The decision is unlikely to grow more popular with time. At a minimum, a highly publicized trial will remind Americans of the 9/11 attacks, something Democrats have been encouraging us to forget.
The potential consequences for the United States of extending to these terrorists the constitutional rights afforded U.S. citizens in a civil trial are grave.
The legal status of the al-Qaida bigwigs -- none of whom are U.S. citizens -- was that of unlawful combatant. In attacking the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, they committed an act of war, but did so in a manner which deprives them of prisoner-of-war status under the Geneva Convention of 1949.
To be recognized as lawful combatants, irregulars must meet four criteria, the Geneva Convention states. The criteria are "(a) that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates; (b) that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance; (c) that of carrying arms openly; and (d) that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war."
The al-Qaida bigwigs fail to meet three of those four criteria, and thus, under international law, are entitled only to such "rights" as their captors are willing to extend to them. And now Mr. Obama and Mr. Holder have decided to give them the rights of American citizens.
The most consequential of those rights is that of discovery -- the right of American defendants to see the evidence the prosecution has against them.
"Prosecutors will be forced to reveal U.S. intelligence on KSM, the methods and sources for acquiring its information and his relationships to fellow al-Qaida operatives," wrote former Justice Department official John Yoo in the Wall Street Journal last week. "The information will enable al-Qaida to drop plans and personnel whose cover is blown. It will enable it to detect our means of intelligence-gathering and to push forward into areas we know nothing about."
The concern isn't hypothetical. Andrew McCarthy, who prosecuted the blind sheikh, Abdel Rahman, after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was required to turn over to defendants a list of 200 possible co-conspirators which, he said, apparently was delivered to Osama bin Laden within days of its production as a court exhibit. Mr. McCarthy declined to prosecute another suspect in that bombing for fear the intelligence loss through discovery outweighed the benefits of a conviction.
To fail to turn over intelligence sought through discovery is to run the risk that KSM and his co-conspirators might be acquitted on a technicality. But to release them from custody would be political poison for Democrats. The administration would have to keep holding them even if they are found not guilty. But that would make a mockery the main reason Mr. Holder has given for trying them in federal court: that a civilian trial would showcase American justice.
Even if no vital intelligence is disclosed to al-Qaida, a civilian trial will be a propaganda fest, as was the trial of the "20th hijacker," Zacarias Moussaoui.
Former Justice Department official Shannen Coffin thinks the real reason for a civilian trial is that President Obama hopes KSM and his lawyers will attack the Bush administration. "The decision to try KSM in civilian court accomplishes indirectly what Obama does not wish to do directly -- it puts the Bush administration's interrogation tactics on trial for all the world to see," Mr. Coffin said.
This would be red meat for the liberal base. But it's unlikely to be popular with centrists who are already unhappy with Mr. Obama's economic policies.
This has been, arguably, the most political administration in modern times. Ten months after his inauguration, Mr. Obama still behaves more like a candidate than a president. But in pursuing his vendetta against his predecessor at the expense of American security, he may be campaigning to be a one-term president.
But though our historical memories are full of Commodore Perry and the opening of Japan, John Hay and the Open Door in China, and Lyndon Johnson and the open-ended war in Vietnam, it's important to remember that there always has been a strain of deference in American relations with the East.
Of course we Americans have been historically illiterate from the beginning. This has been (as the Chinese might say) both crisis and opportunity -- or, more precisely, both our charm and our curse.
Our eyes have always been on the future, not the past. We've ignored the past -- not such a wise practice, as we have seen repeatedly -- but we have built shining futures: a frontier future, then an industrial future, now an information future. When people say America is no longer the land of the future, they are forgetting that we already have had more futures than any people on earth. Who is to say we don't have one more in us, or more?
This historical forgetfulness is one of our national character flaws. We forget, for example, that most of Asia once was colonized too, just as we were. We forget that Asia, like America, once was ransacked by Europeans avaricious for natural resources and on the prowl for hungry markets. We forget that Asians, like Americans, defined themselves simply: (BEG ITAL)We are not Europeans.
Now we are ascribing to Asians the important traits we think we need today, having forgotten that they were ours in the first place. This became clear last week when Time magazine identified five things Americans needed to learn from China. Let's not pick on Time here; the editors of the newsmagazine are right -- admirably right -- to argue that we would do well to be ambitious, prize education, attend to the elderly, save more money and look to the future.
But these are not foreign ideas. They're our ideas, or have been for a good part of our short time as a country. The suggestion that they are alien tells us how little we understand ourselves -- and how far we have drifted from the anchors of Americanism. Let's look at them briefly:
(1) Be ambitious
That's the key to Americanism. Whether in colonial times or our own, few have come to America with small ambitions. One of the most useful cliches of the colonial period was that dukes didn't emigrate. America was the world's first enterprise zone, a congenial locale for second sons and others who wanted to dream big, think big and build big. President Johnson is not often remembered for his elegeic views, but he expressed this American ambition when he spoke of seeking "the star that is not reached."
(2) Education matters
It always has here. Americans planted schools on their soil before there even was a United States, and Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann sowed ideas about public schools that sustain us still. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, adopted before the Constitution, provided for land sales to support public education. Amid the upheaval of the Civil War, Congress and Abraham Lincoln still managed to create a network of land-grant colleges that remain the envy of the world.
(3) Look after the elderly
This we have not always done so well, in part because the mobility of our society -- first the move to the United States, then the flood west, then the internal immigration prompted by industrialization -- separated families and generations. But because we all are immigrants, we all have an Old Country (Native Americans excepted, of course), and we all have reverence for the pioneering strivers who first came to this land and who suffered and worked to build a better life and a stronger country. At times in the 19th and 20th centuries, multi-generational families were common, and the loss of that tradition has resulted in a loss of connection to the past. (The advent of the nursing home may seem an improvement -- until you are sent to one or visit one.)
(4) Save more
We were frugal once, even amid great national wealth. We once reused wood and nails, and we saved pennies and dollars. We did that because, despite the munificence of this land, we understood the caprice of the economy, and of life. In colonial times natural resources were bountiful, but manufactured goods and finery were rare; they were saved. Only a few years ago our streets and stores were full of people who had experienced the full fury of the Great Depression. These survivors of hard times husbanded their savings and found a second use for everything; it is not uncommon to see people of this generation wash and reuse common plastic bags. Earlier Americans recycled at a time when the word "green" meant nothing more than a color.
(5) Look over the horizon
It was an American, Robert Goddard, who looked over the horizon, quite literally, and invented modern rocketry, building on a tradition of tinkering that dated back 11 centuries to the experiments of Chinese alchemists. It was an American who saw the neutrino, the Van Allen Belts, the forward pass and the McDonald's hamburger. We know how to do this.
Now to what we can learn.
We're good at reinventing ourselves and, despite the F. Scott Fitzgerald aphorism, at providing second acts to American lives. We know the old-fashioned values. But the goal in the 21st century -- the Chinese Century, if we are not careful -- must be to reinvent ourselves by seeing the virtues in the values we think are so old fashioned, the values the Chinese think are relevant to our times.
The argument here isn't that China doesn't have a lot to teach us. China has an awful lot to teach us. And what it can teach us is that the tools it is using to forge ahead in the 21st century are the very tools Americans used in the 19th and 20th centuries. The tools for success going forward are not foreign. They are our own. We should remember that, and use them.
Copyright 2009, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
]]>After all, handgun ownership is not allowed in the city of Chicago, which has one of the strictest gun control laws in the country, and Scott killed himself with a .380-caliber sidearm.
Unlike most Chicagoans, Scott could have been a legal handgun owner. Because he had it before the ban was enacted, he was allowed to register and keep it. But the police department says he never did. By having it in the city, Scott was guilty of an offense that could have gotten him jail time.
Amazingly enough, he was not the first local public official to take the view that firearms restrictions are something for other, ordinary people to observe. Chicago politicians are zealously committed to gun control in law but fairly relaxed about it in practice.
In 1994, State Sen. Rickey Hendon had an unregistered handgun stolen from his home in a burglary, and he didn't feign contrition about his disregard of the ordinance.
"I have a right to protect myself," he declared, noting that he had been burglarized before -- and forgetting that the state legislature of which he is a member allows Illinois cities to deprive their citizens of that right. Asked if he would replace the lost piece, Hendon said, "No comment." The police were kind enough not to charge him.
U.S. Sen. Roland Burris, another Chicagoan, has endorsed a nationwide ban on handguns and, in 1993, organized Chicago's first Gun Turn-in Day. But the following year, while running unsuccessfully for governor, he admitted he owned a handgun -- "for protection," he explained -- and hadn't seen fit to turn it in along with those other firearms. Lesser mortals apparently can protect themselves with forks and spoons.
Scott was shot in the abdomen while chasing a burglar in 1988, so it's understandable that he would appreciate the value of having the means to defend himself against criminals. But that understanding didn't extend to the needs of ordinary Chicagoans. When the city gun ban was challenged in court, the board of education that he headed filed a brief defending Chicago's right "to prohibit classes of arms in order to prevent crime and protect public safety."
A law banning handguns, in Scott's view, was necessary to protect public safety. But when it came to protecting his private safety, he somehow perceived the law to be a hindrance, not a help.
Does his attitude carry the distinct tang of hypocrisy? Yes, but that's not out of the ordinary for Chicago politicians. Under a state law dating back to 1872, mayors and aldermen are designated peace officers. And, conveniently, peace officers are permitted to not only own but carry handguns.
That makes aldermen a special class in Illinois, one of only two states with an almost complete ban on the carrying of concealed handguns. In most places, an adult with no criminal record or history of psychiatric commitment can get a concealed-carry license after taking a training class.
But here, we have a unique system. You want to be able to pack a weapon in public for your safety? Fine. All you have to do is 1) run for the city council and 2) win.
Why the state assumes that aldermen are fit for this prerogative is a mystery. "Law-abiding" is not the very first word that comes to mind when you think of the city council. Since 1972, 27 of its members have been convicted on charges involving malfeasance, misfeasance, nonfeasance, disfeasance and anti-feasance with mopery aforethought.
It would be hard to come up with a group of people that has proven itself less deserving of blanket trust. The most recent convict, Arenda Troutman, got four years in prison for bribery after being caught on tape attesting that "most aldermen, most politicians are ho's." At a 1991 neighborhood meeting that got rowdy, Ald. Dorothy Tillman reportedly pulled out her handgun and waved it pugnaciously.
In Chicago, only criminals and aldermen are armed. Forgive me for being redundant.
Copyright 2009, Creators Syndicate Inc.
]]>Oil seeping from the ground there was collected for medicinal purposes -- until Edwin Drake drilled and 150 years ago -- Aug. 27, 1859 -- found the basis of our world, 69 feet below the surface of Pennsylvania, which oil historian Daniel Yergin calls "the Saudi Arabia of 19th-century oil."
For many years, most oil was used for lighting and lubrication, and the amounts extracted were modest. Then in 1901, a new well named for an East Texas hillock, Spindletop, began gushing more per day than all other U.S. wells combined.
Since then, America has exhausted its hydrocarbon supplies. Repeatedly.
In 1914, the Bureau of Mines said U.S. oil reserves would be exhausted by 1924. In 1939, the Interior Department said the world had 13 years worth of petroleum reserves. Then a global war was fought and the postwar boom was fueled, and in 1951 Interior reported that the world had ... 13 years of reserves. In 1970, the world's proven oil reserves were an estimated 612 billion barrels. By 2006, more than 767 billion barrels had been pumped and proven reserves were 1.2 trillion barrels. In 1977, Scold in Chief Jimmy Carter predicted that mankind "could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade." Since then the world has consumed (BEG ITAL)three times(END ITAL) more oil than was then in the world's proven reserves.
But surely now America can quickly wean itself from hydrocarbons, adopting alternative energies -- wind, solar, nuclear? No.
Keith O. Rattie, CEO of Questar Corporation, a natural gas and pipeline company, says that by 2050 there may be 10 billion people demanding energy -- a daunting prospect, considering that of today's 6.2 billion people, nearly 2 billion "don't even have electricity -- never flipped a light switch." Rattie says energy demand will grow 30 percent to 50 percent in the next 20 years and there are no near-term alternatives to fossil fuels.
Today, wind and solar power combined are just one-sixth of 1 percent of American energy consumption. Nuclear? The United States and other rich nations endorse reducing world carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050. But Oliver Morton, a science writer, says that if nuclear is to supply even just 10 percent of the necessary carbon-free energy, the world must build more than 50 large nuclear power plants a year. Currently five a year are being built. Rattie says that as part of "a worldwide building boom in coal-fired power plants," about 30 under construction in America "will burn about 70 million tons of coal a year."
Edward L. Morse, an energy official in Carter's State Department, writes in Foreign Affairs that the world's deep-water oil and gas reserves are significantly larger than was thought just a decade ago, and high prices have spurred development of technologies -- a drilling vessel can cost $1 billion -- for extracting them. The costs of developing oil sands -- Canada may contain more oil than Saudi Arabia has -- are declining, so projects that last year were not economic with the price of oil under $90 a barrel are now viable with oil at $79 a barrel.
Morse says new technologies are also speeding development of natural gas trapped in U.S. shale rock. The Marcellus Shale, which stretches from West Virginia through Pennsylvania and into New York, "may contain as much natural gas as the North Field in Qatar, the largest field ever discovered."
Rattie says U.S. known reserves of natural gas, which are sure to become larger, exceed 100 years of supply at the current rate of consumption. BP recently announced a "giant" oil discovery beneath the Gulf of Mexico. Yergin, writing in Foreign Policy, says "careful examination of the world's resource base ... indicates that the resource endowment of the planet is sufficient to keep up with demand for decades to come."
Such good news horrifies people who relish scarcity because it requires -- or so they say -- government to ration what is scarce and to generally boss people to mend their behavior: "This is the police!" Put down that incandescent bulb and step away from the lamp!"
Today, there is a name for the political doctrine that rejoices in scarcity of everything except government. The name is environmentalism.
Copyright 2009, Washington Post Writers Group
]]>Let me explain. It's not because they shouldn't be here in the first place. That's a given. Regular readers know that I don't support illegal immigration. In fact, I support speedy deportations, workplace raids, and tighter borders. I also support comprehensive immigration reform that gives illegal immigrants already here a pathway to earned legal status. There's no contradiction. You can't have conditional reform without enforcement. How would you handle those who didn't meet the conditions?
But don't expect me to sign on to the idealistic rhetoric from immigration restrictionists who think that all people in the country illegally should voluntarily return to where they came from because it's the right thing to do. Why should they? They have accomplices after all -- they came here because employers were willing to hire them. I would never be so naive as to make the argument that illegal immigrants should self-deport for moral reasons -- anymore than I would suggest employers turn themselves in to get right with the law.
Yet, given recent events, I am willing to contemplate a completely different argument -- that illegal immigrants should self-deport because of family reasons or, more precisely, because of family responsibility. They should leave not to please Americans but to alleviate some of the pressure that has come to weigh on relatives back home. After all, in large part, Mexican migration is an expression of family values. The main reason that most Mexicans are here in the first place isn't for freedom or a fresh start, but simply to make enough money to send home to their relatives so that their lives in Mexico might be a little easier.
And guess what's happening now? According to The New York Times, there's a kind of reverse remittance going on where, instead of illegal immigrants sending money to Mexico, more and more poor people in Mexico are scraping together whatever they can to send funds to unemployed sons and daughters in the United States. Reporters interviewed Mexican government officials, bankers, money-transfer operators, immigration experts, and Mexicans with out-of-work relatives in the United States. What they found was that, more and more often, these binational transfers of wealth are headed north instead of south.
This trend sounds counterintuitive but it makes perfect sense in human terms. The parents quoted in the article want to do what most parents do when their kids are struggling financially -- send money, at least enough for them to get a bite to eat. It doesn't matter whether those kids are under the same roof or 1,000 miles to the north.
But, as the article points out, the trouble is that most Mexicans are not in a position to be anyone's fairy Godmother. Poised to lose as 735,000 jobs this year and with an economy that could decline as much as 7.5 percent, Mexico could be one of the countries hardest hit by the global recession. Remittances from relatives in the United States, while still a leading source of foreign revenue, have also suffered a steep decline.
In many Mexican villages, all you find are older people -- many of them now working harder to earn a few extra pesos to send to children in the United States. This is, at best, a temporary solution. Folks on both sides of the border are treading water and trying to buy enough time for the U.S. economy to bounce back and for the jobs to return. At that point, they hope things will go back to the way they used to be -- money flowing south.
But until that happens, why remain here? For pride? For hubris? To avoid accepting failure? For that, they're allowing their elderly parents -- many of whom have worked their entire lives -- to continue to work long hours, perhaps putting their own health in jeopardy? What if something happens to them in the process? It's not worth it. Life is short enough as it is.
If the immigrants who are in the United States can't afford to live here, then remaining is a luxury they also can't afford. They might not be better off at home. But their families might be. If so, time to go.
Copyright 2009, Washington Post Writers Group
]]>No one could accuse President Barack Obama or Judge Richard Goldstone of South Africa of harboring ill will toward the president of the Palestinian Authority. But their separate worthy initiatives have resulted in pushing Abbas into a no-exit hell while lowering the chances for Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Afghanistan is not alone. The Obama administration's wobbly approach to the Middle East peace process is also in urgent need of reassessment. Plan A -- to get concessions from Arab states to balance an Israeli freeze on settlement construction -- was abruptly abandoned after Obama was stiffed by both sides at a trilateral summit in September. Now the administration hopes to leapfrog the impasse over settlements by going straight into "final status" negotiations by getting agreement on conditional borders for an independent Palestinian state.
But the Arabs are newly upset and are moving the goal posts: They say the encouraging rhetoric of Obama's Cairo speech last June has been washed away by his failure to deliver the settlement freeze -- which has now become an Arab precondition for resuming negotiations with Israel.
Israelis, on the other hand, are newly confident of U.S. support, which rattles the Arabs even more. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu got a cold shower from Obama and congressional leaders when he visited Washington in May. He was told that he should accept the principle of a Palestinian state, which he grudgingly did last summer.
But Netanyahu emerged from a Nov. 9 White House meeting with Obama able to claim credibly that the two men had talked as allies about Middle East peace and Iran's nuclear program -- with Obama setting a new end-of-December deadline for his engagement efforts with Tehran to produce results. (That deadline had been September, and is almost certain to slip again.)
What happened in the interim? Part of the answer is Goldstone and his U.N.-commissioned report, which accuses Israel of committing war crimes during its January assault on the Gaza Strip. Stung by the accusations and prodded by Washington, the Israeli government -- which refused to cooperate with Goldstone's investigation -- is debating carrying out its own investigation of the Gaza operation.
Whatever the Goldstone report's merits -- and they are lessened by its deliberate demonization of Israel's motives and milquetoast exculpations of Hamas' actions -- it seems to have been written with no feel for the political consequences it would bring for the peace process. The report also ignored the concern it would create at the Pentagon and in other Western military headquarters with forces fighting guerrillas who use civilian populations and infrastructure as shields in modern asymmetrical warfare.
On Capitol Hill, misgivings about Netanyahu were buried in a reflexive gathering around Israel under U.N.-inspired attack. The Goldstone fracas also helped push the politically sensitive Obama White House back toward a more supportive, traditional U.S. attitude toward Israel. Abbas -- not glimpsing the quagmire he was lurching toward -- went along with Washington's request to ask the U.N. to delay taking up Goldstone's report, only to back down when Jordan and Egypt joined Hamas in unleashing ferocious criticism of Abbas in their media.
"He is hurt, and angry," says an Arab official who has talked to Abbas recently. "He has been let down by everybody, especially Egypt," which has tilted toward cooperating with Hamas at the expense of Abbas' Fatah movement in recent months. The Egyptian turn (caused more by internal succession problems than regional factors) has also antagonized Saudi Arabia, which is locked in an increasingly open and hostile war of words with Iran, Hamas' most important patron.
This is a combustible mix of betrayals, failures and intentions gone awry. So Netanyahu may yet throw Abbas a lifeline on settlements if only to keep his weakened opponent in office.
Israel's long occupation of Palestinian territory has helped produce the cynicism and weak leadership on both sides that confound would-be international shapers of peace and moral rectitude. Outsiders cannot resolve this conflict: Only an Israeli decision to end that occupation in fast order can lead to the security Israelis need and deserve, and the dignity Palestinians seek through a state of their own. That is the broader, more vital decision that Netanyahu needs to make.
Copyright 2009, Washington Post Writers Group
]]>I'm not scared of what KSM has to say in court either. I'm scared of what a federal judge might say and do.
Mohammed already has said, "I was responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z." By handing the 9/11 Five over to the federal court system, the Obama administration has opened the door for other federal judges to issue rulings that affect or delay the trial and/or punishment.
I'm scared that even a federal judge not presiding over the Trial of The Century could muck it up. Consider California, where in February 2006, U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel blocked an execution because there was a .0000000000001 chance that a convicted rapist/murderer facing execution might feel pain when administered a three-drug cocktail. In so ruling, Fogel blocked not only that killer's execution, but also any other execution in California.
I'm scared of what Mohammed's attorneys will say to prolong this trial. As former CIA Director George Tenet wrote in his book, "At the Center of the Storm," when CIA officials first interrogated Mohammed in 2003, he defiantly told them, "I'll talk to you guys after I get to New York and see my lawyer." Now, thanks to Holder, Mohammed is about to say hello to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York -- where undoubtedly, he'll have more than one lawyer.
I'm scared of what President Obama said to NBC's Chuck Todd last week -- that those bothered with the change of venue for Mohammed won't find it "offensive at all when he's convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him." In pronouncing the verdict and punishment before the trial, Obama has handed civil libertarians ammunition.
I'm scared by what Holder said in response to this question by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.: "Can you give me a case in U.S. history where an enemy combatant caught on a battlefield was tried in civilian court?" Holder said he'd "have to look at that," after which Graham answered that there is no such case.
I'm scared that, according to the New York Times, Justice Department officials have said that even if "Mohammed is acquitted, the Obama administration will keep him locked up forever as a 'combatant'" under the laws of war. It's clear the Justice Department hasn't thought this through.
I'm scared at what the next legal Dream Team will try to get others to say to deflect attention from the murder of 2,973 individuals. "Are we going to allow discovery of classified information so that we can get a fair trial?" asked John Eastman, law school dean at Chapman University in Orange, Calif. Are we going to depose past Bush Department of Justice and Pentagon officials?
Eastman fears a scenario in which, "It's not so much Khalid Shaikh Mohammed who's on trial, but the Bush administration." (Eastman believes Congress should pass a bill "to withdraw jurisdiction from the civilian courts for enemy combatants." Good idea.)
I'm scared at what the international and self-styled human-rights communities might say to undermine the credibility of a trial that in any way falls short of perfection.
Today, everyone knows that KSM is guilty. But in the age of the Internet, the guiltiest perpetrator can be modeled as a victim.
In 2001, a Scottish court found Libyan intelligence agent Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi guilty for the 1988 Pan 103 Lockerbie bombings that left 270 dead. Al-Megrahi was convicted under a unanimous verdict passed by three Scottish (not American) judges (not jurors) based in The Netherlands. The (barbaric American) death penalty was off the table and the other defendant was acquitted. The Scottish justice minister recently issued a "compassionate" release for al-Megrahi. Still, the likes of Noam Chomsky argue it was an unfair trial, and have called for a U.N. inquiry.
Check out Slobodan Milosevic on the Internet. The former Serbian leader died while on trial for torture, murder and genocide at the U.N. International Criminal Court/Yugoslavia in The Hague. Serving as his own attorney, Slobo managed to prolong a trial that was supposed to last 14 months for a grueling four years -- and then it only ended because he died of a heart attack.
What thanks did the ICC get for accommodating Milosevic's delaying antics? Scurrilous rumors that it was responsible for his death.
So I'm not scared about what Mohammed might say about jihad in court. I'm scared about what he did -- and what a judge might say if he wants to serve as his own attorney.
Copyright 2009, Creators Syndicate Inc.
]]>This tribal approach has widespread support, in principle. The problem is that, in practice, the U.S. has often moved in the opposite direction in recent years. Rather than supporting tribal leaders, American policies have sometimes had the effect of undermining their ability to stand up to the Taliban.
The paper by Maj. Jim Gant, titled "One Tribe at a Time," has been spinning around the Internet for the past month. It contends that in an Afghanistan that has never had a strong central government, "nothing else will work" than a decentralized, bottom-up approach. "We must support the tribal system because it is the single, unchanging political, social and cultural reality in Afghan society," he insists.
Gant recounts his experience leading a Special Forces "A-team" in Konar province in 2003. His soldiers briefly became part of the Pashtun tribal family, fighting alongside a local leader whose followers straddled the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It's a passionate story that evokes an Afghan warrior culture that has enticed foreign adventurers for 150 years.
But will this tribal strategy work? The U.S. thought so in 2003 and 2004, when Gant and many others were sent out with small teams to chase al-Qaeda and Taliban insurgents. Back then, I'm told, the Special Forces teams had more than 5,000 tribal fighters under arms.
But U.S. officials began to worry that by arming the tribes, they were encouraging Afghanistan's old curse of warlordism. So after Hamid Karzai's election as president in 2004, they focused instead on developing Afghanistan's national army and police. They convinced the Tajik tribal militia known as the Northern Alliance, a key ally against al-Qaeda, to lay down its weapons.
Unfortunately, this top-down strategy left the tribes vulnerable to the Taliban, which was rebuilding its networks. As the Taliban's influence spread, U.S. strategists looked again to the tribes as a counterinsurgency force. They were encouraged by the example of Iraq, where the Sunni tribal movement had stopped al-Qaeda's advance.
As tribal politics have come back in fashion in Afghanistan over the past year, a number of experiments have been launched. The "Afghan Public Protection Program" is working with tribal leaders in Wardak province and elsewhere. The "Community Defense Initiative" is recruiting and training local militias in western Afghanistan. Across the country, "CAAT" units (short for CounterInsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team) are working on local development and security projects.
The U.S. approach in Afghanistan now is a mix of national and local, government and tribe, top-down and bottom-up. There are frantic plans to expand the national army and police, even as the Northern Alliance rearms its fighters. That's one reason Gen. Stanley McChrystal's strategy is confusing -- it's going in several directions at once, looking for game-changing opportunities to halt the Taliban's advance.
This jumble of ad hoc ideas isn't necessarily a bad thing: Similar experimentation in Iraq helped produce the unlikely network that finally began to improve security there. But it requires a basic decision by the White House that the fight in Afghanistan is worth the human, economic and political price.
Obama's slow-motion process of decision carries its own costs. The president has been so concerned about finding an early off-ramp that the public must wonder whether he really wants to get on at all. In the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll, 52 percent say the war hasn't been worth it, up 13 points from last December. Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the delay has helped prompt a new wave of capital flight as Afghans rush to get their money out before the U.S. pulls the plug.
This is a transactional White House, so the president is looking for deliverables: A new commitment by Karzai to fight corruption; a new pledge by NATO allies to send more troops; a new plan to speed the training of Afghan forces. That checklist may help reassure Obama, but in the end, he will still have to roll the dice.
Even Maj. Gant, the gung-ho Special Forces operative, agrees there's only a limited time to make any policy work: "Make no mistake," he writes, "the people (or politicians) of the U.S. will get tired of the war and will eventually make the U.S. military pull out." Obama's decision, in effect, is how much time to buy.
Copyright 2009, Washington Post Writers Group
]]>Everyone knows that the resulting "entitlements" dominate government spending and squeeze education, research, defense and almost everything else. In fiscal 2008 -- the last "normal" year before the economic crisis -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (programs wholly or primarily dedicated to the elderly) totaled $1.3 trillion, 43 percent of federal spending and more than twice military spending. Because workers, not retirees, are the primary taxpayers, this spending involves huge transfers to the old.
Comes now the House-passed health care "reform" bill that, amazingly, would extract more subsidies from the young. It mandates that health insurance premiums for older Americans be no more than twice the level of younger Americans. That's much less than the actual health spending gap between young and old. Spending for those aged 60-64 is four to five times greater than those 18-24. So, the young would overpay for insurance which -- under the House bill -- people must buy: 20- and 30-somethings would subsidize premiums for 50- and 60-somethings. (Those 65 and over receive Medicare.)
Not surprisingly, the 40-million member AARP, the major lobby for Americans over 50, was a big force behind this provision. AARP's cynicism is breathtaking. On the one hand, it sponsors a high-minded campaign called "Divided We Fail" and runs sentimental TV ads featuring children pleading for a better tomorrow. "Join us in championing your future and the future of every generation," ended one AARP ad.
Meanwhile, AARP lobbyists scramble to shift their members' costs onto younger generations. For example, the House health legislation improves Medicare's drug benefit. That would help the half of AARP members who are over 65. The other half, those between 50 and 64, could benefit from the skewed insurance premiums.
Although premium changes would apply mainly to people using insurance "exchanges," the differences would be substantial. A single person 55-64 might save $3,490, estimates an Urban Institute study. By contrast, single people in their 20s and early 30s might pay from about $600 to $1,100 more. For the young, the extra cost might be larger, says economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Hudson Institute, because the House bill would require them to purchase fairly generous insurance plans rather than cheaper catastrophic coverage that might better suit their needs.
Whatever the added burden, it would darken the young's already poor economic prospects. Unemployment among 16- to 24-year-olds is 19 percent. Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, notes on his blog that high joblessness depresses young workers' wages and that the adverse effect -- though diminishing -- "is still statistically significant 15 years later." Lost wages over 20 years could total $100,000. Orszag doesn't mention that health care "reform" might compound the loss.
AARP justifies the cost-shifting as preventing age discrimination. Premiums based on age should be no more acceptable than premiums based on medical expenses reflecting race, gender or pre-existing health conditions, it says. The House legislation bans those, so it should also ban age-based rates. AARP dislikes even the 2-1 limit. It thinks premiums for someone 22 and someone 62 should be identical. (In insurance jargon, that would be full "community rating.")
This is unconvincing. All insurance aims to protect against risk -- but within groups facing similar risks. Put differently, most insurance is risk-adjusted. Auto insurance premiums vary by age; younger drivers pay higher rates because they have more accidents. Homeowners' policies for similar houses cost more in high-crime areas. This is not "discrimination"; it's a reflection of risk and cost differences. Insurers that ignored these differences would soon vanish, because they'd suffer heavy losses and lose customers.
On health insurance, we may choose to override some risk adjustments (say, for pre-existing medical conditions) for public policy reasons. But the case for making age one of these exceptions is weak. Working Americans -- the young and middle-aged -- already pay a huge part of the health costs of the elderly through Medicare and Medicaid. These will grow with an aging population and surging health spending. Either taxes will rise or other public services will fall. Already, all governments spend 2.4 times as much per capita on the elderly as on children, reports Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution. Why increase the imbalance?
It's true that premiums for older people would be higher. But this might have a silver lining: Facing their true health costs, older Americans might become more eager to control spending.
Copyright 2009, Washington Post Writers Group
]]>"Why aren't women coming to her defense?" they asked.
"Why are the media being so rough on Sarah?"
Having been enjoying a self-imposed moratorium on all things Palin, declining numerous interviews to discuss her latest self-promotional tour, I was surprised by the questions. My thoughts lately have drifted toward the sense that, though Palin is very much a celebrity, she's no longer running for public office, at least officially. Ergo, radar gets a rest.
As for her book ... right after I finish "Ulysses."
But the questions -- and the passion with which they were proffered -- intrigued me. Are the media treating her unfairly? Are they "bashing" Palin, as her supporters describe any criticism? Was the Newsweek cover sexist?
Call me a guy, but give me a break. Sarah Palin is the luckiest woman on the planet.
Hats off to the girl from Wasilla who, slightly more than a year ago, was virtually unknown, is now on the cover of Newsweek, hawking a book for which she was paid a few million, drawing huge crowds and getting the kind of free publicity most celebrities have to jump on Oprah's couch to get.
Oh, and, yes, she got to sit on Oprah's set as well. And we're supposed to defend/feel sorry for/protect Sarah from ... what? Wild success, popularity and riches? You must be joking.
I don't doubt the sincerity of those who feel compelled to defend Palin. Women, especially, feel personally diminished when a female candidate is treated unfairly. Some of the commentary aimed at Palin during the presidential campaign was clearly over the top -- vile and vicious in some cases -- though I would challenge the common assertion that noting her lack of familiarity with national policies and issues constitutes "bashing."
Vile and vicious is standard fare for anyone in the public eye these days. That's no justification for it, ever, but Palin's experience, if higher-profile than most, is not unique. Hence the acute interest in civility.
Palin, meanwhile, is no one's dummy when it comes to political strategy. She knows exactly how to animate her base, and demonizing the media is the most powerful quill in her quiver. That is, by picking fights with the media, she mobilizes her fans against a monolithic enemy -- "them" -- while getting "them" to give her more ink and airtime.
It's a plan, and it works. Americans, however much they may protest to the contrary, have a soft spot for damsels in distress, no matter how faux the foe.
So, Palin doesn't like her Newsweek cover. It's sexist. It's out of context. If you've somehow missed it, the photo shows Palin in black shorts, a red, long-sleeved top and running shoes. She has one elbow propped on the back of a chair draped in an American flag and is clutching two BlackBerrys in her hand. She is smiling.
Originally taken for Runner's World magazine to go with a profile of the former governor, an avid runner, the picture couldn't be any more flattering or wholesomely all-American if Norman Rockwell had painted it. In a word, the photo is fantastic.
It is perhaps sexy, depending on the beholder's eyes, but it couldn't be construed as sexual. Sexist? Would we show a man similarly posed? Only if he positioned himself that way -- and looked as good. We've seen dozens of far-less flattering photos of George W. Bush in various athletic pursuits. And who can forget the photo of Barack Obama striding shirtless through the Hawaiian surf?
Yet, Palin called Newsweek's selection of the photo "unfortunate." On her Facebook page, she wrote, "When it comes to Sarah Palin, this 'news' magazine has relished focusing on the irrelevant rather than the relevant. ...
"The out-of-context Newsweek approach is sexist and oh-so-expected by now. If anyone can learn anything from it: It shows why you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, gender or color of skin. The media will do anything to draw attention -- even if out of context."
Point taken. Indeed, if anyone can learn anything from this, it shows that one shouldn't judge a book -- or a candidate -- by its cover.
Radar off.
Copyright 2009, Washington Post Writers Group
]]>In Washington, Republicans have been branded as the party of no for achieving near-constant unanimity on major votes on stimulus and health care. Gov. Haley Barbour, chair of the Republican Governors Association (RGA), called that an inevitable consequence of both diminished numbers and simple procedural roadblocks. But because of that Beltway reality, victories in the gubernatorial arena are a needed sign of life for the party, he said.
"In states where there are Republican governors, people can see if conservative and Republican ideas, when actually implemented, work," Barbour, a two-term Mississippi governor, said at the RGA's conference here this week.
As the focus turns to the midterm races for Congress and state offices, the RGA event was designed not just as a warning to Democrats, but as a guide for the rest of the GOP. One clear message seemed to be that as an ideological schism felled the party in a Congressional race, Republicans won key gubernatorial tests by focusing relentlessly on the top concern of voters.
"Every moderate Republican in Virginia voted for Bob McDonnell even though he was a conservative. Every conservative Republican in New Jersey voted for Chris Christie even though he was clearly the moderate candidate," Barbour said. "Folks should campaign on the right things - it helps keep the base together, and also wins a majority of the independents in both of these cases."
"Focusing on bread and butter issues and having not just rhetoric, but ideas and solutions ... I think is a big part of the equation in places like Minnesota and Vermont, all across this great country," Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota said. Borrowing again from an Obama campaign theme, he added: "If you're positive and optimistic and hopeful and civil, you're reaching out even if people don't agree -- those are some of the ingredients that you see are common to candidates being successful."
The governors here did not shy from a policy fight, with most of the attending governors joining together to make a forceful case against proposed health care legislation in Congress. In doing so, however, they were careful not to deny the necessity for changes in the system, and offered ideas that they said would be met with bipartisan agreement. Some of the rhetoric was more politically charged from some on the dais, but the general message was that the party welcomed a respectful contest in the issues.
"People want our presidents to succeed. They want our country to succeed," Barbour said. "So in my opinion it doesn't serve any purpose to be critical of the president personally." That sentiment showed in some of the governors' rhetoric - criticizing Democratic Congressional leaders by name but speaking generally of "the administration" and not Obama individually.
Looking ahead, Barbour told a larger gathering at the conference that 2010 is "going to be a good year for us." Comparing it to 1994, when he chaired the RNC, Barbour said: "This feels better this early," in part because of the increasingly unpopular policies at the federal level.
Those federal issues will "really matter in these governors races," RGA executive director Nick Ayers said. The lesson of 2009 was not that the mood of the electorate is anti-incumbent, but anti-spending and anti-government overreaching. That's more cause for concern on the part of Democrats looking to hold on to their majority of governorships -- of nine Democrats seeking re-election in 2010, "seven of them at this point have Corzine-like numbers and have Corzine-like governing problems," Ayers said.
Nathan Daschle, Ayers' counterpart at the Democratic Governors Association, countered that a number of Republican-held seats are in the same jeopardy because of their own challenges. New state-by-state unemployment data shows at least a half dozen states with Republican governors had higher unemployment rates than New Jersey's, which means "that both parties are going to have to carry the same burden next year."
"The RGA didn't have to put up any of their incumbents in '09, which was a huge boost for them. But next year they do," Daschle said. "And some of them are very vulnerable."
Among them were Republican governors not in attendance: Nevada's Jim Gibbons. Other GOP held seats in California, Connecticut and Florida are in jeopardy as well, with the declining fortunes of the retiring governors tied in part to the economy as well.
Daschle also said that Republicans need to nationalize gubernatorial contests to "cover up deep divisions" that have poured into state races as well - affecting candidate recruitment in Colorado recently, for instance. There is even a tough GOP race shaping up involving the host governor, Rick Perry. These factors lead Daschle to make what may be an optimistic assessment of the role federal issues may have.
"In 2010 voters will have other candidates on the ballot to make a statement about on national issues," Daschle said, referring to House and Senate contests that will also be on the ballot next fall.
Even if the specific federal issues themselves aren't on the ballot, a broader concern over the size of government that may translate at the state level. One governor far away from Washington offered an example of how that message would play in his race.
"Clearly the federal government is taking away our freedoms and our opportunities for a strong-growing economy," Alaska's Sean Parnell said in an interview. "We're fighting them off every day that I'm governor."
Earlier this year, in a touching exercise in diplomatic and civilizational outreach, he sent two letters to Iran's mullahs and a new year's message to the Iranian people. How mannerly, how unthreatening. When the Iranian government beat protesters in the streets after it stole the election for Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June, Obama kept his criticism muted. How sensitive, how subtle.
In October, the Iranians agreed to send their low-enriched uranium - at least the portion of it we know about - to Russia in what was hailed as a triumph for Obama's charm offensive. Except it's all predictably ending in tears. If George W. Bush put too much faith in oppressed people - their ability and willingness to rise up for freedom - Barack Obama puts too much faith in their oppressors.
The Iranians have all but announced that they are reneging on the October deal. U.S. officials, according to the Wall Street Journal, "acknowledge Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appears to be using negotiations to limit U.N. pressure while also working to legitimize his government domestically." Maybe they should get word to the president?
In response to Iranian intransigence, Obama is supposed to be poised to crack down with harsh sanctions supported by the Russians and Chinese, won over by Obama's accommodating gestures. Neither is likely to go along, though. True to his word, Obama has worked a remarkable change in America's reputation in the world - from purported bully to notorious chump in less than a year.
As Obama demonstrated again on his Asian trip, he is the leader of the free world in adoring crowds ("Obama-san!" they shouted in Japan) and personal charisma ("I would like to be his friend," Xie Lijun, 28, told the Washington Post in Shanghai). But even the press is beginning to realize that all this personal good will generates only personal good will.
Obama's chief politico, David Axelrod, explained that Obama's team never expected "change overnight." Now he tells us. It's not just that the world hasn't fallen at Obama's feet, it's that the administration's self-described "smart power" has - to borrow an old gibe about the Moral Majority - proven to be neither.
Afghan ambassador Karl Eikenberry is fundamentally at odds with Gen. Stanley McChrystal over Afghan strategy, making it all but impossible that the two will replicate the superb civil-military cooperation of Amb. Ryan Crocker and Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq during the surge; super Af-Pak envoy Richard Holbrooke is persona non grata in Afghanistan; Amb. Christopher Hill in Iraq is something of a diplomatic nonentity; Middle East envoy George Mitchell has hurried the "peace process" to a point of crisis worse than when he started.
As Casey Stengel famously asked, "Can't anyone here play this game?" The administration might have waited to accomplish something before adopting a foreign-policy slogan pre-emptively congratulating itself for its diplomatic acumen. But that's not the Obama way.
Democrats spent years banging on Bush for alienating our allies. What they really meant was that he hadn't been nice enough to our enemies. Reversing field entirely, Obama has been hell on allies like Hamid Karzai and the Israelis. He's undercut the Poles and Czechs. He's given a cold shoulder to friends who have the temerity to want to trade with us, like the Colombians and South Koreans. He's cooled the special relationship with Britain. And he hammered the government of Honduras when it stopped a creeping Chávezist coup by its sitting president.
The more pro-U.S. a country is, the more it can expect scolding or neglect from the president of the United States. It's our enemies and the authoritarian big powers that Obama wants to woo. And like every cad who's ever been presented with achingly defenseless innocence, they are very glad to see him. Yes, the world loves Barack Obama.
The Congressional Budget Office stated on October 29 that the House bill would generate $167 billion in revenue from "penalty payments." Individual Americans are expected to pay $33 billion of these penalties, with employers paying the rest. Former member of Congress and Heritage Foundation fellow Ernest Istook has concluded that for this revenue goal to be met, 8 to 14 million individual Americans will have to be fined over the next ten years, quite an incentive for federal bureaucrats.
Who will be included among those subject to civil and criminal penalties if this provision becomes law? For starters, any family of four whose combined income in 2016 is above $102,100 ($88,200 in today's dollars) and that chooses to pay all its medical expenses out of pocket rather than pay the $15,000 a year that the CBO says will be the lowest-priced insurance option for families. Also any healthy twentysomething in a city with high costs of living who chooses to take the risk of going uninsured. And by outlawing the popular high-deductible plans that are currently among the lowest-cost health-insurance solutions, the new law would only increase the number of Americans on the rolls of those who cannot afford insurance. The CBO itself estimates that at least 18 million Americans will still be uninsured in 2016.
The fact that the penalties for noncompliance are enforceable by criminal prosecution is a chilling abuse of the prosecutorial power, which Columbia law professor Herbert Wechsler pointed out 50 years ago is the greatest power that any government uses against its citizens. Using it to enforce one particular notion of appropriate insurance coverage is nothing less than a tyrannical assertion of raw government power over the private lives and economic rights of individual Americans.
How would the penalties work? As a starting point, taxpaying Americans who do not satisfy the law's insurance requirement would be penalized on their federal income-tax returns. Their tax burden would be increased by the lesser of (a) the amount the government decides they should pay for government-mandated health coverage or (b) 2.5 percent of their adjusted income above a filing threshold. An otherwise law-abiding American who fails to pay this "tax penalty" could be criminally prosecuted and sentenced to a year in prison if the feds deem his refusal to be a misdemeanor.
Worse, if the feds decide the refusal is felonious, the culprit may spend five years in federal prison and be fined up to $250,000. You could end up in a cell in Leavenworth even if you have paid all your family's medical bills yourself.
By transforming a refusal or failure to comply with a government mandate into a federal tax violation, the "progressives" are using the brute force of criminal law to engage in social engineering. This represents an oppressive, absolutist view of government power.
What does President Obama think of the criminalization of Americans' economic choices? He trivialized the issue when he told ABC's Sunlen Miller he didn't think the question of the appropriateness of possible jail time is the "biggest question" the House and Senate are facing right now.
We beg to differ.
The idea of imprisoning or fining Americans who don't knuckle under to an unprecedented government mandate to purchase a particular insurance product should outrage anyone who believes in the exceptional promises and opportunities afforded by our basic American freedoms. The idea isn't progressive but highly regressive, the equivalent of reinstituting debtors' prisons, a punishment Americans eliminated 160 years ago.
Of course, the prospect of winding up in prison for failing to maintain government-mandated insurance may be of no personal concern to the president or members of Congress. They each receive a Cadillac version of health-care coverage funded by those same American taxpayers who, in the reformers' vision, will be federal criminals if they have the audacity to make their own decisions about medical insurance.
If the public's objections to this provision grow loud enough, we will undoubtedly be told that criminal prosecution will be used only against really bad actors. But that same reasoning was used to justify the law that sent inventor and entrepreneur Krister Evertson to federal prison for nearly two years. Evertson testified in July at a bipartisan House hearing investigating the overcriminalization of conduct in America.
In May 2004, FBI agents driving a black Suburban and wearing SWAT gear ran Evertson off the road near his mother's home in Wasilla, Alaska. When Evertson was face down on the pavement with automatic weapons trained on him, an FBI agent told him he was being arrested because he hadn't put a federally mandated sticker on a UPS package.
A jury in federal court in Alaska acquitted Evertson, but the feds weren't finished. They reached into their bag of over 4,500 federal crimes and found another ridiculous crime they could use to prosecute him: supposedly "abandoning" hazardous waste (actually storing, in appropriate containers, valuable materials he was using for the clean-fuel technology he was developing). A second jury convicted him, and he spent 21 months in an Oregon federal prison.
Many of the Americans who will surely ignore the government health-insurance mandate may not wind up in prison. But if noncompliance becomes too widespread, any one of us could become the example the feds prosecute to make sure the iron hand of the new Washington is clearly visible to other potential "criminals."
This is Chicago-style hardball, backed by the full power and resources of the U.S. government. It illustrates both Obamacare supporters' view of the appropriate uses of governmental power and the lengths to which they are willing to go to force us to do what they believe is best. It is a view unbefitting a free people.
Unless this paternalistic juggernaut is stopped, Americans will lose some of their most fundamental freedoms, and the power of the federal government to impose novel requirements in every facet of our personal lives will have become virtually unlimited
This piece originally appeared here and is reprinted with permission.
]]>Everyone knows that the bloodthirsty blowhard -- whom officials often refer to by his initials, KSM -- is never going to see the light of day. The uproar is really about the word "war." Outrage is being voiced by those who worry that Holder and President Obama are abandoning the Bush-era doctrine of a "war on terrorism" that must at all times be conducted by military means.
Those critics are wrong. The problem is that we can vanquish al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups without defeating the larger enemy: a militant, fundamentalist perversion of Islam. We can and should go after Osama bin Laden and his collaborators with relentless determination and, yes, that fight should be led by our armed forces. But to achieve a meaningful victory, we also have to win the war of ideas -- and in that philosophical and theological struggle, the concept of justice is a key battlefield.
It's amazing that so many people who insist on the "war on terrorism" framework apparently have such little interest in understanding the enemy, which seems to me the only way to find the enemy's vulnerabilities. The jihadist narrative is largely about justice, or rather what radical imams and their followers perceive as injustice.
In the enemy's version of history, the West -- meaning the United States, Israel, Britain and what used to be called Christendom -- has a long history of exploiting the Muslim world. We occupy Muslim lands to steal their resources. We install corrupt lackeys as their rulers. For all our high and mighty talk about fairness and justice, we reserve these luxuries for ourselves. In this warped worldview, we deserve any atrocities that jihadist "warriors" might commit against us.
Protesting that all this is absurd and obscene does not make it go away. And our troops' military success actually helps to further the jihadist narrative about a "crusade" against Islam.
It's ironic that many of the officials and commentators who are so upset about the decision to give KSM a civilian trial were also quick to call the Fort Hood killings an act of terrorism. If the suspect, Maj. Nidal Hasan, is indeed a terrorist -- and not just a deranged man who snapped -- then his awful rampage helps demonstrate the point I'm making. Hasan reportedly considered the U.S. military deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan a war against Islam, at one point arguing that Muslim soldiers should be excused from combat as conscientious objectors. In other words, he apparently bought at least part of the jihadist line. If killing a terrorist in Kandahar creates one in Killeen, we'll never make progress.
In this context, putting KSM and the others on trial in a civilian proceeding on U.S. soil is not just a duty but an opportunity. It's a way to show that we do not have one system of justice for ourselves and another for Muslims, that we give defendants their day in court, that we insist they be vigorously defended by competent counsel -- that we really do practice what we preach.
Even if a military tribunal would be just as fair -- and a military court might be even more offended by the fact that KSM was subjected to waterboarding -- a trial by men and women in uniform would be seen as an extension of the "war on Islam."
Holder's choice is not without risk. The biggest question I have is whether an impartial jury could be impaneled in New York. And while I believe the chance of an acquittal is incredibly remote, if it happened, KSM would be kept in indefinite detention anyway -- a nightmare scenario.
But there's one more huge benefit to a civilian trial: It would show the preachers of hatred and their followers that we're not afraid of them or their poisonous ideas. It would show that they haven't changed us or our ideals -- and that they never will.
I say bring it on.
An important addition to the list of tax hikes included in the Senate bill was an increase in the Medicare portion of the payroll tax. The current Medicare tax is 2.9 percent, paid half each by workers and employers. The proposal in the Senate bill raises this to 3.4 percent for workers making more than $200,000 a year ($250,000 for joint filers).
Under a long-standing principle, taxpayers pay the Medicare tax during their working years and receive coverage for hospitalization during their retirement. Using the additional payroll tax revenue from raising the rate to pay for a new, separate entitlement program would break the long-established tie between the tax and the benefits taxpayers receive for paying it.
Using new revenue from the Medicare tax to fund health care reform would be as illogical as raising the federal gas tax, which funds highway construction and maintenance, to pay for a new welfare entitlement.
Higher Taxes Than France
Higher Medicare taxes would push the top average marginal tax rate even higher than already scheduled. Currently, the top federal tax rate is 35 percent, but President Obama has proposed to allow it to increase to 39.6 percent.
In addition, the House of Representatives' version of health care reform includes a 5.4 percent surtax on incomes over $500,000 a year. All these increases, combined with state and local income taxes, would raise the average top marginal rate in the U.S. to over 52 percent. This would be higher than traditionally high-tax countries such as Italy, Spain, and even France.
A Growing List
Below is a list of the tax increases Congress and the Administration have proposed to finance health care reform. This list includes taxes in the bill passed by the House of Representatives, the bill the Senate is currently debating, and other taxes mentioned as a possible way to pay for health care reform.
More to Come
The full list of taxes proposed to pay for health care reform is provided because taxes currently left out of the Senate or House bills could reappear at any point. For instance, the tax on cosmetic surgery listed above (sometimes called the "Botox tax") was written off long ago as a laughable way to pay for health care reform. Nevertheless, it somehow found its way into the current version of the Senate bill.
As the legislative process continues and Congress's desperation to pass a bill increases, it could propose even more tax hikes to pay for its massive expansion of government size and power. The Heritage Foundation will update this list with each new proposal.
No Time for Tax Hikes
Raising taxes at any time is economically harmful, but doing so during a severe recession is reckless. The higher taxes in the health care plans would depress economic activity and delay recovery. When the recovery does finally come, it would be weaker than it would have been without all the tax increases. In the long run, economic growth would remain lower because of these damaging tax increases.
Instead of rushing through a badly conceived health care bill and raising taxes to pay for it, Congress should focus first on economic recovery by increasing the incentives to work, save, invest, and take on new economic risk. Congress can do so by dropping all talk of tax increases and extending permanently the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.[30] That is the only way to pull the economy out of the "Great Recession" and get unemployed Americans back to work.
This piece originally appeared here and is reprinted with permission.
]]>"The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn't work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle."
Other readers pounced like wolf-sized Dobermans on an intruder. One guffawed, "That sentence by Sarah Palin could be entered into the annual Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest. It could have a chance at winning a (sic) honorable mention, at any rate."
But soon, the original contributor confessed: "I probably should have mentioned that the sentence quoted above was not written by Sarah Palin. It's taken from the first paragraph of ‘Dreams From My Father,' written by Barack Obama."
The ruse should have been allowed to fester longer, but the point was made nonetheless: Some people hate Palin first and ask questions later.
My all-time favorite response to John McCain's selection of Palin as his running mate was from Wendy Doniger, a feminist professor of religion at the University of Chicago. Professor Doniger wrote of the exceedingly feminine "hockey mom" with five children: "Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman."
The best part about that sentence: Doniger uses the pronoun "her" - twice.
Just this week, a liberal blogger at The Atlantic who has dedicated an unhealthy amount of his life to proving a one-man birther conspiracy theory about Palin's youngest child (it's both too slanderous and too deranged to detail here) shut down his blog to cope with the epochal, existential crisis that Palin's book presents to all humankind. The un-self-consciously parodic announcement seemed more appropriate for a BBC warning that the German blitz was about to begin, God Help Us All.
Indeed, some of us will always be sympathetic to Mrs. Palin if for nothing else than her enemies. The bile she extracts from her critics is almost like a dye marker, illuminating deep pockets of asininity that heretofore were either unnoticed or underappreciated.
In fairness, just as there are people who hate Palin for the effrontery she shows in daring to draw breath at all, there are those who love her with a devotion better suited for a religious icon.
I hear from both camps, often. And while I don't think both sides are equally wrong (after all, the acolytes of the Doniger school openly reject reality more than any so-called creationist), I don't think either position is laudable or sufficient.
Sarah Palin is neither savior (that job has been taken by the current president, or didn't you know?) nor is she satanic. She is a politician, a species of human like the rest of us.
I'm fairly certain that if you read many of her public-policy positions but concealed her byline, many of her worst enemies would say "that sounds about right," and some of her biggest fans would say "that sounds crazy." But most people would say that her views are perfectly within the mainstream of American politics. She may be more religious than coastal elites in the lower 48, but that is something some bigots need to get over, anyway.
I'm happy about the books she's selling thanks to the controversy over her, but that doesn't mean I think these controversies are justified. Palin holds no public office and, as of yet, is not running for one. But the Associated Press assigned eleven reporters to "fact-check" her book, while doing nothing like that to fact-check then-candidate Obama's or current Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's no doubt riveting book.
As it stands, my sense is that Palin is good for the Republican party but not necessarily great. She generates enthusiasm among, and donations from, the base. But she also turns off many of the people the GOP needs to persuade and attract. That could change with this book tour, and I hope it does. Whether she's ready or qualified for the presidency is another matter. But the presidency is a long way off, and besides, that's what primaries are for.
Copyright 2009, Tribune Media Services Inc.
]]>And now its self-proclaimed architect, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, has been given by the Obama administration a civilian trial in New York. Just as the memory fades, 9/11 has been granted a second life -- and KSM, a second act: "9/11, The Director's Cut," narration by KSM.
September 11, 2001 had to speak for itself. A decade later, the deed will be given voice. KSM has gratuitously been presented with the greatest propaganda platform imaginable -- a civilian trial in the media capital of the world -- from which to proclaim the glory of jihad and the criminality of infidel America.
So why is Attorney General Eric Holder doing this? Ostensibly, to demonstrate to the world the superiority of our system where the rule of law and the fair trial reign.
Really? What happens if KSM (and his co-defendants) "do not get convicted," asked Senate Judiciary Committee member Herb Kohl. "Failure is not an option," replied Holder. Not an option? Doesn't the presumption of innocence, er, presume that prosecutorial failure -- acquittal, hung jury -- is an option? By undermining that presumption, Holder is undermining the fairness of the trial, the demonstration of which is the alleged rationale for putting on this show in the first place.
Moreover, everyone knows that whatever the outcome of the trial, KSM will never walk free. He will spend the rest of his natural life in U.S. custody. Which makes the proceedings a farcical show trial from the very beginning.
Apart from the fact that any such trial will be a security nightmare and a terror threat to New York -- what better propaganda-by-deed than blowing up the entire courtroom, making KSM a martyr and making the judge, jury and spectators into fresh victims? -- it will endanger U.S. security. Civilian courts with broad rights of cross-examination and discovery give terrorists access to crucial information about intelligence sources and methods.
That's precisely what happened during the civilian New York trial of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers. The prosecution was forced to turn over to the defense a list of two hundred unindicted co-conspirators, including the name Osama bin Laden. "Within ten days, a copy of that list reached bin Laden in Khartoum," wrote former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, the presiding judge at that trial, "letting him know that his connection to that case had been discovered."
Finally, there's the moral logic. It's not as if Holder opposes military commissions on principle. On the same day he sent KSM to a civilian trial in New York, Holder announced he was sending Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole, to a military tribunal.
By what logic? In his congressional testimony Wednesday, Holder was utterly incoherent in trying to explain. In his Nov. 13 news conference, he seemed to be saying that if you attack a civilian target, as in 9/11, you get a civilian trial; a military target like the Cole, and you get a military tribunal.
What a perverse moral calculus. Which is the war crime -- an attack on defenseless civilians or an attack on a military target such as a warship, an accepted act of war which the U.S. itself has engaged in countless times?
By what possible moral reasoning, then, does KSM, who perpetrates the obvious and egregious war crime, receive the special protections and constitutional niceties of a civilian courtroom, while he who attacked a warship is relegated to a military tribunal?
Moreover, the incentive offered any jihadi is as irresistible as it is perverse: Kill as many civilians as possible on American soil and Holder will give you Miranda rights, a lawyer, a propaganda platform -- everything but your own blog.
Alternatively, Holder tried to make the case that he chose a civilian New York trial as a more likely venue for securing a conviction. An absurdity: By the time Obama came to office, KSM was ready to go before a military commission, plead guilty and be executed. It's Obama who blocked a process that would have yielded the swiftest and most certain justice.
Indeed, the perfect justice. Whenever a jihadist volunteers for martyrdom, we should grant his wish. Instead, this one, the most murderous and unrepentant of all, gets to dance and declaim at the scene of his crime.
Holder himself told The Washington Post that the coming New York trial will be "the trial of the century." The last such was the trial of O.J. Simpson.
Copyright 2009, Washington Post Writers Group
]]>Last week at a city council meeting in Allentown, Pa., a top official of the local Service Employees International Union chapter ranted about 17-year-old Scout Kevin Anderson's park cleanup work. Anderson devoted some 200 hours to the job in order to earn an Eagle Scout badge. He picked up trash and helped clear a 1,000-foot walking path with fellow members of Boy Scouts Troop 301 of Center Valley.
But SEIU's Nick Balzano gave them hell instead of thanks.
Balzano disparaged altruistic efforts in city parks and asserted that "there is (sic) to be no volunteers" since his union members were laid off. He then issued a witch hunt threat: "We'll also be looking into the Cub Scout or Boy Scout who did the trails. We may file another grievance on that." Citing union rules, he gave the Allentown city council, the Boy Scouts and all potential volunteers an iron-fisted ultimatum: "None of them can pick up a hoe. They can't pick up a shovel. They can't plant a flower. They can't clear a bicycle path. They can't do anything. Our people do that."
That's right. Balzano was ready to bludgeon the Boy Scout because his gung-ho volunteerism posed a threat to the SEIU labor monopoly. The outrageous display of Boss Balzano's union protectionism provoked a national furor. SEIU headquarters in Washington immediately blamed "the disreputable Fox News and other right-wing outlets like Michelle Malkin's accuracy challenged blog" for the backlash. While decrying their critics' "fiction," SEIU distanced itself from Balzano, denying that he was a top union leader and dismissing his remarks as "unauthorized."
Fact: U.S. Department of Labor records from 2008 (their most recent filing) show that Balzano is no rogue rank-and-file member. He currently serves on the SEIU local's executive board and previously served as president.
Fact: The union tried to minimize Balzano's grievance threat as "inappropriate." But the dirty open secret is that public-sector unions have routinely attacked volunteer workers who threaten their stranglehold.
Last June, union officials in Baraboo, Wis., filed a complaint against volunteer firefighters who built sandbag barricades to protect the city from record flooding. They whined that city Department of Public Works employees should have been called first and demanded overtime pay (for work they didn't do) to compensate them.
Yes, kids, the city was knee-deep in water and the government union got mad that other people scrambled to work together in an emergency to put sand in bags, save homes and help their neighbors. Public-sector unions aren't about serving the public interest. They're about serving their people, their power and their self-preservation.
In Montpelier, Vt., several years ago, the teachers union went after a superstar educator, Bill Corrow. The students, staff and supervisors at his school loved the social studies teacher and Vietnam veteran. But the Vermont Education Association hated him because he was a volunteer who did not accept payment for his elective course. Teachers unions are all for parents and schoolchildren volunteering their time to engage in political lobbying and power-expanding initiatives on the union's behalf. But God help the community service-oriented individual with a passion for sharing his knowledge in their classrooms.
In California, union heavies in the Sacramento area sued a nonprofit environmental group for using college-age volunteers on a state-funded project to clean up a canyon and build a community trail. Big Labor dusted off an old law that requires community service volunteers to be paid prevailing wages for doing the same kind of cleanup that Allentown Boy Scout Kevin Anderson was punished for doing freely. The law was finally repealed, but not without a brass-knuckles fight.
As National Right to Work Committee President Mark Mix, whose group monitors forced union abuses, pointed out during the battle: "Discerning California union bosses' real agenda ... is not hard. Volunteer workers don't have to pay compulsory union dues to serve their communities, but most paid workers on public projects in California do. ... (It) is yet another example of how government-authorized compulsory union dues corrupt the political process and furnish unscrupulous union officials with an enormous incentive to act against the public interest."
SEIU President Andy Stern in Washington speaks for all of Big Labor when he describes his organizing philosophy: "We prefer to use the power of persuasion, but if that doesn't work, we use the persuasion of power." President Obama, who has made national service an administration priority, has been and will continue to be silent about the Big Labor bullies who make public enemies of Scouts with trash bags and hoes.
You see, kids, Obama owes Stern (his most frequent White House visitor) and his union brethren. SEIU alone poured more than $60 million in compulsory membership dues into Obama's campaign and leaned on its workers to "volunteer" to knock on doors, place phone calls and send out mailers for the Democratic Party. No good deed goes unpunished by union bosses -- unless it benefits their political empire.
Copyright 2009, Creators Syndicate Inc.
]]>Now the president and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates are desperately trying to jerk the spotlight away from a dysfunctional Afghan decision-making process in which chaos has preceded choice, complicating every possible outcome.
Gates is "appalled by the amount of leaking that has been going on," which would be, if the culprits are discovered, "a career-ender." Obama recently added, "I think I am angrier than Bob Gates about it." They should be appalled and angry at the process they created -- as should the rest of the country.
Sometimes government leaks are merely self-serving, reflecting the powerful passion of midlevel functionaries to appear in the know. But leaks in this process have been attempts to rig the outcome of a national security decision.
This summer, nameless White House officials began leaking their skepticism of plans for troop increases. Then Gen. Stanley McChrystal's assessment, calling for a more troop-intensive counterinsurgency strategy, was leaked. Then a leak of internal government reviews on the poor state of the Afghan military and police forces. Then a leak from "informed sources" that Obama had settled on a troop increase of 34,000. Then the leak that Obama had rejected all the military options on the table and was insisting on refinements. Then the leak of two classified cables from Ambassador Karl Eikenberry, which cautioned against troop increases, leaving McChrystal, according to another nameless source, feeling "stabbed in the back."
The Afghan policy process has resulted in more leaks than Oktoberfest. Leaks are a form of disloyalty -- an attempt to box in the president of the United States, a mini-coup in which unelected officials attempt to substitute their judgment for the president's own. Leaks increase tension and anger, then leave the losing side in a debate publicly humiliated and perhaps alienated from the outcome. Depending on that outcome, Obama will be vulnerable to charges of buckling to military pressure or disregarding the advice of his commanders.
Though leaks are bad for the president and the country, they are gifts for journalists and commentators, who often draw their purpose from the failures of others. We have learned that Obama's national security team is both deeply divided and playing for blood. Military-civilian tensions are growing and have become reflected on the ground in Afghanistan. One key to the success of the surge in Iraq was the close cooperation of Gen. David Petraeus, in charge of military operations, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, who led the civilian efforts. McChrystal and Eikenberry seem to have a different relationship.
We have also learned that military and civilian timelines are quickly diverging. In his strategy memo sent on Aug. 30, McChrystal warned: "Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) -- while Afghan security capacity matures -- risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible." At that time, I talked to administration officials who were hoping the scale-up of troops would begin in earnest before the end of the year. Soon, three months will have passed since McChrystal made his dire assessment -- three months of leaks and recriminations that must give pause to our troops and encouragement to our enemies. While it is important to get a military decision right, it is also possible for the right decision to come too late.
It is not fair that large presidential choices must be made with insufficient time and information, but it is also not unusual. A dysfunctional process on Afghanistan has begun to narrow the range of good outcomes. The time and the options in Afghanistan are limited. "As an analogy," says David Kilcullen, an expert on counterinsurgency strategy, "you have a building on fire, and it's got a bunch of firemen inside. There are not enough firemen to put it out. You have to send in more or you have to leave. It is not appropriate to stand outside pontificating about not taking lightly the responsibility of sending firemen into harm's way. Either put in enough firemen to put the fire out or get out of the house."
So reported the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press on Nov. 11, summarizing its latest poll.
I think there's reason to believe that the public's anger is even deeper than Pew's estimate because voters believe - correctly - that "the way things are going" is not getting better.
If so, and with Republicans and Democrats fighting all the time and improving nothing, there's an opening for a third-party challenge as strong as Ross Perot's in 1992.
Running against deficits, free trade and the inadequacies of the two major parties, the quirky industrialist led the field with 39 percent of the vote in June 1992, dropping to just 18.9 percent in November because he torpedoed his own campaign.
The likeliest figure to seize upon this opening is populist demagogue (and self-styled "Mr. Independent") Lou Dobbs, formerly of CNN, so let's hope a better alternative appears - or the direction of the country improves.
But, right now, the prospects are dismal. My favorite economic guru, David Smick, editor of International Economy magazine, summarized them in a speech last week at the Colony Club of New York, soon to be excerpted in Commentary magazine.
"Americans are worried," he said, "about a pending national fiscal nightmare that could doom the U.S. economy to slow growth and second-rate status.
"They instinctively sense we may be becoming like Britain after the Second World War, quickly fading in relevance, our currency losing credibility, our industrial and entrepreneurial edge dulled, our people deeply frustrated."
For one thing, he said, for unemployment to fall from 10.2 percent to 5 percent, the economy would have to produce 250,000 jobs a month for the next five years, whereas the average monthly job growth rate over the past 20 years has been 90,000.
"Reducing unemployment to where it was before the [current] crisis may be impossible," he said. "So get ready for an American work force full of long-term anxiety - and anger."
Smick, once chief of staff to the late Rep. Jack Kemp (R-N.Y.) and a 1996 presidential campaign adviser to Democratic Sen. Bill Bradley (N.J.), added that the barely recovering economy is burdened by "a 300-pound backpack of personal and public debt."
"Within a decade," he said, "the U.S. will be borrowing $722 billion a year just to pay interest" on the national debt.
"We're about to enter a fiscal trap, chasing our tail just to pay off our creditors. That's the experience of Third World regimes. Their currencies lose all credibility. They suffer from high and crushing interest rates, ending up as wards of the International Monetary Fund."
Smick is an expert on all this. He's made a fortune as an international trader and he wrote a best-selling book, "The World Is Curved," on the dangers of the unregulated world financial system.
Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama ("George W. Obama") have made matters worse, he said.
"Both proposed huge new entitlements with no way of paying for them. Both are at a loss at understanding the means of creating new private sector employment opportunities. ...
"Both offered the big Wall Street banks an incredible $700 billion in taxpayer funding with no stipulation that the banks lend the money, which today they are not doing."
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Smick says, is trying to keep the economy afloat by holding down interest rates - but all that means is that big banks borrow at zero, invest (often overseas) at 3 percent or 4 percent, make huge profits and refuse to lend to small U.S. businesses, which create 70 percent of new jobs.
Smick thinks the Obama administration should have forced banks to lend their bailout money before paying it back and included an investment tax credit for business in its stimulus package.
"What Washington can provide is a climate conducive to innovative risk," he said. "But that's not today's climate, where the tax, regulatory and financial future are as terrifyingly uncertain as at any time in postwar history."
Smick agrees that the moment is ripe for a third-party candidate - "a problem-solving, no-nonsense leader who can come to Washington to clean out the swamp created by both political parties."
"We need to reignite America's fires of innovation, daring and confidence. If the current crowd in Washington lacks this vision, the American people, I can assure you, will find someone who has it."
He's not talking about Lou Dobbs here. Or former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R). And unfortunately, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I) and Gen. David Petraeus don't seem to be running. But there is an opening. Help wanted.
Mort Kondracke is the Executive Editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill since 1955. © 2007 Roll Call, Inc.
"(Defense Secretary Robert) Gates Condemns Leaks on Fort Hood Investigation," and "Gates Says 'Shut Up' About Fort Hood."
"Attorney General Eric Holder Announces Terror Trials in New York City for 9-11-01 Plotters."
"Guantanamo Detainees to Illinois Prison."
All three of these actions -- the Gates outburst, the Holder decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other 9/11 conspirators in a Manhattan federal court, and the plan to transfer nearly 200 radical Islamic terrorists to a state prison in western Illinois -- have been decried as egregious examples of political correctness run amok. Actually, coming as they did -- while Mr. Obama was on a meaningless, ceremonial Asian junket -- the "package deal for terrorists" is much worse than many imagine.
Secretary Gates' admonitions regarding Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan -- now charged by the U.S. Army with murdering 12 soldiers and one civilian and wounding about 30 others at Fort Hood -- have nothing to do with protecting the rights of the accused. His misplaced anger is directed at those in our military and defense and intelligence agencies who have justifiable concerns about radical Islamic militants' conducting acts of terror on American soil. Inside the Obama administration, muzzling critics is now an accepted practice -- even at the Pentagon.
The move to relocate up to 200 terrorists from the U.S. military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and house them in the nearly vacant Thomson Correctional Center is a double whammy for the O-Team. It assuages leftist elites in the U.S. and Europe who have been grousing about delays in closing Gitmo and serves as a multimillion-dollar "stimulus" for Mr. Obama's home state.
Though Rep. Tom Latham, a Republican from neighboring Iowa -- directly across the Mississippi River from the Thomson prison -- wants to introduce a "Keep Terrorists Out of the Midwest Act" to prevent the move, it is already a fait accompli. Sen. Richard "Dick" Durbin of Illinois immediately endorsed the idea, saying, "We should not let the unsupported and misplaced fears of a few stand in the way of this historic economic boost to our region."
Holder's decision to move the trials of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh, Waleed bin Attash, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali and Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi from the military tribunal system at Guantanamo to a federal courtroom in Manhattan -- another sop to the global left -- has generated the greatest heat in the media and on Capitol Hill. Notably, the announcement was made the same day that Holder revealed that other accused terrorists being held at Gitmo will be tried by military courts.
Most attention has focused on whether the accused can get fair trials, how classified information can be protected in an open court, and the possibility KSM and his cohorts will escape justice and go free. On Nov. 18, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Holder dismissed the criticism, saying, "I'm not scared of what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has to say at trial, and no one else needs to be, either." Mr. Obama went even further, telling reporters covering his Asia trip, "We'll convict this person with the evidence they've got, going through our system." That statement alone undoubtedly will be used by KSM's lawyers to prove that he cannot get a fair trial just blocks away from ground zero, where the World Trade Center towers stood before the 9/11 attacks.
Unfortunately, nearly all of the comments and commentary miss the point. The real reason we all should be concerned about the Fort Hood massacre, moving terrorists to U.S. prisons and show trials in New York is there are undoubtedly other Nidal Hasans here in the U.S. The media circus in New York and Illinois will go on for years -- inviting radical Islamist "sleepers" and "lone wolves" to attack.
It has happened before. In 1987 -- coincident with extraordinary media coverage -- an Abu Nidal terror "sleeper cell" in northern Virginia was ordered to assassinate a U.S. military officer. The terrorists -- all legally in the U.S. -- were in the employ of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. Thankfully, the FBI detected the "hit" before it could be carried out, and the officer and his family were rushed out of their home and sequestered on a military base until a full-scale U.S. government security detail could be organized to provide 24/7 protection for them at their home and wherever family members went.
Nobody has asked yet how many judges, prosecutors, prison guards and jurors will require such protection as a consequence of these decisions. They should. Otherwise, the actions taken this week by the Obama administration won't just be labeled as political correctness; they will be called political suicide.
Copyright 2009, Creators Syndicate Inc.
]]>Apparently not in the twin capitals of liberalism, D.C. and New York.
In a ranking of 50 states and D.C. by how much each spent per pupil in public schools in 2005, New York ranked first; D.C. third. The state spent $14,100, and New York City just a tad less.
And the bountiful fruits of this massive transfer of taxpayers' wealth?
In D.C., nearly half of all black and Latino students drop out. Of those who graduate, nearly half are reading and doing math at seventh-, eighth- and ninth-grade levels. D.C. academic achievement ranks 51st, last in the U.S.
Yet last week came a report from New York that makes D.C look like M.I.T. Some 200 students, in their first math class at City University of New York, were tested on their basic math skills.
Ninety percent could not do basic algebra. One-third could not convert a decimal into a fraction.
If this was a representative sampling, nine in 10 CUNY students not only do not belong in college, they do not qualify for their high school diplomas. As for that third who can't do decimals and fractions, they should not have been allowed into high school until they could do sixth-grade math.
As 70 percent of all CUNY students are graduates of city schools, a question arises: What are the taxpayers of New York getting for the highest tax rates in the nation?
If a private business annually turned out products that were of inferior quality than the year before, management would be thrown out by the board. Yet, the education racket has been shaking us down for four decades, and turning out graduates that know less and less.
Scholastic Aptitude Test scores peaked around 1964. Ever since, the national average has been in an almost unbroken descent.
So embarrassing did it get that, a few years ago, the SAT folks retooled the test to produce higher scores. Now there are more 1600s. But the national average continues its decline, and the gap between blacks and Hispanics, and Asians and whites, endures.
Is it not a time for truth?
Just as there are many kids who do not have the athletic ability to play high school sports, or the musical ability to play in a high school band, or the verbal ability to recite poetry well or star in debate, not every kid has the academic ability to do high school work.
By the end of the first two months in first grade, an alert kid can tell you who are the smart ones and who are the athletes.
No two kids were ever created equal -- not even identical twins. The family is the incubator of inequality, and God is its author. As the parable teaches, each of us is given different and unequal talents.
Given equality of opportunity, the brightest will inexorably rise, and the less talented -- athletically, artistically, academically -- will fall behind. All things being equal, the fastest kid will always win the race.
This campaign to equalize test scores among unequal students is utopian and unattainable, and amounts to a scam by the education industry.
How many times have they promised progress? And how many times have they delivered?
It is time to look not only skeptically, but cynically, on further demands for billions for education.
Rather, follow the money. Look for who is getting the jobs, the TV appearances, the consulting contracts, the grants, the titles, the limo drivers. Because, at bottom, that is what it is all about -- the transfer of wealth and power from those who earn it and those who produce it, to those who produce little or nothing.
The city colleges, now the City University of New York, were once municipal jewels. They nourished an intellectual elite from the ethnic groups that came in the great immigration wave before 1924. As open admissions -- letting in every high school graduate in the city who applied -- was being debated, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew weighed in against.
"If these quality colleges are degraded, it would be a permanent and tragic loss to the poor and middle class of New York, who cannot afford to establish their sons and daughters on the Charles River or Cayuga Lake. New York will have traded away one of the intellectual assets of the Western world for a four-year community college and a hundred thousand devalued diplomas."
Agnew quoted historian Dan Boorstin:
"In the university, all men are not equal. Those better endowed or better equipped intellectually must be preferred in admission, and preferred in recognition. ... If we give in to the ... demands of militants to admit persons to the university because of their race, their poverty, their illiteracy or any other nonintellectual distinction, our universities can no longer serve all of us or any of us."
The limousine liberals knew better.
Now, they have CUNY students who can't handle fractions.
Copyright 2009, Washington Post Writers Group
]]>In the New York Times, the television critic, writing about her appearance on Oprah, said "she still had the hunted look and defensive crouch" she demonstrated in the campaign. This is pretty much politics as usual. The dominant liberal media can't see beyond their stereotypes.
Dylan Ratigan on MSNBC put Sarah Palin's face atop several female bodies, one in a red, white and blue bikini and another in a tight black miniskirt and high heels. He decreed that "she's hot," not necessarily an insult, but he apologized for the pictures. Newsweek, which runs an Obama cover every other week, put her on the cover this week in running shorts.
Stereotypes of politicians and other celebrities are fair game and sometimes even fun. I once described Palin as the female Republican "Crocodile Dundee," who could wrestle an alligator or shoot and dress a moose and look good doing it. She quotes her father that her resignation as governor was not about "retreating," but about "reloading." Annie Oakley lives.
Beauty (and the beast) may be in the eye of the beholder, but political personalities are shaped by many forces. Palin's memoir "Going Rogue," which is what a John McCain staffer accused her of when she went off their script in talking to a reporter, is how she wants to position herself as an independent thinker, not bound by conventional notions of partisan togetherness, of party or of ideology. She likes the idea that she can duke it out within the Republican Party, not always toeing the party line.
She emphasizes "commonsense conservatism" that she says appeals to a broad spectrum of independents as well as Republicans, drawing on an appreciation of free market values and low taxes. Economic ideas were not her strong point during the campaign, when the Republican ticket never recovered from McCain's limp response to the economic downturn. Nor did she have much to say about foreign policy and was unfairly ridiculed for noting (correctly) that Alaska was close to Russia.
She talks with some ease now about increasing sanctions on Iran and raising troop levels in Afghanistan. She blames her handlers for her poor campaign interviews, but herself for rising to the bait in her interview with Katie Couric. She reckoned, correctly, that the question about which newspapers and magazines she reads was merely condescending to the imagined "Neanderthal atmosphere" of Alaska.
She had, after all, just published an op-ed piece in The New York Times. Nevertheless, her irritation showed her as a novice in the national spotlight and someone clearly not ready for the media hazing of candidates for vice president.
Today she's been granted something of another look as she tries to bring clarity to her past and clear the decks for new ideas. Her campaigning for Republican candidates next year will be closely watched, and she will no doubt accumulate useful IOUs. She will be closely watched as well for whom she turns to for advice on domestic and foreign policy issues. At the moment, she's a stronger talk show host than major political player.
But time and events will polish her mettle, or tarnish it. She needs to show how her natural affirmation of hockey moms and laborer-fathers like her husband can accomplish her goal of a revitalized America. Other public figures have overcome stereotypical derision similar to what she has endured.
Harry Truman was urged to resign no sooner than he was sworn in to make room for "somebody smart." Ronald Reagan was widely regarded by the elites as an "amiable dunce." The tea party crowds are looking for a populist leader who shows a little faith in the decency of the little people and the democratic processes, whom Andrew Jackson called "the humble members of society -- the farmers, mechanics and laborers," who want the obstacles removed that keep them from realizing their abilities.
Matthew Continetti, in his book "The Persecution of Sarah Palin: How the Elite Media Tried to Bring Down a Rising Star," says the time is ripe for a politician with imagination to separate the good populism of free enterprise from the bad populism of loony theories. Palin, he writes, can give voice to those millions who don't want government aggrandizing the powerful and risking fiscal imbalances but "who do want public policies that create the conditions for a general prosperity."
Sarah Palin is poised to move on. Where she goes and how she gets there will determine who follows.
Copyright 2009, Creators Syndicate Inc.
]]>As much as it may pain her many critics, she also has a lot of history on her side.
Many Republicans, looking at the recent fiasco in New York's 23rd Congressional District, argue that the endorsement by Palin and her talk-radio buddies of a rigid right-winger running on the Conservative Party cost Republicans a House seat they had held for more than a century. They worry that the populist anti-establishment "rogues" like Palin will kill GOP prospects for a comeback in 2010 by backing ideologues in many other primaries and scaring off independents and moderate Republicans.
They are wasting their breath on Palin, who got to be governor of Alaska by knocking off incumbent Gov. Frank Murkowski in a Republican primary in 2006. When she told Limbaugh, "What I appreciate about the Republican Party (is) we have contested, aggressive, competitive primaries," she had that fight in mind.
Unlike Palin, most campaign managers and party chairmen hate primaries. They hate to see the money spent fighting people on the same team, and they fear the scars that may be left.
But Palin has a strong point, especially when a party has as many unsettled issues as the Republicans do these days. In such a situation, primaries are the best way to test leaders and ideas. The modern Republican Party began recovering from the many defeats of the New Deal era only in 1952, when Dwight Eisenhower, a war hero, defeated Adlai Stevenson. But before Ike could win the general election, he had to face down Robert A. Taft, the leader of the GOP congressional wing and an embodiment of conservatism. Their battle started in the New Hampshire primary and continued through bitter convention roll calls testing and finally overthrowing establishment control.
Another such fight came in 1980, after the ruin of Watergate had restored Democrats to the White House. Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush squared off, with Bush winning the first round in Iowa and Reagan forced to defend his claim in New Hampshire and in later primaries. Without those tests, Reagan would not have been the candidate who ousted Jimmy Carter.
And as recently as 2000, George W. Bush had to absorb a shellacking at the hands of John McCain in the New Hampshire primary before he was able to slug his way back in South Carolina and develop the tough tactics that he used to claw out his narrow, disputed win over Al Gore.
Against those examples of tough primary battles that preceded and prepared the winners for victory, we have the case of the 1976 struggle in which Reagan challenged President Jerry Ford for the nomination. Ford went to his grave believing that Reagan had weakened him so much that Carter could send him home. He argued that if Reagan had conceded earlier and campaigned harder for the Ford-Bob Dole ticket, the Republicans could have prevailed. But in fact, Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon and debate slip-up on Poland had as much or more to do with his defeat.
The overall pattern has been much the same in Republican primaries for governor and senator. The number of cases where a potential winner has been sabotaged by a primary contest's leftover wounds is remarkably few.
The fear among some Republican pros now is that as the GOP base has shrunk and become more monolithically conservative, ideological purity may replace broad voter appeal as the criterion for prevailing in primaries. The answer to that is to bring more people to the polls, as Eisenhower and Reagan both did.
The way to deal with Palin is not to shut her down, but to match her in appeal and effort.
Copyright 2009, Washington Post Writers Group
]]>Where to begin? The claim that the Bush administration was somehow dilatory sets a new standard for gall, particularly coming from Eric Holder. As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy points out, "The principal reason there were so few military trials is the tireless campaign conducted by leftist lawyers (including Holder) to derail military tribunals by challenging them in the courts."
Those lawyers threw up hundreds of roadblocks. Military detentions and tribunals violated, they claimed, the U.S. Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Litigating all this has taken years.
At last clearing those obstacles, the government initiated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's military trial in Guantanamo in September 2008. In December, KSM pleaded guilty and asked to be executed.
But now, the attorney general puffs out his chest and declares that by trying KSM in an Article III federal court, he has chosen the forum "most likely to lead to a positive result."
The mind reels.
This is an excruciatingly awful decision that no hanging judge talk of "the ultimate penalty" can perfume. What about the increased risk of terror attacks on New York during the trial? The city is "hardened" against attacks Holder assures us. Really? Like Fort Hood?
By granting a civil trial to KSM, while Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who bombed the USS Cole in Yemen, will receive a military tribunal, the U.S. telegraphs this message to terrorists: Wherever possible, attack our civilians. You'll get more lawyering and a better deal than if you attack our military. (And by the way, you'll get more rights than a member of our military who commits a crime.)
Attorney General Holder is keen to prove to a supposedly skeptical world that America lives up to its values (never mind that granting the full rights of citizens to enemy combatants is not part of our creed -- nor anyone else's). Yet he has also repeatedly asserted that a not-guilty verdict is unacceptable. "Failure is not an option. These are cases that have to be won." Whoa. In the first place, it isn't at all beyond imagination that the government could lose this case. KSM was waterboarded. No evidence thus obtained is admissible. A liberal judge who disliked the Bush administration might exclude other key evidence as well.
But Holder says he'll be found guilty. Isn't that a perversion of our jurisprudence? If a not-guilty verdict is impossible, then the trial is a sham. "Sentence first -- verdict afterward" said the Red Queen.
Moreover, the Justice Department has assured Sen. Jon Kyl that "we will not release anyone into the United States if doing so would endanger our national security or the American people." So in the event that KSM is acquitted, it's the position of the Obama Justice Department that we would continue to hold him? How does that outcome burnish the reputation of our justice system?
And while we're on the subject of not thinking things through, at a Senate hearing, Holder could not answer Sen. Lindsey Graham's question about how we would deal with Osama bin Laden if we caught him tomorrow. Would he be Mirandized? Would we give him a lawyer? Isn't that the precedent this decision sets?
There are dozens more reasons (including the intelligence bonanza this will confer on al-Qaida) that this decision is among the worst to emerge from a terrible presidency. What did they hope to achieve? Perhaps they have thought it through -- at least as far as how the trial would unfold. With no defense (he has boasted about his mass murder), what will KSM do? He will put the CIA and the Bush administration on trial. Prepare for lurid accounts of his and others' mistreatment.
Is that the nub? To satisfy the revenge fantasies of American leftists who have lusted to put the Bush administration on trial, the Obama administration is willing to sacrifice logic, justice, national security, and honor?
When KSM's star turn in the courtroom goes viral on the Internet and inspires thousands of new jihadis, the Obamaites can console themselves that at least they stuck it to George W. Bush.
Copyright 2009, Washington Post Writers Group
]]>SARAH PALIN, FORMER GOVERNOR OF ALASKA: I do. Shhh, that was part of that going rogue stuff nobody was supposed to know about in the campaign.
O'REILLY: So you were going rogue, calling O'Reilly at home. I don't know how you got my home number. But you basically said to me "I want to do the show," but why didn't you do it?
PALIN: Whatever the logistics were that weren't working out, we ended up not doing the show, unfortunately. But yeah, reaching out to you and to others who I believed would report fairly, objectively on the campaign. I wanted to talk to you guys.
O'REILLY: We couldn't figure it out because obviously "The Factor's" the biggest cable program with the most people watching. We certainly were fair to you. Would you say we were fair to you?
PALIN: Very fair.
O'REILLY: OK. So why couldn't we get you? And we had trouble getting Senator McCain on the program. I didn't get it.
PALIN: The media strategy was a bit perplexing for at least those on the vice presidential side of the ticket, and not really understanding where we were going there with the relationships with the media. It was just an indication of maybe some things in our campaign being out of touch with the normal everyday average American who wanted to truly connect with the candidate. But very glad to get to be here today.
O'REILLY: OK. But you wanted to be on the program. You wanted to be on "The Factor" during the campaign. You told me you did, and I believed you. And why would you bother taking time out of your busy schedule to call me if that weren't the case?
PALIN: It would be fair to the electorate had we reached out and had more of a connection via different media personalities.
O'REILLY: It's fair to say that you were over-controlled by the McCain people?
PALIN: They were the experts. They had run national campaigns before, and, of course, I had never been a participant in anything larger than a state campaign. So obviously, having to put a lot of faith in their strategy and not having a whole lot of say in things like the media rollout.
O'REILLY: Should you have said, "Look, I'm doing O'Reilly. I don't care what you say"?
PALIN: Oh, as you can tell in the book though, those times that I was more assertive were the times that, you know, we were called "going rogue" and then that being leaked to the press, which was unfortunate. But at this point, of course, it's water under the bridge though. It is - there were mistakes being made in the campaign. I made mistakes in the campaign.
O'REILLY: Everybody does.
PALIN: I acknowledge that, and I think more of a concern has been not within the campaign the mistakes that were made, not being able to react to the circumstances that those mistakes created in a real positive and professional and helpful way for John McCain.
O'REILLY: All right. Let's talk about the senator. Was he accessible to you? Could you pick up the phone and get him on the phone?
PALIN: Absolutely. He still is, and I have great respect for him.
O'REILLY: Did you tell him, "Hey, I'm having trouble with some of your people"? Did you tell him that?
PALIN: I never bad-mouthed any of the operatives.
O'REILLY: Why not?
PALIN: I had faith that Senator McCain was working with those operatives regarding...
O'REILLY: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait, wait, wait. You're frustrated and you're not seeing their vision?
PALIN: Yeah, yeah.
O'REILLY: Don't you think you should have gone to the presidential candidate and said, "Hey, they're mismanaging me. You got to let me loose"?
PALIN: Not necessarily.
O'REILLY: No?
PALIN: Not burdening the candidate who was out there every day putting it on the line for voters to understand what it was that our ticket had to offer. Not wanting to burden him with the internal operatives.
O'REILLY: So you didn't want to put more pressure on him?
PALIN: Absolutely not.
O'REILLY: See, I would have done that.
PALIN: Well, again, hindsight. But no, I think it was obvious to everyone within the campaign that things weren't quite going well.
O'REILLY: You guys could have won the election, I think.
PALIN: Well...
O'REILLY: Looking from a - look, the press was against you. We all know that. Bush had a lot of trouble, and that hurt the Republican ticket. We all know that. But it was close. John McCain - did he ever scold you, by the way...
PALIN: No.
O'REILLY: ...after the Couric interview and the Gibson interview? Did he call you and say, "Hey, Sarah, you got to elevate your game"?
PALIN: John McCain was nothing but positive, encouraging and supportive.
O'REILLY: So he never had any contention between you?
PALIN: Not an ounce of contention. No.
O'REILLY: All right. The two signature moments that got you in trouble, with all due respect, governor, were the Gibson interview when he looked down at you with his nose - on the glasses on the nose and said:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHARLES GIBSON, ABC NEWS: Do you agree with the Bush doctrine?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
O'REILLY: When I heard that I went, "What Bush doctrine?"
PALIN: Everybody said that. So did I.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PALIN: In what respect, Charlie?
GIBSON: Well, what do you interpret it to be?
PALIN: His world view?
GIBSON: No, the Bush doctrine enunciated in September of 2002 before the Iraq war.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
O'REILLY: Do you think that Gibson did that to demean you, to make you look stupid?
PALIN: Those are the gotcha techniques that some in - what some people call mainstream, others call now the "lamestream" media, who want to participate in a tactic like that.
O'REILLY: But he's not like that. Gibson's not like that.
PALIN: Had he explained a little bit more the context of the questions he was asking, probably could have answered it.
O'REILLY: Now that was a signature moment there, and it hurt Gibson because a lot of women said that's not fair. Katie Couric's a different story. Now, Katie Couric asked you an easy question and you booted it, governor.
PALIN: I sure did.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KATIE COURIC, CBS NEWS: What newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this to stay informed and to understand the world?
PALIN: I've read most of them. Again, with a great appreciates for the press, for the media.
COURIC: Like what ones specifically? I'm curious.
PALIN: All of them.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
O'REILLY: Why did you boot it? I mean, if somebody asks what do you read? I say I read the, you know, New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post. I can reel them off in my sleep. You couldn't do it?
PALIN: Well, of course I could. Of course, I could.
O'REILLY: Why didn't you?
PALIN: It's ridiculous to suggest that or to say that I couldn't tell people what I read, because by that point already it was relatively early in that multi-segmented interview with Katie Couric, it was quite obvious that it was going to be a bit of an annoying interview with the badgering of the questions. It seemed to me that she didn't know anything about Alaska, about my job as governor, about my accomplishments as a mayor or a governor, my record. And a question like that though, yeah, I booted it. I screwed up. I should have been more patient and more gracious in my answer. It seemed to me that the question was more along the lines of do you read? How do you stay in touch with the real world?
O'REILLY: So you thought it was condescending. So that was your inexperience that led to that exchange with Couric. You were frustrated.
PALIN: It was my inexperience in having to deal with a badgering, condescending line of questioning.
O'REILLY: Right.
PALIN: It had no reflection at all on my inexperience in terms of administrative record or accomplishment...
O'REILLY: No, it's just handling the media.
PALIN: ...or vision for America. Yeah, and, you know what? So what? So I wasn't...
O'REILLY: It hurt you though.
PALIN: ...so I wasn't doing the right thing to ingratiate myself with liberal media personalities to make them like me. So what? I think if most normal Americans were put in the same position that I was there, they'd probably look at her and have that proverbial eye roll and say, "Are you kidding me?"
O'REILLY: If they knew...
PALIN: "Are you suggesting that I don't read?"
O'REILLY: If they had known, that led, in my opinion, to the McCain people, Steve Schmidt and the other guys saying, you know, we can't trust her out there because she booted that, and that's where you lost credibility among them. I understand what you're saying. Although Katie Couric, and I spoke to her a couple days ago, says she wasn't out to get you, clearly in your book, you feel that Katie Couric was out to get you.
PALIN: I let the transcript speak for itself, and readers will decide for themselves if she had any kind of bias or nonobjective mission there.
O'REILLY: Yeah, but you think she was out to get you. It's different than Gibson.
PALIN: I think that she was out to get, if you will, anyone who didn't believe in her perspective. It's not like she was going to get in there and be, I think, unbiased, objective and fair.
O'REILLY: Interesting.
PALIN: But it is my bad. It is my mistake, and it was my inexperience in dealing with the media elite in my response, a very annoyed response to a very annoying question.
O'REILLY: Your bad.
PALIN: Bad, that's my bad. My mistake.
(LAUGHTER)
(END VIDEOTAPE)
O'REILLY: I love those slang expressions. Now up next, was the governor surprised by the media attacks after her speech at the Republican Convention? Right back with the second part of the Sarah Palin interview.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
O'REILLY: Continuing now with our lead story, a conversation with Sarah Palin. Her new book "Going Rogue" will debut at No. 1, and it'll be a huge best-seller for Harper Collins. That's because Governor Palin has millions of admirers, despite the unprecedented media assault.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
O'REILLY: I was in Minneapolis, as you probably know, watching your speech when you were nominated. And it was, you know, obviously lights out speech.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PALIN: You know they say the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
O'REILLY: Did you know after you gave that speech that the media was going to hammer you? Did you have any idea that they were going to come after you the way they have?
PALIN: You know what I thought they were going to come after me for? Getting a "D" in a college course 22 years ago. That was the big controversy in my little world. That was the skeleton in my closet. Crap. Once the media finds that out...
O'REILLY: You didn't know...
PALIN: ...then it's going to be a...
O'REILLY: Right. So you didn't know they were going to come after you?
PALIN: No, and neither did the campaign. Had the campaign known, then they would have had, practically speaking, things like a binder full of information about me.
O'REILLY: Can I say something bold and fresh?
PALIN: Please.
O'REILLY: You should have known. You are a pro-life woman, a pro-gun woman. You didn't think the elite media in New York and D.C. was going to put a target on your forehead?
PALIN: Not to the extent that they did. No, I didn't anticipate that, and evidently those running the campaign didn't anticipate it either. But you know, they did what they did. But I'm here where I am today, meaning we plowed through a lot of that stuff that they threw our way, a lot of the darts and the arrows thrown our way. I'm still standing and I'm here with Bill O'Reilly. I think that's a bit of a victory.
O'REILLY: Well, I don't know about that. OK. So you and the campaign were unprepared for the vitriol. See, I knew, when I watched you on that stage, I said here's a regular person, which I think you are. I don't know you that well, but I think you're a regular person. Here's a regular person now could be vice president of the United States. Those pinheads back in New York and D.C., they're not going to go for you primarily because of the pro-life stuff.
PALIN: How would we have known though, that the - to the extent that it would have been made manifest their disdain for the normal American? And I am a normal American. And when it comes to my pro-life views, there are more Americans today saying that they understand the sanctity of life and that they are pro-life than they are pro-abortion for the first time in decades, I believe it is.
O'REILLY: OK. The latest poll has you with a 23 percent favorable, 37 percent don't know. You do the math, OK, and you're up at 60 percent of people who could like you. You are the biggest threat because you are a star, media star, whereas you're the only Republican. There aren't any other Republicans who are media stars but you. Now, that's why they're attacking you so vehemently. Do you know that?
PALIN: I don't know why they're attacking me.
O'REILLY: That's the reason. You're a threat.
PALIN: Well, OK, whatever. I do know though that you are spot on when you say perhaps they fear what you're suggesting is a voice being heard that's coming from the heartland of America. And I say that figuratively and literally.
O'REILLY: You're a populist.
PALIN: A populist, yes.
O'REILLY: Do you know what they're calling you now?
PALIN: No.
O'REILLY: Evita.
PALIN: Well.
O'REILLY: Eva Peron.
PALIN: Uh-huh.
O'REILLY: That's who they're calling you now.
PALIN: Well, I don't know, but the liberal media's going to do what they do. And more Americans though are getting disgusted with what they are doing.
O'REILLY: I agree.
PALIN: And not just because of any kind of personal or political attack on me. They're just saying you know what? Enough is enough. There is no longer - there is no longer a mainstream media that can be trusted to be objective and fair and balanced.
O'REILLY: I agree.
PALIN: People are getting their information...
O'REILLY: That's why Fox does so well.
PALIN: Exactly.
O'REILLY: What was the worst personal attack on you?
PALIN: I think the attacks that had to do with suggestions that Trig should never have been allowed to be born, of course...
O'REILLY: That a Down syndrome baby should have been aborted.
PALIN: Yes, that was pretty hurtful, pretty harmful. But the personal attacks there, too. You know, that's something that we've dealt with, and we plowed through it and we moved on.
O'REILLY: Yes, it's hurtful.
PALIN: There were some practical things, though, that took place within the campaign that I wrote about in the book, that were extremely disconcerting and disruptive in the campaign, like my personal e-mails being hacked into and then being broadcast via media outlets that...
O'REILLY: Lucky you didn't say anything scandalous.
PALIN: Well, I know. They were looking for it though.
O'REILLY: Yeah, they were pretty mundane.
PALIN: I mean, it was like a modern time break-in of a campaign headquarters because electronically, that is my campaign headquarter.
O'REILLY: That's right. That's Watergate light.
PALIN: Yeah.
O'REILLY: David Letterman, were you really mad that he made those jokes?
PALIN: I reacted - again, my reaction to a reporter who asked me about the joke that he made about...
O'REILLY: But in hindsight?
PALIN: ...about my 14-year-old daughter being impregnated by a baseball player. And my reaction was, oh, I thought it was atrocious. It wasn't funny. And then from there, I think the spin kind of was that I was absolutely outraged. It gave me an opportunity to say that that kind of humor is pretty outrageous.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
PALIN: It was a degrading comment about a young woman, and I would hope that people really start really rising up and deciding it's not acceptable.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
O'REILLY: If Letterman invited you on to plug the book, would you go?
PALIN: No.
O'REILLY: No?
PALIN: I don't think I would want to boost his ratings and participate in that, no.
O'REILLY: OK. Interesting. Oprah asked you about Levi Johnston.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
OPRAH WINFREY: Will he be invited to Thanksgiving dinner?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
O'REILLY: Why do you - I wouldn't answer questions about him if I were you.
PALIN: Because you guys ask. And I don't know, give me advice. How do you pivot away from questions about a character who is saying things that aren't necessarily true...
O'REILLY: Right.
PALIN: ...and certainly aren't very nice about, again, one of my children and my family?
O'REILLY: I would just say he is the father of my grandchild, and I want a very loving relationship in our family, but I'm not going to say anything more.
PALIN: I will say that, but at the same time, after a year of getting clobbered by the media, capitalizing on people who will make things up, there does come a time in any mama's heart and gut where they're going to say no, no, no. You're picking on my kids. You're picking on my family. I'm going to set the record straight. My guttural instinct is kind of like a mama grizzly bear. You're touching my cubs, you're touching my kids. I'm going to respond and I'm going to set the record straight.
SENATE MAJORITY LEADER HARRY REID, D-NEV.: This reform plan deals with health care. It saves lives. It saves money and it saves Medicare.
We're going to do a bill. We hope that we don't have to do it with Democrats, but if we have to, we will.
SEN. JOHN THUNE, R-S.D.: Nothing has really changed in terms of the basic elements of this proposal. They have tried to figure out a way to wrench it into a budget window that somehow makes it look like it costs less, but at the end of the day, it actually costs more than the Senate Finance Committee bill.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BRET BAIER, HOST: Well, we now have the Senate bill: The Democrats' version is 2,078 pages long. This Saturday they need 60 votes to move it forward to the Senate floor, so if they get past that hurdle, if they do, they can start debate on the bill after Thanksgiving.
As you look at the latest poll numbers, Quinnipiac has a poll out about President Obama's handling of healthcare - 53 percent disapprove, 41 percent approve.
We're here with the panel to breakdown of the Senate bill: Fred Barnes, executive editor of The Weekly Standard; A.B. Stoddard, associate editor of The Hill, and syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer.
Fred, what about this bill?
FRED BARNES, EXECUTIVE EDITOR, THE WEEKLY STANDARD: Well, if you were a government bureaucrat you would think they designed this bill just for me. That's what it does. It gives the government a lot more power and their panels or commissions or commissioners and so on.
If you're a doctor or a patient, you're going to have less power. Patients now will have less choice than you get when you go to Starbucks to buy coffee. They're going to have very little choice.
And then there are up couple of other things: One of the tricks they have used, of course, that are pretty transparent that they have used to make the bill look like it actually will reduce the deficit. Now Bret, if you believe it is going to reduce the deficit, I've got a few things I'd like to sell you.
And of course they took out the doctor's fix and that saved them, what $210, $220 billion? And then they have the taxing and the so-called spending cuts, which they may or may not actually cut, go for 10 years, but the benefits only go for five years. When you get to the second 10 years, then of course it costs so much more. And that's pretty transparent.
But here's the hard part: Anything in this bill is going to be hard to change because you're going to need 60 votes if you want to change the part about abortion or if you want to get rid of the public option. It is going to be hard.
And Republicans are not going to help. They are not going to let this bill be improved because they think at the end of the day it will be an awful bill anyway. Why should we make it nicer so a few of the more moderate Democrats will vote for it? They don't want to vote for it.
BAIER: A. B. They move the spending to 2014, but when the program actually goes into effect - the taxes goes into effect in 2011.
One thing about the Congressional Budget Office's assessment that Senator Reid has touted again and again as being a good thing, on page nine they say that the public plan that's in there would typically have premiums that were somewhat higher than the average premiums for the private plans in the exchanges.
In other words: The public plan that's offered in this plan would cost more than the private plans. I don't get it. Wasn't the purpose to drive down premium costs?
A. B. STODDARD, ASSOCIATE EDITOR, THE HILL: Right, well there was actually a CBO score from a few weeks ago saying on the House side that their public plan might also do the same.
I think it's important to know for Senate Democrats the most important thing is that they got a good score from the Congressional Budget Office. And Fred and others who quibble whether or not it's deficit neutral...
(CROSSTALK)
BARNES: Quibble?
STODDARD: I just want to make a point that politically, timing, we all know on November 19, they would be nowhere without this score. They literally could not move. They could not get going. They're up against serious deadlines here and they want to get this done before 2010.
I do think in the end that in order to get 60 Democrats onboard, including Senator Byrd, who is in frail health, and get this out the door, I think the abortion restrictions are going to be strengthened. I think the public option will be weakened and I think that's how they get everyone onboard.
I don't know how that's going to happen...
BAIER: Because now, let me interrupt you, Democrat Ben Nelson told us, our producer up there, that he would join a filibuster of the bill once it gets to the floor if the abortion coverage is not changed.
STODDARD: Exactly, but he is willing to allow the public option to go forward hoping it might get pulled later. Mary Landrieu is willing to proceed with a vote to proceed, but she says the public option must go later.
So this talk that we're not hearing in back rooms has to do with the two topics. I think the abortion restrictions get tightened, much to the chagrin of the liberal left of the Democratic Party. I think the public option gets weakened as well.
BAIER: Charles?
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Where do you start? This is a really unbelievable bill.
As Fred indicates, because the numbers hand - because the provisions that the CBO looked at are so jiggered, even though CBO's numbers are real, it's about an unreal assumption.
If you start with 2015, which is essentially where the benefits start, and you go into the future, every 10 years you will have a plan that is not $800 billion, it's going to be $1.5 trillion. Which means that except for the early years, in which there are no benefits paid out and a lot of taxes paid in, you're going to have a huge net deficit which will probably be around half a trillion every decade.
Secondly, even if you had the revenue neutrality, which you won't, everybody assumes, well, that is going to help us economically. In fact, to achieve revenue neutrality, you have to increase taxes and you're going to have spending cuts.
Those increases in taxes in cuts and spending, are now not available in reducing the other deficits outside of health care which are going to amount to $9 trillion over the next decade.
So you create a new entitlement. You support it with new taxes and spending cuts, which you cannot now use in reducing the outside - the other deficits - which are destroying the dollar and the federal budget.
BAIER: And A. B., there are some hidden taxes that we kind of discovered in this thing: The botox tax that was laughed out of the negotiations in the Senate Finance Committee is in this bill. There's the payroll tax that a lot of people are concerned about the economy. It's interesting that this stuff made it back into this bill.
STODDARD: Well, they have to find a way to pay for the bill and so they put in - to increase the Medicare payroll tax and to start finding new sources of revenue is a way for Harry Reid, the majority leader, to get away from the taxes on these Cadillac plans, which labor unions oppose.
And I think as you look at a merging of a House and Senate bill, you're going to see more of these new taxes on the wealthy and less of taxes on plans because they really need to give labor something in this very tough year.
BARNES: I don't mean to quibble, if you can just forget these numbers. When you get into these health care plans as they have done in several states, what happens is the spending, it costs two or three times more times more than they had ever dreamed of. It happens with Medicare, it happens with Medicaid, it happens everywhere. So the CBO numbers are really irrelevant.
And for Harry Reid to say they're saving Medicare, it reminded me of, remember in Vietnam, Charles, you'll remember this, where the army explained they burned down the village and they said they had to destroy the village to save it.
He will destroy Medicare.
BAIER: Last word, quickly.
KRAUTHAMMER: Of all the ways in which you can raise revenue, in the Reid bill it's done with raising the payroll tax in the middle of a recession with over 10 percent unemployment exactly at a time when you want to encourage employment and lower the payroll tax. It's perverse.
BAIER: We haven't even talked about the states' opting-out option and how that's all going to work, but we will, guarantee you.
The administration seems to be backing off controversial new guidelines about breast cancer screening. The panel will discuss this after the break.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES SECRETARY KATHLEEN SEBELIUS: Do what you've always done: Talk to your doctor, figure out your own health situation with your doctor, your family history. Those are the really important ingredients.
REP. MARSHA BLACKBURN, R-TENN.: This is how rationing began. This is the little toe in the edge of the water. And this is where you start getting a bureaucrat between you and your physician.
And as we have gone through this health care debate over the past several months, this is what we have warned about.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BAIER: What are they talking about there? The recommendation by a federal task force - federally appointed task force - that women should not undergo a routine mammogram until the age of 50.
Well, the White House and specifically through the health and human services secretary backed away, saying that this is just a recommendation. It's an independent panel. It does not mean that this is coverage or will make policy.
What about this, the politics of it and the science of it? We're back with the panel.
A. B., we'll start with you.
STODDARD: I think it's been a very tough week for the government. I think it was hard for the Obama administration facing a fight on their hands over whether or not they are resisting an investigation into the killings at Fort Hood; whether or not there were 700 incidents reported by the recovery.gov site of grants that were actually never provided to phantom congressional districts.
And now they are just disowning recommendations that are so important to women on this very important topic, trying to urge in the middle of the health care reform debate that we not follow these new guidelines issued by a government panel.
It is true that the government panel doesn't include any breast cancer expertise and perhaps should not have been making those who argue the substance of the recommendations.
But it is very interesting moment for the Obama administration to tie to distance itself from a government panel and those recommendations, fearing that this will impact the health care reform debate and it will show people in 3D just what a government takeover of their health care could actually look like.
BAIER: Which was the congresswoman's point there, Fred, about lifting the veil on these task forces.
BARNES: This is actually what Sarah Palin was talking about when she referred to "death panels": In other words panels that are unelected, unaccountable officials whose recommendations would be enforced by the government.
And these would have been - they would have embraced these if it hadn't been for the huge flap by patients and doctors, you know. And not just whacko doctors and people at tea parties or anything like that, but the doctors at Massachusetts General and so on, really a significant part of the medical community that rebelled at these.
When you think of what would have happened this week, though, if the Obama administration had gotten its way: No hearings in Congress on the Fort Hood hearing - the Fort Hood killing; the stimulus.
The press has exposed all this stuff: The press has done a great job of exposing all the phony claims of jobs created by the stimulus. And then of course this panel, this would have become policy absent the huge adverse reaction to it in public.
(CROSSTALK)
BAIER: I want to point out there are some normal doctors who go to the tea parties. Charles?
KRAUTHAMMER: People are reacting as if we never had a panel or a recommendation before. Years before, we had a recommendation from a panel like this who said start at forty. Every day the FDA is deciding this new drug is a good one or not, and if it's not, you don't ever see it.
So it is not as if these kinds of independent commissions don't exist and determine what we get and what we don't. So it's, the issue here is not panels in general or recommendations in general; it's the recommendation in and of itself.
BAIER: We had some doctors on the air today who said this is also about a woman who spends a month terrified when she gets a false positive. There's, you know, speaking up for the task force recommendations. And what what's your thought on that?
KRAUTHAMMER: I read the paper and the report that came out of it and its recommendation is based not on the cost, the financial cost, but on the benefits, the net benefits.
And the problem here is a mammogram is extremely inexact: One in 10 tests which are returned as cancer are not, so you have a 10 percent false positive, which causes not just anxiety and suffering, but new tests, more radiation, even a procedure, and perhaps other harms, which could come.
And the balance of this is how much of that is worth how many of the real cancers that are caught.
So when you have inexact tests and inexact screenings, you have got to make a determination and decide how to balance them, and I think the report is a fairly good recommendation. It's not aimed at saving money. It would, but that's not what its recommendations are based on.
BAIER: But do you think it is the start of rationing?
KRAUTHAMMER: Absolutely. It is the way it will happen in the future.
BAIER: But you're not opposed to it?
KRAUTHAMMER: Look, we ration all the time, as the FDA does, and in Britain it is done by a medical commission and government imposition. Here it happens all the time in what insurance will support and what it doesn't.
It's not new.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
VAN SUSTEREN: Senator, nice to see you, sir.
SEN. ORRIN HATCH, R - UTAH: Well, it's nice to see you.
VAN SUSTEREN: I love that you have the U.S. code in your office.
HATCH: Yes, we -- we -- I used to spend a lot of time in the U.S. code, and still do.
VAN SUSTEREN: Well, speaking of the U.S. code, this could be -- what is this? This could -- this might be part of the U.S. code at some point.
(LAUGHTER)
VAN SUSTEREN: What is that?
HATCH: Well, that's actually the bill that -- this is the Reid bill. It's 2,074 pages. By the way, the Constitution -- this is the Constitution, the most important document in the history of the world, and that's how long that is. "War and Peace" is only 1,400 pages.
VAN SUSTEREN: I didn't get to "War and Peace." I skipped that.
(LAUGHTER)
HATCH: I did. And Webster New World (INAUDIBLE) you know, 1,700 pages. And you can see what we're talking about here. If it takes that kind of -- that kind of gibberish to be able to do health care, you've got to -- and they can't get 75 to 80 votes on it in a bipartisan way, then you know it's a lousy bill. And I can tell you right now, it's a terrible bill.
VAN SUSTEREN: All right, I want to talk cost (INAUDIBLE) but first of all, the CBO is the one who, quote, "scores" it, which I always love the name "score" because they don't want to say what it costs because you can't really determine the cost, so we score things. But has the CBO -- do they do revisions? Do they have a long track record of getting it right, just so we know how much confidence we should have in their numbers?
HATCH: Well, actually, I have a great deal of respect for the current CBO. He's a Democrat, but he's, I think, honest. But CBO has often missed the mark and they usually are much lower than what the real costs are. But I'll give them credit for at least trying to do a very, very good job at CBO. But now, look, a lot of the people in the media buy off on the fact that Senator Reid and others say this is an $849 billion bill or some...
VAN SUSTEREN: Which brings me to your other prop that you showed me that you have here in your office.
HATCH: Yes.
VAN SUSTEREN: Explain this one. This is the CBO estimate, $849 billion.
HATCH: This is what they estimate, $849 billion, the CBO score. Now...
VAN SUSTEREN: Well, is this, like, over what -- over 10 years?
HATCH: Well, it's over 10 years, except they don't count the first four years and maybe even the first five years. So the fact of the matter is, it's a budgetary gimmick to get it below a trillion dollars, when, in fact, if you count the full 10 years, it's $2.5 trillion.
VAN SUSTEREN: All right...
HATCH: And that's also a CBO score. But both of these are what we call preliminary scores because they don't have final scores on this bill. But it's the best they can do under the circumstances. But this is just a fraud. It's a fake. That is what it really is, if you look at it over what really is a 10-year period. This is basically a five or six-year period.
VAN SUSTEREN: So (INAUDIBLE) but this is the year 2014 to 2024?
HATCH: Right.
VAN SUSTEREN: Would that be...
HATCH: That's...
VAN SUSTEREN: So that's...
HATCH: (INAUDIBLE)
VAN SUSTEREN: That's the 10-year period.
HATCH: Well, it would be this bill. This would be this bill, if we actually made the bill fully implemented.
VAN SUSTEREN: From now.
HATCH: From now. If they tried to go ahead with this bill without really allowing enough time for amendments and for chances to try and correct the bill, I think the American people are going to be outraged, and they should be.
VAN SUSTEREN: You used the term "holy war" in describing that, right?
HATCH: We're talking about a country that is really going to be in real economic jeopardy if this bill goes through this way. And let's just be honest. Those figures are probably low.
VAN SUSTEREN: Is this going to get passed?
HATCH: I don't know. I hope not, and I'm going to do everything in my power to try and stop it. I personally don't believe it will. I think if the American people get up in arms here -- and many of them are getting up in arms because they're starting to realize that these figures are reality (ph) -- if they get up in arms, I don't think it'll pass. If you have a bill this big that's this big clunking thing here -- I can hardly lift the doggone thing!
VAN SUSTEREN: Who's going to read it?
HATCH: I mean, look at that! Who's going to read the doggone thing? But if you have a bill like that -- think about it. It's going to just wreck the country! And I don't understand how they think they can sell this. And American people are starting to catch on. And seniors in particular and independents in particular are starting to say, Hey, this is not what we want.
VAN SUSTEREN: Why isn't it starting, though, in 2012? Why the 2014?
HATCH: Well, because that's a budgetary gimmick. They could not be below an estimated $1 trillion if they actually started it where...
VAN SUSTEREN: So this is all playing numbers.
HATCH: Sure. It's a game.
VAN SUSTEREN: Well -- and then the American people, are they complaining to you?
HATCH: Well, you bet your life they are. I get people all the time everywhere I go. People stop me in airports and say, Please defeat that doggone thing. And that's true, I think, of a lot of Republicans. And Democrats, too.
VAN SUSTEREN: What do you say to Speaker -- or what do you say to the majority leader, Reid?
HATCH: Well...
VAN SUSTEREN: Or won't he talk to you?
HATCH: No, he talks to me. He's very cordial. We're cordial to each other, of course, and he's a friend. But in all honesty, he's got a job to do, and the only way they can do it is by phonying up the figures, which the media allow them to do, by the way, by and large, because they know...
VAN SUSTEREN: Do Republicans ever do that?
HATCH: Unfortunately, I think they have from time to time. And I think it's wrong. I don't care who does it, it's wrong. But in this case, it's really wrong because the American people are sold a bill of goods if this is under a trillion dollars when, in fact, it's really $2.5 trillion.
VAN SUSTEREN: Sir, thank you, sir. Good luck, sir.
HATCH: You're welcome.
VAN SUSTEREN: Thank you.
HATCH: OK.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
He is the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee.
Congressman, thanks very much for coming in.
I know you're getting ready to catch a flight.
Are you satisfied with the answers you're getting so far from the executive branch of the U.S. government, whether the Pentagon or -- or the administration, the Army, as far as this investigation is concerned?
REP. PETE HOEKSTRA (R), MICHIGAN: No, Wolf, I'm really not. And I think I probably share some of the same frustrations that Senator Lieberman has. I applaud the Senate for holding public hearings. I hold them -- I applaud them for doing the hearings. There's no indication at all that that's going to take place on the House side. And I think they really do have to take place.
You know, we had a briefing today, but way too often with the questions that we ask, the answers were, sorry, congressman, we don't have an answer for that today. And you're kind of thinking, well, this is two weeks after the incident, you would think that this would be Investigation 101.
I think the administration has to be more forthcoming. They have to -- you know, they have to give us partial information, even if they haven't got the whole -- even if they haven't connected all of the pieces themselves. We're used to getting partial information. They need to be more open.
BLITZER: We're -- we're hearing from our producer, Carol Cratty, among others -- and let me begin precise, because this is very sensitive information suggesting, perhaps, that the left hand of the U.S. government doesn't know what the right hand of the U.S. government is -- is doing or what they know. That when Major Hasan first came to the attention of investigators due to his communications with this radical cleric in Yemen, officials looked at his personnel file, but they said there was nothing suspicious included in it -- none of the warning signs that we all know about.
How could this be, Congressman?
HOEKSTRA: Well, you know, Wolf, you know, if we go back to 2001, after the 9/11 attack, the big issue was that the right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing. They -- they weren't communicating. Now that -- you know, now we look and we say, sure, we've got an organization called the Director of National Intelligence.
At the macro level, these people are now working together better. But I think that at the lower levels of these organizations, I can unequivocally say we still have problems, whether it's on this case or other cases. I don't think there's any doubt in my mind that these problems still exist and they are persistent.
BLITZER: We know he was in touch with this one radical cleric in Yemen.
Is there any evidence he was in touch with others?
HOEKSTRA: Again, that's one of the answers that we would like to have and we're -- I'm willing to get it.
I think the other thing that you're seeing here, Wolf, is that a lot of the information we're getting is actually coming from the press. They're digging into this quicker and, in some cases, more thoroughly. And they're providing information that, you know, we haven't had access from the -- the intelligence community or from the Department of Defense or the FBI. The -- the media -- the press is actually going out and doing a very good job in keeping Congress informed and keeping the American people informed.
I can't tell you how frustrating that is on our part. But at the same time, I appreciate the work that they're doing.
BLITZER: Is it your sense, at least based on what you know right now -- and there's obviously a lot you don't know and a lot that none of us really knows -- that he was this one individual, perhaps inspired by jihad, but he wasn't part of a formal al Qaeda or Islamic terrorist plot?
HOEKSTRA: Well, Wolf, we need to understand that he may not be part of the formal al Qaeda organization, but he clearly fits in with their model of how to terrorize the world. I have been studying this phenomenon of lone wolf individuals radicalized through the Internet for the last four or five years in depth. they have been -- they understand this concept in Europe. Only in America have we been unable -- unwilling to recognize this phenomena. It is real. It is -- you know, it is prevalent in Europe. We now need to understand how extensive it is here in the United States.
BLITZER: Have you heard anything about Major Hasan wiring money to so-called charities in Pakistan?
HOEKSTRA: Well, there were press reports out today indicating that he sent $20,000 to $30,000 to the Islamic Relief charities. These organizations frequently are front organizations for terrorist organizations in these other countries. If that report is accurate, I don't think it's at all unlikely that some of this money would have made it back into the Middle East, might have made it back to Pakistan or Afghanistan.
But we don't have, you know, the reporting from the intel community that will either verify that or debunk that story. But, again, this was a guy that was living frugally, making a good salary. You know, we really do want to know where he went with his money -- who did he give it to and what front organizations may have received it and where would he have sent it.
BLITZER: Congressman Hoekstra, we'll stay in close touch.
A dreary rain pelted New York City as tabloid headlines shouted from beneath tarpaulin-covered newsstands. "Evil Returns," proclaimed the giant New York Daily News headline plastered across the face of avowed mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
The New York Post featured a sunny postcard depicting a Manhattan skyline featuring the twin towers adorned by the words, "Welcome to New York."
"NOW DIE!" is plastered below. "9/11 fiends coming here for trial. Next stop is hell."
But even as the most sensational of the city's newspapers played the story for maximum drama, every New Yorker gulped through the real emotions of imagining these monsters paraded into their city - and into America's justice system - not as warriors against our nation but as criminal defendants.
Even when pretending to be tough on terrorists they scarcely admit exist, the Obama administration cannot help but reveal where its genuine anger is directed.
Attorney General Eric Holder stood before cameras and microphones Friday, trying to look half as enthused about prosecuting 9/11 conspirators as he is about punishing their CIA interrogators. But as he announced civilian trials for those who launched a war against America, his words betrayed him.
"After eight years of delay," he began, "Those allegedly responsible for the attacks of September 11 will finally face justice."
Eight years of "delay"? Surely he knows the years since 9/11 have contained chapter after chapter of attempts to progress down a path toward some kind of disposition for the monsters who planned that attack on America.
But we mustn't forget that in the Holder mindset, the years between 9/11 and the Obama inauguration are a blur, filled with developments he prefers to forget, if not condemn.
These men who made 9/11 happen were plucked from various parts of Pakistan and detained as enemy combatants, ultimately assigned to the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
This handling of terrorists as terrorists has always been a hairball in the throat of an administration eager to be admired in foreign capitals and on the metaphoric "Arab street," all part of the campaign to be everything the Bush administration was not.
To our national detriment, their progress toward that goal continues at a quickening pace. They are not in the mood to handle the 9/11 kingpins in military tribunals as befits combatants in wartime. They are not concerned about energizing terrorists by affording their brothers the constitutional protections usually reserved for U.S. citizens. They are not worried about the security concerns this poses for New York or for the nation as sensitive security information finds its way into open court.
Those factors are brushed away with ease in the face of two tantalizing opportunities this president and his attorney general cannot resist: Scoring brownie points among the roll call of America-haters at the U.N.; and, of course, putting the real defendants on trial - George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
And while past policies will surely be mauled in court, the supposed defendants may well escape by asserting the very rights this administration is so eager to bestow.
Does anyone remember that we waterboarded old KSM about every hour on the hour there for a while? Sure, it worked - and saved American lives. But criminal juries are properly concerned with Miranda rights and other loopholes completely outside the proper framework of wartime justice.
So let this president and his attorney general sidekick bow up as if they are meeting terror head on. The confused cauldron of "world opinion" may smile, but America should notice another layer of evidence that as terrorists continue to wage war on us, we are slowly dismantling our war against them.
The United States is in the process of recovering from the worst financial and economic crisis in generations. After an extended and painful contraction, we saw solid annualized GDP growth of 3.5 percent last quarter. We expect continued growth in the fourth quarter and ahead in 2010.
But as we press forward towards recovery, there is still much work to do - not only to ensure that many more Americans see the tangible benefits of recovery, but also to help ensure that Americans are never again forced to suffer the consequences of a preventable economic collapse.
In the years leading up to the crisis, our financial regulatory regime permitted an excessive build-up of risk, both inside and outside the traditional banking system. The shock absorbers critical to preserving stability - capital, margin, and liquidity cushions in particular - were inadequate. Outdated, ineffective regulation left our system too weak to withstand the failure of major financial institutions.
Firms took huge risks with borrowed funds and little of their own capital at stake. They funded long-term, illiquid assets with cheap, short-term debt. This risky behavior migrated from the regulated and partially regulated parts of our financial system to the almost entirely unregulated parts, making it difficult for us to control or even gauge its dimensions.
The result was a financial system vulnerable to bubbles, panic and collapse.
And unfortunately, the regulatory regime that failed so terribly leading up to the financial crisis is precisely the regulatory regime we have today. That is why recovery alone is not enough. To ensure the vitality, the strength and the stability of our economy going forward, we must bring our system of financial regulation into the twenty-first century. We need comprehensive financial reform.
To achieve financial reform, the Administration has advanced a broad set of proposals. We have worked closely - and continue to work closely - with Chairman Frank, Chairman Dodd and members of their respective committees and other important legislators, including many on this Committee, to craft strong financial reform legislation that we hope will be enacted as soon as possible.
Given the range and complexity of the issues with which we are dealing and the critical stage at which our work has now arrived, it is important to step back for a moment and remind ourselves of the central objective of reform - and the key principles that, in the Administration's judgment, are essential to achieving that objective.
The central objective of reform is to establish a safer, more stable financial system that can deliver the benefits of market-driven financial innovation even as it guards against the dangers of market-driven excess. It is to ensure that the financial system functions in a way that creates opportunity and reduces risk. It is to provide stronger protections for consumers, investors, and tax-payers.
In our view, there are at least four key principles that we must follow in order to achieve that objective. These are not meant to be exhaustive. But we do believe they are essential.
First, firms must not be able to escape or avoid regulation by choosing one legal form over another. Firms engaged in the same kind of business, performing the same essential economic functions, must be subject to fundamentally the same regulation and supervision.
Today, bank holding companies are subject to one supervisory regime, thrift holding companies to another, investment bank holding companies to yet another. Without changing its core business, a firm can change - or avoid altogether - regulation at the holding company level simply by switching its legal form.
The fact that investment banks like Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers or other large firms like AIG could escape meaningful consolidated federal supervision simply by virtue of their legal form should be considered unthinkable from now on. The largest, most interconnected firms must be subject to one uniform, consistent set of standards, regardless of charter.
Similar inconsistencies plague the market for consumer lending. Banks and non-banks operate in the same market and compete for the same customers. But they play with a different rulebook. Non-banks like mortgage brokers, consumer credit companies and payday lenders escape federal supervision almost entirely. The inconsistent regulatory regime sparked a race to the bottom in the mortgage lending market, and the consequences are tragic and well known.
The second principle of reform is that there must be clear regulatory accountability. The principle is particularly important with respect to oversight of the largest, most interconnected firms.
The regulation of the largest, most interconnected firms requires tremendous institutional capacity, clear lines of authority and single-point accountability. This is no place for regulation by council or by committee. The stakes are simply too high to allow diffuse authorities and responsibilities to weaken accountability.
In addition, an essential element of accountability is that rule-writing and enforcement authority must not be divided. Separating rule-writing from enforcement deprives the rule-writer of vital, hands-on information - and gives both the rule-writer and the supervisor an excuse for failure. A rule-writer that is also a supervisor and enforcer, on the other hand, is unmistakably accountable for success - or failure.
Today, responsibility for consumer financial protection is divided among numerous regulators, none of whom regard consumer protection as their top priority. To ensure more responsive and more effective rule writing and enforcement, we have proposed the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). Consolidating the consumer protection authority of the Fed and other prudential regulators, the CFPA would be fully accountable for setting and enforcing rules of the road for the benefit of responsible consumers.
The third principle is that the financial system as a whole must be more capable of absorbing shocks and coping with failures.
One of the most salient lessons of the recent crisis is that financial firms are deeply intertwined, linked by a complex web of contractual and reputational connections. These inter-firm connections allow financial distress to spread contagion across the system. The risk of such contagion means that capital, liquidity and margin requirements must be increased, system-wide - and set with a view to ensuring the stability of the financial system as a whole, not just the solvency of individual institutions.
In addition, there must in the future be a greater focus on the quality of capital, and an effort to design capital requirements that are more forward-looking and reduce pro-cyclicality.
While the buffers need to be increased system-wide, the largest firms should face still higher prudential requirements. They should be forced to internalize the cost of the risks they impose on the financial system, and to strengthen their ability to withstand shocks and downturns.
While strengthening prudential standards for firms is one element of making the system as a whole more resilient and risk-absorptive, it is not alone sufficient.
To strengthen the system overall, the Administration has called for measures to strengthen financial markets and the financial market infrastructure. For example, we have proposed to strengthen supervision and regulation of critical payment, clearing, and settlement systems and to regulate comprehensively the derivatives markets.
We should never again face a situation - so devastating in the case of AIG - where a virtually unregulated major player in the derivatives market can impose risks on the entire system.
The fourth and final principle is that no financial institution should be considered "Too Big to Fail."
During the recent crisis, in order to preserve the stability of the financial system, protect the savings of Americans and prevent a far more devastating economic collapse, the government was forced to provide financial support to individual institutions in extremis. Those interventions were necessary, but they must not - and do not - set a precedent.
Institutions and investors must be responsible for their decisions. No financial system can operate efficiently if financial institutions and investors assume that the government will protect them from the consequences of failure. And as the President said two months ago in New York, "Those on Wall Street cannot resume taking risks without regard for consequences, and expect that next time, American taxpayers will be there to break their fall."
Part of the answer is simply making the financial system more resilient - as just discussed - by strengthening supervision, eliminating loopholes, building up capital and liquidity buffers, and increasing transparency in key markets. In most circumstances, those precautions will be enough. And for that reason, bankruptcy will remain the dominant means of dealing with the failure of a non-bank financial firm.
But as Lehman's collapse showed quite starkly last year, the U.S. government does not have the tools to respond effectively when failure of large, non-bank financial institutions truly threatens the stability of the system at large.
That is why the Administration has proposed that the government have the authority - as we have today for banks and thrifts - to break apart or unwind major non-bank financial firms in an orderly way, imposing pain on shareholders, creditors, and managers, but limiting collateral damage to the system and sparing the taxpayers.
The proposed resolution authority would not authorize the government to provide open-bank assistance to any failing firm. In other words, the authority would facilitate the orderly demise of a failing firm, not ensure its survival.
Moreover, if there are losses to the government in connection with the resolution, the losses will be recouped from the largest financial institutions in proportion to their size. The financial industry - not taxpayers - will be on the hook.
We must be sure we have the necessary tools to cushion the broader financial system against potential shocks, in times of severe stress. Otherwise, in a financial panic, credit to our economy, to small businesses and homeowners could grind to a halt. To make sure the tools we have are effective but narrowly tailored to achieving financial stability goals, we have proposed to modify the emergency authorities of the FDIC and the Federal Reserve. Their authorities should be subject to appropriate checks and balances and should be available only to protect the financial system as a whole, not individual institutions.
Should new financial crises occur, despite our best efforts to prevent them, these tools are essential to preserve the government's ability to respond in an effective, responsible way.
Let me close by saying this: In today's markets, capital moves at speeds unimaginable when our current regulatory framework was created. Financial instruments that were mere novelties a few decades ago have grown to play a critical role in our financial system. Whatever statutory framework we erect today will, undoubtedly, encounter new, unfamiliar institutions, instruments and markets.
But if we put in place a set of financial reforms that prioritizes consistency, accountability, and resilience, and responsibility; if we fight to close gaps, eliminate loopholes, empower regulators and hold them accountable, raise standards, and give the government the tools it needs to manage crises while ensuring that no one is insulated from the consequences of their actions; if we do those things, we will be able to say that we have met our obligation to the next generation.
Finally, let me thank again the members of this committee. And let me thank again those members of the House Financial Services Committee and the Senate Banking Committee for the good work that you are all doing to advance this important legislation.
Thank you.
I also want to thank Ambassador Holbrooke and his team in Washington, who have provided vision and leadership to our efforts in this region.
This is an important moment. Today's inauguration opens a real window of opportunity for a new compact between the Afghan Government and its people, and for a new chapter in the partnership between Afghanistan and the international community. And we must seize this moment. For the United States and Afghanistan, this means a renewed partnership based on mutual responsibility, where we each do our part to deliver for the Afghan people and to advance our common fight against our common enemy.
President Karzai's inaugural address provides an important new starting point, and we intend to build on it. The speech laid out Afghanistan's commitment to take responsibility for the security of its own country by speeding efforts to stand up a capable and effective Afghan national security force that can replace international forces over time. The United States shares this same objective, and we welcome this strong commitment.
Of course, our civilian effort will remain long after our security effort has concluded, and it will be just as decisive to Afghanistan's future and our interests. So I was pleased that the inaugural speech also outlined the steps the Afghan Government will take to improve its efforts to deliver for its citizens, to bring them basic services, access to justice, and the educational and economic opportunities they deserve.It's an effort that will require steady progress on government capacity, transparency, and accountability. It will also require us to pursue a broader and deeper partnership with capable Afghan ministries responsible for carrying out their own programs. Last night, I met with the education and agriculture and finance ministers, and received detailed briefings on past progress and future plans.
Through their work and our support, we are starting to see results. Farmers are beginning to switch from poppies to pomegranates, girls are attending schools - many taught by newly trained teachers, families are visiting new health clinics and driving on freshly paved roads. Thousands of new civil servants, trained through a partnership with USAID, are helping build democratic institutions from the ground up.
Moving forward as we work with President Karzai and his government in Kabul and leaders at the local, district, and provincial levels, we will keep in mind that our most critical partnership is with the people of Afghanistan. We will use clear benchmarks and measures to ensure that our efforts are delivering results for them. We will also coordinate with our international partners to ensure we are engaged in a common and effective effort in service of their needs as well as our common interests. I had a series of extremely productive discussions with my counterparts here, with the foreign ministers from troop-contributing countries, donor countries, and those who have a stake in the future of Afghanistan.
Now, as we call for accountability from others, we will hold ourselves accountable as well. That's why we are working to ensure that development funds are tracked, accounted for, and used as intended; that our detention facilities and procedures are consistent with our security and our values; that we do everything we can to minimize civilian casualties.
I am here in Afghanistan and so many brave Americans are serving here because we believe that we can make progress. Now, we are under no illusions about the difficulty of this mission. The road ahead is fraught with challenges and imperfect choices. Setbacks are inevitable, and we have to be realistic about what we can accomplish. But we are also clear-eyed about the stakes. For the Afghan people, it is about a better future. For the United States, it is about protecting our people, our allies, and our interests. That is why we are working so hard to renew this partnership and why it is so vital that we seize this moment, this crucial window of opportunity.
Again, I want to thank everyone serving here and really express, on behalf of not only President Obama and the Obama Administration but our country as well, our gratitude for the service of the men and women who serve the United States of America. Thank you all very much.
MODERATOR: The first question is going to be (inaudible) TV.
QUESTION: (Via interpreter) First of all, let me thank you and - for coming here to Afghanistan and the inauguration ceremony. My first question is that whether President Karzai has not bring any reforms in his new cabinet, and the second is that if there is a six-month deadline as you've given to President Karzai to bring reforms? And the third is that - the question of whether the U.S. - Mr. Ambassador Eikenberry has said that more forces should not be sent to Afghanistan, in contrast to the request that was made by General McChrystal.
So in those cases, the first few cases, whether the United States will leave Afghanistan or will work with the new government if President Karzai does not make any changes or if that deadline is not achieved in six months time?
SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, first, I thought that the inaugural speech that President Karzai gave today set forth an agenda for change and reform. He was particularly strong on the steps that he intends to take regarding corruption, the idea that government officials will have to register their assets so that any money or other influence can be more easily tracked is a very bold proposal.
So we are heartened by what we see as the agenda for change and reform that was outlined by President Karzai. We think that the issue now is to ensure that it is implemented, that we see results. I had a number of conversations with President Karzai, and I know that he has every intention of moving on these reform measures to stand against corruption and to make the Government of Afghanistan even more effective.
Also, I think what you have seen in the debate in the United States is a very serious effort to try to analyze all the different aspects of the decision that has to be made. And I'm very proud that we have a country and we have a President who really encourages people to express themselves, so that we don't leave any questions. We try to answer all the questions. And I think when President Obama makes his announcement, he will be very well prepared to express the significance of his decision because he will have asked, and asked many others to contribute to the debate.
I want to make something very clear: Our relationship with Afghanistan is not exclusively military. Obviously, we have troops here along with our allies to try to assist the people of Afghanistan in defeating the terrorist threat. But we also are committed to a long-term relationship with Afghanistan to assist the people of this country in having a better future, having the education and healthcare opportunities, ensuring that the farmers can be productive and have a good income going forward, helping with infrastructure that will enhance the economy of Afghanistan.
So we see our relationship as very broad and deep, and our approach now is to focus on security so that the people of Afghanistan can feel that they are free from intimidation and threats from our common enemy, but it is much more than that as well.
MODERATOR: The next question is Chris Lawrence of CNN.
QUESTION: Madame Secretary, Iran now says that it will not export its uranium for further processing, and its courts have now decided to give the death sentence to two - or five, I should say - of its election protestors. How do these two developments affect your efforts to engage Iran in the process?
SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, I think it's clear that the President and our Administration have made a good-faith effort to reach out to the Iranian leadership. The effort to engage Iran through the P-5+1 process with the offer (inaudible) to Iran, or to ship out its low-enriched uranium in order for it to be reprocessed outside of Iran, had the unified support of the international community. And according to press reports, Iran may well be prepared to reject that offer at the IAEA Board of Governors meeting next week.
And it is important to remember that our approach to Iran was always a dual-track one. On the one hand, we said we would reach out to see whether or not there could be any common discussions about their nuclear program, other problems that we and many countries in the region have with Iran. But we also said that there was a second track, and that track was to work toward consequences for Iran if engagement did not work. As recently as the United Nations meeting in New York in September, I joined with the foreign ministers of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, China, as well as the EU in signing a document which said basically that. So we will proceed accordingly.
But I do think it is a very unfortunate, distressing development to see these sentences handed down in Iran, imposing the death penalty on people who participated in expressing their opposition to the government in demonstrating in the streets, and it underscores the approach that this government in Iran takes for their own people. So we will proceed on our international track and we will continue to stand up for the rights of the people of Iran to speak for themselves, to have their votes counted, to be given the opportunity to have the measure of freedom and rights that any person deserves to have.
MODERATOR: Okay. The next question is BBC (inaudible).
QUESTION: (Via interpreter) My question, please, Secretary Clinton, is that today in the inauguration ceremony, we saw the two warlords standing on each side of President Karzai. So if people like this remain in the future government, what will be the reaction of the United States Government in the future?
SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, we understand the concerns that have been expressed about this. We have certainly conveyed those concerns ourselves. What we are looking for in the second term of President Karzai is an effective government that respects the rights of the people of Afghanistan, delivers services to them, responds in a transparent and accountable way to the concerns of the people. Anyone who's in the government should agree with that kind approach that President Karzai outlined today.
And we expect that the government he is putting together will abide by the directions that his inaugural speech set. And we want to work with a government that is ready to meet the needs of the people of this country, and that is our priority and that's what we're going to expect from the government.
MODERATOR: Final question is to Nick Kralev of Washington Times.
QUESTION: Madame Secretary, I wanted to ask you about two issues that the president mentioned in his speech. And the first was his goal that in five years Afghan troops will take responsibility for the security of the entire country and the foreign troops out. Is that goal too ambitious? Do you think it's doable? And what's the link between that goal and to what might happen to the American troops?
And the second question on corruption. He wasn't very specific in what he said. He was very general and vague. In your private meetings with him and his ministers, were they any more specific about the measures they have in mind to prove to you that they have really resolved to fight corruption?
SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, as to the first question, I was personally pleased to see the president set an ambitious goal for the training of the Afghan national security forces. It is a goal that he believes can be met. We want to assist him and the military and police leadership in Afghanistan to move as quickly as they can to stand up and deploy a professional, motivated, effective force on behalf of the people of this country.
And I think that both the analysis that General McChrystal has made and the analysis that's been made within the Afghan Government is that we can do more, we can provide greater support to assist them in doing that. And we intend to follow through. It is clearly one of the highest priorities, both for the government and people of Afghanistan, as well, as for our NATO ISAF leadership here, because the goal is to create conditions of security that will be able to be transferred and maintained by the Afghan security forces. And we are - we're going to work with the president to try to move toward the goal that he set.
Secondly, I had a somewhat different reaction. I've sat through a lot of inaugural speeches, and they often don't get down to specifics at all. As I recall, the president talked about the registration of assets, which is a very tangible demand that will be placed on government officials, the major crimes tribunal, the end of a culture of impunity. I thought that the commitment that we heard today from President Karzai gives us all a very strong base on which to measure the actions taken by his government. He could have been very vague and talked about how we're all against it and we all want to end it, but he got much more specific. And we're going to - along with the people of Afghanistan - watch very carefully as to how that's implemented.
So thank you all very much. It's been wonderful being back here, and I really appreciate the chance to participate in this historic day here in Afghanistan. Thank you.
In her new book, "Going Rogue," Palin complains about her running mate's handlers, whom she says kept her from being herself. I have similar complaints. Those handlers also kept me from interviewing her. The handlers are long gone, of course, but still I cannot get close to her.
I could either play the victim, or move on. I choose to move on. But before I do, the Palin phenomenon -- for that is what it is because her celebrity flows singularly from John McCain's choice of her as a running mate -- offers an opportunity for conservatives to choose their path to the future. Will it be a path of the angry and disenfranchised outsider, or will it be something of substance that produces triumphs in both politics and policy?
The victim thing is getting old. Conservatives have a significant presence in virtually every venue they like to denounce. That includes government (though not this one) and especially the media. Talk radio rules and the rulers are conservatives. Fox News Channel dominates the ratings. The conservative presence in academia lags, but there are universities that do not revise American history and mock religious values. Movies? There are some with solid conservative principles, such as Sandra Bullock's latest film, "The Blind Side." Will conservatives go see it, or are they more comfortable denouncing "Hollywood"? How about reinforcements for those conservatives already "making it" in the mainstream media?
In her interview with Oprah Winfrey, the queen of talk asked the queen of politics about the famous Katie Couric interview. I thought Couric gave her ample opportunity to reveal herself and to let viewers see if there was substance behind Palin's attractive exterior. Couric legitimately tried to find out what shapes Palin's worldview and what she reads. Palin couldn't name a single publication. Oprah gave her another chance, but she never followed up to ask about books or a newspaper from which she gets information, ideas and inspiration.
It is true that conservatives are often asked questions that are never asked of liberals and in ways that seem condescending and superficial. But that is an opportunity to give an answer that can skewer the questioner while making the point you wish to make.
Do I wish Palin had more intellectual depth like Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan's United Nations U.S. ambassador? Of course. But that can be developed if she gets serious about it. Because of her notoriety she can surely command the best and the brightest tutors.
Still, if she is as bad as her detractors say, why are they wasting so much time dumping on her? One might think they would be cheering the prospect of her becoming the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, thus guaranteeing in their mind a second term for President Obama.
Victimization plays well with the conservative base and that's a problem. If conservatives don't rise from the muck of feeling excluded, disrespected, ignored and mocked, they will continue to suffer all of these things. There is nothing like proving the worth of your ideas to put the mockers in their place. Victimization can raise money, sell books and get one face time on TV, but it doesn't advance the ball.
Sarah Palin is a force the Republican establishment must reckon with. She has energized a sizable portion of the GOP base. If the party ignores that base and nominates another candidate in 2012 who is part of the inside-the-beltway crowd, it could lose. And that would be a double tragedy -- for the GOP and the country -- as President Obama keeps giving Republicans issues that make a conservative agenda far more attractive than the hard-left one he is attempting to impose on the country.
Palin's optimism is refreshing. If she can sharpen her intellect, in three years she won't be mocked; she will be feared.
Copyright 2009 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
]]>Critics will call him hysterical, paranoid and stupid. They will say he is a scaremonger misusing the language for political effect. Instead of looking at where Obama's policies are taking us, we'll have another fight over the meaning of a word and its connotations.
So fine. Let's drop the s- word and simply agree instead that Obama's policies call for a vastly enlarged welfare state, an extraordinarily more powerful and interventionist federal government exercising ever greater control over business firms and the economy, further redistribution of income and fewer freedoms for all.
Obviously, our current chief of state did not invent this federal intrusiveness that the founders explicitly tried to inhibit. From very early on, there were dribs and drabs of statist ambition, though it was not until Franklin D. Roosevelt that we had the deluge, the New Deal, much of which is still with us.
Since then, both Republican and Democratic presidents have pushed us ever further in that direction. Lyndon Johnson gave us the Great Society, its most notable program being Medicare. Richard Nixon talked conservative talk but gave us the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, temporary wage and price controls, far more regulation and automatic Social Security increases based on inflation.
He unsuccessfully sought comprehensive health-care reform.
Jimmy Carter produced the Chrysler bailout and the Education Department, but also deregulated airlines. Ronald Reagan slowed governmental growth down some and, with the help of the Fed, broke the back of "stagflation," inflation accompanied by low growth. Bill Clinton? After failing to get health-care "reform," he gave us a smaller federal government, thanks to the end of the Cold War and the consequent downsizing of the military. He signed an act that succeeded in reducing welfare rolls.
George W. Bush lowered taxes across the board, but he also saw spending go up significantly, increased Medicare through his prescription drug program and gave us more bureaucracy and a heightened federal presence through the demands of his school program and creation of the Homeland Security Department. He went along with campaign finance legislation regulating political speech.
So we already have a country where well-intended programs have morphed into gargantuan, money-gobbling entitlements dwarfing all else in the federal budget and threatening our future well-being, where incomes are redistributed, where 145,000 pages of regulations are said by The Heritage Foundation to cost the economy $1.1 trillion a year and the federal government is in our face everywhere we turn.
The question is whether the Obama agenda could take all of this to something like the still more overweening governmental invasiveness that much of Europe is now trying to escape, something that becomes a change in kind instead of just a change in degree, and the answer is: Look at what's happening.
Obama has already undone Clinton's welfare reform. The stimulus bill is a heaping helping of deficit deathliness with few compensatory benefits. The government now represents the largest percentage of the economy since World War II. The oppressively dictatorial House health bill would expand costs when the only salvation is to contain them. The government's the boss of financial institutions and much of the auto industry, massive new regulation is looming and there is constant talk of reshaping the economy. Proposals to lessen global warming would further tax and control overtaxed businesses to restrict energy vital to economic growth with little hope of affecting climate more than an insignificant bit.
If you don't want to call all of this and much more socialism, don't. But it would assuredly give us a new kind of America that diminishes much that has been precious.
Scripps Howard News Service
Beijing is worried about owning so much American debt. Tokyo is tiring of an American military base in Okinawa, and wants to redefine its relationship with us. Seoul is starting to doubt American commitment to keep it safe from North Korea.
Why all the sudden pushback to our charismatic president?
Our dollar is crashing, while the price of gold is soaring. The budget deficit has never been worse - and the president wants to float even more debt for health-care and energy initiatives.
By the end of this presidential term, we may add another $9 trillion to our already astronomical $11 trillion debt. Unemployment has already topped 10 percent. This quarter's trade deficit reached a near-historic high. Our debtors and oil exporters talk of scrapping the dollar as the common international currency.
American hesitation abroad reflects the shaky economic news. In Afghanistan, we can't decide whether to seek victory or admit defeat -- or simply vote present by keeping the status quo. President Obama reached out to enemies like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. But so far they remain unimpressed, despite his apologizing for an assortment of supposed past American sins.
The Chinese don't listen all that much anymore to our sermons on their human-rights, coal-burning and free-trade abuses - not when they hold $1.5 trillion in U.S. assets. The president took a lot of flak for bowing to Saudi royals and the Japanese emperor. But why wouldn't he show deference - given America's huge dependence on foreign oil and Japanese imports?
France, of all nations, is now warning us to get a backbone with the Iranians. So far the theocracy has snubbed our new outreach efforts aimed at stopping its nuclear proliferation. Iran's Russian patrons now talk more nicely to us - but mostly because we caved on land-based missile defense in Eastern Europe, and got nothing really in return.
The Norwegians gave Obama the Nobel Peace Prize after less than a year in office and without any real accomplishments. They must suspect that such global recognition will flatter Obama to push a now-unexceptional America toward a more multilateral perspective in tune with the thinking at the United Nations.
The Obama administration announced a kinder, gentler approach to the war on terror. It serially promised to the world to shut down Guantanamo and loudly derided much of the Bush-era anti-terrorism protocols. We may put on trial former CIA interrogators, while we give civil trials and full American legal protection to the terrorist detainees who planned the 9/11 attacks.
Obama himself has praised the history and culture of the Islamic world, and even fudged the historical record to magnify its achievements.
Yet so far this year authorities broke up three radical Islamic terrorist plots inside the United States. And we lost 12 soldiers and one civilian (with others wounded) at Fort Hood; the accused, a member of our own military, has shown himself to be a Muslim extremist. Al-Qaida promises more attacks, and the Taliban feel that American commitment to a free Afghanistan is weakening.
Add it all up and there is a growing sense that America is in fact hemorrhaging - as both friends and enemies abroad smell blood in the water. The president through conciliation and concession - not to mention constant talk - is trying to superficially restore the influence we once earned by virtue of our economic power and self-confidence in our exceptional past and singular values.
But being both loud and vulnerable is not a winning combination, since political influence and military power are ultimately predicated on economic strength.
The United States needs to re-establish itself as financially credible and responsible so that when we lecture -- about everything from global warming to Iranian nukes -- we do so from a position of strength. That means, we need to stop borrowing other nations' money.
America also can't afford to keep importing high-priced oil that we won't produce at home. And we should stop promising ever more government entitlements to ever more voters that we can't even begin to pay for.
For as we continue in our self-indulgence, a more defiant world seems to be saying that the old rules of the game have changed. In response, America should keep quieter abroad - and try finding a bigger stick.
Last year, the voters gave him the largest popular vote margin won by a presidential candidate in 20 years. They gave Democrats their largest Senate majority since 1976 and their largest House majority since 1992.
Obama didn't just offer bromides about hope and change. He made quite specific pledges. You'd think that the newly empowered Democrats would want to deliver quickly.
But what do real Americans see? On health care, they read about this or that Democratic senator prepared to bring action to a screeching halt out of displeasure with some aspect of the proposal. They first hear that a bill will pass by Thanksgiving, and then learn it might not get a final vote until after the New Year.
Is it any wonder that Congress has miserable approval ratings? Is it surprising that independents, who want their government to solve a few problems, are becoming impatient with the current majority?
Democrats in the Senate -- the House is not the problem -- need to have a long chat with themselves and decide whether they want to engage in an act of collective suicide.
But it's also time to start paying attention to how Republicans, with Machiavellian brilliance, have hit upon what might be called the Beltway-at-Rush-Hour Strategy, aimed at snarling legislative traffic to a standstill so Democrats have no hope of reaching the next exit.
We know what happens when drivers just sit there when they're supposed to be moving. They get grumpy, irascible and start turning on each other, which is exactly what Democrats are doing now.
Republicans know one other thing: Practically nobody is noticing their delay-to-kill strategy. Who wants to discuss legislative procedure when there's so much fun and profit in psychoanalyzing Sarah Palin?
Yet there was a small break in the Curtain of Obstruction this week when Republican senators unashamedly ate every word they had spoken when George W. Bush was in power about the horrors of filibustering nominees for federal judgeships. On Tuesday, a majority of Republicans tried to block a vote on the appointment of David F. Hamilton, a rather moderate jurist, to a federal appeals court.
Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama explained the GOP's about-face by saying: "I think the rules have changed."
That was actually a helpful comment, because the Republicans have changed the rules on Senate action up and down the line. Hamilton's case is just the one instance that finally got a little play.
Thankfully, this filibuster failed because some Republicans were embarrassed by it. But Republican delaying tactics have made Obama far too wary about judicial nominations for fear of controversy. He is well behind his predecessor in filling vacancies, a shameful capitulation to obstruction. There's also the fact that the nomination of Christopher Schroeder as head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy, which helps to vet judges, is snarled -- guess where? -- in the Senate.
Republicans are using the filibuster to stall action even on bills that most of them support. Remember: The rule is to keep Democrats from ever reaching the exit.
As of last Monday, the Senate majority had filed 58 cloture motions requiring 32 recorded votes. One of the more outrageous cases involved an extension in unemployment benefits, a no-brainer in light of the dismal economy. The bill ultimately cleared the Senate earlier this month by 98-0 -- yes, that is a zero.
The vote came only after the Republicans launched three filibusters against the bill and also tried to lard it with unrelated amendments, delaying passage by nearly a month. And you wonder why it's so hard to pass health care?
Defenders of the Senate always say the Founders envisioned it as a deliberative body that would cool the passions of the House. But Sessions unintentionally blew the whistle on how what's happening now has nothing to do with the Founders' design.
The rules have changed. The extra-constitutional filibuster is being used by the minority, with extraordinary success, to make the majority look foolish, ineffectual and incompetent. By using Republican obstructionism as a vehicle for forcing through their own narrow agendas, supposedly moderate Democratic senators will only make themselves complicit in this humiliation.
Copyright 2009, Washington Post Writers Group
]]>"No law shall be passed that restricts a person's freedom of choice of private health care systems or private plans of any type. No law shall interfere with a person's or entity's right to pay directly for lawful medical services, nor shall any law impose a penalty or fine, of any type, for choosing to obtain or decline health care coverage or for participation in any particular health care system or plan."
Proponents were outspent 5-1 by opponents who argued, meretriciously, that it would destroy Arizona's Medicaid program, with which many insurance companies have lucrative contracts. Nevertheless, the proposition lost by only 8,687 votes out of 2.1 million cast, and Arizonans will vote on essentially the same language next November.
But does not federal law trump state laws? Not necessarily. Clint Bolick, a Goldwater Institute attorney, says, "It is a bedrock principle of constitutional law that the federal Constitution established a floor for the protection of individual liberties; state constitutions may provide additional protections."
In 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court held that under the Constitution's system of "dual sovereignty," states' "retained sovereignty" empowers them to "remain independent and autonomous within their proper sphere of authority." The court has been critical of the "federalism costs" of intrusive federal policies, and recently has twice vindicated state sovereignty in ways pertinent to Novack's plan.
In 2006, the court overturned an interpretation of federal law that would have nullified Oregon's "right to die" statute. The court said states have considerable latitude in regulating medical standards, which historically have been primarily state responsibilities.
In 2000, Arizona voters' endorsed an English immersion policy for students for whom English is a second language. Federal courts had issued an injunction against such policies because they conflicted with federal requirements of bilingual education. This year, however, the Supreme Court mandated reconsideration of the injunctions because they affect "areas of core state responsibility."
The court says the constitutional privacy right protects personal "autonomy" regarding "the most intimate and personal choices." The right was enunciated largely at the behest of liberals eager to establish abortion rights. Liberals may think, but the court has never held, that the privacy right protects only doctor-patient transactions pertaining to abortion. David Rivkin and Lee Casey, Justice Department officials under the Reagan and first Bush administrations, ask: If government cannot proscribe or even "unduly burden" -- the court's formulation -- access to abortion, how can government limit other important medical choices?
Democrats' health bills depend on forcing individuals to buy insurance or face severe fines or imprisonment. In 1994, the Congressional Budget Office said forcing individuals to buy insurance would be "an unprecedented form of federal action," adding: "The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States."
This year, the Congressional Research Service delicately said "it is a novel issue whether Congress may use the (Commerce) Clause to require an individual to purchase a good or service." Congress has the constitutional power to "regulate commerce ... among the several states." But a Federalist Society study by Peter Urbanowicz and Dennis Smith judges it perverse to exercise coercion under the Commerce Clause "on an individual who chooses not to undertake a commercial transaction." As Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, says, there is "a fundamental difference between regulating activities in which individuals choose to engage" -- e.g, drivers can be required to buy auto insurance -- "and requiring such activities" just because an individual exists.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., says Congress can tax -- i.e., punish -- people who do not buy insurance because the Constitution empowers Congress to tax for "the general welfare." So, could Congress tax persons who do not exercise or eat their spinach?
When asked whether any compulsory insurance purchases are constitutional, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was genuinely astonished: "Are you serious? Are you serious?" In 1803, in Marbury v. Madison, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote, "The powers of the legislature are defined and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken, or forgotten, the Constitution is written." He was serious.
New London had wanted to replace the area's weathered cottages and auto-body shops with a cityscape more amenable to the corporate types at the new Pfizer research park. The city bought some of the properties and seized those whose owners refused to sell.
The old neighborhood is now gone, and soon Pfizer will be too. The multinational drug company just announced plans to close its New London facility. It expects to complete the withdrawal by 2011, just when its tax deal with the city runs out. So much for those pretty architectural drawings of high-end condos, restaurants, offices and marina.
How many American cities and towns have turned themselves inside out to attract and keep the big corporation? And how many later learned that their heroic efforts to please went largely unreciprocated? What municipal leaders often see as their economic salvation the corporation regards as but one piece on a global chessboard.
New London extended Pfizer a handsome deal whereby the company would pay taxes on only 20 percent of its property's assessed value for 10 years. (Other local taxpayers made up the difference.) The company received a $5 million grant for engineering work.
Fort Trumbull had long lived with the smells from a nearby sewage treatment plant, but the city fixed that for Pfizer. The neighbors' ability to share the sweeter air was short-lived, due to the $75 million plan to turn their area into a waterfront district for fancier folk.
The Fifth Amendment of the Constitution lets government seize private property for public purposes -- such as roads or military bases -- as long as owners are fairly compensated. But the definition of public use had been expanded to include giving condemned property to other private owners in the name of economic development. In its famous 1981 Poletown decision, the Michigan Supreme Court permitted Detroit to condemn an old neighborhood for a General Motors factory.
The Fort Trumbull property owners and their supporters asked the Supreme Court to stop that practice. Some of the holdouts had not cared for the city's offer. Then there were old-timers, such as 86-year-old Wilhelmina Dery, who wanted to die in the house where she was born. No price was right for her. To the distress of many, the justices decided against the property owners. And what a bittersweet victory that's become for the city.
Some in New London have comforted themselves with the thought that even if Pfizer empties its building, the company still has to pay tax on the property. They should know that when Pfizer closed a campus in Ann Arbor, Mich., two years ago, it promptly asked the city to cut its tax assessment in half. It eventually sold the complex to the University of Michigan, which as an educational institution pays no real-estate taxes.
New London remains blessed by fine old architecture, a waterfront setting and a choice location between New York and Boston. It will reinvent itself. In the meantime, it must live with this huge irony: Two years hence, the auto-body shops banished from Fort Trumbull would have been employing more people in New London than the pharmaceuticals giant they were sacrificed for.
Copyright 2009, Creators Syndicate Inc.
]]>I don't know whether Palin will run for president in 2012, and right now I don't really care. Most in the media do care, of course, which is why they can't seem to stop buzzing about her book, her book tour and her political intentions. You'd think the Iowa caucuses were right around the corner.
Even "real" news programs, such as CNN's "State of the Union," hosted by John King, spent too much time for my taste on Palin last weekend, both during the program's political roundtable, during an interview with former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) and then during an unnecessarily long piece about her book.
Most - maybe all - of the current media coverage of the race for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 will be irrelevant for anyone who wants to know whom the GOP will nominate to take on President Barack Obama three years from now. There will be so many other developments over the next two years that will color that race that Palin's book will be barely an asterisk.
Of course, if you are simply looking for entertainment rather than trying to understand how the next GOP presidential field will develop, then it's certainly reasonable to pay attention to anything Palin, as well as to every speech by Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney or former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.
There are many in the media who will wax poetic about Palin and the 2012 race, so you won't have trouble finding people who want to talk about the contest, even though there is no race now and there won't be one for many, many months.
Ultimately, you have a simple choice: Do you get more enjoyment out of watching "The Biggest Loser," "CSI" or "The Office," or would you rather watch politics? If your answer is politics, then following all of the speculation about Palin and other potential candidates is the right thing for you to do.
And if you hate politics, you can watch Palin the way you watch any other pseudo-celebrity - on "Oprah" or "Entertainment Tonight."
But don't think for even a moment that any chatter now about the 2008 Republican nominee for vice president has any bearing on the 2012 GOP contest.
True, who will be in the race and who is raising big money for "next time" matters, but you don't need to follow the Palin book tour or opinions about Pawlenty's last speech to do that.
Even with their victories in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races, the Republicans are pretty much irrelevant now. That's not terrible for them, and it's not unusual for the "out" party to be irrelevant.
All of the nation's focus right now is on Obama, and almost every day there is some news item that seems to put the White House or the Democratic Party in an unflattering light.
Whether it's unemployment, the deficit, health care, Afghanistan, the president bowing to the emperor of Japan or the ill-advised comments from a single Florida House Democrat, Democrats seem to have more problems than they need.
Democratic activist Al Sharpton commented over the weekend how happy he was that Palin is getting so much attention. The more attention, she gets, said the Rev. Sharpton, a man who is no stranger to media attention or to self-induced controversy, the better for the Democrats.
That may be true today, but not 10 months from now, when the midterm elections are likely to be about Obama no matter what wacky things Palin does now.
Yes, both the national media and Democrats are likely to keep Palin in the spotlight as long as possible.
For the media, the former governor of Alaska is a celebrity with an "interesting" family, while for Democrats, she is an easy target - a political lightweight of uncertain substance, who drives "tea party" conservatives into a euphoric frenzy but divides the GOP into two very different camps.
Palin may or may not be particularly relevant in early 2012, as the first states begin to select delegates to the next Republican National Convention. Right now, I'd guess she won't. But that's still two years away, so I'm not going to spend much more than a few seconds thinking about it.
Instead, I'm going to watch the last episode of "The Office," which I missed.
The unauthorized recordings, however, were sufficiently serious to result in Gerber's resignation -- as his actions conflicted with a California law requiring that all parties consent to a recording of their conversations. Conviction on a first offense could result in a $2,500 fine, one year in jail, or both.
Brown's response was to have Chief Assistant Attorney General Dane Gillette investigate. On Nov. 9, Gillette determined that although AG lawyers had told Gerber not to record any conversations without notifying reporters, neither Brown nor any other AG staffer was aware of the recordings. And: Because the interviews were "on the record," there was no crime.
Gillette may be right, but as former congressman and law professor Tom Campbell, who is running as a Republican for governor, told me, "It is almost arrogant to say, 'I'm the judge in my own case and I've decided I did not do anything wrong.'"
Brown finally figured out that his self-investigation isn't credible. On Friday, he asked Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O'Malley to review the allegations.
Here's why you should care about Tapegate. One: Brown is California's top lawman. His office should know and respect the law. "I've known since I moved to California that it's illegal under state law to tape a phone conversation without getting permission," noted Democratic political consultant Garry South. "What I don't know is how the dynamic inside the attorney general's office contributed to this fiasco."
Two: Now that South's former client, Ess Eff Mayor Gavin Newsom, has dropped out of the governor's race, Brown is likely to be the Democratic nominee for governor.
Three: Brown and his deputies have demonstrated one standard for themselves, but a different standard for others. In September, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger asked Brown to investigate the community activist group ACORN -- in light of secretly videotaped conservations between ACORN staffers and conservative activists James O'Keefe III, 25, and Hannah Giles, 20, who posed as a pimp and prostitute looking for ACORN's help in getting housing while breaking the law.
Brown's office responded that it would investigate both ACORN and "the circumstances under which ACORN employees were videotaped."
How are the ACORN tapings worse than Gerber's? AG spokesperson Christine Gasparac replied, "We can't compare the two because the ACORN investigation is ongoing."
Now, I don't want to see Gerber go to jail or financially ruined -- whether he was a rogue operator or a follower. That said, Gerber showed little concern for two kids who should not have taped conversations on the sly -- indeed, they were wrong to lie to ACORN -- but also don't belong in jail.
Before he got caught, Gerber trumpeted, "We're going to look at the tapes, we're going to follow the facts without fear or favor and we're going to see where it takes us." Now the AG's office sees where it took them.
This is not how it was supposed to be. "I am absolutely certain that generations from now," he said on the night he clinched the Democratic presidential nomination in June 2008, "we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last best hope on earth."
We're still working on a lot of that. The Democrats are having a problem passing a health care bill in the Senate (though somehow a lot of sick people are being cared for), and those good jobs will have to wait, it appears, for the December "jobs summit." Whether the rise of the oceans has begun to slow is unclear to me; we had a cool summer and a warm fall here in Washington.
As for the planet beginning to heal, well, that's not clear. Obama evidently expected that his election would change not only America's image in the world but the policies of nations both friendly and unfriendly. In saluting the fall of the Berlin Wall, on videotape, he made no mention of Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, Lech Walesa or John Paul II, Mikhail Gorbachev or Vaclav Havel, but cited as a world-changing event his own election in the United States 19 years later.
Obama has often said that all the world's nations have shared interests, and during his campaign he made clear his willingness to meet with leaders of enemy countries in order to reach agreements. His idea seemed to be that his own eloquence and his own example would make the scales fall from their eyes and enable them to see that it was in their interest to do what he would like.
So far, not so good. The mullahs of Iran have consented to something in the nature of negotiations, but their agreement in principle to allow the enrichment of nuclear fuel in France has, like many agreements in principle, turned out to be no agreement. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the mullahs have proved no more moveable by Obama's emollient and respectful tones than by George W. Bush's Texas twang.
Nor have we made any discernible progress on settling issues between Israel and the Palestinians, the first priority of Obama's national security adviser. Obama's insistence on a stop to natural growth of Israeli settlements -- no new spare rooms for grandma or the new baby -- seems now to have been abandoned. Israelis are distrustful of the U.S., and the West Bank Palestinian leader is threatening to quit.
Obama's unilateral concession to the Russians -- abandonment of missile defense plans in Poland and the Czech Republic -- has evoked statements from Russian President Dmitri Medvedev that sanctions against Iran may someday be necessary. But it's beginning to look like Medvedev is Lucy, sanctions are the football and Obama is Charlie Brown.
The leaders of China, despite Obama's refusal to meet the Dalai Lama, are sticking to their peg to the dollar and, like the leaders of India, have shown zero willingness to damage their growing economy by raising energy prices to avert the global warming that will supposedly bring catastrophe 50 years from now. So Obama at the APEC summit was forced to concede that there will be no agreement on a global climate treaty next month in Copenhagen.
Obama's election was indeed a major event, as the election of every American president is, and the election of our first African-American president was a landmark in our history, as John McCain noted on election night. But it didn't change the world.
All nations may have the same interests in some platonic sense. But all nations' leaders don't. George W. Bush didn't cause all our foreign policy problems, and Obama's ascension and appeasement don't seem to be solving them.
Copyright 2009, Creators Syndicate Inc.
]]>These are "facts on the ground," as the Israelis like to say. And they are the result of a determined Palestinian effort, with U.S. and Israeli support, to begin creating the institutions of a viable Palestinian state. Even Israeli hard-liners, including Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, agree that the improvement in Palestinian security forces is for real.
But here's the tragedy: At the same time there is brick-and-mortar progress in Ramallah and some other West Bank cities, the peace process has nearly collapsed. A wary Netanyahu has been dragging his feet, a frustrated President Mahmoud Abbas has been talking about quitting, and the Obama administration has been spinning its wheels trying to revive negotiations.
It's the same old depressing Middle East story of missed opportunities. But rather than walk away, the U.S. needs to give a harder push.
Here's a suggestion, drawn from a visit here and several days of conversations with Israeli, Palestinian and U.S. officials: Follow the lead of Salam Fayyad, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority and the man who's largely responsible for Ramallah's turnaround. He has drawn up a plan for a two-year transition to statehood. The United States should endorse this goal, explicitly, and call for an immediate start to negotiations about the details.
"Fayyad is the only game in town, but his plan isn't sustainable without a political process," says Martin Indyk, the head of the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution who organized a three-day conference in Jerusalem to discuss U.S.-Israeli issues.
Israelis may balk at some aspects of Fayyad's state-building plan, but that's what negotiations are for. It's a better alternative than the recent proposal from Abbas' allies for the United Nations to declare Palestinian statehood, which Netanyahu rightly rejects as a unilateral move. And it's certainly a better alternative than just letting the problem fester, which only benefits Hamas, the extremist group that controls Gaza.
"What we're focusing on is to get ready for statehood," says Fayyad. His plan, published three months ago, is a compendium of mission statements, ministry by ministry, for providing government services. "Our objective is to ensure that within two years, the Palestinian people will have strong, competent institutions."
This may sound like pie in the sky, given the Palestinian Authority's reputation for corruption and inefficiency. But Fayyad, a former official of the International Monetary Fund, has begun to reverse that history of mismanagement. His reorganization of public services in the West Bank has encouraged something of a boom here. The economy is officially growing at 7 percent, and Fayyad reckons the real rate may be 11 percent.
The Israelis have helped the economy by removing 28 of 42 checkpoints in the West Bank. But they can do more to ease movement and market access for West Bank businesses. Economic development is a cheaper option than Israeli troops.
Fayyad's biggest success story -- to the Israelis' astonishment -- has been in security. When he became prime minister in 2007, gunmen roamed the West Bank almost at will. Fayyad insisted that the government would establish a monopoly of force, and with U.S. and Israeli help, he has delivered results. The U.S. has funded the training of what are now more than 2,000 well-disciplined troops, with several thousand more planned by 2011. The Israelis, after initial reluctance, have given them responsibility in West Bank cities.
The Israelis would be smart to build on this success by reducing their own raids into the cities and extending the authority of the Palestinian troops. Right now, the Palestinians usually need Israeli permission to move outside the major cities. A top Israeli military official tells me he's ready to let the Palestinians operate more in villages and rural areas -- a move that Fayyad says would give Palestinians hope that occupation will end eventually.
Don't get me wrong: The West Bank is still ragged, and Gaza is a disaster. Fayyad will be lucky to meet his two-year timetable for creating effective institutions. If he can't deliver, the Israelis shouldn't go forward. But frankly, his nation-building program is the only ray of light I can see in the Palestinian morass, and it deserves American support.
Copyright 2009, Washington Post Writers Group
]]>A former congressional aide offered this ominous assessment following the House of Representatives' passage of "health care reform." Warning to the Senate: President Obama and his party face political catastrophe if you fail to do your part so that the President can sign a bill!
Nonsense.
The political risks of success are much, much higher. Taxes would go up -- and not just on "the rich." And since "the rich" provide jobs, they would hire fewer people, spend less on their businesses, and take fewer risks. Costs would explode beyond government estimates -- which conveniently limit the estimated price tag to only the first decade.
Expect insurance companies to deny requests for medical treatment at a greater rate than today. Why? The bill would require insurers to take people with pre-existing illnesses, so denying requests for treatment would be the only potent weapon to reduce costs. And since those with pre-existing illnesses could not be denied coverage, people would simply wait until they required care before getting insurance -- only to drop it and risk paying fines once they were treated.
Government eventually will start "controlling costs" by rationing care -- denying requests; imposing waiting times for treatment; and withholding treatment from those with "bad" lifestyles (e.g., those who smoke cigarettes or those who fail to exercise and eat "appropriately") and those considered too old to "sufficiently benefit."
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, during the Great Depression, launched the New Deal -- a blinding array of expansive and expensive government programs designed to "rescue" the economy. Obama, as did FDR, calls this expansion necessary in order to achieve economic recovery. Government expansion -- in this case, ObamaCare -- and economic prosperity supposedly go hand in hand.
Henry Morgenthau served as FDR's Treasury secretary. Thus Morgenthau, who served from 1934 to 1945, was to FDR what current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is to Obama. Morgenthau wrote in 1939: "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises. ... I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started ... and an enormous debt to boot!"
Political Armageddon if ObamaCare fails? No. A recent Rasmussen poll shows more "likely voters" opposed than in favor. Preventing Obama from being Obama is job security for both the President and the congressional Democrats.
The then-Republican-controlled Congress stopped President Bill Clinton from passing HillaryCare. People soon forgot about his "failure" and re-elected him by a larger margin than he received in his first term. Republicans also blocked his first-term attempt to pass a multibillion-dollar "economic stimulus package."
Because of Republican pressure or support, Clinton signed measures unpopular with his base -- the NAFTA and GATT trade agreements; a reduction in capital gains taxes (as part of a larger budget compromise); and 1996's welfare reform act, which, for the first time, refused recipients more money if they had additional children and imposed benefit time limits. Many congressional Democrats opposed these measures.
Though he successfully blamed the Republicans for temporarily shutting down the government over a budget impasse, Clinton signed a budget more modest and less expensive than he wished. For these reasons, among others, Clinton left office with a budget surplus that Democrats constantly brag about -- never, of course, giving Republicans any credit for restraining Clinton's desire to spend.
Besides, if ObamaCare fails in the Senate, watch Obama and the sycophantic media round up the "usual suspects" -- "anti-women" pro-lifers who reject government money for abortions; anti-illegal-alien "racists" who wanted some teeth in the legislation to stop illegal aliens from receiving benefits; "in-the-pockets-of-insurance-company" opponents of the noble "public option" (government-subsidized insurance designed to keep insurance companies "honest"); "evil and greedy" health insurance companies that "misled" the public about the wonders of ObamaCare; "the rich" who selfishly resisted tax hikes; and, of course, Republicans who "failed to offer an alternative."
The media will praise the President for his "heroic" effort, for "going down swinging," for getting the House -- for the first time in history -- to pass health care "reform," for going further than any president since President Harry Truman first proposed government-based universal health care.
After spending trillions to "save" our financial system, signing an $800 billion spending package to "stimulate" the economy, and pushing government takeovers of financial firms, banks and car companies, the President stands -- pen in hand -- ready to enact a dangerous government takeover of one-sixth of the nation's economy.
President Clinton survived -- not in spite of but, in part, because of his "failure" to "reform" health care. Obama will survive -- and benefit -- from this "failure," as well. So, Senate, do the President, yourself and the country a favor.
Stop him.
Copyright 2009, Creators Syndicate Inc.
]]>You can confirm all this by looking at what the three wrote. Goldwater, the 1964 Republican presidential nominee, made his reputation four years earlier with an eloquent and intellectually coherent volume, "The Conscience of a Conservative," which laid out a blueprint for the policies he favored.
Reagan likewise made the thinking person's case for conservatism. Between 1975 and 1979, after he had finished two terms as governor of California, he did some 1,000 radio commentaries, most of which he wrote himself. They were later collected in "Reagan, In His Own Hand," which provides the texts of his handwritten manuscripts and proves that, far from being the "amiable dunce" of liberal mythology, he thought hard and clearly about the issues of his time.
Palin? Her new memoir, "Going Rogue," fills up 413 pages, but it has less policy heft than a student council speech. Where Reagan dove into the murk of arms control and Goldwater fathomed federal farm programs, Palin skims over the surface of a puddle.
Amid all the tales of savoring the aromas at the state fair and having her wardrobe vetted by snotty campaign staffers, she sets aside space to lay out her vision of what it means to be a "Commonsense Conservative." It takes up all of 11 pages and leans heavily on prefabricated lines like "I am a conservative because I deal with the world as it is" and "If you want real job growth, cut capital gains taxes."
But the priorities of "Going Rogue" are striking poses and attitudes, not making actual arguments about the proper role of government. The book is meant to create an image, or maybe a brand -- folksy but shrewd, tough but feminine, noble but beset by weaklings and traitors, ever-smiling unless you awaken her inner "Mama Grizzly Bear" by scrutinizing her loved ones.
No one could be more pleased with her than she is with herself. Reading the book is like watching Palin preen in front of a mirror for hours on end, as she tirelessly compliments herself for courage, gumption, devotion to family and maverick independence.
Who needs policy? In her world -- and the world of legions of conservatives who revere her -- the persona is the policy. Palin is beloved because she's (supposedly) just like ordinary people, which (supposedly) gives her a profound understanding of their needs.
That attitude used to be associated with the left, which claimed to speak for the ordinary folks who get shafted by the system. Logic and evidence about policy, to many liberals, were less important than empathy and good intentions. Now it's conservatives who think we should be guided by our guts, not our brains.
Palin is the embodiment of this approach, never imagining that knowledge and reflection might be of more value than instinct. When Oprah asked if she had felt any doubts about her readiness to be vice president -- which requires the readiness to be president -- Palin replied breezily, "No, no -- I didn't blink. ... I felt quite confident in my abilities and my executive experience and I knew that this is an executive administrative job." (The audience tittered.)
Contrast that with Reagan, who after learning of his victory on Election Night 1980 told his supporters, "There's never been a more humbling moment in my life." Palin doesn't do humble.
You could almost forget that for well over a year, Republicans have ridiculed Barack Obama as lighter than a souffle, an inexperienced upstart who owes everything to arrogant presumption and a carefully crafted image. But Obama wrote a 375-page book, "The Audacity of Hope," that shows a solid, and occasionally tedious, grasp of issues.
It is hard to imagine Palin (as opposed to a ghost writer) producing anything comparable. Almost as hard as it is to imagine that modern conservatives would expect it.
Leaders who can think? That's so 20th century.
Copyright 2009, Creators Syndicate Inc.
]]>When did fearmongering in a time of war become an act of patriotism?
Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to try al-Qaida strategist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other residents of the Guantanamo prison in American civilian courts has provoked angry criticism from all the usual sources, from the Wall Street Journal editorial page to the Fox News airwaves. While some of the complaints are thoughtful, many are nothing more than demagogic appeals that seek to undermine the foundations of justice in a democratic society.
When Holder's critics say that Mohammed doesn't "deserve" an open and adversarial trial, they are misunderstanding the spirit of our laws. The right to a trial -- indeed, all the rights afforded to criminal defendants under the Constitution -- is not apportioned according to what the defendants supposedly deserve. What they deserve is, in fact, precisely what a fair trial is designed to determine.
The nation's founders despised the passions of the lynch mob and the arbitrary penalties handed down by kings and despots. They were particularly appalled by the tortures and abuse inflicted on American Revolutionary soldiers by the British oppressor -- and vowed never to do the same to America's enemies.
When Holder's critics say that we don't dare try a criminal like Mohammed on the soil of the United States, in a New York City federal courthouse, that is a terrible concession to the terrorists. The same is true when those critics protest against incarcerating a figure such as Mohammed in an American prison, rather than Gitmo. Essentially, those arguments exaggerate the power of al-Qaida -- which conservatives usually claim has been profoundly weakened over the past several years -- and underestimates the strength of the American justice system.
In fact, we have been trying dangerous terrorists in American courts for many years, and then incarcerating them in American prisons. According to a new study by the Center for Law and Security at New York University, the U.S. government has indicted 828 defendants on terrorism-related charges since 2001. Of those indictments, trials are still pending against 235 defendants -- and of the remaining 539 defendants, 523 were convicted either at trial or via plea.
The single largest venue for terrorism trials is New York City, where 145 terrorism indictments have been filed. The center found in a previous study that the conviction rate in New York is higher than in the rest of the nation, and that sentencing in New York is also tougher. That is understandable -- and may help to explain why the attorney general chose the Southern District of New York for the Mohammed prosecution. In the city's federal courts, the conviction rate of individuals charged with terrorism involving a U.S. target is 100 percent.
When Mohammed is convicted (or pleads guilty, as he has previously vowed to do), the U.S. federal prison system is ideally equipped to inflict suitable punishment on him and his cohort. Better than providing him with martyrdom via execution, he should be buried in a "Supermax" prison, from which nobody has ever escaped, and left to rot.
The most basic challenge of the terror campaign waged by jihadi extremists is to preserve the differences between us and them -- a challenge that the American government has failed at in far too many instances over the past eight years, through the use of torture, extrajudicial detentions, renditions to other countries, and various other violations of U.S. law and treaty obligations. Our own courts found that these acts by the previous administration were lawless and required them to be reversed.
As a nation, we should have the confidence to make the case against these murderers according to our laws and Constitution, without fear of their propaganda or violence. Every precaution should be taken to protect national security and public safety -- and then our system will prevail over their perverse ideology.
Copyright 2009, Creators Syndicate Inc.
]]>Republican Senator Lindsey Graham joins us live. And Senator Graham, before we even get to this health care, I want to talk about Attorney General Eric Holder. You roughed him up a little bit today.
SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM, R - S.C.: Well, he's a good man. I just think he made a bad decision. We're at war. There's a difference between fighting wars and fighting crime. Never in the history of this country have we ever taken a non-citizen enemy combatant captured on a battlefield and put him in federal court. No time in World War II did we allow anybody access to our federal courts, the Germans and the Japanese.
Al Qaeda is every bit as dangerous as the Nazis, and we're giving him the same constitutional rights as an American citizen. And the theory is because they killed 3,000 civilians, we're going to put them in civilian court, and the guy that bombed the Cole naval ship is going to go into military court. So you're giving a reward, basically, to someone for killing civilians. It makes no sense.
VAN SUSTEREN: You know, even -- even -- and another aspect to it, the sort of the practical -- if I were the criminal defense attorney, the first thing I'd do is file for a motion for change of venue because everybody's got a relative who died in the building. So now all the money spent, like, transporting them and building this facility or something -- it's not like (INAUDIBLE) popped out (ph) of New York to -- I mean, you know, it's, like...
GRAHAM: Absolutely. And in fact...
VAN SUSTEREN: Have anyone thought that one through?
GRAHAM: Tell you what it really does for the future of this country. If we capture an al Qaeda member in Pakistan or Afghanistan tomorrow, what is the military to do? Because under domestic criminal law, your lawyer...
VAN SUSTEREN: You got to Mirandize them!
GRAHAM: The moment you're in the custody of the government and you begin to be questioned, you have a right to a lawyer and to remain silent. Under military law, we can talk to you all day long to find out what you know about the enemy that we're fighting so we can get good intelligence. So now the military is going to give up intelligence-gathering because we've criminalize the war.
VAN SUSTEREN: Well, even worse is everything that he said on the battlefield without the Miranda warnings, when you get to the civil court, should get bounced out for being a violation of Miranda warnings.
GRAHAM: Exactly because once you have somebody in your custody under civilian law, they're entitled to a lawyer and to remain silent. Under military law, we want to question you about what the enemy is up to so we can protect our troops. This is a major league mistake. And I think it's offensive to the victims of 9/11 that this man would be given the same constitutional rights as an American citizen.
VAN SUSTEREN: All right, health care.
GRAHAM: OK.
VAN SUSTEREN: It's $849 billion, your colleague across the aisle, Senator Reid -- that's his bill. One quick question. There's the so- called "doctor fix," $200 billion...
GRAHAM: Yes.
VAN SUSTEREN: ... or $250 billion. I didn't see that in this so far. So it seems like that one sort of got carved out. We're going to get that bill later? It's not part of health care?
GRAHAM: This bill has so many gimmicks, it would make the Enron people embarrassed if they wrote it. Remember Enron accounting?
VAN SUSTEREN: Right.
GRAHAM: This is -- this is unbelievable. They say they're going to cut Medicare by $400 billion to offset the $849 billion. We can't get the will to reduce Medicare spending by $10 billion. We got 24 votes when we tried to reduce it by $33 billion. So the $400 billion cuts of Medicare is never going to happen, and it's not fair to seniors for them to happen. We're going to raise Medicare taxes. And Medicare is $36 trillion underfunded. We're not going to put a penny of it into saving Medicare. We're going to pay for the uninsured.
At the end of the day, this raises taxes. It cuts Medicare. And it will never be paid for. It's going to increase the deficit.
VAN SUSTEREN: You know, the CBO that sort of has given him this number...
GRAHAM: Yes.
VAN SUSTEREN: I went through a list quickly. We didn't -- we haven't had this this long. And there's, for instance, one thing. It's called the National Demonstration Projects on Culture Change and Use of Information Technology in Nursing Homes. That's section 6114. Now, how in the world does the CBO figure of the cost of that one? That's the most ridiculous thing! The National Demonstration Projects?
GRAHAM: Here's what we're going to do. One, you can't price all this, but eventually, if the government takes over more health care, we're going to start rationing care. And this mammogram bill (SIC) is a real concern. The public options in this bill will eventually destroy private health care.
So what I believe we've done today -- one, this was done in the dark of night. No Republican has seen the bill. This is what candidate Obama said in November 2007, We're going to have a big table and everybody's going to be invited -- labor, employers, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, patient advocates, the drug and insurance companies. They'll get a seat at the table, and we're going to work on this process publicly. It will be on C-Span.
VAN SUSTEREN: OK, well, that -- none of that happened!
GRAHAM: Well, I haven't watched C-Span lately, but these negotiations were done by Democrats, among Democrats without any Republican input. The ink on the bill is not dry yet, and we're going to vote on this thing Friday. Now, this is what's wrong with the government.
VAN SUSTEREN: Yes, but...
GRAHAM: One sixth of the economy is going to be changed...
VAN SUSTEREN: But -- but -- but...
GRAHAM: ... without any input from the minority party.
VAN SUSTEREN: But people are going to vote on it because they think it's under the $900 billion, not taking into account the fact they've carved out $200 billion they're not even considering it's part of the health care, which brings it well over that.
GRAHAM: Right.
VAN SUSTEREN: But -- but the thing is, it's absurd to think that the CBO can give you a number on this!
GRAHAM: They can't give you...
VAN SUSTEREN: It's the most ridiculous thing!
GRAHAM: ... a number...
VAN SUSTEREN: And it's -- so it's all...
(CROSSTALK)
GRAHAM: ... absurd, too, Greta? We're not going to cut Medicare by $400 billion to pay for this bill. So that $400 billion will never be realized. That is a joke. We will never do that. So the cost of this bill is going to be a lot higher than they're saying. And if we do cut Medicare by $400 billion, every senior should be upset that their benefits are going to be reduced to pay for the uninsured. We can pay for the uninsured without putting seniors at risk.
VAN SUSTEREN: Senator, thank you, as always.
GRAHAM: Thank you.
Senator Harkin, we‘ve been really looking forward to getting you on the show. Thank you so much for your time tonight.
SEN. TOM HARKIN (D-IA), HEALTH COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN: Rachel, good to be with you.
MADDOW: You need 60 votes to overcome the Republican filibuster and start debating this bill. Do you think you have the 60 votes?
HARKIN: Rachel, to put it in baseball terms, we rounded third and we‘re heading to home.
(LAUGHTER)
HARKIN: And I‘ve got to tell you: no member of our caucus is going to want to be the one person that stops this from getting to home plate. We‘ve all had our input. We‘ve all had our debates. But I believe, now, the team is together. And our team is going to hold together and we‘ll have those 60 votes to move ahead.
MADDOW: There is, of course, a public option in this bill that was presented today to your caucus with the provision that states can opt-out of that public option if they want to. How happy are you with that element of the bill? Are you at all concerned that the opt-out provision might significantly weaken that public option?
HARKIN: Well, Rachel, it‘s like a lot of things. If I were the dictator in writing this bill, I wouldn‘t have written that in there. As you know, our bill that came out of my committee did not have that. But, again, in order to get the votes and to-to get some people on board, it was necessary to put that in there.
And so, it‘s a compromise. And I think it‘s-it‘s a reasonable compromise. Whether or not a state will vote to opt-out or not, well, it‘s up to the states. I would think most people in any state would want to have that competitive edge that a public option would present. So, I-quite frankly, I can‘t imagine too many states actually having their legislatures vote to decrease competition. If anything, they want increased competition and that‘s what the public option does.
MADDOW: Senator Harkin, you, of course, have a long and progressive record on health reform. Are there changes to make this bill more progressive that you or any other Senate liberals will be pursuing through amendments when it-if and when it does make it to the floor?
HARKIN: Rachel, first of the all, as the chairman of the committee and part of the team that‘s trying to get this bill through, quite frankly, I think we have a good product here. Our leader, Senator Reid, has done a great job in putting this together. And, sure, it‘s a compromised package. And so, I want to get it through.
When we go to conference with the House, then maybe we‘ll have to make some adjustments and some changes at that point in time. But quite frankly, the bill, as it is, is a bill that I can support and gladly support. Do I agree with everything in it? Not really. Like I said, I‘d like to move it perhaps in a different direction in many cases. But I recognize that we have to have the 60 votes and so, I‘m sort of being trying to be (ph) a Hubert Humphrey Democrat, OK, Rachel?
(LAUGHTER)
HARKIN: He always said-he always said, "If you can‘t get a whole loaf, by gosh, get a half loaf, and then we‘ll go after the rest of the loaf later on," and that‘s what I intend to do.
MADDOW: Well, in terms of that-in terms of that loaf, there‘s, of course, this first procedural vote to get the bill to the floor. You‘re saying tonight that you feel like you‘re rounding third and heading toward home on that one, that it looks like it will go to the floor. There will, of course, be a second procedural vote on whether after debate-whether or not this bill comes up to a final vote.
If there are not 60 votes at that point, if Senator Lieberman, for example, follows through on his threat to filibuster at that point, this could be passed through reconciliation. That would mean it would only require a majority, 51 votes.
Do you think that would mean we‘d get more of that loaf then? We‘d get a more progressive bill because nobody would have to woo conservatives, like Lieberman and Nelson, anymore?
HARKIN: Not really, Rachel. That would probably be the worst thing that we could do right now because if-because of deadlines and dates, if this were to go to reconciliation now, it would not be written by my committee, which is a very progressive committee. It would be written by the budget committee. And it wouldn‘t even go it our committee. And that has all kinds of implications for how this bill might be drafted by the budget committee.
The other thing is, if it goes to reconciliation, all of the things I‘ve worked so hard on for prevention and wellness, and trying to put more emphasis on keeping people healthy rather than just going to the hospital and fixing them up, all of that would fall by the way side. And I think this is one of the most important parts of this bill, is to start focusing on a health care system rather than a sick care system, which is what we have right now.
So, if we go to reconciliation, all of that falls by the way side. I‘ll tell you, we don‘t have to go to reconciliation. We are going to have 60 votes.
MADDOW: Including Joe Lieberman?
HARKIN: Including Joe Lieberman. We‘re going to have the 60 votes.
Look, just look at this bill we have here now. It cuts the deficit. You pointed out earlier-it cuts the deficit by $127 billion. It‘s going to cover 94 -- actually, 98 percent of all of the people in this country, when you factor in Medicare. It comes less than the $900 billion that the president had stipulated.
It has all of these insurance reforms: no more pre-existing condition clauses, and insurance company can‘t just drop you because you get sick, your children would be able to stay on your policy until they‘re age 26. We have all of these insurance reforms. Plus, we have all of the wellness and prevention programs in there.
To me, this is a good deal for the American people and I think that the more that they learn about what‘s in this bill, the more they are going to realize that this is really good for the American people.
MADDOW: Senator Tom Harkin, the huge news today, of course, is the content of the bill. I think you made some real news with us here on this show with your comments, especially on reconciliation. And I will tell you that I‘m going to call Senator Lieberman‘s office and tell him that you said his vote is there in health reform, and then, maybe he‘ll come and talk to me about his feelings on it.
Thank you for helping us make this news, sir.
HARKIN: Thanks, Rachel.
ERIC HOLDER, U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL: When the 9/11 conspirators are brought to trial, I have every confidence that the presiding judge will ensure appropriate decorum. And if Khalid Sheikh Mohammed makes the same statements he made in his military commission proceedings, I have every confidence that the nation and the world will see him for the coward that he is.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MATTHEWS: Welcome back to HARDBALL.
That was attorney General Eric Holder on Capitol Hill today. Well, did he make the right call by sending that trial up to New York? Are critics like Rudy Giuliani right that they said it was a wrong decision for New York and for the country?
With us now, two members of the Congress, of the House of Representatives, California Republican Dan Lungren, who was attorney general out in California-he sits on the Homeland Security Committee-and New York Democrat Jerry Nadler, who sits right there on the Judiciary Committee.
I want to ask you both, gentlemen, about American values, before we get to the issue of security, which is always tricky. I have always been proud as an American that when we started this country, even the members-the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre were given a fair trial. And they even had a first-rate lawyer, John Adams, defending them.
I love the fact that this is a country of law. And I hope we can maintain that principle.
Mr. Lungren, do you agree or not?
REP. DAN LUNGREN (R-CALIFORNIA): I agree. But that doesn‘t answer the question as whether they should be tried in a civil trial or whether they should be tried in a military tribunal.
I don‘t think you are suggesting that President Eisenhower didn‘t bring-believe in American values, nor Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn‘t believe in American values, when they had people who were tried by military tribunals who got justice, but did not make a mockery of our courts by-by somehow pretending that they had a right to the full protection of the Constitution of the United States in civil courts.
It is an abysmal decision that moves us in the wrong direction. And any suggestion that you can‘t have justice in military tribunals is belied by the decision by this administration to try other terrorists in those military tribunals.
MATTHEWS: Mr. Nadler, your view?
REP. JERROLD NADLER (D), NEW YORK: Well, I think that this country has been distinguished by a commitment to the rule of law. And it is our glory that we give people fair trials before we send them to prison or execute them.
And the whole experience of Guantanamo has been a stain on our record. It has been a terrible propaganda for us all over the country-all over the world, rather. And the fact that we are going to give these alleged terrorists a fair trial in a federal court is exactly the right thing to do.
Traditionally, we have used military courts, our military tribunals for people captured on the battlefields, when you couldn‘t get to a regular court. And it is exactly the right to do to try them in an appropriate court, and to try them-as traditionally we always have, to try them in the same jurisdiction where the crime occurred.
MATTHEWS: Let‘s bring the president.
LUNGREN: We haven‘t traditionally tried people in this way.
MATTHEWS: Let‘s bring the president in here. I want to-I‘m sorry, Mr. Lungren.
I want to bring the president in right now. He is here talking to NBC‘s Chuck Todd on this point.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has been sitting there for years now without us finally convicting him and meting out justice. And part of the goal, I think, of the attorney general is to make sure that justice is no longer delayed and that is something that the American people should be happy about.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MATTHEWS: Mr. Lungren, this man has been water-boarded 183 times but he‘s never brought to trial even in a military tribunal for six years. Shouldn‘t the Bush administration have done what a lot of people like yourself think that Barack Obama should do now which is give him a military tribunal? Why didn‘t they do it over the last six years?
REP. DAN LUNGREN ®, CALIFORNIA: I can‘t tell you why they didn‘t do it. That doesn‘t make the decision now correct to bring him to a civil court. They will get protections under this decision that they would not get if they were in a military tribunal situation.
So what is suggested here and by Jerry Nadler‘s comments is that someone who fights the United States on the battlefield gets-and doesn‘t attack innocent civilians but rather fights against American forces in uniform gets less rights than someone who commits the ultimate-the ultimate crime going after innocent civilians, men, women and children who were not on the battlefield. That makes no sense whatsoever.
The people who commit the worst crimes get the greatest protection? You don‘t get the full panoply of constitutional protections if you are not in the United States and you‘re in a situation like the military tribunal. Yes, you get justice. But the reason you make a distinction is there are very different circumstances.
How about giving our information that they gained as a result of the civil trial or civilian trial that took place after the attacks in 1993? The presiding judge in that case Mr. Mukasey, said this is crazy.
MATTHEWS: Ok. Mr. Nadler.
Mr. Nadler.
REP. JERRY NADLER (D) NEW YORK: First of all, I can tell you why the Bush administration didn‘t put these people on trial in a military tribunal because they couldn‘t. Because they invented this new military tribunal which they tried to give less rights to defendants in front of and the Supreme Court on several occasions said you can‘t do that.
They set up Guantanamo outside the United States because they thought that people housed in Guantanamo would have no constitutional rights. And the Supreme Court in 2006 said wrong. They have the same constitution rights because it is controlled by the United States as if they were on American soil.
LUNGREN: They don‘t have the same constitutional rights.
NADLER: I think they do. The Supreme Court said so in 2006.
LUNGREN: That‘s not true.
NADLER: It is true.
LUNGREN: No, they didn‘t say they had all the same rights.
NADLER: I didn‘t interrupt you, Dan.
And the fact of the matter is in eight years the administration-the former administration trying to use military tribunals succeeded in getting guilty pleas from three people in the same time period 195 terrorists were convicted in regular courts.
And the thing that Congressman Lungren said about giving information, that is simply not true. The information that was allegedly given about co-conspirators was given because that wasn‘t classified information. We have something called the classified intelligence protection act or procedures act, CIPA back in 1978 which protects classified information and protects information from being used or from being given to terrorists or defendants if it, in fact, is sensitive information. And that prosecutors can use and where appropriate presumably will use.
MATTHEWS: I think a lot of people-gentlemen-
LUNGREN: Outside of that trial that information would not have given out. That is what Judge Mukasey said who is later attorney general of the United States.
NADLER: Yes. And Judge Mukasey has not said that in several recent articles he‘s written because I think he realized that he was mistaken the first time he said it.
LUNGREN: He just said it last week.
NADLER: Well, then he is still mistaken. The fact is that that information-I just checked with the Justice Department today-was not classified at the time and the prosecutors elected-the prosecutors at the time elected to give that to the defendants and didn‘t have to. They could have protected had they wanted to.
MATTHEWS: Congressman Nadler, are you concerned there is going to be violence because there have been suggestions by members of Congress or at least one member of Congress, Mr. Shadegg, there might be hostage taking, there are all kinds of possibilities in a trial situation?
NADLER: No. I‘m not concerned terribly about that. The fact is I am concerned always at the potential of a terrorist attack against New York City. New York City, my hometown, is at the top of the terrorist target list and if they can hit us they will. But the fact that we are holding a trial there does not make it any more or less likely that they will get through our defenses and be able to stage a terrorist attack in New York.
Now, we have tried, as I said, or convicted 195 terrorists since 2001 in courts and we haven‘t had a problem with that. We know how to keep people in secure facilities and we know how to protect our courts.
MATTHEWS: Ok. Thank you very much. Congressman Jerry Nadler and Congressman Dan Lungren of California.
As you wait for the senators to walk in here, we are getting some news from our producer up there, Trish Turner up on Capitol Hill. She says there have been changes to the Senate bill, and they have done some changing to the taxes on the Cadillac plans, the high-cost plans, the individual plans worth $8,500.
There you see Senator Reid walking in - also changes to the abortion language. Each state will be required to offer one plan that covers abortion and one plan that does not.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid surrounded by other Democrats up on Capitol Hill. We are going to listen into this as he rolls out the Congressional Budget Office's score. He just had a private meeting with the Democratic caucus on Capitol Hill.
SEN. HARRY REID, D-NEV, SENATE MAJORITY LEADER: We just completed a caucus. It was really very, very good. We all acknowledge this legislation is a tremendous step forward. Why? Because it saves lives, saves money, and protects Medicare, makes Medicare stronger.
We've traveled really long ways to where we are, and tonight begins the last leg of this journey that we've been on now for some time.
The American people, President Obama, have asked us for health insurance reform. It does two things. One, makes it more affordable for the American people.
Remember, this past year 750,000 Americans filed bankruptcy. Over half of those bankruptcies dealt with health care costs. More than half the people filed bankruptcy because of health care costs had insurance.
So, not only do we make it more affordable for every American, we also certainly do it in a fiscally responsible way.
We're not going to add a dime to the deficit - in fact, quite the opposite. We'll cut the problems we have with money around here by as much as three-quarters of $1 trillion dollars.
And this bill is going to do good things over the next ten years for so many different people in our society - 98 percent of the American people, those that have Medicare, will be included in that number, will have health insurance. And we'll make sure that 30 million more Americans who don't have health insurance today will soon have it.
I want to repeat. We not only protect Medicare, we're making it stronger.
The numbers I just have gone over are pretty impressive, and I have no doubt that the American people agree with that.
Although we're proud of these figures, these numbers that we have given you, we can't afford to really overlook what this is really all about. More accurately, we can't afford to overlook who this is all about.
This is about a parent, for example, my friend Jeff Hill from Searchlight, Nevada, 23-years-old. He goes off his parents' health insurance policy. Within six weeks, he is diagnosed...
BAIER: OK, that was Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid as he continues to roll out his health care reform bill, the Congressional Budget Office scoring it tonight.
We're going to move on right now, but you can see the rest of this press briefing, this event streaming live on Foxnews.com. Just log on to the site and go to "watch live" banner at the top of the page and you can see it in its entirety.
We're going to talk not a little bit about this rollout, change gears a bit, and bring in our panel, Steve Hayes, senior writer for the Weekly Standard, Mort Kondracke, Executive Editor of Roll Call, and syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer.
Steve, they are very proud of these numbers that the Congressional Budget Office has given them, $849 billion in the cost, and they say reducing federal deficits by a total of $127 billion over ten years.
STEVE HAYES, SENIOR WRITER, THE WEEKLY STANDARD: It will be fascinating to jump into the details and get into the weeds on this.
What I think is most remarkable about the rollout tonight is that it was so long in coming. Remember, this is a party and a president who had said he was going to show these deliberations on television on C-Span and they were, in fact, done behind closed doors.
We're now seeing the product of what they did behind closed doors, and it will be up to the media and others to scrutinize it.
BAIER: And we are going to scrutinize it.
Mort, one important thing to point out is that this does not include the $200-plus billion doctor fix, the payments to doctors Medicare payments.
MORT KONDRACKE, EXECUTIVE EDITOR, ROLL CALL: Right. So if it is $127 billion over ten years saved but it is $215 billion over ten years spent on the doctor fix, that is a net loss.
And, you know, the fact is that this is going to cover more people. That's the good side of this reform. The bad side is everybody is going to pay for it in higher insurance premiums, and it's not going to, as they say, bend the curve on the total cost of health care in the United States.
BAIER: Charles, with this rollout, with the differences that are pretty wide between the House and the Senate versions, what are the chances, do you think, of passage?
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Well, it will depend on whether these numbers are anywhere near real. We just heard Harry Reid throw out a number, and I don't know where it came from, three-quarters of a trillion dollars he said are going to be saved as a result of this. I don't know where that came out of this. If that holds up, I will eat my hat.
There are already loopholes that Mort talked about, which is the doctor fix, and there is something else. In the House bill, and I'm sure in the bill that we will hear about tomorrow in the Senate, it's ten years of people paying in, and six or seven years of health care because it kicks in later.
So that is how you make the numbers look good, but annually, it runs at a huge deficit.
When we hear about the details of this, we're going to have an idea if any of this is real. I suspect it is all smoke and mirrors in the numbers.
BAIER: And we also have the issues of abortion, illegal immigration, what's in this.
KONDRACKE: And the public plan. The public plan is not a problem solved yet. He can't get 60 votes for a public plan.
BAIER: OK, we're going to dig into this obviously and have a full report tomorrow. And again, you can see that briefing in its entirety as it goes on on Foxnews.com.
More of the panel's comments on the big interview today, President Obama's interview with Fox News, including the president's take on taking criticism.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
OBAMA: There may be some tax provisions that can encourage businesses to hire sooner rather than sitting on the sidelines. So we're taking a look at those.
I think it is important, though, to recognize that if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery that at some point people could lose confidence in the U.S. economy in a way that could actually lead to a double dip recession.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BAIER: President Obama sitting down with our senior White House correspondent Major Garrett in China. That statement and others made a lot of headlines on wire services and newspaper sites online.
We are back with the panel about this overall interview overall. Charles, first on that statement, the focus and concern about the debt?
KRAUTHAMMER: Let me say how good it was to see the president sit down with Major. It constitutes the most important truce in our history since the Korean armistice in 1953, and I would say that we are South Korea in this particular analogy.
It was interesting what the president said on this. He said people are warning us about a loss of confidence. He means the Chinese and the others whom he has been speaking with, meaning that he is a little bit wary about attacking the jobs issue with another huge stimulus because the people who buy our bonds, who he has been speaking with in Asia, are extremely nervous about that and are discouraging any attempt to blow up our debt on the jobs issue, also on healthcare and other of Obama's ambitious domestic agenda.
So it looks as if he wants to scale back. And in fact, the example he used, he mentioned earlier in the interview, which we said one thing we could do is to increase our exports to Asia by one percent, that would create a lot of jobs and it wouldn't be a drain on the treasury, and that is so. But if he wants any progress on that, he's got to get Chinese to redo, to readjust the currency. And on that he just got stiff. He spoke about it in a press conference earlier in the week.
But on Sunday, at the APEC summit, the Asian summit, the clause in the communique that called for a market-oriented currency exchange, which is a code for raising the Chinese currency, was stopped and didn't enter the communique at all. So he didn't have any success on that, and he knows he's not going to get an increase in exports.
KONDRACKE: All that is exactly right. The best idea is for creating jobs would be a payroll tax cut or an investment tax credit or an acceleration of military - building military hardware that we're going to buy anyway. But all that costs money and all that will raise the deficit.
Now, the Obama administration has not been cutting spending all this time. The appropriations contained earmarks. The healthcare plan will cost more money than is anticipated. So it is already raising the deficit.
And if he wants to stimulate the economy in order to create jobs, which is very hard to do, he is going to have to raise the deficit and the Chinese are not going to like it.
BAIER: Steve, other issues that perhaps caught your ear?
Guantanamo Bay, he officially said they will not make the January deadline of closing but hey will make it sometime next year.
HAYES: I thought it was disingenuous for the president to say that he wasn't disappointed that he wasn't going to make the deadline that he had set.
If you go back and you look at May 21st speech at the national archives, he sort of doubled down. He said, look, there are costs to keeping Guantanamo Bay open. And every day it is open, we are incurring those costs as a nation in terms of our moral authority and things of that nature.
So he said, again, we need it closed within a year and I intend to close it within a year, that's why I did it. So of course he is disappointed that it's not going to be closed within a year. And I think it marks something, a failure.
The other thing he said thought that came up today on the Guantanamo issue was Eric Holder today testifying and talking about 100 Gitmo detainees being prepared for transfer. That is a huge jump in the number of Guantanamo detainees that may be transferred. I think the president and attorney general need to explain exactly who those people are. People need to see that.
BAIER: The president is saying also today that these alleged 9/11 conspirators will be convicted, Eric Holder saying that again and again and again in Senate testimony.
Another issue, Israel and the settlements, Charles, seemed to make a little news there.
KRAUTHAMMER: Well, he returned - he has got his hard line again, in which he says that Israeli settlements are making it hard for a re-launch of the peace negotiations.
Well, look, apart from what anybody thinks about the virtue of a settlement or not, the ideological import of it, look at the historical fact. For 16 years in the absence of a freeze of settlements, there were negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. In fact, a year ago Abbas, the leader of the Palestinians, was deep in negotiations with the Israeli prime minister at a time when there was an increase in settlements.
So it was Obama who comes in. He calls for a settlement freeze. The Palestinians, of course, endorse it, and then say that unless Israel imposes a freeze, that there won't be any negotiations. This was a self- inflicted wound on the part of the administration, completely unnecessary, and that's what has stopped the negotiations.
KONDRACKE: In another interview today, he said that his travels all over the world, he's the most traveled president in this - for this period in office of any in history, that he has significantly improved America's standing in the world.
Yet on every issue - China, Iran, Iraq, the Middle East - it's more difficult than he anticipated. Of course it is, because popularity and high poll ratings on the president's behalf do not change the fact that this is a very difficult world and he has not solved any of those problems yet.
BAIER: Lastly, Steve, do you think that the White House now looks at this interview and says maybe we should have done this all along?
HAYES: Yes, well, I think they actually thought that before the interview took place. And I think there were people in the White House who have regrets about this whole thing from the beginning.
But yes, Major is a serious journalist. He asked serious questions. The president gave answers that I disagreed with for the most part, but reasonable answers. Interviews aren't that hard.
BAIER: We are going to talk much more about this on the online show after this broadcast. That's it for the panel here.
OBAMA: Yes.
HENRY: ... the most of any U.S. president in his first year what. Have you accomplished?
OBAMA: Well, a couple of key things.
Number one, I think that we have restored America's standing in the world. And that's confirmed by polls. I think a recent one indicated that, around the world, before my election, less than half of the people, maybe less than 40 percent of the people, thought that you could count on America to do the right thing. Now it's up to 75 percent.
That builds goodwill among publics that makes it easier for leaders to cooperate with us. We then have seen very specific areas of cooperation around the nuclear issue. If you just take the example of Iran, you know, we started off saying that, right at -- at the time of my inauguration, the -- the world community was still divided on what Iran's intentions were.
And we mobilized the international community to present a credible, legitimate offer to the Iranians that would show their intentions to pursue peaceful nuclear energy, as opposed to weapons. Iran, so far, has not been able to say yes to that offer, and as a consequence, you now have validators like the International Atomic Energy Agency, you've got the P-5 plus one, which includes Russia and China, all saying to Iran, you're on the wrong side of history here. And that means if Iran continues to rebuff the international community, us setting up sanctions or other measures that put pressure on them becomes much easier.
HENRY: But the Chinese president is not endorsing sanctions yet. And when people look at other issues like Mideast peace, you could argue that the peace process is worse off now than it was a year ago. You promised transformational change. I know it's not going to happen overnight, but on the other hand, do you feel some pressure to get some of these things done? OBAMA: Well, I think that there is no doubt that in the same way on domestic policy our first job was to stabilize the situation and prevent disaster, on the international stage our first job was to stabilize the situation to allow us to move forward. A lot of our initiatives have not yet borne fruit, but we knew that something like Iran's nuclear program wasn't going to be solved in a year.
The question is, are we moving in the right direction? And I think there's no doubt that we are.
HENRY: While we have been in Asia, your attorney general decided that there were going to be civil prosecutions of the 9/11 mastermind, other terror suspects.
Did you sign off on that?
OBAMA: You know, I said to the attorney general, "Make a decision based on the law." We have set up now a military commission system that is greatly reformed, and so we can try terrorists in that forum.
But I also have great confidence in our Article 3 courts, the courts that have tried hundreds of terrorists suspects who are imprisoned right now in the United States. And, you know, I think this notion that somehow we have to be fearful that these terrorists possess some special powers that prevent us from presenting evidence against them, locking them up and, you know, exacting swift justice, I think that has been a fundamental mistake.
HENRY: So, that was his decision, but you'll take responsibility if it goes wrong?
OBAMA: I always have to take responsibility. That's my job.
HENRY: Now, on Afghanistan, have you made a decision on troop levels in your own mind? And when we hear that you don't want the U.S. to be an Afghanistan forever, obviously, do you think you'll be able to get most U.S. troops home by the end of your presidency, or will this be something you hand off to the next president just as you were handed off Iraq and Afghanistan?
OBAMA: My preference would be not to hand off anything to the next president. One of the things I would like is the next president to be able to come in and say, I've got a clean slate and I can put my vision forward that I presented to the American people.
We are very close to a decision. I will announce that decision, certainly in the next several weeks. The pieces involved, number one, making sure that the American people understand we do have a vital interest in making sure that al Qaeda cannot attack us and that they can't use Afghanistan as a safe haven.
We have a vital interest in making sure that Afghanistan is sufficiently stable, that it can't infect the entire region with violent extremism. We also have to make sure that we've got an effective partner in Afghanistan, and that's something that we are examining very closely and presenting some very clear benchmarks for the Afghan government. We have to make sure that we are training sufficient Afghan troops so that they can ultimately secure their own countries.
HENRY: Do you trust President Karzai?
OBAMA: You know, I think that President Karzai has served his country in important ways. If you think about when he first came in, there may not have been another figure who could have held that country together. He has some strengths, but he's got some weaknesses. And I'm less concerned about any individual than I am with a government as a whole that is having difficulty providing basic services to its people in a way that confers legitimacy on them.
So, these are all factors that have gone into the decision- making. I am very confident that when I announce the decision, the American people will have a lot of clarity about what we're doing, how we're going to succeed, how much this thing is going to cost. You know, what kind of burden does this place on our young men and women in uniform? And most importantly, what's the end game on this thing? Which I think is something that unless you impose that kind of discipline, could end up leading to a multiyear occupation that won't serve the interests of the United States.