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We have a president created and supported by a bodyguard of lies. The latest example comes from a NY Post story about how pre-election employment figures were manipulated.
In the home stretch of the 2012 presidential campaign, from August to September, the unemployment rate fell sharply — raising eyebrows from Wall Street to Washington.
The decline — from 8.1 percent in August to 7.8 percent in September — might not have been all it seemed. The numbers, according to a reliable source, were manipulated.
And the Census Bureau, which does the unemployment survey, knew it.
Just two years before the presidential election, the Census Bureau had caught an employee fabricating data that went into the unemployment report, which is one of the most closely watched measures of the economy.
And a knowledgeable source says the deception went beyond that one employee — that it escalated at the time President Obama was seeking reelection in 2012 and continues today.
“He’s not the only one,” said the source, who asked to remain anonymous for now but is willing to talk with the Labor Department and Congress if asked.
The Census employee caught faking the results is Julius Buckmon, according to confidential Census documents obtained by The Post. Buckmon told me in an interview this past weekend that he was told to make up information by higher-ups at Census. …
The healthcare train wreck prompted this from Walter Russell Mead.
… All this has plunged the White House into the deepest hole of the Obama presidency to date, but the biggest shock isn’t about the cruddy rollout, the kludgy law or the disingenuous sales job by which it was passed. The biggest shock and the most damning revelation came in the President’s hasty and awkward press conference when President Obama responded to a reporter’s question about his knowledge of the website’s problems:
“OK. On the website, I was not informed directly that the website would not be working as — the way it was supposed to. Ha[d] I been informed, I wouldn’t be going out saying, boy, this is going to be great. You know, I’m accused of a lot of things, but I don’t think I’m stupid enough to go around saying, this is going to be like shopping on Amazon or Travelocity, a week before the website opens, if I thought that it wasn’t going to work.”
This was eyepopping. Obamacare is the single most important initiative of his presidency. The website rollout was, as the President himself has repeatedly stated, the most important element of the law’s debut. Domestically speaking there was no higher priority for the President and his staff than getting this right. And the President is telling the world that a week before the disaster he had no idea how that website was doing.
Reflect on that for a moment. The President of the United States is sitting in the Oval Office day after day. The West Wing is stuffed with high power aides. His political appointees sit atop federal bureaucracies, monitoring the work of the career staff around them. The President has told his core team, over and over, that the health care law and the website rollout are his number one domestic priorities.
And with all this, neither he nor, apparently, anyone in his close circle of aides and advisors knew that the website was a disaster. Vapid, blind, idly flapping their lips; they pushed paper, attended meetings and edited memos as the roof came crashing down. It is one thing to fail; it is much, much worse not to see failure coming. …
And according to Yuval Levin, the healthcare long game has been sacrificed for short term news cycles.
… The president, in his Thursday press conference, did not treat November 30 as a key date. He did not suggest that there was just one large obstacle to overcome and then things would be fine. He did not say the product was good but the website is bad. He said things like this:
“But even if we get the hardware and software working exactly the way it’s supposed to with relatively minor glitches, what we’re also discovering is that insurance is complicated to buy. And another mistake that we made, I think, was underestimating the difficulties of people purchasing insurance online and shopping for a lot of options with a lot of costs and lot of different benefits and plans and somehow expecting that that would be very smooth, and then they’ve also got to try to apply for tax credits on the website.”
These are the words of a man who has had to internalize a lot of grim briefings lately, and to come to terms with some painful realities. And the decision the president announced is the decision of a man who has to just think about politics day by day now, rather than in terms of large goals and visions.
It may turn out, of course, that the situation of Obamacare and its champions is not in fact this dire, that the exchange system will find some balance relatively soon and function in a way that bears some resemblance to how it was designed to work, and that the politics of health care in 2014 will be more mixed and complicated than the fiasco the Democrats now face. But the last few days have suggested that Democrats, including the president, are beginning to lose faith in that possibility.
Things aren’t all bad, we do have Clarence Thomas sitting as a Justice of the Supreme Court. He was the main event at a recent meeting of the Federalist Society. Scott Johnson of Power Line posts.
I had the great good fortune of attending the Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention annual dinner featuring Justice Thomas last night. Justice Thomas was the attraction who drew a packed house of more than 1,300 justices, judges, attorneys and law students, and he just about brought down the house.
Responding to questions put to him by Seventh Circuit Judge Diane Sykes, Justice Thomas told a deeply American story. He ranged widely over his life and career, recalling his slave forebears, his grandparents, his teachers, his studies in college, seminary and law school, and his first job with Senator John Danforth. He recalled in detail the day he gave up the hate in his heart — April 16, 1970 — and spoke frequently of his loves. He spoke of his love for his wife, for his life on the Court, for his clerks, and above all, for the Constitution.
He moved the audience several times to laughter and, I think, by the end, to tears. David Lat captures the event in his Above the Law post “Justice Clarence Thomas speaks–and oh what a speech!” I left the event thinking, this is a man.
Here’s the article by David Lat mentioned by Scott.
Over the past few years, some amazing speakers have appeared at the Thursday evening dinner of the Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention. Last year, Justice Samuel A. Alito offered a very funny look back at his time at Yale Law School. In 2010, Justice Antonin Scalia engaged in a spirited and wide-ranging conversation with legal journalist Jan Crawford.
Last night’s event will be tough to top. Justice Clarence Thomas, speaking with Judge Diane Sykes of the Seventh Circuit, delivered remarks that were “equal parts hysterical, poignant and inspiring,” as Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett noted on Twitter.
I was lucky enough to attend, seated just one table away from the stage. Here’s my account of the evening (plus a few photos)….
The event took place in the cavernous ballroom of the Omni Shoreham Hotel, one of the few venues large enough to accommodate the roughly 1,300 attendees. The crowd included legal luminaries too numerous to mention; I’ll simply note that the room was one vote shy of being able to grant cert (Justice Antonin Scalia and Justice Samuel Alito also attended).
Judge Sykes — stylishly attired in a bright magenta jacket, shiny black pants, and an impressive amount of bling for a federal judge — did a superb job interviewing Justice Thomas. She did not make the mistake made by some SCOTUS interviewers of being too interventionist; instead, she gently and unobtrusively guided the conversation with thoughtful questions, keeping the spotlight on Justice Thomas. Her interviewing skill won praise from the attendees I spoke with after the event, as well as from the Los Angeles Times. …
Click here for Justice Thomas interview/speech from You Tube.
Interesting article from WaPo reports what American cities are warned against by foreign governments.
Planning a trip abroad? It’s probably best to check out the State Department’s list of travel warnings for countries with unsafe political situations. At the moment, the State Department has issued travel warnings for 34 countries, from the Central African Republic and El Salvador to Iraq and North Korea.
Well, just as State warns Americans about dangerous places to travel, so too do foreign ministries in other countries — and some countries warn their citizens to avoid heading to certain cities in the U.S. France, in particular, warns travelers to be careful in a large number of specific cities.
Here’s what other countries, mostly France, say about American cities: …