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Just when you think this administration had done it all. Nile Gardiner has the post.
I wrote recently about Barack Obama’s sneering contempt for both Israel and Great Britain. Further confirmation of this was provided today with new details emerging regarding the President’s appalling reception for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House earlier this week. As Adrian Blomfield reports for The Telegraph:
“Benjamin Netanyahu was left to stew in a White House meeting room for over an hour after President Barack Obama abruptly walked out of tense talks to have supper with his family, it emerged on Thursday. The snub marked a fresh low in US-Israeli relations and appeared designed to show Mr Netanyahu how low his stock had fallen in Washington after he refused to back down in a row over Jewish construction in east Jerusalem. …
WSJ editors say the health care returns are starting to arrive.
It’s been a banner week for Democrats: ObamaCare passed Congress in its final form on Thursday night, and the returns are already rolling in. Yesterday AT&T announced that it will be forced to make a $1 billion writedown due solely to the health bill, in what has become a wave of such corporate losses.
Jonathan Adler explains in Volokh Conspiracy why these write-down’s are happening so quickly.
… Why are the companies announcing these changes? And why now if the tax change does not take effect until 2013? Because failure to do so could get the companies in trouble with the SEC. Under standard accounting rules, companies are supposed to take the charge in the quarter in which the tax law change is enacted, not when it takes effect. Because the first quarter ends Wednesday, more writedown announcements may be forthcoming.
David Harsanyi discusses the implications of Obamacare.
…When House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., was recently asked to identify where the Constitution granted Congress the authority to force all Americans to buy health insurance, he replied, “Under several clauses; the good and welfare clause and a couple others.” …
…Attorneys general from 14 states and other state legislatures disagree with Conyers, and have already mounted legal challenges to the constitutionality of individual mandates. Few people believe they will be successful in their admirable cause. …
Richard M. Esenberg, professor of law at Marquette, explained the consequences of Obamacare like this: “If Congress can require you to buy health insurance because of the ways in which your uncovered existence effects interstate commerce or because it can tax you in an effort to force you to do any old thing it wants you to, it is hard to see what — save some other constitutional restriction — it cannot require you to do or prohibit you from doing.”
Representative Paul Ryan from Wisconsin gave a brilliant speech about government and healthcare in January at the DC Kirby Center of Hillsdale College. His points are still relevant; the Obamacare passage does not mark the end of the process. This was published in February’s Imprimis.
…Under the terms of our Constitution, every individual has a right to care for their health, just as they have a right to eat. These rights are integral to our natural right to life—and it is government’s chief purpose to secure our natural rights. But the right to care for one’s health does not imply that government must provide health care, any more than our right to eat, in order to live, requires government to own the farms and raise the crops.
Government’s constitutional obligations in regard to protecting such rights are normally met by establishing the conditions for free markets—markets which historically provide an abundance of goods and services, at an affordable cost, for the largest number. When free markets seem to be failing to meet this goal—and I would argue that the delivery of health care today is an example of where this is the case—government, rather than seeking to supply the need itself, should look to see if its own interventions are the root of the problem, and should make adjustments to unleash competition and choice. …
In the WSJ, Daniel Henninger has some great thoughts on Obamacare and the Dems. Repeal!
…Spring renewal and baseball’s new season are upon us, so let’s quote the optimism of Yogi: It isn’t over until it’s over. I thought 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. Sunday night in Washington was the Republican Party’s finest hour in a long time. When the voting stopped, the screen said the number of Republicans voting for Mr. Obama’s bill was zero. Not one. Nobody.
Pristine opposition is being spun as a Republican liability. It looks to me like a Republican resurrection. The party hasn’t yet discovered what it should be, but this clearly was a party discovering what it cannot be. …
…The GOP is being counseled to abandon its morning-after impulse to “repeal the bill.” Why do that? This is the first honest emotion the party has had in years. Yes, technical repeal isn’t remotely possible until after 2012. But “Repeal!” is a terrific bumper sticker and campaign slogan for our times. Repeal! ObamaCare is just a start. Can’t repeal the bill yet? Drive people to November’s polls to repeal the Democratic Party and what it has turned into. …
Stuart Taylor discusses the John Adams project with the ACLU that showed photos of CIA agents to Gitmo terrorists. No surprise that Taylor thinks no one should be prosecuted. It is a pleasant surprise that the Attorney General appears to be taking this seriously.
…The August 21 Post article reported that FBI agents had questioned military defense lawyers about whether they had shown their clients photos of covert CIA officials that had been “in some cases surreptitiously taken outside their homes.” The Justice Department cleared the military lawyers of any wrongdoing months ago, according to the March 19 Newsweek report by Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball. (I am an occasional contributor to Newsweek.)
But the investigation of the John Adams Project lawyers “was given new urgency after the discovery last month of additional photographs of interrogators at Guantanamo,” Bill Gertz reported in The Washington Times on March 15. …
…This concern might seem far-fetched if — as the ACLU has suggested — the 9/11 defendants were shown the photos but were given no other information that could lead to exposure of the agents’ names or whereabouts. But Romero’s statement that the 9/11 conspirators were not told the agents’ names “to our knowledge” is not entirely reassuring. Nor is the fact that some of the photos were apparently left with — rather than just shown to — a detainee. …
Mark Steyn blogs about Ann Coulter’s reception in Canada.
A couple of days ago, I mentioned François Houle, the leftist apparatchik and provost of the University of Ottawa who threatened Ann Coulter with criminal prosecution before she’d even set foot on Canadian soil.
M. Houle warned Miss Coulter not to “promote hatred“. As this young lady points out in her report from the university, the only hate-promoter here is the buffoon Houle, whose barely veiled threats led to a gang of menacing Houligans (le mot juste) getting the event closed down. Alliances between the state’s ideological commissars and street mobs are a familiar feature of certain kinds of societies, and I suppose Canada will soon get used to its membership of this unlovely club. Ann Coulter says of her experience in the Great White North:
This has never, ever, ever happened before — even at the stupidest American university… Since I’ve arrived in Canada, I’ve been denounced on the floor of Parliament — which, by the way, is on my bucket list — my posters have been banned, I’ve been accused of committing a crime in a speech that I have not yet given, I was banned by the student council. So welcome to Canada! …
In the Corner, John J. Miller has some good news about another politician, and a Dem, no less.
Rep. Artur Davis, Democrat of Alabama, is black. He also voted against the health-care bill, both last year and this year. The Washington Post seems to think that a black congressman shouldn’t commit the apostasy of “distancing himself from the biggest legislative achievement of the first black president.” Forget the merits of the issue: It’s a black thing and Davis should get with the program.
“I vigorously reject the insinuation that there is a uniquely ‘black’ way of understanding an issue, and I strongly suspect that most Alabamians will as well,” says Davis, who is running for governor.
Good for him. Shame on the Washington Post for thinking this is some kind of controversy.
NRO staff posted a few of Charles Krauthammer’s takes. Here’s one:
On Vice President Biden’s profane utterance at the signing ceremony for Obamacare ["This is a big f**n deal"]:
I think he is the man who, perhaps without intending, has given historical context to this presidency. After all, Obama sees himself as a successor to FDR and Truman, so now we have the historical procession: the New Deal, the Square Deal, and the “Big F**n Deal.” …
Daniel Foster has an interesting post in the Corner. The California part of this equation is not an astonishing fact to Pickings readers.
This is probably bad news for California, but it is certainly good news for Iraq:
Traditional Wall Street investors have taken note. Iraq is now considered a safer bet than Argentina, Venezuela, Pakistan, and Dubai — and is nearly on par with the State of California, according to Bloomberg statistics on credit default swaps, which are considered a raw indicator of default risk.
“Compared to California, I’d rather bet on Iraq,’’ Daher said. “Iraq is a country where there are still bombs going off and people getting murdered, but they are less indebted than the United States. California is likely to have more demands on its resources, and there is no miracle where California is going to have more revenue coming out of the sky. Iraq has prospects for tremendously higher revenues, if they can manage to get their act halfway together, which they seem to be doing.’’ …