Does ObamaCare cover Political Suicide ?

Let's find out, shall we ... Kabuki Theater is next week.

Political Suicide [Yuval Levin]

The apparent decision to push Obamacare through reconciliation gives new meaning to the term political suicide. It will almost certainly fail, for one thing. And it will persuade rank and file Democrats in Congress that their leaders have lost their minds, and so will badly divide the Democratic caucus and make for a very difficult year to come for them. An ethic of every man for himself — which is what many House Democrats will have to adopt after this — is the last thing a party in trouble needs in an election year.

Rich Lowry: Blame Obama, Not the System

http://article.nationalreview.com/425485/blame-obama-not-the-system/rich-lowry

Last Year's Stimulus -- Success or Failure ?

A silly question of course, except to the Obama spinmeisters ...

Obama’s Faith-Based Economics [Brian Riedl]

On the stimulus’s first anniversary, keep in mind one number: 6.3 million.

That is the Obama jobs gap — the difference between the 3.3 million net jobs President Obama said would be created (not just saved) and the 3 million additional net jobs that have since been lost.

By the president’s own logic, the stimulus failed. So Obama has shifted his argument. Sure, the economy lost jobs, he now says, but without the stimulus it would have lost nearly 2 million more jobs.

This “it would have been worse” theory is completely unprovable. No one knows how the economy would have performed without the stimulus.

Furthermore, it’s faith-based economics. The White House’s new estimates of “saving” nearly 2 million jobs are not based on observations of the economy’s recent performance. Rather, they are based on the Obama administration’s unshakable belief that deficit spendingmust create jobs and growth. Specifically, the White House’s “proof” that the stimulus created jobs is an economic model that they programmed to assume that stimulus spending automatically creates jobs.

How’s that for circular logic?

The idea that government spending creates jobs makes sense only if you never ask where the government got the money. It didn’t fall from the sky. The only way Congress can inject spending into the economy is by first taxing or borrowing it out of the economy. No new demand is created; it’s a zero-sum transfer of existing demand.

The White House says the $300 billion spent from the stimulus thus far has financed as many as 2 million jobs. Maybe. However, the private sector now has $300 billion less to spend, which, by the same logic, means it must lose the same number of jobs, leaving a net employment impact of zero. But the White House’s single-entry bookkeeping simply ignores that side of the equation.

Even Washington’s transferring money from savers to spenders doesn’t create demand, since the financial system already converts one person’s savings into another person’s spending (as I detail here). A family might normally put its $10,000 savings in a CD at the local bank. The bank would then lend that $10,000 to the local hardware store, which would then recycle that spending around the town, supporting local jobs. Now suppose that the family instead buys a $10,000 government bond that funds the stimulus bill. Washington spends that $10,000 in a different town, supporting jobs there instead. The stimulus has not created new jobs. It has merely moved them to a new town.

Yet the White House continues to wave the magic wand of “stimulus.” All evidence that it failed be damned.

— Brian Riedl is Grover M. Hermann fellow in federal budgetary affairs at the Heritage Foundation.

More Kabuki Theater -- Obama's "Debt Commission"

Why bother doing anything constructive about the deficit when you can punt it over to a partisan commission -- O will claim to be doing something while doing nothing -- except widening the deficit to mind-boggling record levels !

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=OGY3YmQxNzFiOWQwODk1OTg0NmM3NWMzMWFkZWMyYzQ=

The Dead-End Debt Commission [James C. Capretta]

News reports indicate that the much-discussed Obama Debt Commission will be announced tomorrow, with former Clinton White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles and former Republican senator Alan Simpson co-chairing the effort.

Skeptical congressional Republicans are being attacked as obstructionists for threatening not to participate in the commission’s work. But they are right to dismiss the credibility of this effort from the get-go. It’s quite plainly a partisan set-up, and certainly not a genuine bipartisan exercise. Moreover, it’s designed mainly to protect the president, not to solve a pressing national problem that the administration would make worse with the policies it is pursuing.

The commission will apparently have eighteen members, twelve of whom will be appointed by the president and Democratic congressional leaders, while only six will be appointed by Republican leaders in Congress.

The president and his aides say that the partisan balance will actually be 10 to 8, not 12 to 6, because two of the president’s picks can’t be Democrats. But this is nothing more than a cynical political game. The president gets to appoint the Republican co-chair? Let’s put the shoe on the other foot. How would Democrats view things if Mitch McConnell or John Boehner were picking the lead Democrat? Instead of Erskine Bowles, that might mean someone like former Georgia governor Zell Miller defining the Democratic position on taxes and entitlements for the rest of the party. Does anyone seriously believe that national Democrats would quietly go along and participate in a panel under such circumstances? Of course not, and neither should Republicans.

Indeed, Senator Simpson is already making statements that show he is truly Obama’s choice. He is scolding Republicans for threatening not to participate in the panel, and echoing the dubious White House line on the Massachusetts Senate election, saying it wasn’t so much a repudiation of Obama’s liberal agenda as it was an angry reaction to Washington inaction. Moreover, he is already signaling that he will support a tax increase as part of the commission’s recommendations, apparently employing the tried-and-true negotiating tactic of preemptive capitulation.

Then there’s the issue of health-care. The president and his advisers have said they have no intention of abandoning the health-care bills that have passed the House and Senate, despite overwhelming evidence of intense public opposition. The primary reason for long-term budgetary imbalance is out-of-control spending on health-care entitlements. And so what would the Democratic health-care bills do? Stand up another runaway health-care entitlement, of course. The Congressional Budget Office has said that the new spending commitments in both the House and Senate-passed bills would reach about $200 billion in 2019 and increase 8 percent every year thereafter. Moreover, if enacted, a health-care billwould dramatically reduce the options available to the new Debt Commission. It would not be possible to seriously consider fundamental Medicare reforms just months after Congress voted to cut payments to Medicare providers by nearly $500 billion over a decade. Nor would Democrats go along with scaling back a new health-care subsidy program they just spent two years getting into law. Team Obama’s plan here is quite obvious: lock in a partisan health-care program over the unanimous objections of congressional Republicans, and then to try to get Republican help to clean up the government’s budgetary mess. That Republicans are resisting this one-sided game should surprise no one.

If any further evidence is needed that the Obama Debt Commission is a farce and should not be taken seriously by Republicans, it can be found in the laughable timeline the Obama White House is pushing for the commission’s recommendations and follow-on congressional action. The plan is to have the commission spend most of this year behind closed doors coming up with the most far-reaching tax hikes and spending cuts seen in a generation. Then, aftervoters have already cast their ballots in the mid-term congressional elections in November, the commission would make its recommendations known and the lame-duck Congress would take them up and pass them in a matter of weeks, with almost no time for public debate. And politicians wonder why the electorate is cynical.

The fundamental problem here is lack of presidential leadership. If the president thinks the long-term budget outlook is a serious threat to economic prosperity, he needs to do more than talk about it and punt the solution to a commission. It’s clear that most Democrats, the president included, have no appetite to restrain and reform government. They believe the solution is a massive tax increase. But, despite their commanding majorities in Congress, they don’t have the guts to propose one. Indeed, the president was elected in no small part because he promised middle-class voters he would not raise their taxes. Now he is trying every maneuver possible to renege on that promise without saying so — and pin the blame on Republicans if he can. Republicans, of course, should do everything they possibly can to make sure he doesn’t get away with it.

Stimulus, Porkulus, Incompetence, Failure

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTJjY2M0M2YxODBlODBkNmY3M2ZmYTU3M2IyMWY1Y2I=

Stimulus, They Cried [Jonah Goldberg]

From Eric Cantor's shop (PDF):

As we looked back over the past year of the Democrats’ Stimulus, two reoccurring themes emerged:

1. Every time the Administration or Congressional Democrats would claimcredit for some number of jobs created or saved, a subsequent fact-check would debunk the claim
2. The unemployment rate kept marching upward.

February 17, 2009: $787 billion Recovery Act signedinto law. Unemployment rate stands at 7.6%.

February 17, 2009: Administration releasesspecific state-by-state numbers reflecting the expected impact of the Recovery Act.

February 17, 2009: The nation’s first Recovery Act project is announced, a new bridge in Tuscumbia, MO.

February 24, 2009: President Obama announcesthat Vice-President Biden will “lead a tough, unprecedented oversight effort – because nobody messes with Joe.”

March 3, 2009: President unveils“Recovery Act” logo designed by the same Chicago firm that helped create the Obama Campaign logo.

March 4, 2009: CNN reportson the controversy surrounding the first Recovery Act project in a segment titled “A New ‘Bridge to Nowhere.’”

March 6, 2009: Department of Labor announcesthat 651,000 jobs were lost in February and that the unemployment rate rose to 8.1%.

March 16, 2009: Press reports indicatethat even Recovery Act “Czar” Earl Devaney is questioning the state-by-state jobs figures released by the Administration

April 3, 2009: Department of Labor announcesthat 663,000 jobs were lost in March and that the unemployment rate rose to 8.5%.

April 13, 2009: The Administration announces 2,000thRecovery Act project, but an ABC News fact check reveals that far fewer projects are actually underway.

May 8, 2009: Department of Labor announcesthat 539,000 jobs were lost in April and that the unemployment rate rose to 8.9%.

May 12, 2009: Reportsbegin to surface of dead people, some deceased for 40 years or more, receiving $250 stimulus checks.

May 13, 2009: The Administration releasesits first quarter Recovery Act report stating that as of May 5, $28.5 billion had been spent.

May 21, 2009: The Administration quietly releasesa footnote to its previous report announcing a $10.4 billion accounting error that reduces the actual spending by roughly one-third of what was reported a week earlier.

May 27, 2009: President Obama marks the 100 day anniversary of the Recovery Act by claimingthat 150,000 jobs have been saved or created.

May 29, 2009: Politifact.com reportson the President’s claim of 150,000 jobs created or saved, saying it is “not much better than a guess presented as a fact.”

June 5, 2009: Department of Labor announcesthat 345,000 jobs were lost in May and that the unemployment rate rose to 9.4%.

June 22, 2009: Administration releasesrules for counting jobs “saved” and “created.”

July 2, 2009: Department of Labor announcesthat 467,000 jobs were lost in June and that the unemployment rate rose to 9.5%.

July 8, 2009: It is reportedthat the Administration will spend up to $18 million to revamp its recovery.gov website.

July 27, 2009: Congressional Democrats claimhighway and transit spending from the stimulus has created or sustained 48,000 jobs.

July 31, 2009: ProPublica checksin on the Democrats’ claim of 48,000 highway and transit jobs created or sustained and says the estimate suffers from “fuzzy math.”

August 5, 2009: Reportsindicate that only 12% or $70 billion of stimulus funds have been spent.

August 7, 2009: Department of Labor announcesthat 247,000 jobs were lost in July and that the unemployment rate was little changed at 9.4%.

August 17, 2009: Speaker Pelosi marksthe six month anniversary of the Recovery Act, saying, “the Recovery Act is already paying dividends for workers, families, and small businesses.”

September 3, 2009: Vice President Biden statesthat the Recovery Act is "doing more, faster, more efficiently, and more effectively than most expected."

September 4, 2009: Department of Labor announcesthat 216,000 jobs were lost in August and that the unemployment rate rose to 9.7%.

September 28, 2009: Reportsindicate that Recovery Act spending has reached $102 billion.

October 2, 2009: Department of Labor announcesthat 263,000 jobs were lost in September and that the unemployment rate rose to 9.8%.

October 15, 2009: Administration announcesthat contracts awarded with Recovery Act funds have created or saved 30,383 jobs.

October 29, 2009: Associated Press analysisreveals that the 30,883 job count previously released by the Administration overstated the jobs created or saved. “The AP review found some counts were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of jobs; some jobs credited to the stimulus program were counted two and sometimes more than four times; and other jobs were credited to stimulus spending when none was produced.”

October 30, 2009: Administration announcesRecovery Act has saved or created 640,329 total jobs.

November 6, 2009: Department of Labor announcesthat 190,000 jobs were lost in October and that the unemployment rate rose to 10.2%—surpassing the 10% unemployment mark for the first time since 1983.

November 16, 2009: The press reportsthat many of the jobs created or saved were, according to the government’s official website, created or saved in congressional districts that do not exist.

November 16, 2009: Appropriations Chairman David Obey (D-WI), one of the principal authors of the Recovery Act, condemnsthe inaccuracies reported on recovery.gov as “ludicrous mistakes.”

November 19, 2009: Administration confirmsthat they cannot confirm their claim that 640,329 jobs were saved or created by the Recovery Act.

December 4, 2009: Department of Labor announcesthat 11,000 jobs were lost in November and that the unemployment rate edged down to 10.0%.

December 18, 2009: Administration sends out a memosaying they will no longer count jobs created or saved, but instead count jobs funded in whole or in part by the Recovery Act.

January 8, 2010: Department of Labor announcesthat 85,000 jobs were lost in December and that the unemployment rate remained at 10.0%.

January 26, 2010: The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) increases the estimated costof the Recovery Act by $75 billion to $862 billion plus interest.

February 3, 2010: Reports indicate that one-third of stimulus funds have been spent.

February 5, 2010: Department of Labor announcesthat 20,000 jobs were lost in January and that the unemployment rate edged down to 9.7%.

February 12, 2010: The press reportsthat Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent Democrat Members of Congress a memo stating that "The Recovery Act is a hallmark achievement of this Congress…"

Mideast ... sane comments

At least Avigdor Lieberman makes sense when it comes to the words and deeds of the Palestinians that are demonstrably representative of their lack of peaceful intent and goodwill.

http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=168759

No diplo babble from him.

Dick Cheney messes with Joe O'Biden

But but but you are not supposed to Mess With Joe ....

First, here is O'Biden, in all his glory:

Biden Knocks Cheney on Meet the Press [Daniel Foster]

In a pre-taped interview for NBC's Meet the Press, Vice President Joe Biden took shots at his predecessor, Dick Cheney, over the latter's criticism of Obama administration counterterror efforts.

Biden accused Cheney of attempting to "rewrite history" and suggested that in little over a year in office, the Obama administration has outstripped the counterterror successes of the Bush administration:

"Maybe he's not fully informed of what's going on. I mean, the progress we have made. There has never been as much emphasis and resources brought against Al Qaeda. The success rate exceeds anything that occurred in the last Administration. And they did their best."


Cheney Hits Back [Daniel Foster]

Appearing on ABC News' This Week today, former Vice President Dick Cheney did his part to make the Sunday morning political chat shows a battle of the Veeps.

Cheney responded with some charity to Biden's claims that the Obama administration was doing more to counter terrorism in Af/Pak and elsewhere than the Bush administration had, but took issue with Biden's claim that Iraq would become one of Obama's great successes. A partial transcript:

KARL: OK, before we get to Eric Holder, a couple more things from the vice president. He's been out responding preemptively to you. One thing he said we heard in the open, that he believes Iraq may ultimately prove to be one of the greatest achievements of the Obama administration.

CHENEY: Well, I — I guess I shouldn't be surprised by my friend, Joe Biden. I'm glad he now believes Iraq is a success. Of course, Obiden and — Obama and Biden campaigned from one end of the country to the other for two years criticizing our Iraq policy.

CHENEY: They opposed the surge that was absolutely crucial to our getting to the point we're at now with respect to Iraq. And for them to try to take credit for what's happened in Iraq strikes me as a little strange. I think if — if they had had their way, if we'd followed the policies they'd pursued from the outset or advocated from the outset, Saddam Hussein would still be in power in Baghdad today.

So if they're going to take credit for it, fair enough, for what they've done while they're there, but it ought to go with a healthy dose of "Thank you, George Bush" up front and a recognition that some of their early recommendations, with respect to prosecuting that war, we're just dead wrong.

He also said the administration was unprepared for dealing with the attempted Christmas Day attack:

KARL: OK, let's get to — you mentioned Eric Holder, the treatment of the Christmas Day underwear bomber. How do you think that case should have been dealt with?

CHENEY: I think the — the proper way to — to deal with it would have been to treat him as an enemy combatant. I think that was the right way to go.

The thing I learned from watching that process unfold, though, was that the administration really wasn't equipped to deal with the aftermath of an attempted attack against the United States in the sense that they didn't know what to do with the guy.

There was talk earlier after they'd dismantled the system we'd put in place for prisoner interrogation of high-value detainees. They'd gone out supposedly to create the HIG, high-value interrogation program, but in reality, it was not up and running at Christmastime when it should have been. It started months before that, to put that in place. They need a process, a set of institutions that they can fall back on. Admittedly, this is hard. We had a hard time dealing with this. You've got the Supreme Court on one side that — that is going to evaluate everything you do, and you've got to be careful with that. The Congress gets involved in it.

CHENEY: So I'm not saying it's an easy task, but by this point, when they've made all the decisions they've had, closed Guantanamo, end (ph) the high-value detainee program and so forth, I think those are all mistakes. Those were the tools we put in place to deal with this kind of situation. They should have had something to put in lieu of those programs, and it would look like they do not have — have that kind of capability yet.

Cheney said that he was a "big supporter of waterboarding," and that waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques should have been "on the table" for Abdulmutallab:

CHENEY: I think you ought to have all of those capabilities on the table. Now, President Obama has taken them off the table. He announced when he came in last year that they would never use anything other than the U.S. Army manual, which doesn't include those techniques. I think that's a mistake.

Global Warning Hoax Update: Phil Jones admits its a fraud !

This speaks for itself ...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1250872/Climategate-U-turn-Astonishment-scientist-centre-global-warming-email-row-admits-data-organised.html


Decline and Phil [Mark Steyn]

Say it loud, he's unsettled and proud. Hide-the-decliner Phil Jones is embracing his inner decline:

Climategate U-turn as Scientist at Centre of Row Admits: There Has Been No Global Warming Since 1995

That would be 1995 as in a decade and a half ago? Gee, you wouldn't get that impression from reading the papers.

Here's another first. Dr Jones is the first IPCC honcho to concede the possibility that the present allegedly roasting planet may not be unprecedented:

He said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.

"Far from settled"? But I thought it had all been peer-reviewed up the wazoo...


Never Mind? [Jonah Goldberg]

From the Times of London: "World May Not Be Warming, Say Scientists"

The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”.It warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C and that there could be 5C-6C more warming by 2100, with devastating impacts on humanity and wildlife. However, new research, including work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”