It's not about Chrysler; it's about the unions

In case you have any doubt that the government bailout of Chrysler is all about the union jobs, Megan McArdle explains it for you. Marc Ambinder tries to provide his own answer about why it's not about the unions. See who you think is more persuasive.

Well, we appreciate the sentiment, but $17 billion isn't going to do the trick

President Obama is delivering today on his promise to go through the budget line by line and eliminate wasteful programs. And the result? A whopping $17 billion in cuts. When you read through the list of programs to be cut, it all sounds very good. Yes, Virginia, there are wasteful programs in the federal budget. So kudos to the Obama administration for finding these cuts. Of course, it's just half of the $34 billion in cuts that President Bush proposed. And we all know that Congress will work to reinstate a lot of this money.

But $17 billion is just a drop compared to our $1.7 trillion deficit which is growing every day. But not to worry, because the Obama administration predicts $300 billion more in savings.

Administration officials defended their approach, saying the list of program reductions and terminations is just the start of a broader effort to cut spending and rein in a skyrocketing budget deficit, which is projected to approach $1.7 trillion this year. They also noted that the list does not include more than $300 billion in savings Obama proposes to squeeze from federal health programs and use to finance an expansion of coverage for the uninsured.

If you believe that 1) he can find $300 billion in health care savings and 2) that his proposals that will lead to a single payer health care plan run by the government is going to cost less than $300 billion, then you are just hopelessly naive.

So we can applaud the effort to find $17 billion in cuts, but let's not relax our vigilance on government spending. We're still at the top of the first inning in the efforts to rein in government spending and this little effort isn't going to get us where we need to be. And that is even assuming that Congress goes along with those cuts. Don't count on it.

How about stimulus from American oil companies?

Robert Samuelson notes how the one industry that the Obama administration is totally uninterested in stimulating is our gas and oil industries. Forget about the value of decreasing our dependence on imported oil, what about the jobs that would be created if we opened up more of our own oil for drilling?

Considering the brutal recession, you'd expect the Obama administration to be obsessed with creating jobs. And so it is, say the president and his supporters. The trouble is that there's one glaring exception to their claims: the oil and natural gas industries. The administration is biased against them -- a bias that makes no sense on either economic or energy grounds. Almost everyone loves to hate the world's Exxons, but promoting domestic drilling is simply common sense.

Contrary to popular wisdom, the United States still has huge oil and natural gas resources. The outer continental shelf (OCS), including parts that have been off-limits to drilling since the early 1980s, may contain much natural gas and 86 billion barrels of oil, about four times today's "proven" U.S. reserves. The U.S. Geological Survey recently estimated that the Bakken formation in North Dakota and Montana may hold 3.65 billion barrels, more than 20 times a 1995 estimate. And there's upward of 2 trillion barrels of oil shale, concentrated in Colorado. If only 800 billion barrels were recoverable, that would be triple Saudi Arabia's proven reserves.

None of these sources, of course, will quickly provide oil or natural gas. Projects can take 10 to 15 years. The OCS reserve estimates are just that. Oil and gas must still be located -- a costly and chancy process. Extracting oil from shale (in effect, a rock) requires heating the shale and poses major environmental problems. Its economic viability remains uncertain. But any added oil could ultimately diminish dependence on imports, now almost 60 percent of U.S. consumption, while exploration and development would immediately boost high-wage jobs (geologists, petroleum engineers, roustabouts).

Though straightforward, this logic mostly eludes the Obama administration, which is fixated on "green jobs" and wind and solar energy. Championing "clean" fuels has become a political set piece. On Earth Day (April 22), the president visited an Iowa factory that builds towers for wind turbines. "We can remain the world's leading importer of oil, or we can become the world's leading exporter of clean energy," he said.

The president is lauded as a great educator; in this case, he provided much miseducation. He implied that there's a choice between promoting renewables and relying on oil. Actually, the two are mostly disconnected. Wind and solar mainly produce electricity. Most of our oil goes for transportation (cars, trucks, planes); almost none -- about 1.5 percent -- generates electricity. Expanding wind and solar won't displace much oil; someday, electric cars may change this.

Instead of encouraging these domestic jobs, the Obama administration has been limiting domestic oil production. Instead he pursues the pipe dream of reducing unemployment by encouraging "green energy." But he can do both.

It may disappoint. In 2007, wind and solar generated less than 1 percent of U.S. electricity. Even a tenfold expansion will leave their contribution small. By contrast, oil and natural gas now provide two-thirds of Americans' energy. They will dominate consumption for decades. Any added oil produced here will mostly reduce imports; extra natural gas will mostly displace coal in electricity generation. Neither threatens any anti-global warming program that Congress might adopt.

Encouraging more U.S. production would also aid economic recovery, because the promise of "green jobs" is wildly exaggerated. Consider: In 2008, the oil and gas industries employed 1.8 million people. Jobs in the solar and wind industries are reckoned (by their trade associations) to be 35,000 and 85,000, respectively. Now do the arithmetic: A 5 percent rise in oil jobs (90,000) approaches a doubling for wind and solar (120,000). Modest movements, up or down, in oil will swamp "green" jobs.

Improved production techniques (example: drilling in deeper waters) have increased America's recoverable oil and natural gas. The resistance to tapping these resources is mostly political. To many environmentalists, expanding fossil fuel production is a cardinal sin. The Obama administration often echoes this reflexive hostility. The resulting policies aim more to satisfy popular prejudice -- through photo ops and sound bites -- than national needs.

Bye-bye federalism

USA Today points out an interesting, but discouraging fact the other day. We have now reached a point where federal money is the number one source of funds for the states.

In a historic first, Uncle Sam has supplanted sales, property and income taxes as the biggest source of revenue for state and local governments.

The shift shows how deeply the recession is cutting. Federal stimulus money aimed at reviving the economy and a sharp drop in tax collections have altered, at least temporarily, the traditional balance of how states, cities, counties and schools pay for their operations.

The sales tax had been the No. 1 source of state and local revenue since the mid-1970s, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Before that, property taxes were the primary source. That changed in the first three months of 2009.

Federal grants — early stimulus money plus conventional federal aid — soared 15% in the first quarter to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $437 billion, eclipsing sales taxes, which fell 2%.

The states hope that this situation will end when the recession ends and the federal stimulus money runs out. But I am not so sanguine that Congress will vote to end programs that governors will claim have become essential to paying for such popular programs as education and transportation. Few federal programs ever die. As Arnold Kling writes the real danger is that states will not make the necessary permanent cuts in their budgets that they all need to make because they will come to depend on the federal government to bail them out.

My prediction is that this will persist even when there is a recovery. It is bad news in many respects. It makes the spenders (in this case, state and local governments) even less accountable for making sure that money is well spent. For the politicians, the incentive to spend other people's money is big enough when its your own constituents paying the taxes, and it's even bigger when someone else's constituents are paying the taxes.

As I have been helping my students review for the A.P. U.S. History exam tomorrow morning, one of the themes we've been following throughout American history is the expansion of the federal government. Periodically, I remind them to think of those Anti-federalists who warned about the reach of the federal government in the proposed Constitution. Imagine what those Anti-federalists would be saying today.

George McGovern on the dangers of compulsory arbitration

George McGovern takes to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to warn against one aspect of the Employee Free Choice Act. While the effort to take away union workers' secret ballots has been getting all the attention, an equally dangerous element of the law would be to impose mandatory arbitration in disputes that aren't settled quickly between management and labor. McGovern rightly argues that such measures would be bad for both sides.

Currently, labor law maintains a careful balance between the rights of businesses, unions and individual employees. While bargaining power differs depending on individual circumstances, the rights of the parties are well balanced. When a union and a business enter negotiations, current law requires that both sides bargain "in good faith."

In a contract negotiation, each party typically perceives the other as too demanding. But no one loses their right to contract willingly or suffers being forced to agree to anything. Employees can strike if they feel that they have been dealt with unfairly, but it is a costly option. Employers are free to reject labor demands they find to be too difficult to accept, but running a business without experienced employees is itself difficult. Both sides have an incentive to press their demands, but they also have compelling reasons not to press their demands too far. EFCA would disrupt that balance by enabling government-appointed lawyers to decide what they believe is fair or reasonable.

A federally appointed arbitrator cannot be expected to understand the nuances specific to each business dispute, the competitive market position of the business, or the plethora of other factors unique to each case. Yet fundamental decisions on wages and benefit costs, rules for promotions, or even rules for exiting an unprofitable line of business could fall to federal arbitrators under EFCA.

Many labor contracts can run over 100 pages with their requirements of each party. Compulsory arbitration is, in one sense, government dictating to employees what they will win or lose in the deal, with no opportunity to approve the "agreement." Why should employees pay union dues to get such a contract?

And in an America where the President has tried to impose his own vision of a labor-owned company on Chrysler investors regardless of the rule of law, who would have any confidence in this government acting fairly towards management in any conflict with unions that have done so much to elect the government we have?

Bashing private investors is no way to encourage eocnomic growth

John Berlau explains how Obama's rhetoric about how he doesn't want the government to go into the car business belies his actions. And his own rhetoric bashing investors endangers the future of private investors in any company that has a large union working force. Who will want to invest in such companies in the future if there is a possibility of the government treating them like this?

Obama’s speech castigating the approximately 20 creditors who refused to accept the government’s terms offers a textbook case of anti-market rhetoric, with some sentences saying the exact opposite of what was true.

Of the creditors, Obama said, “I don’t stand with those who held out while everybody else made sacrifices.”

Yet it is those secured creditors who were asked to make the brunt of the sacrifices and agreed to many of them. According to their statement, the holdout lenders said they were willing to take 40 percent haircuts on their loans, while other groups “lower down in the legal priority chain” for bankruptcy -- such as unions and auto suppliers -- “were being given recoveries of up to 50 percent or more and being allowed to take out billions of dollars” from the company’s assets.

Yet this wasn’t enough of a “haircut” for the Obama administration, which insisted that lenders take a cut of more than 65 percent of what they were owed and get a paltry 33 cents on the dollar. What particularly outraged these lenders, and made them think that they could get a better deal in the bankruptcy courts, was that the lending contracts they and Chrysler signed specifically state that they will get paid 100 cents on the dollar before anyone else is paid out if Chrysler were to liquidate.

As Tom Lauria, an attorney representing some of the creditors, said in an interview on Detroit radio station WJR (transcribed by the Media Research Center’s Newsbusters.org): “My clients bought a position in the Chrysler capital structure that entitles them to be paid ‘first dollars out.’ That is, they're to be paid 100 cents of what they're owed before any junior creditors get a penny.”

But forget these contracts, Obama says, because these creditors were "a group of investment firms and hedge funds” and “I stand with Chrysler’s employees and their families and communities."

But even if it is now permissible in Obama’s America to ignore valid contracts if they only benefit rich folks, the president’s logic still fails in this situation, because many of these investment firms and hedge funds manage money on behalf of other ordinary “families and communities.” As Financial Times columnist John Gapper explains, “[S]ome of these “speculators” inconveniently manage money on behalf of pension plans and endowments, rather than rapacious rich people.”

Indeed, one of the holdout creditors is Colorado-based Oppenheimer Funds, which manages 401(k)s, IRAs, and colleges savings vehicles such as 529 plans. In a statement, Oppenheimer explains that it “rejected the Government’s offers because they unfairly asked our fund shareholders to make financial sacrifices greater than those being made by unsecured creditors.”

For the sake of a the present good feeling of bashing investment firms, President Obama has taken a whack at all future investments in any other company.

The government's actions since these bailouts began have introduced uncertainty to the markets as we wait to find out the government will be doing with TARP funds, bank stress tests, stimulus funds, and car bailouts. That puts the brakes on any possible economic growth because people are afraid of making new investments. Adding bashing of investment firms to all this uncertainty along with the practice of favoring unions over those investors who, by contract, should be ahead of them in line will delay any exit from our current economic doldrums.

How not to fire a teach a teacher - Part Two

The Los Angeles Times has a follow-up on their earlier story about how difficult it is to fire a teacher. Today they look at all the money the LA school district has to pay to house teachers while their cases are being adjudicated.

For seven years, the Los Angeles Unified School District has paid Matthew Kim a teaching salary of up to $68,000 per year, plus benefits.

His job is to do nothing.

Every school day, Kim's shift begins at 7:50 a.m., with 30 minutes for lunch, and ends when the bell at his old campus rings at 3:20 p.m. He is to take off all breaks, school vacations and holidays, per a district agreement with the teacher's union. At no time is he to be given any work by the district or show up at school.

He has never missed a paycheck.

In the jargon of the school district, Kim is being "housed" while his fitness to teach is under review. A special education teacher, he was removed from Grant High School in Van Nuys and assigned to a district office in 2002 after the school board voted to fire him for allegedly harassing teenage students and colleagues. In the meantime, the district has spent more than $2 million on him in salary and legal costs.

Last week, Kim was ordered to continue this daily routine at home. District officials said the offices for "housed" employees were becoming too crowded.

About 160 teachers and other staff sit idly in buildings scattered around the sprawling district, waiting for allegations of misconduct to be resolved.

The housed are accused, among other things, of sexual contact with students, harassment, theft or drug possession. Nearly all are being paid. All told, they collect about $10 million in salaries per year -- even as the district is contemplating widespread layoffs of teachers because of a financial shortfall.

Think of that. Teachers in the classroom are being laid off while teachers accused of all sorts of violations are being paid to do nothing. It truly is an Alice in Wonderland situation.

The article goes on to detail the story of this teacher Matthew Kim who has been charged by several teacher assistants and students of touching them inappropriately. The problem is that he has cerebral palsy. He got his job in the first place by threatening to sue charging discrimination against the handicapped, so he got hired and they also had to hire a full-time assistant to translate what he said for the class. That assistant is one of the ones charging him with touching her in front of the class. In the Wonderland procedures that exist in Los Angeles, once he was dismissed and protested, he was "housed," doing nothing, but the district had to keep paying him. And he was "housed" long enough to actually get tenure and then take full advantage of all the union-inspired protections for a teacher who was dismissed.

In February 2002, the district ordered Kim housed at an administration building while the allegations were formally investigated. The school board voted to fire Kim in October 2003.

For seven years, the district and Kim have battled in administrative forums and courtrooms.

Kim sued Walker and the district for disability discrimination and ultimately lost. By then, Walker had retired -- exhausted, he said, by the battle to fire Kim. He currently heads a charter school in Pacoima.

Separately, a Commission on Professional Competence -- a three-member panel with ultimate administrative authority over teacher firings -- concluded that Kim had indeed engaged in unprofessional conduct by touching three female students. But, the panel decided, he should not be fired because "his conduct was a result of poor judgment, rather than overtly sexual."

The panel found no evidence that Kim was a poor teacher or that he had injured his students. Instead it faulted the district for poorly documenting its case and not informing Kim promptly of the allegations.

The district successfully appealed to the superior and appellate courts, which sent the case back to the commission for reconsideration. Earlier this year, the commission backed Kim again, ruling this time on a 2-1 vote that all of the touching was the result of "involuntary arm movements."

And so it goes on, with no end in sight. As Kim continues to collect his teacher's salary, the district is planning yet another court appeal.

Is the union proud of having negotiated this strange kabuki theater? And why should a principal not be able to fire a teacher who exercises "poor judgment?" Do you want a teacher for your children who is guilty of such poor judgment as asking a teen girl if she's a virgin?

The result is that the district has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars they don't have for a teacher they don't want in the classroom. And they've lost a dedicated principal who decided to go to a charter school instead. Good teachers don't mind working at a charter where there isn't the protection of tenure. And administrators appreciate the flexibility to get rid of poor teachers and hire good teachers whether or not they have been through the proper education school program.

Here's a revealing story about the man who will be the next Israeli ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren. Oren is the author of the excellent history of the Six Day War as well as a great study of the history of America's relations with the Middle East going back to the 18th century, Power, Faith, and Fantasy.

Specter loses again

The Democrats welcomed the former Republican to their caucus yesterday. But, contrary to Harry Reid's promiseand in just as I predicted, he lost all his seniority. The Democrats are holding out the possibility that he would gain seniority back if he wins his election in 2010. Fat chance of that happening - they're not going to put a former Republican in line to chair either the Judiciary or Appropriations committee. Now he won't be able to use his seniority and promises to exert his authority to help constituents as a reason to vote for him next year. Pennsylvanians will have to choose him solely because of his lovely and appealing personality.

How not to fire a teacher

The Los Angeles Times took a look at what the Los Angeles school system has to go through to fire a teacher. And it's clear that it is very rare and laborious procedure that principals only go through for the most egregious cases such as sexual misconduct with a student.

* Building a case for dismissal is so time-consuming, costly and draining for principals and administrators that many say they don't make the effort except in the most egregious cases. The vast majority of firings stem from blatant misconduct, including sexual abuse, other immoral or illegal behavior, insubordination or repeated violation of rules such as showing up on time.

* Although districts generally press ahead with only the strongest cases, even these get knocked down more than a third of the time by the specially convened review panels, which have the discretion to restore teachers' jobs even when grounds for dismissal are proved.

* Jettisoning a teacher solely because he or she can't teach is rare. In 80% of the dismissals that were upheld, classroom performance was not even a factor.

So the mediocre teachers just stay on. I would guess that, in most schools, everyone knows who the really weak teachers are. The children talk. The parents talk. Other teachers talk. The principals know. But the unions have negotiated such a terribly time-consuming procedure and all sorts of protections that such mediocrities remain. The administrators can work with that teacher. The teacher can take all sorts of teacher development classes. Meanwhile, students shuffle through that teacher's classroom year after year and the students fall further and further behind in their learning.

In many California school districts, that goal seems impossibly distant. Laziness, apathy or poor performance often aren't firing offenses, some school officials complain.

"We as administrators, knowing how difficult it is, tend to make excuses for the employee, and I think in some cases, accept mediocrity," said L.A. Unified Supt. Ramon C. Cortines.

Strapped districts are forced to keep tenured staffers they deem unworthy even as they must consider layoffs for less-experienced teachers, without regard to their talents.

"It's really disheartening," said Dr. Mitchell Wong, president of Act4Education, a group of parents trying to improve school performance in West Los Angeles. "What message does it send to the students, to the community and to the teachers who are doing their job?"

They can't fire the teachers who can't teach or control a classroom and, in most cases, they lose their attempts to fire a teacher who has done something egregious such as making sexual advances to female students or advising a student who had tried to commit suicide that he should cut deeper next time.

Check out this chart from the Los Angeles United School District or all the steps necessary to fire a teacher. It rivals the complexity of the Hillary Clinton health care proposal.

Imagine trying to run any other sort of business where bosses were expected to spend hours and hours working with an unsatisfactory employee for many years while documenting every interaction and then still couldn't fire the employee.

At charter schools, one of the strongest benefits is that administrators have much more authority and flexibility to fire mediocre teachers. I've seen this at my own school. Sure, sometimes it can be very hard and I don't envy my principal his job to let go teachers who are, otherwise, very nice and pleasant colleagues. But I like working at a place where the standards are high for teachers as well as students. Just as students will rise to meet high expectations, so will teachers. And that helps to build an environment of excellence.

Hat tip to Mickey Kaus who writes,

It's worth saying again: If the twittish, PC L.A.Times is now going after the teachers' unions, those unions have lost the PR battle in the mainstream press. Does President Obama ("We can afford nothing but the best when it comes to our children's teachers") know this? Do the Republicans who are desperately looking for an issue to use against the Dems?

Now that people are waking up to the damage that the UAW has done to our domestic car companies, perhaps the public is ready to hear the truth about the teachers' unions.

Ah, the joys of Murtha-style nepotism

The earmark machine that is John Murtha found time to funnel money, not only to his financial supporters and his own district, but also to his nephew.

Yet last year, Murtech received $4 million in Pentagon work, all of it without competition, for a variety of warehousing and engineering services. With its long corridor of sparsely occupied offices and an unmanned reception area, Murtech's most striking feature is its owner -- Robert C. Murtha Jr., 49. He is the nephew of Rep. John P. Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who has significant sway over the Defense Department's spending as chairman of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee.

....Murtha's power has had beneficial effects within his family. His brother, Robert C. "Kit" Murtha, built a longtime lobbying practice around clients seeking defense funds through the Appropriations Committee and became one of the top members of KSA, a lobbying firm whose contractor clients often received multimillion-dollar earmarks directed through the committee chairman.

Robert C. Murtha Jr. of Murtech is Kit Murtha's son. He also is a former Marine who once served as a presidential security officer and aide to the president for White House functions. He worked for eight years for ACS, a defense and information technology contractor. When Lockheed purchased ACS in 2004, he started several companies, including Murtech, which he registered as a defense contracting firm.

Murtech received its contracts primarily from the Army Space and Missile Defense Command in Huntsville, Ala., which has been generous to companies in John Murtha's district and enjoys a close relationship with the congressman through a mutual interest in breast cancer research. The Army command has won at least $200 million a year in federal funding for the cancer research, of which Rep. Murtha is a stalwart supporter. In a program called Missiles to Mammograms the command has collaborated with a contractor in Murtha's district, Windber Medical Center, in a multimillion-dollar project to explore using missile-tracking technology to detect breast cancer.

....The nephew disputes the notion that he has secured Pentagon work because of his family ties. In fact, he said, having a powerful relative can sometimes be a distraction.

"I've been critiqued all my life, having the last name of Murtha," he said. "Whenever I walk into a room, I don't know if you like him or if you don't like him."

But Steve Ellis, a spokesman for the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, said contracts to Murtech raise questions about whether taxpayers are getting the best value. "Historically we're always concerned when there is a sole-source or single-bidder contract," he said. "By definition, the taxpayer isn't necessarily getting the best deal possible. And certainly when you see the company has close ties to one of the most powerful appropriators in Congress, our antenna really perks up."

Perhaps the nephew's company was the very best company to get these jobs. But eyebrows should be arranged when a powerful Congressman's relative's company receives no-bid contracts exactly in the field for which Murtha's committee does the appropriations.

Remember when Democrats used to be all concerned about even the "appearance of corruption?" Yeah, so do I.

Ah, interest group pluralism at work

Remember when the Democrats raised a fit because they accused the Republicans of letting energy company interest groups help craft the Republican energy bill?

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman, both of California, were among the Democrats -- then in the minority -- who slammed Vice President Dick Cheney for holding closed-door meetings to draft energy policy early in the Bush administration.

Republicans "invited energy lobbyists to write the energy bill that gouges consumers with big payoffs to Big Gas and Big Oil," Mrs. Pelosi said in 2005. "They have turned Washington, D.C., into an oil and gas town when it is supposed to be the city of innovation, of new, of fresh ideas about our energy policy."

Well, I guess it just depends which interest groups are invited to craft the bills. Now the Washington Times reports that Democrats are using their favored energy interest groups to write their environmental bill. And lo and behold, economic benefits for those groups are being written into the bill.

But the sweeping climate bill Mr. Waxman and Rep. Edward J. Markey, Massachusetts Democrat and chairman of the panel's key environmental subcommittee, introduced at the end of March includes a provision that benefits Duke Energy Corp., a founding member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), whose climate plan released in January the lawmakers have frequently called a "blueprint" for their climate legislation.

The exemption would save Duke Energy -- along with other firms now building new coal power plants -- from having to spend millions of dollars outfitting its Cliffside, N.C., power plant currently under construction with "clean coal" technology.

"The USCAP companies must be delirious over the freebies that they've received after writing the blueprint for [the House draft bill]," said Larry Neal, deputy Republican staff director for the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

James Madison predicted that, with a large republic, there would be one faction to counter another faction. That is true. Perhaps, because he didn't foresee the growth of parties until he helped found one himself, he didn't foresee those favored factions being invited in by whichever party controlled Congress to craft the bills themselves. It's either disgusting when both parties do it or acceptable for both parties.

Smacking down Specter on cancer research

This weekend, weasely Senator Specter popped up on TV to blame Republicans for not funding cancer research and thus making it more likely that people like Jack Kemp and himself would die. That, of course, ignored the fact that he has purportedly recovered from his bout with Hodgkin's Disease and is now healthy enough as a 79-year old cancer survivor to run for six more years in the Senate. Some American medicine must have helped him or did he seek his medical care out of the country?

But the Wall Street Journal does an excellent job in exposing the vacuous reasoning in Specter's claim.

Presumably Mr. Specter was referring to funding for the National Institutes of Health, which now accounts for the vast majority of federal support for biomedical research. Between 1994 and 2006, when Republicans controlled Congress or the White House or both, NIH biomedical R&D spending more than doubled in real terms, jumping to $25 billion in 2003 from about $10 billion in the early 1990s. During the Bush years, it fell slightly after that, though holding relatively constant as a share of discretionary spending.

Criticizing the modest budget reduction to $23 billion in 2007 (in constant dollars) is thus a little like condemning K2 for not being Mount Everest. Still, Mr. Specter is right to note his consonance with the "Democrats' approach," which equates federal funding alone with medical innovation. NIH projects are valuable, but they are far from the only or even main reason that the U.S. is the world leader in new and better treatments for killers like cancer.

Let's not forget that government funding of health research is not the only way that research gets done in this country. We also have the incentive of the profit motive to encourage private businesses to research to find new treatments.

Most of the advances in biotechnology and pharmacogenomics that are revolutionizing the diagnosis and treatment of disease are occurring in America. One reason is a research environment that is less centralized, more competitive, tolerant of risk and richer in cash -- public, yes, but especially private. Between the 1990s and mid-2000s, more than four times as much medical venture capital was invested in the U.S. than in the European Union.

Another explanation is that the profits available in U.S. markets allow companies to cover the costs of converting the ideas gleaned from basic research into workable commercial medicines. To a large extent, patients in Western Europe, Canada and Japan -- which set strict caps on spending for medical technology -- are free-riding off the more open U.S. health-care system.

Of course, if we get the Democrats and Specter's preferred solution to our health care needs - a government-run health plan, we may abandon this model of medical research.

Democrats are now hoping to import those same models state-side. Nationalized health care inevitably results in large government bureaucracies that try to contain costs by restricting access to new therapies by limiting or denying payment or even restricting what doctors are allowed to prescribe. Yet the freedom, innovation and quality of health systems are all closely meshed, and the tragedy of "universal" health care will be the medicines that are never developed at all.

Mr. Specter will probably end up voting for all that. And since he joined his new party purely out of political self-interest, the least he can do in the meantime is to leave cancer patients out of it.

Specter has demonstrated that he will do anything in order to win, even use his own cancer and that of Jack Kemp to try to score cheap political points. The man is a slimy weasel. Will Pennsylvania Democrats really want this guy representing them?

Ya gotta love those Congress Critters

They don't even try to hide their monomaniacal focus on, well, themselves and their reelection. They can all come out and pontificate about their concern for the economy and tell us how they're going to cut spending as soon as they can.

But then it comes to their own budgets. And all concern for fiscal responsibility flies out the window. Because their personal budgets help them get reelected and who can worry about fiscal responsibility when there is an election to win? So that is why the House (and by that I mean the House Democrats because we know that the Republicans are total bystanders in the real action in the House) has come up with a budget that increases their own money for next year so that they can send out more mail to constituents.

The House wants to increase Members’ office budgets next fiscal year by almost 15 percent, partly because 2010 is an election year and lawmakers anticipate a surge in franked mail.

In a recently released budget request, the House Chief Administrative Officer asked appropriators to raise the Members’ Representational Allowances — which fund everything needed to run offices, including salaries, travel and supplies — by $90 million, citing increases “due to the election year cycle.”

“In an election year the expenditures increase and then decrease in a non-election year,” the request reads.

Increases for most expenses are usually modest from year to year, accounting mostly for inflation and cost-of-living adjustments. But during election years, some accounts get a big bump.

The fiscal 2010 request includes an extra $16 million for franked mail — an 80 percent increase from fiscal 2009. The stated reason: Members send more mail to their constituents during an election year.

The idea of franked mail was to facilitate communication between a congressman and his constituents. But the fact that they plan on increased mailings in election years exposes this boondoggle for what it is - reelection privileges for incumbents. If they want to communicate to their constituents, call a local reporter and get on the news. Save your constituents some money - think of all the good will that would earn them as they could trumpet their personal parsimony. Imagine the nice publicity an incumbent could earn if he or she ran and ad saying, "The House leadership wanted to give me more money to send you free mailings. Instead, I'm returning that money to the Treasury and spending my own campaign money to tell you about what is going on in Washington, D.C." Then the ad could list some of the items that would have been in the franked mail. That would mean so much more than some mailing sent out to people that we know most of them will just toss in the garbage.

Do Congresspeople even understand the concept of freedom of speech?

Eugene Volokh has the goods on a proposed bill in the House called "the Megan Meier Cyberbullying Prevention Act" designed to end people bullying other people through electronic communication.

Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication, with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass, or cause substantial emotional distress to a person, using electronic means to support severe, repeated, and hostile behavior, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.

Read through Volokh's examples of what could be deemed felonies under this bill: criticizing a politician in a blog; sending a nasty email to your former boyfriend, or perhaps using the internet to organize a boycott of a company people are angry at. Once you have these vauge criminalization of of causing "emotional distress" or "hostile behavior," you're opening up the door to all sorts of wacky persecutions before the courts eventually determine that this bill is unconstitutional. It might make the supporters feel good. Who likes bullies? But Congress won't be any more successful in outlawing cyberbullying than they were in outlawing internet porn.

Forget the rule of law

Gregory Mankiw also has concerns about where lies the rule of law with Obama's bailout maneuvering with Chrysler.

As the President intervenes in more and more industries, a key question is how he does it and what he is trying to achieve. Is he trying to reorganize insolvent firms while, as much as possible, preserving the rights of stakeholders as established under existing contracts? Or is he trying to achieve a "fair" outcome as he judges it, regardless of preexisting rules and agreements? I fear it may be the latter, in which case politics may start to trump the rule of law

For a president who considers "empathy" to be the most important consideration in a Supreme Court justice, this is no surprise. Achieving some sort of mystical social justice is more important than deferring to the rule of law. And do people care? Nope, fairness sounds to a lot of people as just what we want and who cares about the rule of law?

If you didn't despise Arlen Specter enough already....

This attempt to make political hay over the passing of Jack Kemp by Arlen Specter should be enough to curdle your stomach.

Sen. Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Democrat, said part of the reason he left the Republican Party last week was disillusionment with its healthcare priorities, and suggested that had the Republicans taken a more moderate track, Jack Kemp may have won his battle with cancer.....

"Well, I was sorry to disappoint many people. Frankly, I was disappointed that the Republican Party didn't want me as their candidate," Mr. Specter said on CBS's "Face the Nation." "But as a matter of principle, I'm becoming much more comfortable with the Democrats' approach. And one of the items that I'm working on, Bob, is funding for medical research."

Mr. Specter continued: "If we had pursued what President Nixon declared in 1970 as the war on cancer, we would have cured many strains. I think Jack Kemp would be alive today. And that research has saved or prolonged many lives, including mine."

I'd rank that right up there with John Edwards claiming that electing John Kerry would help Christopher Reeve to walk again, a claim that Charles Krauthammer rightfully disdained five years ago.

This is John Edwards on Monday at a rally in Newton, Iowa: "If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."

In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome display of demagoguery. Hope is good. False hope is bad. Deliberately, for personal gain, raising false hope in the catastrophically afflicted is despicable.

Well, you can now add in Arlen "I'll say and do anything to hold onto political office" Specter.

We'll miss Jack Kemp

I was so saddened to hear of the passing of Jack Kemp after his battles with cancer. He will be sorely missed, but his example is one that should be a model to the Republicans as they struggle to come back from their losses in the past two elections. They could well emulate his devotion to core principles as well as his cheerful demeanor. And his outreach to minority communities on the basis of conservative principles such as choice in education, enterprise zones, and the benefits of free trade are as sound today as they were throughout his career. As the Wall Street Journal writes today,

Kemp's ideas and legacy continue to be relevant for today's Republicans, even if few of them seem to recognize it. The financial meltdown and recession have given President Obama a chance to revive a policy mix of higher spending and taxes, intrusive regulation and easy money. If those policies don't result in a sustainable expansion -- and history argues that they won't -- then Americans will again be looking for other ideas.

Republicans will need to be ready with Kempian proposals to address middle-class economic anxieties and revive broadly shared prosperity. The GOP also needs a rhetoric and a demeanor that invite all Americans to its cause. The Kemp-Reagan message was rooted in ideas but it also appealed broadly across ages and incomes because of its buoyant temperament. Jack Kemp's admirable life shows that it is possible to be a populist intellectual and a capitalist for the common man.

In Jack Kemp's last column he expressed his admiration for Abraham Lincoln ahead of the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth. And being Jack Kemp, he singled out for praise Lincoln's support for entrepreneurial capitalism.

For Abraham Lincoln, true welfare meant not dependency, but well-being; not equality of reward, but equality of opportunity; not reliance on the state, but reliance on oneself and one's family. He wrote, prophetically, "The progress by which the poor, honest, industrious and resolute man raises himself, that he may work on this own account and hire somebody else ... is the great principle for which this government was really formed."

Professor Gabor Boritt, in his great book "Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream," cited the rest of Lincoln's argument:

"I don't believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. ... I want every man to have the chance -- and I believe a black man is entitled to it -- in which he can better his condition -- when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward, and finally to hire men to work for him! That is the true system."

In the most "radical" speech Abraham Lincoln ever gave, he compared America to a house divided against itself, half-slave and half-free. I would submit that today America is once again in danger of being divided -- this time, however, into two economies, one rich, the other poor; one affluent, the other in abject poverty; one a springboard to opportunity, the other a trap of despair and dependency.

Lincoln understood that it is impossible to support equality of economic opportunity without also upholding equal civil, human and voting rights for all.

This is a scary sentence

Of all the people to oversee the distribution of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, would Joe Biden be your choice?

Amid jibes from comedians, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden continues the serious task of overseeing distribution of billions in stimulus money, his office said.

How corruption is done in the Senate - shovel money to the spouse

Now that Senator Dodd's armor has been pierced, we're starting to see all sorts of stories about what a corrupt sleaze he is. Today's entry concerns how companies were able to surreptitiously steer money to Dodd's way by putting his wife, Jackie M. Clegg Dodd, on many corporate boards.

Clegg Dodd, a former legislative aide and senior federal Export-Import Bank officer, was compensated at a rate of about $500,000 a year in 2007 and 2008 from seats on five corporate boards, according to the most recent filings by the companies to the federal Securities and Exchange Commission. The companies report based on overlapping fiscal years. About half the income is in cash; the remainder, in equity, is more difficult to calculate because of the accounting methods that corporations use to value stock and option compensation. A sixth company lists Clegg Dodd as a director but has not reported her compensation.

A spokesman for Dodd's office, who returned a call first placed to Clegg Dodd by The Courant, said that the annual figure is actually about $100,000 less. Some of the stock values reported in the SEC filings are unlikely to be realized or cannot be collected by Clegg Dodd until after she leaves the boards, said Dodd's press secretary, Bryan DeAngelis.

Does anyone have the least doubt that her position on those boards was due, not to her background at the Export-Import Bank, but to her husband's powerful role on the Banking Committee in the Senate? And the disgusting thing is that this is all perfectly proper according to Senate rules. Those rules facilitate disguising such behavior. And she got that job through a political appointment by Bill Clinton. Though she and her husband claim that she was totally qualified for her positions, the evidence doesn't hold up.

Clegg Dodd holds a variety of committee assignments on the various boards, many of which provide committee members with thousands of dollars in additional income. But two assignments stand out: She is chairwoman of the audit committee at Javelin and is an audit committee member at Blockbuster. Both boards have designated her as an audit committee financial expert.

The designation is a demanding qualification written into SEC rules with the enactment of what has become known as the Sarbanes-Oxley law. The reform followed a succession of corporate accounting scandals and requires that corporate audit committees contain at least one member competent in complex corporate financial accounting. The goal was to put enough sophisticated accounting muscle on audit committees to resist companies' trying to inflate bottom lines.

Charles Elson, who directs the corporate governance program at the University of Delaware, said that Sarbanes-Oxley established a rigorous set of qualifications for directors designated as audit committee financial experts.

"You are held to a very high standard," Elson said. "Basically, if you are on an audit committee you better have been an accountant."

Clegg Dodd's supporters say that corporate boards have qualified her as an audit committee financial expert. But she did not list any financial accounting experience in her responses to questions.

Dodd's political critics say that the greater part of his wife's career has been the result of political appointments and that Dodd had a hand in some of them.

In interviews published during Dodd's unsuccessful effort to win the Democratic presidential nomination last year, Clegg Dodd said that she studied communications at the University of Southern Utah. She obtained an internship in the U.S. House of Representatives, a master's degree in national security studies from Georgetown University and later a job as an aide to former astronaut and Republican Utah Sen. Jake Garn, who was chairman of the Senate banking committee until 1987.

She worked for 10 years in the U.S. Senate as a staff member on both the banking and appropriations committees, according to SEC filings. In 1993, she was appointed as special assistant to the chairman of the Export-Import Bank. The bank, which is authorized by and subject to review by the Senate banking committee, was created to provide export financing for U.S. goods and services.

Over eight years, Clegg Dodd held a variety of positions at the bank, among them chief of staff and vice president for congressional and external affairs. In 1997, President Bill Clinton nominated her as first vice president and vice chairman of the bank. An attendee described her confirmation hearing before her former colleagues on the banking committee as a "love fest."

Eighteen months later, Clegg Dodd was named the bank's chief operating officer. When she left the bank in 2001, her salary was $125,700 a year, a bank spokesman said.

An official familiar with the bank's operations said that Clegg Dodd's duties at the bank involved, for the greater part, administration and public and congressional relations. The official, who asked not to be identified for fear of offending Dodd, said he does not believe that Clegg Dodd's legislative and banking experience qualified her as an audit committee expert.

She doesn't sound like an expert in auditing or accounting, does she?

I have nothing against spouses of politicians earning a lucrative living in their own chosen field. But when that field overlaps with the politician's career and the spouse, or children for that matter, get hugely lucrative opportunities simply because of their relationship to a powerful politician, we need to apply extra scrutiny and skepticism. And having Senate disclosure rules that allow Senator Dodd to list her income and holdings as somewhere between $100,001 and $1 million dollars, the opportunity for corporations or other interest groups to shovel money to the spouse is too large.

I guess it all depends on how you define the term "free enterprise"

Cafe Hayek excerpts this clunker from an NPR interview with EPA head, Lisa Jackson.

In the second quote from her, I have tried to reproduce the sounds she makes in trying to avoid telling a ridiculous lie. She tells it anyway. From the 3:35 mark of the interview:

Jackson: The President has said—and I couldn’t agree more—that what this country needs is one single national road map that tells auto makers who are trying to become solvent again, what kind of car it is they need to be designing and building for the American people.

NPR reporter (interrupting): Is that the role of the government. though? I mean that doesn’t sound like free enterprise.

Jackson: Well, ih it , it is free enterprise in a way. Umm uhh you know, first and foremost the free enterprise system has us where we are right this second (laughs) and so some would argue that the government already has a much larger role than we might have when Henry Ford rolled the first cars off the assembly line.

Of course, she is following in the tradition of her boss, President Obama, who keeps issuing disclaimers about his policies while going ahead and doing the exact opposite. So he tells us how he doesn't want to be in the auto business all the while he's telling Detroit automakers what types of cars to produce. Eva Rodriquez in the Washington Post captures this two step from the President.

"I don't want to run auto companies," President Obama said last week. "I'm not an auto engineer. I don't know how to create an affordable, well-designed plug-in hybrid." To those of us who still quaintly believe in the power of private enterprise and free markets, that was a reassuring answer from the leader of a country heading toward owning 8 percent of Chrysler and 50 percent of General Motors. It suggested the president understands that, even with their lousy track records, business professionals are better equipped than government bureaucrats to decide what cars to make, what prices to set and how many people to employ.

Seconds after that promising, if relatively vague, opening, though, Obama took much of it back. He couldn't help himself. "But I know that, if the Japanese can design an affordable, well-designed hybrid, then, doggone it, the American people should be able to do the same," he said. "So my job is to ask the auto industry: Why is it you guys can't do this?"

Somehow, I don't think a stint as a law school professor, community organizer, state legislator, or even senator qualifies him to do market analysis of what the American consumer wants in automobiles. But once the federal government started bailing out the car companies, it took on the role of trying to run them. And that is what is so distorting to the markets and distressing to those who believe in free enterprise, and not the Lisa Jackson version of free enterprise.

It's entirely legitimate for a president to encourage, coax and cajole private actors to adopt his policy preferences. It would be even more appropriate for the president and Congress to provide incentives to really nudge these changes along. A gasoline tax akin to the ones that keep prices high in Europe and spur purchases of fuel-efficient cars would make a lot of sense. It would also draw howls of protest, which is why Obama instead appears to prefer to lean on the car companies.

And why not? Obama controls the funds they need just to stay alive, making it highly unlikely that the companies will simply ignore his suggestions and incur his wrath. As they have learned, there's a price to pay for not minding him. In March, Obama sent Chrysler and GM back to the drawing board and threatened to withhold additional money if the companies did not come up with more ambitious reorganization plans. He was also responsible for the inglorious exit of GM chief executive Rick Wagoner. It isn't that far a leap to think that Obama might -- or at least might be tempted -- in the future to use his financial leverage in similar ways.

Lawmakers, too, will undoubtedly try to insinuate themselves into the boardroom. One may try to block plans to further whittle down the workforce. Another may try to put the kibosh on shutting down dealerships in his back yard. Before you know it, they will be dictating what kind of fuel injection GM may install and how many union members will be needed to install it.

Which brings us to another disturbing aspect of the government's dealings: its unabashed and unwise attempts to tilt the scales in the unions' favor. The government proposed giving the United Auto Workers' retiree health fund a 55 percent equity stake in Chrysler -- more than the combined stakes of Chrysler's merger partner, Fiat, or the other creditors that are owed roughly $7 billion. At GM, the plan is for the union to take a 39 percent slice -- a rich reward for years of work rules, health care and pension deals that contributed mightily to the company's financial woes.

And if we are to take Obama at his word and think that he truly wants to get out of the carmaking business and turn the federal government's role over to private investors, what kind of message has he sent such potential investors by his demonization of private investors who had invested in Chrysler and had the temerity to oppose the distorted deal offered them. While Obama was badmouthing them in the press as “small group of speculators” , these bondholders did have the law on their side.

New York-based OppenheimerFunds said it rejected the offers because the government “unfairly” asked the fund’s shareholders to make greater sacrifices than were being asked of unsecured creditors.

Entitled to Priority

“Our holdings in secured Chrysler debt are entitled to priority in long-established U.S. bankruptcy law, and we are obligated to our fund shareholders to support agreements that respect these laws,” the company said in an e-mail.

Chrysler’s dissident lenders have on their side the “absolute priority” bankruptcy rule, which holds that value must be distributed according to the legal priorities of the stakeholders. What riled the group that put out the statement today was the fact that junior creditors, consisting of a workers healthcare trust, would get equity in a new Chrysler entity while they would not.

What sort of precedent does it set for future investors if the government starts ignoring the established rules of bankruptcy in order to benefit favored supporters such as the UAW? Who is going to want to invest in the future? And doesn't he understand that those "speculators" that he's deriding provide the backbone for our entrepreneurial system works. Investments come from such speculators and often the represent the pension funds and investment hopes of all those small investors that politicians usually want to help. But I guess in a system where the EPA head and president believe that free enterprise means the government's role in telling companies what to manufacture, such upside down thinking is all the rage.

Megan McArdle adds in her thoughts.

Which brings us to the real question, which is, when did it become the government's job to intervene in the bankruptcy process to move junior creditors who belong to favored political constituencies to the front of the line? Leave aside the moral point that these people lent money under a given set of rules, and now the government wants to intervene in our extremely well-functioning (and generous) bankruptcy regime solely in order to save a favored Democratic interest group.

No, leave that aside for the nonce, and let's pretend that the most important thing in the world, far more interesting than stupid concepts like the rule of law, is saving unions. What do you think this is going to do to the supply of credit for industries with powerful unions? My liberal readers who ardently desire a return to the days of potent private unions should ask themselves what might happen to the labor movement in this country if any shop that unionizes suddenly has to pay through the nose for credit. Ask yourself, indeed, what this might do to Chrysler, since this is unlikely to be the last time in the life of the firm that they need credit. Though it may well be the last time they get it, on anything other than usurious terms.

A great point. Is it really in the unions' longtime interest to insert more uncertainty into lending so that investors don't want to lend to a big company with difficulties like Chrysler if there is the fear that the government will jump in and override normal bankruptcy procedures.

The great Chief Justice John Marshall was responsible for recognizing that the country's economy could not grow without respect for the rule of the law and the sanctity of contracts. That created the foundation for the tremendous growth of our nation's economy from its infant stages early in our republic's history. We gain little and lose so very much if the government can now throw over contracts in order to reward financial contributors to the President's party.

Skip Priority Mail

Here's a little tidbit that may save you some money the next time you're at the Post Office. Don't bother shelling out extra money to send your letter Priority Mail.

Postal Service customers who shell out extra bucks to send letters by priority mail aren't getting their money's worth, the Daily News has found.

The special-delivery service costs more than 10 times as much as first-class mail, but doesn't get a letter to its destination any faster in many cases.

In eight of 10 tests conducted last month, letters sent priority and first-class were delivered to the same location on the same day.

Even the cash-strapped Postal Service admits that paying $4.95 for a flat-rate priority envelope won't guarantee faster delivery than a 42-cent stamp.

"They're similar," said postal spokesman George Flood. "Delivery is going to be the same, especially when you're talking about shorter distances."

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2009/05/04/2009-05-04_priority_mail_isnt_faster_than_regular_mail.html#ixzz0EXEjfFWE&B

Shooting down Jon Stewart's historical relativism

Perhaps you heard the story from last week about how Cliff May went on Comedy Central and got into an argument with Jon Stewart as to whether or not we were using torture at Guantanamo. In the course of the discussion, when Cliff May asked Stewart if Harry Truman was a war criminal for dropping the atom bomb on Japan and Stewart, after a pause, said yes, Truman was a war criminal. A couple of days later, Stewart apologized for this glib answer.

And it was dumb. Stupid in fact. So I shouldn't have said that, and I did. So I say right now, no, I don't believe that to be the case. The atomic bomb, a very complicated decision in the context of a horrific war, and I walk that back because it was in my estimation a stupid thing to say.

Yes, it was a dumb thing to say and I'm glad Stewart walked it back.

But this is a very common viewpoint among many people today talking about the dropping of the bomb. You hear all sorts of arguments about how it was really dropped to send a message to the Soviets or to end the war before the Soviets would get in. Or that, if we'd just waited a bit, the Japanese were on the verge of surrendering and we didn't need to drop it.

Historians can debate the subject back and forth. It's easy to second-guess Truman 64 years after the fact. I know the American men who were waiting to invade Japan were very glad that they didn't have to risk their lives to test out the hypotheses of these academics and critics today.

Meanwhile, if you haven't seen it already, you should watch Bill Whittle's masteful 17-minute takedown of Jon Stewart on Pajamas Media. He marshals facts and quotes from the Japanese military leaders at the time to debunk those arguments. And he makes the point at the end that, if Truman is a war criminal, then so is Franklin Roosevelt for ordering the bombing of German and Japanese cities that killed so many civilians - more than in the atomic bombs. And so would Abraham Lincoln be a war criminal for allowing hard war to be fought against the South in Georgia, South Carolina, and the Shenandoah Valley. But then again, it's easy for these armchair relativists to sit back and criticize the decisions of the men who sat in the White House and had to make these very tough decisions in the middle of wartime.

Obama's faulty "Churchill didn't torture" claim

Chalk it up as just a presidential gaffe that will soon be forgotten. When President Obama claimed in his press conference that he opposed torture of military prisoners just as Churchill had opposed torture, he happened to have gotten some of his facts just plain wrong. Apparently, there was an ongoing program of harsh interrogations that those who criticize what was done at Guantanamo would certainly label as torture. Here's the story that The Guardian published in 2005 about what was known as "The Cage."

By examining thousands of documents stored at the National Archives, formerly the Public Record Office, as well as the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, the Guardian has established what happened to this prisoner, and many others like him.

The London Cage was used partly as a torture centre, inside which large numbers of German officers and soldiers were subjected to systematic ill-treatment. In total 3,573 men passed through the Cage, and more than 1,000 were persuaded to give statements about war crimes. The brutality did not end with the war, moreover: a number of German civilians joined the servicemen who were interrogated there up to 1948.

It's a fascinating story about how Britain was routinely violating the Geneva Convention in interrogating German prisoners throughout the war. Do you think that Churchill didn't know what was going on right there in London?

And, apparently, that isn't all that historians have on the record regarding Churchill and torture. Ed Morrissey links to Neill O'Dowd this report from Irish Central about Churchill approving torture techniques to suppress Kenyan revolutionaries in the Mau Mau Revolution, including Barack Obama's own grandfather.

Excuse me, Mr. President: Churchill did condone torture and he did use torture — and advocated using poison gas and concentration camps. And he was quite proud to do so, writing about it frequently as a means to an end.

I don’t know whose Kool-Aid Obama was drinking, but it must have been supplied by the British Embassy in bucketfuls.

It was an amazing gaffe, as there is clear evidence that Obama’s own grandfather, a member of the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya, was tortured by the British after he was captured.

Recent accounts in the British press note that he was whipped mercilessly every day when he refused to cooperate.

It was good old Winnie, drawing on his experience in similar tactics during the Boer War, who as Prime Minister ordered the savage suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in 1952.

According to historians, “The ensuing torture caught up many uninvolved Kenyans, and just like many modern 'anti-terror' campaigns, radicalized them and their friends and family, too. One earlier victim of this approach was the President's grandfather.“

Here's the story from the London Times.

Barack Obama’s grandfather was imprisoned and brutally tortured by the British during the violent struggle for Kenyan independence, according to the Kenyan family of the US President-elect.

Hussein Onyango Obama, Mr Obama’s paternal grandfather, became involved in the Kenyan independence movement while working as a cook for a British army officer after the war. He was arrested in 1949 and jailed for two years in a high-security prison where, according to his family, he was subjected to horrific violence to extract information about the growing insurgency.

“The African warders were instructed by the white soldiers to whip him every morning and evening till he confessed,” said Sarah Onyango, Hussein Onyango’s third wife, the woman Mr Obama refers to as “Granny Sarah”.

Mrs Onyango, 87, described how “white soldiers” visited the prison every two or three days to carry out “disciplinary action” on the inmates suspected of subversive activities.

“He said they would sometimes squeeze his testicles with parallel metallic rods. They also pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together with his head facing down,” she said The alleged torture was said to have left Mr Onyango permanently scarred, and bitterly antiBritish. “That was the time we realised that the British were actually not friends but, instead, enemies,” Mrs Onyango said. “My husband had worked so diligently for them, only to be arrested and detained.”

Churchill was Prime Minister when the Kenyan insurgency broke out and he ordered British troops to Kenya to put down the revolt. Here are some other stories of British treatment of Kenyan insurgents in this period.

The British colonial authorities began a sustained campaign to quell the Mau Mau uprising, establishing numerous detention camps that some historians describe as “Kenya’s Gulag”, where inmates were frequently abused. “There was torture in Kenya during the Mau Mau emergency, institutional and systematic, and also casual and haphazard,” Professor Anderson writes in Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (2005). “Violence . . . was intrinsic to the system, and the use of force to compel obedience was sanctioned at the highest level.”

At the height of the rebellion, an estimated 71,000 Kenyans were held in prison camps. The vast majority were never convicted. Letters smuggled out of the camps complained of systematic brutality by warders and guards. According to the Harvard historian Caroline Elkins, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her exposé of British atrocities during the Mau Mau uprising, there were reports of sexual violence and mutilation using “castration pliers”. “This was an instrument devised to crush the men’s testicles,” she writes in Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (2005). “Other detainees also described castration pliers, along with other methods of beating and mutilating men’s testicles.”

Several hundred letters from camp inmates survive in the Kenyan National Archives, “chronicling camp conditions, forced labour, torture, starvation and murder”, according to Ms Elkins. One white policeman, Duncan McPherson, told Barbara Castle, the former MP, that conditions in some detention camps were “worse, far worse, than anything I experienced in my 4½ years as a prisoner of the Japanese”.

So where did Obama get this story that Churchill didn't torture? Mickey Kaus links to speculation that the story came from Andrew Sullivan who had been touting the contrast between Dick Cheney and Winston Churchill on torture. Marc Ambinder confirms with the White House that Obama does read Sullivan's blog and that the story came from him. Kaus concludes,

Scariest thing I've heard about Obama: He reads Andrew Sullivan's blog.

Will Obama admit his mistake and risk offending the British even more than when he sent back the bust of Winston Churchill? Don't count on it.

Get ready to pay back some of that Obama tax credit

The Associated Press reminds taxpayers that the credit that they just received of about $33 a month will be subject to withholding taxes that they might have to cough up next April 15.

Millions of Americans enjoying their small windfall from President Barack Obama's "Making Work Pay" tax credit are in for an unpleasant surprise next spring.

The government is going to want some of that money back.

The tax credit is supposed to provide up to $400 to individuals and $800 to married couples as part of the massive economic recovery package enacted in February. Most workers started receiving the credit through small increases in their paychecks in the past month.

But new tax withholding tables issued by the IRS could cause millions of taxpayers to get hundreds of dollars more than they are entitled to under the credit, money that will have to be repaid at tax time.

At-risk taxpayers include a broad swath of the public: married couples in which both spouses work; workers with more than one job; retirees who have federal income taxes withheld from their pension payments and Social Security recipients with jobs that provide taxable income.

The Internal Revenue Service acknowledges problems with the withholding tables but has done little to warn average taxpayers.

Hmmm, I wonder why the Obama administration isn't concerned about getting this message out to taxpayers. It would rather interfere with his whole victory lap he's been running touting this as one of his main achievements in his first 100 days.

A bit of good news for the GOP

One of the absolutely worst Republican senators, Kentucky's Jim Bunning, is reportedly giving up his doomed pursuit of reelection.

Kentucky Sen. Jim Bunning, the most endangered Republican up for reelection in 2010, appears headed for retirement after giving his leading GOP rival the blessing to prepare to run for his seat next year.

Bunning’s retirement would be a huge victory for national Republicans who have grown increasingly nervous that the 77-year-old two-term senator would lose a critical race as the party tries to cling to its diminished minority in the Senate.

Republicans are breathing a sigh of relief. The guy was a walking gaffe machine who makes Joe Biden look like a mental giant. All he seemed to have going for him were his glory days from baseball. This was the guy who publicly mused about Justice Ginsburg's imminent death and who described a former Democratic opponent as resembling Saddam Hussein's sons and as limp-wristed. The Republicans now don't have to worry about divisive primaries in Pennsylvania and Kentucky and can save campaign cash that they might have had to spend to help awful incumbents win primary fights. Bye bye Bunning.

Expired campaign promises

Just in case you needed a handy list, Jim Geraghty puts up a list of 18 campaign promises that President Obama has already broken in his first 100 days. As Geraghty keeps reminding us, all of Obama's promises come with an expiration date, all of them. So consider this a list of 18 broken promises as just a start on the list.

Justice Souter to retire

Apparently, Justice Souter is set to retire. Although he's younger than some of the more liberal members of the Court like Stevens and Ginsburg, he has reportedly never liked living in Washington, D.C. and wants to return to New Hampshire.

As Nina Totenberg reports, this won't likely change the ideological makeup of the Court, but will give President Obama the opportunity to appoint a woman and start trying to add his influence to the Court.

Possible nominees who have been mentioned as being on a theoretical short list include Elena Kagan, the current solicitor general who represents the government before the Supreme Court; Sonia Sotomayor, a Hispanic judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit; and Diane Wood, a federal judge in Chicago who taught at the University of Chicago at the same time future President Barack Obama was teaching constitutional law there.

Conservative Ed Whelan is not enthusiastic of any of those choices.

Or Second Circuit judge Sonia Sotomayor, whose shenanigans in trying to bury the firefighters’ claims in Ricci v. DeStefano triggered an extraordinary dissent by fellow Clinton appointee José Cabranes (and the Supreme Court’s pending review of the ruling). Or Elena Kagan, who led the law schools’ opposition to military recruitment on their campuses, who used remarkably extreme rhetoric—“a profound wrong” and “a moral injustice of the first order”—to condemn the federal law on gays in the military that was approved in 1993 by a Democratic-controlled Congress and signed into law by President Clinton, and who received 31 votes against her confirmation as Solicitor General. Or Seventh Circuit judge Diane Wood, a fervent activist whose extreme opinions in an abortion case managed to elicit successive 8-1 and 9-0 slapdowns by the Supreme Court.

Well, that is what winning elections gets you. Conservatives may criticize, but with 60 votes, Obama will get his nominee through. And there are enough Republicans who are honorably opposed to using the filibuster against judicial nominees even when the president is a Democrat. William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection posits a scenario whereby Specter's defection will actually give the Republicans the power to block a nominee in the committee. It's an intriguing possibility, but don't bet on it. The majority party needs the vote of one minority member to move a nominee out of committee. Don't rest your hopes on Lindsay Graham. This will be the first of probably two or three nominees that Obama will have and the Republicans won't be able to stop them any more than the Democrats could stop Roberts or Alito, or even Thomas, from taking their seats on the Court.

All is not happy in Reidland

The Hill reports that many senior Democratic senators are not happy with their leader, Harry Reid, for the deal he cut with Arlen Specter allowing Specter to maintain his seniority as he crosses the aisle. They don't want the 79-year old senator to jump the queue ahead of them when it comes to getting a possible chairmanship of a committee or subcommittee. This could theoretically be problematic if Senator Inouye, chairman of the all-powerful Appropriations committee were to step down and the next most senior senator, Pat Leahy, took his place. That would make Specter the most senior member of the Senate Judiciary committee. Do you think that Democrats want the guy who helped put Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Sam Alito on the Supreme Court chairing the committee as it considers President Obama's nominees. No way that that would happen. The nutroots' heads would collectively explode in one gooey, furious mess.

Meanwhile, there is the more arcane concern of who is ahead of whom in seniority on the committees. If Reid's deal holds up, there are going to be some very unhappy campers in Reidland.

“I won’t be happy if I don’t get to chair something because of Arlen Specter,” said Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), who sits on the Appropriations Committee with Specter and is fifth in seniority among Democrats, behind Chairman Daniel Inouye (Hawaii) and Sens. Robert Byrd (W.Va.), Patrick Leahy (Vt.) and Tom Harkin (Iowa). “I’m happy with the Democratic order, but I don’t want to be displaced because of Arlen Specter,” she said.

Specter’s first full day in Washington after turning the Capitol upside down with his decision to switch parties suggested a lonely future awaits in the upper chamber.

While he received a formal welcome Wednesday to the Democratic Party at the White House from President Obama and Vice President Biden, senior Senate Democrats exchanged phone calls to voice their objections to Reid’s gambit and one lawmaker said Specter should be happy with a committee seat at the “end of the dais.”

How ironically poetic it would be if Specter has to go to the back of the bus with his fellow Democrats because Reid's deal won't hold up.

One senior Democratic lawmaker told The Hill that the Democratic Conference will vote against giving the longtime Pennsylvania Republican seniority over lawmakers like Harkin, Mikulski and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) when they hold their organizational meeting after the 2010 election.

Under his deal with Reid, Specter would jump ahead of all but a few Democrats when it comes time to dole out committee chairmanships and assignments.

“That’s his deal and not the caucus’s,” the senior lawmaker said of Reid’s agreement with Specter.

The lawmaker requested anonymity because the issue of Specter’s seniority is “a sensitive subject.” The lawmaker said it would be OK if Specter joined his panel as long as he “sat at the end of the dais” with junior members.

There is no way that Harry Reid is going to force senior Democrats to step aside for Arlen Specter. The caucus won't support that. Having that 60th vote is all well and good, but we're talking about their senatorial prerogatives and that trumps everything in the senatorial mind. So Reid will have to do some artful finagling.

Reid told reporters Tuesday that Specter, who plans to change his party registration to Democrat in May, would not bump any Democrats from plum committee posts this year or next. But Reid said Specter could invoke his seniority at the start of the 112th Congress.

“Of course, in a year and a half, at the start of every Congress, it’s a new game and Sen. Specter has seniority over a number of people on committees he wants to serve on,” Reid said.

An immediate question facing Democratic leaders is what to do with his current committee assignments.

By switching parties, Specter has given up his Republican-assigned seats on the Appropriations, Environment and Public Works, Judiciary and Veterans’ Affairs committees.

To claim a seat on the Democratic side, Specter would have to bump a sitting Democrat or get one to give up the slot....

Some Democratic senators want only to count Specter’s time in the Democratic Party toward his seniority in the caucus. That would place him behind Sens. Roland Burris (D-Ill.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Michael Bennet (D-Colo.).

Specter would still be more senior than Al Franken, who is expected to be seated as Minnesota’s junior senator later this year.

Most probably the Democrats will push through some rule change to add more members to committees rather than pushing someone off. The only question is whether the Republicans get a matching member. With the high-handedness that the Democrats have shown in leadership, an example of which would be putting the health care plan in the reconciliation process so they could bypass filibuster rules, it would not be a surprise to see them just add a Democratic seat without adding a matching Republican one. Republicans would probably do the same thing if they were in the same position.

And how sublime an outcome it would be to see Specter slide down the seniority scale so he is behind Senator Burris. The fruits of his switch would be lame indeed. Especially if a real Democrat defeats him in the primary.

It all evokes one of my favorite lines from A Man for All Seasons as Sir Thomas More confronts the traitorous underling who perjures himself to testify against More in order to get a minor position in Wales.

Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world... but for Wales?

Why, Arlen, it profits a man nothing to give up yis party for the Democratic primary...but for the junior seat on the Environment and Public Works committee?