Slick Willie to the rescue:

“If they [the Republicans] said, look, that now is not the time for big tax increases to harm the recovery, they would be right,” Clinton told ABC News in an exclusive interview at the Clinton Global Initiative America conference in Chicago. “But it’s also right to say that now’s not the time for big spending cuts.

“What I’d like to see them do is agree on the outlines of a 10-year plan and agree not to start either the revenue hikes or the spending cuts until we’ve got this recovery underway,” Clinton added. “The confidence that the Republicans say would be given to investors with a budget plan, they’d get whether we started this year or next year or the year after that, for that matter.”

Charlie Brown never wised up about Lucy and the football.

Remember: promises Congress makes for future Congresses to keep are worthless.

Unfortunately, however, Clinton fears Republicans’ “ideological conviction” about never raising taxes recalls the lead-up to government shutdowns in the ’90s, adding that the pressure on GOP candidates to toe the ideological line could hamstring their bids to unseat President Obama.

Ideological conviction = principle. Clinton is an unprincipled man.

“They were in a similar anti-government fever, anti-tax fever in 1995 until, you know, the struggle went on for a year and they shut the government down twice,” Clinton said. “The public made a judgment that that was not right. And then we finally broke through. It wound up with the balanced budget act and forced surpluses and real prosperity.”

ABC News

It was a tense moment in a Poughkeepsie courtroom when a 15-year-old girl who had been the victim of sexual abuse for four years was asked to point out the man who had violated her. The girl seemed to freeze.

Then a furry snout and wet brown nose came up over the stand and nudged her arm.

The girl’s demeanor changed and she was able to point out the man in the courtroom and continue with her testimony. The man was found guilty and is facing 25 years to life in prison.

The snout that helped the girl overcome the difficult moment on June 13 belongs to Rose, affectionately called Rosie, an 11-year-old golden retriever service dog whose specialty is comforting people.

Obama’s press conference got things stirred up.

Radio host and author Hugh Hewitt played the tape and concluded that Obama is an economic illiterate and that the USA is “between presidents.”

But credit MSNBC for concision.

MSNBC senior political analyst Mark Halperin was suspended on Thursday by the cable network after he called President Obama “a dick” on a popular morning show and then quickly apologized.

“I thought he was a dick yesterday,” Halperin, who also is an editor-at large for Time, said on Morning Joe, referring to the President’s conduct during his press conference.

Buckle your seat belts low and tight, America, there’s going to be turbulence all the way to Election Day, 2012. It’s only the summer of 2011 and already we have kids vs. corporate jets, courtesy of the White House political machine.

The most newsworthy bit of President Obama’s press conference certainly had nothing to do with economics or America’s precarious fiscal position. Recall: The president’s most recent budget plan would add $9.5 trillion in cumulative new debt over the next decade. Eliminating a tax break for the purchase of corporate jets – it’s called “accelerated depreciation” and Obama has endorsed the deduction twice before to boost growth and create jobs – would save $3 billion, or 0.03 percent of that total.

Yet this is the place where the president has chosen to stand his ground, to say “Here and no further!” Obama astride the bridge Khazad Dûm. He challenged the GOP to “go talk to your constituents, the Republican constituents, and ask them, are they willing to compromise their kids’ safety so that some corporate-jet owner continues to get a tax break.”

Really? Would the food safety system – or National Weather Service or National Institutes of Health – would suffer if government extracts a few hundred million less a year from taxpayers? Is Uncle Sam really running such a lean-and-mean operation? Of course not. McKinsey consultants have found that if the U.S. public sector could just halve the productivity gap with the private sector, its productivity would be as much as 15 percent higher and would generate annual savings of up to $300 billion a year. If the president wants to get rid of corporate tax breaks, he should offset them by lowering the sky-high U.S. corporate tax rate while also cutting spending.

A smirking Obama had this to say at his presser today.

You know, Malia and Sasha generally finish their homework a day ahead of time. Malia is 13 and Sasha is 10. It is impressive. They don’t wait until the night before. They’re not pulling all-nighters,” he said to laughter from the assembled press corps. “They’re 13 and 10. You know, Congress can do the same thing. If you know you’ve got to do something, just do it.”

Obama’s debt commission issued its bleak report last December. Obama has ignored it for seven months. Maybe his daughters should spank him.

Then the  golfer-in-chief had the nerve to call Congress lazy.

“They need to do their job. Now’s the time to go ahead and make the tough choices. That’s why they’re called leaders. And I’ve already shown that I’m willing to make decisions that are very tough and you know, give my base of voters further reason to give me a hard time, but it’s got to be done, so there’s no point in procrastinating.

Ever the politician, never the statesman.

There’s no point in putting it off. You know, we’ve got to get this done. And if by the end of this week we have not seen substantial progress then I think members of Congress need to understand we’re going to have to start cancelling things and stay here until we get it done. They’re in one week. They’re out one week. And then they’re saying Obama’s got to step in – you need to be here, I’ve been here, I’ve been doing Afghanistan, bin Laden, and the Greek crisis. You stay here. Let’s get it done.”

Obama played a round of golf the day before the Bin Laden raid.

Congressional recesses are not vacations taken on Air Force One. They are intended to let members of Congress return to their districts and constituents.

We noted the laughably wrong Time magazine cover story yesterday. Here’s another, easier to read, skewering of the Time article.

Rob Natelson:

One might have hoped Mr. Stengel to be knowledgeable about issues of constitutional meaning. A Rhodes Scholar and Princeton grad, he was president of the National Constitution Center for several years.  But his essay demonstrates that he has a long way to go—and that he should have become more fluent before presuming to instruct Time readers in the subject.

Correcting all of the irrelevancies, distortions, and errors in his essay of nearly 5000 words would take far longer than it is worth. Below is just a sample:

Stengel: “Here are a few things the framers did not know about: World War II. DNA. Sexting. Airplanes. The atom. Television. Medicare. Collateralized debt obligations. The germ theory of disease. Miniskirts. The internal combustion engine. Computers. Antibiotics. Lady Gaga.”

Answer:  Well, yes, but so what? What, really, is the impact of miniskirts on whether the Founders’ views are relevant today? Is Mr. Stengel saying that sexting renders James Madison irrelevant? Or consider it this way: The Montana Constitution (a favorite of “progressives”) was created in 1972, before sexting—or email—was invented. Does that render the Montana Constitution illegitimate or obsolete?

Airplanes? If they fly across state lines, Congress can regulate them under the Interstate Commerce Clause. Lady Gaga? Her performances are (largely) protected from federal interference by the First Amendment.  So what really is the problem here?

Stengel: “People on the right and left constantly ask what the framers would say about some event that is happening today. What would the framers say about whether the drones over Libya constitute a violation of Article I, Section 8, which gives Congress the power to declare war? Well, since George Washington didn’t even dream that man could fly, much less use a global-positioning satellite to aim a missile, it’s hard to say what he would think.”

Answer: No it’s not.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, our Libya actions clearly fall under the definition of “war” as the Founders understood it, and the Constitution clearly requires the President to get congressional approval.  (Incidentally, Washington would have known about manned flight, which began in hot air balloons several years before the Constitution was written; as a former general, he also would have considered some of the military applications.)

Stengel: “What would the framers say about whether a tax on people who did not buy health insurance is an abuse of Congress’s authority under the commerce clause? Well, since James Madison did not know what health insurance was and doctors back then still used leeches, it’s difficult to know what he would say.”

Answer: These are really confused sentences.  “Taxes” are authorized by Article I, Section 8, Clause 1, not by the Commerce Clause (I-8-3). Four courts have now held that the individual mandates in Obamacare are not taxes, but attempted commercial exactions. This conclusion is accurate constitutionally. As for leeches: Changes in methods and financing of health care may be relevant to some constitutional issues, but it is hard to see how they are relevant to the constitutionality of Obamacare.

D’oh!

During President Obama’s press conference today, he scolded Republicans for demanding tax cuts for corporate jets.

From the Associated Press in 2009:

Just a few months after lawmakers scolded auto executives for flying to Washington in private jets, Congress approved a tax break in the stimulus package to help businesses buy their own planes.

The incentive — first used to help plane makers recover from the 2001 terror attacks — sharply reduces the up front tax bill for companies who buy assets like business planes.

…probably the goofiest in a long line of Illinois governors to go to prison, Blago the Nitwit.

Roger Simon in the WSJ

…President Obama, as nominal head of his party, had a perfect right to tell Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich whom he favored to fill his seat, and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, “conveyed the merits of several people,” according to the White House’s official report.

Mr. Obama wanted his close friend and adviser, Valerie Jarrett, to get the plum job. But he was not willing to pay for it or give the governor a cabinet job or an ambassadorship in return.

Blago was outraged. “For nothing?” he says on the tapes, played for the jury at his trials. He curses the president. And then he gets an idea. Maybe he can make an end-run to the first lady. “He’s a lot more henpecked than me,” Blago says. “He listens to Michelle.”

It is dreamland stuff. Crazy stuff. Like when in his sometimes tearful, sometimes bold, and often bizarre self-defense from the witness stand, Blago tells the bewildered jury, “I had a man-crush on Alexander Hamilton.” This was certainly one of the odder statements made in the history of jurisprudence, to say nothing of the history of Alexander Hamilton.

At his first trial, Blago’s lawyers keep him off the stand and he gets a hung jury except for one count. The defense decides to put Blago on the stand for the second trial. Common in the movies, this is rare in real life. It usually happens for one of two reasons: The defense fears the prosecution has proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt, or the defendant insists on it, sure that his charm will win over jurors in the same way it won over voters.

So Blago takes the oath and tells the jury of his insecurities, a middle-class kid going to Northwestern University where he “was afraid that I wouldn’t measure up to the other kids.”

But, he had one thing going for him. “Those were the days when your hairbrush was an extension of your hand,” he said.

The jury had already listened to tapes in which Blago threatens to withhold $8 million in state funding from the state’s largest children’s hospital, serving mostly the children of the poor, unless he gets a $50,000 campaign contribution. And now he is telling the jury about his hairbrush?

Having risen to high office due almost solely to the political machine of his father-in-law, Chicago alderman and ward boss Richard Mell, Blago is now exposed to the jury for what he really is. “You could cut off his head and he wouldn’t be any dumber,” a Chicago insider tells me.

Al Capone ran hooch, cheated on his taxes and undoubtedly killed people. But he never threatened to throw poor, sick kids out onto the streets…

Arctic in danger of becoming ice free by 2009, says 1989 NYT article.

LA Times on how difficult it is for a police state to police the food supply.

Modern Chinese agriculture includes feeding birth control pills to fish, concocting a glaze that makes pork look like expensive beef and dying wheat buns to look like expensive black rice versions.

To eat, drink and be merry in China is done at a risk: Weddings increasingly end with trips to the emergency room. During the May Day holiday weekend, 192 people from two weddings elsewhere in Hunan fell so ill they had to be hospitalized.

Since 2008, when six children died and 300,000 were sickened by melamine-tainted baby formula, the Chinese government has enacted ever-more-strict policies to ensure food safety, including a directive last month from the Supreme Court calling for the death penalty in cases where people die as a result of tainted foods.

It hasn’t helped. If anything, China’s food scandals are becoming increasingly frequent and bizarre.

In May, a Shanghai woman who had left uncooked pork on her kitchen table woke up in the middle of the night and noticed that the meat was emitting a blue light, like something out of a science fiction movie. Experts pointed to phosphorescent bacteria, blamed for another case of glow-in-the-dark pork last year.

Farmers in eastern Jiangsu province complained to state media last month that their watermelons had exploded “like landmines” after they mistakenly applied too much growth hormone in hopes of increasing their size.

Such incidents cut to the quick of the weaknesses in China’s monolithic one-party system. Chinese authorities are painfully aware that people will lose confidence in a government that cannot give them assurances about what they eat. They are equally aware that tainted foods could cause what communist authorities fear most: social unrest.

“Food safety concerns the people’s interests and livelihoods, social stability and the future of socialism with Chinese characteristics,” is how the Supreme Court put it in its notice last month accompanying the announcement of the death penalty.

The government’s efforts are looking frantic.

Sounds like they need a good muckraker, but no…

…In 2006, Zhou published a book about the Chinese food industry that would extinguish the heartiest appetite. He wrote about foods tainted with pesticides, industrial salts, bleaches, paints and, especially nauseating, imitation soy sauce made from clippings swept up from hairdressers’ floors, sold for 5 cents per pound and sent to factories that extract from it an amino acid solution. Zhou wrote that fish farmers confessed to pouring so many antibiotics and hormones into their ponds that “they never eat the fish that they farm.”

Although Zhou’s book has been published in 10 countries — it sold 50,000 copies in Japan alone — it is not available in China. After failing to get the book in shops, receiving threats from police and getting beaten up by thugs, Zhou left China in 2008. He now lives in Germany.

“In China, the reflexive desire to cover up and hide has trumped transparency and the need to protect public health,” said Phelim Kine, a researcher for Human Rights Watch.

by Burt Prelutsky

In America, where the major networks and some of the minor ones, together with most dailies and news magazines, along with 90% of the actors, writers and directors in Hollywood, are dedicated to disseminating left-wing propaganda, it is quite natural for those of us on the Right to feel like we’re waging war behind enemy lines.

Fortunately, we still have a major presence on talk radio and the Internet. In a way, it’s reminiscent of the bad old days when the Iron Curtain was in vogue and it took Radio Free Europe to boost the morale of those in Soviet-dominated countries like Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, and let the oppressed people know they weren’t alone and forgotten.

Perhaps that’s why it saddens me when I see Fox News, in its attempt to be fair and balanced, provide so much face time to Alan Colmes, Leslie Marshall, Bob Beckel, Juan Williams, Alicia Menendez, Al Sharpton, Jon Stewart and Geraldo Rivera. There is, of course, the possibility that their constant presence serves to remind conservative viewers how dangerously deranged liberals are, but with the likes of Obama, Schumer, Biden, Reid, Pelosi, Waxman, Boxer and Eric Holder, constantly on the tube, how much more reminding do we really need?

Speaking for myself, all I require in the way of a reminder is to occasionally tune in NPR. Most recently, I heard some young bonehead doing a hatchet job on Governor Scott Walker. It seems that during his campaign, he promised to create 250,000 jobs in Wisconsin. The reporter jeered that he couldn’t possibly do it, and she then tracked down a few “experts” to confirm her belief. Heck, who doesn’t agree? I suspect even Governor Walker agrees. I mean, unless the governor hires 250,000 new bureaucrats, there’s no way that he could literally deliver on that promise.

What she and her experts failed to grasp, but that the voters of Wisconsin no doubt understood, is that the best that a government — be it state or federal — can do is to create an environment in which business can flourish. Contrary to Obama’s contention that a trillion dollar stimulus would lead to a kazillion shovel-ready jobs, jobs are only created when the politicians lower tax rates and stop trying to micromanage the economy by imposing absurd regulations dictated by loony environmentalists and stop taking their marching orders from public and private sector union bosses.

I suspect that is exactly what Governor Walker meant, and it explains why union thugs and every other left-wing lowlife within a thousand miles turned up in Madison a while back and did their best to thwart democracy, while simultaneously turning the capital into a pigpen.

At present, we have a situation in which Boeing is attempting to build a factory in South Carolina, a right-to-work state, and Obama’s flunkies on the National Labor Relations Board are trying to force the company to build it in the union-controlled state of Washington.

Come to think of it, does anyone ever recall a president, at least one since Lincoln, who has gone to war against the states the way Obama has? First he targeted Arizona over border control. Then there were the twenty-plus states that want to free themselves of ObamaCare. Next came those Gulf States he penalized with his ill-advised moratorium against offshore oil drilling. And now we not only have South Carolina getting a taste of Obama’s bullwhip, but Indiana, which recently decided to de-fund Planned Parenthood. Speaking of which, shouldn’t the laws governing truth in advertising compel Obama’s favorite abortion franchise to change its name to Planned Non-Parenthood?

When you stop and realize that the oath of office requires that the president swear to protect America from its enemies, foreign and domestic, it might explain why Obama got it garbled at his inauguration, and then had to take another stab at it behind closed doors. Even then, I’m betting the little devil had his fingers crossed.

Another fool self identifies.

Blogger Aaron Worthing busts the managing editor of Time magazine for multiple errors of fact about the Constitution. Astonishing errors of fact — in a cover story!

Late last week, I fisked Richard Stengel’s Time Magazine cover story  “One Document, Under Seige”  but it deserves more discussion.  I consider it nothing less than a journalistic scandal that this piece was (1) a cover story, (2) written by their Managing Editor, (3) who serves in an organization dedicated to teaching other journalists about the Constitution, and yet it is rife with factual errors, including many that are obvious simply by reading the Constitution.

My mistake in the last post on the subject was trying to catalogue everything wrong with it, leading me to take issue with his philosophy, too and thus what got lost for some was the simple fact that Stengel was clearly factually wrong on many points, often when the facts could be determined by doing nothing more than reading the Constitution.

So this time, we are going to focus solely on the factual errors.  There are thirteen of them and like the lawyer that I am, I will start off with his most egregious error and end with the least egregious.  Here are the thirteen errors, in short:

1. The Constitution does not limit the Federal Government.
2. The Constitution is not law.
3. The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment emancipated the slaves.
4. The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment granted the right to vote to African Americans.
5. The original Constitution declared that black people were to be counted as three-fifths of a person.
6. That the original, unamended Constitution prohibited women from voting.
7. Inter arma enim silent leges translates as “in time of war, the Constitution is silent.”
8. The War Powers Act allows the president to unilaterally wage war for sixty days.
9. We have only declared war five times.
10. Alexander Hamilton wanted a king for America.
11. Social Security is a debt within the meaning of Section Four of the Fourteenth Amendment.
12. Naturalization depends on your birth.
13. The Obamacare mandate is a tax.

When I am done with this post, I am going to make a bleg where I ask you to try to help get out the word about this egregiously incorrect cover story.  So stay tuned to the end (or jump ahead if you feel like it).

But first here, point-by-point, is proof that each one of those statements are errors.

False Claim #1: The Constitution does not limit the Federal Government.

The relevant passage:

If the Constitution was intended to limit the federal government, it sure doesn’t say so. Article I, Section 8, the longest section of the longest article of the Constitution, is a drumroll of congressional power. And it ends with the “necessary and proper” clause, which delegates to Congress the power “to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.” Limited government indeed.

(Emphasis added.)  [Update: If you want to check the veracity of my quotes from Stengel's piece, I suggest you use this single-page version of the piece, and then perform a Control-F search.]

Proof that he is wrong: The Constitution is filled with limitations on Federal Power.  For instance, Article I, Section 9 says:

The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.  [A.W.: They’re talking about the slave trade.]

The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

No capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken.

No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.

No Preference shall be given by any Regulation of Commerce or Revenue to the Ports of one State over those of another: nor shall Vessels bound to, or from, one State, be obliged to enter, clear, or pay Duties in another….

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States[.]

And then there is Article III, Section 3, limiting what the government can do to a traitor:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

The Congress shall have power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.

It should be noted that Corruption of Blood is a doctrine by which the family of a traitor would suffer because of their alleged corrupted blood, so this is limiting the government’s ability to punish the children of a traitor for his or her treason.

And then there is the Bill of Rights.  As I noted last time, Mr. Stengel considered them as of a piece with the original Constitution, an interpretation I concurred with.  Every single one of them represents a limitation on federal power, so it is sufficient to only quote a few of them:

Amendment 1

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment 2

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

….

Amendment 9

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Amendment 10

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

So contrary to his suggestion, the Constitution does indeed limit the power of the Federal Government, a point most of us learned in elementary school…

Victor Davis Hanson:

Two unconnected developments were announced this past week. President Obama is releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, despite the absence of a global embargo or horrific natural disaster — and despite a litany of assertions from 2008 that drilling and increased supply might only have a marginal effect on prices.

Like the sudden Afghan withdrawal announcement, the tapping is largely explained by political worries about reelection, as in increasing oil supplies to lower gas prices by election time — and thus avoiding campaign ads equating Obama’s opposition to drilling with high prices at the 2012 pump.

In a second piece of news, the Europeans seem to be winning far more plane orders than Boeing. One wonders whether that fact is remotely connected with airlines’ collective worries about obtaining orders on time and as specified — as in uncertainty whether Obama’s NLRB ruling that attempted to shut down a nearly $1 billion new aircraft line in South Carolina translates into something like “who knows what those Americans are doing next?”

All this raises some questions. The strangest things about the global statist crack-up are socialists’ unhappiness with their socialist utopia, and their subsequent efforts to avoid the consequences of the very redistributive state that they themselves once so gladly crafted.

Greece is the locus classicus. Why are the Greeks protesting? Against whom? They obtained long ago the promised bloated sector and high taxes that all schemed to avoid. Their alma mater EU is hardly a demonic capitalist-run plutocracy, but a kindred socialist state. Is Greece an oil producer, industrial powerhouse, high-tech innovator — anything that might explain the sort of upscale life, modern infrastructure, legions of Mercedeses, and plush second homes that one began to see in Greece after 1985?

In truth, socialist Greeks are furious that they have impoverished themselves and demand that private money and far harder-working Germans bail them out — but why so, when socialism should not need outside capitalist-generated dollars? Could not the Greeks, Soviet style, set up a Cuban collective, and adjust their lifestyles (there goes Kolonaki culture) to their means, living in an opportunity of result utopia with a huge public sector, more siestas, high but ignored taxes — with a collective good riddance to those awful intrusive German bankers?

Here at home, Obama got his ObamaCare. Why, then, did he grant hundreds of exemptions — many to northern California liberals? Should they instead not have lined up to volunteer to implement such a wonderful, long-needed entitlement? (more…)

By now, we’ve all seen the traffic signs that show us our speed. What you may not know is that they work better at getting people to slow down than anything else.

It’s an example of a feedback loop. Losing weight by keeping a diary of everything you eat is another example. But it goes much deeper and has some fascinating applications.

Wired has a long meaty article on the subject — it worth reading all of it.

Despite the volume of research and a proven capacity to affect human behavior, we don’t often use feedback loops in everyday life. Blame this on two factors: Until now, the necessary catalyst—personalized data—has been an expensive commodity. Health spas, athletic training centers, and self-improvement workshops all traffic in fastidiously culled data at premium rates. Outside of those rare realms, the cornerstone information has been just too expensive to come by. As a technologist might put it, personalized data hasn’t really scaled.

Second, collecting data on the cheap is cumbersome. Although the basic idea of self-tracking has been available to anyone willing to put in the effort, few people stick with the routine of toting around a notebook, writing down every Hostess cupcake they consume or every flight of stairs they climb. It’s just too much bother. The technologist would say that capturing that data involves too much friction. As a result, feedback loops are niche tools, for the most part, rewarding for those with the money, willpower, or geeky inclination to obsessively track their own behavior, but impractical for the rest of us.

That’s quickly changing because of one essential technology: sensors. Adding sensors to the feedback equation helps solve problems of friction and scale. They automate the capture of behavioral data, digitizing it so it can be readily crunched and transformed as necessary. And they allow passive measurement, eliminating the need for tedious active monitoring.

And that will lead to life changing technologies: things that will allow seniors to live safely in their own homes and much more.

Here’s New York Times columnist David Carr showing his New York sophistication.

NYT: U.S. Plans Stealth Survey on Access to Doctors

Alarmed by a shortage of primary care doctors, Obama administration officials are recruiting a team of “mystery shoppers” to pose as patients, call doctors’ offices and request appointments to see how difficult it is for people to get care when they need it.

The administration says the survey will address a “critical public policy problem”: the increasing shortage of primary care doctors, including specialists in internal medicine and family practice. It will also try to discover whether doctors are accepting patients with private insurance while turning away those in government health programs that pay lower reimbursement rates.

Federal officials predict that more than 30 million Americans will gain coverage under the health care law passed last year. “These newly insured Americans will need to seek out new primary care physicians, further exacerbating the already growing problem” of a shortage of such physicians in the United States, the Department of Health and Human Services said in a description of the project prepared for the White House.

Plans for the survey have riled many doctors because the secret shoppers will not identify themselves as working for the government.

“I don’t like the idea of the government snooping,” said Dr. Raymond Scalettar, an internist in Washington. “It’s a pernicious practice — Big Brother tactics, which should be opposed.” (more…)

A man as inexperienced and inept as Obama needs all the good counsel he can get. But President Cocky thinks otherwise.

LAT

…In the first two years of Obama’s presidency, his top aides had grown accustomed to a process in which Obama drew out and explored the views of his full team and searched for a consensus — decision by ballot, some called it.

Increasingly, however, that process has changed, according to a wide group of Obama’s personal friends, informal advisors and top aides interviewed during the spring. In recent months, they say, the president has been relying more heavily on his own instincts and feeling less impelled to seek accord among advisors.

The change, which came into view with the Egypt decision in February, was vividly on display in the meetings that led to the decision to send a team of Navy SEALs to raid Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.

The success of the Bin Laden raid reinforced Obama’s security in his own judgments, aides said.

“I think he reached a point where he had to trust his instincts, and there was nothing left to inform his decision except to do that,” said one advisor who is intimately familiar with the president’s thinking on foreign policy matters and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

This brings to mind Obama’s growing list of gaffes, some real doozies, such as blabbing during the singing of God Save the Queen until she called him off.

How can such a purportedly brilliant president make such blunders?

Michael Ledeen explains.

Big Media doesn’t pay much attention to them, even though Obama makes an amazing number of errors in his public statements.  And I think it’s easy enough to understand why the BM largely ignores them:  to report them all would totally undermine the image of the president to which a surprising number of “reporters” and pundits are wedded:  that of an unusually intelligent and well educated man.

Yet someone who tells a crowd in Vienna that his “Austrian” isn’t very good, who tells Marines that he’s pleased to speak to the “Marine Corpse,” and who, just today, said he’d given the Medal of Honor to a survivor from the 10th Mountain Division, when in fact the award was given posthumously, doesn’t fit my definition of a brilliant and cultured man.

Yes, there was a Medal of Honor winner who lived to receive it, but it was a different man.  The living honoree is named Giunta;  the deceased hero from the 10th Mountain Division was named Monti.  Both are Italian names.  Did a White House speechwriter confuse the two Italians?  And if so, what does that tell us about the ship under the command of President Obama?  That’s worth pondering for a moment.

When you add up all the mistakes he’s made–not slips of the tongue, but real errors in statements and speeches he could read from the ubiquitous teleprompter–they make quite a number.  So what? you may ask.  The answer is that hundreds of people traditionally read the drafts of presidential speeches and statements.  That happens for two good reasons.  First, presidential utterances are instant policy.  It’s hard to walk away from a public statement.  Second, the myriad political appointees want their leader to look good, and they strain to ensure the accuracy of his statements.  Or at least they did when I had first-hand knowledge of such things, now a few years back.

I don’t think that is happening in this administration.

Very.

The Los Angeles Unified School District has enacted a new policy saying that homework can count for only 10% of a student’s grade.

The policy is intended to account for the myriad urban problems facing the district’s mostly low-income, minority population. It’s also aimed at supporting L.A. Unified’s increasing focus on boosting measureable academic achievement.

According to the new policy, “Varying degrees of access to academic support at home, for whatever reason, should not penalize a student so severely that it prevents the student from passing a class, nor should it inflate the grade.” It was distributed to schools last month.

Does this mean that English students must now write their essays in class? Or will they just do away with writing projects?

Critics — mostly teachers — worry that the policy will encourage students to slack off assigned work and even reward those who already disregard assignments. And they say it could penalize hardworking students who receive higher marks for effort.

Q. How did such idiots come to be in charge?

A. California is a one-party state.

We take you now to San Francisco where the liberal fascists want to ban pets.

The first vision was simple and straightforward: To curtail puppy mills and kitten factories, the sale of cats and dogs should be banned in San Francisco, where the loving guardians of animal companions come to regular blows — politically — with the loving parents of children.

The ban was put on hold last year after animal advocates broadened it to include anything with fur or feathers. Now it’s back, with a new name and a new strategy: More is more. The Humane Pet Acquisition Proposal is on its way to the Board of Supervisors, and it hopes to protect everything from Great Danes to goldfish.

Yes, goldfish. And guppies, gobies, gouramies, glowlight tetras, German blue rams. No fish, no fowl, no reptiles, no amphibians, no cats, no dogs, no gerbils, no rats. If it flies, crawls, runs, swims or slithers, you would not be able to buy it in the city named for the patron saint of animals.

Alana Semuels writes in the LA Times about the small lumber town of Scotia, CA, one of the last true company towns in America.

(Be sure to follow the link to watch a video.)

The Wall Street investors who own the last company town in California want to return it to the people.

Many of the people don’t want it back. They like Scotia just fine the way it is — a North Coast paradise of pastel saltbox homes and lush lawns, where the company keeps everything spick-and-span and residents don’t have to worry about budget deficits and zoning spats.

“People who live in town aren’t political. They don’t know about planning commissions and all that malarkey,” said Mel Berti, who has tended the meat counter at the local grocery for 35 years. With independence, he said, “Who the heck knows what’s going to happen?”

The mill is closed, the lumber company bankrupt and the town in the hands of a hedge fund that wants out. Either the town takes over or they sell.

On Aug. 30, voters will decide whether they want Scotia to become an independent community services district within Humboldt County. On the same ballot, they’ll be asked to choose five board members to run the area. A majority “yes” vote is needed for Marathon to subdivide the 300-acre town and sell it off in parcels, and to ensure that there is a government to oversee sewage, fire protection and other public services.

If the nays prevail, Marathon says it will sell the town lock, stock and barrel, since Scotia cannot be subdivided without a governing body in place. Company executives say Scotia then could wind up in the hands of a movie studio, a religious sect or the developer of a retirement community.

If the entire town is sold, Scotians probably would have to leave the community where many of their families have lived for generations — especially if the collection of old, outdated homes doesn’t fit into the new owners’ plans.

That residents could balk at independence might seem surprising in light of the history of the company towns built near coal mines, textile mills and steel factories a century or more ago.

In that era, “company town” often meant corporate tyranny. Employees and their families were quartered in cheap company housing and were typically paid in scrip that could be redeemed only at the overpriced company store. At its worst, the system resembled medieval serfdom.

For those unfamiliar with the Peter Principle:

“…in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence”

Which brings us to Chicago, where Gerry McCarthy, the city’s new top cop had this to say at a black church.

“So here’s what I want to tell you. See, let’s see if we can make a connection here. Slavery. Segregation. Black codes. Jim Crow. What, what did they all have in common? Anybody getting’ scared? Government sponsored racism.”

“Now I want you to connect one more dot on that chain of the African American history in this country, and tell me if I’m crazy. Federal gun laws that facilitate the flow of illegal firearms, into our urban centers across this country, that are killing our black and brown children,” he said.

Gun laws? Such as the 2nd Amendment?And remember guns don’t kill, people do.

“The NRA does not like me, and I’m okay with that. We’ve got to get the gun debate back to center, and it’s got to come with the recognition of who’s paying the price for the gun manufacturers being rich and living in gated communities,” McCarthy said.

McCarthy illustrated his point by recalling a crime scene investigation while he was a police official in Newark, New Jersey where five children were shot, two of whom were killed. McCarthy said when he got home, he turned on his television to unwind and found an episode of “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” showing.

Wow, now there’s some cause and effect for you!

“She was caribou hunting and talking about the right to bear arms. Why wasn’t she at the crime scene with me?”

Because Palin is not an idiot, like you McCarthy.

WSJ:

The U.S. is in the midst of an energy revolution, and we don’t mean solar panels or wind turbines. A new gusher of natural gas from shale has the potential to transform U.S. energy production—that is, unless politicians, greens and the industry mess it up.

Only a decade ago Texas oil engineers hit upon the idea of combining two established technologies to release natural gas trapped in shale formations. Horizontal drilling—in which wells turn sideways after a certain depth—opens up big new production areas. Producers then use a 60-year-old technique called hydraulic fracturing—in which water, sand and chemicals are injected into the well at high pressure—to loosen the shale and release gas (and increasingly, oil).

***

The resulting boom is transforming America’s energy landscape. As recently as 2000, shale gas was 1% of America’s gas supplies; today it is 25%. Prior to the shale breakthrough, U.S. natural gas reserves were in decline, prices exceeded $15 per million British thermal units, and investors were building ports to import liquid natural gas. Today, proven reserves are the highest since 1971, prices have fallen close to $4 and ports are being retrofitted for LNG exports.

The shale boom is also reviving economically suffering parts of the country, while offering a new incentive for manufacturers to stay in the U.S. Pennsylvania’s Department of Labor and Industry estimates fracking in the Marcellus shale formation, which stretches from upstate New York through West Virginia, has created 72,000 jobs in the Keystone State between the fourth quarter of 2009 and the first quarter of 2011.

The Bakken formation, along the Montana-North Dakota border, is thought to hold four billion barrels of oil (the biggest proven estimate outside Alaska), and the drilling boom helps explain North Dakota’s unemployment rate of 3.2%, the nation’s lowest.

All of this growth has inevitably attracted critics, notably environmentalists and their allies. They’ve launched a media and political assault on hydraulic fracturing, and their claims are raising public anxiety. So it’s a useful moment to separate truth from fiction in the main allegations against the shale revolution.

• Fracking contaminates drinking water. One claim is that fracking creates cracks in rock formations that allow chemicals to leach into sources of fresh water. The problem with this argument is that the average shale formation is thousands of feet underground, while the average drinking well or aquifer is a few hundred feet deep. Separating the two is solid rock. This geological reality explains why EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, a determined enemy of fossil fuels, recently told Congress that there have been no “proven cases where the fracking process itself has affected water.”

A second charge, based on a Duke University study, claims that fracking has polluted drinking water with methane gas. Methane is naturally occurring and isn’t by itself harmful in drinking water, though it can explode at high concentrations. Duke authors Rob Jackson and Avner Vengosh have written that their research shows “the average methane concentration to be 17 times higher in water wells located within a kilometer of active drilling sites.”

They failed to note that researchers sampled a mere 68 wells across Pennsylvania and New York—where more than 20,000 water wells are drilled annually. They had no baseline data and thus no way of knowing if methane concentrations were high prior to drilling. They also acknowledged that methane was detected in 85% of the wells they tested, regardless of drilling operations, and that they’d found no trace of fracking fluids in any wells.

The Duke study did spotlight a long-known and more legitimate concern: the possibility of leaky well casings at the top of a drilling site, from which methane might migrate to water supplies. As the BP Gulf of Mexico spill attests, proper well construction and maintenance are major issues in any type of drilling, and they ought to be the focus of industry standards and attention. But the risks are not unique to fracking, which has provided no unusual evidence of contamination.

Read it all.

by Burt Prelutsky

Because I’ve just finished reading my friend, Ben Shapiro’s excellent new expose, “Primetime Propaganda,” I’m reminded how fortunate I am that during most of the time I was writing for television, I was a Democrat. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have had a TV career at all.

As Shapiro points out, TV has grown increasingly liberal over the past 50 years. Although he is only 27 years old, he has been diligent in his historical research. Moreover, because he is young, Jewish and wore his Harvard Law baseball cap when he interviewed the writers, producers and network executives, who have created the product and scheduled the programming over the years, they all assumed he was, like them, a devout leftist.

I suspect that even without the baseball cap, these limousine liberals would have probably assumed that, like everyone else who enters their well-insulated bubble, Shapiro idolized Barack Obama. Why else would they not have bothered checking out his credentials? After all, in spite of being a practicing attorney, Shapiro has written three previous books, all espousing his conservative values, and is a contributor to several right-wing blogs.

Even I, who personally know several of the makers and shakers in the industry, was shocked to read some of the things they had to say about conservatives. You would have thought they were discussing jihadists, except they are generally far more respectful when referring to the people who wish to behead us. It’s only when it comes to writers and actors with whom they have political differences, that they’re united in their desire to see them blacklisted or, better yet, dead.

The irony of course is that these are the same self-righteous characters who have carried on incessantly about the inequity of the industry’s having blacklisted Communists 60 years ago. Hypocrisy aside, there is a world of difference that is apparent to most normal, fair-minded people, between a conservative opposing ObamaCare and a Communist tithing 10% of his MGM salary to the Soviet Union, where Joseph Stalin was starving millions of Russians to death and assassinating his political rivals. Even the fact that Stalin had his boot on the neck of hundreds of millions of people who had the misfortune of living in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany, was of no concern to the Hollywood lefties. It should be noted that these were the same folks who made Siberia, the hellish place to which Stalin exiled Jews and other nuisances, the tagline to a thousand benign jokes in a way they’d have never dared with Auschwitz or Buchenwald.

I was indeed fortunate that, thanks to having been born into a Russian-Jewish home, I was raised to believe the sun rose and set on FDR. Once something is virtually ingrained in your DNA, it’s hard to break free. In my case, it was the combination and contrast of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan that ultimately did the trick. But in terms of my career, it’s lucky that I didn’t come to my senses any sooner than I did.

Even though the TV movies I wrote weren’t political, it probably wouldn’t have saved me from being ostracized. After reading “Primetime Propaganda” and discovering how very much Gene Reynolds, Allan Burns, Leonard Stern, Grant Tinker, Gary David Goldberg, James Brooks and Larry Gelbart, despised conservatives, I have to assume that I would never have had the opportunity to write episodes of “McMillan & Wife,” “MASH,” “Mary Tyler Moore,” “Family Ties,” “Rhoda,” “The Governor & J.J.” or “Bob Newhart.”

Oddly enough, I broke in during the late 60s, writing a bunch of “Dragnet” scripts for Jack Webb. The fact is I didn’t have to conceal my true feelings in order to write for the show that Shapiro ranks as the fifth most conservative series of all time. Even back then, I was pro-cops and pro-military. Somehow, in spite of my upbringing, I managed to be a registered Democrat without being a complete bonehead.

I now recall that a few minutes after my first “Dragnet” episode aired, an acquaintance, writer Harlan Ellison, phoned me. In lieu of “Hello,” he snarled, “I never knew you were a fascist!” Then, in typical left-wing fashion, he hung up. It’s very possible that was when my politics began evolving. It is, after all, a prime example of the sort of fair and open-minded discourse I’ve come to expect from liberals.

Although Shapiro quotes me a few times (pages 69, 77 and 244, for those discerning readers too cheap to spring for the book), he left out — perhaps because I forgot to mention it — the one time I encountered political blowback during my TV writing career.

In 1990, I foolishly turned 50. I say “foolishly” because if there’s one thing TV hates more than conservative writers, it’s aging ones. Liberals oppose bigotry and discrimination unless, of course, they’re the ones doing the discriminating.

My mood over the next several years ranged from bleak to suicidal as unemployment led inevitably to the sale of our condo, the cashing in of my life insurance and, finally, to bankruptcy. In 1999, though, through dumb luck and a series of quirky circumstances, I landed a spot on the writing staff of the Dick Van Dyke series, “Diagnosis Murder.”

The rest of the writing staff consisted of three male, left-wing, middle-aged yuppies. The producer had hired them back in June. By December, they decided they were working too hard and insisted that another writer be brought on board. What they didn’t know was that they were inviting a viper into their midst.

When they discovered that I was not only a Republican, but that I despised Bill Clinton and had every intention of doing whatever I could to keep Al Gore from succeeding him, they made me feel about as welcome as heat rash.

To be fairer to them than they were to me, their attacks consisted mainly of witless jibes and juvenile ridicule, mainly questioning the intelligence of anyone who would even consider voting for a conservative. For a while, it saddens me to admit, I took it because I really needed the paycheck.

Then one day, as if a huge light had been switched on, it occurred to me that they needed me. I worked harder and longer hours and, what’s more, wrote better than they did. That morning, taking the bit in my teeth, I interrupted their sophomoric prattle long enough to announce that the good times were over, and that they would have to either find a new target or grow up.

I explained as patiently as I could that I wasn’t opposed to bi-lingual education because I was a bigot, but because it holds Latino kids back academically and makes them hate school so much that they can’t wait to drop out. Which, as we all know, they do in record numbers.

I told the three brats that if I was in favor of capital punishment, it wasn’t because I was bloodthirsty — or at least not just because I was bloodthirsty — but because, as a conservative, I naturally empathize with the victim, not the murderer.

Furthermore, I went on, throwing down the gauntlet, if any or all of them wished to debate any issue under the sun, I’d be more than happy to oblige. Nobody accepted the challenge, but from that day on, the not-so-good-natured ribbing came to an end.

By the time the 2000 presidential election rolled around, we were all getting along just fine. They even gave me a pass when Bush defeated Gore. After all, by then they knew I was a lost cause. Instead, like sharks smelling blood in the water, two of them turned on the third. It seems the lunkhead made the fatal mistake of confessing that he’d voted for Ralph Nader.

I recall wondering at the time how he could have been so dumb as to admit he’d deserted Gore in his time of need. But no sooner was I trying to solve that mystery than a little voice in my head that sounded a lot like Jackie Mason was screaming: “How could he have been so dumb? Schmuck, he’s a liberal!”

Conservative health-care wonks have long complained that the methodology used by the Congressional Budget Office to model our health-care system leaves out the effects of structural reforms on the behavior of both doctors and patients, and so fails to account both for the ill effects of centralized price controls (like the ones Obamacare would impose) and for the beneficial effects of competition among insurers and providers (of the sort the House Republican Medicare reform proposal would make possible).

At a hearing of the House Budget Committee today, CBO director Douglas Elmendorf went further that we’ve seen the CBO go before to confirm and agree with that criticism. First there was this exchange with committee chairman Paul Ryan, regarding the effects of Obamacare’s “reforms” on the quality of care:

Ryan: Do your projections assume providers will accept Medicare patients at the same rate now under the traditional program? Because let’s remember, Medicare already pays providers 80 percent of what they will receive in the private market. By 2030 [under Obamacare], this will fall to about 40 percent. Do your projections assume providers will continue to accept Medicare patients at the same rate they do now under the traditional program and does your analysis assume – despite the additional provider cuts coming in current law – that this will have no effect on the quality or access of care?

Elmendorf: The way I would put it Mr. Chairman, is we don’t model the behavior of physicians. We don’t model the access to care or quality of care.

Ryan: So you assume it stays on as is?

Elmendorf: That is the point we noted in the letter analyzing your proposal. That is a gap in our tool kit and a gap we are trying to fill. But under the current circumstances, we don’t model either on the regular base line projections or in our analysis of last year’s health legislation or your proposal, the effects that might happen under current law or alternatives.

Ryan: Therein lies the issue here. Your analysis effective assumes that no matter how much the government pays providers for health care services, providers will continue to provide the same quality care and access. That is the gap you talk about.

Obama trying to cozy up to the troops…

“Throughout my service, first as a senator and then as a presidential candidate and then as a President, I’ve always run into you guys.  And for some reason it’s always in some rough spots.

First time I saw 10th Mountain Division, you guys were in southern Iraq.  When I went back to visit Afghanistan, you guys were the first ones there.  I had the great honor of seeing some of you because a comrade of yours, Jared Monti, was the first person who I was able to award the Medal of Honor to who actually came back and wasn’t receiving it posthumously.”

The problem is, Jared Monti was killed in action in Afghanistan, on June 21, 2006.  He was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously, September 17, 2009.  President Obama handed the framed medal to his parents, Paul and Janet Monti.  He and the First Lady comforted them in the Oval Office following the ceremony.

Pundit Press

The Main Stream Media seems to be constantly shocked at how poorly the American economy is doing under ObamaNomics.  Whenever poor business, house, or job news comes out, they are quick to throw on the word “unexpectedly,” pretending that the economy is actually doing great, but this one time it hiccuped.  But the problem is, the poor economic news is quite expected because of President Obama’s incompetence.

So, I decided to take some time and compile some of the “unexpectedlies” from the start of the year until today.  But before I begin, just remember what Albert Einstein once said (which is normally attributed to Benjamin Franklin): “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

So, without further ado:

U.S. Consumer Sentiment Unexpectedly Falls to Six-Month Low on Job Outlook, from Bloomberg, May 31, 2011

US Q4 growth unexpectedly revised down, from EuroNews, February 25, 2011

U.S. Factory Orders Drop Unexpectedly, from Industry Week, March 24, 2011

US Services Economy Slowed Unexpectedly in March: ISM, from MSNBC, April 5, 2011

… the list goes on and on…