Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, March 3, 2010


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William R. Barker said...

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/02/white-house-land-grab/

[By Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC)]

You'd think the Obama administration is busy enough controlling the banks, insurance companies and automakers, but thanks to whistleblowers at the Department of the Interior, we now learn they're planning to increase their control over energy-rich land in the West.

A secret administration memo has surfaced revealing plans for the federal government to seize more than 10 million acres from Montana to New Mexico, halting job- creating activities like ranching, forestry, mining and energy development. Worse, this land grab would dry up tax revenue that's essential for funding schools, firehouses and community centers.

At a time when our national unemployment rate is 9.7 percent, it is unbelievable anyone would be looking to stop job-creating energy enterprises, yet that's exactly what's happening.

The document lists 14 properties that, according to the document, "might be good candidates" for Mr. Obama to nab through presidential proclamation.

The 21-page document, marked "Internal Draft-NOT FOR RELEASE," names 14 different lands Mr. Obama could completely close for development by unilaterally designating them as "monuments" under the 1906 Antiquities Act.

Rep. Robert Bishop, Utah Republican, made the memo public because he didn't want another unilateral land grab by the White House, like what happened under former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. Using the Antiquities Act, President Carter locked up more land than any other president had before him, taking more than 50 million acres in Alaska despite strong opposition from the state.

President Clinton used the authority 22 times to prohibit hunting, recreational vehicles, mining, forestry and even grazing in 5.9 million acres scattered around the country. The law allowed him to single-handedly create 19 new national monuments and expand three others without consulting anyone. One of the monuments President Clinton created was the Grande Staircase-Escalante in Utah, where 135,000 acres of land were leased for oil and gas and about 65,000 barrels of oil were produced each year from five active wells. But, President Clinton put an end to developing those resources.

Americans should be wary of any plans a president has to seize land from the states without their consent. Any new plans to take away states' freedom to use land as they see fit must be stopped.

That's why I sponsored an amendment to block Mr. Obama from declaring any of the 14 lands listed in the memo as "monuments." Unfortunately, the Senate, led by Democrats, rejected it on Thursday evening by a vote of 58-38.

March 3, 2010 at 9:43 AM
William R. Barker said...

* PART 1 of 2

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704231304575091622911663494.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

[By Congressmen Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) and Mike Pence (R-IN)]

Fiscal storm clouds are upon us. In five years, federal spending has skyrocketed to 24.7% from 19.9% of our economy. That's the highest level since World War II.

Borrowing has ballooned the national debt to $11.9 trillion from $7.3 trillion, a five-year increase equal to the accumulation of debt between President George Washington and President Bill Clinton.

[T]he long-term fiscal picture is worse. As the Baby Boom generation retires and the cost of health care continues to escalate, entitlement programs will cause federal spending to rise to 40% of our economy, double its post-World War II average. This is assuming that spending does not increase even further, an assumption that the trillion-dollar "stimulus" bill and the 84% increase in nondefense discretionary spending President Obama signed into law argues against.

The situation is dire, but don't take our word for it.

"U.S. fiscal policy is on an unsustainable path to an extent that cannot be solved by minor tinkering," Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf said recently.

Former Comptroller General David Walker called the rising costs of government entitlements a "fiscal cancer" that threaten "catastrophic consequences for our country."

Can we tax our way out of this problem? No. In order to pay for what we are on track to spend under current law, taxes would have to double. This would crush our economy and condemn future generations to a far lower standard of living.

Can we grow our way out? Unfortunately, no. Although pro-growth policies like simplifying the tax code and lowering rates are critical components of any solution, they alone are insufficient. Mr. Walker estimated it would take double-digit economic growth every year for the next 75 years in order to close the fiscal gap.

Can we continue to borrow our way out of the problem? Borrowing of that magnitude would drive up interest rates to unimaginable levels, crowding out borrowing opportunities for families and businesses. As Greece and other European countries like Spain and Portugal face default for their excess spending, and China lectures us on our fiscal irresponsibility, the idea of borrowing at still higher levels seems inconceivable.

Without spending discipline only one option remains: monetizing the debt, also known as inflation. Although Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has repeatedly said that this will not happen on his watch, many think it's inevitable. If we do monetize the debt, inflation could be so high we may look back upon the Carter era with nostalgia.

* TO BE CONTINUED...

March 3, 2010 at 10:48 AM
William R. Barker said...

* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 2) --

Winston Churchill once said that "Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted." We've exhausted the possibilities. Now it's time to do the right thing.

That is why we are proposing a Spending Limit Amendment to the Constitution. This amendment would limit spending to one-fifth of the economy (our historical spending average since World War II). The limit could only be waived by a declaration of war or by a two-thirds congressional vote.

As with other constitutional amendments, Congress would be given the authority to enforce and implement it. But for the first time, the federal government would have a limit on its size and scope. The Spending Limit Amendment does not promise a particular spending plan about what programs to restrain and by how much. Rather, it puts a legal constraint on lawmakers present and future.

Some will say it should not be done now. But if not now, when?

Our spending problems are tantamount to generational theft and fundamentally alter the American ethic. We cannot have both unlimited government and unlimited opportunity.

This amendment is an effort to allow "We the People" the opportunity to fundamentally define the size of our government. Passing it would save future generations from lives of fewer opportunities and less freedom.

March 3, 2010 at 10:48 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704548604575097493017190752.html

Let us flip back to an epic series of Senate Finance hearings in 1992. They represented a remarkable meeting of minds across a broad swath of health-care wonks and economists (not interest groups) that the original sin was the exclusion of employer-provided health insurance from taxable income—imposed carelessly by the IRS in 1943 so defense contractors could compete for workers without transgressing Roosevelt-era wage and price controls.

Everybody knows this turned "insurance" into something else. Call it prepaid health care, as Milton Friedman did. It became a massive subsidy to third-party payment, an incentive to channel every ache and pain through an "insurance" bureaucracy. It became an incentive for the most economically competent Americans—the secure, high-earning employees of corporate America—to overspend on health care, treating it as a free good.

What a surprise that the medical-industrial complex reorganized itself in light of this central driver. Nobody was looking for price tags so price tags disappeared, as did any competition on price, and any clarity on price versus value. Voilà.

To Mr. Obama, however, such insurance *is* insurance—the way it's supposed to be [according to Obama], and anybody who doesn't agree must be smoking something.

Mr. Obama hereby chucks over the side virtually all creative thinking about our health-care predicament, not to mention the single worthwhile policy innovation of the past two decades, the health savings account.

In an unwisdom that he will probably come to understand only in his later years, Mr. Obama wastes the umpteen months his predecessor spent stumping the country for HSAs as a way to give consumers some financial "skin in the game." It was a theme voters could grasp because it made sense, unlike the Rube Goldbergism of Mr. Obama's health-care plan.

This week even Warren Buffett called the Obama plan "2,000 pages of . . . nonsense," adding, "The problem is incentives."

Here, Mr. Obama squanders the opportunity his presidency represented.

March 3, 2010 at 10:49 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704625004575089362731862750.html

A string of electoral defeats and the great unpopularity of ObamaCare can't stop Democrats from their self-appointed rendezvous with liberal destiny—ramming a bill through Congress on a narrow partisan vote. What we are about to witness is an extraordinary abuse of traditional Senate rules to pass a bill merely because they think it's good for the rest of us, and because they fear their chance to build a European welfare state may never come again.

The vehicle is "reconciliation," a parliamentary process that fast-tracks budget measures and was created in 1974 as a deficit-reduction tool. Limited to 20 hours of debate, reconciliation bills need a mere 50 votes in the Senate, with the Vice President as tie-breaker, thus circumventing the filibuster. Both Democrats and Republicans have frequently used reconciliation on budget bills, so Democrats are now claiming that using it to pass ObamaCare is no big deal.

Yet this shortcut has never been used for anything approaching the enormity of a national health-care entitlement.

Social Security passed when Democrats controlled both Congress and the White House, yet 64% of Senate Republicans and 79% of the House GOP voted for it. More than half of the Senate Republican caucus voted for Medicare in 1965. Historically, major social legislation has always been bipartisan, because it reflects a durable political consensus.

Reconciliation is the last mathematical gasp for ObamaCare because Democrats can't sell their policy to Senator Snowe, any other Republican, or even dozens of Democrats. This raw exercise of political power is of a piece with the copious corruption and bribery—such as the Cornhusker kickbacks and special tax benefits for union members—that liberals had to use to get even this far.

Democrats often point to welfare reform in 1996 as a reconciliation precedent, yet that bill passed the Senate with 78 votes, including Joe Biden and half of the Democratic caucus.

The children's health insurance program in 1997 was steered through Congress with reconciliation, but it, too, was built on strong (if misguided) bipartisan support.

The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 that created Schip passed 85-15, including 43 Republicans. Even President Bush's 2001 tax cuts, another case in reconciliation point, were endorsed by 12 Senate Democrats.

The only precedent within historical shouting distance is Ronald Reagan's 1981 budget, which was controversial because it reshaped dozens of programs. But the Senate wasn't the problem—it ultimately passed the budget 80 to 14. The real dogfight was in the Democratically controlled House, where majority rules have always obtained, yet Reagan convinced 29 Democrats to buck Speaker Tip O'Neill. Reconciliation, in other words, wasn't used to subvert the 60-vote Senate threshold, but rather to grease the way for deficit reduction.

March 3, 2010 at 10:49 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/02/fuel-taxes-must-rise-harvard-researchers-say/

To meet the Obama administration’s targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, some researchers say, Americans may have to experience a sobering reality: gas at $7 a gallon.

To reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the transportation sector 14 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, the cost of driving must simply increase, according to a forthcoming report by researchers at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

The 14 percent target was set in the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget for fiscal 2010.

March 3, 2010 at 10:49 AM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=522713

Like a cyborg from a "Terminator" movie, Washington's plan for sweeping health care reform seems to never really die. Pronounced dead weeks ago, government-run health care now returns from the grave to reach out and grab Americans by the throat.

Why would the president push for yet another massive entitlement program when the country is awash with debt? Why would he struggle to overhaul the U.S. health care system when the effort already cost the Democrats a Senate seat in a deep-blue state? Why would Democrats even consider using a measure as extreme as reconciliation to force through an unpopular bill when most pundits believe the Democrats are set to suffer historic defeats this fall?

The answer may lie in the president's worldview. Even if he devastates the Democratic Party, President Obama appears determined to fundamentally transform America into what he believes is "good."

Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, outlined this worldview of state supremacy: "What this bill does is we finally take that step. As our leader said earlier, we take that step from health care as a privilege, to health care as an inalienable right of every single American citizen."

Government compassion sounds so noble — we all want Americans to have access to quality health care. But here lies the rub. Sen. Harkin's statement reflects the worldview behind the French Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789, not the American Declaration of Independence of 1776.

* READ THE ENTIRE OP-ED, FOLKS; ANY OF YOU WITH EVEN A HALF-WAY DECENT EDUCATION SHOULD RECOGNIZE THE TRUTH OF THE ARGUMENTS MADE.

March 3, 2010 at 12:40 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=522712

Proponents of creating a consumer financial protection agency assert that failures in consumer protection were behind the financial crisis.

(*SNORT*)

Nothing could be further from the truth. A housing bubble, driven by easy credit and a mistaken belief that housing prices would rise forever, was the cause of the crisis.

The severity of the housing boom and bust was not the result of predatory lending practices. Quite the opposite: It was the result of credit being too friendly. For instance, we know that the No. 1 determinant behind mortgage foreclosure is negative equity on the part of the borrower. Yet this [proposed] new agency would have no power to increase down payments.

Under the guise of consumer protection, bank regulators spent much of the last decade urging banks to expand mortgage credit. Researchers, such as Jeff Gunther at the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, have found that the more Community Reinvestment Act lending done by a bank, the worse its safety and soundness.

(*SIGH*) (*NOD*)

Separating safety and soundness from consumer protection has been tried before in the context of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. From 1992 to 2008, the Department of Housing and Urban Development enforced the housing goals for these companies, while the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight monitored their financial health. Unsurprisingly, HUD over the years continued to push Fannie and Freddie to take on ever more risk, without regard to their financial health. The result has been a taxpayer-funded bailout of these companies that will cost in the hundreds of billions.

[T]he intention of this [proposed] new agency is not to prevent future financial crises, or to protect the taxpayer. The intention of the agency is to expand the reach of the trial bar and federal regulators over financial products offered by non-banks, such as check cashiers and payday lenders. Whatever one's opinion as to the value of these nonbank financial companies, we can generally agree that they weren't behind the financial crisis. In addition, these entities are already covered by the Federal Trade Commission's authority to eliminate unfair and deceptive practices.

Unfortunately, efforts to create a new consumer finance agency distract from fixing the real flaws in our financial system. Washington should abandon this effort at rewarding special interests in the trial bar and focus its efforts on protecting the taxpayer.

Rather than moving so-called consumer protections, such as CRA, to a new regulator, Congress should repeal outright government efforts to push risky lending.

March 3, 2010 at 12:40 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=522692

A Spanish court has charged Venezuela with collaborating in a terrorist plot to assassinate President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia. That's an attempt on a top U.S. ally, and calls for a hard response. If it's not predator-drone time, it's time to name Venezuela as a state sponsor of terror.

What came to light Monday isn't the first time Venezuela's Hugo Chavez has been caught aiding terrorists, but it may well be the most egregious.

Spanish Judge Eloy Velasco named a Venezuelan government official as a key link between 12 FARC and ETA terrorists who were indicted in a 2003 plot to kill Colombia's president. That's capital murder, targeting a head of state.

Using leads from the captured computer of FARC chieftain Raul Reyes, who was killed in 2008, the 26-page indictment charged that these terrorists tried to kill Colombia's president, its former President Andres Pastrana and several other high-ranking Colombian officials on a visit to Spain.

Colombia's FARC sought training from ETA, the Spanish Basque separatist group, on how to rig cell phone bombs. It was possible only because a Venezuelan official on Hugo Chavez's payroll, Arturo Cubillas Fontan, got the two groups in touch for training. He's believed to be still on the Venezuelan state payroll.

There's no such thing as a terror group that doesn't get state support. The indictment lays out a strong case for serious charges showing "cooperation of the Venezuelan government in the illegal cooperation between FARC and ETA." In this regard, Venezuela is little different from Syria, which has assassinated elected leaders in Lebanon, or Iran, which is the granddaddy of international terror.

[D]ata from Reyes' captured computer showed that Chavez offered FARC terrorists $300 million in support. He also housed FARC training camps on Venezuelan soil and sheltered FARC leaders, whose videotaped addresses showed distinctly Venezuelan foliage in the background.

Other incidents have followed: Chavez got caught shipping new Russian weapons to Colombian terrorists last year. The Colombian army found captured Swedish rocket launchers, whose serial numbers showed a Venezuelan origin, in raided FARC camps. At least one of those launchers had been fired at President Uribe's aircraft in 2003 in yet another FARC assassination attempt.

March 3, 2010 at 12:40 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=522689

"China's big goal in the 21st century is to become world number one, the top power," People's Liberation Army (PLA) Senior Col. Liu Migfu writes in a newly published book, "The China Dream." This dream could rapidly become America's nightmare.

These are heady days for China, flush with American cash and holding large chunks of our debt.

China today has nearly $2.4 trillion in foreign exchange holdings, with roughly $1.6 trillion of that in dollar-based assets. It's the No. 1 holder of U.S. debt in the world.

The Chinese military, infuriated by America's sale of $6.4 billion in arms to Taiwan, recently wanted to dump some of China's vast holdings of U.S. Treasury and corporate bonds on the market, hoping to punish us economically. China has too much at stake to do it, perhaps, but the threat is real. And in an actual crisis over Taiwan, who knows?

It would be easy to dismiss all of this as bluster, but we'd do so at our peril. China's economic advancement and military buildup are real, as is the threat in both areas. The leadership in Beijing does not let its military speak so publicly and bluntly unless it wants to send a message that is clear and unmistakable.

Col. Liu argues that China should use its growing revenues to become the world's biggest military power, to the point where the U.S. "would not dare and would not be able to intervene in military conflict in the Taiwan Strait."

That possibility is increasingly real. As Defense Secretary Roberts Gates said in a recent speech to the Air Force Association: "Investments in cyber and anti-satellite warfare (by China), anti-air and anti-ship weaponry, and ballistic missiles could threaten America's primary way to project power and help allies in the Pacific — in particular our forward air bases and carrier strike groups."

Of specific concern is a new Chinese missile, the land-based DF-21. It's the world's first ballistic missile capable of hitting a moving target at sea and is designed to attack and sink U.S. carrier battle groups. The conventionally armed missile has maneuverable warheads and a range in excess of 1,000 miles.

March 3, 2010 at 12:41 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=522716

Remember the furor over lobbyist Jack Abramoff and the lavish golfing trips he furnished for lawmakers? In response to that scandal, Congress tightened its ethics rules in 2007. It barred lawmakers from accepting free travel lasting more than a day if corporations that retain lobbyists underwrite any part of the trip.

Make that supposedly tightened its ethics rules. Last week's report details how a top lawyer to the then-chairman, the late Stephanie Tubbs Jones, D-Ohio, served as a kind of tour guide to help sponsors of a November 2007 conference in Antigua find a way around the new restrictions.

Would it surprise you to learn that Tubbs Jones and her sister attended that conference? This is a case of the fox figuring out how to take the chickens on an all-expenses-paid Caribbean vacation.

It's pretty clear what happened here. The conference, sponsored by the Carib News Foundation, was a sweet annual perk — St. Thomas one year, St. Kitts the next. A member of Congress could get used to this. So when the rules changed, and the conference's corporate sponsorship threatened to end the fun, the question was: Is there a way to keep it going?

The e-mail and testimony compiled by the ethics committee show how Tubbs Jones' lawyer, Dawn Kelly Mobley (still working in the House, for Ohio Democrat Marcia Fudge), did end runs around the committee's nonpartisan professional staff.

She counseled foundation officials about how to explain that the companies it originally identified as sponsors, including AT&T, Pfizer, Citibank, HSBC Bank and IBM, were not really funding the event after all — just making general donations to the foundation. When a diligent committee lawyer kept questioning the arrangement, Mobley forwarded the lawyer's internal e-mail to a foundation staffer.

In fact, a solicitation letter promised the companies "prime access to key elected officials through (a) private reception, seating at Luncheon and Dinner, photo opportunities, etc." The letter included a "cc" to Rangel. Subtle.

So what is the consequence? Exoneration, it turns out, is the last bastion of bipartisanship. Mobley was merely "admonished," though the report makes clear she contradicted herself in sworn testimony and gave answers that conflicted with those of other witnesses, minimizing her involvement.

March 3, 2010 at 12:41 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=522694

[Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) revealed] the hypocrisy of Congress' pay-as-you-go promises. It seems there's always an "emergency" to justify adding another $10 billion or so in red ink.

President Obama's press secretary Robert Gibbs calls Bunning "irrational." Fellow Republicans [kept] their distance.

* AS NOTED IN A STAND-ALONE POST, IN THE END BUNNING WAS JOINED BY 18 OF HIS REPUBLICAN PEERS AND BETRAYED BY 21.

Bunning [raised] a valid point about the hypocrisy of congressional Democrats, who are already reneging on a promise to pay for new spending rather than add it to the deficit. Last month, they passed a so-called "pay-as-you-go" (PAYGO for short) bill requiring revenues or cuts to offset the cost of any new discretionary spending.

Freeing up revenue elsewhere in the budget to pay for the $10 billion in stopgap spending would [have amounted to] to a cut of 0.26% in anticipated total outlays of $3.71 trillion. Heaven forfend that Congress would have to take such drastic, draconian action!

[T]he $15 billion jobs bill passed by the Senate last week violated PAYGO.

Ditto for the bill that Bunning [attempted to ensure was paid for].

[Bunning argued that the Senate could] tap some of the unspent money from last year's stimulus bill to fund the new legislation. Majority leader Harry Reid has rejected that plan, even though more than $500 billion in stimulus money is yet to be spent.

The Democrats' argument for not following PAYGO comes down to strategic procrastination. They've left it to the last minute to keep vital programs alive and workers on the job, so there's no time to work out a proper PAYGO solution. "This is an emergency stopgap," said Sen. Amy Klobucher, D-Minn., as if that was all the explanation needed.

* FOR ALL INTENTS AND PURPOSES WE NO LONGER LIVE IN A NATION UNDER THE RULE OF LAW. I HAVE NO DOUBT THAT WERE THE FOUNDERS BROUGHT BACK TO LIFE, THEY'D CALL FOR A SECOND AMERICAN REVOLUTION.

March 3, 2010 at 12:41 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=522691

[Van Jones] the former green jobs czar in the Obama administration and self-avowed ["former"] communist has landed a job at an Ivy League school, where he'll be teaching your children why America is racist, capitalism is bad, and redistribution of wealth is good.

* NOT TO QUIBBLE, BUT ENOUGH WITH THIS "CHILDREN" NONSENSE WHEN DESCRIBING 18 + YEAR OLD ADULTS.

We have often commented on how academia leans far to the left and how nutty professors like the infamous Ward Churchill can find acceptance for their wacky philosophies. So it was not a total surprise last week when Princeton University announced that Van Jones will be teaching environmental policy at the prestigious school.

Jones has been appointed a visiting fellow in the Center for African American Studies and the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at the university's Wilson School.

Jones became radicalized, he says, when he was arrested during the 1992 Rodney King riots. "I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th. By August, I was a communist," Jones told the East Bay Express in 2005.

Jones was the leader and founder of a radical group, the communist revolutionary organization Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, or Storm. On Sept. 12, 2001, Jones led a vigil by the group that expressed solidarity with Arab and Muslim Americans as well as what he called the victims of "U.S. imperialism" around the world.

He is a ...signer of a petition suggesting that people in the administration of President George W. Bush "may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war." [aka: "9/11 Truther"]

The unanswered question is why, considering Jones' radical background, was he asked to be one of the administration's czars?

On his self-titled show last Thursday on PBS, which receives taxpayer dollars, host Tavis Smiley gave Jones a forum for his views and told him he loved him and would take a bullet for him. Smiley ended the interview with Jones, who just received an NAACP Image Award, by saying, "Van Jones is among the best our community has ever produced."

Agreeing with that assessment is Valerie Jarrett, senior White House adviser, who explained in August 2008 at a Netroots Nation conference in Pittsburgh: "We were so delighted to be able to recruit him into the White House. We were watching him, uh, really, he's not that old, for as long as he's been active out in Oakland.

That certainly explains a great deal about the policies of this administration. Van Jones didn't just slip through the cracks of the vetting system. The White House knew what it was getting. Now the students of Princeton will be the beneficiaries of his energy and "creative ideas."

March 3, 2010 at 12:42 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7a761486-262c-11df-aff3-00144feabdc0.html

Is state-sanctioned assassination justifiable, or does it somehow de-legitimise the state that undertakes it?

When Britain was at war, Winston Churchill sanctioned the assassination by its Special Operations Executive of the SS General Reinhard Heydrich, the capture (and killing if necessary) of General Heinrich Kreipe on Crete; ditto Erwin Rommel.

Just as with some Mossad operations, such as the disaster in Amman in 1997 when agents were captured after failing to kill Khaled Meshal of Hamas, not all Churchill’s hits were successful. But the British state was not de-legitimised in any way as a result.

The intelligence agents of states – sometimes operating with direct authority, sometimes not – have carried out many assassinations and assassination attempts in peacetime without the legitimacy of those states being called into question, or their being described as “rogue”. In 1985 the French Deuxième Bureau sank Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior trawler, killing photographer Fernando Pereira, without anyone denouncing France as a rogue state. Similarly, in 2006, polonium 210 was used to murder Alexander Litvinenko without Putin’s Russia being described as “illegitimate”. That kind of language is only reserved for Israel, even though neither Pereira nor Litvinenko posed the danger to French and Russian citizens that was posed to Israelis by the activities of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

The reason that such double standards still apply – more than six decades after the foundation of the state of Israel – is not because of the nature of that doughty, brave, embattled, tiny, surrounded, yet proudly defiant country, but because of the nature of its foes.

Those who wish to understand Israel’s actions and put them in their proper historical context should read Michael Burleigh’s cultural history of terrorism, "Blood and Rage". Burleigh quotes a senior Mossad agent saying after the Munich Olympics massacre of 11 Israeli athletes: “If there was intelligence information, the target was reachable and if there was an opportunity, we took it. As far as we were concerned we were creating a deterrence, forcing them to crawl into a defensive shell and not plan offensive attacks against us.”

Is that attitude so very different from the pre-emptive targeted assassination of Taliban leaders that Nato carries out by flying drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan today?

March 3, 2010 at 12:42 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/leading_article/article7047282.ece

What was she thinking?

By taking a last-minute detour, on her five-day trip to Latin America, to visit President Fernández de Kirchner in Buenos Aires, Hillary Clinton has — recklessly — given the appearance of throwing America’s weight behind Argentina in its row with Britain over sovereignty of the Falkland Islands.

Intruding in the dispute was lamentable enough. But in further offering to mediate between Buenos Aires and London, the US Secretary of State is implying that there may be some fruitful area of grey between their rival black-and-white claims.

By suggesting so boldly that there may be room for negotiation when Britain has insisted that there is none, Mrs Clinton gives the impression that Argentina has America’s tacit support in the dispute.

[W]hat rattles Britain about her remarks in Buenos Aires is that diplomats of Mrs Clinton’s pedigree rarely speak clumsily, or without calculation. Especially disturbing to Whitehall ears, ever alert to the slightest nuance, was hearing Mrs Clinton refer to the islands as “Las Malvinas” as well as by their British name of the Falklands.

Speaking as one close ally to another, Britain must remind America that it has no need for a go-between in its quarrel with Buenos Aires, since it has full confidence in the legitimacy of its territorial claim. Britain is, rightly, dismayed that Mrs Clinton seems to be encouraging Argentina to believe that any hopes it might nurse of possessing the Falklands one day may not be impossibly fanciful. This is a disservice to Argentina, and an undeserved snub to Britain.

Mrs Clinton’s maladroit intervention has disquieted London all the more for coming so swiftly after Argentina’s diplomatic coup in Mexico last Wednesday in marshalling the backing of 32 Latin American and Caribbean countries in support of its claim to the Falklands. Britain has been seeking to quell its row with Argentina. It was careless of Mrs Clinton to encourage Argentina to think that it might have America’s support if it now stoked the dispute.

March 3, 2010 at 11:40 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://spectator.org/archives/2010/03/02/american-collectivism-a-record

The hype is always better than the real thing.

Boston's Big Dig sounded like a half-decent project in the beginning. Approved in 1982 with a price tag $2.6 billion, it was completed, however, more or less, in 2005 at a price of $22 billion.

"More or less" because concrete panels loosened and crashed from the ceiling of a connector tunnel in 2006, the first full year of operation, killing 38-year-old car passenger Milena Del Valle, a mother of three. The family was awarded $28 million.

Medicare, similarly, was optimistically projected in 1967 to have an annual price tag of $12 billion by 1990. The actual 1990 cost? $98 billion.

Just the parking lot at the Kennedy Center (not the center itself or its whole shebang of theaters, lounges, offices, restaurants, etc.) had a cost estimate in 1998 of $28 million, reports Reason magazine in its March 2010 issue. The actual cost of the parking lot, completed in 2003? $88 million.

Now we're getting the biggest hype yet, the idea that Obama and his various czarinas and central planners have the expertise to re-work a sixth of the U.S. economy so that we'll somehow end up with universal health coverage, 30 million more people insured, and all done in a way that produces lower costs and higher quality while not adding a dime to the federal deficit.

Plus they're saying that billions can be cut from Medicare without cutting anything that seniors are getting from Medicare!

During World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt distorted the free market by implementing wage and price controls in order to prevent "profiteering" and fight inflation. Employers, in order to attract labor, switched from giving raises to providing health insurance.

Today, we're paying a high price in the global arena for that government-created market distortion that produced the ongoing employer-based health system...

On January 8, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson delivered his first State of the Union address, calling for an "all-out war on human poverty," with special focus on black poverty and inner city revitalization. The following year, Sen. Daniel Moynihan sounded the alarm about the breakdown of the black family in his book The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. At the time, 1965, the black illegitimacy rate was 26 percent.

Today, $10 trillion later in federal spending on anti-poverty programs, the illegitimacy rate among blacks is 70 percent.

Most recently, seeking universal and equitable housing, the Carter and Clinton administrations passed legislation, with well-intended consequences, of course, that forced banks to make loans in lower income areas and to unqualified borrowers. The result was a massive expansion of high-risk subprime loans, a real estate bubble, a worldwide distribution of toxic assets, and the subsequent housing crash, financial panic and bank collapses.

And now, next up on the politicians' fix-it list -- healthcare.

(*SHUDDER*)

March 3, 2010 at 11:40 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/mar/03/150000-jobs-created-uh-no/

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s assertion on Feb. 21 that the $787 billion federal stimulus bill had created 150,000 jobs in California prompted these straightforward inquiries to his aides: [1] Could you send a list of the jobs created? [2] Could you break down how many were in the public sector and how many were in the private sector?

(President Barack Obama had promised that 90 percent of the jobs created by the stimulus bill would be in the private sector.)

The immediate answer to both questions was OK, but it will take a few days. A few days later, two Excel spreadsheet files were provided that appeared to show Schwarzenegger was correct.

In the meantime, however, the governor changed his language, saying the stimulus had “saved” or created 150,000 jobs – a huge distinction.

We still don’t have an estimate from the governor’s office on the public sector vs. private sector breakdown, but the information we were provided indicates the jobs are overwhelmingly in the former category. This information as well as a further look at the official recovery.gov Web site further suggests the overwhelming number of California jobs affected by the stimulus were “saved” public-sector positions.

So much for the governor’s initial claim. So much for the president’s promise.

Meanwhile, our visit to recovery.gov only added to this editorial page’s skepticism about the stimulus and the wisdom of its design. For example, a check of National City’s ZIP code reveals the Bay Vista College of Beauty got 67 federal stimulus grants totaling more than $300,000. But 25 of the grants were for $0 or for a negative sum – in stimulus speak, “deobligated” sums returned to the government.

It appears access to stimulus funding is so unfettered that it is the equivalent of a checking account, with regular deposits and withdrawals.

Then there is the further peculiarity that in every corner of California, hundreds of grants are going to beauty, cosmetology and barber schools – apparently because they have figured out how to qualify for stimulus funding more quickly than other types of trade schools.

This is not a quirk or minor point. It gets to the central folly of using massive government spending as the primary means of reviving an economy – the inescapable inefficiency of throwing money at a problem.

In the private sector, jobs are created based on market forces, supply and demand, the public’s appetite for particular products and services. Under the stimulus program, jobs are often created based on how well trade schools can figure out the rules that turn the U.S. Treasury into their personal piggy banks. And this costly scheme is entirely paid for with borrowed money.

How Obama, Schwarzenegger or anyone with a conscience could tout the glories of this approach is hard to fathom. But at least the massive looming surplus of hair stylists in California will keep the cost of haircuts in check.

March 3, 2010 at 11:41 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2010/03/column-big-business-is-simply-vampiric-.html

"Wall Street shifting toward Republicans," blared a front-page headline in The Washington Post last week.

"Commercial banks and high-flying investment firms have shifted their political contributions toward Republicans in recent months amid harsh rhetoric from Democrats about fat bank profits, generous bonuses and stingy lending policies on Wall Street," the Post announced, making it sound as if the sinister forces of corporate reaction were punishing the brave reformer in the White House.

(*SNORT*) (*CHUCKLE*)

Except there's one datum, mentioned but not explored in the article that doesn't quite fit this story line: Wall Street is still giving more money to the Democrats.

"The wealthy securities and investment industry ... went from giving 2 to 1 to Democrats at the start of 2009 to providing almost half of its donations to Republicans by the end of the year," the Post reports.

Almost half. That's another way of saying that the allegedly vindictive Wall Street fat cats are still giving more than half of their political donations to Democrats, also known as the party in power.

(*SMIRK*)

It's worth remembering that Obama was the preferred candidate of Wall Street, and the industry gave to Democrats by a 2-1 margin at the beginning of last year.

The top business donor to Democrats in 2008 was Goldman Sachs, and nearly 75 cents out of every dollar of Goldman's political donations from 2006 to 2008 went to Democrats. Few can gainsay the investment, given how well Goldman Sachs has done under the Obama administration.

(*SHRUG*)

It's not just Wall Street. Obama led in fundraising from most big business sectors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Aside from the desire to back the winner, and the cultural liberalness of East and West Coast plutocrats, why did Obama get so much support from precisely the constituency he demonizes? Because it was good business.

A host of big corporations bet that the much-vaunted Obama era would materialize. For instance, nearly 30 major corporations and environmental groups invested in Obama's promise to force the American economy into a new cap-and-trade system via the United States Climate Action Partnership (CAP). Whatever the benefits of such a scheme for the economy and environment as a whole, these corporations, led by General Electric, were looking simply to cash in on government policies.

GE, which makes many wind, solar and nuclear doodads that would be profitable under "cap-and-trade," was poised to make billions if Obama succeeded in seizing control of the "carbon economy." GE is still protecting its bet, but after the failure in Copenhagen, the "climategate" scandals, and perhaps most significantly, that implosion of Obama's new progressive era, several heavyweights Caterpillar, BP and ConocoPhillips — have pulled out of CAP, with rumors that more will follow.

There are similar rumblings of discontent within the ranks of PhRMA, the trade association for the pharmaceutical industry, which had cut an $80 billion deal with the White House last year for its support of ObamaCare...

The lesson here is fairly simple: Big business is not "right wing," it's vampiric. It will pursue any opportunity to make a big profit at little risk. Getting in bed with politicians is increasingly the safest investment for these "crony capitalists." But only if the politicians can actually deliver. The political failures of the Obama White House have translated into business failures for firms more eager to make money off taxpayers instead of consumers.

March 3, 2010 at 11:41 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://weeklystandard.com/blogs/obama-now-selling-appeals-court-judgeships-health-care-votes

Tonight, Barack Obama will host ten House Democrats who voted against the health care bill in November at the White House; he's obviously trying to persuade them to switch their votes to yes. One of the ten is Jim Matheson of Utah. The White House just sent out a press release announcing that today President Obama nominated Matheson's brother Scott M. Matheson, Jr. to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.

Scott Matheson appears to have the credentials to be a judge, but was his nomination used to buy off his brother's vote?

Consider Congressman Matheson's record on the health care bill. He voted against the bill in the Energy and Commerce Committee back in July and again when it passed the House in November. But now he's "undecided" on ramming the bill through Congress.

The timing of this nomination looks suspicious, especially in light Democratic Congressman Joe Sestak's claim that he was offered a federal job not to run against Arlen Specter in the Pennsylvania primary. Many speculated that Sestak, a former admiral, was offered the Secretary of the Navy job.

March 3, 2010 at 11:42 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/home_top_stories/20100219_Sestak_says_federal_job_was_offered_to_quit_race.html

Rep. Joe Sestak (D., Pa.) said [on February 18] that the White House offered him a federal job in an effort to dissuade him from challenging Sen. Arlen Specter in the state's Democratic primary.

The disclosure came during an afternoon taping of Larry Kane: Voice of Reason, a Sunday news-analysis show on the Comcast Network. Sestak would not elaborate on the circumstances and seemed chagrined after blurting out "yes" to veteran news anchor Kane's direct question.

"Was it secretary of the Navy?" Kane asked.

"No comment," Sestak said.

"Was it [the job] high-ranking?" Kane asked. Sestak said yes, but added that he would "never leave" the Senate race for a deal.

A White House spokesman this morning strongly denied Sestak had been offered yesterday. Before the spokesman issued the denial a senior Pennsylvania Democrat yesterday said Whitye House officials there were angered by Sestak's account.

After yesterday's taping, Sestak said he recalled the White House offer coming in July, as he was preparing to formally announce his Senate candidacy in August. He declined to identify who spoke to him or the job under discussion. Sestak also would not say whether the person who approached him worked for the administration or was an intermediary for the offer.

"I'm not going to say who or how and what was offered," Sestak said in an interview. "I don't feel it's appropriate to go beyond what I said," because the conversation was confidential.

March 3, 2010 at 11:42 PM

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