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“First, and most importantly, it is abundantly clear the Constitution does not guarantee that individuals may avoid taxation through inactivity,” Roberts wrote for the 5-4 majority.
Roberts said that while the Constitution protects Americans from regulation if they choose not to engage in a regulated activity, it does not protect them from taxation if they choose not to engage in a taxed activity.
“The Court today holds that our Constitution protects us from federal regulation under the Commerce Clause so long as we abstain from the regulated activity. But from its creation, the Constitution has made no such promise with respect to taxes.”
Roberts said that his decision upholding the mandate as a tax, rather than as a use of the Commerce Clause, does not create any new federal powers. Instead he said it merely confirms that Congress used an existing power appropriately.
“Sustaining the mandate as a tax depends only on whether Congress has properly exercised its taxing power to encourage purchas¬ing health insurance, not whether it can. Upholding the individual mandate under the Taxing Clause thus does not recognize any new federal power. It determines that Congress has used an existing one.”
He has ruled that Congress can't mandate that an individual must choose economic activity over inactivity -- but then that Congress CAN tax the inactivity itself and give IRS powers (other than criminal prosecution, but presumably including wage garnishment, etcetera) to penalize the refusal to pay "taxes" on that inactivity. (Side note: Roberts said that this is okay because Congress has previously taxed people who were inactive. This is bunkum. Here, Congress is taxing the inactivity itself. This is unprecedented, and illogical. It means that any time Congress wants to force you to, yes, buy broccoli, it can impose a tax on your refusal to do so, and thus escape the limits on Commerce-Clause powers.) Even Roberts described this as "a tax on going without health insurance." I challenge anybody to give a single other example of there being "a tax on going without...anything." This blows aparts every notion of what a tax is. Governments tax things or actions; they do not tax that which is nonexistent.
After Long made his case, it fell to the
administration's lawyer, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, to argue
that no, the mandate was not a tax, and therefore the case was not
subject to the Anti-Injunction Act.
At the same time, everyone knew that the next
day, when Verrilli planned to argue that the mandate was justified under
the Constitution's Commerce Clause, he had as a backup the argument
that it was also justified by Congress' power to levy taxes -- in other
words, that it was a tax.
Justice Samuel Alito saw the conflict right away.
"General Verrilli, today you are arguing that
the penalty is not a tax," Alito said. "Tomorrow you are going to be
back, and you will be arguing that the penalty is a tax. Has the court
ever held that something that is a tax for the purposes of the taxing
power under the Constitution is not a tax under the Anti-Injunction
Act?"
"No," answered Verrilli.
Read the rest.
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I spotted this car at a shopping center in suburban Loudoun County, VA, a few hours after the Supreme Court decision to uphold the statist health care law:
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CNSNews.com: “Madam Speaker, where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?
Pelosi: “Are you serious? Are you serious?"
CNSNews.com: “Yes, yes I am."
Pelosi then shook her head before taking a question from another reporter. Her press spokesman, Nadeam Elshami, then told CNSNews.com that asking the speaker of the House where the Constitution authorized Congress to mandated that individual Americans buy health insurance as not a "serious question."
“You can put this on the record,” said Elshami. “That is not a serious question. That is not a serious question.”
Is there not something pathetic about a nation on tenterhooks waiting to hear the Supreme Court's disposition of some its most fundamental liberties? What Mark Steyn wrote back in March after the oral arguments:
If you incline to the view that Obamacare is a transformative act, isn’t there something slightly pitiful about the fact that the liberties of over 300 million people hinge on the somewhat whimsical leanings of just one man? I mean, Kennedy seems a cheery enough cove, but who died and made him the all-powerful Sultan of Swing? “It is a decision of the Supreme Court,” explained Nancy Pelosi a few years back in more congenial times for the Democrats. “So this is almost as if God has spoken.”
That’s not how earlier Americans saw it: “If the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court,” wrote Abraham Lincoln, “the people will have ceased to be their own rulers.”
Which they have. Or it would not have come to this.
Right.
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The Romney campaign has refuted the Washington Post's false accusations of outsourcing point-by-point here and in a longer document delivered to the paper's editors. The Post responds that it is "very confident" in its "reporting" and refuses to retract or correct. Jennifer Rubin has read the 10-page document and excerpts from it, commenting:
And so it goes, in great detail, though [sic] the remainder of The Post’s story. If accurate, it is a devastating rebuttal.
This episode is remarkable on a number of counts.
First, the Romney team obviously had a great deal of helpful material from its perspective, which it chose not to share with the media in advance of The Post’s story. This, in and of itself, may have been a tactical error, allowing the story take hold.
Second, the Romney team is directly challenging a major mainstream news organization by publicly taking its case against the paper to other outlets. This is, to put it mildly, a high-risk strategy. Going to war with the people who possess one of the largest barrels of ink isn’t always smart. (The Romney camp previously took strong exception to a Post story on Romney’s views on energy, and its supporters vigorously argued with The Post’s decision to put a story about his boarding school pranks on Page One.) That said, this is a shot across the bow of the entire press corps, virtually daring them to report the “outsourcing” meme without reference to the facts. We will see how other outlets respond.
To be fair, I do think "Miami Heat" is an awkward team name, and calling them the "Heats" is kind of cute when your five year-old says it. But it's a bit surprising coming from a basketball super-fan who's a super-genius to boot. Mark Knoller tweets:
Pres Obama congrats Miami "for having the world champion Miami Heats here in town." He said "Heats."
I love Mr. Knoller's matter-of-fact style.
Another great sports-related Obama tweet from Anne Leary:
At least he knows the name of one WhiteSox player now: President Obama Booed After Thanking Boston For Kevin Youkilis cbsloc.al/Lx8KYq
Remember, the president even wore a White Sox cap during his ceremonial first pitch at the Washington Nationals. What a loyal guy! Except, of course, when asked who his favorite White Sox players were later during the broadcast (for some reason MLB Advanced Media has pulled the video from YouTube), Obama answered, "You know uh ..... I I ... I thought that ... uh .... you know, ... the truth is a lot of the Cubs I like too! But, uh ... I did not become a Sox fan until I moved to Chicago. Because I uh .... I was growing up in Hawaii so I ended up actually being an Oakland A's fan."
Not many loyal White Sox fans I've met like players on the Cubs -- and Oakland A's fans. That's unique. Or maybe pandering. I just read the entire David Maraniss biography and I don't recall much on the White Sox or baseball. If someone ever wrote my bio (and what a boring read that would be) the thing would be littered with entire sections devoted to a troubled man's unhealthy devotion to the New York Rangers and New York Yankees. I can probably name the entire roster of the 1991 New York Rangers, but Obama, the purest of sports fan, whose deep loyalty to the White Sox shall not be questioned, couldn't name one single White Sox player?
Harsanyi asks, "Why is the president pretending to be a baseball fan?" and answers, simply and truly: "To pander." (Plus, pretending comes very naturally to our composite prez.) But wait -- Spokestool Carney says it's not pandering at all! And Boston fans weren't even booing! (Apparently Carney is another guy who's forgotten how to tell the truth. It's an occupational hazard.)
Speaking of truth, one indisputably real fact about Obama has been discovered: He loves fast food and seems to be less of a hypocrite when it comes to fried foods and high-calorie meals than his vegetable-pushing wife. So there's that.
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Last week, James Pethokoukis provided a detailed correction of the WaPo/Obama falsehood that Mitt Romney, during his years at Bain, got rich by moving U.S. jobs overseas:
Romney Reality: What CSI actually did was provide U.S. software developers with technical support and sales. Example: It provided domestic outsourcing — which is different than overseas offshoring — for call centers and help desks. As far as its international business goes, CSI was a reseller of U.S. software in European markets. In other words, they helped distribute U.S. software around the world.
Romney Reality: Those overseas call centers in the WaPo story were based in Europe and Japan, and serviced international customers of U.S. companies in their local languages.
Read the whole thing. The charges are false. But that hasn't stopped Obama from repeating them. Kevin Williamson attributes it to ignorance:
Because the Obama campaign knows that one of its most important constituencies is economically illiterate yokels — a demographic to which the president himself apparently belongs — it is on the airwaves claiming “Romney’s never stood up to China — all he’s ever done is send them our jobs.’’ (Whose?) The Obama campaign cites a Washington Post story on the subject, and the Romney campaign has noted that the folks over at WaPo did not distinguish between outsourcing and offshoring (and, indeed, the story is not a very smart one — do read it and see). Obama responded thus: “Yesterday, his advisers tried to clear this up by telling us that there was a difference between ‘outsourcing’ and ‘offshoring.’ Seriously. You can’t make that up.” And indeed you wouldn’t have to make it up, because it is a real thing: different words with different meanings. (Seriously, can we get this guy a library card?)
[Link to The Hill added by me.]
Read on, especially if your name is Barack Obama. He's never been interested in how business really works; that mental file is crammed with socialist slogans instead of reality-based knowledge. So sure, he's certainly ignorant here, even flabbergastingly so.
On the other hand, in the lying-liars column, we have this incredibly misleading ad on Romney's record as governor. It plays relentlessly on Hulu Plus every night as husband and I watch comedies aimed at younger, hipper demographics, and it cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be attributed to ignorance. It's the product of a very aggressive effort to distort facts and deceive viewers.
Bottom line: Obama may not know the difference between offshoring and outsourcing, but he doesn't care, either. His highest priority is getting reelected by whatever means necessary. But you already knew that.
As Dan noted, the Romney campaign is pushing the Washington Post to retract their outsourcing piece on Mitt Romney from last week, which the Obama campaign is using in ads. The PowerPoint presentation made by the Romney campaign of why the Post story is inaccurate can now be viewed online here.
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"They opened up my bag, and I told them, 'Please, be careful. These are my grandpa's ashes,'" Gross told RTV6's Norman Cox. "She picked up the jar. She opened it up.
"I was told later on that she had no right to even open it, that they could have used other devices, like an X-ray machine. So she opened it up. She used her finger and was sifting through it. And then she accidentally spilled it.
"Gross says about a quarter to a third of the contents spilled on the floor, leaving him frantically trying to gather up as much as he could while anxious passengers waited behind him.
"She didn't apologize. She started laughing. I was on my hands and knees picking up bone fragments. I couldn't pick up all, everything that was lost. I mean, there was a long line behind me."
What a perfect scene of tyranny and subjection. I guess we can be grateful the agent didn't "accidentally" trample on his fingers or confiscate the ashes, just for the fun of it.
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Sorry about the lack of a post today. One real-life thing led to another and I never got the chance.
Obviously, the big story is the Arizona decision. I heard a bit of Laura Ingraham and a bit of Rush in the car and my impression is that it's a mixed bag. What's the deal with Chief Justice Roberts? Any comments on that?
I'm nervous about Thursday's Obamacare decision.
In other news, three cheers for Durham, New Hampshire, home of my alma mater, UNH, and the town where I met my future husband (a grad student), converted to Catholicism, got married, and had our first two babies, beautiful daughters #1 and #2.
Here's Hamilton Smith Hall, home of the UNH English department:
Today President Obama holds a campaign event in Durham, New Hampshire. The cost to the town in police and fire overtime expenses are estimated to be $20,000 to $30,000. There are 10,345 residents in Durham, according to the last census, meaning the cost for this one event would be roughly $2-$3 per person.
Durham lawmakers, including town-council chairman Jay Gooze (a Democrat), asked the Obama campaign to cover some of those costs; the campaign declined, contending that as a private organization they do not participate in security or traffic-control planning. They referred the inquiry to the Secret Service.
I believe the Manchester Union Leader once called Durham, a typically liberal college town, "the cesspool of New Hampshire." I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. It's actually a pretty little town, and the current powers-that-be don't seem to be the swooning kind. Live free or die and all that.
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Team Obama has a message for all you old-school, bourgeois types who haven't yet evolved beyond getting married and registering for gifts: Barack Obama needs your wedding gifts more than you do!
Wherever money changes hands, there you will find Obama, sniffing it out and wanting a cut. See Twitchy for more helpful fundraising suggestions. (Husband Pundit was right on target in '09: Obama really does want all your stuff. If you fell for him last time, please try not to be so stupid again this November. Thanks!)
For the first 10 years of our marriage, Barack and I lived in an apartment in my hometown of Chicago.
The winters there can be pretty harsh, but no matter how snowy or icy it got, Barack would head out into the cold — shovel in hand — to dig my car out before I went to work.
In all our years of marriage, he’s always looked out for me. Now, I see that same commitment every day to you and to this country.
The only way we’ll win this election is if we can rely on one another like that, all the way to November 6th. Barack is working hard, but he can’t do this alone — he needs your help.
Make a donation today to build this campaign — when you do, you’ll be automatically entered to join Barack and me for a casual dinner:
https://donate.barackobama.com/Barack-and-Me
Your flight, your meal, your accommodations — that’s all taken care of. Just bring yourself and a guest, and get ready to enjoy a good meal together.
Thanks,
Michelle
Hmmm. Let's set aside that silliness about Obama "looking out for us." Trivial and real-people-normal though it is, I find myself questioning the literal story. If Michelle hadn't asserted it, I might have believed Barack regularly shoveled snow, but no unit of Obama biographical data can be taken as true, or even truish, without assiduous fact checking. My guess: Barack (or a composite thereof, perhaps the brother-in-law of an acquaintance-composite from his Columbia days) shoveled snow (or perhaps scraped the windshield or warmed up the car one morning, or took out the trash, or at least replaced the empty toilet paper roll) at his wife-composite's gentle request, so she could get out to her realish-job and fend off another of those debilitating child-induced headaches. Whatever the chore, it was likely the hardest work he's ever done and he will never, ever, do it again. The campaign probably racked its brains trying to think of some kind of domestic task he might have performed once in the summer but came up with nothing even remotely plausible. (Photo ops don't count.)
"Working in the Garden"
Why are we so skeptical? Simply because he's not who he says he is. That wouldn't have sold books or advanced his political career. Mark Steyn:
Courtesy of David Maraniss’s new book, we now know that yet another key prop of Barack Obama’s identity is false: His Kenyan grandfather was not brutally tortured or even non-brutally detained by his British colonial masters. The composite gram’pa joins an ever-swelling cast of characters from Barack’s “memoir” who, to put it discreetly, differ somewhat in reality from their bit parts in the grand Obama narrative. The best friend at school portrayed in Obama’s autobiography as “a symbol of young blackness” was, in fact, half Japanese, and not a close friend. The white girlfriend he took to an off-Broadway play that prompted an angry post-show exchange about race never saw the play, dated Obama in an entirely different time zone, and had no such world-historically significant conversation with him. His Indonesian step-grandfather supposedly killed by Dutch soldiers during his people’s valiant struggle against colonialism met his actual demise when he “fell off a chair at his home while trying to hang drapes.”
Oh. What a falling off that is from the Dreamed Up About My Father version. But does it really matter? Yes, actually. Mark:
In an inspired line of argument, Ben Smith of the website BuzzFeed suggests that the controversy over Dreams from My Father is the fault of conservatives who have “taken the self-portrait at face value.” We are so unlettered and hicky that we think a memoir is about stuff that actually happened rather than a literary jeu d’esprit playing with nuances of notions of assumptions of preconceptions of concoctions of invented baloney. And so we regard the first member of the Invented-American community to make it to the White House as a kinda weird development rather than an encouraging sign of how a new post-racial, post-gender, post-modern America is moving beyond the old straightjackets of black and white, male and female, gay and straight, real and hallucinatory.
Steyn and Hewitt on President Obama's and AG Holder's rank dishonesty:
HH: It turns out, as I said to Sean Hannity last night, this is an administration that discloses what should be kept secret, and which keeps secret that which should be disclosed, Mark. Are you surprised?
MS: No, I’m not. I’m surprised by the timing, in that he seems to have done it as a kind of tie-in for your book, for which your publisher should be suitably grateful. But I’m not surprised. I think there is a kind of blithe contempt that Obama, and Eric Holder in particular, have for the checks and balances. And by the way, I don’t attach a lot of significance to the sort of niceties of checks and balances, but I would say that as a general rule in free societies, the restraints on power are as much social as anything. They depend on those in power observing a kind of etiquette and deference to codes and conventions. And if you hold, basically, the entire history of the United States until you took power in contempt, which is what Eric Holder and Barack Obama do, I believe, then they don’t have that deference and discretion towards the codes and conventions, and the result is what we’ve seen in the last few days.
Read the rest. As we've tried to explain to our kids, our system of government is ultimately predicated on honorable men and women working within it and an engaged, honorable citizenry holding them accountable. But when the people don't live up to that standard, and power-lust and venality reach critical mass among our minders, this is what we get. Take Obama spokestool Jay Carney, for example. Joel Gehrke reports:
First, Carney couldn’t say if the documents that Obama is refusing to let Congress see actually involve the White House corresponding with the Justice Department about the false claim that law enforcement did not allow any guns to be smuggled into Mexico. “I don’t have a way to characterize the documents in question here,” Carney said.
Next, Carney was forced to back off his attempt to pin Fast and Furious on the Bush Administration. “It originated in a field office during the previous administration. It was ended under this administration, by this Attorney General,” Carney said. ABC’s Jake Tapper quickly observed that “The operation began in fall 2009.” [. . .]
As Carney continued to field questions, he appeared to forget the family name of border patrol agent Brian Terry, who was death ignited the investigation after he was killed by drug smugglers armed with weapons obtained through Operation Fast and Furious.
“We have provided Congress every document that pertains to the operation itself that is at issue here when you talk about the family that you referred to,” Carney said. When Tapper provided him the name, he repeated it — “the Terry family.”
And when Carney said that Obama’s decision to assert executive privilege over documents subpoenaed by Congress was “entirely about principle,” reporters openly laughed.
On Thursday, Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley ripped President Barack Obama for his assertion of the executive privilege to keep hiding Operation Fast and Furious documents from Congress. Grassley said the White House must provide a “privilege log” detailing what documents Obama is exercising his power over, and what his legal argument for doing so is.
“The White House has already produced documents in Fast and Furious involving communications between White House staff and personnel from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, so it’s ironic that this claim comes up only now,” Grassley said. “Either way, the White House must produce a privilege log to make clear which documents they are asserting executive privilege to protect.”
Grassley also questioned why Attorney General Eric Holder was less than forthcoming, during a recent Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, when asked if the president would assert the privilege.
“Just last week, when the attorney general was in front of this committee, I asked him twice if the president could claim executive privilege to protect a certain internal Justice Department email that has been withheld,” Grassley said. “Given the explicit opportunity, the attorney general did not indicate he would be asking the president to assert executive privilege over such documents.” [. . .]
Even though the White House is legally required to produce a privilege, it’s unclear if Obama’s administration will. White House spokesman Eric Schultz would not answer when asked if the administration would.
My emphasis there. Read the rest. Showdown coming, I hope.
By the way, are there any dots Mark Steyn can't connect? Back to his chat with Hugh Hewitt (with product links added by me):
HH: Mark Steyn, I have been perfecting the art of product placement. Most people think of that as the movies, but there’s actually audio product placement, and it involves somehow working a reference to the new book, The Brief Against Obama, into an interview, which is sometimes hard. Like tomorrow, I’m going to interview Balou at Disneyland, and that’s going to be hard to do.
MS: Right.
Five minutes later:
HH: Speaking of great, structural sloughs of despond, I landed in Phoenix today from New York, and who do I see in the crosswalk on the way to the rental car but Jonah Goldberg, who was in Vegas with me on Friday night, wearing the same coat, I might add. I think he lost the nest egg.
MS: (laughing)
HH: And I thought to myself, Mark, there’s this tribe of wandering pundits out there who go from vista to vista and proclaim that Obama’s gotta go, and explain what’s happened. But I’m wondering, does anyone actually listen to commentary? Or is this cake baked? Is this argument over already? Everyone knows what they’re going to do in November?
MS: Well, look. You know, realistically, you’re doing more good with your big interview with Balou at Disneyland, and trying to persuade him that one of the Bare Necessities is a copy of your book.
HH: (laughing) That’s how I do it.
MS: I think many people are like Balou in that movie, lying on their back, gently sailing down the river, and watching the world go by. And they don’t realize that actually coming up at the end of that river is a huge waterfall that they’re going to plunge over unless they actually get out of the river and take this stuff seriously. But yeah, it’s true. It’s difficult, it’s difficult to break through the noise. This guy’s numbers ought to be way worse than they are. He did this to us. Whether or not it’s his fault, it’s his responsibility. He did this.
Touché. Take it away, Balou:
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Last Friday Obama circumvented the legislative process and conjured amnesty for illegal aliens with a wave of his sceptre. Yesterday, he asserted executive privilege in an attempt to flout a Congressional investigation into the DOJ's shocking Fast and Furious operation. What's next for King Barack? Little prediction: If the Supreme Court rules against his health care mandate, he'll denounce that branch of government, too, and go full speed ahead as though the ruling never happened. The only real way to stop him is to vote him out.
. . . Issa and his fellow Republicans on the Hill are waiting for word from the White House on the newest critical questions in the investigation. What documents are covered by the president’s decision to invoke executive privilege in the Fast & Furious case? And what documents aren’t?
Late Wednesday, Issa’s counterpart in the Senate, Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, sent a letter to the White House asking President Obama to specify which Fast & Furious documents are covered by the president’s executive privilege claim. Issa had narrowed his subpoena to about 1,300 documents covering the Justice Department’s response to congressional inquiries about Fast & Furious. It is not clear whether Obama is asserting that all those documents are protected by executive privilege, or just any documents that specifically concern the president himself, or perhaps some other subset of the whole group.
“Can you please provide a more precise description of the scope of your executive privilege claim?” Grassley asked. “Are you asserting it only with regard to documents called for by the subpoena that may have involved communications with you? Or are you extending your claim to records of purely internal Justice Department communications, not involving the White House? Please provide a more detailed description of the documents that you are or are not asserting executive privilege to protect.”
As the Supreme Court recognized in US v. Nixon, the Executive Branch has a legitimate interest in confidentiality of communications among high officials so that the President can have the benefit of candid advice. However, as President Washington himself recognized, that privilege does not protect the President or his underlings from embarrassment or public exposure for questionable actions.
As the Supreme Court has also recognized repeatedly, the Congress, in the exercise of its constitutional powers, has the essential power to investigate the actions of the Executive Branch.
In this case, the exercise of Executive Privilege seems, in its timing and over-inclusiveness, to be nothing less than a political delaying tactic to prevent exposure of wrongdoing and incompetence that resulted in the murder of a American law enforcement agent and injury and death of many others. Further, a wholesale claim of privilege is facially improper: the President should be held to the standard that anyone claiming privilege is held to: identify each document in a log so that privilege can be disputed. (U.S. v. Nixon, 1974)
More at the link. And more legal insights on the subject from Andy McCarthy here.
By the way, can anyone out there confirm the truth of this assertion by Issa?
Issa also accused the Justice Department of trying to compel the committee to close its investigation in exchange for documents it hasn't yet seen. "I can't accept that deal. No other committee chairman would," he said.
Someone at the Justice Dept. has disputed that but their credibility is at about zero right now.
Speaking of zero cred, ye olde mainstream media is covering the bombshell stories of executive privilege and the contempt vote on AG Holder pretty much as expected. If the full House approves the contempt resolution, will that be ignored or minimized, too?
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Oh dear. Just corrected egregious title typo. Apologies!
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Also changed incorrect flaunt to flout. What a mess. Thanks to pal AS for correction.
Last night, Chairman Darrell Issa declared that Attorney General Eric Holder had failed to provide sufficient documentation or a worthwhile-enough ‘briefing’ to forestall today’s scheduled contempt proceedings. Ahead of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s vote this morning, Holder finally decided to go straight to the top and ask his boss to invoke executive privilege on the outstanding documents included in last October’s Congressional subpoena.
Which he granted. More from Johnsen:
Here’s another thought: Invoking executive privilege on this case is going to come off as a very dodgy and arrogant move. But the White House is willing to take on that bad press, and I can only presume that’s because whatever is in those documents… is much more damning than the alternative. Oh, the tangled webs we weave!
Update: The blogosphere has often lamented about the mainstream media’s lack of consistent interest in the deadly Fast and Furious scandal — they wouldn’t want to report too thoroughly on anything that might harm their darling president’s image, you know. But President Obama asserting his supreme authority into the fray has made this the top story of the day. Just search for breaking news related to “executive privilege.” It’s exploding. Heh. No more sweeping this under the rug now.
Soooo . . . instead of cutting Holder loose as a liability, Obama, to his own apparent detriment, gives him a public vote of confidence by granting executive privilege. Those docs must contain an arsenal of smoking guns, no? Michelle Malkin:
And yes, this does give clear and unmistakable lie to the Holder spin that Fast and Furious was just a local, little nothing-burger contretemps out of Arizona that had nooooothing to do with DOJ and the executive branch. Executive privilege applies to communications in which the president, ahem, was directly involved.
Ahem indeed.
Or, to go all conspiracy-theory on you, Holder has something on Obama.
“How can the president assert executive privilege if there was no White
House involvement? How can the president exert executive privilege over
documents he’s supposedly never seen? Is something very big being hidden
to go to this extreme? The contempt citation is an important procedural
mechanism in our system of checks and balances,” he said.
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New York City's 1.1 million public school students are still in session for another week, and just 64 percent of classrooms are air-conditioned. Temperatures are expected to hit 97 in the city both days, about 20 degrees hotter than it was in Central Park on Tuesday.
Students were being advised to wear light clothing and drink plenty of water, and schools have been told to limit outdoor playtime, city Education Department spokeswoman Marge Feinberg said.
So, yeah, kids, you probably won't need that jacket today as you wilt, sweat, and gasp for air continue to develop your intellect in these fine institutions of learning.
Hang on -- there's a school in Brooklyn with air conditioners to spare. Too bad they're all sitting in the basement in their original boxes:
But while the classrooms at New Horizons Middle School do not have air-conditioners, the school’s storage room does.
Earlier this school year, workers discovered 10 unopened boxes of air-conditioner units in the basement, said Deanna Sinito, the principal of New Horizons, in Carroll Gardens. School officials and the Education Department could not say how long the air-conditioners had been there and do not agree on how they got there. (The company that makes the air-conditioners said they were manufactured in 2009.)
While many students are accustomed to sweaty school days, officials say that air-conditioners would be a benefit at New Horizons, where children with special needs attend classes from sixth to eighth grade alongside peers who don’t have disabilities. And in September, the school will house a program for sixth-grade students that have different types of autistic disorders.
If you're so inclined, say a prayer for these poor kids today. In-classroom temperatures will likely top 100 degrees. Can we admit that this system is not kid-friendly?
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Suggestion: Teachers at the hot schools should organize field trips to City Hall, where cool air flows in abundance. If the mayor were less obsessed with beverage serving-sizes perhaps some of those idle air conditioners might have been installed by now.
The school has 18 classrooms. If the 10 units in storage are used, that would leave the children and teachers in the other 8 rooms uncomfortable on hot days.
Better a thousand kids fry than that a privileged few chill. As Alfred the Butler observed to Batman a movie or two back, “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
Many thanks to Mark for the link.
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Trashed rental homes, bad behavior and barroom brawls that have required the local police to step in have some disgusted Martha’s Vineyard homeowners vowing never to rent out to the Secret Service again. And while none of the disturbing behavior appeared to have any direct effect on the president’s safety, some occurred even as the president and his family were nearby. [. . .]
The owner of a six-bedroom home rented out the last two summers to the same Secret Service team that got in trouble in South America showed FoxNews.com a bullet he said was left behind by the agents and said CAT agents let neighborhood children and other residents handle their weapons.
More alarmingly, he said the men told him details of presidential security plans and logistics.
“They left ammo behind, they told me things they shouldn’t have been telling me, things they shouldn’t be telling anyone about the details about how they protect the president. They let us hold their weapons, see all their stuff, they had huge house parties,” said the man, who spoke to FoxNews.com with his wife on the condition they not be named. [. . .]
A woman who was close to one of the agents and spent time with a group of them last summer said she was concerned about the national security implications of them bringing home women -- many of whom were foreign nationals -- nearly every night. She said the agents she spent time with did not bring their weapons out at night to the bars and parties, but that detailed information about the protection plans for the president was on all of their cellphones -- as were the phone numbers, locations and contact phone numbers for everyone on the detail.
See the story for more frat-boy-worthy details. Pathetic if true.
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At first glance, this looks like a funny story of tables turned on the professional gropers of the TSA. But it's not really funny at all. Carol Price missed her brother's funeral and was hauled off to jail in handcuffs after protesting what she believed was an amped-up TSA groping:
Carol Price, herself a former TSA screener, was traveling to her brother’s funeral in Cleveland, Ohio by way of Southwest Florida International Airport.
After Price became infuriated at receiving a pat down, which included touching her breasts and genitals, a violation of the protocols she herself had been trained to carry out, the Lee County woman voiced her complaint to a TSA supervisor by physically demonstrating how she was groped.
The video shows Price briefly running her hands up and down the inside thigh and crotch of the TSA supervisor.
Price believed she was being targeted for harsh treatment by her former co-worker for personal reasons. She was removed from her flight, missed her brother’s funeral, handcuffed and taken to jail.
For demonstrating the kind of humiliation that TSA agents have become renowned for practicing, Price faces misdemeanor battery charges. She has pleaded not guilty.
Guess the agent who groped Price failed to invert his or her paw at the prescribed moment.
The video does indeed show an agitated Price getting inappropriately physical as she demonstrates to the supervisor what was done to her. That was a mistake.
Paul Joseph Watson asks a good question:
Why are cops and FBI agents forbidden from touching American citizens without probable cause whereas TSA agents, who although festooned with badges and uniforms are not law enforcement officials, get away with behavior the federal agency itself characterizes as “violence” on a daily basis?
Moreover, he is not simply refraining from law enforcement. He is affirmatively obstructing the states from enforcing their sovereign right to police their territories. He, furthermore, proposes to confer positive benefits on a class of illegal aliens in order to legitimize their status, something it is in the power only of Congress to do, and something which Congress — having considered the matter carefully, and having heard the objections of the American people — has specifically declined to do. This is another instance of Obama’s brazen lack of regard for the system he is duty-bound to honor: He claims he cannot sit back and wait for Congress to act; but as he well knows, lawmakers have acted: They said said, “No.”
Obama is not merely failing to enforce the immigration laws. He is destroying the system on which our liberty depends, a system he swore to safeguard. This oath was a solemn one, of far greater consequence than, say, a pitcher’s oath to testify truthfully to Congress about steroid use — an incident over which the federal government has spent millions of taxpayer dollars in an effort to convict Roger Clemens of a felony, notwithstanding the utter absence of any federal interest in the integrity of professional baseball.
We are entitled to conclude Obama defrauded the American people in taking his oath of office. He prefaced the oath by unabashedly declaring his intention to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” He followed the oath with a series of usurpations designed to do just that. This highlights another mendacious aspect of Obama’s pandering to the hard Left on illegal immigration and, symmetrically, on election fraud (the policing against which he similarly obstructs). The president says the young illegal aliens he has in mind are “Americans” except on paper. But who is Obama to say what an American is? By his own self-heralding, he is here to transform the United States. His mantra is “Change.” He has stacked his Justice Department and the rest of the executive branch sprawl with progressive operatives whose obsession is to transmogrify America culturally, economically and politically — to alter our very nature. When Obama talks about someone’s being “an American” or something’s being one of “our values,” he is not talking about the America that is; he is invoking the authoritarian, collectivist, redistributionist, post-sovereign, transnational America of his design.
Read the whole thing.
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to all you dads out there. The world needs you more than ever. My traditional Father's Day post --
Mark Twain, Old Times on the Mississippi
When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.
Nat King Cole
I felt something impossible for me to explain in words. Then, when they took her away, it hit me. I got scared all over again and began to feel giddy. Then it came to me... I was a father.
Harry S Truman
I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.
Al Unser, Jr.
Dad taught me everything I know. Unfortunately, he didn't teach me everything he knows.
Jimmy Piersal, on how to diaper a baby
Spread the diaper in the position of the diamond with you at bat. Then, fold second base down to home and set the baby on the pitcher's mound. Put first base and third together, bring up home plate and pin the three together. Of course, in case of rain, you gotta call the game and start all over again.
Laurence Sterne (Tristram Shandy)
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me.
“America is a nation of laws, which means I, as the President, am obligated to enforce the law. I don’t have a choice about that. That’s part of my job,” he said. When Ramos asked a follow-up question about granting formal administrative relief to undocumented youth, Obama was even more forceful: “There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply, through executive order, ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as President.”
Right, because there's this thing called the US Constitution, which he swore to preserve, protect and defend, and which explicitly requires him to uphold the laws of the country.
But what a difference nine little months and declining reelection prospects have made. Now King Barack, ironically a "constitutional scholar," has decided that he does, after all, "have a choice" and, in effect, we aren't a nation of laws. Can he do that? John Yoo says no, not legally. Executive Overreach:
President Obama’s claim that he can refuse to deport 800,000 aliens here in the country illegally illustrates the unprecedented stretching of the Constitution and the rule of law. He is laying claim to presidential power that goes even beyond that claimed by the Bush administration, in which I served. There is a world of difference in refusing to enforce laws that violate the Constitution (Bush) and refusing to enforce laws because of disagreements over policy (Obama).
Under Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, the president has the duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” This provision was included to make sure that the president could not simply choose, as the British King had, to cancel legislation simply because he disagreed with it. President Obama cannot refuse to carry out a congressional statute simply because he thinks it advances the wrong policy. To do so violates the very core of his constitutional duties.
Next question: Can he get away with it? The short answer: Only if he gets reelected. Rep. Steve King is going to sue, for what that's worth.
Victor Davis Hanson suspects this divisive, illegal reelection ploy will backfire:
If one individual can decide to exempt nearly a million residents from the law — when he most certainly could not get the law amended or repealed through proper legislative or judicial action — then what can he not do? Obama is turning out to be the most subversive chief executive in terms of eroding U.S. law since Richard Nixon.
Politically, Obama calculates that some polls showing the current likely Hispanic support for him in the high 50s or low 60s would not provide enough of a margin in critical states such as Nevada, New Mexico, and Colorado, or perhaps also in Florida and Virginia, to counteract the growing slippage of the independent vote and the energy of the clinger/tea-party activists. Thus, what was not legal or advisable in 2009, 2010, or 2011, suddenly has become critical in mid-2012. No doubt free green cards will quickly lead to citizenship and a million new voters. Will it work politically? Obama must assume lots of things: that all Hispanics vote as a block in favoring exempting more illegal aliens from the law, and are without worry that the high unemployment rate hits their community among the hardest; that black voters, stung by his gay-marriage stance, will not resent what may be seen as de facto amnesty, possibly endangering his tiny (and slipping) lead in places like Virginia, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. And because polls show overwhelming resistance to non-enforcement of immigration law, Obama also figures that the minority who supports his recent action does so far more vehemently than the majority who opposes it. Time will tell; but my gut feeling is that his brazen act will enrage far more than it will delight — and for a variety of different reasons. As with all his special-interest efforts — the Keystone cancellation, war-on-women ploy, gay-marriage turnabout, and now de facto amnesty — Obama believes dividing Americans along class, ethnic, gender, and cultural lines will result in a cobbled together majority, far more preferable than a 1996 Clinton-like effort to win over the independents by forging a bipartisan consensus.
Read the rest. Hanson also raises the unemployment issue, which was the subject of Neil Munro's excellent question yesterday in the Rose Garden. For the record, this is what he asked His Majesty: "Is this the right thing to do for American workers?" Obviously it isn't.
Munro has been accused of disrespecting the office; a president mustn't be interrupted! I'm all for respect and decorum, but impertinence is trumped by pertinence this time. The question was an important one, and the act of questioning is even more important. How sad that we've reached the point where our elected leader can wave his sceptre and exempt a million or so people from the law of the land and no one is allowed to ask a question. See Munro's account here.
The legal rollback is needed to focus law-enforcement resources on criminals and terrorists, officials claimed.
But Napolitano also undermined the claim by highlighting the policy’s broad and immediate impact.
“Effective immediately, young [foreign] people who were brought to the United States… will no longer be removed from the country,” Napolitano said in the press conference.
The administration’s large-scale amnesty for roughly 800,000 illegals may spur anger among voters already facing high unemployment. [. . .]
The potential for campaign-trail damage was highlighted by Napolitano’s June 15 press conference.
She portrayed the amnesty as a cost-saving program, not an amnesty or a bid for Hispanic votes in 2012.
“I believe that additional measures are needed to ensure that enforcement resources are not expended on low priority cases,” she said.
But she did not take questions from reporters.
A few problems with the new not-amnesty:
The administration’s election-year amnesty move may grow far larger than advertised, because it can be used by foreign children who are now in the country when they reach the age of 15. Younger illegal immigrants “will be able to age into the process,” said an administration official June 15.
It may also be exploited by other immigrants who will use the existing black-market in false documents to fake suitable work histories and ages.
The new policy may also spur additional illegal immigration by people wishing to see their children immigrate into United States’ relatively high-wage economy.
The process puts illegals under age 30 on track to gain legal residency, citizenship and the ability to co-sponsor their older relatives to legally join them in the United States.
New citizens, including older residents, are eligible for the United States’ relatively generous welfare programs, including Medicare and Medicare.
Does anyone really believe Homeland Security is going to effectively screen out illegal aliens guilty of other crimes? And how could they possibly determine at what point in the past a particular illegal alien crossed the border? I assume they'll just take a person's word for it. Not that it will matter much, with the borders thrown wide open. Mark Krikorian:
Obscured by the president’s illegal DREAM decree is a report by Steve Dinan in today’s Washington Times on a draft memo instructing Border Patrol agents to let certain illegal aliens go:
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency charged with guarding the U.S. borders, has written a secret draft policy that would let its agents catch and release low-priority illegal immigrants rather than bring them in for processing and prosecution. . . .
The memo pointedly warns that “no public mention” should be made of the policy in order to keep it from being subject to Freedom of Information Act requests.
The memo says the policy was drafted at the behest of immigrant rights groups.
So, let them go if they’re caught at the border, then give them work authorization if they stay here long enough. Great!
But Dear Leader isn't asking for an argument, America.
The extraordinary rudeness and imperiousness of Obama's abuse of arrogated power, however, wasn't the focus of most of the coverage; rather it was the extraordinary, unprecedented, mind-blowing, trailblazing, epoch-making ill-manneredness of the reporter from the Daily Caller, whose job was apparently to sit there and take it.
Do nothing Congress? Obstructionism? Obama spent his political capital on other things when the Dems controlled the House and Senate, such as extremely unpopular ObamaCare, which will cost, according to the latest CBO estimates, twice what was promised.
Obama's abuses of power spring from his own desperate sense of superiority to you, me, and the mere law. To hear people arguing that those folks in the press pool whom he has so long abused owe their respect to the office at least, when they witness every day his abuse of it, blows my mind so hard some of my grey matter is now circulating in the earth's troposphere.
Read the rest.
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Thanks to Larwyn for the big link!
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Thanks also to Michelle Malkin for the Buzzworthy link.
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I had high hopes for President Obama’s speech on the economy. But instead of going to Ohio on Thursday with a compelling plan for the future, the president gave Americans a falsehood wrapped in a fallacy.
Time to take a hard look at those high hopes, Mr. Milbank.
Candidate Obama's "big speech" yesterday was a perfect dud. If anyone swooned it was from sheer ennui. From the little I saw of it, the troops dutifully vocalized on cue. But their demeanor was what Joey B. would have called dull as hell. Click to enlarge and look at the faces.
More striking was the evidence of Obama’s indiscipline — a destructive problem for someone in a tight race. The endlessly repetitive speech was so very, very long that it brought to mind a story about the 1960 premiere of the Otto Preminger movie “Exodus,” about the creation of the state of Israel. As the film crossed the three-hour mark, the comedian Mort Sahl stood up and shouted, “Otto, let my people go!”
If the nation’s undecided voters decide Obama has become a bore on top of everything else, they’re going to do what Otto Preminger would not do for Mort Sahl: They’re going to let him go.
So far there's no transcript of Mark Steyn's chat with Hugh Hewitt last night, but it was insightful (as usual) and I'll post it here if it turns up.
We're getting a little ahead of things here, but apparently I'm not the only one interested in how the Obama psyche might be affected by a loss in November. Peter Wehner on the impending Obama crack-up:
What is fairly astonishing in all this is the utter lack of self-awareness by the president. A jolting collision is occurring between his own self-conception (Obama views himself as a world-historical figure and Great Man) and the multiple and multiplying failures of his presidency. Obama appears incapable of processing the truth or coming to grips with reality. And so he’s spinning tales day after day, including his fantastic (and thoroughly discredited) claim that “Since I’ve been president, federal spending has risen at the lowest pace in nearly 60 years.”
Obama has now entered a world all his own. It’s a world where up is down, hot is cold, north is south, and Barack Obama is fiscally responsible and blameless.
In its own way, it’s a fascinating psychodrama that’s unfolding. Given that there are still 146 days until the election, it’s hard to imagine where the president will eventually end up.
If Obama loses, the Ego will be unable to comprehend it, and the excuse-making and responsibility-shifting, including attacks not only on those nasty Republicans, but also on his own party, his own campaign, and the confused and ignorant voters who failed him, will be like nothing we've seen before. He's not a gracious man, and will be at his worst in defeat.
If you plant it they will come. A stunning zebra swallowtail pays a leisurely visit to my 'butterfly flower' (asclepias). Photo by #2 son. Click to enlarge.
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Candidate Barack Obama, on the job at a recent fundraiser:
“Those of us who have spent time in the real world understand that the problem is not that the American people aren’t productive enough,” Obama said during a fundraiser today, after saying that Romney believes that America “automatically” prospers when the wealthy profit. “[Romney says] his 25 years in the private sector gives him a special understanding of how the economy works, [so] my question is why are you running with the same bad ideas that brought our economy to the brink of disaster?”
The president also said that Republicans, not Democrats, caused the current budget crisis. “I love listening to these guys give us lectures about debt and deficits. I inherited a trillion dollar deficit!” he said. Obama compared Republicans to a person who orders a steak dinner and martini and then, “just as you’re sitting down, they leave, and accuse you of running up the tab.”
The real world? I can't quite muster the appropriate outrage this morning, but Erika Johnsen can:
He. Cannot. Be. Serious. And yet, he is. If this doesn’t qualify as playing up the intellectually cheap, populist, class-warfare rhetoric, then I don’t know what does.
Read the rest. And if you'd like a glimpse of where the real unpaid-for steak-and-martini dinners are taking us, read a few of the stories about what's happening in Europe:
In an atmosphere that has become increasingly electric before Greece's crucial election, the far-right Golden Dawn has ratcheted up the rhetoric by threatening to remove immigrants and their children from hospitals and kindergartens.
Earning loud applause at an election campaign rally in Athens, Golden Dawn MP Ilias Panagiotaros said: "If Chrysi Avgi [Golden Dawn] gets into parliament [as polls predict], it will carry out raids on hospitals and kindergartens and it will throw immigrants and their children out on the street so that Greeks can take their place."
Medical supplies and beds at some hospitals are running desperately short. The governor of the state-run Nikea hospital, Theodoros Roupas, called on doctors to stop non-essential surgical interventions because of a critical shortage of gloves, syringes and gauze. The order was revoked when Roupas found emergency supplies later in the day.
"The situation is really critical and getting worse every day," said Dr Panaghiotis Papanikolaou, a neurosurgeon at the hospital. "There is not enough medical staff to cope and huge shortages of supplies. There's no money to even service scanners and surgical microscopes … we're talking about a major healthcare crisis – not in the making, it is happening now."
European finance officials have discussed limiting the size of withdrawals from ATM machines, imposing border checks and introducing euro zone capital controls as a worst-case scenario should Athens decide to leave the euro.
There is no well-thought-out plan for the orderly exit of the eurozone’s insolvent countries. There are no safeguards, no plans, no road map — nothing. The Maastricht Treaty, like the United States Constitution, did not provide for an exit mechanism. So, instead of realism and emergency planning, we get denial and more happy talk. But, just because something is “unthinkable” doesn’t mean that it can’t happen.
In fact, it already is happening. Greece is rapidly running out of money; its residents are withdrawing their deposits and have stopped paying their taxes and utility bills. Even if the country can stay afloat until the June 17 election, a disorderly eurozone exit, default, and currency redenomination will follow. Greece will be dependent upon foreign aid for essential imports such as petroleum and food. Civil order will be difficult to maintain, and the army may be forced to step in (again).
Once Greece goes, runs on bank deposits are likely to follow in Spain and Italy. There is nothing to stop Spanish and Italian depositors from wiring their euros from their local bank to one in Switzerland, Norway or New York. At that point, the only thing still standing between the eurozone and financial chaos will be the ECB, which could buy government bonds and fund the bank runs. The scale of such an operation would be enormous, and would expose the ECB to huge credit risk. But it could, in principle, step in — if northern Europe permitted.
If the ECB does not step in, Italy and Spain, too, will be forced to exit the eurozone, default on their euro-denominated sovereign and bank obligations, and redenominate into national currency. Massive losses would be imposed on the global financial system. Given the opacity of banks’ exposures, creditors would be unable to discriminate between the solvent and the insolvent (as was the case in September 2008).
Read the rest. I don't know much about economics, but I have learned that in the real Real World, nothing is free. Ultimately, someone has to pay. Take it away, Mark Steyn:
In the twilight of the West, America and Europe are still different but only to this extent: They’ve wound up taking separate paths to the same destination. Whether you get there via an artificial common currency for an invented pseudo-jurisdiction or through quantitative easing and the global decline of the dollar, whether you spend your final years in the care of Medicare or the National Health Service death panels, whether higher education is just another stage of cradle-to-grave welfare or you have a trillion dollars’ worth of personal college debt, in 2012 the advanced Western social-democratic citizen looks pretty similar, whether viewed from Greece or Germany, California or Quebec.
That’s to say, the unsustainable “bubble” is not student debt or subprime mortgages or anything else. The bubble is us, and the assumptions of entitlement. Too many citizens of advanced Western democracies live a life they have not earned, and are not willing to earn. Indeed, much of our present fiscal woe derives from two phases of human existence that are entirely the invention of the modern world. Once upon a time, you were a kid till you were 13 or so; then you worked; then you died. That bit between childhood and death has been chewed away at both ends. We invented something called “adolescence” that now extends not merely through the teenage years but through a desultory half decade of Whatever Studies at Complacency U up till you’re 26 and no longer eligible for coverage on your parents’ health-insurance policy. At the other end of the spectrum, we introduced something called “retirement” that, in the space of two generations, has led to the presumption that able-bodied citizens are entitled to spend the last couple of decades, or one-third of their adult lives, as a long holiday weekend.
As the tab comes due and things get increasingly ugly in Europe, our president continues to lead us blithely down the same path. And again the old question -- stupid or evil? -- arises, this time from Michael Walsh:
In other words, what is it about a second term that’s so important to him that he’s willing to expose what has essentially been a sham presidency — certainly, aside from health care, a sham first term of basketball games, parties, golf, and vacations — in his quest for something that’s clearly greater to him? In short, what is Barack Hussein Obama really after, once he’s freed from campaigning and any electoral responsibility to the voters?
So back we go to the only real question — why? With the housing market still cratering, real unemployment soaring, personal wealth vaporizing, what more is left for him to accomplish as he acquaints Amerikkka with the joys of progressive payback? Because either you believe that the wasteland of the first term was due to incompetence or — the only other alternative — malevolence.
He’s not running on competence, so that pretty much narrows it down.
Well, yes, but they're not mutually exclusive. But there's an even simpler answer: the Ego wants it.
Prediction: If Obama loses, the Ego will be unable to comprehend it, and the excuse-making and responsibility-shifting, including attacks not only on those nasty Republicans, but also on his own party, his own campaign, and the confused and ignorant voters who failed him, will be like nothing we've seen before. He's not a gracious man, and will be at his worst in defeat.
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Afterthought: And Bush! Of course, if he winds up as a one-term loser, he'll blame Bush.
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The Regressives want us to think there’s a “war on women” going on, but the fact is, there’s a war on children — which means there’s a war on the future, and the future is losing. What World War II could not accomplish — the complete eradication of whole populations — western-style feminism just might. You’ve come a long way, baby. Michael Walsh
The central fact of our age is the unprecedented, voluntary self-extinction of the developed world. Mark Steyn
