In other House Republican news, a leadership aide associates himself with the accuracy of this Roll Call story:
House Conservatives Persuade Leaders to Slash Spending Further
House Republican leaders have agreed to a key conservative demand that they make good on their campaign pledge to reduce fiscal 2011 spending to $100 billion less than President Barack Obama’s budget request, GOP aides said Wednesday.
According to a GOP leadership aide, Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and other leaders are working with Republican appropriators, the Republican Study Committee and other conservatives on a “unified” strategy to reduce spending beyond the $74 billion in cuts they had already planned. The cuts, which would only apply to non-defense discretionary spending, would come as part of a continuing resolution to fund the government between March and the end of the fiscal year.
“From the start, our focus has been to cut spending so that we can grow the economy, and right now there are a lot of moving parts and we’re actively working to bring the Conference together with a unified strategy,” the aide said.
It remains unclear how Republicans will make the additional $26 billion in cuts. Cantor has reportedly directed appropriators to stay on schedule and introduce their CR on Thursday. Because Republicans are still hashing out their strategy, it appears unlikely the additional cuts would be included in the bill, and a second aide suggested they could come in the form of an amendment.
It is also unclear whether the cuts will be made across the board or whether certain areas would be targeted for deeper cuts.
This is a big early win for new Republican Study Committee chairman Jim Jordan. Oddly, it may be one for his fellow Ohioan, John Boehner early in his speakership, too. The incident adds some credibility to Boehner’s session-opening speech, during which he said:
Above all else, we will welcome the battle of ideas, encourage it, and engage in it – openly, honestly, and respectfully. As the chamber closest to the people, the House works best when it is allowed to work its will. I ask all members of this body to join me in recognizing this common truth.
Appears to be more than apparent. I appreciate this:
“The challenges we face in Western New York and across the country are too serious for me to allow this distraction to continue, and so I am announcing that I have resigned my seat in Congress effective immediately.”
This will be a much shorter news story and distraction to Congress than if he stuck around.
In response to a controversy that barely had time to develop, Re. Christopher Lee (R., NY) has abruptly resigned from the House after the web site Gawker reported on an alleged romantic exchange between Lee and a Maryland woman over craigslist.org.
Lee is married, and after initial denials told Fox News little more than an hour ago that the exchange was something he would have to “work out” with his wife. In a statement announcing his resignation, Lee apologized to his family and staff for “profound mistakes” and promised “to work as hard as I can to seek their forgiveness.”
We’re hearing that the Republican Study Committee and GOP freshmen were almost in open revolt at the Republican conference this morning over the initial round of cuts set out by Paul Ryan. The Ryan ceiling falls shorts of the headline number of $100 billion set out in the Pledge, and is therefore considered vastly insufficient. Says a source familiar with the meeting, “It sent a clear unequivocal message to leadership — ‘Houston, you’ve got a problem.’” The leadership assured conservatives at a RSC lunch later in the day that the message had been received. Says a GOP leadership aide, “The bill that passes the House will cut substantially more.”
Some members were upset that they didn’t get a chance to talk at the conference meeting. At times, the meeting was quite heated. The source familiar with the meeting says, “They’re putting a lot of emotion out on the table early,” and adds that freshman said the cuts were peanuts and their constituents don’t think even $100 billion is enough.
RSC members are still discussing whether they’d prefer picking and choosing targets within the budget or going with a big across-the-board cut of non-security domestic discretionary spending to get to $100 billion. The Ryan number would have already been unheard of — doubling down on it would represent an epochal cut.
UPDATE: A GOP aide close to House conservatives tells NRO: “If the bill that comes to the floor next week does not get to the $100 billion mark ($378 billion in total non-security spending for the year), our plan has always been to offer an amendment to close the gap. So if they come in at $420 billion for non-security, we’d go for another $42 billion in cuts to get down to the $378 billion total. Leadership has said that their plan is just the ‘first bite at the apple.’ We understand that, but a lot of conservatives just think the first bite needs to be bigger.”
UPDATE II: Another House aide close to the situation confirms to NRO’s Bob Costa that there is “growing anxiety” among the freshmen and fiscal conservatives that the Ryan plan does not go “far enough” and that it could be seen as “breaking” the Pledge to America.
“It’s a poor sign that Congress can get serious about fiscal discipline over the next two years,” the aide says. “Even some of the more pragmatic members don’t see the logic of the Ryan plan; that even if you don’t want to see the cuts take effect, for negotiating and political purposes, you want to go into the negotiations with the Senate with the biggest possible number.” In other words, “even if the bill that Obama signs doesn’t equal a $100 billion cut, having the House pass a cut of that size will be seen as a ‘win.’ And by that logic, why not just start with the $100 billion figure?”
“At the very least, Boehner and Cantor underestimated the amount of opposition that the Ryan plan would have within the conference,” the aide concludes. “Things are in flux. A bit messy. But if you’re Jim Jordan, you’re feeling pretty good right now.”
The House Rules Committee held an emergency meeting today, whence passed by a vote of 7-2 a closed rule on the PATRIOT Act extension that failed yesterday. The rule waives all points of order and amendments, allows an hour of debate, and will require a simple majority to pass. A vote is expected tomorrow.
Yesterday’s failure to extend the PATRIOT Act came as a result of a number of Republican defections that kept the yeas from reaching the two-thirds majority required to pass the measure under a suspension of the rules.
Mark, let’s actually agree to agree. The point I am making, however, is that the Congress certainly should acknowledge that evacuation is no longer a responsibility of the U.S. government, and the State Department should stop encouraging every Tom, Dick, and Harriet from registering at the U.S. Embassy. What is needed is to enter into the debate with eyes wide open. When a crisis hits — for example, the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War — we should simply tell Americans that they should hunker down, and that the advantages of being citizens of a superpower are less than what they once were. When and if the defense cuts come, Congress should acknowledge that they will impact the capability to:
Evacuate citizens
Contain rogue regimes
Address multiple crises simultaneously
Congress may conclude that the decline in capability is worth it. What Congress should not do is pretend that budget cuts will not undermine capabilities that many officials, rightly or wrongly, wish the military to have and then whine they did not know when, a year or two down the road, constituents demand assistance evacuating their loved ones.
You bring up a separate issue about which the American government is schizophrenic: dual citizenship. Going back to myposts of the other day, the Defense Security Services (DISCO) does not always recognize that dual citizenship is not optional. For example, the Iranian government requires an act of the Iranian parliament to revoke Iranian citizenship, even on request. This is one of the reasons why all the Iranian-Americans detained in Iran were traveling on Iranian passports rather than American passports. The Russian government still requires three or four years to revoke citizenship, even for people who fled Russia as refugees and want nothing to do with that country. That the U.S. government acquiesces to foreign governments not recognizing naturalized American citizens as American citizens is a fight that the State Department should pick up one of these days.
Christopher, I fear that we will try the patience of the Corner’s readers if we delve too much into our (very differing) reactions to a proposed new law in the Philippines, but this paragraph in your reply to my earlier post raises questions with wider implications than the law we were discussing. You write:
Also of note are the unmentioned violations of freedom of conscience and religion that are peppered throughout this bill. The bill requires that all reproductive-health workers “provide information and educate” and “render medical services” consistent with the new provisions in this bill. Similar to recently passed health-care legislation in the United States, this bill does not include measures that protect conscientious objections for health-care workers or institutions that refuse to provide certain services due to religious or cultural beliefs and practices. In addition, the health-care workers that receive this new training will receive a 10 percent honorarium to incentivize them to buy into the new programs.
Leaving aside the fact that I can see no reasonable objection to incentivizing people with additional pay to work on a particular program, and noting (as one of our commenters points out) that this is not about abortion (which remains illegal in the Philippines), it is indeed hard to avoid the conclusion that the services to which you are referring relate to contraception. If my understanding is correct, you are effectively saying that health-care workers should be given the right to refuse to dispense contraceptives if it contravenes their religious and/or philosophical beliefs (a right too far, I think), but even if my understanding is wrong (in which case I apologize), the question still remains: to what extent should employers be forced to let an employee opt out of aspects of their job on the grounds that those particular duties offend the employee’s religious, ideological, or philosophical sensibilities?
It’s not an easy question, and I don’t have an easy answer, but I raised this topic some years ago on this very Corner, in the course of which I linked to this story from the LondonTimes:
Some Muslim medical students are refusing to attend lectures or answer exam questions on alcohol-related or sexually transmitted diseases because they claim it offends their religious beliefs. Some trainee doctors say learning to treat the diseases conflicts with their faith, which states that Muslims should not drink alcohol and rejects sexual promiscuity. The religious objections by students have been confirmed by the British Medical Association (BMA) and General Medical Council (GMC), which both stressed that they did not approve of such actions.
Food for thought, I think, especially in an era when, thanks in part to multiculturalism, Western societies seem set on redefining themselves in a way that repackages individuals into very distinct and often competing groups, each with their own collection of very distinct and often competing ‘rights’ and privileges, a process that is unlikely to end well.
Michael: You’re right that any consideration of cuts in the defense budget has to take into account the capacity to evacuate Americans stranded abroad. But your point about the thousands of Lebanese with dual U.S. citizenship raises an important point — why should a U.S. Marine, who enlisted to defend his fellow countrymen from harm, risk his life rescuing people who have not fully committed to the American nation? Dual citizenship — a “self-evident absurdity” in TR’s words — means, in this case, people who want to live in Lebanon, as Lebanese, and perhaps even vote there, but who also want to make sure that if things go bad someone else will risk his life to rescue them. How is this morally defensible? And in an era of shrinking defense budgets, it’s not practical either. A dual U.S.-Lebanese citizen can call the Lebanese Marines to bail him out — the U.S. Marines are for those who weren’t lying when they swore that “I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen.”
Robert: What I found most curious about that loooong Washington Post story on registered guns in D.C. was an assumption which you seemed to share with it: That the number and location of guns that were registered has some correlation to the actual number and location of guns. Subtitled “wealthy residents take up arms,” the story breathlessly reported that fewer guns were registered east of the Anacostia River — the poorest and blackest part of the city — than were registered in Georgetown, Palisades, and Chevy Chase, the richest, whitest parts of the city.
While the story mentioned cost — both of firearms and of registration itself — as the reason for this imbalance, it’s likely that an additional factor is the process of registration itself. If you go to the Metropolitan Police Department’s firearms registration page, you’re faced with a daunting list of requirements, summarized in a 13-page study guide, including:
Bring the completed PD-219 to the FRS, along with . . .
Proof that you have met the minimum training requirement of four hours of classroom instruction and one hour of range instruction conducted by a state-certified or certified military firearms instructor . . .
Take and pass the 20-question multiple choice test based on information on DC’s firearms laws and regulations . . .
Who’s more likely to successfully navigate the required maze — a lobbyist or bureaucrat who’s been taking tests and filling out complex forms for his entire adult life, or a cab driver who barely finished high school and who’s intimidated by the 1040EZ? In other words, the disparity in gun registration tells us nothing — I have little doubt that the proportion of law-abiding people with firearms is much higher in Anacostia than in Georgetown, but they’re just a whole lot more likely to be scared off from registering by the byzantine procedures inherent any bureaucratic interaction. Of course, that also means that when they do have to use their gun in self-defense, they expose themselves to prosecution because they couldn’t navigate the bureaucratic maze of gun registration!
Stephen Hunter’s Sunday op-ed in defense of extended magazines applies to firearms in general: “When the question arises of who needs an extended magazine, the answer is: the most defenseless of the defenseless.” Gun control not only makes it somewhat harder for the defenseless (disproportionately the poor, the weak, the less-educated, the elderly) to get guns in the first place, but then punishes them when they’re forced to defend themselves.
I asked election augur Larry Sabato, director of the UVA Center for Politics, whether Sen. Jim Webb’s announcement that he won’t stand for reelection in 2012 changes the game in Virginia.
“I really haven’t changed on this one at all,” Sabato wrote in response. “Virginia Senate is likely to be a presidential coattail race. If Obama can come back and win in Virginia a second time, he’ll carry in any strong, well-funded Democrat for the Senate seat.”
Emphasis on the “strong, well-funded Democrat” bit.
“The Democrats have to find one, and that may be their problem. Tim Kaine will have the right of first refusal. If he says no, I’m not sure whom they will choose, maybe one of the current or just defeated congressmen,” Sabato says.
And what if Obama and the Democrats can’t bounce back from electoral defeats in Virginia in 2009 and 2010? Then, says Sabato, “both the GOP nominee for president and the Republican nominee for Senate should win.”
“My guess is, regardless, there won’t be much split-ticket voting in 2012. That’s true in Virginia, and it may also hold true for some competitive Senate races in other states.”
On the Republican side, Sabato says, “Allen is the presumptive nominee, but he has a Tea Party opponent, and we’ve learned not to ignore them.”
Last month, I spent a few weeks teaching on the USS Enterprise during which time I was also able to observe some basic contingency preparations should the call come to evacuate Americans from Lebanon and Tunisia. In Lebanon alone, the number of American citizens numbered in the tens of thousands, even though many hold dual citizenship and perhaps only a fraction would request assistance. Add Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen to the mix, and it becomes an open question whether the American military has enough forces in the region to evacuate American citizens should violence (or insurance companies) prevent airplanes from flying into unsettled countries.
The Enterprise is on its second-to-last cruise, and Congress may soon cut the military budget across the board. Cutting force projection not only affects future combat missions but also humanitarian relief whether in the form of evacuations or tsunami relief. That’s fine if that is what Congress wants to do, but congressmen should enter the debate with eyes wide open. They should recognize that a vote for cuts would not only undercut the ability to project force globally but would also remove the ability to protect American citizens should many countries simultaneously experience unrest.
Congressmen should also ask the State Department to explain how, in the aftermath of broad-based defense cuts, they will manage evacuations of American citizens absent the same level of military assistance that they can count on now.
My latest New York Postcolumn is up. The subject is the death of the DLC and the media’s ludicrous meme that President Obama is somehow “creeping” to the center — even though he flatly denied that to Bill O’Reilly on Super Sunday.
The DLC lost its political influence and donors because, as part of his well-choreographed and thoroughly dishonest “creep” to the center, President Obama and his media flunkies have co-opted its image and message — without the slightest intention of implementing its philosophy.
What Obama & Co. learned from Clinton wasn’t anything substantive, such as his landmark welfare reform, but the smile and the shoeshine that got him past the shoals of Monica Lewinsky.
In other words, Shinola, not substance.
How else to explain the ludicrous Time magazine cover last week depicting Ronald Reagan with his arm around Obama — as if the two presidents had anything in common except affability?
It’s all in a day’s work for this lighter-than-air administration, which has long since mastered the ability to talk out of both sides of its mouth simultaneously. The juvenile “fierce urgency of now” has left Guantanamo still open, troops still in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan still raging, the Bush-era security policies still largely in place. In Egypt, Obama’s flirtation with the Muslim Brotherhood and his petulant, foot-stamping demand that the transition to a post-Mubarak era must begin now has been met with head-cracking in the streets of Cairo, and it appears likely that Mubarak, 83 and ill with cancer, will leave in September as planned. So much for now.
And yet, confident of a compliant press corps still in thrall to the “narrative” — “first black president triumphs over endemic American racism, girds for battle royale with dead-ender Tea Party” — Obama and his crew treat the public like a newborn: all news is new news, entirely devoid of context. All preceding statements are inoperable.
None of this should come as a surprise. Whatever Obama’s personal merits, the fact remains that this is his first executive position. A man whose remarkable rise to political power has been smoothed by the removal of his opponents from the ballot and by the mysterious release of sealed divorce records, has never faced any significant challenges (including the McCain candidacy), and it is not surprising that he continues to see himself as the Speechmaker-in-Chief, secure in the knowledge that the healing words of his teleprompter are the balm that will make political disagreements disappear in a fog of applause-line rhetoric.
Am I missing why folks seems so mesmerized by an iPhone app that aids a Catholic in the Sacrament of Reconciliation? Many a church will have similar guides, on paper, around its confessional. And this is far from the first new-media confession effort. Count me as a fan.
Last year, I summarized the current state of the debate about gun control and crime for The American Spectator. My main conclusion was that more than a decade after the academic firestorm kicked off by More Guns, Less Crime, the evidence was inconsistent as to whether gun control has any effect on crime whatsoever.
New information out of the District of Columbia, which lifted its handgun ban in response to a 2008 Supreme Court ruling, may shed some light on why this is the case: Since the end of the ban, more than 1,400 residents have registered firearms, but registration has been far more common in wealthy areas than in the poor neighborhoods where crime is highest and law-abiding citizens need protection most. It’s not hard to understand why: Handguns cost hundreds of dollars, and the D.C. registration process tacks on another $60.
In other words, just as gun control succeeds in disarming only the law-abiding, the relaxation of gun control succeeds in arming mainly those who are at little risk of becoming crime victims.
Of course, this does not mean that gun control is harmless or irrelevant. Rather, it means that gun control restricts liberty without having any discernible effect on security. Anyone who thinks that’s a good deal truly deserves neither.
In today’s editorial concerning David Cameron’s important speech on multiculturalism, the editors quote the lament of journalist Mihir Bose that “the tragedy with modern Britain is that it seems not to care any longer for the qualities that make it so special and that drew me and many others to this country.” Bose goes on to say that “unless Britain rediscovers its pride in its values this wretched multiculturalism will never die.”
Although the United States hasn’t traveled as far down the road of multiculturalism as Britain, Bose’s observation is applicable to a number of precincts in America — especially among the elite classes who see little special about America: Senators take to the floor of the Senate to compare American soldiers to Nazis; a president bows to despots, apologizes for America, and remains agnostic about its exceptionalism; schoolbooks are scrubbed of the extraordinary sacrifices, accomplishments, heroism, and generosity of Americans, concentrating instead on the myriad failures and depredations — real and imagined — of this purportedly rapacious republic; Hollywood broadcasts to the world a picture of degenerate America and Americans, reinforcing the vilest propaganda and conspiracy theories of our enemies; disparate schools and town councils order the removal of the American flag, lest it offend those convinced it represents little more than racist imperialism; our elite universities bar ROTC and military recruiters from campus, apparently oblivious to (or contemptuous of) the fact that the freedom to act childishly was bought at a steep price by those evil soldiers; politicians ignore the integrity of our borders as if American security and sovereignty are less important than an approving nod from the editorial board of the New York Times; elected officials in the enlightened regions of San Francisco refuse to say the Pledge of Allegiance, and on and on.
With such a view of America, all cultures must be equal.
The aggressive multiculturalism we see in America today — and its enabler, political correctness — will soon be as dangerous to this nation as it is currently to Britain. It causes us to be blind to the evidence leading to a Ft. Hood, it atomizes the strengths of American culture, confuses its purpose, and retards its resolve.
And it promotes division rather than encouraging unity. When my parents came here decades ago, they had absolutely no doubt they were coming to the greatest nation on earth. They were coming for freedom, opportunity, and to immerse themselves in the uniqueness of American culture. Sure, they retained a pride and love for the best things about the old country (admittedly difficult in regard to a totalitarian regime), but they were determined to be in all things American — and they had little doubt what that meant because all of the institutions that mattered conveyed what it meant without apology. That didn’t mean that warts — and there were plenty– were covered up, but they were placed in context and with an expectation — a demand – that they soon would be remedied.
Multiculturalism discourages legitimate cultural confidence, the ramifications of which are on display in much of Europe. Our own elites, particularly in the political class, would do well to take notice. Many of their constituents have.
John Tierney has a new article on social psychologist John Haidt, who is studying the “statistically impossible lack of diversity” in the political ideologies of his academic colleagues. Haidt says social psychology is a “tribal community” and political conservatives a shunned “out group.” To overcome this bias and open themselves up to different perspectives, the doctor offered the following prescription:
Dr. Haidt was optimistic enough to title his speech “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology,” urging his colleagues to focus on shared science rather than shared moral values. To overcome taboos, he advised them to subscribe to National Review and to read Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions.”
Indeed! And why wait until you’re already experiencing the symptoms of liberal close-mindedness before taking action? Our unscientific studies indicate that subscribing to National Review works just as well as preventative medicine. We’re working on getting it covered under Obamacare.
UPDATE: From a reader who serves as a superior court judge:
When I was studying for the LSAT, the law school entrance exam, in the mid-80s, our “tutor” recommended that to best prepare for the exam, we should read National Review – the erudite writing and analysis, he felt, would serve us well, whatever our political persuasion. Happily, I grew up with your magazine, and had been reading it since I was a teenager. I’ve always felt that was excellent advice.
Obama said, “I didn’t raise taxes once.” But we’ve documented numerous instances when he has. He’s has signed off on small tax cuts for most taxpayers, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s also approved several tax increases. So we rate his statement False.
Dan Mitchell asks the same question and answers:
I suppose I could take a mature approach to this controversy and explain in mind-numbing detail why the President was wrong, but that wouldn’t be much fun. I’d much rather copy the guy who did the famous QE2 video and have some fun.
Frank Lautenberg, in a press conference yesterday, warned Republicans: “I won’t attempt to voice my views on your family and let my family alone. Don’t go near my daughters.”
There are, of course, no Republicans headed for his daughters.
He was talking about H.R. 3, the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, which is a lot less dramatic than he’s making it out to be. It will keep taxpayer funding away from abortion, making the Hyde Amendment permanent and universal. It does, in fact, what Democrats once told us was already law. And exactly what the House Pledge promised.
But don’t tell Lautenberg that, he’s celebrating Halloween early this year:
“If they had their way, the reproductive rights of American women would be tossed away and it sounds to me like a Third World country that’s requiring women to wear head shawls to cover their faces even if they don’t want to do it,” said Lautenberg. “This is America. It’s not one of the third world countries that we see these tragic decisions hoisted upon the women.”
New Jersey congressman Chris Smith, sponsor of H.R. 3 with Democrat Dan Lipinski, ought not to expect a Valentine from the senator this year.
Senator Coburn just released this new report called “Help Wanted,” which looks at federal job-training programs and documents examples of waste, fraud, and mismanagement.
Today, nine federal agencies are in charge of 47 employment and job-training programs. The report notes that:
[The Government Accountability Office] identified another 51 federal programs that could be categorized as federal job training programs, but that were ultimately excluded from its final list. For example, GAO does not include in its total all federal assistance to the unemployed workers – such as the Social Security Administration‘s Ticket-to-Work program.
According to the GAO, it costs taxpayers $18 billion annually to administer these programs, only five of which have had an impact study completed since 2004. Half of these programs have not had a performance review since 2004. In other words, little attempt has been made to determine these programs’ effectiveness.
Until now, that is. The report concludes that with one exception, none of the programs are effective at helping unemployed workers find new jobs. All but three of the 47 programs overlap with at least one other program in that they provide similar services to similar populations.
A very interesting section of the document is called “Where are the green jobs?” It explains:
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) allocated $90 billion for green job technology, including a number of ―green collar‖ job training programs. In late 2010, the President said ―there is perhaps no industry with more potential to create jobs now – and growth in the coming years – than clean energy.‖103 Indeed, Vice President Joe Biden stated people who make $20 per hour before a green job training program can make $50 per hour after. And, on average, clean-energy jobs pay 10 to 20 percent more than similar work outside the field.
One caveat: there must be jobs for these newly trained workers.
And remember that, as shown by a study from King Juan Carlos University in Spain (a country often praised by the president for its leadership in green jobs and technology), for every new position that depends on energy price supports, at least 2.2 jobs in other industries will disappear.
• 490 million through DOL for green jobs training.
• $9.75 billion to renovate schools.
• $5 billion to weatherize low-income homes.
• $300 million to replace old appliances with “Energy Star” products.
Finally, here are some of the examples of waste, fraud, and mismanagement in job-training programs that you will read about in the report:
Grants to Admitted Thief: In West Virginia, Martin Bowling – an admitted thief with a long rap sheet – was the primary beneficiary of a $100,000 federal worker training grant, and was put up for another federal job training grant worth $1 million by his mother, a state official at the time.
Tampa Bay Binge: The Tampa Bay WorkForce Alliance in Florida used federal job training funds for self-indulgent binges on food and other extravagances, including: lunch at Hooters, valet parking for lunch at the Cheesecake Factory (topped with $9 dollar slices of cheesecake), $20 delivery fees for cupcakes, $443.99 on flowers, 300 koozie drink holders and more.
$4 for Us, $1 for Workers:A Montana trade union, tasked with managing a half million dollar federal job re-training grant, was found to have spent four times as much on salaries than on actual training of displaced workers.
State Job Training Executives Scheme Bonuses, Frequent Casinos During Work: Iowa workforce executives conspired to enrich themselves with $1.8 million in bonuses – paid for with federal funds – while engaging in sexual relationships and frequenting casinos during work.
Job Training to Sit on a Bus: In San Francisco, California, graduates of a federally-funded job training program recalled receiving “little training” and having been paid to “sit on a bus.”
Job Training Funds for the Already Employed: In Oregon, local companies used federal job training money to pay for training sessions to help the already employed carry out projects.
Testifying before the House Budget Committee today, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke acknowledged that — contrary to most Democratic claims — bringing spending levels down and getting federal finances under control is one of the best ways for congress to promote economic growth in the short term:
Ryan: “Just to summarize, you do believe that one of the best things we can do for short-term economic growth is to put out a plan that actually stabilizes our fiscal picture, that actually gets our liabilities under control, and shows, with confidence, that we have the right trajectory because we’ve addressed the programs — which are spending programs — that are getting us out of control. Is that the case?”
The edifice of multiculturalism in the West is crumbling, but quick. It seems like only yesterday all good Europeans held as uncontroversial that national self-esteem was racist and imperialist per se, and that even illiberal ideologies were owed liberal deference.
Among the English-speaking peoples, Mark Steyn and John O’Sullivan have been arguing for years — in these pages and elsewhere — the foolishness and dangerousness of this course. Now others are joining the party. In France it’s the disillusioned Marxist nouveaux philosophes like Bernard-Henri Lévy and especially Pascal Bruckner, whose recent The Tyranny of Guilt is a useful polemic against “Western masochism.” Among elected officials, the first and most vocal was of course the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders.
But now it’s going mainstream. First, German chancellor Angela Merkel admitted that multiculturalism had “failed utterly”; now, British prime minister David Cameron has given an important, if tendentious, speech in Munich, on the ways in which British state-sponsored multiculturalism fills the vacuum left by British patriotism with extremist — Islamist — ideologies.
Cameron’s speech is the subject of our editorial today:
Cameron’s argument was that the terrorism threatening the West, both in Afghanistan and at home, had its origins in the underlying “extremist ideology” of Islamism. Young Muslim men in Britain often begin their journey to violent jihad by picking up this ideology from institutions, organizations, and leaders in receipt of government money and official favors. This ideology is further promoted by multiculturalism, which “encouraged different cultures to live separate lives” and so delivered impressionable young people into the hands of state-funded extremists. It would have to be confronted both ideologically — insisting on support for human rights as a condition for entry into public debate — and organizationally — denying funds to bodies that preach hatred and separatism.
NASHVILLE — A newly elected Tennessee legislator writes in the current issue of Hooters Magazine that her experience working in the restaurants known for waitresses’ skimpy outfits led to her later success in business and politics.
Republican state Rep. Julia Hurley, 29, was elected in November after defeating incumbent Democrat Dennis Ferguson in a mostly conservative district west of Knoxville.
Hurley writes that her experience at Hooters helped prepare her for a run for public office — even when opponents tried to make a campaign issue last summer about her past employment and photos from her modeling career.
“I have taken quite a bit of flack from the public at large during my run for State House in Tennessee for being a Hooters Girl,” she said. “But I know that without that time in my life I would not be as strong-willed and eager to become successful.”
GOP chairman Reince Priebus recently fired ex-chief Michael Steele’s staff for the 2012 convention in Tampa. But Priebus wasn’t elected until after the staff had spent $1 million — on a line of credit backed by the federal government. The Tampa Tribune has the details:
[Convention chief Belinda] Cook’s monthly salary of $9,782 – which would equate to $180,000 a year — was paid by the Committee on Arrangements using that line of credit, plus a $25,000 consulting fee for July, according to FEC records.
The committee also paid $4,500 monthly for Cook’s living quarters, a 3,200-square-foot waterfront home in Treasure Island with an outdoor pool and dock, valued at $636,993.
Cook’s son, Lee A. Cook, 26, a 2006 college graduate, was also on the payroll at about $5,000 a month from July to December, records show. Cook, a former special assistant at the U.S. Department of Defense, listed his job as national security research analyst.
Both pundits and diplomats are suggesting that a post-Mubarak Egypt might adopt a “Turkish model,” a reference to the supposed balance between political Islam and democracy.
The irony, however, is that while Egypt moves toward a Turkish model, Prime Minister Erdogan is embracing a Muslim Brotherhood model in which he eviscerates democracy in all but name. Now, while Namik Tan, Turkey’s ambassador to the United States, talks a good game about how Turkey provides “inspiration to all countries of the same faith,” the Turkish government not only tries to shut down the free press at home, but some Turks acknowledge that Namik Tan’s colleagues in the Turkey’s foreign ministry have embraced the Saudi model and begun launching “libel tourism” suits against some of those abroad who question Erdogan’s commitment to democracy.
U.S.-policy concern regarding the Muslim Brotherhood rests upon suspicion about a dissonance between what the group says and what it does. With the latest barrage of libel-tourism threats, it seems that Turkey’s embassy in Washington has become ‘Exhibit A’ in that suspicion.
The footage released by Live Action Films showing Planned Parenthood employees counseling self-identified sex-traffickers on how to obtain STD testing, birth control, and abortions for underage girls has generated a firestorm of controversy. Not surprisingly, this has put the mainstream-media spin machine into overdrive. Wisely, most pro-choice commentators are not defending underage prostitution. Instead they are trying to make the case that Planned Parenthood provides a unique and valuable service by providing contraception to low-income earners. A New York Times Sunday op-ed by Gail Collins makes this point, as did a recent blog post at the Center for American Progress.
However, low-income earners seeking contraceptives have alternatives to Planned Parenthood. In fact, the Live Action videos provide evidence of this. In his blog, Coming Home, Gerard Nadal Ph.D. raises this exact point. The Virginia video shows a Planned Parenthood employee offering the pimp advice about payment. The employee runs through the price list for services and then counsels the pimp to go to the county health department for free services if he can’t afford Planned Parenthood. As such, by Planned Parenthood’s own admission, low-income earners have alternatives that are even more affordable. In light of this, one wonders why Planned Parenthood is receiving $300 million a year from the federal government for services to low-income earners — when they encourage low-income earners to seek services from government agencies
Pro-choice activists always argue that more funding needs to be spent on contraceptive services for low-income earners. In reality though, relatively few sexually active women forgo contraceptives due to cost or lack of availability. Nine years ago the Alan Guttmacher Institute surveyed 10,000 women who had had abortions. Among those not using contraception at the time they conceived, only 12 percent said that they lacked access to contraceptives due to financial or other reasons. Similarly, in their book Unmarried Couples with Children, sociologists Kathryn Edin of Harvard and Paula England of Stanford conducted an intense study of 76 low-income couples who had just given birth. Edin and England found that only a very small percentage of these women wanted contraception but were unable to afford it
Defending Planned Parenthood by emphasizing their role in providing contraception may be politically shrewd. Many Americans think of Planned Parenthood as a contraceptive provider rather than an abortion provider. Furthermore, most Americans approve of the sale and the use of contraceptives. However, evidence shows that contraceptives are readily available and that low-income earners can obtain contraceptives elsewhere. Overall, it is disappointing that so many media outlets are interested in creating distractions and covering for Planned Parenthood. In reality, the mainstream media should give Planned Parenthood the scrutiny they deserve and hold them accountable for their criminal behavior.
— Michael J. New is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Alabama and a fellow at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, N.J.
On Monday night, the House GOP splintered. Twenty-six Republicans, including eight freshmen, joined with Democrats to oppose a one-year extension of some of the surveillance authorities granted by the USA Patriot Act, a counterterrorism law that was passed in the wake of 9/11.
“Believe me, House leadership was caught off guard,” says one Republican committee aide. “They really thought that they had everybody contained. They knew there would be a few defections, but they did not expect this group to try and out–Tea Party one another. The Ron Paul influence, especially on civil liberties, is stronger than you think.”
Monday’s vote was proffered under a suspension of the rules, which requires a two-thirds majority. Other House GOP aides tell NRO that the extension will likely brought up again via “regular orders” in the coming weeks; this requires a simple majority, and they expect it to pass.
The White House, one aide points out, will now be forced to work with Congress, especially with three provisions set to expire on February 28. The House GOP would like to extend the provisions until December 8; Senate Democrats and the White House would prefer extending the provisions through 2013, in order to take it off of the table for the election.
With the clock ticking, Republicans believe they can set the stakes, regardless of how they stumbled on the initial vote. On Monday, an aide close to the process notes, many Democrats who are supportive of a one-year extension voted against it, in order to stand with those who would like to see the provisions extended through 2013. So while Republicans will be whipping hard, to be sure, Democrats, too, he predicts, will be having their own internal debate about a short-term extension.
Both parties, another adds, are confident that they can cobble together enough votes for an extension through December 8, making the argument to members that the Intelligence and Judiciary committees need more time to mull the provisions. Democrats would give up their hope for a 2013 extension and GOP hawks would give up their hopes for a permanent extension.
I read about Rick Santorum’s web-radio comments about Sarah Palin and CPAC before I listened to them. There is a big difference between the two. Have a listen:
He was asked a question. He answered. And his comments about her being a mom with financial concerns doesn’t seem hostile so much as trying to give an honest answer — yes, from someone who also has both a big family and financial concerns.
His comments vis-à-vis Palin are not inconsistent with comments he has made about her previously. He told Rick Klein in early December:
“She’s done a lot to draw attention to herself that’s positive,” Santorum during an interview on ABC’s “Top Line,” adding that the former Republican vice presidential nominee has “done some things that, you know, certainly are going to cause her to have to do some explaining if she runs for president.”
“But right now I think she’s on a roll, she’s having a good time, she’s having an impact,” he continued. “If you’re sitting here out of office, the thing you want to do is have an impact on the direction of the country right now, if you’re not governing things. And she’s having an impact.”
The comments actually might reveal more about Santorum’s self-evaluation than anything else: how to have an impact that is in the best interest of family and country when out of office.
And if they also serve as a nudge for everyone to put their cards on the table, no doubt the impatient chattering politico (pun probably intended) watching potential candidates would not be disappointed to see these remarks have an impact. But to see those Santorum comments as an attack or a right-wing sideshow is a stretch. And you don’t have to take my word for it. Just listen.
Andrew, you take issue with my “rhetorical flourishes,” namely my use of the words “imposed” and “coercive” to describe the proposed legislation in the Philippines. A widely agreed upon definition of coercion is “to compel by force intimidation, or authority, especially without regard for individual desire or volition.” Considering the violations of individual liberty scattered throughout this bill, coercion seems to be a most accurate description.
I thank you for taking time to actually read through some sections of the bill — something I’m afraid many Filipinos have yet to do themselves. And since you’re keen on quoting sections of this proposed bill, I’ll take the liberty of playing from your playbook.
As a principle of “responsible parenthood,” section 20 states that “the state shall assist couples, parents and individuals to achieve their desired family size within the context of responsible parenthood for sustainable development and encourage them to have two children as the ideal family size. Attaining the ideal family size is neither mandatory nor compulsory. No punitive Action shall be imposed on parents having more than two children.”
Such language places two opposing expectations on the state. The state is required to assist couples in achieving “their desired family size” but also “to encourage them to have two children as the ideal family size.” This is self-conflicting language that will yield messy and incoherent implementation.
Although section 20 provides that “attaining the ideal family size is neither mandatory nor compulsory” and that “no punitive action shall be imposed on parents having more than two children,” this is, in effect, a two-child policy. Although there will be no penalties for failure to comply, there will be an expectation, promulgated through teaching programs sponsored by this bill, that this is the “right” family size and that to have more than two children is to be “irresponsible.” Social shame, peer pressure, and official state teaching bring into question the voluntariness with which Filipino citizens can comply with this law. Legally, the section might not be compulsory, but socially and politically it will have a coercive effect.
Then, there’s the issue of sexual education in the classroom. I’m all in favor of knowledge-based approaches to sexual education — a curriculum that teaches young people to make responsible, future-minded decisions and encourages the development of self-control. Research in the United States has indicated that the most successful programs in sex education combine both character-development skills and scientific data, while focusing the students on future-minded goals (such as marriage and child-rearing). I do, however, believe that this bill’s mandated reproductive-health curriculum undermines the rights of parents to be the primary educators of their children. This sexual education program is a state developed program that will be mandated for implementation in both public and private schools, not simply state schools. This is a direct violation of the Philippines constitution, which recognizes the “complementary roles of private and public institutions.”
As for the issue of mandating a “certificate of compliance” in order to obtain a marriage license, one might want to revisit Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to which the Philippines is a signatory:
Nearly seven out of ten Americans disapprove of how President Obama is handling the budget deficit, according to a Gallup poll released today.
Although Obama called for a freeze on non-defense discretionary spending in his State of the Union speech, most Americans aren’t impressed. He also has high disapproval ratings for his policies on the economy (60 percent), health care (56 percent), and taxes (54 percent).
Obama’s also losing independents on key issues. Independents are leaning Republican on health care, the economy, taxes, and the budget deficit. And while independents remain fairly evenly split between the parties on certain issues — including foreign affairs and energy policy — Gallup found no policy that independents are leaning Democrat on.
President Obama is scheduled to release his proposed 2012 budget Friday.
As I have reported in these pages before, George Mason University’s Dan Klein has done a lot of work on the political bias against conservatives or free-marketeers in academia. Yesterday, over at Freakonomics, Stephen Dudner added to the conversation by commenting on a piece by John Tierney in the New York Times about the bias that “some of the world’s pre-eminent experts on bias discovered an unexpected form of it at their annual meeting.”
Tierney’s note about the bias:
It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.
“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal.
This part is really interesting:
“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”
Dubner makes a good point which is that under representation isn’t hard to understand in a self-selecting group. In fact, it is the point of the selection.
The lack of diversity isn’t actually “statistically impossible” in a self-selecting group. But that of course is the point. How can it be that an academic field is so politically homogeneous? What kind of biases does such homogeneity produce? What sort of ideas get crowded out? And how homogeneous are other disciplines?
I have to say that I was surprised at the overt political (leftward) bias exhibited by several prominent economists at the recent American Economics Association meetings, although my sample set was quite small.
Tierney concludes:
In the old version, the society announced that special funds to pay for travel to the annual meeting were available to students belonging to “underrepresented groups (i.e., ethnic or racial minorities, first-generation college students, individuals with a physical disability, and/or lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered students).”
As Dr. Haidt noted in his speech, the “i.e.” implied that this was the exclusive, sacred list of “underrepresented groups.” The society took his suggestion to substitute “e.g.” — a change that leaves it open to other groups, too. Maybe, someday, even to conservatives.
Finally, a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a new analysis that shows the left-leaning bias in Harvard University Press:
Harvard University Press’s output during the last decade has leaned heavily to the left, according to an analysis published this week in Econ Journal Watch. The press’s slant embodies and reinforces ideological disparities in academe, the paper argues, because faculty members are rewarded for publishing with prestigious presses like Harvard.
It would be interesting to understand why such bias exists (especially in economics where my bias tells me that it doesn’t make sense!). Also, does evidence of bias make it go away?
Anyone remember the ruckus a few years back when (if I recall this correctly) the toy people came out with a talking Barbie doll that included in its repertoire the phrase “Math is hard!”? As I recall it, the feminists went nuts (but I repeat myself). Well, I’m starting to think we need a liberal Ken doll who says “Politics is hard!” (Wait, I know what you’re thinking! That’s what MSNBC is for! I concede.)
I’m continually amazed at the liberal inability to decide if Reagan was as awful as they always said years ago (Think Progress is happy to stay faithful), or really a swell guy, certainly a moderate if not a closet liberal, as Eugene Robinson argued his Washington Post column this week. I deliver a long and thorough fisking of Robinson’s argument about Reagan and taxes over at the Powerline Blog this morning, but there’s more to say about this, namely, that this whole line of argument, based on an inability to tell the difference between a person’s principles and his necessary compromises, reveals a childlike grasp of politics.
Ultimately, Robinson’s column refutes itself in a single sentence whose irony is surely lost on him: “[Reagan's] biggest impact on domestic politics was that the center of gravity shifted to the right — enough, in fact, that what were once extreme views have become orthodox.”
Precisely, Eugene. That’s how the big-time players in politics do things. Still think Reagan was a crypto-liberal?
As the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood emerges as the strongest opposition movement in the center of the Arab world and, at this point in time, the likely winner in free and fair elections, particularly in parliament, it is incumbent that we learn more about it.
While campaigning for parliamentary seats in recent years, the shadowy group does not usually go beyond sloganizing “Islam is the Solution.” In a timely release, Palestinian Media Watch has today posted its translation of the book Jihad Is the Way, by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s former director Mustafa Mashhur (1996–2002). The book explains the fundamental concepts of the Muslim Brotherhood ideology, which is typically kept hidden from world view. As PMW describes, it “encompass subjects such as the Muslim Brotherhood’s goal of establishing an Islamic state, world domination under Islam, the public and personal religious duty of military Jihad, and the warning not to rush to Jihad until it is prepared and timed for maximum benefit.”
Below are some sample quotes from the translation:
● “. . . the Islamic Ummah [nation] . . . can regain its power and be liberated and assume its rightful position which was intended by Allah, as the most exalted nation among men, as the leaders of humanity . . .”
● “. . . know your status, and believe firmly that you are the masters of the world, even if your enemies desire your degradation . . .”
● “It should be known that Jihad and preparation towards Jihad are not only for the purpose of fending-off assaults and attacks of Allah’s enemies from Muslims, but are also for the purpose of realizing the great task of establishing an Islamic state and strengthening the religion and spreading it around the world . . .”
● “. . . Jihad for Allah is not limited to the specific region of the Islamic countries, since the Muslim homeland is one and is not divided, and the banner of Jihad has already been raised in some of its parts, and it shall continue to be raised, with the help of Allah, until every inch of the land of Islam will be liberated, the State of Islam will be established . . .”
Jon Chait has reacted to my post on teacher evaluations, but I don’t think that he was responding to my actual claims.He seems to think that I was arguing that quantitative measurements of teacher performance (“value-added” metrics) are not achievable, and that therefore we should not use them.My actual argument was that we need such systems, but that we should be realistic about what is required to make them work.
Chait quotes a long illustrative dialogue that I used to show some of the problems that often arise from trying to use a complex regression model to measure employee performance in a corporate setting.But the sentences in my post that immediately follow the quoted dialogue are:
Not all attempts to incorporate rigorous measures of value-added fail. Let me make some observations about when and how workable systems that do this tend to be designed and implemented.
And later in the post, I also say that:
More serious measurement of teacher performance, very likely including relative improvement on standardized tests, will almost certainly be part of what an improved school system would look like.
My post wasn’t about if we should use quantitative measures of improvement in their students’ standardized test scores as an element of how we evaluate, compensate, manage and retain teachers, but rather about how to do this.
Two of the key points that I tried to make are that the metrics themselves should likely be much simpler than those currently developed by economics Ph.D.s, and that such an evaluation system is only likely to work if embedded within a program of management reform for schools and school systems.The bulk of the post was trying to explain why I believe these assertions to be true.
An additional point that I mentioned in passing is my skepticism that such management reform will really happen in the absence of market pressures on schools.Continuous management reform, sustained over decades, that gets organizations to take difficult and unpleasant actions with employees is very hard to achieve without them.There’s nothing magic about teachers or schools.The same problems with evaluation and other management issues that plague them arise in big companies all the time.It’s only the ugly reality of market discipline that keeps them in check.
says Planned Parenthood should “clean up its act.” But he certainly does not sound like the Michigan Democrat will be joining hands with Mike Pence and other defunding advocates anytime soon. (A staffer in the background of the linked-to audio interview sounds like he was trying to walk back the congressman’s off-message statement.)
The number-two civilian official in the Army committed a Kinsleyan gaffe Monday by telling the truth. Undersecretary of the Army Joseph Westphal, speaking at the University of Utah, said:
“As all of you know, there is a form of insurgency in Mexico with the drug cartels that’s right on our border.”
“This isn’t just about drugs and about illegal immigrants,” he said. “This is about, potentially, a takeover of a government by individuals who are corrupt.”
Westfall — who said he was expressing a personal opinion, but one he had shared with the White House — said he didn’t want to ever see a situation in which “armed and fighting” American soldiers are sent to combat an insurgency “on our border, in violation of our Constitution, or to have to send them across the border.”
Of course, using the Army to combat insurgency on our border is not “in violation of our Constitution”; he presumably means it would be in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, and it’s kind of scary that the Undersecretary of the Army doesn’t know that. (The audio of Westphal’s talk is available here.) What’s more, the Posse Comitatus Act has been circumscribed by Congress and the president many times over the years, and the idea that we are somehow precluded from using our nation’s defense forces to, you know, defend the nation is laughable.
The news report continued:
Westphal is the most senior U.S. official to publicly compare Mexico’s drug cartels to an “insurgency” since Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a similar assessment last September. …
But a Mexican government official familiar with Westphal’s words said the Army leader “went way beyond what the Secretary of State said.” …
Claudio Holzner, an assistant professor in the University of Utah’s departments of political science and Latin American studies, said Westphal’s words were “incendiary.”
As violent and desperate as the situation has become in some parts of Mexico, Holzner said, “it’s an overstatement to call the drug war an insurgency, primarily because the drug cartels are not seeking control of the government — they are seeking safe passage for their merchandise.”
Holzner said it would be foolhardy for U.S. officials to consider sending troops into Mexico. “I think the solution is not a military one. The best thing the United States can do is to enforce its own laws and change the laws that are not working,” to stem the demand for drugs in the U.S. and to stop the flow of U.S. weapons across the border, he said.
It’s obviously premature to be talking about use of U.S. troops in Mexico, and we should all hope it never comes to that. But to shut down any discussion of our options is ridiculous. Unfortunately, that’s just what we’re doing, as evidenced by Westphal’s groveling apology issued yesterday: “I regret that my inaccurate statements may have caused concerns for our partners and friends in the region, especially Mexico”, and so on. Let’s hope someone at the Pentagon is quietly thinking through our options if things really fall apart south of the border.
In the meantime, we need real immigration enforcement — both at the border and in the interior — to make sure Mexico’s anarchy doesn’t spill over even more than it already has. Faster, please.
Kareem Amer, the Egyptian blogger and secular dissident who already served four years in prison as a political prisoner ending in Nov 2010, has been missing since Sunday night – he was last seen leaving Tahrir Square on Sunday night.
The Egyptian government publicly declares its willingness to compromise but quietly accelerates its crackdown. They calculate that rhetoric alone is enough to assuage President Obama and Secretary Clinton because they conflate words and actions. Alas, it seems Mubarak may be right in his calculations regarding President Obama’s attention span.
Bill Kristol is the latest conservative commentator to insist that the Republicans have to take on entitlements in their forthcoming budget resolution to be “serious”: “Leaving entitlements on cruise control is not a serious position for an aspiring governing party—especially one that aspires to reduce the deficit and restore our fiscal solvency. Surely Speaker John Boehner realizes that. Surely the 87 House freshmen do. Will they insist on a serious GOP budget?”
Whether entitlements stay on cruise control is not really the question in dispute, since they are going to do so regardless of what the House budget resolution says. What Bill is really saying is that House Republicans should go on record supporting specific entitlement reforms even though the Senate won’t go along and even though the resolution wouldn’t actually reform entitlements even if the Senate did go along. That’s an odd test of seriousness.
But Bill’s not the only conservative setting quirky standards these days. A recent editorial for the Weekly Standard by Matthew Continetti piles up farfetched assertions—for example, we are supposed to find it plausible that “a good faith effort” by Republicans might “persuade [Obama] to change his mind” about entitlement reform—before concluding thus: “What would it mean, after all, if the Tea Partying GOP House shied away from attempting to address federal spending in all its particulars—discretionary and nondiscretionary?
“Why, it would mean failure.”
Really? Matt is saying that if this Congress succeeds in repealing Obamacare, cutting discretionary spending, capping Medicaid and block-granting it to the states, passing a law blocking bailouts of state governments, reforming the tax code, and privatizing Fannie and Freddie—if, in short, it amasses a record of conservative achievement unparalleled since at least the late 1940s—it should still be judged a “failure” because it failed to take a stand on Medicare in a budget resolution: a stand that almost no Republican took in the campaign, that Republicans have done nothing to prepare people for, and that no survey of tea partiers, let alone the country at large, finds strong support for. I can’t agree.
A Muslim mob burned churches and clashed with police in Indonesia on Tuesday as they demanded the death penalty for a Christian man convicted of blaspheming against Islam, police said. Two days after a Muslim lynch mob killed three members of a minority Islamic sect, crowds of furious Muslims set two churches alight as they rampaged in anger over the prison sentence imposed on defendant Antonius Bawengan, 58.
A court in the Central Java town had earlier sentenced the man to five years in jail, the maximum allowable, for distributing leaflets insulting Islam. But this only enraged the crowd, who said the sentence was too lenient, police said.
Five years.
And that minority Muslim sect?
The latest outbreak of religious violence in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country came as pressure mounted on the government to tackle religious extremism and demonstrate its oft-touted commitment to diversity.
Leading international human rights groups condemned Sunday’s bloody onslaught on the Ahmadiyah Muslim sect in West Java and demanded an immediate investigation into why police failed to stop the lynch mob…Indonesia’s constitution explicitly guarantees freedom of religion. But under pressure from Islamic conservatives, the government in 2008 banned the Ahmadiyah from spreading their faith.
Earlier in the article, we learn this:
US President Barack Obama visited Indonesia in November and praised its “spirit of religious tolerance” as an “example to the world”.
Following a contentious vote Tuesday night, the House Appropriations Committee will move forward with a GOP proposal to cut tens of billions in federal non-security spending for the remainder of the fiscal year (through September). The move puts Republicans one step closer to bringing a continuing resolution to the floor that will replace the one that expires on March 4.
The 27–22 vote broke down by party, with two notable exceptions: GOP Reps. Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.) and Cynthia Lummis (R., Wyo.) joined with Democrats and voted ‘no’ in protest over cuts they viewed as insufficient. Republicans very nearly lost a third member. Freshman Rep. Tom Graves (R., Ga.) had also threatened to oppose the measure, but was won over at the last minute.
The proposal will cut about $58 billion in non-defense spending compared to President Obama’s 2011 budget request. Conservatives like Flake have insisted that the number is too low and called for an additional $42 billion in cuts to fulfill a commitment outlined in the Republican “Pledge to America” to cut $100 billion. Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), chairman of the Republican Study Committee, has promised to introduce these extra cuts in an amendment to any continuing resolution brought to the floor.
Flake’s move was rather unprecedented in that he opted to file a dissenting view in the committee report, something that is almost never done by a member of the majority party. However, those familiar with Flake should not be surprised. He certainly didn’t sign up for the Appropriations Committee to make friends.
If Tuesday night’s vote is any indication of what’s to come when a continuing resolution ultimately comes to the House floor, GOP leadership will be in for a real test.
I sometimes summarize the difference between my native West Coast and the East Coast by referring to the reading material in airport lounges. On the old DC-NY shuttle you used to pick up free copies of the political and financial magazines (maybe you still can — I always take the train to NY these days), while on the West Coast shuttle from LA to San Francisco, you’ll find copies of . . . Daily Variety. At least that’s what was out in a pile in the Red Carpet Room in LAX this afternoon.
So I flip through a few pages and had my own Jay Nordlinger moment, where liberal political attitudes intrude into where they don’t belong. There’s a story in today’s Variety about the Writers Guild of America West Awards show last Saturday, which we all missed because it wasn’t even broadcast on cable — not even on CurrentTV. Their big lifetime achievement prize, the Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award, went to Diane English, the showrunner for “Murphy Brown” (not exactly a current hit), who got a standing ovation for remarks that included “an impassioned plea to CBS” that consisted of this: “If Sarah Palin runs for president, I’m begging you to bring my show back. Six episodes is all I need.” How original.
Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, a 34-year Senate veteran who is up for reelection next year, attended a Tea Party Express event tonight in Washington. Hatch, who may face a tough primary challenge, gave a firebrand speech to a packed room of conservative activists. “We are living in perilous times,” he warned. “We have run this country into the ground.”
“We are not going to take it,” Hatch continued, to nods and murmurs. “The fact of the matter is, we have got to come back and we have got to fight for this country.”
“We have got to get armed and get out there,” Hatch added, as he advocated for a balanced-budget amendment. “If we don’t, we are not going to get spending under control.”
In recent weeks, Hatch has proposed a balanced-budget amendment.He has also been both praised and criticized by leaders of the Tea Party Express, one of the more prominent groups in the Tea Party movement.
Sen. Dick Lugar (R., Ind.) is already facing a likely 2012 primary challenger in Richard Mourdock, the state treasurer. But Lugar, unlike other Senate GOP veterans, is in no mood to make an appeal to the Tea Party movement. Instead, in a recent interview with an Indiana TV station, Lugar urged the Tea Party to “get real” when it comes to Beltway politics.
As the Washington Post notes, Lugar, who has amassed a $2.5 million war chest, is “effectively daring someone to beat him under the belief that the same coalition that has re-elected him time and time again will do so again in 2012.”
The Tea Party Express, a leading Tea Party organization, is taking the dare. In an e-mail to its supporters on Tuesday, the group named Lugar one of its top targets. The message, entitled “Time to Punish Dick Lugar,” calls the senior senator the “epitome of what is wrong in Washington.”
Sal Russo, the chief strategist for the Express, tells National Review Online that activists are “disappointed” by Lugar’s “hostile” attitude. “It’s not helpful for him, it’s not helpful for the movement,” he says.
BREAKING: In a vote this evening, the House failed to extend key provisions of the Patriot Act. The measure was brought up under suspension, meaning it required a two-thirds majority to pass, but it came up just short, 277 to 148.
Christopher, I suspect that we might have to agree to disagree on how we interpret the demographic history of Asia over the last half century, but can we at least agree that the implication (in your paragraph 5) that the proposed Philippines legislation is being “imposed” upon the country was simply a rhetorical flourish? There’s nothing wrong with that, of course (I certainly plead guilty to many similar offenses), but just for the record, what is happening in the Philippines is that a democratically elected legislature is, well, legislating.
As for the law being “coercive” (an adjective you use), well, all laws are in a sense coercive, but assuming the text I have here is accurate and reasonably up-to-date, this particular piece of legislation does not seem to be particularly so.
In particular I note that “there shall be no demographic or population targets . . .” (Section 3 (11)). It is true that Section 20 does talk about the state “assist[ing] couples, parents and individuals to achieve their desired family size within the context of responsible parenthood for sustainable development and encourage[ing] them to have two children as the ideal family size” but that same section goes on (quite rightly) to say that “attaining the ideal family size is neither mandatory nor compulsory. No punitive action shall be imposed on parents having more than two children.”
It seems, however, that you regard some types of advice as more equal than others. You quote the Prime Minister of Singapore (a more authoritarian place than the Philippines incidentally) ‘advising’ his citizens to have more children and you do so not only without concern but with obvious approval. Double standards?
And yes, the proposed law does provide for sex education in the classroom and, in my view, quite correctly so. I also note (section 16) that such teaching has to be, among other things, “age appropriate,” and that it must include “values formation” and the provision of “knowledge and skills” designed to discourage teen pregnancy, and encourage “responsible relationship[s].” Other topics to be taught include dangers associated with abortion and the fact that abortion is illegal in the Philippines.
Then there’s that ‘pre-Cana’:
Section 17: Each Local Population Officer of every city and municipality shall furnish free instructions and information on family planning, responsible parenthood, breastfeeding, infant nutrition and other relevant aspects of this Act to all applicants for marriage license. In the absence of a local Population Officer, a Family Planning Officer under the Local Health Office shall discharge the additional duty of the Population Officer.
Section 18: No marriage license shall be issued by the Local Civil Registrar unless the applicants present a Certificate of Compliance issued for free by the local Family Planning Office certifying that they had duly received adequate instructions and information on family planning, responsible parenthood, breastfeeding and infant nutrition.
Making this information freely available is, or ought to be, unobjectionable. I’d certainly prefer that it was not an obligatory precondition of being granted a marriage license, but, sadly, the institution of marriage tends to bring out the nanny state in many governments . . .
Also on the question of abortion, I note that Section 3 (13) of the bill provides:
This Act recognizes that abortion is illegal and punishable by law . . .
Somehow I feel that the real issue here is contraception — or, more accurately, opposition to it . . .
Phi Beta Cons A New Way to Censor
This morning, the Alliance Defense Fund sent a letter to Florida A&M requesting that they reinstate a Christian student group . . .Go
Exchequer Obama Bails Out More Spendthrifts
As several insightful Exchequer readers predicted, the federal bailout of the most irresponsible states has started with Obama’s loan-forgiveness scheme.
Under . . .Go
Planet Gore Stopping the EPA's Power Grab
Our friends at the Competitive Enterprise Institute on the House's "first step" to leash the EPA:
Washington, D.C. February 9, 2011 . . .Go
