What is this man?

On Thursday, President Obama chaired the loudly touted Healthcare Summit, meeting with Congressional leaders from both sides of the aisle to show us how serious he is about resolving the issue. Various pundits from across the political spectrum will interpret the proceedings and spin the results to suit their own positions, but one sentence will stand out for me. I think it defines this President.

To make the trials of the health care dilemma more personal, or as Reuters' said, "to tug at America's heartstrings," the President told of his own experience taking his youngest daughter, Sasha, to the hospital with a suspected case of meningitis. He ended his story saying, "I remember thinking while sitting in the emergency room, what would have happened if I didn't have reliable health care." (http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE61O6H420100225)

What kind of man is this?!

When our youngest son was one week old, he was diagnosed with meningitis. I remember our fussy, slightly feverish infant son being taken from my wife's arms into another room for the spinal tap, a room where we were not allowed to follow. I remember hearing his infant scream and feeling my wife cringe as they inserted a needle into the sac that surrounds the spine and brain to withdraw a portion of the cerebrospinal fluid and confirm the diagnosis. I remember the doctor's words to us beginning with "if your son lives," and continuing to describe the possibilities of blindness, deafness, profound mental retardation or a prolonged and ultimately fatal vegetative state.

I remember thinking we might lose our precious newborn son. I remember thinking how I could ever bring my tender wife through this tragedy. I remember thinking about how I would manage to tell our other children that their baby brother was dead or dying, or how I would tell my mother. I can't remember even once considering how I would pay for the treatment that might save the life of my son.

What kind of man is this that sits in our White House? Is he as cold as his chilling story suggests? Or is he merely a political opportunist tugging at any string his fingers can find that promises to produce the desired results and gratify his ambition?

Bump, Stall and Dip

In the season opener of a favorite television series the other night, an attractive young female character jostled against another of the regular characters on a crowded airplane. She gave the poor guy an apologetic smile and flirted with him briefly, with her left hand on his chest and her right hand in his jacket pocket. Distraction (See Red Herring) is the best friend of magicians of course, but also of pickpockets. Stall with the left hand and dip into the mark's pocket with the right.

The same thing had happened, a little less obviously, on another season premiere show just a few hours earlier. Unfortunately, it was the most real of reality shows, President Obama's State of the Union Address. There stood the President proposing, among other things, an initiative to build more nuclear power plants to generate clean, reliable energy for America's homes and businesses, flirting outrageously with moderate voters and beating the time of the drill-here-drill-now crowd. The President is an attractive figure, and he throws a good party. But the next day, in the budget he presented to Congress, buried several hundred pages deep was a clause that eliminates all funding for the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Depository, the only place in the U.S. to legally store nuclear waste. In other words, regardless of the proposals of the previous night, there ain't gonna be any nuclear power development. No waste facility means no new plants. The left hand giveth and the right hand taketh away. The stall came from the Presidential podium, and the dip in the back pages of the budget.

Question: Would any self-respecting pickpocket lift your wallet and leave the money clip behind? Answer: The President certainly didn't. For the last year and a half, first-time home buying has been encouraged and subsidized by an $8000 federal income tax credit. A payoff like this goes way past flirting, but I'm not sure we want to take the metaphor that far. It's enough to recognize that while the nation's attention regarding housing has been focused on the tax credit, the Administration has proposed to eliminate the mortgage interest tax deduction for a large class of not-very-rich taxpayers. The tax credit is the stall, and the budget proposes a dip into a previously inviolable pocket.

The cool thing about this technique is that it is so reliable. It works almost every time it's tried, but the stall has to be varied to keep it fresh. The President's evocative emotional appeals for our compassion toward our Haitian brothers and sisters hit just the right chord. Americans have proven in every instance to be among the world's most generous people. The Administration even went so far as to set up links to organizations which handle charitable donations on the official White House web site, to demonstrate that they were right there working with us. But did you know that the President's proposed budget eliminates the income tax deduction for charitable contributions? Once again, our attention is drawn to one hand, while the other goes deep into our pockets.

For generations the American government has subsidized charitable giving by allowing taxpayers to claim a deduction for a certain percentage of their gifts. It was essentially a joint investment by the government and the people in the work of a recognized charity, with the taxpayer deciding who should receive the gift. But under the Obama plan, the rules change. You will still be free to give, of course, but only out of your own pocket without any tax benefit. There won't be any deduction from the tax bill, and the huge gifts previously made by large corporations, the gifts that keep most non-profits alive, will simple go away. You will, however, continue to make "donations," and big ones, because the government itself will take on the responsibility of supporting charities directly, with public money but without public controls. The consequence, of course, will be that the government will suddenly have complete control over which charities are funded and which are not. Under those circumstances, which health care reform plan do you think the American Heart Association will publicly support, the President's or some rival proposal? Will the Boy Scouts, who collect and donate a million tons of food for the poor every year, and who have provided billions of hours of public service over their 100 year history, enjoy the same level of funding as, say, Planned Parenthood? Yeah, that's likely. Government will fund the organizations that agree with the Administration, period, and your influence on the society in which you live will be that much more limited. This trick is more like the magician who looks you squarely in the eye while he removes your underwear! Watch the one hand, and he'll get you with the other.

When we saw our favorite female character bump up against the man on the airplane, I said to my wife, "She picked his pocket." She asked, "Did you see it?" Well no, I didn't see it, but we've seen her do this type of thing before, and we know the character well enough to expect it. On the other hand, who would suspect the President of the United..Um, wait. Isn't the "not suspecting" part just what he's counting on?

A RED Letter Day

(Ted Kennedy must be suffering the pains of hell. I'm not judging how he conducted his life. His sins are his, and my sins are mine. No, I'm thinking it must be hell for him to look back at the situation he so recently left and see that there was no lasting foundation to all that he had built with forty years of labor, that his entire legacy is a sandcastle with the tide coming in. Hell itself is built upon regret.)

The people of Massachusetts did something astonishing last week. They elected Scott Brown, a conservative Republican, to the United States Senate. This is the first time in nearly four decades a Republican has won election in the bluest of New England's solid block of blue states. The result, as you have no doubt heard, is that the 60 vote super-majority the Democrats have enjoyed in the Senate for the past year is broken, and they can no longer simply present a bill, close the debate and bring it to a vote. They still have the votes to pass whatever they want, but they can't make people shut up and vote without talking the issues through. It's going to be tougher for them now.

The Democrat spin on Brown's election has been, predictably, that this was a local race against a weak Democrat candidate and has no bearing whatever on national issues. Hooey.

Spin (see Propaganda Techniques) is more than mere fallacy. It is an attempt to distract the listener from the truth by consciously applying any number of fallacious arguments or explanations. The difference is that a fallacious argument may be presented in ignorance, but the the spinner knows he's spinning and chooses to deceive.The Massachusetts Senatorial election was undoubtedly a referendum on the Obama administration and the Democrat agenda, and both sides clearly demonstrated that they knew it was throughout this special election campaign.

Brown's choice of issues left little doubt what he was thinking. Clearly he was running a national campaign. In spite of the fact that Massachusetts already has state-run health care, his stump speeches hammered the national health care bill where his vote will now be the spoiler. He addressed the American economy, American unemployment, American everything, and the Massachusetts voters ate it up. The candidate did interviews with the national media and courted campaign contributors and grassroots political bloggers from across the country, and he didn't hesitate a moment to welcome the support of the big conservative guns who came to the state to campaign for him. The politics of getting elected are always local, certainly, but Scott Brown and his constituents know that the issues in this case are the concern of the entire country.

Martha Coakley and her staff also knew that the issues, and more importantly the stakes, were national. She too campaigned on health care which, in Massachusetts, would have been preaching to the converted had she not been looking toward the national plan being hustled through the Senate. She also addressed the national economy and national unemployment. More tellingly, she welcomed the campaign visits of national Democrat Party leaders, right up to the President, all of whom stressed the important role Martha (or sometimes "Marcia") Coakley would play in promoting the Democrats' national agenda. To pretend that her defeat was not a rejection of that agenda, and the leaders who support it, is just not credible.

And now that I've written this, I find I could have been more succinct by quoting a woman who donated to Brown's campaign on the internet. She said, "I can't vote in Massachusetts, but the people of Massachusetts voted for me."

PS

Separation of Business and State, part 2.

I wrote last week that the Obama Administration and the Democrat Congress' intervention in the banking industry could be considered a precursor to nationalization. Today The Wall Street Journal reports, "The Obama administration could end up with more direct control over some of the nation's largest banks as policy makers consider converting the government's preferred stock in these companies into common equity" (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124019955514434181.html), which could make the government the controlling stock holder in these banks. Effectively, this would be a hostile takeover of the banking industry.
I can't take much credit on this one. You didn't have to be very smart to see this coming.

Defend the Separation of Business and State

It really doesn't take much life experience to notice that Georges Santayana was right, that history does have a tendency to repeat itself, especially if we fail to learn the lessons the first time. For anyone who is paying attention, the lesson today is that our current economic troubles have a clear and recent precedent.

The social upheaval of the 1920s, the stock market crash of October 1929 and the Great Depression that followed are often explained as reactions to the horrors and expenses of World War I, but there was more to it than that. The disillusionment resulting from a bitter and protracted war was an add-on to the temptations of easy credit fanned into flame by exciting technological advances. Airmail, Ford's assembly line, radio, recorded sound, "talking pictures," and installment credit plans were all new in the 1920s, and all changed the way ordinary Americans conducted their lives. It would be silly to argue that such changes led to the downfall of civilization, but linked to the cynicism the War engendered, the result was the rejection of traditional restraints both moral and financial, a record-breaking level of personal debt, a pervasive, "easy come, easy go" philosophy, and a sense of class envy that sowed poisonous seeds in U.S. society. The only place the boom could go was directly into bust.

This is when many discovered that the "easy go" part wasn't so easy when it meant the loss of savings, businesses and homes. Many in their shock and disillusion at the crash looked for a complete change in our form of government. Some were Communists and some were Socialists and some were Fascists, but all were determined that they would overthrow the evils of Capitalism and usher in a Utopian ideal under their radical and often anarchistic plans. The dirty little secret is that as much as they hated and railed against each other, they all wanted to pursue their revolutionary goals by the same draconian methods--by nationalizing key industries, raising taxes on and seizing the property of "the rich" (that means anyone who has more money than whomever they were talking to at the moment), and finding a scapegoat that the majority of voters could resent and eventually hate. It was an agenda with a lot of appeal for some Americans, just as it was for many Germans, Italians and Spaniards. In fact, in the 1930s we came nearer to the overthrow of our democratic republic than at any time in our history to date.

Perhaps the best example from that perilous period was Huey Long, Governor of and Senator from Louisiana. Long knew two important truths about politics--that power can be had by promising people the things they don't have, and that you really don't have to give the people what you promised, as long as you show that you're taking something away from the rich who already have too much anyway. And so he promised the people of Louisiana roads and education and health care, and that's what they got--minus the huge graft payments that went into the pockets of Long and his cronies, a legacy the state continues to try to purge to this day--financed by "taxing the rich," which made it all acceptable.

The poor weren't actually getting anything of significance, but they could be happy knowing that the rich were being punished for their success. Long's "Share Our Wealth" plan (notice the "our" which actually begins the appropriation of private property) included a cap on the salaries and fortunes of businessmen, a progressive tax up to 100% of the earnings of the most prosperous, severe government regulation of major industries and a guaranteed minimum annual salary for the working man. Does any of this sound familiar to you?

Huey Long's popular support was so intense and radical that Franklin Roosevelt, certainly no conservative himself, considered Long "one of the two most dangerous men in America," and the New York Times worried that he had established the country's first Fascist State.

Our own era is every bit as dangerous as the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the call for a change in government just as radical. The proposals to cap salaries and tax earnings up to 100% we have already heard. The takeover of the automobile manufacturing industry by the Obama Administration and the Democrat Congress, and their heavy-handed intervention in the banking, investment and now the insurance industries, have been historic precursors to nationalization. The proposed establishment of a national health care system by the Administration will be, by definition, a seizure of that industry as well. What Long dreamed and Roosevelt feared, and the 1930s Fascists of Germany, Italy and Spain enforced, President Obama is pursuing headlong, and achieving.

Observing in 1938 the same radical political measures we are seeing today, Professor Halford E. Luccock of Yale Divinity School warned, "When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled 'made in Germany;' it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, 'Americanism.'" Consider that the next time Vice President Biden tells us how patriotic it is to pay more taxes.

TEA--Taxed Enough Already!

Dear Friends,
On Tax Day, Wednesday, April 15, local groups will be holding TEA Parties all over the country. Because of my schedule, I won't be able to get away to go to one, but I will be wearing a tea bag pinned to my lapel all day. I'll be looking forward to explaining it to anyone who asks.
How about you?
PS

A Whole Herd of Goats

Under the Mosaic Law, on the Day of Atonement a goat was brought into the Tabernacle, and over him the priest enumerated all the sins of the people, symbolically transferring those sins from the people to the goat. The animal was then taken out into the wilderness far from the camp and released, never to return. It was a symbolic purging of the people from their sins, and the source of our term "scapegoat," someone to blame to distract us from those who might share the guilt. Not only individuals but whole races and ethnic groups have been persecuted as scapegoats over the centuries. It's a classic Propaganda Technique, and it's being worked hard by the Obama administration.
The AIG executives who received bonuses paid out of the bailout funds provided by the Obama administration out of our pockets, are the most obvious examples. No question, it is galling to think the tax dollars of $30,000/yr laborers are paying the six-figure compensation checks of Wall Street types walking away from the train wreck of our retirement programs, and Congress, the Department of Commerce and the media are making sure everyone stays angry about it. What the media, the Administration and the Congressional harpies, Democrats and Republicans alike, have left out is that the vast majority of those who received the bonuses had no involvement in the "credit default swaps" that brought the company down. They also haven't told you that many of those who received those bonuses had worked the entire previous year for for one dollar to try to address the impending problems, accepting that and the promise of "deferred payments"--spelled b-o-n-u-s--as their total compensation. They also haven't told you that the bonuses were specifically authorized in the 1100 page bailout package that the Congress voted on and the President signed, without either of them ever having read it, or that the clause that authorized the payments was inserted as an amendment by Senator Chris Dodd, Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee which was supposed to oversee AIG's activities! No wonder they want to keep the heat on the AIG execs. If they couldn't transfer their sins to the scapegoats, those dirty little secrets might be darn hard to explain.
Also trussed up and waiting to be led out into the wilderness are the chairmen of Ford and GM. These guys are in a little different situation than the AIG employees. They've galloped forward and volunteered to serve as scapegoats. It's true that the auto companies have been shamefully mismanaged not only by Alan Mulally (Ford) and Rick Wagoner (GM), but by their predecessors as well, and it didn't help their image to fly in for Congressional hearings in their private jets without any plan for recovery beyond demanding a bailout. The part that nobody is talking about is fact that Congressional interference in the auto industry, in the form of Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulations, have forced the automakers to build whole fleets of cars that nobody wants to buy. Popular "green" rhetoric and public proclamations to the contrary, the best-selling vehicles in the United States are and remain trucks, SUVS and family cars. The over-priced and under-performing hybrids, the Ford Escape and Chevy Volt, just haven't won public acceptance, and for obvious reasons. They don't do the job Americans expect of their vehicles. Nevertheless, Congress has mandated the manufacture of these ornamental offerings to the eco-lobby, and the companies keep producing them because they haven't got the guts to oppose the politically correct sentiment that says the government knows better than the free market what the people should have. So Ford and Wagoner will be led off into the woods, never to return. After last week's hostile takeover, the new CEO, President Barack Obama, has fired them, so the people will think their sins are purged. But that won't make the automakers profitable.
To change the metaphor, it's the old Roman trick of placating the people with bread and circuses. On the one hand the Administration is promising to make sure the masses have food on the table and health care down the road, and on the other they provide the spectacle of corporate fat cats being devoured by the lions of official scorn and public outrage, all so that we won't notice the orgy being enjoyed by Caesar and his friends.
PS