Rioting in Ferguson – A Disheartening Rejection of the Civil Rights Movement

Rioting in Ferguson – A Disheartening Rejection of the Civil Rights Movement

By Clark S. Judge: managing director, White House Writers Group, Inc.; chairman, Pacific Research Institute

The most disheartening fact about the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, is that the rioters reject due process of law. Yet these same rioters are among the Americans who should be most invested in protecting the law’s protections. They are, after all, some of the chief beneficiaries of the nearly two-century struggle to achieve the very rights they now so violently want to wipe away.

 The struggle to make protection of rights universal in America – that is, to extend it to African-Americans — began in the Revolutionary years with the banning of slavery in Vermont in 1777, in Pennsylvania (albeit by stages) in 1780 and in Massachusetts in 1783. It continued with exclusion of slavery from the Northwest Territories in 1787, the subsequent ending of slavery within their borders by all states north of the Mason-Dixon line and the Ohio River, the Civil War, the 13th Amendment, and Reconstruction. It languished after Union troops left the South in 1877 and in the decades that followed as the various legislative struggles between pro-civil rights Republicans and pro-segregation Democrats generally ended with no action. It returned to life with the Democratic Party’s split over civil rights at its 1948 national convention. In the following decade and a half a new civil rights movement gained steam among both a new alliance of Republicans and northern Democrats on one hand and increasingly vocal and brilliantly led African-Americans on the other. It ultimately carried the day in a series of victories – legislative and otherwise — stretching from the middle ‘60s to the middle ‘70s.

In this two-century-long struggle’s final outcome, winning the vote for African-Americans throughout the South was important. Desegregation of Southern schools and full access to public accommodation were milestones, too. But nothing was more critical than extending full reach for the rule of law and due process to all citizens in those states where they had been denied, that is, in the Southern states. No more mob verdicts. No more lynchings. No more selective justice to ensure that state penal systems maintained sufficient head counts to keep their captive industries running smoothly. More than everything else, this victory was about ensuring that due process and the rule of law were universally honored rights. No exceptions.

In recent decades we have come to use the term “rights” loosely. Anything that anyone considers desirable we label a “right”. Like the blowhard Glendower of Shakespeare’s Henry the 4th Part 1, proponents of ever more rights proclaim they can “call spirits from the vasty deep” but, again and again, whether, when called, those spirits – or rights – come into the lives of actual men and women turns out to have little or nothing to do with the calling. They usually depend on getting the economics right and unleashing, not restricting, market forces.

The exceptions are the real rights – the rights that government is capable and competent to guarantee, the rights that have to do with governance and the nature of man (that is, humanit — men and women). Freedom of speech, press, religion, assembly, property. Freedom from unlawful search and seizure. Due process and rule of law, including the protections of grand juries and trial by jury. All these rights preceded the civil rights movement, the Civil War, the Constitution, the Revolution. They were the product of an earlier several centuries struggle in what is now the United Kingdom. But nothing was more critical to the final outcome of our own two-century struggle than that they were imported into our governance at the nation’s founding.

So now the rioters in Ferguson are protesting. For what? Overturning a grand jury’s decision not to prosecute? No one disputes that the grand jury was fairly selected and pulled from all parts of the regional community, including from African-Americans. No one disputes that the men and women on it addressed their task conscientiously. Readers of the court transcript report that, based on the testimony these jurors received, a guilty verdict at trial would have been impossible. But the rioters’ position is that the only acceptable outcome in the case would have been that the police officer went to trial and then, presumably, to jail.

In other words the rioters want to wipe away the most critical victory of the civil rights movement, the most essential win of the two-centuries-long struggle.  And with fire bombs, gunshotsand looting, they issuing their demand in the name of the very Americans (including themselves) whose rights (those same rights) that movement and struggle succeeded after such extended effort in securing.

It is tremendously disheartening.

http://www.hughhewitt.com/rioting-ferguson-disheartening-rejection-civil-rights-movement-clark-judge/#more-25422

New deception questions: Obamacare adviser warned of premium increases as Obama vowed savings

Predicted massive health insurance cost increases for Wisconsin residents in 2010 report

By Kelly Riddell - The Washington Times - Monday, November 24, 2014

While President Obama campaigned on a promise that his universal health care plan would lower premiums, his controversial adviser and plan architect was privately warning the state of Wisconsin that Obamacare was poised to massively increase insurance costs for average residents, internal documents show.

Jonathan Gruber, the MIT economist currently under fire for suggesting the Obama administration tried to deceive the public about the Affordable Care Act, was hired by former Democratic Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle in 2010 to conduct an analysis on how the federal health-care reform would impact the state.

Mr. Gruber's study predicted about 90 percent of individuals without employer-sponsored or public insurance would see their premiums spike by an average of 41 percent. Once tax subsidies were factored in, about 60 percent of those in the individual market were projected to see their premiums go up 31 percent, according to his analysis.

In addition, 53 percent of those insured by companies with fewer than 50 employees, would see their premiums rise by an average of 15 percent even after subsidies, Mr. Gruber forecasted. The report warned such increases could impact small companies' decision whether to provide health insurance to their workers.

"There remains some uncertainty about employer reactions given the many forces which might impact their decision to offer insurance," the report said.

The contrast between the Obama administration's optimistic rhetoric on Obamacare and Mr. Gruber's private warnings to Wisconsin is certain to attract new attention from the Republican-led Congress, which wants to know whether there was an effort by the administration to deceive the public about the true consequences of the law as Mr. Gruber suggested in a videotape that surfaced recently.

Mr. Gruber and the White House declined comment when contacted by The Washington Times this week.

The Gruber study, which was released publicly in August 2011 with little fanfare in the state of Wisconsin, was largely ignored by Mr. Obama, who campaigned in 2012 that insurance premiums would actually decrease under his healthcare legislation.

"So when you hear about the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — and I don't mind the name because I really do care. That's why we passed it," the president declared in a campaign speech in Cincinnati, Ohio back in July 2012, "you should know that once we have fully implemented, you're going to be able to buy insurance through a pool so that you can get the same good rates as a group that if you're an employee at a big company you can get right now — which means your premiums will go down."

In Wisconsin, Republican Gov. Scott Walker, considered by many to be a potential 2016 presidential candidate, distrusted the campaign promises, largely because of the work Mr. Gruber had done for the state's previous administration, and has long advocated for repealing the law.

In addition to premium rate increases, Mr. Gruber's work estimated that 100,000 Wisconsinites would be involuntarily dropped from their employer sponsored health insurance also running counter to the President's claim at the time that if a you liked their health-care policy, you could keep it.

The study did project the implementation of Obamacare would decrease the state's number of uninsured by 65 percent by 2016, but doing so would come at the expense of other groups.

Wisconsin's working-class families would be forced to pay a hidden tax to pay for the purchase of health insurance for a family of four earning up to $89,400, the study said. It also showed Obamacare would shrink the numbers of people in the private insurance marketplace from 180,000 individuals to 30,000.

Mr. Walker has said he would like to see the Affordable Care Act repealed and after entering office in January 2011, he opted not to create a state-run marketplace and to instead rely on the federal one. Mr. Walker also has refused Obamacare's Medicaid expansion, refusing to accept federal aid offered under the Affordable Care Act, arguing he doesn't trust the federal government's pledge to cover the cost.

After entering office, Mr. Walker replaced Mr. Doyle's Office of Health Care Reform which had been created to carry out the federal Affordable Care Act with Wisconsin's Office of Free Market Health Care. It was that office that inherited Mr. Gruber's study.

The state of Wisconsin paid $443,718 to conduct the analysis with $200,000 going to Mr. Gruber himself, and the rest of the costs dedicated to Gorman Actuarial, a Massachusetts-based consultancy.

Mr. Gruber developed the model for the report that outlined the federal Affordable Care Act's impact on Wisconsin, and his contract ended June 30, 2011, according to Mr. Walker's office.

"Health care reform was supposed to provide affordable health care for Americans but major concerns have been demonstrated by the results of this study," said Dennis Smith, Wisconsin's Health Services Secretary, in a press release when the report was released in August 2011.

That year, Wisconsin had 33 health insurers actively participating in the individual market and 25 insurers in the small group market, a dynamic Mr. Walker's administration thought competitive and cost effective. The Badger State's uninsured rate is also better than the national average, with 9 percent of its population lacking insurance in 2013, compared with 14.5 percent nationally, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimations.

Because Mr. Gruber's contract was entered into under a previous administration and the vast majority of the work was performed for that administration, Mr. Walker declined to comment on Mr. Gruber's work for the state.

In 2011, Mr. Gruber defended his Wisconsin study to The Cap Times, a Wisconsin-based news site.

"They picked out the most negative aspects of the report to highlight," Mr. Gruber told the Cap Times in an interview in August 2011. "Overall I think health care reform is a great thing for Wisconsin."

Meanwhile, earlier this month, videotapes were leaked from a University of Pennsylvania speech Mr. Gruber gave last year where he refers to the "stupidity of the American voter" as to how Obamacare got passed legislatively, saying the lack of transparency of the bill was a "huge political advantage."

Mr. Gruber received about $400,000 from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for his work focusing on health care computer models. He has also been a frequent guest at the White House, meeting with senior officials more than a dozen times and the president himself, once, visitor logs show.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said this month that Mr. Gruber only advised the administration on the economics of health care.

"He certainly is somebody who is well-versed in understanding how economics will have an impact on health care policy, but it's pretty evident from these videos that he doesn't have nearly as much insight as it relates to politics or communications or legislative strategy," Mr. Earnest said of Mr. Gruber.

A Kaiser Family Foundation analysis of 2015 premium changes as of November show that nationally the lowest cost bronze plans and lowest cost silver plans will increase two and four percent, respectively, with premiums rising as much as 43 percent in Minnesota counties and decreasing as much as 45 percent in Colorado.

In Wisconsin, the analysis found the premiums for the bronze and silver plans in Milwaukee increased by at least 5 percent, less than one percent after tax credits are applied.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/nov/24/jonathan-gruber-warned-of-obamacare-premium-spike-/

Why Do Democrats Look Down on Voters?

By Clive Crook

I support many Democratic policy positions and want to see them succeed. The Affordable Care Act, in particular, is a worthy endeavor: Despite the botched rollout and a great deal of unfinished business, I want to see it prevail. Sometimes, though, I don't know whether to laugh or cry at the incompetence Democrats bring to the task of selling their best ideas. The party, without a doubt, is its own worst enemy.

This is the heading under which I file Grubergate. In the protracted discussion of Jonathan Gruber's comments about Obamacare and the stupidity of the U.S. electorate, his critics and apologists have missed the main point. This isn't about the rights and wrongs of the health-care reform, or the mendacity or good faith of the Barack Obama administration; it's about the Democrats' worldview, and the party's tireless capacity for offending potential supporters.

People have argued endlessly about whether the comments prove Obamacare was a deliberate deception of U.S. voters, or even about whether Gruber was or was not an architect of the reform -- pointless semantic questions. It depends what you mean by "deception" and "architect." Neither issue really matters.

Of course Gruber was deeply involved in the conception and design of the reform. And yes, in a certain sense, Obamacare's advocates did deceive people about the law, by presenting it in what they judged to be the best possible light. How shocking of politicians and their advisers to do that.

Politics is about selling. In between brutal honesty about the full consequences of any particular policy and bald-faced lies about what's intended is a wide zone of permissible salesmanship. As it happens, I think it would be good practice -- and good tactics as well -- for politicians to be more forthright than they usually are about the costs and drawbacks of what they're proposing. But the fact remains, all politicians accentuate the positive in what they're advocating and distract attention from the disadvantages.

Here's what counts about Gruber's comments: His views on the stupidity of the American electorate express the party's reflexive disdain for the very people it hopes (in all sincerity, by the way) to serve.

All salesmen sell -- but some respect their customers, whereas others look down on them. Too many Democrats fall into the second camp, and too few of those are any good at disguising it. In this respect, Gruber, who calls himself a "card-carrying Democrat," is typical of many in the party -- and Democrats are different from Republicans. In their own way, to be sure, many Republicans also take a dim view of the citizenry. (Recall Romney's 47 percent.) But the Democrats' brand of disapproval has a particular quality that puts their party and its good ideas at a perpetual electoral disadvantage.

This syndrome of Democratic disdain, I think, has two main parts. First, liberals have an exaggerated respect for intellectual authority and technical expertise. Second, they have an unduly narrow conception of the values that are implicated in political choices. These things come together in the conviction that if you disagree with Democrats on universal health insurance or almost anything else, it can only be because you're stupid.

Voters recognize this as insufferable arrogance and, oddly enough, they resent it. Democrats who might be asking where they went wrong in the mid-term elections -- not that many of them are -- ought to give this some thought. The conviction that voters are stupid, however, isn't just bad tactics. It's also substantively wrong.

It's good to have policy makers with brains who know what they're talking about. I've even argued that technocrats ought to have a bigger role in shaping policy. But expertise of the kind many Democrats venerate isn't enough. It's no guarantee of wisdom -- nor of honesty.

Democrats despair, for instance, over the public's reluctance to accept without reservation the supposedly settled science of climate change. They call disagreement on this topic a denial of science -- that is, an expression of the purest ignorance. This is wrong. Action on climate change is necessary, yet the electorate's skepticism is understandable. Contrary to what they're told, the science isn't settled: Enough is known to justify action, but that isn't how the case is put. Advocates admit of no doubt, which is false; and they recoil at dissent, which is unscientific. Claiming certainty where there isn't any does not inspire public confidence.

Voters understand that the smartest experts get things wrong. They also understand the concept of unintended consequences. A certain guardedness in the face of fast-talking experts brimming with confidence isn't stupid; it's sensible.

On almost any given policy question, even if all the relevant facts were beyond dispute, choices would still involve complex value judgments. This, for many Democrats, is another blind spot.

As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has shown, liberals tend to give priority to the principles of equity (or fairness) and the avoidance of harm; most conservatives recognize those values but also give roughly equal weight to liberty, loyalty, order and sanctity (as in the sanctity of life, or the sanctity of marriage).

It isn't obvious that either worldview is more worthy of respect than the other. Perhaps it's morally wrong to attach great weight to loyalty, say, or sanctity. A person who doesn't share your moral intuitions, or who attaches different weights to different values, may be a better or worse person than you are. But having conservative values doesn't make you stupid, any more than having liberal values makes you smart.

Voters make mistakes, but I see no compelling evidence that the U.S. electorate is stupid, or lacking in collective wisdom. I see plenty of evidence to the contrary. It really shouldn't be so hard for Democrats to muster some respect for the people whose votes they want. And if that is beyond them, they should for heaven's sake learn to fake it.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-11-23/why-do-democrats-look-down-on-voters?cmpid=yhoo

Mottos for Miscreants

Mottos for Miscreants

Moral midgetry in an empire of lies

By Kevin D. Williamson

A few years ago, I was called upon to inform the IRS that a former employee of mine would have liked to be paid more than I had paid him. Given that I have never met a freelance writer who thought he was being paid enough, I thought it a strange request, but I eventually understood the IRS’s line of thinking: The gentleman in question, who was in his 80s at the time, had retired from his former occupation and worked as a freelance writer. His beat involved a great deal of travel, and he deducted the expenses for which he was not compensated — which, the state of the newspaper industry being what it is, was all of them, at least as far as my editorial budget was concerned. The IRS suspected that his writing gig was somehow phony, something he had invented simply for tax deductions. In truth, he was just a freelance writer who didn’t make a lot of money — i.e., a freelance writer indistinguishable from about 88.8 percent of all freelance writers.

In The Pale King, one of my two favorite books about bureaucracy (Jim Geraghty’s The Weed Agency is the other), David Foster Wallace gives the IRS an imaginary motto: “Alicui tamen faciendum est,” approximately “But someone’s gotta do it.” The standing joke among tax lawyers is that the agency’s motto is: “We have what it takes to take what you have.” Personally, I’ve always thought that an apt motto for the IRS would be the first line of Catullus’s sixteenth carmina, which decorum forbids my quoting here, even in Latin. In reality, the IRS doesn’t have a motto, only that rotten chestnut from lifelong government dependent Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. — “Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society” — carved into its façade.

“Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate” would be an improvement, because what the IRS does is in fact the opposite of what government agencies do in a civilized society: It engages in political repression, selective prosecution, lawlessness, deviancy, dishonesty, and self-serving shenanigans of sundry sorts. It can drop the hammer on a retired writer and demand documentation that he once asked for a raise, but it can’t manage to find internal documents — documents it is legally required to archive — when congressional investigators come looking.

The general malfeasance is maddening enough on its own, but the sanctimoniousness with which the IRS and other government agencies go about committing their various crimes and outrages against the republic — all that risible, cynical talk about “public service” — is what is truly unbearable. It is not enough that the government seizes a share of our harvest that would have made the Sheriff of Nottingham blush and then squanders it on projects that Ludwig II would have thought daft, and that we must endure being lied to; we are expected to participate in the lie, to accept it as the plain and incontrovertible truth when it is the opposite of the truth.

This morning on my subway ride to work, I noted a sign from the Metropolitan Transit Authority (suggested motto, with apologies to Hannibal: “Nec viam inveniam necfaciam”), an agency that wastes vast quantities of public money while wasting vast quantities of commuters’ time when it is not busy slaughtering New Yorkers by being literally — literally, Mr. Vice President — asleep at the switch. It also has a profitable sideline in trafficking heroin, but what it really pours its heart and soul into is preening, stupid, dishonest advertisements for itself, unintentionally comical acts of bureaucratic self-celebration sprinkled between Dr. Zizmor’s creepy dermatology ads and Manhattan Mini Storage’s celebrations of homicidal terrorists. They are a hoot: One advertises the fact that the machines that dispense subway passes now accept — mirabile dictu! – credit cards. “Did you ever think you’d be able to charge a subway ride on a credit card?” the sign asks, breathlessly. That’s a bureaucratic classic: “We’re 30 years behind the times, but we’ve just implemented a new, more convenient way for us to take your money — exciting times!”

The sign that got my attention this morning boasted about the agency’s favored-demographic set-aside programs, which have in the past three years put some $47 million into the pockets of “minority, women-owned, and disadvantaged businesses.” I suppose Swedes are a minority, which would explain why Stockholm-based Skanska, one of the world’s largest construction companies, won millions of dollars in MTA contracts for “disadvantaged businesses,” whatever those are. (Skanska’s market capitalization is $8.4 billion; we should all be so disadvantaged.) The firm’s U.S. subsidiary eventually paid $19.6 million in fines, while executives for the minority beard company were indicted on federal charges. This isn’t an isolated incident — a few years before the Skanska scandal (say that ten times quickly) another firm paid more than $20 million in fines in a similar case. The MTA’s auditor calls the problem “widespread.” But the MTA’s signs read: “That’s just good business.”

Of course, it would not be “just good business” even if the program were not corrupt. Minority set-aside programs are, by definition, something other than “just good business.” If the contracts made sense on purely good-business grounds, you wouldn’t need the set-aside programs to begin with. The program may be good, it may be desirable, it may be politically useful (one out of three, is my estimate) but it is not “just good business.” President Barack Obama is very fond of the phrase “good business,” by which he means companies’ implementing the policies he wishes them to implement. In this speech, for example, he used “good business” three times in three paragraphs. President Obama has never been in business. Other than a few brief stints at law firms while he was a law student, basically glorified internships, he has never held any job of any consequence at abusiness of any description. The MTA is not a business, either, except to the extent that its employees are in the opiate-retailing business. And so “good business” comes to mean “the opposite of good business.”

The lies are everywhere: California teachers go to the mattresses to protect child-molesters while po-facedly insisting that whatever they do, they “do it for the children,” even as their colleagues do it to the children. LAPD promises “To Protect and Serve” even as the officers in its crime-ridden ranks plant evidence in hundreds of cases, as its gang task-force turns into a gang itself, as the traditional game of cops-and-robbers breaks down completely, with police robbing banks. Politics corrupts even our best institutions. “Semper fidelis”? Not at the top. In the upper echelons, “Saepe fidelis” would be more accurate.

Tonight at 8:00 p.m., President Obama will announce that he is ordering Customs and Immigration Enforcement to abandon its motto: “Protecting National Security and Upholding Public Safety.” (Suggested replacement: “Ex turpi causa actio,” roughly: “You’ve got a legit beef, future Democratic voter, never mind that you’re in this pickle because you broke the law.”) According to the president: “What I’m going to be laying out is things that I can do with my lawful authority as president to make the system work better even as I continue to work with Congress and encourage them to get a bipartisan, comprehensive bill that can solve the entire problem.” By my count, that’s an impressive five lies in one sentence: 1. “lawful authority,” 2. “work better,” 3. “work with Congress,” 4. “bipartisan,” 5. “solve the entire problem.” One has to appreciate the economy of the president’s effort there — imagine what he’ll do with 20 minutes.

We could have solved about nine-tenths of the illegal-immigration problem the day before yesterday by implementing robust, mandatory employment-eligibility checks based on up-to-the-second information, something that the same government that is energetically monitoring the content of private citizens’ prayers protests that it cannot quite manage, by implementing visa entry-and-exit controls that are roughly as effective as the employee-screening protocols in place at any halfway decent temp agency, and by frog-marching a couple of felonious CEOs into criminal courts for violations of employment law.

The problem of illegal immigrants is not insoluble; it is, rather, a problem that people in power do not wish to solve, partly out of anxiety related to Hispanic identity politics, partly because many of them find it convenient to maintain a permanent class of marginalized serf labor. That is the truth obscured by the gigantic heap of lies piled up around the immigration debate — that we are ruled by criminals who will ruthlessly violate the law while claiming that they not only enjoy the authority to do so but occupy the moral high ground as well.

And that is the one thing you can be sure that President Obama will not talk about tonight as he does his best to convince the country that “to faithfully execute” means “to refuse to execute.” In an empire of lies, the one impermissible thing is the truth.

— Kevin D. Williamson is roving correspondent at National Review.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/393130/mottos-miscreants-kevin-d-williamson

ObamaCare Enrollment Numbers Have Been Bogus

Lying With Statistics: In April, we doubted that the surprisingly high ObamaCare enrollment numbers could be trusted. Turns out, we were right to be skeptical. The White House had been vastly inflating the figures all along.

This week, Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell admitted that her agency had accidentally counted those who'd signed up for stand-alone dental benefits in its health insurance numbers, padding its latest enrollment data by nearly 400,000 — or 6%.

"This mistake was unacceptable," Burwell said. But don't worry: The fact that they "quickly corrected the number should give people confidence."

Never mind that she admitted the "mistake" only after the House Oversight Committee exposed the book-cooking scheme.

Anyone who had been following IBD's reporting on this wouldn't be surprised at all.

In fact, IBD has been one of the few news outlets that remained resolutely skeptical about the claims coming out of the White House — and parroted by a sycophantic mainstream press — that ObamaCare's first-year enrollment had been wildly successful.

We noted in April that the last-minute sign-up surge touted by the White House was hard to fathom, because it was so out of line with other available enrollment data.

After that, we consistently pointed out that the administration was goosing its numbers by counting anyone who'd completed an application, not those who paid their premiums, and that they were simply adding new "enrollees" onto old ones, without subtracting duplicates or cancellations.

In July, we were the only publication to pick up a finding buried in an Inspector General reportthat the administration's enrollment numbers were unreliable because "it cannot effectively monitor the current enrollment status of applicants, such as ... termination of plans."

At the time, we calculated paid enrollment was more like 7.2 million or less, not 8 million as everyone continued to insist.

In August, another Page 1 IBD storynoted how insurers were reporting sharp drops in ObamaCare enrollment, as people either failed to pay their premiums or canceled coverage on their own for other reasons.

And an October dispatch argued that even the 7.3 million number the White House released at the time was too high.

The response to these stories generally ranged from indifference to ridicule.

Charles Gaba, an ObamaCare booster who runs a site called ACASignups.net, which has been widely cited as a credible independent source of enrollment numbers, at one point blasted IBD for "mangling" his data. He said paid ObamaCare enrollment was upward of 8 million by the summer.

Gaba's own spreadsheets now show that paid enrollment — net of attrition — was 6.9 million in July.

That is 300,000 less than IBD had calculated.

And they suggest that ObamaCare paid enrollment never got anywhere near 8 million.

Reporters covering the latest ObamaCare deception say they can't understand why the White House would do such a thing. Gaba says he's "upset" and feels as though the White House has been "jerking me around."

Backers point out that 7 million paid enrollees is just what the Congressional Budget Office originally forecast. The only complaint they have is that the White House seems to have needlessly shot itself in the foot.

The problem is that this is just the latest in a long string of lies and deceptions, some of which were highlighted in Jonathan Gruber's infamous videos, and all of which were meant to mask ObamaCare problems, or exaggerate its successes.

The only shocking thing about the latest revelation is that so many who should have known better were blindsided by it.

Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-obama-care/112114-727670-obamacare-enrollment-numbers-have-been-bogus-all-along.htm#ixzz3K0j4jv9c
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Censure President Obama

Censure President Obama

If Congress remains silent, it acquiesces in the president’s constitutional excesses.

By John Fund

In reacting to President Obama’s extraordinary abuse of his power on immigration, Republican officeholders are wisely steering clear of talk of impeachment. “I don’t want to do the ‘I-word,’ nobody wants to throw the nation into that kind of turmoil,” Representative Steve King, an anti-illegal-immigration firebrand, told CNN.

But King and others are pointing out that there is another way for Congress to move against a president who has put himself above the law. And it’s one that Democrats once favored as a means of dealing with Bill Clinton’s perjury under oath and subsequent cover-up of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. None other than Nancy Pelosi proposed that the House censure Bill Clinton, rather than impeach him. She and other House Democrats backed a resolution declaring that President Clinton “fully deserves the censure and condemnation of the American people and the Congress.” 

Certainly some action beyond Congress suing the president and trying to withhold money from his efforts to implement his executive orders is needed. A failure to resist President Obama’s repeated, serious offenses against his oath of office not only endangers the Constitution today, but provides a blueprint for future generations to suffer similar assaults from another president.

But what can Congress and the American people do?

The impeachment of a president is a very grave step, a sort of “nuclear option” to be avoided unless absolutely required. Not only is its explicit purpose to legislatively overturn the sovereign judgment of the people at the ballot box, its impact on the work of the government and national life is deeply corrosive.

There is, however, another option, short of impeachment, for sanctioning the president’s unconstitutional conduct in office. As outlined by Charles Cooper, a former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during the Reagan administration, the House of Representatives can and should prepare, debate, and adopt a unicameral resolution identifying and condemning President Obama’s usurpations of legislative power and his refusals to faithfully execute the laws.

The Congressional Research Service has identified many historical precedents in which the Senate or the House has adopted a resolution of censure or disapproval of a president or other executive or judicial officers. Indeed, in 1998 Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein of California and 37 co-sponsors introduced a joint resolution in the Senate that recounted President Clinton’s various misdeeds, and not only “condemn[ed] his wrongful conduct in the strongest terms,” but also “censure[d]” the president personally.

Of course, President Clinton was instead impeached by the House and tried in the Senate (he was acquitted). Some advocates for Clinton’s impeachment argued that the Constitution left Congress no other choice — that the Constitution denies the Congress, and either House, the ability to censure an executive or judicial officer. I disagree, so long as the House directs its words of condemnation at President Obama’s unconstitutional acts and omissions rather than at the president himself.

It is critical that the historical record offer no support to the argument that the constitutional validity of President Obama’s constitutional excesses be judged by claims that they were met with Congress’s silence, and thus its acquiescence. The great Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, offering a Senate resolution denouncing as unconstitutional President Andrew Jackson’s acts relating to the Bank of the United States, warned his fellow senators: “The premonitory symptoms of despotism are upon us; and if Congress does not apply an instantaneous and effective remedy, the fatal collapse will soon come on, and we shall die — ignobly die — base, mean, and abject slaves; with the scorn and contempt of mankind; unpitied, unwept, and unmourned!” Where are our Henry Clays?

A resolution of censure would also force moderate and swing-state Democrats to go on record with their opinion of President Obama’s actions. As Jay Cost points out in The Weekly Standard, “They could either defy their president or risk their constituents’ wrath by letting him get away with his unpopular maneuvers.” A resolution of censure would also serve as a warning, a sort of constitutional yellow card, that Congress and the American people will not tolerate abuses of power indefinitely and that presidents who so abuse their power risk having a blot on their record and creating a climate in which further steps — from defunding executive-branch programs all the way up to impeachment — are contemplated.

— John Fund is national-affairs correspondent for NRO.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/393212/censure-president-obama-john-fund

WHEN YOU’RE STRANGE

WHEN YOU’RE STRANGE

BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN BARACK OBAMA, IMMIGRATION

I cannot find the text of the memos/orders signed yesterday by President Obama to implement the actions announced in his immigration speech this past Thursday evening. (I have looked under Presidential Actions at the White House website.) I have therefore been unable to check the details of Obama’s action against the comments below, which are offered by an immigration attorney who works with existing law:

The proposed executive action on immigration (or whatever name you want to give it) will allow [illegal aliens] who have US citizen or green-card children and who have been here for five years to apply for some kind of quasi-status and open market work authorization. That would allow them to work for a period of time at any employer, the authorization presumably renewable until they decide to leave or have an option for US permanent resident status (green card status). This, the administration tells us, is fair and just and Biblical – yada/yada.

But this option is explicitly NOT available to those in the US in a valid legal status. There are millions of people in the US who have temporary status – as students or temporary workers or researchers or as investors (lots of Koreans own businesses with E-2 investor visas, for example). These people – many of them have US citizen children and have been here five years. These people who have been here legally and not violated their immigration status – these people are explicitly NOT eligible for open market work authorization, renewable indefinitely.

You must be in violation of the law to benefit from this provision.

If Republicans want to begin to push back on this issue, to turn the tables, I believe this is the question that needs to be raised again and again – why is the administration offering something to lawbreakers that is specifically prohibited for those who comply with the law?

There is no answer – I guarantee it. And when this point is circulated broadly, including broadly among immigrant and naturalized citizens, there will be resentment.

I realize there are a lot of angles to this issue but I haven’t seen anyone cover the above and I think it is one of the strongest points. Obama can fool people on the legal analysis and role of the executive but people know on a basic fundamental level that you should not be offering something to lawbreakers that is not available to the law-abiding.

We will revisit this issue when we have found the relevant White House action.

UPDATE: DHS has posted links to the executive actions here.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/11/when-youre-strange.php

THE FIRE THIS TIME

THE FIRE THIS TIME

BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN BARACK OBAMA, CRIME, FERGUSON SHOOTING, LAW ENFORCEMENT, RACE AND RACIAL BIAS

Watching the Ferguson mob rioting for fun and looting for the traditional reasons live on television last night, I didn’t see much “anger” in evidence. The arson and destruction looked premeditated and deliberate, an orgy of opportunity.

Was it an accident that the orgy commenced as President Obama urged calm? (The White House has posted the text of his remarks and a video of his statement here.) It was either a remarkable coincidence or yet another example of the Obama touch. The man is King Midas in reverse.

Obama was the last man we needed to hear from last night. He could have served a useful purpose if he had asked Al Sharpton to pack it in and stay away from Ferguson, but the racial hustle is the family business.

If anger was not obviously in evidence among the mob in Ferguson, the same could not be said about the mob in Washington. As he read his statement, Obama was seething. He took the failure of reality to conform to the prescribed racial script personally.

As well he might have. Obama had already invoked events in Ferguson in his speech at the United Nations this past September. Mentioning ISIS and its famously non-Islamic “violent extremism,” Obama juxtaposed it with America’s “failure” and “our own racial and ethnic tensions” in “the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri.”

“Failure” is right. “[T]here are issues in which the law too often feels as if it is being applied in discriminatory fashion,” Obama intoned last night. Was the “feeling” warranted in this case?

Obama wasn’t saying. Of course, he’s made a fruitful living on the feeling and the Democratic Party has staked its future on it.

We hear incessantly of racial disparities in law enforcement, school discipline, and everything else down the line. We never hear of the underlying behavioral disparities that are reflected in the numerical racial disparities.

“I’ve instructed Attorney General Holder to work with cities across the country to help build better relations between communities and law enforcement,” Obama said last night. Again, Obama could have served a useful purpose ordering Holder to stay put until his time in office is up. His “work” with cities is all about suppressing “racial disparities” by ignoring behavioral disparities, including the behavioral disparities that the rioters in Ferguson have put on display for all to see.

Speaking of disparities, I return to the disparity between Obama’s words urging calm and his seething anger over the outcome of the state’s grand jury proceedings. It’s not over yetand Obama is not conceding an inch to the reality that has failed to conform to the prescribed script.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/11/the-fire-this-time-2.php