Archive for 2016
February 4, 2016
LOST IN TRANSLATION: Hillary Clinton’s grandchild is the crème de le résistance.
Probably should have checked that phrase with John Kerry first.
THIS TIME, IT’S WAR: A Call To Eradicate Mosquitoes.
IT’S FUNNY HOW MANY CATASTROPHES ARE GOVERNMENT-MADE: Flint Water Hearings: How This ‘Government-Made Catastrophe’ Happened.
ACTUALLY, IF YOU BELIEVE IN DEMOCRACY, THIS IS AN ARGUMENT FOR THE “SPOILS SYSTEM.”
“The civil service will interpret a Donald Trump presidency as damage and route around it.”
That was the recent consensus at one of those infamous Washington dinner parties that so repulse Trump fans. (What can I say? We in Washington also have to eat. And while we do, we talk about politics.)
The line, of course, was a play on a gleeful old hacker credo: “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” But it was offered in earnest, and on reflection, I think it’s correct. . . .
Washingtonians, unlike the people making the demands, actually have to analyze the feasibility of these various sorts of requests. When they do, they quickly see that they are impossible, and set about finding innovative ways to ignore them. The insiders who need to get elected nonetheless say, “Yup, I’ll get right on that,” and then ignore them.
The civil service, on the other hand, has been eager to self-weaponize on Obama’s behalf. Which is why the argument that the bureaucracy’s behavior is just a result of realism and circumstance rings hollow.
OBAMA TO PROPOSE UNDERMINING OBAMACARE?: Yep, you read that right. The Washington Examiner is reporting that President Obama’s budget proposal is expected to include a narrowing of Obamacare’s so-called “Cadillac tax” of 40 percent on benefits-rich health insurance plans.
Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Jason Furman and chief economist Matthew Fiedler wrote that the budget, to be published next week, will propose raising the threshold for the cost of plans affected by the tax.
The change, they wrote, will prevent the tax from “creating unintended burdens for firms located in areas where health care is particularly expensive.”
The Cadillac tax was made law as part of the funding for Obamacare. It is also intended to slow the growth in health care costs created by the existing incentives in the tax code. . . .
While the tax is popular among economists, it is opposed by unions that have bargained for costly expensive plans as well as by business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Congress and is generally viewed unfavorably in Congress. Congress voted in December to delay the imposition of the 40 percent excise tax from 2018 to 2020.
No one ever thought the Cadillac tax was politically sustainable, long-term, precisely because of the vigorous opposition by unions, who give so generously to Democrats every election cycle. So it was always a “fake” revenue raiser for Obamacare. The problem, however, is that the Cadillac tax is one of the largest revenue sources within Obamacare–an estimated $108 billion over a ten-year period.
When you narrow, or eliminate, this revenue source, suddenly Obamacare becomes much more expensive than the rosy “deficit reducing” bill of goods sold to the American people. As Obama told the American people in his address to a Joint Session of Congress on health care in September 2009:
And here’s what you need to know. First, I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits — either now or in the future. (Applause.) I will not sign it if it adds one dime to the deficit, now or in the future, period. And to prove that I’m serious, there will be a provision in this plan that requires us to come forward with more spending cuts if the savings we promised don’t materialize. . . .
Now, add it all up, and the plan I’m proposing will cost around $900 billion over 10 years — less than we have spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and less than the tax cuts for the wealthiest few Americans that Congress passed at the beginning of the previous administration. (Applause.) Now, most of these costs will be paid for with money already being spent — but spent badly — in the existing health care system. The plan will not add to our deficit.
Of course, this promise–that Obamacare would not add to the deficit–was completely false. But when you begin to narrow or repeal Obamacare’s major revenue-raising provisions such as the Cadillac tax, the deficit problem grows even worse.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m certainly not advocating for keeping the Cadillac tax, or any other provision of Obamacare. The whole thing was a massive, ill-considered jumble from day one, and it should never have been rammed through Congress via reconciliation. We are all now literally paying the price of such a raw political maneuver.
But when the namesake of Obamacare begins to propose repealing/narrowing the most significant revenue generating provisions of his own (only) major legislative achievement, you know something is seriously rotten in the state of Denmark. Obama is (predictably) throwing a bone to the Democrats’ union constituency, but it only emphasizes how Obamacare was and still remains, at its core, nothing but a stinky pile of crony capitalist payoffs to every single affected sector of economy. Even Obamacare’s Cadillac tax “punishment” of high-value union health plans turned out to be a ruse.
WAPO: Hillary makes Her Wall Street Problem Worse. “The most problematic part of her answer came when she insisted something that is demonstrably untrue: ‘They’re not giving me very much money now, I can tell you that much. Fine with me.'” To be fair, most of what Hillary says is demonstrably untrue.
ROB LONG ON THE PITFALLS OF WINNING ON TWITTER AND LOSING IRL: “My theory is that — for many — posting and tweeting and sharing count as political activity. But there are only two political activities that really matter for citizens, when you get right down to it: organizing and voting. The Organizer-in-Chief knows this. It’s how he got to the White House.”
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY WE’D SEE STUFF LIKE THIS. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Protect Your Womb From the Devil Drink: Let’s talk about the CDC’s bonkers new alcohol guidelines for women.
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USA TODAY: ‘IS IT IMMORAL TO WATCH THE SUPER BOWL?’
Yes, of course it is. It’s really immoral to see it live this Sunday in the San Francisco Bay Area, where they’re all about morality.
Related: “San Francisco, the gay capital of America, is facing invasion from so-called ‘tech bros,’ according to residents of the city’s famous gay districts who are upset by the growing number of straight people in their communities.”
SPENGLER LOOKS AT TED CRUZ’S FOREIGN POLICY:
What makes Cruz so hated is simply that he is smart enough to do without the Establishment. Cruz likes to compare himself to Reagan, whose autodicactic education in foreign policy gave him independence of judgment and confidence to pursue victory in the Cold War when the Establishment of his day thought it impossible. In many ways, Cruz will have a bigger problem if elected: for a decade prior to Reagan’s victory, the neo-conservatives (led by their “godfather” Irving Kristol) had trained cadre, ground out academic articles, and sparred over the big themes in the op-ed columns of the major media. Today the pickings are much slimmer. It’s not so much that the emperor has no clothes, but that the empire has no tailors.
Cruz, if elected, will have to do his own thinking, to an extent that no American president has had to do since Lincoln. He is intelligent enough and arrogant enough to do that, and he will owe no favors or patronage to the Establishment. He would be the cleverest man to occupy the oval office in a century and a half. He carries no baggage from the Bush administration, and will not invite the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol or Fox News’ Charles Krauthammer to draft an inaugural address, as did Bush in 2004. He won the Iowa caucuses by building the strongest grass-roots network in the country (he claims to have a campaign chairman in every county of the United States), which makes him independent of the party apparatus, such as it is.
Endearing, boyish, photogenic and eloquent, Marco Rubio is the candidate that Central Casting sent the Establishment from the studio pool. Rubio, a middling student at university and a Florida machine politician throughout his career, says his lines well but does not have an original thought about foreign policy. That is why the Establishment likes him. Cruz knows that the Establishment is naked, and is willing to say so. That’s why they don’t like him. They aren’t supposed to. They look at him the way a rice bowl looks at a hammer.
Cruz is not (as the Establishment punditeska suggests) a “Jacksonian” isolationist in the sense of Walter Russell Meade’s use of the term; rather, he is a John Quincy Adams realist in Angelo Codevilla‘s reading. Cruz feels no ideological compulsion to assert America’s world mastery. He is concerned about American security and American power. The Establishment came into being in America’s brief moment at the head of a unipolar world, and is imprinted with that notion the way ducklings are imprinted with the image of their mothers. The world has changed.
It certainly has.
MITT-MENTUM! Oh, sorry: Marco-Mentum! Rubio Campaign Courting Romney Endorsement Before NH Primary.
CC: @allahpundit.
FEEL THE BERN!
As the above tweet illustrates, Camp Bernie is following the model that Obama’s minions used so successfully in early 2008: Treat Hillary as the de facto Republican in the race. Whether that approach works when most of the MSM is on Hillary’s side this year remains to be seen, however — but the far left Democrat base certainly ate it up in 2008.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LIE ABOUT RAPE! (CONT’D): Another pro athlete appears to have been falsely accused of rape.
The woman claimed that after she told Bromley that she wanted to stop their sexual activity, he got angry and tried to rape her, then hit her with his car.
The two had met on Instagram and decided to meet up at a hotel. Bromley told police that he found the woman naked on the hotel bed after he came out of the bathroom. She performed oral sex on him, stopped, and demanded $2,000. Bromley said he didn’t pay because he thought it was a date.
Police told the New York Post that after Bromley refused to pay, the woman continued engaging in sexual activity before requesting money again, at which point Bromley left. Surveillance videos showed the woman following Bromley out of the hotel, continuing to harass him before throwing herself onto the hood of his car.
The accuser also has a history of seeking payment from athletes she meets on Instagram, and of threatening celebrities for money. She had reportedly tried to extort money from actor Taye Diggs by threatening to release a sex tape of the two of them. Diggs reportedly paid the woman, but the accuser claims she didn’t extort him or receive money.
The accuser had said she was drunk and had gotten sick after performing a sex act on Bromley, and that he flipped out and attacked her after that. She told the Post that she was “really traumatized” by the encounter.
A police source told the New York Daily News that it appears as though Bromley stopped and left when the women asked him to do so, and that there were “significant discrepancies” in the story she told law enforcement.
“Her credibility is seriously being questioned,” the police source told the Daily News.
What happened to “believe the women?”
DISPATCHES FROM PALLYWOOD: ‘Journalists orchestrating events to make Israel look bad,’ notes the Jerusalem Post:
Lawmakers and an IDF representative accused journalists of orchestrating events to make Israel look bad, during a Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee discussion Tuesday of violent incidents between security forces and the press.
“With all the importance of the press in a democratic country,” MK Moti Yogev (Bayit Yehudi) began, “we cannot get confused and must always give priority to the IDF’s operational freedom of action, because they are acting to save lives.”
Yogev accused the press of behaving like an “imbalanced theater.”
MK Yisrael Eichler (UTJ) compared the press to a car, saying that in some cases it is helpful and brings progress, and in other cases it can be destructive.
According to Eichler, a former journalist, objective reporters should be given freedom of action, but reporters who “take a side in the conflict” should be given less access.
That’s an understandable response, but Pallywood would supply them with plenty of stock footage no matter what on-location access the MSM has:
But in any case, journalists orchestrating events to make Israel look bad sounds pretty chickenshit to me.
Related! “Hamas Discovers the Wheel.” Man, the prop department inside the Pallywood studio system isn’t what it used to be.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Reason: Why Are Liberals Winning the Culture Wars?
Perhaps in small part because they have Reason helping them along.
ROLL CALL: Who’s Afraid of John Thune? So far, everybody.
South Dakota Democrats are still looking for a candidate to challenge Republican incumbent Sen. John Thune, and don’t seem to be having an easy time recruiting one in the strongly conservative state.
Thune famously beat former Senate Minority Leader Thomas Daschle in 2004, and in 2010, Thune ran without a Democratic opponent. At the time of his first reelection campaign, the former South Dakota Senate Minority Leader and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Scott Heidepriem told a local paper “we just concluded that John Thune is an extremely popular Senator who is going to win another term in the Senate.”
South Dakota Democrats aren’t ceding the race this time, said Michael Ewald, communication director for the party. But he also said he could not give names of potential candidates at the moment: “There are multiple people.”
Ann Tornberg, chairwoman of the South Dakota Democratic Party, said having a Senate candidate could have an important effect down the ticket. “In a presidential year, it’s important to have candidates up and down,” Tornberg said. “We would put up a candidate whether or not we see him [Thune] as vulnerable.”
South Dakota currently has an all-Republican congressional delegation, two senators and one representative. But Zach Nistler, who is campaign manager for South Dakota State House Rep. Paula Hawks’ Congressional campaign, said he’s optimistic his party will find a candidate.
Well, okay then.
RICK SANTORUM DROPS OUT, ENDORSES RUBIO ON GRETA VAN SUSTEREN’S FOX NEWS SHOW LAST NIGHT: The Rubio endorsement “came as a surprise to some,” Tyler O’Neil writes at PJM, given that “Both Huckabee and Santorum had appeared at Trump’s veterans fundraiser which he held at the same time as the seventh Republican debate last week.”
ONLY NOW, AT THE VERY END, DO THEY UNDERSTAND: Poll: 81% Think Federal Government is Corrupt.
CHANGE! Goodbye CFLs?
Remember when the CFL was presented as the Future of Lightbulbs? We’d all be thrilled to replace our archaic incandescents with high-tech CFLs. Just to hasten us along in the proper direction, the old bulbs were banned, lest people go all squirrelly and anti-social and prefer them to CFLs. Then came LED bulbs, which were A) better, and B) didn’t require opening every window in the house and wearing gas masks if you dropped one. Well:
GE just announced that it no longer make or sell compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) lightbulbs in the US. The company will wind down the manufacturing of CFL bulbs by the end of 2016, and it will begin to shift its focus on making the newest and most energy-efficient lightbulbs, LEDs.
Between destroying the incandescent lightbulb, championing its stillborn hazardous replacement, bringing you the current incarnation of NBC and MSNBC, ushering Obama into the White House and sponsoring Vox.com, GE’s really spent the last decade covering itself in corporatist glory. Take a bow, fellas.
DUH. BECAUSE HE’S A REPUBLICAN. Ted Cruz is the first Latino to win a caucus or primary. Why isn’t that a bigger deal?
IT’S NOT A SCANDAL, IT’S A CRIME: More Clinton emails to be labeled ‘top secret,’ lawmaker says.
A Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee warned on Wednesday that the Obama administration will declare that additional emails from Hillary Clinton’s personal server have been classified at the highest level.
“The press has reporting there’s been 22 emails. There’s actually more than that,” Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) said on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom” on Wednesday.
“They do reveal classified methods. They do reveal classified sources and they do reveal human assets,” he added. “I can’t imagine how anyone could be familiar with these emails, whether they’re sending them or receiving them, and not realize that these are highly classified.”
Stewart told the Washington Examiner there are seven additional emails that will be marked as “top secret,” in addition to the 22 emails that were revealed last week.
The State Department last week acknowledged that additional emails could be classified at the top secret level, but declined to confirm Stewart’s claim on Wednesday.
“As you know, there’s more emails that we still need to be released through the Freedom of Information Act,” State Department spokesman John Kirby told reporters. “I’m not aware of any additional specific classification issues, so when we have more and we’re in a position that we can talk about the next tranche, we will.”
Confirmation that there were more highly classified emails on Clinton’s server would only add to the controversy that has chased her Democratic presidential campaign. Criticism has mounted that Clinton’s “homebrew” email setup may have jeopardized official government secrets.
Remember: She used her “homebrew” email setup in a deliberate effort to avoid political scrutiny of her actions. And, presumably, she did that because her actions were shady, and quite possibly illegal. As a result, the country’s secrets were exposed to our enemies, and people may have died.