I often think that, had Pelosi, Reid, and Obama been just a little smarter, they would have moved more slowly and incrementally to the left. If they had not given away their hand so quickly, they might have lulled the voters into a false sense of security, and would still have their sixty votes in the Senate and an excellent chance for re-election in 2010. This would have been especially true had they paid more attention to the economy and job creation.
But they moved more quickly than that. Has that frog in the pot—the American voter— noticed he was about to be boiled to death, and leapt soon enough to thwart their plans?
[NOTE: Here’s what really happens to those boiling frogs.]
Twice he’s spoken out against going to that city. Why? Here’s my PJ article in which I speculate on why Obama might have it in for Vegas.
[NOTE: On looking at the comments over at PJ, I notice that some of the commenters find the article trivial and/or petty. And here I thought it would be a relief from my usual heavy weightedness! But I don’t find the topic trivial. I didn’t see it as all that interesting when Obama trashed Vegas once. But the fact that he saw fit to trash it a second time, after having seen the negative response from Las Vegans and the state of Nevada the first time, gave the second incident more significance.]
There are ten Senate seats in play that are currently held by Democrats but are considered “competitive” for Republicans, and Republicans would have to win every single one—as well as keeping all of its own currently held seats. These ten “competitive” races include states that are so traditionally Democratic that just a short while ago it seemed literally impossible that Republicans could win there. But post-Brown, anything seems possible, and strong Republican candidates have been coming forward to run in the presently encouraging environment.
Let’s remember that things could change dramatically in the nine long months that remain till the next election. Just consider the last nine months if you doubt this fact. But looking back, the reports of the death of the Republican Party seem to have been a tad premature.
I don’t completely understand this need of the wronged spouse to publicly unburden herself (and it’s usually a “her”), either through writing a book or granting interviews, or often both—the latter to promote the former. But it seems to be all the rage.
I get that it might be a way to earn money, although both Jenny Sanford and Elizabeth Edwards can’t possibly be hurting for dough. I get that it might be a way to take revenge on the wayward spouse who’s been the cause of all the embarrassment. And I get that it feels powerful, after feeling weak and powerless. I also get that it’s tempting to tell your side of the story, when it’s other side that’s gotten all the attention so far.
But it’s a terrible idea that only serves to expose a person’s humiliation. And it’s not good for the children, even if they are grown, even if they urge you to do it. It compromises two things that used to be thought of as important, but don’t seem to be much valued any more: dignity and privacy.
It’s true that in these cases, the exposure of the husband’s actions has already ripped the veil from what might have been kept secret from the world. But is there any need to compound the error by shedding the last vestiges of privacy?
One of the things I admired most about Jacqueline Kennedy was that she resisted this siren call. Whatever may have been gossiped about her husband’s affairs (and it was plenty), she took her side of the story—and her own dignity—to the grave. I am convinced that the world would not have been a better place had she told all. There are many things we simply do not need to know.
[NOTE: Since Jenny Sanford has decided to share so many of the details of her marriage with us, I have a question about an oddity she revealed: would it not raise a few red flags for most people if a prospective spouse insisted on removing the words “to be faithful” from the marriage vows? Jenny thought it rather strange, also, when husband-to-be Mark made that request. But she “got past it”—until he had his dramatic affair, twenty years and four children later. At least Sanford can claim he didn’t break his vows; he had the foresight to plan ahead.]
Sadly enough, this comes as no surprise whatsoever:
The Obama administration’s plan to cut more than $1 trillion from the deficit over the next decade relies heavily on so-called backdoor tax increases that will result in a bigger tax bill for middle-class families.
In the 2010 budget tabled by President Barack Obama on Monday, the White House wants to let billions of dollars in tax breaks expire by the end of the year — effectively a tax hike by stealth.
The article (by non-conservative Reuters, by the way) goes on to describe the many ways in which this would happen.
It seems that, the more Obama emphasized a certain fact in his campaign and/or the early days of his presidency—“The proceedings will be televised on C-SPAN;” “If you make less than $250,000 you will not see your taxes go up”—the more likely he is to do exactly the opposite. In addition, he attempts to accomplish this without stating that he is reversing himself, and in a hidden manner (as the article puts it “by stealth”).
“Back-door,” indeed. And if anyone is so bold as to challenge him about what he’s doing, he denies, lies, twists, and blames—sometimes all at once.
As I’ve said before: presidents lie, and break promises as well. Obama is not the only one. But he is the most blatant, shameless, repetitively lying president ever, deeply mendacious about the most important facts of his program and his character.
[ADDENDUM: The Reuters story has been withdrawn. A new one is slated to appear next week. I had linked to the Canadian version of the story, which is still up as of this moment.
Very interesting development. It could be due to something innocuous. Or the Reuters folks might have found a horsehead or two in their beds.]
[UPDATE: The Reuters story has itself become The Story. Word is that it contained errors of fact, and was pulled at the White House’s request. Reuters writes:
The Feb 1 story headlined “Backdoor taxes to hit middle class” is wrong and has been withdrawn. The story said lower-income families will pay more under tax provisions scheduled to expire Dec 31. The Obama administration’s budget calls for the extension of those tax provisions for households earning less than $250,000. There will be no substitute story.
That sounds like a major mess-up by both the writer and whatever fact-checkers might still reside at Reuters. Obviously, if the entire premise on which the story is based is incorrect the piece should never should have run in the first place, and a retraction is necessary. If a blogger had made such a faux pas, the mistake would be ascribed to lack of professionalism, and contrasted to the skill of the press. Now we can say that it is evidence that standards in journalism have fallen pretty low.
But of course, we already knew that. The unusual thing about this story is that the errors went against Obama, and they seem to have been fairly egregious.
However, was everything in the original article incorrect, or just some of it? It’s hard to know, because the original story has been pulled. But Powerline quoted quite a bit from it, and as best as I can tell from a quick perusal, the bulk of the assertions in the Reuters article did seem to refer to those now-non-expiring tax cuts. If so, then Reuters was correct to pull it, and the Obama administration was correct to call attention to the mistakes.
Of course, we know that it’s not unusual for articles in the MSM to contain errors both large and small. However, it’s rare for them to be pulled in this way. Would Reuters have done the same for a similar article about Bush? And would Bush have asked them to do so?]
Fifty-nine-year-old Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams needs heart surgery—and he’s going to the US to have it.
That’s his prerogative. He’s lucky to have the resources to do so. But it’s an especially glaring example of a fact most of us already know: Canadians who can afford it often choose to bypass [pun intended] their system and go south of the border for treatment.
Williams needs an unspecified procedure that may or may not be available in Canada; spokespeople are being cagey about that:
“It was never an option offered to him to have this procedure done in this province,” said [deputy premier] Ms. Dunderdale, refusing to answer whether the procedure could be done elsewhere in Canada.
My guess is that Mr. Williams wanted the best treatment possible, and that was available here.
For now.
[NOTE: The title of this post is a reference to the Canadian national anthem, “O Canada.” When looking it up on Wiki, I discovered the curious fact that the lyrics between its French and English versions differ significantly. The English, which I already knew, goes like this:
O Canada!
Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command.
With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North strong and free!
From far and wide, O Canada,
We stand on guard for thee.
God keep our land glorious and free!
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.
And here’s a translation of the French lyrics:
O Canada!
Land of our ancestors,
Thy brow is wreathed with a glorious garland of flowers.
As in thy arm ready to wield the sword,
So also is it ready to carry the cross.
Thy history is an epic
Of the most brilliant exploits.
Thy valour steeped in faith
Will protect our homes and our rights
Will protect our homes and our rights.
We now have some convincing evidence that abstinence-only sexual education programs for teens, long derided as a counterproductive waste of time, actually work.
This is news. This particular study has drawn attention because it is especially well-designed and includes longer follow-ups than usual.
The Obama administration had previously cut funding for abstinence-only programs. But it has also launched “a $114 million pregnancy prevention initiative that will fund only programs that have been shown scientifically to work.” Therefore these new findings may result in a re-evaluation, and perhaps even funding for the programs:
Based on the findings, Obama administration officials said programs like the one evaluated in the study could be eligible for federal funding.
“No one study determines funding decisions, but the findings from the research paper suggest that this kind of project could be competitive for grants if there’s promise that it achieves the goal of teen pregnancy prevention,” said Nicholas Papas, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services.
There are always big problems with policy decisions of this type: research using human subjects is notoriously difficult to design and execute in a scientifically rigorous, consistently replicable, and meaningful way. It is only over time that trustworthy patterns emerge, and even then evaluators must try to look at only the most well-designed studies. That, unfortunately, is not always or even often done. Research that is essentially garbage in and out is often considered on an equal basis, and politics may subtly shape the way researchers frame their results.
A couple of interesting facts about the study itself: the results, although significant, were modest. In a population of sixth- and seventh-graders who were followed for two years after going through the abstinence-only program, 33 percent had sex, compared with 52 percent who were taught only safe sex (there were other findings, too, but that was the most important one). The students were African-American teens in public schools in an unspecified Northeastern city.
The sobering fact is that this means that, for either intervention, an awful lot of kids in eight and ninth grades have already had sex. And this phenomenon is hardly limited to the population in the study. There are so many other forces pushing young teens in that direction, and so few acting as a brake, that the task is especially daunting.
Yet another interesting fact embedded in the article is that the program studied involved only eight hours of instruction. That’s something, but it’s not a whole lot in the scheme of things. Would more time spent yield even better results?
The left has been disregarding abstinence-only programs for quite some time, considering them to be a waste of time and money. This study may or may not change things. But it spotlights a larger problem for policy-setting on social and health issues in general: we must take outcome research into account, or we risk spinning our wheels or worse—but the research itself is often so inconsistent and poorly designed that it is difficult to have much confidence in the results.
And yet, decisions must be made. They are often based on nothing more than hunches, political leanings and preferences, and the needs of special interest groups, supported by bad science. You could say the same for global warming, or any number of other areas in which science, social policy, and politics intersect.
No, not the one about televising the health care debates on C-SPAN. The one about how, if you like your health insurance, you would get to keep it under the Democrats’ health care reforms.
Tom Bevan of RealClearPolitics points out an admission embedded in one of Obama’s answers to questions following his recent address to House Republicans. Obama’s statement received little notice at the time, but it seems significant for a number of reasons [emphasis mine]:
If you look at the package that we’ve presented — and there’s some stray cats and dogs that got in there that we were eliminating, we were in the process of eliminating. For example, we said from the start that it was going to be important for us to be consistent in saying to people if you can have your — if you want to keep the health insurance you got, you can keep it, that you’re not going to have anybody getting in between you and your doctor in your decision making. And I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge.
This paragraph highlights some of the most disagreeable, manipulative, and duplicitous aspects of Obama’s personality: his refusal to admit that he was mistaken and/or lying, his failure to take any responsibility or offer leadership, and the sophistry he uses to conceal these facts.
Obams’s erroneous (or duplicitous?) assertion about Americans being able to keep their health insurance was not only made repeatedly, it was actually the centerpiece of his argument to the people about what health care reform would do and mean for them. And it was stated not once, but almost every time he spoke on the issue of his plans for health care reform.
Many have remarked that Obama stood back from offering guidance to Congress on the details of the bills, and yet he described his own plan and made promises about it as though the two would be in sync. There has been much speculation about why he chose to do it this way, but I believe that one very important reason was that he wanted to retain plausible deniability when the provisions in the final bill violated his promises.
But Obama must not have had much objection to the breaking of his promises in these bills. If he had wanted to make sure his promises were kept, Obama could (and should) have provided far more leadership, giving Congress details to describe the bill he would have considered optimal. What’s more, he could also have threatened to veto any health care reform bill in which Congress put anything that would undermine people’s ability to continue subscribing to their present private health insurance plans.
We know that he did not provide that kind of guidance. His failure to do so was an abdication of leadership, if nothing else. But don’t sit on a hot stove until he admits it.
Now that time has passed and the American people have learned more about the bills and the effects they would have been likely to have had on their private health insurance, Obama has been forced to admit that his promises weren’t kept. But he is not forced to admit that any of it is his fault.
However, in his remarks quoted above, Obama goes a step further in abdication of responsibility. In characteristic fashion, he manages to absolve himself. But note his language; even the Democrats in Congress (who, after all, designed the bills and voted for them) are not to blame, although he simultaneously seems to admit that something went wrong.
But that “something” had no human locus of action; it just happened. It seems that provisions in bills have minds, motivations, and behaviors of their own. They are autonomous little gremlins that creep into bills of their own volition.
Obama indicates this twice: first characterizing them as animistic “stray cats and dogs” that “got in there” somehow against the will of Obama and his fellow Democrats, who are now bent on eliminating them (perhaps by rounding them up and placing them in the pound?). Secondly, there’s this sentence, “I think that some of the provisions that got snuck in might have violated that pledge.” Note the two careful qualifiers: “I think” and “might have,” as well as the reiteration of the metaphor suggesting that the provisions had no human agents we can identify, but somehow acted with autonomous power, catting around and stealthily getting into places they didn’t belong.
This language is easy to miss unless you’re looking for it and studying it. But for many people who hear them, Obama’s words exert exactly the subtly exculpatory effect he intends. This is one of the reasons Obama retains a surprising amount of support from the public, despite all the broken promises and weasel wrigglings.
Weasel—that’s another animal metaphor, isn’t it? And to complete the image, here we have a few of those stray cat and dog provisions, rounded up and stuck in captivity. Will they manage to sneak out again to wreak their damage? They look so harmless right now.
