The American Spectator

Why I'm Glad The Packers Won

Posted by Aaron Goldstein on 1.23.11 @ 7:12PM

Because it means President Obama won't grace us with his presence at the Super Bowl in Dallas.

Obama had planned to attend the game if the Chicago Bears had won the NFC Championship game.

However, we won't avoid Obama entirely on Super Bowl Sunday. The President will be part of the FOX pre-game show when he sits down with Bill O'Reilly.

Then again the O'Reilly-Obama interview could be better than the game.

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MSNBC Shuffles Deck Chairs as it Sinks

Posted by John R. Guardiano on 1.22.11 @ 1:11PM

As John Tabin reports, Keith Olbermann has been canned. This after being temporarily suspended in November for making political campaign contributions to Democratic congressional candidates.

Olbermann's suspension in November was bogus. Say what you will about the man, he never hid his politics. He never feigned fairness or balance like so many other Big Media blowhards do.

To the contrary: Olbermann wore his rabid left-wing views on his sleeve. That, after all, is why MSNBC hired him.

It's not clear what now has precipitated Olbermann's sudden and surprise resignation. The Daily Beast's Howard Kurtz notes that Olbermann's "combative style put him increasingly at odds with his network bosses."

Conservatives are bound to have mixed feelings about Olbermann's departure.

On the one hand, many will be glad to see this pompous, angry windbag leave the airwaves. As National Review's Rich Lowry tweeted this evening: "Who now will be there to lecture us angrily and hatefully about the need for civility?"

In fact, Olbermann was a left-wing hypocrite. He angrily denounced conservatives for their alleged sins while he himself committed flagrant crimes against fairness and the truth.

But that is precisely why conservatives are going to miss him: Olbermann was a useful and effective foil.

Indeed, he was sort of the media version of Tip O'Neil to our Ronald Reagan-like journalistic face. He was our national scold, our angry leftist father who bitterly denounced our right-wing sins. Who can replace him?

Well, apparently, MSNBC is going to have another angry leftist, Lawrence O'Donnell, take over Olbermann's 8:00 time slot.

O'Donnell's show currently airs on MSNBC at 10:00. However, an equally left wing apparatchik, Ed Schultz, reportedly will move his show from 5:00 to 10:00 to fill that void.

So not much has changed really -- just a shuffling of the chairs on the decks of the MSNBC Titanic, which gets beaten consistently and badly in the ratings wars by its arch-rival, Fox News.

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The Dismissal of Keith Olbermann

Posted by Aaron Goldstein on 1.22.11 @ 1:11AM

Scarcely a fortnight ago, Keith Olbermann was calling for Sarah Palin's dismissal from politics.

Now Olbermann has been dismissed from the airwaves.

This is what we call poetic justice.

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Street-Corner Lunatic's Megaphone Runs Out of Batteries

Posted by John Tabin on 1.21.11 @ 9:38PM

Countdown with Keith Olbermann has been cancelled.

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What's Good for Jeffrey Immelt Is Good for America

Posted by Joseph Lawler on 1.21.11 @ 6:15PM

On April 22, 2009, GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt entered a raging controversy at the University of Notre Dame surrounding an upcoming commencement speech by Barack Obama with an op-ed in, of all places, the Notre Dame Observer.

Without addressing any of the issues in contention, namely Obama's pro-choice policies and the school's obligations as a Catholic institution, the article expressed Immelt's wholehearted support for Obama and his upcoming speech. What made the article so odd, beside the apparent cluelessness of the author, was that the CEO of GE felt it necessary to add his opinion to an argument involving Notre Dame. Immelt is not a Notre Dame alumnus (he went to Dartmouth), he doesn't have affiliations with the university other than a commencement speech he gave in 2007, and he's not Catholic. One would think that the CEO of one of the largest companies in America would have better things to do than writing an op-ed for a student newspaper picking sides in an essentially intra-denominational controversy. So why would Immelt weigh in?

Had the Observer provided the most routine of disclosures for that article, the answer would have been obvious. On February 17^th of that year, Obama had signed the stimulus bill, which included $24.9 million in grants that would flow directly to GE, with roughly $20 billion more slated for health care record modernization of the kind that GE specializes in -- "with a direct request to do so from GE's CEO Jeffrey Immelt." Months before, during the Bush administration, GE had successfully lobbied "behind-the-scenes" to get its financing arm, GE Capital, included in a FDIC bailout program that would insure up to $139 billion of its debt. By the time Obama stepped on stage at Notre Dame, GE Capital had used the program to raise "$74 billion, helping to cover [GE'S] 2009 funding needs, and about $8 billion of its projected needs for 2010." In addition, Immelt knew that many billions more would accrue to his company through its green initiatives if Obama's cap and trade proposal became law.

It would be hard to think up a more direct conflict of interest.

Except, of course, for the conflict of interest raised by Obama's decision, announced today, to name Immelt the chair of the new President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness while Immelt still serves as GE's CEO.

According to the president, the purpose of the new council will be to "focus its work on finding new ways to encourage the private sector to hire and invest in American competitiveness." It is not hard to imagine ways for Immelt to fulfill that mandate by enriching GE's shareholders, which, remember, is his contractual obligation as CEO.

Immelt isn't serving on the panel out of love of Obama or loyalty to Democrats: he "counts former President Ronald Reagan as a ‘personal hero,'" and donated $2,300 to both Hillary Clinton and John McCain in the 2008 election. Nor is Immelt concerned about fairness, competitiveness, or the free market: as he has explained, "It's never been a free market; it's never gonna be a free market. That's just the way it is." And: "The fact that I'd like GE to work in concert with where government policy is in the U.S. doesn't mean that I'm a traitor or a bad guy, I think it's just being practical that that's gotta happen."

Immelt is serving on the panel because of money. He represents one of Big Business's biggest. A post in the Obama administration presents a huge opportunity to enrich his company and himself. Obama is allowing him to do so because a company as big and diversified as GE can do a lot for him, up to and including defending him in the op-ed sections of college newspapers.

That's the measure of the extent of the corrosiveness of this kind of government-business collaboration. Its harmful effects aren't limited to the economy, but trickle down into Immelt's advocacy of environmentalism, the programming on GE-owned TV channels, and so on. It introduces corruption into matters, such as Obama's visit to Notre Dame, that might be considered morally significant within a small community but should have nothing to do with big business or money changing hands. Yet Immelt doesn't feel the need, when writing a student paper op-ed, to disclose the billions of dollars his company took from taxpayers by cozying up to the administration. Nor does he, apparently, feel compunction about promising to help people across the country find real jobs while at the same time promising his shareholders that he'll prioritize the company's bottom line.  

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topics: Bailout, Economic Recovery, Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric

Names? Photos?

Posted by Chris Horner on 1.21.11 @ 5:12PM

Here is EarthJustice attorney James Pew quoted in Greenwire today, demanding that EPA immeidately impose some new rules on industrial boilers (zzzzzzzz hey, wake up, it's about to get exciting!):

"Given their druthers, agencies will sometimes spend years deliberating over what the best policy would be, but that's not what Congress wanted. Congress wanted these protections in place, and that's why it set these deadlines," Pew said.

"Everyone agrees -- even industry, as far as I know -- that every year of delay kills off another 5,000 people or so. That's 5,000 dead Americans. Would the industry guys like pictures of those people, or what?"

Strange how the green movement loses credibility over time and exposure. Huh.

Still, odd that our parasitical trial bar hasn't managed to persuade courts and then juries of this. So we know the level of confidence is somewhere below spilling-hot-coffee-on-your-crotch-and-being-amazed-the-coffee's-hot-is-all-someone-else's-fault type certainty.

Indeed, it's been a dozen years since I first called on EPA to invoke its emergency rulemaking authority to match its actions with its rhetoric, on global warming. Of course, that has the inconvenient side-effect of effectively reversing the burden of proof, from an agency needing only to slide in under the bar of 'arbitrary and capricious' to actually justifying what it did. In the future, take notice of the inconsistency found in bureaucrats howling of terrible ongoing catastrophe while proceeding through notice-and-comment rulemaking.

But back to our hysterical friend: If you can't name a fraction -- let's say 10%, 500 names, per each of the past say five years -- of what everyone (sic) agrees to be a body count...um, yes, could we at least see the pictures you apparently have there in your pocket?

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Pennies for Pence?

Posted by Quin Hillyer on 1.21.11 @ 4:48PM

As per this article, one big consideration for Mike Pence in deciding whether to run for president is whether the money would be available. It seems to me that if Dick Armey, Morton Blackwell, Brent Bozell and Jim Ryun can't help raise enough money, nobody can. Obviously, those are some big guns to have on one's side. For the past year I have had other big-name conservative leaders tell me they, too, would like to see Pence run. And Pence has been working the vineyards long enough that he has many friends in all the major activist groups, so even if his nationwide name ID is fairly low, his ID with the workers and leaders and financiers is very high -- as is the level of goodwill for him. He also easily passes the intellectual seriousness quotient, with George Will providing the political equivalent of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on that front. The Wall Street Journal likes Pence, too. With all that going for him, it seems unimaginable that he would't be able to raise the necessary money.

What remains is how "called" Pence feels to try to make the leap in 2012. Some would argue that it is a call to duty. The 2012 presidential election is, in many ways, the whole ball of wax. I have written before that I almost always reject the quadrennial trope that THIS election, or THIS one, or THIS one, is the most important in our lifetimes. I have rejected it every time since 1980. But in this case, I do think it is the most important election since 1980. Barack Obama has put this nation on a precipice. He is no Bill Clinton, triangulating and trying to maintain his "viability within the system." Obama is playing for keeps. His agenda is the biggest departure from American norms in 80 years. And he has made scary headway. Health care, banks, car companies, college education, and other industries all have been brought unde the government thumb as never before. With four more years to consolidate his actions, and add to them, and to appoint judges who will uphold them, and to further seed the bureaucracy with lefties and have them abuse their authority, Obama could do damage from which this nation never recovers. This is no time for moving up the ladder (via the Indiana governorship) just because conventional wisdom says that is how a House member can eventually become president. Really, is Pence's heart with national issues, or state-level ones? Or, put it this way: Are his biggest WORRIES about the future of Indiana, which already is well governed, or with the future of the nation? And does he see anybody else who might run for president who he thinks both really "gets it" philosophically and who is at least as well positioned to actually win the whole shebang as he is? Pence is a conservative who, because he is a gentleman, is known for stirring rhetoric but NOT for tearing down opponents. He just doesn't turn people off. He'll get a listen from independents because of his style, whereas other conservatives are more polarizing in tone. Does Pence think other full-spectrum conservatives can beat Obama? Does he think there are others with the media experience he has as a successful former radio talk-show host -- Ronald Reagan proved how great a communications training ground that daily radio work can be -- or does he worry that nobody else knows how to cut through the fog of the establishment media?

Those who argue that a House member can't make the leap to president are stuck in the past. Modern media allows people to become household names overnight. It allows campaigns to be organized far more easily, with people sitting in their own living rooms all communicating with each other instantaneously. How much have things changed? Well, just 20  years ago it would have been all but unimaginable for leading presidential or vice presidential candidates to be black or a woman, or to hail from lightly populated states like Idaho-via-Alaska, like Hawaii, like Delaware or Wyoming, or to be born in the Panama Canal Zone. Only one senator since 1920 had been elected president, and he (JFK) probably stole it. Nobody since Lincoln had so little experience in federal office or executive positions. Yet Barack Obama blew away both of those "barriers." The truth is, the old barriers do not exist.

The remaining question is, does Mike Pence feel ready for the job? Is he personally confident he can serve this country well in the Oval Office? He would need to feel a call to service, not a call to ego. But when leading figures are openly urging somebody to run for office, it is clear that there's something at work other than self-driven ambition. It certainly doesn't look like ego. It looks like a draft.

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Happy Birthday, Citizens United v. FEC!

Posted by Shawn Macomber on 1.21.11 @ 3:09PM

The Cato Institute puts together a great video on what truly was/remains at stake:

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Re: Paul Ryan to Deliver SOTU Response

Posted by Aaron Goldstein on 1.21.11 @ 2:45PM

I agree that having to address a national audience after the President of the United States has spoken before both Houses of Congress is a tough act to follow. Yet I don't entirely agree with Philip Klein when he suggests it "is always a losing proposition."

Klein notes "the speaker doesn't get to deliver the speech with all the applause and ceremony surrounding the president's address." However, this was not the case with Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell who delivered the response to President Obama's 2010 SOTU address in front of the Virginia House of Delegates. Granted, McDonnell's address was front of a smaller audience and nor did it have the same pomp and circumstance as the SOTU. Nevertheless, McDonnell made lemonade out of lemons.

Which brings me to Paul Ryan. Whether Ryan decides to respond to next week's SOTU with an audience or without I think it will present an opportunity for him to impress people on a grand scale. Those of us who are already familiar with Ryan know that he is a confident yet affable young man with a strong command of policy especially where it concerns the budgetary implications of Obamacare. If Ryan hits the ball out of the park look for the buzz around drafting him as a presidential candidate in 2012 to go into interstellar overdrive.

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State Bankruptcy Makes the Big Time

Posted by Joseph Lawler on 1.21.11 @ 1:18PM

Yesterday the New York Times published a story on members of Congress looking into the viability of an option for states to declare bankruptcy. Since states are sovereign, creating a law providing for state bankruptcy would be difficult, but not impossible. At heart the idea is providing a way for states to correct the structural problems they're facing, which are the long-term costs of public sector worker pensions and benefits. If states could restructure the massive unfunded debts to public workers, they would drastically improve their fiscal situations. 

The Times -- and Jim Pethokoukis, who can rightly claim that he had this story six weeks ago -- explain that there would be a number of glaring problems with allowing banks to declare bankruptcy, including that a bankrupt state would have difficulty issuing debt post-bankruptcy and that merely introducing the option for bankruptcy could spook bond buyers and immediately make conditions tougher for states. 

For these and many other reasons it would be far better for the states to meet their obligations instead of going bankrupt. The usefulness of state bankruptcies would be not  in allowing states to renege on promises they've made, but in providing governors with a powerful tool for bargaining with public sector unions, starting right now. Currently, unions have the upper hand in bargaining with states because the only two options for a state that can't meet its obligations are default or a federal bailout. Since governors would do almost anything to prevent default and bailouts will likely always be forthcoming -- likely in the form of "stimulus " -- they have few incentives to drive the much-needed hard bargains with state workers. 

In a lot of ways the GOP's 2010 adoption of Greece as the example of the result of fiscal irresponsibility was driven by its rhetorical expedience. BuThe sight of Greece's unionized public sector workers holding out long after their demands crippled their country and threatened a continent, though, may have led Republicans to think about that country's experience in a non-opportunistic way. Certainly the example is relevant for Republican governors like Chris Christie. Although Christie was able to push through a leaner budget his first year, he failed to make progress on reforming the states' pension plan, putting off that fight for another day. And the state now faces $53.9 billion in unfunded liabilities. New Jersey's entire 2011 budget was only just under $30 billion. Governors facing such huge structural deficits need all the tools they can get. 

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Paul Ryan to Deliver SOTU Response

Posted by Philip Klein on 1.21.11 @ 10:45AM

Rep. Paul Ryan, chairman of the Budget Committee, will deliver the Republican response to next week's State of the Union address.

In some ways, the response to the SOTU is always a losing proposition, as the the speaker doesn't get to deliver the speech with all the applause and ceremony surrounding the president's address. The most recent example of a response falling flat was Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's disasterous performance in 2009, which dampened his rising star status (though I don't think it will do long-term damage).

That said, somebody has to do it, and I think Ryan is a savvy choice by Republicans. Ryan has emerged as the GOP's most articulate and reasonable spokesman for spending restraint and is the only politician in either party who has proposed a specific, comprehensive, proposal to get our nation's fiscal crisis under control. During the health care debate, he was the most effective Republican at combating President Obama, alaways armed with facts. (See his remarks to Obama during last year's White House health care summit exposing the accounting gimmicks in ObamaCare, in which Ryan explained that, "hiding spending does not reduce spending.") I think it's wise for Republicans to introduce him to a broader national audience and make him the face of a new Republican party that (hopefully) is ready to get spending under control.

GOP statement announcing the decision to have Ryan give response.

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More on Obama, Big Green and SOTU

Posted by Chris Horner on 1.21.11 @ 8:29AM

As noted below, GE's Jeff Immelt is at it again, fresh from sitting across from the president at the state dinner for other GE pal China (Mrs. Immelt was reportedly perched at Obama's left elbow, rather rude given how little room there is on his left).

Politico's Morning Energy reports the following, with English-to-English translation below:

'CLEAN ENERGY ECONOMY' - Expect those words to get plenty of play this afternoon when President Obama arrives in Schenectady, N.Y., to tour General Electric's largest energy division. The president is slated to deliver remarks at 1:05 p.m. on the "importance of growing the economy and making America more competitive by investing in jobs, innovation and clean energy."

The president has made similar remarks at similarly energy-themed locations in the past but this afternoon's event will take on added weight given that he'll be accompanied by GE chairman and chief executive Jeffrey Immelt - who Obama will tap today to lead a new economy task force.

WELL, THAT'S CONVENIENT - Obama will sign an executive order today that will create the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, which Immelt will lead. ...[The] site that Obama is set to tour today is home to the company's future advanced battery facility and the division also includes steam turbines, generators, and wind and solar, and Immelt is a strong supporter of clean energy.

IMMELT OP-ED - Immelt writes in the Washington Post this morning of the need for the U.S. to focus on manufacturing and innovation in order to transition from "recovery to long-term growth." And in what is sure to delight the clean energy crowd, the CEO trumpets his company's energy investments. http://wapo.st/fCR1j4

Graph 7: "Businesses should invest more of their cash and resources in advanced products and technologies that will create jobs in the United States, and government should incentivize this investment in innovation. ...

AND A DROP MORE - Graph 8: "A sound and competitive tax system and a partnership between business and government on education and innovation in areas where America can lead, such as clean energy, are essential to sustainable growth."

Translation, the hundreds of billions to date still haven't done it so the government should rearrange things so as to (further) underwrite the agenda -- and further distort it to meet political, not technological or economic drivers -- and we would then further distort our decisions with politics, pouring more into things this administration and its supporters want us to spend money on.

This affirms the obvious, that Tuesday's State of the Union speech will see Obama's fourth call (including all three such January addresses, and his first at the UN) for legislation "making clean energy the profitable kind." How obscenely direct, and even more garishly ignored each time by the media. He wants laws to make the uneconomic profitable for a politically selected class of people making politically selected gadgets, by taking your wealth and giving it to them which is something, as is clear in that fact this requires the force of the federal government, you would never do.

Make the uneconomic -- key word -- 'profitable'. Because markets, driven by economics, will not. Only politicians can put your dollars to use to make the uneconomic 'profitable'. And we know (and they again admit) that technology is not going to make these things what they would need to be to be profitable. Only state-imposed wealth transfers.

This nauseating display of crony capitalism is a reprisal of Obama and Immelt's earlier buddy-flick. As I wrote in Power Grab:

While palling around together on Obama's [Economic Advisory Board, 'green economy' speculators] Immelt and [Al Gore partner at Kleiner Perkins, John] Doerr took to the pages of the Washington Post on the need for the U.S. to implement low carbon policies to fix America's "competitiveness crisis." Did you know that America is losing its edge because its energy prices are too low, and it has too few wealth transfers and governmental intrusions into the economy? Well, you do now, as the long and the short of this public relations coup for Obama's agenda was that these guys agreed that the U.S. needs new policies so that Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and GE can make more money. Ah, fresh ideas and "change."

Among the claims and admissions in the Post item was that "Kleiner Perkins has invested $680 million in 48 of the most compelling new clean-energy technologies, with $1.1 billion more to invest." These gambles haven't paid off for one simple reason: "our government's energy and climate policies are our principal obstacle to success."

Not policies that are actually obstructing them to innovate and create wealth; though we certainly have those, this isn't of what these gents speak. What they mean is the absence of certain policies is what stands between them and their fortune. But here you see the clever use of language in Obama's service toward energy rationing and old-school Progressivism.

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The Re-Elect Begins: Big Agency on Campus

Posted by Chris Horner on 1.21.11 @ 7:28AM

Let the 2012 Re-Elect begin. Obama is now monomaniacally promoting non-enforceable rhetoric about jobs': a WSJ editorial trumpeting a non-enforceable executive order to look back at olds regs, fogging the mirror so we can't focus so well on the orgy of new regs which is actually what threatens the economy; and today's gesture, another executive order establishing a new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness led by none other than General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, of "We're all Democrats now" and "The government has moved in next door, and it ain't leaving. You could fight it if you want, but society wants change. And government is not going away" fame.

So he's focusing on gummint jobs, direct or indirect, regardless, they're the looming boomlet will be of jobs paid for by political dictate and out of your pockets. Not quite markets at work. Which is really the kind he promised the Obama economy would be built around. In a word: bubbles. Great.

Those new massive reg schemes he plans to use to fundamentally transform America -- like killing the domestic mining industries and backdoor Kyoto-style regs -- those need boots on the ground. And just to keep the return to the glories of '08 in full swing, now comes this, from the EPA for its on-campus eco-ambassadorships. Can't let that bloc of disillusioned youths now disillusioned on the Hollywood and Mad-men made Obama go un-reorganized. And the fights begin immediately with a new House. So, so does this. Here is the announcement in truncated form (it's a biggun):

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Must-Reads

Posted by Joseph Lawler on 1.20.11 @ 6:36PM

• A fair, and intense, interview of a pro-life lawyer/activist in...Mother Jones 
• AOL is a scam (The Business Insider)
• David Parker writes "The Most Emailed 'New York Times' Article Ever" (The Awl)
• Tim Carney on the revolving door: "Bail them out, regulate them, then work for them" (The Washington Examiner)

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Mayors Come to D.C., Palms Outstretched

Posted by Joseph Lawler on 1.20.11 @ 6:24PM

Today a large group of mayors of cities throughout the nation met in D.C. to talk with President Obama and Vice President Biden. According to reports, the mayors' most pressing concern is the fate of Community Development Block Grants (CDBGs), which Obama described as being at risk because of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. 

CDBGs are federal grants intended for localities to use for community-development and antipoverty measures. The Manhattan Institute's Steven Malanga has waged a one-man crusade against CDBGs, arguing in his new book Shakedown (recommended) and elsewhere that CDGBs are actually little more than a vehicle for political patronage. Mayors use the funds for their own projects when budgets are tight, and in return provide support for congressional candidates. 

With the recession taking a heavy toll on city budgets, the nation's mayors are worried that they'll be cut off from the roughly $4 billion in CDBGs that allow them to avoid practicing actual fiscal discipline. 

Although CDBGs are not a major part of the federal budget (amounting to $120 since their inception during the War on Poverty according to Malanga), they are a great example of spending that could be cut without inflicting much pain. In fact, Malanga provides plenty of examples that suggest that CDBG spending is not only wasteful but actually harmful: grants to cities encourage corruption, destroy incentives for businesses, and generate unsustainable investments. For instance: 

Nationwide, nearly 25 percent of block-grant-backed loans wind up in default, according to an analysis of dozens of community-lending portfolios.

In Los Angeles after the 1992 riots, for instance, the federal government plowed an astounding $430 million into a loan program. Since its crime-ridden target area remained an economically inhospitable place, the program had trouble finding companies to lend to.

Criticized for not making loans quickly enough, it then started pouring money into local businesses which racked up big losses. Eventually, the Los Angeles City Council shut down the costly program, supposedly a national model for lending in troubled areas.

Regardless of what mayors need for their own political purposes, CDBGs are not, by any stretch, a priority for the federal government. The costs of these handouts go far beyond the dollar amount accruing to the deficit. Ending the program would benefit its supposed beneficiaries as well as the budget.

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