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In a piece titled ”A vote? We don’t need no stinking vote!,” Orange County Register editorial writer explains why the Dems are attracted to the “deem and pass” rule.
… Give Nancy Pelosi a certain amount of credit for frankness. She says of the three possible ways to come to a vote, at this point she is leaning toward this one because it doesn’t require lawmakers in vulnerable districts to cast a potentially unpopular vote. They can hide behind process. “It’s more insider and process-oriented than most people want to know,” she said in a roundtable with bloggers on Monday, “But I like it, because people don’t have to vote on the Senate bill.” Give her points for openness in acknowledging that evasion of accountability is a prize greatly to be valued in today’s Congress. Of course it might be unconstitutional, but who pays much attention to that old scrap of parchment anyway? …
Streetwise Professor explores an analogy in “Woodrow Obama.”
The analogy is not exact—historical analogies never are—but there is more than a passing similarity between Obama’s health care battle and Woodrow Wilson’s campaign for the League of Nations; there are also striking similarities between the men themselves. Obama should mark well the lesson—but I doubt he will.
Like Wilson, Obama is a self-styled progressive who is deeply skeptical of the Founders’ creation. Like Wilson, Obama is firmly convinced of his own rectitude and his moral superiority over his political foes. As with Wilson, this makes Obama firmly opposed to compromise with these foes; he views compromise as betrayal of a fundamental belief, and as Wilson did, he views his opponents as morally defective. Obama, like Wilson, is a Nobel Peace Price winner (although Wilson actually did something to merit it). …
In the WSJ, Debra Burlingame and Thomas Joscelyn write about the outrageous actions of dishonorable lawyers aiding the Gitmo terrorists, and a shameful Attorney General who doesn’t recognize that he is a public servant.
…Other incidents listed in the FOIA material included: a lawyer who was caught in the act of making a hand-drawn map of a detention camp’s layout, including guard towers; a lawyer who sent a letter to his detainee client telling him that “we cannot depend on the military to do the right thing” and conveying his message of support to other detainees who were not his clients; lawyers who posted photos of Guantanamo security badges on the Internet; lawyers who provided news outlets with “interviews” of their clients using questions provided in advance by the news organization; and a lawyer who gave his client a list of all the detainees. …
…Last August, the Washington Post reported that three lawyers defending Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his 9/11 co-conspirators showed their clients photographs of covert CIA officers in an attempt to identify the individuals who interrogated them after they were captured overseas. Lawyers working for the John Adams Project, formed to support the legal team representing KSM and his cohorts, provided the defense attorneys with the photographs, according to the Post. None of the attorneys under investigation were identified in the Post report. …
…It is entirely legitimate to ask who else among Mr. Holder’s hires from the Gitmo bar is shaping or influencing national security policy decisions. Meanwhile, the public can decide whether the lawyers at Paul, Weiss who are volunteering at Guantanamo are an example of the legal profession’s noblest traditions.
…On Feb. 20, 2007, a post on the Paul, Weiss Web site proudly announced “Paul, Weiss achieves more victories for Guantanamo detainees.” Two detainees were released from Gitmo to their home in Saudi Arabia. One was Majeed Abdullah Al Joudi…The Web site needs an update. The Pentagon has identified Al Joudi as a “confirmed” recidivist who is “directly involved” with the facilitation of “terrorist activities.”
Yousef Al Shehri, the detainee who led his cell block in the feeding tube rebellion, was also released in November 2007. In early 2009 he was listed on the Saudi Kingdom’s list of 85 “most wanted” extremists. Yousef was killed last October during a shootout with Saudi security forces on his way to a martyrdom operation. He and another jihadist, disguised as women and wearing suicide vests, killed a security officer in the clash. Yousef’s brother-in-law, Said Al Shehri, also released from Gitmo, is currently the second in command of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the branch that launched the Christmas Day airline attack last year.
In the Corner, Andy McCarthy summarizes the disgraceful activities of the Al Qaeda lawyers.
That’s the title of of a mind-blowing op-ed by Debra Burlingame and Tom Joscelyn in Monday’s Wall Street Journal. Debra and Tom make mince-meat of the hallucination that casts the Gitmo Bar as modern John Adamses. The essay recounts, among other things…
…The Gitmo Bar incited the detainees against the military guards.
The Gtimo Bar posted photos of Guantanamo security badges on the Internet in a transparent effort to identify U.S. security personnel.
The Gitmo Bar facilitated enemy combatants in communicating messages and interviews to their confederates and the outside world. …
…The Gitmo Bar provided the detainees with news accounts about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, including reports that U.S. forces were sustaining devastating casualities from IED attacks. (Again, it was a court-ordered condition of the lawyers’ access to these war prisoners that they not be given information relating to military operations, intelligence, arrests, political news and current events, and the names of U.S. government personnel.)…
In a word, sickening.
Andy McCarthy has more. The Al Qaeda lawyers and the John Adams Project lawyers have endangered the lives of Americans and their families. And this was done merely to further a political agenda. Where are the MSM who were outraged about Valerie Plame, the desk “agent” whose cover was supposedly blown? The thing that is most disgusting about liberals is that politics trumps the safety of Americans.
…Actually, I would call the enterprise — just for starters — a wartime felony violation of the federal law barring disclosure of the identities of U.S. intelligence officers (Title 50, United States Code, Section 421), as well as a wartime felony violation of the espionage act (Title 18, United States Code, Section 793), which prohibits, among other things, obtaining national defense information with reason to know it will be used to the injury of the United States (including taking and using photographs “of anything connected with the national defense”).
In the Washington Times, Bill Gertz has more on the indefensible Gitmo Bar and its indispensable DOJ protectors. To summarize, a cabal of the enemy’s volunteer lawyers, led by the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and calling itself the “John Adams Project,” is alleged to have hired investigators who staked out CIA agents believed (no doubt based on classified discovery in the detainee court cases) to have been interrogators. The investigators snapped pictures of the CIA agents — in some instances, apparently, in the vicinity of their homes where they reside with their families — and gave them to the lawyers, who, in turn, got them to other members of the Gitmo Bar (including at least some military lawyers) who showed them to top al-Qaeda detainees, enabling them to identify the CIA agents.
The scandal was uncovered because there are a lot of the photos and they’ve evidently been circulating around the detention camp, so some were discovered and seized by military guards. The CIA went appropriately ballistic over the patent security breach. But the Justice Department — which, as we’ve been noting, is rife with lawyers who volunteered their services to the detainees during the Bush years — insisted that the security breach was no big deal. …
Thomas Sowell looks at some of the political strategies being used to pass Obamacare.
In a swindle that would make Bernie Madoff look like an amateur, Barack Obama has gotten a substantial segment of the population to believe that he can add millions of people to the government-insured rolls without increasing the already record-breaking federal deficit.
Those who think in terms of talking points, instead of realities, can point to the fact that the Congressional Budget Office has concurred with budget numbers that the Obama administration has presented.
…any budget — is not a record of hard facts but a projection of future financial plans. A budget tells us what will happen if everything works out according to plan.
The Congressional Budget Office can only deal with the numbers that Congress supplies. Those numbers may well be consistent with each other, even if they are wholly inconsistent with anything that is likely to happen in the real world. …
Robert Samuelson debunks some claims by healthcare reform advocates.
…Though it seems compelling, covering the uninsured is not the health-care system’s major problem. The big problem is uncontrolled spending, which prices people out of the market and burdens government budgets. Obama claims his proposal checks spending. Just the opposite. When people get insurance, they use more health services. Spending rises. …
…Unless we change the fee-for-service system, costs will remain hard to control because providers are paid more for doing more. Obama might have attempted that by proposing health-care vouchers (limited amounts to be spent on insurance), which would force a restructuring of delivery systems to compete on quality and cost. Doctors, hospitals and drug companies would have to reorganize care. …
…Whatever their sins, insurers are mainly intermediaries; they pass along the costs of the delivery system. In 2009, the largest 14 insurers had profits of roughly $9 billion; that approached 0.4 percent of total health spending of $2.472 trillion. This hardly explains high health costs. What people need to know is that Obama’s plan evades health care’s major problems and would worsen the budget outlook. It’s a big new spending program when government hasn’t paid for the spending programs it already has.
In AOL News, Joel Kotkin has a fascinating article on projected population growth rates.
…Even more remarkably, America will expand its population in the midst of a global demographic slowdown. Global population growth rates of 2 percent in the 1960s have dropped to less than half that rate today, and this downward trend is likely to continue — falling to less than 0.8 percent by 2025 — largely due to an unanticipated drop in birthrates in developing countries such as Mexico and Iran. … The world’s population, according to some estimates, could peak as early as 2050 and begin to fall by the end of the century.
Population growth has very different effects on wealthy and poor nations. In the developing world, a slowdown of population growth can offer at least short-term economic and environmental benefits. But in advanced countries, a rapidly aging or decreasing population does not bode well for societal or economic health, whereas a growing one offers the hope of expanding markets, new workers and entrepreneurial innovation.
In fact, throughout history, low fertility and socioeconomic decline have been inextricably linked, creating a vicious cycle that affected such once-vibrant civilizations as ancient Rome and 17th-century Venice and that now affects contemporary Europe , Russia and Japan. …
From Slate we learn what it is like to cruise across the Atlantic on the Queen Mary 2.
…But as we unfurled ourselves on deck chairs on the Deck 7 promenade roughly midway through the trip, I realized that the timelessness around us was not entirely of the sort Cunard intended. The ship’s staff was constantly trying to manufacture a certain sense of lost grandeur, but just by virtue of being at sea for six nights and six days, surrounded by nothing but water and existing nowhere other than a specific longitude and latitude, we were literally timeless. We had nowhere to be. None of the many activities, ranging from dance lessons to lectures to sushi demonstrations and art auctions were compulsory, and for the first time in years, we couldn’t call each other on our cell phones to track each other’s progress through the day. We made approximate plans to meet somewhere for lunch at noon or 1 o’clock and knew that we had all the time in the world to stand around and wait if the other person was late.
Even time itself was ever-shifting. On five of our six days at sea, we set our clocks back by one hour each night so that we would arrive in New York on Eastern Standard Time. As a result, we were never quite sure what time it was, and in the rare moments when we did know, it felt like a different time, anyway, since we were structureless—maybe Berlin time, which we had been accustomed to, or U.K. time, in which we had spent three days at a friend’s house before boarding the ship. Every afternoon, a deck officer rang the ship’s bell eight times to mark “the exact time of midday,” but it seemed like a futile effort to connect us to the world on land. We soon learned to ignore it, because eight little rings did nothing to put a dent in the vastness of the ocean all around us and the ceaseless sliding by of the horizon.