious Dick and Jane readers—that I was assigned in school.
It was exciting compared to Dick and Jane and the rest, since it dealt with an actual story with some actual drama to it. It struck me as terribly sad—and unfair, too—that Philip Nolan was forced to wander the world, exiled, for one moment of cursing the United States. “The Man Without a Country” was the sort of paean to patriotism that I would guess is rarely or never assigned nowadays to students.
Patriotism has gotten a bad name during the last few decades. I think part of this feeling began (at least in this country) with the Vietnam era and the influence of the left. But patriotism and nationalism seem to have been rejected by a large segment of Europeans even earlier, as a result of the devastation both sentiments were seen to have wrought on that continent during WWI and WWII. Of course, WWII in Europe was a result mainly of German nationalism run amok, but it seemed to have given nationalism as a whole a very bad name.
Here’s author Thomas Mann on the subject, writing in 1947 in the introduction to the American edition of Herman Hesse’s Demian:
If today, when national individualism lies dying, when no single problem can any longer be solved from a purely national point of view, when everything connected with the “fatherland” has become stifling provincialism and no spirit that does not represent the European tradition as a whole any longer merits consideration…
A strong statement of the post-WWII idea of nationalism as a dangerous force, mercifully dead or dying, to be replaced (hopefully) by a pan-national (or, rather, anational) Europeanism. Mann was a German exile from his own country who had learned to his bitter regret the excesses to which unbridled and amoral nationalism can lead. His was an understandable and common response at the time, one that many decades later helped lead to the formation of the EU. The waning but still relatively strong nationalism of the US is seen by those who agree with him as a relic of those dangerous days of nationalism gone mad without any curb of morality or consideration for others.
But the US is not Nazi Germany or anything like it, however much the far left may try to make that analogy. There’s a place for nationalism, and for love of country. Not a nationalism that ignores or tramples on human rights (like that of the Nazis), but one that embraces and strives for and tries to preserve them here and abroad, keeping in mind that—human nature being what it is—no nation on earth can be perfect or anywhere near perfect. The US is far from perfect, but it is a very good country nevertheless, always working to be better, with a nationalism that recognizes that sometimes liberty must be fought for, and that the struggle involves some sacrifice.
So, I’ll echo the verse that figured so prominently in “The Man Without a Country,” and say (corny, but true): …this is my own, my native land. And I’ll also echo Francis Scott Key and add: …the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
[NOTE: This is a slightly edited version of an older post.]