Betsy's Page
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Unjustified smearing
Hans von Spakovsky, who has recently withdrawn his name as a nominee for the FEC because of Democratic intransigence against his nomination, responds to his critics today in the Wall Street Journal. He details how ideologues in the Justice Department working together with the ACLU and Democratic politicians, chiefly Barack Obama who had been blocking his confirmation, have been smearing him with accusations of racism for taking positions that have been upheld by the Supreme Court.I have been relentlessly attacked over the past two years for my stance in that Texas redistricting controversy, and for the Justice Department's preclearance, under the Voting Rights Act, of a voter ID law from Georgia. But the Supreme Court and other federal courts have made it quite clear that the Justice Department reached the correct legal conclusion in both cases. The opinions of the career lawyers in those cases were rejected for good reason; as I held all along, they were legally wrong.As he concludes, the real victim here is an honest confirmation process untainted by such ugly politicking for partisan advantage.
I explained all of this in great detail in materials I provided to the Senate after my confirmation hearing in June 2007. No matter; the reasoned – and undisputed – legal explanation was ignored by the left, the media and the Democratic Senators trying to stop my confirmation. Yet I am still being called a racist and a "vote suppressor" because I agree with the Supreme Court on the constitutionality of voter ID laws.
The Bush administration filed more voting-rights lawsuits in its first five years than the Clinton administration filed in its last five years. And we did so without having over $4 million in attorneys' fees levied against us for filing frivolous discrimination claims, as occurred during that administration.My own hard feelings will pass. But the political system has been damaged once more by the poisonous tactics of the left, and there is no reason to think that the whole sorry spectacle will not be repeated again and again and again. So long as such tactics are accepted and even encouraged by politicians and the media, it will become harder and harder to find ordinary citizens willing to submit to the character assassination that now passes for our confirmation process.Alas, I fear that that horse is already out of the barn and we will never have the Senate look just at a nominee's qualifications without having such ugly personal and partisan attacks. Our recent history has demonstrated how successful these attacks have been.Labels: Congress
No wonder George McGovern likes Obama
Obama offered up this proposal last night in Montana.Americans need real relief, Obama said, saying he will pass a law to give each family $1,000 a year to help them pay for higher gas prices and other rising costs.Shades of McGovern's 1972 proposal to give every family $1000 except that Obama has neglected to adjust for inflation.
Why not just cut taxes instead of granting out money to everyone?
McCain's idea of suspending the federal gas tax is equally futile. The prices we're facing today are a result of demand exceeding supply. Giving out money whether through a $1000 grant or through lower federal taxes will just increase demand and keep prices high.
What I don't get is the disconnect between the calls for Americans to use less energy and the efforts to lower gas prices. What could be better suited than high gas prices to get every American to limit his or her gas usage?
Could it be that it just isn't popular for a politician not to have a policy proposal to deal with gas prices when it's the issue that most people are ticked off about. There is nothing Obama or McCain can do about increased demand in India or China and they're not going to support increased drilling here in the United States. So they come up with these band aid proposals that maybe sound good on the campaign trail but would do little to reduce the price of gas or the demand for more gas. So Obama adds to his proposal by saying that the federal government will fund research into alternative forms of energy.Obama pledged to spend $150 billion over 10 years on alternative energy such as wind, solar and biodiesel, a move to rid this country's dependence on foreign oil and one he said would put millions of Americans to work.As James Pethokoukis recently pointed out in a comment targeted at Hillary Clinton's idea that fighting global warming would benefit the economy, this is a replay of Frederic Bastiat's "Broken Window Fallacy."And with that, Clinton seemingly stumbled into the classic economic trap known as the Broken Window Fallacy. As described by the French economist Fredric Bastiat, the fallacy imagines some punk kid chucking a rock through a store window. A bad thing, right? Yet a contrarian onlooker offers that the troublemaker may have actually helped the economy because now the storeowner will have to hire a glazier, who will make money replacing the window. Then the glazier will use that money to buy bread from a baker, who then might buy shoes from a cobbler. And the "multiplier effect" goes on and on, creating a more prosperous economy.
But Bastiat points out that such reasoning ignores the hidden costs to the shopkeeper, who was forced to spend money on windows instead of something else that may have had higher value to him or society, like a new suit or investing in a start-up tech firm. As the great economics writer Henry Hazlitt once put it:The glazier's gain of business, in short, is merely the tailor's loss of business. No new "employment" has been added. The people in the crowd were thinking only of two parties to the transaction, the baker and the glazier. They had forgotten the potential third party involved, the tailor. They forgot him precisely because he will not now enter the scene. They will see the new window in the next day or two. They will never see the extra suit, precisely because it will never be made. They see only what is immediately visible to the eye.
It is certainly unlikely that spending money on climate change will be the "win-win" free lunch Clinton describes, anymore than natural disasters or wars are economic free lunches, even though they seem to spur economic activity. (Indeed, dealing with climate change is often called the "moral equivalent of war.")
Last year, the British government released a review on the economics of climate change, authored by economist Nicholas Stern. It concluded that we should spend 1 percent of the global economy every year to avoid the worse effects of climate change. Now even if you take Stern's numbers as correct—and many think he overestimates the economic risks of doing nothing—he still advocates spending $700 billion a year on a supposed problem, dough that might have a better return on investment if spent elsewhere.
If climate change "creates" 10 million new jobs over the next decade, who is to say those jobs would not have been created anyway, in the nanotechnology industry or healthcare or business consulting or some industry we have yet to imagine? We may need to spend money to deal with global warming, but to think of it as an actual independent economic gain is a stretch.Labels: Energy
Yes, it is appeasement
Caroline Glick has a powerful column from the Jerusalem Post that is reposted at RCP. She explains why Obama's proud intentions to meet, without preconditions, with the president of Iran is indeed appeasement.OBAMA'S RESPONSE to Bush's speech was an effective acknowledgement that appeasing Iran and other terror sponsors is a defining feature of his campaign and of his political persona. As far as he is concerned, an attack against appeasement is an attack against Obama.She is exactly right. By conceding from the get go that he will abandon a military response, he has set the table for other nations to continue with nuclear proliferation. Syria will be trying again. Will Saudi Arabia be long behind? Why should North Korea concede anything about their program?
Obama and his supporters argue that seeking to ease Iranian belligerence by conducting negotiations and offering military, technological, military and financial concessions to the likes of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who refers to Israel as pestilence, daily threatens the Jewish state with destruction, and calls for the eradication of the US while claiming to be divinely instructed by a seven-year-old imam who went missing 1100 years ago is not appeasement. Indeed, Obama claims that conducting direct face-to-face negotiations with the likes of Ahmadinejad is the right way to be "tough."
But is this true? Obama recalls that US presidents have often conducted negotiations with their country's enemies and done so to the US's advantage. And this is true enough. President John F. Kennedy essentially appeased the Soviet Union during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when he offered to remove US nuclear warheads from Turkey in exchange for the removal of Soviet nuclear missiles from Cuba.
But there are many differences between what Kennedy did and what Obama is proposing. Kennedy's offer to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was made secretly. And the terms of the deal stipulated that if its existence was revealed, the US offer would be cancelled. More importantly, Khrushchev was open to a deal and was ready to give up the Cuban nuclear program. And - most importantly of all - Kennedy deployed military forces and went to the brink of war to make the alternatives to negotiation credible.
Obama has repeatedly stated that unlike Kennedy, if he is elected president, he will not openly threaten war while being open to private talks. Instead, Obama intends to surrender the war option while conducting direct, public negotiations with the mullahs. So from the very beginning, he wants to undermine US credibility while giving Ahmadinejad and his murderous ilk the legitimacy that Kennedy refused to give Khrushchev.
Far from exerting force to strengthen his diplomatic position, Obama has pledged to withdraw US forces from Iraq where they are fighting Iranian proxies, cut military spending and shrink the size of the US nuclear arsenal.
SINCE THE definition of appeasement is to reward others for their bad behavior, and since the US has refused for 29 years to reward the Iranians for their bad behavior by having presidential summits with Iranian leaders, Obama's pledge represents a massive act of appeasement. And since it is Iran's illicit nuclear weapons program that would bring a President Barack Obama to the table, his policy would invite nuclear blackmail by other countries by signaling to them that the US rewards nuclear proliferators.
But even if Obama and his supporters were right and negotiating with the ayatollahs was not by its nature an act of appeasement, the question remains whether it would be possible to reach a deal with them that would not endanger US interests or US allies a la Neville Chamberlain at Munich.
Since the EU-3 began negotiating with the Iranians four years ago, the Iranians have made clear at every opportunity that while they welcome negotiations, they will never give up their nuclear program. Over the weekend, Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei again repeated that there is no deal that anyone can offer Iran that would move the regime to give up its nuclear aspirations and nascent arsenal. So there is no deal to be had.
Iran's support for terrorism and its nuclear aspirations make confrontation with the US inevitable. Since there is no way that in the midst of presidential negotiations the US would confront Iran, by pushing for such summitry, Obama is conceding to Iran the US's right to choose when and how the confrontation will begin.
Read the rest of Glick's column and see how she explains that Obama offers attitude in the place of policy.It says that in a world in which evil men are combining and preparing for war and genocide, good men are preparing for pleasant chitchat with their foes because they have come to prefer attitude to substance. It is a world in which indignation can be summoned as readily (and perhaps more easily) for partisan political attacks as for delusional dictators['] open preparation for genocide. And it is a world in which it is more important to discuss "healing" emotional wounds than devising policies capable of coping with an ever-more-dangerous international coalition of murderers.Labels: Foreign Policy, Obama
Monday, May 19, 2008
A windfall profits tax I could get behind
Jim Lindgren and my husband propose that we have windfall profits taxes on farmers who have benefited from the ethanol subsidies. Hee. Hee.
My husband proposes asking politicians who support a windfall tax on oil companies if they also support one on farmers.In the last two years (as of 5/15), crude oil on the Nymex has increased just about 75%, while corn and soybeans have each almost doubled. (Corn, which for many years sold for approximately $2/bushel, has recent been as high as $6/bushel.)Ask those politicians who like to pontificate about the rich paying their fair share why they would support giving government subsidies to farmers who earn three-quarters of a million to a million and a half dollars.
Conceptually, what's the difference between the oil companies' "windfall" and those of the corn and soybean farmers?When the current farm bill was proposed in February 2007, Bush wanted to provide subsidies only for farmers with incomes under $200,000 per year. The bill that just passed the House would provide subsidies for farmers who make up to $750,000 annually, $1.5 million for couples.Labels: Economics
Obama's excuses
Barack Obama has some creative explanations for why he's going to lose in Kentucky."What it says is that I'm not very well known in that part of the country," Obama said. "Sen. Clinton, I think, is much better known, coming from a nearby state of Arkansas. So it's not surprising that she would have an advantage in some of those states in the middle."He had the same excuse for his loss in West Virginia.
Obama has been trying to introduce himself to Kentuckians using a series of biographical TV ads, as well as fliers, including one that shows him at a pulpit in front of a church’s cross and pipe organ.
He acknowledged that he’s trying to “reverse a lot of misconceptions” about his background. He is a Christian, although some e-mail chains have said he is a Muslim.
“Part of it is because there have been these e-mails that have been sent out very systematically, presumably by various political opponents, although I don’t know who,” he said. “And there are a lot of voters who get their news from Fox News. Fox has been pumping up rumors about my religious beliefs or my patriotism or what have you since the beginning of the campaign.”Greg Pollowitz helpfully supplies a map of the United States. In case the senator from Illinois needs a review - Kentucky and Illinois actually border each other. Historically a lot of Kentuckians helped settle Illinois. Think of Abraham Lincoln's family. Arkansas just isn't so close.Last week, Obama attributed his 41-point loss in the West Virginia primary, in part, to his short tenure on the national stage.According to Obama, West Virginians and Kentuckians are so behind the times that they haven't heard enough about Obama to get to know him. Maybe they don't get TV or the Internet there in Kentucky and can't find out about the probable nominee of the Democratic Party? Maybe they've missed the six times he or his wife have been on the cover of Newsweek in the past year. Maybe they've missed Oprah's announcement of her support of Obama. It must be that they just don't get any TV or newspapers there.
"I'm not well-known there," Obama said. "You know, some of these e-mails and rumors that have been talked about penetrated in West Virginia [more] than they have in some other states."
Oh, wait. They must get TV and the Internet because they're getting Fox News and the Internet. Obama has access to some secret Nielsen numbers to tell him that Kentucky Democrats are more likely to watch Fox News. And that they're more likely to receive and believe those emails than residents of other states. Ah, it must be because they're just dumb Kentuckians who haven't yet seen the light about the Obamatopia. That's why they need those fliers with pictures of Obama speaking in a church with a large, lighted cross in the background. Remember the fuss when Huckabee had an ad wishing voters a Merry Christmas and people said that the bookcase in the background served as a floating cross? That became a storyline for several days. But there seems to be barely a whisper when Obama puts out fliers talking about being a "committed Christian." I guess that is what he needs to do to appeal to those stupid Kentuckians who don't know that he's Christian. (Maybe the Obama campaign needs to send one of those fliers to the editors of the New York Times who gave space to Edward Luttwak who wrote about the possibility that Muslims would regard Obama as an apostate from Islam.)
I suspect that Obama's religion problem is not that Kentuckians believe an email they got several months ago saying that Obama was secretly a Muslim but that they listened to Jeremiah Wright and wondered how Obama could stay so long in Wright's church and not have glommed on to the tone of Wright's black liberationist theology, just as Stanley Kurtz concluded from reading the Trumpet, the magazine put out by Obama's church.To the question of the moment--What did Barack Obama know and when did he know it?--I answer, Obama knew everything, and he's known it for ages. Far from succumbing to surprise and shock after Jeremiah Wright's disastrous performance at the National Press Club, Barack Obama must have long been aware of his pastor's political radicalism. A careful reading of nearly a year's worth of Trumpet Newsmagazine, Wright's glossy national "lifestyle magazine for the socially conscious," makes it next to impossible to conclude otherwise.Maybe those silly Kentuckians know that Obama has been a mbember of a church for the past 20 years and that news didn't serve to make them lean to supporting the senator from their neighboring state. Obama might think that to know him is to love him and that explains why Kentucky, or West Virginia, or Pennsylvania, or Ohio voters didn't warm up to him, but the excuses are getting a might bit thin these days.
...I obtained the 2006 run of Trumpet, from the first nationally distributed issue in March to the November/December double issue. To read it is to come away impressed by Wright's thoroughgoing political radicalism. There are plenty of arresting sound bites, of course, but the larger context is more illuminating--and more disturbing--than any single shock-quotation. Trumpet provides a rounded picture of Wright's views, and what it shows unmistakably is that the now-infamous YouTube snippets from Wright's sermons are authentic reflections of his core political and theological beliefs. It leaves no doubt that his religion is political, his attitude toward America is bitterly hostile, and he has fundamental problems with capitalism, white people, and "assimilationist" blacks. Even some of Wright's famed "good works," and his moving "Audacity to Hope" sermon, are placed in a disturbing new light by a reading of Trumpet.Labels: Obama
Negotiations are not an end in themselves
John Bolton explains what is wrong about Obama's pledge to meet without preconditions with all sorts of state sponsors of terrorism.Negotiation is not a policy. It is a technique. Saying that one favors negotiation with, say, Iran, has no more intellectual content than saying one favors using a spoon. For what? Under what circumstances? With what objectives? On these specifics, Mr. Obama has been consistently sketchy.Bolton writes that, if Obama says he wants a debate with John McCain on foreign policy, let's get it on. If McCain is going to reject the idea of face-to-face presidential negotiations, what would be his policy towards Iran and how would it be different from Bush's? That's the question whose answer I haven't heard yet.
Like all human activity, negotiation has costs and benefits. If only benefits were involved, then it would be hard to quarrel with the "what can we lose?" mantra one hears so often. In fact, the costs and potential downsides are real, and not to be ignored.
When the U.S. negotiates with "terrorists and radicals," it gives them legitimacy, a precious and tangible political asset. Thus, even Mr. Obama criticized former President Jimmy Carter for his recent meetings with Hamas leaders. Meeting with leaders of state sponsors of terrorism such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong Il is also a mistake. State sponsors use others as surrogates, but they are just as much terrorists as those who actually carry out the dastardly acts. Legitimacy and international acceptability are qualities terrorists crave, and should therefore not be conferred casually, if at all.
Moreover, negotiations – especially those "without precondition" as Mr. Obama has specifically advocated – consume time, another precious asset that terrorists and rogue leaders prize. Here, President Bush's reference to Hitler was particularly apt: While the diplomats of European democracies played with their umbrellas, the Nazis were rearming and expanding their industrial power.
In today's world of weapons of mass destruction, time is again a precious asset, one almost invariably on the side of the would-be proliferators. Time allows them to perfect the complex science and technology necessary to sustain nuclear weapons and missile programs, and provides far greater opportunity for concealing their activities from our ability to detect and, if necessary, destroy them.
Iran has conclusively proven how to use negotiations to this end. After five years of negotiations with the Europeans, with the Bush administration's approbation throughout, the only result is that Iran is five years closer to having nuclear weapons. North Korea has also used the Six-Party Talks to gain time, testing its first nuclear weapon in 2006, all the while cloning its Yongbyon reactor in the Syrian desert.Labels: Foreign Policy
The ironies abound
Crystal Mangum has graduated from North Carolina Central University. In case you have forgotten, Mangum was the stripper who made up the stories about being gang-raped by Duke lacrosse players. In the course of the investigation, we found out that she'd claimed to have been raped by twenty or five and, finally, three players. She had the DNA of several different men, none of whom were the accused Duke students, in her body and more in her panties at the time of the alleged rape. And we also found out that she had overdosed on a mixture of alcohol and a powerful muscle relaxant.
Kristin Butler, a former columnist for the Duke newspaper, excoriates NCCU for ignoring their own codes of conduct by matriculating Mangum.Unsurprisingly, those actions constitute flagrant violations of NCCU's honor code, which prohibits: "lewd, indecent or obscene conduct (whether public or private)"; "violation of the alcohol policy, including binge drinking, use or personal possession of alcoholic beverages by undergraduate students;" and the real doozie, "knowingly making in public a false [oral or] written or printed statement with the intent to deceive and/or mislead or injure the character or reputation of another."
NCCU also touts itself as a "drug-free academic community," a claim that's hard to take seriously when one of the college's own students admits to turning tricks and getting high four or five nights per week. In fact, Mangum had overdosed on flexeril and booze when she was first picked up by police the night of March 14.
And that's what makes Mangum's latest milestone so infuriating: It demeans the accomplishments of thousands of hard-working, law-abiding Eagles who also graduated this May.
So what did this charmer major in at NCCU?
Police psychology.
Sure, we can all imagine police departments across the state wanting to hire this liar.
You just can't make this stuff up.Labels: Duke
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Tom Harkin unveils a Democratic line of attack
In case you were wondering how the Democrats are going to deal with John McCain's military record, Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa launches a new line of attack to turn that supposed advantage to a negative.Republican presidential candidate John McCain's family background as the son and grandson of admirals has given him a worldview shaped by the military, "and he has a hard time thinking beyond that," Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Ia., said Friday.See, being in the military by choice rather than being drafted is a negative. What does that say about everyone in the military today since we have an all-volunteer armed forces? Do they have dangerous worldviews?
"I think he's trapped in that," Harkin said in a conference call with Iowa reporters. "Everything is looked at from his life experiences, from always having been in the military, and I think that can be pretty dangerous."
Harkin said that "it's one thing to have been drafted and served, but another thing when you come from generations of military people and that's just how you're steeped, how you've learned, how you've grown up."
And Harkin is forgetting that McCain has been out of the Navy for about 30 years. In fact, he's been serving in the same Senate that Harkin has been serving in. Which career is liable to give someone a more dangerous worldview: the Senate or the Navy?
Of course, among other tall tales, Tom Harkin has had his problems with how he has portrayed his own service in the Navy during the Vietnam war. He has became well-known as prevaricating about his service and pretending that he'd served in Vietnam when he'd really been stationed in Japan during the war."After I got out of college," he says in his standard stump speech, "I spent eight years, eight months and eight days as a Navy pilot." His military record, though, shows he served five years on active duty, from Nov. 21, 1962, until Nov. 30, 1967. The senator arrives at the eight-year figure by adding on three years in the ready reserve. Mr. Harkin's military record, acquired by The Wall Street Journal through a Freedom of Information request, shows he remained active in the reserves, ready or not, until Oct. 1, 1989, retiring with the rank of commander.Nothing shameful in having been a pilot in Japan. But what is shameful is trying to pretend that he was a combat pilot and borrow some of the glory from those who had served in combat. Perhaps that explains the bitterness he now seems to project onto John McCain.
"I'm right," Mr. Harkin says. "I was a Navy flyer for eight years, eight months and eight days. I have a certificate to prove it."
What he did while on active duty is even more confusing. In 1979, Mr. Harkin, then a congressman, participated in a round-table discussion arranged by the Congressional Vietnam Veterans' Caucus. "I spent five years as a Navy pilot, starting in November of 1962," Mr. Harkin said at that meeting, in words that were later quoted in a book, Changing of the Guard, by Washington Post political writer David Broder. "One year was in Vietnam. I was flying F-4s and F-8s on combat air patrols and photo-reconnaissance support missions. I did no bombing."
That clearly is not an accurate picture of his Navy service. Though Mr. Harkin stresses he is proud of his Navy record--"I put my ass on the line day after day"--he concedes now he never flew combat air patrols in Vietnam.
He was stationed at the U.S. Naval Air Station at Atsugi, Japan. Damaged aircraft were flown into Atsugi for repairs or sometimes flown out of Atsugi to the Philippines for more substantial work. Mr. Harkin says he and three other Navy pilots flew these ferry flights. And, when the planes had been repaired, he and his fellow pilots took them up on test flights. "I had always wanted to be a test pilot," he says. "It was damned demanding work."
How much time did he actually spend in Vietnam? "I wouldn't really know," he says. He estimates that over a period of about 12 months he flew in and out of Vietnam "a dozen times, maybe 10 times."
But what about those combat air patrols and the photo-reconnaissance support missions? He says he did fly combat air patrols, in Cuba, in 1965 and 1966. He was stationed at Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. base, "and we were on frigging alert for 18 months, the whole time I was there." He would take off whenever a U-2 American spy plane flew by, in case Cuban dictator Fidel Castro scrambled his fighters to intercept it. And he says he flew photo-reconnaissance missions too, out of Andrews Air Force Base, near Washington, D.C., while he was serving in the ready reserve.
In explaining his Vietnam experience at that congressional round-table in 1979, Sen. Harkin says that in retrospect "maybe I didn't say it right."
If Tom Harkin worries about the mindset that John McCain might have absorbed from being steeped in his military background, what about the 20 years Obama spent steeping in Jeremiah Wright's church?
Perhaps, John McCain will be lucky enough to have Tom Harkin campaign along with Senator Jay Rockefeller as they can travel the country expressing what a bad thing it is to have someone with a military record running for president. Remember Jay Rockefeller? He's the scion of the Rockefeller multi-millions who recently denigrated John McCain (although he later apologized) for having been a pilot who just didn't know what the war was really like on the ground.Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-WV, who has endorsed Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., said that Sen. John McCain "has a temper" and, according to the story, "believes McCain has become insensitive to many human issues.As Ed Morrissey writes, the Democrats are really twisting themselves into knots to find reasons to explain why McCain's war experiences are so less notable than John Kerry's.
"McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they [the missiles] get to the ground? He doesn't know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues."This comes, of course, from the same party whose Senate Intelligence chair suggested that military pilots have little human feeling. It precedes an effort by the New York Times tomorrow, along with some of McCain’s oh-so-courageous unnamed Senate colleagues, to suggest that McCain didn’t really experience Vietnam because his five-plus years as a POW kept him from learning all of the lessons John Kerry experienced in his three months in a Swift Boat.Yup, comments like Harkin's sure will help Obama win over all those NASCAR dads.Labels: John McCain
Eleanor Clift: clueless as ever
I still remember Eleanor Clift gushing in 1992 after Clinton picked Gore for vice president about what a great picture their combined shoulder breadth made. Gag.
She still appears to be overwhelmed by the visuals of Democrats. She seems overcome with fatuousness as she hallucinates about what John Edwards could do to help Barack Obama win back white, working-class voters.Politics is all about timing, and Edwards's endorsement couldn't have come at a more opportune moment. He is the embodiment of the working-class message that has eluded Obama and that has become the core of Hillary Clinton's campaign. As he said repeatedly during his own campaign, he is the son of a mill worker, the first in his family to attend college. It wasn't that long ago that the pundits were asking why Edwards was staying so long in a race where most election nights he was finishing a distant third. Now he's been out long enough to seem like a fresh face, and it's not too big a stretch to imagine him as Obama's running mate. Why would Edwards want to run for vice president twice? If the second time around is on a winning ticket, it's his best and perhaps only route left to the White House. He's vetted, there won't be any surprises or $400 haircuts, and his "Two Americas" theme appeals to the Clinton working-class Democrats who might otherwise defect to John McCain. At the very least, he's staked a claim on a cabinet position in an Obama administration.John Edwards as the "embodiment of the working-class message?" Please. Sure he likes to talk a lot about the two Americas, but he sure didn't resonate with voters in the primaries as that embodiment. Or in 2004. And isn't Obama's message all about unity and one America? How does that fit with Edwards' efforts to divide us into two Americas?
Clift then goes on to quote St. Louis reporter, Phil Dine, who has been analyzing those working class voters and thinks that they'll be the crucial swing vote this election. Dine is not as impressed with Edwards' appeal as Clift is.Obama is elegant and cerebral, fine attributes but not a good fit with the hard-hat culture, and his stump speech lacks bread-and-butter basics. Edwards helps Obama but doesn't change the basic equation as Dine sees it. "I don't know if he can adopt confrontation and a class-warfare message and still talk about unity and rising above it all," says Dine. "It's not a unifying message. It's a rallying call for half of America--for people who get the short end of the stick." Edwards has his back. Now it's up to Obama to find his connection to a part of American culture that Democrats for too long have neglected.A factoid that I've seen tossed around recently is that no Democrat since LBJ in 1964 has won a majority of the white votes. No wonder NASCAR dads have replaced the soccer moms. But if Clift thinks that Edwards has a special connection to that vote, she might want to check out how he's done in elections from the 2004 elections when he couldn't help in any southern state including his own and how he did in the primaries this year. He might have inserted himself into the political story this week by endorsing Obama just in time to take some of the focus away from Obama's 40 point loss in West Virginia. But he isn't going to be able to do anything to move people to vote for Obama who wouldn't be able to make that decision on their own. The only people who would like to see Obama pick Edwards as his vice presidential candidate are the Edwards family and Republicans. And, it seems, Eleanor Clift, who still buys into the whole phony Edwards working class shtick.Labels: John Edwards
If the shoe fits...whine about it
The funniest political story this week has been the umbrage that Democrats have taken about Bush giving a speech to the Knesset in which he spoke out against appeasement of terrorist groups. Ah, Bush talks about appeasers, the Democrats scream, he must be discussing Barack Obama!
The party whose Speaker of the House traveled to Syria and proclaimed that the road to peace went through Damascus and whose former president recently met with the leader of Hamas and whose prospective presidential nominee proclaimed proudly that he would meet without preconditions with the leaders of Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela heard the mention of appeasement and realized that the shoe fit and they were being forced to wear it. As the Wall Street Journal writes today,Mr. Obama asserted again yesterday that he will not meet with terrorists. He is, however, willing to meet with Iran or Syria. Virtually no serious person disputes that Iran has shipped weaponry to terrorists in Iraq and that Syria has provided safe haven to these terrorists and let them cross from Syria into Iraq. In turn, these jihadists have killed U.S. soldiers. At a minimum, one might expect that ceasing this lethal activity would be a "precondition" before committing the office of the presidency to meet with either.Sure, Obama won't meet with terrorists, but he'll meet with the sponsors and bankrollers of terrorists.
Mark Steyn notes that Obama has a tendency to turn what other people say into comments about him whether he is mentioned or not."That's enough. That – that's a show of disrespect to me."How to deal with these terror sponsors and their terror franchises is the essential question in our foreign policy for today and the coming era.
That was Barack Obama, a couple of weeks back, explaining why he was casting the Rev. Jeremiah Wright into outer darkness. It's one thing to wallow in "adolescent grandiosity" (as Scott Johnson of the Powerline Web site called it) when it's a family dispute between you and your pastor of 20 years. It's quite another to do so when it's the 60th anniversary celebrations of one of America's closest allies.
President Bush was in Israel the other day and gave a speech to the Knesset. Its perspective was summed up by his closing anecdote – a departing British officer in May 1948 handing the iron bar to the Zion Gate to a trembling rabbi and telling him it was the first time in 18 centuries that a key to the gates of the Jerusalem was in the hands of a Jew. In other words, it was a big-picture speech, referencing the Holocaust, the pogroms, Masada – and the challenges that lie ahead. Sen. Obama was not mentioned in the text. No Democrat was mentioned, save for President Truman, in the context of his recognition of the new state of Israel when it was a mere 11 minutes old.
Nonetheless, Barack Obama decided that the president's speech was really about him, and he didn't care for it. He didn't put it quite as bluntly as he did with the Rev. Wright, but the message was the same: "That's enough. That's a show of disrespect to me." And, taking their cue from the soon-to-be nominee's weirdly petty narcissism, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Joe Biden and Co. piled on to deplore Bush's outrageous, unacceptable, unpresidential, outrageously unacceptable and unacceptably unpresidential behavior.
Honestly. What a bunch of self-absorbed ninnies.This will be the fault line in the post-Bush war debate over the next few years. Are the political ambitions of the broader jihad totalitarian, genocidal, millenarian – in a word, nuts? Or are they negotiable? President Bush knows where he stands. Just before the words that Barack Obama took umbrage at, he said:Obama would have had a much stronger argument if he'd attacked Bush for the lack of accomplishments in dealing with Iran and the fact that Iran is going to be the next president's problem. Just this month, we've seen Syria reassert itself in Lebanon. For all his fine rhetoric, what has been the result? The WSJ writes,
"There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men and try to explain away their words. It's natural, but it is deadly wrong. As witnesses to evil in the past, we carry a solemn responsibility to take these words seriously."
Here are some words of Hussein Massawi, the former leader of Hezbollah:
"We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you."
Are his actions consistent with those words? Amazingly so. So, too, are those of Hezbollah's patrons in Tehran.
President Reagan talked with the Soviets while pushing ahead with the deployment of Cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe. He spoke softly – after getting himself a bigger stick. Sen. Obama is proposing to reward a man who pledges to wipe Israel off the map with a presidential photo-op to which he will bring not even a twig. No wonder he's so twitchy about it.These columns have regularly criticized the current President and Secretary of State for failing to execute any discernible policy to stop the participation of these two state sponsors of terror in causing U.S. casualties in Iraq. This is the real mismatch between Mr. Bush's rhetoric and record, and where Senator Obama, if he chose, could hit hard. We doubt he will.Peter Wehner is exactly right when he ridicules Obama for providing a distraction from the debate about foreign policy.
The Bush Administration has finessed the Iran nuclear problem by handing it to the E3/EU "process" – taken nowhere by the world's top diplomatic talkers from France, Germany and the U.K. For two years, Condoleezza Rice's State Department has played footsie with whomever speaks for Iran, to no effect. For either Barack Obama or Nancy Pelosi to suggest that they know better how to talk Iran's mullahs into an acceptable deal is, to put it gently, grandstanding.
Leaving no argument unturned, Democrats have reached back to Richard Nixon's trip to China and Ronald Reagan's negotiations with the Soviet Union as evidence that Republican Presidents "talk to the enemy." Put it this way: The day Iran brings forth a Chou Enlai and Syria a Mikhail Gorbachev, sure, give them a call.If Obama believes the president’s appeasement formulation was wrong, fine; let him make a substantive argument for why that’s the case. And if he wants to present a careful argument for why as president he would meet without preconditions with the leader of not only Iran but also with the leaders of Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea, all in his first year, that’s fine, too. In fact, it would be a welcome addition to the presidential debate. But for Obama to lash out in the manner he has is silly and unbecoming.Instead of whining about being tagged as appeasers, when it's not even clear that Bush was talking about Obama, the Democrats could have hit Bush about that gap between his rhetoric and what we're actually seeing in the Middle East.
What is driving this response? Probably the belief by Obama that he’s vulnerable to being portrayed as weak on national security matters and he wants to prove that he can’t be “swift-boated.” But Obama’s response will achieve neither aim and, in fact, it makes Obama look thin-skinned, a bit rattled, and prickly. Indeed, Obama’s response seems so 1990s. His words and the words of the campaign could have come straight from the lips of Paul Begala or other former Clinton attack dogs.
Obama and the Democrat’s DefCon 1 response to the president’s speech to the Knesset is a perfect illustration of the kind of tiresome “old politics” we really don’t need. The early media reports I heard of Bush’s speech didn’t even mention the appeasement line; it was only after Obama’s campaign and other Democrats exploded in (manufactured) fury that it became a political issue at all. Or, perhaps more accurately, a “distraction.” Which is exactly what I thought Obama was trying to move us away from.
The problem remains that there are no easy answers for how to deal with Iran. Talking to them won't work. Heck, the Europeans have been talking to them for years and the Iranians have proceeded apace with sponsoring attacks in Iraq and supporting Hezbollah and Syria in Lebanon. We've been negotiating for years with North Korea and using a multilateral approach and the North Koreans were still helping Syria to build a nuclear facility. There are no good options. As usual, the new president will be faced with choosing the least bad option and seeing what that would accomplish. They seem to think that the whole purpose of foreign policy is to talk with our enemies. Bush rightly pointed out that talking to these guys will accomplish nothing. The question Obama and McCain need to address is what will accomplish a change and whether the costs will be worth it. I don't know the answer to that question, but I do know that wailing about Bush talking about appeasers is not the sign of a leader who has truly considered what he will need to do with Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas if he were to become president.Labels: Foreign Policy, Obama
Friday, May 16, 2008
Remember when Mike Huckabee was supposed to be so charming and funny?
I'm on record for never having bought into the whole charm offensive of Mike Huckabee. I always found him to be rather smarmy. Now, he's shown himself to be a tasteless buffoon. He was speaking to the NRA convention and ad libbed a supposed joke when there was a sharp noise during his speech. He thought it would be so funny to say that that noise was Barack Obama tripping over his chair when someone aimed a gun at him and he dove to the floor.
Why would he think that it would be funny to joke about someone trying to shoot a presidential candidate? Especially when we've already had stories about worries over assassination attempts on the first black nominee of a major party.
What a boor Huckabee is. It wasn't funny and it was tasteless. And he handed the Democrats a ripe opportunity for furious indignation.
The only upside is that this one episode should be enough to put the kabosh on the insidious talk of a McCain-Huckabee ticket.Labels: Huckabee
Hamas and Obama
Why isn't it a legitimate question to ponder why Hamas supports Obama? I understand that Obama has condemned Hamas, but the question remains: why do they like him so much? Palestinians are even phone-banking for him. As Steve Gill writes,Ahmed Yousef, a top political adviser for terrorist group Hamas, said in an interview on WABC radio in New York a few weeks ago that the group supports Obama.
“We like Mr. Obama. We hope he will (win) the election and I do believe he is like John Kennedy, great man with great principle, and he has a vision to change America to make it in a position to lead the world community but not with domination and arrogance,” Yousef explained. Hamas, which seized control of the Palestinian Gaza last June, has long been designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department.
The Obama campaign claimed to be “flattered” by the Hamas endorsement, and Obama himself told the Atlantic magazine that he understands why Hamas would support him.
“It's conceivable that there are those in the Arab world who say to themselves, 'This is a guy who spent some time in the Muslim world, has a middle name of Hussein and appears more worldly and has called for talks with people, and so he's not going to be engaging in the same sort of cowboy diplomacy as George Bush.’" Obama concluded that the perception is “legitimate” as long as they understand he will be “unyielding” in his support for Israel.
So what have Barack’s Hamas newfound supporters been up to lately? Well, on the very day President Bush arrived in Israel to mark the nation’s 60th anniversary and to renew his push for a Palestinian state as part of elusive Israeli-Palestinian peace process, a rocket was fired into an Israeli shopping mall. The mall was devastated, and 14 innocent civilians were seriously injured. The Popular Resistance Committees, which has Hamas members, was one of two organizations that claimed responsibility for the attack.
The Hamas endorsement of Obama is even more interesting when viewed against the backdrop of the group’s aggressive promotion of violence among young Palestinians in Gaza and in the context of a recent Al-Jazeera story about how young Palestinians in Gaza have banded together to call American voters at random asking them to vote for Obama! Rockets by night, Obama phone banks by day?
“It all started at the time of the U.S. primaries,” says the pro-Obama Palestinian organizer, 23-year-old Ibrahim Abu Jayyab. “After studying Obama’s electronic campaign manifesto I thought this is a man that’s capable of change inside of America. As for potential change in the Middle East, he can also do that if he can bring peace to the area. At least this is what we hope.” The Al-Jazeera television report can be viewed at www.youtube.com/watch?v=21YF7ggCG6g.
Obama’s campaign may argue that there is no apparent link between the young Palestinian men and the Hamas terrorist organization. But would anyone other than the Obama campaign seriously believe that young Palestinian men are allowed free and easy access to operate an internet phone bank in the impoverished and violent Gaza Strip without Hamas’ knowledge and approval?
The support that Obama is receiving from avowed terrorist enemies of America should bother him. The fact that it does not bother him should bother us even more than the fact that terrorists see something in him that they really like.Labels: Obama
Labor buying the government
Dave Weigel at Reason Magazine looks at how labor has been investing so much in the Democrats and will be getting their reward by passing labor's desired goal of banning secret elections when workers vote on whether or not to unionize. Unions have been steadily losing membership over the years and this is their big effort to stem that decline - prevent workers from voting against unionization by handing them a card that they have to check off in front of fellow workers. And the unions have been pouring millions and millions into electing Democrats so that they can achieve that goal. Forget all the efforts that have gone into achieving a secret ballot for other elections. And try to figure out why it is that labor unions don't want people to be able to allow to vote in private about whether they want unions. Perhaps it is because they don't like the way the votes have been turning out.What’s the Employee Free Choice Act? If you aren’t a lobbyist in Washington, a union worker, or an employer nervously trying to prevent your staff from organizing, you might not have followed the twisty history of the latest attempt to increase private-sector unionization. “Card check,” as it is usually known, would allow employees at a company to bypass secret-ballot elections and declare their intent to unionize by simply signing cards. If adopted, it could portend the most revolutionary change to labor law since the 1940s.Isn't that cozy? The unions will be spending over a third of a billion dollars to elect Democrats. Then the Democrats will pay them back by allowing them to intimidate workers into unionizing so that the unions get more dues that they can use to elect more Democrats. And all along they'll try to portray the Republicans as the party in hock to special interests!
The battle over card check is part of a much larger story of Campaign ’08: the coming-out party of Democratic interest groups. For the first time since 1992, Democrats are eyeing complete control of the executive and legislative branches, with all of the spoils of appointment and legislative scheduling that would entail. Unions want to grow their numbers. Green industries want tax incentives. Trial lawyers want a ceasefire in the war on torts.
If these groups could actually form a line in January, the unions would be at the front. Card check was the brainchild of organizers who had watched their numbers tumble as manufacturing jobs moved out of the rust belt and successive conservative administrations made it tougher to organize. President Bill Clinton, signer of NAFTA, did little to stop the skid from labor’s point of view. The organizers have learned their lessons, pushing members of the House and Senate—including the junior senators from New York and Illinois—to commit in writing to card check.
“When we started working on this legislation five years ago,” Acuff said at Take Back America, “people in Washington said it would never be taken seriously, never pass the laugh test.” Bills were introduced in 2003, 2005, and 2007. The first two times, they never reached the floor, with Republicans arguing that labor organizers usually win unionization elections anyway and that 90 percent of those results are approved by the federal government’s National Labor Relations Board within two months. In 2007, with the Democrats in charge of the legislature, the same bill passed the House easily and won 51 votes in the Senate, but that wasn’t enough to proceed to an up-or-down vote. All along, the effort has faced a veto threat from President Bush.
Things are different now. Democrats believe that as many as nine Republican-held Senate seats are vulnerable in 2008. The AFL-CIO, Change to Win, and allied unions plan to spend $360 million on the 2008 election. That’s around $200 million more than the unions spent in the Kerry-Bush race. As Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton slug it out for the nomination, the AFL-CIO is running a $53 million campaign attacking John McCain—portraying him as a right-wing ideologue who co-sponsored the Secret Ballot Protection Act, the GOP’s attempt at making kryptonite against card check.
All that union money comes with a promise: What’s good for unions will be good for the Democrats. Greg Tarpinian, a Change to Win organizer who spoke at the Take Back America panel, pointed out that union membership was one of the strongest determinants for a voter choosing a Democratic ballot. “If union membership was 10 percent in Ohio in 2004,” he argued, “John Kerry would be president.”
And Obama would sign this bill in a heartbeat. He is already for it. And it would fit in with his plan to designate some companies as "Patriot Employers." He doesn't want to divide us by saying that some people are more patriotic than others, but has no qualms by defining patriotism among employers and giving them tax incentives if they perform according to the unions' mantra.Mr Obama’s plan would lower the corporate tax rate for companies that met criteria including maintaining their headquarters in the US, maintaining or increasing their US workforce relative to their overseas workforce, holding a neutral position in union drives among their employees and providing decent healthcare.Megan McArdle outlines some of the reasons why this plan would never work.It is basically unenforceable--all you will succeed in doing is encouraging companies to divest foreign subsidiaries and do business at arm's length, thus sacrificing whatever residual influence you had over them. America's corporate income tax is, to the great surprise of the majority of people who think of us as the "pro-business" society, one of the highest in the developed world. We also, strangely, try to collect taxes on foreign earnings from workers and companies alike, which strikes the rest of the developed world as thoroughly ridiculous. Hence, companies and people are going to work hard not to have any foreign earnings subject to tax.The Wall Street Journal explained how this sort of attitude towards company profits misunderstands how the economy works.Under Mr. Obama's plan, "patriot employers" qualify for a 1% tax credit on their profits. To finance this tax break, American companies with subsidiaries abroad would have to pay the U.S. corporate tax on profits earned abroad, rather than the corporate tax of the host country where they are earned. Since the U.S. corporate tax rate is 35%, while most of the world has a lower rate, this amounts to a big tax increase on earnings owned abroad.Of course, Obama also has a plan mandating that employers offer health insurance. Add in Obama's ludicrous promises about unilaterally renegotiating NAFTA and you can start to get a grasp on what the unions are buying for their third of a billion dollars.
Put another way, U.S. companies would suddenly have to pay a higher tax rate than their Chinese, Japanese and European competitors. According to research by Peter Merrill, an international tax expert at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, this change would "raise the cost of capital of U.S. multinationals and cause them to lose market share to foreign rivals." Apparently Mr. Obama believes that by making U.S. companies less profitable and less competitive world-wide, they will somehow be able to create more jobs in America.
He has it backwards: The offshore activities of U.S. companies tend to increase rather than reduce domestic business. A 2005 National Bureau of Economic Research study by economists from Harvard and the University of Michigan found that more foreign investment by U.S. companies leads to greater domestic investment, and that U.S. firms' hiring of more offshore workers is positively, not negatively, associated with the number of American workers they hire. That's in part because often what is produced overseas by subsidiaries are component parts to final, higher-value-added products manufactured here.
Mr. Obama is also proposing to raise tax rates on affluent individuals, as well as on capital gains and dividends. This would also lead to more capital and jobs leaving the U.S. The after-tax return on U.S. investment would fall appreciably if these tax hikes were adopted, and no amount of tax-credit subsidy will keep capital from fleeing to lower tax jurisdictions.
If the U.S. didn't impose the second highest corporate income tax rate in the world, companies would have less incentive to move jobs overseas. Rather than giving politically correct companies a 1% tax credit, it makes more sense to reduce the U.S. corporate tax rate for everyone -- by at least 10 percentage points to the global average.
Economists have long understood that companies don't really pay taxes; they merely collect them. A study by the American Enterprise Institute has shown that U.S. workers bear the cost of the corporate income tax in lower wages and salaries. To borrow Mr. Obama's language, what's really unpatriotic is the 35% U.S. corporate tax rate.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
When doing what feels right turns out to be the best thing you ever did
My husband explains it all.
All my love, too.
Blaming his staff
Jake Tapper has been having fun keeping a running tally of all the times that Senator Obama is asked about some embarrassing contradiction between one of his previous stands that is politically uncomfortable today and Obama wriggles out of the story by blaming someone on his staff. Add in when some contradiction emerges between Obama's claim to be a new sort of candidate who doesn't go negative on his opponents.Yesterday, in an interesting New York Times look at Obama's rise in Chicago politics, we learned that in 2004 some Jewish supporters became alarmed to learn that in a questionnaire Obama refrained from denouncing Yasir Arafat, or from expressing strong support for Israel's security fence.The list goes on and on. Tapper is up to 14 examples of this blame-shifting technique. Tapper concludes,
Reports the Times: "In an e-mail message, Mr. Obama blamed a staff member for the oversight, and expressed the hope that 'none of this has raised any questions on your part regarding my fundamental commitment to Israel’s security.'"
In January, during MSNBC's presidential debate in Las Vegas, Obama was asked about a document put together by one of his South Carolina staffers that listed comments made by the Clinton campaign that some perceived to be attempting to stoke racial fires. "In hindsight, do you regret pushing this story?” asked Tim Russert.
"Our supporters, our staff get overzealous," Obama said. "They start saying things that I would not say, and it is my responsibility to make sure that we're setting a clear tone in our campaign.”
In February in a meeting with the Chicago Tribune, Obama was asked about an earmark that went to the University of Chicago while his wife Michelle Obama worked there.
"I don’t think that I was obligated to recuse myself from anything related to the university," Obama said, adding, "when it comes to earmarks because of those concerns, it’s probably something that should have been passed on to [U.S. Sen.] Dick Durbin, and I think probably something that slipped through the cracks. It did not come through us, through me or Michelle, and Michelle has been very careful about staying separate and apart from any government work. But you could make a good argument that this is something that slipped through our cracks, through our screening system.”
In a March 2008 interview with the Chicago Sun-Times to answer questions about Tony Rezko, Obama was asked about the fact that Obama had told the newspaper in November 2006 that he had never been asked to do anything to advance Rezko's business interests. But the Sun-Times had subsequently learned about a October 28, 1998 letter Obama wrote to city and state housing officials on behalf of a housing project for seniors that Rezko was working on.
The letter, Obama said, "was essentially a form letter of the sort that I did all time. And that I wasn’t, by the way, aware of.”
A reporter asked: You weren't aware that he was associated with the project?
Responded Obama: "I wasn't even aware that we wrote the letter. The answer that I gave at the time was accurate as far as I knew...This was one of many form letters, or letters of recommendation we would send out constantly for all sorts of projects. And my understanding is that our letter was just one of many. And I wasn’t a decision maker in any of this process.”And for the record, yet again, let me state that I find Sen. Obama's staff unfailingly competent and polite, courteous and efficient, and I once again express my regret that Sen. Obama does apparently not feel the same way.Greg Pollowitz points to a bit from that hagiographic piece in Newsweek's present cover story where the reporters quote Obama saying that he will not point fingers of blame at his staff after a primary loss. Maybe he won't blame them for campaign losses, but if there is any embarrassing stories out there, he'll toss them under the semi along with Reverend Wright and his grandmother.
You think you have irritations on the job?
Watch these overpaid, overcoiffed prima donna reporters and anchors have on-air meltdowns. Caution: inappropriate language for television, but they said it anyway.
That Bill O'Reilly or Sam Donaldson would act that way is no surprise. But TV weathermen?Labels: The media
John Edwards clambering aboard the bandwagon
So John Edwards has come out and endorsed Barack Obama. The train has left the station and he's clambering on board. His endorsement will perhaps send his 19 convention delegates into Obama's column.
What I find interesting is that Edwards waited until after North Carolina's primary vote to make his endorsement. If Edwards has any pull at all, wouldn't it be in his own state? I suspect that the reason that Edwards held off with an endorsement before North Carolina voted is that he was afraid that the polls showing Clinton closing in North Carolina were accurate. He didn't want to endorse Obama and then have Clinton lose by only a few points. It would have become clear how little clout the former senator has in his own state. So he waited and then Obama, without his help, won a decisive victory here. So, the last bit of clout Edwards had was to jump on the bandwagon a week later and garner one last headline and hope that Senator Obama will be grateful. But Senator Edwards is just a footnote now and no one really cares all that much whom he endorses.Labels: John Edwards
More proof of the Democrats' lies about Colombia
One of the fake reasons that Nancy Pelosi used to block bringing the Colombian free-trade agreement to a vote on the House floor was that Colombia wasn't doing enough to crack down on the paramilitary groups. As the Wall Street Journal reports, President Uribe of Colomia has just taken action to show how hollow that criticism was in the first place.House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's main excuse for trying to kill the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement is that Colombian President Álvaro Uribe winks at atrocities by his country's illegal paramilitary groups. The charge has always been false, and yesterday Mr. Uribe proved it by extraditing 14 "para" leaders to the U.S.Shame to the Democrats who are so reflexively against free trade that they won't even bring to a vote an agreement that would open Colombia's markets to American businesses with our strongest ally in South America. That is what this agreement would do - allow American businesses more latitude in doing business there and helping to further Uribe's goals in raising his country's economy. And by so doing, there would be even less support for those paramilit
The 14 include major paramilitary leaders who have been engaged in a long struggle against FARC terrorists. Mr. Uribe has been fighting the FARC even as he has tried to reduce violence by the "paras," who have sometimes been complicit in killing trade unionists. The 14 have been serving time in Colombian prisons for various offenses and are wanted in the U.S. for drug trafficking. They had been arrested under a Justice and Peace law that allowed them to avoid extradition if they agreed to certain conditions.
But Mr. Uribe said yesterday that the 14 had failed to honor those commitments, which included compensating their victims. The popular two-term president said some of them were continuing to run criminal gangs from prison, and so they were put on Drug Enforcement Agency aircraft for the flight to face trial in the U.S.
Illegal gangs and paramilitary groups remain a problem in the Colombian countryside, a legacy of the state's long failure to stop FARC depredations. Mr. Uribe has done more to reduce violence, from both right and left, than any president in modern Colombian history. He views the free-trade pact with the U.S. as a chance to continue that progress by connecting his country to the global economy to raise living standards. Yesterday's extradition is further proof of his efforts to see that justice is done – and of his goodwill toward the U.S.