We don’t need no steenking photo IDs for health care benefits

The New Neo Posted on by

Guess what? Surprise, surprise: applicants won’t have to show a picture ID to register for health care benefits.

Of course, it’s the Democrats in the Senate who struck down this particular provision, not Obama, but it fits in with the hypocrisy of Obama’s statement about illegal immigrants in his speech to a joint session of Congress about health care reform. You know, the one that made Joe Wilson famous for at least fifteen minutes when he objected by calling out, “You lie!.”

Now comes the news that:

Senate Finance Committee Democrats rejected a proposed a requirement that immigrants prove their identity with photo identification when signing up for federal healthcare programs…The bill, authored by committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), would require applicants to verify their names, places of birth and Social Security numbers. In addition, legal immigrants would have to wait five years, as under current law, after obtaining citizenship or legal residency to access federal healthcare benefits such as Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program or receive tax credits or purchase insurance through the exchange created by the legislation.

But the [bill] would not require them to show a photo ID, such as a drivers license. Without that requirement, the bill “remains dearly lacking when it comes to identification,” Grassley said. “Frankly, I’m very perplexed as to why anyone would oppose this amendment,” he said.

Senator Grassley, be perplexed no more. Many similarly reasonable requests for photo identification have been shot down by Democrats (this particular one went down along straight party lines) because they have no real interest in putting teeth into enforcement. They want to make it possible for the system to be gamed, because this appeals to many of their constituents.

And please, don’t sit on a hot stove waiting for Obama to veto this bill if it happens to get passed without a provision for photo-ID checking.

Reagan on oration

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s one of the many differences between Obama and Reagan, both considered effective orators. In Reagans’ farewell speech he said:

And in all of that time I won a nickname, “The Great Communicator.” But I never thought it was my style or the words I used that made a difference: It was the content. I wasn’t a great communicator, but I communicated great things, and they didn’t spring full bloom from my brow, they came from the heart of a great nation – from our experience, our wisdom, and our belief in the principles that have guided us for two centuries.

That’s true humility, as opposed to fake.

A (female?) chicken in every pot

The New Neo Posted on by

[WARNING: the following post may put you a bit off your feed.]

On this thread I noticed a discussion in the comments section about chicken. Inquiring minds wanted to know whether we eat female birds only, or males and females equally (and by the way, “chicken” refers both to female birds and to the generic species as a whole).

Sorta-kinda-trusty old Wiki has the scoop, although the following may be more (much more) than you wanted to know:

In the United States, laying hens are butchered after their second egg laying season. In Europe, they are generally butchered after a single season. The laying period begins when the hen is about 18”“20 weeks old (depending on breed and season). Males of the egg-type breeds have little commercial value at any age, and all those not used for breeding (roughly fifty percent of all egg-type chickens) are killed soon after hatching. Such “day-old chicks” are sometimes sold as food for captive and falconers birds of prey. The old hens also have little commercial value. Thus, the main sources of poultry meat a hundred years ago (spring chickens and stewing hens) have both been entirely supplanted by meat-type broiler chickens.

And speaking of too much information: please don’t watch this video (I certainly didn’t)—but apparently it demonstrates how male chicks are killed not long after they hatch.

Ignoring the financial experts: where have you gone, Larry Summers?

The New Neo Posted on by

With all the news swirling around lately it seems that Obama’s approach to the financial crisis, a topic that was the main focus of the early months of his presidency, has gone on the back burner. But as his more Leftist financial proclivities have become more obvious, I’ve wondered how some of his more moderate financial advisors are doing.

What, for instance, is going on these days with Larry Summers? He’s hardly a man of the Right, I know, but neither is he a conventionally wild-eyed tax-and-spend liberal. Oh yes, I note that in his recent public appearances Summers is hewing to the party line, praising the Obama administration’s agenda and making excuses for its failures. But I’ve wondered whether Summers (and others of his ilk, such as Volcker) haven’t become essentially Hillarized (or perhaps McChrystaled) by the Obama administration.

Is Summers (and the others) being consulted by Obama, and if so how much? Is he really in agreement with what’s happening, or is he being a hypocrite when he defends it?

Short of being the proverbial fly on the wall when Summers and the others speak privately, there’s no way to tell. But this recent article in the NY Post by Charles Gasparino tackles the question.

Gasparino reports what is essentially gossip, so his piece must be read with a caveat about unnamed sources But if you take a look at Gasparino’s profile it seems he may indeed have access to quite a bit of knowledge, and informants in high places.

His piece describes Wall Street’s general disillusionment with President Obama. Before the election many movers and shakers thought Obama would be a moderate on the economy—although to do so they must have ignored those statements about spreading the wealth or bankrupting the coal industry and making utility rates skyrocket.

But hindsight is 50-50 and all that. Gasparino reports that these financial wizards have come to say (in private conversation, not in public) that they feel as though they’ve been had.

Not surprising, although their initial naivete is. The meat of the article—as far as I’m concerned—is the following allegation:

I’m told that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and chief economic adviser Lawrence Summers have both complained to senior Wall Street execs that they have almost no say in major policy decisions. Obama economic counselor Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman, is barely consulted at all on just about anything — not even issues involving the banking system, of which he is among the world’s leading authorities.

At most, the economic people and their staffs get asked to do cost analyses of Obama’s initiatives for the White House political people — who then ignore their advice…

As one CEO of a major financial firm told me: “The economic guys say that when they explain the costs of programs, the policy guys simply thank them for their time and then ignore what they say.”

In other words, the economic people feel that they have almost no say in this administration’s policy decisions.

Why does this not surprise me? I get the distinct impression that it’s Obama, Emmanuel, and Axelrod all the way, who don’t need no steenking experts.

Oh, and add Valerie Jarrett to that aforementioned threesome. Gasparino reports the following disclosure about Obama’s reliance on Jarrett from:

…a former Wall Street executive and longtime Democrat who anxiously recounted a recent conversation with Obama.

The executive said he told the president that he’s at a disadvantage because he’s relatively inexperienced in economic matters during a time of economic crisis. “That’s why I have Valerie,” came Obama’s reply.

“Valerie” is senior adviser Valerie Jarrett — a Chicago real-estate attorney and one of Obama’s closest friends, who has deep ties to the Windy City’s Democratic political machine.

Now you know why Wall Street is so nervous.

Not exactly reassuring, if true. Jarrett is an especially well-connected (in Chicago terms) lawyer and long-time friend and booster of Obama, but her financial background seems to be limited to having been head of a real estate company and Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Stock Exchange.

It is certainly in line with my own observations of Obama’s patterns of decision-making that she would be the person on whom he relies most for financial policy advice, rather than the more acknowledged experts in the field whom he has appointed to serve him. Her loyalty is not at issue; she has been devoted to the Obama cause for a long time.

Why might Obama have a tendency to ignore experts, even those he has appointed? Arrogance and hubris on his part would certainly be one explanation, and not a bad one at that. But another phenomenon may be in play, best summed up by this comment made by “Artfldgr” in the thread yesterday about Hillary Clinton [I’ve taken the liberty of making the punctuation, spelling, and capitalization more conventional for ease of reading]:

Expertise has no place in power. It is irrelevant and an opposing force. so no one under the despot can have expertise except for the lowest proles who have no other options and no way to leverage their expertise except in the service of the power above.

This is why these states fall apart”¦ at first. Power loves a servant, and an independent capable person is a power of opposition, not servant. So they move incompetents into place. The incompetents owe all they have, since they can’t do that well on their own. So their morals are easy to corrupt and they know whom they serve.

Makes sense to me. Listen only to those loyal to you, but appoint and retain the experts for window-dressing, and then ignore and marginalize them. Figure they’ll be likely to stay on board through moral cowardice and/or the persistence of the “if Stalin only knew” phenomenon—that is, their thought that if only, if only they could get the undivided attention of the leader and plead their case so that he could truly hear, they’d finally have the influence they so rightly deserve.

Richard Fernandez: the death of the Left?

The New Neo Posted on by

The always-fascinating Richard Fernandez muses on whether we are witnessing the dying of the Left:

Some months ago it became evident that blunders were piling on so fast, and they were of such enormity that they fed each other, like a patient facing multiple organ failure. The Left was self-medicating itself so catastrophically, and smashing up so many things so quickly that there simply wasn’t enough outrage in the world to even keep track of it. Like a vast wave toppling over, the very weight of its accumulated blunders has reduced everyone ”” including its cadres and the conservatives, almost to the role of spectators. I wondered in comments last August whether it was actually safe to asssume that the Left was “too big to fail” or whether its sheer size simply multiplied the destruction it brought to bear upon itself ”” and on others…

It is events in the United States that have really provoked the crisis. European socialism was fantasy viable only while the US successfully performed the role of global system administrator. With Barack Obama crashing subsystem after subsystem, the socialist appendages are powering down. Without free energy from the capitalist system they despise, socialism is indeed doomed. What no one anticipated was how quickly the end might come. It would be really interesting if the key problem in the next few years turned out to be not about how to defeat the left, but how to survive the maelstrom left by its sinking.

I’m not at all sure what will happen—which makes me no different from most people. We cannot foresee the future. But in the present, there are rumblings of discontent. The question is how deep they go.

I am a student of this sort of ideological change—it’s one of the main things I write about. And one thing I’ve learned is to have a healthy respect for how difficult it is for most people to abandon an entire philosophy, a way of looking at the world that is deeply entrenched and widely shared. For true believers, whatever failures the Obama administration has experienced can be chalked up to racist teabaggers, the rot of the capitalist system itself, his own personal failings, or sabotage by Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and their like playing up to the gullible bitter clingers of America.

But I do think that Fernandez is onto something here, especially in his comments about the European socialist dream only being viable because it was backed by the US and its very different system. It’s something like the situation with pacifists—they can only exist if protected by a larger society willing to use force to protect itself and the pacifists too.

If the Left is failing, it may be a case of “be careful what you wish for” combined with “give them enough rope and they will hang themselves.” Every theory of government is only an abstraction until put into practice. Communism may have seemed like a good deal until its full flowering into tyranny was demonstrated; witness the many American Communists who thought they had an answer to the woes of capitalism demonstrated by the Depression, but dropped out of the Party after Stalin’s crimes were revealed.

Leftism may be demonstrating its own limitations by finally coming to power and needing to perform in the real world. Leftism had been on the outside looking in ever since the Reagan years. Clinton, the one Democratic president during that time, pulled back from a full liberal agenda because he realized there was no stomach for it in the America of the 90s. But during the Bush years, the distortions of the press as well as Bush’s own flaws combined to work liberals up to a fever pitch of protest and criticism, and the backlash from his administration created an environment in which for the first time since the Carter years liberals and the Left gained powerful control of the executive and both branches of the legislature.

This result has been that, ever since January, we’ve gotten to see what Leftists really want, because they concluded they had a mandate (and/or the power) to get it. So far, Americans haven’t been too happy with the sight. If this trend continues, and especially if much of the liberal agenda gets passed and has negative repercussions for the economy and our security, more Americans will grow a lot more unhappy.

Will this end up discrediting the Leftist agenda and approach as a whole? I think it would at least cause a temporary backlash. But people are fickle, and generations and memory are short. I’m afraid that all it might take for things to reverse, and for the Left to flourish again, would be a few terms of conservative power with its inevitable excesses and mistakes, as well as the fact that no government can solve the problems inherent in living.

Leftist thought is inherently seductive. It promises a utopia, or close to it, and its siren song sounds good to those who don’t study economics and history (and even to some who do). I fear that the lessons of history must be relearned over and over.

The rape of innocence

The New Neo Posted on by

The reaction of no small number of pundits on the Left to the Polanski case is to recommend that we let bygones be bygones. After all, he’s a famous artist, has lived a long life, the offense occurred ages ago, the victim wants to drop it—and after all she was a 13-year old sexually active temptress at the time.

In answer to those who wonder what’s up with these people, I submit the following explanations for their point of view:

(1) moral relativism run amok. There are no objective standards of behavior. Who are we to judge, anyway?

(2) worship of the elite by the elite, or the would-be elite (see also this)

(3) the sexualization of children. You can see it everywhere: fashion, entertainment, and in any school in town. And yes, it’s a very slippery slope.

(4) the desire to be seen as a spiritually evolved human being, a forgiving sort who is far above the primitive desire of others for revenge and retribution rather than peace and love (it’s so Old Testament, you know)

(5) the end of the idea that society is a player in the game, an entity with an interest in setting standards for human behavior

[ADDENDUM: And why does this development somehow not surprise me? But thank goodness the rank and file liberals at HuffPo and Salon don’t happen to agree with their journalist “betters” that Polanski should be let off the hook.]

Obama and Hillary: the spider and the fly

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not a Hillary Clinton fan. But I must say she has surprised me with the depth of her subservience to the Obama foreign policy vision, and her ability to compromise whatever integrity she might have had left as she goes about doing so.

Of course, maybe she never actually had a foreign policy vision of her own to begin with. Maybe her more muscular foreign policy statements during the campaign were just strategic political positioning. But if any of it actually was sincere, that’s all gone now.

Hillary was one of Obama’s very first Cabinet appointments, announced not long after his election. It seemed a transparently political appointment even at the time, a way to placate a strong rival while at the same time keep her from being a threat. It was a good example of the principle expressed in LBJ’s famous statement about J. Edgar Hoover: “I’d rather have him inside the tent pissing out than have him outside the tent pissing in.”

Although Hillary’s gender makes the colorful phrase a little difficult to picture, you get the idea: to co-opt a difficult person by having him/her on your side.

Understand that I’m not blaming Obama’s foreign policy debacles on Hillary’s influence; that responsibility is his alone. But Obama’s naming of Hillary as Secretary of State in the first place shows not only what a wholly political animal he is, but also his utter disdain for the need for expertise in the field. He also probably calculated that someone more experienced and knowledgeable in that arena than Hillary would be likely to give him more trouble and disagree with his policies even more, and that someone less politically ambitious than she would be more likely to resign in protest sooner.

In Obama’s eyes, Hillary may have had the perfect combination of qualities (ignorance and ambition) for the job. And so far, his faith in her ability to be his willing handmaiden no matter what abomination she’s forced to implement has been well rewarded.

Obama lack of interest in conventional expertise is reflected in his boundless confidence in his own knowledge of foreign affairs, despite his own extreme inexperience. I wrote the following about this flaw of Obama’s way back in April of 2008, noting the following extraordinarily juvenile, ignorant, and arrogant statement of his:

…[F]oreign policy is the area where I am probably most confident that I know more and understand the world better than Senator Clinton or Senator McCain.

It’s ironic because this is supposedly the place where experience is most needed to be Commander-in-Chief. Experience in Washington is not knowledge of the world. This I know…[W]hen I speak about having lived in Indonesia for four years, having family that is impoverished in small villages in Africa”“–knowing the leaders is not important–”“what I know is the people. . . .”

“I traveled to Pakistan when I was in college”“I knew what Sunni and Shia was [sic] before I joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. . . .”

Although I am in complete agreement with Obama that experience in Washington is not knowledge of the world, neither is a trip to Pakistan as a college student nor several years spent as a child in Indonesia—and neither of those have anything whatsoever to do with understanding geopolitical realities, power plays, strategy, and diplomacy.

Obama could have made up for his deficits by appointing as Secretary of State a Democrat with a background in world affairs (of course, there was always the danger that it would be former president Jimmy Carter, so at least we dodged that particular bullet). Instead, Obama chose to appoint someone who was as devoid of experience in the field as Obama himself. He must have thought he neither needed nor wanted much help from a Secretary of State. And if he actually has gotten any from Hillary, my guess is that he’s ignored it.

What will Hillary do now? I can’t figure out her game plan, but my sense is that she feels she may have miscalculated in taking on this job. I don’t believe she bargained for her relative powerlessness as Secretary of State, or to what depths Obama would make her sink. Although she’s had a certain amount of experience with men humiliating her (Bill comes to mind), what’s going on now must sting.

Hillary appears to be caught in a trap of Obama’s devising. She can’t become a rogue Secretary, defying the President—at least, if she did so, she wouldn’t last long in the post. The real question is why she would want to continue in it under the present circumstances. It’s hard to see how her current state could lead her to a presidency of her own some day; the window of opportunity for that seems to have passed. But if she quit, where would she go and what would she do?

Hillary’s old Senate seat is not up for grabs, unfortunately for her, and being out of power (even if her power right now is illusory) is not her cup of tea. The New York governorship might be available if she quit and challenged Paterson, but somehow I don’t think she has much interest in that job. Moreover, if she were to abandon her present post so soon, her own party would probably turn on her as having been a traitor to the Obama administration because of her personal ambition.

The only chance I see for Hillary to free herself from Obama’s web is to bide her time. If Obama weakens more and more, and his unpopularity rises even with Democrats, quitting at that point could make her a heroine and position her for a primary challenge against him in 2012, as well as allowing her to claim experience in foreign affairs from her stint as Secretary. But if that’s her intent, before that moment comes she will have to swallow more and more pride and do more and more of Obama’s distasteful bidding, which will further weaken her. And that may be part of the web that Obama has intentionally spun for her.

[NOTE: More about Hillary here and here.]

Totten on Honduras and US sanctions

The New Neo Posted on by

Michael Totten makes a rare detour from Middle Eastern venues to write an insightful piece about US sanctions on Honduras. Totten points out what the Obama administration seems not to have even considered—the consequences of its threats:

Sanctions are supposed to be temporary. Targeted countries are always told what they can do to restore the status quo ante. Iran, for instance, can dismantle its nuclear-weapons program. Syria can cease and desist its support for Hamas and Hezbollah. Saddam Hussein, while he still ruled Iraq, had the option of admitting weapons inspectors.

Honduras, though, will have no way out if the interim government doesn’t return Zelaya to power before his term ends in January. Because the Honduran constitution prohibits him and every other president from serving more than one term, it won’t be legally possible for Honduras to do what’s demanded of it after the end of this year. Unlike Iraq, Iran, and Syria, it will be isolated and trapped under sanctions indefinitely.

Whoops! I can only conclude that Obama and his advisers didn’t think ahead. Or, if they did, they assumed the following:

(1) Honduras would knuckle under to their bullying, and/or (2) a threat is just a threat: empty. If they haven’t kept so many other of their promises, how many people would notice if they didn’t keep this one? At some future date after the election, they’d just pull an Emily Litella, lift the sanctions, and say “never mind”; and/or (3) so what if the sanctions continue indefinitely? Who cares about the people of Honduras and their problems?

I was going to write about the Polanski arrest…

The New Neo Posted on by

…but Kate Harding has saved me the trouble by writing essentially what I was thinking, and probably doing a better job of it than I would have.

I will add that the attitudes of those who would whitewash Polanski’s sorry crime and make excuses for him are not only wrong, but an example of the precipitous decline of what used to be known as Western Civilization.

A couple of legal points: it doesn’t matter what the victim wants at this point. It never does, except in the sentencing phase at the judge’s discretion, because one of the differences between civil and criminal law is that criminal acts are considered a crime against society as a whole.

There is also no proper legal sentence for a crime except the one handed out by the courts. “He’s suffered enough in other ways” is hogwash. If the court decides to take this into consideration and be lenient in the sentencing phase, fine. But that’s the court’s prerogative.

There are many sorts of judgments and many kinds of offenses. A victim can choose to forgive his/her perpetrator, but that’s on a personal level.

And a perpetrator can receive forgiveness from God, either in this life or the next; that’s between that person and the deity. But that’s divine law and divine justice. We happen to reside on earth, where justice is administered (albeit imperfectly) by our legal system. And that’s the system that Polanski had managed to evade for so long, and which may have finally caught up with him.

The wheels of justice grind slow, but they grind exceedingly fine.

Halloween comes early: the Obama mask

The New Neo Posted on by

Watch this; it’s spooky-scary.

Obama’s fixed smile is described thusly (the nearly-fixed head position, which in my opinon is even more revealing, is not specifically mentioned):

Ladies and gentlemen, your President is a robot. Or a wax sculpture. Maybe a cardboard cutout. All I know is no human being has a photo smile this amazingly consistent.

Perhaps Obama was merely getting ready for Halloween a few weeks early, and was wearing his favorite costume: an Obama mask.

And lest you think all of this is sort of trivial, I submit that it is not. Obama is easily the most controlled president I’ve ever seen in terms of his personal style. Although supposedly cool, there is no looseness there, no moment when you think you see a glimpse into the true man in a relaxed state when he has let down his guard.

In general, politicians who would be president must exercise more public control over themselves than ordinary people. But Obama is in a class by himself in this regard; his control is more complete and therefore more eerie. Even gestures that might appear to be spontaneous (witness these) are, IMHO, carefully planned to appeal to a certain audience that “gets” it.

Some people are just naturally subdued, and I think that description fits Obama as well. But there’s much more than that going on with the demeanor of our current president. Anyone who attempts this complete a level of control is hiding something. In Obama’s case, I believe it is his essential far-Leftist self: who he is and what he means to do.

That’s the Obama mask he wears, and he cannot take it off without revealing more than he wishes us to know right now. Maybe some day.

And now let me go all literary on you and quote T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock:”

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

[NOTE: One of the very few people who seems to know Obama—if “know” is defined as having had a great many dealings with him before he ran for office—is Richard Epstein, a law professor at University of Chicago. The following excerpts are from an interview Epstein gave in early April of 2009 (and remember, this is from a guy who has known him personally for quite some time):

Obama has the world’s most perfect human disposition. He can sit in a room with you, he can listen to you, and he can talk to you, and you really get the sense of a man who is in complete self control.

But, that’s the very feature that makes him so hard to read. He is so much in self control, that if he doesn’t want you to know in a conversation what he is thinking, you can be there for 30 minutes and never be able to figure out what he believes. You can only have him question you about what you believe. He keeps all of his thoughts to himself.

Robinson: So, he is like Leonard Nimoy, like Spock, the Vulcan in Star Trek.

Epstein: He basically knows how to keep that shield over his face.

Epstein also expresses little doubt about one of the questions that keeps coming up in discussions of Obama: is he an ideologue, or just a follower and/or a narcissist? From the interview:

Robinson: You are quoted in the Boston Globe, “I like Obama but I reject the suggestion that he is an intellectual. He is an activist merely mimicking the mannerisms of an intellectual.” How good is Obama’s mind?

Epstein: His mind is pretty good, but it is a clever “means-ends” mind. He has never written a scholarly article in his entire life…

His positions are not close to the middle, and so he sees no reason to compromise with Republicans unless and until they can mount a veto threat in the Senate. He is very, very dogmatic about his substantive positions. He knows what he believes and he knows why he believes it, and it is extremely difficult for people on the outside to change his mind.

]

[ADDENDUM: Stuart Schneiderman of “Had Enough Therapy?” adds some further reflections on Obama’s mask.]

Victory: Obama’s football metaphor

The New Neo Posted on by

Obama has an interesting take on the idea of victory. Watch (and by the way, kudos to the journalist asking the question):

To hear this question and then go immediately to a sports metaphor is surpassingly strange, and deeply revealing on Obama’s part. He simply does not think in terms of military or geopolitical victory.

Repeat this question to 100 people on the street, and I would bet that almost all would at least understand that it’s about victory in a war or quasi-war (either a cold or hot war, but a war) and not sport. All Obama had to do to reject the premise of the question and show that he at least comprehended its basis was to say “we’re not at war with Iran, so I don’t want to talk about victory.” You could then either agree or disagree.

Obama is free to reject the concept of war (and therefore victory) over Iran, and I’m free to think it’s dangerous of him to do so.

To be clear: the subject matter here is the development of nuclear weapons by Iran. Iran is indisputably a country that by its own admission has been our sworn and determined enemy for thirty years, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike, and has sponsored terrorism around the world aimed at our friends. Iran repeatedly calls us the Great Satan, and the war that it has waged all these long years has been global, and both cold and hot (the latter through surrogates).

Iran’s present intent regarding the development of nuclear weaponry is a skirmish in that long-lasting ongoing conflict, a cold and sometimes hot war that threatens to become much more hot. But whatever you call it, it sure ain’t football—and no one is suggesting it might be. But it suits Obama’s purposes to suggest that they are.

[ADDENDUM: Meanwhile, in other news, Iran seeks victory.]