Community organizing for me but not for thee...

Mickey Kaus asks the question I was wondering about.

If an "astroturfing" campaign gets real people to show up at events stating their real views, isn't it ... community organizing? ...

Jonah Goldberg scoffs at Nancy Pelosi's accusation that those showing up at townhalls are being sent there as part of an astroturf campaign by the health insurance industry and they're showing up with swastikas.

Now this is a pas de trois of dishonesty, slander, and idiocy. Not only is Pelosi lying when she says protesters are bringing swastikas to these town halls, not only is she suggesting that American citizens are Nazis for having the effrontery to get in the way of Obamacare, but she’s also saying that the alleged swastikas are obvious proof that these protests are manufactured by slick P.R. gurus.

How does that work? What public-relations genius says: “Okay, we need these protests to seem like an authentic backlash of real Americans. Make sure everyone has enough Nazi paraphernalia!”

But that is the type of idiotic thinking underlying the Democrats' faux outrage over people expressing their anger at Obamacare.

It’s difficult for mere mortals like us to fully grasp the enormousness of the Democrats’ hypocrisy. Put aside all that talk of dissent being the highest form of patriotism. Overlook that Democrats would have upended jerry cans of gasoline and immolated themselves in protest if the Bush administration had asked people to inform on their neighbors. You can even forget that the DNC’s claims are untrue.

But how can we ignore the fact that the world’s most famous community organizer is whining about community organizing?

But wait: It gets better. As of this writing, the entire BarackObama.com site was dedicated to “Organizing for America,” with a special page dedicated to “Organizing for Health Care,” where supporters are asked to flood town halls and “make certain your members of Congress know that you’re counting on them to act.”

They only thing they left out is the instruction to leave the Brooks Brothers jackets and swastikas at home.

UPDATE: Peggy Noonan pours her thoughts over the rising tension between those going to the townhalls and the shellshocked Democrats who are unready to answer their constituents' angry protests.

What has been most unsettling is not the congressmen’s surprise but a hard new tone that emerged this week. The leftosphere and the liberal commentariat charged that the town hall meetings weren’t authentic, the crowds were ginned up by insurance companies, lobbyists and the Republican National Committee. But you can’t get people to leave their homes and go to a meeting with a congressman (of all people) unless they are engaged to the point of passion. And what tends to agitate people most is the idea of loss—loss of money hard earned, loss of autonomy, loss of the few things that work in a great sweeping away of those that don’t.

People are not automatons. They show up only if they care.

What the town-hall meetings represent is a feeling of rebellion, an uprising against change they do not believe in. And the Democratic response has been stunningly crude and aggressive. It has been to attack. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the United States House of Representatives, accused the people at the meetings of “carrying swastikas and symbols like that.” (Apparently one protester held a hand-lettered sign with a “no” slash over a swastika.) But they are not Nazis, they’re Americans. Some of them looked like they’d actually spent some time fighting Nazis.

Then came the Democratic Party charge that the people at the meetings were suspiciously well-dressed, in jackets and ties from Brooks Brothers. They must be Republican rent-a-mobs. Sen. Barbara Boxer said on MSNBC’s “Hardball” that people are “storming these town hall meetings,” that they were “well dressed”, that “this is all organized,” “all planned,” to “hurt our president.” Here she was projecting. For normal people, it’s not all about Barack Obama.

She recommends that the Democrats back off and wait until later to push for their vision of health care. Well, that won't happen, because for them, it's all about Obama. And he wants it. And they realize that the problems passing their sort of bill will only rise once it gets caught up in reelection campaigns next year. And there is always the chance that the Democrats could lose their filibuster-proof control of the Senate. That's why they have the need for speed. But after they pushed through the unimpressive stimulus, the rest of the budget, and cap and trade in the House, people just aren't going to roll over for them to mess around with health care.

And Rich Lowry weighs in (and he even borrows my line).

Like Richard Nixon, Barack Obama wants to govern on the strength of a silent majority, although with a twist. Obama wants the majority that opposes or questions his policies to stay silent.

Obama’s White House and its allies have unleashed a barrage of criticism and condescension at people daring to show up at town-hall meetings and ask their elected representatives pointed questions. “Fired up and ready to go!” apparently works only one way. If engaged citizens shower Obama with adoration at stage-managed rallies, they are the very stuff of American democracy. If they boo their congressman, they are a scandalous eruption of fake or hateful sentiment.

The Democratic National Committee has called the hostile questioners and protesters at town halls a “mob.” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said that they represent “manufactured anger” ginned up by nefarious corporate interests, and referred to them as “the Brooks Brothers brigade.” California Sen. Barbara Boxer, too, took offense at the untoward lack of shabby dress, noting with disapproval that the protesters are “well-dressed.” It’s the attack of the haut polloi.

All of these Obama mouthpieces must forget that the president once was a community organizer. As a young man in Chicago, he got people to meetings and primed them with questions to ask city officials. By the Gibbs standard, when Obama prodded his community activists to get the Chicago Housing Authority to remove asbestos from a public-housing complex in the 1980s, it was contemptible “manufactured” outrage.

Conservative groups are publicizing the times and locations of town-hall meetings on the Internet. They are calling and e-mailing people on their membership lists and urging them to make their voices heard. No one prior to the troubled career of Obamacare thought town-hall meetings should be closely held secrets, or considered basic block-and-tackle political organizing as out of bounds.

Obama once extolled such organizing as one of the marvels of American democracy. The same DNC operative who attacked the “angry mobs of a small number of rabid right-wing extremists” ran a union-funded group in 2005 opposing Pres. George W. Bush’s Social Security reform. It organized protests and town-hall meetings, and ran TV ads. But never mind — it’s activism for me, not for thee.

Attacking angry constituents coming out to town halls is a miserable strategy. Hiding from your constituents will not play well in a reelection bid. Better to engage and explain why Obamacare is better than the status quo and why the fears of the protesters are exaggerated. But they can't seem to do that, can they? And the majority is not remaining silent.

Now, that's a cool tank

Israel unveils its new tank.

The IDF Ground Forces Command has declared the Trophy anti-tank missile defense system operational, following a series of tests last week that surpassed expectations for the system's capabilities, it was revealed on Thursday.

The Trophy system, developed by Rafael, creates a hemispheric protected zone around armored vehicles such as the Merkava tank, which operated prominently in Lebanon. The system is designed to detect and track a threat and counter it with a launched projectile that intercepts the anti-tank missile.

The test was held last week in an IDF base in the South. The system was installed on old tanks and was tested in two positions - static and in motion. According to defense officials, it succeeded in intercepting all of the enemy anti-tank missiles.

....While the Trophy will be installed on tanks, the IDF recently announced plans to equip the Namer armored personnel carrier with the Iron Fist missile defense system, developed by Israel Military Industries.

The Iron Fist consists of a radar and passive optical system that detect incoming threats and destroy them by using a combustible blast interceptor within a fraction of a second. Unlike the Trophy, which fires off a large number of projectiles, the Iron Fist intercepts incoming threats by using a rocket in the shape of a mortar, which destroys the threat by using a blast effect that crushes its soft components or deflects the missile or kinetic rod in flight.

Ah, Israeli engineering.

Obamacare 10 years down the road

The CBO has given us a look at what the costs of Obama care would be in the out years, ten years on. And it is not a pretty picture.

In a July 26 letter, CBO director Douglas Elmendorf notes that the net costs of new spending will increase at more than 8% per year between 2019 and 2029, while new revenue would only grow at about 5%. “In sum,” he writes, “relative to current law, the proposal would probably generate substantial increases in federal budget deficits during the decade beyond the current 10-year budget window.” (The House bill has changed somewhat in the meantime, but not enough to alter these numbers much.)

Look at the table and you'll see that it would be a deep mistake to believe the rhetoric about how the Democrats' plan would do anything to lower health care costs.

Of course, entitlements passed by Congress never cost what originally predicted.

As for the spending, when has a new entitlement ever come in under budget? True, the 2003 prescription drug benefit has, but those surprise savings derived from the private insurance design and competition that Democrats opposed and now want to kill. The better model for ObamaCare is the original estimate for Medicare spending when it was passed in 1965, and what has happened since.

That year, Congressional actuaries (CBO wasn’t around then) expected Medicare to cost $3.1 billion in 1970. In 1969, that estimate was pushed to $5 billion, and it really came in at $6.8 billion. House Ways and Means analysts estimated in 1967 that Medicare would cost $12 billion in 1990. They were off by a factor of 10—actual spending was $110 billion—even as its benefits coverage failed to keep pace with standards in the private market. Medicare spending in the first nine months of this fiscal year is $314 billion and growing by 10%. Some of this historical error is due to 1970s-era inflation, as well as advancements in care and technology. But Democrats also clearly underestimated—or lowballed—the public’s appetite for “free” health care.

ObamaCare’s deficit hole will eventually have to be filled one way or another—along with Medicare’s unfunded liability of some $37 trillion. That means either reaching ever-deeper into middle-class pockets with taxes, probably with a European-style value-added tax that will depress economic growth. Or with the very restrictions on care and reimbursement that have been imposed on Medicare itself as costs exploded.

And at that point there will be only two choices: cutting benefits or raising taxes. And raising taxes only on millionaires won't be enough. Of course, by then, Obama will be out of office. Ten years on, everyone will be paying for what is being sold to us as a program that will actually save money.

Yeah, that's a likely a story. No wonder people aren't eager to buy it.

Teacher unions out for themselves

If you ever doubted that teachers unions were interested mainly in protecting teacher salaries rather than what was best for the students, you should read these two examples of how the unions are trying to block worthy programs just because they are more concerned about their own paychecks.

KIPP schools are successful charter schools that have found out that one sure way to help students achieve is to increase the time they spend in the classroom. That, of course, necessitates having teachers who are willing to spend more time teaching those students. And KIPP schools do pay their teachers higher salaries to compensate for that added time. But that is not enough for one KIPP school in Baltimore.

However, Maryland’s charter law requires teachers to be part of the union. And the Baltimore Teachers Union is demanding that the charter school pay its teachers 33% more than other city teachers, an amount that the school says it can’t afford. Ujima Village teachers are already paid 18% above the union salary scale, reflecting the extra hours they work. To meet the union demands, the school recently told the Baltimore Sun that it has staggered staff starting times, shortened the school day, canceled Saturday classes and laid off staffers who worked with struggling students. For teachers unions, this outcome is a victory; how it affects the quality of public education in Baltimore is beside the point.

Why not give the charter schools the option of waiving the union membership requirement. See how many teachers would be willing to trade improved working conditions with an administration dedicated to facilitating learning and students who are trained to come to school ready to learn rather than to misbehave. If it's such a bad working environment, we won't see applicants lined up for the jobs. But instead, the union prefers to crush the opportunity for these students by blocking the efforts of willing teachers to spend more time with their students. It reminds me of a friend who once taught in Massachusetts and told of being warned against tutoring students after or before school by the union representative who didn't want any teacher to work more hours than any other.

And then in New York, parents have banded together to raise money to hire teaching assistants whose jobs were cut by government shortfalls. But that doesn't please the union.

Meanwhile, in New York City, some public schools have raised money from parents to hire teaching assistants. Last year, the United Federation of Teachers filed a grievance about the hiring, and city education officials recently ordered an end to the practice. “It’s hurting our union members,” said a UFT spokesman, even though it’s helping kids and saving taxpayers money. The aides typically earned from $12 to $15 an hour. Their unionized equivalents cost as much as $23 an hour, plus benefits.

“School administrators said that hiring union members not only would cost more, but would also probably bring in people with less experience,” reported the New York Times. Many of the teaching assistants hired directly by schools had graduate degrees in education and state teaching licenses, while the typical unionized aide lacks a four-year degree.

So parents wanted to hire more qualified teaching assistants and raised the money themselves, but the union objected. Better the students go without the TA than the parents get to hire a willing and qualified person yet pay below the going wage.

Never be fooled. The unions care deeply, but like all unions, they care about their members. That's fine as long as we don't have the illusion that what they truly care about is teaching children well. The individual teachers might care, but the unions don't. And it is the unions that are funding the politicians who then pass regulations to facilitate their efforts on behalf of their members. It's one big circle of each group helping the other with the students left out of the circle except as pawns of the politicians and unions.

Clunking the car repair industry

While the government provides money for people to buy brand new cars that might be only marginally more fuel-efficient than their previous car, one industry that is getting the shaft is, as the WSJ reports, the car repair industry.

Owners of automotive repair shops say the program to help invigorate sales of new cars is succeeding at their expense.

Bill Wiygul, whose family owns four repair shops in Virginia, said he has already had five or six customers decide against repairs. A man who sits on the board of Mr. Wiygul's bank traded in his car rather than repair it. "He'd been a customer at our Reston store since it opened," Mr. Wiygul said.

....Auto dealers who offer the rebates on new cars in exchange for clunkers must agree to "kill" the old models by disabling the engines and shipping the dead vehicle to a junkyard.

The loss of such potential work -- as many as 250,000 vehicles will be destroyed in the program's first round -- prompted Mr. Wiygul to question the federal program's focus on dealers and big business at the expense of the little guy.

"How do we get on the special interests, special treatment bandwagon? How much is it going to cost me and to whom shall I send the check?" he said. "Who picks the winners in this game 'cause obviously the game is fixed."

...."This package will hurt mechanical repairs without question. You are taking older vehicles that are still fine to use and removing them," said Robert Redding Jr., the Automotive Service Association's Washington representative. "If you're taking hundreds of thousands of vehicles that you normally service off the road with no consideration, it hurts people."

But it is more important to have the illusion of doing something for the environment. Who cares about the economic effects on the thousands of repair shops and used car dealers? Or the less affluent people who can't afford to buy the pricey new car, but would perhaps be able to buy a used car and will now see the prices of used cars climbed as the supply is destroyed by government fiat.

How health care should be reformed

Arthur Laffer wrote yesterday about how the Democrats and Obama are misdiagnosing the problem with our health care model. One reason, other than the development of new medical technology and treatments, is that most people are not directly responsible for their medical payments. A third party, either the government for Medicare or our insurance agency, is the one footing the bills.

The health-care wedge is an economic term that reflects the difference between what health-care costs the specific provider and what the patient actually pays. When health care is subsidized, no one should be surprised that people demand more of it and that the costs to produce it increase. Mr. Obama’s health-care plan does nothing to address the gap between the price paid and the price received. Instead, it’s like a negative tax: Costs rise and people demand more than they need.

o pay for the subsidy that the administration and Congress propose, revenues have to come from somewhere. The Obama team has come to the conclusion that we should tax small businesses, large employers and the rich. That won’t work because the health-care recipients will lose their jobs as businesses can no longer afford their employees and the wealthy flee.

The bottom line is that when the government spends money on health care, the patient does not. The patient is then separated from the transaction in the sense that costs are no longer his concern. And when the patient doesn’t care about costs, only those who want higher costs—like doctors and drug companies—care.

Sure why not? Someone else is paying for it. So costs continue to rise. Imagine if someone else were paying your energy bill. Would you not tend to lower your air conditioning, take longer hot showers, and leave more lights on?

Laffer proposes that, if we want to lower medical expenses, we focus more on giving patients more control over their own medical expenses.

Rather than expanding the role of government in the health-care market, Congress should implement a patient-centered approach to health-care reform. A patient-centered approach focuses on the patient-doctor relationship and empowers the patient and the doctor to make effective and economical choices.

A patient-centered health-care reform begins with individual ownership of insurance policies and leverages Health Savings Accounts, a low-premium, high-deductible alternative to traditional insurance that includes a tax-advantaged savings account. It allows people to purchase insurance policies across state lines and reduces the number of mandated benefits insurers are required to cover. It reallocates the majority of Medicaid spending into a simple voucher for low-income individuals to purchase their own insurance. And it reduces the cost of medical procedures by reforming tort liability laws.

By empowering patients and doctors to manage health-care decisions, a patient-centered health-care reform will control costs, improve health outcomes, and improve the overall efficiency of the health-care system.

Since the Democrats are misdiagnosing the problem, their solution will only exacerbate our problems. Better to increase, rather than decrease, individual's control over their medical expenses.

Stifling medical creativity

Michael Barone's column today argues that the Obama administration is stifling the creativity and innovation of American military and medical industries that the rest of the world has been free riding off of.

We also may be at risk of squandering our high-tech advantage in medicine. As Scott Atlas of the Hoover Institution points out, the top five American hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in all other developed countries. America has outpointed all other countries combined in Nobel Prizes for medical and physiology since 1970.

American theoretical health research financed by the National Institutes of Health and by American market-oriented pharmaceutical companies outshines the rest of the world combined. And the rest of the world tends to get the benefits at cut rates. American taxpayers finance NIH, which reports results publicly to the whole world.

Pharmaceutical companies that produce benefits for patients and consumers get the profits that support their research disproportionately from Americans, because other countries refuse to spend much more than the cost of producing pills, which is trivial next to the huge cost of research and regulatory approval. Getting these free riders to pay more is, again, Sisyphus's work.

The Democratic health care bills threaten to undermine innovation in pharmaceuticals and medical technologies by sending those with private insurance into a government insurance plan that would be in a position to ration treatment and delay or squelch innovation. The danger is that we will freeze medicine in place and no longer be the nation that produces innovations that do so much for us and the rest of the world.

We are quick to grow irritated with the imperfections of our health care system and with the inefficiencies inevitable (because there is just one buyer) in military procurement. But our grouchiness should not allow us to lose sight of the wondrous American ingenuity and creativity of the American military and American medicine.

The mythology of Cash for Clunkers

David Harsyani dissects some of the arguments that are being put forth about the supposed success of the Cash for Clunkers program.

Then again, in Washington, a place where elected officials are astonished -- astonished! -- when a program doling out free cash is popular, success often translates into higher costs and fewer results.

Now, some of you radicals may have an ideological dilemma with a government handing out thousands of dollars to citizens making an average of $57,000 a year so they can upgrade their perfectly serviceable vehicles.
Turns out, though, that by nearly any criterion, including the ones offered up by President Barack Obama, this populist experiment is an unmitigated fiasco.

To begin with, building a new car consumes energy. It is estimated that 6.7 tons of carbon are emitted in the process. So a driver who participates in the "cash for clunkers" program would need to make up for that wickedness. There are about 250 million registered vehicles in the United States. Only a micro-slither of those cars will be traded in -- and a slither of that number could be deemed "clunkers" outside the Beltway.

A survey of car dealerships found a relatively small differential in fuel efficiency between cars traded in and those replacing them. A Reuters analysis concluded -- even with the extended program in place -- "cash for clunkers" would trim U.S. oil consumption by only a quarter of 1 percent.

As an economic stimulus, the plan is equally impotent. As James Pethokoukis, a columnist at Reuters, succinctly explained, "The program gets much of its juice via stealing car sales from the near future rather than generating additional demand."

The point of a stimulus should be to create new demand, not to move existing demand around to score political points. Then again, for this administration, economic recovery always takes a back seat to moral recovery.

Of course, these days, spending a couple of billion on this program is such a minute drop in the bucket of government spending that we hardly even blink at increasing the spending 200%. That's the real clunker.

Astroturf for me, but not for thee

I think that the Democrats are making a big mistake by demonizing people coming out to townhalls to protest against the Democrats' health care proposals. Robert Gibbs thinks that some of the emotion out there is being manufactured by the "Brooks Brothers Brigade." Apparently, Barbara Boxer is possessed of similar amazing powers of mind-reading because she knows that people sincerely opposed to the Democrats's plan wouldn't be well-dressed. If they were wearing T-shirts, would that make them sincere? Memo to astroturfers out there: be sure to tell your minions to dress down for the townhalls.

But what if people did come out to these meetings because they were being "astroturfed" by conservative groups or groups allied with the health insurance industry? What would be so illegitimate about that? Liberals have used similar techniques for their issues. What do you think a community organizer does? The whole idea of organizing a community is to energize and assist people to use their numbers and voices to achieve their goals.

And, by the way, the Democrats and their liberal allies are using those same supposedly despised astroturf techniques against members of their own party who are feared to be wavering on the leadership's health care plans. As the WSJ reports,

The news is how the political left and its lobbies are roughing up fellow Democrats who won’t get with President Obama’s government-run program. They’re treating the centrists who helped make them a majority as if they were Newt Gingrich without the social conscience.

On Friday, Democracy for America and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee put out a “rapid-response ad” against Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson, who is lukewarm about a government-run insurance scheme, the so-called public option. “Will Sen. Nelson choose the insurance interests who fund his campaigns to the tune of over $2 million dollars?” the ad declares. Democracy for America calls the ad “a warning shot to any Senator who tries to block President Obama’s public health insurance option.”

Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus is another target because he’s negotiating with Republicans. The same “progressive” outfits recently ran an ad attacking Mr. Baucus for “threatening” the public option and “taking” $3.9 million “from health and insurance interests.” The Montana Democrat was also rapped for trying to scale back the cost to under $900 billion. In case Mr. Baucus didn’t get the hint, fellow Senator Tom Harkin publicly noted last week that Democrats hold a secret ballot for committee chairmen every two years. Better hire a food taster, Max.

Over in the House, the Blue Dogs have received similar treatment since they raised doubts last months about the 5.4% surtax, among other problems in the House bill. The DNC immediately targeted the districts of 12 Democratic Members of Henry Waxman’s Energy and Commerce Committee with a “‘It’s time for reform” television ad. MoveOn.org also called out its troops to pressure Blue Dog Democrats not to miss “a once-in-a-generation chance to pass real health care reform.” The pressure seems to have worked because enough Blue Dogs fell in line to pass the bill with only token changes through committee last week.

....Even the Democratic National Committee is trashing Democrats, presumably with a green light from Mr. Obama and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Mr. Obama’s political arm, Organizing for America, which is officially a wing of the DNC, is running ads to press Democratic Senators in Arkansas, Indiana, Florida, Louisiana, North Dakota, Nebraska and Ohio. The outfit has also staged demonstrations outside Senator Bill Nelson’s Florida offices. The campaign is heavy-handed enough that even Majority Leader Harry Reid denounced it as “a waste of money.”

Many of these supposed Blue Dogs are Democrats who won in Republican-leaning districts by running as centrists and fiscal conservatives. What is going to happen to those Democrats in 2010 if they vote against the wishes of their constituents to fall in line for Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid?

If there’s a voter backlash in 2010, these Members will also be the first to be washed out to sea. Yet it’s becoming clearer by the day that Democratic leaders view these moderates as mere cannon-fodder footsoldiers in the great liberal revolution of 2009. And if you have to shoot a couple of them yourself to keep them all marching straight, so be it.

For a party that argued that we should get out of Iraq because that is what polls were telling us that the people wanted, they seem ready to ignore polls that are telling them that people don't want health care reform if it is going to expand the deficit or that people just don't support the Democrats' health care plans.

Marc Ambinder, not a member of any right-wing cabal, acknowledges that both sides use astroturf to generate political movement for programs they support or oppose. And he argues that astroturfing works only when there is legitimate anger or feeling to motivate people to come out in their free time to express that anger. If people aren't upset, they won't show up for an August meeting.

Democrats were able to defeat President Bush on Social Security because they found a way to capitalize on inherent skepticism about forcing that cherished institution to change. Make no mistake, the effort to defeat Social Security reform won because of a mix of organic anxiety, inorganic organizing, focus grouped-messaging and wealthy people and interests writing large checks. Today, we're at a similar juncture, except for the fact that the wealthy, organized/organic/inorganic protesters are on the other side of an issue. Democrats may have used different tactics -- protesting outside of places as opposed to inside of them -- but that's not terribly germane. It's true that health care reform in general is more popular than Social Security reform was, but that fact is not mutually exclusive with the fact that, because Democrats have to get to 60 votes in the Senate, there are meaningful and relevant anxieties too. The point is that, in terms of enthusiasm, on health care the right is capitalizing on a weak "pro" side and actual anxiety in the same way that the left capitalized on an weak "pro" side and actual anxiety on Social Security. Even if you think that the Dems have the right policy on both issues, the strategic analogy is, I think, valid. Social Security privatization failed because it was not popular, because Democrats out-gamed Republicans, and the because the Bush administration failed to find an effective argument that outgamed the gamers. And for a few other reasons too.

Astroturfing strikes us -- and me -- as dishonest because it masks real motivations, like the desire of industries to maintain the status quo. It allows powerful interests to magnify their voices at the expense of those without a megaphone. Be skeptical of Astrotufing. Totally. But technological change has very quickly shrunk the blade of grass, because it's much less expensive and much easier to start and sustain a movement. Sometimes, as in the case of health care, both sides Astroturf. What begats success? The Astroturfing? Or the underlying anxieties? I'll posit that Astroturfing tends to fail when there is nothing to sustain it, and it has a better chance of succeeding when the opposition can't figure out how to Astroturf their way into the same enthusiasm channel.

If Democrats are going to knock people who are sincerely angry by pooh-poohing their anger as being manufactured or are really just Birthers, they're going to risk ticking off a lot of people even more than they are already ticked. Nothing could be more irritating is being told that you don't feel what you dang well know that you feel.

Promises they can't and, therefore, won't keep

John Stossel looks at the impossible promises that the Democrats are making in their health care proposals. They are promising to lower costs and expand coverage. How can we cover more people and not have higher costs? It just doesn't pass a simple test of logic.

Such "reform" must increase the demand for medical services. That will lead to higher prices. Obama tells us that reform will lower costs. But how do you control costs while boosting demand?

The reformers make vague promises about covering the increased demand by cutting other costs. We should know by now that such promises aren't worth a wooden nickel. The savings never materialize.

Some of the savings are supposed to come from Medicare. The Times reports "Lawmakers also agree on proposals to squeeze hundreds of billions of dollars out of Medicare by reducing the growth of payments to hospitals and many other health care providers."

The Democrats are promising the squeeze the costs from Medicare coverage. But we know that that won't happen because seniors will protest and politicians will respond. Remember back to 1989 when senior citizens beat on Dan Rostenkowski's car?

Assume Medicare reimbursements are cut. When retirees begin to feel the effects, AARP will scream bloody murder. The elderly vote in large numbers, and their powerful lobbyists will be listened to.

The government will then give up that strategy and turn to what the Reagan administration called "revenue enhancement": higher taxes on the "rich." When that fails, because there aren't enough rich to soak, the politicians will soak the middle class. When that fails, they will turn to more borrowing. The Fed will print more money, and we'll have more inflation. Everyone will be poorer.

The Times story adds: "They are committed to rewarding high-quality care, by paying for the value, rather than the volume, of [Medicare] services."

So when the seniors protest and the politicians cave, all that will be left are taxes. As James Pethokoukis outlines, there are quite a few reasons (he has five) why Obama will have to raise taxes. The budget math doesn't work and Obama and those surrounding him have already shown their predilection for raising taxes.

I just don't understand what they mean by "value" rather than "volume." They can't mean only reimbursing for treatments that succeed. The only thing they can mean is that they will only reimburse for treatments that have a significant chance of success. But how about a patient and doctor who are willing to take a chance on a treatment that might have only a 5% chance of working. Picture yourself in the doctor's office with your child and being told that things are hopeless except for one medicine that has only worked with 5% of patients. Wouldn't you want that for your child? Your spouse? Your father? Yourself? Of course, you'd take that chance. But is that "value"?

That is why, as Stossel writes, it is wrong to talk about extending a Medicare-like program to everyone.

Listening to the health-care debate, I hear Republicans and Democrats saying it's wrong to deny anyone anything. That head-in-the-sand attitude is why Medicare has a $36-trillion unfunded liability. It's not sustainable -- and they know it.

They've given us a system that now can be saved only if bureaucrats limit coverage by second-guessing retirees' decisions. Government will decide which Medicare services have value and which do not. Retirees may have a different opinion.

One may be willing to give up the last year of life if he's in pain and has little hope for recovery. Another may want to fight to the end. But when taxpayers pay, the state will make one choice for all retirees.

Now, to reduce the financial burden of the medical system, Obama proposes a plan that inevitably will extend the second-guessing to the rest of us. So much for his promise not to interfere with our medical decisions.

No wonder that Democrats are wary about explaining all this at townhalls. Deep down, they know they are making promises they can't keep and that they'll get caught on.

I'll be busy at my workshop today in Boston. Yesterday we had a great time looking at some classics of American art and then having a walking tour of public monuments in Boston.

This workshop is part of an NEH grant to send out 20 large and high-quality two-sided posters of American art that NEH offered totally free to any teacher or school that filled out a short application. You can see the artwork here.

What struck me as funny was the comment made from the guy in charge of education programs at NEH who spoke to us yesterday. He was very proud of the large response that the offer of the posters has had from schools and teachers. He said that they first just prepared a few hundred of these sets but had about 1300 requests and the requests just kept pouring in and they had to keep increasing the number of poster sets that they planned to send out. As of now, he said that they had given out 77,000 of these posters. He joked that this was the closest that the government had come to having a national curriculum.

Don't get me wrong. I was very happy to receive the set of posters and have already put up a bunch in my room and plan on putting up more later in the year. I look forward to weaving discussions of art into my history courses.

But only government workers would be surprised, albeit pleasantly surprised, that people like getting free stuff. It seemed to shock him that teachers were happy to receive these 40 prints of wonderful art without having to do anything more than fill out a short online request form. It's like Cash for Clunkers - people like getting stuff for free. It should be no surprise.

And teachers like going to free and interesting workshops that they receive a stipend for and travel expenses. So he shouldn't have been surprised that there were 2000 applicants for 100 spots in the workshop that I'm now attending. I'm surprised that there weren't more applicants and predict that they will get more applicants for future workshops. Freebies are popular.

Trading in does not necessarily save energy and help the environment

Gwen Ottinger writes today in the Washington Post to explain that trading in your clunker might "be greener."

First, even when new cars and appliances are more efficient than the ones they replace, the act of replacing them entails environmental costs not accounted for in the stimulus programs. Building a new car, washing machine or refrigerator takes energy and resources: The manufacture of steel, aluminum and plastics are energy-intensive processes, and some of the materials used in durable goods, especially plastics, use non-renewable fossil fuels as feedstocks as well as energy sources. Disposing of old products, a step required by most incentive and rebate programs, also has environmental costs: It takes additional energy to shred and recycle metals; plastic components often cannot be recycled and end up as landfill cover; and the engine fluids, refrigerants and other chemicals essential to operating products end up as hazardous wastes.

Policies that encourage purchases of energy-efficient products may also increase, rather than decrease, energy use by confusing efficiency with consumption. For example, Energy Star refrigerators, which now qualify for rebates in many states, are certified to be 10 to 20 percent more efficient than "standard" models. Yet the Energy Star rating is awarded overwhelmingly to refrigerators far larger than would have been the norm two decades ago, and smaller models of refrigerator, which use less energy simply because they have a smaller volume of air to cool, were not even included in the Energy Star program until 2002. Consumers who wish to benefit from environmentally friendly stimulus money, then, are pushed toward purchasing "efficient" but relatively large models rather than being encouraged to opt for the smallest refrigerator, with the smallest energy demands, that meets their needs.

Trashing constituents

Now that it seems clear that Democrats are going to face townhalls full of angry constituents who intensely dislike the health care plans coming out of the House, the tactic seems to be to either avoid townhalls, limit who can come, or just trash those constituents who come out.

Marc Ambinder represents the trashing the constituents approach. First there is calling them "tea baggers" as if using a crude sexual term will so denigrate their issues that those protesters will be disregarded. Ambinder believes that the Democrats' message should conquer the ugly protests.

Where Democrats have President Obama, principles, and a new argument about consumer protections, Republicans have an enthusiastic, self-contained base that is ready to work to defeat Obama's signature initiative. (On some level, this isn't _really_ about health care: it's about anxiety and anger at government, and at the Obama administration.) Democratic members are left to sell a series of principles that are popular, but which have been obscured by the focus on Washington sausage making.

Principles aren't policies. Talking in broad generalizations might appeal to Ambinder, but we're talking about specific policies rather than principles. And when you get to talking about policies, people can start comparing what is proposed to what they have now and they're not impressed. And they get angry. Yes, he's correct that there is anger at government involved with these protests, but that is due to policies taken by this administration and the previous Bush policies. And if people are angry, the congressmen need to pay attention to what their constituents are saying.

As news and videos have emerged of Democrats like Arlen Specter facing angry constituents at townhalls, some Democrats are responding by limiting their meetings. I heard that Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland has made his meeting "by invitation only." Well, that's the attitude. Is the message that the Democrats want to get across that they don't want to hear from constituents who might disagree with them? Hugh Hewitt has some suggestions of good questions to ask your representative if you get into a townhall. One good question is whether the Democrat feels confident enough in the proposal to be debated by a conservative radio host like Hewitt. I wonder if any have that confidence or at all interested in debating people who oppose the plan.

Representatives don't have to vote the way their constituents think. Edmund Burke more than two centuries ago set the standard by telling the Electors of Bristol that what he owed them was his good judgment.

Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

That is fine. However, neither Democrats nor Republicans should be voting on such an important issue that will transform 1/6 of our economy merely because that is the order they've received from their party bosses. This shouldn't be a vote based on preserving or harming Obama's presidency. An honorable representative owes his constituents his full explanation of why he is voting the way he is and why his best judgment tells him that his decision is superior to what his constituents wish. And doing so means not avoiding meetings with his constituents and not denigrating the angry ones, but persuading them as best he can.

The lessons we should be learning from California's budget woes

Robert Samuelson hopes that people will learn from the mistakes that California has made that has led it to the economic meltdown and budgetary mess it now faces. Sure there are idiosyncratic laws in California that make it hard to reach a budget agreement, but the basic problem remains: Californians want more than they can pay for and they don't like paying high taxes. So the legislature has blithely gone along increasing the budget without figuring out what to do when all the bills come due.

California's budget debacle holds a lesson for America, but one we will probably ignore. It's easy to attribute the state's protracted budget stalemate, now temporarily resolved with about $26 billion of spending cuts and accounting gimmicks, to the deep recession and California's peculiar politics. Up to a point, that's true. Representing an eighth of the U.S. economy, California has been harder hit than most states. Unemployment, now 11.6 percent (national average: 9.5 percent), could top 13 percent in 2010, says economist Eduardo Martinez of Moody's Economy.com. Meanwhile, the requirement that any tax increase muster a two-thirds vote in the legislature promotes paralysis. Democrats prefer tax hikes to spending cuts, and Republicans can block higher taxes.

All this produced the recent drama: plunging tax revenue and the state's resulting huge budget deficits; endless negotiations between Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders; the deadlock that led the state to issue scrip (in effect, IOUs) to pay bills; and a final agreement on a 2009-10 budget. But there is also a bigger story with national implications. California has reached a tipping point. Its government made more promises than its economy can easily support. For years, state leaders papered over the contradiction with loans and modest changes. By overwhelming these expedients, the recession triggered an inevitable reckoning.

Here's the national lesson. There's a collision between high and rising demands for government services and the capacity of the economy to produce the income and tax revenue to pay for those demands. That's true of California, where poor immigrants and their children have increased pressures for more government services. It's also true of the nation, where an aging population raises Social Security and Medicare spending. California is leading the transformation of politics into a form of collective torture: pay more (higher taxes), get less (lower services).

Every year, California approved new and expanded programs to provide more services for citizens whether it was mandating smaller classes or health care for immigrants. All worthy programs, but programs that must be paid for by a citizenry that opposes tax increases. How different is that from the federal government which keeps expanding programs and now, under Obama and the Democrats, we are seeing an expansion of federal spending way beyond the scope of anything we've seen before? The federal politicians want to do on a national scare what California has already shown will result in a total failure.

National parallels again seem apparent. Federal budget deficits -- reflecting the urge to spend and not tax -- predate the recession and, as baby boomers retire, will survive any recovery. Amazingly, the Obama administration would worsen the long-term outlook by expanding federal health insurance coverage. There's much mushy thinking about how we'll muddle through.

California has pioneered this sort of delusion. The presumption was that a dynamic economy would pay for expansive government. But California's relative economic performance has actually deteriorated. In the 1980s, the state's economy grew much faster than the national economy; annual growth averaged 5.1 percent vs. 3.1 percent nationally. In the present decade, the gap is smaller -- 2.9 percent versus 2.3 percent -- and much of the state's advantage reflects the unsustainable housing boom, of which California was the epicenter.

And all that remains are tax increases which is why Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner are already making noises about breaking Obama's no-tax-increase-for-the-middle-class pledge. Everyone who understood anything knew that there was no way to pay for all that Obama wanted to do by merely taxing the really wealthy or by the mythical money saved from health care reform. Now we're beginning to see hints that taxes will indeed to go up.

And if California has admonitions for us, Ross Douhat recommends that we look to Texas for another lesson on what works.

Consider Texas and California. In the Bush years, liberal polemicists turned the president’s home state — pious, lightly regulated, stingy with public services and mad for sprawl — into a symbol of everything that was barbaric about Republican America. Meanwhile, California, always liberalism’s favorite laboratory, was passing global-warming legislation, pouring billions into stem-cell research, and seemed to be negotiating its way toward universal health care.

But flash forward to the current recession, and suddenly Texas looks like a model citizen. The Lone Star kept growing well after the country had dipped into recession. Its unemployment rate and foreclosure rate are both well below the national average. It’s one of only six states that didn’t run budget deficits in 2009.

During this economic collapse we've seen how well liberal economic approaches work out in the states.

But in state capital after state capital, the downturn has highlighted the weaknesses of liberal governance — the zeal for unsustainable social spending, the preference for regulation over job creation, the heavy reliance for tax revenue on the volatile incomes of the upper upper class.

....And it also helps explain Obama’s current difficulties. The president is pushing a California-style climate-change bill at a time when businesses (and people) are fleeing the Golden State in droves. He’s pushing a health care plan that looks a lot like the system currently hemorrhaging money in Massachusetts. His ballooning deficits resemble the shortfalls paralyzing state capitals from Springfield to Sacramento.

When I cover the concept of federalism with my government classes, we talk about the advantages and disadvantages of having such a system of government. And one of the advantages is that the states can experiment and other states and the federal government can learn lessons from what works and what doesn't in individual states. So let's apply that advantage that we have in the United States and learn from the mistakes that states like California have made and then study what has worked in states like Texas that are not suffering as much from this recession.

Unfortunately, we have in power a federal government that seems bound and determined to repeat the mistakes of California and to ignore the lessons we should be learning.

What have we learned from the Cash for Clunkers program?

The first major lesson is that incentives work. This is a basic lesson of introductory economics and it's always pleasant to see that congressmen have a tenuous grasp on such concepts. Of course, they don't seem to grasp the further lesson that, if employers have to pay lots of money to give their employees health insurance but have to pay a much smaller fee if they don't insure them and let the government do it instead, those employers will shut down their insurance programs and let the federal government do it for them. That is why Obama's promise that we can keep our insurance and doctors is so fatuous. He's ignoring the role of incentives.

The WSJ is pondering what the lesson is from the Cash for Clunkers program.

The buying spree is good for the car companies, if only for the short term and for certain car models. It’s good, too, for folks who’ve been sitting on an older car or truck but weren’t sure they had the cash to trade it in for something new. Now they get a taxpayer subsidy of up to $4,500, which on some models can be 25% of the purchase price. It’s hardly surprising that Peter is willing to use a donation from his neighbor Paul, midwifed by Uncle Sugar, to class up his driveway.

On the other hand, this is crackpot economics. The subsidy won’t add to net national wealth, since it merely transfers money to one taxpayer’s pocket from someone else’s, and merely pays that taxpayer to destroy a perfectly serviceable asset in return for something he might have bought anyway. By this logic, everyone should burn the sofa and dining room set and refurnish the homestead every couple of years.

It isn’t clear this will even lead to more auto production over time, since the clunker cash may simply cause buyers to move their purchases forward. GDP will get a fillip in the third and perhaps fourth quarters, which will please the Obama Administration. But the test will be if auto sales hold up next year and into the future once the clunker checks go away. The debate over the subsidy may even have prolonged this year’s auto slump as buyers delayed their purchases waiting for the free lunch.

And then they wonder why, if this idea is so great, we don't offer cash for all sorts of things.

And since money is no object, let’s give everyone a $4,500 voucher for other consumer goods. Let’s have taxpayers subsidize the purchase of kitchen appliances, women’s clothing, the latest Big Bertha driver—our Taylor-made is certainly a clunker—and new fishing boats. These are hardly less deserving of subsidies than cars, and as long as everyone thinks we can conjure wealth out of $4,500 giveaways, let’s go all the way.

And if giving out free money for people to make their own choices is so great, how about vouchers for education? What about that District of Columbia program that the Obama administration and Democrats are eliminating?

And it isn't at all clear that this program has increased car purchases. The evidence seems, as Jeremy Anwyl writes today in the WSJ, that all we're seeing is that customers postponed their purchases waiting for the program to go into effect. We've just shifted the timing of their purchases.

First, it’s not clear that cash for clunkers actually increased sales. Edmunds.com noted recently that over 100,000 buyers put their purchases on hold waiting for the program to launch. Once consumers could start cashing in on July 24, showrooms were flooded and government servers were overwhelmed as the backlog of buyers finalized their purchases.

Secondly, on July 27, Edmunds.com published an analysis showing that in any given month 60,000 to 70,000 “clunker-like” deals happen with no government program in place. The 200,000-plus deals the government was originally prepared to fund through the program’s Nov. 1 end date were about the “natural” clunker trade-in rate.

Clearly, cash for clunkers was underfunded from the start. Consumers quickly figured that out and rushed to take advantage before funding ran out.

This sales frenzy was inevitable. We have crammed three to four months of normal activity into just a few days.

If these geniuses are so sure they know how to operate 1/6 of the economy, how come they couldn't even predict how many people would like a free $4500 to trade their car in would be able to make the delicate adjustments to figure out which drugs to approve and which patients to allow payment for their doctor's recommended surgeries if we give the government control over the health industry. And then add in their similar ambitions to figure out the whole energy industry and regulate supply and demand there. Do you have confidence in the government's ability to manage all these industries?

Michael Barone is also pondering the lessons from the Cash for Clunkers program and sees the unintended consequences from such ideas. He tells us of an earlier program built along the same lines in Arizona.

Cash for Clunkers is a prime example of the unanticipated consequences of hastily drafted legislation. The House voted hurriedly Friday to transfer $2 billion of stimulus funds to Cash for Clunkers, and the Senate will probably agree next week. But who thinks Congress will stop there? There will still be plenty of clunkers on the road.

This brings to mind a similarly well-intentioned 2000 Arizona law that paid $22,000 per vehicle to owners of cars operable with alternative fuels. SUV owners began installing small propane tanks and pocketing the money; the law didn't say they actually had to use the propane. A program estimated to cost $5 million ballooned to $500 million, one-tenth the state budget. The Arizona legislature, unable to print money, repealed the law. Congress is not similarly constrained.

He also notes that, in typical government fashion, the auto dealers have to wait for the federal government to sort out the paperwork.

Mind you, the government hasn't yet shelled out the $1 billion authorized for Cash for Clunkers. Dealers reduce the buyers' prices and have to apply to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration for the rebates and NHTSA -- surprise, surprise -- has only managed to process 23,000 of an estimated 250,000 applications. The checks, we are told, will be in the mail.

And what, asks Barone, about the unintended consequences from such policies and how do those lessons apply to the health care plans put forth by the Democrats?

If such simple laws can have such huge unanticipated consequences, what should we expect from the 1,000-plus-page laws congressional Democrats have been trying to write that would regulate the provision and financing of health care, one-sixth of our total economy?

Ballooning costs, for one thing. Not many members of Congress -- maybe not any -- have had the time or motivation to read through 1,000-page bills to figure out how someone could game the system to bring in great gushers of government money. But some nontrivial number of 307,000,000 Americans will do so. And some will figure out how to tap the federal treasury to their advantage.

More important, any health care legislation will inevitably affect medical treatment and care. Under the Democrats' bills, the government will regulate the terms and conditions of health-insurance plans to reduce choice and discourage treatments that some centralized experts decide aren't cost effective. Never mind that experts currently differ on these matters, and constantly revise their assessments based on new information; certain procedures will be frozen into place.

UPDATE: Econbrowser adds in this history analogy.

One of the more embarrassing features of the New Deal was the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, which paid farmers to slaughter livestock and plow up good crops, as if destroying useful goods could somehow make the nation wealthier. And yet here we are again, with the cash for clunkers program insisting that working vehicles must be junked to qualify for the subsidy

Econbrowser then links to Bradford Plumer of The New Republic who doubts that we're actually going to see any environmental benefits from the program.

Now, as we've noted before, the actual environmental benefits of this program may well prove modest. The fuel-economy requirements for the new car were, after all, fairly lax: You could in theory trade in a Hummer that got 14 mpg and get $3,500 toward a brand new 18 mpg SUV. That's still an upgrade (and, in fact, that trade would actually save more gas than upgrading a 30 mpg sedan to a 35 mpg vehicle), but it's a meager one. And if the upgrades are, in fact, all meager, they could end up being dwarfed by the energy required to manufacture new vehicles (particularly since dealers have to scrap the "clunkers" that get traded in—many of which are perfectly good, albeit inefficient, cars).

And, of course, any benefit would be beyond minuscule compared to what is being done in China and India. But that's a totally different question.

Off to Boston

I'm traveling to Boston today for a workshop on teaching art in American History. And, if possible, to sneak in some touring of Revolutionary War sites.

Politicizing the Justice Department

Jennifer Rubin has a must-read article about how Eric Holder has politicized the Justice Department beyond anything that was alleged against Alberto Gonzales. Of course, with the majority in both houses, there is no real effort at oversight that the Democrats will allow. And so, even though Bush's alleged politicization of the Justice Department was a major rallying cry for Obama and liberals, Holder and Obama have already made it clear that they will be using the Justice Department for political ends. Rubin has many examples and you should read the entire article, but here are some highlights.

When Holder asked the Office of Legal Counsel about the constitutionality of voting rights for the District of Columbia and they came back with an opinion that he didn't like, he then went opinion-shopping to the Solicitor General's office.

Page 2 of 2 < Back

He further pronounced,

I will work to restore the credibility of a department badly shaken by allegations of improper political interference. Law enforcement decisions and personnel actions must be untainted by partisanship. Under my stewardship, the Department of Justice will serve justice, not the fleeting interests of any political party.

While some conservatives doubted that the man who helped facilitate the Marc Rich pardon and overrode the recommendation of career attorneys to give Bill Clinton a favorable recommendation on the pardon of 16 Puerto Rican terrorists in 1999 could live up to those pretty sentiments, he was confirmed by a vote of 75-21 with the support of many Republican senators.

Holder soon cast aside his confirmation rhetoric in favor of partisan politics. The first battle occurred over the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), the elite group within the Justice Department that wrestles with difficult constitutional analysis and acts as the constitutional arbitrator for the entire administration. During his confirmation hearing Holder specifically pledged,

We don't change OLC opinions simply because a new administration takes over. The review that we would conduct would be a substantive one and reflect the best opinions of probably the best lawyers in the department as to where the law would be, what their opinions should be. It will not be a political process, it will be one based solely on our interpretation of the law.

Within weeks, however, Holder violated that pledge when the issue of voting rights for the District of Columbia emerged. It had been a longstanding position of
OLC, dating back to the Kennedy administration, that federal voting rights for the District could not constitutionally be granted by statute. This position did not sit well with the new Obama administration, or with Holder personally. After all, Holder has been a prominent figure in D.C. politics and was introduced at his confirmation hearing by a longtime friend and ally Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District's nonvoting representative and a key proponent of D.C. voting rights.

Presented with OLC's settled position, Holder opted to shop around for another opinion. He went to the solicitor general, asking a lower threshold question, namely whether the solicitor general could "defend" the Obama administration if it signed a statute granting D.C. voting rights. Clint Bolick, a veteran of the Reagan Justice Department, observes, "I don't recall [another instance] when the Department of Justice went back to get a second answer, when you have a 'do over,' when the best lawyers come up with the 'wrong answer' from a policy perspective."

Another former Justice Department attorney finds the opinion shopping "extremely out of the ordinary." "[OLC] is the last word on constitutional issues," he explains. "Holder asked the wrong question to the wrong office and got an obvious, easy answer to satisfy his political agenda."

Lamar Smith describes as "worrisome" not only the initial decision but also Holder's subsequent behavior. The attorney general rejected requests from Republican members of Congress for the documents pertaining to the decision. When Holder objected to revealing the Department's internal deliberations, Smith modified his request to ask only for the final opinion, rather than the complete legal analysis. Again, Holder refused. Smith observes, "This is an administration perfectly willing to make public the interrogation techniques [used by the CIA to extract information from terrorists] but something like legal advice they might make available--we can't get these."

Many current and former Justice Department employees are angry about the decision. One explained, "Holder in his own words called the OLC the crème de la crème of Justice. The longstanding opinion of both parties' administrations shouldn't be jettisoned to serve political ends." Another longtime Justice employee says that he "never heard of such a thing." He remarks, "That's why we have institutions--to contain the authority of any one individual."

Then there is the infamous case where the Justice Department ordered charges against members of the New Black Panthers dropped even though they had already won a default judgment against individuals for voter intimidation.

But these instances are tame compared with the Justice Department's controversial and still unexplained decision to dismiss a default judgment obtained in a case of egregious voter intimidation. On Election Day 2008, members of the New Black Panther organization, dubbed by the Justice Department a "black-super-racist organization" were captured on videotape at a Philadelphia polling place. One wielded a nightstick. All wore the uniform and insignia of the organization. They made racial threats and hurled insults at voters. After the video made its way around the Internet, the voting rights section of the Justice Department's civil rights division investigated. Additional evidence showed that the New Black Panthers had in Internet postings called for "300 members to be deployed" at the polls on Election Day. Bartle Bull, a veteran activist and civil rights attorney, filed an affidavit in support of the Justice Department, terming it "the most blatant form of voter intimidation I have encountered in my life in political campaigns in many states, going back to the work I did in Mississippi in the 1960s."

A Justice Department complaint was filed on January 7, 2009, against the New Black Panthers national organization and the individuals present at the polls. Although the Justice lawyers urged the defendants (one of whom was a lawyer himself) to respond, they did not. The court then ordered the Justice lawyers to file a default judgment against the Panthers. Nevertheless, in an unprecedented move, the Justice Department in May dismissed the case against all defendants, save the single nightstick-wielding individual.

Multiple sources within and outside of the Justice Department confirm the curious sequence of events. In April, a preliminary filing of default was filed by Justice lawyers with the court clerk. No concern or objection was raised within Justice. This decision was approved by both the acting assistant attorney general for civil rights, Loretta King, and Steve Rosenbaum, previously acting deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights and recently returned to his post as section chief for housing.

Shortly thereafter, the career lawyers who actually filed the case and obtained the judgment were peppered with questions, according to sources with knowledge of the events. New legal theories were raised disputing how the non-baton-wielding defendants and the New Black Panther party itself could be charged. There wasn't enough evidence, it was suggested, or the case had to be dropped entirely because there was only conclusive evidence against the single baton-wielding defendant. The New Black Panthers had First Amendment rights the career attorneys were told. On it went, as each theory was researched and shot down by the beleaguered lawyers.

As the internal battle raged, the career lawyers presented ample facts and legal theories based on basic principles of liability and citations to other voting rights cases to substantiate the case. In late April, they were instructed by King to seek a delay of the default judgment for two weeks and to make no mention of the change in administrations in the filings seeking the delay. In mid-May, the appellate section weighed in recommending the case go forward. Case discussion, briefings, and mock arguments continued. All of this came to an end when King ordered the default judgment withdrawn on May 15. The decision mystified lawyers in the civil rights division as well as outside observers including the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which sent a letter of inquiry.

And there are the very questionable nominations that Obama has made of unqualified, yet politicized, individuals to head up various divisions within the Department. For example,

Take the case of Mary Smith, a Native-American Chicago lawyer and Obama supporter. She has been nominated as assistant attorney general in the tax division. While she did serve in the Clinton administration, she has no expertise in tax matters and has not spoken on the topic or taken professional education courses in tax law. She did, however, work on three successive Democratic campaigns (including Obama's). A former Justice Department official asks of Smith, "This was the best they could do?"

Hmmm, what could be the motivation for putting a political ally in charge of the tax division?

There are several other questionable appointments that indicate that doubts about whether the man who approved the Marc Rich pardon and the pardon of convicted Puerto Rican terrorists right before Hillary Clinton's run for the Senate in 2000 could be vows to de-politicize the Department of Justice were truly warranted.

Learning at Stanford

The New York Times has a special section on college education and features essays from undergraduates about what learned at their colleges. Here is the experience described by the Stanford student.

When most people consider the hoity-toity, palm-treed paradise of Stanford, naked bread-baking and organic gardening don’t exactly come to mind. After two years of suffocating dorm life, I relinquished the luxuries of sanity and meat to live in Synergy, the Stanford commune famous for midnight flour fights and for making all of its food from local, sustainable scratch — sometimes in the nude. The self-proclaimed “mother of alternative lifestyles,” this on-campus house of some 60 upperclassmen was created in the ’70s for students interested in grass-roots environmentalism.

My initiation had come at Beltane, the pagan fertility festival held every spring on the lawn, complete with a 30-foot wooden maypole and musical performances. How the ancient practice of Celtic druids driving their cattle through fire morphed into “sacrificing” Stanford’s naked virgins still baffles me. The ceremony began with a crowd of more than 100, roughly half of whom were naked, throwing beet juice at one another and frolicking in circles around three virgins (self-elected, unverified, any gender), whom they tightly crisscrossed in ribbons around the maypole. The virgins then broke through the ribbons and ran free, symbolizing their liberating deflowering.

Too insecure and cold to part with my underwear, I enthusiastically distributed body paint and rainbow-colored condoms. Hours later, a purply gang of 15 or so paraded upstairs and crammed themselves into two showers, leaving behind a pink, nutritious trail.

“Is there any soap?”

“We don’t need soap! We have each ­other!”

Now that is clearly the high-quality education that their parents scrimped and sacrificed in order to send their precious progeny to a prestigious university. And then they can attain the ultimate in humanity when they must deal with an ant infestation.

But of all the bizarreness I’ve ever witnessed, none has come to parallel the morning I walked downstairs to the kitchen and discovered a housemate leaning down to the counter and carefully cooing and negotiating with a thick, neat line of ants. He was expressing his beautiful human need to not want to accidentally eat them with his vegan cheese.

This was the culmination of 30-plus e-mail messages debating whether it was ethical to kill the ants overtaking our kitchen. The issue was brought to consensus, and we agreed to explore non-life-ending solutions, since death by pesticide was fist-blocked by a small contingent. Clearly, the only answer was to connect with the ants on a karmic level and express our utmost respect for them in whispered song.

I wonder if Stanford ants respond to the karmic energy being sent their way.

A tax break that Democrats like

For which group of rich guys would Democrats want to push through a tax break? You guessed it - lawyers! Legal News Online reports,

The proposal would allow attorneys to deduct fees and expenses up-front for filing contingency-fee lawsuits. The proposal amounts to about a $1.6 billion tax break for plaintiffs' attorneys, estimates indicate.

"Everyone wants to do it, but the problem is there is not a tax vehicle yet," said Linda Lipsen, American Association for Justice (AAJ) Senior Vice President of Public Affairs.

Lipsen was speaking to the Birth Trauma Litigation Group at the annual meeting this week of the AAJ, the trial lawyers' trade group.

"You cannot have a stand alone bill to help lawyers … so we have to tuck it into something," she said.

Currently, the expenses are considered loans to clients that are to be repaid from ultimate awards if they win or deducted on their income filings in the event of a loss.

Lipsen said that it is "unfair" that trial lawyers are unable to deduct costs connected to their cases in the year that those costs are accrued.

"No other business in America has to do it like this," she said.

Lipsen said the AAJ is working to "fix this," noting that the association has the support of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel, D-N.Y.

The problem is there is not a politically palatable vehicle to carry the legislation, Lipsen said.

Another challenge facing the legislation is its cost, Lipsen acknowledged, noting that Congressional rules require that any tax break be paid for by new revenues.

Some Republicans such as Lindsay Graham, Mike Crapo, and Mel Martinez, all lawyers also favor this. And the ideologically ambidextrous Arlen Specter is the author of the bill. As James Taranto, from whom I found the link, writes,

The WLF [Washington Legal Foundation] brief notes somewhat drolly that “those who practice plaintiffs’ lawyer work learn quickly that it is a business similar to other capital businesses. Capital is placed at risk and a judgment is made whether or not it will bring a profit.” Why would liberal Democrats, usually so eager to tax greedy capitalists, make an exception for this bunch? Probably because the work they do has the virtue of not actually producing anything.

Or perhaps because of the contributions made by trial lawyers...

If we make it less of a risk to bring lawsuits, we'll see many more suits. Just what we need.