December 3, 2014

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

John Fund makes a point about the choice of a new director of the Congressional Budget Office.

It was 20 years ago this month that the Republican Revolution roiled Washington by securing the first unified GOP control of Congress in four decades. That control lasted just over six years and brought both successes (welfare reform, capital-gains-tax cuts) and failures (no major entitlement or tax reform). When a decade ago I interviewed key Republicans in Congress about why the GOP didn’t achieve more during that period, they were in nearly universal agreement: People are policy, and reforming institutions matters. “We didn’t do enough to change the culture of Capitol Hill, from dropping the ball on implementing dynamic scoring of tax bills to not always putting in place the right personnel,” John Kasich, the former Budget Committee chairman who is now governor of Ohio, told me.

The GOP is now in danger of repeating those mistakes as it prepares to once again take control of both houses of Congress this January. Right now, there is a fierce behind-the-scenes battle over who will head the Congressional Budget Office, an influential agency of 200 analysts that provides estimates on the cost and societal impact of legislation.

CBO’s analysis can make or break bills in Congress, and its estimates on economic growth and the budget serve as the benchmark for much of what the Federal government does. Republicans say they will promote a wholesale overhaul of both the tax code and entitlements, planning for the day in 2017 when a GOP president may sign them into law. But will they be able to overhaul anything if they don’t have in place the right people who understand their vision? …

 

 

Now and then a liberal can see truth. In the New Republic there was a surprising article about Ferguson.

Susan Sontag once famously commented that one could have learned much more about the Soviet Union from 1950 to 1970 from reading the Readers’ Digest than from reading The Nation. I think you might be able to say something similar, though not identical, about the grand jury decision not indicting Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for killing suspect Michael Brown, namely that one could have had as much difficulty forming a fair and accurate opinion of the decision from watching Fox News as you would from watching MSNBC, which, at least when I was viewing it, devoted one interview after another to discrediting the prosecutors’ statement and the grand jury decision. …

… The physical evidence ruled out that Wilson had shot Brown in the back while running away, as Brown’s companion Dorian Johnson initially had claimed. And it was not conclusive one way or the other on whether Brown had, after he turned around to face Wilson, tried to surrender. In all, the forensic evidence did not prove Wilson innocent of killing Brown when he was trying to surrender, but it also did not give the grand Jury “probable cause” to indict him on that basis. Other evidence may surface, but from what the grand jury learned, I think it did the right thing, and that it’s also unlikely—given this evidence—that the federal government, which must meet an even higher evidentiary standard, will choose to indict Wilson. …

 

 

Jonathan Tobin with the first of a few posts on the president’s bad instincts.

… how is it that the man who was elected president in no small measure to heal the country’s historic racial divide has not only failed to advance that cause but has found himself sidelined by race baiters.(?) As with so much else that has happened in this failed presidency, Obama’s inability to act decisively or courageously caused him to miss opportunities to help a nation that looked to him for leadership.

To recall Barack Obama’s rise to prominence and then to the presidency is to think of a figure who attempted to both embody the progress the country had made in resolving its historic racial issues and to rise above the issue. Both his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech and his 2008 Philadelphia speech about race were, despite the anodyne nature of their texts, considered watershed events because of the president’s ability to articulate the nation’s aspirations for both post-partisan and post-racial healing.

But once in the presidency, Obama not only embarked on a rabidly ideological agenda that further divided an already polarized country but also used his bully pulpit to sermonize on race in ways that only made things worse. His dubious extra-legal intervention in the controversy over Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates showed how unsure his instincts were on the one topic that most Americans would have looked to him for guidance. …

… By spending so much of his presidency posing as a victim, Obama helped create a reality in which most blacks believe the country is less free of bias than it was when he was elected. Instead of a healer, Obama has become a passenger in a bus driven by men like Dyson or White House friend Al Sharpton. …

 

 

More from Tobin.

… It is true that many African-Americans don’t trust the police and that racism isn’t dead. But by accepting the premise of the Ferguson rioters that somehow the lack of an indictment is proof that the system isn’t working, Obama wasn’t advancing the cause of healing. Even more to the point, by focusing all of his attention on alleged police misbehavior, the president was ignoring the fact that what African-Americans trapped in poor neighborhoods need most is more policing, not less.

As for the president’s suggestions, they speak volumes about how insubstantial the White House’s approach has become. The president said he would seek to impose more restrictions on the transfer of military-style equipment—like the ones deployed in Ferguson when the trouble began this summer—as well as spending money on body cameras for police, presumably to ensure that those wearing the devices would be caught red-handed if they mistreated civilians. …

… But let’s not pretend that this is about better policing or bridging the racial divide. The president could cite no studies pointing to the need for any of his measures nor could he argue credibly that a White House photo op was anything but what he denied it to be: a dog and pony show intended only to demonstrate a faux interest in an issue that would soon be forgotten as soon as the media and left-wing demonstrators move on from Ferguson to whatever the next media feeding frenzy turns out to be. …

 

 

Heather Mac Donald finds the meaning of Ferguson.

The New York Times has now pronounced on the “meaning of the Ferguson riots.” A more perfect example of what the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “defining deviancy down” would be hard to find. The Times’ editorial encapsulates the elite narrative around the fatal police shooting of unarmed Michael Brown last August, and the mayhem that twice followed that shooting. Unfortunately, the editorial is also a harbinger of the poisonous anti-police ideology that will drive law-enforcement policy under the remainder of the Obama administration.

The Times cannot bring itself to say one word of condemnation against the savages who self-indulgently destroyed the livelihoods of struggling Ferguson, Mo., entrepreneurs and their employees last week. The real culprit behind the riots, in the Times’ view, is not the actual arsonists and looters but county prosecutor Robert McCulloch. McCulloch presented the shooting of 18-year-old Brown by Officer Darren Wilson to a St. Louis county grand jury; after hearing three months of testimony, the grand jury decided last Monday not to bring criminal charges against Wilson. The Times trots out the by now de rigueur and entirely ad hoc list of McCulloch’s alleged improprieties, turning the virtues of this grand jury — such as its thoroughness — into flaws. If the jurors had indicted Wilson, none of the riot apologists would have complained about the length of the process or the range of evidence presented. …

 

 

Jonathan Tobin was on a roll. Here he posts on yet more Affordable Healthcare Act lies.

Two weeks after the country first digested the revelation that one of the architects of ObamaCare confessed that its passage was largely the product of a series of deceptions aimed at deceiving the Congressional Budget Office, Congress, and an American public that was too “stupid” to grasp what was going on, it turned out the falsehoods haven’t ended. As open enrollment began for a new year of ObamaCare policies, it was revealed that some of the numbers promoted by the administration as proof of the Affordable Care Act’s success were falsified. While in and of itself this latest problem is not proof that the ACA is doomed, with the law’s existing credibility gap growing and more problems looming ahead in the coming year in which the balance between those who gain from the law may be matched by those who lose from it, perhaps its time for the administration to stop pretending this isn’t a pattern. …

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>