South Dakota Politics

Bad Government

A lot of my colleagues on the left wing of the local blogosphere (well, Cory Heidelberger is still my friend!) defend ObamaCare as the best thing they can get, but what they really want is a single payer system.  That is to say that they want the federal government to directly control the entire healthcare system.  Okay.  Does the federal government seem like a competent administrator just right now?

I seem to remember that Cory once pointed to the Veterans Administration as an example of good healthcare.  If I remember incorrectly, I apologize.  At any rate, we know now that the VA is a scandalous mess.  Veterans waited for treatment and some of them died waiting while VA administrators cooked the books to show that they were promptly serving them and came down hard on whistle blowers.  Don’t believe me.  Believe this guy:

The Department of Veterans Affairs has lost the trust of veterans and the American people as a result of widespread treatment delays for people seeking health care and falsified records to cover up those delays, the agency’s top official said Wednesday.

Acting VA Secretary Sloan Gibson said the VA has created an environment where workers are afraid to raise concerns or offer suggestions for fear of retaliation and has failed to hold employees accountable for wrongdoing or negligence.

Wait!  I typed too fast. 

Despite its problems, Gibson said the VA can turn itself around “in as little as two years” if given additional resources by Congress.

Can anyone believe that?  Give us more money to reward us for our failure and in two years we’ll be back on track. 

Now: do you believe that the Department of Health and Human Services will do a better job of directing the American healthcare system?  Forget about the goofy start of ObamaCare and all the parts of the law arbitrarily canceled or delayed by the Administration.  Instead, consider this:

Federal officials can’t resolve 85 percent of 2.9 million “inconsistencies” on applications for ObamaCare even after nine months of trying, according to new data provided by the administration.

One unidentified state-run marketplace cited situations in which infants and young children were “erroneously identified as incarcerated, according to federal data,” the inspector general for the Health and Human Services Department revealed Tuesday.

Just 425,000 problematic applications have been resolved out of 2.9 million that states and the federal exchange reported, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services told The Post.

These folks don’t know their own asses from oatmeal and it isn’t their fault.  This is ObamaCare as we have it.  Can any sane person think that it would all be better if we could just put more power in the hands of federal bureaucracies? 

Oh, and then there is this:

Federal officials found more than just long-forgotten smallpox samples recently in a storage room on the National Institutes for Health campus in Bethesda, Md. The discovery included 12 boxes and 327 vials holding an array of pathogens, including the virus behind the tropical disease dengue and the bacteria that can cause spotted fever, according to the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees the lab in question.

“The fact that these materials were not discovered until now is unacceptable,” Karen Midthun, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), told reporters Wednesday. “We take this matter very seriously, and we’re working to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.”

The disclosure came hours after Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, testified on Capitol Hill that researchers at the agency mishandled live anthrax and other deadly pathogens in a string of mishaps in recent years. “We missed a critical pattern,” he told lawmakers. “And the pattern is an insufficient culture of safety.”

You have to admire that phrase “unacceptable”.  It means that the agencies that are supposed to protect us against small pox and anthrax and “an array of pathogens, including the virus behind the tropical disease dengue and the bacteria that can cause spotted fever” are leaving this stuff around in zip lock bags where any fool or nave can get their hands on it. 

The Wobbly Critics of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby

It is a charming coincidence that Hobby Lobby is coming to Aberdeen just as the firm is enjoying its moment of national fame.  Or infamy, perhaps; the kind that inspires folks who never shopped there before to announce that they are never shopping there again. 

The Supreme Court decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. generated enough heat on the left to keep the Dakotas warm all winter.  I will try to provide a little light.  The Court did not say, as many critics say that they said, that corporations are people.  It recognized that corporations are legal persons, meaning simply that they have rights and duties under the law.  This has been part of law for the last five hundred years.  

I have written about that once before, but I will add one point here.  As Justice Alito noted, corporate personhood is a legal fiction.  It is useful to treat a corporation as a single person when you want to tax and regulate it, sue it, or, if it is the New York Times, grant it the freedom of the press.  However, corporations are composed of and act solely through people.  When you tell a closely-held corporation that it has to do something, you are making a small group of natural persons (five or less) do something.  Even if corporations don’t have rights, David and Barbara Green surely do. 

Almost all the critics of the decision seem to think that it is the job of the nine Justices to decide who they like more and what they would like to see happen.  It is not.  It is the job of the Court to say what the law is.  In this case, the law is The Religious Freedom Restoration Act.  RFRA (say it like it’s a word and you’ll sound like Scooby Doo) was a response to another controversial decision of the High Court.

The Constitution has two clauses dealing with religion: the Establishment Clause, which means that government cannot compel someone to conform to or profess any religion and the Free Exercise Clause, which means that government cannot prevent someone from practicing or professing a religion.  There are two ways to interpret the latter.  One way is the Sherbert Test, announced by the Court in 1962.  According to that test, when an act of government imposes a significant burden on someone’s exercise of sincerely held religious faith, that government must demonstrate that it has a compelling interest in doing so and that there is no less restrictive way to serve that interest. 

The trouble with that test is that it depends on a lot of vague modifiers.  What is a significant burden?  Which beliefs are sincere?  What government interests are compelling?  In Employment Division v. Smith (1990) the Court adopted a simpler and, in my view, better test.  A law violates the Free Exercise Clause only if it is designed to target a religious belief or practice.  So long as a law applies to everyone the same way, regardless of their beliefs, then it constitutional even if it happens to interfere with some religious practice.  So a law that said that only Native Americans are forbidden to use peyote and only for ceremonial purposes would be unconstitutional; however, a law that says no one can use peyote for any reason is constitutional, even if inconvenient for traditional practices.

If the Smith test were all that the Court had to go on, Hobby Lobby would have had no case.  The ACA contraceptive mandate applies the same way to corporations generally, regardless of religious motivations.  It is up to the Administration to decide on exemptions.  However, the Smith decision offended both the left and the right (which may have been proof enough that it was correct).  Congress passed RFRA almost unanimously when both houses were still controlled by Democrats and it was signed into law by President Clinton.  So if you were offended by Hobby Lobby’s victory, now you know who to blame. 

I am not convinced that RFRA is constitutional.  While persons of any religious faith deserve to be protected from hostile legislation, I don’t think that religious faith should give someone special immunities to otherwise valid laws that are not enjoyed by atheists.  Until the Court comes around to my way of thinking, RFRA is the law and it looks to me like the Court has read it correctly. 

Critics of the decision have flooded the media and the net with horrifying questions.  Does this mean that corporations can stop paying taxes if they have religious objections?  Does it mean that a human sacrifice cult can now begin cutting throats?  This parade of horrors is absurd because we know very well how the principle of law works.  It was operative from the early sixties to the nineties as a matter of constitutional law.  It has been operative on Congress at least since 1993.  The courts have routinely balanced the interests of government and religious objections in mostly sensible ways. 

In Burwell the Court ruled that the government could easily have found other means to achieve its objective or providing contraceptive care under the ACA.  Indeed the Administration has found other means in the case of churches, which are also private corporations.  In those cases, the burden falls on the insurance agencies.  Alternatively, the contraceptive technologies in question could be directly subsidized.  The Administration could have avoided the case by extending to Hobby Lobby the same exemptions it extended to churches.  That they did not do so might be because they wanted to show everyone who is boss.  Well, now we know.  It turns out it’s the law. 

Quote of the Day

Unanimous defeats do not in and of themselves prove that the administration’s position was wrong in all these cases. Sometimes, even a unanimous Court can be wrong. Still, when the president’s position in multiple major constitutional cases cannot secure even one vote on an ideologically and methodologically diverse Court that includes two of his own appointees, it is likely there is something wrong with the administration’s constitutional worldview.

Volokh Conspiracy

A Failed Presidency

It’s no secret that the President is not at the height of his popularity.  His approval rating hovers somewhere between forty-five percent (that’s Rasmussen, mind you) and a disastrous thirty-six percent (Reuters).  All the polls except Rasmussen show him at least ten points in the negative.  If the occupancy of the White House was determined by Nielsen, Mr. Obama wouldn’t be renewed for another season.

There are, however, other tests involved in a complete diagnosis.  One I might call the Beinart test: can the President hold on to an independent minded, moderate to slightly left of center Democrat?  Since Peter Beinart actually exists, we can apply the test and it too produces a negative result for the President. 

Sooner or later, honest liberals will have to admit that Obama’s Iraq policy has been a disaster. Since the president took office, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has grown ever more tyrannical and ever more sectarian, driving his country’s Sunnis toward revolt. Since Obama took office, Iraq watchers—including those within his own administration—have warned that unless the United States pushed hard for inclusive government, the country would slide back into civil war. Yet the White House has been so eager to put Iraq in America’s rearview mirror that, publicly at least, it has given Maliki an almost-free pass. Until now, when it may be too late.

Beinart’s piece is a pretty damning tale of diplomatic neglect.  The present civil war might have been avoided if the Administration had pushed harder for an agreement that would have allowed 20-30,000 U.S. troops to remain in Iraq and if they had put pressure on Prime Minister Maliki to maintain a more inclusive government. 

This account is perhaps not damning enough.  As this blog pointed out back in 2008, Candidate Obama pressed the Iraqi government to delay signing a status of forces agreement with the Bush Administration.  The motive for that was obviously to deny Bush any last minute victory and thus bolster Obama’s campaign.  That might have been forgivable if Mr. Obama had managed to get such an agreement himself once he took office.  As Beinart shows, it is hardly clear that this President ever seriously tried to do that. 

A second and more severe diagnostic tool in the pundits quiver is the Milbank Test.  Is the President still relentless protected by journalists on the left who mostly write like partisan hacks?  In his recent column, Dana Milbank wrote what maybe the most scathing personal comment on Mr. Obama that I have read (at least coming from the left). 

On June 14, Sunni rebels threatened Baghdad after seizing much of Iraq — and President Obama fearlessly played a round at the Sunnylands Golf Course in Rancho Mirage, Calif.

The next day, the militants posted pictures of their mass execution of Shiite members of Iraq’s security forces — and Obama boldly teed off again, at Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s Rancho Mirage estate.

These split-screen scenes were reminiscent of the weekend in March when Russia was about to annex Crimea. Obama played golf both Saturday and Sunday at Key Largo, Fla.’s Ocean Reef resort with former NBA star Alonzo Mourning and former NFL player Ahmad Rashad.

It’s enough to make one wish the president would take up a different pastime — like, say, stamp collecting.

Or, dare one suggest it, trying his hand at being President?  This habit of playing golf while the world burns is bad enough on the face of it but it also takes one of Mr. Obama’s favorite clubs out of his bag: the “I’m not Bush” iron. 

CBS News’s Mark Knoller, the unofficial statistician of presidential activities, reports that Bush played golf only 24 times while in the White House; Obama is up to 177 and now has a round-a-week habit.

Milbank notes that Bush 43 gave up golf entirely after the Iraq invasion.  Say what you like about his policies, President Dubya could at least pretend to be a serious man.  Mr. Obama doesn’t seem to understand the distinction. 

These stories confirm what this blogger has been arguing since 2009: not that Mr. Obama is a bad President but that he is a good anchorman, and little more.  That was enough to get him elected twice.  It was not enough to provide leadership to his administration and, without that, all that comes out of the White House are the results of shifting alliances of aides and lobbies.  What doesn’t come out is coherent policy.

It may be that the President’s approval ratings have fallen about as low as they can go.  There is a stock of strong partisans for both parties who rarely give up.  Even Democrats, however, say (48 to 39%) that the President has not clearly explained his goals in Iraq and only fifty percent of Democrats think that the President’s policies have made the U.S. safer.  No one asked them if they thought the President had goals or policies. 

The Man Who Wasn't There

Someday someone will write the definitive history of the Obama Administration.  It won’t be yours truly, but I have surely got the right title: The Man Who Wasn’t There.  It’s catchy and resonates with the famous poem and with a movie starring Billy Bob Thornton.  Best of all, it pretty much tells the whole story.  The rest of the book would be one long footnote. 

One place the President wasn’t, much of the time, was the President’s Daily Brief.  The PDB is where the President is supposed to be briefed on serious threats to national security.  George W. Bush rarely missed one.  Marc Thiessen reported in 2012 that Mr. Obama shows for less than half of his own PDB’s.  His attendance fell even more as the election neared.  In the weak before our ambassador was murdered by terrorists in Benghazi, Mr. Obama didn’t show for a single one.  He skipped another meeting the day after the attack to meet with grieving members of the State Department.  He had no time to reschedule, since he had to fly off to a fundraiser in Las Vegas. 

Might things have turned out differently if the President had been properly briefed in the week before the attack?  There is no way to be certain, but the British pulled their own ambassador well before the violence in Benghazi.  Did the Brits know something we didn’t know or was it just that they were paying attention?  We do know that there were warnings of violence for months and that the Ambassador himself requested more security.  We have been told that Mr. Obama didn’t know about these requests.  I believe it. 

We have been told that those responsible for the ambassadors’ murder will be brought to justice, but if any progress has been made on this front, the Administration is keeping it a secret.  Days after the attack, CNN reporters entered the compound and found Ambassador Stevens’ diary on the floor.  Apparently no official investigators had arrived.  Are they there yet? 

What happened in Benghazi is apparently standard procedure for this Administration.  The President launched a series of air strikes against the Libyan regime while he was on a “relationship-building trip” to Brazil.  What exactly is that?  Here’s a hint: it didn’t involve anything as dreary as treaties, agreements, or negotiations.  It was all about Latin America and Barack Obama loving one another.  It may be first war ever started while the President was on Spring Break. 

He very nearly launched a second one for not paying attention when he himself was talking.  When you and your subordinates frequently say that the leader of the Syrian regime must go and when you draw red lines about chemical weapons, you may discover that you have accidently actually said something.  That in turn might obligate you to act.  When the President did show up to a meeting, he let the heads in the room talk on but didn’t seem to be doing much listening.  According to the New York Times: “he often appeared impatient or disengaged while listening to the debate, sometimes scrolling through messages on his BlackBerry or slouching and chewing gum.”  So we almost ended up siding the Syrian rebel movement just as that movement was being captured by Al Qaeda, because the President was playing Angry Birds. 

Things haven’t gotten any better.  A year ago the President announced a new counter terrorism strategy, to replace the post 9/11 policies initiated by George W. Bush.  But according to the Washington Post, “much of the agenda he outlined remains unfinished or not even begun.”  The President said he was looking forward to engaging Congress on the issue, but even Congressional Democrats admit that there has been little follow-through from the Administration. 

No one should be the least bit surprised, then, that this Administration could successfully spring an American soldier from the clutches of the Taliban and do it in such a way as to leave everyone wondering whether the folks in the White House can be trusted to tie their own shoes.  Allow me to stipulate that, whatever Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl may or may not be guilty of, bringing him home to be judged here instead of by the Taliban is a worthy objective.  Critics of the exchange are right to point out that we say we don’t negotiate with terrorists and nothing demonstrates our resolve on that point like negotiating with terrorists.  It also reminds our enemies that we care a lot more about individual human lives than we do and reminds everyone that this is a weakness on our part.  We are what we are, however, and the Israelis, who are a lot tougher minded than we are, make the same kind of exchanges. 

So perhaps the President couldn’t help paying such a sordid price for Bergdahl’s release, but he didn’t have to announce it in the Rose Garden.  He didn’t have to say that it’s a “pretty sacred” rule that we never leave anyone behind when, if the worst about Bergdahl is true, we used to bring such fellows home and shoot them.  The President’s National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, didn’t have to say that Bergdahl “served with honor and distinction”, though telling bald face lies on Sunday morning news shows seems to be her special talent. 

It now seems pretty clear that Sergeant Bergdahl lost his faith in his mission in Afghanistan and expressed that loss of faith by walking away from his fellow soldiers and towards the enemy.  Whether he is responsible for the deaths of some of our soldiers or not, he certainly cost our military the time and resources they spent on looking for him.  It also costs us five captured cutthroats that the Pentagon clearly did not want to see released.  Even if this gaggle of foes is no longer useful on the battlefield, Mr. Obama has now turned them into Taliban Superstars.  This is the kind of thing you try to do in the dead of night, not in the Rose Garden.  This has to leave of a lot of the men and women under Mr. Obama’s command wondering in their Commander-in-Chief is a tuna fish sandwich. 

Then there is this little matter of the law and the Constitution.  Releasing prisoners from Guantanamo Bay without giving Congress thirty days notice violates the law.  Does the law not matter to our President or did no one bother to check?  Even if he decided he had to act swiftly because Bergdahl was in peril, he could at least have informed the leaders of both houses of Congress.  He didn’t, perhaps because he doesn’t trust the Republican leader of the House.  This one time teacher of Constitutional Law might have reflected he is not an autocrat and that the war powers are shared with Congress.  That, however, would have required reflection. 

STEM hype isn’t rooted in fact

I have been remiss at posting Pierre Capital Journal columns here.  This is the lastest.  Here's the intro:

Gov. Daugaard recently went to Girls State and gave the young ladies terrible advice.  The governor told them not to bother with liberals arts degrees, such as philosophy, and instead get a technical degree.  This, he said, would give them a better chance at a job.  

What if this is false?  That is the claim of Harvard-based researcher Michael S. Teitelbaum writing in The Atlantic.  Teitelbaum notes that after a number of studies, “No one has been able to find any evidence indicating current widespread labor market shortages or hiring difficulties in science and engineering occupations that require bachelors degrees or higher.”  The studies indicate that the United States is producing more STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) college graduates each year than it creates in STEM jobs.  Matthew LeBar, of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, reports that while 11.4 million STEM degree holders work in non-STEM jobs, there are only 277,000 openings in STEM-specific jobs.  

Empty image appeals and personality-based politics are now the norm

Once again, the latest in the Pierre Capital Journal.  It begins thusly: 

In Graham Greene’s classic novel, “The End of the Affair,” a mediocre government functionary is described as being “important rather as an elephant is important, from the size of his department.”

The biggest “elephant” in the nation would seem to be the most important man in the nation, President Barack Obama. Obama is remarkable in that in memory no one has risen to such heights based on so few apparent accomplishments.

Republicans know Senate post is ripe for the picking

The latest in the Capital Journal.Here's a snippet: 

South Dakota is one of several states where Republicans are competitive, if not likely, to pick up a seat in the U.S. Senate. There are as many as a dozen seats currently being held by Democrats that are at least plausible pick-ups. In some cases, as in South Dakota, the Republican candidate is a clear favorite.

Why this GOP advantage? Partially it is timing. The 2008 election, spurred by Barack Obama, sent many Democrats into office. Democratic Senators elected that year are now up for re-election. Because of that 2008 success, Democrats now have more seats to defend.

Also, the Obama coattails in 2008 brought some marginal Democrats into office. In states such as North Carolina, Alaska, and Arkansas, Democrats won in normally “red” Republican states. Without Obama on the ticket in 2014, to say nothing of the president’s decline in popularity, these marginal Democrats find themselves imperiled.

Only sensible campaign finance reform is more, not less, political liberty

My latest in the Capital Journal.  The mandatory snippet:

South Dakota Democrat Senate candidate Rick Weiland has denounced the McCutcheon decision saying it “may be the worst decision made by any Supreme Court since the Dred Scott case reaffirmed slavery in 1857.” This is absurd. I can easily come up with at least half a dozen cases clearly more heinous than McCutcheon. For example, 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision in which the Court put its stamp of approval on racial segregation.

Mr. Weiland has made campaign finance reform central to his campaign. His campaign website says “the first bill” he will introduce will allow Congress to “regulate the raising and spending of money with respect to federal elections.” This is a broad grant of power to Congress to limit political speech. It certainly seems odd that the first thing this prairie progressive wants to do is to restrict money in politics by reducing our free speech rights.

Mr. Wieland is also a fierce opponent of the related Citizens United decision from 2010. In that case the government’s own lawyer, who defended Mr. Wieland’s position, admitted in oral argument that using the government’s logic the government could ban political books and films. This is not a “pro-democracy” position.

The Party of Enablers

If things are really as bad as they look for Democrats this year, there seems to be no shortage of explanations.  I will argue, however, that all the proffered causes fall a bit short of the whole. 

Things do look really bad.  Michael Barone has this

Here's an astonishing poll: David Freddoso at Conservative Intelligence Briefing links to a report by the Washington Post's Aaron Blake that West Virginia 3rd district incumbent Rep. Nick Rahall trails Republican challenger state Sen. Evan Jenkins by a 54-percent to 40-percent margin…

Rahall, first elected in 1976, is now the seventh most senior member of the House... Moreover, his district in southern West Virginia has historically been very Democratic; in its previous boundaries it voted for Walter Mondale over Ronald Reagan in 1984…

From 1978 to 2008, Rahall was re-elected with at least 64 percent of the vote, except in 1990 when he beat Republican Marianne Brewster by only 52 percent to 48 percent.

Put that together with a Republican leading in the Senate race in Michigan and the Republican victory in the Florida special election, and we may well be looking at an historic collapse.  Ben Highton puts it more mildly in the WaPo:

The chances that the Republicans will maintain control of the House are a near certainty.  Republicans also have a fair chance of winning a Senate majority, too.

So what are the causes?  Highton rounds up three of the usual suspects.

Part of the problem for Democrats is that it’s a midterm election year and the party that controls the White House typically loses seats. On top of that, national conditions do not look very promising if Democrats are to buck the usual tide against the president’s party.  At this point, national conditions look, at best, average for a midterm election, and in the case of presidential approval, not very good at all.

Okay, so we have the election cycle, national conditions (meaning the economy), and presidential approval, in order of increasing severity.  As for the latter, Gallop now has the President’s approval at 39% (vs. 55% disapproval).  His RCP average now has him down ten points, 43 to 53. 

Maureen Dowd identifies the fourth factor, which is obviously related to the third.

At the heart of all this, really, is that the White House totally blew the rollout of the health care law and Democrats have not recovered. It provided a huge opening for Republicans, who had just shut down the government and were tanking in the polls and in despair themselves.

This strikes me as too harsh and too kind.  The botched rollout was devastating, to be certain; but the effects would have faded if we weren’t constantly reminded that the Affordable Health Care Act is in utter disarray.  We are reminded of this as the Administration continually modifies, delays, or suspends various parts of the law. 

Dana Milbank notes that the “millennials,” who were a key part of Obama’s support, are not voting with their feet for ObamaCare. 

The administration announced last week that only 1.08 million people ages 18 to 34 had signed up for Obamacare by the end of February, or about 25 percent of total enrollees. If the proportion doesn’t improve significantly, the result likely will be fatal for the Affordable Care Act.

So if the Democrats do suffer a disaster this November, will ObamaCare be the determining factor?  Yes, in the sense that the proximate cause of a death by heart attack is that the heart stops beating.  That still raises the question of what caused the heart attack. 

Dowd points to the ultimate cause of the Democratic funk:

The state of relations between congressional Democrats and the administration has been deteriorating every week, but now it’s hitting a new bottom… Hill Democrats are seething at Obama, fearing that the onetime messiah is putting them in a slough that will last until — or through — 2016.

Top Democrats who were fans of the president and prone to giving him the benefit of the doubt now say they’ve completely lost confidence in the White House’s ability to advance an agenda and work with them in a way that’s going to give Democrats a fighting chance in November.

That would be the problem.  The White House’s inability "to advance an agenda and work with" Congressional Democrats, but the fact that they have, hitherto, for six years, given Mr. Obama “the benefit of the doubt”.  

The hard truth is that Congressional Democrats have been propping up a largely vacant administration since Mr. Obama took office.  That is political capital spent without any return.  The President’s allies in the mainstream press have been doing much the same.  Now that events both foreign and domestic have exposed his nakedness, the bill is coming due. 

 

Religious liberty is losing the battle for the minds of Americans

Here is my latest in the Pierre Capital Journal.  Here's the teaser before you read the whole thing:

According to religious freedom attorney Douglas Laycock, these RFRA laws were always intended to protect groups and businesses as well as individuals. Arizona was simply attempting to codify this understanding of the law.  

But Mr. Laycock has noted in other contexts that these are dark days for religious liberty.  Because of the clear conflict between same-sex marriage and the deep religious beliefs of many Americans, religious liberty conflicts are on the rise. We are already seeing business owners being sued successfully for refusing to work same-sex weddings and people are losing their jobs because of their traditional beliefs regarding marriage and homosexuality.

There is growing concern, well founded in my view, that same-sex marriage will be used as a bludgeon to force all dissenters into conformity. There is some precedent in law that religious schools, hospitals, social service organizations, and other entities can be stripped of licensures and legal privileges (such as tax exempt status) for reasons of “public policy.” Laycock, himself a same-sex marriage advocate, notes support for religious liberty is at an unprecedented low due to the growing support of same-sex marriage over religious liberty. Increasingly the law is saying sexual liberty is more fundamental than religious liberty.  

Ultimately, it’s a poor return on investment

The Pierre Capital Journal has printed a couple of my columns.  Here's a link to one.  It's on college sports.  Here's a snippet. 

In his new book “The King of Sports: Football’s Impact on America,” author Gregg Easterbrook notes that except for a very small handful of very elite institutions, most college athletic programs take money out of the general fund of the university to pay for sports. This is especially true of student activity fees which are used to fund athletic facilities that the average student is not allowed to use.

Ohio University economist Richard Vedder notes a Knight Foundation study of the 100 largest college athletic programs found that while those schools increased academic spending per student by 8 percent from 2005 to 2011, they increased athletic spending per athlete by 38 percent. The mean academic spending per student was about $13,000, while spending per athlete was about $96,000.

So while we complain mightily about the cost of college education, colleges are charging students to pay for athletics that are only tangentially related to actual education. As Easterbrook puts it, college athletics often acts as a not-for-profit business that takes money from tax payers and students to pay for its own operation, often paying employees quite well.

Hit the link and read the whole thing. 

Mr Obama's Feckless Foreign Policy

I don’t expect the Crimean crisis to turn into a major disaster, but I can easily imagine how it might do that.  All that has to happen is for Putin to be the worst of Putin and Obama to be the typical Obama. 

The worst of Putin would be a Russian invasion of the Ukraine.  There is a precedent for this in the war in Georgia.  The worst-Putin scenario involves a major Russian occupation of eastern Ukraine or maybe all of that nation. 

The first half of the worst-Obama scenario is already in the can. 

We are now deeply concerned by reports of military movements taken by the Russian Federation inside of Ukraine. Russia has a historic relationship with Ukraine, including cultural and economic ties, and a military facility in Crimea, but any violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity would be deeply destabilizing, which is not in the interest of Ukraine, Russia, or Europe.

That is from the President’s address on the issue today.  Notice what it leaves out?  No mention of American interests.  Is the President really interested?  What would a “violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity” represent?

It would represent a profound interference in matters that must be determined by the Ukrainian people. It would be a clear violence of Russia’s commitment to respect the independence and sovereignty and borders of Ukraine, and of international laws. And just days after the world came to Russia for the Olympic Games, it would invite the condemnation of nations around the world. And indeed, the United States will stand with the international community in affirming that there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine.

You have to admire that phrase “there will be costs”.  What is the subject of that proposition?  What costs are alluded to?  No clue.  If you look up feckless in a picture dictionary, you might find a picture of the President giving this speech. 

Unfortunately, there is precedent for this.  Mr. Obama spent years dithering about the war in Syria and then, without noticing what he was doing, drew a red line over chemical weapons.  When it became clear that the Assad had crossed that line, he tried to back pedal.  At that point someone in his inner circle convinced him that he was going all Jimmy Carter and looking like a coward and he panicked.  He decided that military intervention was necessary to save his face and asked Congress for permission to do something manly.

At that point Putin intervened and a deal was struck.  We wouldn’t intervene militarily, which we weren’t going to do anyway, and the Syrian regime would hand over its chemical weapons, which it isn’t going to do either.  Such is foreign policy under Barack Obama. 

So what happens if Mr. Putin invades the Ukraine?  Probably nothing.  Obama spouts a lot of pious fluffdoodle and Mr. Putin does what he wants.  Yet that will remind the world and the electorate in the U.S. that our President is less substantial than a piece of toast soaking up lukewarm coffee.  What if the President panics again?  He might decide to order U.S. warships into the Black Sea, just to show that he is not what he in fact is. 

I don’t think that this scenario is likely.  I think it is entirely possible because we have at the national helm an empty suit.  Putin has figured this out.  He may want to get all he can get just now, before someone competent replaces the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. 

UPDATE

The Russian Parliament has approved the use of force in the Ukraine.  I do not see this as significant in itself.  Russian forces are already in the Crimea and they are moving about.  How far they move is what matters. 

I doubt very much whether Putin needs the approval of Parliament to do anything he damn well pleases, let alone that there was any chance he wouldn't get what he asked for.  What was this about?  He is rubbing our President's face in his own wee wee.  This, Mr. Putin is saying, is how a real man handles a legislature. 

Penny for your thoughts? How about a quarter-penny for good teachers?

My latest in the Pierre Capital Journal concerns teacher pay, or lack thereof.  Kudos to whomever wrote the headline.  I love it. Here's the teaser, and then go here and read the whole thing. 

Another legislative session is under way. A recent study committee has asked to Legislature to address the state’s shortage of quality teachers.

What might cause this shortage? The obvious place to look is teacher pay. According to a recent study by the National Center for Education Statistics, South Dakota is last in the nation in teacher pay, even behind Mississippi. Average teacher pay in South Dakota is about $39,000 a year, falling well short of the national average of $56,000.

Policy makers will sometimes argue that South Dakota’s low cost of living should be taken into consideration when we discuss salaries.

It is worth noting that our state trails every single state that borders us in teacher pay. Indeed, of the five states that border South Dakota, North Dakota is the closest in teacher pay at about $47,000, or $8,000 more a year than South Dakota. Nebraska pays about $9,000 a year more. Are we really to believe that it costs $9,000 a year more to live in Nebraska than South Dakota? Or that is costs $18,000 more a year to live in Wyoming? Because that’s how much more Wyoming’s teachers make than ours.

Legislation to end death penalty in SD shows courage

After some miscommunication my columns are back running at the Pierre Capital Journal.  Here's part of the latest:

While it is hard to make an argument that Christianity forbids the death penalty, it certainly does not require it. As Hickey notes in a letter to his colleagues, the evidence that the death penalty actually deters violent criminals is sketchy and there are many instances in recent years of people on death row being exonerated, often using DNA evidence. Odd that many conservatives who don’t trust the government with their guns or health care trust the government to properly identify, convict and execute the right people.

BTW, the egregious typos in the piece are all mine.  Whoops. 

 

Christmas on the Prairie

My latest in the Pierre Capital Journal. 

I had the good fortune recently to attend the “Christmas on the Prairie” concert in lovely Hoven, South Dakota. The concert is an annual event held at St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, sometimes known as the “Cathedral on the Prairie.” The concert spoke to much of what makes South Dakota a wonderful place to live.

Read the whole thing. 

The Great Crack Up

Every now and then I regret my withdrawal from full time political blogging.  It was often a barrel of fun, especially when readers A.I., Bill Fleming, Donald Pay, and a handful of others were also frequent commenters.  One of the joys was being proved right, at least about some things on some occasions. 

One of the things I was clearly right about was the lack of any honest public thinking in advance of the legislative adventure that became the Affordable Health Care Act.  I thought at the time that a serious examination of the American health care system was certainly in order.  It should have included a recognition of both its strengths and weaknesses, along with a comparison of our system with both the best and the worst of the systems in other nations.  No such thinking occurred. 

It’s fair to say that neither Democrats nor Republicans showed much interest in such thinking.  The Democrats knew what they wanted (an expanded role for government) and Republicans knew what they didn’t want (anything that the Democrats wanted).  However, it was the Democratic Party that held all the cards in the critical period and so it was their responsibility to step back and ask what we needed to do and how we needed to do it. 

It is easy to forget that the President initially chose to make the case for health care reform on economic grounds.  We needed to “bend the cost curve down” by making the system more efficient.  That, however, raised a set of serious questions that were never addressed. 

Was the problem that many Americans were being denied basic health care services?  If so, then it is not easy to see how we could provide a lot of people with services they had been denied in the past without it costing more money.  It was frequently stated that preventive care would save money, but this was based largely on wishful thinking in lieu of evidence and argument.  Nor was there any evidence that the basic premise was true.  We constantly heard that 30 or 35 or 40 million Americans lacked adequate insurance; but we never heard how many suffered from lack of health care services.  There is in fact no good reason to believe that more health insurance would lead to better health. 

Was the problem that lack of insurance subjects many people to economic hardship?  Again, this was more often stated than argued, let alone supported.  If it were true, then fixing it would seem to require more public funding and so hardly seems likely to bend the cost curve down. 

It is difficult, in retrospect, to avoid the suspicion that most of the supporters of the ACA knew all along that it would force millions of Americans to pay more for the health care they were getting while surrendering choices concerning their plans, doctors, etc.  The ACA was really all about redistributing wealth under the guise of reform.  That may be good policy or maybe not, but it was not a policy that the Democratic Party or the President were willing to confess.  They may have been hoping to create a large enough client population to sustain the program and their party, in the same way that Social Security and Medicare have done.  It is now clear that they didn’t think this through.  The disruptions may well be severe for a lot of voters that Democrats have long counted on.  It is not at all certain that those who benefit from the reform will be sufficient to support it. 

Finally, even if the reform were sustainable (once fully in operation) it still had to be put into operation without it blowing up in our faces.  One suspects that someone like Bill Clinton might have been able to pull this off.  The current occupant of the White House seems not so much incompetent when it comes to leadership as entirely uninterested in it.  We learn from the Washington Post that

The White House systematically delayed enacting a series of rules on the environment, worker safety and health care to prevent them from becoming points of contention before the 2012 election, according to documents and interviews with current and former administration officials.

The Obama Administration has never put anything before the immediate interests of Mr. Obama: not the environment, worker safety, or even the President’s signature piece of legislation.  That might not have been fatal if the President had the ability and interest enough to make sure that the actual policy work was done.  He doesn’t. 

A large part of the blame has to lie with the President’s enablers in the mainstream media.  They too systematically delayed the kind of investigative reporting that is now exposing Mr. Obama’s presidency until he was back in for four more years. 

The result of all this is a potential disaster for Mr. Obama, his party, and perhaps for the American health care system.  His approval rating is now below that of George W. Bush at the same point in his second term.  He may recover, of course, but it is not easy to see how.  Even if you believe that the ACA can right itself in time (and there is no good reason to believe that right now) it is unlikely to do so before the next two elections have run their course.  Meanwhile, the confidence of Americans in their political system has rarely or never been more compromised. 

We may all come to rue the day that we entrusted the most important executive office on the planet to a man who had never run so much as a lemonade stand and allowed a Congress to throw our health care system up into the air without any idea what they were doing.  I should think that my friends on the left will come to regret it most of all. 

Patriotism starts at home

Here is my Pierre Capital Journal column speaking against mandatory recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in schools.  A snippet:

The Sioux Falls school district recently found itself in a bit of a kerfuffle. Until recently, only elementary students were required to say the Pledge of Allegiance each day. The district expanded this to middle school students but excluded high school students. Eventually the school board capitulated to those in favor of mandatory Pledge recitation.

Thus controversy. Did the board originally abandon patriotism in the high schools, or does the decision to make the Pledge mandatory represent an imposition on the rights of high school students?

 

It Tolls for the Website

We may be witnessing the most awesome crackup in the history of American Government.  Today is the day that the ObamaCare website was supposed to finally be working, after it was originally supposed to be working.  Well, yesterday was the day.  I am writing after midnight.  Is it working? 

If it were, bells would be ringing across the land, or at least in the blue state media.  I hear no bells.  I went to the Washington Post website just now to look for something, anything, on the second coming on the ObamaCare website Fast and Furious actor Paul Walker died in a fiery crash and President Obama shopped at the Politics and Prose bookstore.  Maybe that tragic crash was a metaphor.  I’m not sure about the bookstore. 

The New York Times leads with a story about the attempt to rescue “a Health Care Site and Obama”.  To the Times’ credit, it is a good story. 

As a small coterie of grim-faced advisers shuffled into the Oval Office on the evening of Oct. 15, President Obama’s chief domestic accomplishment was falling apart 24 miles away, at a bustling high-tech data center in suburban Virginia…

Out of that tense Oval Office meeting grew a frantic effort aimed at rescuing not only the insurance portal and Mr. Obama’s credibility, but also the Democratic philosophy that an activist government can solve big, complex social problems. Today, that rescue effort is far from complete.

The website, which the administration promised would “function smoothly” for most people by Nov. 30, remains a work in progress. It is more stable, with many more people able to use it simultaneously than just two weeks ago. But it still suffers sporadic crashes, and large parts of the vital “back end” that processes enrollment data and transactions with insurers remain unbuilt.

Allow me to translate.  “Far from complete” means “no”.  The website isn’t close to working.  If you don’t believe me, ask the Obama Administration.  They are now trying desperately to keep people from actually using the website.  Again from the NYT:

WASHINGTON — White House officials, fearful that the federal health care website may again be overwhelmed this weekend, have urged their allies to hold back enrollment efforts so the insurance marketplace does not collapse under a crush of new users.

At the same time, administration officials said Tuesday that they had decided not to inaugurate a big health care marketing campaign planned for December out of concern that it might drive too many people to the still-fragile HealthCare.gov.

At this point, a new edition of a picture dictionary could put Obama’s face next to the word “disaster”. 

Tea Party should take stock of how far right the Republican Party has moved

My latest in the Pierre Capital Journal.  Here's a sample:

Over the last couple national election cycles the Tea Party movement has had some successes, such as electing the likes of Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Ted Cruz of Texas in the face of “establishment” resistance.  But the Tea Party has had notable losses.  In places such as Delaware, Indiana, Missouri, Colorado, and Nevada, Senate seats that should have been easy wins for Republicans have turned into losses as Tea Party candidates who were at once too extreme for the state and also political amateurs who made glaring mistakes essentially cost Republicans control of the U.S. Senate.  

We might see something similar at play in South Dakota as candidates Stace Nelson, Larry Rhoden, and Annette Bosworth each run to the right of the presumptive front runner, former governor Mike Rounds.  Rounds, like many of the “establishment” Republicans defeated by Tea Party candidates, is denounced as a RINO, a Republican In Name Only, i.e., not a true conservative.  

Those who throw around that RINO phrase might gain from a little historical perspective.  Looking at the U.S. Senate in 1985, a year when Republicans had a majority in the U.S. Senate, is illustrative.  Republicans in the Senate that year included the likes of Mark Hatfield, Nancy Kassebaum, Lowell Weicker, Robert Stafford, John Chaffee, John Heinz, Arlen Specter, David Durenberger, and more.  All of these Senators were honest-to-goodness moderate and even liberal Republicans.  

The Liar(s)

 

There should be a red label attached to the Presidency that reads like a list of side effects at the end of a prescription drug commercial: Warning!  Occupant likely to be remembered by the most embarrassing thing he or she says while in office.  If Bill Clinton had realized that his most memorable line would not be something like “Four Score and Seven Years Ago” but instead “I didn’t have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinski,” it might have made no difference.  At least he would have been warned.  Would Richard Nixon have said “I am not a crook” if it had occurred to him that these words would all but be carved on his tombstone? 

It took a while, but “If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it” has probably become affixed as Barack Obama’s scarlet sound bite.  The New York Times says that the President “misspoke” when he say that, which is in itself a lie.  To misspeak is to accidently use the wrong words and end up saying something you didn’t intend to say.  If Bill Clinton had actually meant to say “I did have sex relations with that woman…”, then he misspoke.  Of course, Mr. Clinton didn’t misspeak.  He lied through his teeth. 

It’s hard not to think the same thing about Mr. Obama.  Here is what he actually said: 

If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor, period. If you like your health-care plan, you'll be able to keep your health-care plan, period. No one will take it away, no matter what.

He used the same strikingly unambiguous language on several other occasions, both before and after he signed the Affordable Care Act into law.  In the quote above “period,” repeated twice, and “no matter what” are the kind of words you use when you want it understood that you mean precisely what you say. 

What he said was precisely false.  Because of ObamaCare, a lot of Americans have already lost their insurance plans and many will soon be forced to turn to different doctors.  It is clear that the Administration knew this before Mr. Obama said the opposite.  As the Wall Street Journal reports, the President’s policy advisors objected to the language above but his political aides overruled them.  The White House not only put politics above honesty but also above the long term interests of the President’s signature legislative achievement. 

The President told a big fat lie.  However, one cannot be certain that he knew it was a lie, even if his staff did.  After all, when the Justice Department delivered weapons to Mexican drug lords, neither he nor the Attorney General knew anything about it.  He didn’t know that Al Qaeda was flying its black flags in the streets of Benghazi in the days before our ambassador was murdered or that Ambassador Stevens had requested more security.  The President learned that his Justice Department seized the records of the Associated Press when the rest of us read it in the newspapers.  He had no idea that the IRS was targeting conservative groups or that the National Security Agency was spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel.  So if own his words were manifestly fraudulent, well, how would he know? 

But surely he knows now.  Yet he said this only yesterday:

Now, if you have or had one of these plans before the Affordable Care Act came into law and you really liked that plan, what we said was you can keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law passed.

I am not sure who “we” is, but this is not what the President said or what he meant to say.  He has shot past lying to lying about lying. 

The real issue behind the shutdown: Our federal budget process is broken

My latest in the Pierre Capital Journal.  Here's a snippet:

We govern by crisis.  Budgeting is supposed to be a deliberative consideration of the nation’s priorities.  Instead, we consistently find ourselves acting out of anxiety due to impending shutdowns or, related but distinct, debt limit ceilings.  The “grand bargains” that result are not really budgeting; they are sloppiness caused by panic.  

In Federalist #1, Alexander Hamilton famously asked whether free government can act out of “reflection and choice” or whether it is doomed to act by “accident and force.”  Our budget process much more resembles “accident and force” than “reflection and choice.”

 

 

The Man Who Wasn't There Part n

Since shortly after Barack Obama entered the White House, I have been pointing out that he seems largely uninterested in doing his job.  Now that he has been safely reelected, even the New York Times is more or less letting the cat out of the bag. 

In describing the incoherence of the White House on Syria, the Times has this:

A close examination of how the Obama administration finds itself at this point — based on interviews with dozens of current and former members of the administration, foreign diplomats and Congressional officials — starts with a deeply ambivalent president who has presided over a far more contentious debate among his advisers than previously known. Those advisers reflected Mr. Obama’s own conflicting impulses on how to respond to the forces unleashed by the Arab Spring: whether to side with those battling authoritarian governments or to avoid the risk of becoming enmeshed in another messy war in the Middle East.

This picture of a President who cannot make up his mind on a vital issue is bad enough.  Making up his Administration’s mind is pretty much a President’s entire job.  The truth, however, seems much worse. 

Even as the debate about arming the rebels took on a new urgency, Mr. Obama rarely voiced strong opinions during senior staff meetings. But current and former officials said his body language was telling: he often appeared impatient or disengaged while listening to the debate, sometimes scrolling through messages on his BlackBerry or slouching and chewing gum.

The President wasn’t having a hard time making up his mind.  He was playing Angry Birds. 

However you interpret the fact that the President’s closest aides had to interpret his thinking and level of engagement by his body language, this story leaves no doubt that the President was barely even present at a critical moment.  Meet the man who wasn’t there. 

The Aberdeen American News Sets Us Straight

The Aberdeen American News has lost patience with our lone representative in the U.S. House, Kristi Noem. 

Rep. Kristi Noem, R-S.D., has talked herself into a problem.  She has caught herself between pleas for relief for West River ranchers who lost thousands of cattle and tea party conservatives who want to limit government no matter the cost — even at the expense of relief for ranchers, such as the ones Noem represents…  When Noem could choose — voting for the best interests of South Dakota and the nation, or staying in the good graces of the fringe conservative movement — she voted with the latter.

That is a special kind of reasoning.  If you refuse to vote for all the spending that everyone wants, you are voting against West River ranchers, the nation, mom and apple pie.  If you believe, as Rep. Noem does, that we ought to be concerned about the nation’s $17 trillion dollar debt, that makes you a “fringe conservative”. 

The Obama Administration, much of Congress, and just about all of the media, have been working overtime to convince us that we can’t reduce federal spending by a single penny without triggering the apocalypse.  One way to do that is to talk as if failing to raise the debt limit means that the U.S. Government will automatically default on its debt. 

This is nonsense.  If the spending bumps up against the debt limit, that means that the Treasury could not borrow any additional money.  There is plenty of revenue flowing into federal coffers to cover interest on the national debt and that interest will be paid as the Constitution requires.  What would happen is that we would quickly run out of money for new spending and then Congress and the Administration would have to make some tough choices.  I am not saying that this is a good idea.  A sudden contraction of federal spending would be a serious shock to the national and global economies.  However, Democrats in Congress and luminaries on NPR are constantly telling us that those opposed to raising the debt limit are therefore in favor of defaulting the debt.  That is a gross verbal inexactitude, otherwise known as a big, fat, lie. 

For decades the Federal Government has been making promises it cannot possibly keep and spending money it does not have.  Our fiscal situation is not sustainable over the long run, as anyone who pays attention will be forced to admit.  Yet we are told over and over that only a wild-eyed extremist would be in favor of the smallest reduction in federal spending.  Sooner or later we will find ourselves in the position that we really can’t pay the interest on our debt without borrowing more money.  At that point the United States will have shrunk itself down all the way to Detroit. 

Time to discard some false assumptions about higher ed

My latest in the Pierre Capital Journal is here.  A snippet:

We must remember, though, that those who run higher education are not the faculty, but the administrators. Ambitious administrators don’t make their mark by creating a great environment for learning. They make their mark by erecting new buildings, having successful sports teams and securing large research grants. All of this, it should be noted, represents money spent on things only tangentially related to actually educating anyone.

Schools tend to emphasize what is now called the “co-curricular.” This includes things such as how good the student gym is, how nice the dorms are, how many student clubs are there, and which comedians come to campus. Actual education of students takes a back seat. Another thing that drives administrators is enrollment numbers. Higher enrollment is always good and administrators assume that students make their school choice more on what is entertaining than what is educational.

Religious Persecution

My latest in the Pierre Capital Journal.  A taste:

In Nairobi, Kenya, Muslim gunmen assaulted a shopping mall, killing at least 62 people. Reportedly they asked hostages to profess faith in Islam. Those who agreed were set free. Others were not so lucky.

In Peshawar, Pakistan, Islamic suicide bombers killed 82 persons outside a Christian church. Bombers waded into the congregation as it dispersed after service, exploding themselves within the throng of approximately 500.

In Abuja, Nigeria, recently 160 were killed in a weeklong anti-Christian string of violence by Islamic radicals. The main group involved is called Boko Haram, which apparently believes “western education is a sin” and demands all Christians leave northern Nigeria as it tries to set up a new Islamic state.

Some may be aware that Christians are being targeted in both Egypt and Syria by Islamic radicals. In both cases their tactics seem to be a combination of an attempt to incite an overreaction on behalf of official authorities and attempts to purge all vestiges of Christianity.

Does intervening in Syria meet criteria for a just war? Maybe not (Updated)

Latest in the Pierre Capital Journal:

In the run-up to potential war with Syria, it may be useful to review the basic precepts of the classic teaching known as “Just War Theory.”

While this theory has been amended over the centuries, the basic criteria are clear. First, every war must have a just cause. This is usually defined as some sort of aggression, but there are exceptions. Most modern just war theorists, for instance, would agree that a state can intervene to prevent a genocide or perhaps balance a conflict in which a third party has already intervened.

War must be made by the proper authority. Essentially this means that war is made by sovereign states, not by private parties.

War must also be waged with the right intention. In the words of St. Augustine, war should restore the “tranquility of order” and not be for selfish gain.

Fourth, a just war must have a reasonable chance of success. Also, a war must be a proportional response to evil, meaning that it should not produce an evil greater than the one it fights.

Finally, war must only be a last resort. Naturally, there is always something else other than war that could be done. What we mean here is that at some point that “something else” just delays or denies the inevitable.

Just War Theory should not be looked at as a checklist, but rather as a guide to prudent statesmen and citizens as they consider the justice of an act.

In my opinion, the proposed war in Syria meets most of these tests, but fails others.

Read the whole thing.

Update: In the comments, Larry Kurtz says: "US forces rained white phosphorus on Fallujah killing and maiming children: how just is that, Professor?"

Larry's statement confuses jus ad bellum with jus in bell0, or justice of war and justice in war (see here for further discussion).  These are two different concepts.  The first, which I discussed in the article, considers whether it is just to enter into war.  The second, which Larry's statement alludes to, is whether a war is fought justly.  Conceivably, an unjust war can be fought in a just manner, or a just war fought unjustly (no one denies, for example, that American forces in WWII, a just war, sometimes acted unjustly).  Regarding the direct example, the jus in bell0 concept is called "double effect."  In JWT, it is wrong to target noncombatants.  But, if one has a justified target one may strike it even if noncombatants are killed.  It's just that the primary aim may not be to kill noncombatants.  Thus we say the strike has a "double effect," one just (say, destroying a weapons factory) and the other not (killing the noncombatants who work there).  Still, the weapons factory is a legitimate military target and if the aim is simply to reduce the enemy's military strength and NOT to target noncombatants the strike is just.  It is unjust to target non-combatants specifically.  If the white phosphorous was used against a legitimate target, it may (may!) have been just.  If the aim of the attack was to kill/maim the children, it was unjust.  Relevant information on the use of white phosphorous in Iraq can be found here and here. 

The Unbelievably Small Presidency

One of my favorite political scientists recently said to me that Obama might come out of the Syria debacle “smelling like Christmas”.  I have my doubts.  It is true, I think, that (courtesy of the Russians) the Administration now has a way out of the fine mess it has gotten itself into.  From the LA Times:

WASHINGTON – White House officials say they will “take a hard look” at a Russian offer to push Syria to give up its vast chemical weapons arsenal, a late and unexpected proposal that could provide President Obama a way to avoid a bruising defeat in Congress over use of force…

Kerry said at a news conference in London that Syrian President Bashar Assad could forestall a U.S. attack by giving up his sizable stockpile of chemical weapons immediately. Although the State Department quickly sought to squelch Kerry’s comments as “rhetoric,” not a serious proposal, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov quickly offered to push Assad to agree.

In such a deal, apparently, Assad would turn over his stockpile of chemical weapons to someone, perhaps the Russians.  In return, he would be given a pass on the more than a thousand people he has, apparently, murdered with them.  If Assad really does give up his stockpile, that would be a significant achievement.  If he even pretends to do so (for how can we verify what Assad actually has and where he has it?) the Administration could then claim that it was only its tough stance that brought the settlement about. 

It seems pretty clear that this offer came out of the blue.  Up until now, no one in the Administration seemed to suggest that Assad could do anything to avoid his deserved punishment.  When Secretary of State Kerry mentioned the offer, his staff immediately tried to walk it back.  Kerry also said that the strike the Administration was proposing would be “unbelievably small,” which doesn’t really make their position more compelling. 

Still, it is difficult to think that the Administration would be so foolish as to reject the offer, given the situation that they are in now.  They should promptly take it, avoid the vote in Congress, resolve never to mention Syria again, and put duct tape over Kerry’s mouth. 

While this might get Mr. Obama out of his dilemma, I don’t think it would come near to undoing the damage he has done to himself.  The President has gone to bat for an amorphous policy generated, ad hoc, at the eleventh hour.  In short order he has secured returns of no confidence from the U.N., the G20 Conference, our British allies, and the Pope.  Authorization of a military strike by the U.S. Senate is still not a sure thing and a vote in the House looks hopeless.  If his media blitz over the weekend has not actually been counterproductive, its benefits seem to be all too believably small. 

Meanwhile, there is popular opinion in America.  Polling shows that Americans oppose a strike in Syria by two to one margins.  The President’s approval rates have descended into the Dubya-digit nether regions.  Somewhere between 40 and 45% approve of his job performance, while 48-55% disapprove. 

If the President does work out a deal, he will come out of this in better shape than if he launches an unbelievably small strike without Congressional approval or any coalition partners outside Albania or worse, backs away without doing anything.  I am pretty sure that the aroma of this incident will still stick to the President and that it would smell like Frankincense and Myrrh.  

ps.  The Washington Post is very disturbed by the news of this possible "breakthrough" in diplomacy, as the President is now calling the Kerry/Russian deal.  They note, correctly, that Assad has used such gambits in the past to avoid international interference and always goes back on the deal.  That, of course, is what he will do this time if Mr. Obama backs off. 

There’s only one reason an initiative on chemical weapons might turn out differently: a credible threat of military action by the United States. That makes Congress’s vote on a resolution authorizing force all the more important. If the resolution is approved, the administration will have leverage to push through the Russian proposal. If one or both houses of Congress reject the authorization, the Assad regime can be expected to find a way to reject the deal or dodge compliance indefinitely.

Yes, but it works both ways.  If it looks like Obama is using the Syrian deal as an escape clause, he will be less likely to get Congressional backing.  It does, doesn't it?

Defending Obama on the "Red Line"

President Obama received a lot of grief over the following remark, which was part of a response to a question from Steve Holland of Reuters.

First of all, I didn't set a red line.

Conservatives were quick to pounce of that, pointing out (frequently supported by a video clip) that Mr. Obama certainly did set a red line against the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime.  The critical line was that Mr. Obama was trying to weasel out of responsibility for his own words; however, even his defenders on the left seem mostly to concede that he was contradicting himself. 

Unaccustomed as I am to defending the President, I must point out that he was making a perfectly reasonable point.  Here is the rest of his remark.

The world set a red line. The world set a red line when governments representing 98 percent of the world's population said the use of chemical weapons are abhorrent and passed a treaty forbidding their use even when countries are engaged in war. Congress set a red line when it ratified that treaty. Congress set a red line when it indicated that in a piece of legislation titled the Syria Accountability Act that some of the horrendous thing that are happening on the ground there need to be answered for. And so, when I said, in a press conference, that my calculus about what's happening in Syria would be altered by the use of chemical weapons, which the overwhelming consensus of humanity says is wrong, that wasn't something I just kind of made up. I didn't pluck it out of thin air. There was a reason for it. That's point number one. Point number two, my credibility is not on the line. The international community's credibility is on the line. And America and Congress' credibility is on the line because we give lip service to the notion that these international norms are important.

The President wasn’t denying that he endorsed the red line.  He was saying that it didn’t originate with him; it was already set by the international community and by Congress.  All he did was acknowledge it and announce his intent to back it up.  That was a reasonable point and the President should have gotten credit for trying to hold the world and Congress to account. 

Unfortunately, he miffed it with those opening words that did seem to deny the obvious.  He also made a grievous mistake by denying that his own credibility was on the line.  It is blatantly obvious that his credibility is on the line.  Denying it is an unforced error. 

Mr. Obama is great at reading prepared speeches and terrible at responding off the cuff.  That is why his staff rarely lets him hold a press conference.  He is hardly unintelligent or (as G.W. Bush was) inarticulate.  He just won’t do his homework.  He had every reason to know that that question was coming and time enough to prepare for it.  Yet he was obviously unprepared and it cost him. 

Be skeptical of much of what passes for “reality” entertainment

My latest in the Pierre Capital Journal.  A taste:

I recently came across a web ad that made me do something I rarely do, namely look at a web ad. It was for a Discovery Channel show called “Amish Mafia.” I hit the link to see a preview of the show. As I watched the video I couldn’t help but think, “There is no way this is true.” A brief internet search showed that, sadly, “Amish Mafia” is a largely a charade.

Wise television and documentary viewers should be skeptical about much of what passes as “reality” entertainment. There are at least three reasons why this is the case.

The President's Plight on Syria

A colleague of mine had a bumper sticker on his Prius that read “War Is Not The Answer.”  One day I popped my head in his office door and asked: “Can you think of a three letter word for armed conflict?”  He blurted out the obvious.  “See,” I replied, “sometimes war is the answer.” 

President Obama seems to think that war is the answer if the question is what to do now that the Syrian regime crossed his red line and murdered hundreds of innocent people with chemical weapons.  The trouble is that we have very little idea of what the President is really proposing or how he understands the question. 

The most sensible policy statement that the President could make would go something like this.  Chemical weapons are more terrible than conventional weapons, especially for civilians.  We want to prohibit their use by regimes such as Assad’s and the only way to do that is impose a prohibitive cost on the regime. 

That raises as many questions as it answers.  To begin with, who are “we”?  Not the United Nations.  Russia and China will never go along.  Not the U.S. and its most steadfast ally, Britain.  PM David Cameron asked Parliament to endorse military action and Parliament handed him his head.  Rest assured that the French are still on board.  The Administration has decided, apparently, to ask Congress to authorize a military strike.  They are making a full court press on that front right now.  Unfortunately, the American people are more opposed to such an action than they have been to anything like it in the past.  With an election little more than a year away, how many members of his own party will be there to back him up? 

Another question is this.  What kind of military strike will be sufficient to make Bashar al-Assad really, truly, sorry?  More to the point, what kind of strike will strike fear into the hearts of other cutthroats around the globe who might be sitting on their own chemical stockpiles?  The President has three basic choices.  He could attempt to do what he did in Libya: decapitate the regime.  Or he could destroy Syrian airpower, which is the one thing that is keeping Assad’s regime ahead of the rebels.  Either would mean a rebel victory and, with thousands of al Qaeda fighters in Syria, that means rolling a very scary set of bones.  Finally, he could just lob a few tomahawk missiles at a few targets, announced well in advance.  That would make Obama feel better about himself, but it would also demonstrate that the red line against the use of chemical weapons is like the speed limit in Western Texas: just a suggestion. 

It’s not clear what policy the Administration should pursue in Syria.  It is abundantly clear that the Administration has spent a year without bothering much to formulate a policy.  Secretary of State Clinton said that Assad must go back when it looked like Assad was going without any trouble on our part.  That’s putting a wishbone where your backbone ought to be.  There is no evidence that Mr. Obama and his team had any idea what to do to make those words meaningful or that they tried to figure it out. 

Then Mr. Obama famously said that any use of chemical weapons would cross a red line.  That’s the kind of thing you want to say after you’ve got your allies behind you and you’ve assembled a coalition in both houses of Congress.  Or at the very least, you want to start building your coalitions immediately afterward.  Instead, Mr. Obama waited until the line had actually been crossed to finally start doing his job. 

Obama’s critics frequently compare him to the unfortunate Jimmy Carter.  That is unfair.  To Carter.  President Carter’s foreign policy was based on naïve assumptions about the motives of our enemies and it was so weak that he failed to respond adequately when an American embassy was occupied by a hostile power.  He did at least have policies and he worked very hard to formulate and implement them.  Now, at the eleventh hour, we still have no idea what Mr. Obama’s Syria policy is and as far as one can tell neither does he. 

Perhaps the most telling item in this story comes from The Politico. 

Sunday, administration officials made the case to lawmakers that rejecting Obama’s war resolution would stain his credibility on the international stage.

That is no doubt true.  It is also pathetic.  He wants Congress to make an honest man out of him.  Is it really within the powers of Congress to do this?  Can they restore the President’s credibility when he has frittered it away with a year of dithering and missing in action leadership? 

A Note to Readers

I have been posting four or five times a month.  I do miss the days when Donald Pay and A.I. and Bill Fleming and Larry Kurtz were on my butt nearly every day.  Lately, however, this blog has been subject to a relentless spam attack.  I bowed to the inevitable and have instituted one of those annoying verification barriers.  I hate them and I say that there is a special place in Hell for spammers. 

I do wish the above to know (assuming they ever look at this blog anymore) that I have never intentionally deleted any of their comments. 

On the Anniversary of the March On Washington

There have been three movements in the history of the American Regime.  The first was the founding itself, crowning in the Philadelphia convention and culminating in the ratification of the Constitution.  The second began with the rise of the Republican Party, crowning with the election of Lincoln and the Civil War, and culminated in 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th amendments to the Constitution.  The last was the Civil Rights Movement.  That movement culminated in the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act in 1964 and 65. 

The Civil Rights Movement had its crowning in the March on Washington fifty years ago today.  It gave us the last, as I suspect, of our founding fathers in Martin Luther King, Jr.  He gave us one of the greatest speeches in the canon of American rhetoric.  It is altogether proper that this event should observed in Washington today by our first African American president. 

I doubt that Mr. Obama’s speech will be long remembered, but it is worth noting now.  He got off to a good start. 

To the King family, who have sacrificed and inspired so much, to President Clinton, President Carter, Vice President Biden, Jill, fellow Americans, five decades ago today, Americans came to this honored place to lay claim to a promise made at our founding.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

In 1963, almost 200 years after those words were set to paper, a full century after a great war was fought and emancipation proclaimed, that promise, those truths remained unmet. And so they came by the thousands, from every corner of our country -- men and women, young and old, blacks who longed for freedom and whites who could no longer accept freedom for themselves while witnessing the subjugation of others. Across the land, congregations sent them off with food and with prayer. In the middle of the night, entire blocks of Harlem came out to wish them well.

That gets it right.  The central passage from the Declaration is what the United States has always been about.  Those principles were greatly advanced by Lee’s surrender but another century of apartheid would intervene before their promise could be realized.  As in 1863 so in 1963, that realization was advanced by the relentless march of vast numbers.  

The President unintentionally reveals the problem facing the contemporary civil rights movement in this passage:

To dismiss the magnitude of this progress, to suggest, as some sometimes do, that little has changed -- that dishonors the courage and the sacrifice of those who paid the price to march in those years. (Applause.) Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, Martin Luther King Jr., they did not die in vain. (Applause.) Their victory was great.

But we would dishonor those heroes as well to suggest that the work of this nation is somehow complete. The arc of the moral universe may bend towards justice, but it doesn't bend on its own. To secure the gains this country has made requires constant vigilance, not complacency. Whether it's by challenging those who erect new barriers to the vote or ensuring that the scales of justice work equally for all in the criminal justice system and not simply a pipeline from underfunded schools to overcrowded jails -- (applause) -- it requires vigilance.

Yes.  It is unsound to argue that nothing much has changed or that the 1960’s movement did not fundamentally transform the nation.  Yet, the issues raised in the second paragraph, however you come down on them, just are not a part of that movement.  They are part of the ordinary business of politics in a country where African American voters can play a decisive role in nominating a candidate and getting him elected at the highest level. 

Perhaps the most surprising part of the speech was this:

And then, if we're honest with ourselves, we'll admit that during the course of 50 years, there were times when some of us, claiming to push for change, lost our way. The anguish of assassinations set off self-defeating riots.

Legitimate grievances against police brutality tipped into excuse- making for criminal behavior. Racial politics could cut both ways as the transformative message of unity and brotherhood was drowned out by the language of recrimination. And what had once been a call for equality of opportunity, the chance for all Americans to work hard and get ahead was too often framed as a mere desire for government support, as if we had no agency in our own liberation, as if poverty was an excuse for not raising your child and the bigotry of others was reason to give up on yourself. All of that history is how progress stalled. That's how hope was diverted. It's how our country remained divided.

The President did a very brave thing, there.  He acknowledged the legitimacy and to some extent conceded the point of the honorable opposition.  Almost any conservative could have put the matter in just that way. 

No, we are not a color blind nation, as if anyone ever said we were.  No, racism has not disappeared from America, even if is now a mere shadow of what one sees in such enlightened places as Europe.  Race continues to haunt us in our passions and imaginations.  It has become, however, just another of the issues that heat up pages and political rooms.  The President mentioned jobs in his speech.  Whatever we accomplish on that front, it is unlikely to be memorialized in granite. 

That is what the heroic period of the Civil Rights Movement accomplished: to make our politics less heroic and more ordinary.  It is a good day to recall how magnificent and achievement that was. 

Obama's Failed Middle East Policy

Mr. Obama returned from his recent vacation just in time.  News had just broken of a possible chemical weapons attack in Syria’s capital, almost a year to the day after the President drew his infamous red line (or was it the dreaded periwinkle squiggle?  I forget) on the use of such weapons by the Syrian regime.  Meanwhile the UN Security Council convened an emergency meeting to discuss the news.  Our newly appointed U.N. Ambassador, Samantha Powers, skipped it.  She was vacationing in Ireland.  Never mind.  She tweeted:

Reports devastating: 100s dead in streets, including kids killed by chem weapons. UN must get there fast & if true, perps must face justice.

At any rate, no action was taken, which is surely what would have been the result if she or the President himself had attended. 

Well, back to the grind.  Mr. Obama and Ms. Powers would do well to consult Walter Russell Mead’s postmortem on the Administration’s “grand strategy” in the Middle East.  I am still not entirely sure that Mr. Obama really had a strategy, but Mead makes a plausible case. 

The Obama administration had a grand strategy in the Middle East. It was well intentioned, carefully crafted and consistently pursued. …The U.S. would work with moderate Islamist groups like Turkey's AK Party and Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood to make the Middle East more democratic. This would kill three birds with one stone. First, by aligning itself with these parties, the Obama administration would narrow the gap between the 'moderate middle' of the Muslim world and the U.S. Second, by showing Muslims that peaceful, moderate parties could achieve beneficial results, it would isolate the terrorists and radicals, further marginalizing them in the Islamic world. Finally, these groups with American support could bring democracy to more Middle Eastern countries, leading to improved economic and social conditions, gradually eradicating the ills and grievances that drove some people to fanatical and terroristic groups.

That has the advantage of at least sounding coherent and reasonable.  It has the disadvantage of having failed miserably. 

With the advantages of hindsight, it appears that the White House made five big miscalculations about the Middle East. It misread the political maturity and capability of the Islamist groups it supported; it misread the political situation in Egypt; it misread the impact of its strategy on relations with America's two most important regional allies (Israel and Saudi Arabia); it failed to grasp the new dynamics of terrorist movements in the region; and it underestimated the costs of inaction in Syria.

That strikes me as correct, though all five boil down to the same thing: a failure to recognize who is competent at what.  Any progress in the region depends on persons, parties, institutions, etc., that can deliver at least marginally competent government.  As Mead points out, the Administration hoped to make new alliances with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government in Turkey.  The Brotherhood turned out to be miserably incompetent both at politics and at administration.  Erdogan seems to be sliding toward “tinfoil-hat” weirdness:

Prominent members of the party leadership look increasingly unhinged, blaming Jews, telekinesis and other mysterious forces for the growing troubles it faces.

With the exception of Iran, Islamists have shown very little aptitude for competent, let alone progressive governing.  What the radicals have shown an aptitude for is mischief and mayhem.  Defeated, at least temporarily in Iraq, they have reformed and renewed their strength across the region.  The Administration was not wise to speak of an end to the war on terror. 

Mead’s prescription is to renew our investment in allies that are forces for stability in the region: Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the Egyptian military.  Again, that seems right.  Mr. Obama has offended all three though, Mead tells us, he has been busy mending our relationship with Israel. 

On the issue of Syria, however, he repeats the conventional wisdom that Mr. Obama might have rescued the situation if he had intervened forcefully and early.  By dithering, he let the wounds fester and now Hezbollah is fighting for the regime while militants from around the region are getting training and experience fighting against it.  The violence is spilling over into Lebanon and other places.  Perhaps if the President had acted at the beginning, he could have forged alliances with genuine moderates. 

Here I have to come to Mr. Obama’s defense.  Dither he did, but is it really plausible that competent government would have emerged out of the spontaneous rebellion that ignited the war?  Mead’s own arguments suggest otherwise.  Syria is a mess and I do not know what policy would make sense there. 

It does seem to me that it was stupid to insist that Mr. Assad must go back when it looked like he was going anyway.  Battlefield events are hard to predict.  It was certainly a bad idea to draw a red line in the sand unless you have a very good idea of what you are going to do if the line is crossed.  Mr. Obama’s consistently insipid language sends the message that his words mean nothing.  Now that he is back from vacation, if indeed he is back, he would do well to tend to that matter. 

NPR v. South Dakota

Here is my recent column for South Dakota Magazine. 

In October 2011, National Public Radio aired a scathing critique of South Dakota’s child protection policies.  It alleged that the state is removing Native American children from their homes in disproportionately high numbers, “sometimes under questionable circumstances,” and that “the state is largely failing to place them according to the law.”  That last part means that the state is not making an effort to place such children in Native American homes, as required by the Indian Child Welfare Act. 

Lest we miss the significance of all this, we are reminded that “Years ago, thousands of Native American children were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to boarding schools, where the motto of the schools' founder was "Kill the Indian, Save the Man."”  The implication here is that South Dakota is continuing racist policies of the past, atrocities that aimed to destroy Native American culture and that resulted in terrible abuses. 

The story alleges, moreover, that South Dakota has an additional, venal motive for its mistreatment of Native children.  We are told that the state receives $100 million a year for foster children, implying that the state profits by removing Native children from their homes. 

If the NPR journalists had made their case, it would be a damning indictment of South Dakota.  Did they?  NPR’s Ombudsman, Edward Schumacher-Matos, doesn’t think so.  An ombudsman is hired precisely to keep an institution honest.  This he does by utterly demolishing the story.  He finds that the series violated NPR’s code of ethics and standards in the following ways:

1. No proof for its main allegations of wrongdoing;

2. Unfair tone in communicating these unproven allegations;

3. Factual errors, shaky anecdotes and misleading use of data by quietly switching what was being measured;

4. Incomplete reporting and lack of critical context;

5. No response from the state on many key points.

I will mention only a few of the misleading elements that Schumacher-Matos uncovers.  Consider that $100 million.  It includes all children in foster care not, as inferred, just Native children.  It includes Medicaid and other medical reimbursements and doesn’t count the state spending that matches federal funds.  It is very unlikely that the state makes money by removing anyone from their homes. 

Or consider this statistic presented in the story: nine of ten Native children removed from their homes are being placed in White families.  You aren’t told that four of those nine were placed by tribal courts or that tribal judges put Native children in White homes at a higher rate than state judges. 

According to NPR, Native American children “make up less than 15 percent of the child population, yet they make up more than half of the children in foster care.”  That is the basis for the charge that Native children are removed in disproportionate numbers.  Yet NPR’s own website shows that the disproportion is greater in Minnesota and Washington.  What does that mean? 

It means that all three state governments are simply responding to the cases with which they are confronted.  Some populations of residents have higher rates of social dysfunction than others.  One might suspect that Minnesota and Washington are acting more vigorously, with greater resources, to protect children in peril.  If South Dakota removed fewer Native children from their home, that would “correct” the disproportion.  It would also leave us open to the charge that we don’t care about the most vulnerable children. 

Protecting children is one of the most important tasks of state governments.  Sometimes that means removing them from dysfunctional families and placing them in any safe environment you can find.  Almost everyone agrees that it would be better to place Native children in Native American foster homes, but there is an acute shortage of these homes.  When a child becomes the custody of the state, surely the real question is where to find a safe environment to place the child. 

There is no reason to believe that South Dakota has done a less conscientious job of this than any other state or that racism or greed drove our policies.  That doesn’t mean that there aren’t abuses in our system.  I am sure that there are and we need to know about them.  NPR’s slanderous yellow journalism serves only to make it easier for real abusers to escape scrutiny. 

http://www.npr.org/2011/10/25/141672992/native-foster-care-lost-children-shattered-families

http://www.npr.org/blogs/ombudsman/2013/08/09/186943929/s-dakota-indian-foster-care-1-investigative-storytelling-gone-awry?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=t.co

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/11/slandering-the-red-states-part-i.php

http://www.npr.org/2011/10/25/141475618/disproportionality-rates-of-native-american-children-in-foster-care

 

When You’ve Lost Eugene Robinson…

Eugene Robinson is about as reflexive a liberal and as defensive a defender of Mr. Obama as one can imagine. Yet he even he has come to understand how little the President's words mean.

President Obama's message about the government's massive electronic surveillance programs came through loud and clear: Get over it.

The president used more soothing words in his pre-vacation news conference Friday, but that was the gist. With perhaps the application of a fig leaf here and a sheen of legalistic mumbo jumbo there, the snooping will continue.

Unless, of course, we demand that it end.

The modest reforms Obama proposed do not begin to address the fundamental question of whether we want the National Security Agency to log all of our phone calls and read at least some of our emails, relying on secret judicial orders from a secret court for permission. The president indicated he is willing to discuss how all this is done -- but not whether…

As part of its public relations campaign, the administration released a 22-page white paper outlining its legal rationale for collecting and keeping a detailed log of all our domestic phone calls. The document depends on novel definitions of words whose meaning, I always thought, was fairly clear.

Somewhat less kind was Jeffrey Rosen at the New Republic:

President Obama's repeated comments that "there is no spying on Americans" and that "we don't have a domestic spying program," as he told Jay Leno, were contradicted by two revelations at the end of last week. On Thursday, the New York Times reported that the NSA is "searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans' e-mail and text communications into and out of the country," looking not only for Americans who communicate with foreigners under surveillance but also for those who mention information about them. On Friday, The Guardian reported that the NSA has a previously secret backdoor allowing it to query the names of American citizens in the course of searching phone calls and emails collected about foreign targets.

These revelations led news outlets like the Huffington Post and others to ask: "Did Obama lie on national television?" And it's certainly true that the evasive language the administration uses to describe what it's doing is increasingly corrosive. The administration feels it can't reveal the details about its surveillance program, so it uses funny language and then gets caught "lying," creating an atmosphere of dishonesty and distrust. Obama's Clintonian equivocations have made this the administration of what James Clapper called the "least untruthful answer," and that seems troubling.

Rosen is being rather bashful with his scare quotes, but the title of the piece is "The Lies Aren't What Makes Obama's NSA Stance So Awful."

I'm not sure that the kind of data mining that the Administration is doing is indefensible. I think it might be possible to do it in a way that protects privacy. I am sure that the Administration has shameless lied about what it is doing, in both artful and very clumsy ways.

I remember a lot of exchanges on this blog with A.I. and others about the Administration's mendacity. I was right.

Close to the point is Mr. Obama's habit of declaring that something must be done about something which he then does nothing about. One case in point is the reform of our entitlement programs. He and nearly everyone else recognize that reforms are desperately needed. The managers of Social Security and Medicare constantly cry out in alarm. So what are the President's proposals? Don't hold your breath.

A more recent case is his speech on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. From Meagan McArdle:

U.S. President Barack Obama just gave a speech saying that he wants to reform the housing market, pulling back on the government's role as the primary backer of your mortgage. And about time.

The government currently backs about 90 percent of newly issued mortgages, through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Federal Housing Administration and Department of Veterans Affairs. To all intents and purposes, except for very large loans to very affluent people, there is no private mortgage market in the U.S.

The president said today that he wants to change that -- to make it so that investors, not the government, are bearing more of the default risk. A fine sentiment, but he's a little vague on the details of exactly how government involvement in the mortgage market will be wound down.

That's our man. He's got a great idea there. Now: how does he propose to actually do what he says needs to be done? He doesn't. He ain't gonna. He never does. His words are cotton candy, sweet on the tongue but utterly insubstantial.

SD Legislature is right to favor reinstatement of Glass-Steagall Act

Here's my latest in the Pierre Capital Journal.  A snippet:

If we don’t like bailing out banks, then we can’t let banks get so large. Presently, five banks hold “assets equal to 56 percent of the country’s economy” according to David Rohde. One way to reduce the risk to the public is to separate commercial and investment banking.

Some, including Sen. Johnson, believe that the Dodd-Frank banking reform bill passed in 2009 is enough regulation. This complicated morass of regulatory confusion accomplishes precisely what it was intended to do. Sponsored by two members of Congress, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, deeply involved in banking corruption, Dodd-Frank favors big banks at the expense of smaller banks who find compliance with byzantine rules difficult and expensive. It also keeps in place “too big to fail.” There is an implicit guarantee that if large banks start to go under, the taxpayer will bail them out.

Those interested in both economic justice and sound policy should stand with the South Dakota Legislature and favor a reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act.

South Dakota Slandered by NPR

Here's a bit of real South Dakota Politics! From John Hinderaker at Powerline:

In October 2011, NPR aired a three-part series of programs on its investigation of foster care for Native American children in South Dakota. The series, reported by Laura Sullivan, made the sensational claim that South Dakota welfare agencies take (the word "kidnap" was used more than once) Indian children from their homes, and place them in foster care with white families so that they can collect money from the federal government.

Hinderaker produced a series of posts that demolished the NPR story. You can find links to his posts at the above site.

NPR's ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos has released his own review of the story and it confirms what Hinderaker has been saying. Schumacher-Matos tears the NPR story into shreds.

In October 2011, NPR aired a three-part investigative series by and alleging abuses in the foster care system for Native American children in South Dakota. With a mix of statements by the reporter and much innuendo, the series unmistakably alleges that the state's Department of Social Services was systematically removing Indian children from their families in order to collect federal reimbursements. The series further alleges that cultural bias — it stops just short of saying racism — was behind the overwhelming placement of these children in white homes, in possible violation of federal law…

My finding is that the series was deeply flawed and should not have been aired as it was.

The series committed five sins that violate NPR's Code of standards and ethics. They were:

1. No proof for its main allegations of wrongdoing;

2. Unfair tone in communicating these unproven allegations;

3. Factual errors, shaky anecdotes and misleading use of data by quietly switching what was being measured;

4. Incomplete reporting and lack of critical context;

5. No response from the state on many key points.

No doubt the investigative team was driven by the history of injustices suffered by Native Americans. There is much to be outraged about. But good intentions are not enough. Specifically, there is no whistleblower, no document — no smoking gun even — to support the unmistakable allegation that for nearly the last 15 years, state social workers have been so evil as to take Indian children from their families as a way to reap federal funds for the state government. The charge is so shocking and such a potential insult to many dedicated social workers that the burden of proof should have been especially high.

There is more that is wrong, too. The reported federal reimbursement numbers are badly inflated. That is a factual flaw. Perhaps more upsetting to many of us is a moral one: concern for the centrally relevant matter of child neglect is simply dismissed. That many of the foster decisions, meanwhile, are in fact made by the tribes' own independent judges goes unreported altogether. The crucial context of social ills and a crisis of Indian family breakdowns on the state's reservations are also all but missing.

Apparently NPR is "standing by its story" even though there is not enough left of it to bury in a coke spoon. I close with Hinderaker's conclusions.

I don't believe I have ever seen a representative of a media outlet take apart his own outlet's story with the care and thoroughness displayed by Mr. Schumacher-Matos. The one thing he doesn't do is address the motivations of those who reported and produced the false and misleading series, but it is easy to fill in that blank. The reporter and editors spoke from the liberal perspective that is taken for granted by pretty much everyone at NPR. They had a narrative that they wanted to push for political reasons.

Hoodwinked About Fort Hood

When a lone gunman shot U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords and eleven others in a Safeway parking lot in Tucson, Arizona, killing six people, the New York Times was quick to jump to conclusions. The shooter, the editors explained, "is very much a part of a widespread squall of fear, anger and intolerance that has produced violent threats against scores of politicians and infected the political mainstream with violent imagery." In fact, there was never any evidence that Jared Lee Loughner was part of anything outside his own paranoid delusions. The Times' mixed metaphor (squalls blow, pathogens infect) suggested a pathetic desire to connect the Tucson rampage to the Tea Party or maybe Sarah Palin.

The Times had been more circumspect a year earlier, after the Fort Hood shooting. On November 5, 2009, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan murdered 13 people and wounded 32 others. The Times warned against jumping to conclusions. "Until investigations are complete," the Newspaper of Record cautioned, "no one can begin to imagine what could possibly have motivated this latest appalling rampage. There may never be an explanation."

In fact any idiot could tell exactly what Hasan's motives were. He shouted "Allahu akbar!" he pulled the trigger. The Senate Committee on Homeland Security released a report on their investigation of the incident. What is most appalling about the Committee's report is that the Army and the FBI had plenty of reason to know well in advance what Hasan was and what he might do.

Major Hasan, an army psychiatrist, was promoted in spite of the fact that his performance was poor. He was promoted even though his superiors and pretty much all the soldiers who knew him recognized that he was adopting a radical, militarized version of Islam. A couple of his evaluators called him a "ticking time bomb". They were ignored. Maj. Hasan wrote a paper detailing his radical views and his sympathy for suicide bombers and he presented it to his fellow soldiers. His official evaluations explain that he had an interest in terrorism research.

The FBI knew that Hasan was in contact with known terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki. Awlaki's specialty is encouraging individuals to commit terrorist acts from afar, by means of online communications. He may have trained the Christmas Day Bomber. His writings inspired the Times Square Bomber, among many others. President Obama authorized the targeted killing of Awlaki by drone in 2011. Two Joint Terrorism Task Force units in FBI field offices in San Diego and Washington D. C. monitored Hasan's contact with Awlaki, but they did a poor job of pooling and sharing their information with one another. No serious investigation was carried out and by the middle of 2009, a few months before the attack, the FBI had lost all interest.

Hasan's court martial finally began last week, almost four years after his crime. "The evidence will clearly show that I am the shooter," he declared at the outset. It is said that someone who represents himself in court has a fool for a client. Hasan is no fool. He does not seem the least bit confused about what he did nor does he show any sign of wishing to deny it.

The Pentagon does seem confused. It refused to classify the shooting as an act of terror, preferring instead to call it "workplace violence." This has some unfortunate consequences for Hasan's victims. If this was not an act of terror then they are ineligible for Purple Hearts and can be denied certain benefits. The Pentagon sheepishly explained that classifying the crime as terrorism would make it harder to convict Hasan, something that is very hard to believe. What the military is doing is what it has long been doing with this self-described foot soldier in the mujahedeen: trying to ignore what is starkly obvious.

There is a pattern here. The Army and the FBI refused to see a terrorist hiding in plain sight, except for the hiding part. The New York Times remained in denial even after the self-professed Solider of Allah murdered a dozen soldiers of the United States. His military prosecutors would refuse to call him a terrorist if he had the word tattooed on his chest.

This is multicultural sensitivity run amok. More to the point, it is an example of the appalling timidity our elites in the press and the Administration are seized with when dealing with militant Islam. No, most Muslims are not terrorists and no, we aren't at war with Islam. We are in fact at war with various camps of mujahedeen scattered about the world. Those forces represent an existential threat to everything that our liberal democracy is about. When we try to be sensitive about this, it only sends the message that we are weak and that their murderous violence pays dividends.

We don't have religious tests for citizenship, or service on juries, or service in our armed forces. That is a very good thing. If you are prepared to obey the law and to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, we don't care in which direction you turn when you pray or if you pray at all. It is a good idea to encourage American Muslims to join the military and to give them the respect that all Americans are entitled to. However, it is far more important to recognize a ticking bomb before it goes off. Getting that backwards cost us dearly at Fort Hood.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/06/justice/hasan-court-martial

The Man Who Isn’t There

I occasionally listen to the New Yorker Political Scene podcast to find out what liberals say when they think they are talking only to one another. In a recent podcast on Obama's speeches, including the one he gave shortly after the Zimmerman verdict, one of the guests said something that was unintentionally revealing. He described interviewing the President concerning racial issues. Mr. Obama said [I am quoting David Remnick here] that "the most important thing I can do on race, I've already done. I'm the first elected African American President."

That reveals a lot about how Obama understands his job. It is to be something more than to do anything. Mr. Obama thinks that from his presence in the Oval Office or at the many podiums policy and change will radiate out without his having to bother much with the details. So when he decides to "pivot" to some new topic in his speeches, that alone is presidential action.

For a case in point, Mickey Kaus considers the President's recent speech on the economy.

"Washington's taken its eye off the ball. And I'm here to say this needs to stop. … Our focus has to be on the basic economic issues that the matter most to you — the people we represent. (Applause.) That's what we have to spend our time on and our energy on and our focus on.

… [R]educing poverty, reducing inequality, growing opportunity. That's what we need. (Cheers, applause.) That's what we need. That's what we need right now. (Cheers, applause.)

That's what we need to be focused on." [E.A.]

Okay, Obama is here to say that "Washington" needs to keep its eye on the ball. But as Kaus points out, it's Obama himself who has been focusing on issues that have nothing to do with the economy.

Since his reelection, the President's policy agenda has included the following:

1. Gun Control
2. Immigration
3. Climate Change

It is reasonable to think that all three are important and that they may have long term economic consequences. None of them, however, is likely to have any effect on the economic problems we face right now. Climate change may have some long term effects on poverty, inequality, and opportunity, but wind power and the war against coal aren't going to return any dividends in the near term. In poll after poll, these issues rank at the bottom of those that "matter most" to most Americans.

Now that the President has decided to pivot to the economy, what proposals does he offer? Kaus teases them out of the speech, and the result is a list of trivialities.

If the President understood his job as setting the agenda for policies to be enacted by Congress, he might want to step back and ask why the present economic recovery has been so terribly anemic with regard to job creation. He might want to ask why labor force participation has decline precipitously, or why so many of the jobs recently created are part time. He might want to direct his advisors to offer some remedies. That's a tall order and it's not clear that anyone knows what to do. Still, we might expect our chief executive to at least make an effort. That's not our man.

Summer Travel

The Pierre Capital Journal has posted my comedy stylings on traveling with kids. 

Pacific Rim (2013)

Holy Buckets, but this one was a lot better than I expected. Given that movie making these days seems to have been reduced to choreographing action sequences (see Star Trek) and allowing for the fact that it belongs to that general category of movies in which giant monsters battle giant robots, it's hard not to award Pacific Rim five out of five stars. It does a superb job of almost everything that can be expected of such a film.

Story

The earth is invaded by giant reptiles (Kaiju), which enter our world through a dimensional rift on the ocean floor. Mankind responds by pulling together and building giant, humanoid robots (Jaegers). Each Jaeger is controlled by two pilots ( or in one case, a set of triplets) who are mentally linked with the machine and with each other. After seven years of war, the tide turns against mankind as the Kaiju increase in power and numbers faster than human industry can respond. A former Jaeger pilot is brought out of retirement to command one of the few remaining machines in a last ditch effort to close dimensional portal.

Acting/Casting

Charlie Hunnam (Jax Teller on Sons of Anarchy) has the lead role as our returning pilot. Emotionally wounded but not weakened by the death of his brother/partner early in the war, Raleigh Becket is now paired with Mako Mori (played by Rinko Kikuchi). Mori carries a heavier set of emotional baggage, having lost her family to a Kaiju attack when she was a child.

The pairing of pilots is a clever device for keeping relationships neatly sorted. In addition we get a father/son pair, a Slavic husband and wife team, and the Chinese triplets, in diminishing degrees of exposure. We also get a pair of deliciously quirky tech nerds (actors Charlie Day and Burn Gorman).

Finally, Idris Elba gives us Stacker Pentecost, the fiery commander. If you haven't heard him declare "Today, we are cancelling the apocalypse" you haven't been listening.

All the actors are very well cast, physically and temperamentally.

Plot/Dialogue/Mood

The storyline is boilerplate fantasy/sci-fi. Hopelessly outgunned, our heroes must overcome inner demons and mutual mistrust in order to pull off a more or less miraculous stratagem. Think here of Independence Day, The Lord of the Rings, and The Avengers. The dialogue is a bit better than you would expect, if not the least bit inventive.

The pacing and mood, however, are very good. I found that the sense of desperation was very convincing and built steadily throughout the film. This owed a lot to the role played by the two tech nerds, who argue incessantly about what is going on and what will happen next. Of course, they both turn out to be right.

The real test of this kind of movie is whether it can rekindle some of the same excitement I felt when I was six years old and saw Godzilla for the first time. It did that.

Visual Effects/Sound

The special effects were flawless and spectacular. I doubt whether anything as large as a Jaeger or a Kaiju has ever been thrown into the air on planet earth, let alone the one punch the other out. The laws of Hollywood physics were scrupulously observed, so the action felt plausible without being fitted out for any thinking. Along with the sound and the texture of water and fire, everything seemed to be suitably heavy. I am happy to report that there was not a hint of offensive, Peter Jackson goofiness in the action.

The interiors of the Jaeger fortress had an iron retro look, a bit like the Nautilus in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954). Pretty much everything else, including the inside and outside of the machines, the streets of Hong Kong, and the monsters was glowing with red and blue pastel fire. It was visually delightful, due in part to the fact that the power never went out even when flying giants were scraping the architecture off of whole city blocks.

An Odd Note (small spoiler alert)

There were a lot of rather blunt references to Independence Day (1996). We learn a lot about the enemy when one of the scientists mentally interfaces with an alien brain. For instance, the creatures responsible for sending the Kaiju here are in the habit of plundering whole worlds. Those same aliens look rather a lot like the critters that Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum waved at from their hijacked spacecraft. I will stop there, but there is a lot more. This borrowing is so blatant that is must mean something. I have no clue, unless it was just lazy theft.

Summary

There is almost nothing new or surprising here, so I can't quite give it five stars. It is certainly four star popcorn fun. Box office returns seem a bit anemic, which is probably due to the fact that there is so much apocalyptic banging going on in summer theaters that audiences are just worn out with it. It is also possible that the idea of giant robots sounds too Might Morphin' Power Rangers. I note that the Jaeger pilots are called rangers. That is too bad, because this is the sort of thing you will really like if you like that sort of thing. I do.

 

Zimmerman, Self Defense, & Stand Your Ground

What follows is my column for South Dakota Magazine. I think that Dr. Schaff and I have no significant disagreements.

Carrying a gun, like driving a car, involves a very heavy moral and legal responsibility. Carelessness and error can have grave consequences for which the person is liable. This responsibility is heavier still when a private individual draws a weapon to defend himself or someone else. If someone is armed and observes a school shooting about to happen, what should he do? Most of us would say he should stop it if he can, even if it means firing the gun. If, however, he has misinterpreted the situation or injures a bystander, he must know that he will bear the responsibility for that.

When George Zimmerman set out on foot, armed, to follow Trayvon Martin, a young man who was not engaged in any criminal activity, it resulted in a violent confrontation and the death of Martin. It seems to me that Zimmerman should have been held criminally responsible for his behavior. Firing "a warning shot" or even pointing a weapon at someone (say, a police officer) can land you in the slammer, while falling well short of murder.

That said, there is a very good reason why Florida police did not initially charge Zimmerman with murder or manslaughter. They had no case. Once the story became racially charged, political pressures lead to a special prosecutor and a charge of second degree murder. The affidavit on which the charge was brought excluded exculpatory evidence in Zimmerman's favor, something that is ethically and legally suspect. That the special prosecutor was inclined to such mischief supports the original decision not to bring charges.

Zimmerman claimed that he shot Martin in self defense. It doesn't matter that Zimmerman was the initial aggressor. If Martin responded to Zimmerman's non-deadly aggression with deadly force, Zimmerman was entitled to defend himself with the same. According to eyewitness accounts, Martin was on top of Zimmerman, beating him "mixed martial arts style," when Zimmerman fired his weapon. Zimmerman sustained injuries to the back of his head.

It was the responsibility of the prosecution to refute the claim of self-defense. To do that, they would have had to convince the jury, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Zimmerman did not believe that he was in danger of serious injury or death when he used deadly force to defend himself.

That is the question that the jury was instructed to answer. It was not whether Zimmerman was a racist or whether he profiled Martin. It was not whether Zimmerman might have shot Martin with some kind of criminal intent. To convict Zimmerman, they would have had to conclude beyond reasonable doubt that he was not acting in self-defense. Presented with the evidence mentioned above, a responsible jury could hardly have reached such a conclusion and this one did not.

If you think that Trayvon Martin was an innocent victim, you will certainly be disappointed by the verdict. Some voices in the media are now declaring that it is now "open season on black boys." There will probably be calls for reforming our criminal statutes to make sure that the next George Zimmerman cannot escape. While such reactions are understandable, it might be a good idea to take a breath and ask what that will mean. Who will it benefit and who will it injure if we make it easier to convict young men, African American or otherwise, of murder? Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.

What follows is in addition to the column.

My old friend Ken Laster and I have been fighting on Facebook about this. One issue is whether Florida's "stand your ground law" was involved in this case. I think not. As I understand that law, it modifies traditional self-defense rules. What happens if someone breaks into my home and threatens my life? Under traditional rules, I can use deadly force only if I have no safe avenue of retreat (for example, running screaming out the back door). Under the SYG rules, I can use deadly force in self-defense even if I had a safe avenue of retreat.

If the general account of the shooting is correct, it happened when GZ was on his back and TM was on top of him. SYG was not relevant in that case and would not have influenced the local authorities in their initial decision not to pursue charges, nor would it have influenced the jury. The defense in the case did not appeal to the SYG law for the simple reason that traditional self-defense rules were enough.

I believe it is true that the jury was instructed to consider the SYG law. This may be because SYG lowers the threshold for use of deadly force to a "reasonable belief" that such force is necessary to prevent death or great bodily harm. Again, that is irrelevant here because an appeal to SYG would have been necessary only if the case had not turned on simple self-defense. Neither the defense nor the prosecution thought that SYG was relevant to the case and that strikes me as dispositive.

A second question is whether the Justice Department will seek civil rights charges against GZ. I think that unlikely because the prosecution would have to prove that GZ fired his weapon because of racial animus. I don't see how they could possibly accomplish that. Apparently the FBI has sought and failed to find any evidence that GZ exhibited racial bias. The prosecution would have to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that when he pulled the trigger he was motivated by racial animus and not by a fear for his life. Not likely.

ps.  The best single thing I have read on this issue is William Saletan's piece at Slate. 

A Note on Martin/Zimmerman Affair, With A Comment on Murder Stats

I largely agree with Prof. Blanchard, but feel moved to compose a "concurring opinion." George Zimmerman was almost certainly not guilty of the crimes with which he was charged, but that is not the same as saying he was innocent.  Zimmerman, some of his cheerleaders should note, was a fool to get out of his car with a loaded pistol and search for Trayvon Martin.  He greatly increased the chances that something bad was going to happen, which is why he should have been charged with negligent homicide and remains in jeopardy of a civil wrongful death suit. 

At the same time, Trayvon Martin was a fool as well.  Despite the efforts of some to paint Martin as St. Trayvon, he was clearly a young man with a record of  bad judgement and offensive opinions.  Throwing the media narrative on its head, its seems far more likely that Trayvon Martin held both racist and homophobic opinions than George Zimmerman, who seems to be a basically decent, if foolish, man.  And, not to put too fine a point on it, when you are smashing a man's head into the sidewalk, you are asking for trouble.  There are no "good guys" in this story.  It seems to me that it was two people using incredibly bad judgement and then paying a deadly price for it.

This case should ( and probably won't) create room for a healthy discussion of race and crime in America.  Look at the FBI Stats.  While the statistics have a lot of missing data, the pattern is clear: white people kill white people and black people kill black people.  That is not surprising.  People tend to murder people they know.  The incident if Florida is an outlier, namely a mixed race killing involving strangers.  It should not be used to draw generalizations. 

The murder problem in the US is young black men killing other young black men.  Look at Baton Rouge as one example. 

Last year, 83 people died by homicide in Baton Rouge. Of that number, 87 percent were black, and 87 percent were male. Two-thirds had been in trouble with the law before, and one-third had been in trouble with the law for drugs. The median age of victims: 26.

Of the perpetrators, the median age was 22. Get this: 96 percent of them were black, and 90 percent were male. Almost two-thirds had previous arrests. One out of four had a drug record.

President Obama should spend less time talking about how Trayvon Martin could have been his son and more time thinking of the thousands of young black men killed by other young black men.  I suspect neither he nor anyone else will, though, because there is no political hay to be made talking about black on black crime and, sorry to say, there is so little we can do as a matter of policy to change that sad situation. 

Is there a literary renaissance under way in South Dakota?

My latest in the Pierre Capital Journal. A snippet:

John Miller is a retired professor of History at South Dakota State University. Judging from his work ethic, Miller hasn’t figured out yet that he’s retired. A passion for Midwestern history in general, and South Dakota history in specific, keeps him researching and writing. His latest efforts deserve our attention. Miller asks whether a literary renaissance is occurring in South Dakota.

Miller has been kind enough to send me a preliminary draft of his work and given me permission to write about his tentative conclusions in these pages.

Zimmerman v. Sharpton

I still think that George Zimmerman should have been held criminally responsible for following Trayvon Martin with a loaded gun, if the law allows such a thing. That said, I could never see a case against him for murder or manslaughter. Was Zimmerman justified in shooting Martin when the latter was on top of him and his head was hitting the pavement? I don't know. Could a reasonable jury have concluded beyond a reasonable doubt that Zimmerman's act amounted to a crime?

No, and this jury didn't. They confirmed the original decision of police and prosecutors not to pursue charges against Zimmerman. There was never any real case. This was a show trial. It was generated by irresponsible behavior on the part of the media (Zimmerman was a "white Hispanic"?) and by political blowhards like Al Sharpton. That is precisely the sort of thing that the jury system is supposed to resist. In this case, it did.

Fortnight For Freedom

My latest in the Pierre Capital Journal.  A taste:

John Fisher was a Catholic bishop in England in the 16th century. For refusing to recognize the divorce of Henry VIII from Catherine of Aragon and refusing to take an oath declaring Henry the head of the Church in England, Fisher was condemned to death. He was beheaded on June 22, 1535.

Two weeks later, on July 6, Thomas More was beheaded for much the same reason, refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy. More’s head replaced Fisher’s on a stake at Tower Bridge in London. Both Fisher and More were later declared martyrs and saints by the Catholic Church and share a feast day, June 22.

Inspired by the example of Fisher and More, the American Catholic bishops have declared June 21 to July 4 this year a “Fortnight for Freedom.” This is intended to call attention to abuses of religious liberty by the American government.

Obama Delays Employer Mandate at Midnight with a Fog and No Moon

After several years of handing out waivers to exempt employers from the requirements of ObamaCare, canceling another part of the bill, and delaying the exchanges that would offer a range of plans to small businesses by at least a year, we now learn that the employer mandate will also be delayed until, well, after the next election. The Administration obviously wanted us to know about this because they announced it in a Treasury Department blog, on the Eve of the Fourth of July.

The mandate would have required any firm with more than 50 full time employees to offer insurance that meets the standards of the new health czars or pay a $2,000 penalty per employee. It was supposed to take effect in January of next year.

Is this a big deal or not? Letting it leak out like they did suggests that the Administration can't quite decide what they think about it. Kevin Drum, voice of the Administration at Mother Jones, thinks it's no big deal because the employer mandate was no big deal. Then he offers us two rather different explanations of why that mandate was in the bill.

The employer mandate requires big employers to offer insurance to their employees. Most big employers already offer insurance, so the primary idea behind this wasn't to force laggards to step up to the plate. The idea was to maintain the status quo and make sure that employers currently offering insurance didn't drop it once Obamacare started up.

Okay. That makes it sound important, but maybe the delay won't matter much. Then he adds the following:

If the employer mandate hadn't been in the bill, CBO would have scored its cost higher, which would have meant higher offsetting taxes. That would have made it a tougher sell.

So the employer mandate was in the bill largely (if not entirely) because it allowed the President to say that the bill costs X instead of X+Y. That makes the mandate look like a bit of window dressing. This is apparently what you have to concede if you want to argue that the delay doesn't matter.

Yuval Levin at The National Review observes that ObamaCare is a big machine with a lot of moving parts that depend on one another. Consider the "exchanges" that are supposed to begin operating in three months, in order to offer a range of options for insurance, along with subsidies to anyone who cannot otherwise afford it.

Under the law, eligibility for exchange subsidies depends on an individual not receiving an affordable offer of qualified insurance from an employer. If employers will now not be required to report on their insurance offerings in 2014, I don't see how the government will be able to determine eligibility for subsidies, and therefore how the exchanges will be able to function.

Making subsidies available without proof of eligibility would be very expensive and destabilizing to the insurance system, and would also require the retraction of such subsidies if the employer mandate ever does return. Coming up with other ways to prove eligibility would be very difficult at this late stage (as exchanges are supposed to start operating in three months), and would also be totally lawless—though I recognize that is a rather quaint and old fashioned concern in the age of Obama.

If Levin is correct, this delay is at least a temporary train wreck in the making for the implementation of the law. Moreover, it dispirits the supporters of ObamaCare while giving its opponents new evidence that it is a disaster. Worse still, it reinforces the obvious truth that any part of this law is now negotiable.

Tthe central proposition of defenders of the law has been that continued conservative opposition to it is a denial of the basic reality that the law is on the books and will be implemented. But apparently, the administration does not think of the law as a done deal. They believe they can pick and choose elements to implement or to ignore, and think the nature of the health-care system in the coming years is still an open question.

Yes. Everyone out there whose interests are adversely affected by any provision knows full well that the Administration can gratify them simply by choosing to do so. The Administration can hardly say that the law is the law, because it can obviously rewrite the law on a whim.

So why, if the employer mandate is no big deal, as Drum drums, did the Administration decide to delay it? The only answer is that they think that conservative critics of the employer mandate might be dead spot on. What do I do if I am an employer and I do not want to come under the mandate? I have three obvious options. One is to dump my insurance coverage for my employees and pay the fine. Would this make economic sense? No one knows for sure, yet. Another is to reduce my employee's hours to 30 or less a week, so they aren't full time. A third is to make sure that I don't have more than fifty full time workers. How many employers would have chosen one or more of these options if the mandate had come into effect in January of an election year, as scheduled? The Administration doesn't want to find out.

Do We Want to Kill More Birds & Bats?

I confess that I have a somewhat pernicious sense of humor, something I apparently share with Mother Nature. The white throated needle tail has been spotted in Britain only eight times since 1846. I know nothing about this creature except that it is a bird with a white throat and rather sharp tail feathers.

Recently forty stalwart limey bird watchers gather in the Hebrides, a group of islands just off the coast of Scotland, to catch a glimpse of this rare avian survivor. They got one, but unfortunately the guest of honor didn't survive. After two hours of ecstatic bird watching, the bird flew into a wind turbine and was flattened like a fly with a fly swatter.

There may be many morals to this story, but one is surely this: well-meaning plans often have unforeseen consequences. Wind turbines may be part of a smart energy package, though I have my doubts. What is beyond doubt is that they kill a lot of birds and bats. A study published in the Wildlife Society Bulletin estimates bird fatalities from wind turbines at 573,000 per year. That includes 88,000 raptors, which is worth mentioning only because raptors are really cool. I know I'd be a poorer man if I never saw an eagle fly. I am not sure what seeing an eagle fly into a wind blade would do to my balance sheet.

The carnage is considerably worse for bats. Wind turbines apparently knock about 888,000 of these winged mammals out of the air every year. I really like bats. They are basically mice that scoop the air with big webbed fingers. Some of them use sonar to hunt for creatures I am less fond of, like mosquitoes. Some years ago I set up camp in the Ozarks just as the sun was setting. We were suddenly swarmed by mosquitoes. Then the bats came out and in about a half hour they had scoured Sylamore canyon clean of the pests.

I don't know how many bats we can afford to sacrifice annually to these gleaming white pinwheels, especially since bat populations are suffering a dramatic population decline due to a pernicious fungus. Nearly a million seems like a significant cost.

It is not a cost the wind industry needs to worry about. According to the Associated Press, the Obama Administration has never fined or prosecuted a wind farm for killing eagles or other protected species. Instead, they had shielded the industry from any liability. This is not how they treat oil companies or power companies when birds drown in waste pits or fry on power lines. When a protected hits the fan it is, in principle, a federal crime. The Administration has resolutely kept a blind eye.

You can decide for yourself whether wind power, which generates 3.5% of our electricity nationally, is worth the loss of fur and feathers. If you pretend to care about all about our airborne cousins, you might be concerned that President Obama wants to double "renewable" energy sources by 2020. If wind power expands to contribute 7% of our power, what will that mean for birds and bats?

It is possible that technological innovations will produce less lethal fans. No one seems knows how to do that. It's also possible that, with more efficient turbines we can double the energy yield without quite doubling the number of blades. Still, a doubling of the energy yield will almost certainly mean more blades and that means that the dreadful numbers mentioned above will go up. A policy dedicated to expanding renewables will necessarily have to go on ignoring that.

President Obama has a great faith in the power of central planning. As Ron Bailey points out in Reason Magazine, his recent energy policy initiative amounts to a Soviet style Five Year Plan, only with less than four years to go. We know how central planning works and we can see it in the Administration's handling of the bird problem. When central planners decide to do one good thing, they usually commit to ignoring everything else.

The birds and the bats are not the only ones who will suffer from energy policies driven by pretty ideas. In his speech, the President praised Germany for "going all out in the race for clean energy". One of the results of that all out rush is that German households pay about three times as much for a month of power as their American counterparts. If you tell me that I have to chop falcons and bats into McNuggets in order to keep my house well lit at night and warm in the winter, I might reluctantly buy in. If you tell me I am going to kill those creatures so I can pay three times as much for electricity, I am opting out.

Direct Democracy Takes A Hit in Hollingsworth

The other Supreme Court decision on same sex marriage-Hollingsworth v. Perry-is certainly a blow to those who want to preserve traditional marriage, at least in California. It would seem to doom CA Proposition 8, an initiative passed by the voters of that state that defined marriage in traditional, i.e. man and woman terms. Less noticed is what it means for the initiative process.

The Orange County Register sees this as a blow to direct democracy, which it surely is.

The Supreme Court's ruling Wednesday in Hollingsworth v. Perry was celebrated in much of California. By a 5-4 majority, the justices held that defenders of Proposition 8, the voter-approved 2008 ballot measure defining marriage as a union strictly between a man and a woman, lacked standing to challenge a federal judge's ruling that the law was unconstitutional.

Standing indicates the right to bring a question before the court. I may think that the President's actions in Libya violated the War Powers Act (which I do). I cannot sue the President and thus bring this question before the Court because I lack standing. I cannot show that I have been personally injured by the supposed violation. The Court's decision in Hollingsworth turned entirely on the question of standing.

The justices declared that, if state officials refuse to defend a ballot measure duly enacted by their state's voters, not even the private citizens who actually sponsored the measure may defend it in court.

The voters of California passed Proposition 8. Opponents of Prop 8 sued and a federal court struck it down. Defenders of Prop 8 appealed and the High Court heard the case. It ruled that only the state government had standing to defend the proposition in court.

This looks to me like a big defeat for direct democracy. The initiative process is designed precisely to allow voters to go over the heads of their state legislatures and make laws that those legislatures were unwilling to make. Now we see how easy it is for the Governor to nullify a proposition passed by the voters. All that has to happen is for someone to sue before a sympathetic court. Then the Governor need merely decline to defend the proposition. Apparently no one among the millions who may have voted for or pushed for the proposition has standing to defend it in court.

I am not particularly disturbed by this because I have long been a critic of the initiative and referendum process. If voters are not satisfied by the action or inaction of their state legislatures, the solution is to vote the rascals out. The Court's rule of standing in Hollingsworth clearly weakens the initiative process by making it relatively easy for the state government to nullify any proposition. I am okay with that.

Most of my friends on the left are very fond of direct democracy. They should be very disturbed by the Court's action in this case. They won't be. Winning on the issue is all that matters.