(CNSNews.com) – President Barack Obama, as an Illinois state senator in 2002, said that using military force to topple a murderous dictator amounted to a “dumb war” and should be opposed.
The “dumb war” Obama was criticizing was the planned invasion of Iraq and the murderous dictator was its leader, Saddam Hussein. Obama, speaking at an anti-war rally in Chicago on Oct. 2, 2002 said that while Saddam was a brutal tyrant, that was not enough to justify using military force to remove him from power.
“Now, let me be clear – I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein,” said Obama in his speech. “He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied U.N. resolutions, thwarted U.N. inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He's a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.”
"... After September 11th, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this administration's pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such tragedy from happening again," said Obama. "I don't oppose all wars. ... What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne."
Obama argued that deposing Saddam militarily was not necessary, because Iraq posed no “direct threat” to the United States. Obama also cited Iraq’s weakened economy and the fact that it was still possible to contain Saddam’s aggression, repudiating the Bush administration’s rationale that Saddam posed too great a threat to American interests and his own people to be left in power.
“But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military is a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history,” said Sen. Obama.
However, as president of the United States, Obama has discounted those same arguments he once made against using military force against brutal dictators.
In his March 28, 2011 speech justifying his decision to attack the government of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, Obama cited Gadhafi’s record of brutality, saying that allowing Gadhafi to continue his brutality was not an option.
“Qaddafi declared he would show ‘no mercy’ to his own people,” said President Obama. “He compared them to rats, and threatened to go door to door to inflict punishment. In the past, we have seen him hang civilians in the streets, and kill over a thousand people in a single day.
“Now we saw regime forces on the outskirts of the city,” Obama said. “We knew that if we waited, if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”
Gadhafi, apparently unlike Saddam, needed to be stopped because he would kill his own people to maintain his own power, an act that this time posed a threat to America’s “interests and values,” Obama said.
“But when our interests and values are at stake, we have a responsibility to act,” said Obama. “That’s what happened in Libya over the course of these last six weeks.”
Obama, in his 2002 speech, said that instead of deposing Saddam through force, America should “fight” for democratic reforms in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, stronger international nuclear safeguards, and energy independence.
“Those are the battles that we need to fight,” Obama said in 2002. “Those are the battles that we willingly join – the battles against ignorance and intolerance, corruption and greed. Poverty and despair.”
By 2011, however, Obama had come to endorse the use of military power to enforce America’s “responsibility as a [global] leader” arguing that the United States was “different” and therefore had no other choice but to attack Libya.
“To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader and, more profoundly, our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are,” he said. “Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different.”
This is a very eye opening video and thanks to the tipster for this one. It was published a couple of weeks ago by CBS and details the account of an ATF agent that claims that the US Justice Department has been forcing ATF to let guns flow freely to Mexico. The crux of this video comes when you find out that one of the guns they let go to Mexico a year earlier was used in the killing of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.
Last week we ran an interview by CBS of an ATF agent accusing the feds of allowing guns to be smuggled into Mexico, guns that are responsible for the death of a border agent. You can watch that here. In the video they showed Rep. Grassley investigating this story.
Today Grassley came on Laura Ingraham’s show and said that he is getting nothing but stonewalled by the administration on this issue. Listen below:
Glenn interviewed Wayne LaPierre on radio this morning, and the NRA boss unveiled a shocking story to the radio audience.
Wayne explained, “What’s going on is NRA called for full‑scale congressional investigations into this program that our government, the Obama administration was running called Fast and Furious.”
“Apparently what was going on and this is all based on what agents, law enforcement agents, are coming forward under the Whistleblower Act and saying is that we all heard Hillary Clinton and Eric Holder and the administration saying 90% of the guns the cartels are getting are coming from the United States.”
“Blaming the Second Amendment, lock, stock and barrel for the guns of the Mexican gun cartels.”
“Problem was they could only prove a trickle. What it looks like, apparently, is someone in this administration, in our federal government, set out to turn that trickle into a river of guns flowing from the United States into the hands of the Mexican drug cartels over the border into their hands.”
“It’s called Fast and Furious. They did it over the objections of their field agents who said if we send guns over the border into the hands of these evil people, the Mexican drug cartels, we’ll see these guns again. These people will cause harm with these guns.”
“They wept ahead and did it. They, in effect, set up a dealership. They set up an illegal pipe line and they pumped thousands and thousands according to the agents’ words, guns, from the United States over the border into the hands of the Mexican drug cartel.”
“We’re arming the military to help stop them, or are you saying there’s actually an illegal gun smuggling ring that was set up by the United States government to push to actually put them in the hands of the bad guys?” Glenn asked.
Obama says he didn’t inform Mexico of U.S. gun smuggling operation because he didn’t know about it
Under fire for an operation that allowed smuggling of U.S. weapons across the nation’s border with Mexico, President Obama said in an interview that neither he nor Attorney General Eric Holder authorized the controversial “Operation Fast and Furious.”
The Mexican government has complained that it didn’t know about the U.S. operation that allowed guns to illegally cross the southwestern border so they could track the weapons.
AP photo
Obama told Univision‘s Jorge Ramos that President Felipe Calderon wasn’t informed of the operation because he — the president of the United States — wasn’t informed either. When asked whether he knew of the weapon smuggling plan, Obama responded that it is “a pretty big government” with “a lot of moving parts.”
The investigation into the program comes after it was connected to two weapons that were found at the scene of a border shootout that killed U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry in December. Likewise, a gun smuggled from the U.S. were used to kill Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agent Jamie Zapata, but it has not been determined if it was part of “Fast and Furious.”
When President Calderon came to visit Washington recently, the two presidents came together on a policy to stop drug and weapon smuggling across the border.
“Our policy is to ram up the interdiction of guns flowing south because that’s contributing to some of the security problems that are taking place in Mexico and what we’re doing is trying to build the kind of cooperation between Mexico and the United States that we haven’t seen before,” Obama told Univision.
The president said his attorney general has been “very clear that our policy is to catch gunrunners and put them into jail.”
The controversial operation was the subject of a CBS News Investigation that reported ATF was allowing traffickers to bring weapons into Mexico in order to track them rather than arresting the traffickers. Obama said Holder has assigned an inspector general to investigate what happened, because he does not know who authorized the operation.
“Letting guns ‘walk’ is not something that is acceptable,” Holder said during a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee hearing. “Guns are different than drugs or money when we are trying to follow their trail. That is not acceptable.”
Holder said he made this clear to attorneys and ATF agents.
>>> On the jump page: Complete transcript of the exchange from Univision
JR: THE MEXICAN GOVERNMENT COMPLAINS THAT THEY WERE NOT INFORMED ABOUT THE “FAST AND FURIOUS” OPERATION. DID YOU AUTHORIZE THIS OPERATION AND WAS PRESIDENT CALDERON PROPERLY INFORMED ABOUT IT?
PBO: Well, first of all I did not authorize it. Eric Holder, the Attorney General, did not authorize it. He’s been very clear that our policy is to catch gun runners and put them into jail. So what he’s done is he’s assigned an I.G., an inspector general, to investigate what exactly happened…
JR: SO WHO AUTHORIZED IT?
PBO: Well, we don’t have all the facts. That’s why the I.G. is in business. To collect the facts.
JR: AND YOU WERE NOT EVEN INFORMED ABOUT IT?
PBO: Absolutely not, this is a pretty big government, the United States government. I got a lot of moving parts. But I want to be very clear, I spoke to President Calderon when he came to visit just a few weeks ago, our policy is to ramp up the interdiction of guns flowing south because that’s contributing to some of the security problems that are taking place in Mexico and what we are doing is trying to build the kind of cooperation between Mexico and the United States that we haven’t seen before. That ensures that we have a comprehensive approach. I’ve said to President Calderon and I’ve said it publicly, we’ve got obligations. It’s not just Mexico’s problem, it’s also our problem. We got to reduce demand for drugs, which is why even though we got obviously significant deficits; we are allocating 10 billion dollars in our budget to try to reduce demand through prevention programs and education programs. We have to make sure that we are enforcing the kinds of measures that will stop the flow of guns and cash down south that is helping to fuel these transnational drug cartels. So we’ve initiated excellent cooperation, there may be a situation here in which a serious mistake was made, if that’s the case then we’ll find out and will hold somebody accountable.
JR: MEXICO WAS NOT INFORMED THEN?
PBO: Well, if I wasn’t informed I assure you that Mexico wasn’t either.
A U.S. president has attacked another country, so it’s time for the scam artists to pull out their fake constitutional arguments in support of our dear leader. Not all of them are doing so, to be sure – in fact, it’s been rather a hoot to hear supporters of the Iraq war suddenly caterwauling about the Constitution’s restraints on the power of the president to initiate hostilities abroad. But I’m told that radio host Mark Levin criticized Ron Paul on his program the other day on the precise grounds that the congressman didn’t know what he was talking about when it came to war powers and the Constitution.
That means it’s time to lay out all the common claims, both constitutional and historical, advanced on behalf of presidential war powers, and refute them one by one.
“The president has the power to initiate hostilities without consulting Congress.”
Ever since the Korean War, Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution – which refers to the president as the “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States” – has been interpreted this way.
But what the framers actually meant by that clause was that once war has been declared, it was the President’s responsibility as commander-in-chief to direct the war. Alexander Hamilton spoke in such terms when he said that the president, although lacking the power to declare war, would have “the direction of war when authorized or begun.” The president acting alone was authorized only to repel sudden attacks (hence the decision to withhold from him only the power to “declare” war, not to “make” war, which was thought to be a necessary emergency power in case of foreign attack).
The Framers assigned to Congress what David Gray Adler has called “senior status in a partnership with the president for the purpose of conducting foreign policy.” Congress possesses the power “to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations,” “to raise and support Armies,” to “grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal,” to “provide for the common Defense,” and even “to declare War.” Congress shares with the president the power to make treaties and to appoint ambassadors. As for the president himself, he is assigned only two powers relating to foreign affairs: he is commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and he has the power to receive ambassadors.
At the Constitutional Convention, the delegates expressly disclaimed any intention to model the American executive exactly after the British monarchy. James Wilson, for example, remarked that the powers of the British king did not constitute “a proper guide in defining the executive powers. Some of these prerogatives were of a Legislative nature. Among others that of war & peace.” Edmund Randolph likewise contended that the delegates had “no motive to be governed by the British Government as our prototype.”
To repose such foreign-policy authority in the legislative rather than the executive branch of government was a deliberate and dramatic break with the British model of government with which they were most familiar, as well as with that of other nations, where the executive branch (in effect, the monarch) possessed all such rights, including the exclusive right to declare war. The Framers of the Constitution believed that history testified to the executive’s penchant for war. As James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson, “The constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the Legislature.” Madison even proposed excluding the president from the negotiation of peace treaties, on the grounds that he might obstruct a settlement out of a desire to derive “power and importance from a state of war.”
At the Constitutional Convention, Pierce Butler “was for vesting the power in the President, who will have all the requisite qualities, and will not make war but when the nation will support it.” Butler’s motion did not receive so much as a second.
James Wilson assured the Pennsylvania Ratifying Convention, “This system will not hurry us into war; it is calculated to guard against it. It will not be in the power of a single man, or a single body of men, to involve us in such distress; for the important power of declaring war is vested in the legislature at large: this declaration must be made with the concurrence of the House of Representatives: from this circumstance we may draw a certain conclusion that nothing but our interest can draw us into war.”
In Federalist #69, Alexander Hamilton explained that the president’s authority “would be nominally the same with that of the King of Great Britain, but in substance much inferior to it. It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces, as first general and admiral of the confederacy; while that of the British king extends to the declaring of war, and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies; all which by the constitution under consideration would appertain to the Legislature.”
According to John Bassett Moore, the great authority on international law who (among other credentials) occupied the first professorship of international law at Columbia University, “There can hardly be room for doubt that the framers of the constitution, when they vested in Congress the power to declare war, never imagined that they were leaving it to the executive to use the military and naval forces of the United States all over the world for the purpose of actually coercing other nations, occupying their territory, and killing their soldiers and citizens, all according to his own notions of the fitness of things, as long as he refrained from calling his action war or persisted in calling it peace.”
In conformity with this understanding, George Washington’s operations on his own authority against the Indians were confined to defensive measures, conscious as he was that the approval of Congress would be necessary for anything further. “The Constitution vests the power of declaring war with Congress,” he said, “therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they have deliberated upon the subject, and authorized such a measure.”
“John Adams made war on France without consulting Congress.”
Supporters of a broad executive war power have sometimes appealed to the Quasi War with France, in the closing years of the eighteenth century, as an example of unilateral warmaking on the part of the president. Francis Wormuth, an authority on war powers and the Constitution, describes that contention as “altogether false.” John Adams “took absolutely no independent action. Congress passed a series of acts that amounted, so the Supreme Court said, to a declaration of imperfect war; and Adams complied with these statutes.” (Wormuth’s reference to the Supreme Court recalls a decision rendered in the wake of the Quasi War, in which the Court ruled that Congress could either declare war or approve hostilities by means of statutes that authorized an undeclared war. The Quasi War was an example of the latter case.)
An incident that occurred during the Quasi War throws further light on the true extent of presidential war powers. Congress authorized the president to seize vessels sailing to French ports. But President Adams, acting on his own authority and without the sanction of Congress, instructed American ships to capture vessels sailing either to or from French ports. Captain George Little, acting under the authority of Adams’ order, seized a Danish ship sailing from a French port. When Little was sued for damages, the case made its way to the Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that Captain Little could indeed be sued for damages in the case. “In short,” writes war powers expert Louis Fisher in summary, “congressional policy announced in a statute necessarily prevails over inconsistent presidential orders and military actions. Presidential orders, even those issued as Commander in Chief, are subject to restrictions imposed by Congress.”
“Jefferson acted unilaterally against the Barbary pirates.”
Another incident frequently cited on behalf of a general presidential power to deploy American forces and commence hostilities involves Jefferson’s policy toward the Barbary states, which demanded protection money from governments whose ships sailed the Mediterranean. Immediately prior to Jefferson’s inauguration in 1801, Congress passed naval legislation that, among other things, provided for six frigates that “shall be officered and manned as the President of the United States may direct.” It was to this instruction and authority that Jefferson appealed when he ordered American ships to the Mediterranean. In the event of a declaration of war on the United States by the Barbary powers, these ships were to “protect our commerce & chastise their insolence – by sinking, burning or destroying their ships & Vessels wherever you shall find them.”
In late 1801, the pasha of Tripoli did declare war on the U.S. Jefferson sent a small force to the area to protect American ships and citizens against potential aggression, but insisted that he was “unauthorized by the Constitution, without the sanction of Congress, to go beyond the line of defense”; Congress alone could authorize “measures of offense also.” Thus Jefferson told Congress: “I communicate [to you] all material information on this subject, that in the exercise of this important function confided by the Constitution to the Legislature exclusively their judgment may form itself on a knowledge and consideration of every circumstance of weight.”
Jefferson consistently deferred to Congress in his dealings with the Barbary pirates. “Recent studies by the Justice Department and statements made during congressional debate,” Louis Fisher writes, “imply that Jefferson took military measures against the Barbary powers without seeking the approval or authority of Congress. In fact, in at least ten statutes, Congress explicitly authorized military action by Presidents Jefferson and Madison. Congress passed legislation in 1802 to authorize the President to equip armed vessels to protect commerce and seamen in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and adjoining seas. The statute authorized American ships to seize vessels belonging to the Bey of Tripoli, with the captured property distributed to those who brought the vessels into port. Additional legislation in 1804 gave explicit support for ‘warlike operations against the regency of Tripoli, or any other of the Barbary powers.’”
Consider also Jefferson’s statement to Congress in late 1805 regarding a boundary dispute with Spain over Louisiana and Florida. According to Jefferson, Spain appeared to have an “intention to advance on our possessions until they shall be repressed by an opposing force. Considering that Congress alone is constitutionally invested with the power of changing our condition from peace to war, I have thought it my duty to await their authority for using force…. But the course to be pursued will require the command of means which it belongs to Congress exclusively to yield or to deny. To them I communicate every fact material for their information and the documents necessary to enable them to judge for themselves. To their wisdom, then, I look for the course I am to pursue, and will pursue with sincere zeal that which they shall approve.”
“Presidents have sent men into battle hundreds of times without getting congressional authorization.”
This argument, like so much propaganda, originated with the U.S. government itself. At the time of the Korean War, a number of congressmen contended that “history will show that on more than 100 occasions in the life of this Republic the President as Commander in Chief has ordered the fleet or the troops to do certain things which involved the risk of war” without the consent of Congress. In 1966, in defense of the Vietnam War, the State Department adopted a similar line: “Since the Constitution was adopted there have been at least 125 instances in which the President has ordered the armed forces to take action or maintain positions abroad without obtaining prior congressional authorization, starting with the ‘undeclared war’ with France (1798-1800).”
We have already seen that the war with France in no way lends support to those who favor broad presidential war powers. As for the rest, the great presidential scholar Edward S. Corwin pointed out that this lengthy list of alleged precedents consisted mainly of “fights with pirates, landings of small naval contingents on barbarous or semi-barbarous coasts, the dispatch of small bodies of troops to chase bandits or cattle rustlers across the Mexican border, and the like.”
To support their position, therefore, the neoconservatives and their left-liberal clones are counting chases of cattle rustlers as examples of presidential warmaking, and as precedents for sending millions of Americans into war with foreign governments on the other side of the globe.
“The War Powers Resolution of 1973 gives the president the power to commit troops anywhere he likes for 90 days.”
Which is why it’s manifestly unconstitutional. I’ve written on this elsewhere.
“If the United Nations authorizes military action, the president does not need to consult Congress.”
The UN Charter itself notes that the Security Council’s commitment of member nations’ troops must be authorized by these nations’ “respective constitutional processes.” The Congressional Research Service’s Louis Fisher explains further: “Assured by Truman that he understood and respected the war prerogatives of Congress, the Senate ratified the UN Charter. Article 43 provided that all UN members shall make available to the Security Council, in accordance with special agreements, armed forces and other assistance. Each nation would ratify those agreements ‘in accordance with their respective constitutional processes.’ It then became the obligation of Congress to pass legislation to define the constitutional processes of the United States. Section 6 of the UN Participation Act of 1945 states with singular clarity that the special agreements ‘shall be subject to the approval of the Congress by appropriate Act or joint resolution.’ The procedure was specific and clear. Both branches knew what the Constitution required. The President would first have to obtain the approval of Congress.”
The UN Participation Act’s provisions regarding military action and the president have often been misread, thanks to a qualification in Article 6. But that qualification simply means that once the president has obtained congressional approval for a special agreement with the UN Security Council to make American forces available to the UN, he does not need congressional approval a second time to implement that agreement.
Fisher elaborates on the UN Participation Act of 1945 here. (See especially pp. 1249-1250.)
The remaining claims, somewhat more technical in nature, have been put forth most memorably by John Yoo, former deputy assistant attorney general under George W. Bush. These are paraphrases of Yoo’s positions. They are replied to in much more detail in Who Killed the Constitution? by the present author and Kevin Gutzman.
“In the eighteenth century, a ‘declaration of war’ was a merely rhetorical and communicative act – a ‘courtesy to the enemy’ – and did not involve the initiation or authorization of hostilities. Thus in granting Congress the power to declare war, the Constitution had merely given it the power to communicate to an enemy people (as well as to neutrals and to the country’s own citizens that a state of war existed; the president, on the other hand, retained the power actually to bring the United States into war by commencing military action.”
This is partly correct. In the eighteenth century a “declaration of war” could indeed have this lesser meaning. But a review of eighteenth-century usage reveals that to “declare war” could also mean actually to begin a war.
Consider also that as the Constitution was being debated, Federalists sought to reassure skeptical anti-Federalists that the president’s powers were not so expansive after all. For one thing, the Federalists said, the president lacked the power to declare war. In order for their argument to carry any weight, “declare war” must have been taken to mean the power to initiate hostilities – for no anti-Federalist would have been appeased by “Sure, the president can take the country to war on his own initiative, but the power to draft declaratory statements will rest with Congress!”
If Yoo’s argument were correct, we should expect to see presidents in the years immediately following ratification of the Constitution taking bold military action without concerning themselves much about the will of Congress, which according to Yoo had only the power to issue declaratory statements. But as we have seen in the examples of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, the opposite was in fact the case; these early presidents were careful to defer to Congress.
“Congress may have some power over major wars, but lesser uses of force are reserved to the president alone.”
The evidence from the early republic contradicts this claim. Supreme Court justice Samuel Chase summed up the reigning doctrine in 1800: “Congress is empowered to declare a general war, or congress may wage a limited war; limited in place, in objects and in time.” The 1804 case of Little v. Barreme involved a ship commander who, during the Quasi War with France in the late 1790s, had seized a ship that he thought was illegally trading with France. The commander was following a directive from President John Adams in seizing this ship, which had been coming from France. But Congress had authorized President Adams only to seize ships going to France; in short, the president’s directive ventured beyond what congress had called for in this limited war. In a unanimous decision, the Court declared that the commander was liable for damages even though he had acted in accordance with a presidential directive. No such presidential directive could override the authority of Congress, said the Court.
“The Vesting Clause grants the president a wide array of unspecified powers pertaining to foreign affairs.”
You won’t hear this argument in many casual discussions of presidential war powers, but since Yoo cited it in a draft memorandum he wrote for the Department of Defense in early 2002, it’s worth a brief reply. (Again, a lengthier reply can be found in Who Killed the Constitution?)
The Vesting Clause can be found in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution; “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” According to this view, the Vesting Clause bestows on the president a host of unspecified powers in addition to the specific ones listed in the rest of Article II. The Framers of the Constitution, they say, thereby showed that they wanted the president to exercise all powers that would have been recognized in the eighteenth century as being fundamentally executive in nature, even if those powers are not actually mentioned in the Constitution. Congress, on the other hand, is assigned no such open-ended authority but is instead limited by the Constitution to all “legislative Powers herein granted,” a reference to the specific list of powers that then follows. The conclusion: the president may rightly exercise all powers relating to foreign affairs (since such powers are by their nature executive) except those specifically assigned to Congress.
Unfortunately for Yoo, he will not find any support for his views on executive power and the Vesting Clause in the state constitutions drawn up after 1776, in the Federalist, or in the state ratification debates. Nowhere in the state constitutions do we see any indication of an intent to vest the executive with an array of unspecified powers beyond those that were expressly mentioned. In Federalist #69, Alexander Hamilton argued that the American president would be much weaker than the British king, and cited the specific list of powers the Constitution grants the president. That argument would have been absurd and dishonest if the Vesting Clause had given the president an additional reservoir of powers beyond those Hamilton catalogued. Curtis Bradley and Martin Flaherty, writing in the Michigan Law Review, conclude that “in the thousands of pages recording these debates the argument that the Vesting Clause grants the president a general foreign affairs power simply does not appear.”
In short, there is no constitutional support for the presidential war powers claimed by mainstream left and right. That’s why they usually wind up claiming that the congressional power to declare war is “obsolete.” They can’t deny its existence, so they deny the document in which it is contained. And that means they lose the argument.
CAIRO — In post-revolutionary Egypt, where hope and confusion collide in the daily struggle to build a new nation, religion has emerged as a powerful political force, following an uprising that was based on secular ideals. The Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group once banned by the state, is at the forefront, transformed into a tacit partner with the military government that many fear will thwart fundamental changes.
It is also clear that the young, educated secular activists who initially propelled the nonideological revolution are no longer the driving political force — at least not at the moment.
As the best organized and most extensive opposition movement in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood was expected to have an edge in the contest for influence. But what surprises many is its link to a military that vilified it.
“There is evidence the Brotherhood struck some kind of a deal with the military early on,” said Elijah Zarwan, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group. “It makes sense if you are the military — you want stability and people off the street. The Brotherhood is one address where you can go to get 100,000 people off the street.”
There is a battle consuming Egypt about the direction of its revolution, and the military council that is now running the country is sending contradictory signals. On Wednesday, the council endorsed a plan to outlaw demonstrations and sit-ins. Then, a few hours later, the public prosecutor announced that the former interior minister and other security officials would be charged in the killings of hundreds during the protests.
Egyptians are searching for signs of clarity in such declarations, hoping to discern the direction of a state led by a secretive military council brought to power by a revolution based on demands for democracy, rule of law and an end to corruption.
“We are all worried,” said Amr Koura, 55, a television producer, reflecting the opinions of the secular minority. “The young people have no control of the revolution anymore. It was evident in the last few weeks when you saw a lot of bearded people taking charge. The youth are gone.”
The Muslim Brotherhood is also regarded warily by some religious Egyptians, who see it as an elitist, secret society. These suspicions have created potential opportunities for other parties.
About six groups from the ultraconservative Salafist school of Islam have also emerged in the era after President Hosni Mubarak’s removal, as well as a party called Al Wassat, intended as a more liberal alternative to the Brotherhood.
In the early stages of the revolution, the Brotherhood was reluctant to join the call for demonstrations. It jumped in only after it was clear that the protest movement had gained traction. Throughout, the Brotherhood kept a low profile, part of a survival instinct honed during decades of repression by the state.
The question at the time was whether the Brotherhood would move to take charge with its superior organizational structure. It now appears that it has.
“The Brotherhood didn’t want this revolution; it has never been a revolutionary movement,” said Mr. Zarwan of the International Crisis Group. “Now it has happened; they participated cautiously, and they realize they can set their sights higher.”
But in these early stages, there is growing evidence of the Brotherhood’s rise and the overpowering force of Islam.
When the new prime minister, Essam Sharaf, addressed the crowd in Tahrir Square this month, Mohamed el-Beltagi, a prominent Brotherhood member, stood by his side. A Brotherhood member was also appointed to the committee that drafted amendments to the Constitution.
But the most obvious and consequential example was the recent referendum on the amendments, in the nation’s first post-Mubarak balloting. The amendments essentially call for speeding up the election process so that parliamentary contests can be held before September, followed soon after by a presidential race. That expedited calendar is seen as giving an advantage to the Brotherhood and to the remnants of Mr. Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, which have established national networks. The next Parliament will oversee drafting a new constitution.
Before the vote, Essam el-Erian, a Brotherhood leader and spokesman, appeared on a popular television show, “The Reality,” arguing for the government’s position in favor of the proposal. With a record turnout, the vote was hailed as a success. But the “yes” campaign was based largely on a religious appeal: voters were warned that if they did not approve the amendments, Egypt would become a secular state.
“The problem is that our country will be without a religion,” read a flier distributed in Cairo by a group calling itself the Egyptian Revolution Society. “This means that the call to the prayer will not be heard anymore like in the case of Switzerland, women will be banned from wearing the hijab like in the case of France,” it said, referring to the Muslim head scarf. “And there will be laws that allow men to get married to men and women to get married to women like in the case of America.”
A banner hung by the Muslim Brotherhood in a square in Alexandria instructed voters that it was their “religious duty” to vote “yes” on the amendments.
In the end, 77.2 percent of those who voted said yes.
This is not to say that the Brotherhood is intent on establishing an Islamic state. From the first days of the protests, Brotherhood leaders proclaimed their dedication to religious tolerance and a democratic and pluralist form of government. They said they would not offer a candidate for president, that they would contest only a bit more than a third of the total seats in Parliament, and that Coptic Christians and women would be welcomed into the political party affiliated with the movement.
None of that has changed, Mr. Erian, the spokesman, said in an interview. “We are keen to spread our ideas and our values,” he said. “We are not keen for power.”
He would not comment on whether the Brotherhood had an arrangement with the military, but he said the will of the people to shift toward Islam spoke for itself and was a sign of Egypt’s emerging democratic values. “Don’t trust the intellectuals, liberals and secularists,” Mr. Erian said. “They are a minor group crying all the time. If they don’t work hard, they have no future.”
But the more secular forces say that what they need is time.
“I worry about going too fast towards elections, that the parties are still weak,” said Nabil Ahmed Helmy, former dean of the Zagazig law school and a member of the National Council for Human Rights. “The only thing left right now is the Muslim Brotherhood. I do think that people are trying to take over the revolution.”
Egypt is still a work in progress. Ola Shahba, 32, a member of a group in the youth coalition behind the protests, said, “After the results of the referendum, we need to be humble.”
The coalition and others have said they see the overwhelming approval of the amendments and the rise of the Brotherhood as worrisome, and as evidence that more liberal forces need to organize in a more effective outreach campaign, and fast.
“Freedom is nice; so is democracy,” said Rifaat Abdul Massih, 39, a construction worker. “But I’m a Christian, and we are a bit worried about the future. I voted ‘no’ to give more time to the secular parties. I don’t want to have the Muslim Brotherhood here right away.”
Remember a year ago when VP Joe Biden was caught telling his boss that the massive Healthcare Reform Bill the President had just signed was (using Biden’s words) a ‘big f**king deal?’
Well folks, I hate to say this, but Joe Biden was right. This is a big deal. A big and expensive deal that still has not earned the support of more than half of America.
The as the bill was passed a year ago, a Gallup poll said:
only 49% of us think that passing healthcare reform was a ‘good thing.’
40% believe it was a bad thing
11% have no opinion
The people at Gallup asked the same question last week and not a whole lot has changed, except that more people DON’T like the idea:
only 46% support the healthcare reform bill
44% think it’s a bad idea
10% have no opinion
Maybe people just don’t know enough about what is in the bill. Remember then-speaker Nancy Pelosi telling us that we needed to pass the bill to find out what was in it?
As you know, they passed the bill, and now we know what is inside it. Bad stuff. Which might explain why even staunch Obamacare supporters like Congressman Anthony Weiner want a waiver for New York City.
But just how bad is it?
The folks at ‘Americans For Tax Reform’ have combed through the bill and found 10 Expensive Things You Did Not Know About Obamacare:
1. Did you know that . . . since Jan. 1 of this year (2011), you cannot use your flex-account at work (FSA) or health savings account (HSA) to purchase over-the-counter medicines?
2. Did you know that . . . since July 1 of last year (2010), Americans have been paying a 10 percent excise tax on all indoor tanning services?
3. Did you know that . . . starting in 2018, if your health insurance is “too good” or considered a “Cadillac” plan, then you will incur a new 40 percent tax on your health plan?
4. Did you know that . . . Obamacare has 21 new or higher taxes in it, totaling over $500 billion in increased taxes going to the government over 10 years?
5. Did you know that . . . beginning in 2014, individuals and families that do not purchase “qualifying” – as defined by federal bureaucrats — health insurance will be forced to pay a yearly tax penalty?
6. Did you know that . . . 7 tax hikes in Obamacare directly break President Obama’s “firm pledge” not to raise any form of taxes on individuals making less than $200,000 per year and families making less than $250,000 per year?
7. Did you know that . . . the capital gains tax rate under Obamacare will rise to 23.8 percent starting in 2012? That is a 59 percent increase from its current rate.
8. Did you know that . . . in 2013, those Americans facing the highest medical bills and the least ability to pay for them will find their ability to deduct medical expenses is further limited (medical expenses must be reduced by 10 percent of income under Obamacare, rather than current law’s 7.5 percent)
9. Did you know that . . . beginning in 2014, businesses with over 50 employees will be forced to offer health coverage for everyone, or pay a hefty tax for each employee?
10. Did you know that . . . in 2013, Obamacare caps the amount individuals and families can put in their flexible savings accounts at $2500? Currently there is no cap and these accounts are used for a myriad of health expenses including paying upwards of $14,000 in tuition to special needs schools for some parents?
I don’t know about you, but I‘m kind of nervous about what we will discover when this bill hits the ’terrible twos.’
Rep. Anthony Weiner said Wednesday he was looking into how a health law waiver might work for New York City.
Weiner, who is likely to run for mayor of New York, said that because of the city’s special health care infrastructure, his office was looking into alternatives that might make more sense. Weiner is one of the health care law’s biggest supporters; during the debate leading up to reform, he was one of the last holdouts in Congress for the public option.
"The president said, 'If you have better ideas that can accomplish the same thing, go for it,'" said Weiner. "I'm in the process now of trying to see if we can take [President Barack Obama] up on it in the city of New York, ...and I'm taking a look at all of the money we spend in Medicaid and Medicare and maybe New York City can come up with a better plan."
New York is one of two states that pass on Medicaid expenses to cities and localities, so "the city winds up having an enormous Medicaid expense," Weiner said.
The congressman was trying to debunk Republican "myths" about the health care law during a speech at the Center for American Progress. He used the waivers as way to describe how flexible the law actually is and how "this notion that the government is shoving the bill down people's throats" is not true.
"The administration needs to make this argument more forcefully," he said. "A lot of people who got waivers were ...people who are our friends."
The New York Democrat said that he does not have the power to get the city to apply for a waiver but that he is "personally looking at whether he can make the numbers work."
"We in New York already have hospitals, we already employ doctors and we employ nurses. We have a lot of uninsured people. ... [Setting up] the exchanges is the one piece of the puzzle that would be difficult for us to do," he said. "I’m just looking internally to whether the city can save money and have more control over its own destiny."
Weiner is slated to hold at least five events on the anniversary of the and has been one of the most outspoken Democratic supporters of the law.
Here's a clip of Rep. Anthony Weiner at a town hall meeting, asked about the health care bill, declaring, "I wrote the bill. ... The bill and I are one."
Weiner made the comments on Monday night at the Middle Village Property Tax Association, taking rather strong ownership of the congressional reform bill that few are embracing when a voter asked about it. Weiner had been a strong advocate for a single-payer option, which was never part of the final drafts.
The Senate version of the health care bill had most of the elements that actually passed, not the House one. Weiner's little-known GOP opponent, Bob Turner, was also there, as were Democratic officials including state Sen. Joe Addabbo and Assemblyman Andrew Hevesi, I'm told.
Today is the first anniversary of the greatest single assault on our freedom in my lifetime: the signing of ObamaCare. As we consider what this law may do to our country, I can't help but reflect on a medical miracle made possible by the American health-care system. It's one that holds special meaning for me.
Some years ago, a little girl was born with a serious heart defect: Her aorta and pulmonary artery were reversed. Without immediate intervention, she would not have survived.
The infant was rushed to another hospital where a surgeon performed a procedure at 1 a.m. that saved her life. Eight months later, when her heart was the size of a small plum, an incredibly dedicated and skilled team of medical professionals surgically reconstructed it. Twenty-seven years later, the young woman is now a nurse in a neonatal intensive care unit where she is studying to become a nurse practitioner.
She wasn't saved by a bureaucrat, and no government mandate forced her parents to purchase the coverage that saved her. Instead, her care was provided under a run-of-the-mill plan available to every employee of an Oshkosh, Wis., plastics plant.
If you haven't guessed, this story touches my heart because the girl is my daughter, Carey. And my wife and I are incredibly thankful that we had the freedom to seek out the most advanced surgical technique. The procedure that saved her, and has given her a chance at a full life, was available because America has a free-market system that has advanced medicine at a phenomenal pace.
I don't even want to think what might have happened if she had been born at a time and place where government defined the limits for most insurance policies and set precedents on what would be covered. Would the life-saving procedures that saved her have been deemed cost-effective by policy makers deciding where to spend increasingly scarce tax dollars?
Carey's story sounds like a miracle, but America has always been a place where medical miracles happen. Since 1970, American doctors have won more Nobel Prizes for Medicine than all other countries combined. According to McKinsey and Co., thousands of foreigners come to the United States every year for medical care they cannot get at home—due to rationing or because it is simply not provided. And cutting-edge drugs to treat serious illnesses are more widely available in the U.S. than abroad.
Take cancer as one example. Compared to the U.S., breast cancer mortality is 9% higher in Canada (according to the government statistics of each country), 52% higher in Germany and 88% higher in the United Kingdom (according to studies published in Lancet Oncology). Prostate cancer mortality is 604% higher in Britain.
Those in need of timely care from specialists are better off in the U.S. Drawing on several peer-reviewed studies, Dr. Scott Atlas of the Stanford University Medical Center notes that patients who need knee and hip replacement, cataract surgery, and radiation treatment wait months longer in the United Kingdom and Canada than in the United States.
The plain truth is that the American system is better at rewarding innovation and responding to consumer needs. But the history of government-led care is there for all to see. Are we doomed to repeat it?
For the first time in U.S. history, a personal inaction (not purchasing something, in this case, a health- insurance plan) will be deemed unlawful. The person not committing this act (or is it committing an inaction?) will be subject to a fine. Or is it now, as the government contends, a tax? I'm confused.
This is precisely what Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and President Obama wanted. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was sprung on an unsuspecting public with barely enough time for anyone to read it. Remember Speaker Pelosi's famous line? "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it." Unbelievable.
I am convinced that ObamaCare was designed to lead to a government takeover of our entire health-care system, which is one-sixth of our economy. As I traveled around Wisconsin in the last year, I asked thousands of people a simple question: "Do you think the federal government has the capability of running one-sixth of our economy?" Only two people ever raised their hands.
Our health-care system has problems that must be addressed. But ObamaCare will make those problems much worse. Instead of increasing consumer choice, it narrows it. Instead of encouraging innovation, it stifles creativity. Instead of expanding access to care, it will ration it. And instead of allowing competition to help bring down costs, it increases spending and puts our health-care system on a path to ruin.
The defects with the president's health law are so serious and widespread that the administration has already granted over 1,000 waivers to protect businesses, labor unions and other organizations from its most onerous provisions. We need to recognize that the finest health-care system in the world is at risk—and repeal ObamaCare before it's too late.
Mr. Johnson, a Republican, is a senator from Wisconsin.
And lay off Bachmann and Palin while you're at it. Why shooting fish in a barrel is a bad political strategy
What dumb thing did Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann or Glenn Beck just say? You don’t need to watch Fox News to find out. The progressive media will tell you. The economy is still in a coma, revolution is rocking the Middle East -- but you can be sure that Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews will take time to snicker at something silly that Palin or Bachmann or Beck said in the last 48 hours.
Is the constant mockery of these bloviating right-wing demagogues really the best use of precious center-left media time? I think it’s likely to backfire on liberals, for several reasons:
It makes other far-right Republican conservatives look moderate. Mockery of Palin, Bachmann and Beck may backfire on the left by making conservative and libertarian politicians with equally nutty ideas but more statesmanlike gravitas appear to be more moderate than they really are. Rep. Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, has ideas about the budget and social policy, like voucherizing Medicare, that are just as crazy as anything spouted by Glenn Beck. But he looks dignified in a suit and speaks the language of policy wonkery, so he gets respectful attention, while liberal pundits pummel right-wing media blowhards and less influential politicians like Rep. Bachmann who, unlike Ryan, do not have their fingers around the levers of government.
It makes liberals look like snobs. Since the '60s, conservatives have managed to recruit populist voters by claiming that the intellectual elites look down their noses at them. By theatrically sneering at less-educated politicians and media loudmouths, progressive pundits seem to prove that the left consists only of snobbish members of the college-educated professional class making fun of the errors of people who did not attend prestigious schools.
If you're going to be an intellectual snob, at least get your facts right. A few weeks ago Chris Matthews mocked Bachmann for suggesting that most of the Founders were against slavery and that the three-fifths clause in the Constitution was intended to insult black people by calling each one "three-fifths of a human being." As conservatives gleefully pointed out, before it was endorsed by Bachmann, the theory that the Constitution, despite its concessions to the practice, embodies disapproval of slavery was shared by Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. The same viewpoint was held by Alexander Stephens, the vice-president of the Confederacy, who declared in his "corner-stone" speech of March 21, 1861:
The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."
Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery -- subordination to the superior race -- is his natural and normal condition. [Applause.]
As for the three-fifths clause, its inclusion in the Constitution was a defeat for the slave owners of the South, who would have preferred to maximize their region’s representation in Congress by counting each slave as a full "person" for purpose of congressional redistricting. The three-fifths clause provided states with more congressional delegates as a reward, if they ended slavery. Bachmann 1, Matthews 0.
It’s a reactive strategy that gives the initiative to the right. When progressive opinion leaders wait for conservatives to say something stupid and then pounce on it, they cede the choice of topics in national debate to their enemies. No doubt this drives ratings, attracting hyper-partisan Democrats whose greatest pleasure in life is the rather low one of picking apart the statements of Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck: "Nyah, nyah, Glenn Beck is wrong again!" But it’s no substitute for a liberalism that tells its own story, on its own timeline, and lets the right react.
It’s a waste of effort and attention. We are mired down in two wars in the Muslim world and suffering from the greatest global economic crisis since the Great Depression. The last time things were this bad, in the 1930s, American liberals and leftists were debating the nature of capitalism and government and world politics and putting forth their own, often contradictory plans. Liberal politicians and journalists devoted little, if any, time to dissecting the errors of right-wing crackpots of the period, like the radio priest Father Coughlin.
Of Ezra Pound, the American poet who became an apologist for Mussolini and Hitler by way of monetary theory (which has a way of driving people mad), Gertrude Stein observed: "He was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not." The populist right has cornered the market for village explainers in the American media in part because liberals have abandoned it. The relatively poor ratings of liberal media pundits reflect their decision to follow a strategy of narrowcasting aimed at the minority of Americans who have graduated from four-year colleges and the even smaller minority with graduate and professional degrees.
The education of most Americans ends with high school. That does not mean they are stupid or ignorant. Many have a life-long interest in world affairs and the American economy and American history. It speaks well of their civic engagement and intellectual curiosity that many Americans, in the absence of alternatives, are drawn to "village explainers" like Ross Perot with his charts, which liberals mocked two decades ago, and Glenn Beck with his blackboard diagrams, which liberals mock today.
The center-left needs its own village explainers, with their own charts and their own blackboards. In the plain language used by FDR for his Fireside Chats, they could show how liberalism is rooted in American values and history, instead of being an alien transplant from socialist Europe. They could sketch the relations between today’s radical right, with its loony theories about a Muslim-leftist world revolution, and the similar conspiracy theories of the Liberty Lobby in the 1930s and the John Birch Society in the 1950s. They could put up diagrams on the screen to explain elementary Keynesian concepts and show the need for public spending, or exports, or both to make up for depressed private consumption in a near-depression like the present. They could ...
Oh, never mind. It’s easier to run a clip of Palin, Bachmann or Beck, and then roll your eyes and ask a fellow pundit to join you in snickering at those idiots.
You read that headline correctly. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration is financing oil exploration off Brazil.
The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil's state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil's Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil's planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan.
The U.S. Export-Import Bank tells us it has issued a "preliminary commitment" letter to Petrobras in the amount of $2 billion and has discussed with Brazil the possibility of increasing that amount. Ex-Im Bank says it has not decided whether the money will come in the form of a direct loan or loan guarantees. Either way, this corporate foreign aid may strike some readers as odd, given that the U.S. Treasury seems desperate for cash and Petrobras is one of the largest corporations in the Americas.
But look on the bright side. If President Obama has embraced offshore drilling in Brazil, why not in the old U.S.A.? The land of the sorta free and the home of the heavily indebted has enormous offshore oil deposits, and last year ahead of the November elections, with gasoline at $4 a gallon, Congress let a ban on offshore drilling expire.
The Bush Administration's five-year plan (2007-2012) to open the outer continental shelf to oil exploration included new lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico. But in 2007 environmentalists went to court to block drilling in Alaska and in April a federal court ruled in their favor. In May, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said his department was unsure whether that ruling applied only to Alaska or all offshore drilling. So it asked an appeals court for clarification. Late last month the court said the earlier decision applied only to Alaska, opening the way for the sale of leases in the Gulf. Mr. Salazar now says the sales will go forward on August 19.
This is progress, however slow. But it still doesn't allow the U.S. to explore in Alaska or along the East and West Coasts, which could be our equivalent of the Tupi oil fields, which are set to make Brazil a leading oil exporter. Americans are right to wonder why Mr. Obama is underwriting in Brazil what he won't allow at home.
WASHINGTON, March 18 (UPI) -- Washington has given Petrobras America Inc. permission to start oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico, a regulator said.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement gave Petrobras approval to use a floating production storage offloading facility at its Cascade-Chinook project in the Gulf of Mexico.
The approval marks the first time FPSO technology will be used in U.S. waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
The oil and gas project is about 165 miles off the coast of Louisiana in 8,200 feet of water. The FPSO has a production capacity of 80,000 barrels of oil and 16 million cubic feet of natural gas per day.
The BOEMRE approved the production safety system permit and a supplemental deep-water operating plan from Petrobras. The regulatory agency said it was satisfied that operations would be safe from hurricanes and other natural disasters.
"These regulatory approvals pave the way for safe, new production of oil and gas resources in the Gulf of Mexico," BOEMRE Director Michael R. Bromwich said in a statement.
Noble Energy in early March was awarded a BOEMRE permit to drill in the Mississippi Canyon block about 70 miles south of the Louisiana coast.
The permit was for what the BOEMRE described as a bypass well meant to drill around a mechanical problem in the original hole.
Deep-water exploration is under scrutiny following the April oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The U.S. government lifted a moratorium on deep-water drilling in October, six months after the Deepwater Horizon oil rig caught fire and sank in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Chevrolet Volt is beginning to look like it was manufactured by Atlas Shrugged Motors, where the government mandates everything politically correct, rewards its cronies and produces junk steel.
This is the car that subsidies built. General Motors lobbied for a $7,500 tax refund for all buyers, under the shaky (if not false) promise that it was producing the first all-electric mass-production vehicle.
At least that's what we were once told. Sitting in a Volt that would not start at the 2010 Detroit Auto Show, a GM engineer swore to me that the internal combustion engine in the machine only served as a generator, kicking in when the overnight-charged lithium-ion batteries began to run down. GM has continually revised downward its estimates of how far the machine would go before the gas engine fired, and now says 25 to 50 miles.
It turns out that the premium-fuel fired engine does drive the wheels--when the battery is very low or when the vehicle is at most freeway speeds. So the Volt really isn't a pure electric car after all. I'm sure that the people who designed the car knew how it ran, and so did their managers.
Why then the need to keep this so quiet? It's doubtful that GM would have gotten such a subsidy if it had been revealed that the car would do much of its freeway cruising with a gas engine powering the wheels. While the Volt is more complicated than the Prius, and has a longer battery-only range, a hybrid is a hybrid, and the Prius no longer qualifies for a tax credit.
In other words, GM was desperate for customers for what they perceived would be an unpopular vehicle before one even hit the road. It had hoped to lure more if buyers subtracted the $7,500 from the $41,000 sticker price. Instead, as Consumer Reports found out, the car was very pricey. The version they tested cost $43,700 plus a $5,000 dealer markup ("Don't worry," I can hear the salesperson saying, "you'll get more than that back in your tax credit!"), or a whopping $48,700 minus the credit.
This is one reason that Volt sales are anemic: 326 in December, 321 in January, and 281 in February. GM announced a production run of 100,000 in the first two years. Who is going to buy all these cars?
Another reason they aren't exactly flying off the lots is because, well, they have some problems. In a telling attempt to preserve battery power, the heater is exceedingly weak. Consumer Reports averaged a paltry 25 miles of electric-only running, in part because it was testing in cold Connecticut. (My engineer at the Auto Show said cold weather would have little effect.)
It will be interesting to see what the range is on a hot, traffic-jammed summer day, when the air conditioner will really tax the batteries. When the gas engine came on, Consumer Reports got about 30 miles to the gallon of premium fuel; which, in terms of additional cost of high-test gas, drives the effective mileage closer to 27 mpg. A conventional Honda ( HMC - news - people ) Accord, which seats 5 (instead of the Volt's 4), gets 34 mpg on the highway, and costs less than half of what CR paid, even with the tax break.
Recently, President Obama selected General Electric ( GE - news - people ) CEO Jeffrey Immelt to chair his Economic Advisory Board. GE is awash in windmills waiting to be subsidized so they can provide unreliable, expensive power.
Consequently, and soon after his appointment, Immelt announced that GE will buy 50,000 Volts in the next two years, or half the total produced. Assuming the corporation qualifies for the same tax credit, we (you and me) just shelled out $375,000,000 to a company to buy cars that no one else wants so that GM will not tank and produce even more cars that no one wants. And this guy is the chair of Obama's Economic Advisory Board?
It really is enough to get you to say Atlas Shrugged. For those who do not know, or who are only vaguely familiar with, the Ayn Rand classic, it is a story of a society in decay, where politically favored technologies and jobs are foisted on the nation, where innovations that might threaten existing corporatist cartels are financially or physically sabotaged as unemployment mounts and the nation spirals into a malaise that makes the Carter years look like Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.
Atlas Shrugged is about to come out as a surprisingly good and entertaining movie (which will be destroyed by Hollywood and New York Critics) on--you guessed it--April 15. Maybe the government could put in an ad before the show with Immelt exhorting Americans to care about "the environment and green jobs." All must buy Volts.
Patrick Michaels is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and author of Climate Coup: Global Warming's Invasion of our Government and our Lives, which comes out April 22.
Everyone knows that the U.S. budget is being devoured by entitlements. Everyone also knows that of the Big Three - Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security - Social Security is the most solvable.
Back-of-an-envelope solvable: Raise the retirement age, tweak the indexing formula (from wage inflation to price inflation) and means-test so that Warren Buffett's check gets redirected to a senior in need.
The relative ease of the fix is what makes the Obama administration's Social Security strategy so shocking. The new line from the White House is: no need to fix it because there is no problem. As Office of Management and Budget Director Jack Lew wrote in USA Today just a few weeks ago, the trust fund is solvent until 2037. Therefore, Social Security is now off the table in debt-reduction talks.
This claim is a breathtaking fraud.
The pretense is that a flush trust fund will pay retirees for the next 26 years. Lovely, except for one thing: The Social Security trust fund is a fiction.
If you don't believe me, listen to the OMB's own explanation (in the Clinton administration budget for fiscal 2000 under then-Director Jack Lew, the very same). The OMB explained that these trust fund "balances" are nothing more than a "bookkeeping" device. "They do not consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits."
In other words, the Social Security trust fund contains - nothing.
Here's why. When your FICA tax is taken out of your paycheck, it does not get squirreled away in some lockbox in West Virginia where it's kept until you and your contemporaries retire. Most goes out immediately to pay current retirees, and the rest (say, $100) goes to the U.S. Treasury - and is spent. On roads, bridges, national defense, public television, whatever - spent, gone.
In return for that $100, the Treasury sends the Social Security Administration a piece of paper that says: IOU $100. There are countless such pieces of paper in the lockbox. They are called "special issue" bonds.
Special they are: They are worthless. As the OMB explained, they are nothing more than "claims on the Treasury [i.e., promises] that, when redeemed [when you retire and are awaiting your check], will have to be financed by raising taxes, borrowing from the public, or reducing benefits or other expenditures." That's what it means to have a so-called trust fund with no "real economic assets." When you retire, the "trust fund" will have to go to the Treasury for the money for your Social Security check.
Bottom line? The OMB again: "The existence of large trust fund balances, therefore, does not, by itself, have any impact on the government's ability to pay benefits." No impact: The lockbox, the balances, the little pieces of paper, amount to nothing.
So that when Jack Lew tells you that there are trillions in this lockbox that keep the system solvent until 2037, he is perpetrating a fiction certified as such by his own OMB. What happens when you retire? Your Social Security will come out of the taxes and borrowing of that fiscal year.
Why is this a problem? Because as of 2010, the pay-as-you-go Social Security system is in the red. For decades it had been in the black, taking in more in FICA taxes than it sent out in Social Security benefits. The surplus, scooped up by the Treasury, reduced the federal debt by tens of billions. But demography is destiny. The ratio of workers to retirees is shrinking year by year. Instead of Social Security producing annual surpluses that reduce the federal deficit, it is now producing shortfalls that increase the federal deficit - $37 billion in 2010. It will only get worse as the baby boomers retire.
That's what makes this administration's claim that Social Security is solvent so cynical. The Republicans have said that their April budget will contain real entitlement reform. President Obama is preparing the ground to demagogue Social Security right through the 2012 elections. The ad writes itself: Those heartless Republicans don't just want to throw granny in the snow, they want to throw granny in the snow to solve a problem that doesn't even exist! Vote Obama.
On Tuesday, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia denounced Obama for lack of leadership on the debt. It's worse than that. Obama is showing leadership. With Lew's preposterous claim that Social Security is solvent for 26 years, Obama is preparing to lead the charge against entitlement reform as his ticket to reelection.
At a time when public school students are being forced into ever more crowded classrooms, and poor families will lose state medical benefits, New York State is paying 10 times more for state employees’ pensions than it did just a decade ago.
That huge increase is largely because of Albany’s outsized generosity to the state’s powerful employees’ unions in the early years of the last decade, made worse when the recession pushed down pension fund earnings, forcing the state to make up the difference.
Although taxpayers are on the hook for the recession’s costs, most state employees pay only 3 percent of their salaries to their pensions, half the level of most state employees elsewhere. Their health insurance payments are about half those in the private sector.
In all, the salaries and benefits of state employees add up to $18.5 billion, or a fifth of New York’s operating budget. Unless those costs are reined in, New York will find itself unable to provide even essential services.
To point out these alarming facts is not to be anti- union, or anti-worker. In recent weeks, Republican politicians in the Midwest have distorted what should be a serious discussion about state employees’ benefits, cynically using it as a pretext to crush unions.
New York does not need that sort of destructive game playing. What it needs is a sober examination of the high costs of wages and benefits, and some serious proposals to rein them in while remaining fair to hard-working government employees.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo has pursued a reasonable course, making it clear that he expects public unions to make sacrifices, starting with a salary freeze. He wants to require greater employee contributions to pensions and health benefits, with a goal of saving $450 million.
Negotiations begin this month, but so far union leaders have publicly resisted Mr. Cuomo’s proposals. If they don’t budge, Mr. Cuomo says he will have to lay off up to 9,800 workers. That would damage the state’s struggling economy. Some compromise must be found.
Here are the three most expensive areas of spending that need to be addressed:
WAGES Last April, in the midst of one of the worst financial crises that New York and the nation have ever faced, the state’s unionized workers got a 4 percent pay raise that cost $400 million. It came on top of 3 percent raises in each of the previous three years. These raises were negotiated long before the recession began, by a Legislature that routinely gave in to unions that remain among the biggest political contributors in Albany.
During the same period, many private-sector workers had their pay or hours cut. Private-sector wages in New York dropped nearly 9 percent in 2008. In 2009, Gov. David Paterson pleaded with the unions to give up the raises to help the state out of its crisis. Union leaders attacked him in corrosive television ads, and Mr. Paterson eventually caved, settling for an agreement that reduced pension payments to new employees. The deal wasn’t enough to address New York’s serious fiscal problems.
He may need to go further. Even after the current labor contract runs out on April 1, more than 50,000 workers are in line for step increases and longevity pay negotiated in that contract, which will cost about $140 million. A clause in the state labor law known as the Triborough Amendment allows contract provisions for all workers to proceed until a new contract is reached.
This clause, unique to New York, was a well-meaning attempt to give some balance to state unions, which by law are not allowed to strike and had no leverage to draw management to the table in flush years. The problem with the Triborough Amendment is that it gives the unions far less incentive to bargain, as we saw last year.
The amendment should be re-examined. Allowing the state to cut wages or benefits without a contract would be unfair, especially given the no-strike law. But the state should, at least, have the power to freeze wages and benefits once a contract runs out, which would give both sides an incentive to bargain.
PENSIONS In 2000, employee pensions cost New York State taxpayers $100 million. They now cost $1.5 billion, and will be more than $2 billion in 2014. Wall Street’s troubles are a big part of that. But so are state politics. The Legislature, ever eager to curry favor with powerful unions, added sweeteners to pensions and allowed employees to stop making contributions after 10 years.
In 2009, Albany began to recognize the deep hole it had dug. Under the state Constitution, a worker’s pension benefits cannot be cut back once granted. So under the agreement Mr. Paterson reached with the unions, a more rigorous tier was created for nonuniformed employees hired after 2009. It raised their retirement age from 55 to 62, required pension contributions every year instead of just the first 10, and capped the amount of overtime that is calculated in pension benefits.
The deal did not go far enough. New employees can still retire with full benefits at 62, while most American workers must wait until 65. They can still drive up pension payments by earning overtime in their final years, up to a $15,000 cap. And most important, they have to contribute only 3 percent of their pay to their pension; the national norm for public employees is double that.
In the next few weeks, Mr. Cuomo will propose a less-generous tier for new employees. Ideally, it will address all of these problems: pushing the full-retirement age to 65, raising employee contributions to 6 percent, and ending the use of overtime in calculating payments.
An investigation by The Times last year found that 3,700 retired public workers were getting six-figure pensions, largely because of overtime abuse, and that number is expected to grow. The system even allows workers on full pensions to double-dip and return to state employment, a practice the Legislature should end. Recently, Gannett Newspapers found more than 2,000 people collecting both state salaries and pensions.
It is also worth considering giving new employees the option to join what is known as a defined-contribution system, similar to the 401(k) plans widely in use in the private sector, and reducing the reliance on a guaranteed benefit system that has proved so ruinously expensive. The 401(k) system shifts the risk of a falling stock market to the employee instead of the state, but in the long run may be necessary to protect vital state services from economic downturns.
HEALTH INSURANCE As national health care costs have soared, the state’s payments for employees’ and retirees’ care has more than doubled in the last decade. This fiscal year, the state will pay $3 billion; that is projected to keep growing by $300 million to $400 million a year.
Health care contributions by state retirees are considerably lower than for workers in the private sector or the federal government, and will almost certainly have to be raised as baby boomers retire.
Current state employees pay 10 percent of their health insurance premiums for single policies, and 25 percent for family policies, which is roughly in line with national averages for the public sector. But it is considerably less than most private workers pay — 20 percent and 30 percent, respectively.
If the state is unable to achieve the necessary savings in wages and pensions, it may need to seek higher insurance contributions for all state workers. That benefit is not protected by the state Constitution.
Unlike Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Governor Cuomo is not trying to break the unions. He is pressing them to accept a salary freeze and a reduction in benefits for new workers. The unions need to negotiate seriously.
We are also urging the governor to rethink his pledge to cap property taxes and allow a tax surcharge on high incomes to expire at the end of this year. That would bring the state an additional $2 billion this fiscal year, and $4 billion the following year — not enough to solve the fiscal crisis, but a serious down payment.
The state’s middle-class workers will have to make real sacrifices. New York’s many wealthy residents, all of whom are benefiting substantially from a new federal tax break, should have to pay their fair share as well.
Barack Obama told Americans Saturday in his Weekly Address,
“We need a government that lives within its means.”
But, that was Saturday. Today we found out that Obama’s February deficit topped Bush’s Deficit for all of 2007.
Barack Obama tripled the national deficit in his first year in office. In his second year the deficit was again a record $1.29 Trillion. This year the deficit will be even higher. This chart was updated to reflect the recent news that the deficit this year will reach $1.65 trillion. (The Captain’s Comments)
In Febrauary the Obama Administration posted the largest monthly deficit in US history. The Washington Times reported, via Free Republic:
The federal government posted its largest monthly deficit in history in February at $223 billion, according to preliminary numbers the Congressional Budget Office released Monday morning.
That figure tops last February’s record of $220.9 billion, and marks the 29th straight month the government has run in the red — a modern record. The last time the federal government posted even a monthly surplus was September 2008, just before the financial collapse.
Last month’s federal deficit is nearly four times as large as the spending cuts House Republicans have passed in their spending bill, and is more than 30 times the size of Senate Democrats’ opening bid of $6 billion.
