And keep your eyes on the prize during the sprint, the relay, and the marathon ahead.
Obama to press forward with other stuff most Americans hate
Why? Because yes, he can.
Did anyone doubt that, emboldened by his “success” in passing the HCR legislation that America didn’t (and still doesn’t) want and that is likely to lead to greater financial ruin, Obama would be inspired to press a cooperative Democratic Congress to enact still more legislation that America doesn’t want and is likely to lead to greater financial ruin?
Well, if you doubted it for even a moment (and I doubt you did doubt it), then doubt no more:
“But what I’m not going to be dissuaded from is us going ahead and taking on these big challenges that are critical in terms of America’s long-term economic health.”
The president said specifically that it was important for Congress to move ahead with legislation on energy and immigration policy as well as financial regulatory reform.
Note the typically Orwellian assertion that the first two have anything to do with our economic health, except to undermine it.
“Legislation on energy”—one may assume that translates to cap and trade which Obama himself said (back in the days when he was still telling a little bit of the truth now and then) would “bankrupt” those who tried to build new coal plants as well as causing utility rates to “skyrocket.”
As for “immigration reform”—that of course is designed to lock in the all-important Hispanic vote as well as the larger purpose of swelling voter rolls by 2012, in order to counter the fact that everything Obama is doing will lose him votes with current American voters.
Don’t doubt for a moment that this is the plan. The only question is whether Democrats in Congress will follow their leader with the same rigid discipline (and disregard for America’s future) they showed in passing HCR.
But I think we know the answer. Now that they’ve given up listening to their constituents, and already have large targets painted on their backs, what have they got to lose by supporting him? So I wouldn’t count on a single Democrat to go against the president, Pelosi, and Reid (unless they’re not needed for passage of the bills), although I suppose it’s still possible that some may surprise us and become profiles in courage . But I, for one, would be shocked were that to happen.
The real question is what will the RINO Republicans do. The Republican Party ultimately held firm in opposing Obamacare, but will this rare moment of unity continue? Watch Lindsey Graham and see.
However, let us reflect a moment on the fact that the election of Scott Brown still might actually make a difference. He came to the Senate too late to fulfill his promise to block Obamacare, because Pelosi and Reid finessed him by letting the House vote in the already-passed Senate bill and end his ability to oppose cloture for HCR. But right now he still represents that 41st vote against cloture for new legislation such as immigration reform. If all 41 Republicans stand firm in their opposition, they could succeed—that is, unless Democrats try new tricks like the dread nuclear option.
Senate rules now in place forbid that from happening before a new session in January of 2011. But hey, rules are for suckers—and Republicans. Democrats now say they are meant to be broken.
Obama says “drill baby drill”—or does he?
It should come as no surprise that it was all just a diversionary smokescreen:
When you cut through the hoopla, here is what Obama’s announcement added up to:
* Cancelled five lease sales off the Alaska coast that were planned over the next 2 years. One of the areas is estimated to hold up to 77 billion barrels of oil, or more than 3 times US reserves.
* A study of the southern Atlantic OCS, with the findings due back next year….no leasing.
* Delayed a planned lease sale off Virginia until at least 2012.
Sarah Palin calls it “stall, baby, stall.”
Politics as sport: not all wins are wins
This Politico article reflects a common theme among pundits and those in the political game, treating politics as a sport in which people like a winner. The theory goes that Obama’s victory in passing HCR should lead to a significant boost in his standing in the polls.
It’s true that people like a winner. And I have little doubt that the passage of HCR will improve Obama’s ratings with those liberals and leftists who were frustrated with Obama during the time it seemed as though the bill would never become law. But I cannot imagine why anyone with a grain of common sense would think that mere passage of what is perceived by many people to be a bad law would raise his stock in the eyes of those who oppose it.
The public likes strength in a president. But most Americans would like that strength to be marshaled against our enemies and to work on our behalf, not vice versa. We the people would like to be the judge of what would benefit us, not a government and leader perceived as increasingly out of control. Politics is not a game where it’s all about who wins a certain battle, although those who reflect on these things for a living might come to think so. But for most people, a win is only a win if we are in agreement with the goal.
One of the strongest Democrat memes is that, as people come to learn more about this bill, they will like it better. That has not panned out at all so far; quite the opposite has been true. Of course, this doesn’t mean that things couldn’t reverse. But Democrats seem to underestimate the American public, assuming that all most people care about is immediate gratification: bread and circuses.
Obama pollster Joel Benenson certainly thinks so:
…[He] predicted the plan would grow in popularity over time, as the public learned it included a ban on denying coverage for pre-existing conditions and helped seniors close the “doughnut hole” of prescription drug costs not covered by Medicare.
“When it comes to health care and insurance, once reform passes, the tangible benefits Americans will realize will trump the fear-mongering rhetoric opponents are stoking today,” he wrote.
I like to think that most Americans are not children in a toy store, looking at the shiny objects and coveting them no matter what they cost. Of course, some people operate just that way. But perhaps not as many as Obama and the Democrats are counting on. Amazingly, quite a few citizens take the long view and realize that such entitlements and perks must be paid for, and that we are in a financial crisis that only promises to get worse as already-existing entitlements such as Medicare and Social Security increase the number of their beneficiaries at the very same time that the number of working people to pay for them decreases as a proportion of the total population.
That’s not rocket science, it’s common sense. But common sense is something that political pundits, Democrat politicians, and our president seem to lack. Or perhaps their goals are not our goals.
Obamacare and the states
So many states are fighting Obamacare in the legal arena because they are already teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and they know this law and its demands will push them right over the precipice. That is one of the dirty secrets of passing a mandate like Obamacare during a financial crisis like this one, requiring that the states expand their Medicaid coverage to include those who earn 133% of the poverty level.
This is a first: to establish a universal floor for eligibility that applies to all states. There is an additional new requirement that childless adults be covered in all states; this was not a mandated category before Obamacare and will account for the bulk of the expansion. Florida, for example, estimates that its Medicaid rolls will expand by a whopping 50% at least as a result.
To do this, the bill promises to federally fund that expansion—but only until 2014. After that, the states will have to pay 10%, which may not sound like much but with the high cost of medical care it’s actually a big deal (Medicaid also covers dental benefits and nursing homes, the latter likely to be an even bigger cost in light of the aging boomer cohort).
Here’s how it works
Unlike Medicare, which is solely a federal program, Medicaid is a joint federal-state program. Each state operates its own Medicaid system, but this system must conform to federal guidelines in order for the state to receive matching funds and grants. The matching rate provided to states is determined using a federal matching formula (called Federal Medical Assistance Percentages), which generates payment rates that vary from state to state, depending on each state’s respective poverty level. The wealthiest states only receive a federal match of 50% while poorer states receive a larger match.
Medicaid funding has become a major budgetary issue for many states over the last few years, with states, on average, spending 16.8% of state general funds on the program. If the federal match expenditure is also counted, the program, on average, takes up 22% of each state’s budget.
States must follow federal guidelines and cover certain populations, but they have quite a bit of leeway about the details of how they will do so: for example, managed care vs. fee for service. The states facing financial ruin would like to trim their Medicaid budgets. The prospect of Medicaid cuts at the state level is not a pretty one. But neither is bankruptcy at the state level (not to mention the federal level).
Obamacare takes away the ability of the states to balance their budgets in this way. Obamacare tries to squeeze blood from stones. How can a state cut its budget in the face of these burgeoning requirements? The federal government can laugh at the idea of balancing its own budget—for a while, that is. But states are unable to print money or borrow vast quantities from China, and are therefore more restrained by reality.
One can see this phenomenon as a small fractal of the policies that led us here in the first place. Increased benefits lead to increased debt, and the federal government cannot bail the states out indefinitely. We are running out of “other people’s money” at both state and federal level, and yet not only cannot give up any of our entitlements but instead are actually bent on expanding them. It’s a spiral that, if continued, has no possible end except astronomical taxes or runaway inflation or bankruptcy—perhaps all three in due time.
Yes Nancy, apparently we did have to pass the bill to learn what’s in it
And what a learning curve it’s been.
This may come back to haunt the Democrats; I certainly hope so. We’re always told not to sign a contract without reading and studying every word. Well, HCR was one whopping big contract that the Democrats signed by proxy for the American people, on the advice of slick con artists Pelosi and Obama.
Under ordinary circumstances a great deal of time would have been taken for the task of designing a major bill with huge consequences for the public and the economy. But Obama and Pelosi and Reid couldn’t risk taking that time; they didn’t want the voters or the leaders’ Congressional underlings to read it and figure out what might actually happen as a result. So no real debate, no Republican input, and no care was taken. The bill seemed to spring fully-formed from some leftist bureaucratic Zeus’s head.
But all of the deliberation and conferencing that were bypassed for this law aren’t ordinarily entered into merely to create some nicey-nicey bipartisan cover, but to actually iron out legislation that might make sense, be coherent, and do what it’s intended to do. The lengthier and more deliberative process at least has a chance of protecting we the people from those who pass the laws on our supposed behalf. But the focus for this particular bill wasn’t so much on what it would say or what it would actually do to the public or the economy, but on constructing it in such a way as to game the CBO system and get the votes in Congress.
Now we discover embarrassments involving who may get subsidized and how much they will have to pay anyway (Althouse thinks Americans will “freak out” when they find out), who is exempt from paying the individual mandate penalty (hint: maybe Muslims), how the bill will hurt large corporations such as Caterpillar and Deere and AT & T and make them lay people off, and how much uncertainty the whole thing will add to the economy (economies don’t like uncertainty).
The WSJ says it warned the Democrats:
Turning over every couch cushion to make their new entitlement look affordable under Beltway accounting rules, Democrats decided to raise taxes on companies that do the public service of offering prescription drug benefits to their retirees instead of dumping them into Medicare. We and others warned this would lead to AT&T-like results, but like so many other ObamaCare objections Democrats waved them off as self-serving or “political.”…
What’s more, now that the CEOs are objecting, the Democrats would like them to shut up about it:
Democrats don’t like what their bill is doing in the real world, so they now want to intimidate CEOs into keeping quiet …
The Democratic political calculation with ObamaCare is the proverbial boiling frog: Gradually introduce a health-care entitlement by hiding the true costs, hook the middle class on new subsidies until they become unrepealable, but try to delay the adverse consequences and major new tax hikes so voters don’t make the connection between their policy and the economic wreckage. But their bill was such a shoddy, jerry-rigged piece of work that the damage is coming sooner than even some critics expected.
This highlights the abysmal economic ignorance of the Democrats in Congress, as well as that of our very own president. They don’t seem to recognize that there is a financial reality that cannot be stopped by spin and words (although spin and words can get bad legislation passed by “hiding the decline”), that once this bill is actually let loose on our gasping and choking economy there will be actual real consequences in the actual real world, and that these things will not be hidden or blocked by Obama going out on the road again to tell us, as he pisses on our leg, that in fact that wetness we’re feeling is just the gentle touch of a soothing rain.
[NOTE: You might call the revelations of these unintended economic consequences a kind of poetic justice—as in Kipling’s “Gods of the Copybook Headings“:
…
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!]
Venus Williams…
…wears the strangest tennis outfit I’ve ever seen in my life.
This is a good example of a fashion principle I’ve noticed: if a woman isn’t naturally a girly-girly sort, ruffles or bows or glitter will not make it so. Much better to stick to something more streamlined and classic, which can be feminine without looking like you’re trying too hard.
The common denominator
Here’s a comment from a piece at PJ:
I hope the Jews who voted for this POTUS are just tickled by this guy’s hopey changey for Israel. James Baker in 1992: F**k the Jews, they don’t vote for us anyway; the Obami in 2010: F**k the Jews, they’ll vote for us anyway.
The common denominator?: F**k the Jews.
Remember Honduras? Obama does, and he hasn’t given up trying to destabilize the country
Obama has not given up practicing on Honduras, working on his techniques to destabilize it and support a leftist thug if at all possible.
You got to hand it to him: he’s consistent.
What appeared at the outset to be a possible aberration has become a pattern. What initially seemed a surprise is a surprise no longer. Obama supported Zelaya not just because he is a fellow-leftist, but in order to stand for the principle that, once a person is elected, he’s allowed to do anything he wants.
Here’s the picture in Honduras, according to the intrepid Mary O’Grady, who has covered the story from the start for the WSJ and will not let it go:
Four months after a presidential election, reports from Honduras suggest the Obama administration remains obsessed with repairing its foreign-policy image by regaining the upper hand. The display of raw colonialist hubris is so pronounced that locals now refer to U.S. ambassador Hugo Llorens as “the proconsul.”
Washington’s bullying is two-pronged. First is a maniacal determination to punish those involved in removing Mr. Zelaya. Second is an attempt to force Honduras to allow Mr. Zelaya, who now lives in the Dominican Republic, to return without facing any repercussions for the illegal actions that provoked his removal. Both goals are damaging the bilateral relationship, polarizing the nation and raising the risk of a resurgence of political violence.
The U.S., as represented by Mr. Llorens, has been at the center of the Zelaya crisis all along. People familiar with events leading up to Mr. Zelaya’s arrest on June 28 say that had the U.S. ambassador not worked behind the scenes to block a congressional vote to remove the president a few days earlier, the dramatic deportation would never have happened.
The State Department denies this allegation. But numerous sources maintain that Mr. Llorens’ interference allowed Mr. Zelaya to push ahead with an unconstitutional referendum. Fearing he would use violence””as he had before””to trample the rule of law, the Supreme Court took action. Mr. Zelaya was arrested, shipped off to San José, and removed from power by a vote of Congress the same day.
Honduras had defied Uncle Sam and the U.S., led by Mr. Llorens, decided that it had to be taught a lesson. It took out the brass knuckles and tried hard to unseat interim president Roberto Micheletti in the interest of restoring Mr. Zelaya to the office.
But the Americans had scores to settle. The U.S had already yanked dozens of visas from officials and the business community as punishment for noncompliance with its pro-Zelaya policy. Then, just days before President Porfirio Lobo’s inauguration in January, Hondurans estimate it pulled at least 50 more from Micheletti supporters. The visas have not been returned, and locals say Mr. Llorens continues to foster a climate of intimidation with his visa-pulling power.
He hasn’t stopped there. In early March he organized a meeting of Liberal Party Zelaya supporters and the party’s former presidential candidate, Elvin Santos, at the U.S. Embassy. Some 48 hours later the party’s zelayistas and its Santos faction voted to remove Mr. Micheletti as party head. Rigoberto Espinal Iréas, a legal adviser to the independent public prosecutor’s office, complained that the “meeting generated much bad feeling in Honduran civil society” because it was “perceived to have the purpose of intervening in Honduran national politics.”
Now more trouble is brewing: Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes, according to press reports, has said that Mr. Lobo made a promise, in front of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Mr. Funes, that Mr. Zelaya could return “without fear of political persecution.” Mr. Lobo subsequently announced that Mr. Zelaya is free to enter the country. In exchange, it is expected that foreign aid flows to Honduras will resume. But the minister of security maintains that if Mr. Zelaya returns he will be arrested.
All the newspapers in the United States should be covering this on their front pages. But they are not; and when they did cover the Honduras story they got it exactly (and purposely, I believe) wrong.
In this topsy-turvy world, the people of Honduras continue to resist the muscle of Chicago politics represented by the Obama administration (I am tempted to call it a “regime,” but I will desist for now). Let’s hope the people of Honduras are the ultimate victors. And I’ll say the same for the people of the United States.
Those crazy intellectuals
By now we all have probably noticed the strange phenomenon of people who are highly accomplished in their own fields but who fail to exercise even a modicum of common sense when opining outside them. I’ve been reading Thomas Sowell’s wonderful Intellectuals and Society, which explores this curious circumstance with his usual thoroughness and insight (even though Sowell himself could be called an intellectual, which makes it rather ironic).
In light of the recent strategic arms control treaty between Russia and the US, the following hit home with me:
Bertrand Russell, for example, was both a public intellectual and a leading authority within a rigorous field. But the Bertrand Russell who is relevant here is not the author of landmark treatises on mathematics but the Bertrand Russell who advocated “unilateral disarmament” for Britain in the 1930s while Hitler was re-arming Germany. Russell’s advocacy of disarmament extended all the way to “disbanding the army and navy and air force”—again, with Hitler re-arming not far away. The Noam Chomsky who is relevant here is not the linguistics scholar but the Noam Chomsky of similarly extravagant political announcements…
Visiting the United States in 1933, George Bernard Shaw said, “You Americans are so fearful of dictators. Dictatorship is the only way in which government can accomplish anything. See what a mess democracy has led to. Why are you afraid of dictatorship?” Leaving London for a vacation in South Africa in 1935, Shaw declared, “It is nice to go for a holiday and know that Hitler has settled everything so well in Europe.” While Hitler’s anti-Jewish actions eventually alienated Shaw, the famous playwright remained partial to the Soviet dictatorship. In 1939, after the Nazi-Soviet pact, Shaw said: “Herr Hitler is under the powerful thumb of Stalin, whose interest in peace is overwhelming. And every one except myself is frightened out of his or her wits!” A week later, the Second World War began, with Hitler invading Poland from the west, followed by Stalin invading from the east.
It goes on, but I think you get the idea. The stupidity of supposedly smart men (and women!) can be simply stunning. And that stupidity is not random; it tends to almost always go in the same direction, that of failing to understand the workings of the totalitarian and tyrannical mindset.
Looking back: who is Obama?
Here’s another blast from the trying-to-figure-Obama-out past, this time from Spengler (David P. Goldman), who wrote the following on February 28, 2008:
Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his mother’s milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American culture, although not their religion. He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.
There is nothing mysterious about Obama’s methods. “A demagogue tries to sound as stupid as his audience so that they will think they are as clever as he is,” wrote Karl Krauss. Americans are the world’s biggest suckers, and laugh at this weakness in their popular culture. Listening to Obama speak, Sinclair Lewis’ cynical tent-revivalist Elmer Gantry comes to mind, or, even better, Tyrone Power’s portrayal of a carnival mentalist in the 1947 film noire Nightmare Alley. The latter is available for instant viewing at Netflix, and highly recommended as an antidote to having felt uplifted by an Obama speech.
America has the great misfortune to have encountered Obama at the peak of his powers at its worst moment of vulnerability in a generation. With malice aforethought, he has sought out their sore point…
Be afraid ”“ be very afraid. America is at a low point in its fortunes, and feeling sorry for itself. When Barack utters the word “hope”, they instead hear, “handout”. A cynic might translate the national motto, E pluribus unum, as “something for nothing”. Now that the stock market and the housing market have failed to give Americans something for nothing, they want something for nothing from the government. The trouble is that he who gets something for nothing will earn every penny of it, twice over.
Holds up pretty well, I think.
But enough of the past. Moving right along, we come to the future. How will this play out? Spengler didn’t know in February of 2008, and we still don’t know in March of 2010 (actually, we can never know the future—until it becomes the past, and even then our knowledge remains incomplete).
But we certainly should know more about whether either of the following two possibilities occurs within the next three years (perhaps even sooner):
“Evil will oft evil mars”, J R R Tolkien wrote. It is conceivable that Barack Obama, if elected, will destroy himself before he destroys the country.
Obama is certainly well on his way to destroying himself in terms of public opinion. But he has also shown that he has contempt for public opinion; although he prefers that it be with him, he has no problem acting against it if he has the power to do so. And right now he’s got that power.
Suicide bombers on Moscow subway
Now we read the terrible news that two female suicide bombers have killed 38 people and wounded another 65 in two separate blasts on the Moscow subway.
We should not be surprised by any of this. It is actually more of a surprise that it doesn’t happen more often. Bill Roggio has some information about who may have done it that fits in with my own first (and relatively uninformed) thought—Chechnians:
The FSB believes the attacks were carried out by the ‘Black Widows,’ members of the Caucasus Emirate’s female suicide bomber cadre. The chief of the FSB said the heads of two women have been recovered at the blast sites. The Black Widows are typically wives or daughters of family members killed during the wars against the Russians in Chechnya.
Here’s some background from Roggio:
A cell associated with Sayeed Buryatsky, the slain ideologue of Caucasus Emirate [formerly Chechnya], may have carried out today’s attack. On March 2, Russian security forces killed Buryatsky and five other terrorists during a raid in Ingushetia. Buryatsky was the mufti for the Caucasus Emirate.
During an interview this February with the pro-terrorist Kavkaz Center, Umarov [the current leader of the al Qaeda-linked Caucasus Emirate] threatened to conduct attacks using the Riyad-us-Saliheen [martyr operations] in the heart of Russia. He also reiterated that the Riyad-us-Saliheen was back in action…
“Blood will no longer be limited to our (Caucasus) cities and towns,” Umarov continued. “The war is coming to their cities. If Russians think the war only happens on television, somewhere far away in the Caucasus where it can’t reach them, inshaAllah (God willing), we plan to show them that the war will return to their homes.”
But the world being what it is, and this being Russia in particular, nothing is certain—except that a great many innocent people died today at the hands of terrorists bent on sowing fear and chaos in Russia.