If there is any doubt as to what federal bailout money is intended to purchase, the Obama administration’s behavior towards Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona is telling us plainly: The money is intended to buy political obedience and to suppress dissent.
The same will be true of federal money spent to bail us out of health care difficulties.
Greg Hitt of the WSJ explains how the Democrats are working over Chuck Grassley to get his vote on their health care plan.
I presume this is as a prelude to throwing him out on the street once he’s outlived his usefulness to them, as has happened to other GOP Senators who’ve gotten in bed with Democrats. But who knows? Maybe they’ll still respect him in the morning.
In any case, what we’re seeing, which is no surprise to some of us, is that Sen. Grassley’s vote is a lot more important to the Democrats than is Al Franken’s. They phrase it like this: “The White House and top Democrats think a bipartisan bill would give the public added confidence in the legislation…”
In other words, the Democrats have very little confidence in their health care plans. They’re pretty sure that once they’re enacted, it will be necessary to lower expectations, just as has happened with the Stimulus Bill.
Remember when the stimulus was urgent and important? Now we’re being told that patience is the thing, and that things will get worse before they get better, etc. etc.
Democrats realize that the same thing will happen with health care, which is why they need Chuck Grassley and maybe one or two other Republicans. When the program has been in operation long enough to have results the opposite of what are now being advertised, they’ll need to save their jobs by pointing to these Republicans and repeating the word “bipartisan” to their constituents.
A good way for President Obama to exhort Africans to rid themselves of corruption would be to lead by example. He could start by being more open with Congressional investigators about the firing of watchdog Gerald Walpin.
The first African-American president came to the continent of his father to exhort Africans on Saturday to rid themselves of corruption, embrace democracy and move from the grand, often violent, struggles of liberation and tribalism to the quieter, more potent movement of stability and economic growth.
URL here.
Taking $540 billion out of the private sector and turning it over to the government? That’s not a wealth tax. It’s a tax on all of us. It may hit the wealthy more directly than it hits the rest of us, but that’s small comfort.
WSJ item:
House Health Bill Relies on Wealth Tax
House Democrats plan to pay for their health-care legislation with a big tax increase on wealthy households, aiming to raise $540 billion over the next decade.
Interesting. Page one of the WSJ says, “U.S. Rethinks How Best to Pay Pros. I wondered how anyone could possibly know what the U.S. was thinking, so I clicked on the article. There I learned that the page one headline had lied to us. Instead of the U.S., it’s the White House that’s thinking these thoughts. (“White House Rethinks How Best to Pay the Pros.”)
That’s kind of what I suspected.
Actually, I’d rather leave it up to the U.S., or more specifically, to the hundreds of millions of people who have an even greater number of factors to consider in evaluating the services of these pros. The Obama administration may have a lot of intelligent people, but if these people think they are intelligent enough to design pay incentive systems for these professions, they are not nearly as smart as they think they are.
But if they think they can handle the job, maybe they should first prove it. They could start by designing and codifying an incentive pay system for the members of the administration.
Hah. I thought that was an original idea until I read to the end of the article.
NYT headline: “President Pushes Health Plan as an Economic Boon“
Sure. And if I tore my house down and sold the lumber and other materials, that would be a good way for me to earn some extra income. Really, this stuff is worth money. There are some old oak 4x4s, for example, that woodworkers would love to have.
I didn’t know a national politician could be capable of writing something this good. Bob Dole had a sharp wit, and also did heroic work in saving our country from nationalized health care in the 90s. But this guy might be able to top Dole on both counts. And he’s from my home state, too.
I’ll probably find some things about Thaddeus G. McCotter that I don’t like, but for now I am just enjoying the fact that an elected politician can do this.
Oh, and he has also re-motivated me to learn Russian well enough to read Dostoevsky in the original. I’ve been spending a few minutes each evening reading some Tolstoi — in a bilingual edition because I need the help of the translation much of the time. In other words, I have a long ways to go. But after reading McCotter I don’t know if I can wait for that before reading more about the Grand Inquisitor.
In the weekend WSJ, Gerard Baker tries mightily to raise the double standard. The scene might not make quite as good a monument as the statue of the soldiers raising the flag on Iowa Jima, but it ought to count for something in the journalism profession.
The article is titled Sex Americana. Subheadline: “Infidelity is no longer a career-killer for politicians. Bur weirdness, mendacity and ineptitude just might be.” The article is of course about Sen. Mark Sanford. (Why that topic rates a full page on the front of the Weekend Journal, and the firing of Gerald Walpin does not, deserves a front-page article all its own.)
Especially since the Clinton days, the media have a hard time hounding someone out of office for marital infidelity. They need an angle to show why this one should go, while in the case of the other guy we need to move on so he can stay. And Baker thinks he has found one:
For all the talk of yet another politician dragged down by an uncontrollable libido, it may well be the sheer strangeness of Mr. Sanford’s behavior, rather than his original sin, that will do him the most political harm.
Though adultery was, and still is perhaps for a minority of voters, an automatic disqualification for political office, the fact is that the moral rules by which American politicians are judged are complex and changing.
There you have it. According to Baker, Sanford didn’t follow the usual pattern:
There was, for once, no adoring wife, standing by her man, gazing dewy-eyed at the flawed hero. There was no attempt by the sinner to explain his sin in artfully phrased self-exonerations; no references to some inner demon, an abusive father, an addictive personality or the indescribable pressures of working so hard for the good of the American people.
Therefore, goes the innuendo, Sanford needs to go because he is weird.
To tell the truth, the weirdness is one of the things I liked about this whole affair — especially the part where Sanford was out of touch for several days. We need more of that in our executive officers.
As to the apology in front of the cameras, I didn’t see it and don’t plan to watch it on YouTube, either. My entertainment comes from mocking the newspaper coverage, which hardly leaves time for watching the actual events the professional journalists are writing about. But Dorothy Rabinowitz saw it, and she didn’t seem to think it was weird at all, as such things go. To her it was the same old, same old:
We can now add the sad-eyed Gov. Mark Sanford, making his tearful public confessional, to the galaxy of similar fallen stars we have seen in this state before. The question no one has ever answered is how they all fell into the grip of the same delusion: namely, that the way to retrieving dignity is to go before the microphones to issue craven apologies to a list of purported victims.
So she seems not to have seen the same apology that Gerard Baker saw. But maybe Baker isn’t even convinced by his own innuendo, because towards the end he seems to have changed his mind about what it might take to get Sanford booted:
[He] seems to have spent state money on furthering the affair. If anything undoes him, it will be that.
Well, yes, that would do it. But I suppose if we’re going to be concerned about how state money is spent, we might also have to be concerned about the abuses that Gerald Walpin was trying to stop, and we couldn’t have that now, could we? Better to stick with the weirdness angle.
The Times implies, without quite saying it, both that it approves of Obama’s evasions (“the United States must take special care”) and that it would approve if he took a different approach (“he may have to speak out more forcefully”). It’s hard to know whether to describe this as a posture of total deference to the president or of complete indifference to the underlying subject.
When Obama’s first stimulus bill was making its way through Congress, we kept hearing about “shovel ready” projects that could get started right away. Then it turned out there weren’t so many such projects.
But now we see that some projects truly are shovel ready.
Last night the scandal involving the firing of federal watchdog Gerald Walpin made it onto the front page of Google News, though not to the very top. In the wee hours of the morning you could find it, not on the front page, but pretty high up if you clicked on U.S. news. Around 9 a.m. EDT it was 19th on U.S. news, and now it’s not there at all. It looks like the news media have been burying it as fast as possible.
There you have it. That story was shovel ready.