Ockham’s Razor – Since October 2001 – by Scott Kirwin
Archive for the ‘Obama’ Category.
A few weeks ago I referenced Blazing Saddles, today I get to reference another comedy classic, The Blues Brothers.
Jay Carney’s shifting excuses for the IRS reminds me of another famous Ja(ke), although this one has a heart of gold and is a helluva lot funnier.
I will update this as new stories appear, and as I work backward. Recent stories will be added to the top of each list.
Oh for crap’s sake can’t our leaders do anything right?
Russia Captures US Embassy Worker in Act of CIA Recruitment
This reminds me of an appropriate book for times like these:
Yes, even paranoids have enemies, very real, very dangerous, very powerful enemies.
The Internal Revenue Service is apologizing for inappropriately flagging conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status.Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS unit that oversees tax-exempt groups, said organizations that included the words “tea party” or “patriot” in their applications for tax-exempt status were singled out for additional reviews.
UPDATE: Here are the IRS excuses reported by WaPo reporter Zach Goldfarb:
The senior IRS official briefing the press just said: “I’m not good at math.”
In her defense, the IRS official, explained: “I’m a lawyer.”
The operative question to the IRS official is: What is one-quarter of 300?
You know, for a government of supposedly intelligent people they sure are pretty stupid.
UPDATE: The Washington Post is reporting things are much worse than the initial story above…
At various points over the past two years, Internal Revenue Service officials targeted nonprofit groups that criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution, according to documents in an audit conducted by the agency’s inspector general.
The documents, obtained by The Washington Post from a congressional aide with knowledge of the findings, show that on June 29, 2011, IRS staffers held a briefing with senior agency official Lois G. Lerner in which they described giving special attention to instances where “statements in the case file criticize how the country is being run.” Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the agency, raised objections and the agency revised its criteria a week later.
Update: Contrary to initial reports AP is reporting the acting head of the IRS Steven Miller knew about conservative groups being targeted and lied to Congress denying they were.
Anyone wondering what life was like in the Nixon years, well this is what it was like.
Premier Li
Thanks for taking my call so early in your morning. I hope Hong forgives me for dragging you out of bed, but I felt it necessary given the circumstances.
As you know our two nations have had our difficulties over the years. I understand that there is a lot of history between us, and I don’t expect bygones to be forgotten on your side any time soon. But the recent history of our two nations should be cause for optimism. I would like to think that you see things have improved between our two great nations since I took office. I have personally worked very hard to give your nation the space it needs to take its place as a true world power. I am not worried that doing so weakens my country, and I have done my best to marginalize those who do. I see a great future between our two countries based on shared responses to common problems such as environmental degradation, rising income inequality and the common prosperity that our two nations can share by working closely together.
But I must speak clearly and forthrightly about the North Korean situation. Here in America we have a saying coined by former Secretary of State Colin Powell called the Pottery Barn Rule. Pottery Barn is a shop common at indoor shopping malls that sells decorative glass and pottery items for around the house, much of which I might add come from factories in your country. If a customer mishandles an item in the store and breaks it, the store has a rule that he or she must buy it. In short, the Pottery Barn rule is if you break it you’ve bought it. Secretary of State Powell spoke in reference to US intervention in Iraq, but I believe the pottery barn rule applies equally to North Korea.
Mr. Premier, make no mistake that everyone knows China owns North Korea. Every American president since Truman understands this, as does every Russian president and Japanese prime minister. We might play along with the notion that North Korea is an independent state in public, but we learned our lesson who owns what there when the Chinese Red Army spilled over the Yalu River some 60 years ago. Some may advise you that our goal is to regain what we lost on the battlefield back then, that we seek a united Korea firmly allied to the United States. Let me reassure you that nothing is further from the truth. I know that the South Koreans have told you the same thing they’ve told us – that they do not wish to do what Germany did in the 1990’s when it reunified. It has taken the Germans over two decades to make reunification work, and it still has a way to go before the living standards are equitable on both sides of the former Berlin Wall. The South Koreans see the disparities between the living standards between North and South as even greater than that between East and West Germany, and know that reunification would bankrupt them and possibly wreck their economy for generations. The South Koreans simply do not want reunification in the foreseeable future, and would much prefer to see North Korea follow your nation’s path to prosperity. Their argument against reunification seems very sensible to me and I see no reason not to believe them.
For decades the North has played a game in which it has threatened my nation and its allies in exchange for this or that. This game was played masterfully by Kim Jung Il, allowing him to acquire nuclear weapons while under UN sanctions. But Kim Jung Un is not his father. I am very concerned that the young Un truly believes the propaganda dished out to his people by the State, and trusts the views of his advisers who do not understand my position. We have given North Korea as much as we possibly could under my administration, and I simply do not have anything left to give.
I must make this clear: in the event North Korea attacks the United States or its allies, I will personally hold you and your nation accountable. Premier Li, I am a peacemaker as proven by my Nobel Prize. Unlike my immediate predecessor I don’t start wars, I end them. Although I have no interest in a war between our two great nations, an attack by Kim Jung Un will leave me with no choice but to retaliate against China. This will not be a battle of proxies, but one directly between the United States and China. Such a war would be calamitous for our countries. It would result in thousands of deaths on both sides, and send the entire world into distress. And over what? The deluded scion of a hermit kingdom?
Following the Pottery Barn Rule, North Korea is broken and you own it. Therefore you must fix the situation in a manner that you see fit but one that calms the region. It is up to you to handle the North Koreans. There is nothing more that I can do on my side to prevent war. If Kim attacks, I must respond and in a way that you will likely not approve of.
这是谁？
Aw crap. The translator is not working? G-d D*** it! Denis! Get Brin on the line 2 NOW, and while you’re at it give Eric a call and tell him Google is his b***h.
The unemployment rate is down to 7.6%, it’s lowest in 4 years. Alan Krueger, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers at the White House, writes “today’s employment report provides further evidence that the U.S. economy is continuing to recover from the worst downturn since the Great Depression. It is critical that we continue the policies that are helping to build an economy that creates jobs and works for the middle class as we dig our way out of the deep hole that was caused by the severe recession that began in December 2007.”
So, happy days are here again? Only if you are drinking the kool-aid at the White House. Every month roughly 150,000 more people join the workforce as they come of age or arrive on our shores as immigrants. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) says that payrolls expanded by 88,000 people last month. So why did the unemployment rate drop to 7.6%?
A record 663,000 people gave up trying to find a job and left the workforce. These people are not counted in the BLS employment statistics; only those that are working or actively seeking employment within 2 years of having a job are counted. Anyone beyond that 2 year mark is simply dropped from the statistics, as is anyone who applied for and received disability, or moved back to live with their parents while attending school.
So is this statistic really indicative of a healthy economy?
Consider the following thought experiment:
In 2017 a Republican moves into the White House. Within a few months of taking office, her policies begin to have an effect on the economy and it starts to boom. Businesses start hiring, the economy picks up, and wages rise. At the same time social programs are cut back by the Republican administration and its allies forcing those on the dole to return to the work force.
What happens as these people reenter the workforce?
The BLS begins to include them back into their statistics because they are actively looking for work. If the number of jobs is growing but the number of job seekers is growing faster because they are being forced to get a job or encouraged by the success of friends and family to get one, what happens to the unemployment rate? It rises as the number of people outside the workforce shrinks, the exact opposite of the situation today. Do you think the mainstream media will trumpet the expanding economy sucking people off their couches and back into the workforce?
Happy days aren’t here again, and won’t be while leftist ideology trumps job creation, and crony capitalism allows the wealthy to benefit from the Left’s War on Poverty.
Americans have been conditioned to believe that a low unemployment figure is good while a higher unemployment figure is bad. Such simple notions used to be true until economists and their political patrons realized it provided them with a tool to support their favored policies. They then began manipulating the figures, including this while excluding that in order to support their favored legislative agenda. A century and a half ago Mark Twain recognized the danger of statistics who wrote “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” But today our political leaders have gone beyond lies with their manipulation of statistics, whether damned or not, into the realm of pure propaganda.
In 2008-9 our country experienced an unprecedented meltdown of its financial system brought on by the cosy relationships between government regulators, politicians and bureaucrats. In response the Federal Reserve embarked on a program whereby the it stole money from the bank accounts of 98% of the country and shifted it to the wealthiest of American society through depressing interest rates paid to savers on their accounts below the rate of inflation, meaning that for every $1,000 in your bank account you lose $30 every year to inflation. This subsidized those with money by providing them with low borrowing costs, allowing them to leverage their wealth for even greater gains in the stock market. It’s not good enough that a billionaire invests $100 million in the market; no, he must use that $100m as leverage to control a billion dollars worth of stock. The stock market has become a casino where small investors are left to chase nickels in front of steam rollers while the government funds the wealthiest segment of society. Worse, the Cyprus Model has put paid to the idea that bank savings are property and protected by the law. Instead savers have become “speculators” and their savings “investments” to be wiped out whenever banks need a bailout. It must not be forgotten that the initial bank bailout, the first put forward by the European Union, looked to steal 6.7% of guaranteed savings below 100,000 Euro. The European Union isn’t exactly communist China or Soviet Russia yet it completely ignored its own law of guaranteed deposits (the EU FDIC) and took the money. Is such an event possible in the United States? Yes. Unlikely perhaps at this point, but still possible.
To support this stock market bubble the federal reserve has flooded the markets with currency yet denied such actions, euphemistically called “quantitative easing”, are inflationary. Government bureaucracies such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) manipulate employment statistics to make it appear as if good times are here to stay by excluding the long-term unemployed and those who have given up on finding a job, meaning that if your wife is working and you’re looking for a job, our economy will improve by you staying at home and watching daytime TV since your household will go from 50% unemployment to 0% unemployment. Similarly the BLS manipulates inflation rates by discounting the volatility of food and fuel, the largest categories all but the very wealthiest people spend their money on besides taxes and housing, and making “qualitative adjustments” that hide inflation. In addition companies are passing on higher production costs to consumer through stealth inflation, providing less product for the same money. The profusion of dollar stores are proof of the success of this strategy since shoppers at these stores believing they are getting a bargain while in reality they are paying more per unit of good than at other stores. 4 loads of Tide for a $1 might seem a deal until one goes to a supermarket and finds a 40 load box of the detergent for $7.
Not one person from the banking crisis has been indicted or prosecuted by the Obama administration or Congress, a fact that spawned a PBS Frontline show “The Untouchables.” Could this be because the federal government would be prosecuting it’s own? Former SEC Chairwoman Mary Schapiro resigned and has taken a position at Promontory Financial Group, a bank consulting group, but promises not to lobby the government she once worked for. That has led to Forbes wondering what other of her qualifications Promontory is willing to bill $1,000 – $10,000 an hour for. She’s among numerous ex-federal employees at her new digs. Check out the nifty graphic at ZeroHedge listing Promontory employees and their former positions in the government. Yet we are supposed to believe this revolving door between regulators and those they regulate is free from moral hazard. In the comments at ZeroHedge someone calls the place a “high end whorehouse.” It it were taxpayers wouldn’t be the ones being screwed.
Banks like JP Morgan-Chase and investment firms like Goldman Sachs are considered too big to fail, taking their “skin” out of the game and replacing it with the American taxpayer’s. If JPMC or Goldman’s risky investments turn out well, it’s “capitalism” and their corporate managers and shareholders are rewarded; if they bomb it’s no big deal. The shareholders or managers are still rewarded as they were in January 2010 when banker bonuses were “bigger than ever” according to the New York Times even after the economic collapse of 2008-9. The American worker will simply work a few hours to provide the taxes the firms need to be bailed out, that is if she has a job. It’s a great system if you are Lloyd Blankfein GS’s CEO who earns upwards of $100 million a year at Goldman Sachs. It benefits Democratic politicians like Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Obama too since Blankfein is a large donor to the Democratic party.
Then there’s the debt. To call it a “mountain of debt” is to betray a shallow awareness of the world’s topography. Here are some neat visualizations of our debt in $100 bills, and an impressive sounding statistic that’s hard to visual: a line of $1 bills would stretch from the Earth to Uranus. We’ve reached a point where analogies lose their meaning, although the current debt being greater than the country’s entire output in 2011 must be at least a bit sobering to even the drunkest Keynesian economist. The best way to consider the debt is by making it personal. Since 2008 the debt has expanded by $26,000 per person. Multiply that number by those in your household and ask yourself if you feel that amount richer over the past 4 years. That would mean an extra $78k for my household, enough to drop the Wife’s med school debt by 40% or replace our aging cars, each with over 150k miles on them, as well as buy a new car for the Kid. If you don’t see that money, where did it go? Ask yourself: are you better off today than you were 4 years ago? Then ask Lloyd whether he is.
The system is corrupt yet we do nothing about it. We are told happy days are here again, that the stockmarket is at record highs, yet those of us who dabbled in the market prior to 2009 have still not recovered from the losses suffered then, leaving us on the sidelines of this rally. Small investors piled into the market and out of the market late back then, proving they were the “greater fools” and some are doing so today as the market skyrockets and smart money looks for the exits. Sure our 401K’s are expanding, but the numbers are meaningless for anyone other than those planning to retire in the coming months before this bubble bursts. Self employed people and contractors like myself don’t have 401K’s, we just have our wits and an ever sharpening skill set that we use to stay employed, but both are slowly being eroded by time as we age and the younger cohorts below us grow hungrier and more competitive. Time will unravel us, and when it does we will be poor and destitute, remembering the hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxes paid that could have gone, should have gone, into our retirement funds but didn’t. At that point we’ll be on the side of the 47% who don’t pay taxes, but by then the government will be completely broke. We shouldn’t expect any sympathy from the generations coming up in our shadows, since both Left and Right are in agreement that theirs will be the first generations to have lower living standards than preceding generations. It doesn’t help that we’ve sent them to substandard schools whose sole purpose seems to be to employ Masters of Education degree holders instead of actually teaching our children the skills they need to succeed in life.
The collapse of our education system is proof of our sick society, one that raids the education budgets for the young to pay for the guaranteed pensions of the old, one in which the only people who treasure marriage these days are gay and everyone else hooks up like a shed-full of feral cats in heat, with an increasing percetage of the products of these unions are on ADHD medication. I’d need to be medicated too if I was forced to sit still with a body full of hormones and brimming with youthful energy, taught by teachers who, like the children of Lake Wobegon, are all above average, all 98% of them. Conversely, Walter Russell Mead points out ”only 78.2 percent of American students graduated high school in 2010. Sixty-seven percent of all fourth graders could not read at grade level in 2009. And only 32 percent of eighth graders and 38 percent of twelfth graders were reading at or above grade level that same year.” Of course if we measured education aptitude by the number of body piercings and tattoos we’d lead the world.
David Stockman, former Reagan budget director, is getting beaten up in the press for his book The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America. Journalists, products of the Masters of Education employment entities described above, look at the highs of the Dow and discount Stockman’s thesis that the system we have today is more akin to the monopolies and crony capitalists that spawned the progressive movement over a century ago rather than some Randist free market anarchic paradise that they instinctively fear. The treatment of Stockman is similar to that shoveled out to Bob Woodward for daring to criticize President Obama game of chicken with the sequester, as J-school graduates leaped in defense of their icon in the White House attacking Woodward with various ad hominems that any of the profs would have failed them for had they used them in class (or rather, a class where failure was an option – evidently a rarity these days where students can pass without actually studying.) Watching Woodward, a man whose politics I disagree with yet whom I respect for helping pull off the greatest journalistic story of the century, being attacked by the likes of Andrew “I’m here, I’m queer, blah blah blah” Sullivan was like watching a fine thoroughbred horse attacked by a swarm of flies fresh from their home in a dung pile. But such is the fate for anyone who dares call “shenanigans” in the current climate where anyone who can’t continue deceiving themselves is lampooned, debased, or in the case of Woodward, threatened.
Our problems aren’t just economic either. The Obama administration has fled the Middle East and attempts to appease Iran by refusing to support the rebellion against the Assad regime in Syria.
“I think that the United States has not taken a more active role in Syria from the beginning because they didn’t want to disturb the possibility, to give them space, to negotiate with Iran,” Javier Solana, the former European Union foreign policy chief, said Monday at a Brookings Institution discussion about this week’s talks. Solana, who was a top negotiator with Tehran in the nuclear program until 2009, added, “They probably knew that getting very engaged against Assad, engaged even militarily, could contribute to a break in the potential negotiations with Tehran.”
As Walter Russell Mead notes this could be a catastrophic mistake.
If Solana is right that this policy has been driving the White House all along, this is Obama’s initial Iran failure—remaining silent during the 2009 Green Revolution—on steroids. Weakness doesn’t win you the friendship of bullies. And if this dispatch is right, we should expect some ugly repercussions from the Sunni Arabs, the Israelis and the Turks. All these powers want to see Iran’s claws clipped and they want Assad to go; all of these powers chiefly view the value of their US ties at the moment in the light of the confrontation with Iran. If they come to feel that the United States is willing to throw the Syrian lamb to the Iranian tiger, their trust and confidence in the United States, and consequentially America’s power to get things done in the region, would go into a deep eclipse.
Things don’t look any better on the other side of Asia with North Korea promising to attack the United States. So far the US response has been mild, yet that hasn’t stopped the press from asking White House spokesman Jay Carney if that hasn’t provoked a communist dictatorship whose people are being starved to death on a steady diet of leftist propaganda and grass. But their carbon footprints are tiny, for now. How much carbon will be released by a nuclear strike on Osaka or Guam? Quite a bit I suppose. In any event we soon might find out if North Korea acts on its threats.
A whole industry is set up to use imagery and fantasy to modify our behavior so that we buy something, yet somehow a related industry employing the same techniques but for entertainment purposes ie exempt from responsibility when an admittedly sick individual dresses up as villain of the violent movie being shown to the audience he then commences to massacre. The Roman Catholic Pope is labeled as an extremist for calling abortion murder while a doctor who performs late term abortions and keeps the tiny feet of his victims in a jar as memento mori is lauded as a hero. The billionaire mayor of New York City makes it his personal mission to rid the city of large soft drinks while the city’s crime rate rises and the city becomes less friendly to all but society’s richest and poorest.
But when all is said and done, who is to blame for this mess that we find ourselves in? We are.
We didn’t demand for the bankers to be tarred and feathered (well, we did but failed to hold our elected leaders accountable for allowing the bankers off scot-free.). We continually vote in the politicians who offer us platitudes instead of common sense and plunder the public purse for the benefit of the monied elite regardless of their party affiliation. We engage in bitter fights over issues that don’t impact us directly (I’m not gay, on medicaid and I can’t get pregnant, so honestly just how worked up can I get about gay marriage, social programs and abortion?), yet ignore the issues that unite us and affect our daily lives. We vilify other Americans for their differences yet are willfully blind to the commonalities. Intellectual laziness encourages us to accept stereotypes and straw men built by those who feed on hatred the way a maggot feeds on the flesh of an open wound instead of putting ourselves in the other’s position, or to use an old cliche, “walking a mile in the other man’s moccasins.” We have Obama himself saying, “It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” accepting a stereotype and succumbing to a form of elitism and intellectual laziness by belittling his opponents instead of attempting to understand them and winning them over. We’ve accepted the low standards of education because we’ve been trained that “fighting city hall” or in this case the school board is futile. So our kids read less than we do, they can text faster and know the special combo to beat the god Zeus in the “God of War” video game. They’ll be alright. Right? We keep our heads down, do what we are told and hope that our dreams come true, the way they do on TV between the ads for drugs to help men get it up and women feel not so down.
We should be ashamed for what we’ve done, or more importantly, not done, expending the effort to fight for accountability from our elected officials and receiving their heads in baskets after they ignored us 4 years ago. Today the problems are even worse, the threats greater, yet we continue on the way we did before the 2008 financial meltdown and on September 10, 2001, fighting among ourselves without giving the other the benefit of the doubt or the dignity our opponent deserves. To paraphrase my late mother-in-law, we chose this path, and we did so because we are idiots.
Before visiting Israel President Obama said in an interview with Israeli TV Iran was about a year away from having the Bomb, and “all options were on the table” for preventing it from acquiring it. Visiting Jordan later in his trip Obama took a more conciliatory tone, saying the issue is best resolved through diplomacy and the United States will continue to apply pressure on Iran “in a non-military way.” But if what Obama says is true, that Iran is a year away from having a bomb, it would represent a failure of diplomacy and would contradict the CIA position held as recently as 2012 that Iran had “halted its nuclear weapons program” in 2003. So what would it mean for Iran to have the Bomb? What would happen after a successful bomb test?
The first awareness of a successful Iranian underground nuclear test would come from seismic sensors detecting an earthquake having a magnitude of 4.0-5.0 centered in a sparsely populated region of Iran. Such man-made earthquakes have a distinctive seismic signature compared to naturally occurring quakes and can be detected within minutes of a test. Occasionally an underground test, such as one conducted by North Korea in 2006, releases cesium 137 into the air which can be picked up by detectors downwind in China, India and Pakistan, but it is likely the seismic signature of a blast would be enough to announce to the world that Iran had joined the nuclear club.
Press reports would appear suggesting a nuclear detonation in Iran, but in the initial hours after the blast most nations would be quiet about it, preferring to review their own intelligence before making statements, and the media in the USA and Europe will double and triple-check their sources before setting the headlines. Not so the Iranian press. A nuclear Iran has been perhaps the only thing opposition groups and the theocratic regime agree on, and Iranian media outlets will be trumpeting the news throughout the nation and the regime will be passing out sweets in the streets of Teheran in celebration. Therefore it is likely we would learn about a successful nuclear blast from the Iranian press via American and European media reports before official confirmation came from western governments.
When those official confirmations arrive expect them to be funereal in tone, of the type “The (your nationality here) people condemn the Iranian regime for its unlawful nuclear weapons test that threatens the stability of the region as well as the regime itself.” There would likely be near panic in some quarters, jubilation in others with commentators and reporters expecting the imminent obliteration of Israel. But Israel will not be in immediate danger. Building a bomb for a test and a bomb that can be put onto a missile or airplane are two separate engineering challenges, and because of that they are most likely occurring concurrently and with assistance from North Korea and some assistance from Russia.
There will be a sense in the West that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was worthless, and the sanctions Iran has put up with for over 15 years have completely failed. Promises made by the Obama administration to Israel and other states in the Middle East that containment of a nuclear armed is not an option as Vice-President Joe Biden said to a meeting with the Jewish group AIPAC, “Let me make clear what that commitment is: It is to prevent Iran from gaining a nuclear weapon, period. End of discussion. Not contain. Prevent,” would be repeated by some right wing or conservative media outlets while others more supportive of the administration would spike such “we told you so” stories.
There would likely be a window of at least a year or two beyond the bomb test before Iran could target a weapon on Israel, and during that time nothing on the surface will seem to have changed much. In fact because of that calm, voices preaching containment and appeasement would begin to appear, saying “How are the Iranians different from the Soviets?” “The Iranians got the bomb, but they won’t use it.” “If containment worked for the Soviets why can’t it work for the Iranians?” Ron Paul said as much in the 2012 Presidential debates. Leaks would come out of the Israeli and US intelligence agencies of possible military action being launched against Iran to keep it from “weaponizing the bomb,” with the intent of undermining the rationale for the attacks in favor of non-intervention. Iranians would return to the negotiating table, promising to halt their nuclear program in exchange for this that or the other thing. North Korea plowed, graded, paved and painted lines on this road so expect the Iranian regime to ride it in comfort. As the sting from the surprise of the test wears off, liberals, anti-war type and other useful idiots of the Islamic regime will play a more active role and attempt to protect the regime. “The USA is the only state ever to use the Bomb,” expect them to say, “So why should we trust it more than Iran?”
And they’ll have a point, but for the wrong reasons. US credibility will be at a low not seen since the Iranian Hostage Crisis at this point. States such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia have already begun dusting off their own test programs, and a successful test by Iran would accelerate this research. Of the two nations Saudi Arabia being the wealthier would probably simply buy a nuclear weapons program from Pakistan with assistance from France and other European nations, and perhaps share it with Turkey. But it would still take the better part of a decade for the Saudis to join the Nuclear Club. It would also push these nations closer to Russia who would be seen as an honest broker in the region, even when it is honestly supplying the Iranians whom the Sunni regimes in the Middle East detest. At least the Russians could be trusted while the Americans make threats and do nothing.
The time between a nuclear test and the successful weaponization of the Bomb will be the last window of opportunity for the Israelis and Americans to gather what remains of their spines and attack Iran. Failure at this point would lead to the fulfillment of promises made consistently over the history of the current Iranian regime: Israel will be destroyed. And while Israel will not go down without a fight, taking hundreds of thousands of Persians with them, it will not be said that the Iranians didn’t warn us; but it will be said that we were foolish not to believe them.
Walter Russell Mead despairs over the Obama administration’s actions in the Middle East.
President Obama’s choice of one of the most prominent “Iran doves” in American public life as his new Defense Secretary is also being read in Tehran as a sign of the President’s thinking. Surely, the mullahs appear to believe, if the President were really serious about using force to stop Iran’s nuclear program, he would be appointing someone who isn’t deeply opposed to it. In any case, this kind of appointment is what people overseas often see as a signal. The President may not have meant to send it, but he did.The announcement of more troop withdrawals from Afghanistan in last night’s SOTU will confirm the already widespread view in Tehran that the U.S. is in retreat and that if Iran hangs tough it can get what it wants. If the U.S. really were gearing up for war, the mullahs would expect to see signs that American forces in the region were strengthening positions rather than standing down by land and by sea.
From Iran’s point of view the Administration also seems to be standing down in Syria. A year ago Washington was full of tough talk: demands that Assad relinquish power, unambiguous statements that he “must go.” America was huffing and puffing—but folded like a cheap suit when it came time to back words with deeds. From an Iranian point of view this sends two very clear signals. First, don’t worry about threats and rhetoric from this White House. When they utter threats, they are just making noise. Assad “must go,” Iran “must stop” its nuclear program. This is just chit-chat; it won’t be followed up by anything other than diplomatic notes.
In another piece, this one about Afghans contemplating emigration before the US leaves, Mead writes:
Back in the early 2000s, you heard a lot of Americans, including dozens of leading Democrats, talk about the huge mistake the U.S. made in walking away from Afghanistan prematurely following the collapse of the Soviet Union. We wouldn’t make that mistake next time, we all vowed as we watched the smoke rise up from lower Manhattan and pondered the consequences of Taliban rule. And we spent a lot of time and money convincing Pakistan and other countries in the region that this time we really meant it: America had learned the “lessons of history.” This time we would stay the course.And there were many more lessons to be learned. Then-Senator Barack Obama, running for president, hammered the Bush administration incessantly for neglecting Afghanistan and not putting everything it had into this “war of necessity,” this vital contest. The national security consequences of failure in Afghanistan were so great, and the moral issues posed by the war so important, that we needed a president who would roll up his sleeves and do what it took to win. The new policy appears to be more a “decent interval” approach. We will do what it takes to avoid too painful a humiliation, unless that involves rolling up our sleeves.
To those of us who always thought Obama was the Second Coming of Jimmy Carter and who believed the Democratic party excelled at projecting weakness abroad, encouraging America’s enemies like Osama Bin Laden who saw such weakness and concluded America was “the weak horse,” such ruminations of despair come as no surprise. In fact we have been despairing ever since Obama and the Howard Dean pacifistic wing of the party beat out Hillary Clinton and the Blue Dogs in the 2008 party primary. But to paraphrase my late mother-in-law, America chose this path. In fact it did so twice. So we as a people are responsible for the consequences of the Obama policies, whether they be a nuclear armed Iran, nuclear tipped ICBMs in North Korea, or the next Osama Bin Laden, in a tent somewhere in North Africa plotting the next 9-11.
It reminds me of this classic skit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Brave Sir Barack ran away
He bravely ran away, away
When danger reared its ugly head, he bravely turned his tail and fled
Yes brave Sir Barack turned about and gallantly he chickened out
Bravely taking to his feet, he beat a very brave retreat
Bravest of the braaaaavvvvveeeeeee, Sir Barack
In general I believe the Senate should confirm a president’s nominees, but not in the case of Susan Rice. In my view Rice would be a disaster as Secretary of State.
The Benghazi incident where al Qaeda terrorists killed four Americans including the Libyan ambassador deeply troubles me. The incident is a combination of three failures, each of which Rice had a hand in. First the ambassador asked for better security for State Department workers in the country and was turned down by the administration. Second, when the ambassador and his security detail came under attack communications broke down and prevented an effective rescue from being mounted. Finally, ambassador Rice took to the airwaves for weeks denying the nature of the attack, blaming an Internet video instead of acknowledging it as a terrorist attack against the United States that resulted in the death of four Americans, including the loss of its first ambassador in over 30 years.
In 1994 and 1995 I lived in a national park Tanzania. To get there I had to fly through Nairboi Kenya and spent over a week there on the way in and another on the way out. During my stays in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam Tanzania I visited the US embassy in both cities to check in and get information on the area. On my visit to the embassy in Dar I learned that the low profile building on the outskirts of the city had once held the Israeli embassy before the Israelis built another more secure compound elsewhere in the city. At the time I thought nothing of it, nor did I question the location of the US embassy in a poorly built highrise in downtown Nairobi.
Three years later both embassies would be destroyed by simultaneous truck bombs engineered by al Qaeda. The attacks killed 224 including 12 Americans and wounded over 4,000. Prior to these attacks the Kenyan ambassador had pleaded with Secretary of State Madeline Albright for better security at the facility in Nairobi but was ignored. Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) has raised suspicion over Susan Rice’s involvement in the failure to secure the embassy because at the time she was the Assistant Secretary of Affairs in Africa. “What troubles me so much is the Benghazi attack in many ways echoes the attacks on those embassies in 1998, when Susan Rice was head of the African region for our State Department. In both cases, the ambassadors begged for additional security,” Collins said. Administration supporters counter this, saying Rice had “no direct role” in the scandal at the African desk, with the Soros funded political action committee ThinkProgress saying Collins stance against Rice was “hypocritical.” The problem with attacking Collins is that she is not considered by members of either party as an extremist, and if anything sides with the Democrats on many issues against the will of her party. If the administration can’t count on the support of Collins, they know they can’t count on anyone with an “R” behind their name, as well as a few conservative-leaning “D”s.
The similarities between Benghazi 2012 and East Africa 1998 are eerie enough without Rice’s presence, but to those of us who take a hardline against Islamic terror both events are connected by Democratic administration that failed in their sworn duty to protect the citizens of the United States. President Clinton’s response to the attack was to launch cruise missile strikes on Sudan and Afghanistan that destroyed a powdered formula factory but did little damage. The weak response by the USA gave credence to Osama Bin Laden’s narrative that the United States was a “weak horse” whose back would break when enough pressure was applied.
Why Sudan? The attack on Sudan ties the embassy bombings and Rice to an even bigger intelligence failure, Susan Rice’s thwarting of Bin Laden’s capture in 1997 – a year before the embassy attacks and a full four years before 9-11. In the book “Losing Bin Laden,” author Richard Miniter describes the primary role Rice played in convincing President Clinton to rebuff Sudan’s offer of handing over Osama Bin Laden who lived there at the time. She argued that Sudan was bluffing and Clinton shouldn’t take it seriously. Bin Laden evidently thought otherwise, left the country and moved to Afghanistan where he plotted the attacks that led to the death of 3,000 Americans four years later.
So on one hand we have senior State Department official (do mid-levels meet with the President and offer him advice?) in two intelligence failures prior to 9-11 and one after. What is common between these incidents is a failure to appreciate the depth of hatred for the USA and the danger presented to it by Islamic terrorism, a failure that was on display in Susan Rice’s performance after Benghazi denying it was a terrorist attack.
Is this the person we should have as the head of our diplomatic corps?
The likely nominee is John Kerry. While I believe he was unfit as Commander in Chief and do not have much respect for his behavior during the Vietnam War, and while I think he might be a wealthy weasel for basing his yacht in Rhode Island to avoid taxes, I do not view him with the same level of concern as I do Susan Rice and would not actively oppose his nomination as Secretary of State. But Susan Rice? Either the woman has bad luck by being party to the greatest intelligence failures since World War 2 or she is actively causing these failures. Either way she does not belong as head of Foggy Bottom.
I’m not a fan of Steve Forbes but his essay President Obama, Clinton Prosperity Requires Clinton-Sized Government is proof that even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes. In it Forbes counters the unspoken assumption by Democrats returning to Clinton era tax rates Clinton era growth will follow, pointing out that the federal budget back then was half a trillion dollars smaller and the Fed wasn’t printing dollars like a bunch of coked up monkeys running the printing presses.
In 1998 the budget for fiscal year 1999 Clinton submitted contained $1.7 trillion in spending and $1.8 trillion in revenue for a $9 trillion economy. It was the first balanced budget in 30 years, and resulted in a $124 billion surplus.
Contrast this with Obama’s 2012 budget. $3.8 trillion in spending and $2.5 trillion in revenue resulting in a deficit of $1.3 trillion. To put it another way the 2012 deficit alone is roughly 3/4 of Clinton’s budget. The US economy has grown to $15 trillion in 2011, making it about 66% bigger today than it was in 1999, but the rate of government spending has increased 124%, almost double economic growth that period.
So where has the money gone? Defense obviously. In 1998 when the ‘99 budget was being formulated American troops were deployed on a peacekeeping mission in Bosnia-Hercegovina. Today the world is different and America has deployments not only in Afghanistan but covertly in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Northern Africa and wherever Islamic terrorists like to hang out, so in my opinion the expense is justified to a degree. But I am not averse to defense cuts. How long do we have to protect Europe from the Germans or Russia? Isn’t 70+ years of American boots on the ground enough there? I’ve even advocated drawing down troops in Japan and South Korea, although these nations may not be so keen to see our backs given China’s rise to superpower status.
By comparing the 1999 and 2012 budgets by budget function, what’s interesting is the lack of divergence between functions over the 13 year period. As a portion of the total budget defense’s portion grew by 2.56% between 1999 and 2012, the largest positive shift of budget resources. Considering how things have changed in the world a 2.56% allocation to defense seems modest. Other notable changes include a nearly 9% decrease in Net Interest – a fact that strikes me as some kind of budgetary gimmick or error, and a 2.53% decrease in Social Security payments (don’t we have a higher percentage of elderly in our population today than in 1999?)
Comparing the FY1999 to FY2012 US Federal Budgets
When I look at the budget figures for both years, nothing leaps out at me and says “Here’s why we’re $16 trillion in the hole.” Bush didn’t add a whole new category of spending, and neither has Obama. The reason our budget mess is not apparent in these figures is because it’s a problem of scale. To use another analogy, it’s not as if any slice of the pie has grown over the others, the entire pie has grown beyond inflation and outpacing the economy. If the government grew at the same pace as the economy in the period 1998-2011 the federal budget in 2012 would have been $2.50 trillion dollars, $1.3 trillion less than the actual 2012 budget and coincidentally, the same figure as last year’s deficit. The entire federal government expanded and I find that disturbing because that implies uncontrollable growth, and a single statistic proves it.
How much does federal spending make up the economy? Dividing the 1999 $1.7 trillion budget by $9 trillion GDP results in 18%. Using the same numbers for 2012 and we get 25%. The federal government now owns 7% more of the economy than it did in 1999. 7% of an imaginary number like $15 trillion is meaningless on the face of it, but when we realize that while we weren’t looking the federal government added to itself an economy the size of Mexico (2011 GDP $1.15 trillion) or South Korea (2011 GDP $1.11 trillion) that it didn’t possess in 1999 and things start to look a bit more serious. Perhaps those Tea Partiers weren’t as crazy as the mainstream media portrayed them as after all, unless of course you assume government control of the economy isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
If we add state and local spending, the situation gets worse for a Tea Partier, better if you are a socialist, adding another 14% of GDP for combined government spending of 38.9% of GDP. Ranked against other nations in the world that puts us roughly tied with Canada, a few points ahead of Japan and Australia and a few points behind Spain and Ireland, two nations that are struggling to stay afloat in the EU.
Total US Govt (federal/state/local) Spending as Percentage of GDP 1903-2011
It is ironic that the administration of President Bill Clinton, a man so detested by the GOP establishment they tried to have him forcibly removed from office would serve as the epitome of small government at the same time as his Democratic successor strives to emulate his tax policies to fund an even bigger government. But it is what it is; up is down right is wrong, good is evil and the Clinton era stands as a shining example for small government libertarians and conservatives to strive to recreate. So party like it’s 1999 and embrace the smaller government ideals that underlaid its prosperity.
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Calculations used in this article can be accessed here in their entirety.
In this post I wrote, “I have felt bad about Romney’s chances to win since mid-Summer. In April my instincts or gut told me that Romney would win, but by July that feeling had dissipated.” What I didn’t mention was that in its place my gut told me that Obama would win but that he would also be impeached in his second term.
Now I am no Nostradamus. I am the first to admit the accuracy of my predictions over the past 11 years has been pretty poor, and as a rational human being I know that the future is unknowable. But the feeling in my gut remains. My instincts, completely irrational they may be, are telling me that Obama’s failure in office will lead to his impeachment.
Let me be clear: I am no fan of impeachment. I was vehemently opposed to the Republican effort to impeach then President Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair. Yes he lied. Yes he was philandering weasel, but he didn’t marry the country he was elected to lead it. His marital transgressions were between him and his wife, and while he deserved scorn, I do not believe that his crime of lying under oath about his illicit affair rose to the level requiring impeachment. I understand while some will disagree with me, saying that lying under oath is a serious crime which I agree it is. But to me there is a difference between Clinton’s lying about his affairs and lying about a political matter. The former doesn’t warrant impeachment while the latter does.
The articles of impeachment are the “nuclear option” in the Constitution. As such they should be used only rarely and as judiciously as circumstances warrant. The last president to deserve impeachment, in fact the only one in our country’s history that deserved it in my humble opinion, was a Republican: President Richard Nixon. I may be a member of his party today, but if I could go back in time and impeach him myself I would. Nixon’s crimes were treasonous to the point where it’s conceivable he should have faced a firing squad. Instead his vice president spared him the ignominy of the impeachment process, and he lived out his days long enough for his enemies to warm to him and for people to forget the gravity of his crime that undermined democracy for his personal gain. Ford believed sparing Nixon from impeachment allowed the nation to heal after a decade of riots, Civil Rights marches and anti-war protests. Sorry, I don’t accept that. Nixon should have been nailed to the wall of the House of Representatives to serve as an example to all leaders current and future that the People run this country NOT one man.
It is a chance that was lost, so the danger remains. At the same time impeachment has lost its gravity. The first “impeach Obama” bumper stickers appeared soon after his inauguration in 2009. Impeachment has become an inevitable lament for losers, but remains a misguided, dangerous and all too tempting opportunity to thwart the will of the People.
In his first term Obama presided over the looting of the American treasury for the benefit of his well connected friends. Is that an impeachable offense? By itself, no. His Justice Department has investigated his enemies, ignored racism against whites, and armed the Mexican drug cartels, an action that lead to hundreds of dead Mexicans and the death of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. Are these impeachable offenses? With proper investigation, perhaps yet we live in a system of presumed innocence so as of today, no. On 9/11/2012 four Americans plus the Libyan ambassador were gunned down by Islamists in an attack that for two weeks was blamed on a YouTube video (whose producer now sits in jail. ) Impeachable offense? On its own, no.
Yesterday Gen. David Petraeus resigned as director of the CIA. He had been under investigation by the FBI for over a year about his affair with a journalist writing a book about him, a female journalist, a rather hot one I might add. Ronald Kessler writes today,
Still, the White House, with concurrence by the FBI and Justice Department, held off on asking for Petraeus’ resignation until after the election. His resignation occurred three days after the election, avoiding the possibility that Obama’s ill-fated appointment of Petraeus could become an issue in the election.
Gen. Petraus is arguably the greatest American general since MacArthur. He took charge of a situation in Iraq that promised war without end for both Iraqis and Americans, and turned it around in two years. He tried to do the same thing with Afghanistan but achieved lesser success there. Still his success in Iraq will be studied by students of counter-insurgency for decades to come. He was a great man.
I use the past tense of the verb “to be” intentionally for he compromised himself and the office he held as director of the CIA by conducting an affair. He allowed his own personal folly to threaten the lives of countless CIA operatives and the Americans citizens they serve to protect. I understand the temptations men of power must have, but I have no sympathy. If he’s horny he can chase all the tail he wants in retirement. A truly great man would have avoided temptation and insisted on a male biographer who looked more like Charles Krauthammer instead of a woman of striking appearance, or would have resigned the moment before he succumbed to temptation. A less great man would have admitted his affair publicly and insisted on the acceptance of his resignation the moment he became aware that he was under investigation and the lies had caught up with him. Instead he stayed silent as good men died in Libya and his boss pulled out all stops to win the election.
What did Obama know about Petraeus’ extramarital affairs and when did he know it? There had been talk after 2009 that Petraeus would make a solid GOP candidate for his office in 2012, so did Obama keep this knowledge in his hand to use as a trump card in case Petraeus expressed interest in supporting the GOP field in 2012?
There is a pattern here, one that I believe my instincts are zeroing in on. President Obama feels there is nothing he cannot get away with, that he is not held accountable for his actions the way his predecessors are, and that the ends justify the means. He has never failed in his career. People who groomed him and those who supported him sacrificed themselves in order to promote him upward to bigger challenges. Everything has come easy to him, and with that must come a sense of entitlement, that he is destined to make his mark in History, and nothing will stand in his way to achieve that. He became president on the thinnest of credentials, and now he has been re-elected to the office.
He knows in his heart what the people need, and his re-election has provided him the mandate that justifies it. All his opponents and the shouting and sloganeering on the streets do not represent the majority that elected him not once, but twice. His opponents both times were laughable, the first a tired elderly throw back to a time that the American people are eager to put his political party’s history behind them, the second a zealot who inspired a few of the faithful but no one else, both sent to exile along with their parties by the unstoppable force of Destiny. The voices of dissent have been silenced by his win, relegated to the fringe and ignored by the media who trumpet his brilliance and support him without question. He had become invincible.
That’s what President Richard Nixon thought, and what President Obama may believe today. Americans were just as tired of the Democrat’s folly in Vietnam in 1968 as they were of Bush’s war in Iraq in 2008. In 1972 Nixon faced McGovern, an intellectual who inspired a few in the Democratic Party just as Romney excited pro-business types but few beyond that in the GOP 40 years later. The press weren’t as pliant under Nixon as they are under Obama, but they did see him as a man capable of ending the war in Vietnam, just as 40 years later they latched on to Obama as the candidate best capable of ending the war in Iraq.
Obama doesn’t see that the Press supports him, just as Nixon hated the press for curbing his excesses. Thankfully two reporters working at the Washington Post became intrigued by a story about a break-in at the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. Within two years the president had to resign in disgrace or face impeachment. He chose the former path.
Where is today’s Woodward and Bernstein? Definitely not at the Washington Post given that paper’s unquestioned support of the Obama administration. Andrew Breitbart was their most obvious heir, but he’s dead. Today there is no one to keep the president in check, to keep him from ruling as he sees fit. And it’s not just the right that is worried. The press that once reported every word from Cindy Sheehan has silenced her, and every Code Pink protest against “Bush’s Wars” are ignored now that those wars are owned by Obama. Sure some on the Left worry about Obama’s kill list, but better that power resides with him rather than Romney, ignoring the fact that anything that Obama gets away with in Office will remain in the Office, setting precedent for any future GOP president to wield the same power.
He remains invincible because his supporters in the Press and the Democratic establishment want him to be so. As long as he has them, he will indeed be invincible. But are there limits to his power? Are there lines he will cross that will expose him as being vulnerable after all? Perhaps. Perhaps not, but one thing is certain: we are about to find out.
By the time most of you read this the outcome of tomorrow’s election will be known. Regardless of who wins America’s health care system is still a wreck and closer than ever to the river catching fire point of no return where revolutionary change is inevitable – and even welcomed by some including me.
Recently a local non-profit hospital announced changes to its health insurance plan as it has every fall for years. With each announcement its employees inevitably pay higher premiums for a higher deductible that covers less. It’s a situation that employees in the private sector are familiar with, at least those that work for companies that are large enough to provide access* to health insurance.
To set the stage of the current benefit situation requires a quick review of recent history. Earlier in the past decade the hospital underwent expansion, adding scores of beds and a complete revamping of the ER. It also went on spending spree, buying up private practices and recruiting doctors to the area to open new ones. I’m not sure what drove this expansion. The hospital sits in one of the poorest areas of North Carolina that has for decades suffered high unemployment and increased dependence on government programs such as Medicaid at a time when payments to providers by Medicaid have been cut. Word was that there was a generation of doctors planning to retire, and that may have influenced the hospital’s plans. But the declining stock market and insurance reimbursement cuts meant that many of those physicians are still practicing today because they can’t afford to retire. In addition, the hospital competes with other rural regional hospitals less than 30 minutes away, plus the cancer, pediatrics and state-of-the-art trauma centers at Wake Forest and Baptist in Winston-Salem less than an hour away. The result of this expansion is a massive overhang of debt, a tiny patient census, plus the massive drain caused by too many providers chasing a decreasing pool of privately insured patients.
The HR department had assembled some of the hospital staff for a benefits presentation. As the changes sunk in the audience turned hostile, shouting at the presenters and demanding that the plan be rescinded. The HR representative took the podium and reportedly said, “Y’all are lucky we provide health insurance at all.”
She had a point. Starting in 2014 the hospital could opt out of providing access to health insurance and pay a penalty for each employee. I’ve looked around to determine what that penalty is (it’s $2k for small business owners for 50 employees or less but I haven’t been able to find it for companies with more than 50 employees), but if the cost of providing access is less than that penalty the hospital could save money by paying the penalty rather than offering access to insurance. Paying the penalty would not only save it the costs of subsidizing insurance, it would also reduce administration expenses because administering the payment of a variable health insurance payment every paycheck is a lot more expensive than simply paying a flat penalty once a year to the IRS. Knowing what I know about back-office operations of large companies, the cost of administering health care is likely a significant chunk of that $2000 penalty per employee, so such a fine would have to be double or perhaps triple the small business tax for it to deter ending health coverage and dumping employees into the public pool.** If I were the CEO of the hospital it’s an option I’d consider as many CEOs of companies are doing. Expect this number to rise over the coming months before the provisions go into effect in 2014.
In an economically depressed area the hospital, being the area’s largest employer has the economic upper hand when it comes to lower-skill staff. But the same is not true of its physician assistants, primary care doctors and highly trained specialists. These people are also employees and notice when their insurance premiums go up, but have a much more mobile, in-demand skill-set than medical assistants, orderlies and the like. Working in a rural setting isn’t very popular among these groups to begin with, which is why rural doctors are supposed to earn more than their urban and suburban peers. When that premium disappears, these highly-trained professionals will disappear too, voting with their feet and moving to more lucrative positions elsewhere. Doctors are human; they get sick and need treatment, and when their co-pays on medicine rise to $50 per prescription per month, they notice it. Rural charm only goes so far and unfortunately can’t be used to pay down $300k of student loans. Doctors aren’t happy with the current system as providers, and when they aren’t happy as patients either you know the system is screwed.
But people have been predicting the doom of the American health care system for at least 20 years since the HMOs appeared on the scene and were supposed to reign in costs, and we all know how well that worked. I have opposed Obamacare since its inception, but the more I examine the legislation the more I believe that it may in the end be “good” for the American economy in the longer term by bringing about the end of the American health system as we know it and allowing us to start from scratch.
The Paranoid wing of the Obamacare Opposition believes this is what Obama intended all along, that expanding Medicaid while cutting reimbursements to doctors and at the same time driving companies out of providing access to health insurance the President would wreck the system to the point where people would be clamoring for a federal government takeover of Medicine. It’s not a bad idea if it wasn’t for the fact that a) it requires a complex game-plan built using information that could only be predicted in retrospect (had Ted Kennedy not died chances are Obamacare would have been much more socialist), and b) the government is broke bailing out Obama’s well-connected friends the rest of the Economy that the only way to do it is it to kick Zimbabwe off their printing presses and print dollars like the North Korean Army on a methamphetamine binge. Far more likely that Obama handed the task to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid so that he could play golf and read glowing pieces on his greatness in Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, and that the Democrats made sausage out of their hopes and dreams distilled from liberal utopias in the states of New York, Illinois, Massachusetts and California. Since these states are all now circling the drain financially a federal government takeover of the health care system is impossible. It’s a shame because laissez-faire libertarian I may be, I have in the past argued for socialized medicine. The citizens of Japan paid for the birth of the Kid, and since they nearly shot my father dead in a foxhole in the Philippines during the War I’ll consider us even. The Dean’s World’s archives are scrambled so all traces of these arguments are wiped out, but I still believe that prior to the massive federal takeover of the economy caused by the financial meltdown in 2008-09 a sound argument could have been made for socialized medicine. Not so today, and definitely not by me.
Obamacare has forced us to the end of the American health care disaster. Employers will soon quit the insurance access business, forcing people to purchase insurance from the government. For the first time they will know how much they are being paid by their employers since their benefits package won’t contain more than a few worthless baubles and trinkets. Transparency is good. As a contract worker I know exactly what my skill-set is worth, something that a full time employee does not. I can then make decisions about my future that are grounded in reality. Obamacare will expand the rolls of Medicaid, forcing millions into a program that providers lose money on. At my dentist’s office I was paying my bill when the phone rang. The receptionist picked up the phone, listned then told the caller that the office no longer accepted Medicaid patients. There was another pause and the receptionist recommended the caller contact the county health department. The experience of the caller will not be atypical as health care providers “go John Galt” rather than lose money by treating Medicaid patients. This will increase the burden on the states who will then go cap-in-hand to the federal government which is $16 trillion in the hole. By 2014 when Obamacare goes completely into effect it will probably be closer to $24 trillion. Those printing plates at the Fed better be made of titanium because they’re going to be getting a workout. Maybe they can hire the North Koreans to help. Of course by then the Norks will have moved on to printing something of value, like yuan.
The collapse of the American health care system will be nasty, brutish and hopefully short, and we will have President Obama to thank for it. What comes afterward is anybody’s guess but whatever does it has to be better than this mess we are in. For that no matter what happens tomorrow, Obamacare opponents like me will owe President Obama a debt of gratitude as we man the barricades and hoist the flag of revolution over the land.
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*Let’s get something straight: Hardly any employers provide free health insurance these days. What they provide is access to group plans which they subsidize to a degree, something that mystifies my European readership (all 3 of them). The tie between access to health care and employment puzzles me too. Why the tie? Why aren’t we tying car insurance or life insurance to employment too?
** It just dawned on me that the cost of the penalty to avoid providing insurance will factor into the benefits offered the employee. Having worked for businesses large and small, I know a thing or two about how jobs are created. When a company decides to hire, it sets a budget for hiring that employee. That budget will include salary and the cost of all benefits. So if a firm budgets $50k for a position, the highest offer it will make to the employee will be Salary + Penalty=$50k or for a small business, $48k + $2K=$50k. So in essence the employee pays the penalty by not receiving the full $50k s/he would if Obamacare not been enacted. Existing employees may also face the prospect of not only having their insurance dropped, but having to pay the resulting penalty themselves. Irony… Mmmm…
Here’s a tip from someone in his 5th decade of life: If you do something on the basis of skin color that doesn’t involve sunscreen or biopsies, you’re being racist. There is nothing that justifies racism, period.
Racism is insidious in all its forms, and can easily sneak up on you without you even being aware of it. Case in point: black people who vote for Obama based on his skin color. Jesse Washington of the AP has written a provocative article that examines why black people are voting for Obama based on his skin color, and how they are justifying it. One black man justifies voting for Obama because of the color of his skin, “You’re black, you need to stand behind black people.” It’s not racism to him because he’s voting for someone who understands his situation better. Several Hollywood stars have come out in support of Obama because he’s black, and an actress of mixed race was called a “jigaboo” and “house n****r” for tweeting in support of Romney. A law professor at the University of Maryland, when asked whether it would be okay for a white person to vote for a white candidate based on his race, called this a “false symmetry” because of the history of black oppression.
Are these people racists? I’m not sure. They are doing racist things but I don’t enough to call them racist. As for me I do not consider myself racist even though I sometimes find myself sliding into racist thinking at times. But I catch myself and strive to overcome it. Racism is toxic, and I believe a steady diet of it will kill the human spirit within. So I’m a bit troubled by those who vote for Obama because his skin color is darker than the competing candidate’s.
If you think skin color matters, travel to Africa. The continent is full of black people, yet they have little in common with black Americans. The experience of black people in America is unique, and the culture they have created over hundreds of years of oppression is as different from any found in Africa as it is from the culture of white Anglo-Saxon protestant culture. This culture defines black Americans in ways that are easily apparent to Africans but not so apparent to other Americans.
Based on this, is Obama a black American? Sure he has the skin color, but his father was Kenyan, he grew up raised by his white grandmother in Hawaii and with his white mother and Asian stepfather in Indonesia. He did not grow up in black America. He did not experience the sting of racism that starts to define black people at a very young age here in America. He did not experience the smooth rhythms of Grandmaster Flash played on a boom box on the street, the dominance on the court of Dr. J, the vicious, side-splitting humor of Richard Pryor or the raw power of Hank Aaron on the baseball diamond in the 1970s. He missed out on house music and rap that defined a generation of black – and white – Americans. Washington’s article references the suspicion by the black community prior to 2008 that Obama wasn’t “black enough,” so I’m not the only one wondering if Obama is really “black.” Is it racist to ask if any black man besides Tiger Woods has played more rounds of golf than this president?
As for “false symmetry,” would it be okay if the Republicans nominated an Hispanic and Latinos said they would vote for him because he had three Latina women in the house? Hispanics, after all, are experiencing oppression today. Would it be okay if I voted for an Irish-American candidate simply because of the history of Irish oppression? The Irish have been some of the most oppressed people on the planet, suffering slavery, discrimination and genocide second only to the Jews. Speaking of the Jews, would it be okay for a Jew to vote for a Jew simply because of 4,500 years of oppression, slavery and antisemitism that culminated in the Holocaust? When does the guilt end? There is no one alive in the USA today that owned slaves. Most of my ancestors arrived after the Civil War was over, so why should I suffer for the immorality of men long dead who merely shared with me the same shade of skin color?
The problem with such judgements based on skin color is that they don’t work. I’ve been robbed at gun point by a white guy, not a black one, so any security I feel with a stranger who is white is misplaced. Similarly I’ve been the sole white face in a crowd of villagers in Africa and had nothing at all to fear.
One of the politicians I admire the most, the one that I’ve actually donated the most to, is Congressman Allen West. West shares my vision of a strong America, a man who says what he thinks, who takes pride in our values and doesn’t apologize or bow down to people who hide women in bags, kill homosexuals, or call for the death of others of different faiths. Lt. Col. Allen West happens to be black.
I don’t expect black people to change their minds based on the writings of a middle aged white libertarian living in rural America who believes that Obama is the worst US president since Carter not because of his skin color but because of his inexperience and naive policies. But I would hope that people began to recognize that racism isn’t dead, that it can surprise you when you least expect it, that the price of freedom – true freedom of action that is not tainted by irrational racist thought – is eternal vigilance. Once you accept that racism in any form is okay, then you have to contort yourself into a veritable pretzel using terms like “false symmetry” to avoid appearing racist. But it won’t work when all you are doing is repeating the same excuses that justified racism generations ago. The simple truth is you can’t end racism by being racist, and until that is realized racism will thrive like a cancer among us, all of us.
In the final weeks before the election I’ve been thinking long and hard about what the outcome could mean for the future of my country. Regardless of who wins, he will face a China that is bullying its neighbors into American arms, a Middle East that has become more radicalized not less, an Iranian nuke or a war started by Israel or the United States but blamed on the Great Satan regardless of which flag is painted on the bunker busters. The November winner will face a crumbling Europe, a soaring American debt that has become so big no one knows how to tame it, and a catatonic domestic economy. American education spends more than any nation in the world on its students yet they learn less. The weight of the pensions of Baby Boomers threatens to crush public spending, turning cities and states into mob enforcers who shake down the working, relatively poor young and pass the cash to the retiring relatively wealthy elderly.
I will leave the economic issues aside for the moment to focus on foreign policy. In my view with the exception of China, Obama has made all of these problems worse. But looking at these issues over the long-term, say through the remainder of this decade, would an Obama loss be really a victory for those of us who have opposed him every step of his way to the office he now holds?
China stands as perhaps the only issue I agree with the administration on. I’ve studied China and East Asia for decades, and recognize that handling a rising superpower is never easy, especially one with a 4,500 year history and cursed by a long, often twisted, memory. The Obama administration has attempted to encourage the rise of a peaceful, prosperous China that would take its place as an equal partner in the Pacific, but at the same time has worked to support our allies such as Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. It is an art more than a science, and while mistakes have been made by the Obama administration, they are to be expected in such a long-term important endeavor. The Chinese cannot understand why the United States would welcome a peaceful, prosperous and powerful China that is integrated with the rest of the world, and instead sees every American move through paranoid eyes and zero-sum calculations. We can’t do much to change this view of American policy in the Pacific, except by doing what this administration has done, setting policies that reassure our allies while encouraging the Chinese to play nice with others in the Pacific’s playground.
Unfortunately the tact, intelligence and real-politic shown by the Obama administration towards China has not been manifested anywhere else in the world. In the same way the reality of Iraq showed the folly of the neocon dream, the murder of our diplomat in Libya and the virulent anti-American nature of the “Arab Spring” has put paid to the dreams of Obama and his liberal eggheads. Obama believed that he alone could solve the Middle East problem with a grand speech in Cairo and apologies and bows to Arab leaders. He thought he could strong-arm Israel to make peace with the Palestinians, and that the Muslim world would see the wisdom of the Nobel committee’s awarding him his Peace Prize. He believed that once free from Iraq, he would be able to exit Afghanistan gracefully without fear of the Taliban taking it over and turning back the clock to 2000.
Nearly four years later America is even more hated than it was under the Bush administration. Iraq is becoming a satellite of Iran, allowing its Shiite neighbor unrestricted flights over its territory to resupply the Assad regime. Pakistan has degenerated into a pit of vipers that protected a man personally responsible for more American deaths than anyone since Ho Chi Minh and allowed Chinese to test a piece of top secret American gear left behind after its forces aired out his skull. Vast swathes of North Africa have been lost to al-Qaeda affiliated radicals including half of its most populous nation, Nigeria. Women are being secreted behind closed doors in Cairo and Tunis, as Egyptians copts are raped and terrorized out of their homes, putting an end to communities that date almost to the time of Christ. Liberals laughed when a man threw shoes at George W. Bush; they are oddly silent as they see Obama burned in effigy by crowds throughout the Middle East. Americans once were able to visit the Pyramids and Valley of the Kings; today members of the Egyptian government call for the destruction of the Pyramids and the State Dept warns Americans to avoid Egypt.
Hope and change.
The murder of the Libyan ambassador proves the Obama administration has failed to learn the lessons of 9-11. The average rapper has better security in Los Angeles than the Libyan ambassador. Threats against American interests there were ignored just as Bin Laden’s declaration of war against the US was in 1998. Many on the right including myself have given a pass to the Clinton administration for failing to imagine the attacks of 9-11 and stop them; today the Obama administration has no such excuses.
And speaking of silence, where is Code Pink, Cindy Sheehan and the other anti-war Left? Where are the anti-war drums that sounded for every dead Muslim civilian or American soldier arriving at Dover Air Force base in Delaware in the middle of the night? Where is the anger, the spiteful commentary of lost wars, the Vietnam comparisons that flowed thick through every mainstream news outlet during the Bush administration? As Walter Russell Mead notes, “If George W. Bush were president now, and had ordered the surge and was responsible for the strategic decisions taken and not taken in Afghanistan over the last four years, the mainstream press would be rubbing our noses in his miserable failures and inexcusable blunders 24/7. The New York Times and the Washington Post would be treating us to pictures of every fallen soldier. The PBS Newshour would feature nightly post-mortems on “America’s failed strategies in the Afghan War” and every arm-chair strategist in America would be filling the op-ed pages with the brilliant 20/20 hindsight ideas that our pathetic, clueless, failed president was too dumb and too cocky to have had.”
After his election I feared that Obama would weaken the position of the United States in the world. I envisioned Obama to be a pacifist who would gut our military, anger our friends and embolden our enemies. I was wrong about Obama’s pacifism; he may be a pacifist at heart but he has shown a willingness to kill America’s enemies that would make Dick Cheney offer him a high-five. Unfortunately he has succeeded in doing what I feared. Our alliances with our closest friends Australia, Canada and Great Britain are ignored. Our long-standing friendship with Israel rebuffed. A deep relationship with Egypt lost. Meanwhile Iran, North Korea and the socialist states in South America continue on as before, confident that the US lacks the resources to challenge them. As Machiavelli wrote “if one cannot be both, it is better to be feared than loved.” Obama should play less golf and read more because he has failed to do either.
The only solace I can take is that the Obama administration has shown a willingness to kill our enemies. Bin Laden is crab food, and drone strikes and special operations continue worldwide. The administration avoids calling it by its name, but the Global War on Terrorism continues using the same methods and tactics that the Bush administration developed and supported. What Obama has not done is use his speech giving abilities to provide an explanation to the American people why the war continues, and show that he and his administration understand the existential threat posed by radical Islam. It is a shame because it is possible that a liberal like Obama could do more to protect and advance freedom in the world for the same reason that a cold warrior like President Nixon could open up to China: his base trusts him.
And this is what concerns me about a Romney victory. If Romney wins I would expect that the Democrats would stoke the flames of their anti-war brothers at a critical time in our history. War is Not the Answer bumperstickers would sprout on foreign cars. Colleges would be wracked by anti-war protests. We need a coherent strategy explained to the American people while continuing the fight against terrorists around the world. There is the potential for Obama to do that, and for his allies to keep their anti-war instincts at bay. Likewise I suppose it’s possible that Obama, having achieved his goal of reelection would simply allow his own pacifist instincts to rule the day, putting American in even more danger. But I would hope that four years of at least occasional Angry Birds free Intelligence Briefings would have convinced Obama the threat to our nation is real.
So it is possible that the best outcome is an Obama victory for those of us who believe in the primacy of the war against radical Islam. The continued media silence at dead terrorists may be worth the price of four more years of Obama. This of course will not change my vote in November, but it has given me something to think about.
