LFTC - Letter From The Capitol

LFTC - Index 6/19/09

4 posts: (1) IRAN: The Mourning After; Sour Sermon at the Mosque--Us v. Them; (2) Hillary Twits; Khamenei Tweets--Us v. Them; (3) Sonia's Cases Before the Supremes & More--The Home Front; (4) Obama's North American Managed Trade Discord--Wobble Watch.

LFTC: IRAN: The Mourning After; Sour Sermon at the Mosque

Yesterday's massive mourning assemblage of demonstrators in Iran was dignified and, thankfully, marked by minimal violence.  Meanwhile, our Omniscient One at 1600 Penn awaits a second "Miracle of the Abacuses" recount, after the original "Miracle of the Abacuses" tally.  Robert Kagan nails Obama's narrow realist view.  The Jerusalem Post reports that this morning the Supreme Guide Ayatollah Ali Khamenei used Friday prayers to try to quell the protests once and for all: (a) declare that the election result was free of fraud; (b) blame America and other "furriners" for the unrest; and (c) warn that future protests are highly illegal and would be dealt with severely.

Charles Krauthammer says Obama should do more; he lets fly at 44's putting negotiations first:

Dialogue with a regime that is breaking heads, shooting demonstrators, expelling journalists, arresting activists. Engagement with -- which inevitably confers legitimacy upon -- leaders elected in a process that begins as a sham (only four handpicked candidates permitted out of 476) and ends in overt rigging.

Then, after treating this popular revolution as an inconvenience to the real business of Obama-Khamenei negotiations, the president speaks favorably of "some initial reaction from the Supreme Leader that indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election."

Where to begin? "Supreme Leader"? Note the abject solicitousness with which the American president confers this honorific on a clerical dictator who, even as his minions attack demonstrators, offers to examine some returns in some electoral districts -- a farcical fix that will do nothing to alter the fraudulence of the election.

Before slamming Nixonian Press Secretary Robert Gibbs for his contemptible euphemism re the two sides in Iran being engaged in a "vigorous debate" and nailing 44 on his illusions that he can talk Iran away from the nuclear precipice, CK notes the immense stakes for the entire Mideast in how the Iran showdown ends:

This revolution will end either as a Tiananmen (a hot Tiananmen with massive and bloody repression or a cold Tiananmen with a finer mix of brutality and co-optation) or as a true revolution that brings down the Islamic Republic.

The latter is improbable but, for the first time in 30 years, not impossible. Imagine the repercussions. It would mark a decisive blow to Islamist radicalism, of which Iran today is not just standard-bearer and model, but financier and arms supplier. It would do to Islamism what the collapse of the Soviet Union did to communism -- leave it forever spent and discredited.

In the region, it would launch a second Arab spring. The first in 2005 -- the expulsion of Syria from Lebanon, the first elections in Iraq and early liberalization in the Gulf states and Egypt -- was aborted by a fierce counterattack from the forces of repression and reaction, led and funded by Iran.

Peggy Noonan says Obama need not do more, as everyone knows whose side Obama & America is on.  The WSJ offers us Voices from Iran and says that the fear is gone.  Jeffrey Lord reviews Reagan's rhetoric during the endgame of the Cold War and finds more support for Russian dissidents than 44 is offering those in Iran.  Iran maven Michael Ledeen says we should give the protesters tools to fight tyranny: information age tools such as Internet and smuggled satellite phones, a strike fund for workers and more open, clear encouragement.  Washington Post columnist David Ignatius says the protests are "for real" this time.  National security maven Daniel Byman says that while Iran is ripe for revolution, Mousavi is no Mikhail Gorbachev.  Alas, Byman is right about Mousaavi.

Discovery Institute founder-CEO Bruce Chapman offers Iran blog posts and ties Iran & North Korea together.  (Full disclosure: Discovery sponsors LFTC, though LFTC content is solely mine and my own choosing.)

Revolutionary Guard leader Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has switched sides, and is now back in the Ayatollah's camp.  Rafsanjani--who in 2001 said that it would be worth losing 15M Iranians to nuke Israel and kill 5M Israelis, because the Jewish State would be extinguished while Iran would survive--is a nasty piece of work.  But had he stayed with the protesters the chances of ending clerical rule in Iran would be greater.  Such an end would be a huge victory for the West, even were a secular, hostile Iran to survive and make other kinds of trouble.  Now that appears suddenly less in prospect. 

Here are more evaluations of the unfolding drama.  This report shows how dangerous a place Teheran is.

LFTC - Hillary Twits; Khamenei Tweets

While the State Department bureaucracy did a star turn on information age technology Monday--importuning (successfully) Twitter to delay a network repair so as not to shut down Iranian Twitter posting--the fog in Foggy Bottom migrated to the Office of the Secretary.  Hillary Clinton said of Twitter: "I wouldn't know a Twitter from a Tweeter."  (A Tweet is a message sent via Twitter, a service that broadcasts mini-messages limited to 140 syllables that can be accessed by anyone online who follows Twitter.)  Meanwhile Supreme Guide Ali Khamanei uses Twitter to post messages from time to time.  (I use Twitter to post daily previews of LFTC entries and to enable my Twitter followers to track my radio appearances.)  Atavistic theology works seamlessly with modern technology, while our blase Secretary remains in techno-fog at State.

Peggy Noonan, who "gets" Twitter, wrote of the new Internet services that their creators should grow up:

The great question is what modern technology can do not in the short term so much as the long. It is not the friend of entrenched tyranny. Connected to which, it would be nice if the technologies of the future were not given babyish names. Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc., have come to be crucial and historically consequential tools, and yet to refer to them is to talk baby talk. In the future could inventors please keep the weight and dignity of history in mind?

LFTC - Sonia's Cases Before the Supremes & More

This Human Events article profiles 7 cases where rulings by Judge Sotomayor came before the Supreme Court.  National Journal legal affairs columnist Stuart Taylor demolishes the argument that Judge Sotomayor's ruling in the New Haven Firefighters case was not quota-based.

I took a good look at one case the Human Events article discusses, as it seems to me especially important, involving the extent of federal regulatory power over industry.  The case Entergy Corp. v. Riverkeeper, Inc. (decided April 1, 2009), involved an Environmental Protection AGency (EPA) order apply cost-benefit calculus to pollution control regulation, overturning a ruling by Judge Sotomayor's appeals court panel entitling the EPA to ignore cost-benefit and demand instead "best available technology"; this is precisely the kind of regulation we can expect from the militant Greens (like White House czar Carol Browner, who headed a radical EPA under President Clinton).

A New York Times article profiles Sonia's national security cases--not reassuring.

LFTC - Ayatollah, Waco & Hill

Who knew?  The Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Supreme Guide of Iran, in last Friday's sermon, called out Hillary for...(I am NOT making this up, as Dave Barry would say)...the 1993 massacre of religious cultists (including children) at Waco, Texas.  As the LA Times reported:

Khamenei blamed Western media and officials for stirring up unrest by exploiting internal political differences over the election results. Such allegations have been running nonstop for days on state television. He singled out the U.S., mocking America's concern for human rights issues in Iran, noting that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's husband was president when federal forces stormed the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, setting off a fire that killed scores of people.

"Do you even believe in human rights?" he said, criticizing America for its involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan and its support for Israel.

"The followers of the Davidian sect were staging a sit-in protest in a house," he said. "The authorities asked them to come out. The Davidians refused. More than 80 men, women and children were burned alive in this house."

Well, well.  Does this explain why Hillary is staying off Twitter?

LFTC - Obama's North American Managed Trade Discord

Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman pointed me to a Deroy Murdock NRO piece on how Team Obama is stiffing Canada & Mexico, to placate its domestic protectionist allies.

Re Canada, DM notes:

For starters, Canadians find February’s $787-billion stimulus package as stimulating as a cold shower on a hot date. It requires American-made construction materials in all federally funded public-works projects. This “Buy American” provision would keep U.S. roads, bridges, and tunnels free of Canadian iron, steel, and other components, although such Canadian inputs were allowed before the Democratic Congress passed and President Obama signed this measure.

Re Mexico, DM writes of the cross-border trucking brouhaha:

Obama’s $410 billion omnibus spending plan defunded a pilot program in which about 100 Mexican trucks were allowed to drive goods into the U.S. beyond a 25-mile frontier zone. American trucks were given equal access to Mexican destinations. (Removing goods from one country’s trucks and reloading them onto the other’s for onward travel has boosted transit costs anew. These eventually increase price tags.)

Mexico correctly argues that the North American Free Trade Agreement, which President Clinton signed in 1995, opened U.S. roads to Mexican trucks. However, Washington kept dragging its feet. In 2002 Congress imposed 22 safety regulations on Mexican (but not Canadian) trucks, and it was only in 2007 that the Bush administration started the pilot program. In exasperation at the ending of this program, Mexico has raised tariffs on 90 American exports worth $2.4 billion, including grapes and toilet paper.  This will reportedly kill 40,000 American jobs. Mexico’s backlash against U.S. protectionism interrupted its unilateral reduction of average industrial tariffs from 10.4 percent in 2008 to a projected 4.2 percent in 2013.

Even worse, June 1 brought word that Canacar — an association of 4,500 Mexican trucking companies — had filed a grievance with the U.S. State Department seeking $6 billion in damages because of the pilot program’s termination and the resulting brick wall that arose in front of big rigs at the border....

Democrats claim Mexican trucks are dangerous. However, the Arizona Republic found that between 2003 and 2007, 1.2 percent of Mexican truckers in America were non-compliant with safety rules, versus 7 percent of U.S. drivers. As Arturo Sarukhán, Mexico’s ambassador to the United States, wrote in the March 18 Wall Street Journal: “During the 18 months that the program was in operation, 26 carriers from Mexico (with 103 trucks) and 10 from the U.S. (with 61 trucks) crossed the border over 45,000 times without any significant incident or accident.”

Bottom Line.  The new administration is moving towards what economists call "managed trade": politically-supervised trade, where politics trumps economics, in service of domestic constituencies.  NAFTA--the North American Free Trade Accord, an idea spawned by Ronald Reagan & brought to fruition by Bill Clinton (over the opposition of most of his party, primarily with GOP support)--is being morphed into NAMTD--North American Managed Trade Discord.  That Mexico and Canada are our two largest trading partners does not seem to faze Team Obama.  Greens & unions can smile while the rest of us pay for this economic & diplomatic disaster.

LFTC - Index 6/18/09

4 posts: (1) IRAN: Revolution or Devolution?--Us v. Them; (2) Financial Regulation: Risk Management Supreme--The Home Front; (3) Newt Gores, Mitch Soars, Sarah Scores--The Home Front; (4) Climate Change: China Straddles; Aussies Rebel--"It's the Earth Stupid!"

LFTC - IRAN: Revolution or Devolution?

As LFTC posts this AM, there is less than one hour before the mass rally in Tehran, scheduled to start at 7:30 AM EST, begins.  The mullahs have signaled that they intend to proceed with their suspect recount, with President Ahmadinejad certain to emerge still on top.  The decision by Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei to conduct Friday prayers, a rarity for him, indicates that he will attempt to quell the protests that have spread far beyond Tehran.  At stake is nothing less than the clerical character of Iran's regime.  With former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the leading power in Iran's vastly influential Revolutionary Guard, having sided with Hossain Mousavi's effort to reverse that rigged election, Iran's ruling class is divided.

Today may help determine if what originally was mostly a youth protest movement has expanded to the middle class.  Whether Rafsanjani's defection will undercut efforts to use security forces to break up the protest is also unclear.  It is hugely significant that the Ayatollah Montazeri issued his recent fatwa declaring a violent response to peaceful protest to be a violation of islamic law.  The regime clerics were seriously damaged when the "divine miracle" landslide for Ahmadinjead, proclaimed publicly by Ali Khamaenei, was repudiated by Khamaenei himself.  The official religious leader of a clerical fascist regime admitted, in effect, his own fallibility.

Bottom Line.  First order for the West is whether the revolutionary character of the Iranian regime is supplanted by a more secular, more traditional regime.  This would undercut the principal global theological force of Shia fundamentalism, the Ayatollah Khomeini's version ofTwelver Shiism.  Such would make more plausible that if Iran goes nuclear--still likely no matter who prevails in the political contest--its leaders may respond to a traditional calculus of deterrence.

Second order for the West is whether a new, secular Iranian regime, should it come to pass, ends support for Islamist militant terrorist groups--Hezbollah and Hamas.  Coupled with an Iran that does not immediately upon attaining a nuclear capability weaponize it, an arms race in the Mideast might be avoided.

The above would, of course, all be null and void, should Iran's militant clerics prevail in the showdown now going forward and thus regain full control.  But Rafsanjani's switch, representing the judgment byIran's perhaps canniest politician, suggests that real change is a real possibility.  And real change in Iran will cause real change to ripple throughout a Mideast region in which Iran, by its geographic location, population size, and technological prowess, is bound to play a leading role, however this showdown ends.

LFTC - Financial Regulation: Risk Management Supreme

The massive financial regulation package unveiled yesterday by Team Obama will require a few days digestion to offer useful analysis.  Most immediately and obviously significant is that a formalized effort to address systemic risk is now part of America's permanent financial regulatory architecture.  While there is abundant reason to be skeptical that the government has the competence--considerable--to discharge such responsibilities, the severity of the global financial partial meltdown made such a move politically inevitable.  Looking back, the failure of the government and key private financial institutions to create informal mechanisms to deal with financial crises after the 1998 Long Term Capital Management hedge fund debacle was a grave error.  Had some informal mechanism been in place last year, creation of a formal, highly public and thus highly political mechanism might well not have been thought necessary.

LFTC - Newt Gores, Mitch Soars, Sarah Scores

At a top conservative summit last week, Newt Gingrich gave a 56-minute speech.  His survey of the issue and political landscape is masterful.  It is easier and quicker to read the transcript text than to spend an hour watching Web video.  My favorite line: "Let me be clear: I am not a citizen of the world.  I think that the entire concept is intellectual nonsense and stunningly dangerous.  There is no world sovereignty, there is no world system of law....I am a citizen - I am a citizen of the United States of America."  Newt also shreds the MSM press for giving the Obama administration a pass on phony economy claims, a pass no GOP administration ever gets.

Indiana two-term Governor Mitch Daniels gets an admiring portrait by NRO's Rich Lowry: successful and forward-looking, if non-flashy.  Quiet competence may look good after unchecked charisma.  Problem for Mitch as for all low-profile aspirants: name recognition.

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin won a huge victory last week: here is the Juneau Empire story on how Palin got Exxon to support the monster Canada natural gas pipeline deal it had long opposed.  The Trans-Canada consortium is the largest on the North American continent.  Investor's Business Daily provides more detail on how Palin played the pivotal role in getting Alaska's legislature on board.  (You also won a biggie when Letterman apologized formally this week.)

My Palin Program  You also won a biggie when Letterman issued his mea cupla(1) Do NOT run in 2012; avoid the risk of being upset in gubernatorial re-election bid.  (2) Spend the next three two-year election cycles raising funds for GOP House & Senate candidates, including those who inhabit different segments of the party--raise hundreds of millions & collect chits.  (3) After finishing your gubernatorial term in 2010, do NOT run for re-election; a loss would be fatal.  (4) Instead, host a talk-radio show--better yet, a talk TV show, as beauty helps sell lots of things, including politicians; this will keep the Palin Power brand in the national spotlight.  (5) Put together the kind of advisory council (if not already in place) that Ronald Reagan used in his wilderness years (1974-1980).  (6) Travel extensively, meeting foreign leaders.  (7) Give major foreign policy speeches at key forums.

Then run in 2016, as 2012 may not be a good year, even if Obama has a bad first term.  The GOP will not get the White House back unless the party comes together on a national program that is coherent and reflects America's post-Reagan era.

The changing demographics mean that the electorate increasingly will include major segments neuralgic about social issues, on which they increasingly are liberal.  For future national campaigns, the focus should be on national security and economic issues, with social issues confined to those that have broad bipartisan appeal, such as special needs children.  Contentious social issues--gay marriage, abortion--should be pursued at the state level, via initiatives.  Otherwise the GOP will find itself increasingly out of step with the under-30 set, which went for Obama 66-32 (while the over-30 group went 50-49 for Obama).

Ignore Charlie, Katie & the MSM Mob.  You owe nothing to the wolves that sought to drag you off the national stage.  And when, inevitably, you must confront them if you pursue national office again, prepare on foreign policy like lawyers do for Supreme Court cases.   Your first major MSM interview will be an attempt to cause your candidacy to implode.

You will have to answer this question, too: Were you fully qualified to be President in 2008, given your minimal foreign policy experience?  To which you can answer: No one is fully qualified, said Bill Clinton at the 2008 Denver convention.  Governors rarely are foreign policy experts, bringing other skills to the job, such as managerial competence legislators generally lack.  When Bill Clinton ran in 1992 his foreign policy experience was zero.  President Obama’s on-the-job foreign policy training will make this area an even bigger issue in 2012 than in 2008—even if the economy ranks first.

Above all, good luck.  You deserve it and America needs it, too, in times like this.

LFTC - Climate Change: China Straddles: Aussies Rebel

Gordon Chang writes in Forbes that China continues its resource and company buying spree overseas.  Meanwhile, the Times of London reports that Team Obama is giving China a pass on strict compliance with emissions targets, while it presses American companies to comply fully with militant Green targets.

But Down Under Aussies are resisting the Rudd administration's cap & trade emissions bill.  Aussie Greens predict doom for the legislation.

LFTC - Index 6/17/09

2 posts: (1) Chrysler Deal Details: Consecrating Economic Tsarism--The Home Front; (2) Arabs Fear Nuclear Iran; North Korea's Peninsular Adversary--Us v. Them.

LFTC - Chrysler Deal Details: Consecrating Economic Tsarism

Examination of the Supreme Court's astonishing refusal to grant a stay of the Chrysler - Fiat deal midwifed by Treasury, Indiana State Police Pension Trust v. Chrysler LLC (June 2009), reveals the extent of the government's shocking tactics.  Pages 5 - 10 of the appellant's brief detail a horror story.  (1) Chrysler & JP Morgan concluded a First Lien Agreement with senior secured bondholders on Aug. 3, 2007.  (2) When Chrysler filed for bankruptcy April 30, under Treasury sponsorship, junior creditors--most notably, the UAW pension fund--were put, along with the taxpayers, in front of the line, ahead of secured creditors.  (3) Most senior creditor loans (over 60 percent of the $6.9B) came from four firms--JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Citibank & Morgan Stanley--that had received TARP funds, and were pressured by Treasury to go along.  (4) Most of the non-TARP creditors opposed the plan.  Thus the First Lien creditors were offered $2B--29 cents on the dollar.

What did Treasury do?

1.  Upon learning that First Lien lenders refused to waive their right to senior status for repayment, Treasury substituted for the original bankruptcy plan a sale to a New Chrysler shell corporation created solely to evade senior creditor claims.  The new entity and the transaction would be treated simultaneously as (a) a "going concern" for most creditors but a (b) "liquidation" for senior creditors--despite the fact that the new firm was formed to keep as much of the old firm's business afloat as possible for as long as possible.

2.  Treasury commissioned a convenient financial analysis purporting to show that the First Lien creditors would do worse without the Treasury plan.

3.  Chrysler told Treasury it could offer senior creditors additional value.  Treasury bluntly, flatly refused to even consider this.

4.  E-mail correspondence showed that Treasury directed Chrysler to reduce cash on hand before the filing--thus ensuring that the company was wholly dependent upon TARP funding.

5.  There is a technical legal argument made by petitioners, as to various sections of the bankruptcy code, that is beyond my pay grade, though at first look it appears sound.  Indiana argued that Section 506(1) of the Bankruptcy Code on determination of secured status was ignored, so as to permit a Section 363 transaction to go forward without paying off secured creditors.  Feel free to review the two Code sections and parse the language; as legalese goes, it is not too dense.  In the event, that is not needed.  The points above are enough.

George Will, in the same vein last Sunday, wrote that courts must check Executive Branch excess:

he Supreme Court has said nothing about "bailout law," a phrase that currently is an oxymoron. America as Bailout Nation is governed by unconstrained executive discretion.

Last September, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson testified to the Senate that TARP money was necessary for ailing "financial institutions." Nowhere in the bill's 169 pages was there any reference to government funding of "automobile" or "manufacturing" companies. In November, Paulson told a House committee: "I've said to you very clearly that I believe that the auto companies fall outside of [TARP's] purpose." Then advocates of a Detroit bailout proposed legislation to authorize that. It failed. So President Bush's Treasury Department gave an "interpretation" of the law that ignored the unambiguous terms of the pertinent legislation, the history of its enactment and Treasury's own prior interpretations of it.

Controversy about the judiciary's proper role is again at a boil because of a Supreme Court vacancy, and conservatives are warning against "judicial activism." But the Chrysler and GM bailouts and bankruptcies are reasons for conservatives to rethink the usefulness of that phrase and to make some distinctions.

Of course courts should not make policy or invent rights not stipulated or implied by statutes or the Constitution's text. But courts have no nobler function than that of actively defending property, contracts and other bulwarks of freedom against depredations by government, including by popularly elected, and popular, officials. Regarding Chrysler and GM, the executive branch is exercising powers it does not have under any statute or constitutional provision. At moments such as this, deference to the political branches constitutes dereliction of judicial duty.

Bottom Line.  This goes beyond what Michael Barone called "Gangster Government."  This is pure Tsarism.  The Russian Tsars, as historian Richard Pipes observed, ran a "patrimonial state"--one in which all property belonged to the Tsar nd the State.  This is not socialism, which embodies collective ownership of the means of production.  This is a state in which, like the Russian Tsar, The One at 1600 is casting himself is the country's Father.  Petitions to the Tsar were addressed to "Our Father the Tsar"--as was done on Bloody Sunday 1905 in front fo the Winter Palace outside St. Petersburg.  Our Father Obama the One need not resort to Cossacks; he has Treasury and lawyers at his beck and call.

LFTC - Arabs Fear Nuclear Iran; North Korea's Peninsular Adversary

A recent study by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy examines Arab attitudes towards the prospect of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapons capability.  The study is detailed, but may offer nuggets of value to the interested reader.  John Bolton warns that the consequences of a nuclear Iran are worse than not taking out Iran's nuclear capability, as Israel may do.  JB addresses six arguments that Iran would retaliate so severely that pre-emptive strikes cannot be justified; he shreds them.  Well worth a read.

A WSJ interview with South Korean President Lee Myung-Bak reveals a tough-minded, strongly pro-American leader whose is the South's first to be skeptical about the stalled, feckless six-party talks, and who took the ROK into the Proliferation Security Initiative recently.  Iran, of course, is in cahoots with Iran re nuclear development.

LFTC: SPECIAL ADDED 6/16/09 POST: IRAN

President Obama's belated and tepid response to the transparent fraudulent election count in Iran, and apparent acquiescence in a partial "recount" conducted by the same authorities that perpetrated the original counting fraud, is contemptible in the extreme.  Coupled with Washington's palpable eagerness to engage in negotiations over Iran's nuclear program--made clear by Vice-President Biden on Sunday--the administration has given carte blanche to the mullahs to rig the recount.  Our eagerness to negotiate gives Iran the upper hand in the nuclear talks, one they will exploit to the fullest extent possible.  Coming after the surprising setback to Hezbollah in Lebanon's parliamentary elections, and the rejection of pro-Iranian candidates in Iraq's local elections the administration's failure damages the prospects for liberalizing governance in the Mideast.

Instead of conferring legitimacy upon the Iranian clerical fascist regime by awaiting a phony recount and pressing unconditionally for talks, President Obama should immediately call for a new election run under international supervision to ensure a fair count.  Only then can the results of the election have legitimacy.  As for negotiations, a regime that will lie to stay in power will lie in negotiations, so it can continue to pursue its nuclear ambitions and the vastly enhanced geo-strategic influence possession of nuclear weapons will give the mullahs.  Expecting anything else from Iran is a dangerous illusion.

LFTC - Index 6/16/09

2 posts: (1) Obama Urban Renewal: Channeling the Vietnam War?--The Home Front; (2) Health Care Armageddon?--The Home Front.

LFTC - Obama Urban Renewal: Channeling the Vietnam War?

The Daily Telegraph reports on a new Team Obama initiative under consideration: bulldozing decrepit urban neighborhoods in major American cities.  Among candidate cities are Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.  Sounds a lot like an infamous 1968 quote delivered by a soldier during the Vietnam War: "We had to destroy the village to save it."  Wonder how disclosure of a GOP administration proposal to do the same would be received by Democrats and their allies in the major media?

LFTC - Health Care Armageddon?

Begin with the White House Web homepage for the administration's health care program initiatives.  It contains many links LFTC readers may follow as desired.  The WH Web page points to, among many links, HealthReform.gov, the official government ObamaCare website.

Hudson scholar Betsy McCaughey, who more than anyone else saved America from HillaryCare 15 years ago, calls "Voodoo Health Economics" ObamaCare's numbers; Betsy has additional analysis in a TAS piece.  Betsy's arguments are supplemented in the TAS piece with great graphs.  Her detailed case against ObamaCare explodes myths that dominate the health care debate, and have for a long time.

Some key points Betsy makes:

(1)  Since 1960, Americans' share of expenditures devoted to the Big Four--housing, food, energy & health care--has been constant; what has changed is the mix.  Housing has stayed the same percentage, food & energy have declined & health care risen.  Because food & energy costs have fallen, health care increases have been affordable for most households.

(2)  90 percent of the difference between what Americans spend on health care and what Europeans spend reflects the greeter wealth of Americans--not wasteful consumption.

(3) Key Obama officials see physicians as overly concerned for their individual patients and not concerned enough about social justice and the larger needs of society.

(4) Private doctors will be forced to follow bureaucratic protocols as to what care is "appropriate" & "cost-effective"; by 2014, those who are not "meaningful users" of the new system will face financial penalties.

(5) In the name of "comparative effectiveness" the new system will impose rationing of care based upon age.  As 5 percent of consumers consume 50 percent health care expenditures, targeting them is inevitable.

(6) At least half of increases in health care expenditures reflect better -quality treatments--and get better results for the patient.

(7) Of the 47 million uninsured, 14M are eligible for government-supplied care but fail to sign up; 10M have households incomes above $75,000; only the remaining 23.4M need new assistance.  Debit card technology can be applied to minimize fraud, as is now done with food stamps.  Sliding scale assistance based upon income within this target group would cost about $20-$25B annually.

(8)  Rising Medicare costs are driven not by health care prices, but by aging Boomer demographics.

Read Betsy's superb 11-pager in full to get all the rich detail.

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Gorge Will, with his customary concision, said on "ABC News This Week" that President Obama, who has aid he would select a single-payer system were he starting from scratch, makes four flawed arguments to justify a public plan in some form: (1) a public option is needed to improve honesty in plans; (2) a public option will play by the same rules; (3) more consumer choice is needed--despite the existence of 1,300 private entities today; (4)people aren't smart enough to make complex choices--yet they can choose computers.  Added Will, "he Left knows that what is wants is a slippery slope towards a single payer."

A recent NY Times front-pager reports that Team Obama plans a big push on health care.  Tom Daschle, originally slated to be Health & Human Services Secretary until tax games sank his nomination, wrote a book on health care setting forth his plan for a public system.  As policy maven Ronald Bailey notes, Daschle's plan would deny coverage for treatments bureaucrats deem not cost-effective, or those it deems simply ineffective.  A doctor asks probing questions, based upon chilling quotations from Daschle's recent book on health care policy.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius advances Team 44's most clever rationale for the ObamaCare plan: to create a public alternative to private company monopolies she alleges exist in in certain areas.  Michael Gerson assesses ObamaCare in a WP column.  A WSJ editorial sees ObamaCare based on cost illusions.  David Frum looks at Canada's ObamaCare.  An NRO piece looks at RomneyCare in Massachusetts for lessons.  NRO's Mona Charen sees "the whole ball game" in health care.  The WSJ published a brief doctor's lament re ObamaCare impairing patient care.

Hudson Institute scholar Diana Furchtgott-Roth notes major issues & choices in health care.  Notable is DF-R's focusing on Democrats being willing to do now under President Obama what Candidate Obama assailed: eliminating the tax deduction for employer-paid health insurance premiums.  DF-R sees two benefits from such a change (if not canceled out by other Team 44 policies): (1) it fosters growth of private plans; (2) it fosters labor mobility.  Safeway is cutting health care costs via market solutions.

A recent NRO issue featured major articles on health care that, being away, I missed.  Here is the NRO sub-page for the May 25 issue, which has links to five articles for digital subscriber login; I believe you can join without charge.  The articles are those by Ponnuru, Goodman, Hertzlinger, Cannon & Capretta.

The New York Times reports that the American Medical Association opposes Team Obama's public insurance proposal.  Karl Rove offers 5 arguments the GOP must make against ObamaCare.  Policy ace Peter Ferrara has read the White House's June 2 document, "The Economic Case for Health Care Reform" (56 pages) and calls it "murder by bureaucracy": it expressly contemplates migration to a single-payer public system.

Politics maven Jay Cost analyses health care politics in several essays: Part I;  David Broder sees "the rock" in the politics of health care reform.  A Forbes article sees "no more Kumbaya" in health care politics, offering rich detail of inside baseball interplay.  Michael Barone sees "qualms & questions" about ObamaCare.  Kim Strassel sees Team Obama facing a "health tax taboo" created by their own campaign 2008 theme.  Time Magazine's Karen Tumulty sees Team Obama "papering over" health care details in its push.  Yuval Levin & Bill Kristol argue for defeating ObamaCare, as it is far from assured to pass.  The Washington Post reports that the public feels "growing unease" about the prospect of trillion-dollar deficits for year, which can undermine support for health care reform on the grans scale sought by Team obama.

LFTC - Index 6/15/09

3 posts: (1) WMD Watch: Iran "Votes"; North Korea Emotes--Us v. Them; (2) Guantanamo: The Triumph of '60s Radicalism--9/11, 3/11 & N/11; (3) Palin Tells Matt About Dave--The Home Front.

LFTC: WMD Watch: Iran "Votes"; North Korea Emotes

Iran's June 12 election provided a declared landslide--roughly 2 to 1--for Iran's Islamist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad--who Sunday declared his country "the most stable in the world"--over his challenger, Hossein Mousavi, a former member of Iran's government.  When CNN's Christine Amanpour asked Ahmadinejad about why Mousavi was jailed after, he reply was that the loser had been arrested for violations of "traffic laws."

Clinton-era Defense Secretary William Cohen said on Fox that the foreign policy implications are minimal, because Iran's Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, makes foreign policy.  The election results were dubious, in that the margin of victory was near-identical across a wide range of local areas, a statistical improbability; NY Democratic Congressman Elliot Engel, a sharp foreign policy player, called the election result no doubt a fraud. 

In the event, Iran's 86-member Assembly of Parties, a body composed of mullahs not looking to put the regime out of business, vets and approves all candidates.

A New York Times front-pager reports that the election results dashed hopes for real change.  A more optimistic sign, reports the Times of London, is increased insistence of women in Iran that their lives be freed from hard-line Islamic straitjackets.  The Globe and Mail sounds a similar theme on women pressing for change.  NY Times author-pundit Thomas Friedman sees "winds of change" across the Mideast--a wave of moderate democratic impetus coming from the aftermath of Iraq, Lebanon's Cedar Revolution, diffusion of Internet technology (cell phones, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) and the soft-power salesmanship of of President Obama,

North Korea reacted to last week's adoption of more UN sanctions by announcing that it will enrich uranium and weaponize its plutonium stocks.  Sunday the North threatened nuclear war on the Korean Peninsula.  It regards any patrol of waters per the Proliferation Security Initiative as acts of "aggression" against the North.  Its sentencing last week of two American journalists on bogus spying charges further ups the ante, giving the North a bargaining chip to use against America.

Bottom Line.  Had Iran's President lost, added momentum for and optimism about engagement as a way to halt Iran's nuclear program would have been stimulated.  It is harder to hold--but, alas, not impossible--illusions about the determination of Iran's regime to go nuclear and use negotiations as a diplomatic fly- trap.

LFTC - Guantanamo: The Triumph of '60s Radicalism

Begin with a slight geographic error: 4 of 17 Uighurs (Chinese Muslims) detained at Gitmo have been sent not to Palau but the the island paradise of Bermuda, where they are under desultory monitoring at best.  Noteworthy is that they told Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge that they were treated better at Gitmo than they were treated while living in China.  Meanwhile the Times of London reported that the British government vented "ill-disguised fury" that the transfer was accomplished without the Brits being notified about it--Bermuda remains a British territorial possession.

I do not normally look to Bill Maher of "Politically Incorrect" for material, but Stephanopoulos played one hilarious clip of him, riffing on the Bermuda transfer.  Maher noted that the Uighurs in Bermuda were each given $100,000!  (I presume Maher is not making this one up.)  He than added that after learning of this news the entire population of Detroit declared itself members of al-Qaeda!

As Team Obama abandons its plans to settle any released Gitmo detainees in the US of A, having been beached on the rocky shores of domestic political reality (Congress), Arthur Herman's 17-page jewel in Commentary is especially timely.  Herman explains how 1960s radicals plotted to sabotage detention policy even before Guantanamo was opened, and succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, aided by a dishonest political party's political moves and a fawning media.  The organization that started the war against Bush 43 detention policies began fighting before Gitmo was opened; it was founded by a top-drawer radical leftist lawyer named William Kunstler, whose philosophy was best summed up in his famous quote: "I don't criticize socialist countries.  Soviet Russia has no better friend during the Cold War.  Now he has triumphed from the grave, grievously wounding America and her struggle against Islamist terror.  A depressing read, but a must-read.

Recently a career intelligence professional named Philip Mudd, former deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center and Obama's nominee to head intelligence at the Department of Homeland Security, withdrew his name from consideration.  As Jed Babbin noted in a column recapping the waterboarding roller-coaster of Team Obama's--and Nancy Pelosi's--first four months--Mudd was scared off by slings & arrows aimed at intel officials who conducted interrogations during the Bush years:

Now, the political war over waterboarding has taken its first casualty. Phillip Mudd -- nominated by President Obama to be Undersecretary for Intelligence and Analysis in the Department of Homeland Security -- withdrew after it became clear that his confirmation would be focused on his knowledge of and involvement in the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” while he was deputy director of the CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis during the Bush administration.

Mudd’s fate sends a clear message to everyone in the government -- especially the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community -- that whoever was involved in the terrorist interrogations and knew of or participated in waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques has no future.  Your careers are over. There will be no promotions, nothing but second-guessing and vilification in congressional hearings.

Hoekstra told me, “If thus guy was withdrawn because of his involvement in enhanced interrogation techniques, it’s outrageous.”

Pelosi and the anti-waterboarding warriors are fighting against our intelligence community.  In another episode last week, Pelosi illustrated her dedication to what she said in January 2006 would be the “most honest and open” congress in history.  “Open” means giving terrorists information they can use.

Mudd will, to be sure, not be the only casualty of the Obama team's assault on Bush actions, merely the first.

Bottom Line.  Radical lawyers practiced--with the aid of complaisant, sympathetic mass media worldwide--"lawfare" in its purest form.  America's legal system has now been turned into a weapon wielded against America's ability to defend itself effectively.

LFTC - Palin Tells Matt About Dave

NBC News Today host Matt Lauer interviewed Sarah Palin Friday (7:01) in which after one minute discussing a massive natural gas project Gov. Palin is seeing through to fruition in her state (with Canada), ML spends 6 minutes discussing Letterman's boorish jokes about her family.  This NBC mini-piece adds one crack I had missed, not mentioned by ML: that disgraced NY ex-Gov. Eliot Spitzer was ISO Palin's daughter during their NYC visit.  Lauer agreed Letterman's jokes were off-key, ut tried to get Palin to accept Letterman's excuse that he thought Palin's 18-year old daughter Bristol was with her at the ball game, and would never had said anything nasty about Palin's 14-year old daughter Willow, who was in fact the one at the game with Mom.  Palin would have none of it, pointing out that it took 48 hours for Dave to come up with that one.  She also elevated her criticism to call for Letterman to apologize to young women generally, attributing low self-esteem problems among young women today in part to the trashy culture Dave represents.  Good point.  Watch this excellent video.  To Lauer's credit, BTW, he did not try to trip Palin up, and gave her every chance to make her points.

For his part, Letterman, true to form, on Thursday told his viewers that Palin called to invite him to go hunting with her.

Bottom Line.  Palin could not avoid answering--loudly & publicly--a slanderous & salacious sneer at her teenage daughters.  Vulnerable young egos cannot withstand alone a public whipping from a huge celebrity.  Palin would no doubt prefer to discuss her gubernatorial record, but her opponents would rather shoot dirt-darts at hear & her children.