The early-morning paramilitary-style raids on citizens’ homes were conducted by law enforcement officers, sometimes wearing bulletproof vests and lugging battering rams, pounding on doors and issuing threats. Spouses were separated as the police seized computers, including those of children still in pajamas. Clothes drawers, including the children’s, were ransacked, cellphones were confiscated and the citizens were told that it would be a crime to tell anyone of the raids.
Some raids were precursors of, others were parts of, the nastiest episode of this unlovely political season, an episode that has occurred in an unlikely place. This attempted criminalization of politics to silence people occupying just one portion of the political spectrum has happened in Wisconsin, which often has conducted robust political arguments with Midwestern civility.
Category: US politics
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No comments on Justice, Milwaukee County style
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If you talk to college students about making conservatism “cool,” as the Daily Signal did, this apparently is what you get:
This past weekend, the Republican National Committee sent its chairman, Reince Priebus, to North Carolina to rally college voters, a demographic historically elusive to the GOP. The hope is the effort could make a difference in the state’s competitive U.S. Senate race.
Some 30 or so college students, most representing NC State, walked across the street to attend a Saturday rally at state party headquarters in Raleigh.
In the interest of getting less-biased data, The Daily Signal spoke later that night to young adults who didn’t attend the rally. …
‘How You Frame the Message’
Matthew Cobb identifies as “very conservative.”
Cobb, a senior political science major from Goldsboro, N.C., labels most college students in his public policy class as “Marxist leftists.”
Yet Cobb has a problem with the Republican Party.
“I feel like most people agree with conservative values, but don’t like the conservative brand,” Cobb says.
Cobb, eating with his hometown friends at the Chipotle on Hillsborough Street—the main artery running through the NC State campus—says Republicans have let Democrats position the GOP as out of touch and uncool to millennial voters.
Larry Sampson, also a senior from Goldsboro, shares his friend’s views.
“It’s a matter of how you frame the message,” Sampson says. “Republicans don’t do enough to combat the negative image. There’s a perception that Republicans are racist, and they just take it. They need to be on the attack more.”
‘Need to Go Out and Argue’
Sampson, who is black, says that for Republicans to control their message, they must be visible on issues and with communities that they normally wouldn’t confront.
He admires the work of Sen. Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican, who has courted black Americans.
Paul recently met with black leaders in Ferguson, Mo., which dominated headlines over the summer after a white police officer shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown, who was black.
Paul has endorsed an overhaul of the nation’s criminal justice system that he hopes would make it easier for nonviolent criminals to reintegrate into society.
“Republicans are scared of confrontation,” Sampson says. “The only way to change someone’s mind is to say, ‘Look, here is what I am offering.’ Sometimes you just need to go out and argue with people.”
Sampson and his friends say the easiest perception Republicans can control is how “cool” they are.
Justin Walker, a recent college graduate, works as a mechanic. He says being cool has become the biggest selling point for Democrats to young voters.
“A lot of their information is not true, but they are cool,” explains Walker, who identifies as an independent libertarian.
Republicans just need to try harder, Sampson says.
“They need to hire a style guru,” he says. “You see conservatives show up to public events in tri-cornered hats. We get it, we’re conservative. But we need to be the most stylish people at the table.”
‘A Way to Be Pragmatic’
Many of those interviewed come from conservative families that instilled traditional values. But some say Republicans must be flexible on certain issues, to match changes in society.
Same-sex marriage and abortion are the two touchiest subjects for these conservative students.
Court rulings overturning current state laws have made same-sex marriage, at least for now, legal in the majority of states.
“The government should get out of the marriage business,” Sampson says. “If a church lets you get married, that’s the church’s business. With social issues, there’s a way to be pragmatic about it–to make sure everyone is respected.”
Justin Baird, an NC State freshman from Garner, volunteers at GOP events. He comes from a conservative background and says he plans to vote for Tillis “because he matches my views.”
But those views are related to the economy, not social issues.
“I am more concerned with economic issues,” Baird says. “A candidate’s views on social issues wouldn’t impact my vote as much.”
David and Jennifer Curley, siblings from Charlotte, say they vote based on the completeness of a candidate’s conservatism.
“I support conservatives on economic and social issues,” says David Curley, a junior who voted for Mitt Romney for president in 2012 and will support Tillis on Nov. 4.
‘Spending Less Money Is Good’
Just like most Americans, students worry most about what’s closest to home: the economy.
Jerry Jones, a recent college graduate, is the most reserved in the group of friends eating at Chipotle.
He has a degree, but he frets about his job prospects.
“I’m concerned about the economy,” says Jones, who votes independently and is undecided about the Tillis-Hagan race. “There’s too much government regulations and not enough job creation.”
Walker, the independent libertarian and Jones’s friend, says he thinks Republicans fall on the correct side of the economic debate.
Republicans just don’t do a good enough job of communicating their message, Walker says, because they’re too busy playing defense on other issues.
“Republicans need to do a better job of selling the economic aspect to young people,” Walker says. “Because most people in general believe spending less money is good.”
This piece makes one of those skeptical expressions break out over my face. For one thing, college students have the historically worst percentage of voter turnout. Frankly, people in the generation older than them — people with children, homes and retirement investments — aren’t always very happy to live in the same place with helicopter voters, college students who vote in elections and then blow out of town, leaving the mess their votes caused for others to clean up.
The issue that politicians have tried to bring up to get the new-voter vote is the cost of college and student debt. Democrats claim the issue is the fault of not sending enough government money to colleges and students. Republicans claim the problem is the fault of colleges spending too much money, particularly on things that are not really about most people’s understanding of education, such as fancy dormitories and student recreational and athletic facilities. Colleges in turn claim they’re building buildings because they have to to attract new students in an area of a diminishing student-age population.
That issue nicely sums up the liberal-vs.-conservative divide. Liberals say: More money! Conservatives say: Spend less. Which sounds more fun? The liberal point of view, of course, particularly because it involves spending money from somewhere else besides you.
The minimum wage is another issue, since most minimum-wage workers are high school and college students. Everyone wants more money from their employer. Few people think about the implications of raising wages 40 to 100 percent more than an employee is worth to his or her employer, such as 40 to 100 percent higher unemployment among the high school- and college-age population.
This is where someone writing on this subject is obligated to repeat the statement attributed to Winston Churchill that if you’re not a liberal at 20 you have no heart, but if you’re not a conservative when you’re 30 (or 40 depending on your quote provider) you have no brain. Being liberal will always be more fun-sounding than being conservative, until you survey the wreckage of a couple of generations of the liberal mindset bringing us such non-fun things as multiple generations of families on welfare and government sucking the life out of the economy, and as a result your not having the opportunities your parents had.
Back to that “cool” thing: At the risk of equating life with high school, being “cool” isn’t something you can wake up one day and become. A childhood of wanting to be cool, and never being cool, taught me that either you’re cool, or you’re not, and once you’re out of high school no one cares, and should care, about being cool or popular. Except, of course, politicians, whose continued sucking of the tax dollar — I mean, continuing to serve in public office — depends on being more popular then their opponent.
One issue that plagues conservatives in their struggle for coolness is that being a conservative requires frequent use of one word whose letters are found in the word “conservative” — the word “no.” No, you can’t spend more money than you have, or can generate. No, spending more money on something does not make it automatically better. No, giving minimum-wage employees a pay increase they haven’t earned through better work is not going to make the economy better. No, you should not be able to ingest whatever controlled substance you feel like using. No, the world is not a nice place filled with good people who only have good intentions.
This is why in every workplace the least popular employee is the person whose job involves the word “no.” That can be the boss, that can be a person underneath the boss who has the “no” role (I’ve worked for that person), or that can be someone in the business office or who has accounting responsibilities.
Remember Chris Matthews’ observation a decade ago that the Republican Party is the “daddy party” and the Democratic Party is the “mommy party.” Conservatism is about tradition and values of long standing. New things are usually more cool than old, until you realize that new is not necessarily better, and change may be inevitable, but positive change is not.
Parents know that children need limits, though they do not generally want limits. No one likes to be told they cannot do something, or have to do something they don’t want to do. That, however, is reality. It’s hard for me to grasp how that fact is ever going to become popular or cool.
A lot of what attracts people to politics is not the issues, but the person on top. Baby Boomers had John F. Kennedy. My generation had Ronald Reagan. The generation that followed may have been motivated by Bill Clinton, and young Democrats today have Barack Obama. (Which helps explain how screwed up our country is.)
Here’s another one of those uncool facts: The biggest flaw of Wisconsin’s “Progressive Movement” then and the liberal ethos today is that they seek to change human nature, which is immutable. Good and evil exist both in the world and in all of us. That’s why human beings need law and people to enforce it, as well of rules of society. Personal freedom sounds great until someone else’s personal freedom infringes on yours, or, for that matter, collective expressions of personal freedom cause real damage to society. As has been said numerous times before now, the facts of life are fundamentally conservative.
You may have noticed in the Daily Signal piece the divide between conservatives and “conservatarians,” who are conservative on economic issues and libertarian on social issues. This isn’t just a problem attracting young people to vote Republican; it’s a problem attracting people, period, to vote Republican. The younger you are, the more likely you are to know, for instance, people who smoke marijuana without it controlling their lives, or people in same-sex relationships, or women who have had abortions.
No one has a good handle on how to get past that issue, because at the heart of every political philosophy not named “libertarian” and, for that matter, every religion (and parenthood too) is the desire to control other people’s behavior. I think Republicans need to find the common ground of economic conservatism, because all Republicans (except Dale Schultz) agree on that issue. To me, the issues that are important to social conservatives are really not things about which government can do much; you have to change the culture to, for instance, reduce the number of abortions.
Improving communication, however, is always worthwhile, because communication is never as good as it should be. The downside of conservatives and Republicans migrating to Rush Limbaugh and Fox News is that listening to your own views diminishes your ability to counter the bad, illogical yet heartfelt arguments of Democrats and liberals. (I’d argue the converse as well with liberals and MSNBC, but why help them out?) Besides the cause of self-promotion, I agree to appear on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Friday Week in Review (including tomorrow at 8 a.m.), even though I am positive that most listeners disagree with me, because the views of non-liberals and non-Madisonians need to be heard.
The first thing you have to do to reach college-age people, speaking from my experience of having been one myself, is to not be condescending. (The second verse of Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” begins with “Oh, you’re so condescending …”) Conservative arguments should rely on facts and logic, particularly when trying to engage the brains of people whose brains are being engaged sitting in a classroom every weekday.
It also depends a great deal on the messenger. Reagan was a great messenger of the conservative message, even though he was old enough to be our grandfather. Optimism always convinces more than pessimism, even though a pessimistic worldview avoids disappointment. The age of college is the last chance we have to be idealistic before the real world hits after graduation, and candidates and causes need to appeal to that, while following the high school advice: “be yourself.”
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Former Wisconsin Gov. Anthony Earl was occasionally referred to in the media as the “Velcro governor” — everything bad that happened during his term stuck to him.
The contrast was to both Ronald Reagan, referred to as the Teflon president, and Earl’s successor, Tommy Thompson, once called in print “Teflon Tommy,” where nothing bad ever stuck to them.
Michael Goodwin suggests that Barack Obama is the federal alternative to Earl, except that Obama got reelected and Earl did not:
Chalk it up to karma, fate or bad luck. Whatever you call it, the Ebola scare is proof that Bad Things Happen to Bad Presidents.
The morphing of what is a single case into near panic is, according to medical experts, unwarranted. They point out that, so far, one person from Liberia died in a Texas hospital and two nurses who treated him got sick. Period, end of panic.
In rational and medical terms, they may be right. But their calculations omit another factor. It’s the X factor.
In this case, X stands for trust.
President Obama has spent six years squandering it, and the administration’s confusion, contradictions and mistakes on Ebola fit the pattern. This is how he rolls.
Don’t worry, there’s no chance of an outbreak, they said. Then it was, Oops, we must rethink all procedures for handling cases. Then there was no worry about a “wide” outbreak, yet quarantines for lots of people.
The irrational fear of an alien pathogen is fueled by rational suspicion of an incompetent and dishonest government. How did the so-called experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention give Nurse No. 2 permission to travel by air, even though she had a mild fever?
That’s a great question — if only the CDC would answer it. “I have not seen the transcript of the conversation,” was Director Thomas Frieden’s lame answer.
Meanwhile, the most obvious move, a travel ban from affected countries, is rejected with unpersuasive claims about the need to get aid workers to Africa. It looks and smells like political correctness searching for logic.
There isn’t any logic, so bet your hazmat suit a ban will happen soon. It’ll be one way for the new Ebola czar to make a mark.
But it will take a miracle worker to restore Barack Obama’s credibility. While there are many things to say about his tenure, the one thing you cannot say is that the nation trusts him.
Poll after poll, on subject after subject, show a collapse. Consistently now, a majority of Americans say Obama is not trustworthy. Most think he’s a failure, many say he is incompetent and the vast bulk — 70 percent in some cases — says his key policies are wrong for America.
He is so unpopular that members of his own party don’t want to be seen with him, lest his failures spawn a political plague.
Against that backdrop, any emergency will cause the national yips. The rise of the Islamic State and its beheadings of two Americans did it, and now Ebola is doing it.
As “Ghostbusters” asked, who you gonna call? Certainly not this White House.
Credibility is like a reservoir or a bank account. You make deposits in good times so you can make withdrawals when you need them.
Obama never made the deposits. It’s been all downhill since Day One. He blames others for failures, and when cornered or ambitious, reaches for a lie. Routinely.
The claim that “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” is a defining example, but hardly the only one. Don’t forget “shovel-ready jobs” to justify a trillion-dollar boondoggle. Or there’s “not a smidgen” of corruption at the IRS. And Benghazi was caused by an anti-Muslim video.
His lies are legion and now he’s like the boy who cried wolf. When he makes a national appeal on Ebola, the trust tank is empty.
Maybe, though, “karma, fate or bad luck” is punishing not Obama, but this country for having a majority of voters stupid or unwise enough to vote for Obama twice.
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Jim Geraghty observes Oregon, a “progressive” state run by Democrats since forever, with Democratic Gov. John Kitzhaber favored for reelection over Republican Dennis Richardson despite scandals involving Kitzhaber’s fiancée, Cylvia Hayes:
Greetings from Portland, Oregon — the state with the most egregiously failing Obamacare exchange in the country, now set to reelect the governor whose administration oversaw that disaster and wasted all that money. …
Richardson probably has to try to make the most of the stories surrounding Hayes, as it’s undoubtedly the biggest news to come out of the Oregon governor’s mansion in years. But the more salacious aspects probably generate some sympathy for Governor Kitzhaber; his fiancée hid a criminal past from him.
But it seems like relatively small potatoes compared to a state exchange site that never worked properly, never enrolled a single citizen online (everything had to be done with pen-and-paper), and cost, oh, $305 million.
And the bad news for Oregon’s attempt at health insurance just keeps piling up.
A Klamath Falls woman who applied for health coverage through Cover Oregon says the insurance exchange mailed her the personal information of other applicants.
Ann Migliaccio told The Associated Press that she received documents last week containing the names and birth dates of two applicants from Hillsboro. She says the documents did not include Social Security numbers.
This is the 18th low-level security breach in the past six months, Cover Oregon officials said. They say the information inadvertently shared in these breaches included addresses, names, dates of birth and internal Cover Oregon IDs, but no Social Security numbers.
And piling up:
More than 12,000 people who purchased policies through Cover Oregon could owe money at tax time because of errors in tax credits issued by the health exchange.
The figure is updated from an estimate of about 800 people that exchange officials shared with the Legislature last month, only to realize they’d got it wrong.
A more recent internal staff estimate released under Oregon Public Records Law found errors in 12,772 policies, or 38 percent of those who received tax credits.
Portland intrigues me. If you are one of those despairing conservatives who thinks that the United States of America is caught in an inescapable whirlpool of progressive-driven decline, our future is probably going to look something like Portland.
And at first glance — or at least a visit, the progressive utopia of Portland has its upsides. The ludicrously restrictive zoning laws kept farmland close to the city, so there’s always plenty of locally-grown food, produce, and so on for the run-amok foodie culture. There’s plenty of green space and parks. (Our old friend Mark Hemingway wrote one of the definitive takedowns of modern Portland.)
But the upshot of Oregon’s failed insurance exchange, and the seeming lack of any lasting public outrage, is the confirmation that a key element of modern progressivism is never, ever, ever getting upset about government spending if it’s done with the right intentions.
What’s revealing is how “progressive” does not necessarily mean “follows politics or news coverage of government at any level.” There’s a lot of “set it and forget it” Leftism going around. Because you would figure that any self-designated True Believer in the Power of Government to Improve People’s Lives would be breathing fire over something like this. Because all Cover Oregon’s debacle did was make a lot of money for Oracle, and whoever got the contract for those silly singing television commercials. Think about it — big, incompetent government, paying a fortune to a big, incompetent or insufficiently-competent corporate contractor, and most of the lefties in Oregon yawn or just shake their head in mild disapproval.
The formula here — a governing class, cozy with certain big, corporate contractors, coupled with a tuned-out electorate that reflexively elects and reelects the proper names from the progressive class — turns representative government into a giant con. The funny thing is that the stereotypical leftist from, say, the 1960s was extremely suspicious of the government, but that suspicion focused upon the military, the “military-industrial complex”, the intelligence agencies, the police . . . the spiritual and ideological children of those 1960s liberals walk around with enormous faith that the government knows what it is doing and it can be trusted with ever-more amounts of tax money.
Isn’t there any suspicion left over for state health and human services and insurance administrators? Any anger to spare for governors remaining oblivious at best to serious problems within their administration?
Some of these folks can summon skepticism about childhood vaccines, but not the Obamacare insurance mandate.
This is why you should vote for no Democrat Nov. 4. Democrats obviously don’t believe in competent government. The Doyle administration, and before that the Tony Earl administration (which ran Wisconsin so well that Wisconsin was the last state in the U.S. to recover from the early 1980s recession) is proof.
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The Independent Journalism Review notices that the New York Times had to sort of correct itself from a decade ago:
It wasn’t the only justification for the Iraq War, but it certainly has often been held up as the biggest. Although it has been claimed before that chemical weapons had been found in Post-Hussein Iraq, due to new documents uncovered by a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the New York Times is now reporting it in a piece, “The Secret Casualties of Iraq’s Abandoned Chemical Weapons.”
While various news sources had reported the finding before, all assertions that Hussein had chemical weapons in some capacity (weapons-grade or not – they had been hidden from U.N. inspectors) were largely scoffed at as nothing more than supercilious bunk. Well, behold…
The news report from the Times explains the now not-secret revelation that there had been WMDs in Iraq, after all:
From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule.
In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
The NY Times even published a map of all the cases when American military troops were exposed to the formerly ‘non-existent’ weapons of mass destruction:
Graphic via New York Times. As The Blaze’s Oliver Darcy pointed out, the WMD discoveries were kept partly hidden from Congress.
Retired Army major Jarrod Lampier, who was there when the U.S. military found 2,400 nerve agent rockets in 2006 — the largest chemical weapons discovery of the war – said of the finding’s import, “‘Nothing of significance’ is what I was ordered to say.”
Similar to what the Pentagon is now saying about climate change, because the Obama administration ordered the military to exaggerate something that has absolutely nothing to do with national defense.
Back to Iraq: The other cliché you heard from liberals for nearly a quarter-century is “No Blood for Oil!” Oil is a form of energy. Energy is only the thing that runs everything in an economy, including the military. At no point, during Operation Desert Storm or Operation Enduring Freedom, did I have a problem with the rationale of protecting oil from Saddam Hussein. If OPEC was crushed, I would be one of the happiest people on the planet.
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You may read claims that the National Institutes of Health doesn’t have enough federal money to be able to deal with the Ebola virus, whether or not it becomes a threat in this country beyond now.
The Daily Mail reports on why you should be skeptical (or as the Brits would spell it, sceptical) about those claims:
The $30 billion U.S. National Institutes of Health blamed tightening federal budgets on Monday for its inability to produce an Ebola vaccine, but a review of its grant-making history in the last 10 years has turned up highly unusual research that redirected precious funds away from more conventional public health projects.
The projects included $2.4 million to develop ‘origami’ condoms designed with Japanese folding paper in mind, and $939,000 to find out that male fruit flies prefer to romance younger females because the girl-flies’ hormone levels drop over time.
Other winners of NIH grants consumed $325,000 to learn that marriages are happier when wives calm down more quickly during arguments with their husbands, and $257,000 to make an online game as a companion to first lady Michelle Obama’s White House garden.
The agency also spent $117,000 in taxpayers’ grant dollars to discover that most chimpanzees are right-handed.
The same group of scientists determined, at a cost of $592,000 for NIH, that chimps with the best poop-throwing skills are also the best communicators. But while flinging feces might get another primate’s attention in the wild, they discovered, it’s not much good in captivity. …
Dr. Francis Collins, the head doc at NIH, complained bitterly on Sunday that budget ‘cuts’ were to blame for his agency’s failure to produce a vaccine in time to fend off this year’s Ebola virus epidemic.
Collins blamed a ’10-year slide in research support’ in a Huffington Post interview.
But overall NIH funding sits at $30.15 billion this year – up from $17.84 billion in 2000.
NIAID has seen its budget grow by 220 per cent over the same stretch of years.
It took a different NIH department to see the value in giving a University of Missouri team $548,000 to find out if 30-something partiers feel immature after they binge drink while people in their mid-20s don’t.
‘We interpreted our findings to suggest that, at 25, drinking is more culturally acceptable,’ declared a doctoral student who coordinated the government-funded field work.
A generous $610,000 paid for a 120-nation survey to determine how satisfied people in different countries are with their lives.
A staggering $1.1 million funded research into how athletes perceive their in-game surroundings, including one Purdue University study that discovered golfers can putt 10 per cent better if they imagine the hole is bigger.
And $832,000 went to learn if it was possible to get uncircumcised South African tribesmen into the habit of washing their genitals after having sex.
The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan group that advises federal lawmakers, reported in 2011 that NIH’s funding ‘has grown significantly over the past 15 years,’ including a $10 billion increase solely from President Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus plan.
‘In 2010, over half of all nondefense discretionary spending for health research and development went to NIH,’ CBO noted.
The agency recommended a drastic cut in NIH’s funding, citing a 2009 Government Accountability Office report that ‘found gaps in NIH’s ability’ to keep tabs on what happened to its outgoing grant money.
‘Some costs could probably be reduced or eliminated,’ the CBO concluded, ‘without harming high-priority research.’
One of those candidates might be a $484,000 study to determine if hypnosis can reduce hot flashes in postmenopausal women. If that doesn’t work, NIH also spent $294,000 to try yoga.
This laundry list demonstrates why claims that the government doesn’t have enough money for whatever the bureaucrats or their politicians are requesting …
… should be disbelieved until proven.
It’s not just about spending that should be outrageous to anyone. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal wrote for Politico about the Centers for Disease Control:
In a paid speech last week, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton attempted to link spending restraints enacted by Congress—and signed into law by President Obama—to the fight against Ebola. Secretary Clinton claimed that the spending reductions mandated under sequestration “are really beginning to hurt,” citing the fight against Ebola: “The CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] is another example on the response to Ebola—they’re working heroically, but they don’t have the resources they used to have.”
Her argument, like those made by others, misses the point. In recent years, the CDC has received significant amounts of funding. Unfortunately, however, many of those funds have been diverted away from programs that can fight infectious diseases, and toward programs far afield from the CDC’s original purpose.
Consider the Prevention and Public Health Fund, a new series of annual mandatory appropriations created by Obamacare. Over the past five years, the CDC has received just under $3 billion in transfers from the fund. Yet only 6 percent—$180 million—of that $3 billion went toward building epidemiology and laboratory capacity. Especially given the agency’s postwar roots as the Communicable Disease Center, one would think that “detecting and responding to infectious diseases and other public health threats” warrants a larger funding commitment.
Instead, the Obama administration has focused the CDC on other priorities. While protecting Americans from infectious diseases received only $180 million from the Prevention Fund, the community transformation grant program received nearly three times as much money—$517.3 million over the same five-year period.
The CDC’s website makes clear the objectives of community transformation grants. The program funds neighborhood interventions like “increasing access to healthy foods by supporting local farmers and developing neighborhood grocery stores,” or “promoting improvements in sidewalks and street lighting to make it safe and easy for people to walk and ride bikes.” Bike lanes and farmer’s markets may indeed help a community—but they would do little to combat dangerous diseases like Ebola, SARS or anthrax. …
But, as the old saying goes, to govern is to choose. Unfortunately, this administration seems intent on not choosing, instead trying to insinuate Washington into every nook and cranny of our lives. It’s a misguided and dangerous gambit, for two reasons. First, a federal government with nearly $18 trillion in debt has no business spending money on non-essential priorities. Second, a government that attempts to do too much will likely excel at little. And the federal government has one duty above all: To protect the health, safety and well-being of its citizens. …
In her speech, Secretary Clinton said, “too often our health care debates are clouded by ideology, rather than illuminated by data.” I couldn’t agree more. But in this case, the data show not that the CDC faced a lack of funding, but misplaced priorities for that funding based on choices made by the Obama administration.
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Jim Geraghy is writing to you:
You work hard. You pay what you think is more than enough in taxes. The economy hasn’t really felt good since 2008, but you manage to get by. If you’ve got a 401(k), it’s grown in the past few years — but the real-estate bubble burned you, and the dot-com bubble burned you before that. You know that nice sum in your 401(k) could plummet without warning. What you would really like is a better job, so you could feel better about the amount of income coming in every month.
You’re trying to play all of your roles — worker, parent, sibling, child, friend, neighbor, parishioner, and somehow find time to take care of yourself so you don’t keel over from a heart attack. It’s tough. Time is at a premium. Speaking of which, your insurer announced your premiums are going up again. You’ve been thinking of trading in the old car, but you’re not so sure you could handle new car payments and the higher premiums.
But you get up every day and you take care of everything that needs care, because that’s who you are and what you do. You get it done. You take some pride in that. You look at your loved ones, your friends and neighbors, your colleagues, and you know that they know that they can count on you.
You kind of wonder about everybody else, though.
What’s with the Centers for Disease Control? They keep telling you “we’re going to stop Ebola in its tracks here” and then there are new cases. The NIH Director seems to think he’s reassuring us by telling us “the system worked” as we learn about new infections. Then there’s that enterovirus 68 floating around, killing kids. Terrifying, heartbreaking. Hey, guys, maybe a little less time studying gun control and a little more time spent on, you know, disease control? That’s your job.
What’s going on with everybody who’s supposed to be protecting us? First Obama says “We don’t have a strategy yet” — why not? Don’t we spend billions, even trillions, on national-security agencies, intelligence agencies, and a Department of Defense? Isn’t somebody in those vast, expensive organizations supposed to come up with a strategy? Then he said “they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria” — isn’t that their job? Wasn’t anybody watching?
Now they’re saying the airstrikes over in Iraq and Syria aren’t doing enough, and the Islamic State is knocking on the door of Baghdad. Sunday morning, National Security Adviser Susan Rice said we’re not reassessing our strategy. Well, shouldn’t somebody? Just in case? Doesn’t anybody over there believe in having a Plan B? Isn’t that the job of a national-security adviser?
How the hell did the top guys at the Department of Veterans Affairs not know about the waitlists and that veterans were dying, waiting for care? That’s their job.
How the heck did the federal government AND so many state governments manage to spend so much money and not build insurance-exchange web sites that worked? That was their job.
The president keeps insisting that test scores are up and that college attendance is up, when it’s actually been the opposite. Obviously, the public schools aren’t good enough for his kids. He promised the moon when it came to improving schools back in 2008. Wasn’t that his job?
In your life, failure is not an option. If you don’t pick up the kids from school, they’re stuck there. If you don’t go shop for groceries, the kids don’t eat. All around you, every day, you see things that have to get done, and you do them. You don’t tell the kids, ‘well, our intentions were good. We tried. We had some glitches.” You don’t get to blame your predecessor or the opposition party. You don’t get to tell them, or your spouse, or your boss, that the situation is the same, as normal, and that they’re “just noticing now because of social media.”
Where is this “get it done” attitude in Washington? Every time you turn around, it’s some new excuse. Americans do not accept this kind of incompetence and unaccountability in their personal and professional lives. Why should they accept it from Washington?
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Personal Liberty reports:
New polling data suggest that anger at President Barack Obama and a growing distrust of big government could spell trouble for Democratic lawmakers heading into the 2014 midterm elections.
A new Gallup poll reports that 32 percent of likely voters will head to the polls this fall to send a message of opposition to the president and his Democratic colleagues. Just 20 percent say that they will go to the polls to signal support.
Opposition to the president is at a 16-year high. For comparison, opposition to the commander in chief is 13 points higher than during Bill Clinton’s sex scandal and 2 points higher than George Bush’s final year.
Gallup reports:
A majority of Republican registered voters, 58 percent, say they will be sending a message of opposition to Obama with their vote this fall. In contrast, 38 percent of Democratic voters say they will support the president. Rather than supporting Obama, most Democrats, 53 percent, say they will not be sending a message with their vote.
Democrats are a bit less likely now (38 percent) than in 2010 (45 percent) to say they will be sending a message of support to Obama, while Republican opposition to the president is the same.
Meanwhile, numbers from The Associated Press show that more than half of Americans feel that the government is too incompetent to handle economic and other problems facing the nation.
Just 2 percent of respondents reported that they are “extremely confident” that Washington can fix the economy.
When it comes to protecting Americans from terror threats, people on both sides of the political divide said they are losing faith.
“Democrats tend to express more faith in the government’s ability to protect them than do Republicans,” the AP reported. “Yet even among Democrats, just 27 percent are confident the government can keep them safe from terrorist attacks. Fewer than 1 in 5 say so on each of the other issues, including climate change.”
I saw this on Facebook with this added comment:
Anger is something of an understatement. And it’s not reserved for 0bama; if you voted for him, I hope you end up unemployed, homeless, and on a 12 month 0bamunistCare waiting list with 6 months to live. No, I’m not wishing you ill, I’m wishing you what you voted for. The fact that the two are indistinguishable is far more a testament to your stupidity, ignorance, and irresponsibility at the polls than any malice on my part.
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Dana Milbank is the winner of this week’s Media-Can’t-See-the-Forest-for-the-Trees award:
Aspiring Republican presidential candidate Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana, scheduled a big Washington speech for Monday to condemn President Obama’s defense policy. But an unexpected competitor beat him to the punch.
Leon Panetta, in an interview with USA Today’s Susan Page published just before Jindal’s speech, criticized Obama in harsh terms that would have been dismissed as partisan sniping — if Panetta weren’t a Democrat who had served as Obama’s CIA director and secretary of defense.
Panetta criticized his former boss for having “lost his way” — allowing the power vacuum in Iraq that created the Islamic State, rejecting Panetta’s and Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s advice to arm the Syrian rebels and failing to enforce his own “red line” barring Syria’s use of chemical weapons.
The interview was timed with this week’s launch of Panetta’s book, in which he wrote that Obama “avoids the battle, complains, and misses opportunities.” Panetta also wrote of Obama’s “frustrating reticence to engage his opponents and rally support for his cause” and his tendency to rely “on the logic of a law professor rather than the passion of a leader.”
So when Jindal arrived at the conservative American Enterprise Institute on Monday morning, all he really had to do to blame Obama for the world’s woes was to quote Panetta.
“How did we get to this point?” Jindal asked. “Just ask the people who can be honest about what happened. Ask former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.”
In a news conference following the speech, I asked Jindal to elaborate. Panetta “is now the latest in a series of officials who have served in this administration coming out and saying from the inside they saw some of the dangerous mistakes this president has made,” the governor said.
George W. Bush got criticism from former advisers (Paul O’Neill, John DiIulio), as did Bill Clinton (George Stephanopoulos, Dick Morris), but this level of disloyalty is stunning, even though it is softened with praise for Obama’s intellect.
At the start of the year, Robert Gates, Obama’s first defense secretary, wrote a memoir full of criticism of Obama’s handling of Afghanistan, saying Obama made military decisions based on political considerations. Clinton, who also published a book this year, criticized Obama for rejecting her advice on Syria and mocked the “Don’t do stupid stuff” phrase used by administration officials to describe Obama’s doctrine.
The lack of message discipline is puzzling, because Obama rewards and promotes loyalists. But he’s a cerebral leader, and he may lack the personal attachments that make aides want to charge the hill for him.
Also, as MSNBC reporter Alex Seitz-Wald tweeted in response to a question I posed, Panetta, Gates and Clinton didn’t owe their careers to Obama. Clinton was a rival, Gates was a Bush holdover, and Panetta is a Democratic eminence grise. Loyalty didn’t trump book sales — or Clinton’s need to distance herself from Obama before a presidential run.
But there’s also David Axelrod, long Obama’s loyal strategist, saying on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Obama made “a mistake” in saying his economic policies will be on the ballot next month.
Obama’s most loyal mouthpiece at the moment may be Vice President Joe Biden, who in a speech at Harvard last week condemned as “inappropriate” the books by former administration officials. But having Biden speak for you is of dubious value: The vice president’s criticism of Panetta was overshadowed by loose remarks in that same speech that led Biden to apologize to the governments of Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.
Here’s an alternative explanation: Maybe Panetta thinks Obama’s weak-on-defense anti-American American foreign policy is bad for the country. Maybe Panetta is a patriot before he’s a Democrat or one of Obama’s apparatchiks.
Notice the trope that Obama (like Clinton before him) is really smart, and of course its countertrope that Republicans are dumb. Anyone with sense knows the success, or lack thereof, of your life isn’t about how smart you are, it’s about the smart decisions you make, or don’t. Slick Willie exercised horrid personal judgment. Obama exercises horrid judgment on issues that affect the lives of the American people.
This is also the sort of inside-baseball story that shows why Americans increasingly hate the news media. What is more important here — the future of our country, or who’s not being nice to whom in the White House? Milbank appears to believe that all Obama administration officials, past and present, should demonstrate slavish loyalty to their leader as Milbank does. Independent of personal ambition, that’s not how the American system is supposed to work.
Remember when liberals used to think that dissent is patriotic?
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The new issue of Wisconsin Interest magazine includes a story about a lesser known, but more immediate, funding crisis in federal entitlements — Social Security Disability Insurance.
(Spoiler alert: The crisis is not just financial.)
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 