There is no guarantee that categorical American support would have altered the outcome of the struggle between autocracy and liberty in Iran. But it shall now be part of the narrative of liberty that when Persia rose in the summer of 2009 the steward of American power ducked for cover, and that a president who prided himself on his eloquence couldn't even find the words to tell the forces of liberty that he understood the wellsprings of their revolt.
The President has been voting 'present' for most of the first five weeks of the [oil spill] disaster. It's not as if it's the first time Obama tried to avoid responsibility for an issue or refuse to show leadership. Many of us wrote extensively about Obama's pattern of avoidance during the election -- and suggested that Democrats try Obama in a lesser executive position first, such as Governor of Illinois, before nominating him for the top spot, in order to make sure he was up for the job. . . . Only those who willingly allowed themselves to be enchanted by charisma and public relations could possibly act surprised when inexperience leads to incompetence.
We Will Remember from Republican Governors Association on Vimeo.
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A new President nearly always gets what he wants on his top legislative priority, especially when he has such big majorities in Congress to work with. Republicans nonetheless managed to keep their Members together, turn public opinion against the bill despite nearly unanimous media support for it, and in the end came a few votes short. They would have won if Mr. Obama and Nancy Pelosi hadn't been so willing to put so many of their Members at risk by pushing a partisan program and flouting normal Congressional rules.
The GOP's goal now should first be to remove some of the uglier parts of the bill in Senate reconciliation. Then they need to focus on taking back as many seats as possible this fall. Rather than publicly crowing that ObamaCare will deliver them the House—a hard task and a risky expectations game—they'd do better to concentrate on continuing to educate the public about what ObamaCare is going to do to insurance premiums, federal deficits, taxes and the quality of medical care.
Many Republicans are already calling for "repeal" of ObamaCare, and that's fine with us, though they should also be honest with voters about the prospects. The GOP can't repeal anything as long as Mr. Obama is President, even if they take back Congress in November. That will take two large electoral victories in a row. What they can do now is take credit for fighting on principle, hold Democrats accountable for their votes and the consequences, and pledge if elected in November to stop cold Mr. Obama's march to ever-larger government.
The ruthless and corrupt way this bill was forced through Congress on a party-line vote, and in defiance of public opinion, provides a road map for how other "historic" changes can be imposed by Obama, Pelosi and Reid.
What will it matter if Obama's current approval rating is below 50 percent among the current voting public, if he can ram through new legislation to create millions of new voters by granting citizenship to illegal immigrants? That can be enough to make him a two-term President, who can appoint enough Supreme Court justices to rubber-stamp further extensions of his power.
When all these newly minted citizens are rounded up on election night by ethnic organization activists and labor union supporters of the administration, that may be enough to salvage the Democrats' control of Congress as well.
The last opportunity that current American citizens may have to determine who will control Congress may well be the election in November of this year. Off-year elections don't usually bring out as many voters as Presidential election years. But the 2010 election may be the last chance to halt the dismantling of America. It can be the point of no return.
President Obama has crossed the Rubicon with the health care vote. The bill was not really about medicine; after all, a moderately priced, relatively small federal program could offer the poorer not now insured, presently not on Medicare or state programs like Medicaid or Medical, a basic medical plan. . . .
No, instead, the bill was about assuming a massive portion of the private sector, hiring tens of thousands of loyal, compliant new employees, staffing new departments with new technocrats, and feeling wonderful that we "are leveling the playing field" and have achieved another Civil Rights landmark law. . . .
[W]e are in revolutionary times in which the government will grow to assume everything from energy use to student loans, while abroad we are a revolutionary sort of power, eager to mend fences with Syria and Iran, more eager still to distance ourselves from old Western allies like Israel and Britain.
There won't be any more soaring rhetoric from Obama about purple-state America, "reaching across the aisle," or healing our wounds. That was so 2008. Instead, we are in the most partisan age since Vietnam, ushered into it by the self-acclaimed "non-partisan."
Well, it seems to be in the bag now. I try to be a sunny the-glass-is-one-sixteenth-full kinda guy, but it's hard to overestimate the magnitude of what the Democrats have accomplished. Whatever is in the bill is an intermediate stage: As the graph posted earlier shows, the governmentalization of health care will accelerate, private insurers will no longer be free to be "insurers" in any meaningful sense of that term (ie, evaluators of risk), and once that's clear we'll be on the fast track to Obama's desired destination of single payer as a fait accomplis.Congratulations, progressives. You've just made the citizens of the country started with a Declaration of Independence permanent wards of the state. This is what you wanted--to begin to manage and organize and run people's lives--and you got it.
If Barack Obama does nothing else in his term in office, this will make him one of the most consequential presidents in history. It's a huge transformative event in Americans' view of themselves and of the role of government. You can say, oh, well, the polls show most people opposed to it, but, if that mattered, the Dems wouldn't be doing what they're doing. Their bet is that it can't be undone, and that over time, as I've been saying for years now, governmentalized health care not only changes the relationship of the citizen to the state but the very character of the people. As I wrote in NR recently, there's plenty of evidence to support that from Britain, Canada, and elsewhere.
More prosaically, it's also unaffordable. That's why one of the first things that middle-rank powers abandon once they go down this road is a global military capability. If you take the view that the U.S. is an imperialist aggressor, congratulations: You can cease worrying. But, if you think that America has been the ultimate guarantor of the post-war global order, it's less cheery. Five years from now, just as in Canada and Europe two generations ago, we'll be getting used to announcements of defense cuts to prop up the unsustainable costs of big government at home. And, as the superpower retrenches, America's enemies will be quick to scent opportunity.
Longer wait times, fewer doctors, more bureaucracy, massive IRS expansion, explosive debt, the end of the Pax Americana, and global Armageddon. Must try to look on the bright side . . .
Of the 30-odd attempted terrorist plots against the United States or American installations abroad that have been foiled since 9/11, roughly a third have been uncovered in the past year alone. What is new, and particularly frightening, about these recent attempts is that the budding perpetrators were initially indoctrinated inside the United States, with help from extremist websites or Islamic preachers. It was only after they had been brought some ways along the road to holy war that at least some of these would-be jihadists sought training and logistical support from al-Qaeda and others overseas. . . .This kind of rains on the parade of people who, wherever they look, see class warfare and jealousy-caused conflict between the "haves" and the "have nots."
While they come from diverse ethnic and regional backgrounds, most of the men involved in homegrown plots fit a similar profile: they are middle class and well-educated. The same can be said of many, if not most, Islamist terrorists, whether it be the son of the former Nigerian finance minister who attempted to bring down a plane on Christmas Day near Detroit; the seven British doctors (and one medical technician) who plotted to carry out car bombings in 2007; or Osama bin Laden himself, whose family operates a massive construction empire worth billions of dollars. This reality contradicts the trendy, post-9/11 contention, as wrong then as it is now, that terrorism is caused by poverty.
Why has the politics of economic redistribution had such limited success in America? One reason is that Americans, unlike Western Europeans, tend to believe that there is a connection between effort and reward and that people can work their way up economically. If people do something to earn their benefits, like paying Social Security taxes, that's fine. But giving money to those who have not in some way earned it is a no-no. Moreover, like Andrew Jackson, most Americans suspect that some of the income that is redistributed will end up in the hands not of the worthy but of the well-connected.(h/t Scott L.)
Last year Mr. Obama and his policy strategists seem to have assumed that the financial crisis and deep recession would make Americans look more favorably on big government programs. But it turns out that economic distress did not make us Western Europeans.
AP: "The 5-4 ruling by the Supreme Court Thursday overturned a 20-year-old ruling that said companies and other outside groups can be prohibited from paying for ads to back or oppose a federal candidate." The guys at Cato are thrilled: "In short, the Citizens United decision has strengthened both the First Amendment and American democracy."
Most conservatives were pretty cheery about the decision; generally on the right folks conclude that you can't restrict political spending without restricting political speech, and if the First Amendment is supposed to mean anything, it's supposed to protect your God-given right to declare as loudly and widely as you want that those who govern you stink to high Heaven. Otherwise, you end up with a First Amendment that somehow protects lap dances but not political advertising close to an election.
Ed Morrissey: "In the first challenges to the BCRA (McCain-Feingold), the earlier court appeared to accept the notion that one has to break a few First Amendment eggs to get a clean-elections omelet. This court has apparently decided that Congress should amend the First Amendment if it has grown tired of it, rather than pass laws that contradict it. The fact that only five of the nine justices could reach that rather obvious conclusion shows how much judicial activism and Congressional overreach have in common -- especially the sense that they can manipulate clear boundaries of power for whatever end they seek."
Michelle Malkin: "Yes, unions will benefit from the ruling and spend more money. But sunlight is the best disinfectant. Full, transparent, accessible disclosure is the ultimate campaign finance reform. As for viewing the decision through the 'political plus' lens: I don't. The Constitution matters more than electoral consequences. Too bad more in Washington don't see it that way."
"With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics," declared President Obama, who was elected with the assistance of hundreds of millions of dollars in donations from unions, trial lawyers, Hollywood, academia, Goldman Sachs, and environmentalists. Despite what you might think from that opening sentence, he disapproves of the decision.
At Bench Memos, Bradley Smith makes short work of the legislative responses introduced by Rep. Alan Grayson, the Floridian who represents Daily Kos in Congress: "That these proposals are clearly unconstitutional doesn't matter much to Mr. Grayson, who only has eleven months left in Congress to make his reputation and gain that slot guest hosting for Keith Olbermann. It's highly doubtful they could ever pass, anyway."
Caleb Howe watches Olbermann so we don't have to, and he finds Keith saying that the Supreme Court decision on campaign finance was "worse than slavery."
