Ah, the racism card you knew was coming

Everyone knew that sooner or later the Obamanians would start playing the race card on the Van Jones controversy. You had a black man who had to resign because of outrage over things he'd said. Of course, it must be all about racism. Politico has the accusation.

Some progressives said they saw racial overtones in Jones’ departure – which came as critics began to step up their scrutiny of Jones’ past words of support for Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther on death row whose murder conviction in the death of a police officer is a cause célèbre for some on the left.

"It struck me, why go after this guy? He is a minor player, he has no power, no budget, why take him? It's because he looks like Obama and he has all those same attributes of being well-educated and he’s an electrifying speaker with an elite education," said John Anner, a good friend of Jones and former chair of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, an organization Jones founded in Oakland. "It seems to me that he is symbolic of what the Obama administration is and could be and that's inspiring for me, but for some people on the right, it's terrifying and threatening.”

He's an electrifying speaker all over youtube blaming whites for pollution in colored communities. He's been a leader to try to save a convicted black man for killing a white policeman. And one day after 9/11 he pointed to U.S. "bombs falling on Iraq" as the "bombs that blew up New York."

So who brought race into discussions of public policy and current events? Does being black make him immune from criticism for things that he clearly said? Is that the left's only defense?

And now the new defense is that he's such a minor guy. Only a racist would think that his objectionable comments made him an inappropriate member of the administration. Well, the guy was in charge of $30 billion of stimulus money targeted for green jobs. Maybe in liberal land, $30 billion of federal money is chump change, but, for a lot of us, it still has importance and we're interested in the people in charge of doling it out.

But apparently, this is their excuse for not vetting the guy - he was just too small potatoes. Hey, he shouldn't even be called a czar! And that's why the guy wasn't vetted properly. He was just not that important.

Because Jones's position did not require Senate confirmation, he avoided the kind of vetting that Cabinet officials were subjected to. "He was not as thoroughly vetted as other administration officials," the official said. "It's fair to say there were unknowns."

Yeah, I'll say.

While back in April, Jones was happily explaining his job to a reporter from SLATE as making sure that that $30 billion in stimulus money got doled out properly, today that job description has changed. In April,

When I spent the day with him in Washington last week, Jones told me he sees the transition as one of "inspiration to implementation." It's a slogan that summarizes not just Jones' challenge but the whole administration's. The trouble for both: Inspiration is the easy part.

Jones is the switchboard operator for Obama's grand vision of the American economy; connecting the phone lines between all the federal agencies invested in a green economy. The $787 billion stimulus Congress authorized in February had at least $30 billion of green-jobs funding attached to it. It's Jones' responsibility to work within all the government agencies to make sure it gets doled out appropriately.

Now he's being portrayed as just a guy who gave a lot of speeches, just as he had been doing before being brought into the administration.

Jones's skill in conveying how clean energy could provide economic opportunities for Americans across social strata earned him a prominent place in the green movement. In his six months at the CEQ, he delivered about two dozen speeches nationwide, as varied as an address in Indianapolis to trainees for a weatherization drive and a talk at a sustainability event in Philadelphia.

Kate Gordon, who serves as both a senior policy adviser for the Apollo Alliance and vice president of energy policy at the Center for American Progress, said Jones managed to make the idea of embarking on "a new industrial revolution . . . really compelling." He served as a senior fellow at the CAP, a liberal think tank, and as a board member of the Apollo Alliance, a clean energy coalition.

"He really transformed it from an idea to a movement," Gordon said. "He was very much in a spokesperson role. Van himself would say he's not a policy wonk."

So if his main role is as a spokesperson and he did that before he got hired by the administration, can't he continue to do that? And he'll be free of all those pesky critics who object when a race is blamed for pollution or when he gets behind calls for investigations of the Bush administration's foreknowledge of 9/11. He can still be a "towering figure" as the Washington Post called him both yesterday and today. He just won't be on the federal payroll and a spokesman for the administration with all those annoying ethics restrictions on what he can say and what compensation he can receive.

I know that it was very irritating to have the right wing oppose the guy and dare to use his own words and actions against him. I know that it's frustrating that the administration was in such a bubble that they never thought to question his wacky statements. I know that it's aggravating beyond all measure to have Glenn Beck win a victory over The One. But it has nothing to do with race. The only guy talking about race was the guy now packing his bags.

UPDATE: Victor Davis Hanson notices this trend on race in the Obama Era.

Americans were assured that with the ascendance of Barack Obama we would evolve beyond race. Yet in the last nine months it is almost as if precisely the opposite has occurred — but with a strange twist. The country has been serially lectured about race from some of the most privileged Americans in the country. Columbia Law grad elite Eric Holder accused the country of cowardice for its reluctance to speak about race. Harvard Law alum Barack Obama accused the Cambridge police of profiling and acting stupidly in taking elite Harvard professor Skip Gates down to the station after his screaming-invective episode. Harvard Law-educated Michelle Obama explained Justice Sotomayor’s unease at Princeton by relating her own ordeal there. Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee Charles Rangel, who serially dodged his tax obligations, claims that white angst explains his IRS problems. New York governor David Paterson blames his sinking polls on white racism, more prominent than ever in the age of Obama. Now Yale Law graduate Van Jones claims smears did him in. The list could be easily expanded.

What we are seeing is a very unfortunate turn of events in which racism is now the guaranteed retreat position once many prominent African-American elites find themselves in controversy. The problem is that the rest of the population of all races and classes looks at this privileged cohort and does not really detect evidence of bias or ill treatment, but rather of remarkable tolerance and race-blind attitudes.

It's the racial grievances of elites who hold positions of power and influence. A grievance highway, by the way, denied to conservative blacks such as Condoleezza Rice or Thomas Sowell. But they would probably disdain playing the race card to defend themselves. It's a shame that these liberal blacks can't just take criticism as the function of their high positions rather than dealing out the race card.

Is calling Obama "disingenuous" just a euphemism for "lying"?

The British are striking back at American complaints over their release of the Lockerbie bomber back to Libya.

Downing Street has hit back at Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for attacking the decision to release the Lockerbie bomber.

President Obama and the US Secretary of State fuelled a fierce American backlash against Britain, claiming Abdelbaset Al Megrahi should have been forced to serve out his jail sentence in Scotland – but a senior Whitehall aide said their reaction was ‘disingenuous’.

British officials claim Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton were kept informed at all stages of discussions concerning Megrahi’s return.

I guess it's time for one of those "What did the President know and when did he know it?" sets of questions for Obama. It always seemed pretty unbelievable that the British would have taken such a step without letting the U.S. know ahead of time. And if they knew, how deep were those protests to prevent Scotland from going ahead?

(Link via Clarice Feldman)

Why Charlie Rangel gets to stick around

In addition to Nancy Pelosi's unwillingness to dump over any of the members of her party with corruption scandals, there are other reasons why Charlie Rangel is getting a pass from his party on all the ethics violations swirling around him. There just isn't any good alternative to be the new Democratic head of the Ways and Means Committee. The guys waiting in the wings are, as Politico reports, no prizes either. And on top of that, she has to worry about angering the Congressional Black Caucus, sure to cry racism if one of their top guys gets thrown under the bus. They already raised a stink when Alcee Hastings, of bribe-taking infamy, got passed over as head of the House Intelligence Committee.

If Pelosi were to supplant Rangel, she’d face the prospect of choosing from a unappetizing menu of potential replacements at the Ways and Means helm.

“There are not a lot of good choices for her on that committee,” said a leadership aide.

The next Democrat in line would be Pete Stark, an outspoken 77-year-old liberal with a firebrand reputation and a penchant for intemperate cracks – like calling Blue Dog Democrats “brain dead.”

Next up: Michigan Rep. Sander Levin, also 77, and Washington Rep. Jim McDermott, 72, who are not considered favored choices of Pelosi based on their ages and temperaments.

The two most desirable substitutes from leadership’s perspective, staffers say, are Georgia Rep. John Lewis, 69, the civil rights hero, whose appointment would assuage Black Caucus anger at Rangel’s ouster; and Massachusetts Rep. Richard Neal, 60, a tax expert who is a favorite of his colleagues.

But jumping three or four people might be a tough job. Representatives like their seniority rights and all the other chairs who got their position by waiting their turn would back the other septuagenarians.

So expect to see the House Democrats to keep their wagons circled around Good Ol' Charlie while hiding behind the fig leaf of waiting for the Ethics Committee report. And don't expect that report any time soon.

Forty years ago today...

Hank Stuever of the Washington Post is getting a bit tired of 1969. Since the sixties were such an eventful decade, every year this decade we've had a spate of 40-year anniversaries. Heck, they're even celebrating the anniversary of the beginning of Scooby-Doo. It's all starting to run together.

It was the press release about all this (touting a new live-action prequel movie, "Scooby-Doo: The Mystery Begins," that airs next Sunday night on the Cartoon Network) that pushed me over the cliff of 1969 retrospectives. There's a relentless stream still coming, after Nixon's inauguration, after John and Yoko's bed-in for peace, after Judy Garland died and the drag queens rioted at the Stonewall Inn, after Apollo and the moon, after Chappaquiddick, after Woodstock (and more Woodstock), after all that.

In another two weeks, it will be the 40th anniversary of the first episode of "The Brady Bunch." In a month it will be 40 years since the beginning of "Monty Python's Flying Circus"; four weeks after that, it will be the 40th anniversary of the dawn of "Sesame Street," in which a slightly more frightening proto-version of Big Bird emerged from a New York brownstone and started asking basic questions of existence.

It all seems a bit more momentous than our present decade. Sure, there will be the historic events like 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Obama's election to commemorate. What will we think of these events 40 years on? Well, I guess chances are I won't be here to be thinking about it.

However, what will be the iconic moments of pop culture that we'll be nostalgic about in 2049? I'm such a fuddy-duddy, that I can't imagine nostalgia for the music of this decade - it all seems rather meh to me. Will VH1's "Remembering the Aughts" be about Lost, Mad Men, and American Idol? The birth of Scooby-Doo seems downright pivotal in comparison.

Van has left the building

Obama's erstwhile Green Jobs Czar has, in a singularly ungraceful letter, resigned his post. As could have been expected he blames his need to depart all on those crazy right-wingers.

"On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me," Jones said in his resignation statement. "They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide."

How viciously sneaky of the right wing. They dared to use the man's own words against him. As Powerline's John Hinderaker commented, Van Jones was a one-man youtube channel." Really, how underhanded can critics go - using what the guy said himself as evidence against him. That's what can be done now in this age of youtube. Remember macaca? Well, Jones had more than a decade of macaca moments in his past and they kept finding their ways to the internet. How unfair all that payback is, isn't it?

Of course, the guy waited until around midnight on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend to resign. Not trying to bury the story, are they?

But why would they need to bury the story? The major media has totally ignored it. As Byron York tabulated on Friday when the whole kerfuffle was reaching a crescendo on cable, internet, and talk radio, the network news and nation's two leading newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times, hadn't printed a word about the controversy. It's all so plebeian, I guess, to report on something that bubbled up from outside their purview. Why this was a story that emerged from the same sorts of folks who were coming out to the townhalls and angrily daring to oppose the Democratic health care proposals. And we know what the major media thinks of that!

Tom Maguire is having well-deserved fun with the New York Times which now has to report on Jones' resignation after never having reported on the controversy in the first place.

COMEDY CLASSIC: The NY Times' first story about Van Jones covers his resignation, leading to some potentially awkward moments:

In a victory for Republicans and the Obama administration’s conservative critics, Van Jones resigned as the White House’s environmental jobs “czar” on Saturday.

Controversy over Mr. Jones’s past comments and affiliations has slowly escalated over several weeks, erupting on Friday with calls for his resignation.

The controversy has escalated for weeks, and his resignation finally forced the Times to cover it. Folks living in the Times bubble are possibly becoming accustomed to these moments of whiplash - the Times' first coverage of the Eason Jordan resignation at CNN also came with his resignation.

As Mickey Kaus wrote,

I've been waiting for the day when a prominent pol resigns and for print MSM readers it appears to be out-of-the-blue, though everyone on the Web knows the whole story.

So now we have the amusing spectacle of a man that the Washington Post's Garance Franke-Ruta and Anne E. Kornblut called "legendary" on Saturday and "towering" on Sunday having to resign. Can't love him enough, can you guys?

Even so, they can barely bring themselves to quote what the guy actually said and did to get people so riled up. Come on, can't these reporters get on the internet and check out Google and youtube for themselves? Or is it just easier to swallow the line that it was right-wingers egged on by Glenn Beck who got rid of this guy?

It's Jeremiah Wright all over again. The Obamanians and their media fans are so deeply perched inside their bubble that they don't think that statements that seem so normal and reasonable to them like Wright's rantings and Jones' musings about white polluters and environmentalists wanting to poison black folk or how the Bush administration used the flag to beat, whip, and lynch anyone opposed to torture. Yeah, because we saw all those folks protesting BushHitler being lynched back in the day. But these sorts of comments didn't seem to ring any sort of alarm bells with the Obama folks, because it's what they're used to hearing all the time. It sounds perfectly sane to them. It's what they read on their websites and hear at their gatherings. Just as Obama didn't seem to notice anything objectionable in Jeremiah Wright's regular preaching, Jones' pseudo-intellectual paranoid explanations of how he sees the world as working didn't seem all that remarkable or worth denying the guy a job as a senior adviser to the President. It was only when it was put through the evil spin of people like Glenn Beck that it suddenly became "lies and distortions to distract and divide."

There is not, apparently, one person in the administration with an ear for how these sorts of things sound to people who haven't drunk the Kool-Aid on Barack Obama. Just as no one noticed that it was creepy to have the Department of Education put out a lesson plan asking kids to write letters on how they could help the President, no one noticed that this "towering" and "legendary" figure in the environmental movement was, well, rather a crackpot.

Perhaps they could hire somebody who could serve the role of the slave in a Roman triumph who reportedly would whisper in the Emperor's ear reminding him that he was only a mortal and that fame was fleeting. Since they have demonstrated again and again how tone deaf they are to how regular folks respond to some of their Obamasms, they really do need someone around who could rein them in when they get too caught up with their own greatness. Or, they could just travel outside the cocoon and read the right side of the internet for a bit.

Van Jones is just a symptom

With all the news coming out almost hourly about Green Czar Van Jones and his connections to so many of the radical agenda such as support cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, suspicions about the Bush administration's foreknowledge of 9/11, accusations that whites are poisoning black communities through pollution, and a whole host of other wacko stances for which Gateway Pundit has become a clearing house of information, there are some real questions that the Obama administration should be forced to answer.

1. Since it's clear that no cursory Secret Service background check would have failed to come up with at least part of this guy's record, why did the White House decide that this guy was so crucial that they could ignore all the warning flags. Jeffrey Lord detailed what, based on his experience in the Reagan White House, the Secret Service goes through to check anyone who is going to show up at the White House. There is no reason to think that the Secret Service has gotten any less competent today, especially with all the advantages that the internet provides for instant research. Or to think that with the first black man in the White House and all the concerns over his safety that they have gotten any less vigilant.

But the question here in the Van Jones case -- as it would have been for me and my Reagan colleagues is very simple. What if I, like the White House guest I had invited, had a police record? Had a seriously questionable set of quite public and quite wacky, well-articulated views captured on video tape? What if I had been a Democrat with a father or older brother in the Ku Klux Klan? What if I had been a John Bircher? What if I had been signing on to documents that accused President Eisenhower of being a Communist? What if I had tagged along with Jane Fonda and gone to North Vietnam to mug for the cameras?

The answer is simple. The only way that I could have gotten a clearance to work for a President Ronald Reagan would be if the President, the First Lady or the Chief of Staff to the President specifically overruled the Secret Service.

That's it. There was then, and surely is now, no other way.

Which is to say, Van Jones is in the White House this minute because someone -- or several someones -- knew his problems and quite deliberately overruled the Secret Service. That would be someone of very considerable power.

We've all been told about the strenuous efforts that the White House has made to vet appointees. These efforts are so stringent that they've complained about the difficulties they've had filling some positions. Did Jones fill out one of those forms? Or was he just waved through since Valerie Jarrett liked him?

So what did the Secret Service recommend about giving this guy clearance in the White House and were they overruled by someone in the Obama inner circle? Why?

And these questions aren't even getting into the root question: what does a green jobs czar do and why should the federal government be doing it? I'm afraid that that solar powered bus has already left the station.

2. And the qualifications of Van Jones are a minor question compared to the bigger question that has been bothering me and others for a while, why is Congress letting the Obama administration get away with having by the latest count 31 so-called czars in their administration. There used to be a time when the Legislative Branch relished its role as a check on the Executive Branch. As Politico reports, the Republican Party is planning to use the brouhaha about Van Jones to raise the larger issue of all the President's czars. Look at that list from Politico of all the czars. Why couldn't these offices have been folded into existing executive departments where the appointees would have undergone Senate confirmation? Congress could have oversight over all these people are doing. Is Robert Byrd the only Democrat who is concerned about what this trend means?

Earlier this year, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) criticized the administration’s use of czars as a power grab by the executive branch.

“The rapid and easy accumulation of power by White House staff can threaten the constitutional system of checks and balances,” wrote Byrd. “At the worst, White House staff have taken direction and control of programmatic areas that are the statutory responsibility of Senate confirmed officials.”

And these czars aren't holding do-nothing jobs with no power whatsoever except to advise the President. Some are helping to oversee all that vast money that Congress has been appropriating for all the overreach that we've been seeing of the federal government into all aspects of our economy. For example, here is a description from an April article in Slate about Van Jones and his position within the administration.

Jones is the switchboard operator for Obama's grand vision of the American economy; connecting the phone lines between all the federal agencies invested in a green economy. The $787 billion stimulus Congress authorized in February had at least $30 billion of green-jobs funding attached to it. It's Jones' responsibility to work within all the government agencies to make sure it gets doled out appropriately. Obama wants a cap-and-trade policy that will eventually force American industry to develop new green technologies that will lead to new green jobs. It's Jones' task to convince the American people that this is a good idea. The administration will have to get employees of dirty-energy companies—companies Jones calls the "pro-polluter status quo"—to believe they'll have jobs in a green economy, too. It's for Jones to sculpt that messaging operation. Jones told me the one thing he's learned in the four weeks he's been in Washington is that "power in D.C. is an illusion. Nobody in D.C. has as much power as they want—not even the president." Maybe Jones should lend Obama some of his.

And all sorts of the other new positions created to oversee the TARP, bailout, and stimulus money being appropriate have been given vast new powers unheard of until this year. One example is the pay czar, Kenneth Feinberg.

The Obama administration scrapped the $500,000 salary cap it proposed for executives at firms receiving large amounts of federal assistance but appointed a pay czar to review, reject and even set pay levels -- with no appeal.

Kenneth Feinberg, the administration's new "special master for compensation," will have broad authority over compensation for senior executives and the top 100 earners at American International Group Inc., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., General Motors Corp., GMAC LLC, Chrysler LLC, and Chrysler Financial. All seven companies got what the government calls "exceptional assistance" from the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Mr. Feinberg's decisions won't be subject to appeal, and the Treasury Department said he will follow certain principles in making his decisions, including whether compensation rewards risk, allows a firm to remain competitive, is comparable to peers, tied to long-term performance and contributes to the value of the firm. Mr. Feinberg won't receive any government compensation himself.

That's an amazing amount of unappealable power to be given to one person with no check from either the Congress or the courts. As always, turn the tables and ask yourselves what the left would be saying if the Bush administration had created such a position. They'd be screaming and rightly so.

Even beyond the issues of checks and balances, what about the simple concerns of running an effective organization? Having such muddled lines of responsibility can't be the best way to run the Executive Branch. If the federal bureaucracy is such a mess that the only way to get something done is to go outside the original set up and appoint these czars, why don't we see about reforming the system rather than building a whole new layer on top of it?

Yes, we've had such positions before, but never to this extent. And don't the Congressional Democrats realize that, at some point, there will be a Republican in the White House. And by being supine for this President's power grab of czardoms, they will be unable to launch any successful counterstrike when that future GOP president follows Obama's examples.

More Sun rises in the East news

In what must be the most unsurprising news of the day, The Hill reports that Congress will yet again be unlikely to get all 12 appropriations bills passed by the end of the fiscal year on September 30. Congress hasn't been able to complete this basic function on time since 1994.

The struggles over these budgetary decisions will be taking place simultaneously with the fights over health care reform and cap and trade. All in an era of practically unimaginable deficits. What fun.

Good luck with all that. We'll see if having the Democrats control the entire government makes the bills run on time any more than it did when the Republicans controlled the whole shebang.

Learning from Michigan's example

Another state whose mistakes we can learn from is Michigan. As the WSJ details, Michigan has done more than most states to try state government subsidies to spur economic growth - policies that we are now trying on a federal level.

For the past 14 years, Lansing politicians have offered $3.3 billion in tax credits through the Michigan Economic Development Corporation and spent another $1.6 billion in outlays to create and retain jobs. The subsidies have ranged from tax breaks for Hollywood, to money for new industrial plants, to millions for TV ads starring Jeff Daniels and Tim Allen talking about business and tourism in the state.

So how has this worked out for Michigan?

It's one of the largest experiments in smokestack chasing in American history, but one thing it hasn't done is create jobs. An exhaustive new 100-page study by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Michigan think tank, has reviewed where all the money has gone and what came of it. The study finds that for every 100 jobs that were promised with these tax credits over 14 years, only 29 arrived. Dare we call this cash for clunkers?

Economist Michael Hicks, a business school professor at Ball State, calculated the rate of return on the corporate tax credits. He found that for every $1 million in tax credits awarded, there were 95 lost manufacturing jobs in the counties where the companies were located—a result that is "strongly statistically significant." There was no gain in personal income in these counties. Perhaps more jobs would have been lost without the credits, but what is undeniably clear is that the businesses that got the government loot were not magnets for other employers.

Basically, the state government has picked out favored companies and then taxed the rest of the state for those subsidies.

Why doesn't this kind of industrial policy work? One reason is that the subsidies have to be financed by somebody, which means raising taxes more broadly on the rest of the state. The subsidized businesses may bring a few jobs, but the overall employment and investment impact is miniscule at best.

In Michigan these programs were responsible for 0.25% of all new jobs created in the last decade, according to the study. Meanwhile, in 2007 Michigan raised business taxes by $1.4 billion on other firms to pay for many of Ms. Granholm's favored companies. Despite all the giveaways, Michigan was recently ranked as having the third most antibusiness climate among states, in a survey of executives by CEO magazine. If Michigan had simply cut taxes for every business, as Mr. Engler did in the 1990s when the state briefly led the nation in new jobs, it's a good bet unemployment would be lower.

When Ms. Granholm gave her state of the state address earlier this year, she crowed about the similarities between the Michigan and Obama Administration strategies of using tax subsidies to aid favored businesses. "President Obama's priorities are nearly identical to ours," she declared, and we can only hope the results won't be.

Instead, we seem to be following down this failed path for the entire country.

Let's not go down the Massachusetts road

CATO's Michael F. Cannon has been looking at the results of the health care reforms in Massachusetts, which instituted reforms quite similar to those being promoted by the Democrats. Yes, more uninsured people now have insurance, but that is due to the mandates that everyone buy insurance. The result has been that costs have been increasing substantially.

"The effect," writes the Boston Globe, "has been to provide more comprehensive insurance than in most other states but also to raise costs." Premiums are growing 21 to 46 percent faster than the national average, in part because Massachusetts' individual mandate has effectively outlawed affordable health plans.

Massachusetts long ago adopted another feature of the Obama plan: price controls that prohibit insurers from varying premiums based on a purchaser's health status. Those price controls further increase premiums for the young and healthy.

They also eliminate comprehensive health plans. Obama adviser David Cutler found that in Harvard University's price-controlled health insurance exchange, "adverse selection" or the attraction of the sickest patients caused premiums for the most comprehensive plan to rise until insurers eventually canceled it. Those price controls also encourage insurers to avoid the sick. And who can blame them, considering that the government is forcing them to sell a $50,000 policy for just $10,000?

So the whole Orszagian argument that Obama has been trying to sell that health care reform will actually bend costs down is ridiculous.

"The effect," writes the Boston Globe, "has been to provide more comprehensive insurance than in most other states but also to raise costs." Premiums are growing 21 to 46 percent faster than the national average, in part because Massachusetts' individual mandate has effectively outlawed affordable health plans.

Massachusetts long ago adopted another feature of the Obama plan: price controls that prohibit insurers from varying premiums based on a purchaser's health status. Those price controls further increase premiums for the young and healthy.

They also eliminate comprehensive health plans. Obama adviser David Cutler found that in Harvard University's price-controlled health insurance exchange, "adverse selection" or the attraction of the sickest patients caused premiums for the most comprehensive plan to rise until insurers eventually canceled it. Those price controls also encourage insurers to avoid the sick. And who can blame them, considering that the government is forcing them to sell a $50,000 policy for just $10,000?

Costs have skyrocketed and citizen satisfaction has sunk. And, just as opponents of Obamacare have argued, the result has been increased government interference in the marketplace.

Nevertheless, those costs are appearing in higher taxes and health insurance premiums. State officials have raised taxes on tobacco, hospitals, insurers and employers, as well as eliminated coverage for many legal immigrants just to scrape up their 20 percent share of the cost. They are also showing the nation where ObamaCare would ultimately lead: government-imposed rationing.

To cope with the cost of its reforms, Massachusetts created a legislative commission that has recommended moving the entire market to a single, Canadian-style payment system that would encourage doctors and hospitals to ration care.

The advantage of having a federalist system is that we can look to the experiments in the states and learn from their successes and failures. We should be doing a close study of Massachusetts to learn what worked and what didn't.

Barack Obama - ordinary human being

Charles Krauthammer explains how Obama has fallen to earth. First, he rejects the argument that Pelosi and Reid pulled Obama to the left.

The conventional wisdom is that Obama made a tactical mistake by farming out his agenda to Congress and allowing himself to be pulled left by the doctrinaire liberals of the Democratic congressional leadership. But the idea of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi pulling Obama left is quite ridiculous. Where do you think he came from, this friend of Chávista ex-terrorist William Ayers, of PLO apologist Rashid Khalidi, of racialist inciter Jeremiah Wright?

So Krauthammer looks elsewhere for an explanation and doesn't find it all that surprising that Obama's numbers have fallen back to that of a rather ordinary president. The holy aura, despite the iconic pictures, has faded away.

Obama then compounded it by vastly misreading his mandate. He assumed it was personal. This, after winning by a mere seven points in a year of true economic catastrophe, of an extraordinarily unpopular Republican incumbent, and of a politically weak and unsteady opponent. Nonetheless, Obama imagined that, as Fouad Ajami so brilliantly observed, he had won the kind of banana-republic plebiscite that grants caudillo-like authority to remake everything in one's own image.

Accordingly, Obama unveiled his plans for a grand makeover of the American system, animating that vision by enacting measure after measure that greatly enlarged state power, government spending and national debt. Not surprisingly, these measures engendered powerful popular skepticism that burst into tea-party town-hall resistance.

Obama's reaction to that resistance made things worse. Obama fancies himself tribune of the people, spokesman for the grass roots, harbinger of a new kind of politics from below that would upset the established lobbyist special-interest order of Washington. Yet faced with protests from a real grass-roots movement, his party and his supporters called it a mob -- misinformed, misled, irrational, angry, unhinged, bordering on racist. All this while the administration was cutting backroom deals with every manner of special interest -- from drug companies to auto unions to doctors -- in which favors worth billions were quietly and opaquely exchanged.

"Get out of the way" and "don't do a lot of talking," the great bipartisan scolded opponents whom he blamed for creating the "mess" from which he is merely trying to save us. If only they could see. So with boundless confidence in his own persuasiveness, Obama undertook a summer campaign to enlighten the masses by addressing substantive objections to his reforms.

Things got worse still. With answers so slippery and implausible and, well, fishy, he began jeopardizing the most fundamental asset of any new president -- trust. You can't say that the system is totally broken and in need of radical reconstruction, but nothing will change for you; that Medicare is bankrupting the country, but $500 billion in cuts will have no effect on care; that you will expand coverage while reducing deficits -- and not inspire incredulity and mistrust. When ordinary citizens understand they are being played for fools, they bristle.

After a disastrous summer -- mistaking his mandate, believing his press, centralizing power, governing left, disdaining citizens for (of all things) organizing -- Obama is in trouble.

Of course, he is still vastly popular with almost half the country. But continuing to assume that he knows more than anyone else and will be able to convince the American people to buy his big government policies if he can just speak to everyone long enough is not going to win him new fans.

The media might not have noticed it yet, but the extraordinary man they maneuvered to elect is just an ordinary man and is going to face the problems, adjustments, and political setbacks that ordinary presidents face all time. The sense that we suddenly ushered in a sort of Woodstockean era of peace, love, and intellectually rigorous government has died the natural death that such ridiculous ideas suffer.

For a man who only recently bred a cult, ordinariness is a great burden, and for his acolytes, a crushing disappointment. Obama has become a politician like others. And like other flailing presidents, he will try to salvage a cherished reform -- and his own standing -- with yet another prime-time speech.

But for the first time since election night in Grant Park, he will appear in the most unfamiliar of guises -- mere mortal, a treacherous transformation to which a man of Obama's supreme self-regard may never adapt.

The Obamanians calls for a rewrite

After a day of outrage about the creepy study guide accompanying the President's speech to schoolchildren, the Department of Education has edited out the most controversial parts of the study guide.

President Obama's plan to inspire the nation's schoolchildren with a video address next week erupted into controversy Wednesday, forcing the White House to pull out its eraser and rewrite a government recommendation that teachers nationwide assign students a paper on how to "help the president."

Presidential aides acknowledged the White House helped the U.S. Education Department craft the proposal, which immediately was met by fierce criticism from Republicans and conservative organizations who accused Mr. Obama of trying to politicize the education system.

White House aides said the language was an honest misunderstanding in what was supposed to be a inspirational, pro-education message to America's youths.

Among the activities the government initially suggested for prekindergarten to sixth-grade students: that they "write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president."

Another task recommended for students immediately after listening to the speech: to engage in a discussion about what "the president wants us to do."

The novel curriculum plan brought sharp criticism from conservatives, including some who complained that classrooms were being used to spread political propaganda.

In response, the White House last night confirmed they were revising the lesson plan that was distributed last week by the U.S. Department of Education.

"We're clarifying that language," White House spokesman Tommy Vietor said.

By Wednesday evening, the sentence asking children to think about how they can "help the president" had been replaced.

The rewritten line said students should "write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short-term and long-term education goals.

These would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals."

The remarkable thing is how tone deaf the White House was about this. The initial idea of addressing the schoolchildren didn't particularly upset me. I just don't think it will do much. I'm skeptical that any children who were going to be a slacker would change their minds or behavior after they hear some inspirational words from the President. But if it worked for any kids, that would be a great thing. I assume that he is going to give a rather anodyne message about the importance of learning, setting goals, and working hard to achieve them. Fine.

The juxtaposition of having the President give this talk to kids one day and then going on TV the next night to push for health care is problematic. Kids who are politically aware will see the two speeches as linked and, of course, in some ultimate way, they are since both messages are part of the President's agenda. That is why we don't have presidents address schoolchildren; it seems to blur some sort of line to bring the President into schools because his message can't be separated from the fact that he is a political entity and the achieving of his policy goals can't be separated from his political goals.

The real overreach was in the study guide that accompanied the announcement to the schools with such suggestions as "write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president." As Allahpundit points out, it's remarkably similar to that extremely creep "I pledge" video where Demi Moore pledge to be a servant of Barack Obama.

Since the White House has admitted that aides helped draft the education plans, the real question is why they were so totally tone deaf to how that sounded. Didn't anyone catch that and note how odd it would be to personalize the message of working hard in school to helping the president?" Apparently not. They are so caught up in the messianic spirit surrounding Barack Obama that this didn't jump out at them. It took a day of ridicule from conservatives for them to walk it back. And now the whole point of having Obama address the students is lost in the controversy surrounding the silly lesson plans. The inspiration of whatever message he planned to give is tarnished by the overreach of the Obamanians. They can act like the Kremlin and erase it from the site, but, in this day of cached files on the internet, it's not gone. Sure the elementary school kids won't be aware of this controversy and it will just wash over them along with all the other adults telling them to work hard.

And then the next day he's going to preempt prime time TV to come before Congress and push for health care? Talk about overexposure! But those surrounding the President seem to think that his presence and his supposedly gold gift of oratory is enough to reverse his declining polls and pass a health care plan that the majority of people now oppose. Just as they didn't realize that asking schoolchildren to write letters asking how they can help the president, they don't seem to realize that people are getting a mite bit tired of seeing him in their face all the time.

If this speech fails, what then? More speeches? Ugh.

A First Lady who will be well worth headlines

Japan's new First Lady sounds like she is going to be more fun than any First lady we have. In fact she sounds like a match for Dennis Kucinich as she tells us of her experiences being abducted by aliens.

Miyuki Hatoyama, wife of Japan's Prime Minister-elect, Yukio Hatoyama, is a lifestyle guru, a macrobiotics enthusiast, an author of cookery books, a retired actress, a divorcee, and a fearless clothes horse for garments of her own creation, including a skirt made from Hawaiian coffee sacks. But there is more, much more. She has travelled to the planet Venus. And she was once abducted by aliens.

The 62-year-old also knew Tom Cruise in a former incarnation – when he was Japanese – and is now looking forward to making a Hollywood movie with him. "I believe he'd get it if I said to him, 'Long time no see', when we meet," she said in a recent interview. But it is her claim in a book entitled "Very Strange Things I've Encountered" that she was abducted by aliens while she slept one night 20 years ago, that has suddenly drawn attention following last Sunday's poll.

What fun for everyone to have her in the headlines.

Calling Pelosi's bluff

The rumors are out there that President Obama is going to borrow Hillary Clinton's Reset Button and scale back the demand that he originally said in his State of the Union was so very important for any health care reform bill - a public option when he told us that the public option was "our friend." Perhaps he can have a halfway system with a trigger. Word is that he's negotiating with RINO-in-chief, Olympia Snowe for a bill that would have a trigger in it for a public option some time down the road if private insurance companies didn't make the sorts of reforms that she wants.

Nancy Pelosi isn't backing down. She reiterated yesterday that the House wouldn't pass a bill without a public option.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she is firmly committed to passing a comprehensive healthcare reform bill with a public insurance option despite signals from top White House aides that the president may forge another path to gain bipartisan approval. “We can’t pass a bill without a public option,” Pelosi told reporters after speaking at a healthcare event hosted by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce in her home district.

So what will happen if the President adopts some sort of a policy lacking a public option that Madame Speaker approves of. What will she do? Not support it?

Pfft. As if. President Obama is calling her bluff. She has served her purpose by setting out the most liberal possibilities in negotiations. But don't swallow all the hype about liberal Democrats who will abandon the President if he doesn't enact a bill with a public option. They'll splutter, then talk about the politics of the possible, and the get in line.

I remember when the labor unions were up in arms over NAFTA and threatened all sorts of retribution against Democrats if they supported NAFTA. I bet you haven't noticed the reticence of labor unions to support Democrats since then, have you? They swallowed and then marched right in line. So President Obama knows that he'll be just fine without the public option. Sure the Kossites might rage and threaten retribution. They might not work with the same fervor in 2012, but once a Republican candidate gets chosen, they'll rediscover their love for the Democrats. Their bluff and Pelosi's posturing will have served its purpose but will soon be forgotten.

Duke administrators making the same mistake over again

KC Johnson, who did a magnificent job chronicling the ludicrous Duke lacrosse rape story and Duke University's kowtowing to those demanding a metaphorical lynching of the lacrosse team brings us news of a new Duke outrage.

Three Duke University students were the victims of the highest-profile fraudulent rape claim in modern American history. That fact alone should make the University particularly sensitive to the dangers of false rape allegations, and the need for a firm commitment to due process in handling any allegation of sexual misconduct.

But Duke administrators seem to worry not about violating the due process of rights of their students but instead about running afoul of politically correct campus ideologues. So, starting this semester, the University has adopted a new “sexual misconduct” policy—a policy that even some Duke administrators fear will lead to an increase in false rape claims against Duke students.

In the bizarro world that is feminist thinking these days, the fact that there were only five reported cases of sexual harassment at Duke in 2007 is proof that those sneaky rich smart males at Duke are intimidating and preventing women from reporting the abuse that they must be suffering.

Amazing. It rather reminds me of the spectral evidence used at the Salem Witch trials when the fact that the accused might have had an air-tight alibi for the time that her accusers alleged that they had seen her dancing with the devil was actually evidence of what a powerful witch the accused was to so deceive people.

Read the whole post at Johnson's blog Durham in Wonderland. It's so dismaying that Duke would have taken this route in light of its own experience with false rape allegations.

You might think that a university that witnessed the highest-profile rape hoax in modern American history would go out of its way to protect its students from future such hoaxes. At the very least, you might think that such a university wouldn’t design a procedure—motivated by many of the same politically correct impulses that fueled the rush to judgment in 2006—that even its own administrators worried could produce more false sexual misconduct claims.

Duke, instead, has gone in the opposite direction, adopting a policy that Women’s Center Director Gregory concedes is far more extreme than that at most universities in the country. Simply extraordinary.

Full disclosure: both my daughters are Duke grads.

Link via Instapundit.

The coming battle over reconciliation

Now that it is looking tougher every day for the Democrats to get 60 votes to pass health care, there is more and more talk about their using the tactic of reconciliation, of folding the measure into the budget which only needs 50 votes to pass. The big catch is that the rules of the Senate require that such measures should truly be budgetary and not policy measures. So the Democrats would have to spin off the new policy sections of the bill to do separately while trying to slip through as much as they can through reconciliation. And the GOP has their plans ready to thwart the Democrats' moves. It will be a titanic battle that most voters in the country won't completely understand so it will become a struggle of spin to see which side can do a better job of explaining/spinning their maneuvers to the public. Interestingly, the point man that the GOP has leading their efforts against this maneuver is Senator Gregg, the guy that Obama wanted to be Secretary of Commerce. Here is what the GOP is planning.

Gregg said the only way for the so-called public option to have the necessary budgetary impact to warrant procedural protection would be if the program were “very aggressive in setting rates, price controls and rationing,” an option that might cause conservative Blue Dog Democrats in the House to bolt.

Budget experts say it is too soon to tell whether Gregg will be able to carve up the Democrats’ healthcare plan.

William Hoagland, a longtime senior aide to Senate Republican leaders on budget issues, said it will depend on how Democrats draft their final bill and how the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) scores it.

“At the end of the day it comes down to green-eyeshade examinations of the bill and ultimately to the Senate parliamentarian,” said Hoagland, who now works for CIGNA, a global health-services company. “There are a lot of gray areas, right up until the end.”

Hoagland said, however, that he did not see how a plan to set up membership-run healthcare co-ops could survive a Republican objection.

“On the co-op plan, those particular proposals as currently drafted, it’s an authorization for start-up and capitalizing the co-ops,” he said, drawing a distinction between an authorization to spend and an actual allocation of funds, arguing that as a result the proposal “has no budgetary consequences. It doesn’t spend money or save money.”

If Senate Parliamentarian Alan Frumin rules the budgetary impact of a provision is negligible next to its larger purpose, he would likely uphold an objection that it violates the so-called Byrd rule, a section of the 1974 Budget Act named after Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.). Democrats would need 60 votes to set aside such a point of order.

The CBO, which has disappointed Democrats several times this year with its cost estimates, and the Joint Committee on Taxation would assess the budgetary impact of various measures.

Co-ops have emerged as the leading Democratic alternative to a government-run health insurance option as a way to pressure private insurance companies to lower their rates. Sens. Max Baucus (Mont.) and Kent Conrad (N.D.) are among Democrats who favor co-ops.

Hoagland said that barring insurance companies from discriminating on the basis of pre-existing conditions and setting regulations governing insurance for individuals and small-business employees would likely be found to have no budgetary impact and thus require 60 votes to be approved by the Senate.

But Hoagland said that “smart staff” may find ways to draft the public option or co-ops in a way that enables them to pass under reconciliation.

The procedural obstacles that Democrats would find in the way of many elements of their healthcare reform agenda would require them to pass two bills if they used reconciliation. Proposals that fell to Gregg’s procedural objections would need to pass in a “sidecar” bill that must win the support of 60 senators.

Democrats argue that provisions such as banning discrimination on the basis of pre-existing conditions and promoting healthier habits could win broad approval. But some Republicans say that ramming major elements of reform through the chamber with a simple majority would create enough animosity to kill the accompanying bill.

Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) said in a recent television interview that liberals are “going to insist that the Democrat leadership divide the legislation and give them the part that they want and then give Republicans a chance to vote on another piece of it."

I'm not so sure that the GOP senators have the fortitude to vote against some of the more popular elements of the sidecar bill such as forcing insurance companies to give policies to those with pre-existing conditions. That's popular-sounding and most people don't think about how that will violate the whole purpose of insurance. But people might understand if it's put into terms that they can clearly understand. You don't get to buy car insurance after your car gets wrecked or fire insurance after your house burns down. Who would buy insurance ahead of time if you could get it without question when you find out you need it.

It's going to be a battle royal in the Senate. Buckle your seat belts.

Oops! Not the way to run a fund-raiser

You'd think that the Democratic Party and luminaries like Bill Clinton and Al Gore would know better. Yet they made a real boo-boo this weekend at a big Tennessee fund-raiser by just passing along buckets for people to throw some cash into. The state requires a bit more documentation of who is donating how much money than a bucketful of cash.

Buckets of cash collected for a state legislative candidate during a major fundraising dinner put the Tennessee Democratic Party on the wrong side of state campaign finance regulations.

Party officials decided to donate all the cash to charity after The Associated Press raised questions about their failure to gather the names of the people who put the money in the buckets.

Saturday's Jackson Day event was headlined by former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore and attended by more than 3,000 people, including elected officials, political operatives and other partisans.

State Democratic Party Chairman Chip Forrester in his speech urged attendees to throw money into the buckets placed on every table to support Shelbyville Democrat Ty Cobb's efforts to be elected to the vacated House District 62 seat.

It's a minor oversight, but how can someone who rose to the level of state party chairman not know better?

Cap and Trade delay

It now looks like the Senate won't even get to Cap and Trade for about a month.

Yesterday, Barbara Boxer (Marin County) and John Kerry (Nantucket) announced that Democrats won't release their cap-and-trade bill next week as scheduled after all, but will instead postpone it for up to a month. It's far too early to say that carbon tax and cap is dead, but mark this delay down as one more sign that it remains well short of 60 votes.

Ms. Boxer and Mr. Kerry insist that all systems are still go, though it didn't sound that way when the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate, Dick Durbin of Illinois, told Bloomberg TV last month that "I have to be honest with you. As a whip, I count the votes and I count the days in the week, and I look at this rule book in the Senate and think this is not an easy lift. I think we can still do it, but it's a question of timing."

That puts it into the middle of the debates over the budget which still hasn't been completed. And that's not even counting whatever will be done with health care. That's just not going a propitious time to bring up a bill that will really sock it to the economies of states that rely on coal-based energy. Getting to 60 on cap and trade seems like a carbon-based bridge too far. And good riddance since the bill that came out of the House was pork laden and full of payoffs to various groups. Remember this map of which states will benefit and which will pay for the House bill.

I wonder how much the Blue Dogs in the House who got their arms twisted to vote for this monstrosity now appreciate Pelosi and Waxman's hectoring to get this bill passed out of the House right away feel now. If the bill just gets buried in the Senate, those members are going to be left hanging out there in next year's election. Their opponents will be able to point for their vote for this bill and then to talk about what it would have done to the constituents in their district and they won't even have any benefits to point to in their own defense.

They're not going to be so eager to pass a very liberal health bill out of the House unless they know that the Senate will go along. So that's why there is murmuring out there for the Senate to go first on health care. House members are tired of jumping off Pelosi's bridge to vote for something more radical that would never get passed in the Senate.

How about a pay freeze instead of a pay increase?

Are you getting a raise this year? Sounds like a stupid question, right? Most of us are just happy to still have our jobs. Others are happy that the pay cuts haven't been as bad as they could have been. But there is one group that is getting a pay increase - you guessed it - federal workers.

And President Obama is asking them to sacrifice also. Instead of getting a 2.4% increase, they're only going to get - wait for it - a 2% increase. Oh, the humanity!

Citing the current economic recession -- and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks eight years ago -- President Obama says he will use emergency powers to cut the programmed across-the-board January increase in federal employees' pay from 2.4 percent to 2.0 percent, according to a letter he sent to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., on Monday.

The move was not a surprise, as Obama telegraphed a 2 percent increase in the budget he proposed earlier this year. But it's certainly not welcome news for federal employees, whose unions protested when Obama's budget was released.

Never say that President Obama doesn't have the guts to stand up to the powerful government workers' union.

So now we're witnessing a kabuki theater where Maryland and northern Virginia Democrats whine about the pay cuts and the fact that the military aren't getting the same cuts. They're getting a 3.4% pay increase. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is quick to defend the federal employees in his district.

"Congressman Hoyer is a strong supporter of our federal workforce as well as the principle of pay parity, which ensures equal annual compensation adjustments for both civilian federal workers and members of the military. Though he believes it is reasonable to have a smaller adjustment this year during a time of national economic hardship, he was extremely disappointed the administration did not follow pay parity," Hoyer spokeswoman Stephanie Lundberg said.

Is there anyone out there other than the members of the American Federation of Government Employees and those politicians they've bought who is upset that the military is getting a bigger increase than federal bureaucrats?

Other Democrats tout the desperate need we have to keep high quality federal workers and that we shouldn't be endangering that talented workforce with less than large pay increases.

Obama's initiative also drew a quick and unhappy response from Virginia Democrat Gerald E. Connolly, who also represents many federal workers who live in his 11th District in suburban Washington, D.C..

"Recruitment and retention of a quality federal workforce is critical to our national interest. Forty-seven percent of federal employees will be eligible for retirement over the next decade and the federal government will need to hire 600,000 new workers in just the next 3-4 years," Connolly said in a statement.

He continued, "To recruit and retain a quality federal workforce, this Congress and the administration must show a commitment to quality pay and benefits. When Congress returns from recess, I hope we will continue to look at federal pay in the context of the appropriations process and work to secure an increase higher than 2 percent. The federal employees in my congressional district and the millions across the country deserve appropriate recognition for the vital work they perform -- and that includes a decent pay raise."

Sheesh! Where has this guy been? The only secure jobs out there are government jobs. In this economy are we really going to have that much trouble recruiting workers to a secure job that has guaranteed pay increases?

The only scandal is that Obama didn't freeze their salaries and stop even the 2% pay increase. In demanding sacrifices of everyone else, shouldn't federal employees learn to make do with less than a 2% pay raise?

Link via Instapundit who publishes this email from a reader,

A federal employee reader who asks that I not use his name writes: “Also note — that 2.0% is just the base increase. Once subjected to locality adjustments (all of them adjusted upward), that 2.0% becomes more like 3.5%. Last year the 2.9% increase in the general schedule ended up being in the neighborhood of a 4.2% increase for most working in the northeast (D.C included).”

Freeze their salaries and block the filling of open positions until we get the economy growing again.

Interrogation under the new regime

Richard Cohen admits that he is full of questions about what is the level of interrogation techniques that he would accept in order to keep us safe. That is fine. So are many of us. But what was really chilly is his posited scenario for an imaginiary terrorist he calls Ishmael a man Cohen describes as dedicated to killing as many Americans as possible and who has been picked up now. We want to question him and find out what he knows about current plots. This is what will the terrorist knows about what we can and cannot do.

Now he is in American custody. What will happen? How do we get him to reveal his group's plans and the names of his colleagues? It will be hard. It will, in fact, be harder than it used to be. He can no longer be waterboarded. He knows this. He cannot be deprived of more than a set amount of sleep. He cannot be beaten or thrown up against even a soft wall. He cannot be threatened with shooting or even frightened by the prospect of an electric drill. Nothing really can be threatened against his relatives -- that they will be killed or sexually abused.

He knows the new restrictions. He knows the new limits. He may even suggest to his interrogators that their jobs are on the line -- that the Justice Department is looking over their shoulders. The tape is running. Everything is being recorded. He is willing to give up his life. Are his interrogators willing to give up their careers? He laughs.

It's a chilling scenario. And it is the one we now face due to the decisions of the Obama administration which has decided to embrace the counterfactual Obama has posed - what information could we get from a high-value detainee without using an enhanced interrogation. If you think that Cohen's Ishmael is going to be worried about this new scenario then you should be confident that slow and steady questioning will get the guy to give up his associates and their plans. The rest of us will just hope that the terrorists' plans will fall of their own weight since we will be fighting the war on terror with one hand tied behind our backs.

The magnificent hypocrisy of Charlie Rangel

Amid all sorts of ethics charges swirling around Charlie Rangel, including taxes he forgot to pay and assets he forgot to report, the guy wants to increase the penalties for ordinary folk who have done some of the same things he has.

The changes approved by the House Ways and Means Committee that Rangel chairs would strip away legal defenses and pile higher penalties on corporate and individual taxpayers facing IRS proceedings for what they claim are unintentional mistakes, experts said.

Rangel's bill would:

* Punish those who fail to alert the IRS to potentially questionable tax exemptions.

* Bar the IRS from waiving penalties against taxpayers who clearly erred in good faith.

* Double fines in certain circumstances.

"The bill raises penalties and eliminates many of the reasonable defenses that taxpayers have always been able to use when honest mistakes are uncovered," one lawyer told The Post.

In fact, the bill increases fines "in some cases even for honest mistakes," the expert added.

.... The Rangel plan also would prevent the IRS from waiving punishment in cases where tax officials thought the penalty was excessive.

Under another provision, the IRS would require that taxpayers self-report areas where they may have gone over the line seeking tax advantages. If they fail to self-report and problems are found, tax penalties skyrocket.

The IRS becomes "judge, jury and executioner," said a lobbyist.

In one provision, the measure doubles the fine against the taxpayer from 20 percent of the underpayment to 40 percent.

As with many of the complex tax provisions buried in the 1,018-page bill, the severity of the self-reporting language is a matter of debate.

Advocates argue that the provision is intended only to go after flagrant tax cheats, but that's not clearly spelled out.

What is deliciously hypocritical of Rangel is that he has been guilty of some of the same transgressions.

In addition to $75,000 in rental income he failed to report to the IRS a few years ago, Rangel recently filed new papers revealing he neglected to disclose to Congress more than $1.3 million in income and $3 million in business deals between 2002 and 2006.

The Post reported last week that he also failed to pay taxes on property in New Jersey that he neglected for years to disclose he owned.

His office maintains he is now up to date on all his taxes.

Let's add in a provision to double the fine if the person is a member of Congress.

Or, we can adopt the Rangel Rule.

And then there is H.R. 735, also known as the "Rangel Rule Act of 2009."

The brainchild of Rep. John Carter, a Texas Republican who spent two decades as a judge before coming to the House in 2002, H.R. 735 would require the IRS to give everyone the same kid-glove treatment it gave Rangel.

The bill's title is modeled on something known in Texas as the "Hobby Rule." In the 1970s, Bill Hobby, then the state lieutenant governor, was pulled over for drunken driving. Hobby was taken to the police station, but when his attorney showed up in the wee hours of the morning, authorities simply let Hobby go -- no bond, no nothing. That special treatment became a precedent for future drunken-driving cases, as lawyers cited the "Hobby Rule" to demand their clients be freed with no questions asked, just like Bill Hobby.

Thus the "Rangel Rule." Under H.R. 735, if you're caught cheating on your taxes, you would pay what you owe, then write "Rangel Rule" at the top of your return, and you wouldn't be charged any penalty or interest. That way, Carter said when he introduced the bill, ordinary taxpayers would be "treated with the same courtesy that, it seems, the IRS is treating the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee."

Of course Carter's bill doesn't have a chance. Democrats undoubtedly see it as a joke. But the Rangel case is very, very serious.

As Byron York points out, Ted Stevens was indicted for hiding smaller funds than Rangel.

If you don't think so, just look at this, from the front page of the Oct. 28, 2008 Washington Post: "Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, one of Congress's most powerful Republicans, was convicted yesterday of lying on financial disclosure forms to conceal his receipt of about $250,000 in gifts and expensive renovations to his house. ..."

Stevens' conviction was later thrown out because of prosecutorial misconduct, but the message was clear: This is the kind of thing you can go to jail for.

Rangel appears to have hidden greater sums of money than Stevens allegedly did. Democratic leaders don't want to face it now, but it's just a matter of time before they're forced to admit they have a serious Rangel problem.

And Republicans are hoping that they keep the guy in charge of the Ways and Means Committee through the next election just so they can beat the Democrats up about him.

The next bailout

Percolating a bit beneath the surface of public notice is the coming crunch with the FDIC. And, as the WSJ points out, this will be the next area of the economy that the federal government is on the hook to have a massive bailout. This is well and proper that the federal government insures our deposits. But as we're adding up the costs of future spending, we need to include the money that the federal government will have to be spending to come through on that insurance for deposits in failing banks.

We're referring to the federal deposit insurance fund, which has been shrinking faster than reservoirs in the California drought. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. reported late last week that the fund that insures some $4.5 trillion in U.S. bank deposits fell to $10.4 billion at the end of June, as the list of failing banks continues to grow. The fund was $45.2 billion a year ago, when regulators told us all was well and there was no need to take precautions to shore up the fund.

The FDIC has since had to buttress the fund with a $5.6 billion special levy on top of the regular fees that banks already pay for the federal guarantee. This has further drained bank capital, even as regulators say the banking system desperately needs more capital. Everyone now assumes the FDIC will hit banks with yet another special insurance fee in anticipation of even more bank losses. The feds would rather execute this bizarre dodge of weakening the same banks they claim must get stronger rather than admit that they'll have to tap the taxpayers who are the ultimate deposit insurers.

It isn't as if regulators don't understand the problem. Earlier this year they quietly asked Congress to provide up to $500 billion in Treasury loans to repay depositors. The FDIC can draw up to $100 billion merely by asking, while the rest requires Treasury approval. The request was made on the political QT because, amid the uproar over TARP and bonuses, no one in Congress or the Obama Administration wanted to admit they'd need another bailout.

But this subterfuge can't last. Eighty-four banks have already failed this year, and many more are headed in that direction. The FDIC said it had 416 banks on its problem list at the end of June, up from 305 only three months earlier. The total assets of banks on the problem list was nearly $300 billion, and more of these assets are turning bad faster than banks can put aside reserves to account for them. The commercial real-estate debacle is still playing out at thousands of banks, even as the overall economy bottoms out and begins to recover.

This is a bill that is coming due. So figure these billions in with the rest of the money that is being spent. This is one more reason to pause before we hand over the health insurance industry to the federal government to run.