Today (3/2/10), the Supreme Court heard arguments as to whether the 2^nd Amendment’s right for individuals “to keep and bear arms” against the federal government can be applied to the States.  The case is McDonald v. City of Chicago, and it made some news in a page one, above-the fold story in the Washington Times today (Matthew Cella, “Gun Rights Lawyer Gives Hope to Liberal Causes.”).  All conservatives want the Supreme Court to hold that the Second Amendment should be applied to state and municipal laws.

The main issue is how you link the Second Amendment to protections against the states.  (There is a long legal story here involving the Fourteenth Amendment and what is known as “incorporation doctrine.”)  The lead attorney for the “conservative” side, Alan Gura, wants the Court to let the Second Amendment operate via a particular constitutional provision – the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause –  that has been dormant for 137 years.  The Family Research Council joined an amicus brief arguing AGAINST this position saying that reviving this clause would be like Christmas-come-early for judicial activists.  One of the lead attorneys on the amicus brief, Ken Klukowski, is quoted in the Times piece:

Constitutional scholar Ken Klukowski warned that a ruling incorporating the Second Amendment based on privileges or immunities and overturning Slaughterhouse could have broad political implications.

“Slaughterhouse may be second only to Marbury v. Madison as the most impactful Supreme Court decision of all time,” he said. “It could fundamentally rewrite the nature of what goes on in this country.”

Mr. Klukowski wrote an amicus brief in support of Mr. Gura’s case filed by a handful of conservative groups, including the American Civil Rights Union (ACRU), a nonprofit organization founded by Robert B. Carleson, who was an adviser to President Reagan.

The group, whose policy board includes conservative legal heavyweights such as former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese III and former Solicitor General Kenneth W. Starr, supports incorporation of the Second Amendment through the privileges or immunities clause but asks the court not to overturn the Slaughterhouse Cases decision.

“The Privileges or Immunities Clause could be used as a source for judicial activism unlike anything America has ever seen,” the group said on its Web site.

Please take a look at our amicus brief – link provided above – to see the entire argument.

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Last week I posted a blog on President Obama’s decision to aggressively use executive power to implement his agenda in areas where his legislative agenda seems unlikely to succeed.  Today’s Washington Times editorializes on this topic (“Obama the Philosopher King: The O Force Uses Executive Power to Get around the Pesky Congress,” p. B2). In it, the paper’s editorial board notes among other things:

Exploiting executive power is nothing new for Mr. Obama. He has appointed more executive-branch policy “czars” than any of his predecessors…. But last fall, Mr. Obama pressured Democrats in the Senate to kill legislation that would have brought his czars under congressional oversight.

Mr. Obama claimed emergency powers to reshape two of the Big Three auto manufacturers. He has sought the authority to assume extraordinary powers to deal with cyber threats and purported climate change. He has used executive orders to pursue pet causes, such as EO 13502, which effectively banned nonunion labor from federal construction projects, and EO 13509, which established the Soviet-sounding Council on Automotive Communities and Workers. Even Mr. Obama’s liberal supporters have blanched at his claims of power regarding extraordinary rendition, surveillance, state secrets, signing statements and executive privilege.

So, we at FRC are not alone in noticing this alarming trend in the administration’s behavior.  Stay tuned for further developments.

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Ronald Reagan’s 99^th birthday would have been on February 6, 2011, had he lived.  Thus, it was refreshing to hear an excellent radio interview with one of America’s best economic journalists, Robert Samuelson, discussing Reagan’s greatest accomplishment – defeating the inflation that had crippled the American economy in the 1970s.  The interview on John Batchelor’s radio show (found here, 2/13/2010, 9pm-10pm) is roughly coincidental with the paperback release of Samuelson’s The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath.

Reagan allowed the Federal Reserve chief, Paul Volcker, to throw the country into a brutal recession in which unemployment reached 10.8%.  Samuelson notes that Volcker could never have achieved the defeat of inflation without the support of the sitting president.  Reagan’s approval ratings went down to 39% in 1982, but he never wavered.  Reagan realized that Jimmy Carter’s inflation had destroyed the faith of the American people in the economic-political system.  He also understood economics well enough to know that the country could not flourish with systemic inflation, so he resolved to end it even if it destroyed him politically.  This is great statesmanship, and it sets Reagan apart in a manner matched by only a few presidents.

I agree with Samuelson that this was Ronald Reagan’s signal achievement.  Had he not solved the economic crisis – there would not have been a second term and no victory in the Cold War.  Conservatism would have been completely discredited.  All those victories rested on Reagan’s economic victory and that paved the way for decades of low interest rates and low inflation.  Samuelson is absolutely correct that Reagan’s tremendous political courage and economic insight have been overlooked and trivialized.  Thus, Samuelson wrote his book, to refresh our memories lest we forget what Reagan and Volcker accomplished and lest we forget the poisonous effects of Keynesian inflation.

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A deeply worrisome article appeared in the New York Times on Saturday (2/13/10).  It has received much attention on Monday’s radio programs.  The article by Peter Baker is entitled “Obama is Making Plans to Use Executive Power for Action on Several Fronts.”  Baker tells us that the President is “preparing an array of actions using his executive power to advance energy, environmental, fiscal, and other domestic policy priorities.”  And Baker continues with this observation, “Any president has vast authority to influence policy even without legislation, through executive orders, agency rule-making and administrative fiat.”

Translation:  now that various Obama legislative (i.e., democratic) efforts have failed, it is time to force his policies on the nation through the diktat available to the head of the American federal administrative state.  Of all the items mentioned in the article, the most destructive is probably the Administration’s plan to begin regulating carbon emissions via the Environmental Protection Agency.  This will be enormously costly for the American economy, and it comes at a time when the science supporting man-made climate change is collapsing.  (See these articles as evidence: here, here, here, here and here (listed on Mark Levin’s website.)  The collapse of scientific support may provide some minimal chance that the federal courts might block or alter EPA’s rulemaking efforts, but EPA clearly has the upper hand in any litigation.  Congress needs to eliminate EPA’s authority to regulate carbon emissions until some scientific clarity emerges.

In a slightly differently category is the Administration’s apparent decision to stop enforcing the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” which is statutorily mandated and has been in effect for approximately 16 years.  It seems axiomatic that if the administration wants to change the policy, Congress needs to change the law.

The article deals at length with presidential recess appointments, and President Obama’s threat to make use of them.  The use of “holds” by members of the Senate seems to have gotten out of hand.  All that said, the appointment power is far different from unilateral executive branch lawmaking – which was never remotely considered by our Founding Fathers.  And, here, we see plans for this constitutional abuse to be taken to new levels.

America is rapidly becoming a judicial and bureaucratic oligarchy.  This institutional development is a threat conservatives and libertarians need to focus on much more seriously.  This development is even more dangerous when coupled with the crony capitalism (corporatism) that is emerging from government ownership or subsidization of American industries.  The United States is beginning to resemble the corrupt England of George III’s era where commercial monopolies were sold by the Crown drawing the ire of the American colonists and men like Adam Smith.

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Well, I checked the facts, and the Politico was correct.  I only doubted the reporting due to the massive amount of President Obama’s proposed increase in education spending.  Could it possibly be true?  Tuesday’s February 2^nd Politico column by Eamon Javers and James Hohman on the newly released proposed federal budget contained this text on one of the “Winners” – Education:

Obama calls for ramped-up education spending. Department of Education outlays would increase from $32.4 billion in 2009 to $71.5 billion in 2011. Obama puts money into a laundry list of initiatives, from a $1.6 billion increase in child care funding to making permanent the expansion of Pell Grant payouts.

He has sought to please his supporters in the powerful teachers unions by pushing to rework the unpopular parts of Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act. Now he’s trying to put $3 billion more into K-12 education generally, with up to an extra $1 billion if Congress reworks the education system in the way he wants this year.

If you look at the 2011 budget’s section for the Department of Education (pp. 63-68), go to page 68 and look for the line entitled “Total, Outlays.”  There one finds that the actual 2009 budget for the Dep’t of Education was $32.409 billion and that the projected amount for 2011 is $71.479 billion.  By my calculation that is a 121% increase in two years.

I am not an expert on direct loan programs, but on the same page the figures for disbursements increases from $100.7 billion (2009 actual) to $135.0 billion (2011 projected) – a 34% increase over two years.  This Congress wants to enact a statute to federalize the student loan programs, so the budget contains this gobbledygook comment: “This measure would then use savings to make historic investments to increase college access and success, and would lay a foundation for success for America’s youngest children.”  What does that mean?  $$,$$$,$$$,$$$.$$  Good grief.

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The New York Daily News reported last night (Thursday, 1/29/2010):

The White House ordered the Justice Department Thursday night to consider other places to try the 9/11 terror suspects after a wave of opposition to holding the trial in lower Manhattan.

The dramatic turnabout came hours after Mayor Bloomberg said he would “prefer that they did it elsewhere” and then spoke to Attorney General Eric Holder.

Well, the dam appears to be breaking on ostensibly what is the easiest of the “Jack Bauer War” issues facing the Obama Administration: that is, where to try KSM.  I say “ostensibly” because the matter of where to try KSM will not be as easy it may seem.

All this being said, there are all sorts of conflicting stories about whether or not this will happen.  See Jack Foster’s piece at NRO.

According to the Daily News’ account four options are being considered – all in New York State:  1) Governors Island (near Manhattan and Brooklyn); 2) West Point, N.Y. (U.S. Military Academy); 3) Newburgh, N.Y. (Stewart Air National Guard Base); and 4) Otisville, NY (Federal Correction Institution).

Why won’t this be so easy?  First, leaving aside Governor’s Island, these communities will go crazy in opposition.  Even Governor’s Island may not leave New Yorkers feeling warm and fuzzy.  Second, a civilian trial will still be a disaster.  Think Slobodan Milošević turning the Hague into a circus for a year.  Enormous damage will be done to the national security.  Third, the cost will still be enormous.  Fourth, what civilian will risk his or his family’s well-being to sit on the jury?  Can the jurors identity be protected?

I guess the good news is that they can always move the trial back to Guantanamo.  Didn’t KSM already plead guilty before a military commission down there and ask to be executed?  Oh, I forgot, he was given the mass-murdering-jihadist-criminal-procedure-do-over-and-mulligan.

So, how long does Eric Holder have left as Attorney General?

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Last week I wrote a blog post on Barack Obama’s conduct in what I called “Jack Bauer’s War.”  That is the war being conducted directly against the jihadists.  In the week since then we have discovered more disturbing information about the Obama administration’s performance in this conflict.  For example, Jeffrey Kuhner of the Washington Times asserted on his weekday radio show that it is now well-known that the underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was questioned for only 50 minutes before he was read his Miranda rights.  This is true.  See the Wall Street Journal article affirming these facts.

I argued that these “Jack Bauer” war issues are a political acid that are badly damaging Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.

The national security issue has been mentioned as one that Scott Brown ran on but MSM reporting has not placed it as a first-tier issue in Massachusetts.  However, in Jamie Glazov’s interview with national security attorney and former prosecutor, Andy McCarthy, in Frontpage Magazine, we read the following (my emphasis):

McCarthy: …. The Brown campaign’s internal polling told them something very interesting.  While it’s true that healthcare is what nationalized the election and riveted everyone’s attention to it, it was the national security issues that put real distance between the two candidates in the mind of the electorate—in blue Massachusetts of all places. Sen.-elect Brown was able to speak forcefully and convincingly on issues like treating our jihadist enemies as combatants rather than mere defendants, about killing terrorists and preventing terrorism rather than contenting ourselves with prosecutions after Americans have been killed, about tough interrogation when necessary to save innocent lives.  Martha Coakley, by contrast, had to try to defend the indefensible, which is Obama-style counterterrorism.  It evidently made a huge difference to voters.

Similarly, the brilliant American-Israeli columnist for the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick, picked up on this as well.  She made note of Robert Costa’s National Review interview (1/19/2010) with Eric Fehrnstrom, the Brown campaign’s senior strategist.  Fehrnstrom made the following points about the national security issue:

On the issues, “people talk about the potency of the health-care issue, but from our own internal polling, the more potent issue here in Massachusetts was terrorism and the treatment of enemy combatants,” says Fehrnstrom. Health care, he says, was helpful in fundraising, but it was the campaign’s focus on national security in the final week that he believes helped to give voters another issue to associate with Brown…. (2^nd paragraph from bottom)

Wow.  KSM’s trial in NYC; the undie bomber trial’s in Detroit; moving / releasing Gitmo prisoners.  These are wounds that won’t stop bleeding.

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I follow national security news stories pretty closely, but I have to admit to being shocked by Human Events magazine’s publication of an excerpt from a new book.  It is Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack, by Marc Thiessen.  Thiessen was a top speechwriter for President George W. Bush.  For that reason he had access to very highly classified national security documents and information.

One excerpt about information gathered from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (“KSM”) is astounding, mind-boggling:

[KSM’s] resistance is described by one senior American official as “superhuman.”  Eventually, however, the techniques work….

He begins telling his CIA de-briefers about active al Qaeda plots to launch attacks against the United States and other Western targets  He holds classes for CIA officials, using a chalkboard to draw a picture of al Qaeda’s operating structure, financing, communications, and logistics.  He identifies al Qaeda travel routes and safe havens, and helps intelligence officers make sense of documents and computer records seized in terrorist raids.   He identifies voices in intercepted telephone calls, and helps officials understand the meaning of coded terrorist communications.  He provides information that helps our intelligence community capture other high-ranking terrorists,

KSM’s questioning, and that of other captured terrorists, produces more than 6,000 intelligence reports, which are shared across the intelligence community, as well as with our allies across the world.

Perhaps I’ve been under a rock, but I never heard these details before.  I assume they are correct.

Some of the KSM information appears to have foiled an August 2006 plot to destroy seven airliners flying across the Atlantic from London-Heathrow in a revised version of KSM’s failed 1994-1995 Bojinka operation.

Top CIA officials are clear that the enhanced interrogation methods in the Bush counter-terrorism program were essential to obtaining extremely valuable, life-saving information. According to Thiessen, Obama shut the program down within 48 hours of assuming office when he signed Executive Order 13491.  That order allowed only interrogation techniques permitted in the U.S. Army Field Manual 2 22.3.  The manual does not permit water boarding, for example.

The Left and President Obama have completely misread the desires of the American people on this matter.  I put it this way:  Jack Bauer – Yes; Nation Building – No.  That is, the American people want to fight the jihadists in any manner necessary to kill and defeat them anywhere in the world.  They have never waivered on this principle, and that includes keeping Guantanamo prison open in Cuba.  It also means keeping it filled.  That said, the American people have never been keen on protracted wars of attrition, counter-insurgency, and/or nation-building – see, Iraq and Afghanistan.

To be fair, President Obama may have been fooled by John McCain’s idiosyncratic positions on interrogations and Gitmo.  I mean idiosyncratic for a Republican.  Inside the GOP there are very few people who agree with McCain on either position.

That said, the Obama Administration clearly does not understand how Americans feel about Jack Bauer’s War.  Consequently, its behavior after capturing the underwear bomber left bare a policy which American’s deem to be ill-advised and dangerous.  Instead of treating Flight 253’s Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as an enemy combatant, Obama/Holder have decided to try him in federal courts.  After singing for a mere six hours, Abdulmutallab was given a lawyer and has stopped talking.  Now he’s negotiating with prosecutors.

Look above at Thiessen’s quote and think about the information that would have been lost had KSM only talked to us for six hours.  Seven planes lost over the Atlantic?  That’s a pretty high price to pay for adherence to glib liberalism.

This is a public opinion cancer that will not go away for the administration.  The KSM trial in New York City may decimate the Democrat Party in that State, and it will go on for months and years.  Now there will be a trial in Detroit for Abdulmutallab.  And, heaven forbid, that an actual attack on the United States or Americans overseas succeeds.  Obama would be finished instantaneously.  Every Gitmo prisoner brought to the United States will constitute a new crisis.

Therefore, it is completely unsurprising that Scott Brown, the senator-elect from Massachusetts, was able to pound Martha Coakley on this point.  Brown is a USAF reserve JAG officer who was able to hammer away at the Dem’s soft position on terrorism.  This he succeeded in doing even in ultra-liberal Massachusetts.

In sum, while we are correct in focusing on the health care legislation as the core political issue at present.  I would argue that the Obama Administration’s foreign policy and national security strategy are hurting it and doing so at an increasing rate of damage with the passage of time.

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According to a Washington Times news account by Cheryl Wetzstein in Washington Times (1/12/2010), the Obama healthcare bill will contain $1 billion over five years for a new federal welfare program.  It is a maternal home-visit service in which a volunteering mother with a new baby will receive, for up to two years, “nurse visits once or twice a month to help the younger mother cope with the daily demands of a growing child.”  Wetzstein adds, “This maternal home-visit service is on its way to becoming a massive federal program….”

President Obama touted the “Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP),” during the campaign.  NFP was devised by in the late 1970s by psychologist David Olds, now a professor at the University of Colorado, Denver.  True to his word, Obama is pushing this program now.

In an accompanying analysis piece, Wetzstein’s focuses her only fire on the lack of attention paid to fathers by the program.  Howerver, there are other concerns.  The first that struck me was this: so what happens when the poor, at-risk, poorly educated mother doesn’t do what the friendly nurse instructs?  What if she doesn’t stop smoking, for example?  How close is the link between the visiting nurses and social services enforcement division in your local community?  These nurses have to be filing reports on their student moms and evaluating them.  Are there jurisdictions in which NFP visits have led to mother’s losing custodial rights over their children?

Continue reading »

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The news came yesterday that Sarah Palin has agreed to become a commentator on the Fox News Channel. I agree with Andrew Breitbart (“Big Hollywood”) that Sarah Palin could become a cultural force via TV on a par with Oprah Winfrey. Palin just connects with large numbers of people in a way that very few people do.

Palin could become the sower of the seeds of a conservative counter-cultural revolution if she proceeds wisely. That said, there are dangers for Palin. Jennifer Harper’s column for today’s “Inside the Beltway” (Washington Times, 1/12/2010) quoted John Tantillo, a New York marketer who invented the title “The O’Reilly Factor” for Fox News. Tantillo made the critical observation yesterday that the Fox-Palin partnership is brilliant while noting, “….the most important thing is for the network to let Sarah be Sarah. She is a natural brand that people recognize and like instantly. They should just let her be herself.”

He continued, “It would be very unwise if Sarah Palin went too New York or too Hollywood or too Washington in her new role. She’s got to avoid that. The reason people like her is that they can relate to her. She doesn’t need a lot of flashy stuff.” And, if she starts to get “too fancy” – her audience is “going to think she’s become one of ‘them.’ You know. The ‘media.’”

Tantillo is exactly correct. The question is where can Palin eventually produce high-quality programming in which she will not be undermined, either deliberately or unintentionally, by her producers and executives. I can recall the disastrous run that talk-show host Dr. Laura had when she went to TV. Working in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or Washington would be disastrous for Palin.

After thinking about this for a while, I have concluded that Palin has to base her operations in Nashville. Nashville contains a community of the highest quality musicians, producers, and technicians. Consequently, producing high-quality television there would be no problem.

More important than the technical capabilities available in Nashville is the nature of the artistic community that lives there. I have been told that something like 10% of Nashville’s music industry is focused on Christian contemporary and traditional gospel recording. That is where I think Palin could find a large number of sympathetic executives, producers, and technicians who could produce her shows while remaining loyal to her and her evangelical, conservative values and vision. I don’t think a similar community exists in either Hollywood or New York.

In an age of jet travel, there’s no reason Palin couldn’t still spend much of her time in Alaska, but her natural “base” nationally is in the South. And, if that isn’t enough – Tennessee doesn’t have an income tax.

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It seems so long ago now, but Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal wrote a terrific commentary piece before Christmas entitled “The Adam Lambert Problem.”  In it Noonan discusses the alienation and sense of pessimism that Americans now have about the primary institutions of this nation.

She opines that the national disquiet isn’t only about money, jobs, health insurance and material security.  Noonan writes, “Americans are worried about the core and character of the American nation, and about our culture.”

For those of you lucky enough to not know much about Adam Lambert – go to Wikipedia – or read Noonan’s description:

This was behind the resentment at the Adam Lambert incident on ABC in November. The compromise was breached. It was a broadcast network, it was prime time, it was the American Music Awards featuring singers your 11-year-old wants to see, and your 8-year-old. And Mr. Lambert came on and—again, in front of your children, in the living room, in the middle of your peaceful evening—uncorked an act in which he, in the words of various news reports the next day, performed “faux oral sex” featuring “S&M play,” “bondage gear,” “same-sex makeouts” and “walking a man and woman around the stage on a leash.”

People were offended, and they complained. Mr. Lambert seemed surprised and puzzled. With an idiot’s logic that was nonetheless logic, he suggested he was the focus of bigotry: They let women act perverse on TV all the time, so why can’t a gay man do it? ….

Enough said about the former American Idol finalist, but the background sets up Noonan’s theme of alienation:

It is one thing to grouse that dreadful people who don’t care about us control our economy, but another, and in a way more personal, thing to say that people who don’t care about us control our culture. In 2009 this was perhaps most vividly expressed in the Adam Lambert Problem.

Here Noonan seems entirely correct.  While there used to be an unwritten pact by the artistic elites and the entertainment-industrial complex to refrain from assaulting American families in their homes, that norm is rapidly breaking down.  And the sorts of folks who run Comcast-GE-Universal-Disney-CBS-whatever don’t care about staying in their boxes.  Now they are going to make you watch smut (and pay for it) on your TV and in your house, on your new TV-iphone-GPS-camcorder, and on whatever else they can force on you.  Let’s be honest: unless something changes it is only a matter of time before basic cable has soft porn and then real porn on it.  The “FX” channel is only a stone’s throw away now.

And, yet the libertarian conservative political class in Washington doesn’t get what Noonan does – that there is political gold in the hills for the political leaders who understand that being free entails not being compelled to buy things that offend us morally.  Why is that?  Too many political contributions from the cable industry probably.

But note this: NONE of the libertarians who founded this country would have disagreed with the proposition that freedom rests on the ability to reject morally objectionable ideas and art.  Anything less is tyranny.  A man’s house is his castle, Mr. Otis observed.

Perhaps, it will take a woman, a mother, to ride this political horse to victory – someone like Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachmann.  When she’s ready, she should call Peggy Noonan to write the speech.  There is a nation waiting to hear it.

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With all the big health care news going on this week one could not be blamed for missing the news that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has filed suit against Intel, the computer chip maker, for anti-competitive practices.   This news left me scratching my head.  Of course, it is possible that Intel is crushing its competitors with horrible business practices, but, as the Wall Street Journal notes, it isn’t so obvious.  Chip prices decrease now at staggering rates, and it is not clear that Intel is selling their chips below cost, the lodestar of anti-competitive behavior.

More to the point is this: has anyone at the FTC noticed that we are in a crushing recession and that Intel is one of the very few bright spots in the American economy?  I guess not.   To an outsider Intel appears to be engaged in fierce competition while fighting off regulators using antiquated anti-trust tools.

The Europeans have recently fined Intel a massive amount, but this strikes me as being part of a emerging trade pattern in which EU authorities use their trade laws to cripple America’s leading tech companies.  Of course, the U.S. government appears oblivious to this strategm.   Microsoft has been the most visible punching bag for the Euros.

Bottom line: perhaps, our government would do better laying off our job creating industries and firms until the unemployment rate — the “U-6″ rate which is the broadest — goes from 17% to half that amount.  How’s that for a deal?

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The story broke this Saturday that another attempt has been made to surreptitiously use a chemical abortifacient to kill a woman’s baby.  In this instance a Brooklyn woman, Keisha Jones, was infuriated to find out that her husband’s girlfriend became pregnant, so she tried to kill the girlfriend’s baby by chemically inducing a miscarriage.  According to a story in the New York Daily News Jones tricked the pregnant mother, Monique Hunter, into going to a pharmacy and picking up a prescription for misoprostol, a drug that immediately causes a pregnant woman to begin uterine contractions.  The trick worked, she took the drug, and Hunter soon went into labor.

Misoprostol is the second drug in the Mifepristone (RU-486)/Misoprostol abortion regimen approved by the FDA.  It should be noted that RU-486 is not available in the United States by prescription.  RU-486 is only available through abortion providers who agree to certain terms and conditions set by FDA and the drug manufacturer / distributor – that is, doctors, clinics, and hospitals.  RU-486 kills the pregnancy by blocking its development, but the misoprostol is needed to expel the embryonic or fetal remains.

Thankfully, the baby was born alive and is healthy.  Incredibly, Jones tried another stunt to kill the baby: this time she tried to have poisoned milk given to the baby.  That trick didn’t work, and it led to Jones’s arrest.

Misoprostol was approved as an anti-ulcer medication, but it can be used to kill.  Pregnant women need to be very careful about the drugs they take.  In particular, they need to be warned never to take misoprostol, mifepristone (RU-486), or methotrexate, an abortifacient and chemotherapeutic drug.

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Imagine my surprise, amusement and satisfaction upon reading an Associated Press story in the Tuesday (12/1/2009) Washington Times entitled “Obama seen not unlike Mr. Spock.”  You see I had been claiming that President Obama resembled a Vulcan for about a year-and-a-half – that is long before he was elected president.

The only problem with the A.P. story is that the president doesn’t resemble Spock – he resembles the Vulcan Tuvok from a later iteration of the show.  (Yes, that would be the indescribably terrible Voyager. The show with Captain Janeway and Neelix — the most P.C. of all.  The one with the Indian shaman.  Didn’t the men wear dresses?  Hide the razor blades.  The memories of it are returning.)

Well, Tuvok was played by an African-American actor, Tim Russ, and Russ bears an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Obama.  One eco-Trekkie agrees; go here and see Obama in Tuvok’s uniform.  Or this on Facebook (“Barack Obama Is Actually Tuvok.”  Yes, we have never seen both of them at the same time.)

Lorne Michaels of Saturday Night Live, give Tim Russ’s agent a call and sign him to a three-year two-month contract with a renewal option.  Russ is your dead-ringer Obama impersonator, but he needs to wear the Vulcan ears when playing the President or the gag won’t work.  (Lorne, it shouldn’t have taken this long to figure this one out.)

+  +  +

On a more serious note, this Vulcan thing is now having political implications.  So says A.P.’s Seth Borenstein who writes, “President Obama’s Spock-like qualities have started to cause him political problems in real-world Washington. Critics see him as too technocratic, too deliberative, too lacking in emotion.”  No kidding.  (The A.P. article appears to be an attempt to spin Obama’s bloodlessness to be a positive – a nerdy love for science.  It isn’t.)

Obama’s Vulcanism seemed completely obvious to me.  He’s a great orator, but he has none of the warmth of a Ronald Reagan or a Bill Clinton.  They would light up a room when they entered.  Obama’s different.  I was always struck by images of Obama sitting next to some poor shlub in an Iowa diner at breakfast with the other guy looking like he wanted to take his pancakes and run away.  No one-on-one rapport.  None.

That doesn’t make someone a Vulcan, however.  Unfortunately, Obama has a detached, rationalism that is incapable of projecting any empathy.  Combine that with his general demeanor, and you start getting a Vulcan.  Even the patrician Bush the Elder could shed a tear occasionally.  One doesn’t have to go Dick Vermeil to beat the Vulcan tag, but I don’t think I have ever seen Obama come close to choking up.

The greatest example of Obama’s Vulcanism occurred when the president hosted ABC’s propagandistic Health Care Day at the White House.  He told a woman whose 100+ year-old mother had a pacemaker that under his scheme her mother’s zest for life wouldn’t have gotten her the device that kept her alive.  You could almost hear the utilitarian Vulcan maxim: “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”  “Your mother’s Death Panel does not approve of pacemaker’s for 100 year-olds.”  “So, we’ll give your mother some painkillers and send her on her way to go die in Vulcan Valhalla.”  (Actually, that’s a pretty close approximation of what Obama did say.)

Who knows how this will all end up, but articles like this one in the Washington Times demonstrate that the public is starting to look at Mr. Obama much differently.  And the media spins on.

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There is much gnashing of teeth by abortion supporters over the inclusion of the Stupak-Pitts Amendment in the Speaker Nancy Pelosi health care bill – H.R. 3962.  Bart Stupak, Michigan Democrat, and Joe Pitts, Pennsylvania Republican, succeeded in amending H.R. 3962 so that no government funds can be used to pay for abortion.  Claims that Stupak-Pitts is out of line with current law or that it is unconstitutional are simply false.

The Stupak-Pitts amendment (“Stupak-Pitts”) combines two principles.  First, it contains the core principle of the Hyde Amendment that the government not encourage abortion through direct funding or subsidization of the cost of plans that cover elective abortion.  Second, Stupak-Pitts refuses to accept deceptive schemes in which funds deposited into a common pot are claimed to be separate.  Stupak-Pitts recognizes the obvious truth that money is fungible.  Hence, Stupak does not swallow the deception that government subsidized insurance policies covering abortion do not involve the government in the promotion or encouragement of abortion through subsidies.

Anyone with an ounce of foresight on the Left should have seen this coming.  The current principle in federal law – a la Hyde – is that the United States government does not pay for abortions (with exceptions of mother’s life, rape and incest) or pay for the cost of any plan that covers abortion.  This principle even carries over to the private plans purchased by government employees.  Now, if, as the Democrats want, the government is going to dominate, micro-regulate, and subsidize the nation’s health care system – both government run and privately insured – then the question of how the Hyde principle will apply to these new programs arises immediately.

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Jeffrey Kuhner is one of the best conservative writers going these days.  His column appears on Sunday’s in the Washington Times.  He has a way of getting to the heart of a topic, and two Sundays ago he addressed President Obama’s jihad against Fox News Channel (see “Who’s Partisan Now,” 10/18/09, p. B1):

For decades, the Washington press corps has presented itself as the guardian of political order and institutional stability. They are the real “news experts” whose experience and rational judgment are necessary to preserve “fairness” and “objectivity.” The rise of Fox News and the New Media – Internet news sites, such as the Drudge Report, World Net Daily and Newsmax, along with talk radio – has ripped away that shallow, smug and self-satisfied journalistic veneer.

The emergence of Fox News is a sign many Americans no longer trust the political and media class. It is part of a larger populist revolt that is slowly reshaping our society. The American people crave government accountability and political transparency. Moreover, many in the heartland rightly sense that something has gone terribly wrong. They are slowly losing their country to globalist progressives who no longer share any attachment to traditional America.  (my emphasis)

Right, and we recently got an Exhibit A of things gone terribly wrong.

Here’s a headline from a Financial Times story: “[Securities and Exchange Commission] hires Goldman [Sachs] alumnus to head enforcement division.”  Fox, hen house.  Say no more.  But there is more.  First paragraph of updated story: “The Securities and Exchange Commission has hired a 29-year-old Goldman Sachs alumnus as managing executive of its enforcement division.”  Is this a joke?  I guess no high school students were available.  Well, he has an MBA from New York University.  I am so glad the SEC is serious about enforcement.

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Well, President Obama sure knows how to pick ‘em. His latest appointee miscue – if you exclude recent news of White House communications director, Anita Dunn, explaining why she admires Chairman Mao – came from his adviser on Muslim affairs, Dalia Mogahed.

As reported in an article by Andrew Gilligan and Alex Spillius of the Daily Telegraph (U.K.), Mogahed appeared on a British TV program “hosted by a member of an extremist group to talk about Sharia Law.” For more details, go to the article itself, but here are some key paragraphs:

Miss Mogahed, appointed to the President’s Council on Faith-Based and Neighbourhood Partnerships, said the Western view of Sharia was “oversimplified” and the majority of women around the world associate it with “gender justice.”

The White House adviser made the remarks on a London-based TV discussion programme hosted by Ibtihal Bsis, a member of the extremist Hizb ut Tahrir party.

The group believes in the non-violent destruction of Western democracy and the creation of an Islamic state under Sharia Law across the world.

* * *

She said: “I think the reason so many women support Sharia is because they have a very different understanding of sharia than the common perception in Western media.

“The majority of women around the world associate gender justice, or justice for women, with sharia compliance.”

* * *

The video of the broadcast has now been prominently posted on the front page of Hizb ut Tahrir’s website. [See the interview from the group’s Australian website.]

For a liberal Yemeni woman’s critique of Mogahed’s assessment of worldwide Muslim opinion, go to this link. Dr. Elham Mane’a wrote this piece on July 1, 2009.

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Today, the Washington Times published a very good editorial on Friday’s unemployment data.

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On Friday I wrote about the bleak unemployment numbers released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over the weekend, I heard some talking heads presenting a more optimistic economic picture (e.g., Juan Williams on “Fox News Sunday”). The preponderance of true expert opinion I heard over the weekend – via internet streaming – was much more gloomy than I bargained for. Because you probably won’t have an opportunity to hear a detailed analysis of the numbers, I decided to provide links to audio streams that will do so.

The Korelin Economics Report is a weekly radio and internet webcast with a libertarian perspective with a distinct focus on precious metals. That said, Al Korelin, the host, interviewed former Labor Dep’t chief economist under George W. Bush, Diana Fuchgott-Roth for this past weekend’s program. Furchgott-Roth is a Stanford-trained labor economist who is a wholly mainstream conservative now working for the Hudson Institute in Washington. John Walter Williams is an economist and labor statistics guru. I recommend listening to them in this order: Furchgott-Roth, Williams – segment 1, Williams – segment 2 (you can stop around half-way through Williams / segment 2 when Korelin and Williams discuss whether gold is a good investment).

A main point both analysts make is that the most comprehensive unemployment number (“U-6”) now has a seasonally adjusted rate of 17.0%. Here is the definition of U-6 taken from Table A-12 of the BLS Household Data:

U-6 Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers.

17.0% comes to about 1 in 6 as a truer measure of unemployment or underemployment. As Furchgott-Roth notes, it is most unfortunate that policy makers in Washington are not focused on doing those things that will create jobs, so the potential for a rapid improvement in economic activity and employment is not great.

In the final segment, Williams discusses the fact that the new report indicates BLS has greatly underestimated the decline in payroll numbers – by 824,000. (BLS News Release, USDL-09-1180, p. 5.) This prompted Williams to conclude that in May (approx.) – with this revision included – the U.S. reached “the steepest decline in payroll employment since the Great Depression.”

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Today’s economic news was not good. This from Reuters via Yahoo! Finance:

U.S. employers cut a deeper-than-expected 263,000 jobs in September, lifting the unemployment rate to 9.8 percent, according to a government report on Friday that fueled fears the weak labor market could undermine economic recovery.

The consensus was for a loss of 180,000 jobs. Furthermore, highly respected banking analyst, Meredith Whitney, wrote in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal that credit available for small business, the job creator in the American economy is non-existent:

Anyone counting on a meaningful economic recovery will be greatly disappointed. How do I know? I follow credit, and credit is contracting. Access to credit is being denied at an accelerating pace. Large, well-capitalized companies have no problem finding credit. Small businesses, on the other hand, have never had a harder time getting a loan.

This is not a good sign for getting people back to work. This credit contraction in conjunction with the make-believe economy of zero percent interest rates, money printing, and too-big-too fail has to undermine one’s confidence in any data about current economic relationships. That, in turn, will make a recovery far more difficult due to the increased level of risk and uncertainty. It’s going to take a long time for things to work themselves out I am afraid.

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