For example, we have been told that President Obama was briefed at 5 pm about the attack on Benghazi, he observed some of the attack in the White House situation room, he then told the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense to “take care of it” or something like that, and then he went to bed and wasn’t involved at all in any subsequent activity. There doesn’t seem to be any dispute–that is what happened.

So we must ask ourselves, What would cause a President to abdicate his authority to subordinates at a time when our country’s sovereign soil (a consulate, we’ve been told), is under attack, (especially a President who was so visibly involved in the situation room during the Osama bin Laden capture and killing, all the way to the end)?

We must ask, Why was the Ambassador in that situation to begin with?

We must ask, Why wasn’t an (official) attempt made to thwart the attacks?

We must ask, Why was an obviously false story about an offensive video put forth as a prime cause for the attack?

We must ask, Why have the survivors of the attack been essentially hidden away from Congressional investigators?

We must ask, Why do senior government officials believe they need both legal counsel and Congressional protection to tell their stories to the House committee investigating the attack?

Now that more information is coming to light, we must ask Why are only Republicans asking questions about the facts of what happened, and why are Democrats doing everything they can to prevent those questions from being answered and to marginalize the answers that emerge?

And no matter what eventually comes out, we must ask, Why did the MSM decide that it was’t important to find out the answers to any of these questions before the national elections in November, 2012?

After all the questions like that are asked, it’s up to us, ourselves, to answer them.

Those were examples, so I’ll give one example of a possible answer we can figure out for ourselves. In answer to the first question, Why would a President delegate his authority to his underlings (he is stuck with the responsibility, at least President Truman would have been)?  My belief is that he wanted to be able to distance himself from whatever developed. He never seems to want his name on the line until the results are in. If it turned out well, he could claim to be instrumental in that success. If not, as was the case, it wasn’t his fault.  He wasn’t even there. “He didn’t build it.”

You can figure out your own answers.  Try it.

In a news conference this morning, President Obama was asked a question about the Affordable Health Care Act by reporter Chuck Todd: “Why does Senator [Max] Baucus… believe that this is going to be [a train wreck], and why do you believe he’s wrong?”  The President’s answer is enlightening.

“…A huge chunk of it’s already been implemented. And for the 85 to 90 percent of Americans who already have health insurance, they’re already experiencing most of the benefits of the Affordable Care Act even if they don’t know it. Their insurance is more secure, insurance companies can’t drop them, uh, for bad reasons, their kids are able to stay on their health insurance until they’re 26 years old, ahh, they’re getting free preventive care. …this thing’s already happened, and their only impact is that their insurance is stronger, better, more secure than it was before. Full stop. That’s it. Now, they don’t have to worry about anything else.”

That’s all?  He forgot these “benefits”:

• Many workers are in danger of losing their existing insurance as it becomes too expensive for their employers to carry.
• Premium costs for the self-insured are already much higher
• The government is the ‘decider’ about what is a ‘bad reason’ for termination or a good enough one
• We get to pay extra for those 25-year-old ‘children’
• The ‘free’ preventive care comes with strings, and surely somebody is paying for it
• A real unmentioned impact is that the cost of all health insurance is already skyrocketing
• People are being forced to carry insurance they don’t want, or with more coverage than they want
• Payments to health care providers are being drastically cut to help offset the higher cost of administration of the new bureaucracy
• Taxes will go up to pay for the rest of the new bureaucracy and increased use of medical facilities
• One result: Doctors are already leaving their practices (I received a letter from mine today informing me she is retiring) which will mean a scarcity of care, whether there is ‘coverage’ or not
• Taxes will have to go up to pay premiums for all the newly covered indigent patients
• The 85 to 90 percent figure is made up out of whole cloth; there is no basis for it in reality
• Insurance premium costs are forecast to rise in future years to an unsustainable figure; the eventual result will be lower quality care, from less-qualified providers, less innovation in treatments, equipment, and medicine, and long waiting periods for much care
• The Administration is already talking about withholding certain treatments for patients beyond certain cutoff ages
• The AHCA is so onerous that businesses by the hundreds, perhaps thousands, are asking for exemptions to be excluded from it
• Even unions, Obama supporters, who wanted it before it passed are calling it a disaster in the making, as does Senator Baucus–”a train wreck.” They have the resources to study, understand, and reject it
• Workers in some industries are having their hours cut back to keep businesses under the 50 full-time employee threshold
• Perhaps worst of all, it does nothing it was promised to do–it doesn’t reduce or hold down costs, it will not end up with more people able to receive care in the end, and the quality of the care they do receive will be compromised

They might be worrying about those issues. They’re already experiencing that “benefit,” too.

Does the President not know these facts, or does he simply think that we don’t know them? And why does it have to be reported in a blog, rather than in the MSM?

Senator Flake, this is really for your benefit, so I address my comments to you.

First paragraph:

“What I never expected was that Senator Rubio and I would be working on immigration-reform legislation with liberals like Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Dick Durbin (D., Ill.).”

Neither did we, Senator, neither did we. It’s not what we elected you to do.

Second:

“While conservatives are justified in their skepticism of any legislation that Senators Schumer and Durbin sign off on, I hope we don’t let their association with the bill that is now before the Senate overshadow the conservative elements that Republicans have included.”

Gee, do you think so? Do you realize you just said our skepticism is justified? That may be the most completely honest statement in the column. Maybe you should be a little more skeptical. And it doesn’t really matter that there may be some “conservative elements” in the bill, because it is loaded with anti-conservative elements.

“It requires the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to develop a “Comprehensive Southern Border Security Strategy” and appropriates $3 billion to implement the plan…. DHS is also required to develop the “Southern Border Fencing Strategy,” with $1.5 billion…. if they do not achieve a 90 percent effectiveness rate within five years (meaning that 9 of every 10 illegal border crossers is apprehended), another $2 billion will be spent to implement recommendations from a commission of border stakeholders, who, for the first time, will have meaningful authority to increase border security.”

So, now we know it requires that a lot of money be spent ($4.5B), and if it doesn’t work at “a 90 percent effectiveness rate within five years,” even more will be spent ($2B) to ask somebody called “border stakeholders” what they think should be done. Here’s a suggestion.  Why don’t you ask them first, and save five years? And shouldn’t the DHS already have a comprehensive strategy to protect our southern border? Isn’t that already the law? Isn’t that part of their job?

And just how do we determine that we are catching 9 out of 10 illegal border crossers? Do they check out of Mexico as they leave, so that we have a count of the total number and can thereby tell when we’ve caught 90% of them? Seems to me that otherwise, by definition, if we don’t catch them, we don’t know how many we didn’t catch, which would mean we can’t calculate the percentage caught. (I have a degree in physics, so I know how math and percentages work. You need both a numerator and a denominator.)

Or do we just use the same people who tell us that the census is x% undercounted in urban Hispanics and y% undercounted in rural Chechnyans, and therefore another Democrat Congressman was cheated out of his seat? Is that the “border security” you have so sincerely promised we would have before there is “no” amnesty?  And I thought Barack Obama was the expert on smoke and mirrors.

Whew.  Almost halfway through. Let’s continue.

“This bill ensures that no illegal immigrant will be given amnesty or rewarded for illegal behavior. In fact, no illegal immigrant will be “given” anything.

Before any illegal immigrant can adjust to a non-citizenship provisional status, DHS must have submitted the border-security and border-fencing strategies.”

Did you actually write that?  After the strategies have been submitted, then the change in status (called Registered Provisional Immigrant, or RPI) can occur?  Not after the border is secure, but only after DHS has submitted a “strategy,” which probably won’t even work? And they are definitely “given” the right to stay here legally, which is exactly what they crossed the border illegally to get in the first place (did I get that right, Associated Press?). Can it be any clearer that this is a complete renunciation of your promise of Border Security First, then legalization? (These issues have been covered in more detail by Daniel Horowitz here and here and here.)

“Only then will these immigrants be able to legally work in the country — but they will not be eligible for government assistance (unemployment, welfare, Obamacare, etc.).”

Just one sentence here to point out that this prohibition will last just long enough for the first RPI status immigrant’s ACLU lawyer to get his briefs to the right federal courthouse, where a sympathetic judge will declare that it mandates “unequal treatment under the law” and is therefore a no-no to be ignored. To continue–

“Moreover, to be eligible for this non-citizenship provisional status, illegal immigrants must pay a $500 fine, pass a background check, and pay fees.”

As almost anybody might say, Big Whoop. In fact, total fines under the bill are only $2000. Considering that some of the RPI’s will have been here perhaps twenty years, that isn’t much. And about the background check–we are told that we don’t have the resources to deport any of these people, yet we do have the resources to carry out background checks on all of them? Are they going to work for the FBI? Give me a break! This is unworkable on its face, especially given that there will be millions more streaming over the border with false documents to “prove” they were already here in 2011.

Furthermore, we are told (when it’s convenient) that “half of the illegally overstaying foreigners came in on student visas.” Will they get to apply for RPI status, too? Why? What do you plan to do with those of any stripe who don’t apply for RPI status at all?

“Only after ten years can these provisional-status immigrants apply for a green card (which is still short of U.S. citizenship). In order to earn a green card, they will have to pay all back taxes, maintain employment in the U.S., learn English and civics, and wait until everyone who applied for a green card before them has been processed. It will likely be close to 13 years before current illegal immigrants begin to become eligible for citizenship.”

It sounds draconian, until you realize that all these poor, unfortunate RPI’s will have spent those years waiting and working here in the US of A, which, I repeat, is exactly what they crossed the border illegally to do in the first place. And they get to do it legally, neither of which the prospective immigrants who followed the law could do, because they are still where they started, not here.

“Conservatives worried that President Obama or Secretary Napolitano will be able to expedite the legalization sections of the bill while dragging their feet on border security should consider that the border-security measures come first, while the status-adjustment portions of the bill will take many years. It’s also worth noting that it’s likely that this process will occur under both Democratic and Republican administrations.”

But we have just shown that the only border security measures the bill demands before legalization are strategies, not real security-creating actions. And there is absolutely nothing that will make a President Obama enforce the parts of the law he doesn’t like (he isn’t enforcing those parts now), nor is there anything that would keep a future Democrat President and Congress from changing the law, either.  Of course that is true of any law, but if the physical border security infrastructure is already installed before amnesty, it will be harder for them to say, “We just don’t have the resources to secure the borders now, but we can do the status adjustments,” because the physical barriers will already be in place. Unfortunately, technological fences can be dismantled with an order or a flip of a switch.

“I think we can all agree that the status quo is unacceptable, and I’m convinced that this legislation moves us in a positive direction.”

Again, Senator, no. The only thing wrong with the status quo is that the Democrats beat you like a drum with it, because like a drum, you are flat on your backs. That, and the fact that the border is too sieve-like to protect us from any serious foreign threat carrying a small nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon. And it doesn’t keep out drug cartels or illegally-crossing foreigners, either. So fix that part, then come back to ask what you should do about “status adjustments.” That’s why those of us who are serious about solving the problem, not placating a pressure group, have insisted from the first that we shouldn’t even talk about anything else until the border is truly secure. This bill is NOT an improvement.

ps. I’m insulted that you think we are stupid enough to think this is good law. Today, your credibility level stands at zero. IF you and Senator Rubio were to renounce this bill today and remove your names from it, admitting you were turned every which way but loose by the other six Senators in your gang, and pledge to fight its passage, you MIGHT have a SLIM chance to redeem yourselves. Forget about the top of the ticket, but you MIGHT get re-elected to the Senate. If the bill passes, no chance at all. That may turn out to be wrong, but it’s honest advice.

Cross-posted at Terriers Of The Right.

Marriage Equality?

“Marriage Equality” is a recently-coined euphemism for “gay marriage,” which is itself a euphemism as well. Our tender psyches apparently don’t respond well to euphemisms that get too close to saying what they mean, especially in advocacy advertising. Still, it’s a great phrase that conveys exactly what its proponents want to convey–that everybody has a right to marry the spouse of his or her choice, gay or straight: marriage equality! The advertisements are superbly crafted.

I won’t go into the arguments that support that position; you’ve heard them all before. But all those arguments apply equally well to numbers greater than two. And if you believe that there is a Constitutionally protected “right” to marry whomever you choose, you must also agree that the same right applies to marriages between more than two people. Logically, the connection is undeniable. If the right exists, to restrict it to two people we would have to find specific language in the Constitution that does so, and there is no such language.

So is it a right?

An argument can be made that marriage is NOT a right because it imposes a burden on someone else to fulfill it, not just one time but on a continuing basis; that is, the other partner has to be willing to marry also. If we had a right to marry, we could just pick out a spouse and say, “Tag, you’re it,” and it certainly wouldn’t require approval from a government to do so. A right either exists or it doesn’t; it can’t depend on the continuing agreement and support of another person to exist, as does a “right to marry.” I believe that argument is a compelling one, but a court might disagree.

I believe what we really have is a right to remain single, and a process exists to enter into marriage if we can find a qualifying and willing spouse. That the government has butted into the process is just a complication, but it’s a big one, because it has granted many special privileges, and some penalties, to people who are married.

What does “marriage” mean?

Or perhaps, why does marriage mean what it means, and who gets to change the definition? Or more specifically, who gets to decide who qualifies as a spouse? Is it a court? A statewide initiative? A legislature? A church?

It’s hard to argue that anybody but a government gets to define what a legal marriage is, and that includes setting rules as to what minimally constitutes a qualified spouse. Setting a minimum age for marital consent is one example that varies among states.

But the social definition of marriage is defined primarily by societal norms and common usage. Its history is thousands of years old, so naturally there is resistance to change, even resistance to changing a legal definition. And there isn’t a requirement that it have the same definition as the legal one.

Conclusion?

If marriage is determined by the Supreme Court to be a “right” rather than a “rite,” many unwanted consequences will logically follow. Courts will have more and more decisions they won’t want to make, and it will never be resolved. But if it bypasses that trap and allows the decision to remain in state hands (overturning the 9th Circuit and lower federal courts at the same time), without creating a right to marry, it eliminates it as a federal judicial problem. Still a federal legislative and executive problem, perhaps, but it will be clear that there is no Constitutional requirement to federally define or even deal with marriage at all.

Naturally, this won’t satisfy many people. The demand for “Marriage Equality” isn’t a logical one, it’s a legal and emotional one. But civil unions could and should be readily available in all states, legal constructs that should confer the same legal rights on the participants that marriages do, for more reasons than those put forth by gay-marriage proponents. What is the demand that they be called “marriages” about, anyway? An emotional, subjective, and extra-Constitutional plea for “fairness.” Without a real civil right to marry, we are left with only a demand that society change its opinion, and that can’t be decreed by a court.

What a court decision affirming California’s Proposition 8 will do is allow the voice of the people to count, and for other voices to be heard either directly or through their representatives, and it will mean the final decision is a popular one rather  than one decreed by a court of nine judges.  If “marriage” is not a “right,” there will be far fewer reasons for federal courts to intervene in state business.  Better for the Court, and better for the unruly civil union called The United States of America.

A more complete presentation of this argument is cross-posted at Terriers of the Right.

Maybe because we’ll miss them the most.

Because the President has forgotten he’s already been elected and he’s been campaigning across the country to defeat his own idea, there are too many sources to quote regarding the dire consequences President Obama sees if the sequester, or Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA), isn’t averted. So without individual attribution here are some of the services we will lose.

Local first responders–fire, police, EMS.

Teachers.

Military “readiness” and “preparedness.”

Airport security and TSA.

Homeland Security. Border Patrol.

FEMA, FDA, NASA.

(Wait a minute, wasn’t NASA killed last year?  Here’s one that’s for sure going to save money: the National Drug Intelligence Center, still slated for a $2 million cut to a $20 million dollar budget. But it was closed on 6/15/2012. Why does it need a budget?)

FBI, NRC, the federal prison system, SEC.

Sounds awful, until we notice that these “cuts” come out of a budget that’s already scheduled to increase more than the cuts amount to. And that Republicans have offered to give the President emergency authority to allocate these cuts in ways that are “least harmful.”

The basic insincerity of the President is clear if you just cast a skeptical eye on these threats. The threats always target services that the federal government has at least some legitimate reason to be involved in, never mentioning pork barrel programs whose elimination would hardly be noticed by anybody who doesn’t lose a job as the result. And why should anybody elsewhere lose a job, at least because of the sequester? There will still be more money available than there was last year. At worst, we’re talking about simply holding the line against expansion of government.

This is the most transparent administration, ever, at least in this case. It’s transparently obvious that the President’s aim is to scare the gullible. You don’t scare them by threatening to cut off funding to a study of the hare-brained snail darter, you scare them by saying they won’t have police or fire service.

This has been standard operating procedure for years. The lists at city and state level usually include no more garbage pickups, no road repairs (and maybe the President mentioned those services, too). I wouldn’t even be surprised to see them threaten to cut out Saturday mail delivery.

Cross-posted at Terriers of the Right.

Setting the stage

Dr. Benjamin Carson ruffled some feathers with his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast a couple of weeks ago. You can’t blame the Left for being ruffled–the speech was a High Right Fastball under the chin. They didn’t like anything he said, and they didn’t like the way he said it. They didn’t like it that President Obama had to sit through it, and they really didn’t like the fact that it was delivered by a black man who had studied and worked and achieved his way up from the worst kind of poverty to become the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Md.

Some on the Right ignored both the message and the messenger and concentrated on the event, choosing to be offended by the fact that Dr. Carson delivered a ‘political’ message at the prayer breakfast. To mention just one example, Cal Thomas, writing in syndication and online, sniffed that Dr. Carson’s criticisms of the President’s policies had been “inappropriate for the occasion.”

“If Carson wanted to voice his opinion about the president’s policies, he could have done so backstage. Even better, he might have asked for a private meeting with the man.”

Inspiration

The inspiring idea I want to point out has nothing to do with the content of Carson’s remarks, accomplishments, or his life, inspiring as they were and are. His inspiration was to do just what Thomas and the entire Left say he shouldn’t have done–use an ‘inappropriate’ venue to deliver a conservative message.

I’ve beaten this dead horse into glue before: If nobody hears our message, we might as well not have one. We must make our statements in ways and places that can’t be ignored or marginalized. Had Dr. Carson followed Cal Thomas’ advice, nobody would have known about it. More important, nobody else would have heard his conservative ideas.

I may be wrong, but I’d bet that Dr. Carson has given the same speech to local groups before, yet nobody knows it. If you Google search for ‘dr benjamin carson,’ you get about 12 million hits. Of those, about 5.5 million are references to his speech at the breakfast. Draw your own conclusions, but I believe there are a lot of people who now know not only who he is, but what he said that morning and that there is more to the story than simply what the President and all his men tell us.

The end justifies the means

Most conservatives don’t like that phrase and we tend to oppose the idea, but it really depends on how distasteful the means are and how vital the end is. Dr. Carson balanced the two and delivered a speech that may have broken some rules but which was covered by most of the popular press, and the only spin they could generate was that it was “inappropriate for the occasion.”

I don’t suggest that Dr. Carson had any of these strategies in mind. There’s no reason to believe he did anything other than deliver a speech that he thought was completely apropos, and he says so.

Whether he intended to make two kinds of statements that morning or not, he gave us an example that should be inspiring to Republicans, conservative or not. Get your message ready and when you deliver it, make it count by forcing the the MSM to both report it and report it accurately. The truth is always appropriate, but if it’s spoken in a manner, time, and place that the MSM is forced to report it, it’s even better.

Needed next: Ways to make this happen every week.

For another take on the Cal Thomas column, check out Chicks On The Right.

A good President would seize this opportunity to shrink the deficit a little bit by cutting spending in areas that he normally wouldn’t get a chance to touch, and to build some bridges to the other party. A poor one will use it as a campaign talking point.

You have probably heard him say that Republicans don’t care about all the problems the sequester will bring on, they just don’t want taxes raised on their rich friends–even though they already allowed taxes to go up on those friends in January, but never mind about that. The fact is, some of us do think they should let it happen, but not for that reason.

First, I don’t see sequestration as causing a big problem for the country, although depending on how President Obama decides to implement it there can be significant hardships for certain groups of people. But that’s already been happening for four years. This will mostly just be a different group of people, but the relatively small size of the sequester should allow a good administrator to work around it with minimal disruption of operations, or even none, if he wants to.

Second, Sequestration has been called using a meat ax to do what should be done with a scalpel. Here’s what’s wrong with that characterization: Our overspending problem needs an ax taken to it, whether meat or lumberjack’s. Scalpels have been tried in the past, as have butcher and even Bowie knives, but it never works because opposing sides can never agree upon enough of what to pare. In the end, the hearings to decide what to cut cost more than what is saved IF anything ends up being cut at all.

Third, the attractive thing about sequestration is that the decisions have already been made. EVERYTHING will be cut. Well, almost half of everything, anyway. But sacred cows will bleed, even if it will only be flesh wounds, and even though they won’t be deep enough to do any real fiscal good in the end. The good will come from the post-mortem that will follow the fact. The world will not end, and if the Republicans can hold their nerve they will have won a real victory from which to launch the next assault on overspending.

A. B. Stoddard of The Hill suggested Wednesday on Fox Special Report that Republicans should take “a third bite of the apple” with the Democrats and compromise on sequestration, going along with the President and cutting spending down the road. I guess the first bite would have been the negotiations to raise the debt ceiling the last time with a promise of a ‘grand bargain’ that was scuttled by President Obama at the last moment in favor of his sequester plan, and the second was the tax rate increase passed last month in return for spending cuts (which are unspecified and will not happen). Not being a conservative, A. B. believes that this time the football will NOT be pulled away, and spending cuts will pass later.

No. This is a chance to actually do something rather than merely talk about what we intend to do. This situation is analogous to our illegal immigration situation. This is why conservatives demand that the border be secured first before we even talk about next steps. If decisions are made that satisfy liberal demands first, they will never support border security.

Democrats always insist that we do what they want first, then at some point in the future they’ll reward us with what we want. Only it never happens. Although Republicans seem never to learn, if they hold firm here, there may be some hope left. They need to earn respect by standing by their own principles, allowing sequestration, and facing the consequences of “reduced” spending like responsible legislators.

Cross-posted at Terriers of the Right.

It’s the Messaging, Stupid. It’s the Stupid Messaging.

More than the messengers? I mostly agree.

[D]umb, ill-prepared and gaffe-tastic candidates will always be a part of American politics. You don’t win by making a strategy that consists of preventing people you think are too dumb en masse from picking a candidate. You win by effectively selling your ideas.

Yes. To every pundit who has appeared on TV to say we can’t continue to nominate candidates who say dumb things, I say that Richard Mourdock and Todd Akin were both seasoned politicians who had been elected to office many times previously. Did anybody out there know in advance they’d each make one public statement that bordered on the insane, at least AS SPUN BY THE MSM? They were indeed dumb statements to make, but were they predictable? More predictable was our Republican response, to abandon them to the open sea, rather than to defend them as merely victims of their own tongues who really meant, [insert whatever NEEDED to be said, even if it had to be precisely the opposite of what actually WAS said.  Democrats do this all the time.] But the fact that they did say them illustrates a different problem with the GOP–they had no help in learning how to handle the press and its gotcha questions.

We, as the low-tax & personal responsibility party cannot waltz into a low income housing area, look around, shake our heads and say “Hey, when are you guys going to stop being idiots and voting for people that think you’re stupid — also, you don’t pay enough taxes.”

Whether or not we view that as what happened, the people we’re talking to certainly did.

Actually, that isn’t even close to what was said. But it’s metaphorically what was reported and repeated in the media WITHOUT REFUTATION. I know it’s lame to say, “But he didn’t say THAT,” but it’s even lamer to say “We agree with you and we’re denouncing the scoundrel.” There ARE other things to say and do.

Of course, it’s not only messaging. There’s the issue of policy perscritpions[sic] that run counter to our alleged shared beliefs. As Michelle Malkin pointed out, Rove played a major role in “disastrous Medicare prescription drug entitlement expansion that created an unfunded liability of $9.4 trillion over the next 75 years, No Child Left Behind federal education expansion, steel tariffs, ag subsidies, the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law.”

Right, again. Had Rove and W. not done some of those things, we might still have a 2-term Obama, and he might even have had more support. But we Republicans would have been spared the countless claims that we had added to the debt as much as all previous administrations combined, and we would have had some credibility as we tried to take on the mantle of the Small(er) Government, Fiscal Responsibility Party in 2012. Maybe a few more Tea Partiers would have voted for us instead of Ron Paul or Gomer Pyle on TVLand. We might have even gotten some Democrat votes.

As the headline says, “It’s the messaging, stupid. It’s the stupid messaging.”

…You have to do more than be right. You have to convince people you are right.

…Somehow we’re failing to convince people that keeping more of their paycheck and affording them less government interference in their lives is a good thing. “Don’t blame the messenger” just doesn’t apply here. The messenger is without a doubt the problem.

That’s the right track, but there is more to it.  There is also a problem with the listener. If he is predisposed to reject the messenger, the message, no matter who delivers it, will not have any effect, because it won’t be heard. The exception is if the speaker can capture the voter’s interest and hold on to it long enough to break down that barrier.

Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute makes a strong case that we have a huge cultural hurdle to overcome–Republicans are looked upon as selfish (and Democrats are considered to be generous, or selfless) by too many people, and they don’t want to listen to a “selfish” message from a “selfish” Republican, which is exactly what a message of self-reliance and independence sounds like if you only hear a little bit of it.

That’s a big reason why they “like” Obama better than they “like” us in the polls, even though they tend mostly to agree with our ideas rather than with Democrat ideas, when they hear them from a pollster.  And as Rush Limbaugh has been pointing out this week, the Democrat ideas simply don’t stick to Obama.

They’re predisposed to dismiss us and our ideas before they even hear us, so they don’t hear us.

Obviously, this won’t change in one election cycle, but it’s a key problem that needs to be considered as our great speakers deliver our not-really-selfish message to the people we need to convince to listen to us and then believe us. So I guess I agree in the end–it’s the stupid, no, undisciplined, unfocused and inadequate messaging and messages (not the principled message itself) that we have to modify to enable the ideas and solutions to be heard, no matter who the messenger is.

Perhaps you have been asking yourself that question. After all, we win the debate on all the big issues, as verified by polls as recently as today, with questions in the form of “Do you agree with President Obama on…?” The majority of respondents don’t agree with him on anything except defense in general, while they disagree with his specific policies, including those regarding defense.

The Flagstaff Tea Party was host last week to Yaron Brook, Executive Director and President of the Ayn Rand Institute. He spent over an hour answering the question, “Why are we losing?” not just the most recent election, but the war for public opinion for the last fifty years or so. The answer is intuitively obvious once revealed, but it doesn’t easily convert to a sound bite, so we don’t hear it in the popular media (nor would it be helpful if we did). And it involves cultural psychology.

Self-interest vs. selflessness

Our culture teaches us to revere those who give of themselves (the selfless ones), and to scorn those who make a lot of money (the self-interested ones), at least until they start to give it away. Although we suspend those prejudices when we go to work ourselves, we still hold them and apply them to public figures, including political candidates, so when one party convinces “us” that it’s the party that gives to the needy, and ours is the party that says we can’t afford to keep doing it that way, guess who wins. The subconscious prejudice frequently overwhelms logic, especially when we don’t point out that our principles will make it easier to help the truly needy than theirs will, that self-interest promotes the public good far more than altruism does.

I note the parallel question, “How can President Obama’s personal approval ratings be so high when his policies are all unpopular?” This wasn’t addressed by Brook, but it has the same answer. Why is President Obama looked upon as “likable,” while Mitt Romney has been called “unlikable,” to say the least? It isn’t all because of the advertising hatchet-job Obama’s campaign ran against Romney.

A brief comparison of the two men: Barack Obama has had a career in politics, preceded by a stint as a lecturer at the university level and a job as community organizer. He had no experience that relates to making hard decisions or even of doing the hard work of being President. He was never highly compensated until he was elected to political office. He was Constitutionally qualified to become President. He is a Democrat.

Mitt Romney is almost precisely the opposite. He has worked in profit-making concerns since he was young (excepting his Mormon mission time), even while starting his family and going to college. He ran his own company and was compensated well enough to be considered rich, to become Governor of Massachusetts, and to run for President. He was prepared by experience to be President. He is a Republican.

Each epitomizes his party as it is connoted in the public mind, and that is the key to Brook’s answer–we are losing because the Republican Party is perceived to be the party of self-interest, frequently morphed into selfishness. The Democrat Party is perceived as the party of selflessness.  Selfish Republican Romney loses to selfless Democrat Obama in the hearts of enough voters to make the difference.

To close out my presidential metaphor, we couldn’t have had two more stereotypical candidates running for office last time if we had tried, and our society is predisposed to prefer both the image and the facts of Obama over those of Romney, even though both the image and the facts are misleading. The attributes we liked in candidate Romney were much less highly regarded by the general population, and the baggage they carried with them hurt him.

What can we do about it?

Brook admitted it will take time to change a cultural norm, but a start would be for our side to start standing up publicly for our own principles. For those principles that would make it hard for a politician to explain during a race, let our non-politicians talk about them.

The left has been using this tactic against us for years; we should be following their example of success.

Both gun control and immigration reform are classic examples of shiny objects.  They are attractive.  They are important. And they don’t really require immediate attention at all. Both can and should be handled through normal channels and nothing will be lost, because nothing can really be achieved by addressing them in the mode of the Crisis of the Month.  It’s simply not possible to do anything effective about either issue in crisis mode; all we’ll get will be style, no substance, and real solutions if there are any are more likely to be worked out away from public view.

So, Republicans, what are they distracting us from?  A bloated government, no budget from the Senate (resulting in Continuing Resolutions that expand the deficit and balloon the National Debt), out-of-control spending,  serious unemployment, and the question of how to deal with the Debt Ceiling.  These are real problems that the government is Constitutionally charged with addressing (unemployment’s included because it is government policy that’s made that problem worse).

What to do?  Let the Democrats pontificate about the shiny objects.  Let THEM propose unpalatable “solutions” to non-critical “problems.”  Meanwhile, John Boehner has the right take now, if I understand him. Engage the Democrats on these shiny objects in “regular order.”  Committee hearings.  Deliberations.  In other words, think before you act.

Do the same for the big issue of federal spending, but use your airtime to talk about it and explain why WE have the right answers (smaller government and less spending) instead of tilting at the gun and immigration windmills.  If you simply HAVE to say something about immigration, just point out that border security has been promised (and paid for), and it hasn’t happened no matter what this week’s Big Lie is, and until security is achieved we have to keep working on it in regular order.  In fact, the Democrats have already agreed to it.

CBS Miami, 1/28/2013:

Rubio Pitching Bipartisan Comprehensive Immigration Reform

“A bipartisan group or [sic] Senators including Senator Marco Rubio are set to unveil a new comprehensive immigration reform package at a Monday afternoon press conference in Washington.

The sweeping overhaul of immigration laws would reportedly include a path to citizenship for the 11 million illegal immigrants in the country. The bipartisan deal also includes border security, non-citizen or “guest” workers and employer verification of immigration status….

According to the framework of the plan it will contain four basic legislative “pillars:” [starting with]

1. Create a tough but fair path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants currently living in the United States that is contingent upon securing our borders and tracking whether legal immigrants have left the country when required….”

Without going into how much of the entire agenda is strictly political, I’ll only point out that very little of it addresses what many of us agree is the problem: our porous border.

Although the first pillar depends upon “securing our borders,” none of the remainder do, and even the first one describes a “fair path to citizenship,” rather than a means to achieve legal residency. And now that the door has been opened to comprehensive immigration law reform, it’s clear to me that the idea of “security first, legislation reform to follow,” has been pretty much abandoned by our leadership, including Marco Rubio, for whom I otherwise have tremendous respect. This is a direct result of President Obama’s re-election, and our failure to elect more conservatives to Congress.

I promised to be brief and direct, so I will. Whatever plan they come up with under the guise of “reform,” the result will be the same as every other plan we’ve tried in the past–and border security isn’t really on their list of necessities. If the border is left unsecured, the day will eventually come when conditions in Mexico will be so unattractive to its citizens that sneaking into the United States will again (if it has ever stopped) look like the least bad of their alternatives, and the tide of illegal immigration will resume. Ignore the nonsense being mouthed today by people like John McCain. Whatever bill is proposed, its primary beneficiaries will be politicians, not the American people.

Conduct a thought experiment.

Compare life today to that of 1000 or so years ago. In some ways, it isn’t so different. We Americans have managed to cede back to our King many of those guarantees of freedom that were fought for, hard and at great cost, by our ancestors.  The “Rule of Law in America” is rapidly being observed only when convenient for the “Ruling Class.” King Barack tries to rule by decree, and in some cases he is successful. His nobles, now called “Democrats,” do his bidding, and he does what’s necessary to keep them mollified and often happy. The opposition Republicans remain loyal, perhaps because they aren’t mistreated as badly as they might be if they came right out against the King, and perhaps because it’s been so long since they really had to fight against anything that they’ve forgotten how to do it.

Meanwhile, we peasants, aka “the country class,” are distracted by shiny objects offered to us by the Nobility of the Alphabet Press–CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, and ABC–with News Corporation presumed to be different, but not by much. They do so by parceling out titillating tidbits of trivia to give us “something” to get excited about, while still not giving us enough solid information to really understand the big picture. “Something” happened at Benghazi, but three months later we still aren’t sure what, although we know it’s bad or it’s innocuous, depending on the channel. Same for “Fast and Furious.” The same even for the Fiscal Cliff, Fiscal Crisis, whatever we want to call it.  Yes, it’s important, but there isn’t any substantive discussion about it–what it is, why it is, what it means for the future–anywhere in the news beyond Fox, partly because it really is complex and therefore requires a lot of detail to treat properly, but mostly because it’s so much easier to treat it as a shiny object, the issue of the year-end, and devote time to what he-said and she-said about it.

Same for mass murders committed with guns, while serial murders committed by repeat offenders are ignored, apparently because continuous murders committed one-at-a-time just aren’t as interesting to report as those where we can be shown dozens of grieving mourners for dozens of young and not-so-young victims, all gathered together in candlelight vigils attended by the pompous priests of the Ruling Class, who intone self-righteously about the sins of the killer (almost always already dead) and his obvious insanity, about the sins of society (almost always the ultimate villain) and how obsessed we are with our “gun culture,” and who promise fatuously to “do something about this tragedy to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”  The King tells us that we must put politics aside and get something done (restrictions on Second Amendment rights), even though politics is the method we rightly use to come to reasoned agreement when issues are contentious.  His words sound like code for “Just do it my way and nobody will get hurt.”  The press prattles on about the need for a conversation to come up with a solution to the threat of mass murder, but the only words they will abide by concern gun ownership restrictions and nothing else.  They don’t want a conversation, they want a monologue, delivered by them.

Then it happens again, and when suggestions are made that might actually have positive results, if they don’t include further restrictions on gun ownership and individual rights, those ideas are called “stupid,” “foolish,” and dozens of similar epithets, even when those same ideas had previously been promulgated by the King’s nobles in moments of lucidity. But I digress. See how easy it is to get sidetracked by the shiny objects?

The King likes to deal in facts. Well, here are the facts:

The King and his government have too much power, and that fact is prima facie truth. That truth is proven by the fact that so many otherwise powerful people who know better are willing to kowtow to the King, because they KNOW he can destroy their good life if he puts his mind to do so.  For example, why else would gun manufacturers donate money to Dianne Feinstein’s Senate campaign, or Ford Motor Company executives donate to the re-election of President Obama?  The downside of being on the wrong side terrifies them.  And they know he can also tilt the playing field to HELP them if he wants to.  That all testifies to a too-powerful government.

It’s proven by the willing acceptance of bad policy at all levels of government by people who are receiving what they think are benefits from that government, willing acceptance that will eventually result in either the enslavement or impoverishment, or both, of their offspring by their indebtedness to the government or others, or by the destruction of the value of their currency by inflation, or by their slide into ignorance as a result of a sub-par education, particularly in history, delivered by that government through an “education” bureaucracy that’s dedicated to serving itself and its work force rather than to actually educating our people.  Acceptance because it’s too big to fight.

Our public education system has become a self-perpetuating bureaucracy, completely ill-suited for its stated goal of public education, but perfectly suited for indoctrination of masses of children into ways of “right-thinking.” In fact, they are indirectly being taught magical thinking, that the government can fulfill all their needs with little help from themselves, and worse, that such an idea is good and desirable.

It’s proven by the fact that there is no reasonable way that the promises of this government can be met with the resources it has available. Too much of the wealth of the country is being consumed by the government itself. To hide that fact, we are constantly distracted by the shiny object of “the 1% who don’t pay their fair share.” In fact, nobody knows what a “fair share” is, but by golly it doesn’t apply to me, although it does to thee. These are symptoms of a government that’s not only too powerful, but just plain too BIG. It’s very bigness makes it unaffordable.

Less than half the population cannot support more than half the population in the style they would like to live, especially if those supporting the others are told they must do so with half their resources tied behind their backs and that the rest must eventually be given to the government.  It WAS possible at one time, but that was because the demands of the many were constrained by a palpable reality, and not hidden by a governmental veil across our eyes.

Especially the way the two halves are divided today.  Consider that in earlier, more prosperous years, less than half DID support more than half.  The supporting half was working fathers; less frequently it was working mothers.  An intact family made it possible for those fathers and mothers to support themselves, their spouses, and their children.  They also often provided partial support for their own parents, and sometimes they helped out extended family members and friends as well. There was a close relationship to those supported, and this enhanced the effectiveness of this unofficial “redistribution of wealth.”  The incentive for the giving ones was to be as generous as possible because they were helping loved ones; the incentive for those receiving was to ask for the least possible, because they were imposing on loved ones.

Today, wealth is being redistributed via an official, governmental bureaucracy.  To a much greater degree than before, both the father and the mother (when both are present, which is much less frequent nowadays) work to support themselves and their family, which tends to be smaller, and they’re still as generous as they can be.  But more and more of their income is being demanded by the government in taxes, reducing their ability to help people and causes they know, and the reason is given that their prosperity needs to be shared with others.  It was already being shared, but now it also is to be shared with strangers, chosen by the government to receive support from people they neither know nor care about.  The fewer are still supporting the more numerous, but they no longer know them personally.  Breadwinners are still supporting their own families and helping friends and neighbors as much as they can, but now they’re also essentially facing demands for support from strangers across town and across the country, and those demands come first, as tax bills.  Incentives have been turned on their heads.  Taxpayers have every incentive to pay as little in taxes as possible, but welfare recipients have every incentive to take as much from government as possible.  And as the votes of the takers seem to be more powerful than the votes of the providers, the situation is one of being behind the power curve.  The forces within the system aren’t in equilibrium, and they are pushing it in a worse direction rather than a better one.

Nothing can be done to fix this state of affairs. Nothing. At least, not until the majority of the voting public understands it, and that won’t happen until the working press decides to step up to its Constitutional responsibility to report, fully and accurately, on the reality of life in the United States. That may not mean ignoring the shiny objects, but it would certainly mean reporting that they ARE shiny objects, distractions of a sort, and not often the most important things going on today. And it would also mean they would be reporting WHY those shiny objects are being shown to us–what they are hiding behind them, and what their full import is.

Our Constitutional protections are already almost gone, insofar as protections FROM the government are concerned, and those are the primary reasons the Constitution was written in the first place. Much is made at times of the importance of the Magna Carta, and it was important, of course, although it’s nowhere near as important to our freedom as is the Constitution, but they share an important concept–the only way to control the power of a government is to place MORE power somewhere else. The Constitution places the power in a diverse group, the PEOPLE, with the expectation they’d be farsighted enough to keep the government at heel. That expectation seems lost, even though King Barack is displeased that the Constitution is one that consists primarily of “negative rights.” He rightly sees that the power of the government is restrained by restrictions the Constitution imposes. He also knows that he can ignore those restrictions until something stops him. That would normally have been the last election, but we apparently chose to re-elect him, leaving us with only the two “co-equal” branches of government to stop him, or failing that, the states.

Seen that way, the House has a duty to prevent as much Kingly mischief as it possibly can. The Supreme Court can’t be counted on to read and interpret the English language without bias.  The Senate is composed of vassals of the King, so the option of impeachment is not available. Beyond that, our House of Lords has given no indication it wants to do anything other than serve the King, rather than the people. If our House of Commons fails us, we have nowhere else to turn, and no one to blame but slightly over 50% of the voting population and those who chose to sit the last election out, and the so-called unbiased media for shirking its duty when called upon. That’s part of our Constitutional crisis, because the press is the only private institution expressly protected by the Constitution from government interference.

King Barack is a different kind of President.

Whatever one wants to call King Barack, he is NOT a Democrat and he’s certainly not a Republican. As Mark Belling noted the other day, President William J. Clinton may not have been a good man in some ways, but he did have one thing in common with the rest of us–his idea of a successful Presidency for himself was to leave a prosperous country behind when he exited the White House. He is proud that the budget was in surplus when he left office. He was happy to take full credit for entitlement changes made in conjunction with the Republican House, such as welfare reform.

Barack Obama seems oblivious to proven rules of economics that could be used to repair the country’s finances and put us back on the road to prosperity. While calling for cooperation and compromise to address national problems, he can’t bring himself to say “yes” to a Republican idea, even if it was first put forward by one of his Democrat colleagues. When he comes close to an agreement, he suddenly remembers additional demands that kill the impending deal. He’s done so time and again (apparently including on 12/31/12). Furthermore, everything he says is intended to advance his personal agenda. He gives no credit to Republicans for good intentions and personal behavior. If he can cut down a Republican, he figures that elevates Democrats, and in the world of public relations, he’s right.

It’s clear that he has no interest in avoiding the “fiscal cliff” if it means giving up ANY of his demands. Although he claims that his top priority is to make sure that middle-class Americans don’t receive a large tax hike because of it, his true top priority is obviously to make sure that at least the top two percent of American taxpayers DO receive one.  In fact, it’s clear from his ebullient demeanor in some appearances that things are progressing exactly as he wants them to. His return from vacation in Hawaii was 100% for show. He came back to speak, to pontificate, to posture, to preen. He didn’t come back with any plan to show to John Boehner and say, “See, John, we CAN solve this problem without adding $6 trillion more to the national debt in the next four years, and here is how we’ll do it.” A President who was interested in finding a solution would have been working on this well-known problem for months, laying out his own blueprint for success, and consulting with Congress. Instead, he’s done nothing and he came back purely for publicity reasons and to make sure nothing substantial was accomplished before year-end.

It’s also clear that HIS criteria for a successful Presidency does not include consideration of the prosperity or stability of the country, nor of its people. His primary goal is indeed, as he said, to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” Whether he means well in that goal is almost irrelevant. The ways in which he is transforming America are antithetical to the principles of a country thought to be “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” as they change it to a country controlled by the bureaucracy, paid for by the working people, and operated for the benefit of the governmental ruling class. In this goal, we should all be wishing he would fail.

This dichotomy of objectives explains as well just why he has been such a mystery to some of the chattering sub-class of workers called the press. If one doesn’t understand that he has a fundamentally different set of goals and criteria for success than any of his predecessors, one is of course confused by his actions. Accept that his goals are different, and they become easy to understand. Why they’re different isn’t particularly important, except that “why” also explains how he has advanced so quickly from community organizer to President without actually possessing or accruing any of the skills necessary to be a truly good President.

There you have the facts.

Call them opinions if you will, but there is evidence to support all of them. The above also contains the rudiments of a plan for the salvation of our Republic. First, to remain a credible alternative to the Democrats, the House Republicans have to figure out a way to remain true to our values without allowing King Barack to drag the country into fiscal insanity.  He’s an expert at presenting them with dilemmas.  ”Raise taxes or go over the ‘fiscal cliff,’ because I’m not going to agree to anything less.”  Both choices are bad, but they have to choose one.  When they do, they need to explain their choice, clearly and believably.

Second, Republicans and conservatives have to figure out a way to get their case to the public, a way that the public can understand and accept. We were right on all the issues during the last election, but the public wasn’t convinced, partly because we didn’t try to convince them, and partly because when we did try, they couldn’t hear us. Public announcements on the steps of the Capitol won’t cut it any more. They must figure out a way to get the so-called unbiased media to report it fairly, or at least completely. This seldom happens now. That message must also be consistent. No digressions; no personal stories; no opportunities for an innocent comment to be turned into a “war on women.”

One tactical adjustment worth considering would require a change of priorities and/or more money:  new, topical political advertising needs to be rolled out all the time, not just before elections.  The Republican Party should this very day be broadcasting public statements explaining just what the heck they’re doing about the “fiscal cliff,” and why.  They must start countering the Democrats’ misleading accusations that everything bad is the fault of Republicans while everything good comes from the Democrats.  They can’t count on cable news interviews or the free press to get the job done.

Third, nominate articulate, competent, committed, passionate conservatives to run for office. They can make the conservative case a lot better than any old-line politician can, and better than Mitt Romney did, simply because they know it in their hearts AND they know the importance of making their case to people who are open to understanding it. Whenever possible, they should explain not only their position, but WHY their position is the right one, a much more convincing way to make a convert.

Fourth, Republicans must figure out some way to counteract the union manpower juggernaut, particularly the SEIU. The playing field is NOT level, and they have to make it level.

Fifth, and, at a more fundamental level, conservatives must acquire control of more of the so-called unbiased media. A first step in that direction is to quit supporting the liberal media in any way. That means cancel your subscriptions to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, etc., and quit donating to liberal causes like PBS and NPR. Subscribe to conservative magazines and newspapers. For publications and outlets that fall in between, let them know you pay attention to what they say and expect them to report the news COMPLETELY–that will take care of the “fair and balanced” part without anybody actually having to decide what is “fair” or what is “balanced.”

A second step will be for the more affluent conservatives to become more involved in the media aspect of politics. Koch brothers–BUY MEDIA OUTLETS!  Mega-million dollar contributions aren’t the most effective use of your donations.  In doing so, make sure your new toy is itself reporting the news COMPLETELY. A policy statement approved by a source considered unbiased by the public is far more likely to be accepted than one approved by what’s considered a partisan source. Why do you think the left puts so much effort into demonizing, ridiculing, and marginalizing Fox News? They know that if they can convince the public that Fox is conservatively partisan, the public will discount what they see and hear there, even if a lot of the public DOES see and hear it.

Sixth, recognize that the game has changed. King Barack doesn’t consider us his opponents who might win next time, he considers us enemies to be defeated permanently. We need the same outlook. Recognize that this has become an existential battle for the Republic.  If the next President is Hillary Clinton or Chris Van Holland, our children will face a bleak future, at least bleak compared to a future living in a free enterprise driven economy.  Otherwise, fascism is the precise term for where we’re heading.

Finally, a suggestion to conservative writers of all kinds:

We need fewer books but more pamphlets.  We need fewer essays but more interviews in the so-called unbiased media of all kinds.  And (note to self), we need shorter essays rather than longer ones.  The people we’re trying to reach don’t believe they have time to read our books and find our blogs, but they do find time to watch the alphabet news and perhaps read a short pamphlet or internet page that covers just a single issue in the war against fascism.  We have to figure out a way to get our arguments into their minds, and shorter arguments make that easier.

In his losing campaign, Mitt Romney promised he would “repeal Obamacare,” among other reasons because it took $700 billion in physician reimbursement funds out of Medicare to make Obamacare appear less expensive than it actually is. He said he would reduce tax rates across the board for everyone, in conjunction with reductions in deductions and exemptions, primarily for business, all in an effort to boost the economy without adding more debt. He also promised to bring the deficit under control, primarily through growth in the economy and reductions in Federal spending. One way to do that, he said, was to hold any spending request brought to him to this standard:  Is the project so necessary that it’s worthy of borrowing money to pay for it? That sounded good to me, but it got lost in the kerfuffle about his example–Big Bird. Finally, he promised to attack the twin problems of Social Security and Medicare–both are underfunded and will run out of financial support under current law within a few years, several years fewer now than when George W. Bush requested they be reformed in 2005. And more, of course, but let’s stop there.

We now know none of that is going to happen, at least not that way.

I don’t believe President Obama promised to do any of those things, but perhaps that was simply because he thought it so obvious that it wasn’t worth mentioning. We knew that he intends to raise income tax rates on the richest of us, sometimes meaning those with incomes over $200,000 annually and sometimes meaning something else, but always with the threat attached that if Republicans don’t go along with whatever he decides, he will allow income tax rates on everybody to increase back to pre-Bush tax rates by vetoing any tax bill that does not raise tax rates on the “rich.” According to USA Today, (11/14/12), that veto would take $214 billion out of the economy while “reducing the deficit” very little if at all. According to the paper, the total result of going over the cliff will be a 3.6% decline in GDP, amounting to a $560 billion smaller economy, which means the rate increases will NOT generate the tax revenue that is advertised, but less. And today he added a new note–he wants to approximately double the tax rate increase he had been proposing, which if passed would take an additional $40 billion from the economy. But that has been his general plan all along, and we all knew it.

Beyond that, he only said he wouldn’t be a deceptive and “sketchy” conservative like Romney.

The ball is in your court

That is, the Democrats’ court.  The Legislative and Executive Branch situations haven’t changed all that much, numerically. Republicans can still filibuster in the Senate, although Democrats control the agenda there. Republicans control the agenda in the House, but can’t get anything passed without buy-in from Democrats in the Senate, which seems impossible to achieve on major legislation. (I just heard Congressman Luiz Gutierrez {D. IL}, expounding on immigration reform. He couldn’t even bring himself to say that Republicans who disagree with him but would work towards compromise legislation are anything better than desperate politicians “doing it for political purposes so that [their] party can have a future,” as opposed to Gutierrez and others [Democrats] who simply want to make “America a better, more decent place to live….” This after he criticized Republicans for “beginning the conversation” in a way that closes the minds of Hispanic listeners. Not promising as a sign of future agreement and civility.) And the President can still veto anything that he doesn’t like.

What has changed is that we’ve had an election, and regarding legislative cans that have been kicked down the road, we can say the chickens have come home to roost. The fiscal cliff will either be dealt with or we face a the second dip of a recession. The debt ceiling must be raised or spending cut to the bone (which do you think will happen?)

The election has given President Obama a mandate, but not one he relishes.  It’s a mandate to lead. He must take the lead on all these issues, no matter how much he wants to simply continue to blame George W. Bush and the House Republicans while he does nothing. If he doesn’t lead, even our compliant mainstream press won’t be able to cover for him in the history books, although it might fool a lot of people about his performance for a while. His leadership is necessary to reach agreement between the two Houses of Congress.

He can’t just turn things over to Reid, Pelosi, McConnell, and Boehner and expect to come in at the end and take credit for their progress, or demand changes to what they hammered out before him. That resulted last time in what is referred to as the fiscal cliff or “Taxmageddon” that awaits us in January.

So, what is he going to do? 

Here are some of the issues that need to be addressed:

National debt–Growing past $17 trillion at the rate of $1.5 trillion per year.

Annual deficit–$1.5 trillion each year for the past 5 years and next year. Where will the loans come from? There isn’t enough money in the economy to reduce the deficit significantly by increased taxation.

Federal budget–We haven’t had one passed by the Senate since the first year of the Obama Administration. Until we get one, continuing resolutions guarantee continuing deficits (see above).

Spending–What can be reduced or eliminated? What absolutely has to be increased?

Stock market–Has been falling steadily since election day, just as it did in 2008. Will there be a crash like the one that bottomed in March, 2009?

Federal regulations–Are they too heavy for business to thrive?

Military readiness–The military budget is scheduled to see huge cuts under Taxmageddon, cuts that the Secretary of Defense say will be devastating.

Social Security–Outgo exceeds income. Cannot survive without reform.

Medicare–see Social Security, only worse.

Obamacare–Contains many new taxes, pushes the economic envelope away from developing more medical doctors, facilities, procedures, and medicine, and many other problems you Democrats don’t care about–yet.

Obamacare– How will we pay for 16,000 new IRS agents to enforce it?

Obamacare–Businesses are already starting to cut back work hours and lay off workers, primarily to avoid situations that will be very expensive for them.

Obamacare–Is it OK to force the Catholic Church to pay for abortifacients and birth control measures in its employee health plans against its religious convictions? If it doesn’t have to pay, why should anybody else have to?

Republican War on Women–Will the Senate hold hearings to find out what that means?

Fast and Furious–What, Who, When, and Why?

Benghazi–What, Who, When, and Why?

Illegal immigration–Border security is essential, immigration reform is needed.

Iran–What will he do to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons?

Muslim Brotherhood–How do we relate to them? In Egypt, are they our ally? In Libya, are they an insurgency?

Syria–Do we allow Assad to continue killing his people?

Afghanistan–Friend or foe?

Pakistan–Friend or foe?

Al Qaida–Is it really “on the run”?

Energy independence–The last Obama Administration closed oil fields, closed offshore rigs, gave money to Brazil to develop offshore oil to sell to us, rejected the Keystone pipeline, and wasted money on Obama contributors’ “green” companies. What will this one do? They’ve already cut back on energy leases in Colorado.

Israel–Will we treat them as friend or foe?

China–Do we continue to feed jobs to them? Will they loan to us again? Will the yuan become the world’s reserve currency under Obama’s watch?

Taxes–Will the President really veto any tax bill that doesn’t raise taxes on the “rich”? He says he will.

Taxes–He has said he wants to raise capital gains taxes for “fairness,” even if it means less tax revenue. Does he know many non-rich retirees depend on the sale of securities to sustain their lives? Raising their taxes leaves them less to live on, reduces the life of their nest eggs.

Taxes–Every dollar of additional tax taken out of the economy is a dollar that can’t be used to buy something in it.  Even if it is sent back to somebody else, some of it is skimmed off to pay the bureaucracy.

CIA–What???

California–Will the federal government support California if it asks us to pay its bills?

Federal government payrolls–Every dollar must be paid by non-government workers or be borrowed.

Government transparency–Where is it?

Guantanamo Bay Prison–When will it close? What will happen to the inmates?

Russia–What will Obama do with his new-found flexibility?

Hurricane Sandy/New York/New Jersey/Philadelphia/FEMA–Will Federal assistance ever arrive?

Queen Elizabeth–What to give her on her birthday….

What do you want him to do?

Seriously, most conservatives could tell you what they would have wanted Mitt Romney to do had he been elected. That’s why we were Romney voters. What do you want your President to do about these issues and others? Or have you even thought about it? Comments are open for business.

Almost any set of policies can have enough cohesion to generate a “three-legged stool” analogy. For the Reagan Administration the legs might have been (1) Strength through a military strong enough to be feared, (2) Diplomacy carried out by a State Department that understood where our priorities lay and what they needed to say to please our friends and discomfort our enemies, and (3) Outreach to the world in the form of sensible policies regarding human rights that were beneficent enough to allow the occasional Grenada invasion to go essentially without comment. Not that the Reagan administration would have put it that way, but that’s just an example to show how it can be made up out of anything.

Obama’s three-legged stool for foreign policy starts with an apology tour

If the Obama administration has a three-legged stool, its legs seem to be (1) Appeasement, and self-condemnation of America while projecting national weakness, (2) Inaction in the face of crisis, and (3) Refusal to face reality in a real world. I don’t have to expand much on the first one–we’ve all seen the bowing to foreign potentates and heard the speeches accepting American blame for all the ills of the world, with shows of strength saved for overmatched attacks on individuals. Not just the killing of bin Laden, but the taking of the pirated ship. Two small victories in the face of a sea of defeats. We are losing our gains in Iraq. We have lost too many men to “green on blue” murder in Afghanistan. We invade Pakistan to get bin Laden, but we won’t do anything about the terrorist cells there. We rely on our allies to clean up in Libya, and we do nothing in either Egypt or Syria. Not that we should do something, but Obama can’t describe why we shouldn’t, and it’s clear that Obama doesn’t want to lead anything, and that projects weakness.

Obama’s Inaction

Obama’s Inaction would be laughable if it weren’t pathetic. Inaction is the only word to describe our reaction to the uprisings in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and earlier in Iran. Did his aide actually think he was coining a compliment when he said, “Obama leads from behind”? I have described this inaction as a policy of “Don’t do anything and see what happens. Something always does. Then spin it to our political advantage.” It’s obvious that he follows that path, because he does the same thing in domestic policy, with his lack of leadership after the Deepwater Horizon disaster a prime example. That betrays two flaws in Obama’s character: First, it shows a leader unwilling to take any chances at all, always opting to take the “safe” course of doing nothing. This may be a result of his lack of any leadership experience before sitting down in the Oval Office. Any CEO, heck, even any business school graduate, knows that you never have ALL the information you’d like to have and that doing nothing is in fact choosing a path that depends not on your own skill and resources, but on the winds of fate, putting you at the mercy of events. The second flaw revealed is that he is more interested in political advantage than he is in serving the country.

Refusal to face reality

The most serious of the three (if they can be graded–they are all exactly the wrong actions in foreign policy) is his inability (or refusal) to face reality. He has a belief that by changing the words we use we can change the reality they describe. No more “War on Terror;” it’s now an “Overseas Contingency Operation.” A soldier kills thirteen people on his post and it’s called “workplace violence” rather than “treason” and “terrorism.” Kill bin Laden and declare that al Qaeda is dead, and voila, it is! An attack on a consulate therefore can’t be terrorism, it must be the result of righteously angered Muslims who have heard that somebody else has seen a video on the internet that slanders Mohammed and whose demonstration just gets out of hand and kills four Americans. Further ignoring reality, he thinks he can convince other people of the same story. Compounding the error, he spreads the story of the “video-caused attack” around the world, alerting other outraged Muslims to its existence and that the President of the United States, despite protestations to the contrary, seems to think it a reasonable excuse for demonstrations, if not for murder. He seemingly didn’t realize that his words could be used against us.

The Arab Spring is an example of all three legs being exposed.  It’s in the interest of the United States to have stability in the oil-producing countries of the Middle East and even in those that don’t produce much oil.  We depend on that supply, no matter how many windmills the government subsidizes, so even if Mubarak treated many of his people badly, even if Khaddafi did the same and sheltered terrorists and was our enemy, even if Assad was willing to kill thousands of his own people, it was to our interests to either maintain stability in the area and to make sure the new regime was as “friendly” to us as the old one had been. But the policy of “do nothing and see what happens” doesn’t provide for that consideration. The enemy of our “enemy” is not always our friend.

Our President substituted nice words for reality.  He declared that the winds of democracy were sweeping across the Middle East, blowing away the old dictators and replacing them with the will of the people, only that isn’t what happened. The old dictators were removed in Egypt and Libya, only to be replaced by new dictators called the Muslim Brotherhood, and these dictators have no interest in stability for the sake of stable relationships and trade; they’d just as soon ALL their own people starved as to help the West in any way. Calling them “democratic popular uprisings” didn’t actually make it true. These were no more democratic uprisings than was the rise of the National Socialist Party in pre-war Germany, and it is to ignore reality to claim otherwise.

Ignoring reality, he thinks that he can talk sternly to Mahmoud Achmadinijad and that such talk will convince a hell-bent-for-anihilation Iran to cease its nuclear arms program, the program for which they’ve been sacrificing their own comfort for years.  First, the phrase is “talk softly and carry a big stick,” not “talk sternly and hope nobody notices you’re unarmed.” Second, even if we had the capacity to be an existential threat to Iran, they still would oppose us because they DO oppose us. As it is, they KNOW President Obama would never use military power on the scale it would need to be applied against Iran, so Obama’s words are meaningless. The will to use strength has to be credible for even available strength to be effective.

We can see the same effect on Bashar Assad in Syria–none, and our weakness has led our old enemies of Russia and China to take the sides of Iran and Syria, because they have no fear of us either.

Taking all of this in, the picture emerges that the United States under Barack Obama doesn’t have a viable foreign policy.

What’s coming?

History teaches that a power vacuum will be filled. By weakening the United States, President Obama has begun to create a power vacuum. It was happening demographically anyway, simply because of the huge population advantage China has over us and its decision to abandon much of Communism, but just as the United Kingdom slipped behind us yet remained prosperous without becoming our enemy after our great 19th and 20th century expansion, there ARE ways to maintain our wealth, dignity, and standard of living without helping the process along by becoming weak intentionally. If we fail to develop our own energy resources, we will be at the mercy of our Middle Eastern trade “partners,” and of Canada and Mexico. A reality-based foreign policy is a necessary “leg” for us to stand on. Energy policy is an important support for a successful foreign policy, and our energy policy is far from realistic.

Rules for Presidents

But now another character trait may be Obama’s undoing, right before the final debate, which is fortuitously centered on foreign policy. That is his obeisance to Saul Alinsky. Nowhere in Rules for Radicals is there a rule that says, “Tell the truth.” In his attempt to spin the recent Benghazi disaster to his advantage, either he or his handlers decided to push that “video-caused attack” story, and now reality is setting in.  Facts regarding what was known by whom and when are coming to light that can’t be explained by anything other than “We were lying to hide the truth of our incompetence” or “We weren’t really lying because we didn’t know the truth but we wanted to be able to tell you a story anyway.”

The coming debate

I’d like to hear Governor Romney question President Obama pointedly and directly about the logical contradictions in the stories of the last month.

“You should have known the facts by the next day–your underlings did.  Did you not know, or did you know but choose to not state the facts on purpose? If you didn’t know, why didn’t you?  Were the facts withheld from you? Why? To this day, you haven’t used the words, ‘Benghazi was a terrorist attack.’

This disaster, and it WAS a foreign policy disaster, leaves us with a lot of questions. Why were the requests for more security denied? Who denied them? Did you not believe the danger was present? Why were we still in Benghazi? Even the British had left. Why did you continue to push that “video” story for two full weeks, long after you must have known the truth, long after you must have known there was NO demonstration outside the consulate before the attack? Or did you? Vice President Biden has claimed that your “intelligence was faulty,” but Congressional testimony indicates that both “intelligence” and the State Department had it right from the beginning. The identification and capture of the perpetrators is important, but not as important as the answers to questions you have the knowledge to answer today.”

Of course, he must be “respectful” to the President, who will attempt to blame the Republican budget.  And that will give Romney an opening to mention the fact that there IS NO BUDGET.

I’d also like to hear Romney say, “As soon as I name an Attorney General, I’ll direct him to look into the mysterious process whereby the State of California decided to arrest a legal resident because he produced a movie expressing his political beliefs. I don’t believe that it was a coincidence that his parole was revoked so conveniently in the middle of the night with full network news coverage. This seems to be a clear violation of the first amendment.”

I’d like to hear him say, “My AG will be directed to find out the real reason that charges were dropped by the DOJ on a voter intimidation case in Pennsylvania after a guilty plea had already been entered.”

I’d like to hear him say, “I will sign an executive order stating that those killed and injured at Fort Hood were victims of a terrorist attack. There is no reason that those wounded and surviving service members should not receive the same support that those wounded and killed on the battlefield receive. As a member of the military, the perpetrator may be open to charges beyond murder.”

I’d like to hear him say, “I will issue a new Presidential Medal of Valor, equivalent to the 9/11 Heroes Medal of Valor awarded to New York Port Authority heroes, to each of the passengers and crew killed in that Pennsylvania crash on 9/11/2001.  Their heroism was equally valiant, and was performed as a gift to our country. Rather than sit back and accept fate, they boldly took charge, and averted further sure disaster in our nation’s capital, giving their lives in the process.”

And I’d like to hear him say, “In my administration, laws will be applied impartially. Speech will actually be free, and political correctness will not hold sway.”

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Update:

Although I sometimes think I can’t go wrong by disagreeing with Bill Kristol, I thought he made a reasonable point this morning on Fox News Sunday: Romney should “…be Presidential.  He has to be less the challenger of the President, the prosecutor of the President’s agenda, he has to be the next President of the United States…. Voters… want to see him as someone who is up to being President, with the judgement, the maturity, knowledge, a toughness but sort of soundness to be President. …not a kind of guy who’s arguing with the current President and challenging him and fact-checking him, …if Romney can be Presidential tomorrow night, I think he’s in pretty good shape….”

Chris Wallace: “How do you think he should play Libya?”

Kristol: “…he should stipulate that a terrible thing has happened which has been a real setback for us… the Obama administration hasn’t handled it well …more about what he would do over the next four years and less picking on every flaw of the Obama administration…. the key for tomorrow night is to be less of a prosecutor and more the next President.”

I find myself agreeing with him, especially from the standpoint of avoiding driving up Obama’s likability ratings and Romney’s down. Romney does need a counter to Obama’s foreign policy, even if Obama’s is a void. Somehow, the Democrats are spreading a meme that Romney is a “warmonger,” and Kristol suggested going back to Reagan vs. Carter: “Peace through strength…. Here is why my policies are less risky than the current Democratic President’s.” A statement like that would require a followup statement of what is different and why would it be less risky.

If Obama tries to claim that he is the man with foreign policy experience, Romney can point out our negotiating failures under Obama, or that his Secretary of State has done all the negotiating. He could even do it in French.

Cross-posted at Terriers of the Right.

Expectations vs. performance

There is an accepted pattern for Presidential campaigns.  Use speeches and TV appearances to attack and counter-attack.  Send out mailings.  Make phone calls.  Knock on doors.  For incumbents, the opportunities are almost endless.  For their opponents, not so much, but we expect them to reply forcefully against whatever the incumbent says.  This wasn’t happening for Mitt Romney in June, and mutterings abounded that he was wasting the summer.  In July and August the Olympics were held in London.  Romney dipped his toe in the water and was almost devoured by sharks.  His innocuous but accurate comment in answer to a question about Olympic security in London was spun by the British press into an insult against the British, and amplified by our own So-Called Unbiased Media. Lesson learned, Romney went back to a lower profile for a while.  And still, we who are experts on the ordinary insisted he was wasting time because he wasn’t doing what WE would do.

When September 11 rolled around, with it came an attack on our Egyptian embassy and our “consulate” in Benghazi, Libya.  After the Egyptian attack but before the killings in Libya, Governor Romney issued a statement (originally intended to be held until midnight but released earlier), regarding the Egyptian embassy’s “tweets” during the attack.  He was himself immediately attacked by the American So-Called-Unbiased-Media for having the temerity to have an opinion about statements published by an embassy.  It mattered not a bit that the White House issued a similar statement later the next day, saying essentially the same thing.  As they did so, they criticized Romney for “shooting before aiming” (an odd metaphor–his aim seemed clear).  But this time, his words were reported more fully, and they stayed in the news long enough to be judged on their own merits.

Debate forecasts and reality

It’s now October and we’ve had two debates.  The first was forecast to be one of high importance to Romney.  Make or break, if he could just hold his own against the great orator he’d have a moral victory and he’d still be in the race. But to do so, he’d have to be hard-hitting, ruthlessly tearing into President Obama’s failures and exploiting them for all to see.  He’d also have to provide details of all of his proposals from taxes to health care, and don’t forget that RomneyCare would embarrass him.  Anything less and Obama would win simply by virtue of being the incumbent.  Obama was sure to hit him with the dreaded phrase, “47%,” and Romney was reported to be memorizing “zingers” with which to come back when stung by Obama.

As it turned out, the pattern we expected to see didn’t happen.  Romney was soft-spoken, matter-of-fact, and direct.  He explained his own plans and refuted Obama’s attempts to misrepresent those plans as something else.  Romney appeared to be as likable as Obama, or more so.  Obama’s vaunted oratory was replaced with a series of misstatements and missteps.  He couldn’t explain his own ObamaCare program, although he liked the name.  ”47%” never came up, and many of us wished that Romney would have taken some of the many opportunities to attack Obama on his record.  For instance, we would have liked a mention of the missing budgets for 2011, 2012, and 2013.  Still, viewers decided that Romney was the victor by a huge margin, for this sort of thing, and polls the following week confirmed that sentiment had swung towards Romney.

Enter the VP debate and Joe Biden vs. Paul Ryan.  It was introduced on Fox News with Bret Baier saying Biden’s strategy would be to “drive a wedge in between Paul Ryan and Governor Romney… to set up his boss before the next debate.”  Megyn Kelly stressed their almost-30-year age difference without telling us why that would be important.  As it turned out neither was important, and that strategic plan, as near as could be determined between sniffs, wasn’t followed.  Earlier speculation was that the meeting would be confrontational, with wonky statistics being used by each to bash the other.  Biden would be sneaky and tricky, and Ryan would come right back at him, giving him references to class and race warfare in return for references to “47%.”

In fact, wonkiness was held to a minimum by both men, at least to the extent possible given the questions.  Ryan seemed to be debating two opponents at times throughout the evening, with both moderator Martha Raddatz and VP Biden frequently interrupting an answer to dispute it, or to ask followup questions, or unrelated questions on another topic. Biden DID attack often, but Ryan’s usual response was to ignore the tone and answer the substance.  Biden WAS obnoxious, but Ryan responded with detached amusement or not at all, and never with hostility or petulance.  Only once did he allow himself to suggest that the people would be better served if they “both” didn’t interrupt each other, although it was clear the only interruptions came from Biden and moderator Raddatz.  And for the second week the nice guy finished in first place.  Not by the huge margin of the prior debate, but far enough in front for Wolf Blitzer of CNN to call it a tie.

So what the (bleep) is Romney doing?

The pattern we saw for weeks didn’t match the one we expected and we interpreted it as mistakes on Romney’s part.  Throw away that pattern and we saw what a man who is mostly a non-politician can do when he has the skill set of Mitt Romney. I may be thinking wishfully, but my thought is that Romney has been planning his moves from the early summer to maximize the utility of his campaign funds and to expose Obama without sounding strident himself.

While we were hoping to see a little of Thor’s hammer used on Obama, Romney was instead setting the President up to look like Larry, Curley, or Moe in a way that his shortcomings would be apparent to independents. By maintaining that low profile, Romney let Obama get the headlines with his mismanagement of the economy, energy, the border, et al.  Since the So-Called-Unbiased-Media didn’t care to cover Romney’s  speeches, they were left to cover Obama’s actions and inactions, which hurt the President more than anything Romney could have said.  Not what we wanted, but maybe more effective.

Why the change?

If ever a political party needed a turnaround, it was the Republican Party after Bush.  The ball got rolling with the Tea Party, a grass roots movement that was inspired by Obama’s incompetent handling of the TARP and stimulus monies after they had been granted to him to “save the country.”  It was completely independent of the Republican Party; in fact, it took way too long for Republican officials to realize they had been granted a chance at redemption, a chance to atone for too many years of “compassionate conservatism” and nominations of incompetent candidates like Bob Dole and John McCain.

We have now nominated a man who is a specialist in turnarounds.  It’s his profession, and he’s extremely good at it.  We expect him to be able to save the economy and save the country.  Isn’t it just possible that he can run a successful campaign for President that doesn’t fit the old pattern, and save the party while he’s at it?

It makes sense to let him set the economy and the country aright again, but he knew that he couldn’t campaign on that theme.  He recognized that it was in “personal likability” that Obama could beat him if he ran a traditional campaign.  So he first started his turnaround on the Party by abandoning the old pattern and nominating a young, smart Congressman who could help him with both likability and with issues and content.  He picked a man who might have upstaged him, but that didn’t matter.  He was improving Party image and Ticket credibility.  Then he continued to campaign without confrontation but by gradually becoming more critical as he pointed out his differences with Barack Obama’s failures.

Media look for old pattern

When it became debate time, the objectives were set by the media–for both, energize the base, and for Romney, show yourself capable.  The assumption was that he would do so by attacking Obama directly on his record.  Obama would use his oratorical skills to overwhelm the contender, generating a groundswell of Democrat base support.

But Romney recognized a couple of things that seem to have escaped the media and us as well.  First, the best way for him to energize the base would ultimately be not by attacking the President, it would be by winning the debate.  Second, the best way to win the debate would be to win over independents, and that would also not result from attacks on the President.  So while Obama was playing to his base, Romney was addressing his remarks and demeanor toward independents, who were after all the voters he needed to win over.  If he got them, any waverers in his base would come with them.  He calculated that they’d be more impressed by logic and ideas than by bluster and gotcha.

The Vice Presidential debate continued the theme, except Joe Biden went off the chart with “confidence” that came through as rude, arrogant, and obnoxious.  The Romney-Ryan ticket couldn’t have been better served if they had scripted it themselves.

Different targets

Understanding your audience is important to any public speaker.  The Obama campaign decided its target audience was the Democrat base.  That’s the way they conducted themselves.  OTOH, the Romney campaign targeted the independents and undecideds, and they did it two ways.  First, they treated the debates as if they were opportunities for serious discussions rather than circus sideshows set up for flexing muscles.  Second, they behaved as mature adults should behave in polite company.

Perhaps they also recognized that their target audience was comprised of people who might not be particularly knowledgeable about the details of the issues they talked about, or even about the existence of those issues, so they tried to provide some context for their arguments rather than simply spout sound bites, while they also introduced themselves for the first time to people who didn’t know them.

The Democrats changed targets on the day after the Presidential debate.  We have wondered why the Obama camp appeared the next day with myriad examples of how Romney “lied” during the debate, even though the President didn’t seem to notice in real time, and the “lies” were rather questionable. We wondered how these claims could be effective, since they seemed be either inaccurate or based on imaginary statements or proposals.  The answer, I believe, is smart politics on the Democrats’ part:  those questionable statements were aimed directly at undecided voters who didn’t watch the debate and were therefore wide open to persuasion.  Convince them that Romney lied, cheated, and/or stole and they would not bother to check further.  It’s a tactic that can work, and it’s aimed at precisely the right demographic–undecided, uninformed voters.

Fortunately for Romney/Ryan, the original target was re-acquired by the Democrats just in time for the Vice Presidential debate.  Biden played to his base, while Ryan played to civility.  For a President who has lectured us all so many times on the need for “civility,” he abandoned his interest in it for the first two debates. To some extent, both campaigns hit their targets; the question remains, which target was most productive?

Will the next debate be different?

Will tactics change for the Tuesday, October 16, debate? My guess is that they won’t change much.  Perhaps President Obama will choose to highlight some of his policy measures he considers to be successes, and tell us why he thinks so.  If he does, Governor Romney may be more specific in his rebuttals.  If Obama becomes more “aggressive,” Romney may be a bit sharper in his replies.  Overall, I believe Obama MUST do whatever he can to maintain his “likability” lead if he still has one.  Behavior like VP Biden exhibited will be a big mistake, even if the devoted left-wing would love to see it.  Acquiescence bordering on somnolence won’t do either.  His best bet may be to continue to misrepresent Romney’s positions and fight on those grounds rather than to try to defend his own record, just as he did before.  And Romney may simply try to remain calm, cool, and collected, with ready answers and honest criticism for everything but put-downs for nobody.  That gave him a huge bump before and there is little reason to think it won’t do so again.

What’s important?

In the end, what is said will be forgotten unless it is catastrophically wrong. How it is said, though, is what makes the impression, and it’s what drove poll numbers following the debates in the Republicans’ direction.

Cross-posted at Terriers of the Right.

A contempt-of-congress order against Attorney General Eric Holder may be issued by the full House.

The U.S. Supreme Court may find that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional.

Both of these are big news. Really big news. Only one of them, however, is of a nature that will be almost 100% favorable to the Republican Party, and that’s the Court decision, even if only the “mandate” is struck down. In fact, even if the law is upheld as constitutional. No matter how the decision goes, it falls mostly to the benefit of Republicans, either in fact or for strategic purposes. Yet while waiting for that to be announced, the House may fall all over itself in an attempt to affix responsibility for the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry (and incidentally to make Eric Holder look bad), and in doing so give the Obama Administration a chance to have their friends in the MSM deflect the “big” story from the court decision to the House’s action.

IMO, that will be a mistake on two levels, even though AG Holder richly deserves the C-of-C finding. On the first level, as I noted, it’s a distraction Republicans shouldn’t want. The Obamacare law is one the public in general doesn’t agree with, and the more it’s in the public’s mind the more it benefits Republicans. Yes, they have to be able to do something with it, but at least it’s something they can do something with. The C-of-C charge is another matter.

No matter that the underlying outrage, Operation Fast and Furious, is 100% a product of the Obama justice department, despite their obfuscations about Operation Wide Receiver. No matter that it’s pretty obvious that a coverup of some kind has been going on for some time, and that the documents requested by the House committee are legitimate objects of investigation on that basis alone, it can still be spun by the Democrats and their MSM allies that the inquiry is a political witch hunt, a fishing expedition designed to find, not the truth, but simply something with which to attack the Obama administration during the election campaign. It’s neither the legal nor political big winner that some Republicans think it to be. Why let it get in the way of the real winner, the defeat of Obamacare?

On the next level, it’s a mistake to go ahead with the contempt citation from the full House anyway, based on the expected sequence of events to follow. The Contempt-of-Congress citation is issued. President Obama stonewalls the request for documents, continuing to cite executive privilege. This puts the issue in limbo until one party or the other appeals to the courts, the Supreme Court, which will be in recess by the end of this week. Little more will happen until the court reconvenes in October, because there will now be no reason for the executive branch to pretend to be cooperative, and there is no way the House committee can compel testimony regarding anything of significance–executive privilege goes far enough to stop them if the President wants to, and he will want to. Meanwhile, the MSM will portray the House Oversight Committee as a bully and the AG and the President as the aggrieved victims.  All of that works to the advantage of the Democrats.

What should be done instead? Leave things as they are today. Invent a reason to delay the C-of-C vote. Let the House Oversight Committee continue to hold hearings and call witnesses, point out more specifically what AG Holder is not complying with and why that’s important, and basically keep the issue in the pubic eye, not as an attempt to harm Holder, but as an attempt to find out “who knew what, and when.” Quote Senator Sam Ervin whenever possible.  Hammer on the discrepancies within the various stories told by the Justice Department, on the coverup, and on the non-transparency of the administration’s positions; in October, if necessary, then issue a C-of-C finding from the full House.

I may be wrong about all of this, but I hope the Republican leadership has at least considered it before they vote to find the Attorney General of the United States in contempt of Congress.  If I’m right, it could be a distraction that will dislodge the country’s economic problems from the front pages for a significant part of the campaign, and that will be to the President’s benefit.

Barack Obama, while a state senator in Illinois, also made decisions–including one to vote against a bill that would have outlawed the medical murder of babies who survive a botched abortion. President Obama has since then decided to close Guantanamo Prison, then to keep it open; to hold terrorists’ trials in New York City, then to start over again and keep them in Guantanamo; to sue Arizona for its attempt to help enforce US federal immigrations law.  Is that the kind of leadership and decision-making we want?

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Surrogates for President Obama are critical of Mitt Romney because Romney is supported by Donald Trump, an extremely successful businessman and entrepreneur. Why? Because Donald Trump agrees with some widely help opinions that it was odd that it took so long for Barack Obama to produce an official birth certificate when the question was raised. Silly? Maybe. But it is, after all, just an opinion. It can’t hurt anybody. Still, Obama’s people say that it is unacceptable, and that his unusual supporter is a black mark against Romney.

Well, William Ayers has long been a supporter of Barack Obama, who launched his political career at a reception in Ayers’ home. Not a successful businessman like Trump, Ayers is a self-confessed anti-government bomber, saved from prison by a technicality and the statute of limitations. On 9-11-01, an article in the New York Times quoted him:

”I don’t regret setting bombs,” Bill Ayers said. ”I feel we didn’t do enough.” …So, would Mr. Ayers do it all again, he is asked? ”I don’t want to discount the possibility,” he said.

Ayers is now a college professor, regularly accepting government grants to supplement his six-figure salary, which is paid by the citizens of Illinois. Which supporter is the least “acceptable”?

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Barack Obama’s surrogates charge that Mitt Romney’s business experience is irrelevant to his future as President. Let’s compare past performance. President Barack Obama (who has no business experience at all) was presented with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.  Failing to recognize that two immediate problems to the ecosystem were both the leak into the ocean and the tide of oil sweeping towards the Gulf coast, President Obama chose to put all his attention to the leak, and to finding different ways to say, “It’s the fault of the oil companies. We need more regulation. Stop all drilling offshore.” Yet regarding the oil drifting towards land, he ordered the Coast Guard to stop coastal states from doing anything to protect their beaches.  Other countries offered to send in their ships which were already configured to solve the problem. The President said, “No! We don’t need your help.”

The drama played out for weeks, beaches were covered with oil, but the President was only interested in finding ways to take credit for what he didn’t do, and to blame the oil company for the accident.  And in the end, he continued the moratorium on all offshore drilling, disregarding a court order which said it was illegal to do so. Gasoline prices eventually went from $1.70 per gallon to almost $4.00 per gallon, perhaps as a result.

In contrast, Mitt Romney was asked to take over the 2002 Winter Olympics in 1998 because of malfeasance and bribery on the part of his predecessors. He turned a financial mess into one of the most successful Winter Olympics ever, concluding with “a surplus of $40 million at the conclusion of the games. The surplus was used to create the Utah Athletic Foundation, which maintains and operates many of the remaining Olympic venues.” (Wikipedia)  Could Barack Obama do that, even today? With all the resources of the United States Government at his disposal, he personally failed to bring back the 2016 Summer Olympics to Chicago in the 2009 negotiations. Leading from behind has its drawbacks.

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President Barack Obama claims that venture capital firms are bad for America, implying that because Mitt Romney headed up Bain Capital, Romney himself is therefore bad for America. His supporters call them “vulture capitalists,” asserting that they care about nothing but profiting from the misfortune of the little companies they invest in, “raping” them and then closing them while taking all their money, leaving their employees out of work and without pensions. Let’s examine it.

What venture capital firms actually do is to loan companies money to keep operating, and provide management expertise and advice along with it. Without the infusion of cash, the firm goes broke before any help arrives, and all those people are out of work that much sooner. But in about 78% of Bain Capital’s cases, the firms actually turned around and prospered after the infusion of cash. That’s why they asked for it in the first place–to have a chance to get past a very rough patch. Venture capitalists don’t invest in companies intending to destroy them.  They invest their own money–destroying the company is a good way to lose it.  Their only way to really profit is to turn the company around and make it profitable. Sometimes that includes layoffs, but that would have happened sooner and to a greater extent without their capital infusion. Further, “11% of private sector jobs come from venture backed companies and venture backed revenue accounts for 21% of US GDP.” The charge is literally nonsense.

When confronted with the fact that government intervention in private industry via grants and loans and loan guarantees are essentially doing the same thing, but with public money rather than private, the administration responds that they are “different.”  “We have more responsibilities to consider.”  But ALL those obligations would be met if the company becomes viable without government support, so there is really no difference at all. Do “government-fund-infused” firms ever fail? Yes, they do: Solyndra, for example. Do they ever need to reduce the work force? Yes they do: Chrysler/GM closed over 2,200 dealerships across the country after accepting billions of dollars in public loans, putting over 100,000 people out of work; still they eventually had to declare bankruptcy.

GM still owes us, the public, $5 billion, with no hope of repaying it for years, if ever. Our equity stake in the company would have to double in value for us to simply break even on it. What business does the government have in risking public money (both tax receipts and borrowed money) in the stock market? The only difference between what venture capitalists do and what the government did is that the venture capitalists know what they’re doing–if they don’t succeed, they go out of business. If the government doesn’t succeed, it taxes, borrows, and eventually just prints more money, creating inflation.  It never “goes out of business,” but its citizens do.

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Other topics available for comparison:  Keystone pipeline, TARP II, government takeover of industry leaders, pork-laden “stimulus,” funneling money to contributors, fallacy of central planning, picking winners that aren’t viable, junk science, American exceptionalism, open personal records, broken campaign promises, leaks of secret anti-terrorist operational information, border security, religious freedom, Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, the Democrat-induced mortgage meltdown, and many, many more.

There was an account of the election in the Arizona Republic, headlined Paul supporters boo Romney’s son off stage.  Except that wasn’t true.  It didn’t happen that way, and it puzzles me that the “paper of record” in Arizona couldn’t get it right–there was some booing, yes, but not “off the stage.”

The good news is that fist fights didn’t break out on the floor or in the parking lot.  The bad news is the convention lasted hours longer than planned and ended without taking a final vote for our National Committeewoman (not because of disruptions by anybody but because of serious problems with the voting machines and balloting).  No final vote was taken because a quorum wasn’t present at the end.

A friend wrote in his blog that “Ron Paul supporters were clearly loathed and not welcome to the event.”  I disagreed with that, and responded to him.  But it caused me to give some thought as to why there does seem to be a division between Paul supporters and the rest of the party, one that keeps them from being able to commit to supporting our nominee, especially if it’s Mitt Romney.  My answer follows, including some commentary on the convention events, with some emphasis added:

I wouldn’t say that “Ron Paul supporters were clearly loathed.” That’s somewhat overstated. AFAIK, MOST of us delegates were of a mind to say “we’re all in this together.” The fellow walking around outside (and perhaps inside, I don’t know) shouting that “Only Ron Paul can win” was unique–that is, there weren’t any others on either side. I personally found that to be a bit grating, but not intolerable. I guess I was surprised that there weren’t more like him, though.

The Paul contingents have done a good job of exercising their rights. More power to them. The fact still remains that they don’t constitute a majority of anything, so they might be a little bit less sensitive about having their feelings hurt. Just because you THINK you have a monopoly on the conservative way doesn’t mean that you actually have it.

The fact is, you lost the primary election, and it appears to some people that you’re trying to get by fiat what you didn’t earn at the ballot box. I don’t think that’s the case for most of you. There isn’t a thing wrong with flexing the muscles you have to get concessions during the national convention. I think it’s exactly what you should do. But it’s asinine to spend the day, as SOME did, having tantrums about who you will vote for if Ron Paul loses the nomination.

The calls for unity were calls to get behind the nominee, WHOMEVER it is. (And yes, some might have said ‘Romney,’ but that wasn’t the point for me.) If roles were reversed, I’d cast my own vote and proceed to do whatever I could to help Candidate Paul win the Presidency. Some of us have a bit of a problem that that spirit isn’t reciprocated.

Those who are sane realize that there are reasons why Ron Paul hasn’t done better. There are reasons why his support didn’t skyrocket when Rick Santorum and then Newt Gingrich dropped out of the race, but rather most of their supporters switched to Romney. Those reasons do not significantly include his treatment by the press (generally fair, but not very much in quantity) or unfamiliarity of the public with his ideas and principles. He’s a known quantity. Whether they are VALID reasons or not (although many of them are) doesn’t matter. Most people just don’t want to vote for him.

IF, by some miracle, Ron Paul were able to win the nomination by getting enough delegates to control the convention, it would guarantee an Obama win. NOT because Paul wouldn’t make a better president than Obama, but because millions of Republicans across the nation would perceive the truth, that the convention process had been overturned by deft maneuvering by one group of dedicated supporters (does that remind anybody of the way Obamacare was passed?) to result in the nomination of a man who got a small minority of all the votes cast in the primaries; fewer votes, in fact, than some other candidates who dropped out before the race was over.

IOW, they would perceive that they had been done dirty by the very man who has campaigned on a platform of essentially “I will do the RIGHT thing!” His credibility would vanish, he would not win, and it would probably be the end of the Republican Party, once again snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. If that’s the objective, it can be achieved that way.

So you can see how booing, interruption, and vows to “never vote for Romney” would not be exactly welcome in a gathering of people who don’t agree completely with your objective, IF they think your objective is to thwart the will of the vast majority of the Republican voting public. But not loathed. And you were welcome to be there in the spirit of the event, a coming-together of Republicans to elect delegates to nominate an opponent to defeat Obama.

Personally, I didn’t find the booing and interruptions to be beyond the pale. Rude, yes, and probably counter-productive, but they were not excessive and not profane. In fact, I didn’t find any of it unacceptable. But that’s just me, and it’s because I believe that most of us really are united against Obama.

Maybe I’m too optimistic.  Maybe I’m too pessimistic.  But that’s my assessment of the situation after the convention.  One response to me was, “Half the states have not voted yet so you’re jumping the gun.”  I guess that was before Ron Paul announced he would cease campaigning, other than to try to get delegates for the convention.

My friend asked me if I thought that Republicans wouldn’t vote for Paul if he were nominated.  My answer was that if the circumstances were as I wrote above, many wouldn’t.  That might be rationalized to justify some Paulites non-support for Romney, but I don’t see the two as parallel situations.  Some of them feel much that way, however–their candidate has been unfairly disadvantaged by everything from the MSM to “rich bankers.”  Some were convinced that the problems at the convention, including intolerably long waits for ballots to be tallied, followed by incorrect results that had to be contested and corrected, were generated intentionally by the “establishment GOP” to the detriment of Ron Paul.

I do believe that Mitt Romney would be wise to incorporate as much of the Ron Paul agenda into his own as is possible.  Conceptually, much of it is worthwhile, and not counter to anything Romney has already said he supports.  Not that it would get all the Paul supporters in his corner–there are many who are invested in the idea that Ron Paul is the victim of a conspiracy of sorts, so to them concessions by Romney would just be another lie.  But where the ideas are good, use them.

So the Ron Paul convention strategy seems to be:  Get enough national delegates to have a significant effect on the party platform and Romney’s agenda if he’s the nominee, but also to take the nomination from him if he isn’t elected on the first ballot.  Their tactics seem to have been to elect enough state convention delegates to control the conventions or at least to elect slates of Paul delegates for the national.  Consideration of how Republicans voted in the primaries isn’t in the equation.  As long as Non Paul conservatives are complacently watching without participating, it could work.

The book is Killing Lincoln, 2011, by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugas. Unlike many marketing descriptions, O’Reilly’s blurbs this time are very accurate–”With an unforgettable cast of characters, vivid historical detail, and page-turning action, Killing Lincoln is history that reads like a thriller. ”

Nothing like his recent best seller Pinheads and Patriots in either style or  substance, Killing Lincoln is truly a well-written, interesting and informative book. Although I can’t say that I couldn’t put it down, I can say that when I did I looked forward to picking it up again later. It’s told in an episodic style; the sixty-two chapters average less than five pages long, each one covering anywhere from a few hours to a few of the days between April 1 and July 7, 1865. In effect, it’s quite a bit like a written version of the old Walter Cronkite TV show, You Are There.

To be clear, it’s not a novel or a fictionalized account “based on history;” it’s a straight description of the events, pieced together from contemporary articles and personal eyewitness accounts, and “books, websites and other archived information,” supplemented by visits to the actual locations of the historic events. Although it isn’t footnoted, its sources are listed in “Notes” at the end of the book, and they seem to be extensive and detailed enough to satisfy even people who might be tempted to dismiss the book as a lightweight effort by a TV guy. An Index is also provided.

It’s not an exaggeration to say this book is entertaining and informative. The Prologue sets the stage by describing events of March 4: President Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address (with John Wilkes Booth in attendance), and the simultaneously occurring siege of Petersburg, Virginia.

The body of the book is divided into four parts. Part One, Total War,  starts on April 1, the night of the final assault on Petersburg. From there, it counts down the days to the the end of the war at Appomattox Court House on Palm Sunday, April 9, describing the details of battles and pursuits, and even more interestingly, the consideration of the commanders for both the necessity of winning these battles and for the welfare of the men that were going to have to fight them.

The Ides of Death picks up on Monday, April 10, with post-war festivities, official meetings and speeches by Lincoln, and his belief in the need to begin the national healing immediately, starting with effectively no recriminations against Southern combatants. ”Post-war” does not describe the mood of Booth and his co-conspirators. What had been a plan to kidnap Lincoln during the war becomes a plot to murder the President now that a kidnapping would serve no purpose. Booth decides, like a modern terrorist, that he will make a statement and in the process go down in history as “the man who will end Abraham Lincoln’s life.” Preparations are made by President Lincoln for him to attend Ford’s theater on Friday with wife Mary and General and Mrs. Grant.

The Long Good Friday covers the day of April 14, Good Friday. Lincoln’s final day in office is described, and the plans and the activities of the conspirators are laid out in detail. Presidential plans are altered for the night’s entertainment–the Grants will not accompany the Lincolns, but another couple will. During a burst of laughter in the performance, Booth carries out his attack and escapes. A simultaneous attempt is made on the life of Secretary of State William Seward, an attempt that doesn’t succeed (because of a jammed revolver) but results in extremely serious injuries to four people. And there is more, including a planned attack against Vice President Andrew Johnson.

The Chase is as it sounds, ending with the trial and execution of Booth’s co-conspirators and facilitator Mary Surratt. Her July 7 hanging made Surratt “the first and only woman ever hanged by the United States government.”

The book has “extras,” starting with an Afterword with tidbits about the later lives of survivors, including son Robert Todd Lincoln. Notably, it was during the Johnson administration that Seward achieved the purchase of Alaska. Had the plot fully succeeded, who knows how that would have affected twentieth century history? A “re-creation” of the April 29, 1865, Harper’s Weekly article, “The Murder of the President,” wraps it up.

For anybody who, like me, suffers from a poor knowledge of history, Killing Lincoln could be especially informative.  I was only vaguely aware of the attack on Seward.  Booth’s motivation was obvious, but the depth and intensity of his obsession with Lincoln was unknown to me, as was the fact that he had essentially acted as a spy for the South during the war.  I highly recommend the book to everyone with any interest at all in American history.

The Administration has told us repeatedly that the mandate is necessary to help hold down the cost of health insurance. Nobody has objected yet; we should have.

The mandate is supposed to hold down costs by forcing everybody to buy health insurance whether they want to or not. Supposedly, fifty million (or ten or twenty or thirty or forty million) additional people added to the books of various insurance companies will carry a significant part of the health cost burden for the rest of “us,” but it really can’t work that way.

First, let’s consider what makes health insurance expensive.

It’s primarily the health care it pays for (a Homer Simpson moment there). In fact, the government has decreed that 80% to 85% of each premium dollar must be paid out in benefits. And of course health care itself is expensive because of all the facilities, time, equipment, education, training, research, and expertise it requires. That leaves 15% to 20% available to the insurance company for its fixed and variable costs, and for profit. (And don’t forget that the more covered benefits that are included in the insurance policy, the more it costs.)

Then consider the ten to fifty million people who will be forced to buy insurance.

Those who are healthy, strong, perhaps young, those people will definitely be helping to pay our bills. But how “fair” is that? Someone who doesn’t really need something is being forced to pay for it, just so our cost will be lowered. The obvious bet is that enough healthy people will be added to the rolls to significantly reduce the total cost of underwriting both them and the rest of us. There are about 255,000,000 of us who are already insured, and about 51 million more who are in the pool and considered to be “uninsured.”

That 51 million breaks down this way: About 4 million are the above referenced “young and healthy.” Seven million are “temporarily  uninsured,” that is, uninsured for less than a year, most likely between jobs. Another 10 million are non-citizens, and 17 million are already eligible for government sponsored insurance but have chosen to refuse it.

Who will be subsidized?

That leaves only about 13 million who are truly Americans in need of help buying health insurance. We are told that they want to buy insurance but can’t afford it or are uninsurable. They’ll be subsidized. So actually, their premiums will be paid by us, as taxes or as premium increases or surcharges, indirectly adding to our health care costs, and offsetting some or all of the savings provided by the “healthy” insured. While we’re at it, we might as well add the 10 million uninsured non-citizens back into this number, because it’s reasonable to expect that almost all of them will also be subsidized. So we will end up subsidizing or outright paying for the insurance of 23 million people, while forcing another 28 million to buy insurance they don’t want and maybe don’t really need.

Who will pay?

Looking at those groups a bit differently, we have only four million who will actually help reduce insurance premium net benefit costs, because they’re the only ones who are likely to use a below-average amount of health care resources. All the rest can be reasonably expected to access health care at average or above-average frequencies and quantities, so we are apparently expected to believe that by forcing four million healthy people who presently self-insure to buy insurance, we will make insurance rates significantly lower for the other 302 million. It isn’t possible. (I say significantly because one doesn’t go through an upheaval like ObamaDon’tCare for a trivial improvement.)

As a prominent cable news network host likes to say, “Let’s look at the numbers” for the answer. For simplicity, let’s say that the average health insurance plan premiums will be $100 per year, even though we know it will be many times this amount; it’s just a way to make it easier to state as a percentage at the end. Now let’s assume that the four million healthy people who will be insured actually have only 10% of the risk that the rest of us have, meaning that their actuarially true premium should be $10, yet they will be paying $100. That leaves about $90 from each one of them to apply to our premiums.  So $90 times 4 million equals $360 million. Divide that by $100 (average premium cost), and that is enough money to pay for the insurance of 3.6 million others. From above, we need to subsidize or fully pay for insurance for 23 million people. That means we have to find the money for 19.4 million someplace else, and that means higher taxes or higher insurance premiums or surcharges for the rest of us.  That’s right.  We will all pay. I’ll show you. I’ll even suggest how much more it will be.

Putting taxes aside for a moment, a bill for $100 times 19.4 million is $1.94 billion. Divide that by everybody else, and it means $1,940,000,000 divided by (306,000,000-23,000,000), or $1,940 divided by 286, or $6.78 per person. Put another way, insurance premiums would have to go up about 7%, not down at all. (This is a rough approximation, of course, because it leaves out several factors that would add even more expenses, and it doesn’t adjust for those in the group who could pay for part or all of their own premiums.) And if we try to use taxes to pay the additional cost instead of putting a surcharge on each premium, it’s even more for each taxpayer because there are fewer taxpayers to share the total cost, which itself wouldn’t change.

So the mandate does not, in fact, make the Unaffordable Health Insurance Act affordable.

It makes health insurance more expensive. What else does it do? It guarantees health insurance companies 50 million new customers, and each of them will add to a company’s profits. Now, I am not an anti-business person, not even an anti-insurance person (as long as the customer is not forced to purchase), so don’t take this that way. I am a free market person, the freer the better, and I believe in profits. Even I can see that the mandate, rather than being a vehicle installed to eliminate “free riders” and make them pay their “fair share,” was in fact a vehicle to get the insurance companies on board with UHIA and convince them to forgo their Harry and Louise advertisements, the ones that demolished HillaryCare twenty years ago, by guaranteeing them more profits through more customers.

Other considerations in the UHIA.

We are told it eliminates the “free rider” problem–folks who use emergency services in place of standard palliative or preventive care. But we aren’t told how much that costs every year. Using the low numbers I used to estimate above, it would have to cost  (and be therefore available to be saved) 51 million times $100, or $5.1 billion for the new plan to be a net saving for the country as a whole, and my estimating number is probably only 10% or less of the real number.  So we’re really faced with the need for a present cost of $51 billion before ObamaDon’tCare even deserves consideration.

We are told, “everyone will be insured.” Only they won’t. There will still be those who self-insure but can’t pay for their own care, and there will still be those who just won’t participate. Even in Massachusetts, where almost everybody was already insured before the advent of MassCare, that has proven to be true. In the end, we’ve turned our health care system on its head to insure about 20 million more people, some of whom don’t even want it. Is the goal to insure those people, or to make their necessary health care affordable? Whichever it is, there are much better and less expensive ways to accomplish it than what we’ve done so far.

The new system is full of incentives for employers to terminate employee health insurance plans–high expenses on the horizon and a low penalty for non-compliance. Top-end plans are mandated; no low-budget plans are available because everybody must have the same coverage that the richest of us can pay for. This is a recipe for destruction of the private health insurance market, leading directly to a Medicare-like government controlled plan in which, eventually, little care is available. And it has already eliminated some customer-friendly, low-cost, Medicare Advantage plans in states like Arizona.

Built-in provider (doctor) reimbursement restrictions are counter-productive as well.  They tend to reduce the number of providers, yet universal coverage increases the need for more providers.

One type of health insurance that is true insurance, “Major Medical,” is severely restricted in the UHIA (I believe–I haven’t read the thing, either). Instead, we will be forced to buy what is really a health maintenance plan, which is sure to increase usage and demand, therefore putting even more strain on the system.

If the program were as good as the Administration claims, businesses would be petitioning to get into it, rather than get out of it.

What happened?

Even though the data behind this analysis weren’t available at the time, we knew all this before Obama was elected, anyway. When he said we could add 40 million people to the insurance rolls without paying “a single dime” more in premiums, we knew he wasn’t being truthful. At least, those of us who don’t believe in the Tooth Fairy Free Lunch Delivery Service knew it. Some closed their eyes to what they knew was wrong as they “hoped” it would magically become right. We the people made our decision based on several false premises that we chose not to examine closely.  We voted for hope but we got hype instead.

Congress failed to represent all the people in its effort to give special attention to some of the people. And the criticism for lack of curiosity and skepticism that I accuse the press of below doubly applies to the Republicans and honest Democrats in Congress in 2009 and 2010.

The free press failed to notice that it was being fed a fanciful story and was simply regurgitating it on the people instead of doing any real analysis. Or it intentionally withheld facts from the public in order to help Barack Obama win his election. I’m not an expert in the health care field by any means, and I was able to write this article within the span of less than a week, in my spare time. More than a few paid reporters should have conducted this same exercise (only with much more exacting research and in much more stringent detail) while ObamaDon’tCare was being debated, whether my conclusions are right or wrong. It’s a Constitutionally protected professional industry and has no reason to be in the pocket of any administration or party. It simply wasn’t done; the press became PR flacks for the Democrat President. The fact that the research still hasn’t been conducted is disgraceful.

What can be done?

No matter what the Supreme Court rules in June, the Obama Administration  and the Democrat Congress needs to be replaced in November, and the UHIA must be fully repealed. It does nothing that it claimed to do, and it gives the government power over many things that will be harmful in both the long and the short run. To leave any part of it in place would be a mistake.

Then, with calm deliberation and without hysterical claims that women and minorities will die in the streets if something isn’t passed NOW!, some changes to health care and health insurance law can be considered.  Multi-state policies can be expedited. Individual, stand-alone Major Medical policies can be authorized. Tort reform can be passed. Deregulation of what must and what simply may be covered by policies can be debated. Formation of groups to buy group insurance policies can be facilitated, similar to credit unions. Allow, but don’t mandate, extended coverage of adult children on parents’ policies with proper underwriting protocols. If coverage of pre-existing conditions is desired (although it isn’t really insurance, it’s welfare), provide a means whereby the insurance industry as a whole can cover the individual insurance company’s excess benefit costs that result, with government backup as a last resort if necessary.

Most importantly, any and all of these changes should be passed individually, in small, understandable laws, not as part of a gigantic tidal wave of health-related legislation that drowns the health care industry in red ink and paperwork and “must be passed in order to be read.”