Cast a wide dragnet

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m continually impressed by how often the Obama White House has done not only what he spoke against while Bush was president, but what the left fantasized/feared the Bush White House was doing. The latest example is obtaining the Verizon phone records of millions of Americans in a supposed effort to combat the terrorism that Obama has also said isn’t really a force anymore:

The [secret] order…requires Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk ”“ regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing…

The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual. Fisa court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target who is suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets.

The court order expressly bars Verizon from disclosing to the public either the existence of the FBI’s request for its customers’ records, or the court order itself.

The order is not limited to calls made to overseas, either, but includes wholly domestic calls as well.

Bush did much the same thing in 2006, to widespread criticism. The difference, of course, is that Bush did not base his political career on promising to eliminate such actions, as Obama did. Another difference is that few people (except the most virulent BDS sufferers) doubted that Bush was serious about fighting terrorism both at home and abroad—his rhetoric and actions consistently demonstrated it, whereas Obama has been inconsistent to say the least, as well as rhetorically weak.

Neither was Bush guilty of the sort of persecution and privacy violations of his political opposition that Obama has long perpetrated (I’m including the Obama campaign’s probable role in the unsealing of his rivals’ private divorce records during his 2004 Senate election). This is what makes these phone sweeps (and the AP and Rosen records-gathering, combined with the IRS scandal) so ominous.

[ADDENDUM: Michelle Malkin details some of the differences between Bush’s use of the program and Obama’s.]

Young, single, healthy, and sufferer from Obamacare sticker shock

The New Neo Posted on by

Megan McArdle analyzes how premiums might shake down for the young, unattached Californian who makes more than $25,000 or $30,000 a year.

I said my piece in the matter a couple of days ago, here. But I want to add a few things in response to McArdle’s points. The first is that any young and healthy person who didn’t already understand what Obamacare was likely to mean for their premiums probably didn’t understand much about health insurance—but I would imagine that most young and healthy people don’t understand much about health insurance. Another is (as I mentioned in my previous piece) that each state will be different, and that Obamacare, if it lasts, will be morphing and changing (perhaps into single payer, which may have been the original intent).

McArdle opines on whether young and healthy people will select the option of paying for insurance versus paying the penalty for not buying it (oops, excuse me; the tax for not buying it, says Justice Roberts):

The individual mandate is now the law of the land, and Americans are pretty law abiding. Also, people clearly like having health insurance; they opt for more generous coverage even when it’s not cost effective, and unions will give up almost anything else to protect health benefits. This may be enough to get the healthy youngsters joining the exchange.

But then again, it may not. And if they don’t, that’s going to be a really big problem.

I submit that they won’t. Why would they? The penalty will be relatively small compared to the premiums, and a person faces no impediment to buying health insurance because of pre-existing conditions if he/she should have the misfortune to fall ill. The only problem that person would face is if there’s an emergency which causes them to incur large immediate expenses, and young people with a halfway decent income and yet without insurance are already choosing to take that risk. The insurance they are now refusing to get would cost less for them at present than under Obamacare, as McArdle points out, so why on earth would they buy it when Obamacare kicks in? Just to help out the rest of us? Some particularly altruistic souls might, but I doubt their numbers would be great enough to avoid Obamacare’s potential “really big problem.”

Now it earns a suspension…

The New Neo Posted on by

…to even talk about guns at school or on a school bus:

The father of a middle schooler in Calvert County, Md. says his 11-year-old son was suspended for 10 days for merely talking about guns on the bus ride home.

Bruce Henkelman of Huntingtown says his son, a sixth grader at Northern Middle School in Owings, was talking with friends about the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre when the bus driver hauled him back to school to be questioned by the principal, Darrel Prioleau.

According to the father, what was his son’s crime? Was he threatening anyone? Not unless you call this a threat:

“He said, I wish I had a gun to protect everyone. He wanted to defeat the bad guys. That’s the context of what he said,” Henkelman said. “He wanted to be the hero.”

The boy was questioned by the principal and a sheriff’s deputy, who also wanted to search the family home without a warrant, Henkelman said. “He started asking me questions about if I have firearms, and [the deputy said] he’s going to have to search my house.

To its credit, the ACLU seems to be backing the father up in his story, and protesting the boy’s suspension.

Next up: the Thought Police, enforcing penalties against thoughtcrime, coming to a school near you.

Now, why would anyone think they’re trying to take citizens’ guns away?

ADDENDUM: On a lighter note, a comment here by “MollyNH” made me recall how often we played with toy guns in our Western-oriented youth. Didn’t seem to hurt us any.

Here’s the very young neo in her previous cowgirl life. The holsters don’t show in this picture, but I had em, along with the cap pistols and the caps, which made a satisfying and aromatic bang:

neocowgirl

He never calls…

The New Neo Posted on by

…he never writes:

Sen. Chuck Grassley, a pivotal deal-maker in Congress, said Tuesday that he has not received a phone call from President Obama in four years.

The lack of communication between the Iowa Republican and the president is an indication that Obama’s new “charm offensive” with Republicans on Capitol Hill has come up short.

Grassley, who struck landmark legislative deals with both former Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, said he is surprised there hasn’t been more outreach from the 44th commander in-chief.

My question is: why? Why would Grassley be surprised?

Oh, maybe at first. The first few months, even though it had been clear before the election what sort of a person Obama was and what his idea of outreach would be, perhaps Republicans could be forgiven for expecting more. But after that–if Grassley really was surprised, which I’m not sure he was—for any Republican to have failed to realize that Obama’s rhetoric of compromise and deal-making was a hollow hypocrisy would have been astoundingly naive.

Obama is not Clinton, as Grassley should undoubtedly have been aware long long ago. Not in terms of personality nor in terms of ruthlessness nor even in terms of goals.

Christie the politician

The New Neo Posted on by

My first thought on reading that Christie had called the NJ senatorial election for this coming October was that, although he may find himself re-elected governor of New Jersey, he’s completely killed his chances for higher office on a Republican ticket.

Of course, he may not want higher office (yeah, and I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you). Or he may decide to run for president as an Independent or even a Democrat—although I doubt either move would get him very far. Can you imagine the Democrat Party nominating him? I can’t.

My second thought was that this sort of thing is why people hate politicians, and why conservatives hate RINOs. And the resultant furor (see this and this) certainly seems to support that thought.

I know next to nothing about internal New Jersey politics, except that it’s a blue state. But it did occur to me that, if somehow a Republican gets elected to the New Jersey US Senate seat in spite of everything—a la Scott Brown (a highly unlikely event, I would imagine)—that could go a ways towards Christie being forgiven by the right.

And lo and behold, a guy named Josh Barro at Business Insider writes that it is within the realm of possibility:

A low-turnout election on a Wednesday in October with nobody else on the ballot gives Republicans their best chance to win. Booker still has an advantage, but he isn’t as good a candidate as his national profile suggests. The right Republican candidate could paint Booker as a better civic booster than city official. While pursuing the education and policing reforms that built his national profile, Booker has neglected Newark’s finances. He’s repeatedly sought to liquidate or borrow against city assets instead of bringing recurring revenues and expenses into line. And when he got caught off guard because the city council rejected one of his financial engineering schemes, he had to do a major police layoff instead.

Sounds like fantasyland to me, though.

[ADDENDUM: And I agree with Ace here. Christie’s about Christie.]

At today’s IRS hearings

The New Neo Posted on by

Yes, the IRS illegally provided the liberal group Human Rights Watch with lists of conservative donors to its rivals the National Organization for Marriage. Those donors included one of Romney’s political committees, a fact publicized for Obama campaign purposes.

Here’s the original story about the donors (minus who was responsible for the leak), which broke back in March of 2012:

A state political action committee run by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney gave $10,000 to a conservative group that has come under scrutiny for plans to “drive a wedge” between African-Americans and gays, according to documents revealed Friday.

Free & Strong America PAC Alabama, one of a network of state-level PACs that has raised and disbursed money on Romney’s behalf, gave the donation in 2008 to the National Organization for Marriage, which at the time was working to pass Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage in California, disclosure records show.

The Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights group, argues that Romney disbursed the money through his little-known Alabama PAC in an attempt to avoid drawing national attention to the donation and said it could violate California disclosure requirements. The group said it first learned of the gift from confidential NOM tax records provided by a whistleblower, which listed the money as coming from a PAC address in Massachusetts.

Whoever leaked the list apparently was careful to redact the identifying IRS origins—at least, he or she thought the markers of the document’s provenance were redacted. It turns out that the document retained “internal IRS stamps,” which “only exist within the IRS.”

Here’s a portion of today’s exchange about this:

What a tool McDermott is.

Suffering is suffering

The New Neo Posted on by

I forget what led me to this video. But I’m impressed by the matter-of-fact way this young woman discusses her situation (she’s a C-5 level quadriplegic as a result of an auto accident), without excessive drama but actually saying some pretty deep and even wise things.

The first segment is from 1:44 to about 2:59:

The second segment is from 5:00 to about 5:45:

Cynicism: it depends

The New Neo Posted on by

Ann Althouse wonders whether the result of the recent tsunami of scandals will be that “Everyone becomes cynical and dismissive and won’t even listen to the explanations or pay attention to any specific facts and answers that might emerge.”

But when did people used to pay attention? It seems to me that, at least in the last few years, whenever there have been allegations of a sequence of behavior that would tend to discredit the Obama administration (Benghazi back in the fall comes immediately to mind, but the pattern actually goes back to the 2008 campaign), I’ve seen the shrugs and heard the waves of dismissal and rationalizations, and sometimes the cynical: “they all do it.”

Part of this reaction is the human tendency to want to shut out bad news, and to a liberal anything that reflects poorly on Obama and the left is bad news. In addition there seems to be a fairly rampant inability (or unwillingness?) to make distinctions of degree or type between the “its” that “they” (politicians) do. Not all offenses are of the same magnitude or kind, but to see the differences takes attention and the motivation to be willing to sort it all out beyond a kneejerk defense of one’s own party.

The political effect of all of this depends on what people end up getting cynical about. If their reaction amounts to “all politicians are crooks, so a plague on both their houses,” the probable result would be apathy and a lot of people giving up and staying home on election day. Fanatics of either party would still be likely to come to the polls, of course. Still another group of voters likely to continue to show up would be people on the dole who want to keep the gravy train running, and who are far more likely to be Democratic voters.

But—and it’s a big “but”—if people become cynical about big and centralized government in general, that would be likely to benefit conservatives because it is one of the basic principles of conservatism itself. It’s not just that the perpetrators of these particular scandals are liberals. It’s that the subject matter of these particular scandals should have a natural tendency to reinforce the idea of the benefit of smaller and less intrusive government.

But the dots need to be connected more and more explicitly so that word reaches the largest number of people possible. To the extent that the focus remains on personalities it would tend to obscure that. To be sure, “Impeach Holder!” and “Fire Lerner!” have a certain ring to them, and both would be great ideas, IMHO. But they risk making Holder and Lerner the issues rather than the abuse of power inherent and inevitable with big government. Impeaching Holder and firing Lerner don’t even begin to address the problem, which is deep and systemic. There are plenty more where Holder and Lerner come from willing to do the same as their predecessors.

The IRS—not the usual “scandal”

The New Neo Posted on by

Peggy Noonan is coming along:

Because people think the IRS has always, in various past cases, been used as a political tool, they think we’ll glide through this scandal too. We’ll muddle through, we’ll investigate, the IRS will right itself, no biggie.

But when a scandal is systemic, ideological and focused on political ends, it will not just magically end. Agencies such as the IRS are part of what Jonathan Turley this week called a “massive administrative state,” one built with many protections and much autonomy.

If it is not forced to change, it will not…

What does it mean when half the country””literally half the country””understands that the revenue-gathering arm of its federal government is politically corrupt, sees them as targets, and will shoot at them if they try to raise their heads? That is the kind of thing that can kill a country, letting half its citizens believe that they no longer have full political rights.

Those who think this is just business as usual are ahistorical, and those who think nothing can be done, or nothing serious should be done, are suffering from Cynicism Poisoning.

Unfortunately, there are plenty such people, but I don’t think Peggy is diagnosing most of them accurately. It not cynicism that’s poisoning them, it’s the vision of the anointed and the seduction of power. They’re the anointed, the good guys, and therefore the ends justify the means.

So I’m afraid that many liberals would say who cares? We’ve got the power, we’re on the side of right, let’s stick it to that other half.

[ADDENDUM: Don’t miss Mark Steyn, either.]