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Attorney General Eric Holder and his minions, along with some of their slavish apologists in the media, are deliberately trafficking in lies of great note. They prevaricate with great enthusiasm, and they excuse lawlessness with fierce disdain. They -- both the Department of Justice (DOJ) officials and their leftist amanuenses pretending to be journalists -- brazenly ignore the public's right to information, and intentionally distract attention from relevant facts and from their own deep beliefs.
These conclusions arise from the accumulated weight of evidence in what should be a broadening scandal emanating from the infamous New Black Panther Party voter-intimidation case. Not that one would know it from the main pages or airtime of establishment-media outlets, but the Panther-related issue of race-based decision-making at DOJ reached crests last week on multiple fronts.
Deserving of howls of media outrage, but instead attracting barely a peep of protest, was the highly disturbing evidence of a major cover-up at DOJ, as discussed by both the Washington Times and the Heritage Foundation's Hans von Spakovsky. (Please do read both links for more information on those aspects of the scandal.) Von Spakovsky makes an excellent argument that both internal investigative arms at DOJ are "protecting Obama's political appointees and disregarding their ethical and professional violations in the New Black Panther Party case."
In any other circumstance, if an administration 1) claimed utterly bogus privileges never before recognized by law, 2) dragged its feet for 16 months on a rather simple internal investigation, 3) put partisan officials in place to oversee or skew the investigations, and 4) stiffed Congress and the media and an independent agency on formal, legally weighty information requests, then the axis of CBS/New York Times/AP/White House press corps would be in full-on Watergate mode with breathless updates about the latest nefarious occurrences.
Yet that's just the cover-up. In this case, the "crime" (metaphorically speaking) really is worse. For well over a year now, the biggest normative violation has not involved the actual Panther intimidation, or even anything focusing on the Panthers at all. Instead, the more important focus has been on the convincing evidence that both the DOJ Civil Rights Division and the Obama political team at the Department, up to and including Holder, exhibit a pervasive hostility against the idea of race-neutral enforcement of laws related to civil rights, and have both spoken and acted accordingly. Most concretely, did Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes adopt a policy of not enforcing, or not enforcing in an equal manner, two separate laws relating to voting rights and procedures? Two sworn testimonies say that she said as much at specific, widely attended Civil Rights Division meetings in the fall of 2009, and further sworn testimony says she and the Obama team directly ignored a key lawyer's recommendation to enforce one of those laws against eight states in obvious violation thereof.
These incidents get to the very heart of the entire investigation by the Commission. From the very adoption of this topic for its statutorily mandated annual report, the Commission's investigation was deliberately broader than just the Panther case alone, but instead was to discover if DOJ had adopted "a change in policy or practice" that remained "consistent with proper enforcement" of civil rights laws. Contemporaneous media accounts made abundantly clear that the overriding issue was this (quoting the excellent Jennifer Rubin): "And therein lies the most likely answer to the mystery as to why the Obama team would want to undo a victory in a high-profile civil rights case. The notion that civil rights laws apply to all citizens, and are not on the books merely to protect minority groups or to pursue white racists, is an anathema to the liberal civil rights establishment and their sympathetic partners in the Justice Department."
All along, therefore, the question was if the Obama-Holder Justice Department was giving support to the internal Civil Rights Division belief that civil rights laws should not be enforced against black perpetrators who abused the rights of white victims. This is explosive stuff. It cuts to the very heart of equal rights under the law. It's also straight out of Orwell's Animal Farm, where some animals were "more equal than others."
In December the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights adopted the main text of its draft major report into all these matters, and last Friday the entire report officially was released -- after inclusion, for the first time on the record, of the comments dissenting from the report, and other comments rebutting those dissents, penned by individual members of the Commission.
Here is the absolutely key thing to note about the individual statement of the two liberal commissioners, Arlan Melendez and Michael Yaki: Nowhere in the main text of their 23-page comment did they even mention the name of Julie Fernandes. The entirety of their discussion of this most explosive of the commission's findings was relegated to a single footnote that never even addressed the substance of Fernandes' alleged statements or actions, but only highlighted an alleged, almost infinitesimal, discrepancy between the two whistleblowers that told of the Fernandes meetings. There is good reason for the liberal commissioners' failure to address this issue: Fernandes' statements and actions can neither be denied nor justified. Too many people were at the meetings in question for it to be plausibly refuted. The Holder team repeatedly has ignored the same questions; it repeatedly refused to allow Fernandes to be deposed on the matter; most importantly, it has not explained why -- if the department's policy is not as Fernandes (according to the whistleblowers) described it -- the administration never did enforce the law against the eight states in violation even after whistleblower Christ Coates, in his official capacity, brought the violations to the Holder team's attention and recommended action on it.
If the Fernandes issue is not addressed, then everything else by Messrs. Melendez and Yaki is pure misdirection and obfuscation. After all, in Commissioner Gail Heriot's formal comments released last Friday, Heriot noted "Commissioner Yaki's earlier declaration that if Deputy Assistant Attorney General Julie Fernandes made the statement she is alleged by Christian Adams to have made, she 'should be fired.' As he so colorfully put it, 'That person should be tossed out on their ear in two seconds flat.'"
Abigail Thernstrom, vice chairman of the Commission, was even more colorful during hearings: "It is simply impossible to believe that [Fernandes] said anything remotely like]" what was reported. "…. She surely didn't announce that. I mean, unless she is some sort of moron." Yet Thernstrom herself wrote a dissent to the official report saying as follows: "The majority charges that racial double standards govern the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act in the Holder Justice Department. If that can be convincingly demonstrated, it will be a grave indictment of this administration. But that evidentiary showing awaits further investigation by the Department of Justice and Congress."
Thernstrom ignores the fact that sworn testimony, by law, is evidence, unless directly disputed and refuted. And the only reason it "awaits further investigation" is because of the lawless stonewalling by Holder's team -- made easier by Thernstrom's repeated refusal to support a single Commission effort (once the topic was chosen as its official report) to garner further evidence on its own about whether Fernandes was indeed the sort of "moron" who would say what seemed inconceivable to Thernstrom.
The failure to enforce the law against the eight scofflaw states, and the unrefuted charges that Fernandes announced a policy of refusing to enforce that law, are themselves strong evidence of partisan and probably racialist attitudes ruling the roost at DOJ. As Commissioner Gail Heriot noted in her own formal comments released last Friday, the allegations about Fernandes are made all the more believable because Fernandes also was quoted by a liberal news service expressing just those abhorrent views -- the views that civil rights laws aren't intended to protect whites also -- on an occasion before she joined DOJ. "The law was written to protect black people," Fernandes said back then.
The truth is that this viewpoint enjoys overwhelming support in lefty legal circles. Sickeningly wrongheaded as it is, it is not unusual, but an ideological touchstone. That truth was made abundantly clear especially in the pointed rebuttal by Commissioner Heriot, and also in the other interlocking statements by her and Commissioners Todd Gaziano and Peter Kirsanow. Together, their statements are brilliant expositions of the entire, sprawling matter. (They are included in the report that is the first entry at this site, which also provides every other document of note in this case.) As Gaziano noted, even the former chairman of the Commission itself, Mary Frances Berry, wrote in an official Commission report -- blatantly ignoring the text of the civil rights laws themselves -- that "Civil rights laws were not passed to give civil rights protections to all Americans." Read that again: The civil rights of whites should not be protected, according to a liberal former chair of the Commission, pushing the same noxious view (in dissent from the majority) attributed to Ms. Fernandes and the bulk of her compatriots at DOJ. The Washington Post and the Christian Science Monitor, among others, have found and published ample evidence (cited by Heriot) of other current and former DOJ attorneys saying much the same thing.
Again, this is at the center of the entire Commission investigation springing from the Black Panther affair, and at the root of questions pushed by a number of Republican congressmen led by Frank Wolf of Virginia and Lamar Smith of Texas -- questions stonewalled by DOJ in the same way DOJ stonewalled the Commission. Holder knows this is the case. Every one of his minions knows this is the case. Their toadies in lefty (and even some in the "mainstream") media know this is true. And why should they not: It is only a step away, different in degree but not entirely different in kind, from their advocacy of the more aggressive forms of affirmative action. In affirmative action, the government provides extra benefits to minorities; in these civil rights disputes, the left would have government protect minorities against illegal actions that whites are unprotected from. The logic is the same, except that in affirmative action they can pretend they are merely offering benefits but with no "victims"; whereas with a failure to protect the civil rights of white Americans, the lefties would be forced to assert that the victims just aren't really worth protecting.
They apparently feel morally justified in acting on this racialist basis, but they cannot say so in public because they know the public strongly disagrees. Heck, they know that even their favored, aggressive forms of affirmative action are deeply unpopular with a majority of Americans, and that this further step of race-based favoritism would infuriate a larger majority still.
The most froth-mouthed (and at times flat-out nasty) of the left's media lackeys, Adam Serwer of the American Prospect, who too often also pollutes the Plum Line blog at the Washington Post, actually admits and excuses the double standard even while denying that DOJ applies it:
There's no question that civil rights laws cover Americans of all backgrounds -- and indeed, the voting section under Obama has intervened on behalf of white voters. But civil rights enforcement can't be anymore 'race-neutral' than our own society or history. Ensuring that people's rights are protected regardless of race can't actually be achieved through color-blindness.
(The so-called "interven[tion] on behalf of white voters" is a total red herring, by the way, as whistleblower Christian Adams explained -- even before the DOJ took action -- exactly why that particular action, if taken, would amount to more of an invitation to wrongdoing than a blockage of wrongdoing.)
What Serwer is suggesting, again, is the old "some are more equal than others" approach to determining whose civil rights do or don't merit active government protection rather than lip service. This is racialism, pure and simple -- not to be confused with the overt racism that Serwer repeatedly insinuates is the real reason for conservative interest in these matters.
(Of many examples of Serwer cheap shots that could be given, consider two: 1) He writes of "the feverish alternate universe of racial resentment in which some conservatives seem to reside." 2) "This whole 'scandal' isn't really about 'race neutral' enforcement of civil rights laws. It's about discrediting the whole concept of civil rights enforcement by undermining the legitimacy of the federal agency charged with doing so." In Serwer's world, conservatives want no civil rights enforcement: We secretly pine for a return to all-white lunch counters and exciting cross burnings. Serwer's vicious calumny merits, and will receive in this space in another column, a full and devastating refutation.)
Commissioner Kirsanow's excellent rebuttal statement summed up the issue perfectly:
Racialist sentiments like those attributed to Fernandes demonstrate a deeply flawed understanding of the Voting Rights Act, whose plain language protects all American voters, not just members of minority groups…. [DOJ] treads on constitutionally treacherous ground where it identifies the beneficiaries of its enforcement efforts on the basis of race…. Our Constitution forbids this type of gross, race-based meting out of benefits and burdens.
Those of us who have pushed this case believe deeply in civil rights for all, and feel in our very marrow a particular revulsion against the unfairnesses, indignities, and sometimes pure horrors that black Americans suffered for decade after decade. In his eloquent racial protest song "What did I do/to be so black, and blue?", Louis Armstrong sang that "The only sin/ is in my skin." His message was right, that there is no sin in dark brown skin -- nor is there sin in skin of any color.
People of every skin color deserve the laws' equal protection. Compelling evidence indicates Eric Holder and his team do not appear to act according to that principle. It is not latent racism for Americans to "call them out" on their immoral lawlessness.
Tuesday
A super day. I awakened at the Hermitage Hotel in downtown
Nashville. It is an old hotel and in perfect repair. Truly a
showplace. Grand lobby with immense chandeliers and bright immense
skylights. There is a roaring fire in the fireplace and comfortable
chairs and couches everywhere.
Last night, when I checked in, I ate a hamburger at the Oak Bar downstairs here. Cheerful, helpful bartender and waitresses. One, Bobbie Marie, showed me pictures of her poodles, which apparently have eyes that are split between a brown top and a blue bottom. Another told me about how her statistics teacher used to tell her that statistics are "…lies, all lies, all made up to make a point." He was pretty close to the mark. I see studies written up in the newspapers day after day that purport to prove something and almost never do. The gullible reporters write them up anyway.
"Lies, all lies." Good thing to remember about statistics.
This morning, I got up and got into my car and headed up to Murray, Kentucky, in a fierce freezing rain. Eventually, the rain died down, but it was still terribly cold. I slept and next thing I knew, I was in Murray. It is a charming town of about 28,000 people. My speech is at Murray State University. I was met in front of the Forrest Pogue Library, a simply beautiful building, by the woman in charge of the event, a former high school captain of the cheerleaders and still super beautiful, Jeannie. Wow, is she gorgeous. We had a little tour of the library, then a press conference, then dinner, then my speech.
It all went super well, the way things always do in small Southern or border state towns. The air was bitter cold, with a cruel wind, and as we walked to the auditorium, I thought it would be amazing if anyone showed up. But we had a completely full house, which made me super happy. The audience was lively, pleasant, good natured, got all of my jokes, and I loved them.
I really hated to leave, which I did after a short faculty reception. It was an easy ride back with me sleeping most of the way, and then when I got back to my room, I had a snack of onion puree, then watched the news from Egypt.
It is all bad in Egypt. But Murray, Kentucky, is the Garden of Eden, and Murray State is paradise.
WASHINGTON -- My guess is that Judge Roger Vinson of the Federal District Court in Pensacola, Florida, is an amateur zoologist. Judge Vinson is the federal judge who ruled Monday that those who confected Obamacare cannot compel the citizenry to buy health insurance. Moreover, he found that because of the way the 2,600-page bill is created without any "severability clause" that makes the entire law unconstitutional. The authors of Obamacare declared that without mandatory insurance the whole bill was unworkable. Mandatory insurance was not severable from the law. Hence Judge Vinson, because of the way the bill was constructed, threw the whole law out. Now it is up to the Supreme Court to breathe life into this legislation or to bury it. I say RIP.
As learned as Judge Vinson indubitably is -- in the course of his meditations on Obamacare he reread the Constitution, The Federalist Papers, James Madison's notes at the Constitutional Convention, certain cogitations of Chief Justice John Marshall and more -- the erudite judge surely noted a zoological curiosity. Conservatives and Liberals are so different as to be drawn from distinct species of political animals. To me, the conservative has always appeared to be some form of mammal. The Liberal is reptilian. I could be wrong. I wonder what Judge Vinson might say.
We saw this difference at work during President Barack Obama's dogged pursuit of his suicidal legislative bomb called Obamacare. Prior to that, we saw this difference at work as President Ronald Reagan pursued an issue equally dear to his heart, the banning of abortion. In wanting to ban abortion Reagan had a goodly number of the American people behind him, though not a majority and certainly not a large enough number to burden the remainder of the American people with an abortion ban. Reagan settled for arguing his case. He relied on persuasion. He tried to build a majority behind banning abortion. Perhaps he picked up some support, but he did not envenom an already divisive issue by forcing an abortion ban on the American people.
Obama did envenom an issue, healthcare. Recall fifteen months ago when the Hon. Pelosi responded to a reporter's inquiry about the constitutionality of mandatory insurance? Said she with her trademark urbanity, "Are you kidding?" Well since then she has lost her speakership. The Democrats have lost their majority in the House. They almost lost it in the Senate. And Judge Vinson, and earlier Judge Henry E. Hudson, agreed with that unnamed reporter. He had a point.
Liberals and conservatives seem to see things differently. Sometimes the Liberals see "inactivity" as "activity." The conservatives see inactivity as… well, inactivity. In the case of Obamacare, the Liberals see the ordinary Americanos' failure to purchase insurance, sometimes until they absolutely need it, as increasing the cost of healthcare for everyone -- in other words, "activity." Thus they will penalize anyone failing to buy healthcare with a tax to pay for God knows what. In the world of Obamacare we all have costly healthcare. Some pay and some do not. We are all one big happy family.
This is where the Commerce Clause of the Constitution comes in. The Commerce Clause was originally intended to eliminate the interstate trade barriers that existed under the Articles of Confederation. Yet since the New Deal it has been expanded upon so that at least up until the time of Chief Justice William Rehnquist it gave license to almost anything a Congressional majority wanted. The Congressional majority was even permitted by the Court to prohibit a farmer from growing on his own farm wheat for his own consumption. Now along comes Judge Vinson arguing that the Commerce Clause applies only to "clear and inarguable activity," not clear and inarguable inactivity. As the Wall Street Journal editorialized in the wake of Judge Vinson's decision, "It never applied to inactivity like not buying health insurance, which [to quote Judge Vinson] has 'no impact whatsoever' on interstate commerce."
Doing so would be significant. It would create a totally centralized government. That is to say, a government that can do almost anything. It would be unlimited government, which is another difference between conservatives and Liberals. We want limited government. They do not.
They only pay me for original stuff, so there is no point in noting that Obama is the Moses of our time. Everyone knows that. He said "Let my people go!" and the heads of American corporations immediately started letting people go in all directions.
Now he is taking his imitation a step further, trying to get today's leader of Egypt to destroy his own regime in an orgy of drowning chariots. And this fool might actually get his way! Although the situation in Egypt appears to be confusing, the one aspect of it which should have been clear was the range of possible American responses. Perhaps counterintuitively, the United States was in a fairly good position when this began, because most of the options had some upside. Sure enough, Obama picked the one wrong way to go.
Not just wrong. Bloody-minded, short-sighted, ill-conceived, mean-spirited and self-destructive. Just about every pejorative you can cobble together with a hyphen will cover the situation amply.
Let us review. Egypt was the de facto leader of the Arab coalition which attacked the fledgling State of Israel shortly after it declared independence in 1948. It was seen as the leader of the 1956 force fighting Israel, although it worked very closely with Syria during that period. Between 1958 and 1961 Egypt and Syria merged into the United Arab Republic. After they split, Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser was again the leader of the Arab world in its bellicosity against Israel.
In 1967, a blockade instituted by Nasser in the Gulf of Aqaba triggered the Six-Day War, with Egypt again the prime opponent. The Yom Kippur War in 1973 was a direct invasion of Israel by Egypt under Anwar Sadat. It is fair to say that the Arab-Israeli conflict was mainly in those days the friction between Egypt and Israel.
This means that when Sadat made peace with Israel in a shocking turnabout, the idea of full-scale war between Israel and its neighbors, as had occurred four times in the prior quarter-century, was no longer a clear and present danger. Thirty-three years later, that impression has not been materially altered. All military engagement involving Israel since that time has been limited geographically; no sovereign country has directly been at war with Israel since. The only sort-of exception was when Syria allowed its Air Force to duel Israel's over Lebanon in 1982, resulting in a humiliating rout. Also, Iraq shot 39 Scud missiles at Israel in 1991 while being spanked by George H. W. Bush.
A great deal of time and effort is invested into trying to smooth the feathers of the Palestinians, all this goes under the heading of the Mideast peace process. But in the real world those are very small potatoes. With Egypt on the sidelines, the danger of a real conflagration in that region is limited to the possibility of Iran making up the geographical gap between itself and Israel by virtue, or vice, of nuclear technology.
Which brings us to Mubarak. Since the assassination of Sadat, he has managed his country fairly well and managed the peace exceedingly well. The alliance between the United States and Egypt is by far the single most valuable asset we have bought in the entire world. Israel is a great asset, too, but they are peaceable people in their own right and would support our interests even if we showed them no favor at all.
Egypt is not democratic with some repressive elements involved. Still, there are no Iraq meat-grinders on the security front, nor are there leprous gangrenous scabrous limbless orphans in tatters begging in the streets like Calcutta. Tourists are permitted to roam quite freely there and they find a country with some prosperity and a lot of lower-middle-class people in mismatched clothes, a sort of Central-America-on-the-Nile. Mubarak is not Gandhi, but neither is he Ahmadinejad or Castro.
To treat the democracy demonstrators there better than those in Iran requires a degree of lunacy. And as this column's honorary South American correspondent -- Miss Latin America 2005 Claudia Monteverdi -- has pointed out, it is beyond absurd to regard Mubarak as less legitimate than Manuel Zelaya was in Honduras in 2009.
We could have handled the situation by praising Hosni Mubarak's benevolent leadership while pointing out that it is in the interest of Egypt and its neighbors for greater democratic participation. Much, in fact, as Condoleezza Rice did. However, mass anarchic demonstrations paralyzing the economy are counterproductive. As Abraham Lincoln said in 1838, "There is no grievance that is a fit object for redress by mob law." We could have promised the good offices of the United States in working with our loyal ally to negotiate gradual improvements in the system.
Instead Obama chose to say: "The people are right. Get out, Mubarak. Now."
Number one, stupid: we are now at the mercy of street thugs in the most sensitive country in a volatile region. Number two, heartless: taking Mubarak out is certain to visit horrific dislocation on the entire population. Whoever takes over will not be able to prevent Iraq-style suicide bombings all over the place, destroying the quality of life. Number three, morally obtuse: Mubarak is not a bad guy and should not be treated like Hu in China, who sticks electric cattle prods in people's rectums to make them talk. Come to think of it, how did we treat creepy sadist torturer Hu when he dropped by the other week? Number four, ineffective, because Mubarak has no incentive anymore to play ball.
Here, then, is the climax of my argument. The money and the cover fire we gave him until now acted as a brake on his behavior, not an accelerator. By telling him now we were dumping him, we gave him the one trump card which could save him, anti-Americanism. He can now slam us while he fights to save himself, thus winning over some of the America-haters who can't bring themselves to back any friend of ours.
Until Obama opened his mouth I thought Mubarak was gone. Now I think he will survive. Once his goons get the protesters out of the streets, good luck enforcing his Larry-Craig-style resignation effective in September. The Pharaoh of old saw cows in his dream, but today's leader of Egypt is done with mooing for Barack.
I have often written that the reason some folks persist in calling themselves Catholic is to be ready when reporters from the New York Times come to call. Sometimes I think that the Old Gray Lady might someday be the catalyst for many conversions to the faith, should serious thinkers ever meditate on just why the Church is so often in her crosshairs.
The Catholic Church is the largest institution in the world, and probably the oldest still in existence; and as such, her ways have been and still are well known throughout the globe. Why then, must she constantly explain herself to those who neither hold to her tenets nor share her mission? And even more curiously, why are her attempts to lead her own flock the subject of so much controversy? Surely, in this enlightened age, no one is forced to be a Catholic. If those who chafe at Rome's bit wish, there are many options out there from which to choose. But this exercise of free will does not serve the real agenda of those who wish all worship of God expunged from our nation.
A case in point is the recent decree by Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Arizona which revoked his consent for St. Joseph's Hospital to "use the word Catholic or be identified as Catholic in the Diocese of Phoenix," because he learned that an 11-week-old baby had been aborted in direct contravention of Church teaching. Prior to this unfortunate action he was forced to take, he also privately informed a nun, Sister Mary McBride, who sat on the hospital's ethics committee that, as a result of her consent to the abortion, she and all other Catholics involved had automatically incurred excommunication.
Anyone familiar with this issue knows that, as has been pointed out by myself and many others including Pope Benedict XVI, that this self-excommunication, or latae sententiae, is supported by Canon law, "which says that the killing of an innocent child is incompatible with receiving communion, which is receiving the body of Christ." This also explains why Bishop Olmsted was correct in removing the Blessed Sacrament from the hospital chapel and forbidding the celebration of Mass on the premises.
Which is where the Times and its ongoing anti-Catholic crusade come in. An op-ed piece by Nicholas Kristof entitled "Tussling Over Jesus" begins thusly: "The National Catholic Reporter newspaper put it best: 'Just days before Christians celebrated Christmas, Jesus got evicted.'" (A note to those who think NCR is a Catholic publication representing the views of a great many Americans of the Faith: NCR and its ilk are no more representative of adherence to the Magisterium of the Church than are Planned Parenthood and its supporters in encouraging women to become parents.)
In keeping with Times' policy as stated in my opening paragraph, Kristof then quoted a total of four "Catholics"; the hospital's president, two writers from NCR, and vampire chronicler Anne Rice, who recently "quit being a Christian;" a group she now calls "quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious and deservedly infamous." Kristof then goes on to crow that "The Catholic Health Association of the United States, a network of Catholic hospitals around the country, stood squarely behind St. Joseph's." Except that, the CHA -- which naively backed ObamaCare, believing promises that it contained no federal abortion funding -- has since recanted and issued a statement supporting the bishop and recognizing that he is the "authoritative interpreter" of the ethical and religious directives that guide Catholic health care in his Diocese.
And in choosing to revoke St. Joseph's Catholic designation, Bishop Olmsted cited continued abuses by the hospital and its parent organization, San Francisco-based Catholic Healthcare West. Indeed, CHW and its affiliates are responsible for distributing numerous types of contraception, performing sterilizations and granting monies to organizations that promote Planned Parenthood and the homosexual lifestyle; all of which may seem desirable to some, but not to faithful Catholics.
And that's the problem. Most folks, and indeed many Catholics who have not been properly catechized, simply do not understand the Faith. They don't understand, for example, that excommunication is far from being a tool to punish and permanently separate Catholics from the Church, but an act of charity aimed at getting the person to recognize their error and return to a faithful reception of the sacraments; most often accomplished simply by making a sincere sacramental confession and receiving absolution.
Servant of God, Archbishop Fulton Sheen, once famously said, "There are not over a hundred people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions, however, who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church -- which is, of course, quite a different thing."
And this, my friends, is what consumes the New York Times and its minions; expanding on the lies and distortions about the Church and her Founder. It's why folks like Kristof, who make a habit of denigrating people of a certain faith -- hint: it's not Islam -- will continue to seek out disgruntled Christians who have lost their way as proof that religion is indeed merely the opiate of bitter clingers.
But when it comes down to it, the only ones evicting Jesus are the people who have chosen to expel him from their hearts by rejecting the hard parts of his teaching that interfere with their chosen lifestyles.
A few blocks from my home is the spot where the most famous exorcism in American history took place, the one William Peter Blatty used as the basis for his novel The Exorcist. Most of "the rite" took place in the psychiatric ward of Alexian Brothers Hospital in 1949. The hospital no longer exists. (Cue ghostly music.) It was long ago destroyed by the malevolent forces of the Midwest Wrecking Company. However, if you go to the site and stand on what's now a very black and ominous parking lot, you will not only be told to leave before police are summoned, you will notice a crack in the pavement that resists all attempts to seal it. A crack, legend has it, that extends all the way to Hell (Cue crazy demonic laughing).
When I'm not staring at cracks in parking lot pavements, I sometimes wonder if there hasn't been a recent spike in Satanic meddling. How else might one explain the persistence of North Korea, the popularity of Two and a Half Men, and the three-hour Monday morning staff meeting, except, to quote Pope John Paul II, "the devil is still alive and active in the world"?
Now it's official. According to a Catholic Church spokesman, exorcism requests have been unusually high for "the last five years or so." Which makes me wonder what happened five years ago that got Mephistopheles so hot?
Church officials have a few theories. These include the Charismatic Renewal Movement, endless Hollywood treatments and, that universal scapegoat, the Internets. Add to that, increased immigration from "developing" countries where demonic possessions are as common as Kalashnikovs.
All of those explanations seem entirely plausible, as well as extremely boring. Besides, they are overlooking the obvious explanation.
Looking back, we find roughly five years have passed since Saddam Hussein moved into his new digs overlooking a certain Lake of Fire. It's easy to imagine Saddam strolling through the gates of Hell, taking a look around and immediately barking orders.
SADDAM: What is it with you demons, lying around all day watching reruns of Two and a Half Men? Shouldn't you be upstairs tormenting people? Hitler, Woodrow Wilson, how can you allow such sloth?
HITLER (shrugging): It's one of the Seven Deadly Sins, isn't it?
Do you have a better explanation?
EVER SINCE VATICAN II, the Church has been hoping the whole awkward idea of demonic possessions would go away, along with its various sex scandals, Rome's concordat with Nazi Germany, and those weird nuns who want to be priests. But, since demonic possession seems here to stay -- thanks to Hollywood schlockmeisters -- some Church officials have opted to embrace the phenomenon. If nothing else, exorcising demons is a chance for priests to play the good guys for once.
Which is why the Catholic Church recently held a two-day exorcist seminar for 110 clergy at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront. Appropriately enough, since the Marriott was the scene of the infamous Nightmare on Waterfront Street, during which I downed five fuzzy melon balls in less than two hours and spent the night projectile vomiting green bile all over my bed.
Religious experts may not know what this sudden rise in reported possessions means, but television producers sure as hell do. It means a great idea for a reality television show. So this spring the Discovery Network is launching a new show called "The Exorcist Files," which stars Pope Benedict as a sexy, brooding, paranormal investigator who's got a thing for his co-star Sister Eleanor, played by Gillian Anderson.
Not really.
But the Catholic Church is opening up its secret files and making its usually guarded exorcists available for the show. After all, it's TV. And, as anyone who's seen the film To Die For knows, "you're not really anybody in America unless you're on TV... 'cause what's the point of doing anything worthwhile if there's nobody watching?"
I'll definitely be watching. Demonic possession makes for great TV. I mean, battling the Germans or spinal cancer or a giant corrupt multinational corporation is one thing, but a reality TV show that pits heroic clergymen against the Prince of Darkness himself -- it doesn't get any more dramatic than that.
One scene from the 1969 version of True Grit, directed by the journeyman Henry Hathaway, that doesn't appear in the new remake by the Brothers Coen comes at a moment of down-time on the trail when John Wayne as federal marshal Reuben "Rooster" Cogburn -- who is played in the remake by Jeff Bridges -- is giving his employer and protégé, Mattie Ross (Kim Darby), a résumé of his life since his disreputable service with Quantrill's Raiders in the Civil War. At some point, he says, he had gone to New Mexico and robbed a bank in order to get the money to start a business. Though he is now an officer of the law himself, he appears to take the view that this was simply a necessity for him to live and so not subject to the usual moral and legal prohibitions against theft. Mattie, who has a highly moral and legal approach to everything and who is especially censorious about Rooster's drinking ("I would not put a thief in my mouth to steal my brains!" she says to him, quoting Shakespeare), firmly informs him that neither morality nor the law makes any exceptions for his necessity. "It's all stealing," she insists.
"That's the view those New Mexicans took!" says Rooster with renewed incredulity that anyone should be so needlessly and heedlessly scrupulous. No wonder Richard Nixon is said to have written Wayne a fan letter -- although the screenplay was by blacklisted Communist Marguerite Roberts -- about the movie! In another scene that the Coens do not include, Wayne drills a rat with his six-gun, explaining to Mattie as he does so: "You can't serve papers on a rat; you've got to kill him or let him be." So much for legal niceties! Most people would then have understood that Rooster is a man of classically heroic stature, a man who stands outside and above the law. "If the President does it, it's not illegal," as Nixon was later to put it to David Frost. Wayne's character, Tom Doniphon, in John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) is there to make much the same point. Later, in yet another scene that the Coens do not repeat, Rooster has to rob some people at gunpoint of their horses and buckboard in order to get Mattie to an Indian doctor in time to save her life after she has been bitten by a snake. The suggestion is -- as it also is in Liberty Valance -- that necessity does sometimes justify a disregard for the law.
This inconvenient truth is meant to contrast with the quaint moralism of the revenge-seeking Mattie, who has hired Rooster to bring her father's killer in dead or alive. In the Coens' version of Mattie, there is still a touch of her Old Testament grandeur in demanding a strict moral accounting for that death -- which (unlike Hathaway) they do not represent -- though only a touch. The impressive young actress who plays her, Hailee Steinfeld, was actually younger when she made the movie than her 14-year-old original in Charles Portis's novel. But the more salient contrast with the Mattie of Miss Darby (who was 20 at the time), is that she is less religious, less moralistic and more interested in the law, of which she has a considerable knowledge, acquired we don't know how. Miss Darby's Mattie is a less interesting and less attractive person, but she has the strict sense moral rectitude which seems to me at least to ring truer of a frontier lass of the 1880s. Her successor has something of that newer movie favorite, the child prodigy about her.
The new film isn't really interested in what I regard as the serious question of the moral ambiguity of the heroic so much as it is in the less interesting and more general moral chaos of the world that was also characteristic of the brothers' view of things in such recent films as No Country for Old Men and A Serious Man. In one way, however, this makes for a better picture -- as does the fact that, like all its authors' movies, it is a much more highly crafted piece of cinematic workmanship. It means that it is more focused on the heroism of its heroes -- who include Matt Damon in the role of the Texas Ranger La Boeuf, played by an absurdly miscast Glen Campbell in the earlier version -- and less on its moral significance. The season of their quest to capture and bring to justice the murderer, Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), is changed from summer to winter in order to stress the hardships they must endure, and the violence, including the hanging at Ft. Smith which occurs near the beginning of both films, is more graphic.
Mr. Bridges is inevitably a less-imposing screen presence than the Duke, but then who isn't? And the fact that he brings the heroic more down-to-earth is in keeping with the darkness of the rest of the film's vision. I also like that they have kept so much of Mr. Portis's old-timey language in the dialogue -- what the New York Times reviewer called its "twisty, funny sentences." The smack of authenticity is doubtless an illusion, but it is no less an effective one for that, and an unbiased viewer will find in the film itself no trace of the reviewer's mistaken and ideologically motivated attribution to it of an obsession with "that old- time American religion of vengeance."
Its other negative virtue is that the Coens manage to resist the temptation -- which they did not resist in the two films mentioned above -- to make too much of a point of the moral indifference of the universe to our ideas of justice. If you doubt this, just look at the fact that their use of the hymn tune, "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" as a musical leitmotif does not immediately strike one as being ironic.
Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms;
Leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms…
What have I to dread, what have I to fear,
Leaning on the everlasting arms?
I have blessed peace with my Lord so near,
Leaning on the everlasting arms.
Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter (1955), another film about children endangered by an evil man, used the same trick except that its irony was at the expense of the evil man, a faux preacher played by Robert Mitchum who sings it as part of his pose of religiosity. By piping it in over the soundtrack and making no obvious connection to the drama on-screen (except for a brief and otherwise irrelevant scene of hymn-singing at the hanging), the new movie merely hints at the consolations others have found in the idea of a just but merciful God without -- quite -- sneering at them. Mattie is still allowed the frontier wisdom that "Nothing is free but the grace of God" even if the film-makers themselves are agnostic about this. And she does, after all, get her man -- though the price she pays for the justice she seeks is enormous and apparently includes her never getting a man in the sense that young ladies were once expected to do.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course! But by bringing in the grown-up Mattie as old maid (Elizabeth Marvel) at the movie's end, the Coens restore Mr. Portis's framing device, whose omission from the John Wayne version was part of what made that movie at once simpler, sunnier, and more satisfying than the remake. Such virtues are rather thought to be vices these days, however, and I expect that most people will prefer the newer, more up-to-date True Grit. Undoubtedly, it's more to our contemporary taste. Yet I think I have to go with the 1969 version, even in spite of Glen Campbell's warbling of its brain-dead theme song, "One Day, Little Girl" (music by Elmer Bernstein, lyrics by Don Black) with its glib assurance that
Though summer seems far away
You'll find the sun some day
The Coens may have a juster appreciation of the difficulties we all have in coming by any sense of the moral order in the universe, but the earlier film reminds us that without one there's not much point to even the most craftsmanlike representation of its heroes' sufferings.
I literally crawled off the airport shuttle van at Park City, Utah, on Day One of the Sundance Film Festival, rested one knee on the snow-blanketed terra firma to regain equilibrium and thanked God I had not spilled my cookies during the driver's thirty minute re-creation of Jackie Stewart's run at the 1967 Monte Carlo Grand Prix. I was that close. Fortunately the journey was the nadir of my excursion; the next seven days at Sundance were equally dizzying, but delightfully so.
What brought me to the Festival (which wrapped last Sunday), and what has been the reason for my absence from The American Spectator's pages these last few years (you've missed me, right? right? hello?), is a feature narrative film I have produced, written, and directed: Moonhair. (More of which in due course).
No, Moonhair was not in the 2011 Festival lineup. In fact, it requires a few more months of editing to finish. But as we near completion I thought it was time to venture into the marketing of the film, the exercise of which I admit I am a babe in woods. But one must start somewhere, and why settle for the Cleveland Film Festival when one can visit Sundance? With luck, I thought I might even bump into Robert Redford, the Festival's founder.
Along with Moonhair's primary investor, his wife, his two secretaries, and my Director of Photography, we descended each day from our multi-room condo on the hill armed with DVDs and iPads and iPhones to present our 30-second teaser to anyone and everyone we could corner. Call it the blind shotgun networking approach. Keep firing and eventually you'll hit something.
The four or five block stretch of Main Street that is the historic part of Park City that you see in photos lies at the southern top of a slow rising gulch. This gulch grows mysteriously steeper and steeper in relation to the minutes left to the start of shows at theatres at the top of the hill. Main Street is filled with swank fur shops, art galleries, ritzy clubs ($150 entrance fees), and restaurants ranging from the posh to the casual. Not that casual implies inexpensive: I paid $40 for two gyros sandwiches at an order-at-the-counter, clean-your-own-table joint. Call me tight, but ouch! Park City descends to the north and west, melding into modern subdivisions and malls and massive buildings until, thirty miles later, it blends seamlessly into Salt Lake City. It is not an isolated mountain retreat, but an expensive suburb.
Actually, it proved more difficult to miss a budding filmmaker than to hit one. Turns out that darn near everyone at Sundance is a filmmaker. I kid you not. I soon discovered that I could stand in any line, sit in any movie theater, eat at any restaurant, and the person next to me was not a mere movie-goer, but either had a film in Sundance or was presently producing a film he or she hoped to have in next year's lineup. This is not hyperbole, but God's Truth. The Festival would more appropriately be called the Sundance Young Filmmaker's Convention.
Emphasis on young. I felt very very old (I'm not saying exactly how old) for a guy making his first independent feature film. I look more like a middle-aged Alfred Hitchcock; the surrounding hordes looked more like 26-year-old Federico Fellini clones, sans smoldering cigarettes. Trim black coats, stylish haircuts, black rectangular glasses, tidy little configurations of facial hair. Even some of the women filmmakers.
But, surprise and joy to me, everyone was amazingly friendly and eager to offer assistance and advice. And I mean everyone! There was no sense of competitiveness. Egalitarianism ran rampant, and I was inspired and rejuvenated beyond belief. (Struggling for years to put together a low-budget film will take it out of you, believe me.)
Here's how it worked.
I'd spot someone on the sidewalk, or in a movie line, or maybe the guy sitting next me before the film started. The filmmakers officially part of Sundance wore name badges.
"Are you a filmmaker? Do you have a film here?"
"Yes!" Being young, they were excited to be there and happy to share that excitement.
"I'm in post on Moonhair, a micro-budget action/adventure/historical/fantasy with an all Native American cast, the first in U.S. cinema history. Possibly the first micro-budget epic film ever produced. Set in the Dog Days, before the white man and horses. A girl with white hair and magical powers fights off the Dung Eaters -- the bad Indians -- and tries to save her people from extinction at their hands. Along the way she interacts with mythological figures like Whirlwind Girl, who flies through sky. Falls in love. Our motto is "NO WOODEN INDIANS." We use contemporary cinematic language to tell the story. We appeal to young Indians who are embracing the Internet and pop culture. We use TECHNO-POWWOW music. We think the film has universal appeal. Want to see the teaser on my nifty new iPad?"
"Whoa! I'd love to!"
And they really do love to!
"Wow! That is so totally cool and new! That is so perfect for Sundance! Who's your distributor."
"Don't have one."
"Here's my card. Call me next week and I'll put you in touch with my rep. He's looking for this sort of thing. Want to have lunch? What did you think of my three million dollar horror film?" He really did want to know, too.
This scenario played out time after time. Some of the best help I received was from film directors from Rwanda, India, and Norway. What a happy, optimistic, eager-eyed conglomeration of young people. Where were the shallow celebrities? The jaded cutthroat agents? The paparazzi?
I confess, I played my own paparazzi when someone announced, "There's Robert Redford!" I turned on my Canon HD in 24i Cine Mode and recorded forty seconds of Robert Redford walking across Main Street. You can't see his face, I shot him from the back side. Cinéma vérité. But you'd recognize his slight figure and black coat and beret .
I sat two seats over from James Franco at the screening of Prairie Love, produced by a 26-year-old film school grad from my alma mater, Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana. When I was 26 we did not have HD digital cams or laptops on which to easily edit and add sfx. I recall that film labs charged at least $50 for a simple dissolve. Do these kids know how lucky they are?
Rutger Hauer charged down the aisle of the Egyptian Theater screaming and wielding his real shotgun at the premier of Hobo With a Shotgun. He was having a grand time interacting with the crowd during Q & A, filming questioners with his Flip camera. No pretense. None. Just a regular guy who was obviously happier than hell to be in a fun movie. Like a little kid!
The world's greatest living cinematographer, Vilmos Zsigmond (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Deliverance, Bonfire of the Vanities, The Deer Hunter, dozens of others), was present at the world premiere of Summer Children, a 1965 film he shot that has never been released. During the Q and A after the screening, he lamented what digital cams have done to films. No one cares about lighting, he said. No one even knows who Rembrandt was. They think chiaroscuro is an STD. Most film today is crap. I couldn't agree more. But then, with future film distribution depending on iPhone viewing, who needs lighting?
In the lobby, I purchased the one remaining DVD of Summer Children, turned around and found myself facing Vilmos. He looks more like a healthy 62 than his 82. I shook hands, expressed my sincere admiration, and asked if he'd autograph the DVD. Puzzled, he signed it.
"Where did you get this?" he asked. "I didn't know they'd printed them. I don't even have one."
"I bought the last one off the table. I'll sell it to you, but it'll cost. It's the only DVD autographed by Vilmos Zsigmond." He laughed.
And so did I laugh. Aside from overpriced gyros sandwiches, how wonderful and inspiring to spend a week hustling my film in a charming mountain setting, surrounded by friendly masters and future masters of the art of cinema. This is why I chose to struggle and sacrifice to make Moonhair: To aspire for beauty, to share visions and dreams with like-minded souls, to encourage and be encouraged, to share camaraderie.
Political differences aside, thank you Robert Redford for the vision and realization of Sundance. With a bit of luck and a ton of persistence, I'll be back next year with Moonhair in the lineup, offering what I can to another newbie.
As of this moment Obamacare is officially not the law of the land. As Federal Judge Roger Vinson ruled on Monday in Florida, "[T]here is a long standing presumption that officials of the Executive Branch will adhere to the law as declared by the court. As a result, the declaratory judgment is the functional equivalent of an injunction." That law as declared by the Federal District Court in Florida is now that Obamacare is unconstitutional.
This, of course, is the second federal court ruling that Obamacare is unconstitutional, following the ruling of Judge Henry Hudson in the Northern District of Virginia on December 13. I predicted in this space at the time that Judge Vinson would rule the same. Now he has. I filed amicus curiae briefs in both cases on behalf of the American Civil Rights Union arguing for these results. Those briefs drew on my work in The Obamacare Disaster: An Appraisal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, published by the Heartland Institute.
Recall former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi laughing off Tea Party objections that Obamacare was unconstitutional with the reply, "Are you serious? Are you serious?" Now she knows just how serious we were.
Limits to Federal Power
Judge Vinson's ruling, as Judge Hudson's before him, represents a return to the original Constitution of limited enumerated powers delegated by the people to the federal government. Vinson opens his decision quoting James Madison in the Federalist Papers explaining, "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite," noting further that "the Tenth Amendment reaffirmed that relationship."
Vinson goes on to explain that the reason for that is to "ensure protection of our fundamental liberties" and "reduce the risk of tyranny and abuse." He goes on to quote the ultimate explanation again from James Madison in The Federalist Papers:
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
The enumerated power claimed by Congress for Obamacare was the Commerce Clause, which grants Congress the power "To regulate Commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian Tribes." Trade among the states was mentioned so Congress would have the power to eliminate the protectionist trade restrictions and barriers that had been erected among the states against trade with each other. Eliminating those protectionist trade barriers is a fundamental reason for the long term, world leading prosperity of America. This is the original reason for the Commerce Clause, not to allow abominations like Obamacare.
But this was dramatically changed during the New Deal to allow Congress to affirmatively regulate interstate commerce based on the language of the Commerce Clause, and neither Judge Vinson nor Judge Hudson challenged that change. But more recent Supreme Court decisions have reaffirmed that there are still limits to Congress's power to regulate under the Commerce Clause. Both Judge Vinson and Judge Hudson have now ruled that the individual mandate in Obamacare exceeds those limits.
Obamacare's individual mandate requires all individuals without employer-provided health insurance to buy insurance with all the politically correct and expensive coverage the government dictates they must buy. But as Judge Vinson noted, " (essentially for life) just for being alive and residing in the United States." Every prior regulation upheld as constitutional under the Commerce Clause involved some activity that could be construed as participation in interstate commerce. But failure to buy health insurance involves no such activity, and no participation in interstate commerce at all.
As a result, Judge Vinson concluded:
It would be a radical departure from existing case law to hold that Congress can regulate inactivity under the Commerce Clause. If it has the power to compel an otherwise passive individual into a commercial transaction with a third party merely by asserting…that compelling the actual transaction is itself commercial and economic in nature, and substantially affects interstate commerce…it is not hyperbolizing to suggest that Congress could do almost anything it wanted.
Then in words that will be memorialized on future Tea Party walls, Vinson wrote:
It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place.
Judge Vinson consequently ruled, "If Congress can penalize a passive individual for failing to engage in commerce, the enumeration of powers in the Constitution would have been in vain for it would be difficult to perceive any limitation on federal power."
They Can't Believe He Ate the Whole Thing
Once the individual mandate was declared unconstitutional, it was inevitable that the whole Obamacare law would be struck down, as Judge Vinson also ruled. The legislation included no severability clause as in most every bill, which provides if one provision is struck down, the rest survives. That was not an oversight.
Without the individual mandate, the rest of Obamacare is transparently unworkable, as President Obama and the Democrats themselves said during the jihad for its enactment. That is because the bill also includes what is known as "guaranteed issue" and "community rating." Under those provisions, an insurance company must insure whoever applies, and charge them no more than anyone else, no matter how sick or costly they are when they first apply.
This is like fire insurance regulation requiring the insurer to accept whoever calls for coverage, and to charge them no more than anyone else, even if their house is already on fire when they first call! In health insurance as in fire insurance, this would naturally cause premiums to skyrocket. But it's worse than that.
The skyrocketing premiums cause younger and healthier individuals to drop their coverage. That forces insurers to raise premiums even more because the remaining pool is even sicker and costlier on average. The younger and healthier than flee even more, knowing they can automatically get coverage later if they become sick! In fire insurance terms, this leaves the insurer with a "risk pool" of all burnt down houses, which is quite costly to cover. The result is a financial death spiral both for the insurers and anyone still trying to pay premiums.
The individual mandate was intended to be the antidote to this death spiral. If everyone must buy the insurance in any event, premiums would still rise, but no one could drop out in response. The system could then still function, albeit at higher insurance rates, exactly contrary to what was promised. But without the individual mandate, the whole system inevitably collapses as described above.
This is why, as Judge Vinson wrote, "the defendants concede that the individual mandate is absolutely necessary for the Act's insurance market reforms to work as intended. In fact, they refer to it as an essential part of the Act at least fourteen times in their motion to dismiss." Where there is no severability clause, the legal standard that determines whether the whole law must be struck down is whether what is left can still function independently of the part that was struck down, and whether Congress would have intended for the law to continue in that manner. The remaining dysfunctional Obamacare without the individual mandate does not fit this legal standard.
As a result, Judge Vinson rightly concluded:
[T]he record seems to strongly indicate that Congress would not have passed the Act in its present form if it had not included the individual mandate. This is because the individual mandate was indisputably essential to what Congress was ultimately seeking to accomplish….The Act, like a defectively designed watch, needs to be redesigned and reconstructed by the watchmaker.
The Supremes in the Final Act
Just as I predicted that Vinson would follow Hudson in making this ruling, I predict as well that Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito will now follow Vinson and Hudson in also finding the individual mandate unconstitutional, and in throwing the whole Obamacare Act out on the same grounds as above.
The swing fifth vote is as usual up to Justice Anthony Kennedy. I believe what will be decisive in winning his vote as well is to demonstrate there are other alternative means to achieving the goals of Obamacare that would be constitutional, so we would not be asking Kennedy to rule that universal health care for all must be unconstitutional.
Just two basic reforms would provide a universal health care safety net that would ensure that no one need ever suffer without essential health care. First would be to block-grant Medicaid back to the states, with each state then to replace it with Medicaid vouchers for the purchase of private health insurance. Each state would decide how much to provide at each income level in their state to ensure that no one would lack basic health insurance because they were too poor.
This would benefit the poor enormously because the current Medicaid program so badly underpays doctors and hospitals that the poor often cannot find doctors and hospitals that will treat them under Medicare. With these Medicaid vouchers, the poor would enjoy the same health care as the middle class, because they would enjoy the same health insurance as the middle class.
The second reform is state uninsurable risk pools for those who nevertheless still do not buy health insurance, and then become too sick and costly to buy it, like the homeowner who fails to buy fire insurance before his house catches on fire. These uninsurables would get coverage from the risk pool, paying premiums based on their ability to pay. The state would subsidize the pool for the remaining costs. A majority of the states already operate such uninsurable risk pools, and they have proved quite workable.
Everyone would then have the means of obtaining essential coverage and care, without any individual or employer mandate. Indeed, unlike Obamacare, this safety net covers everyone, and so achieves the valid social goal far better.
These reforms would not be costly because less than one fourth of the uninsured fail to get health coverage because they are too poor to do so, and only a relatively small number of people find themselves without insurance and then too sick to get it. If we do this in the context of block-granting Medicaid back to the states, the net result could well be less overall government spending rather than more. The only reason President Obama and the Democrats would not even consider this approach is that it does not involve the government takeover of health care, which was the real goal all along, so the wise government could run health care in the interests of progressive "social justice" (which sometimes means denying people health care).
The only option left for President Obama is to decide when he gets the final death notice for Obamacare, before the 2012 election or after. If he agrees to an expedited appeal to the Supreme Court, he will likely have to run for reelection having wasted his first term putting the entire country through a meaningless exercise, which only served to discredit the Democrat party. If he decides to slog through the Circuit Courts, he will likely suffer further adverse rulings before Election Day, with legal momentum building against him, reinforcing the likelihood that the Reagan-appointed Kennedy would go with the conservatives.
We can see the impact of that legal momentum in Vinson's ruling. Hudson declined to strike down the entire statute, even though that inevitable result was obvious then, undoubtedly because he felt it was brave enough to find the individual mandate unconstitutional. But Vinson was emboldened by his ruling as a bolstering precedent to go the whole nine yards.
But it would be wise to deny Obama even this choice, because which way Kennedy would go can never be certain. That is why Senate Republicans should still force a vote on the House repeal, which is even more likely to win assent now. Obamacare will decline even further in the polls as the public increasingly recognizes its unconstitutionality, and even fewer Senate Democrats will be willing to fall on their political swords for an increasingly doomed cause.
President Obama would then have the choice of killing his own Obamacare baby himself, and then running on taking the credit for it.
White House sources say that they are pleased with the initial rollout of President Obama's "Startup America" program, which they say will focus on encouraging American businesses to speed up investments in manufacturing, information technology, green technology, bio-sciences. A stated goal of the program is to encourage those companies that are startups to do so in economically distressed areas of the country.
U.S. business coalitions, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, which have roundly criticized the Obama Administration's handling of the economy and its anti-business rhetoric and policies, are supportive of the program, and a number of member companies, such as IBM, Intel, HP, GE, Google, among many others, are committed to participating, says the White House. The program is being overseen by former AOL founder Steve Case.
But because much of the program will have ties inside the Obama White House, the Commerce Department, and other Obama agencies, White House sources say, Obama's political operation will be able to monitor -- and they hope influence -- political giving for the 2012 election cycle from those companies.
"Technically, we are all on the same team now, so why would a company that is working with us so closely on 'Startup America' or some of the other 'pro-business' projects we've been announcing want to give financial support for the campaigns of Republicans?" says a White House policy staffer who will shortly be moving to a new job at the Democratic National Committee's expanding 2012 campaign operation. "It's one more way to engage corporate America. We know many of the executives are predisposed to Democrats, this is just a way to build more connections."
If there is a reason why more radical forms of school choice are critical to the reform of America's education crisis, it can be seen in the case of Kelley Williams-Bolar, a student teacher in Akron, Ohio, convicted of using her father's address in order to help her kids avoid the city's dropout factories and attend better-performing schools in the Copley-Fairlawn district.
Williams-Bolar's case garnered national attention from civil rights leaders and school reformers alike. While Copley-Fairlawn took the time to make her an example, she was just one of 48 families who have committed such residency frauds in the district; in most cases, the kids end up being removed from the schools while the parents may be forced to pay back tuition (which is funny given that the parents already foot part of the tab through their own state tax dollars). While the statistical evidence is spotty at best, the reality is that low-income families elsewhere throughout the country are doing the same thing.
All this in turn shows the reality that parents -- especially poor white, black, and Latino families in the nation's urban centers -- struggle mightily to get high quality education for their children within the confines of traditional public schools. And traditional districts, in turn, are doing what they can not to make this a reality.
In December, parents of students attending McKinley Elementary School in Compton, California, have used the state's Parent Trigger law -- which allows a majority of parents to petition for the overhaul of a school -- to convert the school into a charter school and remove it from control of the Compton Unified School District. Since then, the district has attempted to toss out the petition and its allies have leveled allegations of deceptive tactics against the parents and Parent Revolution, the organization helping the families in their effort.
Meanwhile in most districts, the range of intra-district choice options available to families of all economic backgrounds is limited at best. Most traditional school districts continue to restrict students to schools within particular geographic areas. The few instances when districts allow for intra-district choice -- in the form of so-called magnet schools -- are still limited; students often can't attend magnets without the blessing of teachers and guidance counselors. Poor and first generation middle class families, who usually don't know the game or how to play it, still lose. A smattering of states, including California and New Jersey, allow for students in the worst of the worst schools to transfer to districts outside of their home communities. This still means that many families are still stuck sending their kids to failure mills and mediocre schools.
Public charter schools have proven to the be the most-successful form of school choice -- and one embraced by urban parents, centrist and conservative activists, school reform-minded governors and the Obama administration alike. Thanks to the Race to the Top reform initiative, states such as California and New York have either lifted or eliminated artificial caps on the number of charter schools that can be started. But charters still serve just three percent of all students and mostly in the nation's urban communities. Thanks to state laws that require charter school petitions to be approved by school districts, few suburban districts willingly bring competition into their backyards. So middle class and poor families in the suburbs dissatisfied with traditional schools have few options.
The continuing obstinacy among defenders of traditional public education -- including the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers -- to the idea of letting parents make real education decisions is part of the problem (as is the opposition of suburban families). But the biggest problem lies with the nature of school funding itself.
State governments provide the plurality of all school revenues (picking up 48 percent of the total tab); if they picked up the full tab, school choice-minded governors and legislatures can then open up the full range of choice, either through vouchers or weighted student formulas. But the fact that districts continue to depend on local property tax dollars gives them leverage to oppose even small-scale choice options; they can argue that choice will cost them money (even as they ignore requests from families within their districts, who are funding the tab).
States could pull off the trick of fully funding schools, expanding choice and even lowering overall tax loads by increasing taxes they already charge while forcing districts to quash their property tax levies; that has been the approach taken since the 1970s as part of property tax relief efforts and in response to earlier generations of school funding lawsuits.
But even with that, another aspect of the choice problem must be solved: Expanding the array of private and parochial options available for kids to attend.
For decades, Catholic diocesan schools -- which emerged in the 1850s to help Catholic children escape the heavy-handed Protestantism in an earlier generation of public schools -- have been the destination of choice for poor and middle class families alike. They have also proven to do a better job in improving student achievement than traditional public schools. But the number of Catholic schools in the United States has declined by 13 percent between the 1999-2000 and 2009-2010 school years, according to the National Catholic Educational Association. Last month, the Archdiocese of New York announced it would close 27 of its schools. Other private schools are also closing down, leaving fewer private schools to take up the slack.
Vouchers may stall some of the decline of Catholic and other parochial schools. But it is going to take other groups to start new ones. In urban communities, black churches are already housing charter schools on their grounds; they could easily take on the role of providing academic instruction, either on their own or in collaboration with other churches or online education providers to provide so-called blended (or online instruction with some physical classroom time). Churches in suburban areas, along with Rotary Clubs, other community organizations or even homeschooling parents working together, could also do the same.
Kids and their parents shouldn't be stuck with the worst America's public schools can offer.
Sens. John McCain and Mark Kirk both expressed concerns about the Muslim Brotherhood gaining power in Egypt, but offered widely divergent views about preventing that outcome.
Kirk argued that Egypt needed a new strong man, while McCain argued that the radical Islamic group would not gain power if free and fair elections were held.
"We've seen in past history very well organized fanatical organizations can hijack democracy, whether it be Lenin, or whether it be radical Islamic extremists in Iran," McCain told me outside the Senate floor when asked about whether he was concerned that the Brotherhood could gain power. "They are an organization with ties to terrorist organizations. They support Sharia law, that alone should be reason not to have them as part of any democratic government. Sharia law is the most abhorrent treatment of women and perversion of the democratic ideals we stand for."
Yet when I asked him whether the United States should recognize a government that included the Brotherhood, he insisted, "I think the United States should take every step to make sure there is a free and fair and open and transparent election, and that won't happen."
Earlier this evening, Kirk gave a long floor speech about the history of the Brotherhood, reading quotes showing that it's current leadership still advocates Jihad.
"We ought to know their names, what they've written, and where they stand on the future of Egypt if they ever have power," Kirk told me.
What he was worried about is that Egypt could follow other revolutions.
"The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Iranian Revolution all had a plausible, acceptable, interim figure that was immediately then swept away," he said. "And that's my fear."
In contrast to McCain, Kirk said that it was "Far better that the Gamal Abdel Nasser secular nationalist tradition be what comes to the fore in Egypt."
Asked whether it would be a problem given that the Egyptian people were currently rising up against an oppressive ruler, he said, "Egypt is a tough place to govern, so it probably needs a strong but new hand."
Sen. John McCain has called on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to step down.
Moments ago, McCain tweeted:
Regrettably the time has come 4 Pres. Mubarak 2 step down & relinquish power. It's in the best interest of Egypt, its people & its military.
His statement reflects the view of foreign policy observers who argue that whatever source of stability he once was, Mubarak is no longer.
John Guardiano is far too kind in his assessment that the Obama administration's Egypt strategy (if one can even call it that) is explained by an abundance of caution or temperamental conservatism. A better explanation is simple incompetence.
Consider this report on the thinking within an unnamed administration policymaker's office, before Mubarak's speech on Friday. "The mood was buoyant," because "the favored bet would have been that Mubarak was about to 'do an LBJ' and repeat what President Lyndon Johnson did in 1968 in the face of a wave of protests: announce he would not stand in the upcoming presidential election." In other words, it wasn't that policymakers were worried about letting Mubarak fall so much as they were delusional about the willingness of an authoritarian dictator to loosen his grip of his own accord.
Until Mubarak's statement on Friday, Obama had deliberately avoided contacting him, on the theory that "president-to-president intervention should be held in reserve as a last recourse" since "any exchange with Mubarak would require Obama to say whether he supported Mubarak's continued rule." So they tried to indirectly signal that he should offer concessions to the protestors. But this was the same administration that, last fall, helped kill a Senate resolution to support a transition to democracy in Egypt, and the same administration that, despite warnings that it was time to prepare for the end of the Mubarak era by pushing for political reform, had done nothing of the sort. Given that, and in the wake of administration statements that Mubarak wasn't a "dictator" (Biden) and that his regime was "stable" (Hillary). Why would Mubarak assume that Obama would care whether he embraced reform?
Mubarak finally did announce yesterday that he wouldn't seek another term, but it was pretty obvious that that wouldn't be enough anymore to calm the protests down. Now pro-Mubarak forces (most of them paid thugs affiliated with the government -- the backlash is clearly coordinated) are attacking the protestors, and the Obama administration's calls for an "orderly transition" have become a bad joke. Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, a columnist for the UAE-based newspaper The National, sums up the perception abroad: "The White House has not looked weaker & more indecisive in decades."
In reference to the video of a Live Action activist going undercover as a pimp at Planned Parenthood in New Jersey that Shawn Macomber posted, Michael New writes:
In this video, a Planned Parenthood office manager literally spends about ten minutes finding ways to aid and assist a pimp who clearly admits that his employees include underage girls. A simple phone call to the police might have succeeded in shutting down this whole prostitution ring. However, instead the office manager cheerfully provides the pimp with information about abortion services, contraception, and medical exams. Even more disturbing, when asked about underage girls, the clinic manager gives him information about another abortion clinic "whose protocols are not as strict as ours." She warns about and callously insults a Planned Parenthood nurse who has an interest in following the rules. The clinic manager admits that she is ‘cool' with the pimp and offers to rearrange her schedule to help "streamline" the process.
Obviously, there are many implications from this video. One hopes that New Jersey (and other states) will improve their regulation of Planned Parenthood and other abortion clinics, and that this will give some momentum to congressional efforts to defund Planned Parenthood. However, what is most striking is the calm and nonchalant way the clinic director behaves toward someone purportedly running an underage prostitution ring. Unlike some other Planned Parenthood employees captured in previous videos, she never once expresses the slightest bit of skepticism or concern. The presence of legal abortion has always facilitated a promiscuous culture. However, allowing people to see the lengths that Planned Parenthood will go to defend and actually encourage illegal and perverted sexual activities might be the most valuable contribution of this undercover video.
Yet writing that Planned Parenthood would "actually encourage illegal and perverted sexual activities" doesn't fully express what this video revealed. Illegal and perverted sex activities are one thing, but sex trafficking and the exploitation of children are in a different category of moral concern. In this video, the office manager behaves as if facilitating trafficking and exploitation of children is routine for Planned Parenthood.
Of course it should go without saying that that fact should give Planned Parenthood's supporters pause. And this video will convince anyone who isn't knowledgeable about Planned Parenthood that they don't necessarily share any of his most basic values. As for those who already thought it was a bad organization... well, I for one don't think this video changed my perception of Planned Parenthood at all.
My friend Kathy Hoekstra at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan has a great report about how unions, who are losing members in droves, are creating labor disputes out of thin air and engaging in new pressure tactics (they are always coming up with new pressure tactics) like "bannering."
Not to mention the lies...
The Senate Judiciary Committee just concluded its hearing on the constitutionality of the national health care law. There were many illuminating points made in the roughly two and a half hour hearing, but there was one in particular that I want to highlight.
Michael Carvin, a lawyer at Jones Day, made the point that there's a key distinction between the mandate and Congressional efforts to regulate commerce. It's one thing for the government to impose regulations on insurers, such as the requirement that they cover those with pre-existing conditions, but doing so causes a distortion in commerce. And the mandate is an effort to "ameliorate" the distortion to the market caused by Congress.
Paul Chesser is no doubt correct in his observation that The New York Times did not intend to state "humankind has no dominion over nature" in response to today's nearly nationwide snowstorm.
The same, however, cannot be said of Al Gore. The former Vice-President replying to a question put forward by Bill O'Reilly states that this deluge of winter weather is "a consequence of man-made global warming."
It's good to know that we can rely on Gore to blow in hot air on a cold day.
To a significant extent, President Obama's innate caution and temperamentally conservative nature have served him well. It's why he has reneged on his campaign pledge to close Guantanamo Bay. And it is why (after much dithering and indecision, admittedly) he finally and belatedly committed the United States to a prolonged strategy of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.
But Obama's strength has also been his profound weakness vis-à-vis Egypt. He has been cautious to a fault. Consequently, he and his administration have consistently been behind the curve, surprised by events, and caught flatfooted by the trajectory of history.
Thus his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, last week declared that the Mubarak regime was stable just before it dissolved.
Egypt is no doubt a difficult and challenging situation. However, this is a moment that cries out for bold and visible American leadership. And Obama's statements thus far have been seriously inadequate.
Obama seems to be going out of his way not to offend Mubarak. This is a mistake. Mubarak is 82 years old. He has been a faithful and helpful American ally, but his time has passed. And the United States of America should say just that, clearly and publicly: Mubarak must go.
That we have not done so is a reason this crisis is continuing and now, it seems, with violent clashes in Cairo Tahrir Square. Indeed, pro-Mubarak thugs, with Molotov cocktails and a thirst for autocratic revenge, have been unleashed into the streets of Cairo.
This is unacceptable. Obama last night said that violence must be averted; however, he did not call for the man who precipitated this violence, Hosni Mubarak, to step down now. Yet public diplomacy in this media age is a crucial and integral aspect of American foreign policy.
Obama famously said that "words matter." Too bad that when it comes to Egypt he doesn't seem to heed his own advice.
The New York Times, in its report this morning about the massive snowstorm covering much of the U.S., begins with:
A paralyzing 2,000-mile swath of winter at its snowy, icy, messy worst pushed eastward across the United States on Tuesday, disrupting the rhythms of everyday life and punctuating this season's recurring lesson that humankind has no dominion over nature.
I'm sure that last phrase was purely accidental.
This truly shocking video has been posted around various other outlets, but just in case AmSpec readers missed it, I'm posting it below. Between this and the diabolical Dr. Kermit, it's been quite a month. And if you'd like to see the contortions such episodes engender, check out this Bloggingheads episode.
Mitt Romney leads some polls in the coming race for the 2012 Republican Party presidential nomination, but he continues to have a big ObamaCare problem. How does the man who once touted his role in passing RomneyCare, highlighted by an individual mandate to purchase insurance, in Massachusetts attack President Barack Obama, who applied the same principle nationwide? Especially when the courts have begun striking down the latter?
The putative candidate is attempting to run away from the issue, but his task is not an easy one. Reports ABC:
On the kick off to his "No Apology" book tour Mitt Romney is on message - refusing to apologize for the Massachusetts health care law that, like President Obama's federal legislation, requires citizens to buy health insurance.
"I'm not apologizing for it, I'm indicating that we went in one direction and there are other possible directions. I'd like to see states pursue their own ideas, see which ideas work best," Romney told me.
That stand seems to reject the advice of Karl Rove and others who say that Romney can't get the GOP nomination in 2012 unless he finds a way to distance himself from "Romneycare", but Romney did concede that his Massachusetts plan is imperfect.
As for "Obamacare"? It's a "very bad piece of legislation," Romney said, siding with the federal judge who ruled it unconstitutional and wrote in his decision that "it is difficult to imagine that a nation which began...as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place."
There is an important constitutional difference between a state and federal mandate--states have "police power" and thus are authorized to regulate where the federal government, which possesses only limited, enumerated powers, cannot. But there is no difference in substance, and so far candidate Romney continues to defend his handiwork.
Having gotten the issue so wrong when he was governor, just how would he handle health care if elected president?
Michelle Malkin has the story. Homosexual activists have ginned up a fake controversy targeting Chick-Fil-A just because one of the chicken outlets was kind enough to donate sandwiches and brownies to a "marriage seminar" run by a group that happens to oppose same-sex marriage. How utterly pathetic of the activists. How utterly pointless. How utterly unhinged. The homosexual groups' tactics are Leninist. Dangerous too. Or, at least would be if they weren't so pathetic. One could almost remark that if they really are so offended by the donation of brownies, their own showy hypersensitivity plays right into the stereotypes they condemn as being unfair. Well, if they don't want the stereotypes, don't take actions that fit the stereotypes. They come off as whiny babies.
As far as I'm concerned, a private life is a private life as long as it doesn't harmfully coerce somebody else. A friend who "comes out" is still a friend. The friend will answer to his own conscience and to God. So too will a problem drinker. So too will a serial liar. So too will a saint. So too will all of us, for whatever choices, good or bad, we make in life. Our call as friends is to continue offering friendship and support. Our sexuality does not define everything we are. Our fraternal friendship -- our agape "love for fellow man" -- remains a calling from the Almighty and a human imperative as well.
But if donating brownies to a group promoting faithfulness within traditional marriage is somehow anti-gay bigotry, then the word "bigotry" has lost all meaning -- and please let me find the time to bake some more brownies to help with the donations. The protesters can run home to their mommies -- as should all protesters, of whatever ilk, who have nothing real to protest against, but who merely give histrionic expression to their own illogically hurt feelings.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is having a hearing today on the "Constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act." You can watch live here.