OUR RUNAWAY GOVERNMENT

OUR RUNAWAY GOVERNMENT

BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN ADMINISTRATIVE STATE, OBAMA ADMINISTRATION

The Wall Street Journal offered a remarkable detail in its news story today about the IRS targeting of “icky” conservative groups:

Internal Revenue Service officials considered imposing a tax on large donations to many tax-exempt political organizations in 2011, recently released emails show, a move that could have disproportionately hurt conservative activists. . .

Establishing such groups as tax-exempt entities is attractive, because it allows organizers to keep donors’ identities secret. Imposing a gift tax on those donations could discourage them, advocates fear. The top gift tax rate was 35% in 2011 and is now 40%.

IRS audits of donors to these tax-exempt entities came to light around May, 2011. At the time, the IRS had sent audit notices to a handful of donors. Word quickly spread among lawyers who handle gift tax matters, because the IRS effort was unusual. The agency generally hadn’t sought to impose the gift tax on donations to tax-exempt groups in at least 20 years, perhaps longer, following an unfavorable court ruling and changes in the law by Congress, according to lawyers and IRS documents…

The Wall Street Journal later reported that all the donors who received audit notices had contributed to a now-defunct conservative entity called Freedom’s Watch. [Emphasis added.]

How conveeeenient that only the donors to one organization received audit notices.

But there’s a more fundamental question here: what gives the IRS the authority to change the application of tax law in such a broad way on its own initiative? As the WSJ story explains further:

In May 2011, an attorney in the IRS chief counsel’s office wrote to his superiors that the “plan is to elevate the issue of asserting gift tax on donors to 501(c)(4) organizations,” and seek a decision from the commissioner and the IRS chief counsel.

This is the runaway administrative state in action. Hardly the first instance of this from the Obama Administration. Lawrence Tribe, who is the chief of the “living Constitution” tribe,writes elsewhere in the WSJ today that Obama’s greenhouse gas regulation plan is unconstitutional. (Don’t forget that Tribe thanks Harvard Law student Barack Obama for his research help on one of his most radical articles ever, “The Curvature of Constitutional Space: What Lawyers Can Learn from Modern Physics.” You need to read it, not to believe it.) Anyway, take it away Tribe:

In my view, coping with climate change is a vital end, but it does not justify using unconstitutional means. . . After studying the only legal basis offered for the EPA’s proposed rule, I concluded that the agency is asserting executive power far beyond its lawful authority. . .

Even more fundamentally, the EPA, like every administrative agency, is constitutionally forbidden to exercise powers Congress never delegated to it in the first place. The brute fact is that the Obama administration failed to get climate legislation through Congress. Yet the EPA is acting as though it has the legislative authority anyway to re-engineer the nation’s electric generating system and power grid. It does not. [Emphasis added.]

I don’t think Tribe has any appreciation for how much Obama—an epigone of Woodrow Wilson—thinks taking action without lawful authority or Congressional action is a feature, not a bug. That’s why I highlight “every administrative agency” in Tribe’s quote above. Obama is merely trying to complete Wilson’s ambition of rendering Congress completely subordinate to the president, if not functionally obsolete. This means every administrative agency is now set up to govern on its own. (Phil Hamburger, call your office.) And who might Obama have learned this from (in addition to Wilson)? Why, Tribe and his colleagues at elite law schools. Still, better late than never.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/12/our-runaway-government.php

A Model Senator

BY ANDREW FERGUSON

"In any election,” Tom Coburn often says, “you should vote for the candidate who will give up the most if they win.” All things being equal, we should prefer politicians who have accomplished something in their lives beyond government work—and who are willing to sacrifice it, at least temporarily, to serve the country at a cost to their convenience and comfort. During his 6 years in the House of Representatives and 10 more in the Senate, Coburn has embodied his own principle. He went to medical school after a successful career in business and became an obstetrician when he was 35. He built a lucrative practice in his hometown of Muskogee, Oklahoma. He waited until he was 46 to seek public office, after he’d delivered 4,000 babies. First things first. 

TOM COBURN

AP IMAGES / THE OKLAHOMAN / NATE BILLINGS

Coburn retires from the Senate at the end of this Congress, and we’ll miss him. His résumé makes him an increasingly rare bird in the Washington aviary. Among “antigovernment” Republicans no less than Leviathan-loving liberals, our political ranks brim over with men and women whose careers began in second grade with their first campaign for hall monitor and went on from there, with perhaps a brief detour to law school offering them their closest view of the push and pull of normal commercial life. Coburn calls himself a “citizen legislator,” and the archaic title fits. Single-handed, he restored the phrase “public service” to good repute in Washington, at least for his admirers.He’s done so by being a pest. This is the kindest word we can come up with, though enemies both in and of out of his party prefer surlier tags like crank and headcase. Coburn commandeered every parliamentary maneuver available to a lone senator and used his mastery to slow the Senate down and draw attention to the untoward details of business-as-usual: absurd expenditures, cheap favors for the well-to-do, presidential appointments for dolts and clowns, and every imaginable accounting trick in service of parochial rather than national interests, all of it undertaken on borrowed money. His endless amendments and points of order became a kind of shaming, directed at people who long ago abandoned shame. Coburn trained an outsider’s eye on the work of insiders and delivered the news, usually bad. “If we applied the same standards to Congress that we apply to Enron,” he once said of congressional book-juggling, “everybody here would go to jail.”

But he’s also a gentleman. Much of Coburn’s appeal lies in an apparently bottomless insouciance. (He once mentioned that he was well into college before he even heard of marijuana, which proves that Merle Haggard was right: They really didn’t smoke it in Muskogee.) In his most passionate moments he seemed baffled that the workings of politics and government don’t operate disinterestedly and out in the open, for all to see, as the Founders intended. He spent a fair amount of time in his farewell speech offering apologies. “To those of you through the years whom I have offended, I truly apologize,” he said, though even the sincerest apology couldn’t make him cross his view of the Constitution. “I believe the enumerated powers meant something,” he went on. “When I have offended, I believe it has been on the basis of my belief in Article I, Section 8.” That’s the section listing the things Congress is permitted by the Constitution to do. Senators might want to get staff to look it up. 

A pest and a gentleman and a man of firm principle—but not an ideologue, the off-the-shelf epithet tossed at him by a ditzy press and exasperated colleagues. His pragmatism is another reason he was always worth paying attention to. The lack of ideological rigidity most often served to expose the rigidity of others. When he sponsored a bill to cut agriculture subsidies to people who make more than $1 million a year, he was blocked by the same Democrats who complain that millionaires are undertaxed. When he grudgingly supported the timid tax increases in the Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction proposal, he was disparaged by Republicans who say our debt is a form of national suicide—but nothing to raise taxes over. Most of the time he was asking his colleagues to put their money where their mouths were. And no one ever caught him in double-dealing or hypocrisy. That cut in agriculture subsidies, for example: It applied to millionaires in Oklahoma too. They voted for him anyway.

After his farewell speech, his fellow senators gave Coburn a standing ovation. We join his countless admirers in the general applause, but we can’t help but wonder: Were the senators cheering his speech or his decision to retire and—finally—leave them alone?

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/model-senator_821871.html?utm_source=newsletters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=JVL+12_23_14

Special-Ops Representatives

Special-Ops Representatives

A trio of incoming congressmen bring top-notch national-security experience to Capitol Hill.

By Andrew Johnson

Their résumés are unlike those of any of their soon-to-be colleagues: one from SEAL Team Six; one a member of the team that captured Saddam Hussein; and one who worked undercover for the CIA in some of the world’s most dangerous places.

Montana’s Ryan Zinke, Oklahoma’s Steve Russell, and Texas’s Will Hurd will soon be freshmen members of Congress, but their credentials will probably separate them from their peers. This trio of Republicans, each with his own unique special-operations background, expect to use their experience in national security when they arrive on Capitol Hill next month to help reverse what they see as the country’s declining standing in the world.

“We’re going to look to move the ball up the field,” Zinke told National Review Online, referring to advancing policies that keep the country safe both abroad and at home.

Zinke knows what that’s like. A third-generation Montanan, Zinke, 53, attended the University of Oregon on a football scholarship, racking up multiple accolades as an offensive lineman. After college, he embarked on a 23-year career as a Navy SEAL, during which he was awarded two Bronze Stars for combat. He served two three-year stints as a commander at SEAL Team Six and performed duties in Europe, the Middle East, and the Pacific. He hesitates to share details of his time with the SEALs, whose operations are highly guarded, and calls the Obama White House’s habit of leaking information about their missions, such as in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, an example of the administration’s national-security failings.

Overall, Zinke blames President Obama and his team for involving themselves too much in military decisions — a complaint registered by his former defense secretaries as well. As a result, the military and its missions are put at risk when officials don’t trust the servicemen and women in the field to make these decisions, he says. For example, the White House’s ISIS strategy, “by every estimation, is failing” because of the president’s controlling approach, such as (reportedly) insisting on signing off personally on all strikes. Zinke expects the U.S. to be in the same position in three years unless it changes course. This approach is not only affecting how the military operates, but other areas as well.

“The micromanagement in the military is no different than the micromanagement of any industry in this country under this administration,” he says.

Russell, 51, whom Zinke already calls a friend, also says the country’s position on the world stage has declined on the president’s watch. “Our president, in an effort to end two wars, has us in five now,” he says, adding Syria, Libya, and Ukraine to the list that already included Afghanistan and Iraq. This is part of what inspired him to run.

Before returning home to Oklahoma in 2006 and starting a rifle-manufacturing company, Russell spent 21 years in the Army. While serving in Iraq, he led a unit that was part of the team that captured Saddam Hussein. That experience was the subject of his 2008 memoir, We Got Him! A Memoir of the Hunt and Capture of Saddam Hussein, which earned national media attention on Fox News, on CNN and in Time magazine.

Contrary to public perception, he says, “the capture of Saddam was not a single evening’s event — it was a six-month manhunt. I don’t claim to be the only unit involved or the one that pulled Saddam out of the hole, but I was one of the key leaders.”

Asked to give the president’s foreign policy a grade, Russell is quick with an answer: F. Russell says polls show most Americans feel the same way.

Among Russell’s biggest concerns are proposals to shrink the military to pre–World War II levels. He says cutbacks in training and the loss of experienced personnel will further reduce the country’s capacity to respond to threats. “When you cut them, they’re gone — you don’t get them back,” he says.

Meanwhile, as a former clandestine officer for the Central Intelligence Agency in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Hurd brings a background to Capitol Hill unlike that of any other of his soon-to-be colleagues. He describes himself as “the guy in the back alleys at 4 a.m.,” and it was that sort of experience that earned the support of Robert Gates, John Bolton, and Lieutenant Colonel Allen West on the campaign trail. It was during his time at the CIA – in particular, during briefings with lawmakers – that he realized there was a knowledge gap about security issues on Capitol Hill. This prompted him to jump into the congressional race, in which he knocked off a Democratic incumbent.

Zinke and Russell worry that the dwindling number of congressmen with experience in the military, or national security more broadly, is having an effect. “You want to know why we’re making draconian foreign-policy recommendations and defense recommendations?” Russell says. “One of the biggest concerns is that we have one of the lowest representations of veterans in Congress in decades — we see an even smaller percent of combat veterans.” Zinke echoes Russell. He says that the voices of veterans aren’t “being heard in strong enough numbers” and hopes that, through his presence, they will have “reinforcement” in the years to come.

But for now, this trio is focused on the beginning of the 114th Congress next month. Although it may not be the highest of bars, given the body’s record-low approval, or the toughest challenge they’ve faced in their careers, Zinke says he’s “an optimist” when he looks at the incoming Congress. Republicans will have opportunities to pass meaningful legislation now that the party controls both chambers. The key element will be making sure President Obama doesn’t veto the bills, which will be harder for him to do if they receive Democratic support. In some cases, Zinke is even confident that Congress will have the votes to override a presidential veto if need be. All that will require a results-oriented approach of collaborating and coordinating with different teams, which he, Russell, and Hurd all possess and have successfully employed thanks to their service and training.

“We’ve been trained to solve problems,” he says. “What a sign of relief that is for America.”

“I’ve done it in life-or-death situations,” Russell adds. “I can only imagine we can do it a little better in our government.”

— Andrew Johnson is an editorial associate at National Review Online.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/395066/special-ops-representatives-andrew-johnson

Obama enters the 'fourth quarter'

Entering what he himself calls the “fourth quarter” of his term, President Obama is starting to look at the scoreboard.

Declaring himself “energized” and “excited” by what lies ahead, Obama began his end-of-year press conference with a detour into legacy as he sought to build the case that the country should "enter into the new year with renewed confidence that America's making significant strides where it counts."

The past 12 months were bruising for Obama, with his party badly beaten on Election Day and a series of international crises and domestic policy missteps that battered his approval ratings.

But a flurry of good economic news, a $1.1 trillion budget deal, and a series of executive actions that have energized his liberal base all left the president in a chipper mood — and eager to talk about what he thinks he’s achieved.

The president repeatedly argued that 2014 had been a "breakthrough year" for the country as he prepared to jet off for a prolonged Hawaiian vacation.

"The six years since the [economic] crisis have demanded hard work and sacrifice on everybody's part," Obama said. "But as a country, we have every right to be proud of what we've accomplished: more jobs, more people insured, a growing economy, shrinking deficits, bustling industry, booming energy. 

"Take any metric that you want, America's resurgence is real. We are better off."

The White House has increasingly made moves to promote the president's legacy in recent weeks, with the release of multiple reports touting recent economic gains.

A senior administration official told The Hill earlier this month that economic messaging "will be embedded in everything we do" and "a major part of the story we'll be telling about the past eight years."

The problem for the White House is that public opinion is not yet on its side.

A George Washington University Battleground poll released this week found that 56 percent believed economic conditions were either poor or getting worse. More than three-quarters of survey respondents said they're very or somewhat worried about the current economic climate.

Obama seemed to suggest toward the end of his remarks that the media was partly to blame, telling reporters that he knew their jobs were "to report on all the mistakes that are made and all the bad things that happen, and the crises that look like they're popping."

"But through persistent effort and faith in the American people, things get better," Obama saying, adding that his hope for the new year is that the country could "generate some confidence."

Obama also seemed hopeful that he could reset his oft-strained relationship with lawmakers in the coming year despite the Republican takeover of Congress.

"I'm being absolutely sincere when I say I want to work with this new Congress to get things done, to make those investments, to make sure the government's working better and smarter," Obama said. "We're gonna disagree on some things, but there are gonna be areas of agreement, and we've gotta be able to make that happen."

The president said he expects staff-level discussions with Republican leaders in the coming weeks about a potential framework for corporate tax reform, an area where the White House argues there is the potential to generate new funding for infrastructure.

He declared he was "excited about the prospects for the next couple of years."

Still, the press conference offered reminders of Obama’s looming lame-duck status, and the potential for new crises to permanently sap his power and influence as attention turns to the 2016 presidential race.

He acknowledged the final two years could find him on defense, with Republicans likely to target ObamaCare, consumer protection laws and immigration executive actions. He said he would have to "take into account the issues that they care about."

Still, Obama repeatedly insisted he was "not going to be stopping," a point that was reiterated by ally Organizing for Action, which sent an email under his name titled, “I’m not done.”

"My presidency is entering the fourth quarter," Obama said. "Interesting stuff happens in the fourth quarter. And I'm looking forward to it."

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/227737-obama-enters-the-fourth-quarter

Rand Paul’s Cuba Meltdown

Rand Paul’s Cuba Meltdown 
His mockery of Marco Rubio as “isolationist” reveals Paul as a joke in the foreign-policy arena. 

By Quin Hillyer

• 

(Getty Images)

With his enthusiastic support for Barack Obama’s normalization of relations with Cuba, Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) again shows that his foreign-policy views are wrongheaded. With his bizarre mislabeling of his views and of those who disagree, Paul shows himself (yet again) to be truly ignorant about foreign affairs. And with his juvenile, nasty, strangely personal attacks on fellow Republican senator Marco Rubio of Florida, Paul shows himself temperamentally unsuited for the presidency.

Rand Paul is no conservative; he’s a quack.

First, as for Obama’s policy change, the in-depth arguments against normalizing relations right now have been superbly laid out by the Washington Post, Andrew McCarthy, Rich Lowry, the National Review Online editors, Elliott Abrams, andMark Krikorian, among others. This column won’t rehash all the arguments. Suffice it to say that while there might be some good arguments for asking Congress to modify the economic sanctions against Cuba, establishing “normal” diplomatic relations sends the horrendous message that human rights and liberty are irrelevant — and that we will ignore (or even reward) a half-century of active hostility 90 miles from our shores even though Cuba has never made amends.

In short, one can argue that some forms of economic liberalization might work in Cuba the same way that perestroika did in Russia — to undermine the regime rather than prop it up. But a greater and rightful world power shouldn’t dignify an evil and far lesser power by offering it diplomatic imprimatur free of charge.

Everybody is entitled to be wrong occasionally, of course. If Paul’s error were only that he conflated the embargo with fully normalized relations, while making a free-market argument for lifting the former, it would be one thing. It’s entirely another thing, and bizarre, to completely up-end the meaning of the word “isolationist” and use it as a cudgel against Senator Rubio, who is far less conventionally isolationist than he. This continues a long pattern of Paul demonstrating a real ignorance of basic concepts of defense and foreign policy.

In October, Paul made a speech at the Center for the National Interest in which he outlined what he called a new “conservative realism.” He was clearly trying to shed the label of “isolationist” that has hobbled his stature among large swaths of the Republican electorate. It was a strange performance. His version of “realism,” despite some tough-talking verbiage, amounted to asserting that “the best outcome” America could have achieved in Iraq was “stalemate”; that “our interventions in foreign countries may well exacerbate . . . hatred”; that the world “does not have an Islam problem” but instead a “dignity problem”; that you “can’t solve a dignity problem with military force”; that “we need a foreign policy that recognizes our limits”; that “in the end, only the people of the region can destroy ISIS,” which will happen when “civilized Islam steps up to defeat this barbaric aberration”; that in the Black Sea region we must “achieve a diplomatic settlement that takes into account Russia’s long-standing ties with Ukraine”; and that “though we will not abide injustice, we will not instigate war.” (Will we never “instigate war” to stop injustice? Would Paul have opposed the rescue of Grenada? The ouster of Noriega from Panama? The moral cause of evicting the Communist North from South Korea?)

Taken individually, most (but not all) of those pronouncements might be defensible. Together, they paint a portrait of a man as uncomfortable with American military and diplomatic robustness, and as naïve about the real nature of our enemies, as any senator this side of George McGovern or Barack Obama.

Remember, this is a man who wants to put an end to all foreign aid. Never mind the vast diplomatic advantages that the aid buys us, or the humanitarian problems that at least some aid helps solve. Yet he has the gall to call others “isolationist.”

This is a man who repeatedly has blamed American actions, not jihadist ideology, for having “created the chaos” in the Middle East and for making us “less safe in Iraq.” Really, Senator? Maybe no safer — though many of us would disagree — but less safe? Even more ignorantly, spectacularly so, were his assertions that “there were no WMDs, that Hussein, Qaddafi, and Assad were no threat to us.” No threat at all?

Worse, as I outlined earlier this year, Paul has repeatedly slandered Dick Cheney and even Ronald Reagan with outlandishly absurd lies masquerading as history. Anybody who still thinks Reagan armed Osama bin Laden is so monumentally ignorant and prone to conspiracy theories as to be dangerous.

One could write much more about the perilous loopiness of Paul’s antipathy to American arms and diplomatic robustness, but let’s concentrate on his meltdown concerning Cuba. Alone among potential Republican presidential candidates, Paul wholeheartedly embraced Obama’s prostration to the Castro brothers. Rubio, whose father emigrated from Cuba, quite naturally bristled when asked about Paul’s comments by Fox News’s Megyn Kelly: “Like many people who have been opining, he has no idea what he’s talking about.” Rubio then explained at length what he meant, without mentioning Paul again. It was neither a premeditated attack on Paul nor a deliberately personal one; he was taking aim at the “many people” he thinks are wrong on the issue.

Paul then had a hissy fit. First he took to Facebook with a two-paragraph, full-scale assault on Rubio’s position, including this strange passage: “Seems to me, Senator Rubio is acting like an isolationist who wants to retreat to our borders and perhaps build a moat. I reject this isolationism.”

How, pray tell, is it “isolationist” to take an active stance to penalize another country? Existing sanctions against Cuba don’t isolate the United States; they isolate Cuba in ways that, as the Washington Post has pointed out, have actually worked to keep Cuba’s harms in check. To call American policy “isolationist” means that the United States is retreating behind its own borders, not that we are insisting (with significant, if tacit, support from other nations) that an evil regime remains within its own.

Paul didn’t stop there. Continuing his highly personal attack on Rubio, Paul emitted a series of at least four Tweets, each mentioning Rubio by name, mocking the Floridian and again accusing him of wanting to “build a moat.”

This is the kind of name-calling that middle-school debate-club members resort to, putting down others with snark to hide their own adolescent insecurities. Paul’s tweets were not so much reasoned debate as a variation of “yeah, and so’s your mother!”

Not only is this sort of foolishness unpresidential, it’s unsenatorial. And in an age when Harry Reid has dramatically downgraded the very notion of what it means to “senatorial,” one must work mighty hard to fall short of even the new, lowered standards.

Let’s not forget that Rubio is a Senate colleague of Paul’s, of the same party. And he’s somebody whose background — his life experience, family history, and political views — are profoundly rooted in a Cuban-American milieu that should earn him at least a little respect, even if Paul disagrees with him on points of policy.

But this is part of a pattern with Paul. He seems utterly unable to disagree on any matter involving arms or diplomacy without insulting his adversaries or questioning their conclusions, intelligence, or motives — or all three.

Thus, in Paul’s world, John McCain met with the Islamic State! Cheney started a war to enrich Halliburton! The “war caucus” in the Reagan years, including Reagan’s State Department, supported “radical jihad”!

At least he hasn’t yet called Dwight Eisenhower “a conscious, deliberate, and dedicated agent of the Soviet conspiracy.” (Although Paul did employ a long-time racial provocateur — to put it kindly — who once averred that “John Wilkes Booth’s heart was in the right place” when he assassinated Lincoln.)

Still, enough is enough. Nobody should ever again take seriously any Paulite pronouncements outside of domestic affairs. Months ago I thought he was a menace; now he’s just a joke.

— Quin Hillyer is a contributing editor for National Review Online. Follow him on Twitter: @QuinHillyer.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/395186/rand-pauls-cuba-meltdown-quin-hillye
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EARTH’S CLIMATE SHOWS 2,000-YEAR COOLING TREND

EARTH’S CLIMATE SHOWS 2,000-YEAR COOLING TREND

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN CLIMATE

People who swallow global warming alarmism almost never know anything about the Earth’s climatic history. Next time one of your friends or relatives starts giving you the global warming routine, ask him or her to graph the temperature history of the last 500,000 years. Or 20,000 years. Or 2,000. Trust me: the supposed climate expert won’t be able to do it. Yet putting the modest temperature increase of the latter half of the 20th century into historical context is the first prerequisite of any intelligent evaluation.

From Watts Up With That? comes a report on a new tree-ring study that covers the last 2,000 years. Are tree-ring analyses valid? I don’t know, but the alarmists use them all the time, and they are certainly more reliable over a relatively reasonable time frame like 2,000 years. The study finds that global temperatures have been gradually declining over that time:

In a paper published in the Journal of Quaternary Science, Esper et al. (2014) write that tree-ring chronologies of maximum latewood density (MXD) “are most suitable to reconstruct annually resolved summer temperature variations of the late Holocene.”

The late Holocene is the geologic era in which we are living.

As the international team of researchers from the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Greece, Sweden and Switzerland describes it, this history depicts “a long-term cooling trend of -0.30°C per 1,000 years over the Common Era in northern Europe” (see figure below). Most important of all, however, they note that their temperature reconstruction “has centennial-scale variations superimposed on this trend,” which indicate that “conditions during Medieval and Roman times were probably warmer than in the late 20th century,” when the previously-rising post-Little Ice Age mean global air temperature hit a ceiling of sorts above which it has yet to penetrate.

This graph shows the long-term cooling trend as well as the relatively wide variations on smaller time scales. Click to enlarge:

This finding is consistent with other studies indicating that the Earth is currently cooler than it has been about 90% of the time since the end of the last Ice Age. So, could it get warmer? Yes, and with any luck, it will.

A Dictator’s Best Friend

A Dictator’s Best Friend

Obama throws our adversaries a lifeline.

By Matthew Continetti

‘It’s a sad day for freedom,” Marco Rubio told Bret Baier after President Obama announced he would normalize relations with Cuba. Not a sad day, senator: a sad year.

If there was a theme to 2014, it was Obama’s persistence in bailing out dictators and theocrats from political scrapes and economic hardships, his tenacity in pursuit of engagement with America’s adversaries no matter the cost to our strength, principles, credibility, or alliances.

In this president the thugs in Havana and Caracas, Damascus and Tehran, Moscow and Naypyidaw and Beijing have no better friend. For these bullies, these evildoers, these millenarians and sectarians, Barack Obama is more than a dupe. He is an insurance policy.

Cuba is but the latest example of this president’s failing to exercise leverage in the pursuit of American strength, security, and prestige. Here are the Castro brothers, decrepit and spent, their revolution a joke, their economy in peril thanks to the collapse in oil prices brought on by a strong dollar and increased U.S. supply.

The China option — foreign direct investment from America — is Raul and Fidel’s only play to sustain power over the society they have impoverished. And Obama says yes, yes to everything: an embassy, an ambassador, diplomatic relations, travel and exchange, status among nations, removal from the list of state sponsors of terror, and a serious opportunity to lessen the embargo that has kept the dictators caged for decades.

In return, the Castro brothers give up . . . well, what? Alan Gross, a political prisoner and persecuted religious minority who shouldn’t have been imprisoned in the first place? A second man who has been in captivity for decades? Thin gruel.

No promise of elections, no declaration of religious freedom, no demilitarization, no opening up of Cuban prisons to international inspection. Not even a pledge that salaries from U.S. companies operating in Cuba at indentured-servitude rates — the minimum wage is $19 a month — will be paid directly to employees rather than passed through the bloated, corrupt, suffocating state.

This isn’t giving away the store. This is giving away the shopping mall, town center, enterprise zone. And it is entirely in character with President Obama’s foreign policy.

In the late summer of 2013, Bashar Assad was caught using chemical weapons against his own people. The president and his secretary of state decried this violation of international norms and pledged, in televised addresses, to punish the Syrian tyrant for wanton slaughter and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The application of deadly force against Assad’s air force and military installations would cripple the regime and hasten the end of a civil war that has taken the lives of some 200,000 Syrians. But suddenly Obama reversed course. He signed on to a Russian proposal to prevent a military strike in exchange for Assad’s “giving up” his barbaric tools.

Today, Bashar Assad remains in power, his opposition is divided, he has entered into an alliance of convenience with the medieval Islamic State that governs from Raqaa to Mosul. The weapons? Earlier this month the U.S. government — Barack Obama’s government — accused Syria of ongoing “systematic use” of chemical arms. I repeat: ongoing.

Not only has Obama failed to achieve his stated aims of removing Assad and ending the WMD threat. The situation is more dangerous than it was a year ago because the Islamic State’s menagerie of Saddam loyalists and itinerant holy warriors is securing ground from which to launch attacks on targets throughout the world. Baathist dictators, chemical agents, refugees, Islamic armies are the consequence of this president’s curious mixture of false promises and aggrieved passivity.

Barack Obama threw the Castros a lifeline, rescued Assad. But these monsters are not even the most dangerous of the despots he has enabled. An Iranian nuke would change the strategic equation of the Middle East and thus the world. Not only would Israel be threatened, so would America because of Iran’s past use of terrorist proxies and increasingly sophisticated missile tech. And the threat would increase as Sunni and Turkic nations developed or bought WMD to deter the Persian hegemon.

 By the end of last year the economic sanctions passed by Congress over the Obama administration’s objections, as well as the shale energy revolution, had brought the Iranian economy to the brink of collapse. The moment had arrived to rally the West. Demonstrate a credible threat of force—perhaps by crippling Assad’s air defenses—and force the Iranians into a defensive posture.

What did Obama do? He agreed to lift sanctions on Iran, infusing the theocratic economy with billions of dollars, in exchange for entering direct negotiations and a few paltry concessions. The centrifuges kept spinning, Iran cheated on the terms of this incredibly generous interim agreement, Iranian missile development, international terrorism, support for radical Islam, and human rights abuses went on.

Obama said U.S. advocates of sanctions were warmongers. His underlings called Israel’s prime minister a chickens***. And when the interim deal reached its expiration date, when Iran’s undeterred commitment to achieving nuclear status was obvious to all, when the ayatollah was tweeting his plan to eliminate Israel from the earth, Obama extended the deal and economic relief just so he would not be exposed as a failure.

Not even Iran, however, has invaded its neighbors as unabashedly and aggressively as Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which in less than eight years has annexed parts of Georgia and a critical region of Ukraine. Some 4,300 people have been killed since Putin’s undeclared invasion of eastern Ukraine last spring, not counting the hundreds who died when a pro-Russian missile battery destroyed a civilian airliner.

Obama’s response has been limited to sanctions on Putin and his inner circle. He has not provided the heavy arms necessary to roll back Russian advances in the east, nor has he launched a new Marshall Plan to sustain the economy of free Ukraine until Putin’s illegal war comes to an end. Obama’s idea of military aid is to send MREs.

This week Putin reached an impasse. Changes in the global economy — a strengthening America, plunging commodity prices, spooked foreign investors — have provoked the worst crisis in Russia since the late 1990s. The sanctions Obama has already approved will worsen the pain.

This is a point of maximum leverage. A public and generous commitment of financial and military aid to Ukraine, an assertion of U.S. military and ideological might, could expel the Russians from the east and inspire the democratic opposition in Moscow. What will Obama do?

Two words: Blow it. The president has agreed to sign a tough sanctions bill passed unanimously by Congress only because it contains loopholes that will allow him to shirk its harshest and most effective provisions. I do not hear him calling for increased hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, including on federal lands, I have missed his pledge to restore America’s military and rebuild a force to deter the bear, I am betting he won’t expand natural gas exports, or increase the number of military advisers in Kiev, or expel Russia from the G8. Opportunity missed.

Like the Castros, Assad, and the mullahs, Putin is in danger, his grip tenuous, his options narrowing. Lucky for him, lucky for the other bad guys, Putin can count on the American president to bail him out. Forget about standing up for a U.S. –led international order: Obama won’t even respond to North Korea’s act of war against the United States, its cyber-attack on a U.S. film studio that succeeded in limiting free speech from thousands of miles away. And Obama says he’s against bullying!

“Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,” wrote Yeats, “And say my glory was I had such friends.” Dictators don’t have many friends. But they have Barack Obama.

— Matthew Continetti is the editor-in-chief of the Washington Free Beacon, where this column first appeared. © 2014 All rights reserved

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/395120/dictators-best-friend-matthew-continetti

As Vermont Goes . . .

As Vermont Goes . . .

The Green Mountain State’s liberal governor has pulled the plug on single-payer.

By John Fund

The one state that not only embraced Obamacare but insisted on going beyond it to a full single-payer system was Vermont, the haven of hippies and expatriate New Yorkers, which has become one of the most liberal states in the nation. In 2011, it adopted a form of neighboring Canada’s government-financed health care and promised to implement it by 2017. (And Jonathan Gruber was a key architect of this plan as well as of Obamacare.) This week, however, Governor Peter Shumlin, a Democrat, admitted the state couldn’t afford the plan’s $2 billion price tag and consequent sky-high taxes, and pulled the plug. The lessons for Obamacare are obvious and profound.

Scott Milne, the little-known Republican who opposed Shumlin in last month’s election and came within 1 percentage point of winning the most votes, isn’t surprised. “During the campaign I said that single-payer is dead — I’m telling you that now, and Peter Shumlin’s going to wait until after the election,” Milne told the Burlington Free Press. Milne is still running for governor, since Shumlin won only 46 percent of the vote, and Vermont requires the state legislature to elect the governor in January if no candidate wins the majority. Despite his prescience, however, Milne is highly unlikely to persuade the Democratic legislature to substitute him for Shumlin.

But Milne certainly has won a moral victory. Lieutenant Governor Phil Scott, a Republican, called the cancellation of singe-payer a victory for “overtaxed Vermonters.” Noting that the state’s fiscal plan for implementing single-payer was now almost two years late, he said in a statement: “We’ve already spent far too much money exploring this idea, and the discussion has paralyzed our business community.”

Business realities weighed heavily in Shumlin’s retreat. His experts calculated the state would need an 11.5 percent payroll tax and an additional income tax of up to 9.5 percent. That’s California-style taxation. “My health-care costs would have gone up by 61 percent if that plan had gone through,” Win Smith, the owner of the Sugarbush ski resort, told reporters. “If there were that 9 percent [income tax] on employees, many would have been paying more than they’re paying now. It would have been a lose-lose.” Shumlin admitted it would be irresponsible for him to be “pushing prematurely for single-payer” when “the risk of economic shock is too high at this time.”

But like any good liberal, Shumlin insisted on painting a rosy fantasy that he would bring back a single-payer plan. “[Medicare] took 31 years to become law. Medicaid took 50 years to pass; Social Security took 25 years,” he said in a statement. “Our time will come.” James Haslam of the Vermont Workers’ Center wasn’t buying it, calling Governor Shumlin’s retreat “a slap in the face” of single-payer backers.

Health-care experts from outside Vermont point out some of the implications. “It’s a very liberal state, and its leaders spent years trying to design a system that would work,” Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute observes. “If Vermont can’t make it work, single-payer can’t work anywhere in the country where the economy has free and competitive markets. It’s more evidence that centralized government health care is simply not workable in America.”

Vermont’s decision should embolden Republicans in Congress and state governments to fight harder against Obamacare. While President Obama insists he will tolerate no changes in his program that he doesn’t unilaterally declare through personal whim, his stubbornness may be more difficult to sustain in coming months. The Supreme Court is set to hand down a ruling in June that could declare unconstitutional the subsidies for low-income people in 37 federally run insurance exchanges. The heart of Obamacare would be cut out should the Supreme Court rule that the exchanges are invalid.

Transition rules and discretionary budget accounts could delay the loss of insurance by policy-holders for a while in those states, but a more permanent fix will be needed.

Republicans in Congress would be right to insist that the price of their passing such a legislative fix should involve massive reforms in Obamacare. Republicans in the 24 state governments where they completely control lawmaking would be foolish not to demand complete freedom from Washington’s rules dictating how they run their out-of-control Medicaid programs as the price for stabilizing the exchange markets in their states.

Nancy Pelosi famously said of Obamacare that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” The reality is that Obamacare had to pass before it became clear just how unworkable it is. Vermont’s decision is a canary in the coal mine for liberal health-care-reform zealots. It represents a warning signal that in order to avoid further economic and health-care dislocations they will have to, like liberals in Vermont, give in to reality. The alternative is to face even more punishing political consequences in 2016 than they did this November.

— John Fund is national-affairs correspondent for NRO.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/395045/vermont-goes-john-fund

TEENAGER SHOT IN MISSOURI: SO WHAT?

TEENAGER SHOT IN MISSOURI: SO WHAT?

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN CRIME, MEDIA BIAS, RACE AND RACIAL BIAS

One of this morning’s big news stories is the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Antonio Martin by a policeman in Berkeley, Missouri–a place that, the Associated Press tells us helpfully, is “just a few miles from Ferguson.” The Antonio Martin shooting is currently the top story on Google News, and it is being headlined on pretty much every newspaper’s website.

But why? What makes this a major news story? The Michael Brown and Eric Garner stories that preceded it, obviously. But what made them worldwide news? Or, to go back in time, what made the Trayvon Martin case a cause célèbre, commented on by the President of the United States and followed breathlessly by millions?

The Antonio Martin case won’t be as big a story as Brown’s and Garner’s deaths. Rather than being your typical “unarmed” 300-pounder, Martin apparently pulled a 9 mm. pistol on the policeman who responded by shooting him. But every shooting of a civilian by a police officer is now deemed an important news story–with the critical qualification that the civilian, but not the officer, be black.

Are these shootings worldwide news because of an epidemic of racist murders being carried out by American policemen? That is what Eric Holder, Bill DeBlasio and Al Sharpton would have us believe. But it obviously isn’t true. Heather Mac Donald writes:

Police killings of blacks are an extremely rare feature of black life and are a minute fraction of black homicide deaths. The police could end all killings of civilians tomorrow and it would have no effect on the black homicide risk, which comes overwhelmingly from other blacks. In 2013, there were 6,261 black homicide victims in the U.S.—almost all killed by black civilians—resulting in a death risk in inner cities that is ten times higher for blacks than for whites. None of those killings triggered mass protests; they are deemed normal and beneath notice. The police, by contrast, according to published reports, kill roughly 200 blacks a year, most of them armed and dangerous, out of about 40 million police-civilian contacts a year. Blacks are in fact killed by police at a lower rate than their threat to officers would predict. In 2013, blacks made up 42 percent of all cop killers whose race was known, even though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. The percentage of black suspects killed by the police nationally is 29 percent lower than the percentage of blacks mortally threatening them.

These stories about the killings of African-American men by police officers (or by a “neighborhood watch captain,” in Trayvon Martin’s case) are all what my long-time radio and podcast partner Brian Ward calls “stories of choice.” They are plucked from a nearly endless supply of sad events that occur daily in a nation of 315 million, and are promoted because they further a political narrative. An unholy alliance of activists and newspaper reporters and editors tries to distort our perception of reality by giving undue emphasis to them. Then, of course, reality begins to catch up with perception, and we have riots, murders of police officers, and so on. But understand that the decision to promote these stories, in preference to others that are equally or more newsworthy, is a choice that is consciously made by people with a political agenda.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/12/teenager-shot-in-missouri-so-what.php