…where Obama condemned this random act of random hostage-taking by random violent extremists?
Scott Walker addresses the press
In this op-ed, Scott Walker channels Newt Gingrich minus all the nastiness—although Newt wouldn’t really be Newt without the nastiness.
Why do I say Walker is being like Gingrich? I remember, back in the 2012 Republican primaries, one of the things that drew Newt-supportors to Newt was that he was the only one of the Republican field who threw the press’s “gotcha” questions back in their faces, questioning the motives and tactics of the questioners rather than being trapped by them. A lot of people wished the others would adopt the tactic, too, because it can counter one of the ways in which members of the MSM treat Republicans very very differently than they treat Democrats.
Well, Scott Walker has adopted it, and Walker has the decided advantage (at least to my way of thinking) of seeming personally non-threatening and mild-mannered. Unlike Newt, he’s got that Midwestern affability thing going. But watch out—as with that “amiable dunce” Reagan, Walker is both sharp and unafraid of standing up for himself and defying the attempts of the media to define or trap him.
I found the following video of Reagan because I was looking for a clip of his “I am paying for this microphone” quote. But when I watched it I was struck by what Reagan says at the very end about Carter (it starts around 0:50). The statement is very well put, and could be a template for what Walker might say about Obama right now. Yes, Obama’s leadership is much worse than “mediocre,” the word Reagan uses in the clip for Carter’s. But it’s still a very hard-hitting statement overall, and “mediocre” is actually a description that even most moderates could agree with. Take a look:
Scare tactics about the pending SCOTUS Obamacare subsidies case
Soon the Supreme Court will start hearing King v. Burwell, the case that could eliminate federal subsidies for people in states that declined to set up Obamacare exchanges. It would deal a huge blow to Obamacare itself if the plaintiffs were to win.
That—and not the merits of the law—is the reason I have long thought that SCOTUS is likely to blink on this. On purely legal grounds, I believe the plaintiffs have a good case, but the consequences seem so potentially cataclysmic that SCOTUS will be reluctant to trigger them. Whether the justices should take that sort of thing under consideration, the reality is that they sometimes do, and they then figure out a way to justify their decision legally (there’s always a way to do that). That’s what I think Justice Roberts did when he “creatively” declared the Obamacare penalty a tax for one purpose and not for another (see this). It’s my opinion that his motive for turning himself into a mental pretzel was to avoid what he saw as too dramatic a result if the main basis of Obamacare coercion, the penalty, was declared unconstitutional.
Prior to that decision, Democrats had been sounding the drumbeat of alarm because they knew it would spook the Court as well as the public, and they’ve been doing it again (see this and this) for quite some time.
There’s a way that Republicans could take a lot of the sting out of this, which is to formulate a viable alternative and publicize it heavily. That way we wouldn’t get as many articles like this one:
The immediate effect of a ruling against the ACA would be to hurl the political system, and no small part of the economy, into chaos. Yet there’s little sign that Washington is preparing for that scenario. Democrats won’t talk about what they would do because they don’t want the court to believe they could contain the fallout. Republicans don’t want to talk because they’re loath to admit that, even after voting 67 times to repeal or defund the ACA, they have no plan to help the millions who would be affected. (But they’d sure love the court to kill the law anyway.)
Actually, Republicans have several plans, and the author goes on to mention one by Stuart Butler of the Brookings Institution. There are others, as well, described here, here, and here. The problem is not that there aren’t any plans, it’s that there isn’t agreement on a single plan that the Republicans can (or will) publicize as the plan.
That’s not surprising. The issues are complex, the best fixes are not obvious, and after all this is Congress and the GOP we’re talking about. What’s more, why spend so much time and effort on something that they may not even get to vote on if SCOTUS doesn’t rule against the subsidies?
Because they need to unify on this and get their message out to show that they are serious and that they are prepared—that they are practical and have a way to say “yes” rather than just “no.” And it is no small matter, too, that it would help reassure the SCOTUS swing justices such as Roberts that chaos will not inevitably follow a ruling for the plaintiffs.
FCC votes for net neutrality
Anyone surprised at the vote? Didn’t think so. The general trend is for greater and greater control by agencies in matters that may seem innocuous, technical, and/or unimportant at the time but can have wide-reaching effects especially when they are followed by ever-expanding restrictions.
The net neutrality rules don’t sound so bad. And maybe they’ll stay that way. But I wouldn’t bet a dime on it.
Here’s the “neutrality” part:
The Federal Communications Commission today voted to enforce net neutrality rules that prevent Internet providers””including cellular carriers””from blocking or throttling traffic or giving priority to Web services in exchange for payment.
Trouble is that it gets the camel’s nose in the tent (actually, I think the nose was already in the tent, but I think you know what I mean):
The most controversial part of the FCC’s decision reclassifies fixed and mobile broadband as a telecommunications service, with providers to be regulated as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. This brings Internet service under the same type of regulatory regime faced by wireline telephone service and mobile voice, though the FCC is forbearing from stricter utility-style rules that it could also apply under Title II.
Chairman Wheeler tut-tuts concerns:
This proposal has been described by one opponent as, quote, a secret plan to regulate the Internet. Nonsense. This is no more a plan to regulate the Internet than the First Amendment is a plan to regulate free speech. They both stand for the same concepts: openness, expression, and an absence of gate keepers telling people what they can do, where they can go, and what they can think.
So, which is it folks? Hint: Obama and the Democrats are for it, and Republicans and Libertarians seem to trend against it. Therefore my guess is “a plan to regulate free speech,” step by step by step. A certain step may seem perfectly fine and even reasonable at the time. But objections are not, as Wheeler so elegantly says, “nonsense,” because a step is almost inexorably followed by another and another and another, until a point is reached that isn’t fine at all.
Net neutrality open thread
I’ve run out of time for writing posts right now, but I thought I’d provide a thread for discussion of the topic of net neutrality. It’s a biggee. To spark things, go to Drudge and take a look at some of the top stories.
I think an open thread on this topic is very apropos, isn’t it?
Oh, by the way…
…many of you will be pleased to know I’ve changed my mind somewhat on the “Obama doesn’t love America” flap.
I still think it’s not the way to go for Republican candidates, as I said in my previous posts and comments. But I have come to support Giuliani’s move, and I think he should continue in that vein. He’s neither a candidate nor office-holder, so he can serve as a gadfly, stirring up “interesting” questions like that and sparking “interesting” discussions. Not a bad idea, especially if the tactic is limited to people like Giuliani, who doesn’t hold office, and who is someone a lot of Americans still hold in some affection because of his role in responding to 9/11 (Newt Gingrich wouldn’t be quite as effective because he lacks that latter quality of being held in affection, but as a non-office-holder he could certainly do it, too).
One of the reasons I was wary about the approach was because I knew the press would pile on the actual candidates, and try to hoist them by Giuliani’s petard. But I’ve been encouraged by the reaction of Scott Walker, for example, who has refused to bite. As long as the candidates say the equivalent of “Giuliani can speak for himself,” and even better, “Hey, why don’t you ask Hillary what she thinks of Obama for calling President Bush unpatriotic?”, then my concerns about this whole approach are allayed.
There’s still a lot of snow in New England
Watters’ World visits Southie and quizzes people on global warming. Some Boston humor:
What can the Republican Congress do?
Let me begin by stating my point of view. I’m with commenter “Harold,” who writes:
Not only should Republicans break the filibuster, they should break, bend, ignore every rule and tradition in the Senate. Republicans don’t seem to get that they are in an Alinsky jam here. The Democrats are making them live up to their fine old rules while the Democrats live by power and power alone.
As soon as the Democrats ended the filibuster for judicial appointments, arguments for Republicans to retain it became weak, because the reason for keeping it was always to protect one’s own minority rights when the time came. This required that both parties support the rule, knowing that someday it would be their turn to benefit from it (when they were in the minority) and another day it would be their turn to be stymied by it (when they were in the majority but not the supermajority). Respect for the rule also required a modicum of compromise from whatever the minority party du jour might be if Congress wanted to get any work done at all. But that sort of thing ended a while ago, too.
So there is no longer any reason to uphold something I always had defended. Now the situation is such that Republicans are fighting a battle where the implicit rules of the game have changed. As “Harold” puts it, they are in an Alinsky jam here. And they better study up on their Alinsky or they’re going to be in huge trouble (they already are in trouble, actually). But I don’t think most of them have the temperament, or perhaps even the interest, to go bold.
However, let’s not pretend that the jam they face is one in which there’s a simple way out. There may not even be a way out at all, although there are ways that could offer at least a chance of an out. But the difficulty of the situation is why I not only am very frustrated with the Republican leaders (and some others) in Congress, I also am frustrated with people who say that it is obvious what they should do and that it surely would be successful. That is wishful thinking of the highest order—although I may agree with those people on the fact that the GOP should do it anyway.
Right after the election of 2014 there was a brief surge of joy among many on the right about a campaign hard fought and won. But then reality set in, a reality of which many of those same people had also been previously aware. It had long been clear that Obama and the Democrats would do whatever it took, and that a supermajority would have been needed to have had a really good chance of stopping them. Even had the GOP gotten a supermajority (and there was never any real chance of that happening in 2014) I believe that Obama would have just bypassed Congress even more and done exactly what he wanted. Defunding would, however, have been easier to accomplish.
But absent a Republican supermajority, Obama and Reid can continue to call the shots. Obama signaled right after the 2014 election that the Democrats’ loss meant nothing to him, and that he was perfectly willing to bypass Congress. As for the future, if the presidency is really a lock for Democrats from now on because of the Electoral College picture (I don’t believe this theory, but I’ve read many analyses that espouse it), and future Democratic presidents and Democratic members of Congress are willing to follow in Obama’s and Reid’s footsteps in terms of power and ruthlessness, the only conclusion I can come to is that Republican majorities in Congress will never matter much unless they are supermajorities, and that showdown after showdown (and shutdown after shutdown) would be the name of the game.
So what power does the current Republican Congress have? Why even bother to have elected them? One obvious reason is that they stop affirmatively Democratic legislation (such as Obamacare) from being passed. Congress was already Republican enough after the election of 2010 to have been doing that, of course, even when they didn’t have the Senate, because they had at least 40 votes there. Now they have a significant majority of the Senate, but little has changed in actuality because they still don’t have the 60 Senate seats to force cloture, nor do they have the needed 2/3 to override a presidential veto. So their power to pass affirmatively Republican legislation in the Senate continues to be to reduced.
That means that unless they can get a significant number of Democrats to cross party lines (good luck with that) they are limited to either (1) passing less controversial bills where they can get six Democratic senators to join, as with Keystone; or (2) ending the filibuster, in which case they can pass bills galore but can’t make them stick because of the veto problem and the lack of votes to override. But at least they could highlight Obama’s obstructionism as they pass—and he vetoes—bill and bill after bill.
To recap: they can impeach but not convict. They can pass bills in the House that can’t get through the Senate, or that can get through the Senate but not get past the veto. They can…they can…what? They can decline to fund important parts of government, and try to bully the Democrats and Obama into blinking, but Obama rests secure in the fact that the public will be manipulated by the press into blaming Republican “obstructionism” for any lack of funding. That doesn’t mean the Republicans shouldn’t do it anyway, but it does mean they run an excellent chance of taking the hit for it rather than Obama and the Democrats.
That’s the situation we have now. If Republicans don’t have the courage (or foolhardiness—take your pick) to act in this extreme way, it will be up to the courts to stop things, be it Obamacare subsidies or amnesty. Both issues have cases pending. At this point I’m willing to say that the current case pending in Texas about amnesty is one of the most important ones the courts (and ultimately it may be the Supreme Court) have ever faced. The lower court’s decision was based on very narrow grounds, but that was just an injunction and not the final word, which will almost certainly be decided on larger constitutional grounds by higher courts.
That’s one of the reasons I’ve always emphasized how crucial court appointments are. Of course, there’s always the possibility that Obama would defy the courts if the decision were to go against him. Would Obama do that? I have come to think the answer is “yes.” He would do it either overtly, or covertly if possible.
[NOTE: So, if the Democrats wouldn’t hesitate to end the filibuster if they needed to, why didn’t they do it in order to pass Obamacare? The answer is they didn’t need to; with the “creative” use of reconciliation, they passed it despite the election of Scott Brown that was specifically aimed at giving the Republicans the requisite 40 votes to stop Obamacare.]
Obama vetoes Keystone
And he will have no hesitation to veto everything else the Republicans pass that doesn’t have the votes to override. And since the Democrats tend to hang tough, that will be just about everything the Republicans plan to do.
You can rail all you want against the Republicans, but at this point it is clear that minus a president who cares about what the people want, if a president is willing to defy both houses of Congress and can get away with it, the only way to pass legislation these days with an opposition party president is to control more than 2/3 of both houses. But that’s a rare situation; it is not usually the case, historically speaking, that when a president is of a different party than Congress, the other party can muster that strong a majority.
It’s quite an impasses. The only way out I can see is for the Republicans to exercise the nuclear option on legislation in general. That would be quite a move, setting a dangerous precedent for the future when they are not in power. However, at this point it is clear that if they don’t do it the left is determined to make sure the right has no future (amnesty is one tool for that). There is no doubt in my mind that if the situation were reversed, the Deomcrats would jettison the filibuster in a heartbeat. They are playing for keeps.
[ADDENDUM: I realize that eliminating the filibuster would not help override a veto. Unfortunately. But it would enable the Republicans in the majority in this Congress to pass a lot more legislation and force the veto over and over and over, which I think would at least make it crystal clear what’s going on with this president. There is at least a small chance that this would increase the pressure on Democrats, especially moderate ones, to vote to pass certain measures that Obama opposes but which are popular with Americans (such as Keystone), and perhaps to join in an override of a veto. Obama doesn’t care about being re-elected, but maybe the Democrats in Congress do.
Unfortunately, though, without a 2/3 majority, and with Obama in the White House, the Republicans are limited in their possible approaches. Obama is willing to defy both Congress AND the American people, and the Democratic Party is willing to go along.
I don’t think America has ever faced anything like this before, certainly not on this scale.
The 2014 election was incredibly important (as the 2012 one had been before it). It was nearly impossible for the GOP to achieve a 2/3 majority in 2014, even though the GOP did really, really well. But without 2/3, even “really really well” matters little.]
I hate parking pay stations
How about you?
Yes, they do away with the need to always have gobs of change on hand. Big deal. What they offer in that particular convenience they more than take away in the many other annoyances they provide.
How fun to have to hike to one in a storm, and then hike back to the car in order to place the little piece of paper on the dashboard. Even worse is when—as so often happens in New England—there are huge mounds of snow to traverse in order to even get near them.
Sometimes you have to wait in line to use one. That’s great, too. And then try to figure out how to work it, because they’re all just a wee bit different. Some of my favorites manage to trick you into buying more time than you want, if you’re not wary.
Progress.
I seem to recall having been in a city or two where they have individual parking meters into which one can insert a credit card or use cash. Now, that seems like progress. Choice and convenience.
If you need some cheering up…
…and who among us doesn’t?—read this.
It would be immensely satisfying poetic justice if the man the Democrats set out to destroy in Wisconsin ended up becoming the next president in part because his fight against their attacks helped gain him national attention and an impressive history of victory over the left.
Obama and Iran: the shape of agreements to come
Scott Johnson at Powerline alerts readers to news on the current state of negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, pointing to this AP article as well as this piece by David Horovitz at The Times of Israel.
The AP article is awfully ho-hum about it all, considering how high the stakes are. For example, the headline is “Historic US-Iran nuclear deal could be taking shape,” which doesn’t say a thing about good, bad, or indifferent. The article goes on with the usual back-and-forth between those who laud the potential agreement and its critics, but expresses no real sense of alarm (except for Israel’s alarm). It’s got quotes like these in it to appeal to those predisposed to trust the administration:
Still, a comprehensive pact could ease 35 years of U.S-Iranian enmity ”” and seems within reach for the first time in more than a decade of negotiations.
“We made progress,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said as he bade farewell to members of the American delegation at the table with Iran. More discussions between Iran and the six nations engaging it were set for next Monday, a senior U.S. official said.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said the sides found “a better understanding” at the negotiating table.
The tone of the article seems to be that the pending deal represents a balance of competing interests between two sides presumed to be negotiating at least somewhat in good faith (a preposterous notion in terms of Iran’s rulers, and suspect as well for this administration):
Iran says it does not want nuclear arms and needs enrichment only for energy, medical and scientific purposes, but the U.S. fears Tehran could re-engineer the program to produce the fissile core of a nuclear weapon.
The U.S. initially sought restrictions lasting up to 20 years; Iran has pushed for less than a decade. The prospective deal appears to be somewhere in the middle.
It ends on a note of optimism about the talks, and sympathy for Iran:
Daryl Kimball of the Washington-based Arms Control Association said that with the IAEA’s additional monitoring, the deal taking shape leaves “more than enough time to detect and disrupt any effort to pursue nuclear weapons in the future.”
In exchange, Iran wants relief from sanctions crippling its economy and the U.S. is talking about phasing in such measures.
Now let’s take a look at what the Horovitz article has to say. He observes that, although the Obama administration has been engaged in denying Israeli rumors of what might be in the agreement and accusing Israel of “misrepresenting the specifics for narrow political ends,” the pending agreement that the AP article describes not only contains many of the things Israel has been complaining about, but is even worse than previously thought. According to Israel’s “most respected Middle East affairs analyst,” Ehud Ya’ari, the deal would be likely to have some catastrophic consequences:
In his TV commentary on Monday night, Ya’ari highlighted that the deal could further embolden Iran as it expands its influence throughout this region, and he noted that the isolation of Iran even by Israel’s key allies was already cracking, with the firmly pro-Israel foreign minister of Australia, Julie Bishop, announcing an imminent visit to Tehran ”” the first Australian foreign minister to make such a trip in a decade.
Ya’ari also noted that the International Atomic Energy Agency has made clear that it lacks the tools to effectively monitor the kind of nuclear program that Iran will be allowed to maintain under the emerging deal ”” incapable, that is, of ensuring that Iran does not fool the West as it has done in the past.
The devil of such deals is generally in the detail. But the devil, here, is in the principle as well ”” the principle that the P5+1 is about to legitimize Iran as a nuclear threshold state. From there, it will be capable of rapidly breaking out to the bomb, well aware that the international community lacks the will to stop it…
…[I]f the deal now taking shape is indeed finalized, the chances of the regime being ousted from within, or effectively confronted from without, will drastically recede. This deal, indeed, will help cement the ayatollahs in power, with dire consequences for Israel, relatively moderate Arab states, and the free world.
Elections have consequences, and Obama’s election in 2012 has already had some mighty big ones.
The only consolation I can find is one that was pointed out several times in the comment section at the Powerline article, which is that Obama will never bring this to Congress to be ratified because he knows it’s highly unlikely to get Congressional approval. Although the deal wouldn’t require ratification because it’s not necessarily a treaty, as a non-treaty it probably would not be binding on a future president.
I said that was the only consolation, and I’ll add that it’s very scant consolation. Even if America’s next president ultimately goes back on the Iranian deal, Obama has shown the entire world that America no longer can be counted on to have a reliable and consistent foreign policy, even in such an important and basic matter. That sets a terrible, terrible precedent, even if the US (and Israel, and the world) ultimately dodge this particular Iranian bullet.
Anyone who has paid attention to Obama over the years can’t help but notice that his m.o. is to act unilaterally, in “historic” and sweeping ways, against public opinion, in order to get something into place as quickly as possible and hope it will become impossible to undo. Another pattern is to delay the worst consequences of the deal for a little while, in order to lull people into a false sense of security until there’s no turning back.
The Iran deal may be following similar patterns. Obama is not asking for approval, the policy change is huge, it has a delayed fuse, and he wants it completed ASAP so it will have been in place as long as possible, and done as much damage as possible, before a successor president is inaugurated who might try to clean up the mess. The longer in place the more entrenched a thing becomes, as Obama is well aware.
In US News and World Report, Harold Evans is if anything even more pessimistic about the deal than Israel’s Ya’ari was:
Look at the record of betrayals of trust that have enabled Iran to operate 19,000 centrifuges and another 1,008 IR2M machines that can produce bomb-grade, fissionable material five times faster than the other centrifuges. Back in 2005, the West was saying to Iran “zero centrifuges.” Let me repeat: zero. Next we were talking of a compromise at 5,000 centrifuges. The negotiations from 2005 and 2013 can be summed up in one word: retreat. A series of capitulations have left Iran with “the right” to enrich uranium, so now it has thousands of kilograms of enriched uranium. That’s enough to produce a bomb, contrary to the Obama administration’s commitment to Congress that it would not allow Iran to have nuclear weapons…
Now the United States seems prepared to make a deal that not only would suspend and ultimately lift the sanctions, but would do so while leaving Iran as a threshold nuclear power. This is the classic definition of a Bad Deal. And worse: Iran is on track to put a nuclear warhead on intercontinental missiles with a range reaching beyond Europe. This puts the whole civilized world at risk of nuclear blackmail but more, it threatens Israel’s very existence.
The American people understand. In a poll conducted late last year, 81 percent said Iran cannot be trusted. So too do many members of Congress from both parties.
Evans reports that many Democrats in Congress “are furious with Obama for ignoring their concerns and for pursuing his obsession to reach a deal with the Iranians at almost any cost,” and that Dennis Ross (a Middle East negotiator for both the Clintona and the Obama administration) “was scathing in his condemnation of the president’s weaknesses and his ongoing concessions to the Iranians.”
Let that sink in; it tells you how extraordinarily awful Obama’s stance must be if Democrats are criticizing it that harshly. But how much of this do we hear in the MSM? And how willing are Democrats in Congress to do anything about any of it? Just watch how many of them support Obama by boycotting Netanyahu’s Congressional talk; I predict it will be a significant number. And if sanctions on Iran ever come to a vote, just watch how many Democrats will be willing to join with the GOP. I bet it’s not enough to override the inevitable presidential veto.
Obama has made this treasonous travesty of an agreement with Iran the international centerpiece of his glittering second term, just as amnesty has been the domestic centerpiece. The latter is all about consolidating the power of Obama and his party, and the former is all about puffing himself up with pride and selling out Israel, the US, and the world to an evil empire. Despite how cynical I have become in recent years, part of me is still stunned that even this wouldn’t be enough to cause enough Democrats to get fired up with apprehension and outrage and finally make an impeachment and conviction of Obama possible. And yet I am virtually certain that will never happen.
I guess the “consolidate power” part overrides all the other considerations.